“The Adoks surely fled to this star system,” Galyan said. “After the horrendous battle with the ancient Swarm, they must have sworn, ‘Never again.’ Thus, they built the armored moons to protect their new world.”

  “Do you have any idea how much effort that would take?” Andros asked.

  “Massive effort over a long period of time,” Galyan said.

  “Like the ancient pyramids on Earth,” Maddox said. “Primitive societies achieved marvels through hard effort and time. What would an advanced technological society create with similar effort?”

  “We must contact the Adoks at once,” Galyan said.

  “Sir,” Barnes said. “I respectfully submit that it could be suicide to take the starship anywhere near those moons.”

  “How close to you think we could go without harm?” Maddox asked.

  “I thought you’d ask that. I’d stay at least thirty million kilometers from them, but would prefer forty million.”

  “No, no,” Galyan said. “We must go nearer to find the Adoks.”

  Lieutenant Maker swiveled around at helm. “Sir, I could inspect the planet in our fold-fighter. That would keep the starship from going near, and I’d probably be fine in the planet’s atmosphere.”

  “This is our last fold-fighter aboard ship,” Maddox said. “If you crashed, no one might be able to rescue you.”

  “I understand, sir,” Keith said. “But this is Galyan’s dream. I’m willing to take a risk for him, as he’s risked for us plenty of times in the past.”

  “Thank you, Keith.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Galyan. But the captain hasn’t made his decision yet.”

  Galyan turned to Maddox. “I implore you, sir—”

  “That’s enough of that,” Maddox said promptly. “I’ll not risk the starship on this. But I may be willing to let Keith explore the planet.”

  From the comm station, Valerie inhaled sharply.

  Keith noticed. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You have no idea if that’s true,” Valerie said. “Remember, the Unity sent us here. They mean us nothing but ill will. This is a grave risk.”

  Keith nodded, saying no more.

  Galyan began to fidget in silence.

  Maddox fingered his chin as he studied the main screen and glanced at the silent holoimage. The armored moons bothered him. He also knew that Valerie was right. The Unity meant them harm, great harm. This system was an obvious trap. However, knowing it was a trap was the first step to avoiding it. And, it did not seem to be a trap of the Unity’s making. To another Adok…or a holoimage of one, it might not be a trap at all.

  “Perhaps if we extended my holographic range,” Galyan said, “I could go look.”

  “Don’t interrupt me when you know I’m thinking,” Maddox said.

  “I am sorry, sir.”

  “Just don’t do it again,” Maddox said, sounding peeved.

  Galyan fidgeted worse than before.

  “I’ll go alone,” Keith said. “That way, the risk will be mine alone.”

  Valerie began shaking her head.

  Maddox tapped his chin. Keith going was a good idea, but Maddox wanted some common sense on the fold-fighter. He wanted to go, but how could he sell that to Meta? He’d risked mightily as it was, and he didn’t want to start any quarrels between them at this stage of the mission.

  “Lieutenant,” Maddox said quietly. “You and Sergeant Riker will be going in the fold-fighter. I don’t trust the iron moons, though. Thus, you two will fold near the planet’s surface and look around. At the first sign of danger, you will immediately fold back to us. Is that clear?”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” Keith said.

  “You’re sending Riker?” Valerie asked. “Isn’t he still recovering from heart surgery?”

  Maddox swiveled around to stare at her. Valerie immediately looked away. Maddox surged up to his feet, heading for the hatch. “The plan is only tentative,” he said over his shoulder. “First, I need to speak with Sergeant Riker.”

  -83-

  “You’re not going?” Riker asked.

  Maddox looked up at the corridor ceiling, deathly sick of everyone questioning him lately. He’d found the old man speed-walking down ship corridors in a ridiculous sweat-suit outfit. The sergeant kept using his sleeve to wipe sweat from his face. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea if walking winded the sergeant like this.

  “I’m not going, no,” Maddox said.

  “Ah,” Riker said.

  Maddox frowned. He wanted to ask the impertinent noncom what that was supposed to mean. He had an idea the old scoundrel knew it would be better, marriage-wise, for him to skip this exploration.

  Maddox explained the situation.

  “It’s clear the armored moons are dangerous,” Riker said. “You must be figuring the moons won’t fire at anyone on the planet’s surface.”

  “It seems reasonable.”

  “Or the Adoks on the planet were killed by renegade computers…or crazy deified AIs on the moons that broke Adok protocol by firing at those on the planet.”

  “Given that we’ve never run into Adoks before this, the possibility exists,” Maddox admitted.

  Both men looked around to see if they could spy an eavesdropping Galyan. This time, however, it would seem that the holoimage was employing greater caution.

  “I’ll go,” Riker said.

  “I wasn’t asking if you’re willing,” Maddox said. “I asked concerning your physical condition.”

  “I know. It’s good enough for riding around in the fold-fighter.”

  “You might have to step outside and take a look, walking around.”

  “I can do that.” Riker indicated the corridor. “I’ve been feeling a heck of a lot better lately.”

  Maddox refrained from rolling his eyes. He’d found the sergeant sweating from walking around. “You should know that the moons trouble me. I dare not risk Victory near them. But the fold-fighter shouldn’t have any problems on the planet.”

  “Unless the Adoks figured out how to attack a vessel while it’s folding,” Riker said.

  “I seriously doubt anyone can do that.”

  Riker frowned. “Isn’t it strange Andros and Galyan aren’t getting any life readings from the planet?”

  “At first blush that seems so. However, maybe the moons shield the planet from sensors. Or there’s some other technology that does so.”

  “Oh boy, I hadn’t thought of that. Are you sure you want us going, sir?”

  “I think we must.”

  “Because of Galyan?” asked Riker.

  “Yes,” Maddox said in a low voice.

  “Because we owe it to him?”

  “Maybe because of that, too.”

  Riker grinned suddenly. “One thing is clear: I’m expendable. Thus, I’m the logical candidate to send. I applaud your reasoning, sir.”

  “Enough of that, Sergeant,” Maddox said. “You know I don’t care for emotional displays. If you’re going to force my hand on this, I won’t appreciate it.”

  “You mean to tell me you’d miss me if something happened to me?”

  Maddox scowled.

  Riker smiled so lines appeared on his leathery face. “I appreciate the sentiment, sir, I really do. It gets me right there.” Riker fist-bumped his chest.

  Maddox cleared his throat. This damned old man had always been a nuisance. “Good luck, then,” the captain said, as he stared to the side.

  “Yes, sir,” Riker said. “You watch. We’ll be back in no time, with info on these elusive Adoks.”

  “Good,” Maddox said, clapping the old man on the shoulder and then turning and hurrying back for the bridge.

  -84-

  “Here we are again,” Keith said. “You and I do all the heavy lifting around here, eh?”

  “You’re talking about last mission in the Crowder System when we went to that asteroid-moon?” Riker asked.

  “That’s it,” Keith said.

  The two men were strapped into their seats aboard the fold-fighter. It was four hours since the captain had made the decision to have Keith inspect the planet.

  The fold-fighter or tin can was newer than the destroyed one on Remus. It had a few newer features as well, but nothing spectacularly new. It presently drifted outside Victory, facing the third planet with its twelve perfectly orbiting metal moons.

  Keith brought up sensor scans of the planetary surface. There were mountain ranges, oceans, deserts, lakes, ice caps and fuzzy images of unexplained areas. Despite Galyan and Andros’s best efforts, they could not get better views or a sense of what those blurry images were. The going consensus was that the moons blocked or jammed the starship’s full sensor scans.

  “Won’t that stop us as well?” Riker had asked. “Why don’t we send a probe first?”

  Victory lacked any folding probes was one reason.

  Riker and Keith had taken their fold shots. Keith readied the tin can for travel. Riker wore a spacesuit with a helmet to the side, and he carried a heavy blaster rifle. If there were weird aliens on the surface, the sergeant wanted to go down swinging, or in this instance, firing.

  “I’m ready to fold,” Keith said.

  Riker’s heart beat a little faster, and there was the slightest twinge of pain in his chest. The sergeant wondered for a half-beat if this was madness on his part. It was doing the same thing and expecting a better result.

  What about all the exercise? Riker shook his head.

  “You want to delay?” Keith asked.

  “What? No. I’m ready whenever you are.”

  Keith reached for the controls, pausing. “What do you think we’ll find down there?”

  “I don’t know, the answer to an ancient mystery, maybe, if we’re lucky.”

  “Yeah,” Keith said. “Well, mate, we’re folding…now.”

  The small tin can disappeared from its place near Victory and reappeared a mere kilometer off the third planet’s surface over a large desert. That was cutting it close, as Keith barely resumed cognitive abilities by the time the tin can had plunged to half a kilometer from the surface.

  Riker came to a moment later. “Well?” he slurred with a thick tongue.

  Keith must not have noticed, as he was busy flying the unstable tin can. The atmosphere was dense, like it would be on Earth a kilometer below sea level. The desert outside—Keith frowned as he leaned closer to one of his screens. There was something down there on the desert: a big rusty thing that just stood there. He took the tin can lower, adjusted the screen—

  “No way,” Keith whispered.

  “What’s the problem?” Riker asked. He’d attached the helmet to the spacesuit and used a speaker unit to communicate.

  “Look at your screen,” Keith said.

  Riker did just that, and he saw what looked like a giant, ancient rusty school bus lying sideways in the sand. The glass windows had long ago shattered. There might have been gun turrets, but it was impossible to tell from this far.

  “Some kind of alien life colonized the planet,” Keith said.

  “Without a doubt,” Riker said. “Should we land and inspect the thing?”

  “I’m tempted,” Keith admitted. “But the captain wants us to eyeball one of the murky areas from the scans. Let’s see…” The best pilot in Star Watch flipped a switch and looked at a side screen. “There’s one of them two hundred kilometers from here.”

  “Let’s go,” Riker said.

  Keith manipulated his flight panel.

  “Is anything happening on the moons?” Riker asked.

  “Oh. I almost forgot about them.” Keith tapped controls, studied a panel and tapped more. “This is weird.”

  “What’s wrong?” Riker asked. “What’s weird?”

  At that moment, a powerful surge of something that created a low hum washed through the tin can.

  Keith fell back against his pilot seat.

  Riker felt an odd sensation, and he noticed that his suit power had quit. As his heart began to beat faster, Riker tore off his helmet and shouted for Keith.

  The pilot snorted, shook his head and lifted it from the rest pad where it had lain a second ago. “What in the hell just happened?” Keith said.

  “One of the moons,” Riker said. “What did the nearest moon do to us?”

  Keith swore in a different language and began to tap his pilot’s board. His shoulders sagged.

  “Are we’re cooked?” asked Riker.

  “No…” Keith said. “We still have a functional craft. I think a powerful sensor sweep just hit us. It definitely originated from the nearest moon.”

  “Can you tell what’s happening there now?”

  “That’s a good idea.” Keith tapped controls and checked his various screens. “Shit,” he said. “Look at this, Riker.”

  On his screen, linked to one of Keith’s, Riker saw two blooms on the metal moon and slender objects lifting from the surface.

  “I count two of them,” Keith said.

  “What do you think they are?”

  “Missiles.”

  “Aimed at us?” asked Riker, his hoarse voice rising.

  “They’re coming in our direction anyway. The moon is three hundred and fifty thousand kilometers from the planet, though.”

  “Why are the missiles headed for something on the planet?”

  “Maybe the missiles are why no one lives here,” Keith said. “The moons turned on the planet, on the people living here.”

  “A doomsday weapon,” Riker said. “Do you think the Adoks went to all that trouble and ended up creating a doomsday weapon that turned on them?”

  “I have no idea. What do you think we should do?”

  “The powerful moon scan shorted my spacesuit. I don’t know why the scan didn’t do the same thing to the tin can.”

  “The fighter is more robust than your suit.”

  “Yeah,” Riker said. “In any case, it’s time to leave here, if we still can.”

  “Go back to Victory then?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “We should have gone down to check the rusted bus, or whatever it was.”

  “You’re delaying,” Riker said. “Is there a reason for that? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  Keith shook his head.

  Riker felt his heart beat a little faster. He put a hand over his heart, massaging his chest.

  “Don’t fret,” Keith said. “I’m setting the coordinates to leave.”

  “What if the moons won’t let us leave?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough. Are you ready, old man?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Here we go then,” Keith said, as he flipped the switch to send the tin can into fold back to Victory.

  -85-

  Riker and Keith made it back to Victory, where they gave a report in the conference chamber with the usual suspects attending.

  “What do you think this means?” Galyan asked when Keith had finished speaking.

  “I’m not sure we were there long enough to give you a definitive answer,” Keith said.

  “The rusting bus in the desert implies no one cleaned it up,” Galyan said.

  “I doubt it was a bus,” Keith said. “It just looked like an old-style bus, but with a gun turret on top.”

  “Still,” Galyan said. “No one ever cleaned it up. That is not the Adok way. We clean up our messes. I have seen humans toss their trash to the side. No Adok would do such a despicable thing.”

  “The rusted vehicle wasn’t a good sign,” Riker admitted.

  “The rusted vehicle implies a world devoid of occupants,” Galyan said.

  “That’s what we call rushing to judgment,” Ludendorff said. “It implies that with many caveats and assumptions running wild. We haven’t seen anything yet to infer Adoks. The moons do strike me as protective devices, though.”

  “More like a Maginot Line,” Galyan said.

  “What’s that?” asked Keith.

  “After World War One on the Pre-Space-Flight Earth, a country named France won a grueling war together with its allies,” Galyan said. “The French had fought in trenches for four bitter years, losing a grim proportion of their men to the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. In the aftermath and as time progressed, the French built a line of concrete bunkers, emplacements, underground galleries and barracks to guard the easiest approaches from Germany to France, in case war should begin again. The French spent an enormous amount of money on the Maginot Line, a tribute to the mental and morale scar World War One had left on the national psyche. Manning the Maginot Line would take most of the French army personnel.”

  “Did the line work?” asked Keith.

  “No,” Ludendorff said, breaking in. “It failed miserably. The Germans developed their armored units and outflanked the Maginot Line. The static defense didn’t work. What’s your point in calling the moons a Maginot Line?”

  “I do believe we have reached the new Adok Star System,” Galyan said. “The twelve metal moons strike me as something akin to the Maginot Line, built for similar reasons. If these were the surviving Adoks, they would likely have witnessed the destruction of their homeworld. It would have left a deep mental scar in their combined psyche. They might well have invested tremendous effort to building the perfect planetary fortification, a Maginot Line, if you will.”

  “That’s well-reasoned,” Ludendorff said. “I’ll give you that.”

  “But still premature,” Maddox said, who’d been listening closely. “I’ll admit it all seems ominous, but it is still inconclusive. We need to decide on the next step.”

  “What step?” Meta said with heat. “We now know that going to the planet will kill whoever attempts it. How in good conscience can we ask anyone to go there?”

  “I will go,” Galyan said.

  “That may be the only solution left,” Ludendorff said.

  “I am disinclined to attempting to increase Galyan’s holographic range,” Maddox said.

  “May I ask you why, sir?” Galyan said.

  Maddox drummed his fingers on the table.

  “Oh, this is interesting,” Ludendorff said. “You have a definite reason, clearly.”