Mention of the mantis monsters did not produce the gatekeeper's supervisor; the fivesome who came out to see them was far higher in the chain of command than that! "Remasritlfeer" asked a few sharp questions and then waved for them to follow him. In a matter of minutes, they were past the gatekeeper and walking down carpeted corridors. Looking around, Vendacious had to hide his smiles. The interior design was a perfection of bad taste and mismatched wealth, proof of the foolishness of the newly rich. Their guide was a very different matter. Remasritlfeer was mostly slender, but there were scars on his snouts and flanks, and you could see the lines of hard muscle beneath his fur. His eyes were mostly pale yellow and not especially friendly.

It was a long walk, but their guide had very little to say. Finally, the corridor ended at a member-wide door, more like the entrance to an animal den than the office of the world's richest commoner.

Remasritlfeer opened the door and stuck a head in. "I have the outlanders, your eminence," he said A voice came from within: "That should be 'my lord'. Today, I think 'my lord' sounds better."

"Yes, my lord." But the four of Remasritlfeer who were still in the corridor rolled their heads in exasperation.

"Well then, let's not waste my time. Have them all come in. There's plenty of room."

As Vendacious filed through the narrow doorway, he was looking in all directions without appearing to be especially interested. Gas mantle lamps were ranked near the ceiling. Vendacious thought he saw parts of a bodyguard on perches above that. Yes, the room was large, but it was crowded with-what? not the bejeweled knickknacks of the hallway. Here there were gears and gadgets and large tilted easels covered with half-finished drawings. The walls were bookcases rising so high that perches on ropes and pulleys were needed to reach the top shelves. One of Vendacious stood less than a yard from the nearest books. No great literature here. Most of the books were accounting ledgers. The ones further up looked like bound volumes of legal statutes.

The unseen speaker continued, "Come forward where I can see you all! Why in hell couldn't you use the business visitor entrance? I didn't build that throne room for nothing." This last was querulous muttering.

Vendacious percolated through the jumble. Two of him came out from under a large drawing easel. The rest reached the central area a second later. He suffered a moment of confusion as Chitiratifor shuffled himself out of the way, and then he got his first glimpse of the Great Tycoon: The pack was an ill-assorted eightsome. Vendacious had to count him twice, since the smaller members were moving around so much. At the core were four middle-aged adults. They had no noble or martial aspect whatsoever. Two of them wore the kind of green-tinted visors affected by accountants everywhere. The other two had been turning the pages of a ledger. Pretty clearly he had been counting his money or cutting expenses, or whatever it was that businesscritters did.

Tycoon cast irritated looks at Vendacious and Chitiratifor. "You claim to know about the mantis monsters. This better be good. I know lots about the mantises, so I advise against lies." He pointed a snout at Vendacious, waving him closer.

Treat him like royalty. Vendacious belly-crawled two of himself closer to Tycoon. Now he had the attention of all Tycoon's members. The four small ones, puppies under two years old, had stopped their pell-mell orbiting of the accountancy four. Two hung back with the four, while two came within a couple feet of Vendacious. These pups were integrated parts of Tycoon's personality-just barely, and when they felt like it. Their mindsounds were unseemly loud. Vendacious had to force himself not to shrink back.

After a moment or two of impolite poking, Tycoon said, "So, how would you know about the mantis monsters?"

"I witnessed their starship Oobii descend from the sky." Vendacious used the human name of their ship. The sounds were flat and simple, alien. "I saw its lightning weapon bring down a great empire in a single afternoon."

Tycoon was nodding. Most East Coast packs took this version of Woodcarver's victory to be a fantasy. Evidently, Tycoon was not one of those. "You're saying nothing new here, fellow-though few packs know the name of the flying ship."

"I know far more than that, my lord. I speak the mantis language. I know their secrets and their plans." And he had one of their datasets in his right third pannier, though he had no intention of revealing that advantage.

"Oh really?" Tycoon's smile was sharp and incredulous, even unto his puppies. "Who then are you?"

An honest answer to that question had to come sooner or later, fatal though it might be. "My lord, my name is Vendacious. I was-"

Tycoon's heads jerked up. "Remasritlfeer!"

"My lord!" The deadly little fivesome was clustered around the only exit.

"Cancel my appointments. No more visitors today, of any sort. Have Saliminophon take care of the shift change."

"Yes, my lord!"

Tycoon's older four set their ledger aside and all of him looked at Vendacious. "Be assured that this claim will be verified, sir. Discreetly but definitively verified." But you could see Tycoon's enthusiasm, the will to believe; for now, the puppies were in control. "You were Woodcarver's spymaster, convicted of treason."

Vendacious raised his heads. "All true, my lord. And I am proud of my 'treason.' Woodcarver has allied with the mantis queen and her maggots."

"Maggots?" Tycoon's eyes were wide.

"Yes, my lord. 'Mantis' and 'maggot' refer to different aspects of the same creatures, humans as they call themselves. 'Mantis' is the appropriate term for the adult. After all, it is a two-legged creature, sneaky and vicious, but also solitary."

"Real mantises are insects, only about so tall." One of the puppies yawned wide, indicating less than two inches.

"The mantises from the sky can be five feet at the shoulder."

"I knew that," said Tycoon. "But the maggots? They are the younglings of the grown monsters?"

"Indeed so." Vendacious moved his two forward members confidingly close to the other pack. "And here is something you may not know. It makes the analogy nigh perfect. The actual invasion from the sky began almost a year before the Battle on Starship Hill."

"Before Woodcarver marched north?"

"Yes. A much smaller craft landed secretly, thirty-five tendays earlier. And do you know what was aboard? My lord, that first lander was filled with maggot eggsacks!"

"So that will be the real invasion," said Tycoon. "Just as insect maggots burst from their eggsacks and overrun the neighborhood, these humans will overrun the entire world-"

Chitiratifor popped in with, "They will devour us all!"

Vendacious gave his servant a stern look. "Chitiratifor takes the analogy too far. At present, the maggots are young. There is only one adult, the mantis queen, Ravna. But consider, in just the two years since Ravna and Oobii arrived, she has taken control of Woodcarver's Domain and expanded it across all the realms of the Northwest."

Two of Tycoon's older members tapped idly at an addition device, flicking small beads back and forth. A bean counter indeed. "And how do the mantises-this one Ravna mantis-manage such control? Are they loud? Can they swamp another's mindsounds with their own?"

This sounded like a testing question. "Not at all, my lord. Just like insects, the humans make no sounds when they think. None whatsoever. They might as well be walking corpses." Vendacious paused. "My lord, I don't mean to understate the threat, but if we work together we can prevail against these creatures. Humans are stupid! It shouldn't be surprising since they are singletons. I estimate that the smartest of them aren't much more clever than a mismatched foursome."

"Really! Even the Ravna?"

"Yes! They can't do the simplest arithmetic, what any street haggler can do. Their memory for sounds-even the speech sounds they can hear-is almost nonexistent. Like insect mantises, their way of life is parasitic and thieving."

All eight of Tycoon sat very still. Vendacious could hear the edges of his mind, a mix of calculation, wonder, and uncertainty.

"It doesn't make sense," Tycoon finally said. "From my own investigations, I already know some of what you say. But the mantises are superlative inventors. I've tested their exploding black powder. I've heard of the catapults powered by that powder. And they have other inventions I can't yet reproduce. They can fly! Their Oobii may now be crashed to earth, but they have a smaller flyer, barely the size of a boat. Last year it was seen by reliable packs just north of town."

Vendacious and Chitiratifor traded a glance. That was bad news. Aloud, Vendacious said, "Your point is well taken, my lord, but there is no paradox. The mantis folk simply stole the things that give them their advantage. I have ... sources ... that prove they've been doing that for a very long time. Finally, their victims tired of them and chased them out of their original place in the sky. Much of what they have, they do not understand and cannot re-create. Those devices will eventually wear out. The antigravity flier you mention is an example. Furthermore, the creatures have stolen-and are continuing to steal-our own inventions. For instance, that exploding black powder you mentioned? It might well have been invented by some creative pack, perhaps the same one who truly invented the cannon catapults."

Tycoon didn't reply immediately; he looked stunned. Ever since Vendacious had heard of Tycoon, he'd suspected that this pack had a special secret, something that could make him a faithful supporter of Vendacious' cause. That was still just a theory, but- Finally, Tycoon found his voice: "I wondered.... The blasting powder and the catapults ... I remember..." He drifted off for a moment, splitting into the old and the young. The puppies scrabbled around, whining like some forlorn fragment. Then Tycoon gathered himself together. "I, I was once an inventor."

Vendacious waved at the mechanisms that filled the room. "I can see that you still are, my lord."

Tycoon didn't seem to hear. "But then I split up. My fission sibling eventually left for the West Coast. He had so many ideas. Do you suppose-?"

Yes! But aloud, Vendacious was much more cautious: "I still have my sources, sir. Perhaps I can help with that question, too."

CHAPTER 01.

So many impossible things. Ravna is dreaming. She knows that, but there is no waking. She can only watch and absorb and choke on horror. The Blight's fleet hangs all around her, ships clustered here and there like bugs stuck in slime. Originally, the fleet was a hundred fifty starships, and clouds of drones. The drones have been cannibalized. Many ships are gone, some cannibalized. Where it serves the Blight, crews have been cannibalized, too, or simply cast out. Her dreaming eyes can see hundreds of corpses, humans, dirokimes, even skrodeless riders.

The Blight's prey is almost thirty lightyears away, an ordinary solar system ... where Ravna and the Children have fled. And that is part of the reason this vision must be a dream. Thirty lightyears is impossibly far in this part of the universe, where nothing goes faster than light. There is no way she can know what is happening in the enemy fleet.

The fleet floats in death, but is not dead itself. Look closer at the clustered ships. Things move. Construction proceeds. The fleet was once the hand of a living god; now it exists to resurrect that god. Even trapped here, in this encystment of pain, it plans and builds, second on second, year on year, working as hard as its living crews can be driven. If necessary, it can do this for centuries, breeding more crew to replace natural losses. This program will eventually produce ramscoop vessels. They will be the best that can exist Down Here, capable of reaching near-lightspeed.

Now perhaps none of that effort is necessary, for the Blight can see Ravna as she sees it, and the encysted god is saying to her: Rules change. I am coming. I am coming. And much sooner than you think.

Ravna woke with a start, gasping for breath.

She was lying on the floor, her right arm painfully bent. I must have fallen. What a terrible dream. She struggled back into her chair. She wasn't in her cabin aboard the Out of Band II. The automation aboard Oobii would have turned the floor soft before she ever hit it. She looked around, trying to orient herself, but all she could remember was the dream.

She ran her hand across the side of her chair. It was wood, local Tinish manufacture, as was the table. But the walls had a greenish cast, gently curving into the equally greenish floor. She was inside the Children's landing craft, under Woodcarver's new castle. That took long enough to recognize! She leaned her head into her hands, and let the cabin spin around to a stop. When her dizziness had passed, she sat back and tried to think. Except for the last few minutes, everything seemed reasonable: She had come down to the catacombs to inspect the Children's caskets. This part of the castle spanned a range of technology from the pre-gunpowder to fallen transcendence, the walls carved with chisels and mallets, the light provided by lamps from Oobii. Two years ago, the coldsleep containers had been removed from the Straumer Lander and laid out with enough space between them to dissipate the waste heat of the refrigeration.

Half the caskets were empty now, their passengers awakened. That included almost all the oldest Children. Nowadays, the kids lived in or near the new castle; some were in school classes here. If she listened carefully, she could hear occasional shrieks of laughter mixed with the gobble of Tinish packs.

So why did I enter the Lander? Oh yes. She'd spent a only few minutes outside, looking through the casket windows at the faces of little ones who still slept, who waited unknowing for there to be enough grownup caregivers. Most of those revivals would be routine, but some of the caskets tested as borderline defective. How could she save the kids in those withered caskets? That had been the reason for today's visit, to review the results on Timor Ristling, her first attempt with the withered caskets.

The Lander was originally Top-of-the-Beyond technology. Much of that could not function down here in the Slow Zone; she'd never been able to transfer the Lander's maintenance records to the stable technology of her own ship. She had to come onboard to access those records. Her gaze slid uneasily around the Lander's freight cabin. Too much had happened in this green-walled room. The Lander wasn't just Top of the Beyond. It had been at the High Lab, in the Low Transcend, and it had been ... modified. If she looked up she would see some of that, the fungus hanging from the ceiling. The magical Countermeasure. Nowadays, it seemed to be as dead as a dusty cobweb, but Countermeasure had dimmed the sun, and killed her dearest love, and maybe saved the galaxy. The remains of the fungus bothered even the Straumer Children.

This was not a surprising place to have a really bad dream.

But now she remembered what she had been doing just before the crazy dream overtook her. The last two days had been a nonstop guilt trip, with far too little sleep. It was clear that she had screwed up Timor's chances. Not deliberately, not through incompetence. But I did pick him for the first damaged-casket revival. The problem wasn't the boy's twisted leg, it wasn't the fact that he might not be quite as brilliant as the other children. The problem was that in the tendays since his revival, Timor had not grown.

Ravna Bergsndot was thousands of lightyears from reliable advice. Oobii and this strange Lander were all she had. She remembered pounding on the data for almost an hour, combining Timor's casket records with Oobii's latest medical tests, and finally understanding what had gone wrong. No one and no machine Down Here could have known that ahead of time. In cold, cruel truth, Timor had turned out to be a very valuable ... experiment.

When she'd finally realized that, Ravna had put her head in her arms, too tired to look for any more technical fixes and raging against the possibility that she had become a player with other people's lives.

So then I just fell asleep and had the nightmare? She stared at the greenish bulkheads. She had been very tired, and totally beaten down. Ravna sighed. She often had nightmares about the Blighter fleet, though this was the most bizarre yet. A tip of the hat then to the subconscious mind; it had dug up something that could distract her from Timor, if only briefly.

She disconnected her tiara interface from the Lander, and climbed down from the freight cabin. Three years ago, when Sjana and Arne Olsndot had brought the Children here, this ground had been open meadow. She stood for a moment by the spidery pylons, looking round the cool, dry catacombs. Imagine a spacecraft with a castle built over it. Only in the Slow Zone.

She would have to come back here again and again until all the Children were revived-but she was grateful to be done with this place for today. Up two flights of stairs and she would be in the castle yard, in the summer sunlight. There would be the Children just leaving class, playing with each other and with their Tinish friends. If she stayed to chat, she would likely be in the new castle all afternoon. It might be the sunny evening before she had to be back in her cabin aboard the Oobii. As she started up the steps, she could imagine feeling light-hearted. She would take some time off, just to play with the Children. Somehow she would make things right for Timor.

She was still in the dark of the stairs when she remembered something else about the dream. She paused, steadying herself with a hand against the cool stonework. The mind in the fleet had said, "Rules change." Yes, if the Zone shifted and faster-than-light transport became possible again-well, the Blight could arrive very soon indeed. It was a possibility she obsessed upon both awake and in her dreams. She had zonographs aboard the Oobii that monitored the relevant physical laws, had done so since the Battle on Starship Hill. There had never been an alarm.

Still leaning against the wall, Ravna queried Out of Band II, requesting a window on the zonograph. The graphic came up, a stupidly self-formatted plot. Yes, there was the usual noise. Then she noticed the scaling. That couldn't be right! She slewed her gaze back five hundred seconds, and saw that the trace had spiked. For almost ten milliseconds, Zone physics had shot above the probe's calibration, so high it might have been Transcendent. Then she noticed the pulsing red border. It was the Zone alarm she had so carefully set-the alarm she should have received at the instant of the spike. Impossible, impossible. This had to be some sort of screw-up. She rummaged in diagnostics, horror rising. Yes, there had been a screw-up: she had only enabled the Zone alarm for when she was local to Oobii. Why hadn't ship logic caught that stupid error? She knew the answer to that question. She'd explained it to the Children dozens of time. The kids could not understand that when you scrape your knee, it might be your own fault. We're living in the Slow Zone. We have virtually no automation, and what we have is painfully simple, devoid of common sense. Down Here, if you wanted something done right, you had to provide the good judgment yourself. The kids didn't like that answer. Where they came from, it was a far more alien idea than it was even for Ravna Bergsndot.

She glared at the displays that hung in the dark all around her. This was clearly a Zone alarm, but it could be a false alarm. It had to be! The spike had been so brief, less than ten probe samples. An instrumental transient. Yes. She turned and continued up the stairs, still searching back and forth along the timeline's trace, looking for evidence of an innocuous explanation. There were a number of system diagnostics she could run.

She thought about this for five more steps, making a turn from one flight of stairs to the next. Up ahead she could see a square of daylight.

Since the Battle on Starship Hill, the Zone physics had been as solid as a mountain's roots ... but that was a comparison with fatal consequence. Earthquakes happen. Foreshocks happened. What she was seeing could be a tiny, sudden slip in the foundation of the local universe. She looked at the times on the Zone trace. The spike occurred about when she took her odd little nap down in the Children's Lander. So then. For almost one hundredth of a second, maybe c had not been the ultimate speed, and the Lander could have known the current state of the Blighter fleet. For almost one hundredth of a second, Countermeasure could have functioned.

And her dream was simply news.

Even so, she still didn't know how much time they had left. It might be just hours. But if it were years, or decades-then every moment must be made to count. Somehow.

"Hei, Ravna!" came a childish shout from across the yard, in the direction of the school. They would be around her in a moment.

I can't do this. She half turned, retreating toward the stairway. Nightmares can be the truth. It wasn't just villains who had to make the hard decisions.

CHAPTER 02.

There was no school on the last day of every ten. Sometimes that made the end of the tenday terribly boring to Timor Ristling. Other times, Belle would show him some dank corner of the New Castle, or Ravna Bergsndot would take him across the straits to Hidden Island.

Today was turning into the most entertaining kind of day, one where the other kids let him come along on their projects.

"You'll be the lookout, Timor," Gannon had told him. Gannon Jorkenrud had organized the expedition, and specifically invited Timor, even though it meant they had to carry him part of the way down from Starship Hill. Gannon and the others even helped Timor across the boulder field at the base of the cliffs. Sea birds skirled all about.

The kids were right down on the seashore now, the cliffs towering behind them. It was strange to be at eye level with the water. The froth of the waves seemed to merge with the sea haze above, misting over the buildings of Hidden Island just a couple of kilometers away. Here you could see what was beneath the cliffs. You could see how "low tide" had pulled back the water, leaving this field of slick rocks, a jumble of giants. There wasn't a single dry place; all this was underwater when the tide was highest.

Belle pattered along beside and around Timor, grumbling as she often did. "This dirty water is going to smudge my pelts." Belle was all white. This was quite rare among Tines-though one of her, the old male, might have had black patches when he was younger.

"You didn't have to come, crapheads," said Gannon. He and Belle didn't get along.

Belle gave a hiss and a laugh at the same time. "Try and keep me away. I haven't been to a good shipwreck in years. How did you figure it was going to come ashore here?"

"We're humans. We've got our ways."

Some of the other kids laughed. They were strung out, walking down a narrow path between the rocks. One of them said, "Actually, Nevil saw it on Oobii's surveillance monitors when he was studying shipside. Ravna and the packs know about the wreck, but they haven't seen the latest updates."

"Yeah! Woodcarver's packs are probably down at Cliffside harbor. We'll be first where stuff really happens."

Walking down here, they still couldn't see the wreck, just the water crashing on the rocks. Ahead, a swarm of seabirds towered over one particular spot. Timor felt an odd twinge of nostalgia. It still happened, when there was something about this world that reminded him of before. Those birds were so alien, but at the same time, their clustering was just like construction swarms back home.

The water surged ankle deep now, soaking through Timor's leather shoes, gripping like icy hands. "Wait up, guys!"

"See, I told you walking in this was bad." That was Belle, dancing around in discomfort.

Gannon looked back. "What is it now?..." Then he shrugged. "Okay, this is where we put you up on a rock."

Gannon and some of the other kids came back and boosted Timor to a ledge on the nearest monster boulder. Belle climbed two of herself over the remaining three, and reached the same cleft in the rock.

"You can make it to the top from there, can't you?" said Gannon.

Timor twisted around, trying to see beyond the slick curve of stone. He really didn't like to say he couldn't do something. "Yeah, I can."

"Okay. We're gonna go on ahead. Heh. We'll make friends with the shipwrecked doggies. You crawl on up to the top of this rock. If you see Woodcarver's packs coming or Ravna Bergsndot, then have your pack give us a shout. Got it?"