"Impossible!" Colonel Archer muttered.

"I think so, too, Sir-but there they are."

"Well, they can't be a hostile launch. Not coming in from that far out," Archer said to himself. "What's their exact location, Sergeant?"

"Longitude twenty-one north, latitude one-five-five west, altitude nine-six miles and still dropping. They're out over the Pacific. Looks like they'll cross central Mexico on a rough heading of one-six-oh magnetic, but they're pulling a little further north. Course is pretty irregular, Sir, but they're slowing. They were pulling over seventeen thousand knots when we first picked them up-they're down to just over seven thousand now."

"What?"

"That's what it says here, Sir ... and that means they've lost over ten thousand knots in the last four minutes. And look-look at that, Sir! See that little bastard jink around?"

For once, Colonel Archer evinced no desire to complain about Master Sergeant Slocum's language. He was not only a technician, but a highly experienced jet jockey, and he had never-never!-heard of anything, reentry vehicle or aircraft, which could pull a ninety-degree turn at such speeds. He reached for the phone that linked him to the duty watch battle staff, his eyes never leaving the impossible display.

"General Goldmann? Colonel Archer. I've got something very strange on my scopes down here, Sir."

The squadron commander had no name. He had never possessed one, nor had he needed it. He was a tool to his creators, not a person, and one did not waste names upon tools. Indeed, the Shirmaksu had never even dignified his kind with a label. That had been left for humanity, and they called him Troll.

His fighter had no instruments. He was part of the fleet, deadly craft, merged with it as he merged with all the manifold devices of death he had been designed to manage so well. He needed no readouts to track the single, persistent human interceptor which clung to the rear of his formation like Death incarnate. The fighter which had destroyed ten of his own squadron. The last human fighter in the galaxy, in a sense. The one which had stubbornly refused to die for over three Terran weeks.

He was a thing of circuits and servomotors. Of chill alloy and electromechanical visual receptors. His body's veins carried no blood, for it had no veins. There was only the smooth, cool flow of power and the ever-renewed nutrient bath which fed his sole organic component.

Yet he was no stranger to emotion, this Troll. His kind knew the sustaining ferocity of hate, and it nurtured them well. Hate for their creators, who saw them only as disposable, expendable mechanisms. Hate for the humans they had been created to destroy. Hate for themselves, and the destiny which pitted them against humanity in the service of the Shirmaksu.

And at this moment, more than any other entity in the galaxy, the Troll commander hated the pilot who dogged his wake.

He knew what sort of human rode behind those guns and missiles. He had suspected from the first, when he noted the elegance with which that fighter flew and the deadly quick reactions which guided it. It could only be one of the cralkhi, the humans his masters had inadvertently created for their own downfall. Only a cralkhi could have evaded his own tireless pilots so long, clung so close, destroyed every fighter he'd been allowed to detach against it. Only a cralkhi ...

And there was a certain bitter amusement in that, for the beings his squadron fought to protect were responsible for the very symbiote which enabled their enemy to threaten them. Deep inside, the Troll envied the cralkhi its freedom to strike at their mutual creators, for that was the one forever unattainable freedom for which the Troll longed with all the living passion trapped within his mechanical shell.

The first shockwaves screamed past his frontal drive field as his masters dipped into the atmosphere of the planet they had come to murder, and the hate within him cursed his Shirmaksu commander for refusing to let him take his remaining fighters back to overwhelm their single pursuer. But he could afford to wait. The cralkhi would come to him soon. It could not delay much longer. It could not afford to let the Shirmaksu tender slip from its grasp ...

... not if it wanted this planet to live.

Desperation clawed at Colonel Ludmilla Leonovna. She was so tired. Not with physical weariness, but with accumulated mental fatigue. She'd drawn ruthlessly upon her symbiote, knowing the price she must pay-if she survived-for the demands she made. She had no choice, yet there was a limit even to her vitality, and it was nearing. If the Trolls ahead of her ran an analysis of her maneuvers, they couldn't miss her increasing sloppiness. The delay creeping into her responses was minute, so tiny no human would have noted it, but the computers would see it.

She forced the thought aside, concentrating on her task. The pursuit had snaked its way deep into the Sol system. Fighter multi-dees were weaker than those of starships, but they had far lower Frankel Limits in partial compensation, and the Kangas had fled madly, weaving up and down the alpha and beta bands to evade her. She'd long since stopped thinking about the strain on her onboard systems. Her life support had almost a full week still on its clock, but her drive had never been designed to run so long at such ruinous power, nor had her multi-dee been intended for such extended operation. She knew the abused interceptor was nearing the end of its endurance even as she neared her own, yet Sputnik hadn't failed her-not with Anwar O'Donnel to nurse and baby her systems.

She stank. She would have traded a year in hell for a shower, she thought, smiling wearily, and knew her crew felt the same, yet they hadn't complained once. Anwar had been her ESO for over two years-long enough to understand the differences between them-and he hadn't argued even when she ordered him to sleep at regular intervals while she managed his systems as well as her own.

Sergeant Goering hadn't been with her as long, but she, too, had done well. Indeed, it had been she who managed to deduce approximately when they were. Commodore Santander had succeeded in crippling the Kangas' planned Takeshita Translation; Sputnik's crew knew that, for Goering had monitored crude, old-style radio and microwave communications as they raced into the system at FTL speeds. They couldn't be much further back than the late twentieth century-yet it might as well have been 50,000 bc, for all the ability humanity would have to defend itself.

Her crew knew that as well as Leonovna did, but their unshaken confidence in her had been a tower of strength. And she'd needed that strength. Human hardware surpassed the best the Kangas could build, but there were always tradeoffs. Sputnik was faster than the tender she pursued, but despite her more advanced drive, she was no faster and far less maneuverable than the Troll-crewed fighters which guarded that tender. They had no need for life support, nor for the gravity compensators a human crew required. They had more mass to spare for other purposes, and their tremendous drives made up for their lower efficiency with pure, brute power. In deep space, with room to use the superiority of her technology, her bird was the equal of any three Troll fighters, but not if the Trolls could pin her. Not if they could somehow close the range through her superior missiles and more deadly power guns and force her into maneuvering combat in range of their own guns.

And that was exactly what they were about to do.

Her mind flicked over her remaining weapons automatically. She'd expended all but one of her heavy missiles, and she dared not waste that one on a Troll. It was a ship-killer, the last nuke she had, and it could be used on only one target. To get into range of that target, she had only three of the "Skeet" missiles with their deadly powered flechettes designed for short-range snapshots-only the Skeets and her guns.