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  The shuttle launched with a bump. Win closed his eyes and willed himself to stay calm, meditating in an effort to fight the panic that rose from not being able to see anything except the bulkhead next to him, and not being able to hear anything except his own breathing. The pilot called out the distance. Win knew what had happened at Childress Station: Zhelnikov had sacrificed an entire scientific team so that he and his allies could start a civil war. His thoughts spun downward in a vortex of prediction, imagining what would happen at each step of Zhelnikov’s plan, the moves and countermoves after the religious within Fleet discovered the plan. Win soon thought himself to sleep, his helmet clicking against his chest until an adjacent Marine elbowed him awake.

  “We’re here, sir.”

  Win punched out of his seat harness. He waited for the airlock to open then followed the group out the main hatch, filing through and onto Childress Station.

  “Jesus,” someone said. “Look at this place.”

  A cylindrical chamber stretched before them for almost a hundred meters, and papers and equipment spun in microgravity. Scratch marks covered the walls. Deep gouges punctuated smooth rock where Sommen warriors had dragged their knives against it, and Win noted the depth to which their blades had penetrated; whatever material comprised Sommen knives, Fleet hadn’t yet duplicated it. And the strength it had taken—to bury their blades into hard rock . . .

  “Set the nuke,” Win said. “Time it for three hours and put it someplace hard to find. The rest of you on me. Move.”

  Win led them through the cylinder’s center and then turned into a side passage, a map of the station outlined in green on his suit’s heads-up. The project had worked, he told himself again. Zhelnikov assured it. There was no reason for the Sommen to have any interest in the system, which was one reason it had been chosen. No resources, no gas giants, nothing. A worthless star orbited by a tremendous field of rock and ice that alone shouldn’t have attracted Sommen attention.

  Win reached the door to the science section and punched in the access codes, forcing it open.

  “Stay here,” he said. After his sensors adjusted to the sudden increase in brightness, Win surveyed the horrors his new surroundings contained: Men and women had been split almost in half so that over a hundred bodies hovered in midair, bloated from having been dead for some time, and Win sighed with relief that he couldn’t smell the odor. The cuts fascinated him. Win grabbed the nearest body, brushing aside clouds of dried blood, and his servos hummed when he pushed his hand through, his fingers visible on the other side when they protruded from a dead man’s back.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  The Marine lieutenant had ignored Wilson’s order, entering behind him where he locked to the deck and scanned for threats.

  “They are perfect.”

  “What?”

  “The Sommen. This is what they do: destruction perfected. These are Childress scientists and each knew that they were to avoid being captured; they died with honor. And I told you to wait outside.”

  “You’re telling me they killed themselves, sir? Suicide?”

  “Not at all. I’m telling you the Sommen gutted them from chin to groin and these men and women sacrificed themselves for a mission. If our scientists are this brave, maybe we’ll win this war after all.”

  The lieutenant said something else but Win ignored it and moved further in, where he activated his harness’s leg magnets so he could clamp onto the metal grate floor. He clanked his way toward an area with no handholds. Droplets of blood—dried into jagged brown shapes—rose from under the grate and crept upward as he walked. Win barely noticed it, instead centering on hundreds of computers ahead that ringed a huge spherical object, over a hundred meters in diameter, and which rested on a tripod in the middle of the compartment. It took a minute to reach. Win scanned the object and found its data ports, yanking out a series of tubes that he stuffed into a bag until the last one slid free.

  “Contact,” the captain said, his voice buzzing over Win’s helmet speakers. “Vessel inbound, maybe more than one, a million klicks out. Sommen.”

  Win made sure the bag was sealed, shouted for the lieutenant to get moving, and then deactivated his magnetics to travel faster. He pushed off toward the door. His servo harness hadn’t just been designed to support his withering frame, but had been altered to facilitate rapid movement in zero g, the controls wired to hookups in his skull so that Win just had to think and the suit reacted. Small jets of gas puffed. Within seconds he screamed through the air and out of the research lab, where the main group of Marines grabbed Win by the arms and began pulling him through the empty station using their suits’ own gas jets.

  “Come, sir!”

  “The Sommen are close,” said Win. “I can feel it. If we die, die with honor and they may forgive this second incursion outside human space.”

  “Sir?”

  “War. Die bravely and we may avoid an early start to it.”

  “We’re here, sir.”

  The Marine pushed him into the airlock where another one grabbed Win and ushered him into the waiting shuttle. By the time Win re-strapped himself in, he had already felt the gravity increasing as the craft accelerated out of Childress docking, and the communications net erupted with activity.

  “They’re trying to lock on us,” the Marine pilot announced.

  Win’s mind raced. He glanced at the bag that he’d filled with data storage tubes, resting in a webbing harness at the shuttle rear.

  “Arrival at Higgins in twenty minutes,” the pilot continued. “Hard lock. They’re going to launch.”

  “At least they aren’t close enough to use that plasma,” another Marine commented; a few others chuckled.

  “Launch detected. Approximately three hundred targets inbound, probable enemy missiles. Impact in fifteen minutes.”

  Win burst out of his couch and a nearby Marine tried to grab him, screaming something about evasive maneuvers and that g forces would smear him across the bulkhead. Win slapped the Marine’s hands away. He grabbed the bag, ripping it out of the webbing storage space, and then pushed off the wall toward the shuttle’s engine bay where he opened a small hatch to expose the craft’s emergency data buoy. He yanked a cable from his suit’s chest compartment. After jacking the cable into the buoy, several panels sprung open; as fast as he could, Win began stuffing the Childress data tubes in. He sealed the missile-shaped object for flight, punching in Zhelnikov’s coordinates so it would arrive at the right location on the safe side of the wormhole.

  Win detected movement out of his peripheral vision. Two Marines jetted toward him, yelling to strap in, but he punched at his forearm keypad again, cursing. The buoy was too small to have enough fuel for the entire trip, but Win hoped it would go far enough that a Fleet ship would pick up its beacon.

  He hit the launch button and then ripped his cable out. The interior panel slid shut at the same time the Marines grabbed him by the arms, and the pilot announced that an emergency buoy had been dropped to burn toward transit. Win sighed with relief; at least now there was a chance Zhelnikov would get what he needed.

  The two Marines forced him into his seat and then strapped him down, cinching the harness as tight as it would go. A moment later they began evading. Win screamed at the g forces, which threw him from one side to the other and crushed him into the acceleration couch as if the pilot wanted to suffocate them all. Win blacked out several times, coming to in a stupor where, for just a second, he thought maybe they’d dodged the missiles.

  “Higgins docking bay, five minutes,” the pilot announced.

  The computer clicked in. “Missile impact thirty seconds.” Twenty seconds later, Win closed his eyes and prayed.

  I am a warrior; this is a fitting end. I go willingly for this is my purpose and this is my role. I am a warrior . . .

  He hadn’t imagined this would ever happen, not two months ago, and certainly not years ago when he had first been tapped for service. Zhelnikov, h
e thought. Win hated even the name and remembered the first time he saw the man, when he got his first look at the scarred face that now haunted him at death.

  “New launch detected,” the pilot said.

  “Where from?” Win asked.

  “The Higgins. She’s continuing to launch, expending her entire missile store and sending them on an intercept trajectory. It’s a good thing there’s no atmosphere in space or we’d feel what’s about to go down. This will be close; brace yourselves, in case a Sommen warhead gets through.”

  Win switched his view to the shuttle’s optical sensors, just in time. Over a hundred missiles detonated a kilometer beyond the shuttle, expanding into clouds of metal and plastic that screamed in the direction of the incoming Sommen warheads, protecting the Higgins’s shuttle with a wall of debris. It worked. All the Sommen weapons detonated prematurely, and the Marines shouted with joy when their shuttle screamed into the hangar bay, slamming to a stop after its front end buried itself in a bulkhead. The maneuver crushed the pilot and copilot, but the rest of the men scrambled out of the hatch, and Win heard the Higgins’s alarm claxon scream; a voice over ship’s speakers warned everyone to get into acceleration couches.

  CHAPTER TWO

  San Kyarr’s knees trembled. You are a force never before seen, her mother had said, and everyone recognizes that someday you’ll have a chance to prove it. Your father, rest his soul, knew a Buddhist monk who saw it all, the future; something big is headed your way, and it’s your job to prepare so you can defend what’s good. Death is coming. It moves quickly, and travels astride powerful engines.

  She risked a glance at her fellow candidates, their eyes fixed ahead. They resembled San. All had shaved heads so that after she peeked down the line it reminded her of a row of cue balls resting on stubby torsos, each girl four and a half feet tall. Their bare heads glistened with sweat. Summer in Texas crept in through narrow windows, open on each side of the barracks, their metal frames gray with paint layered so thick that it gathered in drops, dried over the years into oval-shaped tears of color. Gray, the color of Fleet. Anything metal, wood, or plastic had been coated with it, a tradition that lingered from the days when mankind’s primary navy had been one of metal and water, the paint meant to protect precious materials from the corrosion of salt.

  She glanced at her skin, its light brown just enough to set her apart from the others. One girl glanced over, grimacing. San wished that Fleet could paint her gray, hiding San under thick layers from the acid looks of Earth-born candidates, Americans who somehow knew from her skin alone that her father had once been the enemy. Myanmarese.

  The girl mouthed words, silently: Go back to Mars.

  “I doubt any of you know this,” the sergeant began, “because most of you are too stupid. But your bodies are perfection—all Fleet. Lovingly altered to absorb oxygen at a more efficient rate than unmodified personnel, and capable of producing excess glucose and improved hemoglobin for surviving combat g-forces. Your short stature and thick bones also help, but don’t think your breeding gives you an automatic pass. Some of you will be going home, washed out.”

  San waited. On either side of them stood rows of bunk beds and despite being on Earth for the first time, her body handled the increased gravity with no problem. Sleep was another issue. The transit from Mars had taken forever and it was her first trip, so San hadn’t rested much and now she fought to keep her eyes open. Exhaustion had accumulated in the corners of her thought, gaining mass with every minute until it gathered on the outside of her eyelids, tiny weights that pulled downward, her eyes on the verge of surrender. They were about to flutter shut when a woman in a black uniform entered.

  “This is Sister Mirriam-Ann MacGuire; you will address her as Sister. She has something to say.”

  The girl who had thrown a dirty look whispered to one next to her, loud enough for San to hear. “First a freak from Mars. Now a freak from the Church.”

  Sister Mirriam-Ann walked on stubby legs, squat. She had white hair tucked under a nun’s coif and dark circles around her eyes. Half her face had been torn apart and rebuilt. San imagined that whoever had reshaped her skin had done it using clay, sculpting it so it retained an inherent symphony of lumps. It reminded San of the lava flows on Mars, rock frozen by the cold atmosphere before it had a chance to run far, forming enormous globules of solid material that looked fascinatingly grotesque. Those were all black; basalt. Sister Mirriam-Ann’s skin looked bone white, pale except for masses of pink scar tissue that punctuated her appearance to invoke revulsion from anyone who stopped to look. When she spoke, San expected her to sound as ugly as she appeared; instead the nun’s voice was surprisingly soft.

  “Good evening. In case you are wondering, yes, I have been to space to minister to the faithful assigned at forward operating outposts; I was there when the Sommen first invaded. They gave me this face.” She pointed to her cheek. “I wasn’t much older than you are now. Eighteen. My order visited Karin-Two and I don’t remember much of the events except for waking up on a tanker ship converted into a hospital, headed back to Earth, where a field medic did his best to rebuild me—without the assistance of bots. Most of the hospital acceleration couches were empty except for me and a couple of sisters from my order; the Sommen didn’t leave many alive. They never do.”

  The nun paused and leaned against one of the bunks. “My order is in a Fleet ancillary order that has many elements but, most importantly, we have . . . special skills. Ones that Fleet thinks should be fully integrated into their operations. That’s why I’m here; this is your final, pre-Fleet test. I will determine your strengths and weaknesses so that we can better determine where you will best serve and weed out those who aren’t suited before we invest in the final training courses for Fleet occupational specialties. Your personal wants and dreams have no place here. All of you, including the boys—who are getting this same lecture in their dormitory right now—have potential, but that is all. Potential means almost nothing. My order decides who becomes an officer and who winds up in latrine engineering. Sergeant,” the Sister said. She turned toward a door at the back of the dorm, and headed through. San caught a glimpse of a small office beyond; its furnishings were sparse, with a large wooden crucifix attached to the rear wall.

  Since when had the Catholics, or any religion, been part of Fleet? she wondered.

  “Line up,” the sergeant barked. The girls jostled into position, some of them needing help from the woman’s swagger stick. “You will be called one at a time and will enter Sister Mirriam-Ann’s office when ordered. What you are about to experience is classified. You will not discuss the questions you are asked at any time. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.”

  Part of San felt nervous—not scared, the kind of energy she always felt when something exciting was about to happen. Classified? What did that even mean? Lost in thought and tired, by the time it was her turn San stumbled into the office to stand at ease, almost missing it when the nun ordered her to sit on a metal chair.

  “Have you ever heard claims that human beings only use ten to fifteen percent of their brains?” Sister Mirriam-Ann asked.

  “No, sir. I mean, Sister.”

  “Well, people have made that claim and they continue to, even though it’s ludicrous. There’s no way our entire blood-pumping system is dedicated to support so much dormant tissue. What is true”—the nun stood and faced the wall, her back to San—“is that you can get some interesting effects by increasing the number of synapses and tinkering with other portions of the brain. Does this make sense?”

  “No, Sister; I don’t know why this is relevant.”

  “We face two great evils, child. They are on the horizon and you and your kind will have to face them before you’re ready; one evil works from within Fleet and another works from without. But that discussion is for another time. It is only important that you remember these words, and understanding will come.”

  “Now, then.” The Sister lowered herself back into
her chair. “I’m going to ask you a series of questions, and I want you to answer them honestly and completely. Understood?”

  San nodded.

  “San Kyarr—San for short—daughter of Maung Kyarr and Nang Vongchanh. Second-generation Fleet. Your parents relocated to special duty on Mars where they entered you into the genetic breeding program soon after your mother’s pregnancy, correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Father, Buddhist. Mother, Roman Catholic. Do you believe in ghosts, San?”

  The question surprised her and she laughed, stifling it almost immediately.

  “Something funny? Am I entertaining?”

  “No . . . no, Sister.”

  “No, you don’t find me entertaining or no you don’t believe in ghosts?”

  “Yes, Sister, you are entertaining . . . I mean . . .” San’s hands shook; she was blowing it, her mind too sleepy. For a second she wished that her parents hadn’t placed her in the Fleet program in the first place, wondering about the normal Martian kids—tall and slender, elegant in gravity and so sure of everything. Even with her brown skin, nobody would guess she was Myanmarese if she had the bone structure of a Martian. Her mother’s words surfaced in a dim memory.

  There is goodness in the world; have faith. Lies are for cowards.

  Sister Mirriam-Ann slapped her desk. “Answer the question.”

  “Yes, I believe in ghosts.”

  San wished she could take back the words after they’d been uttered. Forget about the fact that the nun was trying to fluster her; the answer she’d just given was a wash-out response. Fleet discharged anyone showing signs of psychiatric disorders and now San waited for the nun to snap her fingers and tell her to pack her bags.