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canyon for three days straight. They watched the alien walkers sprint through at two-hundred KPH, and they figured out a rough schedule. Around noon, single walkers tended to come through every forty-two minutes, and there were never any security sweeps or air support. The enemy considered this a safe region.
    â€œWhaddya think, hero? Today the day?â€

Chapter 30:
Dissect
    Jack wasn’t quite thirty and he’d already seen thousands of open wounds. He became numb to the sight of blood and gore, but that hadn’t always been the case. No, back when he first joined the Corps, he thought he was a real tough guy, but all the bravado flushed away when he came upon the remains of someone blown apart by a roadside bomb.
    The air was thick and smelled like a slaughterhouse, but he didn’t immediately put it together. Not until he saw parts he recognized. A hand. A leg sheared off below the knee. Intestines spilling over a curb. Then the floodgates opened and realization rushed into him all at once. The smell was human meat.
    Jack ran away and puked his guts out, and was grim and despondent for days afterward. That’s when he first met Leonid Nikitin, another young corpsman who already had a year of duty behind him.
    Nikitin had enough sense to take Jack out for a beer and listen while the young corpsman came to grips with what he was feeling. He didn’t say a word all night, not until Jack was done, and then all he said was, “It’s good that you’re disgusted, Jackie-boy. You better be, because it’s a damn disgusting world out there. That’s why we’re here, ain’t it? Because we’re disgusted. Because we care enough to try and make things right. Need another beer?â€

Chapter 31:
Dreaming in Color
    Sal traveled back and forth between Mars and Legacy constantly during the construction of the second factory, and by the time the new complex finally sparked to life, she’d completely moved aboard Legacy. With every trip, she brought more tools, scraps and pieces of junk, until her workshop on the great alien vessel was a perfect recreation of the one she abandoned on the Arcadian Plain. The furniture, lighting and even gravity were all the same. She even rigged up a device to imitate the sound of small stones hitting the colony shielding; the noise had irritated her to tears on Mars, but much to her surprise, its absence bothered her even more.
    The difference was that with a single thought, her new workshop’s walls could turn clear as glass, revealing the bustling factory beyond. It was hers now, and was churning out equipment at a startling rate. It had become her pride and joy.
    The factory certainly wasn’t the only source of activity on Legacy. The rest of it was in a constant state of change as the ship and its crew adapted to one another. Legacy grew terminals that mimicked human computers, which went a long way toward improving communications with her new inhabitants. The terminals weren’t perfect, and the ship’s grasp of language especially could be puzzling, but they were a start.
    Engineering posed its own challenges. The original Eireki occupants had been in continual psychic contact with one another, which made their thoughts more orderly and fine tuned. They weren’t just people; they were something more, capable of doing complex mathematics and spatial transformations in their collective consciousness. To run the factory, they simply dreamed up new devices to the last exacting detail and the machinery turned the dreams into reality.
    Sal was supposedly “more like the Eirekiâ€

Chapter 32:
Forward
    Al Saif was abuzz with activity. Everyone had heard there was “big newsâ€

Chapter 33:
Tin Can
    â€

Chapter 34:
Peeping Tom
    Jack knew Uganda and Kenya well enough, and he thought he was pretty well acquainted with the Congo rainforest too, but things change. The Earth was now one