There was no resistance. The few beings Jo saw stood rigidly immobile, staring with terrified eyes. Seldom had she seen so many sports, discards, and bizarre aliens. And this world had been allowed no outside contact for centuries. The creepy-crawlies were taking over.

The target did not move till the circle was under a kilometer in diameter. Jo's faceplate began displaying Gemina track in five second alternates with suit local. Up on battalion net, for all officers and NCOs: "A reminder from up top, people. We will take it alive." No commentary, of course. That was there only in tone.

I Am A Soldier.

Corollary: I Obey.

On platoon net: "It's headed our way, people."

Jo matched Gemina-feed with a suit-local heat trace a hundred meters out. She outlocked Gemina, fixed the track, switched on squad tac. "Coming right down our throats, guys."

"Why can't we see it? You see it, Sarge? Anybody see it?"

No one did. But it ought to be visible. It was on top of them.

Top! She looked up, adjusted to max enhancement. There. Something scuttling along a beam.

Her bolt edged it perfectly. It went into nerve lock, clung to a stress lattice branching from a pylon, slowly changed into what looked like a black plastic film. Jo switched to platoon tac. "Platoon, Second Squad. We got it."

— 6 —

The chamber was a perfect globe a thousand meters across. A great mass floated near its heart, slightly upward as gravity was oriented. Lightning leaped from the curved walls to the mass. Tin-sheet thunder beat its chest and howled around the cavity. Gouts of red, gaseous flame exploded across the darkness. Self-congratulatory devil's laughter pranced between the valleys of the thunder.

A woman stood in the mouth of a corridor ending at the wall of the chamber. "He's in a dramatic mood today." Her companion was a youth who looked seventeen. She looked twenty-one. He was. She was not. She was much older and more cruel. The sorrow of the torturer looked out through her pale blue eyes.