One thing was certain. Even if Jau were given full control at this instant, and all his pilots' skills, there was no way he could accomplish such a landing.

They had cleared the last line of ridges. The aux thrusters burned briefly, a one-degree yaw, guiding them as if with special knowledge of conditions ahead.

Ritser Brughel's time for killing had shrunk down to a few seconds. Rita would be safe. Jau watched the tumbled land rise toward him. And with it came the strangest feeling of terror, and triumph, and freedom. "You're too late, Ritser. You're just too late."

SIXTY

Belga Underville had rarely seen joy or fear so strong, and never attached to the same events by the same people. Coldhaven's techs should have been cheering as wave after wave of their long-range interceptors scored against the Kindred ballistics, and hundreds of other enemy missiles blew themselves up or otherwise aborted. The success rate was already nearing ninety-nine percent. Which left thirty live nuclear warheads arcing into Accord territory. It was the difference between annihilation and mere isolated disaster...and the technicians chewed on their eating hands as they struggled to stop those last, straggling threats.

Coldhaven walked down his row of techs. One of Lighthill's people, an oophase corporal, was by his side. The General was hanging on Rhapsa Lighthill's every word, making sure his techs got the benefit of all the new intelligence that was flooding across their displays. Belga hung back. There was nothing she could do but get in the way. Victory Lighthill was deep in some weird conversation with the aliens, every few sentences punctuated by long delays, time for side conversations with her brother and Coldhaven's people. She paused, waiting, and gave Belga a shy smile.

Belga gave her a little wave back. The cobblie wasn't quite the same as her mother—except, perhaps, where it mattered.

Then Lighthill's phone came alive again—some relatively near collaborator? "Yes, good. We'll get people out there. Five hours maybe....Daddy, we're back on track. Critter Number Five is playing fair. You were right about that one. Daddy?...Brent, we've lost him again! That shouldn't happen now....Daddy?"

Rachner's helicopter had stopped its zigzag, evasive course, though not before Thract became thoroughly lost. Now the heli flew low and fast across the altiplano, as if fearless of hostile observation from above. A passenger on his own pilot's perch, Thract watched the sky show with an almost hypnotized wonder, only partly aware of Sherkaner Underhill's delirious mumbling, and the strange lights coming from his game helmet.

The sheets of amissile launches were long gone, but all across the horizon the evidence of their mission was lighting the sky.At least we foughtback.

The timbre of the rotor noise changed, bringing Thract back from his terrible, far vision. The heli was sliding down through the dark. Shading his eyes against the sky lights, Thract could see that they were headed for a landing on a random stretch of naked stone, hills and ice all around.

They touched down, roughly, and the turbines idled till the rotors were spinning slow enough to see. It was almost quiet in the cabin. The guide-bug stirred, pushed insistently at the door beside Underhill.

"Don't let him out, sir. If we lose him here, he might stay lost."

Underhill's head bobbed uncertainly. He set down the game helmet; its lights flickered and died. He patted his guide-bug, and pulled shut the closures of his jacket. "It's okay, Colonel. It's all over now. You see, we won."

The cobber sounded as delirious as ever. But Thract was beginning to realize: delirious or not, Underhill had saved the world. "What happened, sir?" He said softly. "Alien monsters controlled our nets...and you controlled the monsters?"

The old, familiar chuckle. "Something like that. The problem was, they aren't all monsters. Some of them are both clever and good...and we almost squashed each other with our separate plans. That was terribly expensive to fix." He was silent for a second, his head wavering. "It will be okay, but...just now I can't see much." The cobber had taken a full head of the aliens' killer beam. The blisters on Underhill's eyes were spreading, a pervasive, creamy haze. "Maybe you can take a moment and tell me what you see." The cobber jerked a hand skyward.

Rachner pushed his best side close to the south-facing window. The shoulder of the mountain cut off part of the view, but there were still one hundred degrees of horizon. "Hundreds of nukes, sir, glowing lights in the sky. I think those are our interceptors, way far off."

"Ha. Poor Nizhnimor and Hrunk...when we walked in the Dark, we saw something similar. Though it was much colder then." The guide-bug had the trick of the door. It popped it open a crack, and a slow draft of coldest air licked into the cabin.

"Sir—" Rachner started to complain about the draft.

"It's okay. You won't be here long. What else do you see?"

"Lights spreading out from the hits. I guess that's ionization in the magnetopatches. And—" Rach's voice caught in his throat. There were other things, and these he recognized. "I see reentry traces, sir. Dozens of them. They're passing overhead, and to our east." Rach had seen similar things in Air Defense tests. When the warheads finally came down through the atmosphere, they left trails that glowed in a dozen colors. Even in the tests, they'd been horrible things, the stabbing hands of a spirit tarant, pouncing from the sky. A dozen traces, more coming. Thousands of missiles had been stopped, but what remained could destroy cities.

"Don't worry." Underhill's voice came softly from Thract's blind side. "My alien friends have taken care of those. Those warheads are dead carcasses now, a few tonnes of radioactive junk. Not much fun if one drops directly on your head, but otherwise no threat."

Rachner turned, followed the tracks anxiously across the sky.My alienfriends have taken care of those. "What are the monsters really like, Sherkaner? Can we trust them?"

"Heh. Trust them? What a thing for an Intelligence officer to ask. My General never trusted them, any of them. I've studied thehumans for almost twenty years, Rachner. They've been traveling in space for hundreds of generations. They've seen so much, they've done so much....The poor crappers think they know what is impossible. They're free to fly between the stars, and their imagination is trapped in a cage they can't even see."

The glowing streaks had passed across the sky. Most had faded to far-red or invisibility. Two converged toward a point on the horizon, probably the High Equatoria launch site. Thract held his breath, waiting.

Behind him, Underhill said something like, "Ah, dear victory," and then was very quiet.

Thract strained to watch the north. If the warheads were still live, the detonations would be visible even from over the horizon. Ten seconds. Thirty. There was silence and cold. And to the north, there was only the light of the stars. "You're right, sir. What's left is just falling junk. I—" Rachner turned, suddenly conscious of just how cold the heli's cabin had become.

Underhill was gone.

Thract lunged across the cabin to the half-open door. "Sir!Sherkaner! " He started down the outside steps, turning his head this way and that, trying to catch a glimpse of the other. The air was still, but so cold that it cut. Without a heated breather, he'd have burned lungs in a matter of minutes.

There! A dozen yards from the heli, in the shade of both stars and sky glow, two far-red blotches. Underhill limped slowly behind Mobiy. The guide-bug tugged him gently along, at every step probing the hillside with its long arms. It was the instinctive behavior of an animal in hopeless cold, trying to the last to find an effective deepness. Here, in a random nowhere, the critter didn't stand a chance. In less than an hour he and his master would be dead, their tissues desiccated.