Lonnie Brant awoke with a gasp, fists clenched, muscles rigid, heart pounding. The odor of blood lingered in her nostrils; she could taste it in the back of her throat.  For agonizing seconds she foundered, blinded and paralyzed.  Then the veil between real and unreal lifted, and she sensed the heat of the body next to her in the narrow bed.  Her husband Frank lay curled with his back towards her; cocooned by the shared blanket and sheet, he snored softly.  Beside them under the low concrete ceiling, their young children, Belle and Travis, slept on separate cots.

Gradually her heartbeat and breathing slowed, and she was able to think—and remember.  She had never had a dream so intense, so minutely detailed.  It had left her flesh tingling and her mind reeling.  She had no doubt that she had received a true vision, like in the ancient stories. 

The voice of the Creator had just whispered in her ear,  “Don’t despair.”

Out of the corner of her eye she caught the faint glow of the battery-powered alarm clock.  It was 5:45 a.m. Above the Brants’ windowless bunker, dawn was

breaking over the Adirondaks.  It was time to get up and get breakfast started, but Lonnie didn’t stir from the comforting warmth of the bed. Determined to recall every single aspect of the vivid dream, she closed her eyes and tried to replay it from the beginning.

Her first awareness had been of running downhill, high-kicking as fast as she could—trying desperately to catch up with something on the slope below her. The sun was hot on her shoulders and bare head. Contrails zigzagged across the cloudless blue sky.  The path she followed was a broad, trampeled-flat swathe in the waist-high, still-green wild grass.  It felt like, it smelled like early summer. 

The sounds of a pitched battle erupted from valley floor.  Not just the rattle and pop of small arms; the thundering booms of an artillery barrage.  Concussions from the overlapping explosions rocked the ground and vibrated inside her chest.

Farther down the hillside, she could make out a dark, rapidly-moving mass.  At a distance, it looked like a stampede of large animals. As she gained on them, she could see they all had horns, and between the explosions she caught the insistent beat of a drum.  There were shouts and screams from that direction as well.  And piercing shrieks, like nothing she had ever heard before. 

It occurred to her as she ran that she was doing the opposite of what she should—dashing in a near-panic into the heart of a battle—but she couldn’t stop herself.  The combat focused on a cluster of buildings in the middle of the valley.  A farm perhaps.  Some of the structures were already enveloped in flame and black smoke. A handful of camouflaged tanks hidden among the burning buildings poured cannon fire on the surrounding hillsides. 

There was a blip in time, a lurching fast-forward, and she found herself right on the heels of the mysterious herd.  They stank, and they towered over her but

they weren’t cattle or buffalo as she had first thought.  They were two-legged, pale-skinned, with long, flowing reddish hair.  The horns protruded from the sides of their hammered metal helmets.  They wore short, toga-like garments of skin, fur side out, belted at the waist; they carried shields of wood sheathed in the same dull gray metal, and massive broadswords and war axes.  It wasn’t a costume party or Halloween come a month early. The weapons were real, the Vikings were real.  She could hear them chanting to the beat of their war drum—“Odin!  Odin!  Odin!”—as they rushed headlong into the fight. They didn’t seem to notice her presence. She was like a ghost, surfing in their wake.

The pack veered left to avoid a huge animal laying on its side, surrounded by still-smoking, shell craters. It was the size of an elephant, but it was no elephant.  Under it lay the crushed, bloody bodies of Vikings, presumably its riders or handlers. The creature’s spine had been severed by a cannon round; a massive chunk of meat and bone had been blown out of its back, revealing splintered ribs down to its torso’s midline, and vast amounts of red-weeping flesh. Yet it still lived.  It struggled to rise, its front hooves churning deep ruts in the dirt; and as they did, it let loose another ear-splitting shriek. 

A towering frill of bone framed the back of its enormous head.

A long, wicked horn jutted from above each eye; a short one decorated the snout.

The mouth was like a beak, with row upon row of teeth designed for tearing.

From a middle school trip to the Natural History Museum, from the movie Jurassic Park, from Saturday dinosaur cartoons, Lonnie knew what it was—something even more impossible than a war party of ancient Norse.

It was a triceratops.

Before she could begin to consider the implications of that, sonic booms split the sky behind her.  An instant later, powerful winds buffeted the grassy slope.  Squinting up, she saw a squadron of flat, silver disks—airships one hundred feet across—sweeping down the valley at tremendous speed.  TheVikings paused to cheer on the flying saucers, waving their swords and shields in the air.  Arc-light beams shot from the fronts of the aircraft. The farm complex became a lake of fire, and the camouflaged tanks disintegrated in coruscating balls of flame. 

And still the mad dream unfolded.

As the Norsemen pressed onward, towards the valley floor, her view of what lay ahead was blocked by broad backs, shields, and horned helmets. The war drum still pounded, but forward progress slowed to crawl, as if the front of the formation had met an obstacle it couldn’t bypass.

From the head of the pack came guttural moans and cries of pain.  And a strange sound cut through the din.  It sounded like a human voice, a woman’s or a child’s, hitting and holding an impossibly high note.  So high, so pure in tone and pitch that it gave her chills. The single note sustained for an instant, faded, then reappeared. That happened over and over again. 

As she came closer to whatever was holding up the advance, she felt warm drops falling upon her face and arms. All around her, a crimson rain spattered the flattened grass.

The drum beat faltered, then the drum went still.

An instant later, the bodies packed in front of her broke ranks. Vikings, their eyes wide with horror, faces, beards dripping blood, turned and fell back.  Some were greviously wounded, missing limbs, their heads slashed to the bone. They stumbled around her to escape, yelling a single word, over and over.  It sounded

like “Hell!” 

As the bodies parted she saw what they were running from:  a figure wielding a curved Japanese sword. 

Not a giant.  Not an army of ferocious Samurai.  It was a young woman, a girl.  Her long black hair was tied in thick, double braids that hung down to the middle of her back. The top of her head barely reached the chins of five Norsemen who hadn’t yet turned tail. 

Her blade sang as it sliced through the air in a blur.

And its one-note song was Death.

With a single swipe, powered from slender hips and rooted, moccasined feet, it cleaved through skin, tendon, and muscle—through bone.  It lopped off brawny arms at the elbow, hands dropped to earth still clutching battle axes and broadswords.  It sent heads flying off necks, heads still strapped into helmets.

The girl had rolled the top of her beaded deerskin shift down around her waist.  Perhaps to free her arm movement, perhaps to cool down.  Perhaps as a mesmerizing distraction to her adversaries. Her bare breasts and flat stomach gleamed with perspiration and splattered blood.  The proud, upthrust mounds of her womanhood swayed and bounced as she struck blow after blow with the razor-sharp sword. 

The Norsemen seemed to move in slow motion, confused, stumbling over their own feet. The muscles of the girl’s bare arms and back rippled as she made precise, subtle adjustments in her angles of attack, striking before she could be struck.  Each blow landed with full power, each blow with precisely the same short section of the blade’s curvature.

One moment the huge men were alive; the next they lay in pieces on the grass.

As the last Viking toppled headless to the ground, the girl gripped her sword with both hands and flipped the tip skyward with a practiced snap of her wrists, flinging the accumulated gore off the end in a fine plume.  The blade flashed like a mirror in the sunlight.

Blood misted the girl’s face, the centers of her tanned cheeks were flushed rosepink from exertion.

When Lonnie looked into her eyes, when she took in the bone structure of the face, the shape of the mouth, a shock of recognition shook her to the core.  She saw her own mother’s eyes, her own mouth, her children’s faces.

The warrior maiden was kin.

  “Who are you?!” Lonnie asked. 

The girl smiled, dancing, devilish dark eyes and dazzling white teeth.  But she didn’t reply.  After a moment it was clear: like the Vikings, the girl couldn’t hear or see her. 

It didn’t matter; Lonnie already had her answer.  If this girl, this topless she-warrior existed in some distant future, then her own children had to survive the horrors of the here and now, and her children’s children would survive, and their children, and so on, and so on.  In that instant she realized that the Creator had granted her a magical glimpse of what was to come, a future that against all odds held out hope. 

With an effort, Lonnie forced herself out from under the warm blanket. As she swung her legs to the floor, the dark room began to spin, and she was struck by a wave of nausea.

Clamping a hand over her mouth, she grabbed up the five-gallon plastic bucket that served as a trash can, and vomited into it softly as she could. 

No doubt about it, she was pregnant again.  She was going to have to tell Frank today, before he guessed the truth.  But she would tell him about the dream vision, too.  And what it foretold: that his child growing in her belly would live to be born; and that the offspring of their children would not be tainted.

Lonnie carried the bucket through the dark to the blanket strung over the entrance to the tiny mudroom.  Slipping past the barrier, she found and turned on a flashlight. In front of her was bunker’s heavy steel door. After putting on knee-high rubber boots and pulling a peacoat over her flannel nightdress, she took a 12-gauge pump from the gun rack along the wall.  Before the disaster hit, it had been Frank’s second-best duck gun.  He had cut it down for her. The matte-finish Remington 870 had no buttstock, just a pistol grip, and the barrel ended flush with the tubular magazine. No more ducks for this Wingmaster.

She checked to make sure the weapon was fully loaded, that the magazine alternated double ought buck with deer slugs, all three-inch, high brass. Frank had drilled the firing sequence into her until it was hardwired into her brain: Gutshot, then headshot. Incapacitate, obliterate.  She shoulderslung the foreshortened weapon, unsealed the steel door, and gathering up the vomit bucket, slipped into the concrete stairwell.

At the top of the single flight of steps was a second steel hatch, also dogged from the inside.  Lonnie opened it and climbed out into their roofless, burned-out hulk of a home. Setting down the trash can, she brought the Remington up to hip height, safety off. Holding her breath, she listened.  All she could hear was the drip, drip, drip of moisture falling from the exposed roof joists and pink fiberglass insulation.  It had rained during the night.

The sour smell of charred wood and melted plastic made her vomit again. 

She managed to hit the trash can, more or less.  When the racking spasms stopped, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and closed the bunker hatch.

Moving cautiously through the wreckage to the back porch, she stopped behind the blackened water heater.  It was already growing light outside.  Overcast skies looked threatening. There was a damp chill in the air.  It was going to rain again, soon. She looked out between the charred wall studs at their back pasture and woodlot.  Fall had come early—a golden carpet dappled with orange and fiery red was spread out below tree trunks and bare branches black with moisture.  A carpet now soggy.

From where she stood she could see the top of the Tumbling Waters Casino marquee, across the river.  That was where she and Frank had worked.  The marquee hadn’t flashed for nearly two years, now.  There was talk among the remnants of the Six Nations of fortifying the site, of banding together for mutual defense, of enclosing it in a perimeter stockade.  Of essentially turning back the clock 400 years, to before the European invasion.  So far, it was all talk.

Lonnie left the trash can beside the heater tank and took a clean plastic bucket from its hiding place inside the clothes dryer.

Remington braced on its shoulder strap, pistol grip in her right hand, bucket in her left, she headed down to river bank to draw water.

She was ten feet from the bank when it began to shower.  Cold drops pelted her head and stippled the fast-flowing water. For an instant, the dream came back to her in a flood.  The falling blood.  The eyes of the warrior girl. 

Through the slanting sheets of rain, something moved on the far side of the river, among the row of skinny trees.  Caught in the open, Lonnie let go of the bucket and dropped into a fighting crouch, shotgun in both hands.

Then she saw the four legs, and the rack of antlers. The buck’s head juked forward and back as it strutted between the trees.  It looked prime, alert.  Regal.  Then it turned for the hilltop and was gone.  Too far away for a killshot with the pumpgun.  Wrong side of the river, too. She couldn’t wade across to follow a wounded animal.

As Lonnie stepped ankle-deep in the current with the bucket, cold penetrated the thin rubber of the boots.  She dipped into the flow, rinsed the bucket well, then filled it.  After pausing to check the far treeline, and upstream and downstream banks, she returned to the rear of the gutted house.  Inside the back porch she paused again, searching downrange for the slightest sign of movement.

No way would she or Frank ever lead pursuit back to the bunker. If the worst came to pass, the plan was to steer trouble away, into the maze of pitfalls and punji stake traps they’d built in the woods bordering their property.  And if that didn’t work, there was shooting hide, stocked with ammo, overlooking a bend in the trail.

Back down in the mudroom, before Lonnie drew back the blanket, she lit a kerosene lamp.  In its soft glow she could see her family still fast asleep in the depressing, concrete room; she didn't wake them. Yesterday's foraging had been hard on the kids.  So many bodies left unburied, bodies of people and abominable things; and worse, abominable things that were still alive—and hungry. 

Long before the world’s communication links crashed, the media had begun calling the terrible chain of events “The Die-Off.” 

The mass extinction of species in a single generation. 

It had all started in 2011, a bad year for the flu. Not as bad as the pandemic of 1918, from all accounts, but more people than usual died. In the months following the outbreak, human beings, and all species of large animal, suffered unheardof

numbers of spontaneous abortions. When the next growing season began, it was clear that something had happened to the plants as well.  The staple food crops no longer bred true.  The Internet ran rampant with rumors of a hushed-up terrorist attack, and/or accidental experimental bioweapon releases by the U.S. military.  Some people thought it was Nature, itself, finally fighting back against the ravages of humankind.

By that time, the scientists and doctors had figured out a virus was causing it all, but they didn’t know where it had come from, or how to begin to stop it.  Civilization was already on the verge of collapse when the first, post-2011 babies began to be born. It was only then that the scope of the tragedy became clear.

They were not merely deformed.  They were unrecognizable as human.   

And many of them survived.

Lonnie Brant had been unable to cry for a long time, but looking at her sleeping children she felt the dam breaking.  The living world she remembered, the world she loved so much would never come again; Belle and Travis—and the new baby—would never witness its true glory.  Tears streaming down her face, she lit the propane stove, which Frank had vented up through the wrecked house.  After setting a pot of water on to boil, she started shucking the ears of fresh corn they had looted the day before, under rifle fire from a poorly guarded field outside what was left of the town of Massena. 

Beneath the pale green, striated husk, the cornsilks were no longer pale yellow and fibrous.  They were bright pink and fragile, like thread-thin filaments of worms or jellyfish.  They broke apart at the slightest touch, and left red smears on her fingertips as she swept them away.

A lidless eyeball stared up at her from the middle of the corn cob.

Carmel-colored iris.  Black, fully-dilated pupil.  A human eye. Absent nerves.  Absent brain. 

A dead end.

In texture it was similar to the cob’s kernels: resilient under the ball of her thumb.

Not so long ago, Lonnie would have used her knife to trim away the blind orb—but no more. What was the point?  No matter that the rest of the cob looked normal, every cell of it was part-human.  When cooked, the cyclops eye would turn opaque and become unrecognizable—an oversized milky kernel, tasteless and somewhat chewy.

At least the corn can't scream, Lonnie thought as she tossed it into the cookpot. 
 

As Dr. Talmadge Rind reached for the main thruster controls, the pressure inside his skull suddenly spiked—intense pain stabbed behind both eyesockets, like something at the core of his brain was about to burst.  He clamped his eyelids shut, his expression twisted into a teeth-baring grimace.  Agony struck him in waves, accompanied by nausea: he tasted oysters and licorice, simultaneously. 

Digging gloved fingertips into the form-fitting chair’s armrests, he hung on until the pain subsided.  Gasping for air, he opened his eyes.

The inside of the spacecraft was even smaller than the front compartment of his 1974 Volvo 142 two-door sedan.  The lone observation port was a third the size of the car’s side window; through it, an immense, cloud-speckled blue arc appeared to slowly rotate. 

Clad head-to-toe in a bubble-helmeted, silver vacuum-suit and belted into the reclining chair, the African-American PhD was the first human being to orbit the planet in over a century. 

Not a personal triumph. 

Not a hard-won, technological comeback for his species. 

But rather, the precursor to defeat on an unimaginable scale.

And if he failed to complete the mission he had been given, Miss Vicky would suffer unspeakable consequences. 

LCD readouts on the backlit control panel indicated the capsule’s speed at 17,000 miles an hour; its altitude was a scant 50 kilometers above atmospheric re-entry and burn out.  To regain a higher, safe orbit, he had to fire the thrusters.  He moved his hand toward the controls, and the blinding pain returned.   It flashed behind his eyes just for an instant—almost like a warning.  It made him hesitate. 

Am I dying? he asked himself.  Dying before I can save her?

When the former Cal Berkeley professor entered the space capsule, he’d weighed in excess of  275 pounds, much of it belly flab.  After ten days in orbit, without a bite to eat or a sip of water, the quilted protective suit hung loosely around his midsection.  He wasn’t hungry, he wasn’t thirsty, but he was rapidly wasting away.

An umbilical from the machinery in the massive base of the chair kept his spacesuit pressurized with O₂.  Other umbilicals connected the base to ports along the sides of the suit, which in turn led to openings that had been laser-carved into his torso.  Yellow, green, and purple liquids pumped into his body cavity through loops of clear tubing—in on one side, out on the other.  The protein/carbo/fat hydrating-stew, if that’s what it was, left no residue to void: no bowel movements, no urination.  He felt a slight chill every time the stuff pulsed in and out.  Glug.  Pause.  Glug.  Pause. Glug.  Pause.  It had occurred to him that the garish fluids might have nothing to do with nourishment, but served only to suppress pangs of

hunger and thirst so he could fulfill his mission.  Severe headache was a side effect of starvation and dehydration.  Whether the machinery fed or simply anesthetized him didn’t matter.  

Either way, by any measure, he was at death’s door.

Flying solo, but technically-speaking, not alone.

The atrocity stared at him, unblinking, with its ten-by-ten-inch cyclops’ eye.  Shock-mounted to the control panel within arm’s reach, the gray plasteel cube’s LCD readout scrolled endless columns of data.  As the spacecraft streaked around the planet, the device detected subtle changes in electromagnetic and gravitational fields.  It recorded the positions of these anomalies, which the onboard computer then used to construct next-orbit flight paths and more detailed, pinpoint surveys. 

The Electromagnetic-Gravitational Fluxometer (E-GF) epitomized his captors’ absolute technological supremacy, and their contempt for the suffering of all other beings.  The central component—the main sensor—of the E-GF,  an obscene perversion of his scientific discoveries, was a living human brain.

Dr. Rind had grown up in the 1950’s, overweight and uncoordinated.  Breaking free of oppression and poverty through sports was out of the question, so he devoted himself to developing his intellectual gifts and interests.  As a child he was convinced he would become the George Washington Carver of earth science.

Close, but no cigar. 

As smart as he was, ten-year-old Rind couldn’t anticipate the insular, hidebound nature of science and academia.  Couldn’t imagine that decades of effort and accomplishment would be rewarded with excommunication from his chosen field.  Or that his genius and innovation would get him kidnapped, crammed into a tiny spheroid, and abandoned in orbit around the planet—a fate if not worse than

his enslaved ancestors, certainly no better.

Dr. Rind’s career-changing, “Eureka” moment had come in the fall of 1976, when, halfway through a double pepperoni pizza, he had been struck by the idea that external geophysical forces—tectonic shifts, upsurges in magma, and electromagnetic and gravitational irregularities—might have the power to subtly influence and direct individual human brain activity, and ultimately, mass social movements. 

His preliminary statistical analysis, which catalogued ideation and behavior in times of geologic upheaval, supported a correlation—but not cause and effect.  Undaunted, the professor began mapping and quantifying brain response to specific changes in electromagnetic fields, which he could easily manipulate.  He used grad students as guinea pigs. The results of his controlled study strongly pointed to the existence of an external motive force, previously unidentified—George Washington Carver territory. 

When he presented the framework of his new theory to a national geophysical conference in 1979, the audience of his peers catcalled and yelled insults, then walked out en masse.

Publicly rejected, Dr. Rind’s Unifying Theory of Geologic and Social Forces (UTGSF) was then roundly ignored.  No reputable science journal would publish his ongoing findings. His grad students drifted away.  His lectures were poorly attended; sometimes no one showed up.

The Hayward Fault incident had been the final straw.  Frantic to gather more convincing hard data, Rind had rented an Econoline van and hired eight Cal undergrads as test subjects. After packing the students into the rear of the van, along with half a ton of electronic gear, he drove back and forth over the fault line

for hours—this while trying to monitor the readings from a CRT in the passenger seat.  With eight young people crammed in the cargo compartment of a windowless van, some of them glassy-eyed, all wearing brain, blood pressure, and pulse sensors, all sitting on stacks of flashing, chittering instruments, he should have foreseen the consequences of a chance traffic stop by Oakland police. 

The day after the Hayward Fault incident, the department chairman ejected him from his basement cubicle in the earth science building.  Dr. Talmadge Rind, the world’s one and only “neuro-volcanologist,” was forced to hold office hours and rare, student conferences in the front seat of his Volvo, parked out in the hinterlands on the edge of the sprawling campus.

A career of limitless promise, half a lifetime of effort had gone square in the crapper.

Racial bigotry had had little if anything to do with the outcome.  Radical, paradigm-shifting scientific insights took a long time to be accepted—if ever.  And of course, there was jealousy and fear, the bricks and mortar of bureaucracy.

The command console bleeped a repeating, warning tone.  Capsule altitude had dropped into the critical zone, 39 kilometers from reentry and burn out.

Warily, Dr. Rind reached for the thruster control. Long before his finger touched the red firing button, the pain behind his eyes spiked again.  Muscles locked, body shivering, he clutched the armrests.  It felt like something was ripping, tearing loose deep inside his head.

And this time, the nausea was much worse. 

As his stomach convulsed, acid squirted into the back of his throat, mixing with the flavors of oysters and licorice.  Upchucking inside his helmet in zero gravity was not an option.  Droplets of expelled bile would float around his head,

circulating until they smeared across the inside of the bubble and obscured his vision.  Groaning aloud, he swallowed the acid; clenching his teeth and shutting his throat, he held it down.

Concentrate, concentrate, he commanded himself.  Think about something else.  Think about Miss Vicky.  Remember Miss Vicky. 

The night they met at a Cal faculty singles’ mixer, the first time she uttered his name, with a soft hand of greeting extended, she had pronounced it correctly: “You must be Dr. Rind.”  Not “Rind” as in citrus peel.  “Rhinned” as in “wind.”  Blond, a teensy bit horsey-faced, Miss Vicky had a beautifully-toned body and rather large feet.  She wore an ankle-length, super-gauzy, faded flower print dress, knee-high, lace-up boots, and a long, nubby-knit scarf—the Stevie Nix look, except Miss Vicky was tall and willowy.

Rind had blushed at the touch of her fingers, astonished that she would find him—out-of-fashion tweedy, balding, pudgy, perspiring—the least bit interesting. 

As it turned out, she was interested in him and his controversial academic work. 

At 26, Dr. Victoria Campion was a decade younger than Rind, the only child of trust-fund-baby, Berkeley Free Speech Movement/turned Hippie/turned Social-Activist perpetual students.  From the age of three she had referred to herself as “Miss Vicky.”  As an adult, that’s what she insisted her closest friends call her.  Scary-brilliant, she had earned her Cambridge doctorate in under 15 months.  Her thesis used Game Theory to accurately predict the locations of undiscovered, major Viking archaeological sites across the Middle East and the continental U.S.  Cal’s Cultural Anthropology department had subsequently hired her to lecture on the Viking Age (800-1400 C.E.). 

After an hour of unbroken eye contact and rapid-fire exchanges on wide-ranging topics in science and philosophy, Dr. Rind and Miss Vicky departed the faculty social arm in arm.  They drove separate cars to his upstairs apartment in an Addison Way, circa 1920 four-plex. The wooden staircase was narrow and creaky, and the hall carpet smelled of cat pee and fried onions.  Although the stairs and topfloor hall were fairly typical of Flatlands’ amenities, the professor had worried about her reaction to the state of his three-room domicile—one room of which was completely filled by rows of metal, free-standing bookshelves packed with his UTGSF research.

But she didn’t seem to notice the squalor.  Immediately after entering his digs, she informed him she always sought out “big men” as love partners—her satisfaction was a matter of momentum, the impact of a heavy moving mass being the critical element. 

In all things Miss Vicky only had one gear—overdrive.

The fireworks, physical and intellectual, had lasted until well past noon the next day.

To say they “fell in love” was like calling a perfect, dew-beaded rose “a plant.”    

Lock and key.

Key and lock.

That was how Miss Vicky put it.

The sexual and mental stimulation was like nothing Rind had ever experienced, like nothing he had ever thought possible.  To an eavesdropper, their mile-a-minute pillow talk that night would have been largely incomprehensible.  In husky whispers, Miss Vicky exposed him to ancient Norse myths that seemed to describe UTGSF

to a tee.  He explained the intricasies of his experimental design and the nuances of his findings to her.  Fact bounced off fact, one premise led to another, fresh insights appeared out of thin air, and before the break of dawn, lines of inquiry from two different scientific disciplines had miraculously merged. 

After their liaison, both romantic and scholarly, became the subject of campus gossip, his earth science colleagues started openly referring to him as “the Runestone Cowboy.”

Everyone else mocked, but Miss Vicky believed in his genius. 

His dearest friend had lived out the rest of her life without him, probably wondering to her dying breath what had happened, why he had deserted her after a year of their virtual inseparability, and where in the world he had gone. 

Though Miss Vicky was certainly dead by now, being dead didn’t make her safe. 

And that was the rancid meat of it.

Dr. Rind hadn’t “gone” anywhere of his own volition. He had been sucked from the Telegraph Avenue sidewalk on a pleasant spring afternoon in 1981, and transported a century into the future.  They, the cadre of creatures who lay in wait on the dark side of the moon, had reached back in time and grabbed him up.  In the approximately six months he had spent in the 22^nd century, he had never seen the puppetmasters, but he knew them by their works—the abominations that populated their moon base.  Crosses not just within earth’s myriad species, but between Phyla, between Kingdoms.  And primitive humans and prehistoric animals sucked from thousands, from tens of millions of years past.  Nothing was sacred to them, nothing was off-limits.  In pursuit of their objectives, they chopped the laws of taxonomy and time into confetti and tossed it into the wind. 

If they could reach back and take him, they do the same to Miss Vicky.  They could enslave and torture her, as they had enslaved and tortured him.  Or worse, steal her from the timeline before the two of them ever met, or before she blossomed into a woman—or before she turned three. In an instant, they could erase Miss Vicky’s glory.  And he couldn’t stomach the thought of that. Though she was lost to him, he treasured every second of who she had been. 

Dr. Rind was not a strong man.  Not a physical man.  To save Miss Vicky from threats by his captors, he had cooperated.  At the moon base he had calibrated and fine-tuned the lone, functioning E-GF unit, the gray cyclops squatting on the control panel. Heaven only knew how many failed prototypes there had been, how many human lives had been sacrificed to produce the device; but he’d had nothing to do with any of that.  He had consented to the laser surgery that disfigured his torso, and agreed to map the surface anomalies from space, with no hope of rescue.  He had agreed to die to protect her past. 

Miss Vicky had given him the chance to be a hero.

The warning bleep—bleep—bleep of the altimeter became a grating, continuous whine. 

Orbital decay was accelerating.  Twenty-seven kilometers before burn out.

I can’t die, yet, he thought. Not yet.

The pain started the instant he thought about raising his hand; when he didn’t relent, when he forced his arm to obey, it exploded inside his skull.  It felt like his brain was being slowly sawed in two by a serrated blade, and a paralyzing ache shot down his jawline, his throat, to his sterum.  He clenched his teeth but didn’t close his eyes.  His arm trembled wildly as he extended a finger towards the red button; his body quaked so hard that it rattled the chair.  Four more inches. The agony

became a crushing weight, a piledriver that rammed his head down into the top of his neck, and his neck down between his shoulder blades.  Six words drove him onward as he struggled to close the gap.  Six little words, more precious to him than his own life.

Lock and key.

Key and lock. 

When Mary Brant rose to her feet at the end of the long table, the crowded room fell silent.  More than just the host—the “firekeeper”—of the gathering, the lovely girl in the beaded, buckskin shift with the waist-length, double braid of black hair was sachem of the Six Nations, and commander of the continent-spanning Alliance that her father had created, and died for.  Her dark eyes radiated a confidence far beyond her nineteen years. 

Above the center of the meeting table, a crystal chandelier festooned with cobwebs hung from a plaster ceiling zigzagged with cracks. The chandelier’s bulbs hadn’t burned for more than a century; its dusty glass pendants gleamed a dull gold in torchlight.  Long ago the slot machines and video games, the blackjack and craps tables had been cleared away; the disintegrating carpeting had been pulled up, exposing the bare plywood subfloor. Of its own accord, the room’s water-stained, red-flocked wallpaper had delaminated and peeled from the Sheetrock in pendulous scrolls.  Six-foot-high, eight-foot-wide walls of stacked sandbags formed aisles that

led from the central meeting hall to armored gun ports controlling the fortress’s perimeter. 

The Tumbling Waters Casino had survived many sieges during the hundred years of Species War.  With the coming of a tenuous peace, the stronghold had become the formal meeting place—the longhouse—of William Brant’s Alliance.

A cache of weapons lay on the table in front of Mary: an ancient Japanese katana with a gray, sharkskin-sheathed grip and scabbard; and a midnight-black, Benelli M4 Tactical 12-gauge shotgun.  The rear stock of the compact, eight-shot, semi-automatic was collapsed into a stub, its sculptured pistol grip inches from her fingertips. 

Similar piles of armament marked every place round the rectangular table. “Hands visible at all times, weapons visible at all times” were the rules established by her late father.  None of the Alliance delegates could touch their guns or blades until the session adjourned. 

Huddled in rows of chairs behind the other emissaries were their respective advisors.  Two-legged.  Stereo-optic.  Air-breathing.  But all were semi or quasi-human. Unique external mutations distinguished the panorama of humanoid races: scales, feathers, fur, chitinous shell, even vestigal leaves.  They called themselves “this people” or “that people” based on outward appearances, but on a cellular level they were mixtures of unidentified DNA—animal, plant, fungus. 

More than a hundred years ago a firestorm of uncontrolled gene-jumping had swept the planet, wiping out millions of species, and billions upon billions of individuals, all in the span of a single generation.  Although 99.9999 percent of the helterskelter genetic crosses never produced a viable first cell, here and there a few of the new entities survived; and fewer still ultimately grew to adulthood and found

themselves able to reproduce their own kind. 

Seated around the table were the results of a half-dozen generations of artificially-induced evolution—and constant war.

The delegate of the Owl people scowled up at her with huge yellow eyes.  A fringe of white pin feathers encircled his face, from the point of his round chin, running up both sides of his jawbone, up the temples, across the brows, and meeting in a soft tuft above a prominent, narrow nose.  Longer white feathers sprouted along the outside edges of his bare forearms.  He had five fingers on each hand, but the fingers ended in horny, black talons.

Beside him was the emissary of the Mushroom people, a mutated species easily recognized by their always-slimy beige skins, and the rows of gill-like structures that drooped beneath their chins and along their jawlines.  The “gills” weren’t for breathing; they were for reproduction, for the transmission of spore-like genetic material.  The Mushroom people inseminated by ardently nuzzling into each other’s necks.  They could also self-fertilize if no partner was handy during estrus.

To her right sat the leader of the Scarabs. He had a thick skull cap of iridescent, blue-green chitin, and matching blue fingernails.  A bristling black moustache of segmented appendages, too thick in diameter to be hairs, half-concealed constantly moving, glistening mouth parts. The same sort of “not-hairs” cascaded from the centers of his tiny, shell-like ears down to his shoulders.  His pale-as-snow skin looked completely human, but it exhuded the bellwether chemical odor of his species: concentrated ammonia.

The nine other places at the table were filled by beings just as unlikely. One  sported translucent, black-veined, vestigal insect wings; another had a cape of velvety brown skin that draped between wrist and hip; another had delicate,

rodent-like claw hands. There were cruel fangs, pale green skins, massive bony heads like pike or barracuda; missplaced mouths, absent ears, twitching antennae. 

Sitting behind Mary Brant, also clad in buckskins, was the war council of the Six Nations. Unlike the other members of the Alliance, her three advisors were pure human, as was she; some of the last pure humans on earth.  A quirk of DNA had given their direct ancestors immunity to the mutaplague that had unraveled the very fabric of the world.   

Through plague and decades of war, the history of Mary Brant’s people had been passed down by word of mouth.  The concept of an Alliance was a reframing of the “Longhouse Movement” of half a millennia ago, when the five nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca (eventually becoming six with the addition of the Tuscaroras)—came together in the first American democracy.  Although they called their loose confederacy the Haudenosaunee, European invaders lumped them together under the name “Iroquois.” 

In the previous incarnation of the longhouse, chiefs and clan representatives of the Nations planned joint strategies against their enemies, deflected and resolved internal disputes, and dealt with spiritual matters.  The clans were connected by their namesake animal spirits—creatures of legend whose existence predated the appearance of the first humanlike being—to specific ecologies that provided the Haudenosaunee sustenance.

Bear.

Wolf.

Turtle.

Clan species that were no more. 

The ecological systems that supported them were gone, too.

Not vanished, as in nuclear war.  Or asteroid collision.  Or polar ice caps melting. They had been subsumed. Amalgamated.  It was as if all the living things of the world had been dropped into a gigantic blender and pureed.

Even at this final tipping point in the planet’s history, the Alliance delegates and their entourages glared at each other across the sacred table, remembering battles won and lost, annihilations they had wrought—and they had suffered.  A century of fallen loved ones, of stillborn vengeances pushed hatred deep into the marrow—or root.

At one time or another, Mary Brant’s forbearers had fought each of the delegate races to the death.  Littleburg, Gnarly Loop, Mount Battenkill, Parker’s Glen: the names of battlefields burned into the Six Nation’s oral history.  Places where the blood of pure humans and mutant peoples had mingled and painted the hard ground red. 

Mary despised all of these creatures, as much if not more than they despised her, but vengeance and justice had to be postponed for the sake of mutual survival, out of respect for her father’s memory, and above all, for the sake of Orenda, the power of the shared dream that linked one generation of her people to the next.

“You all know why I’ve summoned you here,” she said, her clear, strong voice ringing off the peeling walls and cracked ceiling.  “The time for debate and foot-dragging has passed.  We must prepare for an all-out attack from above, and we must do it now, while we still can.  That means we all must sacrifice.  If we are to survive, we need to work out defensible lines of mass retreat, and preposition stockpiles for the sieges and running battles that are sure to come.”

“By ‘from above’ do you mean the ‘flying saucers’ that we’ve heard so much about but no one has actually seen?” the Owl delegate said. 

“The saucers exist and they’re coming—today, tomorrow, next week,” she countered. “And when they come, they will do their best to kill us all.”

With a nod and a wink to the others around the table the Owl man said, “And did you learn of this development during a cat nap?”

Though a few of the delegates chuckled at the gibe, the majority went stone-faced or shifted uneasily in their chairs, this while discreetly eyeballing the distance to their surrendered weapons.

Her mother’s lineage—Ohwachira—had passed along the future dream, a vision that had flourished and spread like a weed from its first germination by her great-great-great-great grandmother, Lonnie Brant.  Generation after generation of blessed dreamers had repeated and embellished it.  The creation of the Alliance by her father, her standing without him at the head of the long table—all of that and more had been foretold.     

Mary Brant was many things, but she was not her father.  The reigning sachem of the Six Nations was neither patient, nor by nature given to an excess of analysis or caution.  Perhaps because of the terrible burden she’d carried since birth, her temperament was mercurial. And when it turned from delightful to decidedly unpleasant, it was a good idea to have a loaded gun in your hand.

At far end of the long table, a slightly stooped figure slowly rose to its feet, making heads turn, breaking the tension of the moment.

He had extremely narrow shoulders, and relatively wide hips; the main strength of his body was in its lower half.  An uncertain mixture of plant and human physiologies, the pale green of his skin was faintly tinged with yellow.  Fine, but visible ribs ran vertically down his face, and his exposed neck and arms. The broken, brownish-green stubs of some of these structures poked through breaks in

the surface of his cheeks and neck.  His “hair” was green also, but a much darker shade. Flattened, spade-shaped, and fringed on the edges, the individual “follicles” hung in drooping clumps from the sides and top of his skull.

Of all the assembled former sworn-enemies, Mary Brant hated this one the most.  Before him on the table, beside his CAR-15 carbine, lay an unsheathed blade, a wickedly-curved, jewel-encrusted scimitar.  With that very weapon, Nav Licim, the wilted patriarch of the Celery people, had cut off the head of William Brant. 

The passing of time hadn’t dulled the wrenching pain of Mary’s loss, nor her need to repay agony with compounded interest.  Though her assault shotgun was inches from her grasp, she made no move to grab it.  Killing his kind with small arms was infuriatingly difficult.  The prominent, string-like ribs than ran the lengths of their bodies were as tough as Kevlar braid.  When manipulated by the muscles of torso and limbs, the ribs drew taut—the combination of tensile strength and dynamic tension enabled them to deflect bullets away from vital organs.  She knew the Benelli’s eight, high-brass deer slugs might not do the job: you could punch fist-sized holes in the Celery people and still they kept on coming. 

The only quick and certain way to dispatch her father’s murderer was to cut him in two, crossways, with her katana, but as Licim’s sword was also within easy reach, that wasn’t going to happen without a struggle. Win or lose, a prolonged swordfight in the longhouse would have been an unthinkable desecration of William Brant’s legacy.

As Mary stared at Nav Licim, the best way of killing him wasn’t the only thing on her mind.  She was also considering the best way to cook him afterwards, how to get the most flavor out of his overripe, green flesh. 

A little over a century ago that would have been a horrifyingly uncivilized

proposition.  Five hundred years before that, well before the European invasion of America, the Algonquian enemies of the Mohawk referred to them as “the Maneaters.”  A name based on grisly fact: tribal members were known to roam field of battle after a victory, ceremonially picnicking on the enemy captives and the newly dead. 

Mary Brant, a Mohawk and a child of the plague-altered present, thought nothing of eating fallen foes.  In a world where everything was part-human, every biped was a cannibal. 

  “Only the people of the Six Nations believe in the prophecy of dreams,” Nav said, his black eyes bulging from the strain of producing intelligible, multi-syllabic speech. “But belief isn’t required to see the truth in what the Iroquois Ninja Princess is saying.”

A chair behind Mary scraped the floor as one of her advisors jumped to his feet.  Over her shoulder came a hiss, “Don’t call her that, you dirty stalk of … ”

But before Odianne could add a final epithet she silenced him with a raised hand.  The leather headband couldn’t keep strands of past shoulder-length, midnight-black hair from streaming across his angular, square-chinned face.  A brushed deerskin vest left bare his lean, well-developed arms and chest.  Born a month apart, she and Odi had been constant and devoted companions since childhood. As he sank back into his chair, she saw the hurt in his eyes.  First hurt, then a flash of anger. Of late, he took every dismissal as a personal rejection.

“That’s how enemies refer to me,” Mary reminded the green patriarch. 

“Slip of the brain led to a slip of the tongue—old habits die hard.” Nav’s smile revealed a few splayed, yellow-orange teeth, and the interior of a mouth glistening with a brown fluid that looked like grasshopper spit. He made a little

bow-and-arm-sweep—a flourish of acquiescence—then said, “My apologies, Commander.” 

“What ‘truth’ are you talking about, Licim?” Owl man demanded.

  “For a very long time, everyone thought the earth had been devastated by the accidental release of a bioweapon,” the patriarch replied.  “In the chaos that followed the plague apocalypse, the new and old races were too busy killing each other to challenge that assumption.  The Species War rolled on for decades with no end in sight, until we learned that the conflict was being manipulated from within and from without by creatures with a secret agenda.” 

“By ‘we’ you mean my grandfather,” Mary interrupted, unable to keep the venom from her voice. “Giant Bear Yokohama uncovered the turncoat species—Morning Glories, Bats, Hornets, Vipers—and through captured traitors, the alien scheme to prolong the war until the most powerful races had destroyed one another.”

Nav continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “The aliens’ plan from the outset was to soften global resistance to invasion,” he said, his black eyes goggling. “First with plague, and when that didn’t achieve the desired results, with endless internecine war.  The Alliance not only derailed that plan; it turned it on its head—resistance to attack has been unified; if we aren’t killing each other, our numbers and our power will grow.  The aliens have no choice.  And therein is a ‘truth’ based on logic, not dream prophecy: our enemies must come out of hiding and reveal themselves.  They must attack us directly and in full force, or risk losing everything they have gained.” 

A blast of hurricane-force wind slammed the Casino, as if he had inadvertently called down the wrath of God.  The impact shook the walls to their foundations, rattled the chandelier, and rained ceiling plaster down onto the long table and the

delegates’ heads. The sudden whoosh was punctuated by a shrill, grinding, mechanical scream that rapidly faded into the distance. 

The Alliance emissaries and their entourages sat paralyzed amid the swirling clouds of dust as explosion after explosion rocked and rippled the floor underfoot. Small arms rattled from all sides—the fortress’s perimeter was under attack.  And the anti-aircraft batteries hadn’t fired a missile, not a single cannon round. 

“They’re here, you idiots!” Mary shouted down the table.  She lunged for the Benelli M4 and slipped an arm into her sword scabbard’s shoulder sling.  “Move, damn you!” she yelled as she and her war council rounded the table on a dead run.  “Move now or die!”

But before they and their advisors could rise from their seats, with an earsplitting whine enormous turbines descended directly overhead.  It was like being caught in the funnel of a tornado—everything was shaking apart and the static charge stood short hairs on end.

Hard on the heels of Nav Licim and his entourage, Mary and her council raced for the entrance to the sandbagged maze. Then the ceiling behind them imploded and the chandelier crashed down onto the table. 

Glancing over her shoulder Mary saw a ten-foot-wide, yellow-white beam shoot through the ruined ceiling, into the heart of the meeting room.  With the blinding light came a blast of withering heat, and the sound of sizzling bacon amplified to a crackling roar.  The middle of the long table dissolved in a flash; the delegates struck full-on by the beam vanished in puffs of steam and white smoke.  Those three feet from the beam’s edge became thrashing, head-to-foot fireballs.  And the advisors seated back against the wall couldn’t escape sudden death, either.  In the light of the beam their flesh melted from the bone like candlewax.    

Mary turned from the slaughter and poured on speed, struggling to catch up to Nav Licim.  Shotgun in fist, she was close enough to blow off half his head with a single shot.  And the balance and recoil compensation of the weapon allowed her to fire it accurately one-handed.  But at that moment, taking her most-hated enemy’s life was the last thing on her mind.  It was hard to breathe because of the smoke and the intense heat.  And it was getting more and more difficult to see down the winding passage.  The small arms fire had stopped, which meant the casino’s perimeter had fallen. 

“Escape tunnel to the river!” she shouted at Nav’s back.  “Turn right!”

But it was already too late.  As they veered off at the branching of the sandbagged aisle, they were met and bumrushed by helmeted men with broadswords and turncoats with guns.

Mary swung the Benelli’s skeletonized, blade front sight onto the nearest oncoming attacker, a towering, bearded figure in a horned metal helmet with upraised, double-edged sword.  Seizing the shotgun’s foregrip she rapid-fired a double tap, range to target five yards.  In her powerful, practiced grip, the 12-gauge muzzle jumps were insignificant: two deer slugs slammed into the center of the broad, fur-vest-clad chest no more than an inch apart. Disbelief washed over the Viking’s filthy face, bright blood gushed from his mouth onto his scraggly beard, but his legs kept churning.  Mary shifted her aimpoint.  He was eight feet away when she fired a third round.  Beneath the horned helmet, the deconstruction of skull and brains was instantaneous and spectacular, but the massive body’s momentum kept it hurtling onward.

Mary had to dip her right shoulder and twist away or be buried under the avalanche of dead-on-its-feet Norseman.

The corpse had no more than toppled past her, when something slammed hard into her back, driving her down to her knees.  As Nav vaulted over her body, a charging, snake-headed turncoat opened fire from the hip with a fold-stock SKS assault rifle.  A flurry of slugs hammered Licim’s torso.  Great gobs of fibrous, lime-green matter splattered the wall behind him—wounds that by rights should have been hers. Nav grimaced at the impacts, but did not falter.  With a surprisingly nimble reverse pivot, he avoided the traitor’s gun muzzle; gathering momentum, he swung the scimitar up from the soles of his feet.  As the blow landed, pinwheeling the Viper man’s flat, scaled head from his thick neck, the patriarch’s war cry rang cut through the din of pitched combat:

“Stalk this!”  
 

Ready your mounts!

The command blared inside Ragnar’s skull without warning; as always, the suddenness and sheer volume of the order rocked him. 

It likewise drop-jawed his trio of henchmen.  No longer armed with broadswords and spiked battle axes, Viking warriors once devoted to killing, taking spoils, and laying waste now wielded flat-bladed, short-handled shovels.  Viking warriors who once answered only to him, now had other captains—as did he.

Anvindr, ravager of countless Norman maidens, stood beside a wheelbarrow already half-full of liquid dung and dung-fouled straw.  He had enormous, bushy brown eyebrows and no front teeth, upper or lower—they had been bashed out by sword pommel in a skirmish now lost to time.

A white streak divided Einarr’s orange beard and hair; the blaze followed the

track of a gruesome scar that split chin, lips, cheek, forehead, well up into his receding hairline.  Einarr, who had set afire hamlets from the Loire to the Volga. 

Fenrisúlfr, the “Swamp Wolf,” had slanted eyes, a mouth that upturned at the corners, and a wispy, golden, boy’s beard—although he was by no stretch of the imagination a boy.  Countless fine lines seamed his face.  A line for every defeated foe and hapless victim.

Ready your mounts!

The first time Ragnar had heard that deep, resonant voice speaking inside his head, he’d thought it was Odin, the God of Gods, awakening him from a nightmare of struggling, suffocating death.  When he’d opened his eyes, he’d found a most welcome surprise: though the world that surrounded him was strange beyond imagining, it wasn’t made of primordial ice; it wasn’t the lowest pit of the Land of Mists.  It appeared that he and his hundred brigands—their crimes notwithstanding—had somehow escaped the depths of Niflheim and been raised like heroes to the heights of Valhalla.  Conclusions reinforced by the voice’s display of godlike power.  It knew where they were and what they were doing at all times; and if they did not obey without question, it made skulls fly apart with an explosive bang, like so much overripe fruit. 

Ragnar and his band had soon discovered that the God of Gods wasn’t giving the orders; they came instead from faceless, hidden masters.  The same hidden masters who had rescued them from the frigid waters of the bog and the punishment decreed more than a millennia ago by their own Viking king. While Ragnar and the others lay unconscious, on the verge of death, a tiny communication, location, and summary execution device had been planted inside each of their skulls.

It was not Valhalla, either.

A wet, rappetty-frappetty-frappetty noise accompanied a blast of warm air that stirred and lifted the hairs of Ragnar’s long red beard. 

And then, crashing down on him like Thor’s Hammer, came the stench.

Eyewatering, throat clamping-shut foul, worse than a battlefield heaped with fly-blown dead in midsummer. It made the digestive off-gassings of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, and humans seem like delicate floral bouquets. 

No one spoke, not even to utter a curse.

As sure as moon followed sun, there was worse to come. 

From an aperture beneath the offending creature’s immensely broad, tapering tail, an orifice roughly at the six-foot-six-inch-tall Norseman’s eye level, a gusher of steaming liquid excrement rained down onto the matted straw that covered the deck plates. 

Red pigtails bobbing, Ragnar stepped lively to keep the torrent of splatter off his sandals and fur leggings. 

It looked exactly like bird shit—granular, greenish black slunk topped with swirls of milky white.  Only there were barrels of it. 

With a sputtering hiss the onslaught finally came to an end.  In grim silence they set furiously to work with their shovels, Ragnar included—under the new regime all former divisions of rank had vanished.  It was either keep up with the flow of crapulence, or skate in it as they prepared once again to wage war. 

Overhead, the towering dome of the cargo deck roof was braced with filagreed silver struts. The hold itself was a circle a hundred yards across, lit by thousands of tiny white suns that studded the ceiling.  Vibration from massive

engines made the soles of Ragnar’s feet tingle and loose bits of straw dance and jitter on the deck. 

The airship tilted under him, then hurtled downward in a power dive. When the craft leveled off, his stomach hit bottom, somewhere below his knees.  The disturbing sensation in the even-stranger environment pained his poetic Norse soul: Ragnar longed for the erratic pulse of the windblown sea, a somber gray horizon, and the smell of burning villages. 

Swaying high above the 40-foot-long, 15-foot-wide stall, suspended by rope and pulley from the girders, was an enormous saddle: four connected seats trailed four sets of stirrups and multiple cinches.

A dragon’s saddle.

The behemoth whose backside faced them was ten feet high at the shoulder and rump, 28 feet long, and weighed more than 20,000 pounds.  Big as an elephant, but instead of two tusks, this beast had three—wickedly pointed horns a yard long decorated its immense skull, one over each eye; and a third stump of a horn decorated the long, beak-like snout.  The uptilting frill of bone that framed the back of its head was as tall as the eye horns were long.  Its five-hoofed hands and four-hoofed feet were anchored to the deck by ankle chains made of the same bright metal that formed the rails of its stall and the plates of the floor.

The creature’s skin was inches thick and incredibly tough—pebbly, not scaled like a lizard or snake, and in places the diamond-shaped granulations were pointed and sharp enough to cut through flesh.  Overall, its body was a dark shade of gray-green, but patches of orange discoloration marked its flanks and snout, and the dorsal side of its tail. 

They had named the beast “Meinfretr.” 

Not a silly term of affection; more a precise description.

Stink-fart. 

This animal was, in fact, Meinfretr the Third.  Numbers One and Two had been blasted out from under them by cannonfire and landmines in previous battles; their huge bodies had absorbed the explosions’ shock and shrapnel, protecting Ragnar and company from serious injury.  It appeared that there was an endless supply of replacement Meinfretrs.

Ten identical stalls stood side by side on the cargo deck.  Inside were 10 dragons, or “dinos” (die-nose) as the hidden masters called them, with a total weight in excess of two hundred thousand pounds.  Each beast was tended to by a quartet of  raised-from-the-dead Vikings.  The remainder of Ragnar’s captive brothers-in-arms had been spirited off to unknown missions elsewhere.

Through their drooling mouths, the dinos moaned a chorus of misery.  The corticostimulator implants in their brains made it impossible for them to move, to even blink of their own volition, but they were conscious enough to feel pain. Their nostrils were plugged as well—this out of concern that despite the implants, the faintest whiff of food could send the purposefully-starved herd into a frenzy. 

Unlike the shaggy Icelandic ponies the Norsemen had ridden in happier days, these dragon steeds could never be tamed.  Too huge, too wild, too stupid to learn even the simplest commands—they were ten-ton battering rams with bottomless appetites and brimming bowels.

When the frantic shoveling was nearly complete, Ragnar and Anvindr left the others to finish the task and hurried for the front of the long stall.  They gathered up the beast’s headgear from where it lay draped over the gate.  The armored helmet wasn’t made of chain mail, but a finely-woven fabric the color of oatmeal.  Dinos

always attacked with lowered heads, shielding their vitals with wide, heavy skulls, tri-horns, and frills; as thick as the bone was, it was no defense against volleys of bullets or sprays of shrapnel.  The fabric armor protected the animal’s head from incoming fire and the riders on its back from skull and frill through-and-throughs.  The hood had been tailored to fit, with holes for the three horns, the eyes, and the nostrils.  It was held in place on top by the horns and secured by a series of flexible straps under the chin. 

As Ragnar and Anvindr unrolled the headgear, first over the short horn, then the longer ones, the creature shuddered, full length.  Staring into a dilated black pupil as big as his fist, Ragnar caught a fleeting glimpse of panic—and hate. Beneath the induced paralysis, it was aware of its helplessness. 

He and Anvindr had to climb the stall’s side rails to pull the rear of the hood over the top of the skin-covered frill.  The hood in place, they untied the ropes from the railings and lowered saddle onto its back.  All around them, Vikings were scurrying and other saddles were being lowered from the ceiling. 

The engines’ howl shot up two ear-splitting octaves and the immense ship lurched, braking in midair over its intended target.  The cargo deck’s claxons began to wail and the thousands of tiny white suns in the girders changed color, casting a deep crimson glow over everything and everyone.

Then the voice that wasn’t Odin’s bellowed inside his head:  Prepare to attack!

Einarr and Fenrisúlfr threw aside their shovels and helped lash down the saddle, first around the neck, then around the trunk behind the forelegs. The last cinches were slipped under the belly in front of the back legs, between them, and out the rear.  Ragnar and Anvindr quickly pulled up the ties on either side of the

wide tail.  Working close to Meinfretr’s backend was tricky business—and not just because of the unpredictable eruptions.  Its tail was as dangerous as the three horns and beak, powerful enough to break a man’s neck with a glancing swipe.

As the ship made a slow, grinding descent to earth, Ragnar felt the pulse of its banks of energy weapons firing.  Wave after wave of static electricity coursed through his body, making his testicles ache, and the acrid smell of ozone cut through the hold’s overwhelming reek of dung. 

After hurriedly grabbing broadswords, shields, and axes, and donning horned metal helmets, Ragnar’s men boosted him up to the front stirrup and pommel.  He swung into the driver’s seat behind the frill.  The breadth of Meinfretr’s neck and shoulders forced him to spread his knees uncomfortably wide.

In front of the pommel, strapped to a collar around the beast’s neck was the control apparatus placed there by the hidden masters.  It consisted of a small box with a joystick and a row of toggle switches.  The box sent wireless commands directly into Meinfretr’s brain.  Commands it had to obey. 

Claxons wailing, energy weapons still blasting, the ship continued its vertical descent.  One by one, Anvindr, Einarr, and Fenrisúlfr scrambled up into the seats behind him. 

Perched high above the floor, Ragnar could see deckhands running down the wide central aisle, preparing for the mass exodus from the hold.  They were the size of human beings, and they moved on two legs and swung two arms like human beings, but there the resemblance ended. 

Ragnar had first encountered these and even more bizarre two-legged creatures on the Darkside moon base, where he and his men had awakened from their near-drownings.  In order to avoid a second, equally ignominious death of

exploding heads, he and his men had joined with the not-men/not-beasts, fighting at the whim of the hidden masters.

The deck hands included Hornet people, a combination of man and insect, bone and chitin.  They had six limbs—the middle ones on either side of their torsos were vestigal, shriveled, but with fully-formed hands and fingers. Bristling antennae stubs jutted from their flattened, but otherwise human-looking foreheads.  Their overlarge, multi-faceted eyes were inhuman, as disturbing as they were unreadable.  Shiny black chitin armor formed breast, shoulder, and back plates, joining the pink skin on their stomachs just below the ribcage.  Like their tiny wasp brethren, they had poison glands and stingers, but not in the customary place at the tips of their abdomens.  Cruel black thorns, retractable hypodermics, were concealed under their wrists, along their forearms, above knees and ankles.  In hand-to-hand combat, these built-in weapons could deliver multiple doses of poison—which in seconds caused adversaries’ throats to swell shut, cutting off their airways.

A different variety of misbegotten took a position directly in front of Meinfretr, on the far side of the stall gate.  Typical of the Bat people, this creature was hunchbacked, with extra-long, scrawny arms and very short legs. It walked upright, but with an awkward, capering gait.  Except for ears and nose, and the eight bare patches on its chest, its body was fringed in sparse brown hairs.  The beady eyes were set extremely low on the face, on a level with the nostril slits.  The top of its head came to a rounded point, which was the anchor for powerful jaw muscles.  It had needlesharp fangs, four upper and two lower, capable of tearing out chunks of flesh down to the bone.

This particular Bat was female. From the bare patches on chest and stomach hung drooping, flattened bladders; unappetizing dugs in two rows of four, capped

with dark nipples of various lengths and angles of inclination.  A set of protective goggles sat on top of its head—the Bat people had very sensitive eyes, but the protection was unnecessary after sundown and in the hold’s red light.  Like the rest of its breed, this creature was wingless.  Long, tapering fingers matched its skinny arms, with claws trimmed close so it could operate the stubby assault rifle hanging over its shoulder and the semi-automatic pistol strapped to its hip. 

The Hornets and Bats’ handguns and automatic weapons reflected the pecking order of the hidden masters’ minions. Deemed overexcitable and dull-witted, Ragnar and his Vikings weren’t entrusted with firearms, only with the dinos and edged weapons.  Whether they carried guns or not, all of the masters’ lackeys had powerful explosive charges buried in their heads. All of them took orders directly through communication implants. 

The moment Ragnar had set eyes on the menagerie of horrifying chimeras, he knew they were not the work of Odin, Vili, or Ve—the primordial Norse gods who had breathed life and perception into the first human beings, turning tree trunks into the progenitor couple, Ask and Embla.  Ask and Embla, whose lineage had survived the great flood that punctuated Ragnarök, the first Apocalypse, and then continued on to repopulate the earth.  From humanity’s instant of creation, the gods had kept its chain of life unbroken and distinct from the rest of nature.

Nor could present circumstances be the work of the Norn—three giantesses who, by weaving past, present, and future, formed the web individual and collective human destinies, or Wyrd. Urd, Verlandi, and Sculd could not tinker with the flow of time, could not move living things or objects forward or back; no god of the Norse had the power to do that, not even Odin. Time’s inexorable unfolding was part of Orlog, the first law of the Universe, which ruled over all of existence. 

It was clear that Wyrd and Orlog had been somehow bypassed—or even shattered.  Which told Ragnar that unthinkable, incomprehensibly dark forces were in play. 

As the airship touched down, its engines dropped in pitch, then fell silent.  The sirens continued to wail, and the red beams began pulsing on and off.  With a mechanical groan, a section of  the craft’s far wall split open and a broad ramp slowly lowered to the ground.  Daylight, wind, and the sounds of combat poured through the widening crack—the shriek and sizzle of energy weapons, violent explosions, clattering gunfire. 

The Bat people ducked under the stall rails to unchain dinos’ legs, then, in a strict order, they began opening the gates, one by one—this to avoid a catastrophic stampede for the exit. 

As the first dino lumbered from its enclosure, its riders unsheathed their swords and waved battleaxes in the air, shouting, “Odin! Odin!  Odin!” 

All forty Vikings, Ragnar and his passengers included, picked up the joyous war chant.  They yelled over the wailing siren, screaming thanks to their god for the battle that was about to unfold. To their way of thinking, it was far, far better to die with bloody sword in hand than bound, gagged, half-garrotted, and left to drown in a cold, peaty bog. 

When Meinfretr’s gate opened, Ragnar tripped one of the toggle switches, which in turn unblocked a small portion of the creature’s brain.  He gripped the joystick and pushed it forward.  With a moan, the beast shuffled out of the stall in slow motion, lifting its legs with difficulty. The implant controls selectively scrambled the beast’s nerve impulses, offering the driver degrees of hobbling. 

At the top of the ramp, gazing out over Meinfretr’s frill, Ragnar took in a

long lake nestled between heavily-forested foothills, which vaguely reminded him of home. The airship had landed on a flat table of shoreline.  High on the hilltop above them, the forest was in flames, as was a log-walled fortress that would not have been out of place in 900 A.D. The spiked perimeter was already breached, sections of the outer walls had toppled inward and were burning.   

Two more gleaming silver airships hovered on either side of the fortress; the wind driven by their spinning rims bent the treetops and whipped the lake’s surface to a fine froth. From the domes on the ships’ undersides, bolts of pure energy shot to earth, squealing and crackling like lightning, raising towering clouds of mixed smoke and dirt.  The assault was answered, albeit feebly, by scattered volleys of gunfire from behind the fort’s breached walls.

When all the dinos had been off-loaded, the Bats, their protective goggles down, pulled out the nose plugs.

The instant Meinfretr’s nose came unblocked, its eyes clamped shut, its huge head lifted and turned, then stopped as if locking on a target.  As it sucked down the scent riding the saucers’ wind, its back quivered beneath saddle and stirrups.  Dinos dearly loved the taste of the vega-men, the younger the better.  Short of a direct hit by cannon fire they were unstoppable forces of nature when it came to rooting out tender green flesh.

Meinfretr let out a mournful moan, pawing feebly with its front hooves.  Incoming bullets from the high ground whined overhead and slapped the soft earth all around them.

Attack! The command rang inside Ragnar’s head.

There was no need to warn his passengers to hang on; they knew what was coming.  He tripped the remaining toggles, giving Meinfretr’s brain—and

instinct—access to the power of all its muscles.

The other dino drivers got the same order in the same instant and obeyed it at roughly the same moment, which launched an earthquake of enraged, starving, ten-ton beasts. Leaving the not-men to follow on foot, the dinos charged up the hillside en masse, jostling each other, racing for the source of the delicious aroma.  Ragnar and his henchmen bounced wildly on their saddle, hanging on to pommels and stirrups for dear life.

There wasn’t room on the well-worn path between lake and fort for two dinos, let alone ten, so they made their own paths to the dinner table, rampaging overland, throwing up great divots of soil and grass, bellowing into the gale of the saucers’ turbine wash. 

Halfway up the slope, bullets from the toppled bulwarks began smacking into Meinfretr’s armored hood and frill.  Ragnar kept his head down as the distance to target rapidly closed.

Despite the conditions of his servitude—the constant threat of being rendered summarily headless, the loss of his hard-won command, the endless flow of dino shit—he was still every inch a Viking.  Seconds away from close-quarters combat, he felt a powerful stirring in his blood..

As the wave of beasts neared the log perimeter, the saucers stopped firing energy bolts into the compound. 

Bracing himself, Ragnar peered over the top of the frill and saw that Meinfretr was beelining for a breach in the wall.  A jumble of fallen, unpeeled logs lay directly in their path.  The huge creature bounded over the obstacle and came crashing down inside the fort. 

They were greeted by clattering gunfire from behind the ruins of a series of

log breastworks set out like rows of spears across the central common area.  Ragnar could see vega-men huddled behind the barriers that were still standing.  So could Meinfretr.  So could all the other dinos pouring through the gaps in the wall.  The beasts charged the sharpened log battlements, flying over them or stomping them flat, scattering the defenders. Ignoring the fallen celery people, those cooked or exploded by energy beams, the dinos chased down the live ones—fresher was tastier.

Autofire rattled from their right flank. Ragnar twisted the joystick in that direction, forcing Meinfretr’s head around to block the incoming rounds.

A quartet of green men were covering a hasty retreat to the row of structures along the back wall.

Meinfretr was on them in three loping bounds.  It snatched up one of the runners from behind; then with a toss of its head, flipped his body around in its mouth, trapping him between its jaws, shoulders to hips, face up.  Ragnar leaned into the stirrups so he could gaze down at the victim. The vega-man’s eyes bulged from their sockets; the fine, faint ribs in his face turned to brown stripes.  On the other side of the dino’s mouth, his legs kicked feebly.  Then came a shrill scream cut off by a resounding crunch as Meinfretr’s teeth ground down. Green blood squirted out the sides of its mouth, spattering the churned up earth.   The vega-man’s severed head and neck, and the legs below the hip dropped to earth. Meinfretr barely masticated the mouthful of torso before bolting it down. Then it picked up the head and smashed it between its backteeth like a gooseberry.   

As Meinfretr went for the severed legs, it stopped short.  Its head reared up, then it spun around to the left.  Not fifty feet away, two dinos were maniacally pawing and rooting furrows in the ground.  Their front horns hooked and tossed

aside the ceiling beams of a hidden bunker. 

With a snort, Meinfretr charged after them.

The joystick was useless.  The dino would not be turned. 

It was all Ragnar could do to hold on, a torrent of dirt raining down on his helmet and shoulders, as Meinfretr and the other dinos—60,000 pounds of fury—went frill to frill, horn to horn tearing out the rest of the log beams. 

Frantic automatic weapon fire roared up from the widening hole, but point blank rounds to armored heads had no effect.  The dinos waded into the shallow pit they had excavated, spiking the trapped fighters on their horns, then flinging the limp bodies off, over their backs. 

As the dust dispersed, Ragnar saw the reason for the dinos’ frenzy and the ferocity of the bunker’s defenders.  Celery babies.  A whole cellar-full of the little green tots looked up from the hole with terrified, weeping eyes.  Sensing their end, they began to bawl in unison.

Meinfretr and the others made short work of the sprouts, plucking them up in threes and fours. The celery babies were so tender and juicy, the dinos didn’t chew— they gulped them whole.

Hunger barely dented, the three dinos scrambled from the pit, and rejoined the rest of the herd.  Together, they forced the retreat through fire, smoke, and dust to the rear of the compound, where the last of the straggler vega-men slipped behind a wooden barricade. 

The barrier held no more than a few seconds under the dinos’ horns, and as it splintered apart, it revealed a cave angling down into the limestone bedrock.  Though the beasts were too big to enter and pursue their quarry, that didn’t stop them from trying, and all at once.

Ragnar had to turn off part of Meinfretr’s brain to get it to back up; when it was at a proper distance, he flipped the rest of the control toggles, shutting it down completely.  The other dino drivers did the same.

When they dismounted, Ragnar, Anvindr, Einarr, and Fenrisúlfr stamped their feet to get rid of the numbness caused by the jarring steeplechase.  As they unsheathed their swords and gathered up their shields, the chimeras finally appeared, walking nonchalantly through the smoke to join the festivities. Given that celery people were so difficult to kill with firearms, there was no rush.  The not-men would wait outside until the fight was over, reduced to mop-up duties, finishing off the wounded with close range headshots.

Ragnar and his three comrades were first through the cave’s entrance, blades at the ready.

Apparently out of ammunition, vega-men set upon them with long, curved swords, wooden clubs, and lengths of metal pipe.  It was a delaying tactic meant to give the rest of the survivors time to escape. 

With just enough height in the cave’s antechamber for an overhead swing, Ragnar jumped straight into the fray.  In one mighty slash, he split the head of the first defender from crown to gullet; the force of the blow made the man’s eyes pop from their sockets.  Booting the corpse off his blade, he cut a second vega-man in half with a power-backstroke.

Anvindr, Einarr, and Fenrisúlfr pressed past him, dividing the resistance at swordpoint, then chopping it down at the root, slicing off legs, then heads. Einarr feinted, then ducked behind the last defender.  He used the gathered momentum to thrust his sword through the green man’s back to the hilt, then lifted his victim off the ground with the buried blade.

The exposed leafy head made a tempting target for Ragnar’s sword.  As it flew free of the neck, green gore splattered in a wide arc across the opposite wall.

The stroke barely complete, a familiar voice boomed inside Ragnar’s skull:

Kill them all … and find the stone!

An order which he found irksome. They were Vikings, after all—the first part went without saying.

The headless Viper hit the floor not three feet from where Mary Brant knelt, its neck stump jetting dark red. The black-edged scales that covered its naked torso and arms had a garish, lemon-yellow tint.  Even through the smoke, she could smell the blood’s nauseating fish-stink.

Nav reached down and offered her a hand up, a pained, gap-toothed smile on his face.  Green, watery leakage from multiple, non-fatal wounds dripped off his trouser cuffs and puddled around his heels. In the other hand he held his scimitar.

Ignoring the outstretched fingers and keeping her eyes on the blade’s bright edge, she swung the Benelli 12-gauge up in her fist, muzzle pointing under his green-grizzled chin, ready to deliver a different sort of beheading.

The wilted patriarch of the celery people had killed her father.  As long as he held an unsheathed sword it didn’t matter that he had saved her life.

Yudan Nashi.

Never off-guard.

Just one of the many samurai lessons her grandfather, Giant Bear, had burned into her brain at a tender age.

The vibration from the hovering saucer’s turbines made her skin crawl.  Flakes of white plaster fluttered down on her head.  Then with a resounding crack, the ceiling collapsed.  Sheetrock and roof joists dropped, narrowly missing her and Nav; blown-in, fiberglass insulation cascaded from the breach. 

Squinting up, Mary saw a section of the casino roof was gone as well, and on the other side of the gap, a vast, grinding presence—the underside of the saucer’s spinning rim.  Wind blasted through the opening, buffeting her, peppering her face with grit, blowing away the fiberglass fluff and the smoke, revealing the other two members of Nav’s contingent, a pale green man and woman, and Mary’s trio of trusted advisors.

Her general, Sagoestesi, had come up under and been a devoted follower of her father.  A boulder of a man, he wore a holed-out, Royal Canadian Mountie hat cinched at the chin and pulled down low on his shaved head. Sago looked at least a decade older than his 40 years.  He had pock-marked cheeks and pendulous bags under his eyes.  Bandoleers of high brass, 12-gauge shotgun shells made an “X” across the front and rear of his fringed buckskin shirt.  Braced at waist-height he held a Remington 1100 autoloader cut down at both ends to hogleg-pistol size.

Odi immediately moved to come to her aid, concern on his face.  He held cocked, bluesteel .45 Government Colts in each hand, and a long gun—a collapsible-stock Heckler & Koch G3A4—slung across the back of his deerskin vest.  Before he could take three steps, she waved him off and got to her feet.  Odi turned away as if she had slapped his face. 

Some things when spoken cannot be taken back.

Opening his heart to her and making his true feelings known had been a terrible mistake.  It was one thing for there to be romantic tension between two lifelong, devoted friends, and another altogether for it to be put into words.  Put into words it became something that had to be addressed.

Since they were small children they had been taught that their coming together in that way was impossible.  The depth of their emotional connection had been obvious even then.

Mary couldn’t deny that she felt the same yearning as Odi, but it wasn’t meant to be.  That part of her destiny had already been dreamed.  Orenda said she would never be his, nor anyone else’s for that matter.

It foretold that she would die a virgin. 

To Odi’s right was the female shaman, Kateri Tekakwitha—stocky, middle-aged, with a jowly, bulldog face, bright blue eyes, and a wet stub of unlit cigar clenched in the corner of her mouth. Kat wore a buckskin shift similar to Mary’s, and a beaded hat that looked like a swim cap; it was squashed down on her head with ear flaps and chin tie dangling—the ornate design was in fact a spell she had crafted to keep the Cloud Operatives and other harmful spirits from entering her mind and sabotaging her thoughts. The pressure of the cap made Kat’s wiry red hair mushroom out at the nape of her neck and flow over her shoulders in a wild, flopping bush.  She stood with her short, thick, pale legs braced to absorb the recoil and muzzle climb of her .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun.

Twelve-gauge, .45 ACP, and .308 rifle round—the Six Nations selected calibers for the size of the holes they made.  And because their range and power fit the Nations’ preferred style of combat—close-range ambush, and rapid retreat.

From the direction of the meeting room, muffled by the airship’s steady roar,

came a string of single gunshots.  Not a firefight—there were no back and forth reports.  The attackers were already mopping-up the Alliance’s wounded.

  “This way!” Mary said, waving on the others.

Sago, Odi, and Kat fell in close behind as she ran down the bunkered aisle.  Her advisors would have followed her off a high clifftop without hesitation.  They believed as did she that although critical details of Orenda were still missing—connections, causes and effects—the end was as certain as sunrise and sunset.  Disaster, victory, stalemate all somehow led to the same indelible future.  

Jarring footfalls of the all-out sprint made Mary’s sheathed katana slap wildly against her back and hip.  Ahead on her right, a gap in the wall of sandbags gave access to a door, which in turn led to the casino’s underground escape route.  Fifty feet short of that goal, gunshots clattered from behind and a flurry of bullets smacked into the bags on either side of the aisle and whined overhead.  There was no cover between their position and the doorway.

Trapped in the long, straight corridor, with pursuit rapidly gaining, the battle-seasoned warriors—pure human and vegamen—all realized that it was either turn and fight, or be cut down in midstride.  No command on her part was necessary: they skidded to a stop and spun around to face the attack.  Nav and his two advisors dropped to a knee, bringing up their weapons. Sago, Odi, and Kat aimed over the leafy tops of their heads as Mary rushed back from point to find a clear firing lane for the black Benelli.

In scant seconds the attackers’ fortune had reversed 180 degrees, advantage turned to vulnerability.

Seeing seven guns lined up against them like a firing squad, the leading rank tried desperately to stop or change course in the eight-foot-wide corridor, but those

running close behind crashed into their backs, driving them closer to the waiting muzzles.

Shotguns, pistols, autorifles, and submachine gun cut loose in a deafening roar, blasting apart Vipers and Hornets. Bodies fell, their forward momentum skidding them right up to where Nav and his people knelt.  Gunsmoke and blood mist hung in the air as the surviving attackers turned and ran, putting up only token covering fire.

From the front of the sprawl of corpses came a sudden movement.  The celery woman shrieked and jumped to her feet, clutching her cheek.  Mary glimpsed the hand that had delivered the strike as it drew back into the pile of still-twitching bodies. From beneath its wrist was a dripping, black stinger.

Nav headshot the Hornet with his CAR 15, sending chitinized skull fragments skittering down the casino aisle like gory party ice.

As they looked on helplessly, the celery woman’s face ballooned; the edema sealed shut her terrified eyes. Blinded, she staggered backwards, clutching both hands at a throat likewise swollen closed.  Before the poor woman could choke to death, the seams of her skull ruptured with a wet pop, releasing a gout of watery green fluid down over her shoulders and torso; then she and the sad, sagging remnant of her head dropped lifeless to the floor.

There was no time for mourning, no time to move the corpse.  They had a few moments before the firefight resumed in earnest.

Nav muttered something over the body, presumably a prayer—or a dark oath—to his vile green deity.

“Grab the torches,” Mary told the others. “We’ll need them in the tunnel.”

Odi hung back as she ushered everyone else through escape route door.  From his fixed expression, he intended to stay behind and help her cover their retreat.  That wasn’t going to happen.

“Lead the others to safety,” she told him as she thumbed high-brass, three-inch deer slugs into her shotgun’s magazine.

“Kat and Sago can help them find the way out,” he said.  “Let me back you up.  At least let me do that … ”

There was more—left unsaid, but written on his sad face for her to read: “Please let me stand beside you.  That way maybe I can die a virgin, too.”

Absurd.  Childish, even.  But wonderful, too, because she knew he meant it.

  “Not this time, Odi,” Mary said.  Not ever, she thought.  If anyone was going to stay behind and take a risk, it had to be her.  Not because she was expendable.  Not because she was the Alliance commander, either.  Orenda revealed that no matter what happened she alone was guaranteed to survive.

Odi stared at her lips, his eyes full of longing.  He wanted to kiss her; she could feel it down to the soles of her feet.  She wanted to kiss him, too—and not just goodbye—but she didn’t.  Instead she said, “Close the exit after you leave, but don’t bar it.  I’ll join you at the meeting place downriver. Go now.”

Odi didn’t try to argue with her. He couldn’t.  She was the sachem; she was his commander.

As the tall warrior disappeared through the doorway, Mary extended the Benelli’s buttstock full length and refocused her mind. Taking cover behind the doorway’s gap in the sandbags, she shouldered the weapon and stared down its rifle sights.  She didn’t have long to wait.

Once more the enemy charged down the aisle en masse, trying to overwhelm with speed and sheer numbers.  The Hornets and Vipers in the lead fired wildly in her direction as they ran.

Mary punched out five quick shots, cutting across the front of the attack.  Bodies dropped, causing those following too close to stumble and fall; the ones farther behind jumped the fallen, the dead, and the wounded.

Unable to slow down the assault, Mary drew back through the doorway.  She slammed the door after her and bolted it—the barrier wouldn’t hold for long, but some delay was better than none.

At the far end of the storage closet, light flickered along the crack of another door. She kicked it open and raced down a flight of concrete stairs to the casino’s basement. In the light of a torch left in a wall stanchion, the silver foil backing of insulation gleamed between exposed joists of the floor overhead.  At the edge of the illumination, along the back wall were shadowy, rectangular shapes: the massive metal cabinets that housed the defunct electrical system, stacks of folded gaming tables, rows of dusty video poker and slot machines.  The way out was hidden behind one of the junked electronic slots, which stood flush against the concrete wall.  Odi had closed the entrance as ordered.

As Mary moved toward the exit, she heard the sound of wood splintering.  The hallway door was already coming down. With no time to open then close the escape entrance, she took cover on the far side of the oil furnace’s housing, quickly reloading three more deer slugs from the pouch on her hip. Before she could shove in a fourth shell, bodies in a blur flew headfirst down the steps.

She snapfired once, her 12-gauge booming in the enclosed space, its concussion raining down dust from the overhead joists. The slug slapped meat at

the foot of the stairs.

Meat that was already dead.  The attackers were throwing down corpses to draw fire.

As limp bodies continued to slide down the steps, piling in a heap at the bottom, she thumbed in more rounds and reshouldered her gun.

When they ran out of corpses, live Hornets and Vipers began leaping from the top stairs to the basement floor.  Before they could bring their weapons to bear, she blasted them off their feet, swinging the Benelli in a tight arc from left to right.  But there were too many; she couldn’t nail them all.  Their charge forced her to retreat from cover.   Backing away, she fired her last two rounds from the hip, hitting a pair of Vipers point-blank center chest.

No time to reload.

While she was occupied with the first wave, even more attackers had swarmed down the steps.  The far side of the basement was packed with quasi-humans and helmeted Vikings. The quasi-humans aimed their guns at her.

Outnumbered twelve-to-one, Mary slowly, carefully set the empty Benelli on the floor and raised her hands in the air.

Her people had been fighting the Vipers and Hornets for over a century, but the Vikings were something new. They didn’t appear to be in command, and they weren’t carrying firearms, just broadswords and battle axes.    

She could hear the Vipers and Hornets whispering excitedly back and forth: “It’s her. It’s her.  It’s the Iroquois Ninja Princess.”  Because of the chitin in their faces, Hornets were incapable of changing expression, but the Vipers beamed with delight.  Under their beards the Norsemen were grinning, too. Not necessarily because they knew who she was, but because she was young, nubile, and

apparently trapped and defenseless.

In other words, it was one-sided playtime.

To prolong the fun, the quasi-humans set down their guns, and came at her with their natural weapons—fang and stinger.

In the time it took for them to cross the narrow span of concrete floor, Mary Brant surrendered herself to Orenda.  After sixteen years of rigorous training, it was like breathing in and out.

Then she dropped both hands to the sword’s sharkskin grip.  Faster than the eye could follow, in a single, blinding flash of steel, the katana leapt from its sheath and struck.  A perfectly-executed quick-draw, just as Giant Bear had taught. The sword’s sweet spot, the third of blade back from the tip three or four inches, cut completely through the closest Hornet’s arm at the elbow. The creature let out a piercing shriek and clutched the spurting stump to its chest.

“What Fate decrees, Fate brings to life.”  That was the first thing her grandfather had taught her. The power of the shared, prescient dream was inevitability.  And she was that power’s chosen instrument.

Moving like water rushing downhill, Mary flowed around enemies whose bootsoles seemed rooted to earth.  She backslashed across the front of a Viper’s throat, whirled and with a pair of successive strokes hacked away huge chunks of thigh muscle from two others, exposing red bone from hip to knee, dropping them to the floor in gushers of their own blood.

The efficiency and power of her strikes depended not on main strength, but on kirima, on maintaining the proper distance to target, and steadiness of the hands—minimizing blade quiver as it passed through the target.  As the katana sliced air it sang its glee in a shrill, humming tone.

When the sword’s brief song ended, there was no applause, only screaming.

Four blinding strokes, four attackers down.

Hand-to-hand combat no longer seemed such an appealing idea. The surviving pair of Hornets looked to their guns, but before they could reach them, with sweeping forehand and backhand slashes that severed hamstrings just below the buttocks, Mary cut their legs out from under them.

As the last quasi-humans fell, the Vikings entered the fray.  They towered over her, and their swords were much longer and much heavier than hers.  The low basement ceiling limited them to sidearm strokes and straight thrusts.  And all six couldn’t attack her at once without getting hit by a backswing, blocking someone else’s stroke, or chopping off a friendly limb.

Mary jumped back from a sizzling, waist-high slash that would have cut her in half and countered with a down-angled slice along the side of the attacker’s exposed torso, opening his body cavity crossways from armpit to opposite hip.  She continued her turn as gray coils of guts spilled forth, bringing the katana’s bright edge across the gullet of the man trying to rush her from behind.  The strike cut off his long auburn beard just below the chin, and as the scraggly strands of hair dropped away, a second mouth yawned four inches below the first, vomiting a torrent of red down his chest.

Her next stroke, which should have severed her opponent’s left kidney, did nothing of the kind.  To her surprise, the katana slid off the side of the Viking’s woven metal shirt with a screeching sound, leaving no cut, not even a mark behind.  She barely dodged the down-sweeping edge of the counterblow.  Sparks showered from the broadsword’s point as it crashed into the concrete.

Mary darted around the slickened floor, making her four attackers collide,

block, and otherwise confound each other.  She knew if she tried to parry a broadsword’s sweep, her katana would shatter.  It was clear the sword couldn’t slice through chain mail.  And the mesh was too tight for a straight thrust to penetrate deeply.

When one of the unarmored Vikings slipped on the blood, she stepped in behind him and struck the back of his neck.  The up-angle stroke was wrong for a clean beheading, but it came close.  After the blade passed through his spinal cord, it stuck in bone for an instant; the katana came free as the man toppled forward onto his face.

As Mary continued to duck and dodge, the heat began to build up inside her buckskin shift.  Her cheeks flushed rosepink in their centers.  Beads of perspiration broke free of her hairline and peeled down the sides of her face; inside the leather garment it dripped down her ribcage, belly, and back.

Wary of stepping into range of her blade, wary of the uncertain footing, the Vikings kept well back, relying on their reach advantage.  After five more minutes of all-out exertion, two of the Norsemen withdrew to block the exit and gather breath while the man in the armor shirt did the chasing.

As Mary evaded him, sweat trickled along the insides of her thighs and ran down the small of her back, lubricating her body’s every friction point.  It was time to end the stalemate.  She knew her strength wouldn’t last, not when her adversaries could take turns running her around the basement.

It only took a second for her to shrug out of the sleeves of her dress and jerk the beaded bodice down to the curve of her hips, exposing upthrust breasts that gleamed with bodily oils and perspiration. The air hit her overheated flesh in a rush of coolness.  And the pair of soft bullseyes, pale pink against tawny skin, instantly

contracted, hardening into skyward-jutting points.

The unexpected maneuever stunned—and delighted—the three Vikings.  Leering, rejuvenated, the resting pair shouted encouragement to their champion.  

The man in chain mail shot her a wide smile, displaying snaggle-teeth that alternated between yellowish-brown and tar-black.  Clearly, he relished the game’s added spice.

As Mary moved, feinting this way and that with the katana, her firm mounds lazily josticulated, aureolas swooping here, swooping there—wherever the pink points went, so went the Viking’s focus. The erratic, oscillating motion had a profound effect on him:  his eyes widened, nostrils flared, his breathing came harder, and his ruddy face turned a darker shade of red.  On top of that, he began to drool profusely; slobber matted his beard in glistening snail trails.  His greasy brow furrowed and he bit his lower lip as he continued pursuit.  Clearly torn between lust and dread, he was trying to concentrate on the immediate task.

Mary pretended not to notice his distraction.  She feigned exhaustion, her steps faltered, her arms drooped, she gasped for air. 

With a savage growl, the Viking launched himself at her, broadsword cocked back over his shoulder to deliver a flatside blow to her skull—he didn’t want her dead, yet.  Not by a long shot.  As he lunged forward, he wasn’t staring down at her chest, but the effort required to not look at it divided his attention.

Mary seized the opening, rushing to meet him halfway.  Her weapon was designed as a slicing not a stabbing tool, but in this instance, slicing was impossible.  With the katana poised in a two-handed grip at shoulder-height, edge up, she thrust straight into his right eyesocket. The blade slid all the way to the back of his skull, where the chisel point came to a jarring stop.

Her attacker let out a sharp bleat of pain; his broadsword clattered to the floor as he tried to grab hold of the impaling blade. Mary half-turned, and with a quick, double-handed twist cored the inside of his head, then jerked the katana back out. It was like she’d pulled a cork from a bottle under pressure—spray followed the retreating spine of the sword, spattering hot gore across her throat, down over her breasts and stomach.

The other Vikings looked on horrorstruck as their comrade’s knees buckled and he fell at her feet—a beautiful slip of a half-naked girl, drenched in blood, surrounded by the bodies of the dying and the dead.  Horror turned to panic, and they abandoned the fight.  They ran back up the stairs yelling at the tops of their lungs.

She only recognized one word: “Hell.”

Mary performed chiburi: a snap of her wrists flicked the slender blade clean of blood before she resheathed it. Shoulder-slinging the Benelli, she opened the secret passage, entered it, then closed and barred the door behind her. By the time the enemies found the tunnel—if they ever found it—the survivors of the attack would have vanished.

After pulling up her shift, she grabbed a torch from a stanchion and broke into a dead run.  It was all downhill to the river.  When she saw daylight at the end of the timbered passage she paused to reload her shotgun.

Mary stepped from the tunnel into sunlight filtered through a swirling haze of smoke.  She couldn’t see the saucer hovering overhead, but she could hear its grinding engines, and she could feel the wind it made; wind that flattened the smoke from the burning casino, driving it under the trees that lined the river bank.

She took advantage of the smoke screen, dashing under the trees.  After a

half-mile jog she reached what appeared to be a faint deer trail leading uphill, away from the river.  The winding, narrow track took her past unmanned ambush sites, to the meeting place—a canopied glen with a limestone outcrop at one end, a small waterfall that spilled into a creek, and multiple exits into adjoining caves and the heart of the forest.

The fifteen, mostly male survivors, Six Nations and Alliance who had managed to escape the compound, all turned as she stepped into view.  Odi looked very relieved to see her safe.  Nav Licim and the others stood in silence, awaiting her orders.

They were going to have to wait a little longer.

Kneeling by the waterfall pool on a wide, flat rock, Mary once again shrugged out of the top of her dress.  She cupped her hands in the water and carefully washed the dried blood off her bare breasts, stomach, and arms.  When she finished rinsing herself, she found she had a slackjawed audience.

Odi was staring, too, and blushing to the tips of his ears.

Kat just rolled her eyes and shook her head.

Men are so predictable, Mary thought as she pulled up her shift.

Two inches shy of the red thruster button, excruciating pain short-circuited Dr. Rind’s bodily control, and forced him to relent.

Moving his arm overhead, to the side, in any other direction wasn’t a problem; it was just that direction, as if someone—or something—was telling him “No!”

Perhaps the puppetmasters had put something inside his head? While he was anesthetized, while they were surgically connecting him to the flight chair’s plumbing, they could have implanted some kind of control device. But if they had done that, why would they use it to keep him from firing the thruster? Why would they want him to burn up before the mission was completed? The simple answer was: they wouldn’t. Whatever was causing his terrible pain, logic told him it had nothing to do with the monsters on the dark side of the moon.

He was thirteen kilometers from atmospheric contact and the satellite’s orbital decay continued to accelerate. In short order, friction would turn the tiny spacecraft into a fireball and inside it, he’d be reduced to a glowing, golf ball-sized cinder. Dr.

Rind was afraid, not only of his own impending unpleasant death, but of what it would mean for Miss Vicky. If he hadn’t made sufficient number of passes around the earth, if he hadn’t gathered enough data to satisfy the puppetmasters, they would do the unthinkable to her. There was no rush at their end, either—at the moment they had their hands full with global conquest. But a thousand years from now they could run across a sticky note that said: “Erase Dr. Victoria Campion.”

And they could just pop back in time and make it so.

A new sound—a low, steady hum—broke his train of thought. Until that moment he had been streaking around the planet in eerie silence. He could hear the noise through his bubble helmet, and feel its faint vibration through the base of the chair, through the fabric of his pressurized suit.

Lights began to flash on the command console, warning him that he was five kilometers from re-rentry. Earth’s gravity now had a firm grip on the tiny craft. As five kilometers became four, and four became three, the hum grew in volume, louder and louder until it was a steady roar, like a jet aircraft bearing down.

There was no jet.

The noise and the vibration were a result of a solid object meeting resistance, of the satellite hurtling through the upper fringe of atmosphere. The shaking made it difficult for him to keep objects in sharp focus—everything around him seemed to blur.

Showers of golden sparks swept past the tiny viewport—a sputtering firework fountain that partially obscured his view of the planet below. The craft’s heat shield was holding for the moment, but he knew it wouldn’t last long with an uncontrolled angle of re-entry. Inside his space suit, he was already beginning to perspire. His armpits felt damp, and rivulets of sweat peeled down the sides of his

round, brown face.

Reacting to his rising body temperature, the flight chair’s pumps shifted into high gear, forcing even more of the tri-colored fluids into and out of his torso. The same machinery that had warmed him in the frigidity of space could also keep him cool and hydrated, but its capacity to compensate had limits. When the heat shield failed, the orbiter’s skin would melt away around him; long before that happened, like a live lobster tossed into a cold pot of water and left on a burner to boil, he was going to steam-cook inside his silver suit.

The rapid shaking of the capsule turned the thruster button into a vertical smear of red. He knew if he could just initiate the manuevering rockets, there was still time to break away from gravity’s pull. Regaining a stable orbit would only delay the inevitable as far as he was concerned, but that delay could save his beloved from obliteration. His life and hers depended on his action, yet he hesitated. The memory of his last attempt to fire the thrusters lingered, like a grievous open wound—the harder he’d tried to reach the button, the more it hurt. Until the hurt became unbearable.

As the satellite plunged into Earth’s atmosphere, the character of the vibration changed: instead of a cheap motel bed’s “magic fingers” running amok, it was like driving over a deeply rutted, washboard road—a series of juddering body slams. The intense, violent buffeting made the ship tremble and quake like it was going to fly apart at the seams.

It was now or never.

Dr. Rind summoned all of his strength, and lurching from the chair, reached out for the button.

This time the “No!” was like an ax blow to the top of his unprotected

head—a crushing, downward impact that split his skull to point of his chin and beyond, down his throat, all the way to the center of his breastbone.

This time the agony was accompanied by a command: Wrong way!

He didn’t hear it with his ears; he couldn’t have—the roar of re-entry was deafening. The shout was inside his mind. With it came a tidal wave of images, memories, and feelings he did not recognize: an alien intrusion, a violation that penetrated so deeply into who and what he was that had there been anything in his bladder or bowels at that instant, he would have soiled himself. Spectacularly.

Dr. Rind found himself in a pitched battle, trying to squeeze out the trespasser, struggling to keep breathing as the buffeting pounded the air from his lungs, and aware that there was something in his chest that hadn’t been there before—like an over-revving engine, pushing aside his own heart. Adrenalin flooded his veins—he realized with a start that he was dying.

I’m dying and I’m going crazy, he thought.

You’re not crazy.

The voice again. Like a near-miss lightning strike it overloaded, whited-out his mind’s eye. And assurances to the contrary, it confirmed his fear that he had indeed gone mad.

Clawing gloved fingers into the chair’s armrests, he beat down the wave of panic. His scientific training told him there had to be an explanation for what he was experiencing. The voice had a unique identity; it had a source; it had to be coming from somewhere outside of him. Even as he struggled to think past the obvious contradiction—that he was alone in the tiny capsule—his gaze turned to the gray box on the console, whose unblinking cyclops’ eye jolted as he jolted. The E-GF unit contained the only other living brain, the only other “consciousness” in millions

upon millions of square miles. Was there a human soul trapped inside it? A poor soul trying to communicate? Deductive reasoning had led him full circle, back to the starting point: he had gone insane.

We don’t have to die.

“Oh, my God!” he said with a groan. “This can’t be happening …”

At that moment the bottom dropped out of this stomach. He’d had no sense of falling before, no sense of any motion. Now like it felt like he was in an elevator plummeting from a towering height. When the buffeting resumed, his helmet’s impacts against the headrest made him see fields of stars.

Close your mouth or you’ll bite off your tongue.

He closed his mouth. Sweat was streaming out of him, pooling under the small of his back. To his left, the viewport glowed a flickering, yellow-orange; it was like staring into an open blast furnace. Even over the roar of re-entry, he could hear a crackling, popping noise as layers of the heat shield crisped and peeled away.

His body went rigid as icy fingers probed inside his skull, dug into the base of his brain, then traced the length of his spine, vertebra by vertebra. In the seconds it took for the sensation to reach his tailbone, his galloping heartbeat slowed. His breathing regained its rhythm. Despite what was happening to him, despite the terror he felt, he was calming down—as if the connection between his mind and his body had been severed. The nerves in his limbs fired seemingly at random, contracting, relaxing the muscles. And the capper, he was getting a monumental erection. Dr. Rind was no expert in human physiology, but he knew enough to conclude that something was tinkering with his autonomic nervous system.

“What are you doing to me?!” he cried. Saying the word “you” aloud made him cringe, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Who are you?! What are you?!”

You know all you need to know: I’m the brain in the box. The box you created. We’re in this mess together.

“You hurt me. Why did you hurt me?”

If you fired the thrusters to regain altitude, we wouldn’t have enough power to maneuver our re-entry.

“‘Re-entry’?!” he exclaimed. “No, that is impossible.”

We can return to earth. We can land this craft.

“Hey, I can’t even fly a kite. We’ll burn up in the atmosphere, for sure. Good grief, is there even a parachute on this pile of junk?!”

If we work together we can do it. I’m linked to main computer’s sensor array and data base, but not to the flight controls. I can guide you through the re-entry and landing, but you have to let me move your hands. Can you do that?

“This goes way beyond crazy,” he said. “Whoever you are, whatever you are, if you don’t zap me again, I might be able to regain a stable orbit.”

Too late for that. We’re going down, one way or another.

“Then it’s all over.”

You can still be a hero.

“I’m not a hero.”

You’re wrong.

“In a minute or two what I’m going to be is a pile of ashes—and Miss Vicky will never have been born.”

Only if you give up. Let me have control of your hands.

Dr. Rind’s forearms began twitching, his fingers jerked spastically.

It won’t work unless you cooperate. Just let it happen, don’t resist me.

The illogical was the only logical choice. With nothing left to lose, no other hope, he surrendered to insanity. The sensation of being overtaken—the voice pulling on his skin and bones like tight-fitting, shoulder-length gloves—was unimaginably unpleasant, but the process was quick. And when it was complete he had turned into an observer, looking down as his hands darted to the console—a marionette’s hands, only the strings were hidden within, and he could feel them moving. His fingers precisely adjusted the angles of the thrusters, tapping in the commands at blinding speed. When his thumb jammed down the red button, the rocket engines squealed, lifting the nose of the capsule; and the acceleration pushed his backside deeper into the chair. Almost instantly the buffeting lessened and blast furnace outside dwindled to intermittent showers of sparks. For the next three or four minutes his hands were in constant motion, tweaking the thrusters to maintain the proper re-entry angle.

Then the rocket engines ran out of fuel.

With no power to hold the flight angle, the buffeting and withering heat returned with a vengeance. Dr. Rind assumed the end had finally come, but after a few moments the buffeting vanished, as did the roaring and the envelope of flame. In silence, the capsule began to tumble rapidly, end over end. Even though he was centrifuged into the chair, his fingers somehow continued to dance over the controls.

Servomotors whirred in the walls on either side of him. And gradually the tumbling slowed. He guessed the craft had retractable wings, stabilizers of some sort. Not big enough for flight in the atmosphere, but sufficient to establish a glide path.

Out the viewport, earth grew larger and larger, a world in shadow except for

an arc of blue ocean on the distant horizon. Given the proportion of water to land, it occurred to Dr. Rind there was a chance he might make it safely to the surface only to drown.

I have that covered.

Without warning an explosive charge deployed the re-entry chute. It opened with a whoooomp! and a spine-snapping jolt.

As the capsule descended, it yawed back and forth on the parachute’s long cords. This made the landscape through the viewport pitch so wildly that Rind could make out no details, other than it was green and coming up far too quickly for comfort.

The crash landing knocked him unconscious.

When Dr. Rind came to, he was gasping for air and blinded—the inside of his helmet had fogged with moisture. As he fumbled with the release clamps on the base of his helmet, he realized that he had control of his own body again. He cast the helmet aside and sucked down a deep breath, only to choke on the caustic smoke. Sunlight streamed in through the satellite’s popped-open exit hatch. On the top of the console, the E-GF unit had acquired a nervous tic: its screen flickered on and off.

Something was missing, he realized. The so-familiar Glug. Pause. Glug. of the flight chair’s pumps had been silenced. When he looked down, he saw he was sitting on a heap of twisted metal, a ruin to which he was still firmly attached. Inside the connecting tubes, the green, yellow, purple fluids that had kept him alive were rapidly turning black. He felt a powerful urge to rip the tubes from his body—but that would have left openings the size of firehoses in both sides of his torso. He had no clue what the puppetmasters had done to him, how they had prepped him for

the space mission. He didn’t even know where the tubes led.

“I’m trapped,” he moaned. “I can’t get out.”

I can help you.

“How?” he said to the blinking eye. “You’re just a brain in a box.”

You have to trust me. Really trust me.