"See the big box over the butt?" Bill asked. "Americium power generator."

"So I'm going to get irradiated when I use it?" the SEAL asked.

"I've got over a hundred hours in one." The physicist sighed. "You wear a radiation counter back by the reactor. So far I've picked up about as much radiation as you would at a day on the beach in Florida.

Don't even get me started on flying; I took a radiation counter on a flight one time and it raised my hair."

"Really?" the SEAL asked. "I've flown in a lot of planes."

"Really," Bill replied. "Besides, it's the only power source we have that can run one of these things for more than a couple of hours. It's got some bugs, it tends to want to disco occasionally, but you get past it. This is just a prototype, you understand."

"How hard is it to learn to use?" the SEAL asked.

"Pretty easy," the physicist said. "The electronics suite takes some getting used to. Oh, it walks like Frankenstein and it feels as if you're on ice all the time, but you don't fall down."

"I don't like the idea of standing up all the time," the chief noted. "That just makes you a big damned target."

"Notice the wheels on the elbows, knees and, if you look, under the belly on there," Bill said. "It's actually easier to low crawl over a flat surface than to walk. You can't see unless you activate the camera on top of the helmet."

"I want," Miller said. "Oh, man, do I want. Screw the bugs."

"Good," the physicist replied. "This one's yours. As soon as we get you fitted."

"Why?" the SEAL said, suddenly suspicious.

"We're going to take a little stroll," Bill replied.

"Where?"

"Eustis."

"Oh, shit."

They rode on the front glacis of an M-1 Abrams, their armor-clad feet dangling over the front, one hand hooked over the barrel of the main-gun, the other clutching their weapon. The "accessories" for the Wyvern had included a shipping container filled with appropriate weapons.

These ranged from .50 caliber machine guns, the venerable M-2 or Ma Deuce that dated to WWII, through the more recently designed "Dover Devil" to a new Czech 12.7mm, then onwards and upwards culminating in a massive cannon that dominated one of the walls of the shipping container.

"What's that?" Chief Miller had asked. He was clearly a man who had never seen a bigger gun he didn't like.

"It's a South African one-hundred-thirty-millimeter recoilless rifle," the armorer said, proudly. He was a heavyset gentleman in his fifties, gray haired where there was any left, with a pocket protector containing five colors of pens and an HP calculator dangling from his belt. But he was clearly inordinately fond of his weapons. "It was one of the guns they were looking at for the Stryker Armored Gun System but they turned it down. It had been sitting around in a depot for a couple of years when we picked it up."

"Can you use it with a Wyvern?" the chief said, stroking the two-and-a-half-meter barrel. It had a big shoulder mount about a third of the way back from the end and an oversized grip and trigger.

"Oh, yes," the armorer said. "Reloading, of course, is slow."

"I'll take it," the chief said. "And one of those Gatling guns. And you got any pistols? How about swords?"

"Chief," Bill said, chuckling. "Even with the Wyverns there's only so much you can carry. Why don't you take the 30mm?"

"What 30mm?" the SEAL asked. "Besides, if I've got a choice of thirty or ahundred and thirty, I'll take a hundred and thirty any day. I'll just reload fast."

"This 30mm," the physicist replied, pointing to a weapon hanging on the left wall.

It looked . . . odd. It had clearly been modified for use by the mecha-suits but beyond that the barrel looked oddly . . . truncated. "What the hell is it?" Miller asked.

"Well, you know those guns the A-10s use . . ." Bill said, smiling.

"No shit!" the SEAL replied, clearly delighted. "Besides, there's no way you could fire one of those things off-hand in a Wyvern. The recoil would kill you."

"Oh, we had to modify the ammo a little bit," Bill admitted. "Just like the 25mm Bushmaster I'm going to haul. But it's still got depleted uranium penetrators and I think you'd be surprised at what you can do in a Wyvern. Just remember to lean into the shot."

So lying beside the chief was the 30mm chain gun and lying beside Bill was a modified 25mm Bushmaster, the same gun carried by the Bradley Fighting Vehicles. On their backs were integral ammunition packs but they'd been warned that the ammunition would not last long at full rate of fire. They had external radiation counters, which were running right up into the bottom of redline, internal radiation counters that were down in the bottom of yellow and riding behind them in pride of place a large sack.

The ordnance technician who had assembled the special satchel charge had explained it as carefully as he could. "The material in the device is an expansion-form explosive," the tech said. "Instead of just exploding in one place the material continues to explode on the wavefront and expands through any open space. They tested it on an old mine back before the Afghanistan war and it blew out a steel door at the back side of three hundred meters of tunnel. The thing is, it will do a number on anything but, probably, those centipede tanks. But it's going to probably explodeout of the gate as well. It's not as effective in an open area as enclosed, but it's going to be a hell of a blast in the local area. So you'd better run like hell."

"How long do we have?" the SEAL asked.

"How long do you want?"

"Seven seconds."

There was a short battalion of Abrams and Bradleys parked a thousand meters from the gate, all of their hatches shut and their environmental overpressure systems going full-bore. The ground radiation count was high and the vehicles were going to have to be decontaminated after they were withdrawn. More likely they'd be scrapped; after a few hours at ground zero they were metaphorically going to be glowing like a Christmas tree.

Airbursts of nuclear weapons were relatively clean and caused limited radioactive fallout. But the pulse from the fusion explosion irradiated everything in a large circle. The alpha and beta particles, as well as gamma rays, struck common materials, carbon, silica, iron, and transmuted them to radioactive isotopes.

Sometimes they were split and formed highly radioactive isotopes of lower-weight elements.

So the ground zero of even the cleanest nuclear weapon was highly radioactive. The radiation would fade over time, most of the particles would degrade in no more than a year and while some lingering radiation would exist for thousands of years to come it would be not much beyond background.

Hiroshima, which was hit by a relatively "dirty" bomb, had been resettled since the 1950s. The only sign that it had ever been destroyed by a nuclear weapon was the memorial at its city center.

In the meantime, though, Eustis was hot as hell.

As the Abrams drew to a stop in front of the gate it was the bad time. The firesupport from the vehicles in their defensive positions behind was blocked. If the Titcher came through the gate the Abrams would be blocking the defending units. So far, no Titcher had come through the gate since the explosion. But bad things tend to happen at the worst possible time.

So Weaver and the SEAL hurried. They had planned this carefully and practiced it once, all the time they felt they could afford. They set their weapons down, leaning on the front of the Abrams, and grabbed the big bomb off the glacis. It had been secured with duct tape but the tape tore loose easily at the yank from two Wyverns.

They set the bomb down a half meter from the gate, retrieved their weapons, set them down to either side of the bomb and then Weaver waved at the Abrams, whose driver put it immediately into reverse and stomped the gas.

Chief Miller, in the meantime, seemed to be doing a routine fromSaturday Night Fever , his feet moving back and forth and to either side while his hands flailed wildly in the air.

"Excited, Chief?" Weaver said over the radio. "Damned disco dance, you were right," Miller said, panting.

"Steady down, just quit trying so hard and it will damp out," Weaver replied. After a moment it did and the chief stooped and grabbed one of the handles on the bomb with both hands, hooking the release tab over his thumb. "Ready?"

"Ready," Weaver said, stooping and picking up the bomb.

"One," Miller said, starting the swing.

"Two," Weaver, replied.

"Three!" they both said, letting go just short of the apex of the arc.

Weaver turned and picked up his Bushmaster and then started into a clumsy run. The mecha-suits did tend to walk like Frankenstein, a problem of lack of mobility in the "ankle" of the suit and complete lack of feedback, but they could get up a fair turn of speed and he was going just about twenty kilometers per hour when a giant picked him up and tossed him in the direction he had been going anyway.

He hit hard and a yellow light popped up, indicating that his left arm power system was down. That was really going to suck.

He rolled onto his belly after a couple of kicks, centered his right arm under him and used it to lever himself to his feet. It would have been nearly impossible for a normal human but the Wyvern's design made it surprisingly easy. Which was good because he could tell from the feel that the left arm was under muscle power only. His internal rad counters were higher, also, and he figured he'd popped environmental somewhere. That wasreally going to suck.

The chief was up as well and running back to the gate so Weaver made the command decision that he'd ignore those minor little issues. He picked up his Bushmaster and clumsily trotted over to the gate, carrying the Bushmaster in his right hand.

"You okay?" the chief said.

"Couldn't be better," Weaver replied, hooking up his ammo feed slide. "You?"

"Peachy," the SEAL answered, manually cocking the 30mm. "Okay, let's rock."

With that the two of them bent over-the mecha-suits were fourteen feet tall and could barely fit together though the gate-and stepped, lurched really, through the looking glass.

"I think he's losing it," Crichton said, turning up the news broadcast.

"Who?" Earp replied, looking up from the latest bulletin from FEMA.

"The CBS anchor," the sergeant replied.

The anchor was beginning to show signs of the strain of trying to keep up with the news.

"Another Titcher gate has opened in Staunton, Virginia," he said, pronouncing it, correctly, as Stanton."National Guard units have responded but the initial attempt by state police to stem the attack has failed with heavy casualties among the state police. In other news the State Department has announced that the Mreee have officially requested the loan of mobile nuclear weapons and that the Russians have agreed to sell the U.S. several SS-19 mobile missile launchers. . . ." The reporter, who had won his spurs in Vietnam reporting all the news that was detrimental to the United States and who had been a quiet, but major, advocate of the antinuclear/antimilitary brigade for decades, was reporting the latest news with a rictus smile. "The Mreee have relayed a request from the Nitch, a race of intelligent spiderlike creatures .

. ." He stopped and giggled. "I can't say this. Yes, I know, I'm reading it on my TelePrompTer but this can't be happening! This JUST CAN'T BE HAPPENING!"

The screen changed to a female anchorwoman who was rubbing furiously at her nose with her index finger. She looked up in startlement and then recovered quickly.

"We seem to be having some technical difficulties in New York," she said with studied aplomb. "In other news . . ."

"Score one for reality overload," Crichton said as he turned the sound back down. "Failed his SAN roll."

"Just proud to be here," Earp replied.

"I gotta ask," the sergeant muttered. "Look, Earp's not a really common name . . ."

"My great-great-grandfather was a cousin," Earp replied. "A wanted felon up around Dodge City. They had a gentlemen's agreement; Wyatt didn't come up where Ryan was and Ryan didn't go near Tombstone."

"Thought it might be something like that . . ."

And in other news, Weaver tripped, almost immediately, on a dead dog on the other side of the gate.

The Titcher side of the gate was littered with dead and dying aliens, many of them torn limb from limb by the big explosion. As he lurched forward Weaver caught a glimpse of one of the rhino-tanks over on its side, one leg blown off and green lightning rippling over its surface.

There had been thousands of aliens in the gate room and most of them had suffered some effect from the expansion bomb. But many of them had simply been stunned or thrown off their feet and they were getting up and charging the humans who had been imprudent enough to invade their space.

Weaver felt glad he'd fallen as a line of needles passed through the space he would have occupied standing up. The armor of the suitprobably would have stopped them but better to be out of the way. He toggled his top-side camera, brought the Bushmaster up to his shoulder one-handed, propped it up as best he could with his left hand and opened fire.

"I can't see!" Miller shouted. He was prone as well, with his chain gun up, but it was firing sporadically, many of the rounds flying over the heads of the aliens.

"Toggle your top camera!" Weaver yelled. "Setting Three! Setting Three!" He aimed at a rhino-tank that was just heaving itself to its feet and was pleased to see the 25mm rounds splash goo out of its side. The tank shuddered, did a couple of side steps and then lay down again, its legs twitching. Fortunately it didn't explode. Other than that he wasn't getting very many impressions. The lighting in the room was badly damaged, probably from the explosion, but it was strong enough that it was interfering with the automated low-light circuitry of the cameras. They kept switching from normal to low-light setting. There was also a smell, harshly chemical with a slight undertone like rotten fish. He knew he'd smelled it somewhere before but he couldn't quite place it. On the other hand, he knew for sure that his quarantine integrity had been breached to hell and gone.

There were lots of thorn-throwers, lots of dogs and he was hammering out rounds, single shot, carefully aimed using the laser sight on the Bushmaster. Standard Bushmasters had neither laser sights nor a selectable switch but the armorer, who had a Ph.D. in engineering, was a foresighted man and had made some adjustments. Weaver noticed that the SEAL had started to get his fire under control and assumed he had switched cameras.

"What, exactly, are we doing here?" Miller asked as he took out another of the rhino-tanks. There were so many of the Titcher in the room the tanks couldn't seem to decide whether to fire or not. Or, maybe, they didn't want to damage the room. Good.

"Getting a look at what is on the other side before we nuke it," Weaver replied.

"Good, we've done that," the SEAL said. "Time to do the Mogadishu Mile."

"What?"

"Run away, run away!"

"Oh, okay," Weaver replied. He hooked his hand under him and pushed up to his knees then up to standing. Then he froze.

"What the fuck . . . ?" he heard Miller mutter.

The thing was probably just the right size to fit through the gate. It was, essentially, a mobile green cone that looked like nothing so much as a mound of manure. Tentacles that might have been purple extended from its base and it was glowing, faintly. It also was waddling towards them serenely through the chaos of the gate room.

"I don't know what the fuck that is," Weaver said, taking a step back and lifting his Bushmaster as well as he could with the functional right arm. "But I think we should shoot it."

"Damned straight," the SEAL said, flicking his selector switch from semi to full auto and letting out a stream of depleted uranium penetrator rounds.

What the SEAL had failed to consider was that he had previously been firing from the prone, where the mass of the suit was in contact with the ground. Also, he had been firing single shots, each of which shoved the heavy suit back a few inches. If things hadn't been so chaotic he might have considered the recoil of those shots. But he did not. So when he pulled the trigger, intending to send out a controlled burst of three rounds, the recoil staggered him backwards through the gate as his hand automatically clenched, a monkey reaction from falling, on the trigger.

The first round, however, hit the thing squarely on the front of the cone. The second was near the top, just to the left of a small, brightly glowing patch. Where the third was didn't really matter because by that time the thing had exploded. Weaver had also been knocked back by the recoil of his weapon but he was actually in the process of gate transference when the explosion, categorized from later inference as right at sixty megatons, occurred.

Collective 15379 was nonresponsive. How interesting.

"Collective 12465, report on physical conditions near Collective 15379," Collective 47 emitted.

"Mushroom cloud and radiation emissions categorized as sixty megaton quarkium release," Collective 12465 reported. "Outer collective processes 12465, 3456, 19783 damaged. All functions 15379 terminated."

15379 had reported attacks by fission/fusion weapons and had registered intent to respond with a quarkium unit. Collective 47 had automatically given assent. Once a bridgehead had been secured with sufficient standoff to prevent destabilization of the wormhole the quarkium unit would be detonated and then colonization could recommence with the local area seared of hostile forces.

Something had somehow predetonated the quarkium unit.

Collective 47 could not be said to feel anger or sadness at the demise of the subcollective called 15379.

Collectives were, essentially, immortal and 15379 might have, in time, created as many subcollectives as Collective 47, thereby increasing the Race and ensuring its security. Not to mention that the subcollective was a major supplier of vanadium and a few other trace metals as well as a huge source of biological material via two slave races.

But the loss of Collective 15379 could be borne. It would decrease the status of Collective 47 to a degree and reduce its balance of essential trade. But those, too, could be borne. What was questionable was whether the Race could afford another species to damage it so severely. The Race had encountered many species in its expansion from gate to gate and some of them, the Alborge for example, were significant threats to the survival of the Race itself. If the Alborge ever exerted themselves they could erase the Collective in a span of time that had no meaning. But would be very, very short. The sophonts of world 47-15379-ZB might, in time, become such a race.That could not be borne.