TCX

In the wake of the parley  between John Glenn and  Robyn at Taurus  City  in the  autumn  of  1974  on Timetrack  Theta  the fortunes of the  United  States declined  markedly  due to  the irrational response of certain Christians who led the country.

They were faced with the actual angels,  gods, messiahs and devils of their own theology. The revolution was from the top down and was chief- ly manifested by the predations of a secret agency called Domestic  Ene- mies  Classification, Observation, and Neutralization, or DECON.

Domestic enemies were defined as those American citizens who embraced the  imcomprehensible  changes brought  by  the  B'nei Elohim. Mere possession of a micro, for instance,  was a felony no different from possession of heroin.

It was a  curious fact  that parti-  san politics  had very little to do  with  it. Control of DECON  had passed  between Republicans and Democrats several times and the agency had been created by FDR in the first place to manage the internment camps of Japanese-Americans.

Two hundred DECON agents making up an  expedition to invade the Moon were lofted  using a new  launch laser  constructed at Cape  Kennedy. In the sudden  zero gravity  many of  the agents began vomiting, some from  an upset  stomach, but  more perhaps from fear.

It set off a  chain reaction  of vo-  miting and  there was misery all around in the earliest hours of the flight. Even the well-traveled space veteran John Glenn had to  close his helmet before the smell made him puke.

The troop transports accompanying Asmodeus and Apollyon was joined by seven more largely empty one, and all of these flew in formation with the spacecraft carrier Trespasser, whose name, at this particular time, was apropos.

On their second day of patrol Ba- ron Bayard Sala and Debby were about five thousand miles away from  the radio observatory operated by the  Organization of  the Nations  of Earth  at the second Earth-Moon Lagrange point.

Their red and gray square Sandwich fighters linked together by a long thin  cable so  they could  talk with-  out revealing their presence by ra- dio.

Bayard and Debby  wore  helmets with  their  name on  them, primarily to keep their hair from floating into their eyes, but the helmets also held their earpieces and  microphones and kept them from bumping their head if they took a surprise hit.

Other than that, they wore  no pressure suits,  but instead they sported comfortable red and gray cotton uniforms.

Behind their seat in the angular flight-deck (Hunky and Dory insisted on never calling it a cockpit) was  a tunnel providing access to the main subsystems of  the fighter, and it  was long enough to stretch out in and go to sleep.

"Deb?" Bayard said tentatively. "Deb, I know it's not your watch yet but I have a  contact." Deb stirred awake at the sound of the baron's voice. She floated all the way for- ward, placed her seat in the upright locked position, and put her helmet on. "Okay, I'm awake, Baron, what do you got?"

"Search radar, in band  seven, off  our starboard  beam and down  a little  bit  in Z." Debby booted up  her Elec-  tronic Surveillance Measures system. "All I see is the telescope at one seven five, and you at zero eight zero."

Wait a  few  seconds. It's a long-  range  radar  so  the pulses are spaced far apart. Presently a diamond sym- bol was displayed on Debby's screen, captioned with the small amount of information her instruments had gleaned so far.

Debby said, "Okay, now I got  the enemy symbol on  ESM. I'm slewing my telescope over to have a look-see."

On the stubby cylindrical post that attached  the top solar panel to the rest of her  fighter the tele- scope  spun over to the right  on the lower  gimbals while Debby's  primary weapons, the twin lasers, remained locked straight ahead.

Soon Debby saw on  her screen a  distant winged  brown bulb trailing glowing smoke against a hailstorm of  stars. She said, "Now I see him!" Deb, "I want you to move off  about a hundred miles to  get a good  baseline so we  can triangulate and  get a range."

Okay, breaking the wire, talk to you when I get back. Their contact was the spacecraft carrier Trespass- er of  the Navy of Mastema,  and no  less  a personage  than  the Emperor  himself, Patriarch Asmodeus Gerash, was aboard that  ship, together with his son Apollyon.

"Sire, we have something," the Cherub Belphegor called, and the Emperor drifted over to him in the large but cluttered space of the Combat Engagement Center, or CEC.

Their human host John  Glenn was also  present in  CEC, for combat op- erations were about to commence, and  he joined them as well. #When Asmodeus, Apollyon  and  Glen all  hovered  in freefall nearby  over his  shoulder the  Cherub said,  "Sire, we assumed Tracks 4022  and 4023 were just boulders,  but now Track 4022 is showing independent movement."

"We've been detected." Asmodeus pointed  at the  cherub's screen. "Commence electronic   countermeasures  against  lunar communications and  send everything  in this octant  against the hostile tracks. They must not escape."

While the attack on Bayard and Debby got underway, a number of spe-  cially  configured and  previously  deployed  Imperial bombers assailed the Moon  with such a  heavy bombard-  ment of broadband radio and neutrino noise  such that no broadcasts from space above the farside could be discerned at all.

But Bayard and Debby were still above this electroweak storm and knew nothing of it. "What the? Sorry to break radio silence, Baron but I just took a hit."

"Are you all  right?" They were both  broadcasting in  the clear to avoid the small  delays involved with  encryption, but that hardly seemed to matter now.

A big ragged smoking bite was tak- en out  of Debby's solar panel, and debris glittered around  her like so  many twinkling golden stars. "My top panel is fucked. Just one secondb&"

Debby swung her twin laser mount to bear on the offender, an insect- like  dark brown  Imperial  fighter. After few rounds expended on target she was rewarded with a  satisfying hot ball of expanding gas where the fighter  and its two pilots  used to be.

First blood went to Debby. "Oh yeah! Now I'm okay!" It was fifty miles away  but Bayard  saw the  bright explosion  of the enemy fighter with her  own eyes  as a  little puff  ball. Nice shot. Then Bayard tried to raise his people on  the Moon to re- port the attack, but no one an- swered, which was strange.

"For what it's worth," Debby said, sending raw data over to Bayard,  "here's my  angle on  the intruder." The baron played around with Debby's  numbers for  a bit. "Damn, that thing is twelve hundred feet long! It must  be one of the Emperor's fleet carri- ers come out to play."

"I have  more  bad  news,  Baron.  There's  a  whole  swarm of  Imperial  bugs  between  here and  the  Moon,  fighters  and shuttle-bombers all." "Get back here with me so I can  cov- er you!"

"Too late. I'm gonna punch a hole for you right through the bastards.  Look  how  tight  they're  bunched  up,  the  morons. Honestly, doesn't the Empire know anything?"

"Uplink your memories  to me  as long  as you  can," Bayard said. See you in the next life! And that, for the B'nei Elohim, was not a matter of faith or an idle hope. But the jamming made it problematic for both of them.

Bayard and  Debby  had  run   into  Squadron  21  from  the Trespasser, about a dozen  two-man fighters  like the  one that assaulted Debby plus a handful of larger  five-man bombers with their articulated insect heads that could send a flat, powerful lase in any direction.

Admiral Belphegor ordered all of them to hold station about a thou- sand miles nearer to the Moon than the radio observatory to block any escape to there.

Debby came into range and Admiral Belphegor ordered Squadron 21 to fire  at will. Deb was killed in-  stantly, but  Bayard safely obtained the entire stream  of bits which  rep- resented her final memories.

Debby's ship   broke  up   under  the   withering  Imperial firepower, but  included in  the  debris  was one  fully  armed Brushfire-C missile.

When the pile of expanding  garbage that was the  corpse of Debby's ship passed her attackers,  at exactly that instant, the Brushfire detonat-  ed,  antimatter,  destroying  most  of  the planes, disabling all of the  others, and clearing a  neat hole for the baron to escape through.

When the spherical fireball had  grown to fill half  of the sky and dimmed to invisibility  the baron dared to  look again, and in his telescope she saw the ellipsoid of the enemy carrier looming ever clos- er.

There was a second capital ship following as well. This was the Im- perial destroyer Persecutor, escort- ing the carrier.

As she neared the Moon the baron found himself entering the various cones of Imperial jamming and she understood why he had been unable to warn Taurus City of their danger.

When he got very close  he put her  laser on low  power and locked onto a solar panel in the city's roof to talk through the radio noise by mod- ulating the light. "Taurus, this is Bayard flying Illustrious.  I've been  in a scrap,  and Debby  is gone. Pre- pare to receive me."

It was a  long shot  but they  must have  heard him. Hunky probably thought of this trick too, at the same time. A docking port slid open and Bayard  Sala entered  a hollow space  in the two-story ceiling structure that covered the entire city.

Under withering anti-aircraft  fire from  the city  the two Imperial fighters in  the van  of  the pursuit  veered off  and returned to Trespass- er.

Taurus had been  built using  an economical  cut and  cover technique of tunnel construction, and most of the materials for Taurus had been manufactured from  local resources, but  it was still an expensive property.

Bayard climbed  backwards out  of  the  rear hatch  of  his fighter, near the  twin nozzles,  marked with  blue arrows  and EGRESS in bold letters. Already his ship was being  topped off with more water for the macros.

"What hornet's nest did you  stum- ble into?" Asked Hunky, who was large and in charge at Taurus while Lilith was dead and Robyn off doing something else.

"It's the Empire boys,"  Bayard said when  he let  his long blond hair fly free of his helmet, and there was  a hint of joy on his face when he said that. He wanted it to hap- pen.

Bayard had drilled endlessly for this day, and couldn't wait to roll  out everything  the  B'nei  Elohim  had laid  away  in preparation for it.

"They've finally come out in force,  breaking the agreement be- tween  the gods. So Hunky,  it looks like we've  got to show them a little deterrent of our own."

"Actually it's going to be a lot of  deterrent," Hunky said with a grin of her  own, even with Del  out of the  picture for now.

At the precise moment when Del was storming the beach south of Suez City, three hundred  and eight Ameri- can  and nephilim troops aboard four- teen Empire of Belial shuttles ap- proached the Moon.

It was a great gamble to destroy the Ark of the Covenant so it could not be used to  contact an eloah out- side of Mastema's harem.

The curious timing of their attack was by design, of course. Asmodeus knew he would have absolutely no chance  of victory if he had to face  Del, who seemed to be exactly  like Kandiel in a second life as a human.

So knowing Del's priorities, he arranged for the Egyptians, aided by the Americans, to stir the Levantine shit pot one more time as a distrac- tion, to their own everlasting re- gret.

The invasion force was  launched from the  Imperial carrier Trespass- er, together with a mix of thirty fighters and bombers to provide air cover, as it was still called even in the vacuum of space.

Additional muscle was provided by the guns  and missiles of the de- stroyer Persecutor.

Then the Trespasser hung back about a hundred thousand miles from the Moon, with another  third of her fighters  and bombers circling on CSP, or  Combat Space Patrol,  and the  final third still aboard the carrier in reserve.

The Persecutor and Asmodeus' inva- sion force whipped around the other side of the Moon from the city  of Taurus and entered orbit. In de- fense,  all Hunky  could do  at  that point  was transmit the signal to arm hundreds of space mines.

These had orbited the  moon like silent,  tireless sentries for years. Mines were a dangerous nuisance  but they  were not really considered a game-changer.

Admiral Belphegor, who had already transferred  his flag to the Persecu- tor,  considered them to be good  tar- get practice for his gunners whenev- er one popped up from behind the limb of the moon.

The space mines  deployed  by Taurus  City were  officially referred to as Semi-Maneuverable Anti-Spy  Satellite satellites (SMASSS). None had nucle- ar warheads, but  macro warheads were nasty enough.

Mines were generally easy  to avoid,  being in  orbit where they marched to the precise laws  of phys- ics and  gravity and their positions were known to  all parties at all  times, B'nei Elohim mines had primi- tive AI and they also  had thrusters to maneuver.

When the  mines  saw  the   enemy  ships  they  made  small alterations in their orbits with puffs of  propellant gas. Each Imperial ship immediately no- ticed the discrepancy on radar and changed their own course to swing clear.

After a few near-misses,  the fleet began  constantly doing random course changes to avoid  becoming more pre-  dictable to the mines than the mines were to them.

It took one more orbit  around the moon before  the orbital pattern of the mines could be crafted by their internal micros, working as a team, into a concentrated phalanx.

The invaders were gathered close in to the Moon. They were a loose cluster of ships less  than fifty miles in  altitude, but the sharply bending lunar horizon was still dis- tant enough to allow time for emer- gency evasive action.

hundreds of the space mines popped up over the lunar limb in a gigantic surprise. Evasion began immediately but many of the devices had actually repositioned themselves to take ad- vantage of the most likely evasion plans. The mines were thinking ahead.

A last ditch laser barrage  defense was turned  against the rapidly clos- ing mines but there were simply too  many of them and some of the invad- ers were too slow and  clumsy to get out of the way.

The shuttles Conqueror and Brutal- izer  actually collided, crippling each other for the remainder of the battle.

Six nephilim officers  from both  ships salvaged  what they could of the  fiasco, jettisoning  themselves in  their command sections and making their way down to the prearranged rendezvous point on the surface of the Moon.

But the forty-four angry American troops  left behind would continue to flounder in orbit  until the B'nei  Elohim captured them a week later.

Fourteen of the other  transport ships  successfully evaded the mine attack. But the shuttle Harasser was not so lucky and seemed to walk right into them.

The artificially intelligent mines were ecstatic  that they could final- ly  fulfill  their intended  purpose and  explode. Harasser was struck  by  the  cresting wave  of  mines and  all twenty-five nephilim soldiers aboard her died.

Hunky had definitely grabbed As- modeus'  attention now. So much for the cakewalk he had in mind.

Next Taurus City unleashed  hun- dreds  of surface-to-space missiles from hidden batteries all over the Moon. Half of these missiles were not armed with explosives.

Instead they  were  tasked  to  haul  up  inflatable  mylar balloons, long strips of chaff, aluminum foil, dum- my warheads and canisters of infra- red-emitting aerosols.

In the middle of all this pure trash the real live Brushfire mis- siles in- side the threat cloud were  completely hidden by an  opaque  white  smear  on  radar,  made  even  worse  by  the Imperial's own jamming from  a higher  orbit which  backlit the whole mess.

When Admiral Belphegor realized this and ordered everyone to switch to visual acquisition on telescopes hyz list of potential threats was ten times larger than the number of real threats.

This was all thanks to the B'nei Elohim deployment of decoy inflata- ble missiles. By the time Belphegor figured  that out the real Brushfire missiles were already on terminal cruise

They were aided  by targeting  us- ing  passive and  active sensors scat- tered in odd corners all over the  surface of the Moon. Odd that these formidable preparations on the part of the B'nei Elohim seemed to slip the Emperor's mind  when he planned his raid.

Cherub Belphegor tried  jamming  the  Brushfires. He tried substituting the real radar reflection of Perse-  cutor with an electronic impostor and then moving  that impostor blip off to a new course hoping the mis- siles would follow.

And it did seem to work. Many of the Brushfire rounds did go off course.

Then the Imperial  fighters  pro-  tecting Persecutor  (and Persecutor herself) started  taking potshots at the  rest of the incoming missiles with thumping 80 kilowatt laser firepower, two rounds per second per turret.

With all these  defensive efforts  at a  peak the  big wave broke and  sprinkled  only  a  relative  handful  of  Brushfire missiles through to  hit the  shuttles Degrader  and Immolator, which were destroyed in spectacular, silent explosions with all hands aboard.

The Persecutor had escaped damage  for the time  being, but the fire- works show was just getting started.

Seven B'nei Elohim Sandwich fight- er pilots leaped into the Lunar sky from  the roof  of Taurus  to enter  the fray. Baron Bayard established good old-fashioned encrypted radio con- tact on a UHF frequency. "This is Illustrious, radio check, over."

They reported in by rank. Ash- blonde Stephanie leveled out her fighter and  said, "Illustrious,  this is  Valorous, roger, over." Red-head- ed Amanda  checked in saying,  "Illus- trious, this is Ardent, roger, over."

When it was  her turn  pretty dark-  haired Adirael  Larund said, "Illus- trious, this is Resolute, roger, over."

Blonde pixie   Suzanne  set   her  fighter  busy   doing  a Built-In-Test and piped up saying, "Illustrious, this is Lancer, roger, over."

Shaven-headed Tori got her buggy transmitter working just in time and said, "Illustrious, this is Tornado, roger, over."

Dark-haired, slender little Candra looked through her canopy at Ba- yard's fighter nearby and chimed  in, "Illustrious, this is Talon, roger, over."

"Pink Wing this is  Illustrious, roger,  close it  up tight ladies.  I want  visual contact  with all  of you.  Illustrious, out."

From the first day these women joined his team, Bayard made them drill. And drill. Bayard drilled because  he wanted  no hesitancy to remain. Combat must be learned in the muscles. It should be a dance. Second nature.

There should be  no transition  from training  to the  real thing, and the real thing had finally come.

The Persecutor was easily identi- fied. Each enemy ship had a radar with unique "fingerprints", which  were certain defects in the trans- mitter.

These defects,  which  were  little dips  on  the  tops  of the  pulses,  or slightly  ringing  pulses,  lent an  electronic "personality" to the sig- nal going out.

The Beaters had long ago matched the  radar fingerprints to the ship, and  they had also shared that infor-  mation with the B'nei Elohim. Steph- anie said,  "This  is Valorous,  I  have identified the destroyer, designate track one zero niner."

Soon after  the  seven  fighters  had  all  gathered  close together Bayard barked his initial  orders. "So let's get them interested in us.

Spread to every  corner of  the sky. Then make your runs. Sting 'em with random attacks. No pattern! Set your Multiblip Repeater to attack forma- tion Delta."

The Multiblip Repeater was  a jam-  ming device  unlike any other. Most jammers filled the enemy's radar picture with clouds of static. But the Multiblip Repeater simulated the  echoes of real contacts.

So mixed in with the real blips of  Bayard's seven randomly flying fighters were the false blips of a dozen ghost ships in a precise "V" attack profile. This was Attack For- mation Delta.

Belphegor directed his arsenal to- ward the juicy targets of all those blips lined up in  a straight "V". He instructed the ships under  his com-  mand  to  ignore  the other  blips,  the randomly moving blips, as silly at- tempts to  jam their search radars.

The Multiblip Repeater  was  even more  clever  in that  it deleted  con- tacts  one by  one  as the  invaders thought  they scored "hits." Not un- til Bayard's people actually  passed to within  visual  range did  the  cher-  ub  realize he  had  been tricked.

By then it was much too late. The first pass had to count. Bayard's people made sure to hit all the good stuff, the missile racks and most of the gun mounts.

Still, the Persecutor reached out and slapped Candra as she passed by, crippling her  ship with  close-in laser  fire. "I'm hit!" she screamed as her fighter spun wildly out of the zone of combat.

But eventually her nerves settled down and she  was able to bring her  ship under  semi-control. "This is Talon,"  she said when the immediate crisis had passed. "I'm all right."

"Can you make it back  to the  city?" Bayard asked her. "I don't know. I'm going to  set down on  the surface until  I can check out the extent of my damage."

"If it's bad,  Candra,  don't  try to  limp  back into  the battle." "Roger, out."

Candra didn't know it yet, but the Battle of  Luna was over for her. The damage was far worse than she real- ized, and when she suited up and went over the exterior of  her ship she would marvel that she had made it down to the ground in one piece.

At the same time  that Candra  had sustained  her disabling hit, Amanda and Suzanne's blows combined to score a fatal hit on the Repressor.

It fell like  a stone  to  the sur-  face of  the Moon  and impacted on the  hard regolith,  killing all  twenty- five  men aboard. Then the six re- maining sandwich  fighters headed back out and regrouped, tearing a path away to free space.

Bayard had set out  to interest the  destroyer in  his tiny force.

Persecutor was definitely inter- ested now. With the small shreds of dignity  it  had  left remaining  to  it the  wounded warship and her own retinue of fighters,  bombers, and shuttles turned to stately pursue their attackers.

Bayard said, "Pink Wing, execute Formation  Delta. Scramble your re- peaters." Everyone expertly com- plied. Now it was the actual fight- ers which were in  a precise V pat-  tern and the false electronic blips which were moving randomly.

Cherub Belphegor had picked up on things right away. Now he scoffed at the primitive attempt to fool his radar  with a V of dots  all  lined  up  with  (it  was  so  obvious  now)  machine precision.

Not the rough formations to be ex- pected from inexperienced human wom- en pretending to  be combat  star pi- lots  like the battle-hardened nephi- lim aviation officers of House Ger- ash.

This time he directed his ship's missile and gun-fire to the randomly moving contacts.

"It's electronic warfare," Bayard  said to himself  when he watched his  deception work. He was in a rhythm with  the other five gals. They all functioned as one unit, and more important, they were all having enormous fun.

Bayard allowed the burning de- stroyer to pass into the zone of space defined  by  himself  and the  five  planes under  his command. The cornered Persecutor slowly withered away under Pink Wing's continuing attack.

Belphegor's smooth brown ellipsoid was on fire and had giant ragged bites taken out of it. Parts of the hull had been exposed to vacuum, sucking some unstrapped personnel out into space.

Command shifted to  a  secondary bridge  deeper within  the highly com- partmentalized  interior  where  pres- surized  and undamaged work spaces  were still  to be  found, but  it was  a fool's errand.

Persecutor could no  longer run  nor see  nor fight. There remained only vengeance.

In her death throes Persecutor, true to her name, lashed out with a  blind  Bulldog  missile  which found  its  way  to  the Resolute. Impact.

The dense knot  of water  held in  a phantom  quantum state inside her fighter went up all at once, creat- ing a vast white explosion complete- ly out of proportion to the fight- er's tiny size, much as a macro-bomb punched well above its own weight.

"Poor Adirael!" Suzanne cried, breaking radio discipline in her grief,  because she knew  the Fallen Angel, not  having been Changed, would never live again.

Bayard smiled through his own tears. "This never was about us try- ing to live as long as we can," he said. "Don't you see? Avoiding death never  was  the glue  that  bound us  together." Suzanne nodded to her- self. No, that glue is love!

When the overlapping  glowing  swirls of  water vapor  from Adirael's demise grew  and  faded to  invisibili-  ty all  eyes turned to the final doom of the imperial destroyer.

None of the officers and crewmen of Persecutor survived the final blow, a ship-to-ship Brushfire-B missile  fired by Bayard through a gap in the hull with a thousand pound macro warhead.

This blew  the  ship   into  bright  glowing  embers  which scattered to every corner of the sky.

So ended Cherub Belphegor, victor of countless campaigns in the Egg- beater at Alpha Centauri,  at the hands of a Gold Beard and four human females pretending (as the cherub supposed) to be star pilots.

After only  a  few  moments of  shak-  ing  themselves  and checking for bro-  ken  bones the  troop  transports and  their escorting wings turned and lumbered hell-for-leather  after the B'nei Elohim fighters to avenge the Persecutor.

Gradually the battle became strung out on a line only fifty thousand feet above the Moon, making a bee- line for the city of Taurus.

"There's gotta be an idiot in charge," Bayard told her girls over the coded channel. "This is too easy. No way a worthy foe just walk into our triple A over the city."

The line of Pink and Blue beads lengthened and thinned out. Blue forces  slowly  found  themselves iso-  lated  with  small enemies on two sides. The five gnats became four.

In the  slug-match  that  ensued Tori  aboard  the  Tornado suffered a disa- bling hit. It wasn't as serious as the damage to the Talon, but she had  to withdraw from the  battle and re- turn to Taurus.

Still, the forces  of Asmodeus  were strung  out along  one vulnerable line. Configured this way, one-di- mensionally, each ship could assist only it's two immediate neighbors or assail at most two fighters.

Meanwhile, the entire formation passed directly over Taurus City, which attacked the enemy ships from below using its heavy defensive las- ers with impunity.

Asmodeus dared not  return fire  be- cause  he assumed  his unnamed objec- tive was somewhere  inside Taurus and  he needed the city intact.

This was a classic textbook case of what not to do, studied by naval historians  for  centuries, from  the  time of  wooden sailing ships right through the era of steel battleships in the first and second world wars.

Asmodeus had allowed the B'nei Elohim to cross his "T". And what made it even more unforgivable was that it was a stationary city bris- tling  with cannon  (and not  a line  of maneuvering warships) that did the crossing.

In the  ensuing storm  of  fire  the invasion  fleet  broke formation, went into complete disarray, and  individ- ually set course to get to the Moon's surface as quickly as possi- ble.

All of the enemy ships took dam- age, but the Subjugator was crippled by a particularly well-paced shot from the city and her descent turned into  a free-fall  as she  spiraled down  to the ground. All hands aboard died in the crash.

Hunky noted this sparrowfall from the War Room in the heart of the city and said, "I get the impression the Empire came out here with their  second-best football team and ex-  pected to go up against nothing but cheerleaders."

So  only  nine   Imperial   troop   trans-  port   shuttles successfully landed in the predesignated place,  a small valley in the Taurus-Littrow high- lands about ten miles from Taurus.

Very close by was  the actual  land- ing  spot of  the 1972 Apollo 17 expe-  dition, where  the initials  of Gene  Cernan's daughter had remained in- tact as Robyn had promised him.

Bayard came in low  over them  and scored  a direct  hit on the  troopship Oppressor  before they  could debark,  killing or seriously wounding six- teen of the Americans aboard.

Asmodeus saw this and his anger, already smoldering from the loss of Persecutor, burned white hot. Bayard came around again for another  pass,  this  time  with  his  surviving  girls  in formation behind him.

Asmodeus  prepared   to  let   Bayard   have   it  with   a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile  (although the Moon had no air, so a different name  for his weapon would have been more appropriate).

With effortlessness  derived from  countless  opportunities over two centuries affording him experience, Asmodeus shouldered his rocket can- ister and took meticulous aim while the rest of his people dove for cov- er.

From Bayard a  laser  touched  the ground  at  the feet  of Asmodeus, visible only  as a glowing, searching  orange cloud of dust. Azibeel took aim and fired, unperturbed  and unde- terred by Bayard's attack.

The passive,   IR-homing,  radar-si-   lent  surface-to-air missile found its way unerringly  toward the in- tense  heat of Bayard's underthrust- ers.

Two objects  crossed  in  the black  lunar  sky:  Asmodeus' missile and Bayard's spacecraft. The intervening factor was a hot puff ball  at the point of closest approach  only three feet away from Bayard's wildly evad- ing fighter. "I'm hit!"

Bayard's fighter tumbled in a  flat spin to the  surface of the moon  like a  tile thrown  out a window. And so passed the second son of Queen Aur- ra, though she was long gone her- self, two thousand years gone.

Bayard was  dead  and  the  sudden  loss  of  their  leader frightened the remaining three  star pilots off. The so-called "air" campaign was  largely  over. Now the surviving  Imperial shuttles could unload Asmodeus' peo- ple and supplies unmolested in the vale of Taurus.

Emperor Asmodeus set  up a  perime- ter  with some  of John Glenn's DECON troops stationed at the four points of the compass armed with shoulder- launched SAMs, in case any of the remaining sandwich fighters re- turned.

Inside that perimeter the half- bubbles of many pressurized tents dotted the plain here and there, scattered  too far apart for a single strike to take any two of them out.

The tents were psychologically im- portant. They permitted the troops to get out of the vacuum suits they  wore on the way down, or at least take their helmets off for an hour or two.

No one could spend  all their time  inside a  spacesuit, no matter  how  disciplined they  were,  not  even the  disciplined officers hardened by the constant violence of Barbelo.

Asmodeus' command tent was identi-  fied by gold  and black banners. John Glenn and his two senior officers  entered it and passed through the vestibule sealing the air inside.

They found the Emperor in the mid- dle of a meeting with his son Apol- lyon and  the surviving  nephilim of-  ficers. "Good, Glenn, you made it," Asmodeus said. "You're the last one to come in. Give me your report."

"Our transport took hits from fighters and from the city but we landed with no casualties." "Then we finally have a complete picture of what happened. Give him the latest figures, son."

"Yes, Sire." Apollyon rifled through his papers,  did some figur- ing, then he  said, "Punisher and  five troop  ships are total losses. A  sixth transport was attacked on  the ground and we only saved nine human troops troops from that one.

We have a total of forty-four hu- man troops stuck in orbit aboard the Conqueror  and  Brutalizer who  can't  land but  six nephilim officers from those two ships are here now.

All told we now have just forty- three  nephilim troops and one hun- dred eight-five human troops ready for action."

There was some shocked gasps  and murmuring from  Glenn and his two men at that. Casualties were at forty- three percent!

Asmodeus cut them off harshly, and barked, "This mission has not failed. The carrier Trespasser re- mains out of danger, and stands ready  to pull us out  when we achieve our  objective. As long as one sol- dier lives this mission goes for- ward. Is that clear?"

The nephilim and men blurted their assent. Then the forces split up. John Glenn took command of the human forces, the bulk of their remaining strength, and departed to  assemble them for the assault up the eastern face of the North Massif mountain.

Emperor Abizeel planned to assail Taurus  with his nephilim from anoth- er direction along a small rille  which crossed the mountain to the west.

Leading his forty-two  nephilim soldiers,  Asmodeus started marching cross-country over  what Buzz  Aldrin once  called the "magnificent desola- tion" of the Moon.

After the Emperor  had  forayed north  into the  Sculptured Hills for an hour the Yellow Rille (so named because of the many sulfur outcrop- pings found in it) became a steep canyon.

Asmodeus veered  right. They climbed  to  a small  plateau called Yellowbanks on the  B'nei Elohim moon  map, and  let the rille go it's own way for the time being.

As the  Moon went  this  was  high  and rugged  terrain,  a combination of a classic crater  rim and the extensive volcanism in the wake  of  the large  asteroid that  created  the Sea  of Serenity over three billion years ago.

The rille itself was a steep chan- nel carved by a river of lava after the impact and  undisturbed all that time except from micro-meteoroids which pitted the whole surface of the Moon.

They stayed on the high ground, walking on black gravel and sand and dust as fine as the ashes left over in a barbecue.

Their backpacks and various port- able weapons were enormous loads for each  of them  but  the seventeen  per- cent  gravity helped. They made good time.

Presently the rille finished its wide bend and rejoined them from the west. Dull red and green minerals formed layers in the walls of the gorge, dotted by bright yellow sul- fur deposits.

There was  a  certain  stark beauty  to  it  all,  Asmodeus thought. Io did- n't have a monopoly on this.

Twice during the  march they  buried themselves  under gray camouflage at  the sight  of  sandwich  fighters. It wasn't  a concerted search.

Asmodeus hadn't made his dent  in this country yet  and the B'nei Elo- him  probably didn't  have a  clue he  was up  here. Still, the fighters seemed to be  either using the rille  for a navigational guide or they were actively patrolling it.

He decided to march overland away from the  rille again, so they began peeling away from it.

Returning to the edge of the rille again  some hours later, Asmodeus cast his gaze "upstream" and noted that  the rille had shrunk to just a third of its normal depth yet was still coming out of the north and a little east of north.

If they stayed on this side of it, it would continue to bend east and take then away from Taurus rather than toward it.

Consulting his map, he said  to his troops over  the radio, "The rille has forked. This  is just  a feeder gully.  We cross here."

There was a dirt road at the bot- tom of the gully, the main road to Taurus, but traffic was sparse.

The problem of  fording a  chasm without  specialists, even a rela-  tively small  one  such  as  this  North Fork  of  the Yellow Rille, was going to  have to  be overcome with  a little creativity.

There was no question of  hiking down  one side and  up the other, the pumice stones littering the whole area would make it like walking on marbles. Most of the officers paced around, at a total loss for ideas.

Asmodeus asked around if anyone had packed some cable. There was a flurry of searching  and finally someone produced  a coil with about four hundred yards of it.

The cable wasn't very thick or heavy, but it would be strong enough to support the weight of a nephil in  the lunar gravity, Asmodeus decided.

The Emperor attached the long  ca- ble to  a surface-to-air missile and took aim at the far side of  the rille, aiming near the top where it began to  flare out and become  level with the land on the other side.

He chose his  target carefully,  trying to  get as  high as possible but  not too high, lest  the missile skip off  the soil instead of diving into it. Then he pressed the firing stud.

Success! The rocket dug itself deep into the lunar regolith before burning out, taking the cable with it. The tunnel it made collapsed behind it.

Asmodeus tugged hard on the cable to make sure it was snugly anchored. He ordered his men to  anchor this side of  the cable around a boulder and snip the excess off.

The next part was easier. Asmodeus repeated his trick with the rest of the cable, but  this time he aimed  about four feet below where the first cable had buried itself.

Hy made doubly sure it  was snug  because this was  the one that would bear the most weight. Soon he had two wires stretched tight across the gap, one wire for under the  boots and another at chest level for bal- ance.

Asmodeus hymself made the  first crossing  to prove  it was safe. An hour later the entire group had made the crossing. The last nephil to come over cut  the two cables and  let them fall slack against the steep western wall of the tributary rille.

This was virgin  land, inaccessible  to all  without taking extraordinary measures. They had placed themselves  far beyond reach.

After another mile following  the small tributary  rille on its west bank Asmodeus authorized an  hour of such rest as could be taken while wearing a pressure suit.

On the next march Asmodeus contin- ued to  follow the North Fork of the Yellow Rille again, ever higher to- ward its source.

It curved needlessly, often back  almost on itself,  but it gradually and inexorably drew nearer  to the high volcano in the north which they had begun to glimpse from the hill- tops.

These were  the doldrums  of  B'nei  Elohim territory. The combination of the terrain and the  angle of the sun  and Earth gave the land the appear- ance  of being moody, as  if the Moon itself were taking a nap.

The heavy shade, almost totally black in parts, made it seem secre- tive, even gloomy. The dull thumping of artillery could not be heard in the  near-vacuum of the  Moon, but it  could be felt as bursts of vibration under their feet.

The light-flashes of warfare never lagged far behind. It had to be Glenn who  led the bulk  of the sur-  viving troops  on a frontal assault along the main road to the city.

Asmodeus was feeding Glenn's forces through the shredder to keep the B'nei Elohim from checking their back door.

For the American invaders the  net effect of  wearing their heavy suits and the small lunar gravity was to be fighting under roughly the  same gravity  as  Mercury,  which  was a  ma-  jor consideration when the Emperor planned this raid and chose Glenn to participate.

For protection their spacesuits were covered  entirely with mirrored reflective surfaces, but some joints and  parts of the life-support back- pack,  despite  the best  efforts of  design engineers, were vulnerable to a laser hit.

Glenn personally led an assault with all of  his men across the open while Ambe Omphal  and a  force of Fallen  Angels with company strength hid behind rocks at the top of a gray slope and took leisurely pot- shots at them.

For the invaders the trick was to present  a moving target, hustling to the left or  right, jumping up, flip-  ping through the air, tucking  and sliding  to  the ground,  never the  same sequence of moves twice.

Troops who fell into the  error of patterned  movement were awarded a laser hit and quick death. Glenn's troops dropped like flies as the scored hit after hit.

Heedless of their losses, Glenn  and his DECON  forces just kept com- ing, each trooper dancing and duck- ing to avoid being hit. The random  movement  came  as  second  nature  to  them. Presently some forty of them overran the Fallen Angel position, led by Glenn himself.

Ambe grappled with Glenn  and placed her  faceplate against his so he could hear. "You took our posi- tion but it was awful, just awful! You lost a third of your boys,  easy! Godspeed John Glenn!"

Then with  her knife  Ambe  ripped  the fabric  of  Glenn's spacesuit from crotch  to sternum, letting him de-  flate like a tire.

While they remained hidden here in  the highlands, Asmodeus could see the gully road about  two hundred feet below  was now busy with the traffic of war, mostly B'nei Elohim armored trucks all climbing slowly in single file.

Asmodeus scrambled up a small rise to get a clear view back the way they'd come. From there he could see all the way to the plain where they began this little hike.

The entire area was intermittently lit with reflected laser flashes. Binoculars revealed B'nei Elohim  vehicles exchanging colored light- ning with unseen adversaries.

On the eastern side of the North Massif summit plateau B'nei Elohim defenders  began  popping  up out  of  the  woodwork  to stall the  DECON forces  with a vast  confusing hodge-  podge of engagements.

They fired their  big towed  five- inch  guns, which  had a range of an incredible 49 miles  in the lunar gravity. Each gun, standing well off,  could shoot  three rounds  per minute,  and these shells began rain- ing randomly down on Glenn people.

Artillery was called  the "troop  killer" for  good reason. Within eighty feet  of an  exploding  shell half  of the  DECON personnel were  injured, on  average,  and  one-third of  these injuries were fatal.

Even a little schrapnel that would only cause a minor injury on Earth was sufficient to puncture their  pressure suits here. So it became a grinding war of attrition, with  al- most all of the losses on the Ameri- can side.

If Glenn was detained for  some time or even  defeated that would suit the Emperor just fine. At that point he didn't know Glenn was al-  ready dead. The Americans were just  cover all along.

Asmodeus' objective was to seize or destroy the  Ark of the Covenant, and if the raid became a huge sui- cide run, he would still consider it a  success if  the Ark was  taken out  of the picture.

Asmodeus had given the front door of the city to Glenn after pretend- ing  reluctance, but  the  Emperor  knew it  would  be defended ferociously.

So he  and his  nephilim  plunged  on, heading  north,  and gradually the road and Asmodeus's party began to come together. The rille was getting more and more shallow as they ap- proached its source. Asmodeus felt high,  in  elevation as  well as  in spirits.

Finally they had gone as far as they could possibly go while remain- ing out of view. This was the very source of the North Fork rille: a single unremarkable fumarole.

It was nearly the same in appear- ance as every other crater on the moon, but different in  that it lay sideways  and hadn't been created by impact. Now they were forced to take the road.

Far above  them  the  road  wound  its  way  up  a  set  of switchbacks to the broad summit plateau of North Mas- sif. There were no straightaways longer than three hundred feet.

Three light APCs  ascending the  mountain rounded  a corner just then. It was too short a distance between the time they saw Asmodeus and the decision point where it would  be surrender or ram.

Forty-three nephilim soldiers aim-  ing lasers  and rockets swayed them to  pull over  peacefully. The girls in  the three trucks were stragglers of the big caravan Asmodeus had seen from the edge of the rille.

Asmodeus didn't take any time to ask questions and he wasn't inter- ested  killing  them. The girls, still  wearing  their vacsuits, were simply bound with plastic tie-wraps  and left on the side of the road.

Then Asmodeus's platoon found it- self with transportation. They were all  thinking  how good  it was  to  be moving  while sitting on their ass  and dangling their  poor abused  boot- ed feet.

The APCs had a 1.5 inch main gun, a 30-caliber machine gun, and an anti-  tank  missile launcher,  but  the nephilim  would encounter no more enemies on that road. Taurus lay just beyond a stony fault scarp looming above them.

The road made a final turn and As- modeus  was staring at a darkened tunnel drilled  right through the final  jagged wall. A trap? Asmodeus no longer cared.

Whooping it up, without a second thought,  Asmodeus led his company plunging through the tunnel. They were the first (indeed they would be the only ones)  to crack Robyn's fi-  nal line of defense.

Asmodeus and his nephilim drove right out onto  the roof of Taurus  and parked. They quickly found a  walkway hemmed  by a guardrail, and this walkway led them to an airlock big enough to take all of Asmodeus's men in  two groups. It was all very easy. Perhaps it was too easy.

When the pressure came up to the three pounds of pure oxygen that was standard  inside the  city  of Taurus,  the High  Lord Patriarch Asmodeus, his son Apollyon, and the forty-one officers accompanying them stepped out.

They dropped a flight of stairs to the main floor below. All of them longed to shed  their spacesuits  once and for  all but they dared not, fearing that they would all be  suf- focated by Robyn with the touch of a button.

Soon Asmodeus  and  his  nephilim  found  themselves  in  a labyrinth of passageways without a clue of where they went.

The maze of corridors opened up  into a roomy area,  like a food court in  a shopping mall, and there  As- modeus's commando team ran into the first members of the B'nei Elohim prepared to stop them.

It was a small  squad led  by Chuck, the  son of  Chayn and Gordon and the  cousin of  Victoria. Chuck and his  three Girl Guards pointed their weapons directly at Asmodeus  face, and no wonder, his  elaborate regalia  clearly marked  him as  the most sen- ior nephilim present.

Chuck made signs for Asmodeus to lift the  faceplate on his helmet so he could see  who he  was. When As- modeus complied, Chuck recognized  his fuzzy  face  and  uniquely braided  white beard.

He said, "Well,  well, it's  the Gerash  Patriarch himself. Tell your team to let their guns drop to the floor, Asmodeus, or you'll get it. Now!"

Asmodeus carefully complied. He and his team  did nothing which might make Chuck or his girls squeeze the trigger on their weapons.

"Good, Sire, now reach over and slowly unsheathe your sword halfway out  with your  right hand. Halfway  out only,  mind you Sire. That's per- fect.

Okay, now grab the hilt with your left hand so that when you pull it out, the sword's tip is pointing back  your way and not my way."

When Asmodeus had done all  this Chuck motioned for  him to pull the sword the rest of  the way out of its sheathe. "Slowly, Sire. Slowly now! I know you're tricky, Lord Asmodeus. Okay, now hand it to me."

When he was about to give Chuck his blade, Asmodeus's thumb hit a switch on the hilt and the cap on the very bottom flipped up to reveal a lens. Chuck looked at it in aston- ishment.

A powerful laser in the  hilt in- stantly blinded  him. Her eyes slammed shut, but there  were bright spots  dominating his vision, and there was also great pain. "Ah, dam- mit! Damn you! I'm blind!"

What followed was a fierce tussle where Chuck's three squad members had the better of it at first be- cause they were still armed, while Asmodeus's people had to scramble on the floor for their weapons.

Asmodeus ducked  and  rolled  and swerved  to  avoid  being burned. Even- tually Asmodeus' sheer  numbers pre-  vailed, as they must. Seven members of his group  were hit  before Dory's three girls were  shot. As for Apol- lyon, he was hiding behind an obsta- cle.

Chuck was  still  alive,  but   he  groped  around  in  his blindness. None of his  girls  were left  alive  to pro-  vide imagery of the scene to Dory via the Swarm.

Asmodeus decapitated Chuck with his sword without a word of warning while  he was crawling around  on the floor, blind  as a bat. Then he put  his still-living  head, dripping  with blood, into a gray translucent me- tallic bag and closed it with a yel- low sticker.

"I know you can still hear me, man of the B'nei Elohim," he said to him through the bag, not knowing pre- cisely who he was, "but as you have discovered by now, it's hard  to up- load your memories with neutrinos through the material of this bag.

You're my insurance. So let's see what extraordinary lengths your friends will go to in capturing your final memories to let you avoid the True Death."

And he  gave  the  bag containing  Chuck's  head  to  young Apollyon to carry for him  while some  of his oth-  er officers carried took point and rearguard.

Obviously the whole area was rigged for  sound, because now doors magically opened in front of them, indicating the way the B'nei Elohim wanted the Emperor to go.

The thick  doors they  already  passed  through refused  to budge. The weapons of the Imperials would take too  long to cut through them and they would run out of power at any rate.

Grenades could do it, but there were too many doors and too few gre- nades, and it might break the air-  tight integrity of the city.

Only two floors  separated the  bulk of  the city  with its park-like flora from the hard vacuum of the surface of the moon.

As they  proceeded through  the  doors  they were  silently bidden to use, Asmodeus noticed a scarcity of girl scouts along the way.

Instead of presenting themselves for slaughter  they seemed to back off as if on orders. The only excep- tion to that rule was Chayn Shybear, the mother of Chuck, who approached Asmodeus with arms raised and palms forward to show she had no weapons.

Asmodeus thought she closely re- sembled the woman named Joy who served him  long  ago on  Barbelo, but  her  hair was  very different. When she had  drawn  near, she  sank  to one  knee, lowered her face, and said, "I am Chayn, Lord,  the daughter of Ro- byn. Command me."

Asmodeus thought the resemblance to Joy extended even to the woman's voice. He said,  "Command you?  Would  you attempt  to deceive a god?"

"Deceive you, Lord? Far be it from my mind.  Not all of the B'nei Elohim share the same aims of El Shaddai and Bat-El, as my Lord has already discerned by the service of my brother Edgar.

Name the thing you seek, Lord, and I shall try to get it for you with no further violence." "I have come for  the Ark of the Covenant." Chayn suddenly raised her face to see if Asmodeus was serious. "The Ark? My Lord has been tragically deceived  if he thought the Ark of the Covenant to be here on Luna."

"Then where is  it?" "In a space  station we  call Midway, Lord,  which is  in orbit  some  four thousand  miles above  the second planet of this star system." "I don't believe you!"

"I speak only the truth  to my Lord," Chayn  protested. "He will not find the Ark of the Covenant in Tau- rus City."

"And yet, I would  see the taberna-  cle, the  meeting tent where El Shad- dai always insisted the Ark should be kept. Where is this tabernacle, woman of the B'nei Elohim?"

"I can show you that, Lord,"  And there was a  place in the two-story thick structure that comprised the  ceiling of Taurus where the floor had been replaced by thick glass.

It was such that one could look down past one's feet at the floor of the city. It was easy for Asmodeus to identify what he was seeking.

The Tabernacle,   or  Meeting  Tent,  was   constructed  by materials and labor  which was donated by  artisans from Israel, Hamar, and Nath.

The required materials were gold, silver, brass, fine linen, goats' hair, rams' skins dyed red, badgers' skins, shittim wood, oil for the  light,  spices  for anointing  oil  and for  sweet incense, plus onyx stones. There were stones to be set for the ephod and the breastplate. With these materials, craftsmen made the tabernacle, the staves to carry the Ark, the  altar and its staves, all the altar's vessels, and the show- bread.

They made the candlestick for the light, the incense altar, and the hanging for the door at the entrance of the tabernacle.

There was a glass elevator  leading to the floor  of Taurus but it was only large enough  to hold two nephi-  lim, laden as they  were  with  weapons  and spacesuit  backpacks  and  a  bag carrying Chuck's head.

Asmodeus hesitated for a moment  to think. Then he stepped inside accom- panied only by his son Apollyon,  who carried the head of Chuck.

For a delicate few moments they would both be trapped at the mercy of B'nei Elohim operators who if they chose could run the capsule to a dead stop halfway down the tube, then kill both of them with laser light fired through the glass tube.

But nothing like that  happened be-  cause Chayn  was being covered by the officers Asmodeus left behind,  as the Emperor's life insurance.

The forest sector of  Taurus City  was arranged  around 300 foot tall Green Hill, the highest point on the surface. Asmodeus could see foot trails spreading out like a web  from the summit as they descended.

One side of the hill had a farm with 13 acres of fruits and vegeta- bles plus a ten acre fruit orchard with  room for about thirty head of cattle among the trees.

On the other side of the  hill were tall pines  and about a thousand foot long  stretch of whitewater in a  deep chasm. This was a part of Taurus deliberately sculpted to be wild, which was quite a valuable commodity in space.

There was  a  deep  human  (and  nephi-  lim)  need  to  be immersed in chaos  periodically to balance the  sterile order of technology.

The scenic drop ended with a gen- tle stop  in an abandoned station on the hilltop. The castle of Robyn was at the far end of Taurus's central park perched on a slightly lower hill.

Beyond the castle was a small "downtown" modeled after small ci- ties on Earth, and beyond that was the far end of the city.

Asmodeus and his  son zigzagged  down Green  Hill on  paths between a creek and a stretch of road on another piece of rugged "wild" land between the  two mile-long  walls, which  were more than five hundred feet apart.

Soon they found  themselves sur-  rounded by  perhaps fifty well-armed members of the Girl Guard  in a large level  area at the base of the hill, where the Tabernacle had been set up.

A tall, muscular woman with short hair was at the center of the ring of women, and she pulled  a sword from a sheath held in the  hands of  another woman  and  stepped forward  to meet  the intruders.

"I'm Hunky," she said. "Robyn is indisposed at the moment, Emperor Asmodeus Gerash, so if you came all the way here because you want a  piece of B'nei Elohim ass you'll  have to settle for Number Two."

Asmodeus hesitated. He was nearly exhausted, for one thing. And for another, while Hunky was no substi- tute  for Lilith or Del as a  command- er on the  field of battle, in  a one- on-one situation Hunky was said to be  far more fierce than  either of them.

Still, despite Hunky's nephilim Amazon body frame, in Empire dogma she  was  nothing  but  a  silly  and  weak  female. The Emperor could not back  down in  the sight  of his  son without contradicting many centuries of pa- triarchy bluster, and Hunky knew it full well.

This situation was reinforced when the rest of the officers in the par- ty of  Asmodeus arrived  to observe, with  Chayn in tow, after having come down to the city floor two-by-two.

Humans, demigods, and Fallen An- gels arranged themselves as specta- tors on balconies and alcoves, in nooks and crannies all around the open space. Whatever happened, it was going  to be even better  than a game of  Freeball, which was the  of- ficial sport of the B'nei Elohim.

Intrepid television journalist An- drea Mitchell  rushed to the scene with a crew bearing  lights and cam- era gear, yelling "Wait!" Immediate- ly she had her Interworld crew  set up their equipment, while a half- dozen girls attended to both Gordon and Abaddon with make-up.

"Asmodeus' divine and  imperial dignity  was at  a breaking point. "What is this?" he yelled.

Andrea gaped at hym. "Do you real- ize how many people are watching  this war,  Sire?  Do you  want to  look  like hell  on camera? And  she mo- tioned  for the  girls to continue  to make Asmodeus and Hunky look good but ridiculous.

Finally Asmodeus  and Hunky  were  left  unmolested by  the make-up crew. In a  sign  of contempt  for  his foe,  Asmodeus bypassed the  traditional  opening formalities  of  salute  and counter-salute.

He set down the macro and simply stood there with his blade in hand and tried to stare Hunky down. Few could withstand the withering gaze of the Patriarch of the White Beards.

So Hunky, in reply,  also bypassed the  traditional opening formalities. She skipped the  stupid  alpha-male bluster  that always reminded her of rams beating their heads together.

She was thinking of that  crap where the  opponents circled around one another and talked trash while they made little quick thrusts and parries to gauge their opponent and  tried to shake loose an opening.

Don't men always have to  do that? she thought. Even in a fist fight they  will always begin by throwing  their open palms against each oth- er's chest,  saying "Come on!" over and over again until they make each other angry enough to start throwing fists.

But the B'nei Elohim Girl Guard knew closed fists were lousy weapons and open hands even more so.

At Shangri-La in the Green River Gorge, also  known as Boot Camp, they were  trained to  grab their  foe imme-  diately and actually pull them clos- er,  bringing surprised male  face (or testicles) into raised female knee or lowered female skull.

So it was that Hunky, in her very first  move, simply threw her sharp steel blade  into Asmodeus' chest  like one  of those oriental throwing stars. No fanfare. No boasting.

No playing with her  food which  from much  past experience even her B'nei Elohim associates  expected her to do. In fact, Hunky's move was  totally  unexpected, therefore  it could  not fail.

Some of the women gathered there were disappointed, but when Del re- viewed this memory  later on  the Swarm she  would have high praise for Hunky indeed. The point was to kill the emperor, not jerk off.

Standing there with  Hunky's sword  penetrating his  heart, Asmodeus's face was a grimace of  pain and shock. He could not believe what had just  happened to  him, yet  the agony  was so intense he could not even speak.

It's not fair! I wasn't ready! Hunky cheated and skipped all the customary preliminaries! Apollyon saw  that his  father's wound was mor- tal.

Asmodeus turned to his son and tried to speak, but no words came out. Before he could die, Apollyon was determined  to let his father see that his  son was  determined to com-  plete the mission.

He pointed a gun  at the bag  con- taining  Chuck's severed head and stood forth so everyone could see him. Bring forth the Ark of the Covenant or this man's final memo- ries will be lost forever.

Chayn caught Hunky's  eye. "I tried to  tell them  the Ark wasn't here." Hunky, for one, was not willing to allow Chuck to suffer the  True Death. She yelled, "Everyone hold!  Point your weapons at the deck. No- body try anything."

"Excellent," Apollyon growled. This move was the only way he could save his  life, but  he  also saw  a chance  to at  least salvage his fa- ther's mission, now that his fa- ther's life was forfeit.