The first wave of the mob was down, most of them dead in a heartbeat. But more came on, scrambling over the twitching carcasses of their fellows, until they, too, fell. And then a third wave came.

Abil had never confronted death on such a scale—a thousand or more dead in seconds—it was unimaginable, unreasonable. And yet they continued to come. It wasn’t even murder but a kind of mass suicide. The Coalescents’ only tactic seemed to be to hope that the troopers would run out of fuel and ammunition before they ran out of bodies to stand in its way. But that wouldn’t happen, Abil thought sadly.

So many had been slain now that, he saw, their heaped corpses were beginning to clog the tunnel entrance. Abil tried to think like a corporal. He got to his feet, waved his arm. “Forward the throwers!”

Four of his troopers, carrying bulky backpacks, hurried forward. They launched great gouts of flame into the mounting wall of corpses, and at the defenders who continued to scramble over their fellows. Scores more Coalescents fell screaming onto the pile, their limbs alight like twigs in a bonfire. But that pile of corpses was alight, too. Soon the air was filled with smoke and grisly shards of burned bone and skin.

But the flames wouldn’t hurt Abil and his men in their skinsuits. He waved again. “Go, go, go!”

He led the way into the fire. He put his arms before his faceplate as he hit the barrier of flame, and he felt the carbonized corpses crumble around him as he forced his way through them. But in seconds he was through, into the denser air of the corridor beyond the air lock.

And he faced more people—thousands of them, all eerily similar. Just for an instant the front rank held back, gazing at this man who had emerged from the lethal flames. Then they surged forward. The corridor was a great tube of people, squeezing themselves like paste toward him.

But they ran into flames. The front rank melted back like snowflakes.

After that Abil let the flamers take the lead. They just cut a corridor through the swarming crowd, and the troopers strode ahead over a carpet of burning flesh and cut bone. The crowd closed behind them, clustering like antibodies around an infection, but the troopers’ disciplined and well-drilled weapons fire kept them away. It was as if they were hacking their way into some huge body, seeking its beating heart. As drones died all around him Abil began to feel numbed by it all, as the waves of faces, all so alike, crisped in the brilliant glare of the flames.