Roderick and his entourage disappeared up the curve of the corridor, and Lawrence walked on without breaking stride.

The dormitory that they'd been given was probably only double the size of the compartment on the Moray. It had two ranks of bunk beds each with its own locker containing a standard clothes package for everyone, a couple of aluminum tables with chairs and a sheet screen. There was a small washroom next door.

Hal looked around, his face screwed up in dismay. "Oh man, what is this shit?" he exclaimed.

Amersy laughed. "Best quarters in the fleet, welfare boy. Lie back and enjoy. You get fed, you get paid and nobody shoots at you. Now find a bunk and make the most of it."

"I'll go fucking stir crazy." He made to climb onto a top bunk, only to find his way blocked by Karl's forearm.

"Bottom rung, kid," Karl said, grinning a challenge.

"Jesus fucking wept." Hal threw his small bag onto a lower bunk and hopped on after it. "I can't take these closed-up rooms."

"You'll put up with it," Lawrence said. He dropped his own bag on a top bunk, momentarily fascinated by the weird curve of its fall. "Settle down, all of you; you know the onboard drill. I'll find out what our canteen schedule is, and then we work training and fitness around that. Lewis, how are you feeling?"

"Not too bad, Sarge. Guess the doc was right."

Lawrence made his way over to the small keyboard set into the wall beside a sheet screen. Platoon dormitories didn't rate an AS program, but the operating system was sophisticated and easy enough to operate. He called up their basic shipboard data: where they ate and when, what the local time was, when departure was scheduled.

"Hey, you guys want to know where we're headed?" he asked.

"Thallspring," Karl shouted back. "Didn't they tell you, Sarge?"

Hal gave him a puzzled look. "How did you know that? It's like top secret."

Karl shook his head. "Fuck, you are a big waste of space, kid."

They were due to depart in twenty-two hours. Lawrence read the Third Fleet data from the screen and muttered, "Jesus."

"Problem?" Amersy asked quietly.

Lawrence took a quick glance round the dormitory. Nobody was paying attention to them. "Seven ships. Is that what the Third Fleet is these days?"

"More than a match for Thallspring. Their population is small, barely seventeen million."

"Projected," Lawrence said. "That's no true guide. But it's not what I'm worried about."

"The ships?"

"Yeah. Fate! My first mission, to Kinabica, that took seven weeks of spaceplane flights just to lift us and our equipment offplanet. There must have been thirty-five starships on that mission."

"We don't have that many starships anymore. Not since Santa Chico."

"Not just there. Second Fleet lost two ships on approach to Oland's Hope. No one projected they'd have exo-orbit defenses. But they did."

"You want to eject?"

"Hell no. I'm just saying this one could be tough. We're going in too small."

"They'll cope." Amersy clapped him on the shoulder. "Hell, even the kid will pull through."

"Yeah, right." Lawrence began pulling menus from the starship's computer, seeing what he could throw up on the screen. He read one schedule and smiled, hurriedly calling up supplements. "You might want to see this," he told the platoon. "You'll probably never have another chance for ringside seats this good."

The screen brightened with an image from one of Koribu's external cameras. It was centered on the portal, glowing a hazy blue against the void. Colony trains were clustered around like a shoal of eager technological fish.

"Two minutes to the starting gun," Lawrence announced happily. Despite all he hated about Z-B, he had to admit, they got this absolutely right.

His mood was broken by Hal's petulant voice asking, "What the fuck is that thing, a radioactive doughnut? Order me a couple of coffees to go with it, Sarge." He trailed off fast at Lawrence's look.

Lawrence just managed to stop himself from bawling out the kid. He couldn't believe anyone was that ignorant about the most important endeavor the human race was undertaking. But then Hal was just some teenager from a welfare block in some godforsaken city. Lawrence himself had been a teenager with the best education his home planet could provide, as well as apparently unlimited data resource access, and he hadn't known that portals existed. It had been Roselyn who told him.

CHAPTER FIVE

In five years, Amethi's climate had undergone a profound degree of alteration. The changes wrought by Heat-Smash had become self-sustaining and were now accelerating on a scale that allowed human senses to register them. Locals were calling it the Wakening. Instead of surprise and delight at seeing a single cloud, they now welcomed the sight of a small patch of sky through the sullen cloud mantle.

Now that the overall air temperature had risen several degrees above freezing, the Barclay's Glacier meltdown exhaled water vapor into the atmosphere at a phenomenal rate. Giant cloud banks surged out from the thawing ice sheet, reaching almost up to the tropopause where they powered their way around the globe. In their wake, warmer arid air was sucked in, gusting over the ice where it helped transpiration still further, keeping the planet-sized convection cycle turning.

When the clouds rolled over the tundra they began to darken, condensing to fall as snow. By the time the flakes reached the ground they were miserable gray smears of sleet Great swaths of slush mounted up over the entire planetary surface, taking an age to drain away in stubborn trickles that were often refrozen by fresh falls. On the continental shelves, muddy rivers slowly began to flow again, while across the dead ocean beds, the deep trenches and basins were gradually filling with water. The thin viscous sheets of dirty liquid that rolled sluggishly downslope across the sands carried along the crusting of salt that had lain there undisturbed since the glacier had formed. It was all dragged down into the deepening cores of the returning oceans, dissolving to produce a saturated solution every bit as dense and bitter as Earth's Dead Sea.

Above it, meanwhile, the air was so clogged with hail and snow that flying had become hazardous. Spaceplanes were large enough to power their way up through the weather, but smaller aircraft remained sheltered in their hangars for the duration. Driving also was difficult, with trucks newly converted into snowplows running constantly up and down the main roads to keep them clear. Windshield wipers were hurried additions to every vehicle. Major sections of the Amethi ecology renewal project had been suspended until the atmospheric turbulence returned to more reasonable levels. The insects already scheduled for first release were as yet un-cloned; silos holding the seed banks were sealed up. Only the slow-life organisms remained relatively unaffected, carrying on as normal under the snow until they were unlucky enough to be caught by a fast flush of water. Lacking even rudimentary animal survival instinct, they never had the sense to wriggle or crawl away from the new torrents raking across the land.