“Fifteen minutes.” Whit heard the countdown voice for the first time in three quarters of an hour. Had he been so absorbed in his “tour” of planet Rainbow that he’d missed the other announcements?

He gave the Ring windows more attention. Most were as they had been earlier: static views, graphic representations of power levels and aiming points, all moving in one direction or another.

One quadrant of Whit’s display had an orange overlay, however, and several figures pulsing in red.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a pair of operators emerging from their cubicles. One seemed quite agitated, gesturing so violently that a trio of THE officers immediately appeared.

Followed by a formation of Aggregates. That was never a good sign.

“Whit!” Counselor Kate’s voice hissed in his headset. “Get back to your screen!”

Whit realized he had poked his head up like a prairie dog. He turned away from what was becoming a scuffle and tried to concentrate on his screen, especially his views of planet Rainbow, the city, its slow-moving inhabitants.

He wondered when and how this imagery had been obtained—if Dehm and Carbon-143 were telling the truth, the energy portal was something the Aggregates had never used before. Not only had they never sent themselves or military hardware across the gulf of light-years, they hadn’t sent data, either. Both were subject to the same limitations.

If so, it meant that this imagery was old . . . centuries at least. Or, if the rumors about Keanu’s age were true, millennia.

It was crazy enough to think about invading a planet—though given the Aggregates’ success in taking over a good chunk of Earth, not entirely crazy—but to do so based on information that was current when humans had yet to plant a crop of wheat . . . that was audacious.

The size of Rainbow explained the need for a massive force. (And Whit had seen one tiny window displaying what he believed to be the “order of battle,” with the “portal” opening in three different locations on the planet.)

The tour of the Rainbow city ended, and when Whit tried to click to additional images, he found himself back where he started, falling through the atmosphere.

It occurred to Whit that he might not be seeing imagery at all, but rather generated material, like a video game. Hadn’t Counselor Kate said there would be simulations? Weren’t sims just like games—?

In spite of his misgivings, both about THE enforcement methods and the nasty side effects of the Ring’s ignition, Whit couldn’t help being excited about being involved with this . . . it sure beat the work he’d been doing in Vegas.

“Five minutes.”

Time to pay attention. Everything seemed to be going fine . . . except for the orange displays in the corner of his screen. It didn’t seem to be a critical area—the windows were labeled RANGE and I-STRUCTURE and ENVIRONMENT.

Whit wished he could talk to Dehm. It was possible, he supposed, that his older friend was in one of the other cubicle stations. Without Dehm, he was stuck with Counselor Kate. “What’s all this orange?”

“Deviations from design.”

“Shouldn’t they hold until it doesn’t deviate?”

“Humans might,” Counselor Kate said. “Aggregates won’t. They have faith in their designs that we don’t.”

“Yeah, but some of this material may not be included in their design.”

“Do us both a favor and don’t tell them.”

“I’m only talking to you,” he said. He hoped.

“One minute.”

At that moment the Aggregate unit passed behind Whit. If reaching the last minute before the First Light hadn’t ramped up his heart rate, the presence of a dozen aliens would. It didn’t matter that he had grown slightly more comfortable with Carbon-143; Whit still found the Aggregates menacing.

Especially since the formation stopped, leaving at least three of the chunky creatures directly behind Whit and Counselor Kate.

“Thirty seconds.”

There were flashes from Whit’s screens . . . the mirrors making minute final adjustments. The power levels all reached the top of their various graphs. Whit realized it was silly, but he thought he could feel it, as if the entire building were throbbing and ready to explode.

“Twenty,” the voice said. “Fifteen. Ten. Systems are enabled.”

Whit wondered what it would look like? A big flash? Or would it just be invisible—?

It was a flash, so fast and so bright that it overwhelmed the camera filters and made Whit blink.

A new window opened on Whit’s screen showing a ridiculously large cone with rippling edges rising over the desert landscape. Wider and taller and taller and wider, as if it reached to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Still transparent, the edges solidified . . . and then, for an instant, Whit could have sworn he saw dark space inside the cone, and the edge of a planet that could have been Rainbow.

Then there was another flash, less intense but no less startling, this one from the upper left-side screens—the orange ones were now bright red.

The cone collapsed, so quickly and dramatically that Whit hunched, as if he expected a structure as tall as ten mountains to land on his head.

Don’t be stupid! he thought. The cone was just an energy field. Though God only knew what particles and rays it threw off as it spun up.

The control center was absolutely quiet, surprising Whit. Where were the alarms, the hooting horns? Because this was clearly very bad news.

No one seemed to be moving, either, not even the Aggregate formation. It was as if everyone were either staring at a screen in numbed shock, or receiving data downloads in a similar state.

Finally he heard: “First Light plus fifteen seconds,” from the calm and apparently artificial control center voice. “System shutdown.”

Whit loved euphemisms. He would have called the event an “utter failure.”

“This is bad,” Counselor Kate said, the first truly human thing Whit could recall her saying.

“What happened?”

“What do you think? Something failed and the whole thing crashed!”

“System crash, you mean,” Whit said. “It looks as though most of the hardware is still whole.” It appeared that way in the windows on the right-hand side of his screen, though it was possible they were screen captures and hadn’t been updated, that entire pieces of the massive complex lay in ruins.

“No, I’m seeing a lot of damage to the projectors at segment 270.” Whatever that was, likely some portion of the Ring.

“What do you think happened?”

“Really? Somebody ignored a bunch of warnings and went ahead with the test.”

“Well, it wasn’t me,” Whit said, regretting his words the moment he said them. You get nervous, you make dumb jokes.

Fortunately, Counselor Kate was too upset to notice. He heard her speaking to others, likely her two THE comrades.

“Operators,” the countdown voice said, “please secure all data.”

“What does that mean?” Whit said.

Counselor Kate was now standing behind him, reaching over his shoulder to his keyboard. “Freeze your screen so every operation can be analyzed. Like this.”

While Whit appreciated the assistance—he had no idea how to “secure all data”—he was concerned that a thorough review would expose his snooping into the invasion of Rainbow world.

Given the complexity of the Ring system, and his peripheral role as a mere observer, it wasn’t too likely he would be examined.

Or so he told himself. He could see several silver linings in this dark cloud for the Aggregates.

First, the “invasion” appeared to be off.

Second, North America and most of Earth were spared for a while yet.

The downside, of course, was that a delay still left the Aggregates in charge of Earth.

Now there was general motion in the control center. The nearest Aggregate formation stirred to life, moving in groups of three to block the aisles.