One of them tumbled down the side of the trench, soil and pebbles spitting up around him. A second rose to trigger an explosive round, but was slammed off his feet by a blaze of fire.

A third sprang up and looked briefly as if he might attempt a suicidal charge over the rim ... but then he backed off, tossed his weapon aside, and dropped facedown onto the bottom of the ditch in surrender, his hands stretched above his head.

The chopper pilot watched another invader follow suit and disarm, then another, then the rest seemingly all at once. A moment later the chase squad's leader gave the hand signal to suspend fire, followed by a thumbs-up to the pilot.

He smiled and returned the gesture. His searchlight would make it impossible for those on the ground to see it, but what the hell.

Disengaging his auto-hover control, he skipped off to another spot where he might be needed, the other chopper close behind.

Thibodeau would never know what caught the attention of the invader standing lookout on the warehouse floor--the slight movement of his fingers when he raised the gas pressure in his rifle barrel, the click of the hand guard as it locked into its new setting, or maybe something else completely.

In the end the only thing that mattered was the invader's bullet, and the damage it did to him.

For Thibodeau, it all happened in what his combat buddies used to call slow time. There was the surprising realization that he'd been spotted as the invader's weapon angled up in his direction. There was a spark of alarm inside him, cold and bright, like winter sunlight glinting off ice. Then he felt his reflexes kick in, felt himself reacting, and was sure his reaction was quick enough... should have been quick enough anyway. But as he ducked down below the rail the very air seemed to gain thickness and density, to resist him. It was as if he was sinking through jelly.

And then there was a loud crack from below, and something walloped him on the right side, and he felt heat spread through his stomach and went crumpling onto the floor of the catwalk as time resumed its normal speed like a train jolting from the station.

Thibodeau tried to get up, but his body was all deadweight, somehow apart from him. He lay half on his belly, looked down at himself, and saw that his vest hadn't been penetrated, that the hit was nothing but a fluke, the trajectory of the bullet having carried it up into the space between the bottom of the vest and his stomach, some goddamned nasty bit of gris-gris. And now here he was, blood draining out of him to the floor's treaded runner, filling the spaces between the treads, flowing down along them in thin scarlet streams--when had he ever stepped on Satan's tail to earn this one?

He heard the crash of footfalls, managed to lift his cheek off the floor so he could see more than the blood and the railing in front of him.