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improvise.”
    Drexler ran his glance across the display-monitors bolted to the dash of the
NeoGen-modified Humvee—or HumGee—parked under mimetic camouflage-netting outside the junker’s yard and which was serving as a scratch C&C for
the guys inside.
    Wireframe topographies of the yard itself, thermograph readouts of the targets
in the van overlaid with extrapolated bio-data. Outputs from the microcams of
the three wet-operatives inside.
    “Don’t try to improvise when you don’t have the data,” he told MIRA. “It just
sounds wrong. It doesn’t sound like anything a real human would say.”
    MIRA gave what sounded like a contemptuous little snort—possibly a sound-sample designed to convey that precise effect.
    “I’m a sentient-grade AI, chum, even if I occupy the lower end of the
scale. You just follow the orders and do the job and come it like a frigging
robot. I sound more human and alive than you do, most of the time.”
    “That’s my prerogative, MIRA. You don’t have the option.”
    “Yeah, whatever you say,
boss
,” MIRA said with marked cybernetic sarcasm.
“And speaking of time, boss, we’re well over that deadline I gave the targets.
You wanna give the go-word to take ‘em out?”
    “Do it,” Drexler said. “Remember that the package is our top priority. They
can do what they like, but only after the package is secure.”
    “Yeah, yeah, we all know that,” said MIRA. “I’m relaying the order to… hang
on. Something’s up…
    “Check the bio-readouts on the girl. Something freaky’s going on with the girl
and it’s—oh my God…”
    There was a blinding flash from outside, washing out the Klieg-illumination in
the intensity of its glare, and human-sounding or not, that was the last thing
MIRA ever said.
     
    Shafts of magnesium light blasted from the windows and roof-ports of the van,
from the rust holes eaten in its sides. Tendrils of electrical discharge arced
to the junkyard-compound’s generator unit, travelling the leads to which it
had been hooked to NeoGen’s Kliegs and exploding them in a shower of sparks.
    Vestigial petrochems left in tanks out in the junk piles spontaneously
ignited; the tanks detonated. The junk began to burn. The van itself exploded—torn apart by forces within it that were not entirely physical.
    And something dark burst from it. Something dark in a wholly different sense
than a mere absence of cast light.
    Something big. Something shrieking. Something coming now.

5.
    In a place that has no name, a place indefinable in spatial or temporal
terms—or for that matter, any terms that might apply to organic matter,
let alone life—something vast and inimical and unknowable stirred.
    Something was calling to it. Something had made a small fracture in the world. A tiny imperfection, to be sure, but one that could be worked upon. Something that could be forced further apart, with time. If time had any meaning, of course, for this vast and inimical and unknowable thing, which it didn’t. It had an eternity in which to operate, after all.
    It would be a mistake to believe that the subsumation and destruction of all we know would be anything more than a light snack to this vast and inimical and unknowable thing. The equivalent of a quick pack of potato chips between real meals.
    Then again, potato chips come in a variety of interesting flavours, and a pack of them is just the thing to hit the spot. When you’re feeling peckish—as the vast and inimical and unknowable thing decidedly was.
    For the moment, though, it was in the position of having worked the pack open just enough to insert a finger. Just enough, if it inserted the smallest extremity of itself into the world of men, for a small taste. And this it had proceeded to do…
     
    Half-blinded and gibbering with terror, Eddie Kalish scrambled through the
junk piles, trying to catch his bearings. Things had shifted around, of
course, during the time he had spent away, but Little Deke’s had never