Moon War

From CleanPosts

MOON WAR

Only nine Imperial troop transport shuttles successfully landed in the predesignated place, a small valley in the Taurus-Littrow highlands about ten miles from Fortuna City.

After skidding to a sideways halt on the little prairie of dark lunar soil and sharp rocks of every size the Emperor's first concern was making sure hyz ship still had airtight integrity. Then hy and hyz son went aft to check on their passengers. No one was hurt, so Azibeel counted hymself lucky. But this was the very heart of enemy turf.

Very nearby was the landing spot of the 1972 NASA Apollo 17 expedition, the sixth and final American moon landing of the legendary 20th Century.

Gina came in low over the invaders and scored a direct hit on the troopship Oppressor before they could debark, killing or seriously wounding sixteen of the Russians aboard.

Emperor Azibeel saw this and hyz anger, already smoldering from the loss of Punisher, burned white hot. When Gina came around again for another pass, this time with her surviving girls in formation behind her, Azibeel prepared to let Gina have it with a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile (although the Moon had no air, so a different name for hyz weapon would have been more appropriate).

With effortlessness derived from countless opportunities affording hym experience, Azibeel shouldered hyz rocket canister and took meticulous aim while the rest of hyz people dove for cover.

From Gina a laser touched the ground at Azibeel's feet, visible in the vacuum only as a small red glowing spot on the lunar soil, moving closer to- ward him, leaving a glowing trail behind it.

Azibeel took aim and fired, unperturbed and undeterred by Gina's attack. The passive, IR-homing, radar-silent SAM found its way unerringly toward the intense heat of Gina's underthrusters.

Two objects crossed in the black lunar sky: Azibeel's missile and Gina's spacecraft. The intervening factor was a hot puff ball at the point of closest approach only three feet away from Gina's wildly evading fighter.

"I'm hit!"

Gina's fighter tumbled in a flat spin to the ground like a tile thrown out a window. Gina was gone, but her final memories were transmitted to the Grid safely intact because her Plug did not disintegrate but was only knocked loose and came down intact in the debris stream.

The sudden loss of their leader scared the remaining three fighters off and the "air" campaign was largely over. Now the surviving Imperial shuttles could unload Egorov's people and supplies unmolested.

Emperor Azibeel set up a perimeter with some of Egorov's troops stationed at the four points of the compass armed with shoulder-launched SAMs, in case any of the Femina Caelestis's remaining fighters returned. Inside that perimeter the half-bubbles of many pressurized tents dotted the plain here and there, scattered too far apart for a single strike to take any two of them out.

The tents were psychologically important. They permitted the troops to get out of the vacuum suits they wore on the way down, or at least take their helmets off for an hour or two. No one could spend all their time inside a spacesuit, no matter how disciplined they were, not even the disciplined officers hardened by the constant violence of Gorpai.

Azibeel's command tent was identified by gold and black banners. When Kirill Egorov and his two senior officers entered it and passed through the vestibule sealing the air inside, they found the Emperor in the middle of a meeting with hyz son Thammuz and the surviving yeng officers.

"Good, Kirill, you made it," Azibeel said. "You're the last one to come in. Give me your report."

"Our transport took hits from fighters and from the city but we landed with no casualties."

"Good, Mr. Egorov, then we finally have a complete picture of what hap- pened. Give him the latest figures, son."

"Yes, Sire."

Thammuz rifled through hyz papers, did some figuring, then hy said, "Punisher and five troop ships are total losses. A sixth transport was at- tacked on the ground and we only saved nine human troops troops from that one. We have a total of forty-four human troops stuck in orbit aboard the Conqueror and Brutalizer who can't land but six nephilim officers from those two ships are here now. All told we now have just forty-three nephi- lim troops and one hundred eight-five human troops ready for action."

There was some shocked gasps and murmuring from Egorov and his two men at at that. Casualties were at forty-three percent! Azibeel cut them off harshly, and barked, "This mission has not failed. The carrier Trespasser remains out of danger, and stands ready to pull us out when we achieve our objective. As long as one soldier lives this mission goes forward. Is that clear?"

The yeng and men blurted their assent. Then the forces split up.

Kirill Egorov took command of the human forces, the bulk of their remaining strength, and departed to assemble them for the assault up the eastern face of the North Massif mountain.

Emperor Abizeel planned to assail Fortuna with hyz nephilim from another direction along a small rille which crossed the mountain to the west.

Leading his forty-two nephilim soldiers, Azibeel started marching cross- country over what Buzz Aldrin once called the "magnificent desolation" of the Moon.

After the Emperor had forayed north into the Sculptured Hills for an hour the Yellow Rille (so named because of the many sulfur outcroppings found in it) became a steep canyon. Azibeel veered right. They climbed to a small plateau called Yellowbanks on Robyn's map, and let the rille go it's own way for the time being.

As the Moon went this was high and rugged terrain, a combination of a classic crater rim and the extensive volcanism in the wake of the large aster- oid that created the Sea of Serenity over three billion years ago. The rille itself was a steep channel carved by a river of lava after the impact and undisturbed all that time except from micro-meteoroids which pitted the whole surface of the Moon.

They stayed on the high ground, walking on black gravel and sand and dust as fine as the ashes left over in a barbecue. Their backpacks and various portable weapons were enormous loads for each of them but the seventeen percent gravity helped. They made good time.

Presently the rille finished its wide bend and rejoined them from the west. Dull red and green minerals formed layers in the walls of the gorge, dotted by bright yellow sulfur deposits. There was a certain stark beauty to it all, Azibeel thought. Io didn't have a monopoly on this.

Twice during the march they buried themselves under gray camouflage at the sight of Sandwich fighters. It wasn't a concerted search. Azibeel hadn't made hyz dent in this country yet and the Femina Caelestis probably didn't have a clue hy was up here. Still, the fighters seemed to be either using the rille for a navigational guide or they were actively patrolling it. Hy decided to march overland away from the rille again, and they began peeling away from it.

Returning to the edge of the rille again some hours later, Azibeel cast hyz gaze "upstream" and noted that the rille had shrunk to a third its normal depth yet was still coming out of the north and a little east of north. If they stayed on this side of it, it would continue to bend east and take then away from Fortuna rather than toward it.

Consulting hyz map, hy said, "The rille has forked. This is just a feeder gully. We cross here."

There was a dirt road at the bottom of the gully, the main road to Fortuna, but traffic was sparse.

The problem of fording a chasm without specialists, even a relatively small one such as this North Fork of the Yellow Rille, was going to have to be overcome with a little creativity. There was no question of hiking down one side and up the other, the pumice stones littering the whole area would make it like walking on marbles. Most of the officers paced around, at a total loss for ideas.

Azibeel asked around if anyone had packed some cable. There was a flurry of searching and finally someone produced a coil with about four hundred yards of it. The cable wasn't very thick or heavy, but it would be strong enough to support the weight of a yang in the lunar gravity, Azibeel decided.

The Emperor attached the long cable to a surface-to-air missile and took aim at the far side of the rille, aiming near the top where it began to flare out and become level with the land on the other side. He chose hyz target carefully, trying to get as high as possible but not too high, lest the missile skip off the soil instead of diving into it. Then hy pressed the firing stud.

Success! The rocket dug itself deep into the lunar regolith before burning out, taking the cable with it. The tunnel it made collapsed behind it. Azibeel tugged hard on the cable to make sure it was snugly anchored. He ordered hyz men to anchor this side of the cable around a boulder and snip the excess off.

The next part was easier. Azibeel repeated hyz trick with the rest of the cable, but this time hy aimed about four feet below where the first cable had buried itself, making doubly sure it was snug because this was the one that would bear the most weight.

Soon hy had two wires stretched tight across the gap, one wire for under the boots and another at chest level for balance.

Azibeel hymself made the first crossing to prove it was safe. An hour later the entire group had made the crossing. The last yeng to come over cut the two cables and let them fall slack against the steep western wall of the tributary rille.

This was virgin land, inaccessible to all without taking extraordinary measures. They had placed themselves far beyond reach.

After three more miles following the small tributary rille on its west bank Azibeel authorized an hour of such rest as could be taken while wearing a pressure suit.

On the next march Azibeel continued to follow the North Fork of the Yellow Rille again, ever higher toward its source. It curved needlessly, often back almost on itself, but it gradually and inexorably drew nearer to the high volcano in the north which they had begun to glimpse from the hill-tops.

These were the doldrums of Femina Caelestis territory. The combination of the terrain and the angle of the sun and Earth gave the land the appearance of being moody, as if the Moon itself were taking a nap. The heavy shade, almost totally black in parts, made it seem secretive, even gloomy.

The dull thumping of artillery could not be heard in the near-vacuum of the Moon, but it could be felt as bursts of vibration under their feet. The light-flashes of warfare never lagged far behind. It had to be Kirill Egorov, who led the bulk of the surviving troops on a frontal assault against the main macro factory on the summit plateau of North Massif, about two miles from the city itself.

For the Russian invaders the net effect of wearing their heavy suits and the small lunar gravity was to be fighting under roughly the same gravity as Mercury, which was a major consideration when the Emperor planned this raid and chose Egorov to participate.

For protection their spacesuits were covered entirely with mirrored reflective surfaces, but some joints and parts of the life-support backpack, de- spite the best efforts of GenMat's design engineers, were vulnerable to a laser hit.

Kirill Egorov personally led an assault with all of his men across the open while Gina (a different one this time) and a force with company strength hid behind rocks at the top of a gray slope and took leisurely potshots at them.

For the invaders the trick was to present a moving target, hustling to the left or right, jumping up, flipping through the air, tucking and sliding to the ground, never the same sequence of moves twice. Troops who fell into the error of patterned movement were awarded a laser hit and quick death.

Egorov's troops dropped like flies as the Femina Caelestis scored hit after hit. Heedless of their losses, Egorov and his forces just kept coming, each trooper dancing and ducking to avoid being hit. The random movement came as second nature to them. Presently some forty of them overran the Femina Caelestis position, led by Egorov himself.

Gina grappled with Kirill and placed her faceplate against his so he could hear. "You took our position but it was awful, just awful! You lost a third of your boys, easy!"

Kirill said nothing to her in reply. Instead he just took his knife and ripped the fabric of Gina's spacesuit from crotch to sternum, letting her deflate like a tire. It was most satisfying.

While they remained hidden here in the highlands, Azibeel could see the gully road about two hundred feet below was now busy with the traffic of war, mostly Femina Caelestis armored trucks all climbing slowly in single file. Going home to Robyn!

Azibeel scrambled up a small rise to get a clear view back the way they'd come. From here, hy could see all the way to the plain where they began this little hike. The entire area was intermittently lit with reflected laser flashes. Binoculars revealed Femina Caelestis vehicles exchanging colored lightning with unseen adversaries.

On the eastern side of the North Massif summit plateau Femina Caelestis defenders began popping up out of the woodwork to stall Egorov's forces with a vast confusing hodgepodge of engagements. They fired their big towed five-inch guns, which had a range of an incredible 49 miles in the lunar gravity. Each gun, standing well off, could shoot 3 rounds per minute, and these shells began raining randomly down on Egorov's people.

Artillery was called the "troop killer" for good reason. Within eighty feet of an exploding shell half of Egorov's personnel were injured, on average, and one-third of these injuries were fatal. Even a little schrapnel that would only cause a minor injury on Earth was sufficient to puncture their pressure suits here. So it became a grinding war of attrition, with almost all of the losses on Egorov's side.

If Egorov was detained for some time or even defeated that would suit the Emperor just fine. The Russians were just cover all along. The purpose of this mission was to seize one of Robyn's macros in a state of partial as- sembly, breaking her monopoly, in retaliation for her seizing one of Ki- rill's bots.

The main macro factory was the obvious target, and hy had given that to Egorov after pretending reluctance, but the Emperor knew it would have been defended ferociously, and in the end, if things soured for the Femina Caelestis, they would simply command all the macros to eat themselves, just as the devices automatically did when they were tampered with in the field by the curious who wanted to open them up and see how they worked.

No.

Azibeel was gambling on taking a partially assembled one by surprise, by striking the Femina Caelestis's macro repair depot somewhere inside Fortuna itself. So they plunged on, heading north, and gradually the road and Azibeel's party began to come together. The rille was getting more and more shallow as they approached its source. Azibeel felt high, in elevation as well as in spirits.

Finally they had gone as far as they could possibly go while remaining out of view. This was the very source of the North Fork rille: a single unremarkable fumarole, nearly the same in appearance as every other crater on the moon, but different in that it lay sideways and hadn't been created by impact. Now they were forced to take the road.

Far above them the road wound its way up a set of switchbacks to the broad summit plateau of North Massif. There were no straightaways longer than three hundred feet. Three light APCs ascending the mountain rounded a cor- ner just then. It was too short a distance between the time they saw Azi- beel and the decision point where it would be surrender or ram.

Forty-three nephilim soldiers aiming lasers and rockets swayed them to pull over peacefully. The girls in the three trucks were stragglers of the big caravan Azibeel had seen from the edge of the rille.

Azibeel didn't take any time to ask questions and he wasn't interested killing them. The girls, still wearing their vacsuits, were simply bound with plastic tie-wraps and left on the side of the road. Then Azibeel's platoon found itself with transportation. They were all thinking how good it was to be moving while sitting on their ass and dangling their poor abused booted feet.

The APCs had a 1.5 inch main gun, a 30-caliber machine gun, and an anti- tank missile launcher, but the nephilim would encounter no more enemies on that road. Fortuna lay just beyond a stony fault scarp looming above them.

The road made a final turn and Azibeel was staring at a darkened tunnel drilled right through the final jagged wall. A trap? Azibeel no longer cared. Whooping it up, without a second thought, Azibeel led hyz company plunging through the tunnel. They were the first (indeed they would be the only ones) to crack Robyn's final line of defense.

Azibeel and hyz yeng drove right out onto the roof of Fortuna and parked. They quickly found a walkway hemmed by a guardrail, and this walkway led them to an airlock big enough to take all of Azibeel's men in two groups. It was very easy. Perhaps too easy.

When the pressure came up to the three lbs of pure oxygen that was standard inside the city they stepped out and dropped a flight of stairs to the main floor below. All of them longed to shed their spacesuits once and for all but they dared not, fearing that they would all be flushed out to space with the touch of a button.

Azibeel and hyz people found themselves in a labyrinth of passageways with- out a clue where they went. The maze of corridors opened up into a roomy area, like a food court in a shopping mall, and here Azibeel's commando team ran into the first members of the Femina Caelestis prepared to stop them, a small squad led by Dory herself.

All of the Femina Caelestis Girl Guards pointed their weapons directly at Azibeel face, and no wonder, hyz elaborate regalia clearly marked hym as the most senior yang present.

Dory made signs for Azibeel to lift the faceplate on hyz hylmet so she could see who hy was. When Azibeel complied, Dory recognized his fuzzy face and uniquely braided white beard. She said, "Well, well, it's the Gerash Emperor himself. Tell your team to let their guns drop to the floor, or you get it. Now!"

Azibeel carefully complied. Hy and hyz team did nothing which might make Dory squeeze the trigger.

"Good, now reach over and slowly unsheathe your sword halfway out with your right hand, dear. Halfway out only, mind you. That's perfect. Okay, now grab the hilt with your left hand so that when you pull it out, the sword's tip is pointing back your way and not mine."

When Azibeel had done this Dory let hym pull the sword the rest of the way out of hyz sheathe.

"Slowly. Slowly now! I know you're tricky, Azibeel. OK, now hand it to me."

When hy was about to give Dory hyz blade, Azibeel's thumb hit a switch on the hilt and the cap on the very bottom flipped up to reveal a lens. Dory looked at it in astonishment. A powerful laser in the hilt instantly blind- ed her. Her eyes slammed shut, but there were bright spots dominating her vision, and there was also great pain. "Ah, dammit! Damn you! I'm blind!"

What followed was a fierce tussle where Dory's three squad members had the better of it at first because they were still armed, while Azibeel's people had to scramble on the floor for their weapons. Azibeel ducked and rolled and swerved to avoid being burned.

Eventually Azibeel's sheer numbers prevailed, as they must. Seven members of hyz group were hit before Dory's three girls were shot. As for Thammuz, hy was hiding behind an obstacle.

Dory was still alive, but she groped around in her blindness. None of her girls were left alive to provide imagery of the scene to Dory via the Grid.

Soon Azibeel discovered what the third-ranking member of the Femina Caelestis was defending. It was, indeed, the jackpot. There was a Femina Caelestis shuttle hard by, loaded with perhaps a dozen macros which were not fully assembled. Their self-destruct mechanisms were not fully armed. At last they could be reverse-engineered and the Femina Caelestis monopoly ended. Dory was probably right in the middle of trying to evacuate them away to safety when Azibeel unexpectedly arrived.

"This is exactly what I was looking for," the Emperor said. "But the difficult part will be getting them away from this place." It wasn't like they could just hotwire the Astrodyne shuttle and leave.

Azibeel decapitated Dory with hyz sword without a word of warning while she was crawling around on the floor, blind as a bat. Then hy put her still- living head, dripping with blood, into a gray metallic bag and closed it with a yellow sticker.

"I know you can still hear me, woman of the Femina Caelestis," hy said to her through the bag, not knowing precisely who she was, "but as you have discovered by now, it's hard to upload your memories with neutrinos through the material of this bag. You're my insurance. Let's see what extraordinary lengths your friends will go to in capturing your final memories to let you avoid the True Death."

And hy gave the bag containing Dory's head to young Thammuz to carry for hym, while some of hyz other yeng carried the precious macros.

Obviously the whole area was rigged for sound, because now doors magically opened in front of them, indicating the way the Femina Caelestis wanted the Emperor to go. The thick doors they already passed through refused to budge. The weapons of the Imperials would take too long to cut through them and they would run out of power at any rate. Grenades could do it, but there were too many doors and too few grenades, and it might break the air- tight integrity of the city.

As they proceeded through the doors they were silently bidden to use, Azi- beel noticed a scarcity of Femina Caelestis girl scouts along the way. In- stead of presenting themselves for slaughter they seemed to back off as if on orders.

Presently the Emperor found a glass elevator to the floor of Fortuna's central park, but it was only large enough to hold two yeng, laden as they were with weapons and macros and a woman's head.

Azibeel hesitated for a moment to think. Then hy took one of the macros and stepped inside accompanied only by hyz son Thammuz, who carried Dory's head. For a delicate few moments they would both be trapped at the mercy of Femina Caelestis operators who could run the capsule to a dead stop halfway down if they chose, then kill hym with laser light fired through the glass tube. But nothing like that happened.

The forest sector of Fortuna was arranged around 300 foot tall Green Hill, the highest point on the surface. Azibeel could see foot trails spreading out like a web from the summit as they descended. One side of the hill had a farm with 13 acres of fruits and vegetables plus a ten acre fruit orchard with room for about thirty head of cattle among the trees.

On the other side of the hill were tall pines and about a thousand foot long stretch of whitewater in a deep chasm. This was a part of Fortuna deliberately sculpted to be wild, which was quite a valuable commodity in space. There was a deep human (and nephilim) need to be immersed in chaos periodically to balance the sterile order of technology.

The scenic drop ended with a gentle stop in an abandoned station on the hilltop. The castle of Robyn and Lilith was at the far end of Fortuna's central park perched on a slightly lower hill. Beyond the castle was a small "downtown" modeled after small cities on Earth, and beyond that was the far end of the city.

But Azibeel and Thammuz did an about face and moved off toward the nearest end of the city instead, which would lead back to Fortuna Rille and their landing zone if they could find a way to pass through it. They zigzagged on paths between a creek and a stretch of road on another piece of rugged "wild" land between the two mile-long walls, which were more than five hundred feet apart.

Azibeel and Thammuz followed the road into the face of the wall and found themselves in another unlit tunnel. They steeled themselves up, slapped down their passive frequency doublers hinged to forehead straps and picked their way into the black tunnel by it's now visible residual heat.

When they passed through the tunnel they entered a much larger space, but it was just as dark. Then bright white lights suddenly came on. Doubled through the crystals in their goggles the light shifted to ultraviolet and seared the vision of both yeng. They cried out in unison and tore the de- vices off their heads with one hand while they brought their lasers to bear with the other. But their eyes were tracking with afterimage dazzle-spots and they could barely see to shoot.

"That was for Dory," a woman's voice said, and a few moments later when Azibeel and Thammuz could see clearly again, they found themselves surrounded by perhaps fifty well-armed members of the Girl Guard in a large utility area at the base of the western end wall of Fortuna. A tall, mus- cular yin with short hair was at the center of the ring of women, and she pulled a sword from a sheath held in the hands of another woman and stepped forward to meet the intruders.

"I'm Hunky," she said. "Robyn is, ah, indisposed at the moment, Emperor Gerash, so if you want a piece of Femina Caelestis ass you'll have to settle for Number Two."

Azibeel hesitated. He was nearly exhausted, for one thing. And for anoth- er, while Hunky was no substitute for Lilith Gervasi as a commander on the field of battle, in a one-on-one situation Hunky was said to be far more fierce. Still, despite Hunky's nephilim Amazon body frame, in Empire dogma she was nothing but a silly and weak female. The Emperor could not back down in the sight of his son without contradicting many centuries of patriarchy bluster, and Hunky knew it full well.

Spectators arranged themselves about on balconies and alcoves, in nooks and crannies all around them. Whatever happened, it was going to be even better than a game of Freeball, which was the official sport of Femina Caelestis.

In a sign of contempt for his foe, Azibeel bypassed the traditional opening formalities of salute and counter-salute. He set down the macro and simply stood there with his blade in hand and tried to stare her down. Few could withstand the withering gaze of the Patriarch of the White Beards.

So Hunky, in reply, also bypassed the traditional opening formalities. She skipped the stupid alpha-male bluster that always reminded her of rams beating their heads together. The crap where the opponents circled around one another and talked trash while they made little quick thrusts and parries to gauge their opponent and tried to shake loose an opening. Don't men always have to do that? she thought. Even in a fist fight they will always begin by throwing their open palms against each other's chest, saying "Come on!" over and over again until they make each other angry enough to start throwing fists.

But the Femina Caelestis Girl Guard knew fists were lousy weapons and open hands even more so. At Shangri-La they were trained to grab their foe immediately and pull them closer, bringing surprised male face (or testicle) into raised female knee.

So it was that Hunky, in her very first move, simply slid her sharp steel blade into Azibeel's gut. No fanfare. No boasting. No playing with her food which from much past experience even her Femina Caelestis associates expected her to do. In fact, Hunky's move was totally unexpected, there- fore it could not fail. Some of the women gathered there were disappointed, but when Bravo reviewed this memory later on the Grid she would have high praise for her student indeed.

Standing there with Hunky's sword penetrating him, Azibeel's face was a grimace of pain and shock. He could not believe what had just happened to him, yet the agony was so intense he could not even speak.

It's not fair! I wasn't ready! Hunky cheated and skipped all the customary preliminaries!

The blade dropped from his hand and he stumbled backwards off Hunky's weapon and over the lip of a metal cliff.

A lingering, hideous scream came from the bottom of the deep pit as Azibeel was scalded by superheated steam. At the bidding of Hunky, technicians scrambled to cut the flow of steam off and rescue hym, but it was far too late. By they time they reached him he was still alive but had second and third-degree burns over 30% of his body, mostly his face, chest, and arms. There were broken bones from his fall. And that slice through his abdomen was a serious additional issue, not immediately fatal, but all three prob- lems in aggregate were mortal if he did not receive prompt attention.

After hy saw hyz father fall, Thammuz placed the muzzle of his blaster against the gray bag containing Dory's severed head and yelled, "All of you, lower your weapons, unless you are willing to forfeit the last memo- ries of this woman!"

Hunky, for one, was not willing to allow Dory to suffer the True Death. She yelled, "Everyone hold! Point your weapons at the deck. Nobody try anything."

"Excellent," Thammuz growled. This move was the only way he could save his life, but he also saw a chance to salvage his father's life and the mis- sion. He ordered one of the women, Katerina, to pick up the unfinished mac- ro and stand fast.

After that, Thammuz held Dory's head higher and said, "Women of Femina Caelestis! Listen to my commands carefully and obey them to the letter, or I will destroy this woman's head!"

Hunky said, "If you carry out your threat you will be dead in the following instant."

Thammuz said, "How little you know of nephilim to bandy your words thus. Death holds no terror for the warriors of Belial! Unless you can say the same, you will clear the way for me and this woman bearing the macro, and another four women bearing my father on a bier to reach the carrier Trespasser unmolested."

Hunky said, "I will not compound the loss of this woman's final memories with the possible loss of five more women's final memories. They will bear the macro and your Emperor to one of your shuttles, but they will not go with you to the carrier."

"You have no choice. I cannot fly."

"Three other nephilim officers are still alive. They may go with you and help you fly the shuttle."

Thammuz said, "I will agree to that, if there are no tricks, and my father receives the utmost honor and care while being transported."

Hunky said, "Yet we have no surety you will release the head of the woman after you are safe. There is a high probability you will destroy her any- way. So I'm thinking we should take you out now, since the result will be the same, but at least we will be avenged for her death and for your threat, and maybe in your great haste your final stroke will go astray. Then we will also release your Emperor from his suffering."

Thammuz said quickly, "I propose that your own fleet escort us almost to the Trespasser. When we draw near the ship, one of my fighters will straggle, and the officer flying that one will be the one bearing the head of this woman. He will become your prisoner. Later, perhaps, if all goes well, we can arrange a prisoner exchange."

Hunky considered this for a moment. "Your terms are acceptable. If you keep your word, I will stand down, and we can take up the matter of what just happened here with diplomacy. But if there is further deception, and your officer comes to us bearing nothing in his hands, then our fleet will chase you all the way back to Jupiter, and you will find there are many more Astrodyne elements already positioned on your flank."

He smiled at this, for he knew it was an empty threat with the preparations his father made with respect to the wormhole, so he said, "It is agreed, then."

So Thammuz and three nephilim officers, all that remained alive and free among the original four hundred yeng and men of the Emperor's expedition, were allowed to board one of their troop transport shuttles parked on the surface of the Moon near the Apollo 17 landing site. Shortly they returned to space, followed closely by ten Sandwich fighters, which were joined in turn by a number of Imperial fighters.

Hunky was taken up to the Astrodyne destroyer Resolute and followed close behind in a growing parade as they made for deep space directly away from the sun. When the parade had reached the first picket of Trespasser's fighters on combat space patrol. Hunky ordered the entire Astrodyne fleet to reduce speed.

Three imperial fighters from this picket made rendezvous with the troop transport, one after the other, and Hunky knew Thammuz was hedging hyz bets. Hy could have transferred over in the first fighter, or the second, or the third. Dory's head could be in any one of the ships, and the half- built macro in another.

"At some point Thammuz needs to quit screwing around," Hunky said, "it's not doing Emperor Azibeel any good the longer he remains outside the burn ward in Trespasser's sick bay."

All three imperial fighters made rendezvous with other fighters, and some of these landed on the Trespasser while others flew in a random pattern to shuffle the deck. Hunky waited for one of the fighters to lag behind the others, as they agreed.

It was not until there was quite a distance between the Astrodyne fleet and the Imperials before, true to his word, one of Thammuz' fighters drifted to the rear. Hunky sent one of her destroyer escorts to meet the officer and take him prisoner, lest his ship were rigged to blow and came alongside a more valuable target like Hunky's warship.

For the nephilim of Gorpai, only the officers of flag rank were differentiated between the army and navy. The officer who was taken captive was a newly-advanced lieutenant named Ramiel. Hyz rank corresponded to a navy ensign, the lowest rank in the middle echelon of the armed forces of Belial. Hy was expendable and hy knew it, appointed by the successor to the Emperor to be the sacrificial lamb. But Hunky would treat him well.

Lieutenant Ramiel bore the head of Hunky, as promised. Dory ordered the head to be taken to her stateroom, but Ramiel was to accompany her to the bridge.

When they arrived in the compartment, dimly-lit with soft blue LEDs, hy saw a big tactical display which covered the entire forward bulkhead. On the far right of the screen was the Earth-Sun L2 point, about a million miles from the Earth, opposite the sun, just as the lunar L2 point was opposite the Earth. And approaching that position was a round symbol corresponding to the Femina Caelestis destroyer Crusader.

After Hunky explained the meaning of the information on the tactical dis- play, she said, "Lieutenant Ramiel, I know we were a couple centuries late to space travel, but your miserable campaign has led me to believe that you don't have much respect for us humans, and that is very unfortunate, be- cause after all we are the elder race.

"But maybe it's the woman thing. Maybe your Emperor thought we were just a bunch of silly girls out here playing Pirates and Pilots. When you return to your unit, Lieutenant, hopefully very soon, perhaps you could do much to educate your people otherwise."

"Milady, I can say that your response will serve as a strong deterrent from the like happening in the future."

"That's good because the Emperor broke the rules. This isn't Belial's star system. Your god Belial is allowed to settle his people in this system but excluding ambassadors, the nephilim must remain at a radial distance of four times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. You get the gas giants and maybe some of the asteroids.

"Now I doubt you have diplomatic credentials, Lieutenant, so your presence aboard my ship will bear explaining to our gods Binah, El, and Bat-El. Chokhmah might want an answer too."

"The raid was simple retaliation. We broke your monopoly of macros in response to your raid on Mercury in 2030, when you broke the monopoly on bots, which were the exclusive gift of Belial enjoyed by the Russian humans heading up General Materials."

The ship's operations officer told Hunky the Imperial fleet was so far ahead they were about to fall off the radar. In reply, Dory told her to break off the pursuit. And when the gentle acceleration stopped she said to Lt. Rami- el, "You see? We keep our word as well."

The communications officer said that the Crusader now had visual on the object at the Earth-Sun L2 point. Dory told her to throw the image up on the Big Board.

It was a long tube, square in cross-section, made of an intricate lattice- work of metal. Everyone present knew what it was. An ID grid, front door for the fat wormhole that led between the Sol system and Alpha Centauri. It was supposed to be in orbit above Ganymede, but somehow it was here, and now Hunky understood everything.

"The wings gave you away," Dory said. Ramiel looked puzzled, so Hunky be- came more specific. "Wings on a carrier that's supposed to be at least three AU away from here. It doesn't make any sense, it's useless mass in deep space, unless you just passed through the wormhole from the Land We Know and intended to return the same way."

"I'm very sure I don't know what you are babbling on about," Ramiel said.

"No need for pretense, Lieutenant. We are fully aware that the Land We Know is the crossroads between the worlds. Fly north out of the bubble and you end up at Proxima, no? West to Gorpai, South to Hybla-Dia, East to here. But all at airplane speeds, because you're flying through the air in the Land We Know. That's one thing the ID Grid checks for, that you're not moving too fast. And it marks for you where the wormhole will open, assum- ing three of the five gods agree to open it, for it takes a lot of dark energy to make a wormhole wide enough to pass a ship, doesn't it? Stop me if any of this is wrong."

"Assuming you are right, Lady Hunky, what do you plan to do about it?"

"This ID grid the Crusader just found at L2, it's supposed to be sitting off Ganymede. My guess is that the Emperor thought he found a loophole in the divine agreement. Fly east out of the bubble in the Land We Know and the elohim will send you to the ID grid in this star system, but they don't pay attention to where the ID grid is physically located here. Why should they? It's supposed to be serving your colony at Jupiter. It goes around Ganymede, Ganymede goes around Jupiter, and Jupiter goes around the sun, enough epicycles to make a bird get dizzy, so the elohim just anchor the wormhole mouth to the ID Grid and forget about it."

The Lieutenant merely stared at Hunky, silently bidding her to come to a point.

She went on. "Emperor Azibeel actually had the ID grid moved through real space to within one million miles from Earth so he could do his stupid Moon raid all the way from Gorpai and be back home before anyone knew what was happening. Tell me if I'm straying very far from the mark."

Lieutenant Ramiel said, "Lady Hunky, I must admit your analysis is largely correct, but again I ask you, what do you plan to do about it?"

"Just this."

Hunky got on ship-to-ship and ordered Crusader weapons red and free on the ID Grid. They all watched live as the huge structure was completely demol- ished.

Ramiel clenched his fists in rage and he was dizzy with the import of Hunky's action. "Do you realize what you have done here? Do you have the smallest clue?"

"I do indeed," Hunky told him. "I just severed the only link between your colonies and Gorpai. But don't worry, Lieutenant, the Emperor and his son are not stranded. Sure, it will take them four or five months to get back to Jupiter if they hustle, but if they still want to go back to Gorpai they can always use our pool." And she grinned at him.

Ramiel said, "You know as well as I do that the Emperor's pride would never permit him to return here as a beggar to use your link to the Land We Know."

"In that case," Hunky told him, "I hear nephilim live a bit longer than us plain Jane run-of-the-mill humans, so maybe he can use his new homemade macros to get home to Gorpai the hard way. It should only take about four hundred years."