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# Apocalypse Troll ## USN vs UFOS There Captain Richard Aston was, minding his own business as he single-handed his sailboat across the Atlantic while his Navy retirement was processed, when everything went to hell in a handcart. First, there were the UFOs that decided to overfly a USN carrier group at Mach 17. Their impossible acrobatics were bad enough, but then they started shooting at each other. And at the Navy. With nukes.... Then there was the megaton-range upper atmosphere explosion that fried every bit of electronic gear in a radius of, oh, several hundred miles. And after that, there was the very attractive, very young, critically wounded female alien he pulled out of the ocean after she baled out of her stricken spacecraft. Only she wasn't an alien, or as young as she looked. What she was turned out to be a tough-as-nails warrior locked in a duel to the death with an alien cyborg Idlling machine from a tech base hundreds of years in the future which would stop at nothing—literally—to kill her. No one could really blame Richard Aston for thinking he was looking at a bad situation when his guest's explanation reached that point, only he was wrong. He hadn't seen bad yet. But it was coming. Cover art by Charles Keegan
Hardcover Paperback This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. First printing, January 1999

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

### ISBN: 0-671-57845-6

Copyright © 1999 by David Weber

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
http://www.baen.com

Typeset by Windhaven Press
Auburn, NH

Electronic version by WebWrights
http://www.webwrights.com

## For Ed Wells & Richard Maxwell
two of the good ones it hurts to lose.
Watch each other's backs, guys.

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