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confused, now, with no fewer than thirteen major warships and well over a hundred fighters from both sides, plus Marine Ontos transports and shuttles, robotic sensor craft, and hundreds of circling, target-seeking missiles. Nukes were going off every few moments, and each blast tended to blank out the data transmission with momentary storms of white-noise static. Someone was at the hatch. Garroway heard the thump, followed by a mechanical-sounding clank. Chu, Kenyon, and Delazlo hunkered down behind consoles and link couches, their weapons aimed at the hatch. Ramsey continued working with the computer feed relay. By now, a small army of artificial intelligences were being beamed across from the Lejeune and the Samar, downloading themselves into the Rommel s computer net. If they could capture the electronic high ground in time& . The hatch may be a diversion, Achilles whispered in their minds. I am detecting suspicious noises here. The AI highlighted a section of bulkhead at right angles to the bulkhead containing the hatch. Right, Chu said. Kenyon! Keep covering the hatch! Laz, with me! Chu and Delazlo shifted positions to cover the new threat. A moment later, the hatch flared with a dazzling white light, metal dissolving under a high-energy assault of nano disassemblers. Kenyon opened up with her pulse rifle as soon as the hatch started melting away and there was no longer a threat of own-goal riocochets in the compartment, sending a steady stream of high-velocity fire through the opening and into the compartment beyond. Five seconds later, a second gout of light and hot gases exploded from the other bulkhead, burning through a communications console. A heavily armored Sturmjäger appeared, stepping through the gush of incandescent gasses, his dark grey combat armor outwardly similar to the Marines 660-battlesuit, but with a flatter, more complex helmet and a different weapons loadout. The German armor appeared to flow and distort as its surface Nanoflage blended with smoke and bulkhead, but the elite trooper s battlesuit could not render its wearer completely invisible. As he moved, a general outline of the figure Page 139 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html could clearly be seen, and certain things like the visual pick-ups and external sensor gear were still plainly visible. The Sturmjäger stepped through the molten opening into a double stream of high-velocity kinetic-kill rounds. One round in ten contained a charge of nano-D, but the impact alone was sufficient to shred the man s plastron and helmet, opening the suit up in a shocking blossom of bright red blood. A second trooper came through behind the first, and was cut down. After that, there was silence. Ramsey, Garroway knew, was waiting with a coded thought-click ready. If he triggered it, the instrumentation in the compartment would dissolve. The enemy would hold off on using things like grenades, thermal charges, or nano-D because they didn t want to destroy Rommel s command-center electronics any more than the Commonwealth Marines did. Stand off. And then, four minutes later, the incredible, the impossible happened. A white rag appeared in the opening in the bulkhead. Marines? a voice said over a standard com channel. Marines? Bitte. We surrender. The ship surrenders& . Stay back! Chu demanded. We want confirmation. But the confirmation came through moments later. At the order of Kapitän Walther Hirsch, commanding officer of the PanEuropean monitor Rommel, the ship was formally surrendered. Garroway learned later that the electronic assault AIs, feeding in through the relay, had overcome the ship s electronic defenses and taken control of her computer net. Rommel s captain, when he found he could no longer control his ship, had safed her weapons, then announced his capitulation. The ship-boarding action turned the tide of the battle. Though the Marines in the assault teams wouldn t learn the details until later, Rommel s capitulation triggered a full-scale disengagement by the other PE ships. One of the PE frigates and a destroyer had been knocked out of action and were now helplessly adrift, but the others had broken off the attack and begun accelerating back in-system. Over the course of the next hour, naval personnel arrived from the Lejeune to try to make Rommel operational once more, though that was clearly going to take time. The monitor had been badly mauled in the fight, and many of her weapons systems were off-line. The situation was still extremely serious, however. Both Thor and Morrigan had also taken heavy damage, and six aerospace fighters out of the three squadrons engaged, one fighter in eight, had been destroyed. Both Samar and Lejeune had taken light damage as well. The original operational plan for Lafayette had called for at least three loads of ship, fourteen in all, to be translated into Puller space, and for those fourteen ships to then make a concerted assault against the PE ships while they were still in orbit around the gas giant. The Marine assault was to have been directed against the cruiser Aurore, which Intelligence believed was the enemy command ship, and which was believed to be the vessel where the Marines captured from the Puller listening post were being held. A hostage-rescue assault was now out of the question, since the advantage of surprise had been lost. Still, the capture of Rommel had certainly changed the tactical balance, somewhat. Admiral Mitchell elected to wait and see what happened next. Some two hours after the end of the battle, Skybase translated in from distant Sol with five more ships crammed into her flight deck, the destroyers Kali and Bellona, and three escort gunships, Active, Amazon, and Avenger. General Alexander entered into immediate negotiations with the PanEuropean commander and, before much longer, the Battle of Puller 659 officially was Page 140 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html over. USMC Skybase Puller 695 System 2329 hrs GMT General Alexander stared across the virtual table at the icon of his opposite number in the PanEuropean fleet, an older, diminutive, and bearded man whose personal software had introduced as Admiral Pascal D Urville. Intelligence records indicated that D Urville was better known in military circles by the nickname Marlon, meaning Little Falcon, and the man s formal corona flammae actually held within it the faint image of a bird of prey with outstretched wings. According to the mil-history downloads, he d won the nickname while in command of the battlecruiser Faucon during a nasty little naval confrontation between the PanEuropean Republic and the Islamic Theocracy at Ubaylah twenty years before. 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