Slowly his fear turned into exhilaration. The longest jump he had ever made on Earth had lasted for six minutes, better than lovemaking, better than the day he received his wings. But here he had been flying steadily, accelerating with each new burst, for ten minutes, fifteen.

If he died upon landing, it would be worth it. To have seen a place where the land was the sky, where he could dive any direction and come to ground. Worth it all. Worth even the nightmare of the bore hole and the drifting, torn bodies of his comrades, faces bloated and livid in the vacuum, eyes protruding beyond their lids and ghastly white.

"Pssolonel Mirsky, is that you?"

"Yes! Identify."

"Pshlopov. I've seen others from our ship—and hundreds more! Pshare like angels, Colonel. PshCHKCHKirst squads have dropped away, look behind PSCKHHolonel."

He carefully inclined his neck, keeping his eye on the beacon alignment, then looked behind and below. He could see tiny white dots—parachutes—in the bluish haze above the floor of the chamber. He twisted smoothly and saw more at another quadrant—coming down, as planned, to take control of elevator entrances in the first chamber's southern wall. Pride swelled in him. Who else could have even succeeded this far? History!

He could see the darker hole in the center of the forward wall. None of them had more than two hours of air in their suit tanks—how much longer until he could drop away?

In the fourth chamber compound, Carrolson had given up trying to organize the members of the science team. Most of the security team had been deployed, leaving the barracks, cafeteria and grounds to the evacuees.

Patricia sat in the cafeteria, numb, snot crusted under her nose, half-listening to the sporadic radio signals coming over the cafeteria loudspeakers. The signals from the external satellite feed were still being directed down the bore hole to transponders at the entrance of each chamber. Electronic chatter of robots calmly sacrificing themselves in orbit, seeking orbiting outposts and battle stations, or going silent as they reentered the atmosphere to search out a few million more human beings, enacting a deterrence policy now guaranteeing only more and more death.

Out of control, Patricia thought.

Spasm. The motions a dying person makes, or the twitches in a corpse. San Diego, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara. Spasm.

Farley and Chang wept in each other's arms. Wu was silent and stolid, sitting on a table like a piece of sculpture. Rimskaya stood in a corner with a bottle of Scotch, almost certainly contraband, taking a gulp every few seconds until he fell down.