Ibrahim’s nerves jangled and jittered as he took the elevator from the Lahab-u-Din’s shuttle hangar. When the lift doors opened on the carrier’s bridge, he had to steel himself for just an instant before stepping out.

It wasn't Ibrahim's first time on a military vessel, not by any means, but he still felt a twinge of almost existential despair at the sight of the ghazi pilots, astrogators, datapushers and grunts, no more than swatches of paleness surrounded by dimness, midnight turned to multi-hued twilight by the mingling of the blue glow of the overhead lights and the red and green flicker of datascreens. The contrast to the broad pastel sweeps of the Booth's datapanels and the relatively plush comfort of the controllers' work spaces was a stark one.

Maybe that was how the ghazis had earned their reputation for fearlessness. The professional soldiers knew that survival in battle meant getting sent back to their ships.

Then he found Lieutenant al-Mutawwali, standing at attention with square shoulders and straight back - unusually straight, even for him. Uncomfortably straight, Ibrahim would have thought. When the man nodded and mumbled something just below the threshold of audibility, Ibrahim understood his posture. He was on-line with Setna Amjed. It took some effort for Ibrahim to suppress a guilty flush of pleasure. It looked as if the drill sergeant had met his match.

Ibrahim moved up to stand just behind the Lieutenant at what he hoped was a properly polite distance. Try as he might, Ibrahim couldn't make out a word of the marine's conversation: the Lieutenant spoke softer than a whisper, undoubtedly straining even the hyper-sensitive pickup of his military-grade comm to maximum. Amjed must have been putting on one of his best performances.

Al-Mutawwali turned off his comm with a tap. The ghazi took a deep breath, held it and released it in something very like a sigh of relief.

"Lieutenant al-Mutawwali. Sir."

To his credit, the ghazi didn't jump out of his skin when Ibrahim spoke his name. A twitch of a shoulder maybe, but as one who had been on the receiving end of Setna Amjed's vitriol only moments ago Ibrahim knew al-Mutawwali's remarkable composure for what it was.

"Warden Smith," the Lieutenant said coolly. Overcompensating. "We’re about to retake the Mount, get back into the Park Management System. I understand you've received your orders?"

"Yes, Lieutenant. I'm to observe."

"And make your codes available to me at any time."

"Yes sir. And that."

"We'll get along just fine, then." The Lieutenant turned his still-too-straight back on Ibrahim. "Damned clouds," he murmured. Ibrahim turned his attention to the image of Murkworld on the main viewscreen. Sure enough, the continent was buried under a roiling mass of clouds. Cut off from the surface comm grid, and now unable to observe from above. Ibrahim didn't envy the Lieutenant's position.

A marine approached, a hint of “is-this-doggy-going-to-bite trepidation in his eyes as he saluted the Lieutenant. "Drop sphere's loaded, sir."

“Ah,” Al-Mutaswali murmured. “Good.” His clipped tone made the news seem anything but good, and Ibrahim wondered why.

A drop sphere. They were going all out on this mission. When the marines had landed on Glory of the Ottomans, the drop sphere had been little more than a simulation brewing at the heart of some military thinktank's AI net - though even then the military newsgroups had been aflame with rumors about its capabilities. Designed for the profoundly unlikely occasion of an invasion of the Ghul homeworld (which had yet to be discovered), the spheres relied solely on grav-generators for … well, propulsion wasn't quite the right word. Push? No. Movement. The only word Ibrahim could think of that left out any implication that such archaic a force as thrust had anything to do with how a drop sphere got from place to place. The grav-generators gave ghazi pilots full control of movement in all three dimensions and the ability to slip into atmosphere without the friction-generated heat signature that invariably betrayed even the suprisiest of surprise drops

Al-Mutawwali stood rapping the fingers of his right hand on the back of the datapusher's chair, earning himself an irritated glance from Ms. Pascal. Ibrahim wondered if there was more to his agitation than Amjed's lecture. If this really was the drop sphere's first deployment, he'd have observers other than Setna Amjed looking over his shoulder during the operation.

Any smugness Ibrahim felt vaporized when he realized those same observers would be watching him as well.

"We can't delay any longer." The Lieutenant spoke softly, as if to himself. When he gave his orders, however, his voice snapped with all of its accustomed volume.

"Proceed with the drop."

The datapusher in the cubicle across the aisle from Mushkilah shot her a skeptical glance as she again turned to her mirror to fiddle with her hijab. She supposed she was overdoing it - nothing short of a hurricane could have blown it awry that many times in the last hour.

But Amjed had stomped down the aisle twice during that time, once nearly getting a look at her dataport before she could switch it back to her progress report.

She poked invisible strands of hair back under her scarf as she scanned the length of the aisle in the mirror. At the far side of the control platform, Amjed's door stood closed. A mailbot scurried from cubicle to cubicle, and Mac Nguyen was leaning against the divider that separated Karen Taggert's workspace from his own. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Mushkilah had to be careful. The scene now playing out on her dataport was damning indeed. With the help of friends in low places, she'd managed to patch into the Booth's observation grid. At a touch she could switch from node to node, but she hadn't touched the control pad for quite some time now, since she'd found the perfect view of the Lahab-u-Din and the massive mirror ball growing out of its side. Only the top third or so of the drop sphere bulged up from the blacker-than-black shadow of the carrier, the light reflected up at it from the blue-green vastness of Murkworld glinting off the golden curve of the verses that covered its surface. From the Booth node they appeared delicate and minute - she thought she could make out Ayat al-Kursi, the Verse of the Throne, but couldn't be sure, so tiny did the script appear on her dataport. In reality, each letter towered taller than a tall man, and the entire verse of the Holy Qur’an would have stretched over at least half of the warehouse-like Misr datapool in which she worked.

Ayat al-Kursi. Had to be. No military vessel expected to enter atmosphere did so without its protection against the Jinn who might inhabit its upper reaches. No self-respecting ghazi would have stepped foot aboard such a vessel. A marine could expect dangers enough after planetfall.

Light flared suddenly up from the glow nodes around the drop sphere. The launch sequence had begun.

Mushkilah adjusted herself in the mirror one last time. The coast was clear.

On the dataport, the sphere flashed brilliantly in the Lahab-u-Din's strobes, its data and weapons arrays seemingly alight with Saint Elmo's Fire, as it rolled away from the carrier and began its drop down to Murkworld.

On the viewscreen, the elegantly scrolling verses of the Qur'an seemed to fade away as a dull, oily muck oozed out like sweat from unseen pores in the sphere's surface -- another toy of the ghazi engineers. Based on one of the many failed attempts to emulate the substance with which the Bedouin coated their ships, the drop-sphere's liquid skin served as both heat shield and camouflage. Well, camouflage if the drop was being made on the night-side of the planet: the substance had some of the strength of the Bedu material, but none of its kaleidoscopic color. It came in one hue: primer gray. That gray, however, was almost impossible to detect from ground-based observation nodes, at least at night.

On traditional craft, that coating would have burned off in the first minute of contact with the atmosphere. The drop-sphere's more controlled descent would produce only as much heat as the pilot thought safe - weighed against the marines' need to boots on soil before ground-based fire brought them down.

The calligraphy-covered sphere bathed in sunlight had been stunningly beautiful. Under the liquid skin it shed its beauty. Now it looked brutal, ready to kill.

The drop sphere swallowed its weapons and communications arrays into itself and fell toward Murkworld.

One of the Lieutenant's ghazis cried out from the back of the control room. "Takbir!"

"Allahu-akbar!" Ibrahim caught himself bellowing out the response with everyone else, his own stake in the ghazi's mission momentarily forgotten in the excitement. Even Lieutenant al-Mutawwali stood a little more at ease.

"Takbir!"

"Allahu-akbar!"

The sphere fell like a peculiarly symmetrical asteroid, a real dinosaur killer.

"Takbir!"

"Allahu-akbar!" After the third and final takbir, the hush of awe returned to the Lahab-u-Din’s bridge.

"Track it," Al-Mutawwali barked into the near silence. The image on the viewscreen seemed to leap toward them. In two bounds the drop sphere pressed up against the screen like some roly-poly child's belly rubbing against an ice cream parlor's window.

The sphere hung unmoving in the viewscreen while Murkworld swelled up behind it. Ibrahim wished the Lieutenant had left the view alone - he would have much preferred to watch the drop sphere grow small and disappear into a remote Murkworld, marines and Sprites alike far away, the crisis resolving itself at a distance.

Instead he watched the planet engulf the drop sphere, swallow it like a very big fish gulping down a very little one. Light flared up from the liquid skin as it struck the planet's atmosphere. It glowed an angry red for a few seconds, then dimmed as the pilot adjusted the speed of his descent. The uppermost layer of cloud swept around the sphere, hiding it. The screen flickered as Pascal switched over to heat tracking, and the sphere reappeared, a blue globe still obscured by night. The liquid skin was absorbing too much heat energy for the sphere to present a proper signature: bad for observers aboard the Lahab-u-Din, who would have a tough time tracking it all the way to the surface, good for the marines, since observers on the ground would have just as much trouble.

Ibrahim counted the seconds, though he had no idea how long it would take for the sphere to drop below the clouds.

It faded to near-invisibility as the cloying moisture of the clouds cooled its surface. Then it vanished.

"Sphere nodes," al-Mutawwali snapped. Ms. Pascal's stylus swept across her datapad, and the screen filled with mist.

Beautiful, Ibrahim thought, even as he felt that familiar tightening somewhere in the middle of his chest. He gasped when the mists withdrew suddenly, and the sparkling surface of Murkworld lay spread out beneath him. Beneath the sphere, he reminded himself. Though he could almost imagine himself falling through the open air toward the lights of the Sprite cities, he was only a spectator here.

Alhamdulillahi, he was only a spectator.

Then he noticed. Something was very, very wrong.

The Lieutenant had noticed it too. "Smith, is that Misr's notion of camouflage?"

"No," Ibrahim murmured, hastily adding a "sir." "It's not supposed to…there should be a holo projection over that."

Beneath the sphere, surrounded by the twinkling glimmer of what passed on Murkworld for a metropolis, where there should have been the fiery glow of lava in the volcano's cone, white, oh-so--artificial light swelled up from the Mount of the Oracle.

Ibrahim remembered how firmly the Jacobin had insisted on stripping away every holo-projection concealing the data and power nodes with which Misr Entertainment maintained control over Glory of the Ottomans. Had he been acting on some universal Sprite impulse? Would any Sprite, undeceived, do the same thing?

He told himself that the glitch that had shut down the BrainChild must have deactivated the lava projection. Whoever now controlled the planet's systems simply hadn't gotten around to restoring it yet.

Had to be. It had to be.

Because otherwise it was possible they were faced with another Sprite rebellion.

The Lieutenant shot him an angry glance when the hiccups first hit, then turned away in disgust as they refused to stop.