Then there was the array of mirrors that would catch the initial burst of energy and shape it. There were hundreds of them—a figure Whit knew as a number, but something quite different as an experience. He felt them all as petals of a gigantic silvery flower, each quivering in a gentle breeze.

In another window was the glory of the portal itself, still a rotating, vibrating wire frame (its shape responded to minute shifts in the aiming of the mirrors) thousands of meters tall . . . like a ghostly sun hovering over the Arizona desert.

He had access to the strike force, too, the rows and rows of vehicles poised to roll through the portal the instant it opened.

And they would be arriving on some other planet, an idea Whit still found unlikely.

Wait, here was a window that showed the target planet!

“Counselor Kate,” he said, a bit tentatively. Who else would be listening?

“Yes, Whit.”

“Is there some window or program I should be working in?”

“Not today. This is your orientation. We anticipate adjustments after First Light and will be conducting daily sims until launch. Your job is to get to know what’s in those windows, because you might wind up working in any one of them.”

Much as Whit disliked the sound of daily sims, especially with the end result being the irradiation of Free Nation U.S., he loved being given permission to roam freely.

He had always heard that the Aggregate networks had everything you could possibly want to know. It was the Internet plus the undernet plus whatever the aliens knew. And once you had access, you had total access.

Granted, humans would be unable to understand much of what they would find . . . but that still left a considerable amount of data, such as that dealing with humans and what happened to them.

Like Whit’s parents.

Not just yet, though. Better to see what exactly is going on—

“Sixty minutes,” the countdown lady said, seemingly whispering right inside his head.

Excellent. As the count progressed, Whit glanced at the operational windows on his screen only long enough to be sure things were still going forward.

The rest of the hour was a glorious dive into a pool of wonder . . . the Aggregate data on the world they planned to invade.

The only drawback was that, unlike other data screens at Site A, which were optimized for human use, specifically human users of English with Arabic numerals, the material on the target world retained Aggregate marking and terminology.

Nevertheless, images needed no captions. And there were no obvious limits to access.

As Whit had come to expect, the material was displayed like a tree, starting with an image of the world itself . . . a sphere with multicolored horizontal bands (red and orange at the poles, becoming bright blue at its equator) and a series of rings around its equator. The planet seemed large even though Whit could not read the scalar notations and saw nothing to compare it to. Maybe it was the resemblance to Jupiter or Saturn.

Interesting: Where Saturn’s rings, seen close up, were clearly made of billions of fragments of ice and rock, a quick zoom in showed that the fragments in this world’s rings were uniform cubes. Of what? Whit wondered. Or why?

As the view shifted, Whit saw another startling image of structures beyond the rings . . . at least three moons, all in an orbit that had the same inclination, an obvious sign of artificial placement.

The view swooped close to one of the moons, revealing gridlike structures on a surface that resembled, in many places, a cue ball. It reminded Whit of images of Keanu taken by the departing Destiny astronauts back in 2019 as encrusted soil and ice on the NEO’s surface boiled off and revealed similar smooth material below. Were these distant moons cousins of Keanu? Was he seeing starships under construction?

It was impressive and even terrifying to think that the inhabitants of this planet had the desire and ability to move and reshape rings and moons.

For that matter, what was this planet’s name? Every window bore the same notation, but in Aggregate lettering and figures. He would have loved to have just that single term translated, though it was entirely possible, given the Aggregates, that their designation for the target world required a string of sixty-odd figures.

Whit decided to just think of it as “Rainbow,” since the progression of its banding seemed to match up with the visible spectrum seen in a rainbow.

Where was Rainbow? Almost certainly very far away. Whit wondered if the planet was a relatively close neighbor of Earth’s, possibly circling Alpha Centauri or some star like that. Probably not. A starship like Keanu could make the voyage from Alpha Centauri to Earth. A rational intelligence would choose that mode over the energy portal, if said energy portal left your departure planet a smoking ruin. . . .

But who ever said the Aggregates were rational? By human standards?

And who lived there? Were its inhabitants machinelike bugs similar to the Aggregates? Or something entirely different?

Maybe this was the home of the Sentries or the Skyphoi, some of the other aliens inhabiting Keanu. Either of them could have been Aggregate enemies.

Or humanoids?

So far Whit had to be satisfied with aerial views, satellite imagery showing broad rivers and immense forests, the usual mountains and plains. The undeveloped areas, if that was what they were, looked much like those of planet Earth, allowing for an unusual color tint (everything seemed more purple than green, though that might have been the Aggregate filtering, not true color). Whit guessed that undeveloped landscapes looked pretty much the same everywhere.

(It also seemed that Rainbow was prone to storms. Every relatively close image had a wall of menacing thunderclouds on the horizon. Wider angles had swirling cyclonic structures in their hearts.)

There were cityscapes, too, though, and these were something else . . . one of them covered an entire continent. Whit had seen images of urban sprawl from space, but human cities had winding rivers and freeways and obvious downtowns and parks and twisty streets.

Rainbow’s giant cities were like . . . well, they reminded him of circuit boards in their angularity and their utter lack of any apparently organic life.

Of course, he was still seeing everything from a great height. He blinked to see if there were other windows or tools—

Oh, much better. Suddenly Whit was falling very fast, like a passenger on a meteoroid or, more likely, some kind of space probe. Given the way the ground was rushing toward him, not a probe expected to be returned.

The image went black.

Whit clicked: Here was another view, from a more stable platform. Now he was flying above a purple Rainbow forest, thunderclouds ahead of him and likely making the ride a bumpy one (the imagery seemed to vibrate).

It was not just a visual experience: Whit could feel stinging wintry wind on his face, hear air rushing past his ears, smell a mossy fragrance so thick it almost choked him.

He spied a formation in the distant mountains . . . a giant dish embedded in a valley with a tall spike of some kind pointing skyward.

That image died abruptly, too.

A new one . . . now Whit skimmed across a body of water, then low tidal land as he approached a city. Unlike a human habitation, there were no suburbs, no gradual transition from open field to town, just an abrupt here you are, flying over blocky golden towers. The wind dropped; he heard a low, rumbling hum; he smelled smoke.

He was swooping low now, barely skirting the tops of the Rainbow buildings. (And unlike human buildings, roofs here seemed to be designed with as much care as the fronts. They probably had some function.)

Suddenly his platform, probably some kind of remotely piloted spycraft, made an abrupt turn and dive . . . now Whit could see creatures in the “streets,” and miracle of miracles, they were humanoid, though slow moving—