"Okay. Realign. See if you can punch through to Ritser Brughel." This might be his last chance to check on the ground operation before everything was settled, one way or another.

The Invisible Hand was over the horizon from Southmost when the missiles arrived there. Nevertheless, Jau's displays showed flashes against the upper atmosphere. And their trailing satellites relayed a detailed analysis of the destruction. All three nukes were on target.

But Ritser Brughel was not entirely happy. "The timing wasn't right. They didn't get the best penetration."

Bil Phuong's voice came over the bridge-wide channel. "Yes, sir. That depended on high-level ordnance knowledge-things that are up on L1."

"Okay. Okay. We'll make do. Xin!"

"Yes, sir?" Jau looked up from his console.

"Are your people ready to hit the missile fields?"

"Yes, sir. The burn we just completed will put us over most of them. We'll take out a good part of the Accord's forces."

"Pilot Manager, I want you to personally-" A tone sounded on Brughel's console. There was no video, but the Vice-Podmaster was listening to something incoming. After a moment, Brughel said, "Yes, sir. We can make up for that. What is your situation?"

What's happening up there? What's happening to Rita? Jau forced his attention away from the long-distance conversation, and looked at his own situation board. In fact, he was pushing his zipheads to the limit. They were beyond finesse now. There was no way they could disguise this operation from the Spider networks. The Accord missile fields stretched across a swath of the northern continent, and they only approximately followed the track of the Invisible Hand. Jau's pilots were coordinating a dozen ordnance zipheads. The Hand's patchwork of battle lasers could take out near-surface launchpads, but only if they were given a fifty-millisecond dwell time. Hitting everything would be a miracle ballet of firepower. Some of the deepest targets, offensive sites, would be hit by digger bombs. Those had already been launched, were now arcing down behind them.

Jau had done everything he could to make this work. I didn't have any choice. Every few seconds, the mantra floated up through his consciousness, the response to the equally persistent I am not a butcher.

But now...now there might be a safe way to evade Brughel's terrible orders. Be honest, you're still a butcher. But of hundreds, not millions.

Without the detailed geographic and ordnance advice from L1, any number of small errors might be made. The Southmost strike showed that. Jau's fingers drifted over his keyboard, sending last-second advice to his team. The mistake was very subtle. But it would introduce a tree of random deviations into their attack on the antimissiles. Many of those strikes would now be way off target. The Accord would have a chance against the Kindred nukes.

Rachner Thract paced back and forth in the visitor holding box. How long could it take Underhill to come out? Maybe the cobber had changed his mind, or simply forgotten what he was about. The sentry looked upset, too. He was talking on some kind of comm line, his words inaudible.

Finally, there was the whine of hidden motors. A moment later the old wood doors slid aside. A guide-bug emerged, closely followed by Sherkaner Underhill. The guard came racing around his sentry box. "Sir, could I have a word with you? I'm getting-"

"Yes, but let me talk to the Colonel here for just a moment." Underhill seemed to sag under the weight of his parka, and every step took him steadily to the side. The sentry fidgeted by his post, not sure what to do. The guide-bug patiently dragged Underhill back onto a more or less straight path headed for Thract.

Underhill reached the visitor holding box. "I have a few free minutes now, Colonel. I'm very sorry about your losing your job. I want to-"

"That's not important now, sir! I have to tell you." It was a miracle that he had gotten through to Underhill. Now, if I can just convince him before that sentry gets up the courage to intervene. "Our command automation is corrupt, sir. I have proof!" Underhill was raising his arms in protest, but Rachner rumbled on. This was his last chance. "It sounds crazy, but it explains everything: There's an-"

The world exploded around them. Colors beyond color. Pain beyond the brightest sun of Thract's imagination. For a moment the color of pain was all there was, squeezing out consciousness, fear, even startlement.

And then he was back. In agony, but at least aware. He was lying in snow and random wreckage. His eyes...his eyes hurt. The afterimages of Hell were burned all across his foreview, blocking his vision. The afterimages showed stark silhouettes against a beam of utter darkness: the sentry, Sherkaner Underhill.

Underhill! Thract came to his feet, pushed aside the flatboards that had fallen on him. Now other pains were surfacing. His back was a single massive ache. Getting punched through walls will do that to you. He took a few shaky steps, but nothing seemed broken.

"Sir? Professor Underhill?" His own voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. Rachner turned his head this way and that, like a child still with its baby eyes. He had no choice; his forevision was filled with burning afterimages. Downhill, along the curve of the caldera wall, there was a row of smoking holes. But the destruction here was enormously greater. None of the Underhill outbuildings still stood, and fire was spreading across all that was flammable. Rachner took a step toward where the sentry had been standing. But now that was the edge of a steep, steaming crater. The hillside above him was blown out. Thract had seen something like this before, but that had been a terrible accident, an ammo dump struck by penetrating artillery. What hit us? What was Underhill storing below? Something in the back of his mind was asking the questions, but he had no answers and plenty of more immediate concerns.

There was an animal hissing sound, right at his feet. Rachner turned his head. It was Underhill's guide-bug. Its fighting hands were poised to stab, but its body lay twisted in the wreckage. The poor beast's shell must be cracked. When he tried to sidle around it, the bug shrieked more fiercely and made a ghastly effort to pull its crushed body out from the flatboards.

"Mobiy! It's okay. It's okay, Mobiy." It was Underhill! His voice was muffled, but so were all sounds just now. As Thract slipped past the guide-bug, it pulled its broken body from the flatboards and followed him toward Underhill's voice. But the bug's hissing was no longer a threat. It was more a sobbing whimper.

Thract walked along the edge of the crater. The edge was piled deep with debris that had been thrown up. The glassy sides were already slumping, collapsing inward. And still there was no sign of Underhill.

The guide-bug pulled himself past Thract. There, right ahead of the bug: a single Spiderly arm stuck sharp and high from the mangle. The guide-bug shrilled, and started feebly digging. Rachner joined him, pulling boards out of the way, shoveling the warm splatter dirt to the side. Warm? It was hot as the Calorica bottomland. There was something especially horrifying about being buried in warm earth. Thract dug desperately faster.

Underhill was buried rear-end down, his head just a foot below the air. In seconds, they had him free down past his shoulders. The ground lurched, sliding with the rest of the crater's edge. Thract reached out, twined his arms around Underhill's-and pulled. An inch, a foot...the two of them fell onto the high ground just as Underhill's grave slid into the pit.

The guide-bug crawled around them, his arms never letting go of his master. Underhill patted the animal gently. Then he turned, weaving his head about in the same silly way Thract had been. There were blisters in the crystal surfaces of his eyes. Sherkaner Underhill had shaded the blast from Thract's eyes; the whole top of the old cobber's head had been directly exposed.

Underhill seemed to be looking toward the pit. "Jaybert? Nizhnimor?" He said softly, disbelievingly. He came to his feet, and started for the drop-off. Both Thract and the bug held him. At first, Underhill let them guide him back over the crest of the splatter. It was hard to tell under the heavy clothes, but at least two of his legs seemed to be cracked.

Then: "Victory? Brent? Can you hear me? I've lost-" He turned and started back toward the pit. This time, Rachner actually had to fight him. The poor cobber was drifting in and out of delirium. Think! Rachner looked downslope. The helipad was tilted but the ground above had shielded it from the flying debris. His chopper still sat there, apparently undamaged. "Ah! Professor-there's a telephone in my helicopter. Come on, we can call the General from there." The improvisation was thin, but Underhill was drifting in and out of delirium. He swayed for a moment, almost collapsed. Then a moment of false lucidity: "A helicopter? Yes...I have a use for that."

"Okay. Let's go down there." Thract started for the top of the stairs, but Underhill still hesitated. "We can't leave Mobiy. Nizhnimor and the others yes. They are surely dead. But Mobiy..."

Mobiy is dying. But Thract didn't say that aloud. The guide-bug had stopped crawling. Its arms waved gently in Underhill's direction. "It's an animal, sir," Thract said softly.

Underhill chuckled, delirious. "That's all a matter of scale, Colonel."

So Thract took off his outer jacket and made a sling for the guide-bug. The creature seemed like about eighty pounds of very dead weight. But they were going downhill, and now Sherkaner Underhill followed without further complaint, needing only occasional help to keep on the stairs. So what better could you be doing now, eh, Colonel? The lurking Enemy had finally pounced. Thract looked out across the caldera at the pattern of smoking destruction. Likely it was repeated on the altiplano, trashing the King's strategic defenses. Doubtless, the High Command had been nuked. Whatever it was I came to do, it's too late now.

FIFTY-SEVEN.

The taxi floated up from the L1 jumble. Below them, the mouth of S745 was open, exhausting air and ice particles. If not for Qiwi, they would still be trapped behind the sluiceway's pressure hatch. Qiwi's landing and ad hoc lock work were something that even well-managed zipheads might not have accomplished.

Nau slid Ali Lin gently into the front seat beside Qiwi. The woman turned from her controls, and her face twisted in grief. "Papa? Papa?" She reached to feel for his pulse, and her expression eased a fraction.

"I think he'll make it, Qiwi. Look, there's medical automation at L1-A, and-"

Qiwi pulled back into her seat. "The arsenal..." But her gaze stayed on her father, and the horror was shading toward thoughtfulness. Abruptly, she looked away and nodded. "Yes."

The taxi boosted on its little reaction jets, sending Nau and his men on a quick scramble for handholds. Qiwi was overriding the taxi's sedate automation. "What happened, Tomas? Do we have a chance?"

"I think so. If we can get into L1-A." He related the story of treachery, almost the truth except for Ali Lin.

Qiwi slewed the taxi smoothly into its braking approach. But her voice was near sobbing. "It's the Diem Massacre all over again, isn't it? And if we don't stop them this time, we'll all die. And the Spiders too."

Bingo. If Qiwi hadn't been so freshly scrubbed, this would be a very dangerous line of thought. A few days more and she'd have a hundred little inconsistencies to piece together; she'd quickly see through it all. But now, for the next few Ksecs, the analogy with Diem played in his favor. "Yes! But this time we have a chance to stop them, Qiwi."

The taxi descended swiftly across Diamond One. The sun was like a dim red moon, its light glistening here and there off the last of their stolen snow. Hammerfest had disappeared around the corner. Most likely, Pham Nuwen was trapped in the Attic there. The fellow was a genius, but he'd achieved only half a victory. He had cut off ziphead services, but he hadn't stopped the Arachna operation, and he hadn't reached allies.

And in this game, half a victory was worth nothing. In a few hundred seconds, I'll have the firepower at L1-A. Strategy would crystalize in assured destruction, and Pham Nuwen's own moral weakness would give all the game to Tomas Nau.

Ezr never lost consciousness; if he had, there would have been no waking. But for a time, all awareness was centered within himself, on the numbing cold, the tearing pain in his shoulder and down his arm.

The urge to gasp air into his lungs became overpowering. Somewhere there must be air; the park had as much breathable space as ever. But where? He turned in the direction where the fake sunlight was brightest. Some remnant of reason noted that the water had come out of that direction. It would be falling now. Swim toward the brightness. He kicked feebly and as hard as he was able, guiding with his good hand.

Water. More water. Water forever. Reddish in the sunlight.

He burst through the surface, coughing and vomiting, and breathing at last. The sea lay around him. It writhed and climbed, with no horizon. It was like something from a Canberra swords-and-pirates story he had watched as a child; he was a sailor trapped in a final maelstrom. He stared up and up. The water curved around and closed above his head. His seascape was a bubble, perhaps five meters across.

With orientation came something like rational thought. Ezr twisted, looked down and behind him. No sign of pursuers. But maybe it didn't matter. The water around him was stained with his own blood; he could taste it. The cold that had slowed the flow of blood and numbed some of the pain was also paralyzing his legs and his good arm.

Ezr stared through the water, trying to estimate how far his air bubble was from the outer surface. The water on the sun side did not seem deep, but...He looked down and back toward what had been the forest. Through the blur and the flow, he could see the ruins of the trees. Nowhere was this water more than a dozen meters deep. I'm out of the main mass. His bubble was itself part of a free droplet, drifting slowly across North Paw's sky.

Drifting downward, by some combination of microgravity and the sea's collision with the cavern roof. Ezr watched numbly as the ground came up around him. He would hit the lake bed, just off the lodge's moorage.

When it came, the collision was dreamlike slow, less than a meter per second. But the water swept swiftly around him, spraying and streaming. He hit on his legs and butt and bounced upward, sharing space with a tumble of jiggling, spinning blobs of water. All around him was a clacking sound, a mindless mechanical applause. The stone casement of the seawall was less than a meter away. He reached out, almost stopped his spin. Then his bad shoulder touched the casement, and everything disappeared in a blaze of agony.

He was gone for only a second or two. When consciousness returned, he saw that he was about five meters above the seabed. Near him, the stones of the casement were covered with a line of moss and stain, the old sea level. And the clacking applause...he looked across the seabed. He could see them in their hundreds, the stabilizer servos, pursuing the same sabotage that had set the sea to marching.

Ezr climbed the rough-cut stone of the seawall. It was only a few meters to the top, to the lodge...to where the lodge had been. There were recognizable foundations. The stubs of wall frames still stood. But a million tonnes of water, even moving slow, had been enough to sweep the place away. Here and there, rubble swayed up, snagged in the deeper wreckage.

Ezr moved from point to point, using his good hand to climb across the ruins. The sea had settled into a deep layer that hugged the forests and climbed the far walls of the cavern. It still roiled and shifted. Ten-meter blobs of water still coasted across the sky. Much of the sea might eventually pool back in the basin, but Ali Lin's masterpiece was destroyed.

Things were getting fuzzy and dim; he didn't hurt as much as before. Somewhere out there in the drowned forest, Tomas Nau was trapped along with his merry men. Ezr remembered the triumph he had felt when he saw them sinking into the trees beneath the water. Pham, we won. But this wasn't the original plan. In fact, Nau had somehow seen through them, almost killed them both. Nau might not be trapped at all. If he could get out of the cavern, he could track down Pham or get to L1-A.

But the fear was far away, receding. Ribbons of sticky red water floated around him now. He bent his head to look at his arm. Marli's wire gun had shattered his elbow, opening an artery. The previous wound in his shoulder, and the torture, had created a kind of accidental tourniquet, but I'm bleeding out. Logically, the thought was cause for frantic alarm, but all he really wanted to do was let loose of the ground and rest awhile. And then you die, and then maybe Tomas Nau wins.

Ezr forced himself to keep moving. If he could stop the bleeding...but no way could he even take off his jacket. His mind drifted away from the impossible. Grayness crept in around the edges of his mind. What can I do in the seconds I have left? He picked his way across the wreckage, his vision narrowed down to the ground just centimeters from his face. If he could find Nau's den, even a comm set. At least I could warn Pham. There was no comm set, just endless rubble. The fine woods that Fong had grown were all kindling now, their spiral grain shattered.

A naked white arm reached from beneath a crushed armoire. Ezr's mind stumbled on the horror and the mystery. Who did we leave behind? Omo, yes. But this limb was naked, glistening, bloodless white. He touched the hand at the end of the arm. It twitched, slid around his fingers. Ah, not a corpse at all, just one of those full-press jackets that Nau favored. An idea floated up from the dimness, Maybe to stop the bleeding. He tugged on the jacket sleeve. It slid, caught, and then floated free. He lost his grip on the ground, and for a moment it was a dance between himself and the jacket. The left sleeve slit open, forking down through the fingers. He slipped his arm along its length and the jacket closed from fingers to shoulder. He pulled the fabric across his back, and fit the right side loosely around his mangled arm. Now he could bleed to death, and no one would see another drop. Tighten the fabric. He shrugged it snug. Tighter, a real tourniquet. He slid his left hand down the cover of his ruined arm, squeezing agony from the flesh beneath. But the full-press fabric responded, stiffening. Far away, he heard himself groan with pain. He lost consciousness for a moment, woke lying lightly on his head.

But now his right arm was immobilized, the full-press sleeve at maximum tension. Such a painful extreme of fashion, but it might be enough to keep him alive.

He drank from drifting water, and tried to think.

There was a querulous mewing sound behind him. The sky-kitten slid into view, settled onto his chest and good arm. He reached up, felt the trembling body. "You in trouble too?" he asked. His words came as croaks. The kitten's great dark eyes peered back at him and it burrowed deeply at the space between his chest and left arm. Strange. Normally, a sick kitten would go off and hide; that had caused Ali lots of problems, even though the creatures were tagged. The sky-kitten was soaked, but it seemed alert. Maybe, "You came to comfort me, Little One?"

He could feel it purring now, and the warmth of its body. He smiled; just having someone to listen made him feel more alert.

There was a thutter of wings. Two more kittens. Three. They hung above him and meowed irritably as if to say, "What have you done with our park," or maybe "We want dinner." They swirled around him, but didn't chase the little one from his arms. Then the largest, a rag-eared tom, swooped away from Ezr and settled on the highest point in the ruin. He glowered down at Ezr, and began grooming his wings. The damn creature didn't even look wet.

The highest point left in the ruin...a diamond tube almost two meters across, surmounted by a metal cap. Ezr suddenly realized what he was looking at: a tunnel head in Tomas Nau's den, most likely a direct route to L1-A. He coasted up the hill to the metal-topped pillar. The tom hunkered down, reluctant to move out of Ezr's way. Even now the creatures were as possessive as ever.

The control lights on the hatch glowed pass-green.

He looked at the big tom. "You know you're sitting on the key to everything, don't you, fellow?"

He gently disengaged the littlest kitten from his jacket, and shooed them all away from the hatch mechanism. It slid back, locked itself open. Would the little stupids try to follow? He gave them a last wave. "Whatever you may think, you really don't want to come with me. Gun wire hurts."

The Attic grouproom was crammed with extra seating; there was scarcely room to maneuver around the edges. And the moment Silipan turned off the zipheads' comm links, the place turned into a madhouse. Trud dived away from the reaching arms, retreated to the control area at the top of the room. "They really really don't like to be taken off their work."

It was worse than Pham had thought it would be. If the zipheads hadn't been tied down, he and Trud would have been attacked. He looked back at the Emergent. "It had to be done. This is the core of Nau's power, and now it's denied him. We're taking over all across L1, Trud."

Silipan's stare was glassy. There had been too many shocks. "All over L1? That's impossible... You've killed us all, Pham. You've killed me." Some alertness returned; no doubt he was imagining what Nau and Brughel would do to him.

Pham steadied him with his free hand. "No. I intend to win. If I do, you'll survive. So will the Spiders."

"What?" Trud bit his lip. "Yeah, cutting off support will slow Ritser. Maybe those damned Spiders will have a chance." His gaze became distant, then snapped back to Pham's face. "What are you, Pham?"

Pham answered softly, pitching his voice just over the shouted demands from the zipheads. "Just now, I'm your only hope." He drew Silipan's confiscated huds from his jacket pocket, and handed them to the man.

Trud carefully straightened the crumpled material and slipped them over his eyes. He was silent for a moment, then: "We have more huds. I can get you a pair."

Pham smiled the foxy grin that Silipan had never seen till two hundred seconds ago. "That's okay. I have something better."

"Oh." Trud's voice was small.

"Now I want you to do a damage assessment. Is there any way you can get work from your people here, with Nau cut off?"

Trud shrugged angrily. "You know that's imposs-" He looked up again at Pham. "Maybe, maybe there are some trivial things. We do offline computing. I might be able to trick the numerical control zipheads..."

"Good man. Calm these people down, see if any of them will help us."

They parted. Silipan descended to the zipheads, talked soothing words, bagged the floating vomitus that the sudden upset had generated. The shouting only got louder: "I need the tracking updates!"

"Where are the translations on the Kindred response?"

"You stupids, you've lost the comm!"

Pham slid sideways across the ceiling, looking downward through the ranks of seated zipheads, listening to the complaints. On the far wall, Anne and her other assistant floated motionless on grabfelt rests. She should be safe and out of it. Your final battle is being fought, just a century or two after you thought all was lost.

The vision behind Pham's eyes faded in and out. In most of the Attic, he'd been able to restart the microwave pulse power. He had perhaps one hundred thousand localizers in reach and alive. It was a bright meta-light extending his vision in disjoint fingers through the Attic, to wherever a cloud of localizers had come alive and could find a thread of links back to him.

Status, status. Pham scanned across the readouts on zipheads in the grouproom and beyond. There were only a few still locked in their roomlets in the capillary tunnels, specialists that hadn't been needed in the current operation. Many of them had gone into convulsive tantrums when their job stream was blocked. Pham eased into the control system and opened some of the incoming communications. There were things he had to know, and it might ease the discomfort of the Focused. Trud looked up uneasily; he could tell that someone was messing with his system.

Pham reached beyond the Attic, searching for some glimmer from localizers on the rockpile's surface. There! One or two isolated images, low-rate and monochrome. He had a glimpse of a taxi coming down on naked rock, near Hammerfest. Damn, sluiceway S745. If Nau could negotiate that lockless hatch, there was no doubt where he'd go next.

For a fleeting moment Pham felt the overwhelming fear of facing an unstoppable adversary. Ah, it's like being young again. He had perhaps three hundred seconds before Nau got to L1-A. No point in holding anything back. Pham sent out the command to bring all reachable localizers online-even the ones without power. Their tiny capacitors held enough charge for a few dozen packets each. Used cleverly, he could get a fair amount of I/O.

Behind his eyes, pictures slowly formed, bit by bit by bit.

Pham slid around three walls, staying carefully beyond the zipheads' reach, occasionally dodging a thrown keyboard or drinking bulb. But the renewed incoming data flow was having some calming effect. The translator section was almost quiet, their talk mostly directed at one another. Pham drifted down next to Trixia Bonsol. The woman was hunched over her keyboards with fierce intentness. Pham plugged into the data stream that was coming up from the Invisible Hand. There should be some good news there, Ritser and company bogged down just when they were ready to commit mass murder...

It took him an instant to orient to the multiplex stream. There was stuff for the translators, trajectory data, launch codes. Launch codes? Brughel was going ahead with Nau's sucker punch! The execution was awkward; the Accord would be left with a good fraction of its weapons. Ballistics were arcing up, dozens of launches per second.

For a moment, Pham's attention was swallowed by the horror of it. Nau had conspired to kill half the people in a world. Ritser was doing his best to accomplish the murders. He stepped through the log of Trixia Bonsol's last few hundred seconds. The log had gone berserk when her job stream had been cut off, a metaphorical upchuck. There were pages of disordered nonsense, a gabble of files that showed no last-access date. His eyes caught on a passage that almost made sense: It is an edged cliche that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It's true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.

By blind good fortune, Sherkaner Underhill chose the most beautiful days in the years of the Waning for his first trip to Lands Command...

It was clearly one of Trixia's translations, the sort of "human-colored" description that irritated Ritser Brughel so much. But Underhill's "first trip to Lands Command"? That would be before the last Dark. Strange that Tomas Nau had wanted such retrospectives.

"It's all messed up now."