Private First-Class Majid Nisaar had spent nearly seven years of his life on the Ghul frontier, playing cat-and-mouse with the aliens. He'd greeted his transfer to the Lahab-u-Din with a mixture of disgust, despair and relief. Disgust at being dragged back from the front line when the Ghul conflict looked ready to last a good long time and despair at possibly losing the one guaranteed means to advancement in the Corps - service under fire. Relief, albeit a guilty sense of relief, at the possibility he'd live to collect his pension.

When black-robed figures stepped out of the forest to form a ring around the drop sphere, his emotions were just as confused. Relief, again, that this drop might amount to something worth putting into his permanent record. Anticipation at the thought of actually seeing some action. And terror at the sight of those dark figures, stepping out to confront the state-of-the-art weapons platform that was the sphere completely empty-handed.

Of course, they had come to beg the marines not to blast their way to the Mount of the Oracle. They'd come to surrender, to plead for mercy, to offer up whoever had been responsible for disrupting the shut-down of Murkworld. Of course they had.

"Deployment in ten and counting." The Captain's voice cracked like a whip from the loudspeaker just above his head, filling the dusky air of the aptly-named animal pen in which the grunts of the drop force waited to be herded out to do their jobs. The ship's systems had almost completely filtered out his nasal squeak, given the weasel's voice a bit of authority.

Sami Lebdi's shoulder hunched forward against his own just as it always did before a fight. But this wouldn't be a fight, would it? Certainly not much of one.

Majid waited for the drop sphere to roll over into deployment position and drop the cattle chute through which the marines would deploy, mumbling dhikr prayers. Beside him, Sami murmured just under his breath, doing the same. "Subhanallhi wa bihamdi, subhanallahi-il-atheem, Subhanallhi wa bihamdi, subhanallahi-il-atheem, Subhanallhi wa bihamdi, subhanallahi-il-atheem…."

At five seconds, the Captain's voice blared takbir over the loudspeaker. "Allahuakbar!"

Majid bellowed with everything he had as the sphere shifted beneath him. "Allahuakbar!"

"Allahuakbar!" The Captain's voice and their reply were accompanied by the low whirring of servos and the snapping and popping of releasing latches as the cattle chute was unfurled.

A second's hush before the third takbir, then the takbir. The clang of the pen's gate sliding open gave way to the roar of the charging ghazis and the dimness around Majid seemed to hum and crackle with energy.

Fishyfishy "Fisabilillahi, ya ikhwanii!" The Captain's voice filled the pen behind him, seemed to propel him forward, down the chute to the brilliant circle of light at its bottom. "For the sake of Allah, my brothers!"

The narrow cattle chute resounded with the pounding of boots and the howls of the marines. He could see no further than the padded shoulders and bulky helmets of the two ghazis just ahead of him, their dark forms haloed by the light pouring in from the clearing without. Then the light bloomed bright around them as they leapt down onto the grass of Murkworld, and Majed leapt too, Sami at his side.

The other marines had already formed up, standing with their bolt-sprayers held across their chests, the air filled with the whine of charging plasma-darts. Majid double-timed it to his place in the arcing line of ghazis, thumbed his sprayer to life. Sami fell in beside him.

Silence dropped around them, thunderous after the cacophony of the last few minutes. Majid checked the charge reading on his weapon, then raised his eyes to the forest's edge.

The figures still stood still, faces hidden in the cowls of their robes, hands buried up the sleeves of opposite arms, like 'tainment net Kung Fu masters. Although all were more-or-less within the normal height and weight range for humans, some pushed the envelope of that range close to bursting. Some were just a shade too tall, and far too thin for their height, while others were a bit too broad, or a bit too short, or both too broad and too short.

He had a sinking feeling he knew what that meant.

A single pair of boots thudded down the cattle chute. That would be Captain Al-Qureishi, leading from slightly-to-the-rear, as always. Majid was too much the professional to allow himself to think bad thoughts of a senior officer (such thoughts as, for example, "that baqarah wouldn't have survived a week on the frontier", or "I guess if he ever did take his head out of his ass, his ears might freeze").

The Captain emerged from the chute and stopped cold. The harsh glare of the sphere's floodlights, which glinted on every other surface in the clearing, fell into the blackness of his body armor as if the suit had been carved from a singularity. Majed and the other ghazis ringing the clearing made do with light-weight flash-coats, little more than projectile-absorbing jackets coated with a substance which, they were told, had been specially engineered to deflect the beams of energy weapons but which never seemed to succeed in doing so - and which bore a disturbing resemblance to chrome paint.

The Captain's bolt-sprayer hung across his back in exactly the right place for him to choke himself with the strap were he to make a quick grab for it. In the hands that should have held his weapon, he carried a datakey.

Which meant that the sphere's scans must have confirmed what Majed had suspected: they were surrounded by Sprites.

The thought should have calmed him. He probably wouldn't be using the bolt-sprayer, not when the Captain had a datakey. [check – Ibrahim created hack?]

Majed ran his gaze down the line of robed figures, standing so serenely along the clearing's edge, and felt anything but calm.

The Captain took three steps away from the cattle chute and halted just behind the row of ghazis. His lips moved behind the gray-tinted glasteel of his helmet. No doubt issuing orders to his suit. Sure enough, the suit's external speakers hissed to life, buzzing with the distortion of the "voice of god" mode the Captain had insisted be custom-programmed into the suit's processor block. All the volume and echo the suit could produce couldn't make Al-Qureishi's voice sound any less whiny.

The first and last sound the voice-of-god projected into the clearing was the phlegmy rattle of the Captain clearing his throat.

It was answered by the soft rustle of cloth sliding down arms as, all around them, the Sprites lifted hands above heads and called fire down upon the clearing.

Safe, Majed told himself. Armor's crap, but the Park suits they issued will keep that stuff off of us. Praise Allah, they're only Sprites. Alhamdulillahi Rabb-ilalameen.

Bolts of fiery light pounded the clearing, the marines and the drop sphere. Instead of issuing the command to open fire, Captain Al-Qureishi fumbled at the datakey. Majed imagined he saw the idiot's thumb depress the transmit key, but he couldn't have, because around the clearing the Sprites stayed standing and the fire continued to pound down. The bolts struck the men around him, played around their bodies like St. Elmo's Fire as their Park-suits discharged the Sprites' faux-magic.

He could see that it was getting harder and harder for the men to ignore the attack; beside him Sami took a hand from his bolt-sprayer to slap at a flurry of energy as it scooted across his chest.

Something flickered in the sky above him - it had looked like - no, it was gone.

The fact that the Sprites' attack was apparently without effect seemed to calm the Captain, who stopped beating at the datakey with dead-fish hands and began purposefully poking and prodding it with his index finger.

Something flickered above his head. Majed looked up to see the sky crisscrossed with blue-white beams of light. The energy-net of the Murkworld grid. The shields designed to mask it were failing, which meant the Sprites had to be drawing more than the safety-overrides should have allowed.

Something was wrong. But the Park-suits would -

Deathly silence fell on the clearing as the fire ceased raining down. Had Majed not seen the grid above him still glowing angrily against the stars, he might have thought the Sprites had given up their attack.

"What are they doing?" Sami's voice held just an edge of panic, an edge Majed had heard no more than a handful of times in their years together fighting the Ghul.

Fire lanced down from the grid again, concentrated now on the Captain's armored form. The datakey fell from Al-Qureishi's gauntlets and he fumbled at the bolt-sprayer on his back, managing only to get the strap tangled around his neck. In his last moments, he seemed to be performing a fair pantomime of a man trying to save himself from being strangled by a python.

A warm glow swelled up from beneath the armor's shiny surface, like the fire of a volcanic eruption rising up from oceanic depths. Inside the helmet the captain's lips were moving as he struggled to free the strap of his sprayer from where it had tangled on the suit's shoulder plate. A sheen of sweat glistened on Al-Qureishi's forehead and on the planes of his cheekbones, though the flesh itself seemed to be darkening. The helm's tinting distorted the colors, but Majed could tell the man was turning red as he began to broil inside his armor.

Majed might have been the first to begin firing, or the first spray of plasma-lit darts could have come from someone else, from any of fifty someone-elses. It didn't matter - the ghazis fired more or less as one, and here and there Sprites began to fall. The fires of faux-magic still concentrated on the captain as he clawed at his suit releases, his lips screaming a silent "o" behind his helm. Majed targeted one of the willowy forms, sending a bolt near enough to burn a chunk out of the Sprite's cheek. The next bolt struck true, and the cowled hood became a flaming mess of fabric, flesh and bone.

A sound like the angry whistle of a tea-kettle filled the clearing, and then gore and shrapnel erupted from where the captain had stood an instant earlier. Shards of officer-grade battle-armor tore through the marines. A dozen must have dropped around Majed, but for those few seconds at least he was spared.

He howled and fired and Sprites fell as plasma bolts tore through them. Then those still standing raised their arms once more, and the overloaded power grid again inserted itself between the marines and the stars.

Fire roared down on Sami Lebdi, whirled angrily around his Park suit until the suit died, overloaded. Then Sami died as well, screaming.

Fire lashed down at marine after marine, its energies concentrated now on no more than two or three men at a time. Their armor useless, their Park-suits quickly failing under the overwhelming barrage of energy, ghazi after ghazi fell.

Majed fired and howled and fired and howled while around him two squads died. Fire began playing along the surface of the sphere itself. Majed wondered if the Sprites could actually summon enough power from the grid to crack that egg.

Then the fires found him.

Neither Setna Amjed nor Mushkilah could find it in themselves to speak for several long moments after the last of the marines died. The fires played along the surface of the sphere, but failed to penetrate it. Another squad of marines poured out of the cattle chute and died, and then there were no more. Who would be left inside the sphere? The pilot, a few techies. Whoever they were, they had the presence of mind to retract the chute.

But not before several Sprites had made their way inside. A few minutes later, a last desperate call came from a marine pilot, no more than a scattering of incoherent syllables, followed by his death-howl.

Then silence, and a moment later darkness as the sphere's visual nodes were shut down.

Mushkilah and Amjed sat in silence, stunned by the many impossibilities they'd just witnessed. The Sprites had ignored the datakey, overloaded the grid, gotten through the Park suits. Killed. The Sprites had killed.

How many Guests were still down on the surface of Murkworld? What might the Sprites do to them? What had they already done?

To give him his due, Mr. Amjed recovered first. Mushkilah clearly saw the glint return to his eyes, the curl to his lips.

She, however, was the first to speak.

"He'll need security."

"Already arranged."

"Not just marines – specialists. Someone familiar with the Parkworld."

"Already arranged."

"And after he's finished - "

"Assuming he survives…."

"Posting of his choice within the company, or executive retirement package."

"I was thinking more along the lines of a cash reward and promotion to B grade. Guaranteed employment at the same grade after the Parks have been shut down."

"Posting of choice or retirement, or no deal."

The glint in Amjed's eyes went supernova.

"Same for me."

No, now the glint in Amjed's eyes went supernova. Mushkilah tried to ignore the many horrible things this man could do or have done to her, and held his gaze.

The corner of his mouth lifted a millimeter higher, and her blood went cold.

"Agreed," he said softly.

Agreed? She'd won? Then why was he looking so smug?

"We leave for Murkworld in an hour. Should your Warden fail, I want both of us to be on the scene. In person. To congratulate your man if he succeeds. To deal with the consequences should he fail."

Ah. The consequences of failure. Mushkilah tried her best to feel like she'd gotten the upper hand. She had won.

As long as Ibrahim didn't screw things up.