Another round of explosions knocked all the retreating humans down again. This time the mushrooms of flame rose two or three hundred feet into the cold morning air. All of the trees to the west and east of Ardis were burning.

Voynix leaped through the flames. The chitinous black soldiers shot them down by the score, then by the hundreds.

Then one of the black things was looming over her. It reached out a long, barbed arm and extended a hand that seemed more black claws than hand. “Ada Uhr?” it said in a calm, deep voice. “I am Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. Your husband needs you. My squad and I will accompany you back to the compound.”

The large ship had landed next to the Pit. This flying machine was too large for the palisade and had knocked down most of the rest of the wooden wall on its landing. It stood on high, multiply jointed metal legs and some sort of bay doors had opened in its belly.

Harman was on a litter on the ground with several different creatures huddled around it. Ada ignored the creatures and ran to Harman.

Her beloved’s head was on a pillow and his body had been covered by a blanket, but Ada had to thrust her palm in her mouth to keep from screaming. His face was ravaged, cheeks hollow, gums all but empty of teeth. His eyes were bleeding. His lips had cracked until they looked as if something had chewed them to bits. His bare forearms were visible above the blanket and Ada could see the pooled blood under the skin—red skin that was sloughing off as if he had received the world’s worst sunburn.

Daeman, Hannah, Greogi, and others were huddled near her. She took Harman’s hand, felt the slightest pressure in return to her soft squeezing. The dying man on the litter tried to focus his cataract-covered eyes on her, tried to speak. He could only cough blood.

A small humanoid figure wrapped in red-and-black metal and plastic spoke to her. “You are Ada?”

“Yes.” She did not turn to look at the machine-boy. Her gaze was just for Harman.

“He managed to say your name and give us the coordinates for this place. We’re sorry we didn’t find him earlier.”

“What …” she began and did not know what to ask. One of the machine-things nearby was huge. It was delicately holding an intravenous bottle that fed something into Harman’s emaciated arm.

“He received a lethal dose of radiation,” said the boy-sized figure in its soft voice. “Almost certainly from a submarine he encountered in the Atlantic Breach.”

Submarine, thought Ada. The word meant nothing to her.

“We’re sorry, but we simply don’t have the medical facilities for human beings in this condition,” said the little person-machine. “We called the hornets down from the Queen Mab when we saw your problems here and they brought painkillers, more intravenous bottles, but we can do nothing for the radiation damage itself.”

Ada didn’t really understand anything the little person was saying. She held Harman’s hand with both of hers and felt him dying.

Harman coughed, obviously could not make the speech sounds he was trying to make, coughed again, and tried to pull his hand away. Ada clung but the dying man was insistent, pulling…

She realized that the pressure of her grip must be hurting him. She released his hand.

“I’m sorry, my darling.”

Behind them, more explosions, farther away now. The bat-shaped flying machines were firing into the surrounding forests with that constant chain-rattling noise. The tall, chitinous troopers ran back and forth through the camp—some administering aid to slightly injured human beings, mostly for flash burns.

Harman did not pull his right hand back but held it up toward her face.

Ada tried to hold his hand again, but he batted her hand away with his left hand. She kept her hands still and let him touch her neck, her cheek—he laid the palm flat against her forehead, then used all of his strength to mold his hand to her skull, clutching at her almost desperately.

Before she could even think to pull away, it began.

Nothing, not even the explosion that had just thrown her ten feet backward through the air, had ever struck Ada as this did.

First there was Harman’s clear voice—It’s all right, my love, my darling. Relax. It’s all right. I must give you this gift while I can.

And then everything around Ada disappeared except for the pressure from her beloved’s damaged hand and bleeding fingers, pouring images in to her—not just to her mind, but filling her with words, memories, images, pictures, data, more memories, functions, quotes, books, entire volumes, more books, more memories, his love for her, his thoughts about her and their child, his love, more information, more voices and names and dates and thoughts and facts and ideas and…

“Ada? Ada?” Tom was kneeling over her, splashing water on her face while he gently slapped her face. Hannah, Daeman, and others knelt nearby. Harman had dropped his arm. The little metal-plastic person still fussed over Harman, but her darling looked dead.

Ada stood. “Daeman! Hannah! Come here. Lean close.”

“What?” asked Hannah.

Ada shook her head. No time to explain. No time to do anything but share. “Trust me,” she said.

She reached out her left and right hands, gripped Daeman’s forehead with her left hand, Hannah’s with her right, and activated the Sharing function.

It took no more than thirty seconds—no more than the time it had taken for Harman to share the functions and essential data with her, the data he’d spent the hours of his walk west in the Breach compartmentalizing, preparing for transmission—but the thirty seconds seemed like thirty eternities to Ada. If she could have done the next part alone, she wouldn’t have bothered, wouldn’t have taken the time—not even if the future of the human race depended on it—but she couldn’t do the next part alone. She needed one person to continue the Sharing and one person to help her try to save Harman.

It was done.

All three—Ada, Daeman, Hannah—fell to their knees, eyes closed.

“What is it?” asked Siris.

Someone ran shouting into the compound. It was one of their volunteers at the pavilion a mile and a quarter away. The faxnode was working! Just as the voynix were closing in there, shouted the messenger, the faxnode had come alive.

There’s no time for the fax pavilion, thought Ada. And nowhere to go among the numbered faxnodes either. Everywhere the humans were in retreat or under direct attack. There was no other place on a known node where her darling could be saved.

The large creature that looked like some sort of giant metallic horseshoe crab was rumbling in English. “There are human rejuvenation tanks in orbit,” it was saying. “But the only tanks we know about for certain are on Sycorax’s orbital asteroid, and it just passed the moon under full thrust. We’re sorry we don’t know any other…”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ada, kneeling next to Harman again. She touched his forearm. There was no reaction but she could feel the last embers of life in him—his biomonitors speaking to her new biometric functions. She was madly sorting through all the thousands of freefax nodes, the freefax function procedures itself.

There were the post-human storage depots in the Mediterranean Basin—they had medicines even for such radiation death—but the depots were sealed in stasis and Ada saw from the allnet monitors that the Hands of Hercules had slowly disappeared, refilling the Mediterranean. She would need machines—submersibles—to get to the depots there. Too long. There were other post storage areas—on the steppes of China, near the Dry Valley in Antarctica… but all would take too long to reach and the medical procedures were too complicated. Harman wouldn’t live long enough to…

Ada grabbed Daeman’s arm, pulled him down next to her. The man seemed dazed, transfixed. “All the new functions …” he said.