The team watched a schematic representation of the process on their personal view screens, direct exposure being out of the question. Murayama, the creator of the imploder that sucked up the plasma in the next phase, nodded briefly as the amorphous energy cloud was instantly metacompressed by explosive magnetic rams.

The process temperature soared by a factor of 1019, reaching the fabled Planck's constant as the quark-gluon bubble imploded to a sphere with a density of ten trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion kilograms per cubic meter. Indeed, it was so dense that Pope and his crew had just created the first synthetic wormhole, an insanely impressive achievement, worthy of Nobels for all.

But it was only a job half done. Pope felt his heart beginning to race as his own unique contribution came online, a Casimir Inflator that set the wormhole spinning at a fractionally sublight speed before firing an array of high-powered lasers into its maw, to push the throat out before it could collapse inward.

"Firing up the disco ball!" Morley called out as a ring of perfectly reflective mirrors began to rotate at two million rpm. Two hundred and thirty meters away dozens of beams of coherent light skewered into the mirrors, striking them at a shallow angle that reflected the negative beam pulses half a degree away from their paired positives. The negatives were shunted down a cavity resonator and into the mouth of the wormhole. The nanoscale hole sucked in the lasers, as expected. It inflated, also as expected.

To this point everything had gone as predicted.

And then the process went native, swallowing the chamber that was meant to contain it, sucking in energy like Poe's maelstrom and "spaghettifying" the very matter that had given it birth, stretching and eating the world all around. Inflation took place instantaneously, the gross tonnage of the Nagoya being drawn into the throat like taffy, snuffing out the lives of the only people who possessed any chance of reversing the process, or even explaining it.

Manning Pope died, smiling and unaware.

Pope's wormhole, which should have stabilized at three microns in diameter, instead blew out into a swirling lens of elemental colors fifteen thousand meters across before dissipating just as quickly. In that brief period, however, it punched through the veil separating two universes.

"Some people," muttered Rachel Nguyen, "really get the shit end of the stick."

She was staring at a flexipad image showing a CNN report out of the Indonesian Exclusion Zone. A woman's yellowed eyes burned back at her from within a sunken, malnourished face, imploring her to do something, anything, to save her children from famine and disease. But she and they were almost certainly two years' dead by now.

Rachel thumbed the corner of the screen, shutting down the link and pushing the thin pad across the scarred mess table, out of reach and beyond temptation. The lights in the mess flickered briefly, then returned to normal a few moments later.

She couldn't justify putting off her thesis any longer. The boss had ordered her to catch some sleep but she just couldn't, not with a deadline coming. So she drained the last of her coffee and considered hassling the cook for one of the muffins she could smell baking in the galley.

No, that would probably cost her ten minutes in conversation, and definitely an extra quarter hour in the gym. Cooky had a wicked way with a mixing spoon. Glancing up, she nodded to a lone sergeant a few tables away, who caught her eye as he savaged an impossibly large plate of sausages. Rachel quickly ducked her head back to her notes, breaking eye contact, but she needn't have worried. The old soldier only had eyes for his food.

The mess lights guttered again. She had time to wonder why before the world turned black, and she disappeared forever.

Colonel J. Lonesome Jones willingly gave in to temptation and enjoyed a leftover breakfast muffin with his espresso. At the age of forty-three, the boss hog of the Eighty-second MEU boasted a middleweight boxer's physique, a shaved head he could forge horseshoes on, and an air of casual menace he had learned to turn on and off at will-a skill he had perfected as a kid in the Chicago projects.

Yeah, he could have a goddamn muffin if he felt like one.

As he lingered over the last minutes of a short break in the officers' mess of USS Kandahar, Jones watched an immensely satisfying flexipad vid of his beloved Bulls stomping the shit out of the hopelessly outclassed Knicks. These few minutes of real life he allowed himself each day were sacrosanct.

So it was that two young marine officers who entered the mess made their way as quietly as possible to the far side of the room. There they placed an order with the steward for a round of burgers and fries. They filled mugs of standard-issue instant coffee from a quietly bubbling urn, lest the hissing of the espresso machine distract the old man and lead to an unwelcome round of ferocious ass-chewage. Second Lieutenants Henry Chen and Biff Hannon were keenly aware of the colonel's reputation, both of them from firsthand experience.

Consequently both men nibbled quietly at their burgers like communion wafers, all the while maintaining a very low profile.

Jones was aware of them but didn't attend to their presence until he had disposed of the sports downloads, the local Chicago news, and the global updates, in that order. When his free time was up he stood, stretched, and slipped into character.

"Good morning gentlemen," he purred, turning on his two officers and frowning at their fatty meals. "You're training with the SAS again today?"

They both nodded. "Sir."

"Well, I hope you're not going to allow those sneaky bastards to kick your asses quite so badly this time."

Both men bristled.

"We've worked up a few surprises, Colonel," Chen quickly assured him.

"Surprises? That's good," Jones said, deadpanning the pair. "Because I was very disappointed that anyone could get the better of one of my units, get close enough in fact to light up the farts of the officer in charge."

The color drained out of their faces as they regarded his fixed, humorless stare. Jones paused without speaking, knowing his silence would be infinitely more effective. Eventually, a blushing Lieutenant Hannon stammered something about not letting it happen again. Jones let his stone face rest on the young officer for a moment, then softened it some. Just a touch.

"But it will, son," he said. "It'll happen again today. They'll come upon you no matter what snares you lay in their path, and they'll have their evil way with you. Do you know why?"

Neither man spoke. They simply shook their heads.

As Jones leaned in toward his young charges, the lights in the room dipped for a moment. Damn, almost like I staged it, he thought.

"They'll make you their bitches because they can," he said softly. "I've served with some of those men. They're older than you in ways you can't even imagine. They've fought their whole lives. They've been making war while you have merely been preparing for war, pretending at war."

The lights surged up to full power again and he leaned back, rolling with the moment. "I don't really expect you to win today, gentlemen," he continued, outwardly somber. "You'd make your old man very happy if you did, of course. But I do expect you to improve. Dramatically. I expect you to learn from your training. And I expect that training to be carried out as though you are at war-and not just pretending. Because at war is where we may be, very soon."