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  "Colonel A'Nal," said a flat, hard voice, "Fleet Security. Under the authority of Fleet Articles of War, I order you to open these doors."

  DTrelna tapped the Hold button. "Well?" he asked the other two.

  "If he's talking Articles, he's got arrest warrants," said L'Wrona.

  "We could let them drag a Mark 44 up here," suggested N'Trol. "It would take them a while. It's a hot day, they'd work up a sweat, pull some muscles…"

  "And eventually burn the door down and come thundering in here, pissed as hell," said L'Wrona. "Fun, but not a good idea."

  "Better let them in, J'Quel."

  "Computer," said DTrelna, thumbing the complink, "please admit the properly identified members of our Fleet Security arm."

  The thick doors hissed open. A rush of gray uniforms surged onto the bridge, led by a tall man with colonel's insignia and the crossed daggers of Fleet Security on his collar.

  "You're all under arrest," he said as troopers took D'Trelna's and N'Trol's blasters.

  "This one won't give it up, sir," said a corporal.

  L'Wrona stood imperturbably, hand firmly on his weapon's grips.

  "You will please surrender your weapon, Captain My Lord L'Wrona," said Colonel A'Nal.

  "Not until I see the arrest order," said L'Wrona, extending his free hand.

  "Certainly." Taking a paper from his tunic pocket, A'Nal handed it stiffly to the captain. L'Wrona scanned the order, eyes stopping at the signature block. He handed it back. "This is signed by a councilman. You may be able to hold Commodore DTrelna and Commander N'Trol on it-you certainly can't hold me."

  "Even the aristocracy is subject to Fleet orders," said the colonel. "Even you, My Lord."

  "It's just a civil order," said L'Wrona, "and I am not just any aristocrat."

  A'Nal glared at L'Wrona and started to speak. As he did so, a voice called wonder-ingly from the first officer's station, "Seven hells! They've wiped the commtorps records!"

  The colonel turned to the technician as the three ship's officers exchanged satisfied looks. "I thought that couldn't be done?"

  The woman shrugged. "Nevertheless, they've done it-accessed the Imperial programming, somehow. It's all gone except basic commtorps inventory."

  Face flushing angrily, A'Nal turned back to his prisoners. "You must be feeling very smug. We'll see how you feel after interrogation.

  "Escort the commodore and the commander to the Tower," he ordered, "and remand them to the custody of the commandant."

  D'Trelna shook off the hands that reached for his arms. "What did you do in the war, Colonel?" he asked.

  "In the war?" repeated A'Nal, staring uneasily at D'Trelna's battle ribbons.

  "He means the ten-year war with the S'Cotar," said N'Trol helpfully. "The one that ended this year."

  "My record's none of your concern," said the colonel. "But it's one I'm proud of-I was assigned to ground headquarters of the Home Fleet."

  "In what capacity?" asked L'Wrona. "Budget officer."

  "Interesting," said DTrelna. "How'd you go from budget officer to colonel in a combat arm?"

  "Get them out of here," A'Nal ordered a sergeant. The NCO took the commodore's arm, steering him toward the doors. N'Trol and his escort followed.

  "Luck, H'Nar," called DTrelna as they took him away.

  "Luck, J'Quel, N'Trol," said the captain. Alone on the bridge, he and A'Nal faced each other.

  "You're correct-I can't arrest you," said the gray-uniformed officer. "I'd be very careful, though, if I were you, My Lord. Stay out of this. Go back to UTria-they need you there, now that the war's over." With a curt nod, he turned and left the bridge.

  "The real war's only just begun, Colonel," said L'Wrona softly. Alone on the big old ship, he watched the convoy disappear into the heat of midday, then turned and left the ship.

  Terra. A speck of nothingness on the spiral arm of our galaxy. Which is, of course, why the Empire-or certain members of the Empire-chose to build on Terra's moon a cybernetic guardian that would, when the moment was right, create and unleash into our somnolent Confederation an aggressor race, to "prepare" us for the "real" enemy, those long-forgotten AIs who lived just a universe away. That this cybernetic guardian, some five thousand years after the fall of the Empire, chose to create such a formidable lifeform as the S'Cotar biofabs, made the contest all too real. That we won was a miracle; that we will ever be entirely rid of the S'Cotar plague unlikely. It can only be done planet by planet, nest by nest. And it can only be done by the Watchers.

  Colonel S'Rel

  Report to the Confederation Council Archives Reference 518.392.671

  AI

  c

  2

  "What are you trying to tell me, S'Rel?" said Sutherland, interrupting the Watcher in mid-evasion.

  The K'Ronarin stopped speaking, then leaned forward, fists on the CIA director's desk. "Very well, Sutherland. I'll be blunt. My men and I have been ordered back to K'Ronar -we leave Terra tomorrow."

  "Leave? Tomorrow?" Sutherland heard himself stammer.

  S'Rel nodded. "Repulse is going home. We're to go with her."

  "Repulse is pulling out?"

  S'Rel nodded.

  "Is she being replaced?"

  "No."

  Sutherland slumped back in his chair. "My God, S'Rel-you're leaving this planet defenseless against…"

  "Against nothing," said S'Rel, walking to the big picture window with its view of the Potomac Palisades. A wiry, pale-complexioned man in his thirties, dressed for the weather in a short sleeve plaid shirt and denim pants, he stared across the sullen brown river at Washington.

  "Against nothing," he repeated, turning back to Sutherland, hands clasped behind his back. "That nest in the Mato Grosso was the last of them. There are no more traces on Terra. We've wiped all the S'Cotar on your world."

  It had been a swift, flawlessly executed operation. Without warning, Repulse had moved out of stationary orbit, heading outsystem at speed, protests from a hundred nations rippling in its wake as the radar reports came in. Ambassador Z'Sha had only just issued an uninformative statement when the destroyer suddenly reappeared over Brazil, missile and fusion batteries sending a thin-stream of death into the atmosphere-a fierce rain of ordnance and energy that impacted on a small village deep in the Amazon basin.

  Flashing silver in the tropical sun, five K'Ronarin shuttles had swept in low off the river, Mark 44 turrets strafing the burning, blasted ruins. With a faint whine of n-gravs, the craft had settled into the clearing between the village and a swamp. Before the landing struts had even touched the ground, the raiders were leaping out, running for the village, M32 rifles in hand, S'Rel and Sutherland in the lead.

  The survivors huddled at the other end of the clearing, a pathetic group of ragged, terrified children clutching their frightened mothers; a few old men, watching the American Rangers and the K'Ronarin commandos impassively, through eyes that had seen too much, and one very fat man, shirtless but wearing a big straw hat. Behind them, smoke drifted lazily from the ruins of their homes out over the broad brown stretch of the Amazon.

  S'Rel had halted his force about forty meters from the survivors, waiting as the fat man walked over to them.

  "Why?" said the fat man, halting in front of him and Sutherland, hands spread dramatically, eyes shifting between the two of them.

  Blaster leveled, S'Rel had said nothing, merely pulled the trigger. The weapon shrilled, sending a fierce red beam punching through that great gut-a gut that resolved into a slender green thorax as the S'Cotar died.

  The tall insectoid was still falling when the firefight broke out-the illusion of huddled refugees rippling, dissolving into a tight formation of blaster-armed, bulbous-eyed bugs that opened fire with trained precision, indigo-blue bolts slamming into the human line, a withering fire that would have wiped out the human force had the thin silver miracle of their warsuits not absorbed the fusion bolts, converting them to brief bursts of multicolored lightning that crac
kled up and down the warsuits for an instant, then were gone.

  The return fire was just as accurate as the S'Cotars' but deadly. Unprotected by warsuits, the bugs died, the few survivors scattering for the swamps as the humans charged.

  "Shit," said Sutherland, the target between his sights suddenly shrouded in black mists -the wind had shifted inland, bringing the smoke from the village in over the clearing.

  "They can't get far," said S'Rel, kicking the firelight's first casualty. "Their transmute's dead." The corpse was thinner, taller than the rest, a six-legged horror that lay face down in the mud, tentacles still clutching a blastrifle. Like the dead warriors behind it, it had mandibles. Unlike theirs, its weren't serrated- they were long, thin, hiding the almost microscopic probes that slid out from them and into the brains of its victims, slowly absorbing their memories, their personas, until the transmute could perfectly assume their lives.

  Telepathic, telekinetic, and dead, thought

  Sutherland, looking down at the S'Cotar. Thank God.

  "Bill, take your Rangers through the village, then circle into the swamp from the east," said S'Rel as the air cleared. "I'll take my group and go straight in from here. We should catch any survivors between us."

  As Sutherland went looking for the Ranger commander, S'Rel spoke into his communicator. A moment later the shuttles rose, moving slowly at treetop level into the swamp.

  Three hours and they'd killed three S'Cotar -and almost lost S'Rel.

  "What was that reptile again?" asked S'Rel, turning from the window.

  "An anaconda," said Sutherland. "Largest snake on the planet."

  Hearing splashing and a muted cry for help, Sutherland had hurried through the brackish, waist-deep water, blastrifle above his head. The sounds of the struggle stopped for an instant, then resumed, louder than before, as he penetrated the thick mangrove swamp, emerging into a shallower area where the trees were fewer.

  Eyes bulging, face contorted, the K'Ron-arin was up to his waist in the muddy water, his free hand just keeping the tree-thick, olive-colored coils of the great snake from making the final turn around his neck.

  Cursing, Sutherland twisted the M32's muzzle down to minimum aperture, set the selector switch to continual fire, and moved toward the struggle, water, mud and tangled roots tugging at him, slowing his pace to a frustrating, dreamlike crawl. By the time he'd covered the final yards to the roiling brown water, S'Rel had disappeared beneath the surface.

  Placing the rifle's muzzle inches from the glistening, mottled-brown skin, Sutherland had pulled the trigger, sending a thin red beam knifing through the snake. Ignoring the shudder that suddenly rippled down the long yards of flesh, Sutherland passed the beam through the rest of that thigh-thick braid of muscle.

  The thrashing ceased as the anaconda's body fell into two dead halves.

  Dropping the rifle, Sutherland seized S'Rel's hand, pulling the. K'Ronarin from under the water, gasping for air, still wrapped in dead serpent's coils. The anaconda's head hung down S'Rel's back, mouth open, tongue protruding.

  T don't believe you got all the S'Cotar, S'Rel," said Sutherland, looking up at the Watcher. "I think you're leaving because it's politically expedient-declaring a victory and going home."

  Sighing, S'Rel sank into one of the red leather armchairs fronting the director's desk and leaned forward earnestly, hands on his knees. "Here's how it looks from FleetOps,

  Bill. We fought the S'Cotar for ten years, lost millions of people, scores of planets. We were about to lose it all when D'Trelna and Implacable stumbled onto your planet and found…"

  "And found the S'Cotar were organic manufactures-biofabs," said Sutherland. "Created beneath our moon by a possibly demented cyborg programmed thousands of years ago by your equally demented Empire."

  "Yes," nodded S'Rel, "but don't forget why. To toughen us as a people, prepare us to face an invasion from another reality-an invasion of artificial intelligences-AIs-that happened once before, a million years ago, and was repulsed by the Trel."

  "Even though defeated," said Sutherland, pointing a finger at the Watcher, "those machines killed the Trel and every living thing on all their worlds. And they'd have killed us, too, this last time, if D'Trelna hadn't stopped them at Terra Two."

  "It's FleetOps opinion," said S'Rel, "that the end of the Terra Two incursion marked the end of any threat from the AIs. Our priority now is to purge our planets of any remaining S'Cotar and get on with the rebuilding of broken worlds and shattered lives."

  "FleetOps is wrong," said the CIA director. "The Trel warned that the rift they sealed to the AI universe was opening now. The Terra

  Stephen Ames Berry-Two invasion was a fluke, maybe even a feint. The Fleet of the One is coming, S'Rel, through that rift, perhaps even right now. And what are you people doing?" His voice rose angrily. "You're doling out tea and comfort and congratulating each other on having survived the big green bugs when you should be mobilizing every ship that can mount a fusion battery!"

  "Finished?" said the K'Ronarin as Sutherland caught his breath.

  "What about D'Trelna?"

  S'Rel shrugged. "He was sent to check out the Trel's invasion warning-into Quadrant Blue Nine, from which no ship has returned since the Fall. He hasn't been heard from. I doubt he ever will be."

  There was a faint chirp, repeated three times. Frowning, the K'Ronarin took the slim communicator from his shirt pocket. "S'Rel," he said.

  "Alert condition one," said a flat voice in K'Ronarin. "An AI battleglobe has just entered the Terran system."

  "Close the portal!" said S'Rel.

  "It didn't come from the portal," said the voice. "It came from our space."

  The battle klaxon brought Repulse's Captain P'Qal from bed to bridge in record time, pausing only for a quick commlink call.

  "Status?" he said, taking the command chair, eyes on the big board. Behind him the armored doors slid shut with a faint hiss.

  "Target appeared at jump point a few moments ago," said S'Jat in her usual low, soft voice. She nodded at the board. "As you can see, it's headed insystem at just below light speed, and on present course, will reach here in nineteen point five t'lars."

  "And pass right through," said P'Qal brusqely. The emergency wasn't improving his notoriously short temper. "She's not decelerating."

  "As the captain will note," said S'Jat, unruffled, "what little data we have on AI battleglobes indicates that they can decelerate almost instantaneously."

  "Absurd," said the captain. "A violation of every principle of astrogation and related physics."

  "Perhaps we don't know everything about astrogation and physics," suggested the first officer.

  They stared at each other, the short, bald man and the tall, thin brunette. "I'm not going to debate epistemology with you," said P'Qal. "I always lose." His eyes shifted to the tacscan data threading across the board. "Almost the size of Terra's moon," he said. "Highly manueverable, fusion batteries half the size of this ship, first-class shielding." He looked up. "Suicide to take her on, Number One."

  "Terra has no defenses," she said mildly. "You've alerted them?" She nodded. "Through our New York embassy."

  "And FleetOps?"

  "Knows nothing. The battleglobe took out our skipcomm relay the instant she entered the system."

  "I see," he said, eyes going back to the board. The large red blip had passed Saturn. "Where in all the hells did it come from?"

  S'Jat shrugged. "The implications aren't pleasant."

  P'Qal touched the commlink in his chairarm. "Get me Dawn-Captain S'Yatan. Battle priority alpha." He glanced again at the tacscan-the battleglobe was almost at Mars and showed no sign of slowing.

  "Captain S'Yatan, sir," said the comm officer.

  "Close the portal," P'Qal ordered the man whose image appeared in his commscreen.

  "Already done," said the younger man. "But where did it come from?"

  "Let's go ask her," said P'Qal. "Man your battlestations and follow us."<
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  1. Artificial intelligences (AIs) exist. We have fought and defeated one of their advance units. More are coming.

  2. These AIs are, as suspected, from a parallel reality where organic, carbon-based life is subservient to silicon-based life.

  3. In a revolt against the AI Empire -called the Revolt by all sides-humans, a few hundred AIs and members of at least one other species escaped to this reality, moving uptime 900,000 years. Arriving 100,000 of our years ago, these revolutionaries founded our civilization, their humans intermarrying with humans indigenous to our galaxy. We are their descendants.

  4. The AIs who came here still live among us, in human guise.

  5. The AI Empire still exists. In a million years it has forgotten nothing and learned nothing. And it has found the means to come after us-one million battleglobes strong. Nothing we have can stand against it.

  6. The AI Empire has succeeded in planting a fifth column among us. It is one of our principal industrial arms, Combine T'Lan. As of this communique, we have beaten off one of Combine T'Lan's task forces.

  7. As my and Commodore DTrelna's commands have been declared corsair by FleetOps-one may guess at whose instigation-we have decided to become corsairs, in a limited sense. I have agreed to a limited raid on Combine T'Lan's headquarters-my ships will protect Implacable as she sends in assault boats. It is unlikely that any of my command will survive the action.

  Admiral Second S'Gan, loc. sit. (Final skipcomm received.)

  3

  "So, you slime have co-opted the Tower garrison," said D'Trelna, looking around the room.

  It was a small room, built to inspire fear: thick-mortared walls of ancient, hand-dressed stone, set deep beneath the Tower-an old Imperial interrogation cell furnished only with the traditional scarred gray table and folding chair.

  "The Commandant of the Tower is sensitive to political winds, Commodore," said the man behind the table. "A talent you lack."

  "You're Councilor D'Assan," said D'Trelna. "Of the Imperial Party."