“There are no routes, not anymore,” Mandy said. She was chewing listlessly at a bacon sandwich. “They’re already outside the old town boundaries. All the utility tunnels and storm drains are inside the force field now.”

“You boys aren’t thinking,” The Cat said. Her voice cut clean across the cave, ripe with mockery. Morton gave her an intolerant glance. She was doing her yoga, one foot tucked in behind her neck.

“You have a solution?” Morton asked.

“It’s obvious.”

“Want to share that?”

“Nuke them. That’s all we can do.”

“We can’t nuke them. We can’t get to them.”

She closed her eyes, put her hands into Dawn Sunlight position, and breathed in deeply.

“There has to be a way in,” Rob said. “What about caves?”

“No,” Simon said. “We performed a full seismic survey before we started building Randtown. I didn’t want us to suddenly come up against subsidence problems after we were established. That would have been too costly.”

“Do you have anything that could dig underneath the force field?” Georgia asked.

“Alamo Avenger,” Rob muttered with a small private smile.

“No,” Morton said. “We didn’t come equipped to mount a frontal assault. We’re supposed to harass and disrupt, to make them waste time and money looking over their shoulder the whole time.”

“A nice theory,” Simon said. “But they’re a very centralized species. The activity out in the valleys is susceptible to the kind of campaign you’re talking about, but I doubt it would ultimately have much effect on them. To hurt them, you must strike at the structures inside the force field.”

“It’ll have to be an underwater approach,” Rob said reluctantly. “Even if a dump-web doesn’t work underwater, there must be some route in. An arch in a reef, an inlet pipe. Something!”

“Oh, this is painful,” the Cat said. She slipped her foot out from behind her head. “I thought you were executive management class, Morty. What happened to that ‘don’t download glitches, upload fixes,’ corporate speak you’re so fond of?”

“Just tell us what your idea is, please,” he said wearily.

“The aliens keep expanding the area they’re developing around the refinery station, right? So what we do is put a nuke outside the existing force field, and inside the border where the new one is going to be. When they switch on the new force field, the nuke is now inside their defenses, and it goes off. Any questions?”

Morton wanted to kick himself it was so obvious. He put the lapse of clear thought down to the shock of losing Parker and the Doc. “Simon, do the aliens turn off the old internal force fields once the new ones are up and running?”

“Yes. They have so far.”

“Oh, gosh, boys, are we really going to use my little old idea?” The Cat batted her eyes.

“Yeah,” Rob said. “I don’t suppose you fancy staying with the nuke and detonating it once we’re sure everything is peachy in there?”

The blast from Parker’s last stand against the flyers made things difficult. There was virtually no cover left on the foothills above and behind the town. That left them with the eastern side, where the low ground had been slightly sheltered from the blast wave. Even there, the trees had been completely flattened and incinerated. Large patches of terrestrial GMgrass had smoldered away before the eternal sleet and drizzle extinguished their paltry flames.

A few large houses had been built there, nestled in their own secluded folds in the land. It was one of the areas where the more wealthy had settled, giving them a splendid view out along the Trine’ba. They’d all suffered from the original attack on the Regents, and the environmental aftermath of the invasion; with smashed lopsided roofs and walls lying askew. Once neat gardens were reduced to muddy swamps where plants had briefly run wild before the climate turned against them.

Morton and the Cat picked their way slowly through one such garden. Its owner had been an avid collector of bamboo varieties. There were clumps of the shoots laid out in long curving patterns; from the air it would have looked like a giant tiger orchid flower. Now the leaves were turning brown and soggy. New shoots were rotting in the mud.

“Another two hundred meters should do it,” Morton said. “That’ll take us to the overlook point.” The garden was a shallow depression, partly natural, that a small army of agribots had then worked to extend into the gentle hillside. They were due to place the tactical nuke right on the edge of the garden, where the bamboo gave way to dunes of roses, putting the device in direct line of sight of the giant refinery station along the shore. With the ever-present cloud blocking the starlight, and the sleet choking the air, it was as dark as interstellar space in the garden. Even on full amplification, his visual spectrum sensors had difficulty producing an image. He was heavily dependent on infrared, which gave the tall dying vegetation an ominous looming appearance.

“Okeydokey,” the Cat said. She was using her slightly contemptuous voice, the one full of false enthusiasm.

Morton didn’t care. He’d paired up with her because he didn’t trust her to undertake Rob’s placement. As backup they’d decided a second nuke should be placed on the lakebed. Their sensor disk and comrelays didn’t function underwater. That meant someone working alone. The Cat was a pain in the ass to have alongside, but he could at least keep an eye on her. He wondered what kind of progress Rob was making. They hadn’t done much underwater training.

The swarm of sneekbots scouting the surrounding area reached the house at the center of the garden. It was a long two-story clapboard affair with a three-door garage and a balcony running the length of the wall that faced the Trine’ba. The two nuclear blast waves had left it severely lopsided, with the splintered boards hanging loose at all angles. Solar roofing panels had half-melted in the heat, running like wax to wilt around the structural beams so that the rainwater was constantly tricking down inside, saturating the interior. All the windows were gone, leaving shards of glass to tear at the curtains as they fluttered about, reducing them to a few sodden tatters flapping indolently in the light sleet.

Sneekbot 411 detected an infrared source inside on the ground floor.

“Well, hello there,” the Cat murmured.

“Another survivor?” Morton speculated. The heat source was about the same strength as a human.

“Could be cattle, or a big sheep.”

“You keep telling yourself that.”

The Cat’s hyper-rifle deployed from her forearm, HVvixen missiles slipped into their launch tubes behind her shoulder blades. Ratmines scuttled down her legs, and darted into the thick cover of the bamboo.

Five sneekbots crept forward toward the house. They picked their way up the ramshackle walls and eased their way in over windowsills. The heat source never moved.

A range of neon-green symbols rose up into Morton’s virtual vision. “Electrical activity.”

“Not much. Looks like a handheld array on sleeper mode.”

A sneekbot hurried across an open doorway, its antenna buds tracking across the living room. An alien was standing in the middle of the big room. It wasn’t wearing an armor suit. Water trickled through cracks on the ceiling to splash on its pale skin. A Commonwealth handheld array was lying on a coffee table beside it. An optical cable was plugged into the little unit, snaking up to a compact electronic device that was fused to the bulbous end of one of the alien’s four upper stalks.

“Shit,” Morton gasped. “Where are the others? They always move in fours.” He ordered the sneekbots surrounding the house to extend their search. “What the hell is it doing?”

“One moment, I’ll switch on my suit’s psychic power booster circuit. Oh, dear, it doesn’t seem to be working. How the fuck do I know what it’s doing, you blockhead?”