6

       21 JUNE 2138

       Building 12, Xenocultural Mission

       Terran Legation Compound

       New Sumer

       Ishtar, Llalande 21185 IID

       27:13 hours Local Time

      “Come on, Moore! They’re coming over the north wall!”

      Dr. Nichole Moore kept retrieving her data mems, pulling double handfuls of the domino-sized crystalline chips from the lab’s storage compartment and stuffing them into the Marine seabag Sergeant Aiken had given her.

      “I’m almost done,” she replied.

      Carleton, the senior PanTerran representative, pounded on a desktop with a clenched fist. “Damn it, they’ll be here any minute! Forget that crap!”

      She whirled on him, eyes blazing. “This is five years of research, Carleton!” she yelled. “Five years of my life! I’m not leaving it to be burned!”

      “Stay then!” Carleton snapped, and vanished into the passageway outside. She could hear the wail of the assembly siren over in the Marine compound. She knew Carleton was right. There wasn’t much time.

      But she had to save her records. Five Terran years of patient work with the An and their human pets. She raked the last of the mems into the bag, added her personal recorder and the desktop computer, which still had several thousand photographs and several megabytes of notes that hadn’t been mem-stored yet, then sealed the opening.

      The Marine seabag had little in common with the all-purpose stowage bags of centuries past. It was more like a square satchel, but with smartthreads woven into the fabric. A couple of tugs on the carry straps unfolded it into a backpack; as she pushed her arms through the straps and hoisted it into place, she heard the whine of servos adjusting the balance on her back and felt the grip of shoulder distributors snugging down over her shoulders. She had nearly thirty kilos of notes, mems, and electronic gear inside, and lugging it out of the compound would have been a real bitch without the technic assist.

      Nichole took a last look around her office, feeling the tug of regret. Five years …

      Damn Geremelet and his Destiny Faction anyhow … and damn the High Emperor for trying to appease them, and damn the Trade Mission for interfering with the millennia-old balance of social forces on this world, and damn the Humankind Party on Earth for stirring things up, and, yes, damn herself and her xenocultural team for digging into questions that perhaps should not have been uncovered. Of course slavery was immoral, unjust, and obscenely wrong … but when the slaves were actually happy with their lot, had been bred to be happy for generation upon untold generation …

      Satisfied at last that she’d managed to grab the most critical of her research data, she accessed her neurimplants, logging onto the Legation network one last time. The main network AI was still offline, though, and all she could see within her electronically enhanced mind’s eye was the same warning that had been up and broadcasting for the past twenty hours—all civilian personnel were to gather a minimum of necessary belongings and report to the Pyramid of the Eye for evacuation. The base’s two ground-to-orbit transports had been shuttling up and down constantly for the past twelve hours or so, hauling people up to the relative safety of the Emissary, in Ishtar orbit. The evacuation was perhaps half complete. According to the posting on the net-cast, another transport would be lifting within forty minutes.

      And she would be on it. She took a last look around the room, then, on impulse, used a stylus to scrawl a brief message on a notebook, leaving it on a countertop. Someday she might be able to return. More likely, though, it would be someone else, someone trying to figure out what had gone wrong here. The message might help. She hurried out into the hallway, palm-locking the door behind her. As if I’ll be back to work here at the next shift, she thought, bitter.

      Building 12 was a gray, ground-extruded nanocrete dome near the east side of the XC Mission quarter, ugly as sin, as her grandmother back in Michigan used to say, but it had been home and office for five Terran Standard years. She emerged from light and air-conditioned coolness on the elevated walkway halfway up the side of the curved wall, plunging into the steamy heat outside.

      Spread out below her within the tight perimeter of the Legation walls, the embassy compound was submerged in murky red twilight, with only the bright gleam of a handful of lights in scattered windows to show where Earthers had left them burning after leaving for the evacuation pickup. Gunfire crackled and snapped from the north, where a company of Marines was trying to hold off the incoming tidal flood of Anu god-warriors and their Sag-ura slaves. Smoke stained the red sky at a dozen different points—most of them marking burning ’villes outside the wall, but a few were inside, set by fanatics within the embassy compound or by firebombs lobbed over the wall.

      It was late morning—not that the Terran Legation staff ever paid much attention to local time. Ishtar circled giant Marduk in 133 hours, which meant that its day-night cycle was five and a half Earth days long. The Legation’s work and rest periods were based on a standard twenty-four-hour cycle matched to Greenwich Mean Time on distant Earth, a necessary concession to the biological needs of a much different world’s evolution. In any case, the light from the primary, red-dwarf Llalande 21185, was so wan that the landscape always seemed to be shrouded in twilight, even at high noon.

      At the moment, the sun was a red-ember pinpoint gleaming high in the eastern sky, well above the haze-shrouded Ahtun Mountains, too tiny and too distant to lend Ishtar more than a trickle of heat. In the west, above the black cone of God Mountain, Marduk hung against the deep green and purple sky, a baleful scarlet eye poised to fall upon the exotically lush landscape of Ishtar and crush it. Though gibbous and waning now, the sliver of Marduk’s night side visible at the moment glowed almost as brightly as the sunlit side. Stirred and stressed by the constant gravitational tug-of-war with its largest satellite, the gas giant radiated far more heat than it received from its star, heat sufficient to warm its Earth-sized satellite to tropical temperatures on the side forever facing Marduk in tide-locked captivity.

      Nichole spared only a moment for the red-gloom beauty of the landscape. The gunfire in the north was growing steadily in intensity, and she could see the black sprawl of Geremelet’s hordes surging through the shattered main gate. A cluster of rockets rose from the jungle beyond, trailing orange flame. The flames winked out; moments later, a scattering of flashes popped and strobed across the northern quarter of the compound, followed seconds later by the dull thud of the explosions. The Marines wouldn’t be able to hold that army of Ahannu fanatics back much longer.

      A Marine Wasp droned overhead, its insectlike body painted in stripes of yellow and dark blue-black. It angled across the compound toward the north, and she guessed that it was searching for the launch site of those rockets.

      Shouldering her pack, she moved quickly down the stairway curving along the wall of Building 12. The streets of the city were almost lost in the near-darkness. Not for the first time, she wished she had microimplant optics like the Marines used, to help her pick her way through the shadows. Normally, the Legation’s streets and walkways were brilliantly lit, but the power had failed hours before and the streetlights were out.