"You fool, you can't get away with this," screamed Chang into the commo as she scrambled around to the side of the ship.

"Fuck you, Colonel," came the chilling response. "You'll be dead and I'll get away and no one will ever find any evidence anyway, and if they do they'll have to believe that it was the alien thing, the one that's hiding in that man you brought back. "

There was a tinge of madness in his voice.

"Captain Cachester, we need that man, we need to know everything he knows about this thing, don't you see that?"

"Shut up, Colonel, You said yourself the fucking thing's going to kill itself. Let it, and then all this will be over. "

The Schlesinger fired again, a quiet sound in that thin air, but the detonations of the armor-piercing rounds it was firing were clear enough. Rock flew, and so did Ensign Diaz, who was hit in the face mask and killed instantly when he showed himself to get in a shot.

The other ensign, Orshem, stayed low, too frightened to move.

Cachester shifted out of the hatch and pursued the others around the drop ship. It was the only cover, other than the broken rock at the fault line.

They played a deadly game now, Cachester stalking around the drop ship while they did their best to keep it between them and him.

Cachester wasn't listening to any further entreaties. He was too far in now, they had to die.

He ran, the Schlesinger spraying bullets. Kerwillig and Hopester stayed ahead of him and he missed them.

Luisa Chang had folded herself into the gap between the drop boat's main propulsion tubes.

When Cachester ran past she slipped out behind him and dove into him from behind, knocking his legs out from under him and bringing him down.

He went down but he kept the Schlesinger; it was still firing as he fell and bounced on the ground.

Chang took bullets in her left leg and her right hand.

The pain was terrible; her leg was gone. The suit resealed itself in seconds and she was still alive, but she knew her leg was gone, and when she lifted her right arm she knew her hand was smashed, too.

Then there was just the pain.

Cachester was on one knee, swinging the gun down to aim at her.

Her time was up, it seemed. How futile, how sickeningly hateful it was to die at the hands of this accursed idiot Cachester.

He fired, but before he had the aim, and the first bullets went wide.

The clip was finished.

With a curse, Cachester tore it out and searched for another.

Chang crawled toward him.

Cachester had another clip, but he fumbled it and it fell into the dust. He screamed curses and bent down to pick it up.

Chang was almost there. With her good hand she reached out to get a grip on his boot. She was hoping to be able to swing her right leg around and kick him somewhere in the crotch area.

Cachester had other troubles, though. Caroline Reese had thrown herself at him and knocked him away from the ammo clip. With a snarl of rage he swung the Schlesinger like a club at her helmet and knocked her down. She rolled away, her helmet cracked but not broken.

Cachester groped for the clip, found it, and shoved it into the Schlesinger. He pressed the stud, but nothing happened.

Chang sprawled there, her leg hurting more than she had ever dreamed anything could hurt; she was done, nothing left to give.

The clip was still not in position correctly. Cachester screamed a curse, yanked it down and reinserted it and pressed it home until it clicked.

The curses changed to cries of triumph as he swung it up and aimed down at Chang.

Luisa felt her heart freeze.

And then another spacesuited figure appeared and struck the Schlesinger away and put Ensign Diazs side arm against Cachester's chest and fired.

Cachester seemed to implode, collapsing away from Luisa's viewpoint and disappearing.

It was Darel Hopester; his face was tight with the tension, his eyes staring. He dropped the side arm suddenly and knelt beside her.

"Luisa." The look in his eyes was almost worth the pain.

"Well done, Mr. Hopester," she managed to say before she fainted.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE.

GREAT SHIPS OF SPACE HURTLED INTO THE SYSTEM OF THE SMALL red sun. Like newborn moons of war they blinked into view far above the dead world of the self-styled Gods of Axone-Neurone.

Their names were like glittering shards of human history at its hottest Bellerophon, Sennacherib, Tiberius, and Lehard. With them came the breath of human warfare, for they were the end result of a lengthy line of innovations and improvements that stretched back to the days of ancient Greece.

They came in the way of all Baada-drive ships; one moment they were not there and the next they were. They dumped grav waves and fired attitude thrusters to control spin while they selected orbital paths around the dark second planet.

On their arrival turned the tide of history; on this alien strand would all be decided for the duration of humanity's existence.

Watching them with emotionless optics was the Battlemaster.

From the bridge of the Empress Wu the Battlemaster initiated the great ship's Baada drives. It knew that these other huge ships were as deadly as the one it controlled. It could not fight them and it could not outrun a fleet equipped with the smaller, faster models like the Essex, which could be seen boosting into hyperbolic orbit outbound from the planet below.

A shuttle rose to meet the ship. The Battlemaster waited. That shuttle had to make safe harbor first, before the next move.

There was a high skirling song in the Battlemaster's mind; it had lived to see remarkable things. It had survived beyond all calculable lifespan, and there was nothing left of the old world except for sacred fragments that could only be defiled by the overpowering might of the humans.

It was almost time.

Luisa Chang woke up on the pinnace during the boost to Essex; the pain from her smashed-up thigh was too much just then for the pseudomorphine to overcome.

She screamed for a while.

Then the boost phase was over and they were in free-fall and the pain subsided enough so she didn't feel the need to scream, but every time her ruined leg touched the webbing it sent cascades of agony through her body.

Sweat had pooled in her suit; it was suddenly cold, and she shivered.

Suddenly there was someone standing beside her. Not Jean Povet, whom she expected, but Professor Reese.

"Hello, Colonel," said the big, soft blonde who had started this thing, just a few incredible days before.

"What are you doing here?" Luisa said. The woman seemed All to blur at the edges. Chang realized she was loaded with pseudomorphine.

"Where's Povet?" she mumbled.

Reese leaned forward to hear more clearly. "Povet was shot, remember? "

"Oh, shit. " The memories slammed home. Chang felt a spike of mortification thrusting right through her.

It was all her fault.

"Anyway, Povet is alive."

"Alive? Oh, thank you, thank you." Luisa felt the tension relaxing. Povet was alive.

"What's going on?" she whispered at last.

"Povet is doing pretty well, I've got her in the other emergency medicouch. Cachester and her, then you. You're going to make it, I think; vital signs are good. The med software gives you better chances than Cachester, anyway. "

"Well, that's good news, I guess."

"Essex is picking us up in two minutes. The rest of the Fleet is jumping insystem now. "

"Damn, and the Wu?"

"Still there, in a lower orbit, right now on the very edge of our horizon. "

Professor Reese leaned over; she seemed quite calm and almost relaxed.

"Povet's going to be all right?"

"She has two chest wounds; one lung collapsed, but the other's still going strong. She made it through boost phase, so she can make it through the rest. As will you, Colonel Chang. I think you must be very tough, Colonel; you must be as tough as old saddles, if you don't mind me saying so."

"What would it matter if I did mind? " Chang said before she gave a little shriek as the chair's webbing impacted the medipack around her shattered leg.

"Shit, but I wish this didn't hurt so bad. "

Reese sympathized.

"This boat doesn't have any more painkillers or I'd have given them to you."

No wonder she felt she was wobbling around on a cloud.

"What about the other ones, Diaz, Pentofski."

"Dead, I'm afraid, so Cachester will go up on murder charges."

"Where's Hopester?"

"Sitting forward, with the other one. They're both in a state of shock; I guess I'm in one, too, but I just don't know it." Reese wore a sad smile.

"Well, Professor, you probably took twenty years off your sentence back there. You risked your life and you saved mine. "

Reese was nodding, carrying on some internal conversation for a few moments; finally she said, "Except that before they can even sentence me at all we have to get out of here alive. What are our chances of that, Colonel?"

The Essex was looming up on the forward viewscreen like some gargantuan gray football.

"Just pray that Thama's got his initiation codes in place so he can jump quickly."

And then they were in the docking pathway and were taken aboard.

The pinnace rattled and bumped through the access tube to the docking bay. They were able to float out.

Luisa was destined for the low-grav medcenter and two orderlies were there to float her away, along with the unconscious Povet and Cachester.

She spoke briefly to Thama, but the captain was preoccupied with the effort of keeping the Wu in sight through the Essex's probes. So far the great battleship continued to ride peacefully in orbit. She had not responded to the probes, not even one that came within a thousand kilometers of her.

Luisa fought off the med team's attempts to sedate her. She demanded ancilophen injections and more painkillers.

They protested that she would damage her nerve tissues with so much ancilophen.

"Damn the fucking nerve tissues, I have a job to finish!" she grated.

They gave her the ancilophen. Someone set up a portable screen set by her bed. On the viewscreen the Empress Wu continued to float against the darkness like a great spherical jewel cut from dark amber.

Thama came on line suddenly; his face was tight, he licked his lips nervously.

"Sector Fleet is insystem," he said. "Admiral Careno has ordered lead ships to open fire and disable the Wu. "

Chang shut her eyes; the ineffable stupidity of Fleet commanders continued unabated.

"Initiate your drive sequence, Captain. There won't be much time.

"Once initiated we will have to follow through to jump. If you're wrong then we will be breaking Fleet discipline. I'll face a court-martial. So will you. "

"But not until after quarantine, Captain," she murmured.

Thama looked at her and then laughed. He choked it back after a few seconds.

"Initiate Baada sequence," he said.