Falling Angel
by Jesse Jack Jones

Copyright 2012 Jesse Jack Jones
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Far beyond a thick circle of transparent elastomer, sheets of glittering metal stretched out like curved wings, cut by canals dark as the space around them.  Implacable, Old Testament divinity seemed to radiate from it, filling the void.  Great fields of stars were blotted out by its passage, the distant light of planets eclipsed by its bulk.  It left Zhiang sick with awe and hatred.
Men whispered when they named it the Angel.
Gutted stomachs of dull grey metal hung like overripe fruit from the cargo gantries of the hastily modified Nearspace III translunar tourist ferry Appomattox Courthouse; the name had some meaning to the American pilot, though Zhiang didn't remember what.  Removed from active service years before, the vessel had been rousted from an enthusiast's garage, but he was lucky to have gotten standing room on something as archaic as an N3.  After all, for every soldier who found himself on one of the Nearspace Mark VII’s dragged out of the showrooms in Mumbai, a dozen were stuck riding German Sturmvogel cargo freighters, the oldest craft in the impromptu fleet.  Junkyards across the Eur-U were empty because of the demand for even scrapped members of that hardy transatmospheric craft’s family.
A swarm of nearly four hundred ships crowded the vacuum around the Courthouse; every space-faring vessel the human race had power left to hurl skyward.  Winged suborbitals with streamlined forms never meant to know deep space were crammed with as few as ten men, while the rare, whale-like super-yachts designed for years-long tours through the solar system played host to hundreds of soldiers in denuded suites and empty pools.  Not even those in such relative luxury entertained any deep illusions about a journey home on ships that hadn't the fuel or oxygen for another day's travel.
"An assault unlike anything in the whole of human history," his commander in the PLA had told him a week earlier, when he was signing 'Zhiang Zhisheng, First Lieutenant' onto a patch of gelscreen.  "More than twenty-thousand men, Zhisheng!  Each one drawn from the most elite units and skilled specialists of every military and civilian agency in the system!  You should be proud to be asked to join such a thing as this!"  The man had been very enthusiastic, for someone who had not signed his own life away.
Yes, it was the single most capable fighting force ever assembled, paraded into the vacuum on any piece of metal that could be coaxed, coddled, or catapulted out of orbit.  It would be humanity’s greatest battle.
And it falls to us to see that it will not be their last, he thought grimly.  At least I get an automatic promotion to Colonel when it's over.  It would mean far better death benefits for his family; would guarantee his daughter a place in the best schools in China.
"One quarter hour until contact point," came a cool voice over the intercom, speaking in thickly accented English that Zhiang could barely decipher.  Luckily his monocle provided an immediate pinyin translation of the words that came from somewhere out in Earth's great swarm, from the only true military vessel left, tending its flock of civilian spacecraft: the U.N.S.S. Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr.
"One quarter hour until contact point," the voice repeated, more distinctly.
The Shepherd—as soldiers more comfortable with English had taken to calling it—was a graceless thing.  Ungainly and cigar-shaped, the color of dull alloys bereft of paint, studded with the thin needles of armaments or antennae, it had survived the massacre of its sister ships in the American fleet by virtue of engine troubles that had kept it in dock.  While it languished at the Nevada Space Yards in orbit over Laughlin, its kin were battered at the Second Battle of Mars and the last—the Edgar Dean Mitchell—was torn to shreds in the debacle that had come to be known as Keslinger’s Gamble.  Last Zhiang had heard, the German general had put a pistol in his mouth and left a red resignation plastered across his office wall.
When the Galactic War Powers Article was passed by the U.N. Security Council, the Shepherd had been confiscated and outfitted specifically for the coming mission.  It was the fist that was to drive the offensive, before the enemy encroached any further on human space.
If it was not stopped here, it would penetrate lunar orbit in less than two days.
"Ten minutes until contact point," the voice came anew.
That started a commotion.
"Ten minutes until contact point."
"Okay men," Zhiang called in thickly accented English of his own; it was the language chosen for the task force but not his first by preference or training, "Suits emerald, rifles loaded, packs locked, in that order."
Even as he spoke, his own fingers were dancing across the seams on his suit, relaxing only marginally when the tactile feedback on his gloves' fingertips confirmed all airtight seals were secured.  He proceeded to make sure the short, snub-nosed assault rifle magnet-pinned to his waist was working.  A thin, curved magazine was secured to the stock's underside while the barrel mounted a Beck, a 'Base Explosive Capsule' launcher.  Only when all of that came back emerald as well did he make sure the pack affixed to his back was stable, its electromagnetic pins energized and locked flush, while the distributed weight of various pouches of food, utilities, ammunition, and medical supplies were secured.
He had checked all those things a hundred times over the last day; everyone had.  And they were all checking them again now.
"Five minutes until contact point."
When Zhiang looked up, he could not see the Angel through the porthole anymore.  Even if he could have, nothing but a solid sheet of color would fill the space at this distance.  They had come too close to see the whole of it now.
"Five minutes until contact point."
His monocle retracted as the helmet's heads-up display projected a familiar face.  Lines creased the dark western features, thick streaks running through short hair less black than silver.  From underneath an almost comically bushy mustache, a deep voice emerged.
"We stand upon a preh-see-piece."  Zhiang wondered why English had been chosen for the operation, when so few seemed able to speak it without drowning it in accent.  "Behind us dwells the whole of human hee-sto-ree, exhorting us to greatness; before us lays the inestimable unknown, taunting our resolve."  If any man could be said to command the admiration of the gathered forces, it was the gruff Cossack who now transmitted his last message, for he was Kristoff Oleneva and his hand guided the last desperate thrust of humanity's sword.
"Three-and-one-half years ago, in Jovian space, mankind first encountered an ex-ee-stence alien to our own.  Unknown and implacable, this ex-ee-stence has intruded deeper and deeper into our space, scouring all before it with peerless fury.  Europa.  Gan-ee-mede.  Ceres.  The Belt Stations.  Whitehall.  Mars.  Deimos.  Theia Station.  We can know it only through its actions, and from these actions we can give it only one name: Xee-nocide."
When the plans had been drawn; when the United Nations had assembled its elite soldiers; when the so-called Final Fleet had been commandeered, it was asked: 'who shall lead these men?'  At that time, the great generals of China and the European Union, of Brazil and America and India had stood silent.  Whoever led this mission would never return to the glory awaiting them on Earth.
"It seeks to eradicate an ex-ee-stence foreign to itself, and that ex-ee-stence is humanity.  All attempts at communication have failed, all attempts at pitched battle have met only disaster, and so we have been called upon to do the unthinkable.  We, the greatest humankind can muster, regardless of individual beliefs, national loyalties, or genetic heritage, have come to this place, at this time, to die."
Into that silence, Oleneva had stepped: quiet, calm, and without apparent fear.  It had become one of the most striking of images of the war, this man white-haired with age, stiffer of spine than representatives half his years, striding from the sparse ranks of Russia’s military, crippled and weak from attempts to defend their Martian holdings.  He had marched past the greatest military minds of the mightiest powers on Earth and said, simply, 'I will die with these men.'  Oleneva would live far beyond the passing of his flesh.
"In our deaths, we shall set a pox upon our foe.  Even as our ships burn, we shall devour him from within, carving the flesh of our victory off the bones of his.  Let us harrow him even as he would harrow us, that our sons and daughters might enjoy the bounty of our worlds.
"Like many of you, I am not a re-lee-gious man, but if it is an angel as some have named it, then we shall become the wrath of God Himself!  Scripture hold that angels have been cast down to serve in Hell before!"  The tiny compartment had only the cheers of twenty men in it, but Zhiang imagined he could feel a thousand times that number cheering through the hard vacuum that surrounded them.
Through an animated graphic in a corner of his H.U.D., Zhiang watched the Shepherd pull ahead, preparing for the first phase of the operation.  Weaponry on its dull, uneven skin began to glow and, without sound, streaks of heat spanned the hundreds of kilometers between the Shepherd and the Angel.
Only to turn away harmlessly, splashing like water striking glass as they drove into the great vessel’s invisible energy prow.  Still, the blasts weren’t expected to break the shields so much as announce human defiance for whatever might dwell within.
Deep inside the Shepherd’s bowels, the true power of the ship was churning to life.  From receptacles spaced along the ship’s length, loose protons held in immobile stasis were suddenly agitated into motion, passed into a magnetized accelerator nearly a mile in length that projected out far past the ship’s fore via thin, magnet-studded strings of carbon nanofilament.  As the flow of matter began to race through the vacuum tunnel, a series of tens of thousands of pulsing electromagnets imparted their small contribution to an inevitably tremendous acceleration.
"Contact Point!" The voice called over the intercom.  "Contact Point and God speed you all," was the last, whispered thing Zhiang would ever hear from what suddenly sounded like a very kind, very scared young woman.
Even without a direct view, the porthole filled with light; Zhiang could imagine the brilliantly destructive ejecta pouring out at relativistic speeds from the barrel of the Shepherd’s subatomic mass projection cannon.  After targeted assaults by the enemy and experimental sorties by first national and then UN forces had severely reduced the available supply of high-yield nuclear weapons, the experimental SAMP Cannon was the only option left that stood a chance of even temporarily overwhelming the shields on the Angel.  A sustained blast was calculated to have enough power to create a brief fracture in the enemy's defenses by overloading at least one of the shield wells.  Electromagnetic field analyses had suggested that the massive, pulsing blue spheres resting at either major wing tip were the energy prow's source.
There was a jarring acceleration as the Courthouse’s solid-state rockets kicked in, no doubt burning through what remained of the precious fuel.  Tactical supercomputers aboard the Shepherd would have calculated the positions of the hundreds of ships under its command and sent out orders about coordinates, velocities, and approach vectors to maximize the possibility of penetrating the Angel's defenses.
"Effing hell," cursed a man off to the left.  Someone in the pod was praying in a language Zhiang didn’t recognize.  They had known it all along, but it was only now becoming real.
There would be no trip home.
What Zhiang could not see was the port shield well, perched like a glowing moon within its depression.  It flashed swiftly before going dark.  At that moment, the blast from the Shepherd was no longer impeded; a great wave of excited matter coursed through the void, slamming into the belly of the Angel.  Heat and energy blossomed out into space like a rose of light, the alien substance volatilized and hurled out in arching plumes.  Immediately, the focused plasma projectors that formed the Shepherd's standard armament began to glow in anticipation of adding their own fuel to the fire.  Celebration was short, however, as an answering lance of light ripped out from the Angel, piercing the crude Shepherd and tracing a line of destruction along its side, like a child scrawling with a death-colored crayon.
Even as it crumpled inward, a silent nimbus engulfed the dying cruiser.
However, Oleneva had had time enough to select the most advantageous of the assault plans, rush a few modifications, and pump it out to the fleet suspended about the Shepherd.  Already in motion, they were a swarm of angry bees hoping to fell a giant.  More light as dozens of spears from the Angel now filled the silence of space.
The dying began in earnest.
Ships transmuted almost peacefully into puffs of debris at the slightest touch of the Angel’s weapons, pods bursting and ejecting their loads into cold space.
Through the destruction, scores of ships still sailed on, into the breach in the Angel's energy prow, there-in to contend with the closer defenses.  The Appomattox Courthouse wove and dove and spun wildly, vernier thrusters flaring with a mad passion that regarded neither fuel nor the comfort of passengers.  Somehow, they managed to avoid the Angel's smaller batteries, pulses of blue-white light skirling off through the void as they came within kilometers of the Angel and began Phase Two.
Even inside the pod, Zhiang could feel the dull chunk of the primary locking bolts disengaging.  That would mean...foont...it was deployed.  An instant later, their pod sailed out into crowded, deadly space, three more following in quick succession.
Leading the four ejected pods was a sleek black casing, ostensibly invisible to all forms of electronic detection.  It was the technological masterpiece of the Brazilian military: a stealth super-yield class nuclear micro-warhead.  It was, unfortunately, of the lowest strength that fell into that category but two-thirds of the swarming ships were equipped with these "Baby Blasters" as they were affectionately known.  Striking the smooth, white surface of the Angel, it tore in with all its fury, a carefully shaped, computer-crafted detonation punching through the half-dozen layers that guarded the inner chambers of the alien ship.
Almost immediately, the wound began to heal, the power of that foreign technology coping in stride with the ferocity of the assault.  Zhiang watched through the porthole at the pod's fore as the hole swelled larger and larger with closing distance even as it healed shut.
"We’re not gonna make it," Someone muttered, voice tense.
"The plan says we will," Was all Zhiang could respond with.
The pod made it, if only barely.  The sealing skin of the Angel tore into their tail fins—the pods had originally been designed for atmospheric insertions—sending them spinning wildly, even as the retrorockets kicked in to try and slow the hurtling craft.  It rolled, slammed into a bulkhead, bent, and pinwheeled off the floor, finally lodging itself against the massive chamber’s far wall.
The second pod rammed into the almost-sealed hole, only a thin plume of superheated debris squirting through.  Meanwhile, the third pod collapsed against the smooth, unblemished new hull surface while concentrated fire from the defensive batteries was busy reducing the fourth pod and the Appomattox Courthouse to vapor.  Then it was over, almost as soon as it began, the space about the Angel as still as it was quiet.
In that motionless void, blue light flickered slowly and then strengthened, steadying as the darkened shield well returned to life.

#

The pods were designed to take damage, as were the combat suits and the men who wore then.  Even so, the landing had been rougher than ideal and only fourteen of the twenty men were in condition to emerge from the vessel, rifles in hand and trained on the surrounding environs as they fanned out from the upside-down vessel.
"Sound off," Zhiang subvocalized into his throat-mounted microphone as one eye scanned the area and the other compiled the data streaming across a series of translucent windows projected by the H.U.D. across his field of view.  With a flick of his head, he snapped the monocle back into place so he could get his pinyin translations; the last thing he needed now was to miss some critical bit of information because he couldn't understand an accent or word.
Visible-spectrum light filled the room, radiating from glowing strips at the edges where the walls met the ceiling and floor, and they quickly determined they were in a drab white cube more than a hundred meters to a side, an open archway leading out the only visible feature.
"Carlston; I can barely walk," the first voice responded.
"Oberg; I’m fine, if we take it at a trot."
"Santiago; ready for action."
"Murchison; I can’t feel my right foot.  I’m hoping that makes it easier to deal with."
They continued like that; even if fourteen men had left the pod, only a dozen were going to be worth much in a firefight.  It confirmed the readings on his helmet as he flipped through the troop diagnostics.  Three life signs completely stopped, one erratic, and a slew of wounds.  Not a soldier in the group was uninjured; Zhiang’s own left elbow and wrist shot pain whenever he moved them too sharply.  The only option was to ignore it, the suit already compensating with localized injections of painkillers and anti-inflammatories.
"Form up, if you can so much as walk," Zhiang called, the twelve men fit for duty being joined by another, limping badly but looking determined through the ballistic faceplate on his helmet.  Dark grey patches on the man's suit showed where the self-sealing feature had proved functional.
"We’re going in.  The rest," Motioning to remaining men, "hold this room as a fallback position and maintain radio silence unless there's an emergency.  Remember, if it moves, shoot it.  If it stays still in a threatening fashion, shoot it anyway."  A gallows chuckle ran through the men.
While the injured moved as well as they could to secure the room, the ambulatory exited through the arched portal.  Pouring out with rifles trained in all directions, they were greeted by a hall that curved gently out of sight in either direction, periodically studded with arches that spoke of rooms beyond.  These had seamless plates of white substance filling them, however, with no obvious means of coaxing them open.  Zhiang decided to advance by leapfrogging in three groups from archway to archway, with a fourth keeping the group’s back covered.  No other infiltration forces were showing up on Zhiang’s sensors, which he hoped simply meant that there was interference from the alien architecture.  The idea that they might be the sole hope for humanity was too unsettling to dwell on.
"These corridors," A Brazilian named Santiago muttered in the expected thickly-accented English.  "They all look the same.  None of the doors open and no way to open them."
"What did you expect?" Returned a dark-skinned Italian that everyone simply called Ciao, pronouncing his words painstakingly.  "Doorknobs and map directories in the heart of an alien warship?"
"Cut the chatter," Zhiang remonstrated as his trio leapfrogged to the front.  He was, however, a little disconcerted by the endlessly smooth white corridors with the strips of light.  Monitors in those, I wouldn’t doubt, he thought to himself, eyeing them.  Nothing we can do about it, though.  We don’t have enough bullets to take them all out if they’re even there.
It was almost an hour before they came to the split in the corridor.
"All this time and not one alien," muttered the limping Dobson.  An American, his English was clear at least.  "They have to know we’re here, so why aren’t they showing up to do something?"
"Maybe they plan to let us wander aimlessly until we starve to death," Santiago said off-handedly as they looked down either fork of the passage.  After all, the Angel was larger than some countries back on Earth.
"We don’t have time to just poke around at our leisure and backtrack to every split," Zhiang said.  "Oberg, take Hashizawa, Jefferies, Carlston, Ciao, and Dereks and go right.  Check in with me every fifteen minutes or if something comes up.  If you come to another split, Hashizawa, you get Carlston and Dereks, but no groups smaller than three."
"Sir," The other men responded, saluting before advancing down the right fork.  Nodding to the six men still with him, Zhiang took them left.
It was only ten minutes before Zhiang’s radio sprang to life.  Instead of Oberg’s group, it was the fortified position back at the penetration sight.
"Zhisheng!" A voice yelled over the roaring of rifles.  He was speaking in Chinese, which thankfully only Zhiang seemed to understand.  "Zhisheng, gods aloft!  They’re coming out of the walls!  Watch out for the wa-..." Then the voice stopped.  No cries or grunts of pain, just instant silence.  The last of the gunfire cut off, leaving only the faint crackle of background static.  It was over before Zhiang could do more than call the man’s name.
"Wulong!  Come in, Wulong!  Barnett!  Sampson!"  No voices responded, and the other men in his group stared with nervous fear.  They didn't seem to know what had been said, but they had heard the gunfire, the panic in the voice, and, finally, the all-consuming silence.  Zhiang almost spat—a bad idea in a helmet—then touched one of the buttons on his hip, opening another radio channel.
"Oberg, this is Zhisheng.  We have a situation."
Silence.  It stretched on for several seconds before Zhiang tried again, with similar results.
"Must be something between us," Dobson said nervously.  "Blocking the radio."
"But they’re closer to us than they we are to the insert point," said Black, British and the youngest man in Zhiang’s group.  "If we could hear them..."
"This doesn’t change the mission objectives," Zhiang said firmly, his voice strong as he could make it.  "Oberg’s group knows that too.  All that matters is success.  If there’s a thousand of us or just one on this ship when it goes up, it doesn’t matter."
He pulled up Black and the pair leapfrogged to the front of the column.  They slid into the next archway, eyes scanning as a pair of Americans—Spears and McDougal—moved ahead of them.  Then was Santiago and Murchison, the group’s lone Canadian.  At the rear, Dobson moved up before Zhiang and Black took the column lead again.
Advancing in that fashion, they covered ground safely but slowly.  Time began to drag on and their pace quickened of its own unconscious accord, urgency mingling with repressed fear.  Each man was watching their own version of the other group’s last moments play across their imagination more than their surroundings.
An hour.  Two hours.  Then, finally, another fork in the passage.
"Are we going to split up again?" Black asked, a nervous edge to his voice.
"No," Zhiang decided instantly, to the visible relief of his men.  "This is taking too long.  We can’t get any of these doors open, and at the rate we’re going, we really will starve before we find anything."  Zhiang cast a look at the injured Dobson, who blanched slightly but nodded.  "We go right, at a trot."
They moved quickly, through the ever-unchanging white hallways with glowing edges and closed doors.  It makes the eyes lazy, Zhiang thought, this scenery that never changes.  Perhaps these aliens have no love of art, or at least consider it differently than we do?  His suits sensors weren't picking up anything unusual in light spectrums outside the visual, so it wasn't a difference in physical perception.
When the hallway suddenly blossomed into an open arcade, the old caution reasserted itself immediately and the men fell into their pairs.  Spears and McDougal stood inside the doorway, on either side, with Dobson behind McDougal.  Santiago and Murchison swung out, kneeling, to either side of the doorway, followed by Zhiang and Black, back-to-back and rifles raised.
The arcade was a rectangle twenty meters wide and ten times that in length, ringed with open archways.  The ceiling was twice as tall as that of the hallways, the height of three large men standing on one another’s shoulders.  Other than that, however, it may as well have been the hallways they had been through, with only smooth white metal and glowing strips of light.
It was almost enough to relax them, until something appeared in the closest doorway along the right wall.  Rifles swung towards it and almost fired before everyone's IFF pinged friendlies and they recognized a United Nation’s Galactic Defense League emblem on a streamlined, ferramic-plated hostile environment tactical suit.
"Oberg’s group?" Murchison asked hopefully.
"Doesn’t look like it," Zhiang said back, making a few hand signals that the other figure returned before motioning behind him.  Three more figures, similarly attired, emerged.  Zhiang’s radio then crackled to life.
"First Lieutenant Michael Green, United States Marine Corps."
"First Lieutenant Zhiang Zhisheng, People’s Liberation Army Space Forces."
"God bless you," The marine breathed gruffly, accent as thick as if he were chewing on his words despite being American.  "I thought my men were the only ones who made it onto this abysmal piece of junk.  These all you’ve got?"
"I had a second group, but we lost contact when we split up."
"Then you made it in luckier than we did," He grunted.  "Our pod was cut in half by those damn walls.  Lost a lot of good men."
"This day will be famous for the losing of good men, Lt. Green," Zhiang sighed heavily.  Then noticed that the two groups had closed on each other, talking together, pounding each other on the back as a congratulations for having made it.  If there were two groups, then it was likely there were at least a few more; it lifted a heavy weight from all their shoulders.
"What are your plans?" Zhiang asked.
"We’re pretty much roving blind.  From what I can tell, our pod hit about a third of the way down the Angel’s main body, close to the forward section.  That’s about on target...the brain-cases planetside figured if we could get to the center of the ship around this area, we should be close to the main power source or whatever command core is running this thing."
"So you will continue to move inward from here?"
"That’s the best bet we can figure on," Green shrugged.  "But this entire area seems abandoned.  Just empty halls and sealed doors.  We tried a grenade on one of the doorways, but it just scratched it up bad and dented it a little.  We’d have to unload half the Becks we have on us to bust open just one of them and it'd heal up right after anyway.  Besides, we figure we can move quicker if we don’t have to worry about any little green men wanting revenge for their architecture."
Zhiang flicked something on his belt, switching his radio over to a private channel with Green.  The American raised his eyebrows when he noticed, but Zhiang nodded to him and the marine adjusted his radio to match.
"In that case, I have something important to tell you."  He repeated what few details there were concerning Wulong’s last transmission, during which Green’s face turned grim.
"I see...that does change things," He mused with obvious distaste.  "We can’t lower our guard, even here."
"But at the same time, we need haste," Zhiang added.  "We have probably dallied long enough as it is."
"You’re right," Green sighed, then flicked his radio back to the open channel.  "Okay you dogs, don’t forget we’re still on the clock.  We’ve got a score to settle with our alien friends here, and we wanna make sure Uncle Sam lands the last blow."  The other marines with him gave a strange 'hoo-ah!' shout and, with a wave, started to move.
It was already too late.
When he had time to think about it later, Zhiang would compare it to a sculpture of frozen mercury swiftly melting, except in reverse and coming out of a wall.  As it was, it happened so quickly he only had time to widen his eyes and half-raise his rifle before the thing was fully formed.
It had a body like some sort of six-legged metal spider, a bloated spherical thorax and a thin, shiny metal prism for an abdomen, the head withered and vestigial.  Clinging to the wall, it swiveled that pitiful head about, jawless and possessed of no obvious eyes.
By the time Zhiang's rifle was up and a round squeezed off, the spider had already leapt off the wall, landing on Green’s back as he was half-way through turning to see what Zhiang had started shouting about.
As it struck, wickedly sharp legs seemed to melt partially into the suit—they did not leave cuts in it but passed like water through a sieve—and Green simply...stopped.  Without any visible reaction, no jerking or gasping or stiffening, his turn seamlessly ended with him crumpling into a motionless pile on the floor.  The metal thing perched atop him was already scanning for a new victim when a second shot from Zhiang sent it splashing across the floor, a water balloon rather than a monster.  The drops of the creature had not even settled when they began flowing back together, forming a long puddle with six thin projections, a chrome shadow.
Movement around him brought Zhiang out of the mental torpor through which his body had been reacting.  Turning sharply, he saw two more of the spiders, one already clinging to a stopped Dobson.  Santiago, back-to-back with Murchison, was drawing a bead on a spider still on the wall, but his shot was too late, and it leapt onto Spears, catching him in the side as he tried to dodge, stopping him as well.
"Run!" Zhiang shouted, grabbing Black with one hand and sending a spray of bullets at another spider coming out of the wall.  "There’s too many!"
Soldiers' legs ate ground as they broke for the nearest exit away from the emerging attackers—the middle of the long wall opposite where the Marines had entered.  A few men jettisoned their packs as they ran, the sudden loss of an extra twenty kilos allowing them to demand greater speed from furiously pumping limbs.  Springing and scuttling, the spiders pursued in a disordered frenzy.  They had gone nearly five minutes before the last one was lost to sight behind them.  They went another fifteen before they stopped, leaning against the wall and panting heavily from running in the suits so far, so fast.  With a vague flash of jealousy, Zhiang thought about the newest-generation combat suits the Indians had, with passive muscular augmentation that they said could let a man run at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour.
Zhiang glanced around between gasps and noticed that, though Dobson and Spears were gone, one of the marines had seen fit to follow his lead.  When he trusted himself to speak again, Zhiang queried the new soldier.
"Your name?"
"Richard Barkley, sir," The thick-shouldered man answered, visibly unsure if he was supposed to be treating the Chinese officer as his new C.O. or if circumstances now required he go on alone.  "Folks just call me Brick, though."
"Well, Brick, welcome to the group."
"Sir," That from McDougal, "What...what were those things?  Were they the aliens?"
"Do you think the Chinese officers had a special briefing on what was inside this accursed thing that they neglected to give you?" Zhiang snapped back, immediately regretting it.  His men were obviously panicked and nervous; they needed him for stability.  "I have no idea...but they seem to have stopped following us for now.  They’re probably what got Wulong and the others, though."
"More importantly, where do we go from here?" Santiago interjected.
"We follow this hall, until we come across something worth coming across," Zhiang grunted, quickly pairing Brick with the partnerless McDougal—that both men were Americans might help them deal with the madness their mission had become—before leading the group down the hallway with the quick caution that was becoming second nature.

#

"We gotta stop," Santiago muttered, raising an arm to brush at his sweating brow and seeming surprised when—for the fourth time that hour—his gloved hand struck the transparent mask of his environmentally sealed combat headgear.  "We gotta stop," He repeated disgustedly, making a sort of bird-pecking motion that sent the suit's systems the message to wipe off his forehead for him.
"Just a little further," Zhiang exhorted, as he had to do more and more frequently.  "As soon as we find some place we can defend."
No one spoke—they were all too well-trained to surrender to panic—but the unspoken words were heavy on the six men.  How could they defend themselves from things that could melt out of walls at will, impervious to bullets and unhampered by the latest advancements in protective synthetics?  It had been eight hours since the disaster in the arcade; most of them had been awake since launch from Redhall—Lagrange Two Station—the day before.  They were exhausted.
"But what if we don't find anywhere to set up?" McDougal rumbled, rolling his shoulders to work out the soreness that constant tension had rooted deep.  "It's just been hallway and arches except for that big room, and that isn't what we're looking to repeat."  Brick grunted his agreement, but the tag-along Marine almost never spoke unless directly addressed.  Despite the piecemeal nature of the operation, with most infiltration groups comprised of mixed forces and nationalities to ensure that any one insertion team would have a wide array of skills, the fact that his entire unit had been wiped out seemed to keep the American separate from the other five.
"It can't be all hallways," said Zhiang, albeit without real conviction.  He kicked himself mentally for his tone, but he was exhausted and couldn't keep up a steady stream of optimism in the face of an increasingly bitter reality.
"Why not?" Murchison broke in.  "You saw those spider-things; blow them apart and they'd just squidge all back together again.  If whatever runs this madhouse can do that with something as complex as a robot—or whatever those were—then why not architecture?  A truly modular ship, where you just have to have the right sort of interface to call up whatever room you want from whichever archway you happen to be standing next to."
"We don't know what 'they' can or cannot do," Zhiang replied a little too stiffly.  By his ancestors, he was tired.  "So let's not go ascribing them every unproven idea a half-dozen nervous minds can think up, alright?  We've job enough with the enemies in front of us, without worrying about the ones inside."
"Yes, sir," The others chorused with varying degrees of petulance.
Still, every step seemed to a sap confidence from the troops, with nothing but that endless tunnel of smooth white wall and its monotonously reliable studding of archway after sealed archway, all glowing nacre in the artificial white light.  Hours of walking revealed that the ground under their feet felt like no substance they had ever encountered.  It was softer than metal or stone, but harder than soil or linoleum, producing no sound regardless of how roughly they trod upon it or when they dropped a heavy load, as Santiago had discovered a few hours earlier.  Fiddling about distractedly with his gear, he had accidentally cut power to his pack's magnetic clamps and the entire unit had braced, expecting a gods-awful clamor as the slab of metal and plastic went bouncing down the hallway.  Contents packed tight so as not to shift, it had produced not a single sound.
"Merda," Santiago breathed.
Zhiang had been lost so deeply in thought that, when the hallway they were in ended in a perpendicular junction with another, he had actually turned right and took three full steps before drawing himself up short at the Brazilian's curse.
"No kidding," McDougal replied, similarly overawed.
Even if they had not just been subjected to hours of endless, banausic architecture, the room would have come like a punch to the plexus; after their long trek, Zhiang and the others could only nod in mute agreement with the Portuguese profanity.  Down the hall stood the arched entrance to a chamber that appeared to be a massive, cylindrical space a quarter kilometer across and tiered with circular platforms arranged at odds heights with no visible means of support.  One hovered centimeters off the floor, while the next one visible was a good three meters—plenty of clearance to walk under—and the edge of yet another was perhaps ten meters.  The height of the room was lost past the upper edge of its entrance.
"Stim up and give me a standard entrance," Zhiang managed, recovering himself swiftly enough to assert military discipline before anyone acted rashly.  With a faint mechanical whir, he felt the prick at the base of his neck followed by the warm, tingling rush of the chemical stimulants.  Immediately, fatigue melted away and his muscles tightened, his awareness heightened as his eyes focused more sharply.  His Chinese cocktail was just about as good as one got, though Black's Eur-U stimulant would probably be the latest miracle out of Austria's system-class labs.  Zhiang sent off a quick prayer that the rest of his unit had chemicals good enough to keep them from being liabilities in a fire-fight.
The walls and platforms of the chamber were as white and unadorned as they had come to expect but by the play shadows cast by higher platforms, Zhiang guessed that ceiling must be truly soaring in height.
Movements swift and steady now, Brick and McDougal swung into the doorway, dropping to one knee and darting their snub-nosed rifles in quick arcs.  Santiago and Murchison were in a heartbeat later, their own rifles trained up and around to cover the ceiling and platforms, while Zhiang and Black pulled up the rear, eyes firmly on the far side of the chamber.
"Clear," McDougal called, standing but not lowering his rifle.
"Clear," The others added, each in turn; only after Zhiang added his voice did everyone's gazes start to wander.
"How tall?" Murchison mumbled, and Zhiang focused his eyes on the distant ceiling.  Suit system reacting to the action, it calculated the distance and displayed '846.37m' in a blinking box just to the side of where his eye was pointed.
"About eight-hundred-and-fifty meters," Zhiang replied.  "No signs of movement or an-"
"The door!" Brick cried and the group whirled as one.  Even as they finished turning, they barely had time to glimpse a thin white sliver of the hallway ceiling outside before it disappeared behind the rising edge of a curved door.  Santiago was there in an instant, banging the butt of his rifle on the obstruction but, like the floors, it produced no sound and less reaction.
"Damnation," Murchison muttered, looking around.  "We're trapped.  I don't see any other doors on this level."
Click.
"What was that?" Black asked, twisting and training his rifle on the air above them, where the distant noise seemed to have come from.  With the sound-absorbing properties of the walls, it had not echoed but merely filtered down to them.
"Bad tidings," Zhiang muttered.  "Pairs spread out, find some cover, and watch each others' backs.  We've come too far to lose anyone else."
"And remember boys," Santiago added with a last dash of gallows humor, "Friendly fire ain't, so keep your lead to yourselves."  They all laughed, even though it wasn't a very good joke.  You had to, in situations like this.
"This whole thing stinks," Black muttered conspiratorially as he knelt backpack-to-backpack with Zhiang against the partial cover of the room's lowest platform.  "You saw those spiders; they could wipe us out in a heartbeat, if they really wanted to.  So why all the games?"
"Maybe it amuses them," Zhiang whispered back, too low for the other pairs to hear.  "Maybe they're studying our psychology under pressure.  They could just be operating under restraints we know nothing about; like I said, it's no use trying to guess with as little information as we have."
Click.
"Brilliant," The English airman spat, but this time the strange sound from above did not come and go without incident.
With a faint hiss like the opening of an electronic door in a high-end shopping center back home, the floor underfoot gave a quick jerk and then began to slide smoothly.  Zhiang cast about frantically before he spotted it in the center of the room.  Like some sort of telescoping iris, a circular opening was growing in the center of the chamber's floor.  Two hundred meters away, Santiago roared another Portuguese curse.
"Up on the platforms," Zhiang shouted, then subvocalized the command into the local radio for good measure.  Black had already scrambled onto a smooth disc about the size of a small car and was holding out his hand to give Zhiang a boost.
"Playing with us," He growled as he pulled Zhiang up next to him.
Click.
"Oh, for the love of," McDougal's voice sounded from a nearby platform floating perhaps twice as wide and a meter higher than the one Zhiang and Black occupied.
With a jarring start, the platform beneath Zhiang started to rotate like a slow gear even as it began to transcribe a circular path around the circumference of the room.  A quick glance showed that the scores of platforms that comprised the room's near-kilometer height were beginning to gyre about in similar fashion; the closer to the ceiling, the more swiftly the discs spun.
"What in God's name is that?" Santiago called, gesturing towards the growing hole in the floor's center with the nose of his rifle.  Dashing to a better vantage, Zhiang peered over his platform's lip and down into...something.
"A jet engine?" Murchison supplied.
"Something hot," McDougal agreed, the air around them already beginning to ripple with distorting waves of heat.
Down at the pit's bottom was a device that did, indeed, resemble some sort of jet exhaust, though it produced no sound as it cast up searing incalescence from a flaring nozzle.  As the opening widened—eventually replacing the chamber floor entirely—more and more of the thrusting knives of heat appeared, adding to the temperature of the room.  Glancing at a corner of his H.U.D., Zhiang's eyebrows leapt; the suit's exterior thermistor registered almost a hundred degrees.  Before now, the ship had not varied from a constant and comfortable temperature of twenty-three-and-one-half degrees.  Even as he watched, the temperature rose another two degrees.
"Are they planning on barbequing us?" McDougal asked, glancing over at Brick, who was staring up at the platforms that twirled and spun above them.
"I've played games like this before," The Marine said suddenly, casting about quickly.
"What?" Santiago asked, voice disbelieving.  "What in God's name does that have to do with anything?"
"Pointless traps and puzzles in the dungeon," Brick replied as if that explained everything and suddenly took a running start to the edge of his platform, leaping out over the growing pit like a high jumper going for the record.  Everyone cried at once before, at the apex of his jump, the twirling edge of a higher platform spun out under him and he landed with a well-executed roll.  Springing back up to his feet, he motioned for McDougal and the others to follow.
"Basic platforming dungeon design: you drop in some danger, then force the hero to hop his way out of it," He called.  "It's just like a video game.  If we stay down there, we get roasted alive.  But the higher we go," He jerked a thumb skyward, "The harder the trap is to negotiate.  The heat will probably keep increasing until the lowest platforms are hotter than our suits can compensate for.  If we don't get to the top in time, we fry like so much bacon on a griddle."
"Don't talk to me about bacon," McDougal muttered as he followed Brick to the higher platform, almost missing the jump before the Marine snagged his arm and dragged him up.
"Come on, everyone," Brick shouted, making beckoning sweeps with his arm.  They all looked at Zhiang, who could only shrug.
"So now we're playing alien video games," He muttered and thus began their skyward exodus.
The first hundred meters were simplicity in-and-of itself for men near the apex of physical human ability and hopped up on the latest military-grade stimulant mixtures, but soon the spinning of the platforms under their feet made it difficult to stand and almost impossible to properly time their jumps up the growing distance between platform levels.  The spinning edges offered no ridges or indentations for them to grip and Murchison and McDougal had both missed their last jumps, though they had managed to land back on the platforms they had just abandoned with only a minimum of stopping the other soldiers' hearts.
"We're going to have to ditch the packs," A panting Brick told Zhiang after they had just barely managed to scrabble onto a platform that spun by.  "They're too heavy."
"I hate to do it," Zhiang admitted, "But you're right.  We won't make it to the top at this rate.  Everyone," He subvocalized over the local radio, since Santiago and Murchison were making their way up platforms on the other side of the chamber, "Ditch your packs.  Keep some food and ammo, but dump everything else you can."
"Spread the stuff out as far as you can," Brick added.  "Chuck it onto every platform you see.  They have integral sensors, so we can monitor how the heat levels are increasing," He added after a querying glance from Zhiang.
"Good idea," He admitted, a little chagrined that he had not thought of it himself as he dumped his own backpack in the center of the platform they occupied.  They worked swiftly, so by the next revolution Brick and Zhiang were able to boost McDougal and Black up alongside them while Santiago and Murchison made it up onto a platform that was curling along at the same height but on the opposite side of the room.
"Much easier," Black puffed, massaging the small of his back uselessly through his hard suit.  "My turn, then."  He heaved a deep sighed, eyeing the platform that was making its way towards them.
Another hundred meters, then two, and finally they were half-way up the chamber.  A loud staccato of bang-bang-bang had everyone jumping and rolling, rifles sweeping every visible corner of the room.  Nothing.
"My fault," Murchison admitted into his radio after a moment.  "Sensors say it was an extra ammo clip I'd tossed down on one of the lower platforms.  Looks like it's hot enough to go off down there."
"Good thing no one tossed a mine," Black muttered.
"Aww hell," Santiago shouted.
"You had better be joking," Zhiang cried back.
"We all better be climbing!" The Brazilian returned and made a reckless leap for the next highest platform as it charged by—they were moving at a considerable clip this high up—almost spilling himself over backwards before twisting sharply enough to make a gymnast blanch and rolling safely onto the smooth white disc.
"Goddammit!" McDougal spat, everyone moving with a renewed sense of urgency.  "This is why I hate working with you."
"And here I thought you were just jealous," Santiago laughed back as he yanked Murchison up after him.
They were two-thirds of the way up the cylindrical room, the platforms whizzing around somewhere between 'inconvenient' and 'homicidal,' when the dumped mine detonated.  Zhiang wasn't sure what sorts of explosives Santiago's Forças Armadas do Brasil had issued its specialists for Fallen Angel, but the blast was stronger than anything the solid-state hydrocarbon mines magnetized to his waist could have produced.  Shuddering like a wounded monster, the entire cylindrical room quivered and Zhiang had to drop to hands-and-knees to keep his balance.
"Murchison!" Black shouted, leaping impotently towards the edge of the platform.  He skidded to a stop with one arm hanging out over empty air, as if he could reach across the hundreds of meters that separated him from where the Canadian's bemusedly surprised face was dropping out of view.
"Santiago!  Murchison!"  Zhiang shouted the names with mingled horror and rage as he watched the platforms on the far side of the chamber collapsing.  From ceiling to boiling floor, every platform on that half of the room seemed to have suddenly lost whatever invisible force supported it.  They went crashing in eerie silence towards the ravenous thermal jets on the floor, ivory platforms disintegrating a dozen meters above the reaching fires.
"Get back!" Brick shouted and it took Zhiang a moment to realize why.  Decades of genetic 'social engineering' and new customs of diet and lifestyle had long since quashed the stereotype of the small-statured Chinese—unless you counted those unfortunate children of socialites that had been swept up in the 'retro-China' craze and made sure their offspring were stylishly diminutive—but it was still a feat for Zhiang to leap backwards while bodily hauling Black one-armed with him.
Waves of pressure rolled up over them as the mines left strapped to the two soldiers detonated with ferocious vigor while the unspent ammunition in their rifles and on their persons went shrieking through the chamber.  With so many platforms fallen, they were much more dangerous than the occasional dumped magazine had proven.
McDougal cursed vociferously as one rogue bullet whined off the ferramic plate on his left shoulder, leaving a short dash of scorched carbon around a small divot in the black-green material.
"What was that?" Black asked breathlessly, shaking in Zhiang's grip.  "Why did they go crashing like that?"
"We don't know the rules of the game," Brick radioed in reply, voice eerily calm.  "That explosion might have broken one of them and...we just don't know."
"What we do know," Zhiang interjected, "Is that we have to get to the top before we join them."  Everyone glanced up, faces blanching.
Juking and twisting, the platforms above them raced about the chamber.  There was a disheartening amount of ceiling visible now that fully half of their options had gone tumbling into that terrible furnace below.

#

Whatever the Americans dumped into their stimulant mix, it wasn't as potent as Zhiang's; McDougal and Brick were barely able to scrabble up onto the penultimate platform.  Luckily, every man railroaded into Fallen Angel had passed exhausting batteries of physical tests in addition to their mental and psychological examinations.  Flexing his own gloved hands and watching the final platform zip by in a white blur, Zhiang considered dumping what little remained of his supplies—a day's rations, some ammo, mines, and his stims—but nothing was expendable if he wanted at least a chance of succeeding at the reason they were all here.
"What is even up there?" McDougal asked as he bent over, hands on knees, laboring to catch his breath.  "I can't see any doorways or exits."
"You're welcome to go back the way we came," Black said, well, blackly.
"Cheery chap," McDougal muttered in a bad faux-British accent.
"Enough chatter," Zhiang soothed, stepping between them to cut off a brewing argument.  Training could only take a man through so much.
"We'll just have to see what's up there," Brick added, stretching and eyeing the platform.  Every time it knifed past, it overlapped at the most about a quarter of the ten-meter-wide white disc they rode on, skimming a meter above it.  A difficult jump in the best of times, but they were all exhausted.  Just fifty meters below, Zhiang had been forced to drill himself with a second flood of stimulants; dangerous, since not barely an hour had passed since the first and the doctors advised no more than one dose a month.
"Why bother," Black grunted, straightening up and walking over to the far edge of the platform to look down over it.  "They're just toying with us.  We're never going to make it to whatever part of this bloody thing we need to blow."
Below them, the lower third of the cylindrical chamber was now completely devoid of platforms; their suits would keep them alive no more than a hundred meters below where they stood.  Everyone was staring nervously at Black, who glanced over his shoulder at them and smirked, his eyes glinting with unsettling emotions best left a mystery.
"No worries," He muttered, turning his back on the precipice and stepping towards them.
Click.
With a sudden, jarring thud, everyone was tossed off their feet and sent rolling.
"The hell!" McDougal cursed, grabbing Zhiang's leg as they slid past each other, their opposite momentums arresting them near the rotating disc's center, while Brick managed to prop himself with his rifle before skidding more than a meter.  Everyone whipped around, eyes wide, to try and find Black, so perilously close to the platform's edge.
"Relax," The British airman muttered from where he had fallen back onto his haunches, now seated firmly near the platform edge but in no danger.  "I'm not about to check out while those bastards sit around laughing."
Blurred white slammed into Black's temple with enough force to dent his red-striped-blue ferramic helmet like a tin can hit with a hatchet, his tinted faceplate going red as his body was flung rag-doll fashion into open air.  Tumbling down the room's height, he caromed off other platforms that spun past, finally dropping onto one almost two hundred meters down.  He lay there in the zone of killing heat, body spinning as the platform beneath him rotated and face down in a spreading pond of a blood.  With gut-clenching rapidity, the spilled blood was baked dry by the ambient heat.
"Black!  Black!" Zhiang called into the radio, but he received no reply.  He wished that surprised him, but all the soldier's diagnostic feeds had flatlined at the moment of impact.
"They reversed the rotation," Brick spat as he steadied himself in a kneeling squat, making sure he was well away from the edges of the platform.
Click.
They were all braced now, so when the platform shuddered and reversed again, none of them were thrown down.  Looking at each other, they were all in silent agreement.
Those alien bastards.
"I'm going to try it," Brick said, eyeing the platform as its opposing orbit took it around the room, deceptively serene when viewed a quarter kilometer away.
"Be careful," Was the only advice Zhiang had to give.
No one could find breath when Brick launched himself, body tight and all limbs raised high enough to avoid the platform's rushing edge.  He struck the top and rolled and rolled, arresting himself just as his booted feet went flying over the edge, dangling in open air.  It was moving so fast that he couldn't get all the way to his feet, instead keeping his hands and knees spread wide as he rose up slightly.
"I'm on," He wheezed into his radio, "But watch out for the landing.  I'm going to have a Hershey's-shaped dent in my ribs when this is over."  As he spoke, he rubbed one of the small food packages strapped to his chest.
"I'll take it next," Zhiang said as he came up into a crouch and watched the spinning disc.
"Well, hurry it up," McDougal cut in, "'cause it's getting hotter faster now."
A quick glance showed Zhiang that the temperature had jumped ten degrees in the time that it previously would have taken for five.  He spiced the airwaves with some choice Mandarin profanity.
Still, the majority of his mind was on the matter at hand, so when the platform slashed close, he was up and over in finest fashion, executing a far more graceful landing than Brick had pulled off.  Coming up on to his knees, a bit of something his brother-in-law in the PLA Navy had once shown him came to mind.  Slowly and carefully, he rose into a tentative crouch, the fronts of his feet angled inward and his weight distributed as evenly as he could manage while he tightened the muscles of his stomach.  Surprisingly, he actually did feel a great deal more balanced than on earlier platforms, despite the swifter pace.
"You're next, McDougal," Zhiang radioed and the American flashed a thumbs-up of acknowledgement as he made his way to the same spot Zhiang had jumped from.
"You can do it," Brick added by way of encouragement.
"Three," They heard McDougal count as they watched the platforms nearing eclipse.  "Two.  One!"
Click.
Even as McDougal leapt, there was the now-familiar shudder as the platforms sawed violently and proceeded to spin apart on newly-opposing tangents.  Zhiang and Brick were both already airborne, however, arms stretched out.  The Marine was too far to make it, but one of Zhiang's hands managed to close around the wrist of one of McDougal's questing arms as the other soldier hung suspended in the air for an eternal instant.  As was becoming increasingly common as the mission ground on, they all swapped obscenities in native tongues and accents—McDougal as he dangled in empty, heat-warped air; Zhiang as the American's weight threatened to pull his shoulder out of socket; Brick as he scrabbled on all fours to toss himself down next to Zhiang and seize McDougal's other hand.
"Either you bastards let go, I'ma kill you!" McDougal shouted as the other two hauled back, dragging the kicking American's chest level to the surface.
"Only way I'd be scared of your fat ass," Brick grunted between heaves, "Is if I were a cheeseburger."
With a last, straining pull accompanied by a chorus of shouts and groans, the trio spilled over backwards onto the platform, gasping from the exertion.  Lying there, they all stared a little helplessly at the blank chamber ceiling above them, else glanced at the swiftly rising digits on their H.U.D. thermal readouts.
"Well, we beat level one of their stupid game," McDougal muttered after a few moments, pulling himself up into a sitting position.  "So what the hell comes next?"
"That," Brick said, scrambling up quickly as he gestured towards a section of the wall they were spinning towards.
In an otherwise perfectly smooth, white surface, they could make out the near-invisible outline of a sealed archway.  Before their eyes, it hissed softly and the obstruction slid down, revealing a familiar and—after the events of the room—welcome hallway.
"They don't expect us to jump into that, do they?" McDougal muttered in exasperation.
Click.
They all braced themselves, but it seemed the only effect of the sound this time was their platform slowing, both in rotation and orbit, before finally coming to rest directly in front of the door.  Looking from one to another, they shrugged.
"I suppose not," Zhiang sighed.  It was a small blessing, after the room had eaten half their number.  Still, they were trained and dedicated and no one was making it out of this alive anyway; they had a mission to be about.
"You're still the boss," McDougal said, with a faux-generous wave towards the doorway.  "So boss on."

#

If poorly, at least they were rested now and Zhiang had gotten past the worst of his headache from over-stimming himself.  He'd taken middle watch—as the leader, it was his responsibility—and that hadn't helped, but he felt more spry than he had since insertion two days ago now.  Some dinner had helped as well, though Zhiang had been deadly-jealous of the Americans' meal.  While he had to make do with the small plastic tube inside his combat helmet through which he could suck spirolina-enriched nutrient goo out of his food cartridges, the other two had pulled flavored bars of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats and broken off small chunks, passing them into receptacles mounted below their faceplates.  The food had passed through a small vacuum decontamination chamber before popping out onto a tray where they could snap it up.  Zhiang thought he would sell his grandparents just to chew something, instead of sucking on flavorless, textureless paste.  He'd thought about shooting both men when he watched them devouring their chocolate bars for dessert; they'd offered him some and he was still trying to decide whether they had been teasing him or were genuinely unaware that his helmet did not have an oral intake.
Still, personal discomforts aside, they seemed to be better off than they had in a while.  If only they had some sort of destination, instead of these endless, accursed halls.
"Brilliant strategy, though," McDougal had muttered at one point.  "Just bore your enemies into leaving you alone.  I mean come on, I know this thing is supposed to be the size of two thousand sky scrapers all gummed together around Central Park, but we have to have covered half of it by now!  We've seen, what, three goddamn rooms?"
The grumbling had continued, but neither Zhiang nor Brick had joined in.
Indeed, the American soldier seemed just about ready to launch into a renewed tirade when they came across something new and outside of their experience within the Angel.  A dead end.
"What the hell!" McDougal cried as they came up to the smooth, flat wall where they had expected miles more of straight, undecorated hallway.  It didn't even have a closed archway.
"Now what?" Brick asked, he and the other American turning to stare at Zhiang.  How was he supposed to know?
"We go back," Zhiang said.  "If nothing new shows up, we'll have to get one of these archways open."
It wasn't much of a plan, but it was enough to give them something to do.
Hss-ss-ss.
It was a testament to the training and discipline every man enlisted into Fallen Angel possessed that the three—though schooled by different military branches of different countries—acted in perfect synchronicity.  Zhiang leapt to the left, dropping onto his stomach with his rifle up, while Brick mirrored his motion to the right and McDougal dropped to one knee, rifle up and already flicking his settings to load explosive capsules into the breach.  Only after they were in position did they stop to actually see what had made the strange sound.
They didn't have to wait for Zhiang's command to open fire.
What had previously been hallway stretching out behind them—hallway they had traversed only moments before!—had silently become a room not unlike the arcade Zhiang's squadron had run into the Marines in.  Pillars filled the new chamber, however, standing in two rows across the room and dividing it along the long axis into three roughly equal rectangles.  In the middle of the room and currently obscured by the flashes of tracer rounds and the detonations of McDougal's Beck shots was what Zhiang thought was a robot.
A low-slung body suspended on six sharp, over-long legs, it was like the spiders they had met before, but the size of a pickup truck with a thicker head dangling from the body and facing in their direction.  Zhiang dearly hoped it was not one of the aliens in some sort of combat gear; he didn't want to dwell on the thought of Earth being conquered by these grotesque spider monsters.
"Get some cover!" Zhiang shouted, the three of them being crowded into a small nook made of the last few meters of hallway.  They were exposed, if the giant spider decided to do anything.
"It can't fire back," McDougal argued, switching his rifle back to its regular bullets so he could spray fire at the creature.  Nothing seemed to be affecting it either way.
"I said move!" Zhiang cried even as he rolled behind the nearest pillar, Brick sliding smoothly behind the one opposite him.
"We can't give it a chance to advance," McDougal protested, his training finally failing him in the face of an enemy to vent his anger on.
"We're not affecting it," Brick interjected, dropping out one of his ammunition cartridges from his rifle's underside and slamming in another he fished off his shoulder.  "So get over here!"
"Dammit," McDougal cursed, leaping for the cover of Brick's pillar.  He didn't make it.
The spider's square-sided head tracked along McDougal's path and, as he was making to leap for cover, something lanced free of what Zhiang at first thought was its mouth.  He realized belatedly that was a gap opened specifically for a projectile; a gap that was growing, for the spider had launched something like a harpoon and it was unraveling the metal of the spider's own head for line.
"Look out!" Zhiang cried, but it was too late.  Wickedly barbed and glinting mercurially in the soft light from the strips about the room, the launched projectile passed effortlessly through the abdominal plates of McDougal's combat armor.  Without scar or sound, the American soldier simply went limp in midair, stopping as the others had when touched by the miniature spiders in the arcade.  Before his body could strike the ground, the giant spider sucked back on the unwinding metal cord and jerked barb and soldier back as one.
McDougal struck the floor about half-way across the room and slid the rest of the distance until he was on the ground in front of the creature.  Ideas blazed like suns in the back of Zhiang's head and he shouted into the local radio.
"Brick!  What kind of mines do you use?"
"H9!" The Marine yelled back.  "Want me to mine that bastard?"
"No," Zhiang called, snapping the lever on the side of his rifle to chamber a Beck.  "I want you to duck!"
With that, he leapt out from behind the column and raised his rifle, snapping off a trio of shots.  The spider's head swung up, tracking his motion across the hallway as it had done with McDougal, but this time it didn't get the chance to fire.  The corpse, limp on the floor by one of the spider's metal legs, danced and jerked as its dark green ferramic combat suit blossomed explosions like flowers in a spring garden.  Then, one hit home, and the mother of all roses sprang up from where he lay.
Zhiang was already falling, hitting the ground in a roll and sliding behind the column to run up hard against Brick, who had braced himself.  The pressure wave rolled over the pair—a visceral sensation even through their suits—as the explosion's roar triggered static in their helmets to deal with the sonic overload on the receptors.  It felt like the entire ship was shaking, the columned room sawing violently around them as they struggled to keep the column between their bodies and the blast.
After a few moments of thunder and lightning, everything died down and their crackling feeds relayed the ship's ambient silence to them.  The air of the chamber was thick with a smoky haze while Zhiang's head had been cleared by a rush of adrenaline that was as pure as only mother nature could provide.
"You shot his mines?" Brick's voice came, as if from a great distance.
"It was the best way," Zhiang said, a little defensively.
"That was cold," The Marine said tonelessly.  "Effective, but stone cold."
I notice you didn't say anything about someone dying until it was another American, Zhiang dearly wanted to retort—perhaps in part to distract himself from the bitter taste in his own mouth at what he'd just done—but for the sake of their two-man teamwork he held his tongue.  Instead, he replied with a noncommittal grunt.
"At least we know for sure they can change their architecture however they want," Brick muttered, peering around the column.  "I hope that's why it doesn't look like much of anything happened out there."
Zhiang leaned out and bit back a sigh.  The ground and columns around where McDougal and the spider had been was blackened, but otherwise looked completely unaffected by the detonation of however many mines the soldier had been loaded down with.  For the first time, the staggering impossibility of the task at hand really hit Zhiang and it was like a steel-toed boot to the testicles; he wanted to throw up.
"The floor isn't what we need to worry about being able to damage," He said instead, hoping the words did not ring as hollowly in Brick's ears as they did his.
"True enough," The Marine replied noncommittally.
"Considering that I could turn the thirteen kilometers currently separating you and the, for lack of a better word, 'engine' into a solid wall, I would imagine it to be of prime importance to you both."
Every reflex that had made both of them perfect for the mission had Zhiang and Brick pivoting, their assault rifles disgorging a steady stream of fire that filled the space between them and the voice with the flashes of Zhiang's Beck rounds and Brick's tracers.
Only when the ammunition feed monitor in his H.U.D. flashed red to indicate it was almost depleted did Zhiang release the trigger and cease his volley of miniature explosives.  Brick had already stopped, the nose of his rifle dipping down as he stared in abject disbelief.
Before them, drifting as if floating in water, was a solid curtain of bullets and blast capsules suspended effortlessly in the air.  Through the empty patches made as their ammunition bobbed and weaved languidly in the air, they could only just make out the madness lurking beyond it.
"Dear me, and here, I was hoping we could remain civil about this," The voice said; a deep baritone that spoke clear English with a slight drawl.
A pressure wave washed over the pair of soldiers as the explosive capsules Zhiang had added to the mix detonated, sending the bullets scattering in all directions, several pinging off Zhiang's armor and one left a streak of carbon scoring on the faceplate of Brick's helmet as he jerked back in surprise.
"Much better," The voice said happily, clearing smoke giving an unobstructed view.
It was a man.  A human.
He was a dark-skinned man, tall and naked, with heavy features in the face and a head shaved bald except for a small patch of braided hair at either temple.  There would be a matching tail of hair at the base of his skull, Zhiang knew; it was a style popular with far-system colonists.  Where a human's eyes should have been, however, were rippling pools of quicksilver, as if the orbs had been gouged clean and the sockets filled with mercury that had yet to settle.
Startling beyond even that was the thing in which he rode, looking like a marriage of an emperor's throne and a pharaoh's war chariot.  The front of it rose to obscure his impropriety from the waist down, though a few glistening tubes rose over the rim of it and appeared to enter into the man's hips and navel.  Behind him was thick cushioning, like the acceleration chairs they used on transatmospheric luxury liners to make sure the passengers were always comfortable.  As the man shifted to look from one soldier to the other, Zhiang spied not only the anticipated braided ponytail but more of the glistening tubes—smooth white tendrils as thick as a man's smallest finger—projecting from the back of the stranger's skull and shoulders.
The entire assemblage was shaped like an inverted teardrop of familiar white material, canted so that the point of it was slightly forward, reaching towards Brick and Zhiang, while the bulbous back sprouted a three-jointed boom arm that connected it to the chambered ceiling.  More tubes of white, along with alabaster wires and ivory cords ran from the platform's back, along the arm, and up into the ceiling where they melded seamlessly with the white material there.
"What in God's name...?" Brick whispered so quietly that Zhiang barely heard him.
"Oh no," The figure responded, despite being all of a dozen meters away.  "No, Lance Corporal Barkley, not God; just a man."
"How do you know my name?" Brick growled, raising his rifle again in a gesture that all there knew was futile.
"Hmm...because it is written on your suit?" The man suggested, gesturing to the left breast of Brick's battle suit, where his rank and surname were stenciled.
"Who are you?" Zhiang asked, in no mood for jokes at this point.  He raised the snub nose of his own rifle, flicking the feed from explosives to regular ammunition though it didn't seem like it would make a difference.
"I?" He mused, slowly rubbing the tips of his first two fingers again his thumb.  "I am the bad guy."
In Zhiang's peripheral vision, Brick stiffened like a statue.  It took a moment for him to realize the American's motions were in response to hundreds of tiny, headless, metallic spiders—these no bigger than regular garden spiders—slowly crawling up his suit in an implacable tide.  Zhiang didn't know if one of those could kill as easily as their larger cousins, but Brick was obviously not in the mood to find out.
"Stop it," Zhiang yelled, squeezing off an ineffectual burst.  As expected, it struck that invisible wall between him and the stranger, the bullets stopping immediately before bobbing about slowly like corks on the surface of a vertical pool.
"Zhiang Zhisheng," The man said, voice darkening slightly.  "First Lieutenant in the People's Liberation Army Air and Space Forces; thirty-two years of age, resident of Changsha, married for two years, three months, eleven days to Jingfei Zhisheng née Fài, and father of Jia Zhisheng.  When you were sixteen, you were hospitalized for a month after breaking both your legs jumping out of the third storey window of an apartment complex while drunk; in your military training platoon, you won a commendation for marksmanship despite being ill with the flu at the time; your favorite color is orange."
With every word, Zhiang's eyes widened a little more, the barrel of his rifle drooping closer to the chamber's immaculate white floor.  He muttered something rather brusque in Mandarin.
"Quite," The figure said with a wry smile.  "I've had my eye on you for a while.  Several of you, as a matter of fact, but it eventually came down to the two of you."  He gestured idly towards Brick, as well.  "I regret to inform you, Richard, that I have chosen Lt. Zhisheng."
As the dark man spoke, the blanket of spiders that had covered Brick sank into the man's reinforced suit.  Though it was, by now, no surprise, it still hurt Zhiang when the other man simply stopped, his body crumpling into a pile as all life fled it.
"Such a waste," The man mumbled, then sighed and shrugged.  "But such is the way of things."
"What are you?" Zhiang managed to choke out, though it was a struggle to part his gritted teeth enough to speak.
"I am human, Lt. Zhisheng, just as you are."  He glanced at Brick and shrugged slightly.  "Well, maybe not just as you are, but I'm sure you catch my drift."
"I see only a monster," Zhiang hissed, raising his rifle again before, with a choked cry of mingled rage and disgust, he tossed the useless weapon from him.  "What do you want!?" He shouted.  Long hours filled with little rest and the death of his comrades had frayed nerves that even the harshest training regimens and sternest self-discipline had not made invincible.
"I wish to save my people, Lieutenant," The man said as his suspended platform drifted noiselessly closer.  "I wish to save the human race."
"Save?  Save!?" Zhiang shouted again.  "The only threat to humanity I see here is you!  You and this monstrosity you use to destroy men!"
"This thing—what you have dubbed the Angel—is merely a tool and I am merely a man.  Neither of us is the threat; you are."
"Me?"
"Oh, not you in particular, but mankind.  It threatens itself with pettiness and hate, turning the gathered efforts of minds and bodies towards self-genocide." As the man spoke, his words grew more impassioned and, to Zhiang's mind, less sane.  Had this stranger the eyes of a man, Zhiang imagined they would be alight with the fevered gleam of zealotry.
"Mankind has turned outward," Zhiang hissed, flexing his gloved hands as if he wished for nothing more than his fingers wrapped around this man's throat.  "Those 'gathered efforts' were put to building outposts and colonies for humanity's growth into the wider universe.  It is you, not we, who destroyed those."
"You take man's prejudices and divisions out amongst the ether and call that progress!" The man cried back, raising a hand in front of him and curling it into a fist.  "Will you not be satisfied until you have stained every star in the sky with the bitter blood of internecine strife?  I will not allow it!  You will stand united or you will stand not at all."
"So you are God, then?" Zhiang asked.  "You are divinity, ruling from the paradise of your solitude and relying on the power of your angel to enforce your judgments?"  He was shouting in Mandarin now, but the stranger did not seem to care.
"If you wish to stray into the realm of metaphor and analogy," The man said dismissively, his rancor cooling visibly, "Then that is as good as any other."
"Then tell me, God," Zhiang began acidly, before being cut off.
"You may call me Naeem," The man interrupted.  "I am—or was—Dr. Naeem Highgate."
"Am I supposed to recognize the name?" Zhiang spat.
"Not at all," He said with a shrug.  "I was until recently a man of little note and less ambition."
As Naeem spoke, he waved his hands and the room began to squirm, the white substance flowing away like a thin pudding.  At some point, Zhiang's concentration on the doctor, Brick's body had disappeared and now the columned room seemed content to follow.  What remained in its absence was a dome some twenty meters across, Naeem's throne suspended from the ceiling's apex on a much longer articulated arm.  For the first time, the walls were something other than white; a dull greyish-black, they seemed smooth and reflective.  Startling Zhiang, a rectangle of light sprang up, suspended in the air and wide across as his outstretched arms.
It showed a suburban lawn, replete with a low brick wall and short-mown grass.  Beyond it was a clean, modest home that could have been pressed from construction composite and dropped down in a neighborhood in any of a dozen countries without occasioning comment.  Zhiang lived in one vaguely similar back home, though red rather than this yellowish beige.  The image drifted slightly and he realized that it had depth as well, a glowing shadowbox.  Before he could open his mouth to speak, however, another box emerged showing a starfield.  A third and a fourth with people's faces and then dozens more, until the room was so crowded with three-dimensional images that he had trouble tracking half of them.
"What...?" Zhiang began to ask, English abandoned entirely as confusion temporarily overawed his distaste of the other man.
"It's me," Naeem replied in perfect Mandarin.  "Images, plucked from my memory and cleaned up.  An easy enough task, once I understood the human brain sufficiently."
"But how-"
"I'm getting to that," The doctor cut him off.  "Here we go."
It was only the hope that something in all of this might give Zhiang a chance to strike back—the realization of how impossible defeating this man would be in a head-on confrontation—that focused his attention on the scene in the drifting image.  The innate need to know kept it there.
Everything was seen as if a man's eyes were cameras, focus shifting slightly and intermittent with dark flashes that Zhiang thought were blinks as the observer sat behind a desk of some sort.  Occasional glances to either side showed that the observer was not alone in the image, but most of their attention was on the figure at the head of the room, pacing in front of a wide patch of gel screen.  She was a middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair and nostrils she could lose her lunch in if her aim were poor, dressed in a uniform whose cut and color Zhiang would have recognized as American even without the shield-and-eagle insignia of a Colonel on her shoulders.
"Thank you, lieutenant," She said to someone out of view before turning and scanning the audience with a well-concealed look of distaste.  "I apologize, but I'm not good at this sort of thing.  I'll keep it short.  Because of everyone gathered in this room, you all have no doubt concluded there has been a contact scenario."  The image shivered slightly, the observer had stiffening in their seat.  "On June fifteenth, one of our interstellar probes en route to Lalande 21185 began sending transmissions from within the Oort Cloud.  Apparently, before even managing to completely leave our system, it passed within several hundred thousand kilometers of a massive energy source.
"Further investigation with long range telemetry and probes from our facilities in Jovian orbit have identified what we believe to be artifacts of an extra-terrestrial nature.  You are the most accomplished specialists in your fields that the United States government trusts, so let me be the first to welcome you, ladies and gentlemen, to Project Deep Sky."
The audio on the image cut out as Zhiang whirled towards Naeem, only to find another boxed memory filling the air between them.  As soon as his eyes fell on it, the scene animated and words filled the silence.
"I'm telling you, Highgate, this is the best thing that could have happened," a short, oval-faced man with walrus mustaches gushed.  "We've still got the resources and the know-how to make the most of it, and everyone is so tangled up in the tensions between China and the Eur-U that no one has the time to spend on 'decrepit old America.'  By the time anyone realizes the balance has shifted, we'll already be back on top."
"You seem confident that there's something to find out there," Came a deep bass voice that Zhiang realized was Naeem speaking.  "I'm not so sure, though."
"Bah, you colonials," The man chuckled, puffing out his cheeks.
Stars wheeled slowly outside of long, thin strip-like windows set in the floors.  Judging by the speed of the stellar background's turning, Zhiang thought it must be on a fairly small cylinder ship, the kind that simulated gravity by spiraling through space.
"Still," The mustachioed man continued after a minute's thought, "I suppose there's no use getting too excited, eh?  It'll be Chavez's show and he's military through-and-through.  If it doesn't blow up or shoot holes through things, he's not going to be interested.  They probably only brought me along to be the solar system's most expensive physician, never mind the Nobel Prize."  He shot a calculating glance at Naeem.  "And what they expect an expert in ethnology to do for their military concerns is beyond me."
"My best friend on that long voyage," Came the deep voice again, and it took Zhiang a moment to realize it was the actual Naeem speaking from the far side of the image.  "Dr. Vincent Sartène, one of the most accomplished neuroscientists alive.  Well, alive at that point.  I regretted that necessity the most."
"Why show me this?" Zhiang asked woodenly.
"Because you have to understand," Naeem replied heatedly.  "Because there can be no more mistakes, no more half-measures.  Not after everything that everyone has sacrificed...including myself."
"What you've sacrificed?" Zhiang scoffed.
"I've lost as much as anyone," The doctor said with a shrug.  "More than most."
"Tell that to the dead!"
"Oh, I shall, very shortly.  Trust me."
"What...?" Zhiang began, frowning.  But before he could say anything more, the images began to crowd around him, their audio struggling to drown one another out.
An image of something vaguely like the Angel, surface frosted with interstellar ice, while a thickly accented voice slowly ground out meaningless measurements of mass and dimension.
Figures in hardened combat suits that might have been a dozen Bricks.  They fanned out through darkness, the beams from their suit-mounted floodlights revealing familiar halls of white substance, footfalls silent in the stagnant atmosphere of the ship.  Radio chatter called groups forward or sent them storming down side passages, a constant stream of communication that birthed the military organism.
Back on the American vessel, a score of men and women in civilian dress were seated around a conference table, arguing fervently, launching salvos of vocabulary that Zhiang doubted he could have grasped in Mandarin, let alone English.  A glowering figure at the head of the table ran two tiny hands through his short-cropped hair before finally slamming them down on the table hard enough to make people jump in their seats.
"So what you're telling me is, we know jack-all about the thing after two goddamn months!?"
Inside the Angel again, everyone gathered together in a vault-like room, turning in slow circles as they struggled to take in their surroundings.  Massive pylons the entire group would have had to link hands to surround rose out of the floor and stretched into the darkness where the ceiling lurked.  Occasionally, the dimmest pulse of pale blue would rise like a rocket in the center of one of the translucent towers, shooting up before being lost in the gloom.
A piercing scream that drove out all other thought, coming from an image so close to the floor that Naeem must have been on his knees, shaking badly from whatever nervous gyrations had accompanied the moment.  Shifting in and out of focus, Naeem stared at his arm, the dark skin glistening red with blood, a thick white tube burrowing into the meat on the underside of it.  His fingers twitched with independent vitality, jerking as spastically as a toad with electrodes in its brain.  The focus ripped away from the arm, towards a pair of men in combat armor staring in what Zhiang knew was shock and horror, even with the mirrored faceplates masking them.
"Help...me," Naeem begged, reaching his good arm towards them.  In response, they lifted their rifles, the black barrels staring out like the empty sockets in death's skull.  Then both men stopped in a way terribly familiar to Zhiang, who was unsurprised to see the clinging metal spiders on their backs as the pair collapsed.  Naeem's mounting scream cut out as all the audio in the room stopped.  Darkness descended as the hanging images disappeared all at once, leaving Zhiang alone with the doctor in the dull grey room.
"What was that?" Zhiang rasped, turning to look at the dark man's calm face.
"My end.  And the beginning of all this," With a perfunctory gesture around him.  "Increasing recklessness brought about by our leaders' impatience and, I learned later, by mounting suspicions on the part of other governments about where the resources being funneled into Deep Sky were going.  Even experts like me—wholly unfit to dig around for clues to whatever superweapons they thought they might find—were assigned technical tasks far beyond the scope of our training."
Soundlessly, the armature Naeem rested on swung him around, positioning him eye-level with Zhiang.  Around them, the room shifted yet again; that had become so mundane to him.  What was left in the wake of the changes was practically comfortable by comparison to what the ship usually provided.  It had the dimensions and aesthetic he would have expected of a general's office back home, right down to the crown molding and some sort of carpet made of the white material.  There was even a chair-shaped protrusion in the middle of the floor, which he pointedly ignored.
"What we didn't know was that while we were stumbling through it, the ship was carefully cataloguing everything about us," Naeem continued.  "Ransacking our ship's systems, acquainting itself with our language and sensibilities and biology.  Compartments began to adapt themselves to our living conditions, with breathable air and comfortable temperatures.  Recognizable architecture started to appear.  Even art showing up on the walls and music being played."
"So the ship," Zhiang asked slowly, "It's alive?  It can think?"
"Nothing so dramatic," Naeem said with a dismissive wave.  "Even now, after all this time, I don't know everything about it.  What I do know is that this thing, this great and terrible weapon that has leveled our entire civilization, is like a game to whoever built it."
"What?"  It seemed to Zhiang he'd been saying that a lot.
"All this power and potential is like a relaxing afternoon with a good book to us," Naeem said, the zealous indignation returning.  "This magnificent craft isn't a weapon sent to watch humanity or some relic of an ancient conflict or even some lost attempt to communicate across the gulf of space.  It is a discarded bit of trash not even worth recycling.  I have humbled the nations of man with a piece of litter!"  And he was shouting now.  "And we deny ourselves similar greatness."
"What do you mean?" Zhiang asked, before he could stop himself.
"Our petty strifes and divisions," Naeem said with a sigh, his hand dropping down into his tube-filled lap.  "Our nations gnaw at one another, burning away resources we cannot afford in the vain fires of war, sacrificing the education of our children because it makes them better soldiers and more willing subjects, forcing this all down our throats as patriotism or else as necessary in the name of some illusion of security.
"Well, I have put played to that!  The barriers of nations mean nothing to this ship and all their security is wreckage around them!  But still they persist, with their secrets and their lies."
"The secrets are long past," Zhiang said, slicing a hand through the air.  "We abolished them, we...to fight..."  Slowly his eyes widened.
"Yes," And Naeem's mouth curled in an utterly humorless grin.  "You begin to see the shape of things, don't you?  I did not come all this way, burn a path across the heavens, so that I could rule from this lonely throne.  That would breed nothing but resentment and rebellion.  No, all of this was to set the stage, to press our myriad civilizations, by violence and necessity, until they stood upon the brink of unity.  But still, it is not enough."
"Not enough!  You would demand more death?"
Naeem motioned limply to the space between he and Zhiang, which was suddenly filled with a translucent image of a globe, showing the Earth in glittering detail, as if it had been carved from emerald and sapphire.  Slowly, blotches of ruby began to appear, a shimmering speckle of them across the American Midwest, more along the border between China and Russia.  The coast off of Brazil blazed with red light.
"The preparations," Naeem said with a sigh.
"Preparations?  For what?"
"For your victory.  Their foes are weaker now than they will ever be again; as vulnerable as possible with their colonial holdings in ruins and their corporate masters crippled by financial loss.  Right now, all there is...is Earth.  So there are plans in every major country to try and assure that only one state will make it back into space.  My home hopes their aging stockpiles of nuclear weaponry—yes, they've held back a great deal of nuclear resources, so stop your gawking—will work, despite the anti-missile systems in place.  Brazil is relying on its navy, of course, while the conflict between China and the Eur-U is set to decide which of the two will claim Eurasia."
"Madness," Zhiang whispered, taking a step towards the globe.
"Yes," Naeem nodded.  "I have brought them to the edge of annihilation and they have decided that is excuse enough to hurl themselves over.  Men led by fear and ignorance, ruled by masters so disconnected from reality that they cannot even imagine that the world needs healing now, not war.  I will not abide this."
Something in that voice snapped Zhiang's attention away from the globe to the dark man.  His features were gaunt, drawn with pain, and the soldier realized, for the first time, that the man across from him was not someone to whom violence came easily.  Everything before had been born from a deep, self-destructive belief in the necessity of his actions.  It didn't excuse what he'd done, wouldn't bring the dead back, but in some indefinable way it reassured Zhiang to know that a core of morality lay at the center of everything.
"What do you mean?" Zhiang rasped, fearful of the answer because he also knew that such a man as this would not hesitate to do anything he thought for the best.
"What exists now has too much impetus, too great a weight behind it, to ever really change.  Society will bend back into this twisted shape from any gentle attempt to straighten it.  If I wish to create a world where you can do what is right, then I must shatter this old world with strength enough that no king can rebuild his court."
Zhiang's body acted on its own, reaching the decision before his mind.  His hand at his waist whipped up, sending the small discus unpinned from his suit spinning towards Naeem who turned to face it with a mildly perplexed look on his face.  The high-explosive mine, set to proximity detonation by a few simple taps of Zhiang's thumb, roared like a lion before all his suit's sensors overloaded, feeding him only static and white noise as he braced for a killing impact that never arrived.  Though smoke fountained through the chamber, neither heat nor pressure escaped.
He wasn't really surprised as the smoke cleared with mechanized rapidity, revealing Naeem with a slight frown on his face as he fixed his quicksilver eyes on Zhiang.
"I suppose you needed to try that," He said after a moment.  "To preserve your moral sense, if nothing else.  You would not have made it this far if you were not, at your heart, a moral man."
"I won't let you," Zhiang growled.  "I know what you're going to do.  You're going to attack Earth itself, aren't you?"
"Of course," and as Naeem responded, the room began another transformation around them.  Everything fell away, the walls melting until only stars surrounded them, no illumination but the light of the distant sun and the reflected glow of the Earth hanging as big as only a world can in front of them.  Naeem's pod seemed to drift and, though he could feel the floor beneath his feet, Zhiang had to wrestle with the feeling of floating.
"Don't do this," He begged, thinking of the eleven billion people huddling down there, unaware that their last hope was the mercy of this monster.  Thinking of his family.
"This is all that remains," Naeem said softly, reaching out a hand as if he could cup humanity in his palm.  "All the stations and the colonies, all the research outposts and manned craft outside of high-earth orbit have been eliminated.  Yes," He added at a look of stricken horror that crossed Zhiang's face, "While you were playing around inside my ship, I burned the Lagrange stations, I cracked open the moon and dug out every last living thing ever settled there.  The UN's forward base is so much dust and all that remains of Tycho City is an incandescent shaft sunk two kilometers into the lunar surface."
"Over twenty-thousand people lived in Tycho City," Zhiang mumbled, trying to picture the largest extra-terrestrial settlement in the solar system and the crown jewel of the Eur-U space program disappearing in a growing dome of light.  He found his imagination insufficient to the task.
"Twenty-two thousand one hundred eighty three," Naeem responded immediately.  "I could name every single one of them for you, if we had the time.  All told, including your little military excursion, I have personally claimed seven million seven hundred thirty two thousand five hundred six individual lives.  I see every one of them when I close my eyes.  I am the most fantastically accomplished serial killer in human history.  And now...it ends."
He waved his hand in the air as if the weight of ages lay upon it and the space around them filled with a blue glow like sunlight through glacier ice.  Slowly at first, but with increasing haste, threads of light detached and streaked towards the drifting Earth.  Wide as a man was tall, a contoured image appeared before the silent pair showing a flat map of the planet's surface.  A tiny spot of light flashed on the distant Earth and a corresponding electric blue circle about the size of a fingertip appeared on the map.
"The Pentagon," Naeem whispered and then, at a second and third flash, "DC and NORAD.  That takes care of everyone remaining who knew about Deep Sky."  The strike on the DC metro area alone had just doubled the war's body count.
More and more flashes caused the Earth to glitter as if sequined and as he watched, bolts of blue energy began to curve around the globe.  According to the map, they were impacting on the far side of planet.
"São Paulo," Naeem recited emotionlessly.  "Berlin.  New Dehli.  Luxembourg.  Moscow.  Mumbai.  Beijing."  Zhiang had been bracing for it, known it was coming, but the blob of light consuming the seat of Chinese power still dropped him to his knees.
"The Brazilian fleet," Accompanied a pair of overlapping blue circles off that country's coast.  A squirming line of seven more across central Asia elicited a toneless, "The People's Liberation Army and the European Security Directorate's Emergency Forces."
"Stop it," Zhiang gasped.
"The Centre Spatial Guyanais," As a chunk of South America went blue, "Where the Eur-U had almost completed a military space ship to rival the ill-fated Shepard.  It would have given them uncontestable dominance in space after the war, you see."
"Stop it," and Zhiang's voice was louder now, desperate.
"New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Toronto, Madrid, Frankfurt, Sydney...all because of the stock exchanges.  It won't be enough to kill big business, of course, but it will cripple them for a while, give you room to-"
"Stop it!" Zhiang screamed.  He realized from the hot wetness in his helmet that he was actually crying now, tears streaming down his face where he could not reach to wipe them away.  "How many have to die before you're satisfied?"
"Approximately one-third of the species," Naeem said calmly.  "Including ninety percent of its military, all the current heads of state and at least the first three tiers of their replacements for every first-world country, as well as the executive boards of as many corporations as I can reach without unacceptable levels of casualty."  As he spoke, Seoul and Seattle turned blue like a pair of eyes set on a face as wide as the Pacific.
"And then what?" Zhiang managed with a sob.  "After you've gutted mankind, then what?"
"Then I send them everything they need to return to glory.  I send them a messiah name Zhiang Zhisheng."
"Wha...?"
"Haven't you realized it yet, through all of this?  It was for you, Zhisheng, and for humanity.  They sent me thousands of their best and I picked a few hundred of the brightest stars to bring aboard.  I whittled those down with my spiders and tested you to destruction.  Your compassion and your focus, your ability to deal with stress and hopelessness and the unknown, the speed of your mind and the depths of your resourcefulness.  After all of that, this is what I have left before me."  He gestured at Zhiang.  "Strong and noble, with the face of a hero and the heart of a lion.  A man who will do what is right when given the choice and what he must when everything hangs in the balance.  Someone who knows how to wield power but does not lust after it.  You are not perfect, Zhisheng, but you are as close to my ideal as I am likely to find.
"So now, you will emerge victorious.  Here at the hour of man's twilight, you will succeed in crushing Earth's alien foe where the huddled masses can see.  Carrying the memories of every hero lost in this grim conflict, you will become the embodiment of human victory and of mankind itself.  It will require all the guile and perseverance that you possess, but if you take the opportunity I am presenting you, if you grasp the reins of humanity, our species will have this one chance to become what it needs to be if we are to face a universe populated by wonders such as the Angel."
"What makes you think I'm going to do anything you want?" Zhiang ground out, hands curled into fists at his sides, glaring up at Naeem.
"Oh, there is always the possibility that you won't," He said with a shrug, "But if you are the man I believe you to be, you will not be able to resist the chance to do more good for the human race than anyone in history.  Now, time is short, so let us begin."
"I-"
"You no longer have a say in the matter," Naeem interrupted as white tubes began to snake out of the invisible walls that bounded the starfield.  "You will carry the collected knowledge of the universe back to Earth with you.  It will be your greatest weapon in the coming hard times and I have so much to teach you."
The striking tubes passed through his armor as if it were not even there.

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About the author:

A Texas native, Jesse was born in Corpus Christi and lived there until moving to Denton in 1999 to attend the University of North Texas.  Thirteen years and four degrees later, he's still in Denton and writing science fiction and fantasy.  Though a perennial bachelor, he lives with his five roommates: a programmer, a voice actress, an engineer, a costume designer, and a Japanese teacher.  Needless to say, life is never dull.

Discover other titles by Jesse Jack Jones at Smashwords.com or visit the author's website at jessejackjones.com