“And I’m way too old for reverse psychology, as well.”

“Then give me your answer.”

“If you’re right—”

“I am. I just need the evidence.”

“Tell me why your protector won’t give it to you. And no bullshit, please.”

“I don’t know. It says it doesn’t want to be involved in physical events. Or it doesn’t care. Or it’s cheering for the other side. Or it wants us to stand up for ourselves. Or all of those. I think. I don’t really understand. The Barsoomian warned me not to trust it.”

Paul gave her a surprised look. “Barsoomian? You’ve been to Far Away?”

“Just got back.”

“You get around, these days, don’t you?”

“You mean for a soft porn star?”

“I remember when I first met you. Some party on Resal’s yacht. Sweet little thing, you were back then.”

Mellanie shrugged. “That was about four hundred years ago. Seems like, anyway.”

“Okay. I’ll run an observation on Baron’s unisphere use for you. See what turns up. And, hey, when I get out of rejuvenation…”

“Yeah, I’ll make very sure you never reach five hundred.”

***

Dawn was a pale gray wash creeping up over the Dau’sing Mountains, allowing the peaks to cut a sharp black serration into the base of the bland sky. Simon Rand stood in the narrow mouth of the cave to stare at the insipid light, and sighed. Once, he used to welcome every day in this land with a sense of pride and contentment. Now, he could only greet each new morning with a shiver of trepidation at what sacrilege it might bring.

In the first few weeks since the alien landing there had been little visible activity. More of the giant conical ships had landed and taken off from Lake Trine’ba, producing hurricanes of steam that spun out to smother the entire surface of the water. The cloud would cool rapidly after the incandescent fusion fire vanished from the air, but still expanding, sloshing against the confining rock walls of the giant mountains that surrounded the Trine’ba. Each flight resulted in a cloying fog that lingered for days, or sometimes weeks as it was continually replenished by further flights.

Such dank miserable weather had made it easy for the few remaining humans to move cautiously around the adjacent valleys. The thick mist hindered most of the sensors that the aliens possessed. So they crept in close to the new structures and machines that were being assembled amid the ruins of Randtown, and left their crude bombs before vanishing back into the safety of the perpetual swirling veil. They never knew if they’d done much damage, but the encouragement each strike gave to Simon’s little band of resistance fighters kept their morale high.

There were no ships left now. The last one had launched over three weeks ago, shooting back up to one of the alien wormholes orbiting Elan. The last wisps of unnatural fog had drifted away during the days that followed, leaving eyes and sensors with a clear view for kilometers as the clean mountain air swept back down over the massive lake.

The changes it revealed were slight, perhaps imperceptible to someone who hadn’t lived with that same view for over fifty years. It was late summer on the Ryceel continent, a time when the vines were picked clean and the crops harvested under wide sunny skies. Now, those skies were almost constantly clouded over, bringing unseasonable gusty winds and hailstorms. Usually the thick permanent snowfields that coated the peaks had retreated as far as they ever would. This time they’d shrunk back farther than ever before, thawing before the tides of warm mist pouring out from the lake and the intolerable radiance of the fusion drives. When the ships were flying, the temperature of the whole district had risen by several degrees. Simon could have lived with that; nature would have reasserted herself by next year, pushing the winter snowfall back to its traditional boundaries. But no mantle of snow, however deep, could disguise the damage caused to the Regents. Where the nuclear explosion had wiped out the navy detector station, the profile of the surrounding peaks had been altered. Rock slides, pressure waves, and raw nuclear heat had pummeled the mountains into twisted parodies of their original selves. Only recently had snow and ice begun to crystallize and settle there again. The heat from the blast had finally radiated away from the new crater that had formed, though it would take generations for the fallout to abate.

Down in the town and its neighboring valleys, the aliens were systematically creating a different kind of disaster. For fifty years the humans who’d been drawn to this land had been meticulous how they cared for it. Simon’s Green ethos had guaranteed a respect for their native environment; terrestrial crops had been grown along with some imported grasses and trees on the slopes, but that had been done in sympathy with the scant covering of existing plants. And Lake Trine’ba with its precious, unique marine ecology had been protected from any contaminants or material exploitation.

All that meticulous preservation was being wiped out by the aliens. Their flyers had ferried all manner of equipment and vehicles ashore from the big spaceships: engines and generators spewing out fumes and oily contaminate pollutants. They also brought increasing numbers of their own kind, each one defecating straight into the Trine’ba. As the new buildings were rising out of the remains of Randtown, so rubble and wreckage were simply bulldozed into massive piles where organic detritus festered and oozed into rancid puddles before soaking into the streams and brooks that fed the beautiful lake.

This morning, something new was happening over in Randtown. Simon used his retinal inserts to zoom in on the town, five kilometers away down the shoreline, producing a slightly nebulous image of the shiny metallic hardware just above the quayside. The force field the aliens were using to protect Randtown fuzzed the air slightly, making details unclear. Nothing he could do would bring them into sharp resolution.

Not for the first time since the invasion, he cursed the inadequacy of his organic circuitry and inserts. During his previous lives he never bothered to upgrade and modernize the way most Commonwealth citizens did when each new refinement was shoved out onto the market; all he ever wanted were a few simple systems that could interface him with the unisphere and help manage the day-to-day running of his estate. He’d always made do with whatever was available at the time he finished rejuvenation.

But despite the lack of perfect visual clarity, he could easily make out the thick torrent of dark blue-gray liquid jetting out from the bottom of the largest tower of machinery. It was as if the aliens had struck oil beneath the town and hadn’t yet managed to cap the bore hole. Then the size of what he was seeing registered. The column of liquid was at least four meters across where it left the nozzle in the machinery. It curved down to splash into a broad concrete gully they’d built roughly where the main mall used to be, allowing the liquid to gurgle down to the broken quayside. The force field had been modified somehow to let the liquid through. A vast murky stain was spreading out into the pure waters of the Trine’ba.

“Bastards,” Simon exclaimed.

He heard someone scrambling along the damp rock behind him. The cave where they sheltered began as a simple vertical fissure that extended below the waterline, forcing them to cling to the side for several meters until it opened out. Napo Langsal had told them about it; he often used to take tourists there on his tour boat during the summer. From the outside it looked like any other crevice in the cliff, which made it an excellent hideaway.

It was David Dunbavand edging his way along the slick rock. That the vine nursery owner had stayed behind after the wormhole closed in the Turquino Valley always surprised Simon. He hadn’t thought of David as a partisan fighter. But then who among us is? David was two hundred years old, which made him one of the calmest heads in their little group. As soon as he was satisfied his current wife and their children had escaped, he was quite content to stay behind. “Some things you just have to make a stand on,” he’d said at the time.