The backlash turned them into very small pieces of rapidly spinning molten bronze. Which, following simple Newtonian physics and a touch of thermodynamics, turned into a gaseous cloud of burning bronze.

  BDA complex twelve was pointed, more or less, at the hole created by the breacher. More or less because it was nearly three light-seconds away, and despite better steering systems, the BDAs were still not terribly accurate over that distance. So it was swooping all over the surface of the Horvath ship, out into space, back in, cutting across the shields and back out. The combination of the relatively low power of the BDAs and their poor targeting was the main problem with taking down the Horvath shields in the first place.

  So if the Horvath armor was, as all intelligence indicated, fullerene matrix, there was no way that BDA 12 should have penetrated. Fullerene was bound-together complexes of carbon that were like geodesic carbon spheres. It was vaguely similar to diamond but far stronger. Two hundred centimeters of fullerene, which was what the Horvath claimed their armor consisted of, was beyond even the power of the VSA.

  As it turned out, though, the hull of the ship was, in fact, carbon fiber over steel. And steel was not much more than the stuff the BDA had been blasting out of Connie for the last year. Carbon was even less refractory.

  The beam swept across the opening at nearly six thousand kilometers per hour, which reduced its absolute power input even more.

  It didn’t matter. Four terawatts of power hit the thin steel of the Horvath ship, and the “invulnerable armor” flashed into gas. The beam was attenuated more by the gaseous carbon and iron than by the armor. But it was still moving at the speed of light and cut deep into the ship as it swept across.

  * * *

  “Holy hell,” the admiral said. “That was a solid hit!” Sensors were quickly picking up spectroscopy of water and oxygen being released by the ship.

  “I’m retargeting BDA twenty-four to visual,” Dr. Foster said. “And…”

  Most of the Horvath ship was a mirrorlike shield across which the BDA beams could be seen as bright as the sun that gave them birth. But one portion was clearly open and the telescope revealed a thick gash in the side of the cruiser that was pouring out water and air. As they watched, there was a flash of light and more damage was done.

  “I think that was twelve,” Foster said. “It’s at nearly three light-seconds. If it can do that… Permission to open fire with VSA. It’ll take about…three minutes to set up.”

  “Do it,” the admiral said. “Oh, yeah!”

  * * *

  “Fire has ceased,” the defense technician commed.

  “Compartments fourteen, fifteen and twenty-six are open to space,” Damage Control commed. “Breach is sealed but another hit like that is going to take out our forward reactor and all forward screens.”

  “Are they calling for us to surrender?” the Horvath battle manager commed. “Increase power to engines. Come about. We are leaving the system.”

  “No call to surrender,” the communications technician replied.

  “Shall I open fire on the laser clusters?” the tactical tech commed.

  “Negative,” the battle manager said. “We do not know why they have stopped firing. We would prefer that condition remain until we can return with more forces.”

  * * *

  “Can the VSA target it?”

  “We were moving it out system,” Dr. Foster said. “It’s been cruising along, lying low, through the whole battle. It’s got better antijitter controls, better targeting, better everything. So it’s in a great position. The question is only how long it will last.”

  “Full power coming to the BDA cluster…now,” the laser tech said.

  “Permission to open fire, Admiral?” Dr. Foster said.

  “Granted,” the admiral said, his jaw flexing. “Do it.”

  * * *

  The VSA cluster consisted of seventy-two BDA mirrors, each taking retransmissions from dozens of other BDAs, many of which had been attacking the Horvath cruiser up until a minute or so before. Now they gathered about half of the Very Large Array, even the VSA couldn’t handle the full power, and concentrated it on those BDA mirrors.

  The cluster then took the power, bounced it around twice until the power was gathered into thirty-six narrow beams, and pointed all that raw power at the single VSA mirror. It, in turn, sent out the standard coffee mug beam at the Horvath ship. The difference being it was not four terawatts in a three-inch diameter circle. It was one hundred and forty-four terawatts.

  And it missed. Instead of hitting the small patch of missing shielding, it impacted directly on the powerful forward shields of the Horvath ship.

  * * *

  “Shields are fa—” the engineer tech wailed.

  * * *

  The beam of coruscating energy punched through the forward shield, through the forward compartments, through the command center, through the engine room, jittered around cutting compartment after sealed compartment and only really stopped because the beam wandered off the target. Every portion that it hit, the shields not only failed, the beam went right through the Horvath cruiser.

  The immense swath of damage caused every gravity plate, every power system, to fail in near simultaneity, and the powerful Horvath cruiser came apart in a flash of gas and plasma. Which the VSA continued to shred until Dr. Foster, delayed due to light lag, realized he was just cutting up scrap.

  He terminated power to the VSA, which was going into redline after only six seconds, and looked over at the admiral.

  “Mission accomplished, sir.”

  “Hell,” the admiral whispered, rubbing his forehead. The ship that had dominated Earth for so long had been destroyed almost faster than an eye blink. “What have you created?”

  “As I think Mr. Tyler would have put it,” Dr. Foster said, “a little temporary security. Now let’s work on that liberty thing.”

  * * *

  “How’s your O2?” Steve asked.

  “Fine,” Tyler said. “Unfortunately, I can feel my eyeballs starting to pop out. And I now know what the bends feels like.”

  Whether from the damage inflicted by the Horvath cruiser or the damage inflicted by the gun, the cockpit had developed a leak. It was a small leak and the air compression system was fighting it, but the onboard O2 was about exhausted and Tyler could feel the pressure dropping around him.

  “I think that slow decompression is going to be worse than rapid,” Tyler said. “I get to experience it in slow motion.”

  “That’s going to…suck,” Steve said.

  “Puns I don’t need right now,” Tyler said. “I’ll try to keep my screaming to a minimum.”

  A shadow flashed across the small porthole. Tyler was sort of getting used to those. The rubble of the multibillion-dollar space fighter, in keeping with microgravity conditions, was trundling along with them. He’d even gotten a look at the separated tail section. From the clean-cut look, that had definitely been a laser hit. At present he was wondering if taking a direct hit wouldn’t have been better.

  But this shadow persisted. Then he caught a flash of gray hull metal.

  “Mr. Vernon…?” a voice said in almost a whisper.

  “Hello?” Tyler said. “Somebody there?”

  “Stan…y.”

  There was a feeling of gravity to the side and the cabin thunked against something. Suddenly, light flooded in through the porthole. But not sunlight, artificial light. There was a distant clanging. And Tyler felt the pressure in the cabin start to go up. His ears popped, hard.

  A Glatun face appeared at the porthole. An unsuited Glatun face.

  “How do you open this thing?”

  * * *

  “The plague is hitting full stride,” Steve said, reading the news feeds. “The distribution got jugged in Indonesia. They’re taking a major hit. And Africa is totally hosed.”

  “It always has been,” Tyler said, looking out the porthole of the Glatun shuttle. The alien docs on the Glatun ship had been able to fix him right up. It was, after all, a medical support ship. With, as it turned out, a pressurized shuttle bay. He had to get him one of those.

  The ship swept around in a bank and Lake Washington was revealed in all its horror. The Potomac went all the way to Seventh. And it was now connected to the Anacostia along the line that had been Pennsylvania. The actual creeks into the lake were small since they had had to cut through the wall of rubble around the hole. That looked about a hundred meters high. About the only memorial he could spot was the Lincoln, which had been truncated at the base. The rest of the city, in a circle about four miles in diameter, was flattened. And then there were the fires.

  Superfires were something that had, prior to the Horvath attack, been stuff of theoretical studies. Superfires were what happened when a wall of plasma hit a modern city. Everything in its path caught fire. In a circle six miles on a side. There was no way for conventional firefighting to manage that, even where there was functioning water. The only way to fight it was to destroy everything in its path, and nobody had had the guts to do it.

  The D.C. superfire had torched practically everything in D.C. on the inside of the beltway. There were areas that had survived, but not many. Every major structure had taken at least some damage, and the capital of what was still the most powerful nation in the world, as well as virtually its entire citizen body, had died screaming.

  The hit in Frisco had destroyed every bridge, then torched everything from Marina to Millbrae. Most of the population that was trying to get out was headed across the Golden Gate or the Bay Bridges when the strike hit. Or, rather, stuck in traffic on the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridges. Ninety plus percent were now in the Bay.

  Manhattan was more or less toast. The same damage had happened to the bridges as in SF, and even most of the ferries were destroyed by the combination of the plasma wave and the very small, very intense tsunami that had been kicked up by the strike which centered more or less on the Chelsea Piers. Then the fires had started and raged across the entire island. It was estimated less than a million people had made it off.

  The L.A. superfire had been the real doozy. The strike hit when the chaparral of the L.A. valley was ready to burn anyway. They had seen the smoke from the L.A. basin during descent. You could spot the fire from the Moon. There wasn’t an L.A. anymore. What wasn’t crater was a cinder.

  “It’s just buildings,” Tyler muttered.

  “What?” Steve asked. The shuttle was coming down pretty hot and the soundproofing could be better.

  “It’s just buildings,” Tyler commed. “And people. People die. Buildings crumble. Britain suffered worse in the Blitz. Germany and Japan far worse under our tender ministrations.”

  “Practicing your speech?” Steve asked.

  “Had it memorized when I was nine,” Tyler said. “Honor, duty, country, blah, blah. What can’t be killed is a vision of freedom and liberty.”

  “Very nice,” Steve said, clapping. “Very touching. Amazing how decompression can focus the mind.”

  “Yeah,” Tyler said. “I’m not sure about the addition, though.”

  “Which is?”

  “And a determination that not only will no Horvath ship ever again get more than a hand’s span out of the gate, we’re going to pay this back in spades.”

  “Speak it, preacher,” Steve said.

  “Funny thing,” Tyler said as the shuttle was landing. Unsurprisingly, there was a delegation. Tyler was faintly relieved that all the police present were being used to hold back the crowds.

  “What?” Steve said.

  “Despite all this horror and damage,” Tyler said, “despite all the deaths, despite a damned near crippled economy…Earth is probably a better loan risk than at any point since the gate opened. Maybe now we can really get going.”

  * * *

  “I wish we’d detected this initially,” Xiy Gigum said. The “Glatun” doctor was an Ananancauimor specialist in epidemiological attacks. It was hard to tell body language with a three-foot-long beetle, but he looked embarrassed. “We actually did detect it before we came into the system. But with all the problems with distribution…it didn’t come up.”

  “Which is?” Dr. Cline asked, tilting her head to the side.

  “There was an additional packet with the last virus,” the Ananancauimor said. “A retrovirus addition.”

  “A genetically changing addition?” Dr. Cline said, getting very still.

  Retroviruses actually referred to a particular class of virus, the HIV virus being the most well known, that were simple chunks of DNA or RNA. They didn’t have a protein shell, just a strand of DNA.

  But since they were also the type of virus most often used in genetic modification the terms had become somewhat mixed. Any virus used for genetic modification was generally termed a retrovirus.

  “Yes,” Dr. Gigum said.

  “And the nature of the packet?” Dr. Cline asked, trying to stay calm. Earth had already taken enormous losses from the plagues, and the viruses, before being stopped by the Glatun medications, had spread through some ninety-five percent of Earth’s surviving population. She was trying to not think of legions of cannibal mutants and failing.

  “There is no easy way to say this,” Dr. Gigum said. “So I’m going to tip-toe around it. This is the probable thinking on the part of the attacker, whoever that might be. They anticipated success in this attack. They did not think that Earth would detect the viruses or spread the word. Most planets are not at this level of advancement when contacted and most would not have had the ability to respond within a scant seven years of first contact. They were also under the mistaken belief that if they left a significant number of workers available to collect maple syrup that the Glatun and other races would not respond strongly. This is, in fact, the first true epidemic we have had to respond to in several hundred years. It does not mean we were not prepared, however.”

  “And all that means?” Dr. Cline asked. “Let me just ask a question. Is it going to cause us to go insane or something?”

  “Not…quite,” Dr. Gigum said. “Let me proceed in my estimation. This left, however, the problem of workers. In preindustrial conditions, when there is a severe loss of life, there is a very fast population growth in the aftermath. Populations spring back very quickly.”

  “Noted,” Dr. Cline said. “Various examples. The Black Plague comes to mind.”

  “However,” the beetle continued, “in conditions in which a society is sufficiently advanced to have reproductive control, population levels dip after severe losses. Individuals engage in recreational pseudoreproductive activity, if the species is bent that way. This is a way of dealing with the death.”

  “Also known,” Dr. Cline said. “Not something we like to talk about, but…known.”

  “But if there is reproductive control, actual birthrates drop,” Dr. Gigum said. “And your attackers were looking at an already severely reduced population. One due to lack of population unable to be useful…” The beetle paused, as if trying to think of a polite term.

  “Slaves,” Dr. Cline said, her jaw working. “We know the term.”

  “As you say,” Dr. Gigum said. “I understand this tribe used them until historically recently.”

  “Specifically,” Dr. Cline said, “those who were of darker skin pigmentation. Such as myself.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Gigum said. “Pardon the faux pas.”

  “The point?” Dr. Cline said, then paused. “Oh…hell. How can they overcome standard contraceptives?”

  “To recover the method by which your contraceptives work,” Dr. Gigum said. “They mimic pregnancy. Your females, those within reproductive range, still ovulate during pregnancy. But the egg’s coating hardens preventing fertilization. The packet first works by removing that defense against multiple pregnancies—”

  “That is going to kill women,” Dr. Cline snapped. “Our systems are not designed for multi-start pregnancies!”

  “Nonetheless,” the beetle said. “That is not all, however. Your attackers noted the social conditions of reproduction in your species. I will not get into evolutionary theory on the subject, but your species has two unusual aspects to your reproduction. Your females do not go into a ‘heat’ cycle, and they orgasm. This places most decisions regarding reproduction or pseudoreproduction, absent force on the part of the male, in the hands of the female.”

  “Delicately put,” Dr. Cline said, her brow furrowing. “So…?”

  “The packet does three things,” Dr. Gigum said. “The first is it removes the protection against multi-term pregnancies. Unwisely, as you said. Your females are not designed to handle that. It will cause deaths in the absence of intervention. The second is to increase the tendency, in certain individuals, to orgasm…”

  “Oh…dear,” Dr. Cline said. “That could get…” She tried not to smile. “Difficult. Not necessarily bad, mind you.”

  “The last is, perhaps, the most societally challenging,” Dr. Gigum said, waggling his feelers in discomfort. “Human females, certain human females, now will go into a monthly heat cycle.”

  “Monthly?” Dr. Cline said, her eyes wide. “Monthly?”

  “Yes,” the beetle said. “Certain female humans.”

  “Which?” Dr. Cline said, her eyes narrowing.

  “The attack anticipated that only persons with the Blond gene would survive…”

  “Oh,” Dr. Cline said, exhaling. “Oh. Oh…hell.”

  “So,” Dr. Gigum said, his feelers waggling again. “You have a saying that is now very apt…”

  “Blondes really will have more fun. Got it. When?”

  “The packet is already kicking in,” Dr. Gigum said. “It would have done the modifications over the last month in the population. As females, blonde females, go into the ovulatory period of their monthly cycle they will start to…change.”

  “And people used to joke about PMS,” Dr. Cline said. “Remedy?”