Diocullis sat at the command console of the WRATH, pondering. The refinery traced from the Callistro registry of the CORIANDER had been a feint. The place was an abandoned station, still on the books as a business, but long out of use. The names on the board of directors turned out to be the names of deceased owners, whose' registry fees were paid by agents of other dummy corporations.

Tracing back finally unearthed a viable corporation, the mammoth St. Croix Ltd. The St.Croix Charter and chain of ownership was perfectly legal, showing the other front companies as management firms employed to maintain options on expansion properties.

The ore scout berthed in a shipyard leased by St. Croix. No other connection with the giant could be found, and Havilland was screaming his innocence to the trade commission. The hard evidence of aggression in space was missing, save for crowding, a minor navigation violation.

St. Croix had refused landing privileges to the military investigation mission. The corporation denied any knowledge of the attack, and stood firm on their right as an independent entity to control landing privileges. If I force a landing, we will have to deal with substantial St Croix security defenses.

Diocullis had no assurance there would be any remaining evidence. He weighed the odds of the mission's tactical success against the political repercussions should it fail. The church lodged on many worlds by invitation, and political incidents would not help the cause.

The owner, Dio mused, one Gregory St. Croix, was undoubtably counting on indecision to buy time to cover his tracks. Still, the factory world revolving below, was the obvious source for the proofs needed. The Federated Earth Council, driven by angered citizenry, howled for retribution, and was unlikely to raise issues in the course of this particular investigation. Half the fleet idling at his command here were Earth League ships hastily assembled in support of the inspection. Politics, he thought wryly, is for once on my side. The Terran component was under his order as a condition for the release of Alcomer's investigation results, and because it gave over political responsibility to Papal authority should everything go awry, Mea non culpa.

Diocullis, as he had many times in the past, prayed for guidance. "Lord, guide my hands as I labor to save your vineyard. Open my mind to the truth, and my soul to your will!"

In the quiet of his introspection, tactics and politics cleared from his vision like a lifting fog. This was where the answers were if they were anywhere. St. Croix, like any bully, had scraped a line in the dirt, daring him to cross it. He knew what he had to do.

He snapped open the attack signal block and punched down on the relay button. Attack lights simultaneously activated on every ship in the fleet. Michael reviewed the battle scanner, and committed his forces.

Ship bays opened, releasing thousands upon thousands of cheap globes of shield ceramic. Ejected with force enough to inhibit orbiting, they skipped out across the atmosphere of St Croix, rapidly heating as they sank. Burning white hot, but now well down into the stratosphere, the ceramic spheres cracked open. Each hatched hundreds of grapefruit sized balls of heavy solid reflective composite. The composite storm grayed the skies below as they fell, providing cover for the descending fleet.

Cruisers screamed down, to follow the huge decending cloud of shielding material. Burning reaction mass wantonly, they scanned the ground and electronically monitored the clear zone above the descending wall of ceramic. Intruding from over the horizon, St. Croix orbital platforms unleashed stabbing beams of dark purple UV laser fire at the Cruisers. The Cruisers spun axially, trying to spread the hits over larger areas to prevent heat buildup and penetration while returning the fire. Diocullis watched his sister ship, the ALABAMA, take a full charge amidships. A silent spray of materials blossomed out of a melted gash in its side. Dio gritted his teeth. Even though emergency systems rapidly closed off damaged sections, he knew the remains of many ALABAMA crewmen composed the distantly visible plume.

Laser fire also stabbed up from the ground, seeking the ships. Some bursts made target, to flare, then scorch at the armored cruisers. Most of that fire flashed against the ceramic balls that flocked between, splitting up and diffusing their potency. Worse for the defenders, some of the fire reflected back at the ground, scoring glassine trenches randomly across the planet surface. For now, Dio's fleet ignored the laser ground attack. The cruisers quickly targeted the orbital platforms, and from above them, battle dreadnoughts unleashed flights of intercepting missiles, quickly clearing away the defensive satellites.

Suddenly hundreds of high altitude enemy craft breached the horizon. They streamed into range, deploying protective ECM and belching cluster shells with A.I. guidance so advanced as to seem alive. These projectiles burst into clouds of smaller dart-like rockets that slipped like supersonic eels through the thin air and the cruiser's curtain fire. Diocullis felt the low vibrating thrum of Gatling rail launchers as his own ship responded with a screening fire of hardened steel darts.

The interceptors went high, coming down on top of the cruisers, safer from the orbiting dreadnoughts batteries because of the friendlies below. The thin stratosphere filled with the debris of exploded ships and vaporized interceptors. Responding, Dio's own fighters were already deploying from the orbiting dreadnoughts, diving like arrows into the swarm of interceptors, interfering with their mission objectives. The fighters drove some interceptors down into the direct fire of the cruisers, or below it, into the fatal wall of dropping ceramic. The tactical light craft filled the layer between the cruisers and dreadnoughts, forced into life or death dogfights at astounding velocities.

A group of three defending interceptors broke free of the melee, evading the fleet's fire. Two of Dio's fighters gave chase, strafing the group's wing-men. One was destroyed in a white circular blossom of explosive hell, the other's tight maneuvers ending in a vector which sent it back into the storm of conflict. The enemy point ship speared on, determined to complete its objective. At Dio's console, the crackling voice of a group leader came to life.

"You have an Incoming fighter; at eleven O Clock. On your fore-section, WRATH, we can't catch em', it's up to you."

Near field tracking scanners locked on the sub-orbital flier and four missiles left the forward bay, streaming in an upward curve toward the oncoming menace, while the fleet's fighters disengaged, all too late. A brace of pierce-point torpedoes launched away from the interceptor, targeting the WRATH.

The WRATH's rail guns moaned out a cloud of darts towards the torps, shredding one, but the second rammed the ship cargo lock, detonating with a jarring impact that warped the cargo bay doors. Warning horns blared, and Michael frowned at a swarm of red tell-tales that lit-up across the command console. With the bay doors warped, his ship wouldn't be able to field its ground units on touchdown.

Diocullis ordered the ship to withdraw, and deployed damage control teams to the bay section. Signalling his staff, he ordered transport and immediately made arrangements to transfer command to another cruiser, since there was no purpose in landing the WRATH anymore, to hazard the ship's crew without reason. It could land later, to repair and deploy once a beachead was secured.

Violent as it was, the high atmosphere engagement was over in minutes, the ceramic shield reached the surface and dropped white hot, like a tsunami of bombs, smashing into the ground with explosive force and driving land-based defenses to deep cover. The cruisers instantly landed, belching out swarms of ground units before the planet ceased shaking from the fire fall.

Fully automated tanks, guided by fast outrunning vehicles no larger than mailboxes, deployed at incredible speeds. Sporadic, now loud and violent explosions rippled across heaving landing fields. Next came anti-personnel attack vehicles and finally, units of armored troops.

Remaining interceptors dove to strafe the cruisers and fast deploying troops, but were chased from above by fighters, forced to break off before decisive damage could be done.

Up from cover, the ground defenses stormed the beachhead, but proved no match for the superior training and arms of the combined Earth and Papal troops. Nothing moved on a modern battlefield that was not pinpointed by the sophisticated communications and reconnaissance technology available, and on the ground, the tactician with superior equipment usually won. Still, the moan of machine gun fire and impacts of mortars made their timeless hell of the torn battle field. A soldier stood to aim a shoulder rocket, then collapsed headless, victim of a passing shell. Scenarios such as rarely make newsreels were legion.

In the end, Diocullis easily out deployed and out maneuvered the beleaguered security forces.

Modern battles rarely lasted more than a day. Everything that could be fielded moved much too fast, and everything brought along was deployed. You either won your important beachheads decisively in one lightning lance, or were driven off. After that, it was strictly a typical modern land war, and the League Forces now controlled the air.

Victory had not been cheap. But it could have been worse. Even St. Croix, a world unto itself, was not defended as a home planet would have been. The refinery troops were entirely mercenary. There would be no rallies, no hit and run patriot fighters.

The mining town, well away from the battle zone, beyond the St. Croix main gate was half deserted. The central business district servicing the community's non-mining related needs was peppered with empty structures. Half the outlying suburbs, even further outside the area of the engagement, were abandoned.

There were no slums of course. You came here to work for St. Croix. When you were done, or quit, you left. If you committed a crime, you were fired and deported. If you owned a business, it was at the license of St.Croix. Civil Services and conveniences were as described in the work contracts, and were maintained by the St Croix corporation. There was no government, no tax structure, but also, no welfare or social services of any kind either.

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The planet surface was mostly uninhabitable; a ball of accreted space dust, silicon and mica with no natural resources outside of heavily salted alkaloid seas that had been cultured with mutated algae and bacteria to raise the O2 levels and process out lethal gases. Residential accommodations, dappled around the large industrial center, seemed to be the only inhabited portion of the globe. It would never have been chosen as a premium colonial site, but offered cheap real estate and gravity, both needed by the ore processing center. Diocullis brought up the tactical ground IR scans and noted the half-vacant status of the community,indicating it had seen better days.

Distantly, an occasional report would hang in the air sharp and clear, then vanish. Diocullis drew deeply at the tangy air. The tart sting of cordite and ionized gas blended almost seamlessly with the refinery effluence of St.Croix. The industrial stink was evidently beyond the ability of the terraforming biologicals to process out.

He frowned. The scent of smelting was old, an aged, cured smell. Part of the land, not the acrid green fumes he had expected. The blotchy grit of the packed dirt road rolled up like dough before his scraping boot. The dirt was dustless and heavy, stained by the constant passage of hundreds of earth movers and ore carriers. It probably contained as much vulcanized rubber as native minerals. This road had seen constant, and recent, use.

The lane went past the battered down gates of the fenced perimeter and between rows of large squat tin-sided warehouses. Rutted tracks led left and right, slowly curving toward high double opening cargo doors, some open, most not. Many of the blasted buildings left unlikely remains. One building front ran clean and straight along the left side of the track, large bay doors shut and padlocked, with a seal of some sort threaded through the lock eyes. Behind this front, the rest of the structure was entirely blown away. The sides and back swagged flat to the ground as if stepped on by a clumsy giant. Torn steel supports stuck out at random angles, and a few of the roof trusses were bent so that the fractured middles dug into the earth buttressing the front facade, keeping it straight and upright.

There was lots of traffic, but no recent refining? Michael's eyes lighted as the information added itself to the stream of impressions he was collecting both from his own senses, and from the reports, which continued to drone from the button settled inside his left ear. He was confident that he had made the right decision. Everything he saw fitted the mode Joshua had outlined. The evidence had to be here, somewhere. The ground advance troops continued forward, building by building, rounding up cut off pockets of defenders, entering and reporting on whatever they found. Diocullus focused on the reports as he walked.

"Red four reporting, I am at warehouse at Grid 10-56. Some kind of tarry black stuff put up in oh, seventy rows of stacked pressure crates, No, make that thermal barrier crates. The crates are five high on average. One wall, eh,one is blown out, the 'crete is all shattered. There's a big hole in the pavement. Funny, none of the crates seem to be jarred though. One end row rammed by a displaced girder - ah, split open a few. Stuff inside seems to be crawling up the beam somehow. The area is secured and free. I'm moving on."

Diocullis slapped at the belt transceiver.

"Red four this is One-Oh-One. Stop and Reply."

"Red four on line, sir."

"Collect a sample of that stuff. Have it moved back to hometown by courier. Poke about a bit more, Wayne, see if you can't find a packing slip, Invoice or something there. Move it back with the sample."

"Yes Sir!"

"Red Seven, at grid50-80. Clear through most of the administrative section, here. I got me a whole basement full of steno types, and white shirts. Most don't look like they have a clue. I'd say about forty victims of shock, the rest just stunned and confused. I see no weapons here. No siege supplies, bunks, anything. All dressed for work. Request medical and interrogation team. Will hold here till affirmed."

Good and bad, thought Diocullis. If the lower levels of administration were unaware of anything, unprepared, it was a vote against his intuition. To the good, the way was clear to investigate the main offices now.

"Red Ten Grid 4-8. Storage facility intact, breached. Pigs of bright metal, unmarked, about ten by ten decimeters square, says here (faint papers crackled) Titanium, .99999 there's an inventory ledger, scanned it, but I can't make it out."

Diocullis hesitated then slapped the communicator again.

"Red Ten this is One-Oh-One. How many are there?"

"Red Ten here. Ah, how many units? There's a whole shit-load of it, Sir. With respects, I wouldn't like, care to estimate, the whole place is loaded up with it, looks like Fort Knox done up in silver gray. This shed must be ten acres inside, Sir."

Where would St. Croix have mined thousands of metric tons of pure Titanium? How could they have refined it? How could there be product and no production? Black stuff? Was it oil? Oil was stored in drums, not thermal containment units.

Diocullis switched off the automatic scanning of his transceiver, and dialed in the central field command center.

"One-Oh-One here. I want a transport, and a squad of firsts, an interrogator probe unit, oh, and a bag of sandwiches."

It is time, thought Diocullis, to approach the mystery a bit more directly. The top floor of St. Croix Interstellar Mining, Ltd. was vacated. All the lower floors they had swept were populated with shell shocked and hysterical administrators, accountants, secretarial clerks, and so forth. Diocullis spent considerable time in the mail room and packaging area, finally delegating some of his staff to run through the time-stamped warehouse receiving files, and to interrogate the mail room personnel.

There had been some document shredding, file deletions, even some evidence of recent burning, but all had been done, according to the terrified staffers, by the mail room manager, who, of course, was absent, having disappeared some six hours before the attack. Hopefully the time stamped warehouse logs, when correlated with the remaining inventory record files, would indicate some malfeasance. Filling in those holes might reveal something.

The electronic ledgers on the third floor showed tampering. However, as these only consolidated the record files, that wasn't a major problem. Eventually the St Croix's management books could be largely regenerated. Predictably, the list of destroyed files concerned the rare and unknown substance inventories being physically inventoried by the troops. The relationship wasn't shaping up perfectly. Some 20% of the rematches so far were concerned with quite ordinary supplies, probably not of importance. Records pulled to be updated or representing nominal errors or not yet uploaded to the ledgers. These would be clarified as the general books were rebuilt. Without the aggressive ARS, or Account Restructuring System-ware available, this kind of record regeneration would have taken months, if not years to accomplish. But now, a mere handful of troopers with their scanners backed by a couple of technicians would have the essentials summarized and on his desk before the day's end.

The overall picture was quite clear to Diocullis, even without the final accountability reports.

Scenario: five to seven hours before the attack, most of the key staffers had pulled or destroyed several documents concerning the source, amount and destination of a large portion of St. Croix recent business transactions. The removal had been swift, and therefore not overly thorough. Local warehouse records, for example had not been tampered with.

Three to five hours before the attack, the key staffers had left the facility. The security forces had been put on full alert, ordered to prohibit the landing of any traffic, with extreme prejudice. The missing records were shaping up to be concerned mostly with unusual substances, or unlikely amounts of pure substance inventories, and unusual equipment. Items not usually associated with a mining and refining outfit, even one the size of St. Croix.

Item:

The black substance found in one warehouse turned out to be a form of oxygen, compressed beyond a liquid state, to a viscous semi-solid. Something long known to super compression labs, the substance lost its coldness, since the molecular structure collapsed to the point where the elements physical properties, color, and behavior radically altered. A research lab might manufacture a small quantity for experimental purposes. No one, to his staff's knowledge, had ever manufactured several metric tons of it. There were no records indicating a final customer for the substance.

The other missing exotic materials often had astonishing super-conductive, or alternately, insulating properties that went un-deployed due to rarity, cost, or handling difficulties. Often the real discovery wasn't the substance itself, but a the absence of any viable process for their production. Dios crew had not stumbled over a breakthrough production lab here. Nor uncovered some proprietary processes. Although suspicious, this didn't constitute criminal activity. The stocks abandonment were only an indication of the speed with which Gregory had departed.

Diocullis strode to the large black desk, a central feature of the presidential office that dominated the top floor. Michael sat, thinking, It's not enough. There's not enough evidence to support this maneuver. Missing files,unusual stocks, it's not enough

While the huge quantity of oxygen product was by itself perhaps good enough to satisfy the Earth force contingent, It still didn't link, to Dio's mind, with Joshua's belief that the mining company had employed Wavies, or any substantive link between St Croix, the Wavies,or some sort of Wavie control method. No means, no opportunity, had been established. Dio wished he had the intuitive prelate here now, where he needed his unique talent. The information was being passed to his ship, but no puzzles were being answered. It was the man himself he wished for.

The Investigation team was hard at work, combing the outer office files, performing the rote job of scanning the walls, vacuuming the floors for forensic traces, but it didn't look good. Diocullis tried to put himself in Gregory St. Croix's shoes.

I know something is afoot. I have warning of the approach of the Terran / Ecumenical task forces, he thought. I can't stay here. (Why?) Because cleaning up the traces is not enough? I must remain mobile, in control of something only I can direct, cause, possess? Maybe, I'm not running from danger, but am moving on to a more defensible position. (Where?) In any case, I make arrangements. I conference with, no that's wrong, none of the key people were reported missing or in conference before the files were purged. I call my key people (Known). Who else do I call? I call transportation!

The sweep team began examining the far wall of the office. An alarm tripped and whistled. Evidently, a hidden alcove of some kind lay camouflaged within it. Most likely, mused Diocullis, just the office safe, certainly cleaned out hours before.

Diocullis manipulated his transponder settings, calling up the operations center.

"One-Oh-One Sir, reporting from grid 50-81."

"Yes Sir!"

"Look. I want every available Interrogation and investigation staffer put on the transportation section. Particularly, I want the space field covered. I want flight plans. I want crew lists. I want supplies, cargo,maintenance records, passenger lists, and destinations. I want witnesses of comings and goings from 5 hours prior our arrival here. I want forensic analysis of all radar sweep recordings of take offs and landings occurring about then, too. I want to see the air traffic manager, if you can find him.

Check in town for the local weather mapping agency, and look at that as well, anybody or any source that might pinpoint ships leaving or arriving and their directions, size and type. I want the results collated, and compared to a list of all known holdings of St. Croix. I am especially interested in new holdings or holdings buried under layers of obfuscation, or inactive."

"I can do that. Anything else sir?"

"That's enough work to kill an elephant. Just let me know when you have anything to report. Don't wait until all the candles are lit. Ask staffers to find out whose bosses disappeared. It'll be faster than checking records. Every worker instinctively knows when the boss isn't around. Be quick. Thanks."

Coruscating sparks spat down the wall as burning torches ate at the now exposed cache door buried there. Finally the shielding door sprang away from the wall, tortured with heat warp. Aided by lustily applied pry bars, it tore from the wall and banged to the floor. Diocullis rose slowly from the desk, walked over and began to examine the cage unveiled behind it.