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CHAPTER ONE

"And what happened then?" the bartender asked eagerly, her eyes shining as she leaned close.

"Why, then I died," Commander Peter Ernst Raeder said, voice solemn and low.

"Ooooh!" She whapped him playfully on the shoulder with the towel she usually carried over hers. "Watch the vid. I've got a bar to clean."

He sighed and thumbed the controls:

*Flick* 

"I want you, Vorn!"

"But, Lyrica, I have a wife, children!"

"You don't want them, Vorn . . . you want me!"

"I pity you, Lyrica! For not knowing that there's a world of difference between wanting and loving!"

*Flick* 

"Genuine anthracite from Earth. Formed millions of years ago of actual living matter, this glittering stone can be yours for just . . ."

*Flick* 

"Ssssiiiiiinnnnn! Oh, we tried to save them. Our fallen brothers and sisters. We sought them out and reasoned and pleaded, but they wouldn't hear us. And so we turned our backs and fled them and the carnival of EVIL. They wouldn't leave. They sold to us a place they thought was a desert. But we knew that we would make it a paradise!

"And yet . . . temptation was waiting for us. Yes, even here, with only our brothers and sisters beside us. In the place we sought redemption there lay a serpent . . . whispering of wealth . . . of pow-errr. We could buy our paradise, we need not build it. There was so much we wanted and the means was right there. In an almost unlimited supply of fuel. And we fell.

"They wanted it! They would pay any price. . . . And we fell. We sold them our precious resource, we let them build their factory platforms, peopled with their own technicians. And WE helped them spread the black stain of sin across the stars. WE gave them the means to rrrrraaaappppe . . ."

"Uh. D'ya mind if I change that? When the Mollie Interpreters start talking about rrrraapppe like that I get nervous."

Raeder chuckled and handed over the vid control to the bartender. They'd been flirting mildly since he'd sat down. She seemed to approve of his black-Irish good looks, and he didn't object to her cuddly caramel-colored prettiness. And it was a very pleasant way to pass the time as he sat waiting for transit orders.

He looked around. A big square room, the light level was just right, lightened by beveled mirrors scattered around. The booths were roomy and comfortable looking, and the tables were big enough to accommodate your elbows as well as your drink; even the bar stools made you feel welcome. Golden oak accented the bar along one side with a genuine brass foot-rail—spacers were finicky about things like that—and signed holographs on the wall. The older ones were mostly Survey Service types; the people who went out and found new systems, or died trying. Lately it was fighter pilots and gunners and Marines shipping out to fight the Mollies. The Oblaths Bar of Cape Hatteras Naval Spaceport was a gem of its kind.

Of all the gin joints in all the bases in all the world, Raeder thought in a Bogart voice, why did I have to walk into this one? This is what a bar is supposed to be. He sighed. I've only been here once and I already know I'm really gonna miss it, he thought wistfully. But he wasn't going to miss the hospital, with the grueling hours of physical therapy, and he was eager to get back to work.

The bartender flicked to a sports contest, which broke his reverie. The wall dissolved into a montage of shapes and thuds and groans, with the roar of a crowd in the background.

Colorfully clad behemoths charged into each other at full speed, emitting spectacular grunts and growls. It was a variation on football, played without the ball. The big men pushed each other down the field to the goal-posts, grappling and gouging. The viewpoint jiggled and blinked as it shifted from one helmet-mounted camera to another.

They watched for a moment and then turned away in mutual disinterest.

"Why did we ever get into a war with those fanatics?" she asked him in exasperation, referring to the program she'd just flicked away from. "I mean if the Mollies wanted to separate from the Commonwealth, why the hell didn't we just say, `So long guys—good riddance' when we had the chance? I mean, really?" She rolled her eyes in disgust.

"Apparently you've never heard of antihydrogen, hon." Peter took a sip of his beer. "Be awfully hard to run the Commonwealth without it."

Though he could understand the question. The Mollies are so obnoxious it seems insane to actually fight to keep 'em around. 

She wrinkled her pert nose at him. "Don't bother me with reality when I'm grumping about Mollies. It's not polite. And why are they Mollies, anyway? They sure don't like women, so how come they're named after my favorite aunt?"

"It means Mission of Life Lived in Ecclesia." Raeder watched her take that in; she shrugged the corners of her mouth down in disapproval.

"Ecclesia . . ." she muttered. "Sounds like a digestive disease. Something with gas."

Peter snorted, then took her hand in his left and said earnestly, "My dear, I'm sorry to tell you this . . . you have ecclesia. Could you please leave my office before you explode."

She exploded in laughter. She was pretty when she laughed. Her eyes sparkle, Raeder decided.

"What's it really mean?" she demanded, bringing one shoulder forward coquettishly.

"Ecclesia? It means an assembly or church."

Oddly, his knowing the answer seemed to intimidate her and she withdrew shyly. Having the right answer too many times in a row seems to do that to people, Peter thought in resignation as he watched her walk away. He hated it when it happened with pretty women, though. He pursed his lips. Maybe it's for the best. Be awfully inconvenient to meet the love of my life in the Oblaths Bar at this point in my career. 

His new orders had been cut and he'd be leaving Cape Hatteras Naval Spaceport just as soon as the shuttle pilot arrived to hand them to him. And who knew when, if ever, he'd see this place again.

Peter grimaced wryly and very carefully picked up his drink with his left hand, glaring at his right. I hate that thing. The best prosthesis medical science could provide. It looked just like his real hand had. Which was why they took three-dimensional holographs of every soldier's body, so that if you were careless enough to lose part of yourself they could come up with a mechanical duplicate.

But it ached still, and it was virtually numb. The techs had said that once he got used to the signals from the neural interface there would be more nuance—more of a perception of heat and cold, hard and soft, though never the sensitivity of his real hand.

And he was still learning to control it. Peter could see the sparkle of tiny slivers of glass from where he'd shattered the first beer he'd been given. He'd been brooding, had a flash of temper, and pop! he'd been picking glass out of his palm. Raeder sighed and shook his head, remembering what his physical therapist had said.

"Whatever you do, Raeder, for the first few months, anyway, don't go into the bathroom mad."

The worst thing about the prosthesis though, the thing that made him hate it, was the fact that it couldn't properly interface with a Speed's computer.

A pilot dropped his gloved fingers into receiving cups that plugged him directly into the ship's AI. The inside of the glove was filled with sensors that registered every muscle twitch, analyzed blood pressure, and the chemical content of your sweat, to make the Speed respond like your own body. The machine aimed its weapons and took direction from the position of your eyes, but it was your hands that determined if those weapons fired and where and how fast you flew.

The prosthesis lacked the subtle control needed, and the chemical component was nonexistent, which meant that half the controls on the ship wouldn't respond as they should. Which meant he was grounded.

His dark brows came together in a frown. It still bit deep and felt like the amputation of something even more vital than his right hand.

Yeah, he thought glumly, why couldn't we have just let the Mollies go when they told us they were leaving? He shook his head and smiled ruefully. Even the most fervent and naïve conscientious objector knew the answer to that one. Because without antihydrogen there's no commerce between systems, and with no commerce between systems, Commonwealth civilization would be a fond memory in less than a year. 

The Commonwealth had tried to offer a garden planet to the Mollies in exchange for the desert they'd bought way back when, but their theocratic rulers, the Interpreters of the Perfect Way, had refused. Foaming at the mouth and denouncing humanity all the way back to Adam, I believe. 

Because, just to prove God had an ironic sense of humor, the Mollie cluster proved to be the only place in human-explored space that contained large amounts of antihydrogen, naturally suspended in a magnetic matrix material. In the century or so since then, the old synthetic plants had shut down, their dribble of expensive fuel swamped by the flood of cheap, abundant power from the mining platforms. Commerce boomed. The Commonwealth became united as never before—and very dependent on that flood continuing.

Peter imagined Star Command forcibly evicting the Mollies from their withered dustball of a planet with its too harsh sun and its half-poisoned water and transplanting them to a world of soft breezes, luxuriant plant life, and sweet water, stuffed with ores and all good things. They'd hate us, he thought. We'd be right up there with the Philistines, or worse. 

Whereas, normal people, like say, the denizens of a hell-world like Wildcat, which was heaven compared to the Mollie homeworld, would sell their grannies, their virtue, and their eyeteeth for the chance to change planets. Heck, they'd sell their grannies for a decent vacation.

The fall of the Commonwealth could still happen, of course. Scuttlebutt had it that the stockpiles of antihydrogen were sufficient for only eighteen months of naval operations, a stockpile only sporadically replaced by daring raids on Mollie processing plants. The newly reopened synthetic antihydrogen plants were capable of producing virtually nothing at ten times the cost.

"The plug's out of the bathtub and there's no more than a trickle coming out of the tap," one of Peter's friends had said.

Raeder raised his glass in memory of that particular buddy, killed in the same battle that had taken Peter's hand, his Speed, and his glory. He'd made four "kills" in that action, but the recording computer had been destroyed by the heavy particle beam that tore him out of the sky. Those four victories would have brought his total to seven, making him the first and highest scoring ace of the war.

Never rains but it pours, he thought, not without humor. He'd had a dream about it when he was recovering in the hospital. A crusty old admiral was about to pin a medal on him for becoming an ace. Peter was standing there proud as a peacock, when someone came hurtling onto the stage screaming, "Stop! It's a mistake. We've checked all his recordings and they show him shooting down the same Mollie every time."

"That's ridiculous!" Raeder exclaimed.

"Gimme those," the admiral growled, and grabbed the holostills from the little man. Then he glared at Peter. "We had a cake baked for you," he said. "Decorated and everything. My wife ordered it. I had my mouth all set for that cake. Now I can't eat it."

"But he's lying," Peter insisted. "That's not proof, it's only seven identical photographs. The least you should do is review the recordings themselves," he pleaded.

"Nah! It doesn't matter now," the admiral grumped. "It's all spoiled anyway." He turned and left the stage beside the little guy who'd handed him the holos and clearly wanted them back. The admiral tossed them into the air and they fluttered stageward.

Peter turned and the band was packing up its instruments, the audience was pushing back their folding chairs, gathering their belongings and departing as though this was a perfectly normal ending to the ceremony.

"But I did shoot them," Raeder insisted.

"G'home," the admiral shouted. "And take yer damn cake with ya." Then the stage lights went out and after a confused moment he woke up.

Loud, exuberant voices brought Peter's head around. A gaggle of fighter jocks had just come in, laughing and joking. They looked Raeder over, noting his engineering tabs, and dismissed him, taking their seats at a table and calling out their orders to the pretty bartender.

Peter turned back to the bar feeling slighted. Jeez! Was I that arrogant? 

Well, yes, in all probability.

Piloting a Speed was grace and glory, and massive power literally at your fingertips. To a fighter pilot life consisted of Speeds and the rest of the world. No matter how hard you fought the feeling, you couldn't help but know that everything else lacked . . . something.

Color, texture, meaning, Peter thought gloomily.

Engineers, for example, were valued and respected for their service to you and your machine, but they just weren't on the same plane as fighter jocks at all.

Raeder suddenly wondered if it should be fighter jock or fighter jerk. Ah, you're just feeling left out, he told himself. Missing the excitement, the camaraderie. When he reached his assignment and felt part of something again, he wouldn't be so inclined to take offense where none was meant. You'll be acting like the old man, next, he warned himself, if you don't watch out. His father had been good at finding reasons to get angry—when he'd been drinking—though he was the kindest of men when sober.

There was a sudden burst of laughter from behind him, almost certainly having nothing to do with him at all. Even so, Raeder felt heat rise up his neck as though he'd heard them mocking him and his sudden ship-bound status. He carelessly picked up his glass with his right hand and it popped like a soap bubble. Fortunately it had been almost empty.

"I'm sorry," he said to the bartender.

"Not a problem," she said, smiling. "You want another?"

"Sure," Raeder said. "You got a plastic glass?"

"Nope, something much better." And she yanked a heavy frosted mug from the freezer, filled it with good draft brew, and placed it before him with a flourish.

"Now that," he said, gratified, "is almost as pretty a sight as you are, ma'am."

She laughed. "That's the first time I've ever been compared to a beer."

"But this is more than a beer," Raeder asserted, "it's an experience to treasure." As I'm sure you are, the devilish glint in his green eyes said.

She read that message as easily as if it had flowed by in digital letters and gave a little toss of her head, a dimple peeping on her cheek. She opened her mouth, but before she could speak a massive crowd of pilots and mechanics burst through the doors howling for attention. She gave Raeder a regretful smile and rushed to serve the happy mob.

Peter gave an inward sigh. Oh, well, he thought. So much for their enjoyable, light flirtation.

Raeder looked around at the patrons of the bar and wondered how long it would be before he was once again part of such a group. The other members of his engineering class had departed two weeks ago, but he'd needed to finish up his physical therapy program. Until now he'd kept himself too busy to notice that he missed them.

Raeder speculated briefly about just where he was bound and what form his new duties would take. There was an important job waiting for him wherever it was, and Peter knew he could do it better than almost anyone in the fleet. He'd attacked his retraining as he had the Mollie rebels, and had enjoyed it, too. Learning more about the machines he loved was no great hardship. It's watching them fly without me on board that hurts. He'd graduated at the top of his class; those he couldn't best were the men and women who'd taught him to be a flight engineer. And once I get a little more experience under my belt, watch out folks. 

So he'd still be around Speeds, and he'd be part of the war effort. After all, it wasn't just a matter of fighting a bunch of religious fanatics anymore. Raeder's eyes strayed to a holographic poster on the wall behind the bar.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY! it demanded, and it showed a Fibian soldier in an aggressive pose. The Mollies had found themselves an alien ally lurking at the far edges of their space. Rather like a long ago Irish king who'd sought aid from the English in fighting his battles. The Mollie Interpreters were discovering that their allies had no more intention of peacefully going home again than Strongbow's Norman knights.

In my humble opinion, the Fibs've decided to grab all the fuel in the universe just for themselves, Peter thought. Which somehow makes me feel like an endangered species. 

To human eyes, Fibians were . . . well, if some propagandist had set out to design a species which pushed all humanity's "horror" buttons, this would be it. They bore a strong resemblance to spiders, with a scorpion's pedi-palps evolved into an armored three-fingered hand. Their bodies were a dull red, covered with leathery scales and sparse, coarse hair. They had eight beady, black eyes, two of which were able to see into the ultraviolet. Fibs had eight legs, as well, each tipped with a three-fingered claw. Their mouth-parts were sharp, horny cutting implements accompanied by a formidable pair of pincers used for holding prey while it was being cut up and stuffed into a translucent digestive sack in the abdomen.

Raeder shuddered. Messy eaters, he thought.

Fibians spoke through a flexible tube, like an elephant's trunk, located in the general area that a nose would occupy in a human. At the end of their abdomen was a long, slender tail, tipped with an acid stinger.

Only a lunatic bunch of misanthropes like the Mollies would ever turn to these aliens for help in fighting their own kind, Peter thought. I wonder if the general population of Mollies even realizes that their Interpreters have lost control of the Fibs. Come to think of it, I wonder if the Interpreters realize it. 

Raeder found it ironic in the extreme that the Commonwealth was now shedding its blood to free the rebels from their allies, while the Mollies killed their Welter saviors in the idiotic belief that by doing so they were saving themselves.

But then, to be a Mollie in the first place you're required to have the IQ of a glass of water. 

"Commander Raeder?"

Peter turned to find himself confronting the radiant grin of a very young shuttle pilot. She was about five feet four, with a cap of curly blond hair and a face made pretty by youth and enthusiasm.

"I have your orders, sir." She presented the disk briskly and saluted with traditional pilot sloppiness.

Raeder gave her a better one in return. "Thanks," he said with a smile. I can't believe this infant can fly and I'm grounded, he thought. She looked young enough to be playing hooky from school. He slid the disk into his wrist reader. Yup. Report to CSF Invincible via blah blah, and so on and so forth. He didn't recognize the name, which was odd—even now, fleet carriers weren't all that numerous. The numerical code was definitely for a carrier, though.

Oh, please, please, not an escort carrier. Not a converted merchantman shepherding transports and supply ships . . . 

"We're scheduled for seventeen hundred hours, sir."

Three hours, he thought. And not much to do with them. The shuttle pilot still stood before him. Smiling expectantly. I feel like I ought to tip her. Except that you didn't do things like that. Not outright, anyway.

"Ah, if you have time, would you like a drink?" What am I saying? "Coffee, juice or something?" You're not sucking down any ethanol just before flying my fanny to the moon, kid. Some regulations had good solid sense behind them.

She giggled. "I am over twenty-one, sir. But I would love some coffee. Thank you." She hopped onto a stool beside him. "My name's Gardner. I had a brother in your squadron."

"You're Bo Gardner's sister?" She didn't look anything like him. "How is he?"

"Much better," Gardner said, her young face suddenly solemn. "They say he'll be walking by the end of the year."

"If anybody can do it Bo can," Raeder assured her. "Your brother's one of the best."

"He said the same thing about you." Her grin faded and she looked at him seriously, an expression that didn't suit her. "Why do you think it happened like that? Why were the Mollies at Riga Five in such numbers?"

Peter grimaced. His remaining palm turned slightly damp. "Good question. I wonder myself," he said. As a matter of fact, kid, I dream about it, far too often. 

By rights it should have been just another raid on the Mollie processing plants. Load up the antihydrogen and get out with minimal losses to both sides. "What did Bo say?"

"He said it looked like they were expecting us."

"It did." Peter nodded. "And they couldn't have dug in and gotten ready for business that quickly if their first warning came when we crossed the line."

Raeder could see it in his mind's eye. The processing plant was a big, gray-blue island floating above the orange-brown disk of Riga Five. There'd been a couple of freighters nuzzled up against the plant's docking tubes and nothing else was visible except the planet's two moons.

"They must have been there for a while," he continued softly. "There was nothing for the sensors to report. No Transit signatures less than a week old." Peter shook his head. "The place was as quiet and cold as it should have been. The captain sent us on a quick reconnoiter and we were well on our way when the Mollies struck. Two Space Command ships gone, just like that." He took a sip of his beer, his eyes far away, the screams of spacers months dead still ripped through his mind whenever he let himself remember.

"Bo thinks the service is riddled with Mollie traitors," Gardner whispered. "He says you weren't spotted early, you weren't unlucky, you were set up."

Peter glanced at her; she was fairly twanging with outrage at what had happened to her brother. Hell, I'm pretty outraged at what happened to me, he thought. And she could be right. There'd be no easy way to tell a Mollie from a Welter.

Of course the Mollies might have calculated that Riga Five was the most likely of their processors to get hit and set up an ambush. Though I hate to think of them being that smart. Of course he hated to think of them being comfortably ensconced in the Commonwealth High Command, too. Although at the level of the Echelons Beyond Reality, lack of brains might not be obvious. Which was an outright slander and he knew it, but that kind of thought was almost a tradition.

In reality, since the start of the war, accelerated promotion had brought many fine and competent officers into the upper ranks and the gold far outweighed the dross these days. It had become exceedingly rare to meet an officer who'd been promoted merely because there was nothing especially wrong with him.

"Gardner," Peter said kindly, "Bo might be right. So it's probably a good idea to be cautious and close-mouthed. But we're neither of us in Intelligence, so I don't see any advantage to getting paranoid about it. That's got to be more aggravation than it's worth."

She frowned as she thought it over. "Yeah. I suppose you're right." Then she shrugged herself into a better mood. Smiling, Gardner asked, "Tell me about my brother? And give me your news so I can tell him what you're up to."

"Tell you about your brother?" Peter Raeder smiled a long slow smile.

Here's where I get even. Bo had been one of his best friends, but there was an old service axiom that you could trust someone with your life but not a bottle or your date. He'd gone to the washroom during a dance and come back to find that Bo had told the girl he was taken sick, and Bo was off escorting that little beauty home. . . .

"Let me tell you about the time Bo decided to release these lab rats in the air ducts of the Defiance. He—"

The three hours to their flight window passed very agreeably as Raeder loaded up Bo Gardner's little sister with enough juicy stories to allow her to blackmail her big brother for years to come. And if she was a real Gardner, she'd use them with relish.

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