“Unchanged,” Horus said sadly, and Hatcher closed his eyes in pain.

It had been terrible enough for Isaiah to preside over the slaughter of his crews, but Brisbane had finished him. Now he simply sat in his small room, staring at the pictures of his wife and children.

His friends knew how magnificently he’d fought, rallying his battered ships again and again; he knew only that he hadn’t been good enough. That he’d let the Achuultani murder his family, and that most of the crews who’d fought for him with such supreme gallantry had also died. So they had, and too many of the survivors were like Isaiah—burned out, dead inside, hating themselves for being less than gods in the hour of their world’s extremity.

Yet there were the others, Hatcher reminded himself. The ones like Horus, who’d assumed Isaiah’s duties when he collapsed. Like Adrienne Robbins, the senior surviving parasite skipper, who’d refused a direct order to take her damaged ship out of action. Like Vassily and Geb, who’d somehow risen above themselves to perform impossible tasks. Like the bone-weary crews of the ODCs and PDCs who fought on day after endless, hopeless day, and the fighter crews who went out again and again, and came back in ever fewer numbers.

And, he thought, the people like Tsien Tao-ling, those very rare men and women who simply had no breaking point … and thank God for them.

Of the Supreme Chiefs of Staff, Singhman and Ki had been killed … and so had Hawter, Hatcher thought sadly. Tama Hideoshi had taken over all that remained of Fighter Command, but Vassily was chained to Antarctica, Frederick Amesbury was working himself into his own grave in Plotting, trying desperately to keep tabs on the outer system through his Achuultani-crippled arrays, and Chiang Chien-su couldn’t possibly be spared from his heartbreaking responsibility for Civil Defense. So even with Horus taking over the remnants of Hawter’s warships and ODCs, Hatcher had been forced to hand the entire planet-side defense net over to Tsien while he himself concentrated on finding a way to keep the Achuultani from destroying Earth.

But he was a general, not a wizard.

“We’ve had it, Horus.” He watched the old Imperial carefully, but the governor didn’t even flinch. “We’re just kicking and scratching on the way to the gallows. I don’t see how Vassily can keep the tap up another two weeks.”

“Should we stop kicking and scratching, then?” The question came out with a ghost of a smile, and Hatcher smiled back.

“Hell no. I just needed to say it to someone before I go back and start kicking again. Even if they take us out, we can make sure there are less of them for the next world on their list.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Horus squeezed the bridge of his nose wearily. “Should we tell the civilians?”

“Better not,” Hatcher sighed. “I’m not really scared of a panic, but I don’t see any reason to frighten them any worse than they already are.”

“Agreed.”

Horus rose and walked slowly to his office’s glass wall. The Colorado night was ripped by solid sheets of lightning as the outraged atmosphere gave up some of the violence it had been made to absorb, and a solid, unending roll of thunder shook the glass. Lightning and snow, he thought; crashing thunder and blizzards. Too much vaporized sea water, too many cubic kilometers of steam. The planetary albedo had shifted, more sunlight was reflected, and the temperature had dropped. There was no telling how much further it would go … and thank the Maker General Chiang had stockpiled food so fanatically, for the world’s crops were gone. But at least this one was turning to rain. Freezing cold rain, but rain.

And they were still alive, he told himself as Hatcher stood silently to leave. Alive. Yet that, too, would change. Gerald was right. They were losing it, and something deep inside him wanted to curl up and get the dying finished. But he couldn’t do that.

“Gerald,” his soft voice stopped Hatcher at the door, and Horus turned his eyes from the storm to meet the general’s. “In case we don’t get a chance to talk again, thank you.”

The Hoof of Tarhish pawed the vacuum. Not even the Aku’Ultan could accelerate such masses with a snap of the fingers, but its speed had grown. Only a few twelves of tiao per segment, at first, then more. And more. More!

Now Vindicator rode the mighty projectile’s flank, joined with his brothers in a solid phalanx to guard their weapon.

They must be seen soon, but the Hoof’s defenses were strong, and the nest-killers could not even range accurately upon it without first blasting aside the half-twelve of great twelves of scouts which remained. They would defend the Hoof with their own deaths and clear a way through what remained of the nest-killers’ defenses, for they were Protectors.

“Oh my God.”

Sir Frederick Amesbury’s Plotting teams were going berserk trying to analyze the Achuultani’s current maneuvers, for there was no sane reason for them to be clustered that way on a course like that. But something about the whisper cut through the weary, frantic background hum, and he turned to Major Joanna Osgood, his senior watch officer.

“What is it, Major?” But her mahogany face was frozen and she did not answer. He touched her shoulder. “Jo?”

Major Osgood shook herself.

“I found the answer, sir,” she said. “Iapetus.”

Her Caribbean accent’s flattened calm frightened Amesbury, for he knew what produced that tone. There was a realm beyond fear, for when no hope remained there was no reason to fear.

“Explain, Major,” he said gently.

“I finally managed to hyper an array out-system and got a look at Saturn, sir.” She met the general’s gaze calmly. “Iapetus isn’t there anymore.”

“It’s true, Ger.” Amesbury’s weary face looked back from Hatcher’s com screen. “It took some time to get a probe near enough to burn through their ships’ energy emissions and confirm it, but we found it right enough. Dead center in their formation: Iapetus—the eighth moon of Saturn.”

“I see.” Hatcher wanted to curse, to revile God for letting this happen, but there was no point, and his voice was soft. “How bad is it?”

“It’s the end, unless we can stop the bloody thing. This is no asteroid, Ger—it’s a bleeding moon. Six times the mass of Ceres.”

“Moving how fast?”

“Fast enough to see us off,” Amesbury replied grimly. “They could have done that simply by dropping it into Sol’s gravity well and letting it fall ‘downhill’ to us, but we’d’ve had too much time. They’ve put shields on it, but if we could pop a few hyper missiles through them, we might be able to blow the bugger apart before it reaches us. That’s why they’re bringing it in under power; they don’t want to expose it to our fire any longer than they have to.

“Their drives are much slower than ours are, but they’ve got the ruddy gravity well to work with, too. I don’t know how they did it—even if they hadn’t been picking off our sensor arrays, we were watching the asteroids, not the outer-system moons—but I reckon they started out with a very low initial acceleration. Only they’re coming from Saturn, Ger. I don’t know when they actually started, but we’re just past opposition, which means we’re over one-and-a-half billion kilometers apart on a straight line. But they’re not on a straight-line course … and they’ve been accelerating all the way.

“They’re coming at us at upwards of five hundred kilometers per second—seven times faster than a ‘fast’ meteorite. I haven’t bothered to calculate how many trillions of megatons that equates to, because it doesn’t matter. That moon will punch through our shield like a bullet through butter, and they’ll reach us in about six days. That’s how long we’ve got to stop them.”