A reporter's job isn't as glamorous as most people suppose; and a war correspondent's must be the least glamorous of the lot. Of all the unglamorous wars to cover, Kye must be the worst.

The air pressure, unusually dense for the gravity field, made avian life forms so advantageous that the native sophants moved on leathery wings. Claws on their wing tips remained from earlier evolutionary forms, while their true arms sprouted just below the bases of their wings. Their brains were as fast and sophisticated as one would expect from a race that could fight using arms, wing tip claws, and talons simultaneously. Their ferocity is on a par with the most deadly hunting birds on any world.

We moved on our feet because the natives could detect gravitic drive units, and all other propulsion systems make enough noise for the natives to hear half an hour's flight away. The patrol headed toward a suspected supply dump, a target that the natives would have to either move or defend. Enough supraorbital fighters and heavy troop carriers were on call to smash any native attempts to move the supplies. If the patrol reached the supply depot, the same firepower would smash or seize it.

The first sign of enemy action was when the ground slipped away below the point woman's feet. As the troops rushed to her aid, the natives swooped down from the trees around us. They fell down in waves, spears and swords waving and slashing in threatening fashion. There are few vulnerable points on Domain combat armor; however, after two decades of war, the natives know them all. Two warriors fell, their armor pierced in critical spots. Natives snatched their weapons as they fell, gladly abandoning their primitive armament.

As the first wave of attackers lifted away, the harsh whip-slap of fusion rifles out shouted all other sounds. My visor darkened as miniature stars flew through air. Warriors scattered, firing upward wildly as they sought concealment.

My recorder had been running all the time, of course. I had left the base with enough data cubes for a month of continual recording. I had found that there was no way of telling until after returning to the studios what might make material for a story. This policy had given me the material for hundreds of obituaries.

I panned the sky wildly, trying to judge the tempo and plan of the attack. The natives scrupulously avoided attacking reporters; they wanted our people to see this war. My body armor had Galactic Infotainment's logo painted on the chest, back, and both sides of my helmet. And I had been in more ambushes than anyone else in the patrol.

The native fire slacked off as a second wave of swords-and-spears fell from the trees. Expecting the attack, Domain troops took a fearsome toll of the hundreds of avians that darkened the skies. The second wave was huge. Enough barbarians attacked to simulate twilight.

The natives pressed their attack home, and all the Domain's troops found themselves the center of skirmishes. Some Domain warriors fell, while hundreds of the natives fell. At least three of our warriors were carried off by pairs or trios of natives.

As Domain troops began to break free of their knots of attackers and help their buddies, the natives retreated. Native-wielded fusion rifles began a withering fire to cover the retreat of their more primitively-armed comrades.

Then the first wave of supraorbital fighters arrived. They thundered past, whipping the tops of trees off as they passed over them at hypersonic velocity. The turbulence ripped leathery native wings apart, spilling more natives from the skies.

I dropped. Seconds after the fighters passed overhead, their bombs burst in the treetops. The second wave of fighters passed, spraying fire-retardants.

The action was over in my area. I stood up, getting shots of the shattered trees and the body-strewn ground. My camera's computer counted the bodies in view as I walked toward the patrol leader.

Major Amdahl was dead. I decided to do an ironic piece on his death; I had some of his offhand comments criticizing the plan in storage. Sergeant Nachano was the senior survivor, and he was organizing the survivors. "It looks like you took out four hundred natives," I said as he glared at me."And we lost twenty!" he snapped at me. "I promise that, the next time, I won't be so gentle with them!"

I walked away, noting for future stories that Nachano had inherited the full Tasman temper.
 

Kye had been a clear-cut case for invasion. Its so-called sophants had exterminated at least a million species in the generation immediately before invasion.

The Domain's founders were a species that had made its world uninhabitable by unbridled industrialism and scattered to the stars. The founders had learned from their mistake, however. For more than a million years, the Domain had rescued ecologies from industrial pollution. The Domain annexed every planet they encountered with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, and plant life powered by chlorophyll. By now, most citizens believed that it was our manifest destiny to protect all the chlorophyll-based ecologies in the galaxy.

Kye had been an unusual invasion. Usually, seizing cities would take care of almost all resistance. On Kye, cities in the usual sense didn't exist. The generals planning the operation decided that traditional breeding grounds would do as a substitute.

The breeding grounds turned out to have little real meaning to the natives. A decade later, we still hadn't found any places that had particular significance to the natives. They fled to the forests and mountains, taking all of their industrial base that they could carry. They continued to learn from us. Warriors were beginning to capture fusion rifles not manufactured in the Domain.
 

See Earth! A luxuriant, green world rescued from industry before nanotech pollution ruined its ecosystem!

So screamed the advertisements, and I was looking for a break. I wanted some assurance that the bloodshed I had witnessed on Kye was worth it. Earth was so recently conquered that the generation born just after the war would now be reaching adulthood. If it was already a tourist attraction, Earth might be just what I wanted.

The boss approved vacation time only after I promised a story "if anything came up." I should have sensed that the boss expected trouble; but I was too eager to be on vacation to worry. Besides, the network's recording equipment is a couple of orders of magnitude better and smaller than anything I could afford.

The tourist liner was nicer than anything I'd traveled in lately. Even the cheap cabin I had was better than the cramped quarters the military grudgingly granted me. The military's attitude was that the two warriors I displaced were more valuable than all the good PR I could give them. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy; with their attitude, I wasn't inclined to give them positive reports.

The trip gave me time to reflect. My mind wandered as I idly watched people in the ship's various arcades, lounges, and recreation rooms. A good slice of the Domain was present; more than a hundred different races were present. At least half were mixed breeds. The founders had early seen the political advantages of sophants being mutually interfertile, and modified genetic codes to allow it. It had long been standard procedure for DNA upgrades to be part of routine medical checkups. This allowed interfertility of all intelligent races in the Domain.

Perhaps I should explain. Oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres only existed in the presence of life forms that used the same amino acids, gene codes, mitochondria fueled by ATP, etcetera ad biological nauseum. Perhaps there were only so many biological building blocks available that would work in a given environment, and life on most worlds naturally discovered most of them. Perhaps primitive cells seeded the entire galaxy, sometime in the misty dawn of prehistory, and evolution used the same building blocks to build different life forms on different worlds. Biologists argued these questions endlessly. Dozens of times the question had been settled, only to have new evidence open it up again a generation later.

My own ancestry is Marmose, pure as far as I know. Marmos had been in the Domain a long time, at least half a million years. There is a streak of Puritanism in our race; few felt attraction to members of other races, and most part-Marmose are the result of rape or prostitution. Since I was the only Marmose on the ship, my involvement with shipboard romances was of discouraging advances.
 

I sighed and leaned back, resisting the impulse every two minutes to make notes in my whisper mike. My favorite spots had become balconies overseeing recreation areas. It was the last day before arrival, and I spent the day lazing above an artificial beach. Tusked herdsmen wallowed in a mud bath, trumpeting and strutting in behavior almost incomprehensible to beings that weighed less than a half ton.

The beach itself was the province of smaller individuals. Most of them were bipeds, with two manipulative limbs, and bilaterally symmetrical bodies. The similarities ended there. Claws were almost as common as hands, and two tentacled races were represented. A trio of Ma`Tae engaged in what was obviously as sensual an activity for their race as nuzzling is for mine. I watched, curious; privacy and nudity taboos are eliminated during integration into the Domain, and I had never watched sexual activity in a race with three sexes before.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up, to see a purser with a clipboard. She had taken more than a professional interest in me, and had seemed uncomprehending when I tried to explain why I had no interest in her. "I noticed that you didn't sign up for a tour," she said. "Have you decided yet which tour you want to take?"

I was on the verge of refusing when she bent over. Her race, whatever it was, ran to what I thought of as obscenely large mammary glands, which she was fond of displaying as much as ship's uniform allowed. I wished that her race had the decency to cover them with a marsupial sack as mine did.

"What's still open?" I asked.

"There's a primitive regions tour . . . " she began.

"That'll do," I said, instantly regretting it. I'd just spent a decade watching warfare in a very primitive region.

"All right," she said. "Have fun!"
 

The tour's first stop was to be an old-growth forest on the west end of the smaller continent.

The tour guides surprised me by issuing survival suits. While putting mine on, I realized that it was a brightly colored copy of the combat armor I'd worn while accompanying ground troops in dismounted operations.

The others in my group didn't notice anything amiss, except the Ma`Tae, who was first given a suit with one fewer limb than his body had. After searching their inventory database, they gave him a suit designed for an octopod species, with gravitic floaters in the unused limbs to keep them out of the way.

I took a guide aside. Like most of his peers, he looked young, barely into adulthood."I recognize these suits," I said. "Why are tourists wearing combat armor?"

"Just a routine precaution, sir," he said.

The "sir" surprised me. Nobody calls me "sir." Not even a spacehand apprentice. By the time I recovered, the guides were herding the other tourists aboard the landing boat.

As I entered the boat, I recognized it, too. It was a generation-old planetary reconnaissance vehicle, heavily modified. The modifications were all in the comforts; the armor was intact, and cameras mounted in armored nacelles fed the holoscreens on the walls.

I waved the camera I'd taken around, trying to look like an amateur on vacation. This was beginning to take on the nasty odor of a scandal hidden in plain sight. If so, I planned to demand my vacation time back. The boat dropped away, and I recorded the approach. It was unusual for me; normally I can't see anything, wedged into the corner where I'm least likely to be in the troops' way.

The descent was as unusual as it was spectacular. We flew past several carefully preserved examples of native space technology: a forest of orbiting relays for electromagnetic communicators of various types; a smaller family of orbital reconnaissance platforms, originally designed to aid in native-to-native conflicts; and something called a Global Positioning System. Electromagnetic communications linked it all, which the narrator described as a primitive and dangerous class of technologies. I knew that the health risks involved were lower than popular opinion thought, but higher than the primitive races that used them believed.

We approached yet another reconnaissance satellite, and an elderly power engineer noticed its lack of solar receptors. The tourists were aghast when the narrator mentioned that its original power source was nuclear fission. They were relieved when the narrator said that gravitic power taps had replaced the orbiting reactors. I hoped the technicians kept them properly tuned. A smaller constellation of untuned power taps had destroyed Ader'kiel two generations ago.

Then we swooped downward. The boat moved, at dramatic speed, over a polar icecap and into a thick cloud bank. We emerged from the clouds surprisingly close to the treetops. Then the boat moved, and I could see just how tall those treetops were. Some worlds I've been on don't have mountains that tall."These are known as the Giant California Redwoods," the narrator said, pronouncing the alien name like a native speaker. "Overcutting almost exterminated them before the Domain rescued Earth from its native sophants." The sentence dripped with irony. Then the narrator resumed his professional manner. "Some of those you see are almost a thousand Earth-years old."

I looked more closely as the recorder captured his patter. His appearance was superficially similar to mine: biped, with bilateral symmetry; one pair each of ambulatory and manipulative limbs; hands, but his only had five digits; hair on top of the head, which also housed the main optical, auditory, and olfactory senses. Pulling out a brochure, I realized that all the tour guides were natives of Earth. It seemed unusual, for a race this recently conquered.

The narrator was of the race the natives called "white": his skin was pink rather than true white like mine, and seemed white only by contrast to his darker-skinned companions. The darkest-skinned guide was female, her suit pressed outward by an immense pair of what the brochure claimed were mammary glands. If so, they were much larger than those of my species. Perhaps they had to be; there was no hint in the literature of a marsupial pouch.

The boat settled gently on a black surface that the narrator called a parking lot. As we disembarked, the guide indicated two examples of native ground transports that he called car and van, carefully positioned inside painted lines on the artificial rock.

The guides shepherded us along a path into the woods, keeping up a steady stream of talk about ecology; how industry had poisoned it; and how, with the Domain's help, it was recovering. I felt uneasy. It sounded too smooth, as if it was a lie the guides engaged in every day.

There were wonders in the woods. The oldest trees were so ridiculously large that our entire group couldn't surround them. I stepped back to record our group trying it, stretching hand in claw in tentacle around, and still unable to encircle it. It was unique, as far as I knew, in all the Domain.

After walking around the tourists posing around the tree, I panned upward, zooming tightly on the highest portions of the tree that I could see. Who knew, it might be good for a travel feature.

The darkest-skinned guide approached me as I put the camera back on standby. "Honey chile," she began, pronouncing Standard with what sounded like a transliteration of a native accent, "yer a war correspondent for Galactic, ain't you?" "Yes," I admitted."I jest loved yer coverage of Kye," she gushed. "`Specially the way you covered the suff'rin natives."

I looked at her sharply. If I understood native aging patterns correctly, she had been born after Earth had become part of the Domain.

"Shouldn't we be getting back to the others?" I asked as they departed. She nodded and we hurried back.

A chill descended my spine. I had seen similar behavior elsewhere. These people have a story to tell, and intend to emphasize it with a dramatic gesture. I hope I survive to file the story.

As we walked on, I turned the camera back on and recorded the guides' canned patter. The path led us up a ridge that was exhaustingly steep. Even the guides' patter slacked off as we climbed.

Not long after the top, the guides led us off the marked path. I was the only one who thought anything was amiss. As I glanced around, I realized that I was totally lost. We climbed down the far side of the ridge, on a course that wasn't prepared for casual tourism. It was harder and more tiring than the climb, and the guides promised refreshments at the next stop.

The stop turned out to be in an artificial cave. As we sat at benches obviously designed for multiple physiologies, the guides passed out snack foods and drinks. They did better than I expected, and didn't give anyone something inappropriate for his, her, or its species. Most of the tourists didn't notice the cave doors until they closed with a solid thud.

I turned toward the guides. From some hidden cache, they had produced fusion rifles whose grips looked custom-designed for their species.

I winced at the rifles. At this range, a solid hit would burn a hole through our armor. A glancing blow would merely heat the impact point enough to be life-threatening and hurl the armor enough to endanger the individual inside with broken bones, concussion, and shock."If you all cooperate," the tour narrator began, "none of you will be hurt. We have taken the presence of a major war correspondent as the opportunity to introduce to your interstellar culture to something we humans have developed here on Earth: terror campaigns and wars of liberation."

I thought hard at that. The idea of a terror campaign was new to me. Was he using the words incorrectly? No, he had said earlier that he'd lived half his life in the Domain, and he'd shown finesse in choosing his words. The Domain, used "terror" almost exclusively to describe the urgent fear one feels when one's spacecraft is suddenly disabled. And the word "campaign" had meaning only as a planned series of battles. Coupling the terms had a new, sinister symmetry.

The spokesman was speaking again. "Your culture knows only of wars of conquest; never in your history has a conquered world, once it knew it was conquered, arisen in revolt. Yet, for us, this has been a common occurrence . . . "

The man talked on, telling of Vietnam, Cambodia, the Crusades. He told of wars named after their lengths: Thirty Years', Hundred Years'. He told how two centuries of terrorism weakened the ancient monarchy of Russia, and the war that replaced it with a government at war with its own people. He told of the "people power" revolutions in Russia and the Philippines with the conviction of someone who has seen them firsthand. He told of ethnic and religious feuds that were the subject of the oldest records in their areas, yet still fought over when the Domain conquered Earth.

He paused only when I had to change data cubes. Then he continued, telling how the Imperial and Communist Chinese fought each other, then cooperated just long enough to beat the Japanese, then returned to fighting each other. He told of Israel fighting the Philistines, then both being destroyed by third parties. He told how Israel was rebuilt, only to be destroyed again by Rome. Then he told of Israel's return two thousand years later, only to fight people who some called Palestinians and others Philistines.

He talked long enough that the other humans passed out another meal. He talked through that meal, and quite a long time afterwards. When he finally ran down, I set the camera to "interview" mode, aiming its second pickup at myself. "Is this a racial insanity?" I asked in my most innocent, nonthreatening manner."Perhaps it is," the older man mused. "If so, it's probably built right into our genetic code."

"What is your purpose?" I asked."To show you something of what you're up against," he replied. "We want the Domain off Earth. Some humans would probably want to go with you; that's all right with us. But we're a fiercely independent species, and the Domain tries to force interdependence. All those wars I told you about were different groups with conflicting ideas of how, or where, they should live. There's a large percentage of all our ethnic groups that want you to leave us alone."

"Was there ever a time when these fights ceased?" I asked.

The man shook his head. "Before the Domain's arrival, there wasn't a single year when six or eight little wars, or one or two larger wars, weren't happening simultaneously. The only years I can't prove that for are years for which very little historical documentation exists."

Then he told us about the Cold War, when all other fights were absorbed into the face-off between two competing power blocks. At my urging, he told how most of those fights flared anew after one power block crumbled from the pressure.

At length, there was nothing more to say. Or so I thought. The guides herded us into the back of the chamber.

"Stay in this chamber," the leader said. "Soon after we leave, a thermonuclear bomb will destroy the boat we arrived in." He smiled, as if at a joke I didn't understand. "It's in the van." "Won't that destroy your trees?" I asked."Some of them," the man agreed. "You'll miss them more than we will."

He paused, as if considering whether to speak further. "The bomb is tailored to maximize short-lived radiation and minimize long-lived radiation. It is only the first of the campaign. I hope your people will take it as a warning, but I'm not confident." He looked at the camera with an eerie intensity. "We'll outlast you. The only way you can prevent that is to sterilize the planet."

He looked at the others, and gestured toward a display by the doors. "When that light again becomes green, the radiation will have subsided enough for your suits to protect you. We have left what we hope is a sufficient supply of food and drinks."

The guides removed one-man gravisleds from a concealed closet and left, the iridium doors slamming shut behind them.

I stared at the doors for a long time. Then the world shook, as if bemoaning the bloodshed to come.

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