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  “Very good. How soon can Force Recon deploy a sufficient number of teams?”

  “Within three days after an operation order is drawn up, sir. Possibly sooner. Probably sooner.”

  “Very good. Get started on the op order as soon as you can. I’ll authorize deploying the Marines as soon as the President gives his permission.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” the Chairman said.

  De Castro jerked; his comm had vibrated. He looked at it. “Excuse me, sirs, I think I should take this.”

  Hobson gestured for him to rise and take the call. De Castro stepped away a few feet before answering his comm. He listened for a moment, said something, listened again, gave an order, broke the connection, and resumed his seat.

  “Sirs, three more drones from Troy have been brought in. They all have the same message as the one you’ve seen. One of them had a few usable images. They are being sent to all three of us.”

  “Good!” Hobson rubbed his hands briskly and looked at the comp. In seconds, it signaled incoming traffic from J2. “I’ll put them up on the big screen.” He pressed another button on his chair, and a two-by-three-meter display screen rose on the wall behind the grouping where they sat. After a few touches on his comp controls, a slide show began on the display.

  The three men watched in stunned silence as little more than half a dozen images, some stills and some vids, rotated through. None of the pictures were fully in focus, and some had scrambled—or completely missing—portions. But they all showed the attackers, and the slaughter they wrought.

  The third time through, Hobson cleared his throat and said softly, “We always suspected they were still out there.” He pressed the button that summoned his aide.

  “Tom, have you heard back from the President or State yet?” he asked.

  “Sir,” Irving said, “they’re coordinating a time, and will let us know instantly.”

  Hobson stood, Welborn and de Castro jumped to their feet as well.

  “Instantly isn’t fast enough. Get my car, and tell the President’s office and State that we’re on our way to the Prairie Palace.”

  “Aren’t you meeting with Marshal Ludwig today?” Hobson asked Welborn as the three headed for the Secretary’s vehicle.

  “Yes, sir. I broke off my meeting with him to bring this to you. I’m having dinner with him at the Flag Club later.”

  “Whatever you do, unless the President orders otherwise, don’t let him know about this until I tell you to.”

  “Ludwig’s sharp, sir. He’ll know there’s something important I’m not telling him.” Welborn flexed his shoulders. “But I’m sharp, too. I’ll manage to avoid offending him.”

  The Prairie Palace, Omaha, Douglas County, Federal Zone, NAU

  When the United States of America, Canada, and Mexico merged into the NAU, none of the three would accept either of the other’s national capital for the capital of the new Union. They settled on Omaha, Nebraska because it was situated roughly in the middle of the continent. Moreover, Omaha was cold enough in the winter to satisfy Canadians’ yen for the Great White North, and hot enough in the summer for the Mexicans to fondly remember the deserts of Sonora and Chihuahua—or so it was said. As for the USA, Omaha was a major part of the Great American Heartland, being an established city of the second tier. It and Douglas County were fully adequate for a capital city. Sarpy County, directly to the south, was the home of Offutt Air Force Base, one-time headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, an ideal location for the new Supreme Military Headquarters. And Pottawatomie County, Iowa, directly across the Missouri River from Omaha, provided more than ample space for the buildings needed to house what was sure to be a massive central bureaucracy. Some in Nebraska strenuously objected to losing Douglas and Sarpy, and Iowa to losing Pottawatomie to the new Federal Zone. They were reminded of the benefits previously enjoyed by the parts of Maryland and Virginia adjacent to the District of Columbia—not to mention the additional taxes garnered by those states from the increased population of government workers who lived in adjacent counties—and graciously agreed to losing those population centers.

  Competitions were held to design the new Union’s legislative capitol and the presidential residence and office. Nobody other than the bureaucrats who selected it was happy with the monumental faux sod-house design of the president’s residence and office, christened “The Prairie Palace,” although nearly everybody outside government came to agree that it was appropriate that the legislative Capitol was erected on what had once been the stock yards for the South Omaha slaughter houses.

  It was to the Prairie Palace, located on the site of what had once been Central High School, that Secretary Hobson, Chairman Welborn, and Deputy Director de Castro went to see the President of the NAU.

  The Round Office, The Prairie Palace

  Albert Leopold Mills, tall and lean, in his late fifties, was a distinguished, mild-mannered gentleman. Until he got behind closed doors.

  “What the fuck is the meaning of this!” he demanded as soon as the door to the Round Office closed behind his visitors from military headquarters. “I have more important things to do than sit around in a circle jerk with you. I should have all of your resignations on my desk within the hour!”

  “Sir, if you don’t agree that what’s on this,” Hobson held up a crystal, “is worth disrupting your schedule, you’ll have my resignation as soon as I can scribble it out.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Mills snatched the crystal from Hobson’s fingers. He popped it into his comp and scanned the text report. Then reread it more slowly. “Who did it?”

  “Sir, we don’t know for certain who they are, but there are images,” Hobson said.

  “Show me.”

  Hobson nodded to de Castro, who stepped to the President’s desk and took control of the console to show the images.

  “They aren’t all of the best quality, sir,” de Castro said as he activated the first image. It was an eleven-second vid, bouncy as though the person shooting it was trembling and had forgotten to stabilize the view. It showed armed—creatures—racing along a street. Heavily muscled legs ending in taloned feet propelled them faster than a human could run, even a human augmented with military armor. They were bent at the hips, their torsos held parallel to the ground. Sinuous necks triple the length of a human’s held their heads up, and whipped them side to side. The faces jutted forward, with long jaws that seemed to be filled with sharp, conical teeth. Arms little more than half the length of their legs held weapons that could have been some kind of rifle. A crest of feathery structures ran from the tops of their faces all the way down their spines, where fans of long, feathery structures jutted backward providing a counterbalance to the forward thrusting torsos. Their knees bent backward, like birds’. They appeared to be naked except for straps and pouches arrayed around their bodies. Packs of smaller creatures that might have been juveniles of their kind sped among them.

  Mills was expressionless looking at the vid to the end. “Next.”

  De Castro activated the second image. This one was a grainy still shot, showing one of the creatures rising up slightly from horizontal to put its rifle-like weapon to its shoulder.

  The third image was another vid, seventeen seconds long this time. It had been garbled along the way, and parts of the image were so badly pixilated they couldn’t be made out. But it showed enough to make clear what was happening. Packs of the smaller creatures were leaping onto people, shredding them with their talons, ripping into them with their toothy jaws.

  Two more stills showed one of the creatures biting chunks out of a downed woman.

  A thirty-three-second vid, taken from behind defensive works from which the human soldiers of the battalion assigned to Troy’s defense were fighting, showed the creatures and their packs of small companions assaulting the position. They ran zigging and zagging randomly, almost too fast for the eye to follow. Some of the creatures were hit, and tumbled to the ground, presumably dead or severely wou
nded. But those hits were by chance; the creatures moved too fast to be hit by aimed fire. The last few seconds of the vid showed the creatures and their packs bounding over the defensive works to land among the soldiers and begin ripping them apart.

  “That’s enough,” Mills said softly; he could see that there was another image or two that hadn’t been run. He took a moment to compose himself, then said to Hobson, “You were right to bring this to my attention immediately. It was worth disrupting my schedule.” He tapped his inter-office comm. “Where’s State?” he barked into it.

  “She’s entering the building now, sir,” came the reply.

  “Well, get her tail in here instantly!”

  Mills turned to Welborn. “What’s our first step?”

  “Sir, I’ve already given orders to draw up an operation order for a Force Recon platoon to head for Troy and get usable intelligence on the situation.”

  “How soon will it be ready?”

  “By morning.”

  “And how soon after that can the Marines go?”

  “As soon as you give authorization, sir.”

  “You’ve got it. I want to know what’s happened out there.”

  There was a discrete knock and the door of the Round Office eased open.

  “About time you got here, Walker,” Mills snapped.

  Mary E. Walker, NAU Secretary of State, stopped flat-footed and glared at the President. “Sir, I was in the middle of delicate negotiations with the EU Foreign Minister when I received Richmond’s message. He failed to say what was so grave about the matter. I couldn’t walk out without an explanation. As it is, when I told him about your summons, he gave the distinct impression that by the time I get back, he might be on his way back to Luxembourg.”

  “Then good riddance! We just got word of something much more important than the feelings of an overly sensitive Euro. Take a look.” He angled his comp’s display toward her and activated the image of the vid showing the assault on the defense battalion.

  “What?” the Secretary of State gasped when the vid had run its course. “Where?” She looked distinctly green.

  “Troy,” Hobson said softly. “This came in. . .” He looked at de Castro.

  “About forty-five minutes ago, ma’am,” the J2 director said.

  “Is it them?” she asked. “The ruins?”

  The President looked at the other men for an answer to the question he’d wondered himself.

  Welborn replied, “We have no way of knowing. But, yeah, I imagine so. Or if not whoever it was that destroyed those other civilizations, then somebody maybe just as bad.” In its spread through space, humanity had discovered ruins left by seventeen non-human civilizations. One of them was on the level of the pyramid builders of ancient Earth, while most of them had technologically developed far enough to be on the threshold of interstellar travel—one actually seemed to have achieved it.

  “They had no word? No ultimatum? No warning?” Walker asked.

  “Not that we know of, ma’am,” de Castro said when the President looked at him. “We have a text message saying they were under attack by an unknown enemy, and a few images. You just saw one of them; it isn’t necessarily the worst.”

  “We need to alert everybody,” Walker said. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll notify Minister Neahr right now.” She turned away, reaching for her comm.

  “You’ll do no such thing!” Mills snapped.

  “Sir?” She spun back to him, shocked by both his tone and the words.

  “Until we know exactly what’s happening on Troy, this is strictly need-to-know—and Zachariah C. Neahr doesn’t need to know.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” Mills cut her off. “I’d rather present all the worlds that humanity is on with a fait accompli than unnecessarily cause a panic. Your job in this, Madam Secretary, is to keep the rest of the world in the dark about NAU’s upcoming offworld troop movements.”

  “You’re going to send our soldiers into, into that?” she asked, appalled.

  Mills curled his lip at her. “As you would know if you hadn’t been so tardy getting here, we’re sending Force Recon to gather intelligence. Then we’ll send a counter-invasion force in to clear out those. . .those creatures.” He turned to Hobson and Welborn. “I want you to stand up a counter-invasion force, and ready Navy shipping to get them there once we know what we’re up against.”

  “Right away, sir,” Hobson said.

  “Aye aye, sir.” Welborn grinned. What was the point of having a Navy that traveled the stars, and command of one of the largest and most powerful militaries in all of human history if he never got to give the orders to attack an entire world?

  “I’ll notify Congress once the counter-invasion force is on its way,” Mills said. “Now get everything moving.”

  De Castro didn’t say anything, but he wondered how the President was going to justify taking military action without an Act of Congress authorizing it, or without even consulting with the Congressional leadership.

  Chapter Two

  Launch Bay, NAUS Monticello, in Semi-Autonomous World Troy space

  First Lieutenant Mitchell Paige gave the twenty Marines of his section a final look over—he’d already inspected them—before saying a few words prior to them entering their landing craft. His Marines weren’t exactly invisible, but he’d have had a hard time picking them out in the dim light if they hadn’t had their helmets and gloves off. The patterning of the utilities worn by Force Recon tricked the eye into looking beyond them instead of registering on them.

  “Marines, we don’t know what you’re going to find on Troy.” Paige ignored the quiet chuckles that statement brought from the Marines. “That’s why Force Recon is going in, to find out.”

  Some of the Marines exchanged glances: No shit Sherlock. That’s what Force Recon does; we go in to find out when nobody knows dick.

  “The Monticello been listening on all frequencies since exiting the wormhole, but as of—” Paige checked his watch. “—three minutes ago, no transmissions have been picked up, nor has anything registered on any of the ship’s sensors. So we know no more than we did when we left Earth.” He gave a wolfish grin. “That’s why the Union called on us. We’re going to find out, and then some alien ass is going to get kicked!”

  “OOH-RAH!” the twenty Marines roared. None of them said, or even thought, anything about the fact that their commander wasn’t going planetside with them. Everyone understood an officer going along with a Force Recon squad on a mission would only be in the way.

  “Mount up!” Paige bellowed over the cheers. The Force Recon Marines pulled on their helmets and gloves as they filed into the landing craft and the waiting Squad Pods. One Marine in each squad carried a rifle. The other Marines were armed only with sidearms and knives—purely defensive weapons.

  Paige watched until the landing craft’s ramp closed, then gruffly said, “Let’s go,” and ducked through the hatch from the launch bay. Gunnery Sergeant Robert H. McCard, the first section chief, followed. The two Marines headed for the Command and Communications Center, where Captain Jefferson J. DeBlanc, 2nd Force Recon Company’s executive officer, and the company’s First Sergeant John H. Leims waited for them. Along the way, they had to press against the side of the narrow passageway to let the platoon’s second section pass on its way to the launch bay.

  It wasn’t long before the officers, senior non-commissioned officers, and communications men of 2nd Force Recon Company (B) were gathered in C&C, and eight Force Recon squads were on their way to the surface of Troy.

  The Cayuga Class frigate Monticello was a stealth vessel, specially configured to support Marine Force Recon and small raiding parties. To that end, she had a compartment equipped with comm gear to allow a command element to communicate with its planetside elements via burst microwaves, and give it directions as needed. Her external shape had odd, unexpected angles designed to reflect radar signals in directions other than back at a radar receiver. A co
ating over the entire hull except for the exhausts was designed to absorb and/or deflect other detection methods. Strategically placed vanes and trailing stringers dispersed heat from the exhausts, giving the starship a faint, easily overlooked heat signature. She was not designed for offensive fighting; her weapons and counter-weapon systems were strictly defensive.

  Two hours earlier, the Monticello had exited a wormhole two light minutes northeast of Troy and slowly drifted planetward while using all of her passive sensors to search for spacecraft loitering in the area of her destination world. The warship also constantly scanned the planet’s surface for signs of life, human or alien. When no signs of any presence, human or alien, were detected either in space or on the surface, the order was given for the landing party to prepare to head planetside.

  The Monticello’s equally stealthed landing craft were each capable of landing up to fifty fully armed infantrymen on the surface of a planet, or launching four “Squad Pods” into the upper atmosphere for scattered planetfall. They were called “Spirits,” both because they were as visible to standard detection methods as ethereal spirits and because they could spirit troops to or away from a planet’s surface. The Squad Pods were intended to be mistaken for meteorites during their transit through an atmosphere: an ablative coating was designed to stop burning as soon as the antigrav drive kicked in when the pod was close to the ground, giving the impression that the meteorite had burned up. The Squad Pods normally landed away from populated areas, and flew nape-of-the-earth to their final destinations.

  The eight Force Recon squads landed on Troy at widely separated locations so they could cover as much territory as possible. Upon completion of their missions, the Marines would return to their Squad Pods and rendezvous with the landing craft for return to the Monticello, where she maintained station near the collapsed entrance to the wormhole.

  The Monticello stood ready to reopen the wormhole on fifteen minutes notice, either to return to Earth with the Marines, or to flee from an approaching enemy starship.