The Years Go By

Maria

Date: 2829, 17 December

The Cybrids were waiting for her, outside the small rift. She was trapped, by tall walls on both sides. Only a bend in the slot canyon hid her from the cold, deadly eyes of the mechanical creatures. If one came into the right slot, passed that small bend, her life would be over in an instant's flash of deadly light.

She took stock of the Predator's interior. Suit intact, apparently. She would find out for sure soon enough. Weaponry? A small empistol, and a strong knife, both at the ready at her waist. Console fried: star patterns of broken plas covering sheets of static. Occasionally a coherent image would appear in its window, then disappear again. She fired the empistol into the main computer, wiping it completely, then tucked the weapon back in her belt.

The hiss of escaping air. She looked up, seeing a squirt of ice crystals passing through a tiny crack in the cockpit shield. She hit the depressurize and the air hissed back into the Predator's pressure tanks. She was in vacuum, so she popped the seal and pushed the small hatch open. She slipped through, careful not to rip her suit on the narrow rim.

She checked the suit's integrity lights on the HUD, all green, except for the most important: the long-term recycle. The chemical reactants in the suit's arms and legs would have no problem removing the carbon from the carbon dioxide, but after a few hours the reactants would be exhausted. The long-term would absorb solar radiation and use the energy to break off and vent the carbon. But it wasn't working.

At least the dissipater was working: the heat absorbed by the suit activated an array of thermoelectric cells, which generated enough power to keep the suit working. If the temperature got too high, it would bleed the excess by emitting a burst of microwaves.

She leapt to the stone surface, running a quick glance down the length of the Predator. The copper-toned paint, composed of a mixture of standard Knights' sensor masking compound and crushed anorthosite, was scarred and blackened by the hits of the blink guns that had fried the vehicle's internal components. The computer was dead, the tread servos were misaligned, even the life support system was blown.

It had been a Goad attacking her. She normally could have blown the thing to fragments in seconds, but she had been out of ammunition. She was returning to base, taking one of her usual hidden pathways in the shadows of crater rims and rifts, when the Goad had appeared ten meters in front of her as she rounded a crater rim. It was as if it had been waiting for her.

She crouched, ran a finger along a tiny ridge in the hot stone. She closed her eyes, reading the faint vibrations she felt there.

She looked up. The Goad was approaching. Indeed, it was very close. She straightened, gauging the distance to the dark shadows of the western wall.

Three hundred meters.

The vibration of the approaching Cybrid grew strong enough to feel through the soles of her boots. It had to be very close to the bend now.

She pushed off the Predator, flying into abrupt and desperate motion. She could not sprint as she wished to, since the low gravity forced her into a difficult loping gait. So she put all her energy into remaining upright in a straight, gliding motion. She could not risk a backward glance.

A blast of green light struck the canyon wall in front of her, shooting an array of green sparks off the rock. A star-shaped pattern of burns remained, smoking faintly.

Fifty meters but what difference did it make? The thing knew right where she was now. She could not escape it.

So she shot one leg outward at an awkward angle, feeling the shock tear through the leg as she struck a stone with her foot. She spun her arms, pirouetting on that foot, her body swerving in a hundred-eighty degree arc. She was facing the Goad now, and she pushed off, sprinting directly for the oncoming monstrosity.

As if stunned by her sudden attack, the thing slowed. It could not move too quickly in the canyon anyway, and now it was oncoming at only about twenty kilometers per hour.

The blink guns, disc shaped arrays of spidery circles, turned on their mounts and blazed with green fire. But she was too close for the vehicle-targeting program to hit her, so the bolts shot past a meter over her head. She felt the sting as the spidery bolts' emissions burned into her.

She struck the bottom gun, was nearly bowled over as the irresistible force struck her. She wrapped her arms around the weapon and lifted herself onto it, as the Goad came to a screeching halt and attempted to shake her off.

She climbed up the bottom mount, then slammed her fist into a small projection on the curved main frame of the vehicle. Fire lanced through her hand as her fist passed the vehicle's shield perimeter. Not set against low-speed kinetic impacts, the shields were useless against her.

The empistol would flare the shields, efficiently roasting her, so she drew her knife instead, and with every bit of speed and strength she could muster, she slashed the main power conduit for the blink gun.

Sparks flew, nearly startling her into releasing her grip. As the gun started spinning randomly beneath her, she pulled herself up to the top of the Goad's frame, slashing shield power threads with her knife. Soon the blade was completely useless and she discarded it.

The Goad was tromping out of the canyon now, heading to the west. The swaying motion was dizzying. She bashed the camera closest to her with her fist, knocking the fragile device off its mount. The Cybrid could not see her now, unless she moved into view of one of the other cameras.

She wondered exactly what she was going to do.

The Goad came to a sudden stop, and despite her best effort, she lost her grip and tumbled a few dozen meters, slamming painfully against an outcropping. She rolled and bounced to her feet, ignoring the apparent dislocation of her shoulder, and leapt behind the convenient rock. It would delay the Cybrid for a moment, no more--

She drew her empistol and poked her head over the rock, taking a potshot at the vehicle that sparkled off the shields, doing absolutely no damage. She ducked back down just before the vehicle threw a shot at her from its top blink gun.

The ground trembled as the vehicle moved, coming around the rock to get a clear shot at her. She circled with it, keeping the rock between them, until the Goad fired a volley to blast the rock to fragments.

She ran, as the Cybrid's attention was focused on the rock. There was nothing here but a flat plain, no shelter but a ridge of broken stone about a kilometer away. She ran past the Goad, and it turned to face her again as she blasted it with the empistol, striking it square on but still not able to do any damage with the tiny weapon.

No deathblow struck her, and she risked a glance back.

She nearly fell as she tried to stop herself. She kicked off a small rock to kill her momentum, turned.

Black sky speckled with stars filled the space where the Goad had been.

She could see the faint footprints leading to where the Goad had been... but no Goad, not even the shimmer of a cloaking device.

Not exactly interested in looking for the vehicle, she checked her position on her HUD, turned, and set off for her hideout twenty kilometers east...

Date: 2830, June 04

"Del, Del, Del," Maria said softly.

Delithita glared at her, then back at the scarp hand she was holding. A bunch of white garbage: a Knife, a ten of Death, a one of Light. Nothing that could answer the low Death card she knew Maria would challenge her with.

It was her fault: she had made an error, thrown away the Rose in a desperate bid to gain some more cards of use. She had failed, and her current hand was completely black-vulnerable. It wasn't even any good against Light challenges.

Maria laid a card on the table.

Del looked at it, puzzled. It was a one of Life, which was a strong card but completely useless against her current hand. Maria had to know she had both the one of Light and the Knife, which constituted a perfect defense against the particular card.

Maria watched her with an impassive mask, but Del could see the tiny narrowing of her eyes, the barest trace of a smile at the corners of her lips. "Kindness?" Del murmured. Maria was utterly ruthless in games, and had never pulled a punch in either scarp or chess.

Maria's only response was a faint smile, one that another less familiar with her would probably not even notice. "Challenge, Death," she said softly.

Del ran her fingers down the edge of the Knife card, which would not only meet the challenge, but also would steal the card and allow her a draw this turn.

She shook her head. "I concede. You draw."

Maria gazed at her for a long time before drawing. "Kindness is repaid," she said, and threw a trio of threes. "Shrike," she said, and drew a card from the discard pile, one from the deck, and gestured to Del's hand.

Del showed it to her with a sigh. "That's mean," she said, and Maria took a card from her hand as well.

She took the ten, and when Del looked back at her hand she frowned. What use could she have for that piece of junk? She was answered soon enough as Maria threw away three tens. "Shrike," she said. Invoking a little-used rule (they rarely had two Shrikes in a turn anyway) she shuffled the discard pile into the deck, selected three cards from the deck, and shuffled again.

She set the deck down and gestured to Del to take her turn.

Annoyed, she drew the top card of the deck and looked at it.

Her annoyance melted away as she identified the card.

Her Rose.

"Kindness is repaid," Maria said softly, and Del gazed at her through tear-filled eyes.

"How did you do that?" she whispered. She hadn't even looked at the deck when she shuffled.

"It doesn't matter." Maria stood, displayed her overstuffed hand, which contained the proper number and suits of cards for a victory. "I win," she said.

"And so do I," Del said softly as she turned the Rose over and over in her hand.

Maria dipped her head in a single nod. "Good night, Del," she said, as she turned and opened the door.

"Night," Del said softly, and set her cards down.

Del studied the Rose as it lay on the table, glittering with the gold highlights that marked a card of its suit. The cards were made from the small heat-dissipation units of an Executioner, sheets of thin metaplas cut down to the standard size. This deck represented salvage from four Executioners.

Del traced the stark, precise lines of the Rose, which somehow managed to fit together very beautifully. How long had it taken Maria to draw these, she wondered. And indeed, when did she find the time do something like this, when she had so much work to do just keeping them alive? She vanished for hours at a time after she finished in the vehicle bay, and Del suspected that she slept very little. She had never been in Maria's quarters, and so did not know what she might have in there for tools or equipment. Certainly the cards were not made in the vehicle bay!

She was probably not going to sleep even now; she was probably engaged in some project or another in her quarters. She wanted to ask, but didn't. Maria valued her privacy, and even Del, the only other human on the planet as far as they knew, did not invade it.

A loud beep sounded, and Del dropped the card to the stone table. She leapt to her feet and went to the small computer by the opposite wall.

A Cybrid vehicle, a small one judging by the low radar return, was approaching the hideout. Not only approaching, but coming in on a straight-line course.

"Maria," she called into her rusty commlink.

"Here."

"Direct incoming, looks to be a Goad."

"Understood."

When no further response came, Del assumed Maria intended for her to deal with the threat. After all, a single Goad was not something both of them were needed to deal with.

Del brushed her short, red hair back, grabbed the top to her suit and fastened it. It was somewhat too big, since Maria was taller and they had not been able to locate any salvageable suits in Del's smaller size. She pulled the garment as tight as it would go then fastened the helmet. She sighed: until they managed to get another suit working properly, she was resigned to feeling like an over inflated balloon.

She entered the vehicle bay, and climbed into her Shepard. Dogfighting Goads was not one of her favorite tasks, but she was not really skilled with Maria's Apocalypse. The exacting one-point-four-five-second timing the other vehicle required for maximum effect grated on Del's nerves, and the weak shields and need for constant backpedaling didn't help either. Maria was deadly in it, Del could barely take out a Bolo in it.

The Shepard powered up and she drove it out the doors, toward the Goad that showed up on the edge of her radar, not even eight hundred meters away. The thing certainly knew the exact location of the hideout, and Del dearly hoped she would be able to jam its transmissions.

The jammer activated, and the Goad stopped suddenly, as if confused. "Bad idea," she whispered, allowing her full fury at the Cybrids to fill her. They had killed everyone, everything, and only luck allowed her to save the rose from the colony. They would destroy that too, if they had the chance, and she was here to see they did not.

The Shepard sprinted forward, passing through the small gap in the ridge surrounding the hideout. The Goad, caught by surprise, backpedaled into a massive boulder, and kicked a few times until realizing it was stuck. By then it was too late. Del sliced off the bottom blink gun with a full linked shot, then drew her crosshairs to the vehicle's centerline.

The shields collapsed almost immediately, and slugs from her autocannon ripped into the base of the right heat dissipation fin, cutting it off. The Goad rocketed forward, then, banging into the Shepard, then turned and sprinted away at top speed.

Del cursed, as the Goad slipped past her ELF range in a second. She tracked it and rained autocannon slugs down on it, ripping holes in the vehicle's armor, but it wasn't long before it escaped her entirely.

Angrily, she turned and headed back to the hideout at top speed.

Maria was waiting. "I failed," Del said shortly.

"It happens," Maria said with a shrug, then turned away.

"How can you say that?" Del shrilled. "Soon as that thing gets--"

Maria raised a hand for silence, and Del's tirade switched off as if her power had been cut. How did she do that?

Maria gazed at her for a moment, as if to enforce the silence, then spoke. "The vehicle was a single Goad set with a flee response to assault. It is unlikely it could have been stopped by either of us. Therefore your self-recrimination is irrelevant. The vehicle is being tracked by our satellite and its communications jammed. We may thus transfer our operations to our hideout on the north side of Petrarch while it is still cut off."

"Right, move everything--"

"I have sealed everything to big to move in the lower chamber and set the vehicles on autopilot to the other hideout. As we leave we will bury the hideout in a triggered landslide.

Del's eyes burned. "My garden--"

"Is safely stored in the cargo chamber of the Gorgon. Do not think I don't consider that important."

Del closed her eyes, forced the tears back. "Then let's go," she said.

Maria inclined her head and climbed into her Apocalypse, while Del opened the overhanging hatch to her Executioner and climbed inside.

There on the main console, affixed by a tiny spot of sealant, was the Rose from the scarp deck.

"Maria..."

"Kindness is repaid," came the response as the Apocalypse powered up and left the bay.

Date: 2831, 11 November

Icey and Xenogears were patrolling the colony perimeter cleaning out an infestation of Cybrids, when they found the main enemy unit crawling around behind one of the massive cliffs surrounding the colony. "Xeno, dear, let's not go back there just yet, hey?"

Heartfelt agreement was returned.

The Gorgon, called the Tumor Boomer by Icey and the Infinite Improbability Generator by Maria, plodded eastward along its course. The vehicle was a miracle: it had almost been destroyed more times than Icey could count. Many times the vehicle's crippled hulk was towed off the battlefield by a cargo pallet, yet somehow it was still working, indeed, working very well.

And its pilot was alive, too, and Icey was grateful for that. He'd seen more railgun slugs bury themselves in his windshield than he'd like to count, but somehow they always managed to miss him. This was a good thing.

The ELFs were fully charged and he still had six missiles left in each pack, so he wasn't really worried about getting offed on this little haunt, as long as he didn't do anything so stupid as kamikazing the big Cybrid force at the edge of his sensor range.

Xeno's voice came over the commlink, washed out with static so bad it was barely recognizable. The communications jammers they carried were working very well. "I will kamikaze the Cybrid force," Xenogears informed him, and he watched her Emancipator trot past him. "Prepare to offer fire support."

"You idiot," he muttered, too low for the commlink to pick up. Xenogears was as sharp, efficient, and cold as a Mercurian shadow, but some of the things she did... "Confirmed," he said, more loudly. He wished he could order her back, but despite having been a Ghost longer than she, he had no authority to do so. Only Maria was able to give the Ghosts orders, and if anyone else tried to assert authority over his fellow Ghosts, there would be searing hot hell to pay.

So he followed her, having a sinking feeling that this was not such a brilliant idea.

The Emancipator stopped at the rim of a cliff, paused, and then jumped down. Icey could feel the shaking of the earth the impact caused, as he parked his Gorgon close to the edge and watched the Cybrids.

It wasn't as heavy a force as he had thought. There were two Adjudicators and three Shepards, and they were not heavily armed. This was fortunate, since Xenogears appeared to have abandoned caution along with her math skills and her common sense. She was not kidding when she said kamikaze: she ran straight at the formation, not stopping until she collided full speed with the lead Adjudicator. Her blaster and ELF cut through the vehicle's dented shields, and she fired neatly at the leg of the tall vehicle.

It collapsed, directly on top of her Emancipator, but she was moving fast enough she wasn't trapped. She wheeled, and began hammering the nearest Shepard.

When the shields went down, Icey let loose a pair of missiles, which streaked over the ground and slammed into the weakened vehicle. Hot metal sprayed the ground as the two-headed vehicle detonated, and Xeno ducked behind a small outcropping of rock as the three remaining vehicles fanned out to try to engage both of them.

Icey stepped off the cliff, landing with a terrible crash at the base. The shock ripped through him, giving him an instant headache, and he moaned softly. Someday he had to get one of those metal brains like the others.

He targeted the Adjudicator coming in at him, blasted it with hardly any effort at all. His vehicle ate the chicken-shaped warforms for breakfast. The two Shepards boxed in Xenogears, and though she cut the one in front of her to pieces quickly and efficiently, the other pinned her and was doing some massive damage to the rear of her vehicle. Icey let fly a pair of Shrikes, then another, then his last. and the Shepard fell to pieces.

Xeno's Emancipator was badly damaged. "I'm uninjured," she told him. "But my leg servos are at twenty percent." In other words, her vehicle could barely crawl. "Note for future reference: use crystaluminum armor."

Icey nodded ruefully. The slightly heavier armor was worth the weight, especially when the Cybrids were using projectile weapons. Ceramics kept heat and energy discharges at bay well enough, but they were brittle, and offered little resistance to ballistics.

"Incoming. One Goad, seems to have some damage, odd."

"Well you head back and I'll take care of this Goad. You're in no shape to fight."

"That has not escaped my notice," was the dry response. The Emancipator, limping and traveling in a wobbly path, began walking for the colony.

Icey targeted the Goad, ran a quick scan of it. Oddly, his scans were reflected, very efficiently. It was indeed damaged, missing one of its antenna-like fins, and was riddled with bullet holes. It stopped as it detected him, and when he targeted it, it backpedaled in a circle, turned, and sprinted away.

Unable to chase the fast vehicle and well out of ELF range, Icey scowled and watched it leave.

He turned and followed Xenogears, running over the scan results on his screen. The ECM the Goad carried was impressive, to say the least. He could not so much as tell what kind of reactor the thing had.

Disquieted, he cleared the screen and set himself to work scanning the area for the walk home...

Date: 2832, 13 May

Tycho struck the bull’s-eye precisely with his laser pistol, burning the blackened hole in the stone another centimeter or two deeper. His nerves were frayed: his job of defending the colony was not quite as clear-cut as it used to be: the Cybrids were at war and Fantasma was standing by on full alert waiting for it to hit the fan.

He wished he could shoot something. A Cybrid would be nice. A Ghost would suffice. He put the pistol back on his belt, turned away from the bull’s eye, and took a few steps toward the door.

He whirled suddenly, drawing the pistol in a blur of motion, and fired off a shot. Another smoking hole, barely five centimeters from the center of the bull’s eye, appeared in the stone wall.

He grinned, then spun as a noise startled him.

He stared down the barrel at Xenogears, who raised a disinterested eyebrow at him and studied the bull’s eye. "Nice work," she said, drawing a slicestar from her belt and hurling it at the splatter of burn marks with all her strength.

The blade stuck in the center, quivering.

"Showoff," Tycho muttered. Xenogears ignored the comment, drew another star, and hurled it.

It erupted into a splatter of molten metal as Tycho blew it apart in midair.

"Ah, a contest," Xenogears said neutrally, drawing yet another of the blades. She threw it directly at Tycho, or rather at his weapon. The star cut through the barrel of the pistol, and with a loud dinging noise, bounced off and traveled roughly back along its original course. With another star in her hand, Xenogears reached out and plucked the flying weapon from the air.

Tycho stared at the remains of his pistol. The thing wouldn't fire, without the focusing lens at the end of the barrel, the laser beam would quickly fan out. The thing was now nothing more than a high-energy flashlight.

"Hand-to-hand?" he suggested.

Xenogears nodded once, dropped her weapons on the stone floor, and approached him. When two meters separated them, she entered her combat stance, knees slightly bent, arms crossed at the wrists in front of her chest.

Tycho was expert in a number of martial arts, as befitted a mercenary of his rank, and he suspected he could beat Xenogears hands down. He flexed his knees and elbows, reached out with open hands at waist level, then leapt forward.

It was a standard low-grav combat move, one that he didn't shift into street-fighting mode. Reaching out with one hand he pressed Xeno's right arm against her waist, turning his body away from her to ram into her side. In low-grav, this move would generally knock someone sufficiently off-balance to cripple any possible defense they might muster.

Xenogears spun in a rapid pirouette, braced herself on her right foot, and fired a knee upward into the base of Tycho's ribcage. His breath blew out of him as he staggered under the precise blow, and before he recovered, Xenogears stabbed him in the solar plexus with her left hand, using their combined momentum to strengthen the blow.

Tycho had felt worse, but not in quite awhile. He recovered quickly, though, turned and threw a kick at Xeno's stomach. Somehow, she lifted her leg and caught his foot under her knee, sopping up the force of the blow with no apparent effort. His foot trapped between the thigh and calf of her folded leg, he toppled when she grabbed his hand and twisted her body downward and backward. She completed the perfectly-executed sequence by releasing his trapped leg and stepping on his opposite foot.

He rolled, or tried to; her foot struck him efficiently in the lower back, toppling him onto his belly.

"So you don't need weapons," he noted dryly as he picked himself and his pride off the floor and dusted them off.

Xenogears responded with a tiny smile. "Everyone will make a mistake in fighting, eventually. If one is observant and conservative, the mistake can always be exploited."

Tycho nodded glumly. Fighting in the streets on Mars had taught him that. Rio de Luz was a vicious battle, even for those poor fools who never even had the chance to engage in Herc fighting. Imperial Knights were not easy opponents in hand-to-hand, and some of the mercs had been forced into such a combat mode.

Then the Knights surrounded them with HERCs, and compression lasers and autocannon whirred with threat: surrender or we will kill you.

The Martian rebels had escaped, and the mercenaries were done with their task. So most of them just shrugged and let the Knights herd them into transports.

They were well treated, and because the Knights and mercs fought honorably, the mercs were allowed to leave so long as they did not return to Mars.

Tycho had chosen Mercury, thinking he would not have so much fighting to do anymore. After all, he'd made a pretty penny from the rebels, so he was set for years.

And now, here he was, practicing for combat again, getting his face ground into the stone by a--

He turned to Xenogears, regarding him with the look he had come to identify as her neutral standby mode. Somehow he didn't think Xenogears would be much appreciative of the designation "scorching hot babe." She wasn't Venusian, after all.

He grinned, and was about to suggest another round when Del's voice came through the comm system. "Tycho. Combat status. Xenogears, you are needed in Ops." The channel closed immediately.

Xenogears didn't even look at him as she vanished out the door. Tycho considered retrieving his pistol but decided it was rather a waste of time.

Tycho took the lift down to Level Two, the main construction center for the colony, and where the vehicles were stored. Things were cramped; with only the two levels completed and the others coming along steadily but slowly, the residents were squashed into tight quarters in the upper level. He passed a dozen people on the way to the lift, and most of them parted for him like he was either royalty or diseased. The gold logo on the black uniform that marked him as a Ghost seemed to be powerful currency in the colony. They knew he was one of their defenders, and deferred to him.

It also seemed to attract a lot of the young ladies, much to his amusement. Most of them were not quite on a par with Xenogears though, he thought, chuckling as the lift took him down to the vehicle bay.

He powered up his brown-and-orange-painted Basilisk, checking to see the missile launchers were fully loaded and that their autoload mechanisms were functioning properly. He fed the first pair of projectiles into the tubes as he fired up the EMPs, and took the vehicle out into the sunlight.

"Tycho to Ops, what's up, sweetheart?"

Del's voice was not amused. "Cut the crap, Tycho. We have a pack of Goads fighting each other less than five hundred meters from the opening."

"Indeed. How fascinating. Don't suppose you could just drop a heap of Shrikes on them from the turret..."

"Stupid, if we could don't you think we would have already?"

"Nah, you'd rather just see me get squikked."

"True," was the uninspiring response.

"Give Xeno a kiss for me if I don't make it back," he said, grinning, and cut the connection. Del's blood pressure was amazing; she was a walking hydraulics system. She'd be as hot as Xenogears if she ever stopped scowling for a moment...

The Goads seemed to be too busy to notice him as he stopped at the brink of a small precipice. There were five of them, four with the markings of the local Provocateur Sect, one brown-painted without identifying markings. He zoomed in on that one: it seemed to be pretty badly damaged, riddled with holes, missing its right antenna, and limping slightly.

And all the other Goads were firing at it.

The lone Goad was doing a very good job at keeping itself together, despite missing its bottom weapon. It backpedaled and spun in quick circles, in a complicated series of evasive maneuvers. The others were trying to box it in, but so far were failing.

Tycho frowned, then targeted the closest of the Provocateur Goads and blew it apart with a few volleys from his missile launchers and EMPs.

The other three pulled away from the damaged Goad they were savaging, and attacked him. He backed off, trying to keep enough distance between them that his missiles would have the chance to track. Goads were too fast to dumbfire at.

The brown Goad chased after its enemies, valiantly blasting away with its single blink gun.

Tycho had his hands full. He missed one shot, and the Goad he had targeted did not blow up as he intended. It fell back with heavy damage, but its lasers were quite operational and cut at his shields with stinging blows. The other Goad nearby got behind him, firing its red beams into his back.

Tycho spun, firing unlinked blasts at the nearer Goad, and succeeded in raining enough missiles onto it that it blew up. He was low on ammo afterward, and when he turned to the third Goad, he ran out of missiles before he finished destroying it.

Grimly, he prepared for a long, hard battle with just EMPs. He rained shots on the nearer, and after a long time he got the thing's leg and it toppled into a heap of debris.

The other kept itself at five hundred meters, farther than he could reliably target his EMPs, but where the Cybrid's superior calculations would have no problem hitting him, slowly wearing down his shields and burning into his armor.

Crystaluminum armor did not work well against lasers.

The Goad erupted into a fireball as the brown Goad behind it fired a sequence of shots into the reactor.

Tycho targeted the wounded Goad immediately, but it stood there, not firing at him. He regarded it, tried and failed to scan it, and frowned severely.

It was far enough away he had no chance of killing it, and showed no interest in killing him. The blink guns would pass through his recharging shields without resistance, and would start frying his internal systems bit by bit. It had the advantage, and it knew that.

So he was astonished when the Goad turned and limped away to the north.

Puzzled, he turned back to the colony, setting himself to work repairing what damage he could...

Date: 2833, 30 December

"And yet another year goes by," Delithita murmured as she watched the clock ticking away on her Shepard's dash. Twenty-eight thirty-three, Post-Devastation Calendar. The end of another year, the end of twelve months of fleeing and hiding and fighting and surviving. Another three hundred sixty days of life stolen back from the Cybrids. Another year where a colony of three thousand people still lived. And another year ahead, where there was hope.

The Shepard marched westward, along the rim of Ibsen Crater where the story of the Antipode began. She watched the brown stone slip by on her screens, until she came to a long cleft in the wall, just wide enough for her vehicle to slip through. As she passed through the cleft, and downward into the stone, darkness fell. She was completely covered by the stone of the overhang.

She parked the Shepard against the wall and left the vehicle, dropping to the ground and walking slowly down the narrowing slot in the rock.

She came to her destination a few minutes later, as she squeezed through the tight passages, little more than cracks really, separating the slabs of stone.

When she got to her destination, a widening in the passage, she stopped and leaned against the wall.

"Happy New Year," she whispered, as she ran her fingers slowly over the scratched stone. A laser stylus had carved words into the rock, words that covered many square meters of stone with small, closely packed writing.

A block of writing, with a few sketched drawings, filled one corner. It was surrounded by a scribbled line, and on top, in bigger characters, was written "2832-2833".

She reread the account of 2832, and then the list of plans she had made for 2833. She drew a stylus from her belt and started circling the ones she had managed to get accomplished. When she finished, she looked back, shaking her head sadly. She had barely dented the list.

Angrily she took a few steps farther into the crevasse, and drew a wide, jagged circle around a blank, flat piece of stone, scrawling "2833-2834" in the topmost part.

"The Cybrids still exist," she wrote, her face hardening. "And so do I. This is not possible, and this year I will destroy them." She wrote "Kill all Cybrids" in a separate block to the right. "We have new Ghosts, old Ghosts gone, and old Ghosts fighting on. Maria is not here, but she will be back. Icey is not here, and I don't know if he ever will be. Tycho went out one day and never came back. Xenogears remains, steadfast as ever. John remains, but I can tell he does not want to. The Cybrids are weak now, or else we would never survive.

"Only we three are here, and only I can command them. Maria will relieve me of this burden soon, I hope. And then I can go back to my garden. The roses die as I am off fighting the Cybrids."

She felt tears in her eyes, but could not wipe them because of the suit. She wrote to the right, "Rescue the roses."

She turned away from the wall, unsure of what to write. She would think of something else before she left, she knew. She sat down on a stone shelf, looking up at the writing for a moment, then looked down.

On a small pile of stone, there rested a number of objects. The main telescope lens from the first Cybrid vehicle she destroyed. A spacesuit glove, caked with dried blood. Her own, when an Executioner had penetrated her hull and breached her cockpit. Maria had saved her, nearly at the cost of her own life. A drawing by Maria, the silhouette of a woman in front of the Mercurian sun, holding a Goad at bay with a candlegun as it tried to shoot a small rosebush at her feet. Another drawing, of Del's Shepard, scarred and battered but fighting on, with a rose and a teardrop in the background. A pistol that Icey had souped up with some careful tinkering, with rose stems and thorns scratched into the barrel. The weapon had saved her life once, when an infantry drone invaded the hideout. The eyepiece of another infantry drone, which had been neatly cut in half by Xenogears's pistol as the Cybrid leveled its weapons at Del's head. A small chunk of plastic explosive from Tycho. "Throw it at something and watch the pretty flames," he'd said.

And all around, in little vacuum-packed jars, roses in preservative fluid, alive and in suspension. Two black ones, a dozen red ones, untold pink and white and yellow ones. A blue one, the result of careful calculation and months of precise breeding. Three dark violet ones. And with each, hops and a cluster of roots, so that someday they could be replanted.

She went to the Shepard and opened the small cargo container, pulling out half a dozen new roses. Two were rich, bright red, and the others were purest white without a hint of cream, a color nearly as hard to produce as the blue.

She set them down, pulled out a small stone. It was a piece of the world that she carved out as she built her quarters in Fantasma Colony. Scored by nanites and crumbling around the edges, the stone was nearly as fragile as the roses.

A tooth that she knocked out of Tycho's mouth during an argument. One of Xenogears's slicestars, slightly dented from an impact with a stone wall. The worn-out power cells of her candlegun that had seen so much use this year. And a small black sphere, with the sketched lines of a rose drawn on it in coppery metal. Maria insisted that she place the sphere somewhere safe, where no one else would ever see it. Delithita could not determine what it was made of; it was rough like stone, but contained a faint matrix of snowflake-like patterns like no stone she'd ever seen. And it weighed a lot more than any stone she'd ever hefted. Del had accepted the gift without questioning, and she suspected Maria would not have told her if she did ask.

She placed the sphere in a nest of rocks, and arrayed the other objects around it. Then she placed the roses in a circle, next to the ones she had placed the previous year.

She stepped back, gazing down at the small collection of objects. It was her little temple to Life, her sacred place. She had told no one of it, not even Maria, but somehow the other woman had deduced its existence: she knew full well where Del disappeared to every year.

The rocks trembled a bit and she spun. Pure fury filled her: a Goad was peeking into the crevasse, slowly squeezing through the opening.

She turned and leapt for the Shepard, grabbing the ladder and yanking herself up into the cockpit in one swift motion. The Shepard, already fully powered, wheeled, spitting autocannon bullets at the Goad.

But it was gone.

She drove the Shepard out of the slot, and out into the starlit crater. It was night now, and the landscape was black. And the Goad had disappeared into the shadows.

She checked her sensors. Nothing. Spewing anger from every pore like toxic gas, she sat there motionless for a very long time, before angrily firing an ELF shot at nothing and driving the Shepard back into place, covering the entrance to the tunnel.

This time as she sat and gazed at the mementos of the year gone by, no Cybrid defiled her temple, and she remained there until the clock on her suit ticked over into 2834.

Date: 2834, 30 April

In the sanctum, Maria and Ko'ah dueled it out on the chessboard. Maria's queen reigned, somehow evading the clever trap Ko'ah had set for it two turns previously. The knights and bishops forming the trap were vulnerable now, trapped in positions no longer useful. Ko'ah had a plan to regroup around the king's knight, but it would take several turns, during which time he would be very vulnerable if Maria noticed what he was doing.

He thought for a moment, then moved a pawn forward a space, clearing the path for the bishop, a bishop that he had no intention of moving. Maria gazed at the piece balefully, and Ko'ah carefully controlled his expression. She was buying it: she thought he was going to take the (wiser) bishop move next turn, rather than the less-wise but more decisive knight move he really intended to make.

She moved her queen to a conservative side space, and Ko'ah was puzzled. The only reason he could see for the move was to protect against the knight, but it was not very strong a move. She could easily capture a pawn and put herself in a safer place as well. He studied the board, weighing options. Had she seen his plan, or not? If she hadn't, he could pin her into a horizontal and use the other bishop to force her into the knight's path. This vicious battle strategy usually led to his defeat as Maria stomped over his aggression like an Apocalypse on a pebble, but it would have the benefit of completely unseating her game plan if he did manage to escape her counterattack.

But if she had noted the angles of the knight and bishops, and weighed the options thoroughly, and he made an aggressive move, it was endgame for him in two turns.

He looked up from the board, straight into her calm black eyes. While he read the board, she read him, and he had no doubt she had watched every move his eyes made on the board, had divined his conflict, and was prepared to smash anything he came up with. As this realization came to him, he reddened, and she graced him with the faintest of smiles.

"So at last you figure it out," Maria said, tilting her head, steepling her fingers in front of her, and gazing at him through her lashes.

"I'm toast," Ko'ah muttered. Maria's eyes sparkled with restrained mirth, like a fusion reaction in a bottle. "Perhaps I should copy this board and think on it tonight."

The light left Maria's eyes instantly and she looked down. Ko'ah stared at her. He had become fairly good at reading her moods, and it was obvious to him that she was very upset. She regarded her queen for a moment, then reached out with a trembling hand and knocked it over.

He knew she expected him to thank her for the game and quietly leave, but for some reason he could not define he stayed. He watched her for a long time, uncertain of what to say to comfort her, but knowing she needed someone near.

At last she looked up at him, and her black eyes, normally so shielded and impenetrable, were glistening with tears. When she noticed his regard and focused on him, a single tear dripped from her right eye, and her lips trembled slightly, as if she was about to cry.

He watched the tear slowly slip down her face, running down her cheek, down the line of her jaw, off her chin. He watched it fall through the air to splash on the stone table. Did it sparkle with the light of a sun, casting little shadows of the chess pieces on the board? No, of course not. It was his imagination.

"Maria...?" he said softly, not sure what else to say. Maria was not the easiest person to get close to, indeed, she was probably the hardest he had ever known. Are you alright? or What's wrong? would probably earn the reply of stony silence, and she would withdraw into her shell again.

Ko'ah stood and circled the table, approaching her carefully. She turned and looked up at him, then slowly got up. She stood centimeters from him, looking up at him, for a long time, silent, nor more tears falling but her eyes still sad. Then she put her arms around him and hugged him, resting her head on his shoulder.

Ko'ah held her tightly, his thoughts awhirl. Had some stranger switched bodies with Maria lately or something? Maria was as likely to want a hug as-- he couldn't think of anything suitably outrageous.

"I can't see it," Maria said a minute later, her voice soft in his ear, so quiet he could barely hear.

"See what?" Ko'ah asked, pulling away a bit so he could see her face.

"The future," she said, her arms tightening around his back. She wasn't sad, now, he decided as he studied her. She was scared. This emotion was one he never, never saw in her, and it was infectious. If something could so terrify Maria, God forbid he ever encounter it himself.

"No one can," he said, but she shook her head, and leaned against him heavily.

"I can, or at least..." Her voice trailed away. "It does not matter," she said abruptly, and she was the old Maria again... almost. "I wish..."

"I'm listening," Ko'ah said quietly. "Anything you need to say you can say to me."

And with that, another tear escaped from Maria's eye. "Do not think for a moment I have not always known that," she whispered. "But some things are best left unsaid until their proper time. And now is not the time."

She released him, retreated a step, and met his eyes. She reached out and took his hand, holding it in a strong grip, as she gazed at him. Transfixed, he gazed back, as an overwhelming emotion he could not define filled him. She smiled, only slightly, but enough to send a shock like electric current through him. His hand tingled and he could feel the fine hairs rising as if repelled by static.

And he felt a presence surrounding him, a mercurial flickering of thought, emotion, whispered words, images more vivid than reality but too fleeting to make out. Maria whispering softly, though her lips never moved: "Now, this is a hug." Thoughts entering his mind, a chaotic blur but somehow beautiful, touching the edges of his own mind. A feeling of contentedness, friendship, joy, expanding from the other, touching him, and filling him as if the sensation came from his own mind.

It was the most amazing experience he had felt in his life.

Maria slipped slowly away, holding his hands until letting them slip from her grasp as well. The sensation faded slowly, leaving only the memory. He gazed into her eyes, eyes a little less mysterious now, a little less hidden behind her shield.

But she still held her secrets.

Ko'ah blinked as a noise sounded from his belt. His communicator? He stared at it again.

"Del to Ko'ah, get your butt to Ops."

He was sitting at the chessboard, staring at the empty space where the queen had sat. He checked his chrono, blinked.

He must have fallen asleep. "Maria?" he called.

He peeked into the other room, and saw that she was leaned back in her chair, her arms folded behind her head, her eyes closed. A faint smile graced her face.

"On my way," he told Del, then went into the other room, as silently as he could. He went over to Maria, studied her sleeping face. She seemed at peace, content. This rare expression made her look younger, more beautiful. Remembering his dream, or what his logical mind insisted was a dream despite the disagreement of the rest of his being, he glanced at the chessboard, where Maria's queen stood over a fallen knight. It was the same game Maria had conceded, but a turn later. Maria had devastated his plans with one move.

"It was no dream, was it?" he said softly. Leaning over her, he kissed her lips gently, then turned to go.

As he left the sanctum and began to climb back to the surface, he heard a voice, little more than a whisper, in the back of his mind. "No, my friend, it was no dream..."

A few minutes later he entered Ops with a bemused expression, nearly bumping into Del at the door. "What is it?" he asked.

"Seems we have a Goad sitting in the Herc bay, and it isn't ours."

This shook Ko'ah out of his reverie instantly. "What?"

"Just what I said. A Goad. Powered down, reactor offline and out of fuel."

"Out of fuel? That takes decades!"

"No kidding."

"That's weird..."

"Weirder: it has no pilotform. And Altas confirms the system is only the most basic and so cannot be controlled by remote control."

"Hmm."

"Yeah hmm. I know you've dealt with some weird tech before. Go check it out."

"Yeah." Ko'ah nodded shortly, and left Ops.

Altas was going over the vehicle with a portable sensor in one hand and his other was plugged into a receptacle in the Goad's nose. "I cannot access the mainframe, except to say that it is pretty well destroyed."

"How'd this thing get in here?"

"I don't know. The security cameras would have seen if it came through any of the tunnels."

"Hmm.... Why the brown paint?"

Altas looked at him. "It appears to be an anorthositic mineral compound similar to what we Ghosts use. I have no knowledge of any Cybrid sect using anything similar."

"Is it human then?"

"Insufficient data."

Ko'ah peeked into a hole in the carapace. "Seems to have a lot of internal space. Don't see any control panels though, so a human would not be able to operate it without neurals."

"Neurals?"

"Tarazedi Alliance pilots use an advanced computer system that hooks the pilot into a system designed to read neural and fine muscle impulses. We'd stick our hand into a slot and flex our fingers to fire, and so forth. I don't know if anyone else has anything similar."

"I am not familiar with that system."

"It's classified," Ko'ah muttered. "Yeah, some of the Tarazedis have implanted CCD chips in their retinas, and they set a screen in front of them with a panoramic view. Computers read their eye movements to work the aiming systems. A skilled pilot can bulls eye anything by just looking at it and letting the computer correct vector differences and such."

"Fascinating. That seems a very good system for humans to use, as limited as their options are for interfacing with control systems." Altas withdrew his hand, waving his fingers, which had probes extending from them. The probes retracted as Ko'ah watched.

"Well, do you think this is a threat?"

"Yes. An unknown is automatically a threat."

Ko'ah grunted. "Perhaps we should dispose of it." But something was nagging him. Maria would object, he knew, would object strongly. He could not say how he knew this, though. "No... we'll keep it powered down here until..." What? Until someone needed it?

"As you say," Altas said neutrally.

"It needs paint," Ko'ah said abruptly. "Purple."

Altas stared at him blankly, a look Ko'ah knew to be a psychological assessment. "As you say. We have red and blue. You know what to do with it?" Ko'ah glared at him.

Ko'ah studied the brown Goad looming over him, and for an instant imagined it sprinting over the Mercurian plain, into the sunlight. Or was it some other world?

Ko'ah sighed. Maria giving him a hug. Goads appearing out of nowhere. He had to get some sleep.

Somehow, he had the sensation of Maria's voice in his mind, ringing with laughter.

Date: 2835, 17 February

The Cybrids were in turmoil after the destruction of their forces on the Caloris side of the planet. The operation to take Mercury back, led by the fighters of the Tarazedi Alliance and the Imperial Knights, was finally successful two years after the first drops, back when Mercury was still in its proper place.

Now, though, neither the Cybrids nor the humans were certain what to do next. Alone in an unknown solar system, the only life was what they brought along.

The Tarazedi, vengeance-crazed, were pursuing any Cybrid forces not within range of their supernexi, blasting the metallic creatures off the planet. The destruction of the east Caloris supernexus at the beginning of 2835 marked the beginning of the end for Sect-designate::Provocateur >> First-World//Mercury.

Now, the few Fantasma residents remaining on the surface were watching the Cybrids closely, to see what was going to happen next.

The Tarazedi forces, their job completed, had piled into their dropships and left Mercury, apparently bound for the small, frozen planet fifth out from the Ghost Star. Ko'ah and Icey had reported to the Tarazedi headquarters, and found that the admiral who had founded the Alliance was on Mercury, and not exactly pleased to be, either.

They were "officially assigned" to the Antipode on a permanent basis, and Ko'ah had implied this assignment was more their idea than the admiral's.

Carrot was missing, though, and Jehrico was temporarily off-duty, governing the subterranean colony at Mercury's core. Izabella was in cryogenic suspension, pending a safe method of removing the destruct device from her heart. Razorback and Xenogears were with the Tarazedi, surveying the system in one of their dropships. None of the Tarazedi knew Xenogears was around, though; that was a secret only the Ghosts and a few of the TDF officers knew of.

Altas was engaged in an orbital survey of Mercury, from the Siren, monitoring Cybrid movements. He was disturbed; the Cybrids seemed to be undergoing another transformation. They were torn by war, and the area immediately west of the Antipode was one big battlefield.

The old AMG and Knights' headquarters to the north of Fantasma were also engulfed by the Cybrids, and Altas concluded from the patterns that both parties had been captured or killed.

Altas dipped the Banshee toward the planet, dropping like a stone to the edge of the scarp Fantasma Colony was constructed in. The flier bay set into the precipice of the lip of the massive cliff flashed its lights at him briefly, and he fired the thrusters at maximum. A human would have blacked out under the hard deceleration, but Altas only held the seat tighter so he was not shaken out.

The flier slipped smoothly into its berth, and he powered it down. The first thing he did when the engines shut down was to download the vehicle's complete logs into the [FANT/BANS] server, which he would access later from Ops.

In the meantime, though, he needed to run a self-diagnostic. He was feeling... odd. And to a Cybrid, this was most disconcerting, doubly so since a malfunctioning Cybrid would be wiped in an instant under normal circumstances.

He was very glad he was not still part of the Neptunian nexus. He did not have to worry about the redactors on Mercury, which was good because the redactors in the solar system were quite interested in locating him.

He sat there in the Banshee examining his programming, running the equivalent of a disc defragmentation on his neural net. When his senses returned, he noticed that the scan had revealed no problems, indeed, he was running at about three hundred percent rated efficiency.

He considered cutting back his processor clock, but eventually decided against it. Chalk it up as another redactor Concern. Humans had a saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The redactor equivalent was more along the lines of, "If we didn't program it, it's broke, so fix it." But he didn't care.

He knew there were some alterations in his circuits that he had not performed. Major ones, indeed: his neural net was running at a very high energy level. The mysterious energy spikes he had been seeing around Fantasma were a part of him too, now, and he did not really know what to do with them. His processing speed had tripled and his thoughts were much sharper and more detailed than they had been, but he sensed there would be other changes in the years to come.

His built-in communicator activated, and a small image of Ko'ah popped up in front of him, like a HUD. Razorback had installed the device recently, saying that it was kind of inefficient to have to activate a communicator when Altas was perfectly capable of receiving transmissions without any accessory hardware. Altas had muttered something about not necessarily wanting to use his head as a radio antenna, but he saw the advantages in the arrangement.

"Yes Ko'ah?" Altas said. To an outside observer, it would seem that he was talking to himself.

"You know that Goad?"

"Mmm... I think so?"

"The spare."

"Indeed."

"Did you install some kind of really weird human-tech control system to it?"

"I did not."

"I see... someone has been tinkering with the thing."

"Indeed."

"Do you have any advice, O Sage of Things Cybrid?"

"I do not."

"Thanks anyway buddy."

"Don't mention it."

The channel closed, leaving Altas alone with his thoughts. Since Ko'ah had found a girlfriend in the TDF, he'd become even more insufferable. Altas closed his eyes and began running an imaging program on his primary circuits.

As he mapped a particular synaptic section, he stopped the scan instantly and shut down the imaging subroutines.

There was a memory there, one that he had most emphatically never experienced.

Cautiously he ran it. He was in a star system very close to the Galactic core, standing on a snowy planet. Water snow, identifiable by the spectrum which he was able to view easily, covered a rocky surface with a few spidery trees here and there. The stars above were red and gold, so tightly packed they cast shadows on the ground.

He could tell by the patterns of neural interactions that the memory was his own, but scanning the file he found no time stamp.

A strange suspicion forming, he checked other data files, and he noted there were no time stamps on any of them.

But he was able to catalog them properly. This was impossible, since his memories were accessed by the time stamps.

It was almost a... human memory.

The aphorism about broken things resounded in his mind, reinforced by the knowledge there was nothing he could do about it anyway, short of reinstalling himself from the copy in his quarters, an absolute last resort. That would probably leave him with a fundamentally changed personality even if it was successful, which it probably wouldn't be.

For once, he wished for the redactors.

He scanned the memory again, and placed himself in the scene.

Maria was standing there, her arms folded, her back to him, gazing up at the clouds of stars. "I see you made it, my Cybrid friend."

"But of course," Altas replied, scanning the horizon. A torchship sat on a hill several hundred meters away, looming over the snow filled valley. Another woman, as short as he himself, was sitting on a rock near the ship, writing with a pen on paper. Without zooming in on her distant form, he knew who she was. "Eidolon," he said, quietly enough even his Cybrid ears would not have been able to hear at that distance. But she heard him, and waved a hand at him while continuing to write. He could feel her smile, though he could not see it. "The rest will come soon enough," he said to Maria.

She turned her profile to him, glanced back at him. "But of course," she returned, echoing him. He felt her amusement, like the brush of a warm wind around him.

He looked upward, toward the stars, toward the rings of gas wrapping entirely around the sky. In the very center, a brilliant cluster of blue stars cast a sun-bright radiance outward. The outer galaxy was lost in an impenetrable haze of bright stars. "The Galaxy revolves around us," he said quietly. Even a Cybrid could feel awe.

Maria smiled. "More even than that," she said, and with that, she vanished in a streak of gold light, shooting upward toward the star cluster that marked the Galaxy's very center.

He would follow, later, but for now he just stood and watched the stars.

Altas filed that memory away carefully, and backed it up in triplicate.

Then he set himself to work searching for something in his mind even more out-of-place than that, but he doubted he would find anything...

Date: 2836, 07 February

"Admiral Mee, Ghost Ko'ah, if you please?" Delithita said, waving the two to the stairway that led to the overhanging stage. Down in Mercury's heart, the new city was a crescent hugging one of the main walls. The taller buildings were against the wall, while the smaller houses and businesses and support structures fanned out between the city center and the lake several kilometers distant. Around the lake, there were gardens, and children played.

The overhang was a shelf in the rock, ten meters above the rich black soil. Ko'ah and Mee climbed the stairs quickly and Del went down the other side.

They reached the podium and Ko'ah took the stand first, gazing down at the city residents below. The buildings were bowed outward here, forming a kind of amphitheatre against the rock face. A waterfall whispered from the face twenty meters to the east, falling into a small pool below. Ko'ah glanced at it for a moment before he spoke, thinking, how far we've come. Then he cleared his throat, not enjoying public speaking by any means, and leaned into the microphone that would carry his voice through the city.

"Ghosts, TDF, and residents of Star City," he began, his voice booming off the rocks and filling the amphitheatre with a wall of sound. "Today the Cybrids of Forgotten, who have taken the name of the Paradigm Sect, have declared war on the humans of the Ghost Star system. Preliminary reports from the Tarazedi and our scouts suggest that they are not concerned with wiping us out, merely subjugating us and using us as elements in a plan similar to that held by Prometheus before the Fire: they wish to use us as components in a vast processing network, to use us a little more than high-speed computer chips.

"I will assume that no one here wants to suffer such a fate," he said, and murmurs of agreement sounded. "Therefore, the TDF, in cooperation with we Ghosts, have devised a plan to build our strength for the coming attack. Admiral Mee?"

The black-haired woman stepped up to the microphone, her eyes and voice strong, confidant. "The current population of this colony is seven thousand people. We have some immigrants from the Knights, the Tarazedi, the Black Death Union and Antipode Mining Guild, once our enemies, now our allies. In total, we have perhaps four thousand fighters, but until now, we have had no coherent system to unite us, to forge a solid force from our individual strengths. But now we do."

She gestured to one of the buildings on the opposite side of the hollow. The front face of it lit up, with a pentagonal red icon, slashed with a blue triangle. "As of today, we are now the Carina Zone Guard, and our mission is simple: to defend all humans as we expand through this star system, and to fight off all who would threaten us. This military body will soon be recruiting and training whoever wishes to join. In the meantime, I will be in marginal command of the human forces of the Ghost Star system, at least the military aspect.

"Since this colony was founded, the Ghosts have stood at arms in our defense, ready to give their lives if necessary to protect ours. Therefore, we propose that the Ghosts remain in the role of leadership here, with ultimate authority over our defense, and that this system as a whole be governed by a group of Ghosts elected by the residents, contributing their skills as needed to maintain our strength. The Ghosts know what they're doing. If it ain't broke, as the saying goes, don't fix it.

"It will be a long time before our strength is sufficient to guarantee our safety, but then we are no stranger to uncertainty. But all we can do is build, and grow, and most importantly, dream."

Mee stepped down, and the two of them took the stairs down off the shelf. The applause sounded the instant their feet hit the ground. It was thunderous.

Hundreds of kilometers overhead, a lone Goad trotted westward toward the Caloris basin, past the wreckage of Cybrid cities, through cracks in the basin's vast rim, over craters and into crevasses. The address to the city, sounding in her mind as if she was actually there, ceased. Stop, Eidolon thought, and the Goad obeyed instantly.

She got out of the vehicle, dropping to the stone below the brown-and-purple, mottled hull. The sun burned down on her, and the specks of other worlds in the system were visible as fat stars to the east of the sun.

Mercury held promise, as a budding seed cast into a river, to be cast up on the rich soil of the banks, a thousand kilometers downstream. And this seed, richer than many, had been cast to the stars.

She wondered what would grow from it. She could look to the future and see, of course, but that would spoil the surprise....

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