He then enrolled Eric in Kunming University. There, with Kaytennae's participation, a professor of neurological physiology, and another in pseudo-organics, tailored a curriculum for the young man. This put him close to his military sponsor, and far from his parents, who were relieved if uneasy about their son's education being financed by the government.

His scholastic performance proved exemplary, and the colonel was soon satisfied that the young man's potential was as good as he'd hoped. Kaytennae then approached a wealthy manufacturer he'd cultivated, and got him to finance several scholarships. From the ranks of games enthusiasts, he'd already recruited several youths to fill those scholarships. Because Eric Padilla would need skilled collaborators and assistants.

At age thirty-seven, Doctor Eric Padilla personally and successfully removed the living central nervous system-the CNS-of one Carlos O'Brien. O'Brien was a thirty-year-old ex-construction worker who'd lost both arms and his eyesight in an explosion. Removed and transferred his CNS live, into a bioelectronic interface unit (BEIU, or "bottle") where it underwent hormonal detraumatization. Then he successfully installed the "activated" bottle into a newly designed prototype infantry combat servo. When fitted with the activated bottle, the servo provided a ruggedly formidable, prototype fighting machine.

This epochal operation was carried out with great care for secrecy. For the human rights movement had gone full circle, and begun to eat its own tail: to protect human rights, it undertook to deny them.

Normally Padilla was calm, unflappable, but he found the operation nerve-wracking. Not because of any possible leak and criminal prosecution; he gave that scenario almost no attention. But because neither he nor anyone else had ever performed such an operation on a live human being, and no one knew with certainty what the result would be. Of necessity, the servo's inputs to the overall sensorium were extremely complex, and though analogous, were quite unlike any a human CNS had experienced before. And especially troublesome, the procedure was not reversible. The human core of the cyborg could not be put back in its original body.

To function effectively for an extended period, the CNS requires an integrated set of inputs from its new body. Inputs producing a broad spectrum of information and responses that include, among other things, esthetics, orientation, discomfort, even a modified sense of pain. In fact, pretty much the same spectrum provided by human bodies. Padilla and his collaborators had spent a great deal of time and care in designing, testing, and fine-tuning the servo's quasi-organic nervous system, along with the manifold neural connections of the bioelectronic interface.

But the tests had used devices, not the human brain. There was no way Padilla could know, really know, how Carlos O'Brien would find life as a cyborg.

That had been 157 years before the capture of Tagus Cove. Carlos O'Brien had wakened to life as a cyborg and found it mainly interesting, not traumatic. Certainly it was far better than his brief experience without arms or vision. Also it gave him a job-helping test the prototype. And the series of prototypes that followed, for if O'Brien could never wear a human body again, the bottle that held his CNS could be removed and installed in other servos. The more sensitive procedure had been installing the CNS into the bioelectronic interface unit, attaching pseudo-organic neuroconnectors to biological nerves.

Then someone blew the whistle. The Respect Movement was outraged, and bottling was made illegal. And of course, careers were ruined, among them Eric Padilla's.

Eventually the Wyzhnyny arrived in the fringe of Commonwealth space, Henry Morgan's savanted message reached Kunming, and the news galvanized the Commonwealth. (Changing it forever, though just then no one gave "forever" much attention.) At that time, five manned servos existed, all secret. Five actual manned servos, but many virtual, generated in the computers that drove the Commonwealth military's virtual reality trainers.

Five manned servos, none of them military. That would quickly change. The Office of Industrial Mobilization would see to it.

Maritimus

David MacDonald sat at the sun-deck table, wearing shorts and Sunsafe, and reading a task report from Submersible 4. From their office, his wife's voice interrupted, loud and agitated. "David!"

Afterward it seemed to him he should have known, given the reports from Morgan the Pirate and Gem of the Prophet. But his immediate thought was that she'd cut herself, badly. In an instant he was on his feet and through the door. "What is it?"

"It's happened." Her agitation was gone now, leaving anger and chagrin. She pointed at the wall screen. "The hyperspace emergence detector just kicked in. There are 16,212 blips on the screen."

He turned and stared. A vast display of icons-mostly of large ships-was spread across a perspective representation of the Maritimus System.* A footer gave the number. Briefly he stared. "Good God," he muttered, then shook his head. "At least we're prepared for them." Most personnel, and all children but one, had been evacuated to Terra. Those who'd stayed had a very simple plan: If invaders arrive, get the hell out of F-space.

He turned to his wife. Yukiko Alegria Gavaldon-all five feet three inches and 115 muscular pounds of her-stood with hands on hips, face grim. They had eight years of work and dreams invested in Maritimus. His fingers tapped instructions on a key pad, and a klaxon began to blare over the master comm system, both on Home Base and at work locations-a sound that could waken the dead. He gave it ten seconds before switching it off and speaking into the microphone: "All personnel, this is Mac. All personnel, this is Mac. This is not a drill; repeat, not a drill. We've got sixteen thousand bogies in the fringe. That's sixteen thousand bogies. Carry out Plan 1-A promptly. Carry out Plan 1-A promptly." He gave them another five-second shot of the klaxon, then repeated his announcement, followed by a roll call.

The fourteen humans who'd remained on Maritimus had told themselves the invaders might miss the system. But they'd retained the hyperspace vessel Cousteau, moving it to a cave that opened onto the sea, forty-one miles up the coast from Home Base. They'd also restricted their studies to a travel radius of two hours from Cave Bay, and kept their radios on at all times. Thus almost everyone responded as he read off their names. The two who didn't were accounted for. There were no questions.

His last order was to Dennis Bertrand: to message Terra of the invaders' arrival. The project's communication savant and her attendant lived aboard the Cousteau.

With roll call completed, Yukiko went to the spacious bedroom she shared with her husband. They kept partly packed bags in the closet; filling them would take only a few minutes. David stepped back onto the sun deck to grab his reader from the table, then went to help her.

First they finished packing. Then, Yukiko ran a computer check on the status of the computer-destruct systems at the various locations. The Emergency War Directorate on Terra didn't want the invaders laying hands on a Commonwealth database. Not that it was likely, if the invaders' penchant for indiscriminate destruction was as bad as reported. The checkout was a stepwise procedure, requiring that she confirm each step. She considered the human confirmation needless, but did it as prescribed.

When she'd finished, David rechecked all manned locations. Everyone was to meet at Cave Base, aboard the Cousteau. The Talacogons had already left North Bay, and the Mellstads had left Cleaver Station. Ngozi and Hogan were about to leave Atoll Station. At Home Base, Marcel Kwong was loading his scooter just two hundred yards up the inlet from the MacDonalds. His wife Jeanne had just arrived in a jet boat, from an aborted run to service plankton traps. They'd leave within ten minutes.