In High Places

Twelve

After Khadija disappeared, the people who ran the manor tried to act as if everything were normal. Maybe they even made most of the slaves think so. Not Jacques. Maybe the way they'd grilled him made him notice changes in routine more than he would have otherwise. Or maybe the guards just weren't so good at hiding how worried they really were.

They kept going up and down the stairs to the subbasement room where the transposition chamber came and went. They hadn't done that very much when things were running smoothly. They didn't look happy when they came up, either. Something down there was wrong, badly wrong.

Jacques was tempted to ask the guards what it was. He fought the temptation. Fighting temptation was supposed to be a virtue. Jesus and Henri would have approved of it. That wasn't why he did it, though. He didn't want to make the guards pay special attention to him again. The last time they did, he'd got away with one needle stuck in his arm. He had the feeling he wouldn't be so lucky if they glanced his way again.

Going out to work on the road seemed a relief. The guards swaggered and strutted. "Let's see the savages bother us now," one of them said. "This time, we taught them a lesson they'll remember for years."

No doubt he was right. But the locals had done damage here, too. The almonds and the olives and the vines and the rest of the crops would be a long time getting over their raid. If this were an ordinary farm, one that depended on what it grew, Jacques would have worried about going hungry. But it got food from elsewhere, as it got people from elsewhere.

Or it had. Jacques wasn't so sure it did any more. By the way the guards kept going down those stairs, maybe things had stopped coming. Did that mean just food? How much ammunition for their repeating muskets did they have? If the locals tried attacking again, could the guards rout them so easily? If they couldn't, what would happen then? Nothing pretty—Jacques was sure of that.

But he was also sure the locals wouldn't be back right away. For all he knew, they were still running. The copper-skinned tribes across the Atlantic couldn't face the muskets and cavalry the Muslims and his own people were using against them. The fight here was even more unfair.

For all the guards' bluster, Jacques wasn't the only slave who saw things had changed. "Why are they frightened?" Dumnorix asked him when none of the men in mottled clothes stood close by. "They took you in. They did things to you. What did you learn?"

He wanted to rise up against the guards. Jacques saw that right away. Dumnorix was a warrior, first, last, and always. If he saw a chance, he would fight—and he was looking for that chance.

"You know how you came here?" Jacques said. Dumnorix nodded. Jacques thought hard before he spoke again. He and Dumnorix didn't have enough words in common to make talking about the transposition chamber easy. "They, uh, bring things here in that box."

"Yes, yes." Dumnorix sounded impatient. "And so?"

"If that box is, uh, broken, then they cannot bring things," Jacques said. "Cannot bring . . ." He broke down. Dumnorix didn't understand about bullets. In a lot of ways, he was a savage himself. Jacques tried again: "Cannot bring arrows for thunder-sticks. Cannot bring food."

Dumnorix's eyes were the blue of a lake under a summer sky. They flashed fire now. "We can take them!" he said. His hands tightened on the handle of his shovel till his knuckles whitened. It might have been the neck of the guard he hated most.

"Jesus and Henri, be careful!" Jacques whispered. "They still have, uh, arrows." He hoped Dumnorix was following him. The redhead would get himself killed if he didn't watch out. He'd get a lot of other people killed, too. "For all I know, more will start coming tomorrow, too."

"Maybe." But Dumnorix didn't believe it. Jacques could see that. Those fiery blue eyes flicked towards a guard. "They don't think they can get more. Otherwise they wouldn't be so worried."

He might have been right. Even if he was, what difference did it make? "They aren't worried about us," Jacques said. "They're worried about enemies from their own people."

"So much the better." No, Dumnorix wasn't listening. All he could think of were battles—battles with him as a hero, as the hero. "We can take them by surprise."

"How?" Jacques asked. Dumnorix waved that aside. It didn't bother him a bit. Jacques wanted to take his own pick and bash the redheaded man over the head. He wondered if even that would help. He wondered if anything would.

When Annette got back to the United States, all she wanted to do was pick up the pieces of her life. She knew she would have to start at Ohio State a year later than she'd planned. Mom and Dad had made sure she could do that. It wasn't her fault she'd missed the start of the semester. She'd learned some things at the manor she never would have at the university. Whether they were things she wanted to know . . .

She wondered what she would do with herself till fall semester rolled around again. That turned out not to be a problem. Wondering, in fact, turned out to be foolish. Every police agency in the country seemed to want to talk to her.

It had been snowing in Ohio. When her plane landed in Seattle, it was raining instead. Variety, she thought. A cop met her in the baggage-claim area. She would have recognized him as a cop even if he weren't holding a sign with her name printed on it. He was built like a slightly undersized linebacker. He wore a suit that would have been almost stylish five years earlier. He looked like a man who'd seen too many nasty things, and who knew he would be seeing more.

"Miss Klein?" he said as she came up. She nodded. He held out his hand. "I'm Kwame Daniels."

"Pleased to meet you," Annette said.

"And you." He smiled, his teeth very white against his dark skin. The baggage carousel started going round and round. "Now we see if your suitcase ended up in San Francisco or Singapore."

"You know what? I don't care," Annette said. "As long as I'm back where I belong, I'm not going to jump up and down about the luggage."

"You're smart," Detective Daniels said. "Knowing what's important, that helps a lot. Too many people get all hot and bothered over stuff that doesn't matter." Annette plucked her bag off the carousel and pulled up the handle. He asked, "Shall I take you to your hotel first, or do you want to get right to it?"

"I'd like to get it over with, if that's all right," Annette said.

"My captain told me, however you want it, that's how we do it," Daniels said. "You're doing us a favor being here."

"No, I don't think so," Annette said as they started for the parking structure. "What I went through, what those other poor people are going through . . . That needs smashing. How could I look at myself if I didn't do everything I could to set it right?"

"You get no arguments from me." Daniels popped open a big umbrella to keep them dry while they crossed the street.

The police station to which he drove Annette looked like a fortress. Inside, though, it might have been almost any office building. Men and women sat at desks. They talked on the telephone. They sent and read e-mail. They typed or dictated reports. In most offices, though, very few of the workers would have been armed.

Most office buildings had conference rooms. So did this one, but they were called interrogation rooms instead. Kwame Daniels opened the door to one of them. Annette went in. In a loud, formal voice—everything that happened in there went onto video—he said, "Miss Klein, I would like to ask you if you recognize any of the persons seated here."

She'd cleaned up. She wore stylish business clothes instead of the outfit the manor had given to its slaves. Her blond hair didn't hang limp alongside her head any more. It rose in fancy curls. She had makeup on now. Without a doubt, though, she was Birigida, or whatever her real name was.

And, without a doubt, the man sitting beside her was a lawyer.

Annette sighed. "Yes, I recognize the woman."

"Thank you," the detective said. "And where did you last see Bridget Mallory?"

"Is that her name? I never knew what it was," Annette said.

"The last place I saw her was a manor that used slaves. It was in Madrid, or what's Madrid here. I don't know what alternate it's in. I don't think it's one that Crosstime Traffic visits, but I can't prove that."

"This is all a put-up job," the lawyer said. "If this person was a slave at this place, and if my client was a slave there— which she does not admit, not at all—what's the difference between them? That this person has bought immunity from prosecution by testifying against my client? That won't play well with a jury. We've seen it too often."

Kwame Daniels smiled a most unpleasant smile. "There is another difference, Mr. Nguyen." He turned to Annette. "Do you want to tell him, Miss Klein, or shall I?"

"I'll do it," Annette said. "I was a slave there because I got captured and kidnapped while I was working for Crosstime Traffic. The raiders didn't know I was from the home timeline. They took me to Madrid in that alternate, and the man who bought me took me to the manor I talked about. Miss, uh, Mallory was a slave there because she, uh, volunteered."

Bridget Mallory turned white, or possibly green. Under the harsh fluorescents in the ceiling, it was hard to tell. Detective Daniels threw back his head and laughed. "How do you think a jury'll like that, Sam?"

It didn't faze Sam Nguyen. Lawyers got paid for not letting things faze them. "What you say here and what you say in court under oath may be two different things," he said. "Besides, while it is illegal to make other people into slaves, it is not illegal to be made into a slave."

Annette had wondered about that. Wanting to be a slave might be sick and twisted and disgusting. Was it against the law? She had no idea. Up till a few months ago, she'd never imagined she would need to worry about it.

"Nobody's talking about charging her with being a slave, Mr. Nguyen," Daniels said. Annette wondered what he thought of this. His ancestors hadn't wanted to be slaves, but they got brought to America anyway. He went on, "But she dealt with people who took slaves. She paid money to people who took slaves. She worked with people who were slaves and didn't pay for the privilege. She knew they were forced into slavery, too. And she didn't say a word about any of it till we found out about it from Miss Klein here. How many different conspiracy charges do you think will stick?"

"You can bring conspiracy charges. Whether you can convict . . . You don't know how a jury will decide any more than I do." Nguyen was a cool customer. Whatever Bridget Mallory paid him, he earned his money.

But she turned and spoke to him in a low voice. Annette couldn't make out what she said, but he shook his head. She spoke again, more insistently. This time, Annette could hear her: "What will my name be worth after the reporters and the Net ghouls get their hands on this? Let's make the best deal we can. She was—"

Her lawyer held up a hand. "Whatever she was, you don't say it with the recorders running. You don't do anything with the recorders running till we have a deal. Got that?"

Bridget Mallory nodded. Annette hadn't dreamt she could sympathize with the blond woman, but she did. Her folks had had to sneak her to the airport in the wee small hours so she could go to Seattle. Too many stories had already said too much about what happened to her while she was a slave. Too much of what those stories said wasn't even slightly true. She'd had her picture splashed all over the Net, TV, and the papers. She didn't like being recognized wherever she went.

Maybe it was just as well she wouldn't be starting college for a while. By the time she did, maybe some of the fuss would die down. She didn't want people staring at her all the time. It would make her feel like a freak.

She sighed. It was probably too late to worry about that. People were going to recognize her. Aren't you the one who . . . ? She wondered if she'd be hearing that for the rest of her life. Maybe she would, because she was the one who. . . .

"You will be cooperating with us, then, Ms. Mallory?" Daniels asked.

Sam Nguyen started to say something, but she gestured for him to stop. She nodded. "Yes," she said. She sounded tired.

"All right, then," the detective said. "If you are, you'll need to talk to the people above me. We'll get that started now, if you don't mind." Bridget Mallory nodded again. Her lawyer looked unhappy. Annette understood why. Daniels wasn't giving her a chance for second thoughts. Once she started talking, turning back would be next to impossible.

"Please come with me, then," Kwame Daniels said. The blond woman and the lawyer got up. Before the detective led them away, he turned to Annette. "Wait right here, please. I'll be back in a few minutes."

"Okay," Annette said. The door closed behind the others. She didn't like being alone in the interrogation room. It felt almost as lonely as waking up in slavery every morning. This wouldn't last long, though. That. . . That might have lasted forever.

When Detective Daniels came back, he was grinning. "I hoped putting her face-to-face with you would crack her," he said. "We get her testimony, we get your testimony, we get all the electronic evidence . . . They've recycled a lot of files, but they couldn't get rid of everything."

"It'll be an open-and-shut case as soon as they find the alternate where the manor is," Annette said.

Daniels shrugged. "You'd know more about that than I do. Not my line of work."

"Well, I didn't want this to be my line of work, either," Annette said. "You don't always get what you want, do you? Sometimes you just get what you get, and you have to make the best of it."

"Welcome to the world of grownups, Miss Klein," Daniels said soberly. "You'd be amazed how many people never figure that out. I deal with folks like that every day."

The slavers had thought they could get what they wanted and not have to pay for it. If they hadn't bought somebody from the home timeline, they would have been right. Oh, sooner or later they probably would have made another mistake—how could they help it? But it might not have happened for years.

Or it might not have happened at all. To this day, nobody knew who nuked Damascus in 2033. The Israelis? The Iraqis? The Turks? Rebels inside Syria? Some people even said the USA did it, though the bomb didn't come in on a missile. No one had ever claimed responsibility. If there were any survivors from the people who did it, they'd be old men and women now. Hard to imagine keeping quiet for more than sixty years, but they had— unless they were all radioactive dust.

Detective Daniels broke in on her thoughts. "I'll take you to your hotel now, if you want me to."

"Yes, please," she said.

"If I were you, I'd order room service and disconnect the phone," he said. "You've got to figure the reporters will work out who you are and where you're staying."

"I was hoping they didn't know I was here," Annette said in dismay.

"Well, it's a free country. You can hope whatever you want to," Daniels answered. "That doesn't mean you'll get it."

She found out how right he was as soon as she left the station. News vans had pulled up in front of it. Reporters shouted questions at her. She didn't answer any of them. That didn't keep them from shouting more. It didn't keep them from trying to follow Kwame Daniels' car, either. But four cars with black drivers and young woman passengers left the police-station parking lot at the same time.

"I think we shook 'em." Kwame Daniels sounded pleased with himself.

But three news crews waited in the hotel lobby. Annette went right on not answering questions. Detective Daniels tried to stand between her and the cameras while she registered. He didn't have much luck.

Hotel security people did keep reporters from going up in the elevator with her or right after her. And two hard-faced men and a hard-faced woman in business clothes stalked the hallway on her floor. One of the men said, "We'll check your food before it gets to you, Miss Klein. Wouldn't want any unfortunate incidents."

Wouldn't want anyone poisoning you, he meant. Plenty of people would benefit if the star witness against them came down with a sudden case of loss of life. Some of them were bound to be rich and influential. Annette sighed. Next to worries like that, even reporters didn't seem so bad.

The jumpier the guards got, the more careful Jacques acted around them. The men in mottled clothes knew the slaves knew something was wrong. They knew they might have to deal with trouble. And they were ready to slap it down in a hurry, and hard, if it cropped up. Jacques didn't want to get shot for no reason at all, especially when he hoped Khadija would lead rescuers back here.

Dumnorix didn't believe that that chance was real. "We can take them," he said. "And when we do . . ." He knew what he wanted to do to the guards. He must have been thinking about it ever since he became a slave. Some of the torturers in the Kingdom of Versailles could have taken lessons from him.

"This is not a good time," Jacques said. "They're ready. They have muskets. We have shovels. Bad odds." He hefted his own shovel to remind the older man what he meant.

"We have spirit. We have bravery." Dumnorix sounded like a wolf on the prowl. "They have nothing. You can see it in their faces."

Were he a wolf talking about pulling down sheep, or even talking about pulling down elk, Jacques wouldn't have argued with him. But the prey he hungered for had sharper teeth than he did. "They will fight for their lives," Jacques said. "They know they all die if they lose. That makes them fight hard."

Dumnorix looked at him as if he'd crawled out from under a flat rock. "Where is your spirit?"

"I have spirit," Jacques answered. "I have sense, too, or I hope I do. Even if we win, even if we kill them, so what?"

Now the redheaded man just plain stared. "We have revenge, by the gods! What else do we need?"

"The guards beat the people who live here. They beat them over and over, whenever they fought. The people who live here want revenge, too," Jacques said. "The guards know how to fight them. They know how to use all their tools of war. Do you? What will the people who live here do to us? How will they tell us from the guards?"

"You worry too much," Dumnorix said.

"You don't worry enough," Jacques said, and worried more than ever himself. The only way he could stop Dumnorix from rising up was by warning the guards. He couldn't bring himself to do that. If he did, it would make him feel filthy. But if Dum-norix and however many men he would bring with him did rebel, what would happen then? Even if they won by some miracle— and winning would take a miracle—they would still lose. They still had to face the locals afterwards, and they had no idea how to work the machines or the magic or whatever it was that kept lamps burning without fire and did all the other amazing things that happened in the manor.

Dumnorix didn't care about any of that. He only cared about striking. His being a pagan didn't bother Jacques so much. The guards were enemies, and yet they swore by Jesus, if not by Henri. Some of the Muslims among the slaves had become Jacques' friends, and he thought Muslims were as wrong as pagans. No, the problem was that Dumnorix was a hotheaded fool. He saw only what he wanted to do right now. What might spring from that. . . He didn't care. It wasn't real to him till it hit him in the nose.

Wherever Khadija had gone, if she'd really gone anywhere, Jacques hoped she'd come back soon. He prayed to Henri that she would. He was the only person here who believed in God's Second Son. He hoped that would persuade Henri to listen to him.

He wasn't the only slave here who worried about Khadija, though. One evening after supper, the woman with the crooked teeth who'd been her friend said, "I want to talk to you." Her Arabic was almost as bad as the bits of Breton and Dumnorix's language that Jacques used.

He understood her, though. "Go ahead," he answered, also in Arabic. "You're Emishtar, yes?"

"Yes," she said. "You know where is Khadija?"

None of the guards seemed to be paying special attention to them. He knew he had to be careful anyway. "I'm not sure," he answered. "I hope I do."

"She is all right?" Emishtar asked.

Jacques only shrugged. "I don't know. I hope so."

Emishtar eyed him. "She go into danger, yes?" Unhappily, he nodded. She wagged a finger at him. He almost laughed— when she did that, she reminded him of his mother. But she sounded angry as she asked, "Why you not stop her?"

He did laugh then. The idea that he could stop Khadija from doing anything she aimed to do ... The idea that anybody could stop Khadija from doing anything she wanted to do ... He spread his hands. "How?" he asked.

That made Emishtar smile, too. Jacques found himself liking her smile even if she had bad teeth. Plenty of people did. And she understood what his laugh and his one-word question meant, too. "She is like bull, yes," Emishtar said, and pawed the ground to make sure he understood what she was talking about. She added, "But she like you. Maybe she listen to you."

"No," Jacques said, and let it go at that. Khadija really did like him? This older woman was her friend. She would know if anybody did. Jacques felt like grinning like a fool.

Emishtar smiled at him. "You are a good boy," she said, and walked away.

Jacques was happy and angry at the same time. A boy? He wasn't a boy! He was about to turn eighteen. If that didn't make him a man, what would?

Back in Madrid. This time, Annette came by hypersonic shuttle, not by scamming her way aboard a transposition chamber. She went through customs instead of escaping from a man who might have stopped her if he'd thought a little faster. And the reporters in Spain were just as annoying as the ones in the United States. She couldn't even tell them she didn't speak Spanish, because they all spoke English.

She'd had to make a fuss to get back to Spain. Higher-ups in Crosstime Traffic didn't care that she'd promised some of the slaves at the manor she'd come back. Several higher-ups were under arrest as the scandal widened. Others plainly wished it was never uncovered. They would rather have gone on doing business as usual. Slaves? As long as nobody knew about them, they might as well not have existed.

But Crosstime Traffic couldn't afford any more bad publicity. The company would have got it by the carload lot after trying to keep Annette from returning to where she'd been enslaved. No matter what the higher-ups might have been thinking to themselves, they weren't dumb. They could see that. And so here she was, at Crosstime Traffic's expense.

CT technicians were setting up an enormous transposition chamber in a park several kilometers from the building that was in the same spot here as the manor was in that other alternate. Next to the cost of doing that, flying Annette over from the USA was small change. Thanks to endless computer work, the techs sounded sure they could find that other alternate. Annette hoped they were right.

One of the things that moved into the transposition chamber under cover of darkness was an armored car. A couple of squads of Spanish soldiers boarded the chamber, too. So did a man who looked like a lawyer. "You say they're loaded for bear," he told Annette. "Are they loaded for dinosaur?"

"I hope not," was all Annette said, because she wasn't sure. Her helmet and body armor were made to fit women in the Spanish Army. The releases she'd signed were made to fit the toughest court of law. Without signing them, she wouldn't have been able to get into the chamber.

Her parents had made it very plain they wished she were staying home. If it were up to them, they never would have signed the releases. But she was over eighteen, so they couldn't stop her. Her father's comment was, "Yes, you're of legal age. You know what that means? It means you're old enough to be stupid all by yourself."

"Instead of someone else being stupid for me?" Annette had thought that was the perfect comeback. Her father just rolled his eyes, so he must have been less impressed than she was.

"Are you ready, Miss Klein?" asked the man who looked like a lawyer. He was a lawyer, and worked for Crosstime Traffic. Even if she'd signed his releases, he didn't look happy to have her along. He went on, "Remember, you've agreed to follow the military commander's orders. If you become a casualty"—a nice, polite way to say get killed or maimed—"the publicity would be very bad." That mattered to him. Her health? She wouldn't have bet a dollar on it. But he was coming along, too. Whatever risks she took, he took them with her.

That made her answer him politely: "I remember, Mr. Guerrero. I'll play by the rules." Unless things go really wrong. But if they do, nobody else will be playing by the rules, either.

Somebody closed the door, sealing the transposition chamber off from the outside world. Like most chambers, it had a human along to back up the computer. Most of the time, the human couldn't do much if the electronics went haywire. From what Annette had heard, it wasn't like that here. They were feeling for the alternate that held the manor. They had a good notion of where it lay among so many others. Its world sprang from one where Rome lost the Samnite Wars in the fourth century BCE. No one dominated the Mediterranean in that sheaf of alternates. Spain was split between people like Basques and the descendants of colonists from Carthage. Just where in the sheaf the right alternate lay ... the human operator would, with luck, be able to tell.

The operator looked up from the monitor she'd plugged into the chamber's electronics. "We're on the way," she said in English, after what was probably the same thing in Spanish.

If she hadn't said so, Annette wouldn't have known. The transposition chamber didn't feel as if it was going anywhere. It was, but you couldn't tell till you got there.

The Spanish lieutenant colonel in charge of things military came over to remind Annette of what she'd promised. She promised all over again. Why not? It took up some duration—time didn't really exist while the chamber was traveling, but it felt as if it did.

As they got close, the operator used the manual controls. Except in training videos, Annette had never seen anybody do that. She wondered if anybody else had who'd lived through it. Not many people had—she was sure of that.

Frowning, the operator twisted a knob ever so slightly. "We're just about there," she said. "I'm going to drop us into reality. If it's the wrong alternate, we'll try again."

"If it's the right one, they're liable to start shooting at us," the Spanish officer said. On that cheerful note, the chamber returned to the timelines.

One of the soldiers wore headphones along with the rest of his gear. He said something excited in Spanish. I should have got a course through the implant, Annette thought. Then I'd know what was going on. But she hadn't had time. Since escaping, she'd barely had time to breathe. The lieutenant colonel translated for her: "He says he is picking up wireless phone signals."

'This is the right alternate, then." Excitement of her own tingled through Annette. "In this sheaf, they wouldn't have invented them on their own."

"Si, " the Spanish officer said. He called orders in his own language. The transposition chamber's door slid open. Soldiers scrambled out and . . . what was the military word? They deployed, that was what they did. The armored car rolled out. The lieutenant colonel gave Annette what was almost a bow. "If you will be so kind as to come with me, Miss Klein . . ."

Stay with me. I'll make sure you don't get into mischief. That was what he meant. Annette didn't know what she could do about it, though. She nodded to him. "Let's go."

Her body armor made her top-heavy. She almost fell when she went down the ramp. The officer steadied her. He had to be used to wearing the stuff. The soldiers and the armored car were already heading toward where the manor would be. The distant skyline looked the same as it did when she set out from the home timeline. Someone had taken Madrid away, though.

Someone took away my freedom, she thought angrily. Now she had the chance to help make sure that wouldn't happen to anybody else. She hurried along with the lieutenant colonel.

Jacques was digging out the roadbed when one of the men who spoke Dumnorix's language screamed. He hadn't hurt himself—it wasn't that kind of scream. He stared off to the east, his blue eyes open wider than any eyes Jacques had ever seen. "A monster!" he shrieked, and ran back towards the manor.

He wasn't the only one who ran. Jacques felt like running himself. The monster looked something like what he imagined an elephant would look like. At least, that long snout reminded him of an elephant's trunk, even if it was at the top middle of the thing and not at the front. But shouldn't a trunk be wiggly? This was stiff and still, almost like . . . the barrel of a cannon?

When that thought occurred to him, he also noticed the thing had wheels, not legs. But it moved by itself, without horses or mules or oxen to pull it. And it moved faster than animals could have hauled it. How was that possible?

He glanced over to the guards. They could do all kinds of things he hadn't thought possible. What did they make of this— mechanical?—monster? It wasn't strange to them. He saw that right away. He also saw all of them looking as if they'd just been kicked in the belly. They didn't think the monster was good news, not even a little bit.

Their horrified expressions made hope blossom inside Jacques. Khadija had said her own people would think the guards and the masters were criminals. She'd said her own people could take care of them, too. She'd sounded as if she knew what she was talking about. And maybe she did. Maybe she did!

Men came forward along with the monster. For a bad moment, Jacques feared they were more guards, for they wore mottled clothing, too. Did the elephant with wheels belong to the people who ran the manor, then? The guards didn't think so. That was plain. And then he saw that the newcomers didn't use quite the same kind of mottling. Theirs was a little browner than the guards', with smaller, more jagged splotches. Did that mean they served a different lord?

It evidently did. One of the guards raised his musket to his shoulder and fired several shots in the direction of the wheeled elephant. The soldiers coming up with it all threw themselves to the ground. When they lay flat, they almost disappeared against the dirt and bushes.

A couple of those bullets made sparks clang off the horseless cart. So it's armored in iron, is it? Jacques thought. That was clever. And it spat fire at the guards—not from the cannon, but from a smaller gun next to it that Jacques hadn't even noticed.

He ducked down when bullets started cracking past. At least he'd been under gunfire before. A lot of the slaves hadn't, and had no idea what to do. When the shooting stopped, Jacques cautiously looked up. Sure as the devil, one of the slaves was hurt. He lay on the ground clutching his leg and howling. The wound didn't look too bad. Jacques was glad to see that, anyhow.

Two guards were also down. One had a wound not much different from the slave's. He was swearing in French, which surprised Jacques. He hadn't thought anybody here but Khadija spoke his language. This was a funny dialect, much more nasal than the one Jacques used, but it was French.

The other guard was the one who'd fired at the strangers. He'd taken a bullet in the face, and was dead as an old boot.

What might have been the voice of God—if God were a woman—came from the armored cart. It shouted in several different languages. One of them was a French that sounded like the dialect the guard used. She called on the guards to surrender if they knew what was good for them. As if to underline that, the cannon roared. Its shell went wide, but it went wide on purpose, as if to say it didn't have to.

Jacques would have surrendered after that. And so did the guards. They lay down their muskets and put up their hands. The strangers in jagged mottling hurried up to take charge of them. Several of those soldiers were women. Jacques didn't realize it till they spoke—the armor hid their shape, and most of the men were clean-shaven. The women seemed as tough and capable as their male counterparts. That was one more boulder of amazement piled on a mountainside of wonders.

Then one of the newcomers called Jacques' name. He stared. In that splotched set of trousers and tunic, under that helmet was ... "Khadija!"

He ran over to her and gave her a hug. She didn't feel like a girl. She had armor on under the clothes. He didn't care. He kissed her on the cheek. He'd never kissed anybody in a helmet before. "You see?" she said in his dialect of French. "I made it!"

"You sure did," Jacques answered. "And you brought your friends." She nodded. He asked, "What happens next?"

"We give all these people what they deserve." She looked at the dead guard without flinching. "And we free the slaves. How does that sound?"

"Wonderful!" Jacques said.