The troopers had loaded out with their own assault rifles, but many of them packed other weaponry as well. Considering that things had just gotten a little nastier up here in the House of the Sun, didn't it make sense to pack along anything that might even up the score for me?

It was tough to overcome my queasiness, but I managed to force myself close enough to the broken-backed trooper to see what he was packing. Lots of hand grenades, I noticed, but I left those well alone. (I'd never been trained in their use, and to tell the truth, "personal explosives" scared the living drek out of me. I found it much too easy to imagine pulling the pin and then panicking… and throwing the pin instead of the grenade. Boom.)

There was something that looked more my speed, however. In a specialized holster on his right side, he was packing something that looked like the world's biggest-bore pistol. I pulled it out and turned it over and over in my hands. It was a grenade-launcher pistol; what the frag else could it be? Behind the pistol grip was a magazine, and the digital display on the weapon's mainframe told me I had six rounds ready to fire. Wiz. I made damn sure the safety was on, before cramming it under a strap of my assault vest. I picked up another magazine of grenades and shoved that deep into a pocket. Then I jogged down the ramp after Akaku'akanene…

And out into the middle of some beetle-head's worst chip-trip. Above me the black clouds roiled like liquid, churned by a hot, dry wind that tugged at my hair and clothing like invisible hands. Shattered rock shifted and rolled under my feet as I tried to keep my balance. The entire volcano seemed to thrum with a deep, almost subliminal vibration. My bowels cramped, and it was all I could do not to drek myself. Not from fear-frag, sure I was afraid, but that wasn't it; it was like the sound itself was churning my guts into a pit of diarrhea.

The Merlin had bellied in under the skirts of a hundred-meter-tall cinder cone. Boulders ranging from dishwasher-size to bigger than houses dotted the sloping ground. The shifting light that was Project Sunfire was down there- maybe half a klick away, down a steep scree slope, in the blackened and charred bottom of a secondary crater. The great fan of light-the nimbus of glowing air-towered up above me, reflecting off the underside of the rolling clouds. At its base amongst the lifeless points of arc light, I could see figures moving.

Half a klick-that's 500 meters, a long way to make out details. But maybe there was something in the air up here- magical or mundane, I couldn't know-that added clarity. The moving figures were tiny, but still I could make out some features. They were dancing, for one thing, an even dozen of them, stamping and gyrating, as they pranced in a great circle around the center of that unnatural, liquid light. They were fragging near naked, men and women alike wearing nothing but loincloths and headpieces of woven grass on their brows. The kahunas of Project Sunfire.

A dozen meters to my right, Pohaku and Kono were standing like statues, staring down at the spectacle in dumbstruck amazement. I started over toward them, picking up my pace when I saw the sergeant approach Pohaku. I made it over there in time to hear the sergeant ask, "What are our orders?"

"Stop that" I fragging near yelled, pointing down the slope toward the dance and the light. "I don't care how the frag you do it, but do it, karimasu-ka?"

The sergeant's face became a stone mask, and he turned toward Pohaku, as if I didn't even exist.

I grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him back to face me, using my left hand, the cyberarm with the enhanced strength. Hardened soldier or not, by God he turned. "Listen to me, slot!" I screamed in his face. "Your orders are to stop… that! Orders from the fucking Ali'i, do you hear me?" I fumbled in my pocket and hauled out the deputy's badge Ho had given me at our first meeting. "See this?" I bellowed, holding it up so close to his face that his eyes crossed. "From the fucking Ali'i, yah? Now, do it!"

The sergeant did what just about every military type ever does if someone screams at him loud enough and with enough confidence. He saluted me, right out of the textbook. He spun on his heel and dog-trotted off, yelling orders in Hawai'ian to his troops.

I could feel the hatred coming off Pohaku in fragging waves, but at the moment I couldn't have cared less about his bruised ego. I turned my back on him and ran over to where Akaku'akanene was staring down into the secondary crater. "What's happening down there?" I demanded. "What the hell are they doing?"

Under the weird witch-light in the air, her face looked like a corpse. "They're weakening the veil," she told me, her voice a ghastly whisper. "Preparing to draw it back."

"How long? How far along are they?"

"Far," she answered simply.

"Then we'd better be fragging moving, hadn't we?" I started jogging down that scree slope, starting the 500-meter trek to where the Dance was going on. (What the frag are you going to do when you get there? part of my brain asked. Shut the frag up! another part explained politely.) Around me, I could see the troopers heading down the hill, too. Kono and Akaku'akanene were starting down after me. Pohaku was still standing in the shadow of the downed Merlin, frozen in indecision. Well, fuck him if he couldn't take a joke. I ran on, quickly losing ground to the trained and fit troopers.

That's when the spirits hit us again-maybe the same ones that had downed the Merlin, maybe a different bunch. They hurtled down on us from above, like Thor shots-fire, and wind, and water, and Christ-knows-what-else. They hit the troopers first, the young, hardened men and women who'd easily opened the distance between themselves and the wheezing, out-of-shape erstwhile PI who was trying to keep up with them. Some of the soldiers saw the spirits coming, had enough time to get their weapons up and fire them. Most didn't. Not that it made any difference at all. Bursts of tracer fire, grenades, whatever-everything just went straight through the attacking spirits as if they weren't even there. And then the spirits were among the troopers, and the carnage began.

I turned back and screamed over my shoulder, "Akaku'akanene! Stop them!"

The bird-boned shaman stopped in her tracks, closed her eyes and began to sing. But it was too late for the troopers. They were all dead, or the next worst thing to it, before she even got the first notes of her croaking song out of her throat. Below me some of the spirits were still disporting themselves with the bodies of their victims-rending them into little pieces, carrying them high into the air and dropping them onto the rocks below, or scouring them with fire and cooking off their ammunition. As I watched, frozen in horror, some of the spirits seemed to notice me and the others for the first time. Breaking off from their diversions with the corpses, they hurtled up the scree slope toward us.

I had my own assault rifle off my shoulder as they came, but I didn't even bother touching the trigger. I was dead when those spirits reached me.

They didn't reach me, of course. They broke off their direct trajectories, soaring up into the sky like planes pulling out of power dives at the last instant before slamming into a previously unseen obstacle. My ears were filled with inhuman screams and howls-the spirits' anger and frustration at being blocked from their prey. Behind me I saw that Kono and Pohaku were moving in nice and close to Akaku'akanene, and I figured that they had the right idea. Whatever the Nene shaman was doing, I didn't want to test its range.

Overhead, the spirits were plunging down from the sky again, but before they could reach us they pulled out of their dives once more. Within seconds, we had a dozen of more of the fragging things swirling and orbiting around us, filling the air with their shrieks. At no point did they come closer than about fifteen meters from Akaku'akanene, and I belatedly realized they were displaying the same sort of approach-avoidance reaction as the spirits I'd seen circling the distant Dance.