Noon-day light splashed the moonless sky as she dropped a plasma grenade among their enemies and, for one dreadful moment, the heart of the sun itself raged unchecked. It was pure, stone-fusing energy, consuming the very air, and thermal radiation lashed out from the center of destruction. It caught its victims mercilessly, turning running figures into torches, touching wreckage to flame, blinding the unwary who looked directly at it.

And when the fiery glare vanished as abruptly as it had come, the attack ended. The hissing roar of flames and the screams of their own maimed and dying were all the world the handful of surviving terrorists had, and the smoke that billowed heavenward was heavy with the stench of burning flesh.

The seven executioners faded silently away. Their stealthed cutter collected them forty minutes later.

Lieutenant General Gerald Hatcher frowned as he studied the classified folder, but his frown turned wry for a moment as he considered the absurdity of classifying something the entire planet was buzzing over.

His amusement faded as quickly as it had come, and he leaned back in his swivel chair, lips pursed as he considered.

The … peculiar events of the past few weeks had produced a massive ground swell of uncertainty, and the “unscheduled vacations” of a surprising number of government, industry, and economic leaders had not helped settle the public’s mind. To an extent, those disappearances had been quite helpful to Hatcher, for the vanished leaders included most of the ones he’d expected to protest his unauthorized, unsanctioned, and quite possibly illegal attacks on terrorist enclaves. He did not, however, find their absence reassuring.

He drummed his fingers on his blotter and wished—not for the first time—that he’d been less quick to order Hector MacMahan to disappear … not that his instructions could have made too much difference to Hector’s plans. Still, he wanted, more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life, to spend a few minutes listening to Hector explain this insanity.

One thing was abundantly clear: the best of humanity’s so-called experts had no idea how whatever was happening was being done. Their best explanation of that new, deep crater outside Cuernavaca was a meteor strike, but no one had put it forward very seriously. Even leaving aside the seismographic proof that it had resulted from multiple strikes and its impossibly precise point of impact, it was inconceivable that something that size could have burned its way through atmosphere without anyone even seeing it coming!

Then there were those unexplained nuclear explosions out over the Pacific. At least they had a fair idea how nuclear weapons worked, but who had used them upon whom? And what about those strikes in China and the Tatra Mountains? Those had been air strikes, whatever Cuernavaca might have been, but no one had explained how the aircraft in question had evaded look-down radar, satellite reconnaissance, and plain old human eyesight. Hatcher had no firm intel on Fenyang, but the Gerlochovoko strike had used “conventional” explosives, though the analysts’ best estimate of the warhead yields had never come from any chemical explosive they knew anything about, and the leftover bits and pieces of pulverized alloy and crystal had never come from any Terran tech base.

Now this. Abeokuta, Beirut, Damascus, Kuieyang, Mirzapur, Tehran… Someone was systematically hitting terrorist bases, the dream targets no Western military man had ever hoped to hit, and gutting them. And they were doing it with more of the damned weapons his people had never even heard of!

Except for Hector, of course. Hatcher was absolutely certain Hector not only knew what was happening but also had played a not inconsiderable part in arranging for it to happen. That was more than mildly disturbing, considering the security checks Colonel MacMahan had undergone, his outstanding record as an officer, and the fact that he was one of Gerald Hatcher’s personal friends.

One thing was crystal clear, though no one seemed inclined to admit it. Whoever had gone to war against Earth’s terrorists hadn’t come from Earth, not with the things they were capable of doing. Which led to all sorts of other maddening questions. Who were they? Where had they come from? Why were they here? Why hadn’t they announced themselves to the human race in general?

Hatcher couldn’t answer any of those questions. Perhaps he never would be able to, but he didn’t think it would work out that way, for the evidence, fragmentary as it was, suggested at least one other unpalatable fact. At least two factions were locked in combat, and one or the other was going to win, eventually.

He closed the folder, buzzing for his aide to return it to the vault. Then he sighed and stood looking out his office windows.

Oh, yes. One side was going to win, and when they did, they were going to make their presence felt. Openly felt, that was, for Hatcher was morally certain that they’d already made themselves at home. It would explain so much. The upsurge in terrorism, the curious unwillingness of First World governments to do much about it, those mysterious “vacations,” Hector’s obvious involvement with at least one faction of what had to be extra-terrestrials…

All the selective destruction could mean only one thing: a covert war was spilling over into the open, and it was being fought on Hatcher’s planet. The whole damned Earth was holding its collective breath, waiting to see who won, and they didn’t even know who was doing the fighting!

But Hatcher suspected that, like him, most of those uncertain billions prayed to God nightly for the side that was trashing the terrorists. Because if the side that backed people like Black Mecca won, this planet faced one hell of a nightmare…

Colonel Hector MacMahan sat in his office aboard his people’s single warship, and studied his own reports. His eyes ached from watching the old-fashioned phosphor screen, and he felt a brief, bitter envy of the Imperials about him. It wasn’t the first time he’d envied their neural feeds and computer shunts.

He leaned back and massaged his temples. Things were going well, but he was uneasy. He always was when an op was under way, but this was worse than usual. Something was nagging at a corner of his brain, and that frightened him. He’d heard that taunting voice only infrequently, for he was good at his job and serious mistakes were few, but he recognized it. He’d forgotten something, miscalculated somewhere, made some unwarranted assumption … something. And his subconscious knew what it was, he reflected grimly; the problem was how to drive it up into his forebrain.

He sighed and closed his eyes, allowing his face to show the worry he showed to neither subordinates nor superiors, but he couldn’t pin it down. So far, their losses had been incredibly light: a single Imperial and five of their own Terra-born. No Imperial, however young, could have survived a lucky burst from a thirty-millimeter cannon, but Tarhani should never have been permitted to lead the Beirut raid at her age. Yet she’d been adamant. She’d hated that city for over fifty years, ever since a truck bomb blew her favorite grandson into death along with two hundred of his fellow Marines.

He shook his head. Revenge was a motivation professionals sought to avoid, far less accepted as a reason for assigning other personnel to high-risk missions. But not this time. Win or lose, this was Nergal’s final campaign, and ’Hani had been right: she was old. If someone were to die leading the attack, better that it should be her than one of the children…

Yet MacMahan knew there was another factor. For all his training and experience, all the hard-won competence with which he’d planned and mounted this operation, he was a child. It had always been so. A man among men among the Terra-born; a child—in years, at least—when he boarded Nergal.