He got the arms of the Wyvern moving and rolled himself over on his belly, then levered himself onto his side. He was at the edge of a town. The walls of the strip-mall in view were pockmarked with bullet holes and one end had burned. He could see buildings in the distance that were somewhat higher. The place had a familiar feel and after a moment he figured out why.

"Staunton," he muttered. "Why the hell did I have to end up in Staunton?"

8.

Major Thomas "Bomber" Slade was the S-3 (Operations) officer of the 229th Combat Engineering Battalion (Light, Sappers Lead), based in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The short, stocky, erect officer had arrived three hours before with the main body of the engineering battalion that was tasked with designing and beginning construction upon interlocking defenses to attempt to stem further Titcher incursions through the Staunton wormhole. He was currently observing the wormhole from the front glacis of an M-88 engineering vehicle, that being the only place in relatively short range that wasn't radioactive as hell.

Major Slade was an "active reserve" officer. That is, he no longer held a regular Army commission, despite being a product of the United States Military Academy (West Point, NY). He had resigned his regular commission as a captain to embark on a career as a civilian civil engineer. He had his bachelors in civil engineering from West Point and had attained a masters from Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York while in the United States Army. After serving with the Army in several positions, notably as a company commander of the 82nd Airborne Division's light engineering company, he felt that he had limited chance of eventual advancement to high rank in the regular Army. This was as a result of the incident that had given him the moniker "Bomber" Slade.

As a young lieutenant he had been tasked with clearing a live fire range of unexploded ammunition. His platoon had spent two weeks carefully policing the combined arms' range for unexploded ordnance ranging from small mortar "sabot" rounds, which were about as dangerous as firecrackers, up to five-hundred-pound bombs. They would comb one-hundred-meter by one-hundred-meter segments and put white flags on any ordnance that was detected. Then, when the area was fully surveyed, they would carefully lay small charges of Composition Four on any of the unexploded ordnance, "daisy-chain" the explosives together for simultaneous detonation and then, having removed to a distance considered safe, detonate the charges thereby blowing up the dangerous munitions that had been lying around.

They had done this for two weeks and at approximately three p.m. on a Friday the range had been declared, by Lieutenant Slade, clear.

Unfortunately, Lieutenant Slade was a meticulous officer and he had ensured that only sufficient C-4 had been used on each munition to ensure its destruction. Furthermore there had not been as many exploded munitions as were anticipated. Therefore, there was a large quantity of C-4 left over, approximately thirteen hundred pounds. Once drawn from the ordnance corps, munitions are extremely hard to return, even if it is, as most of this was, in unopened ammunition boxes. It entails vast amounts of paperwork and annoyingly intense questions from various ordnance officers and NCOs who are, understandably, unhappy to have "irregular" munitions in their storage bunkers.

Therefore it was Lieutenant Slade's decision to detonate the C-4 on site. The careful and cautious manner to do so was to detonate the C-4 in small lots, carefully moved from the site of the central group of material. But it was late on Friday, the platoon had been out on the fricking range for two weeks and everyone was ready to head back to quarters, grab a shower and then hit the bars on Bragg Boulevard. Including Lieutenant Slade. It was, therefore, his decision to detonate the pile of explosives as one lot, a sort of going away present for the exhaustive work of clearing the range.

Being a combined arms' range there were more than sufficient bunkers and trenches at a reasonable distance to ensure the safety of the working detail and the C-4 was placed well away from anything that might suffer undue harm, such as a passing tank. Therefore after rigging the pile to blow, the platoon retreated to the bunkers and Lieutenant Slade clacked the claymore firing device that was connected to the blasting cap by a very long wire.

The explosion was more than thrilling. Everyone had inserted earplugs but several of the platoon complained of ringing in their ears and Private Burrell developed a small nosebleed. Despite that fact the platoon, speaking loudly as was necessary because everyone was at that point a bit hard of hearing, packed up and headed back to barracks feeling that they completed a job well done.

What Lieutenant Slade and his platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant who would later leave the U.S. Army at about the same time as Captain Slade, failed to consider was the method in which wave fronts from explosions propagate. They are, essentially, sound waves. Secondary effects can be mitigated, therefore, by the presence of obstacles, such as the pine trees that just about cover the ranges of Fort Bragg.

However, if there is no intervening obstacle they are mitigated only by distance. And it had been a very loud explosion.

The 82nd Airborne Division's quarters are laid out between Ardennes Street and Gruber Road. On the far side of Gruber Road are the motorpools of the division and on the far side of the motorpools are training areas detailed to the various battalions. They begin the vast stretches of training areas that make up the bulk of the Fort Bragg reservation. There are very few buildings other than motorpools on the far side of Gruber. The exception is the division headquarters, which is placed on the top of a hill just about centered on the division. The front of the headquarters, which faces the division, is given over to reception and security areas as well as offices of the lowly in the headquarters. The back of the headquarters is reserved for higher ranking officers. And right at the rear of the headquarters is the office of the commanding general. Behind his desk is a large plate-glass window so that by no more than turning his chair around the general can look out over the vast stretches of land where his troops are busily training.

Thus it was that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was finishing up paperwork for the week and looking forward to a cold martini and maybe a smile from his wife, suddenly found his back covered with glass as a resounding explosion occurred somewhere on the ranges.

Lieutenant Slade was required to reply by endorsement as to his reasoning that led to the commanding general's window being broken. Furthermore, the incident was reflected in his next officer's evaluation.

Officers' evaluations are carefully considered reports that bring the term "hyperbole" to a new level.

Lieutenants that managed to avoid pissing in potted palms or screwing the commanding general's underage daughter still had phrases in their reports that indicated that they were the next Napoleon, but with higher moral standards. Anything other than such phrases led to officers thatwere so described being promoted ahead of those whowere not . It was assumed that if you were not the next Napoleon, you simply were not Army material.

Lieutenant Slade's next efficiency report had the phrase "sometimes given to acts of less than calculatedlogic." In a civilian environment that might have been overlooked. But even for a second lieutenant, this was the kiss of death to an army career.

Thus "Bomber" Slade, after an otherwise exemplary career, chose to hang up the uniform, go back to his hometown of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and go to work building apartments and retaining walls in suburban developments.

However, he did not leave the Army entirely. He joined the Virginia National Guard which had its engineer battalion headquarters located in Fredericksburg (one of the reasons he had joined the Army in the first place) and after another company command and staff time was eventually promoted (despite the efficiency report and probably with a helping hand from the West Point Protective Association) to major.

He acted for a while as the assistant division engineer then became the S-3 (Operations) officer of the battalion. Life, really, wasn't all that bad. He would have preferred, of course, to have deployed with The Division (former members of the 82nd always refer to it asThe Division as if there were only one) to Iraq.

But life goes on. And he'd built quite a few nice retaining walls instead.

Then came the gates.

Now he was, unquestionably, doing the work that he had looked forward to all his adult, and much of his preadult, life: defending the United States from attack by armed enemies. They were aliens, of course, but that just made it better. Hewas a reader of science fiction and aliens were a nice, morally clean enemy. You couldn't get worked up over mounds of alien carcasses. The only post traumatic stress syndrome that was going to come from fighting the Titcher was related to possibly losing.

At the moment, however, the enemy seemed to be unavailable.

There had been reports that a team had entered the Eustis gate and that something had happened there.

At the same time radiation counters in the units that had been fighting in Staunton had gone wild. The aliens, who had been pouring through in an apparently unstoppable tide, had suddenly stopped coming through the gate. The remnant, mostly dog-demons and thorn-throwers with a few rhinoceros tanks, had been mopped up by the survivors of the first National Guard company to be thrown in and locals who, like those in Florida, had turned out with everything from hunting rifles to one squad in an old M-113 Armored Personnel Carrier complete with M-2 .50 caliber machine gun.

None of them had gotten close to the gate, however, because the ground was still reading very hot.

There had been no explosion, just a sudden jump in the radiation count. And now the gate was acting . . .

odd. Instead of a flat mirror it was rippling, reflecting the light in a pattern of every color of the rainbow.

That, however, was not Major Slade's concern. He was tasked with designing the defenses to be emplaced to cover the gate. There were tanks and fighting vehicles dug in on the hill but the division commander wanted a complete and thorough prepared defense with interlocking fire, bunkers, communications trenches and all the rest.

So Major Slade sat down on the front glacis of the engineering vehicle, laid his map across his lap and pulled out a camouflage colored portfolio, unzipping it and opening it to reveal the 8x11 lined pad therein. Then he pulled a Cross pen out of his left chest pocket and began to sketch, occasionally picking up the binoculars or referring to the map on his lap.

It was while he was examining dead-zones around the gate, spots where direct fire could not be placed on the enemy, that the mecha-suit appeared. It seemed to hang in air, almost insubstantial for a moment but that might have been an optical illusion, then dropped to the ground. It was human shaped, about fourmeters tall, or would be if it were standing up. He looked at it again and made a moue of uncertainty. He had three children, all boys, and they were great players of computer games when they weren't watching Japanese anime. Major Slade, for that matter, had spent a couple of years religiously reading the Battletech series until it turned to utter dreck. And he damned well knew mecha when he saw it. And as far as he knew, the United States Army did not have any mecha units. If they did he'd turn in his commission and reenlist as a private if that was what it took to join.

The mecha rolled over on its side and seemed to be looking towards the town; there was a small rectangle of what looked like glass on the chest of the suit. Then it lay back down on its back, as if exhausted.

Major Slade pounded on the driver's hatch with the handle of his locking blade knife until the vehicle commander, wearing a gas mask, popped out of the hatch.

"We need to go down and pick up that soldier," Major Slade said.

"What the fuck is that?" the vehicle commander, a sergeant, asked in surprise. It was clear that none of the crew had been watching the gate which, given that the Titcher might appear at any moment, was just criminally stupid. What they'd probably been doing was sitting as high up as they could, fearfully watching the radiation detectors.

"It's a mecha-suit," the major replied, picking up his materials and climbing up the armored engineering vehicle. "One of ours."

The major was not aware that the Army had mecha, but that did not mean that he thought the suit was alien. Oh, he could get his head around some race, as yet uncontacted, having mecha. There were numerous arguments against mecha as a combat system. Joints were much more prone to mechanical breakdown than the simple track and drive wheel system of an armored fighting vehicle. They also had a higher profile than tanks and more surface area to hit. But the major had known that the Army was eventually going to go to something like mecha for infantry. The weight that infantry soldiers were expected to carry was growing every day as more and more "vital" systems were discovered. Properly designed mecha would simply amplify the abilities of the infantry.

Thus another race could be using them for combat, say against the Titcher; one such might have been "sucked in" by whatever destabilized that gate. And he could allow the logic of them being humanoid; covergent evolution and all that. He could even allow the logic of them being vaguely human facially; he had seen the mask sculpted on the "face" of the suit. Although that was pushing the bonds of credulity.

But lying on the ground next to the suit was what appeared to be a cut-down 25mm Bushmaster from a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He couldn't imagine precise covergent evolution of the Bushmaster. Among other things, it had some real design drawbacks.

Ergo, it had to be a human. Furthermore, it had to be a human from a time sometime near the present. It was probablyfrom the present.

And it was right in the middle of one of the hottest patches of radiation in the world.

The vehicle lurched into motion and he, carefully, climbed up onto the turret and held onto the commander's machine-gun mount as it slowly negotiated the rubble on the hillside.

The mecha had gotten to its feet and was now lurching in the general direction of town. It didn't walkvery well; every step seemed to be dragged out of some recesses of energy. And the steps were not graceful at all, foot by foot lurches, arms held at the sides. It had left the Bushmaster on the ground and now plodded its weary way up the hill, one slow step at a time.

It didn't seem to notice the engineering vehicle until they were about fifty meters away. Then it stopped and raised its right arm, waving it back and forth slowly, very much like the droid in Star Wars but slower and with much less enthusiasm. But Slade waved back and motioned for the mecha to stay where it was.

When the engineering vehicle stopped it was within a meter of the mecha. Slade called for a Geiger counter and went forward, waving the wand over the suit. Sure enough, it was hot enough to fry eggs.

"Stay in that," he yelled. He could see a human face peering at him through the armored glass.

He climbed back up onto the turret and ordered them to pick the mecha up with the manipulator arm.

The manipulator arm was a relatively recent addition to the engineering vehicle. It was designed to pick up mines and "Improvised Explosive Devices." It should, however, be able to lift the mecha. If it was even working; the arm was complicated and broke down on a regular basis.

The one on this vehicle was working, though, and it lurched out of its protective cover and jerked creakily towards the suit. The operator, probably the vehicle commander, clearly didn't have much experience using it. But it managed to clamp onto the chest of the suit, lifting it up by hooking under the shoulder.

"Let's get out of the rad zone," Slade yelled down into the vehicle.

He watched carefully to ensure that the suit was not damaged by the movement. But the driver or the vehicle commander had already thought of that and the vehicle backed up the hill, the suit held well off the ground to avoid obstacles, and slowly bumped to the top and over the other side.

The burst of radiation that had come from the gate had, fortunately, been blocked by the hill. Otherwise the vast majority of the defenders would have died of radiation poisoning. But the back side of the hill was clean and there was a decontamination station set up at the base of it. The driver pivoted the vehicle and carried the mecha down to it, where the suit was lowered to the ground in the middle of the road where the decontamination station had been set up.

"What the fuck is that?" one of the decontamination team yelled through his mask. He was wearing a rubber environmental suit that was half covered in suds and had a scrub brush in his hand. The Humvee that he had been working on was sitting in the road.

"Mecha-suit," the major said from his place of approximate safety on the top of the vehicle. "One of ours. There's somebody inside. How do you want to handle it?"

As he asked that the suit rolled to the side then got up on its knees, slowly. The decontamination team backed up and one of the MPs from the contaminated Humvee drew his sidearm.

"Put it away," Slade said. "I told you, he's one of ours."

"We don't have anything like that, sir," the MP yelled.

"That you know of," Slade replied. The front of the suit opened outwards and a man wearing a black, skintight, coverall stepped out and walked quickly away from the suit, rubbing one shoulder and stretching.

He turned around and waved at Slade as soon as he was well away from the suit. "Thanks for the ride.

This is Staunton, right?"

"Right," Slade said.

"I need a secure line to the Pentagon," the man said. "Right after I get whatever they give you for radiation poisoning. Oh, and I could really use a beer."

"We have a report from Chief Miller on the events at the Eustis gate," the secretary of defense said. "We had assumed that you were killed in the explosion."

"No, I was caught in the gate failure," Bill replied. "At that point I experienced some rather unusual communications. I'll make up a report on it as soon as I can with the strong caveat that I'm not sure whether it was real or a sensory-deprivation-induced hallucination. But I think I know what's going on and I've got a pretty good idea how we can get some control over the gates."

"Good," the national security advisor said. "How?"

"The anomaly in Orlando is a boson generator," Bill said, taking a sip of Miller Light. "I mean, that's pretty obvious but I know, now, how it's working. Bosons require high levels of energy to occur. The anomaly is an opening to a realm outside the normal concept of 'universe.' That is, it's not opening to another universe, it's completely open to utter unreality. The reason that we're opening gates to other planets is that linked bosons create stable wormholes through that intermediate unreality. The reason that they're on other planetary surfaces is that they are inactive bosons left over from previous generation. I think that if we looked hard at all the sites we'd find evidence of previous civilizations. Furthermore, the bosons are resonating on a specific frequency. They only link to bosons on that same frequency. I think that's why the Titcher can only get through certain bosons."

"Can I ask you a question off the subject?" the President said. "More of a point of order. It's not normally the case that one of my subordinates sits in a secure communications facility sipping on a beer during a report."

"Doctor's orders," Bill said, taking another sip. "Honest to God, Mr. President. I know that you don't care for it, and why, but I'm balancing health and need. The only thing you can do for radiation sickness is get as much of the radiation out of your body as you can as fast as you can. The most efficient way to move it out is water transfer, drink a lot and go to the bathroom a lot. Beer is even better than water at both. As soon as I'm off the horn with you guys and get a few things moving, I'm going to sit down with a couple of cases and drink them as fast as I can. In the meantime, I'm staying on the sober side. Just."

"Oh," the President said. "In that case, I hope I never get exposed to radiation."

"Your theory that sufficient energy will destabilize the wormholes seems to be correct, by the way," the secretary of defense said, changing the subject. "The Titcher gates, as well as the Mreee gate, have all shut down and generated a blast of hard radiation. I'm not sure why in the case of the Mreee gate."

"Oh," Bill said, taking another sip. "That's because the Mreee are bad guys." "What?" the national security advisor snapped.

"The Mreee are working with the Titcher," Weaver replied. "They use the same resonance bosons as the Titcher and when I went into the Titcher gate room my environmental system had been breached. I smelled the same smell there that I did at the Mreee gate. I'm pretty sure that just about everything the Mreee told us was a lie, at least about their trying to hold off the Titcher. The gate room, all that concrete, was probablyinside a Titcher organism. Not on an island. The island lie was to explain the smell. They're not trying to hold off the Titcher; they already lost."

"Oh . . . damn," the secretary of defense said. "Are you sure? The Mreee took a couple of our officers up to watch the fighting. They were using those blasters to really sock it to the Titcher."

"Disinformation," Bill said. "The Titcher don't care how much is destroyed as long as we left a gate open and undefended. We were even getting ready to send through support that we wouldn't have been using against them at other gates. But, really, how much did wesee of the Mreee? Just where they took us with those jaunt belts. Total area a couple of square miles, most of it in buildings or cities. The evidence against the Mreee is pretty strong. I'm sorry I supported them in my initial evaluation. That was my mistake. Fortunately, we found out in time."

"We've got teams over there," the national security advisor said. "From State and Defense."

"They might be just fine when, if, the gate opens again," Bill said. "In which case I strongly suggest that they be 'called home for consultation.' Then again, I'd suspect that they'll disappear in the interim. And even if they didn't, the gate room must have taken one hell of a whack. It was on the same boson track as the rest. That probably transmitted the wave front of particles."

"They've attacked, in some strength but not as much as normal, on another track," the national security advisor said. "The open boson in Mississippi. We're holding them and they've apparently retreated for the time being."

"I'd guess that that was a leftover from a previous civilization on that planet," Bill said, thoughtfully.

"There wasn't an organism at the gate so they're having to move them over from wherever they have forces. Which makes the point that we really have to hold them here."

"Why?" the secretary of defense asked.

"We're opening multiple bosons along multiple tracks," Bill pointed out. "The Titcher seem limited to just one resonance, one track; they don't appear to have our version of a boson generator. If they break out on Earth, we're going to let them out across the entire circuit; thousands of worlds they've never been able to touch. And the generator is not going to shut off for thousands of years."

"Oh . . . shit."

The boson in Horse Cave, Kentucky, was quite invisible to the naked eye. The survey team from Louisville that found it, an environmental company again, which normally responded to spills generated by CSX railroad, had had one team member, in fact, walk right through it. It gave off no radiation that was detectable with a Geiger counter. It had no apparent physical presence. But it was giving off a continuous stream of muons.

As Weaver had been assembling the materials he needed for his experiment he had kept one eye on the news and came away with an even greater cynicism than was his wont. The fact that the bosons weregenerating muons had become common knowledge and it had created a real hysteria, exceeding, if possible, the hysterias about the use of nuclear weapons. Which was far greater than the hysteria generated by invading aliens, although of the three they were far and away the greatest threat. Muons were subnucleic particles. They didn't generate "radiation," they didn't cause cancer, they didn't make two-headed babies. Hell, there are about 10,000 muons per square meter at sea level continuously coming from active galactic nuclei and quasars and other cosmic stuff and that hasn't caused us any problems in five billion years. But try to tell that to reporters.

They had found a slew of so-called "scientists" who had trotted out elaborate . . . lies about the danger from muons and bosons. Did they bother to tell people that light particles were bosons? Hell no! They were based on no scientific evidence, but the falsehoods were much more interesting to the news media than the occasional countering truth from physicists who actually knew what they were talking about.

People who had never heard the term "muon" until they saw it on the evening newscast were now running around hysterically trying to find muon detectors and calling up environmental companies to have them come in and check their homes for muons and bosons.

Bill had been at a scientific conference where a psychologist had laid out the theory of hysteria. In chimpanzee society when faced with an overwhelming or previously unknown threat, such as the first time they heard a rifle shot, the tribe would act in a hysterical manner. Some would try to fight, some would run, some would bluff, others would hide or simply collapse. With no way to logically evaluate the threat, the very randomness ensured that some would survive and, presumably, reproduce. It was an evolutionary method to ensure survival.

It was a pain in the ass in humans, though.

And the protests. Oh my God. Rioters had trashed the physics department of the University of California, destroying hundreds of man-hours of work, some of it directly linked to boson research which might have helped fix the anomaly in Florida. Antiscience hysteria was sweeping the nation, hell, the world. The anomaly site was an armed camp now that protesters had decided it was safe to picket there.

In Horse Cave, Kentucky, however, things were placid. The area that the boson had generated on was an open field just up the road from Park, a natural depression, a shallow forty-acre sinkhole, with a stream running through it. The county road had a sign about a quarter mile north that had a horse and buggy on it, indicating that Amish used the area. The county had sent over a couple of sheriff's cars and a few reporters had come down from Louisville, asked him some questions, most of which he'd either lied about or avoided answering by invoking national security, and left. Fortunately they left before the units from Fort Knox showed up.

The boson had been chosen for the experiment for several reasons. The area was rural, well away from major roads, so if the worst happened minimal damage would occur to humans and their possessions.

Even if they got a Cthulhoid entity through the gate, the worst that it would mean was having to change the route of I-65 by a few miles. The depression meant that the boson was easily defended. And it was only two hours from Fort Knox which was the Armor Home of the U.S. Army and which had a vast stock of armored vehicles for the Kentucky Army National Guard. A goodly few of them were being arrayed on the slopes around the depression.

"This is a track one site," Bill said to the National Guard battalion commander. "The Titcher attacking in Mississippi are coming through a track one, but that seems to be a world that was held by another civilization; there wasn't a Titcher organism on the far side. So far all the gatesthey've opened have come from track three. So we're pretty sure that there aren't Titcher on the other side of this gate. On the other hand, it doesn't mean there's notsomething hostile. On the gripping hand, most of the gates have beenneutral. We may not be able to open it. We may find that there's nothing on the other side. We just don't know."

"Okay," the lieutenant colonel said. "When do you open it?"