"Fighting us is useless. Our supreme commanders are dead or out of communication, perhaps for years. Your deaths would be meaningless. You may hold present positions, but signify your acceptance or we will open fire."

Then another voice identified itself, distorted but familiar to Mirsky—Lieutenant Colonel Pletnev, squadron commander of the heavy-lifters. Either he had capitulated or he was still outside the bore hole; there was no way he could have been captured; he would have died in the bore hole entry, not been taken alive.

"Comrades. Our countries are at war on Earth. There is devastation in both the Soviet Union and the United States. Our plan is no longer effective. . . .”

The hell with him. Mirsky moved his men up from both sides. Take this objective, and then the next, and then perhaps talk—

"Psshkommander Mirsky," his radio hissed. "Enemy reinforcements crossing the bridge."

The gunfire started again and Mirsky for the first time in his life, heard the screams of dying men.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Heineman squirmed in the V/STOL's pilot seat, listening to the exchanges in Russian, English and German. Transponders in the bore holes were automatically carrying radio signals from chamber to chamber and down the corridor; why hadn't they been switched off? Perhaps they had—perhaps he was picking up signals from Russian transponders.

He had propelled the tuberider beyond any conceivable danger; he was now a thousand kilometers down the corridor, stationary on the singularity, feeling useless. He had programmed communications processors to track on multiple bands and retrieve all messages, storing concurrent messages for separate playback. He had a ringside seat; there was even some video coming down the bore hole.

He witnessed the crown fire sweeping the Earth before the signal gave out.

It was purely by accident that he looked over his shoulder and spotted the moving glimmer of white. It swung smoothly over his head and to the opposite side. Whatever it was, it seemed to be spiraling around the plasma tube, staying within the plasma layer; its wake was a visible shadow within the general glow.

There were no other aircraft within the Stone—none that he had heard of, at any rate. He doubted the Russians had anything sophisticated enough to follow such a difficult course.

What was it, then?

A boojum. In the middle of all the excitement, he had seen his first boojum. That's always the way, isn't it? He switched on the' aircraft's tracking systems.

For a moment, he had a clear blip on the screens and even a computer-enhanced magnification of the craft's general outline. It was sleek and resembled a blunted arrowhead. He recorded about five seconds of information on it before the trackers suddenly wheeped and lost the target.