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  The supervisor pursed his lips and tapped ash into a tray. Smoke wound around his head in translucent threads. “Don’t you like it here, Cal?” he asked with a casual, encompassing gesture. “A world light-years from stuffy old Central’s nosy snuffling, assigned to a project already listed in the ‘improbable’ category. Plenty of recreational time on a planet with plenty of distractions, several fascinating alien races, an interesting ecology … and a healthy salary.”

  Cal shook his head. “I’ve heard this one too many times, Torl. This place may be Wonder World to you, but frankly I sometimes wonder what the hell I’m doing on it. In case you haven’t noticed, I actually care about being a Quantaphys.” He chuckled. “Even more than having a good time with some hot numbers on the Slippery Track, no matter what you say. This is important stuff, Torl, explosive stuff, and I still can’t figure out why the Freaky Feddies put the project so damned close to Jaxdron space.”

  “You know this is the closest habitable world to the Fault, Cal,” Torl responded coolly.

  “Yeah. The Fault. Dr. Hindrix and all that. Well, I’m sorry, and you can attribute it to my recent less than successful graduation from adolescent rebelliousness, but I’m not sure if I buy the company line on physics. A lot of what they taught me doesn’t cut the mustard empirically.”

  Torl smiled sardonically. “You certainly love your words, don’t you, Cal? Take it from an oldster. Enjoy what you’ve got. Don’t look too deeply into everything, it doesn’t bear scrutiny. And above all, don’t rock the boat, Cal Shemzak! You’re not the only person in it, you know.”

  “Yeah. I know. “Cal got up, unable to hide the slight air of contempt in his voice. Even though this planet, Mulliphen, was many light-years from GalFedCent, even though it was just a meteor’s throw away from a number of Free Worlds, the iron fingers of the Friends hovered at the top of every string of every puppet here.

  Mulliphen was one of the many worlds in the Human Zone considered “Earth standard.” The uniqueness of the world was that it lay so close to what Terran physicists had dubbed “the Fault,” a disruption of energy flow in Underspace. It was appropriate that the Federation use its beachhead upon this distant world to study the disruption with a team of physicists and engineers. Not that the Friends really gave a hoot in a hand basket about the beauties of physics, Cal Shemzak knew. They just wanted more power.

  Cal Shemzak selected his breakfast—eggs, bacon, and toast; his usual—thankful that he didn’t have to eat the Shift-stew glop the natives sold to the Earthies. Not that Shift-stew wasn’t checked out first for its wholesomeness. Nutritionally it was absolutely top-drawer stuff. The greenish purple color was never particularly appetizing, though, at the best of times. And one never knew exactly what the source of the proteins, carbs, and fat was. The station had all kinds of rumors, to be sure, none savory, but the sweet-natured Mulliphenians merely smiled wistfully when questioned and sang a song or spoke of the weather.

  Anyway, Shift-stew was definitely not a post-hangover kind of meal.

  Cal Shemzak clopped his plate onto the table beside Dr. Ornix. “Sorry, Torl. Maybe you’re right. Besides, what can I do?”

  Torl’s face seemed to relax at this, which was just what Cal wanted. No good letting the management know your true feelings. He was very close to getting a real tachyonic tailspin from the tonal to the naugul, and the boys in charge would have fits if they ever realized the implications of his work.

  “Revolutionary” was the only word that fit, and any form of revolution turned the Friends a little red around the gills. At the best of times the leaders of the Federation government were called benevolent tyrants by their opposition, and though Cal Shemzak somewhat questioned the descriptive noun, he definitely doubted the preceding adjective.

  “You are a welcome addition to the team, Cal,” Dr. Torlos Ornix said. “I suppose it’s understandable that your innovative mind champs at the bit that feeds you.”

  Cal Shemzak concealed his chuckle at this, concentrating on getting his food down.

  Breakfast dishes were pushed to one side and the two scientists were absorbed in studying the holocharts when the Jaxdron struck like hammers from the sky.

  They first felt it as a vibration deep in the guts of the Matrix Generator.

  “What’s going on here?” Dr. Torlos Ornix said, staring down at his cup of tea as it clattered in its saucer. Cal Shemzak’s coffee mug wobbled off the table and shattered on the floor, splashing the men’s shoes with the remains of its contents.

  “I don’t know!” Cal shouted. His teeth ached from the subauditory rumble; he lost his vision momentarily as the Visual Augmenter ejected its crystalline components onto the table before they could shatter in his eye. This should not happen, Cal Shemzak realized. The vibration buffers on the generator were the most sophisticated in the universe.

  “We’ve got to get down to the engines,” Torl was saying as the sound overwhelmed him, rising from a gravelly hum into unbearable volume, then modulating to a siren-like keening. Tor clamped his hands to his ears. His eyes bulged from their sockets. The sound seemed to rip Cal’s breath from his lungs. One moment he was sitting, the next he found himself lying on the floor.

  “Get out,” he yelled as he strained to lift himself up. “We’re sitting on a volcano.”

  A thin stream of blood leaked down Dr. Ornix’s left earlobe, dripping into his neat beard. He clung to the table, which was bolted to the floor. The high keen lowered to a steady throb, and Cal became aware of people screaming. He knew that, on the lower levels, people would be scurrying up ladders, climbing stairs, getting out.

  Then the explosion came.

  It hurled Cal Shemzak off his feet and slammed him into a wall. A girder fell onto the table, smashing it into the floor, barely missing Dr. Ornix, who crawled away beneath the rain of plastic and carbon-fibers. From below, a kind of obscene gargling sound arose. From the central well shaft connecting the generator’s subterranean bulk and the surface operations—solar interaction, atmosphere conditioning, temperature control—a geyser rose like a breath from hell. Fire, shifting curtains of energy, firecracker blossoms of color gathered into a searing maelstrom.

  Momentarily stunned, Cal recovered, picked himself up, and ran to Dr. Ornix. “This way,” he called. The doctor did not resist as Cal tugged at him. One thing to say about the Fed’s projects—they did not stint on safety. Their emergency precautions were as modern and as thorough as possible. Cal guided Dr. Ornix to the nearest blow-pod. “Help me uncycle the door,” he cried. Dr. Ornix nodded and together, as the building began to buckle and crack and dissolve around them, they turned the locking wheel. After a moment of resistance it spun. The door opened. Cal pushed his companion into the padded cell, then followed, closing the door behind him.

  “Come on, man!” he yelled at the dazed Ornix. “Strap yourself in!” Cal pushed the eject button, then used the ten seconds it took for the pod to activate to buckle into the molded cushion.

  Despite the padding, despite the comfortable design of the escape pod, when it rocketed away from the Generator Building the experience was akin to rolling bare-assed down a rocky slope. Dr. Ornix lost consciousness. Cal’s world whirled head over heels as the pod lifted into a short trajectory, then headed downward into the Catchfield two hundred meters away.

  Unfortunately, the Catch field was off. When the pod landed, it landed hard, and if not for the cushioning, Cal knew, he and the doctor would have resembled a bowl of Shift-stew moments after impact. When the spherical pod finally rolled to a stop, Cal felt as though his arms and legs had been pulled from their sockets. He seemed a series of aches linked together to form a human being.

  Painfully, the taste of blood coppery in his mouth, he unfastened the buckles and pushed away the cushion straps. “Torl,” he said. “Wake up.” He slapped the doctor’s face lightly. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

&
nbsp; Dr. Torlos Ornix woke into something close enough to consciousness for him to be moved about. Cal removed the doctor’s harnesses, then kicked open the escape hatch.

  They crawled out onto the grassy field. Other pods had already landed. Generator technicians struggled out, bloody, burned, bruised. Another pod landed hard and rolled into a stand of vlack trees. A group of natives—short humanoids with three sets of hands and long stiff hair covering their bodies—helped the occupants out.

  “Oh, my dear God!” came a cry. Cal Shemzak turned to see Shyla Armstile, assistant chief operations director and his occasional girlfriend point back to the compound.

  The Generator Building was constructed like a mountain: a mountain with levels, a subtle pyramid of levels, much of its operational tubing and piping external rather than internal, but formed in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.

  Now the building that housed the Casual Field Matrix Generator seemed to shiver as though it had turned to flesh and that flesh were terribly cold. Chunks of the structure had fallen off. Fluid spewed. Electrical lines sparked.

  The energy geyser that Cal had observed in the core well was slowly rising from the peak of the mountain sized building, reaching for the sky.

  And then the whole building simply disappeared.

  It phased out of existence, like a dream upon waking.

  Moments later there was a loud thunderclap as the surrounding air rushed in to fill the vacuum.

  People still dragged themselves from their pods, stunned. The natives danced to and fro, helping them, chittering their squeaking language, pointing back to where the Generator Building had once stood, and to the devastated periphery.

  A silence hung over all, an eye-of-the-hurricane silence. Cal Shemzak staggered over to attend to Dr. Ornix, who was leaning now against the battered casing of the pod.

  “What could have caused … ?” Torl muttered through broken teeth, gazing blankly over Cal’s shoulder. “Oh, my God!”

  Cal swiveled. At first he saw nothing—and then he saw the ship, descending.

  Cal had never seen a Jaxdron ship before. He had seen pictures, and the models used in the war films that had become popular since the start of the First Galactic War five years ago. All had been inaccurate. Cal thought with irony as the real McCoy thundered down on retrorockets and shimmering repulsor beams. The human renderings of the whip-ships were too symmetrical. The Jaxdron ship that landed a hundred yards away was a jumble of alien geometry, a jagged cluster of angles and rods and nameless shapes.

  “The Jaxdrons,” Cal said. “They did this. But how?”

  “Where are our defense ships?” Dr. Ornix said, suddenly lucid in terror.

  Cal shook his head. “Orbital debris, no doubt.”

  Humans and Mulliphenians were already running away from the imposing shape of the Jaxdron ship.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ornix said.

  “But where to?”

  Before they could do anything, however, a triangular shaped piece of the Jaxdron ship detached itself from the hull and rocketed over the field, knifing through the air.

  Cal looked over to Ornix to see if the man had any suggestions. The doctor was staring down, horrified, at the pinkie finger of his left hand.

  The finger glowed red for two seconds, then pulsed to blue, then back to red.

  “Oh Jesus!” Ornix said. “But it was an approved prosthesis!” He looked up with a stunned expression. “It was from Pax Industries, on Walthor!” Angrily, he tore the hand from his arm. Gray fluid flowed from his stump. The pinkie still pulsed and the digits writhed.

  The swift Jaxdron air-sled swooped toward them.

  Dr. Ornix looked up at Cal. “It must be you they want,” he whispered harshly.

  “What are you talking about?” Cal said, suddenly not certain of his grip on reality.

  “Things about you that you are not aware of,” Ornix said, reaching into a jacket pocket. “Aspects of your work. We were so blind, so stupid not to see!” He pulled out a mini-needler and aimed it at Cal. “I’m sorry, Shemzak, but we can’t let them have you.”

  Cal Shemzak should have died then: the needler beam was directed right at his heart. But Dr. Torlos Ornix froze, eyes glazed over. A wisp of smoke rose from his head. A puff of fire licked up his scalp. He flopped forward, legs twitching, a hole burned through his head.

  Cal became aware of a harsh humming from behind him. He spun around and found himself facing the grav-sled. Sensor bubbles clung to the underside of the gray slab, like multifaceted fly’s eyes.

  Cal Shemzak remembered GalFed’s orders. “Die before you let the Jaxdron take you. Die for your Friends.” Cal looked down at the weapon still gripped in Dr. Ornix’s hand. The way Cal Shemzak lived his life demanded only one course of action.

  “Hi,” he said, raising his arms in surrender and trying to smile through his headache. “Let’s be buddies.”

  The stun beam hit him hard.

  Cal Shemzak groaned as the last of the memory swept through him. He tried to stand, to get off this table, to walk, to do something to get his circulation flowing again, but could not.

  He looked up at the ceiling and the clouds seemed to move, as though making way for a clearer view of sky.

  A peace settled upon him. He lay back upon the table, no longer cold, but calm, only vaguely aware of pink light spilling down from above him.

  The headache was gone. All his pain was gone.

  “Laura,” he whispered before sleep sent him to an even gentler place.

  He loved her.

  Chapter Two

  It was the kind of world that might have inspired Dante. An uninformed visitor might see it as a planet of the damned, a world of the doomed. Not that it was barren or hellishly hot, or tundra-cold. On the contrary, its physical properties made it look like some tropical paradise. An eighty-six-degree axial tilt and a regular orbit, combined with a high water-land ratio, made it a planet lush with life, both flora and fauna. Three separate kinds of intelligent alien life—all agricultural/hunters and preindustrial—had developed on the verdant continents. These races were, on the whole, peaceful until Discovery Day. Then the Federation arrived. They saw that this world, listed on the charts as AB 40, second planet of six around the primary Delta Theta, was perfect for the terraforming techniques Federation scientists had perfected. They created an ideal prison world of magnificent utility, far enough from the main thoroughfares of galactic life not to be examined too closely by individuals with a conscience.

  The Intelligence operative deep in the corridors of the World’s Heart Computer knew this. She also knew that an agent with access to the core data banks within the Block—the castlelike monolith that controlled the planet—could steal priceless information of incredible variety. That was why she had come here, posing as a biotech specialist, and infiltrated the upper-echelon of the Controllers of the Industries. That was why she was padding down the steel corridors as stealthily as a bit of hidden datum in a mainframe. The woman had come to open that core, a job deemed totally impossible by the experts.

  But the woman was no ordinary intelligence agent.

  The guard at the last door was a Conglomerate—a strange fusion of human, alien, and machine manufactured by the ecoindustrial process of this weird world. His antennae wobbled as he reached out to take her pass. Other appendages positioned the identiscreen sensors for retinal readings and additional security checks.

  The woman reached across the desk swiftly, and a stunning jolt of electricity at just the right amperage passed from her hand to a control plate in the creature’s squat neck, rendering it unconscious. Its oddly jointed limbs twitched as she carefully removed the creature’s identity wires. She unbuttoned the loose workblouse she wore, lifted skin flaps, and attached the jacks to her own subcutaneous biotech apparatus.

  For all practical purposes, for
the next few minutes, until the system destabilized, the security devices would read her as the guard. It had taken a lot of hard work to buy just a short time—and if she wasn’t done within the time allowed, the security system would align on her and burn her body to a cinder.

  The agent smiled as she tapped in the opening codes. There was no possible way to finish the job wearing this security identity; she needed more time than it would provide. And when her identity dissolved, and the alarms rang, and all of the multibillion-credit defense weaponry was alerted that an unwelcomed entity was moving about in its most private places …

  Well, she really wasn’t certain what would happen then. No one had ever made it back to tell her.

  But one thing was for sure, the agent thought to herself confidently as a static hiss marked the opening of the thick door: when those klaxons blew, and those guns had her in their photonet cross hairs, the drudgery of this assignment would end and the real fun would begin.

  Quickly she slipped the guard’s needle pistol from its holster and ran through the open door into the unknown.

  Immediately she was presented with a choice: three separate corridors confronted her at thirty-degree angles. Tubing and wiring gleamed softly in the corridors’ ambient lighting. The smell was, if anything, even more antiseptic than in the rest of the building, the familiar ozonish taste of electricity in the air.

  Though she did not know which was the correct way, the agent hardly paused. The rubberized soles of her shoes smacked the tile floor of the rightmost corridor almost instantly.

  It took less than thirty seconds to reach a location which, according to her cyborg sensors, was a tapping place. She unscrewed a panel and found the appropriate neural grid. Less than another forty-five seconds later her biotech consciousness was roving freely through the systems, piercing past the macros of the languages the vast computer understood, skirting even the machine codes, and diving directly into endless kilometers of circuitry, understanding their complexities with a power that was beyond analysis, close to intuition.