Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Thursday, February 3, 2050

The vid-screens showed snow, ash-grey rocks, and low undergrowth so dark as to appear black. Nothing moved in that landscape. Cadre-Lieutenant Arlen Mullet set the mug of steaming coffee down within Lessing’s reach and retired. Jennifer Caw had not finished her first cup yet.

“They really going to surrender?” she asked.

“That’s what Gottschalk told me over our Magellan hookup.”

“Who?”

“Benjamin Gottschalk, the lib-rebs’ commander. Captain, he calls himself. Used to be an instructor at Stanford. Sociology.”

Jennifer wriggled on the military cot, rubbed her mittens together, and jammed them into the pockets of her white, alpaca ski-coat. The lava beds of northern California were a refrigerator in February, more like the high ranges of the Pacific Northwest than the palms, sand, and surf of “Free Calimerica” to the south. The cold bit right through canvas camp-chairs, Cadre uniforms, and thermal underwear.

“What a place to die in! Like the other side of the moon.” Jennifer shook out her auburn locks. She was “just passing through” and had stopped in at the Cadre base camp for a social visit. Spying for Goddard was more like it. That didn’t bother Lessing. Better him than somebody less friendly.

“Here. Liese sends these.” Jennifer fished into a green, leather purse as big as a soldier’s knapsack and handed him a vid-cassette, a book, and four photographs. Lessing laid the first two items aside and glanced quickly at the pictures: Liese speaking in an auditorium (their relationship had helped her speech problem); Liese at the dinner table with Wrench clowning behind her; Liese in ski-togs on Mount Rainier, Liese and Mulder grinning at the camera like Goldilocks and Papa Pig. Liese! How he missed her!

Outside something roared hugely, startling them. “A tank rev-ving up,” he explained, “in case the lib-rebs want to play some more instead of surrendering.”

The new M90A4 Heston tank was gigantic. The lib-rebs had grabbed a few of the monsters to begin with, but now they were down to using antiquated museum-pieces, such as old M60A3s. The Heston possessed a 120-mm gun, two 7.62-mm mounted machine guns, an air-defense missile launcher, and the latest communications gear, deflectors, rocket-confusers, and armor. Some Hestons were equipped with laser cannon as well, but those were all down near newly captured Sacramento, staging for the assault on San Francisco. When that was over, they’d go see about L.A.

No tank was much good in the lava beds; the region was crisscrossed with strange, little bluffs and ravines, heaped with knife-edged volcanic stones and boulders, and pitted with caves. Mullet, who haled from Eugene, Oregon, said that this had been the site of an earlier, almost forgotten conflict, the Modoc War of 1873, in which about a hundred and sixty Indians held off the U.S. Army for months. These days “Captain Jack’s” refuge was home to a different war party: some three hundred rag-tag lib-reb guerrillas fighting a rear-guard action to delay the U.S. Army’s mop-up in northern California.

It had taken weeks of paper wars at the Pentagon, newly refurbished and restocked with bureaucrats, before the generals had agreed to let Lessing’s fledgling American Freedom Brigade — the name Outram had chosen, although the unit was closer in size, makeup, and function to a division than a brigade — handle what should have been a minor police action. Like the Modoc War, this took more lime and lives than anybody had expected, and the Cadre was losing face. Lessing was intent on finishing the job right and correcting the image.

Here the lib-rebs were all done: starvation, dysentery, and the worst winter in fifty years had beaten Gottschalk at last. As with the Modocs long ago, bravery was no match for food, weather, and logistics.

Lessing sipped his coffee and asked, “How’s Mulder? Your mother?”

“He’s fine. She’s green light too. About to marry Grant Simmons. Did you know that?”

“The Congress of Americans for Personal Freedom guy?” Lessing had met Simmons. The man was as unmemorable as a ballpark hotdog. It took restraint to keep from asking, “Why marry him!”

“He’s a dedicated person, hardworking ” Jennifer said, a little

defensively. “He’s a great speaker.” So were some parrots.

“Well… congratulations, if that’s what I’m supposed to say.” “Grant’s likely to be our candidate for President in fifty-two, you know.”

“Unh?” He looked up, surprised. “What about Outram? Vice President Lee? Mulder himself?”

“You haven’t heard? Outram’s got cancer of the liver. He’s likely to die within a few months. Byron Lee’s a nonentity.” She hesitated. “And Mulder doesn’t think he’s going to last that long either.”

“Jesus He never said anything.”

“Oh, he’s in good shape now. Just feeling his age. He wants somebody younger, with drive and energy. Somebody who’ll con-solidate what we’ve done.”

Lessing considered. The Party’s present bright lights were not very appealing: they were unknown, too young, not charismatic enough, or just too “fringe” to suit Mr. and Mrs. American Public. The Party had indeed grown in popularity — you could speak for the movement almost anywhere these days without getting rocks thrown at you — but people like Wrench, Morgan, Goddard, and Abner Hand still weren’t the Boys Next Door. Not yet. Liese and Eighty-Five were working on it.

Jennifer continued, “People are turning inward, looking to the Party to restore our traditional values, our prosperity and identity. Pacov and Starak did more than just kill people: they cut our emotional security out from under us. We need somebody solid… committed… rational.”

“Get Goddard. He’s a winner in two out of three of those categories… you decide which ones.” Lessing still couldn’t work up an interest in politics. Liese had tried to involve him, but even she hadn’t had much success. He’d rather putter with a car engine, read, play racquetball, or practice with the latest additions to Mulder’s arsenal.

“Bill has no imagination. I’d rather have Grant Simmons or Byron Lee… or you.” She let her coat fall open to reveal a forest-green sweater, a Navajo necklace of beaten silver set with turquoises, and some spectacular cleavage.

He made a wry face. “Me? Come on, Jen! ” He had already begun to suspect that Jennifer Caw wasn’t here just to take in the winter scenery. He had nothing to offer politically, and she knew it.

She couldn’t have designs on him, could she? Not when she and Liese were such good friends! Liese was the jealous type — and as straitlaced about her monogamy as a Born-Again elder! Nor was he much of a bargain, in spite of a good recovery after Palestine and Russia.

Yet there was no telling with Jennifer. Wrench called her “the mailbox: a public receptacle into which any man can drop his male.”

A quick roll on the camp cot, then? A morning’s jollies, nobody hurt, and Liese never the wiser? Lessing was in no mood to take that risk. Getting close to Liese had been the hardest thing he’d ever done, and she was worth every angry word, every long wrangle, every drop of sweat, every tear, and every long, luxurious morning in bed.

He drifted over to inspect the row of vid-screens that lined the rear wall of his styro-plast hut. “How’s Borchardt doing in Germany?”

She took the hint with good grace. “Oh… Hans is fine. Big rally last month in Munich: nearly a hundred thousand.”

He heard Jennifer stirring her coffee, but he didn’t look around. Instead he bawled, “Hey, Mullet! Arlen!”

The aide stuck his head inside the door flap. He kept his eyes averted from the camp cot, where Jennifer reclined like Cleopatra cruising the Nile. Skin-tight, black jeans and tooled cowboy boots didn’t Gl the Egyptian image, but the effect was dramatic, nonethe-less.

“Sir?” Mullet’s long, pale, freckled face was as gently bovine as one of his daddy’s cows up in the Willamette River Valley. He was canny, though, and unexpectedly perceptive.

“Where the hell are the lib-rebs? Are we going to have to go drag ‘em out after all?”

Mullet ruminated. “Detectors just started to report movement, sir. Comin’ out real slow, though, ‘cause of the women and kids.”

“The lib-rebs have their families in there?” Jennifer sat up. “In that icebox?”

“The women are mostly fighters,” Lessing told her. “There’re only a few noncombatants with them: people who’re real scared of us. We’re supposed to be the ‘racist, fascist beasts,’ remember?”

“There they are now, sir.” Mullet lifted his bony chin toward the vid-screens. “Two, three hunnerd in the column. Pro’lly all of ’em.”

Jennifer came over to see. “No weapons, no uniforms. Like a bunch of old ladies on their way to church!”

“Them old ladies kept us bottled up here for a month,” Mullet observed morosely.

Lessing was already donning his winter-camo greatcoat, mittens, and officer’s cap. “Tell Ken Swanson to put it over the amplifiers that I’m coming out to accept their surrender personally.”

“You, sir?”

“Yeah, me. They put up a good fight. Least I can do.”

“Can I come?” Jennifer used the honeyed tone that usually worked wonders with males. Not this time!

“Unh-unh. No goozy, foozy, as the Bangers say. Mulder’d unzip me himself if anything happened to you.”

“He’s right, miss.” Mullet blocked the doorway. “Carpet mines… a laser at long range… a rocket from ambush. Dang’rous.” He blinked reproachfully at Lessing. “Even for a so-called experienced mere.”

“Look,” Lessing said to Jennifer, “if you want to help, go over to the field hospital or the mess hall. Show the lib-rebs we’re not murdering monsters. They’ll need hot coffee, food, and medical care.”

“Florence Nightingale? Me? Oh, all right. But after the atrocities the lib-rebs committed at the battle of Redding…,”

“Blame that on their ‘special troops’… the L.A. street gangs, their Mexican allies. All the discipline of a pack of rabid dogs.” When she said nothing he added, “If we show people we’re straight, we have a chance to put the country back together again. Screw up, stay disunited, and the Chinese, the Indians, the Turks, the South Americans… somebody… will kick our lights out”

“They burned down our house in L.A. My mother barely got out alive. They’d have murdered her if they’d caught “

“Forget all that! The future is what matters. Why not use sweet-ness and light, if those’ll get us friends. Oh, we’ll win this war militarily, but we really win only if everybody has a chance at the good life. That’s what Liese has ‘Dom’ saying these days.”

“You’re naive, Alan. Political realities are different.”

“I may not have a Ph.D. in academic horse apples like Wrench or Borchardt, but I know what makes people tick. Peace is better than war… or revenge.”

“The Party of Humankind.”

“The Parry is on a roll. Pacov and Starak took out our worst enemies and put Outram into the White House. Otherwise Mulder’d still be peddling Fertil-Gro out in India, and you ‘Descendants’ would be piddly-shitting around in the sinkholes of the Third World. Luck, lady, pure, gubbin’ luck! The Party had better not miss this chance; it’s the only one it’s likely to get!”

“Even without Pacov we still would’ve won. We were on our way, slower but just as sure. Our North-European heritage… our ethnos, our Aryan blood… cannot be denied! Look at Germany: she lost two world wars but she’s very much a power again! We come through in the crunch: we don’t give up, and we don’ t die easy. Like the sick cannibal said about the missionary he ate for dinner: ‘You can’t keep a good man down.’”

“That’s awful! And you stole it from Wrench!”

“Who stole it from somebody else, who stole it from some other jizmo, all the way back to the clowns in the Colosseum. Look, Alan, we were working on a long-term economic campaign. That was our strategy!”

“Which might’ve taken another hundred years, if it succeeded at all.” Better to argue than give her another chance to make moves on him. He said, “All I’m saying is that we ought to make amends, compromise, and make peace… provided those things gel us where we wanted to go in the first place. Hell, I’m the soldier; when there’re wars I’m the guy who has to duck the bullets! Like my dad said, ‘Rather finagle than fight.’”

She tilted her head and grinned at him. “You know, Alan, you have all the makings of a a great lib-reb. The only thing you haven’t figured out yet is the first part of ‘make love, not war.’” She buttoned her coat and went outside to join Mullet. He followed her into the snow-dusted air. His armored command car stood waiting across what had been the main northern parking lot of the Lava Beds National Monument. Now the tourists and campers and cars and picnic baskets were only memories; instead, Cadre banners flapped fitfully below the Stars and Stripes over khaki-colored, plastic huts, ice-crusted vehicles, and white mounds of tarp-covered stores. Wrench and Morgan had wanted a distinctive Cadre flag, like the silver runes on black of the old SS, but Mulder had vetoed it. He had allowed only a white “C” in the upper-left corner of the Party’s regular flag. That would have to do for now.

Lessing stalked across the dirty, hard-packed snow and climbed into the passenger seat beside Stan Crawford, his driver.

Mullet came up to gesture and shout, but the engine drowned out his words. Lessing could guess that he wanted to send an escort along. That shouldn’t be necessary if Lessing read this Gottschalk right. The lib-rebs would surrender as promised. On the other hand, if Gottschalk were lying, the shit would get very deep.

Lessing thought about it one more time, then waved Mullet away. He wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t a show-off, and he wasn’t particularly brave, but in some odd way he felt himself “fated.” When his lime came he would go and not before. Maybe some of Islam’s qismat— “kismet,” destiny — had rubbed off on him in India.

The chill of the plastic-leather Parodex passenger seat made him wince. The next winter war the Cadre fought, he would see that the cars, the tents, and the toilets had plush seats!

“Heading, sir?” Stan was Ponape-trained, tough, thirtyish, and plain, a dishwater blonde from Charlotte, North Carolina.

The hell with military jargon. He jerked a thumb and drawled, “That a way.”

Snow drifted down in sad, little gusts and whorls as they drove, filling the ruts and potholes with powdered sugar. Captain Jack’s Modoc stronghold lay slightly off to the left, with Canby’s Cross, Gillem’s Camp, and Gillcm’s Bluff beyond. On their right much of Tule Lake was once again filled with water as it had been in Modoc times; the farms and fields of the later settlers were gone, a consequence. Mullet said, of the Viet-Chincse Atomic War of 2010. The locals took this as a sign that Crater Lake, up north in Oregon, was about to erupt again after a sleep of six or eight thousand years.

Stan spotted the lib-rebs before he did: a ragged, black line against jagged, black rocks. Black and white like an old movie: a grey sky, a monochrome landscape. He was reminded of one of Mulder’s ancient newsreels: German troops trudging through the Russian desolation, leaving equipment and frozen corpses behind as they straggled back toward the crumbling frontiers of the Reich.

“You want me to drive right up to ’em,” Stan asked, “or do we wait here?”

He glanced around. “There’s a picnic table,” he suggested. “We can clean off the snow—”

“Excuse me, but you’ll freeze your butt… sir. Standing up in the hatch is better. Say your piece, sit back down, and stay warm. We can put some of their wounded and womenfolk into our passenger compartment. Good publicity… uh, if you think it’s wise.” His expression said he did not.

Publicity: Wrench’s specialty. Words and pictures were more important than any military victory he might win. He looked in the rear mirror and caught the glint of a moving silver-metallic dome: a Magellan unit keeping pace with them, its cameras grinding away for posterity. Ken Swanson, his corn-officer, would have telephoto holo-vid crews up in helicopters as well.

He might as well look heroic.

He clambered up onto the seat and undogged the ceiling hatch. Ice-tipped wind-fingers clawed at his cheeks and forehead as he put his head out; he jerked his cap down and turned up his coat collar. Stan stopped the car, and his ears rang with the sudden stillness.

If this had been a movie, any minute they’d hear the lib-rebs heroically singing their battle-song as they marched out to surrender. Lessing grimaced at the fancy.

There they were, emerging from among the trees, silent except for the crunch of boots in the snow. Through the binoculars Stan passed up to him he saw what a tired, hungry, scruffy lot they were: weaponless, dispirited, dressed in drab, civilian clothes, parts of uniforms, and blankets. The one in front must be Gottschalk: a tall, skinny man with frizzy, black hair and a beard. Beside him was a dark, hatchet-beaked woman who carried a quilt-wrapped infant and herded five older children along before her. Lessing counted two boys and three girls, perhaps seven to twelve years of age. The smallest girl bore a bundle— no, it was a teddy bear, nearly as big as she was. The others in the vanguard were adults: soldiers, would-be soldiers, and play-soldiers caught up in a reality they had never expected.

He tried the bullhorn. “Hey! Attention!”

That wasn’t very eloquent. Out of the comer of his eye he saw the Magellan recording the scene.

“You rebels!” he called, more loudly. “I am Cadre-Colonel Alan Lessing of the American Freedom Brigade, United States Army.”

“Pog yourself, bastard!” A voice from the column squawked back. Others made more pungent suggestions.

“Look, if you’d rather fight some more, we’ll oblige. Send out your noncombatants, and let’s go to it.”

Gottschalk— the skinny man— yelled at his troops for quiet. To Lessing, he said, “You know what we’re here for, uh… colonel. No food, out of ammo, and coldcr’n a bitch. We need medical treatment for our wounded… fifteen men, three women, and a frostbitten kid.”

“Yes… sure. I’ll call for ambulances. No need for your injured to walk the rest of the way.” He passed the order to Stan.

Gottschalk’s woman sat down on a boulder, the children in a defensive ring around her, the others standing or squatting where they were. The lib-reb leader himself came over to the command car.

“A fine end for a Stanford Ph.D.” Gottschalk said. Stan kept their mounted machinegun trained on him. “You ‘re not ended yet.”

“I get a fair trial? A jury? My civil rights? Then you hang me?” “Sorry. We aren’t into hangings.”

“I… we all… just disappear? Is that it? Death-squad style? Or maybe a shower bath that’s really a gas chamber?”

“That’s crap!” Lessing answered tiredly. “You and your people are in revolt against the legally elected, constitutional government of the United States of America. That’s treason! What do you expect from us? Cheers? A peace prize?”

“So what does happen?”

“You get sent to a reorientation camp near Seattle. If we like you and you like us, you go back to being ordinary Americans. If you can’t or won’t fit in, you lose your citizenship. Then you move to any country that’ll take you.”

“Exile? You’ve got to be kidding!”

Lessing smiled at the antiquated turn of phrase. “Nope. Go wherever you’re wanted. If you’re a communist, you can live happily ever after in what’s left of the People’s Republic of China; they need workers to build their Marxist paradise. Blacks have a choice of sixteen settlements in Africa, a half-dozen Caribbean islands, or one of the Black-majority nations in South America. Jews are welcome in the Izzie colonies in Russia. They’re looking for skilled, educated people to build a new ‘Chosen People,’ Jews-only, religious-racist Eretz Israel there. As for Southeast Asians and Latins, they can go back to their native lands as soon as the war is over. Any other unreconstructed lib-rebs… of whatever persuasion… go to whoever lets ‘em in: the communes in Russia, our own settlements around the oil fields in the Persian Gulf, Europe, Australia, Canada… wherever. If nobody wants you, we’ll set up some sort of isolated enclave for you here, where you can do your own thing by yourselves.”

“Lies!” the woman interrupted in a sharp, fierce voice. “Another Holocaust… a free ticket to the gas chambers!”

“Sorry, no gas chambers. Resettlement abroad. Like Germany before World War II, though that’s not how you people want it remembered. Take your families and go!” Lessing was too cold to wrangle; he could no longer feel his ears, and his forehead ached. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

The woman got unsteadily to her feet. Stan’s machine gun swiveled to track her. “Why should we go? Why us? We’ve contributed so much to this country… doctors, lawyers, musicians, scientists, artists… every profession, every walk of life! We won’t go! It’s you… you pogging fascists… who ought to go! You’re not Americans! You don’t belong!”

“Wrong. We are the majority. We’ve been a silent majority for too long. Now we’re taking control. We, the American majority, say that you don’t fit We don’t want your music, your art, your science… we’ve got our own, and we’re satisfied. We can’t assimilate you, and we won’t let you run us. So you go. No argument, no discussion, no high-buck lawyers!” His checks were numb in the bitter wind. “I promise you decent treatment: no gas chambers and no concentration camps. We’ll treat you a helluva lot better than you would’ve done us.”

He shut off his mind. Wrench had given him a list of things to say for the benefit of the TV cameras, and he said them without enthusiasm, without caring whether he believed them or not. For all he knew, that camp up near Seattle might offer a full complement of gas chambers, ovens, torture machines, and sado-pom queens dressed in black leather and waving whips. It might — but he didn’t think so. He had come to trust Mulder, Liese, and Wrench, at least. It would be stupid to lie to him, moreover; he’d find out, and then he would become an enemy. Alan Lessing did not let people lie to him.

“The ambulances are here,” Stan called up to him. “These dinkers can move their wounded into that clearing for pickup.”

The return trip was a triumphal procession. Lessing didn’t like it, but he understood. Starak’s victims had no more worries. It was the survivors who suffered, mourned, endured shortages and social upheavals, and woke sweating from nightmares of invisible death. They needed good news. Morale was the object here.

Lessing resigned himself to being a military hero. He took Wrench’s advice, patched in over their radio to Home-Net headquarters in Kansas City, and rode into camp standing up in the hatch, like a Panzer commander on parade. Too bad he hadn’t brought tanker goggles to go with his peaked cap! There was no martial music either, just the soughing of the wind high up in the evergreens, a dirge to the dead. Wrench could add suitable oom-pa-pa to the broadcast, together with wild cheering and a play-by-play commentary.

The mess hall and hospital were both housed in the big, bam-like garage the National Park Service had built for its maintenance vehicles back during the era of the Born-Agains. They had done a good job with parks and historical monuments, but the administrations that followed were too preoccupied with the Middle East, pollution, farm riots, labor unrest, the national debt, the failure of Social Security and Medicare, and getting stroked by their P.A.C.s to pay attention to lesser matters.

Lessing met Mullet and Jennifer at the door, greeted Timothy Helm, his second-in-command, and waved away the bundle of dispatches Ken Swanson pushed at him. First things first: the lib-reb wounded had to be admitted into the hospital; those suffering from minor frostbite and injuries were lined up to await their turns; and the rest were shepherded into the mess hall, where Lessing’s staff searched and processed them before sending them on to the cafeteria. Some slumped down at the tables without eating; others had to be warned against gobbling too much too fast. The room stank of unwashed bodies, wet wool, and cooking. The combination was not unpleasant; it reminded Lessing of noon recess in his grade school lunchroom during winters in Iowa long ago.

He sat down at one of the tables and accepted a bowl of lumpy, grey chicken soup from Jennifer. He still had a headache, but now he could blame it on the stuffy, overheated room instead of the cold outside. The soup helped. Mullet laid a roll of maps captured from the rebel stronghold beside his plate and announced that Tim Helm wanted to discuss them Swanson was also hovering nearby, clutching his dispatches and picking his nose. Did it have to be a Universal Truth that corn-men were invariably nose-pickers?

“Your guys checking for holdouts?” Lessing asked of Helm. “Snipers?”

“Nobody. We got hoppy-choppics flying search circles back into the beds, but some of them lib-reb smart-asses got deflector blankets that block heat sensors and plastic weapons that don’t trigger our search beams. There’re miles of lava caves down south by Indian Well, too. A guy could hide anywhere. We’ll get most of them sooner or later, though, and any we miss’ll freeze their yarbles off. Oh, we scanned the prisoners you brought in. They’re clean. See you when you’re done.” He scooped up his maps and left

Lessing ate soup, methodically and without interest. By now Home-Net would be telling the world of his splendid victory, this feat of personal valor, this Great Step Forward for the Forces of Righteousness, Home, Mother, and Apple Pie.

The heat was making him drowsy. He needed Liese.

“You Mistadet?” a voice impinged muzzily upon his thoughts. He opened his eyes and saw a little girl, the one with the teddy bear.

“What?” The clash and clatter of cutlery made it hard to understand her.

“Mista Det. You Mista Det?” The child wiped her nose with grubby fingers. She wore a dress made from a patchwork quilt, and her feet were shapeless blobs of U.S. Army sacking and burlap.

Mullet laughed. “She’s asking if you’re ‘Mister Death,’ sir.” He pointed to the black uniform and silver insignia Wrench had designed for Cadre officers. The troops still wore U.S. Army camo.

She held out the stained, brown-plush teddy bear. “Unca Jase said to show Teen to Mista Det.”

“That’s nice, but I’m not….” Oh, the hell with it.

The girl plucked at a plastic ring at the back of the bear’s furry head. “Teen talks, y’know.”

Dandy. Now he would be treated to a bad tape of “cuddle me, mommy!” Lessing had never had much to do with kids, but he could sympathize with this one: it wasn’t her fault she was here.

Another little girl flickered against the shadow-curtain of his memory, a silent and pitiful creature in the back of some sort of vehicle. Was she a dream? It seemed so very far away. He heard sobbing and felt her stick-like body in his arms.

The bear spoke. In a raffish British accent, it said, “Hello, Lessing! Teen here! Remember me? Jason Hollister?”

Marvelous Gap.

God Almighty!

His combat reflexes were still good. He grabbed the bear out of the child’s hands, looked wildly around, howled a warning, slung the toy toward the soup cauldrons in the emptiest part of the mess hall, and dived over on top of the little girl. Chairs screeched and skidded as they tumbled together in a heap under the table.

The thunderclap of the explosion snatched away all sound, all hearing, all breath, and all sensation.

Crockery and cutlery became shrapnel; hot soup turned into fiery napalm; pots and pans flew like cannonballs. Not only did the teddy bear contain an explosive charge, but it was stuffed with undetectable caltrops: sharp, four-pointed stars of brittle plastic that shrieked away in every direction, slashing whatever lay in their paths.

Seconds passed before the screaming began.

Lessing lay sprawled on top of the girl, the table top collapsed over both of them. He didn’t know if he was hurt. The bomb had landed behind the serving counter, limiting the direct force of its blast The caltrops had caused most of the damage. In his mind’s eye he saw the people behind the counter again: two or three prisoners taking seconds, four or five guards, and a cluster of kitchen help over by the coffee urns. They were all dead now.

He had killed them.

Yet what could he have done? The rest of the room was packed; dozens would have died if he had thrown the damned bear anywhere else! Nor could he have rushed over and dunked the bomb into a soup pot; modem demo-devices were waterproof.

The child wriggled and moaned. It was when he sought to roll away from her that he found that he was injured, how badly he wasn’t sure. They lay in a puddle of red, and he knew instinctively that it was his blood, not hers. His left arm didn’t work, and something was wrong with his face. He explored with his tongue and encountered only air: his left cheek was either torn wide open or gone entirely. Both eyes still functioned, though the left one was blurred.

The strange thing was that he didn’t hurt. He had no sensation at all. To his further surprise, his headache was gone.

“We didn’t… we couldn’t… it wasn’t us…” Someone kept moaning above him. It sounded like Gottschalk. Feet stamped on the tabletop over his legs. That hurt, and he cried out. The table tilted, lifted up, and went away, giving him a view of the jagged, blackened hole in the cinderblocks of the far wall where the cafeteria counter had been. Snow was already sifting in to hide the carnage.

Gottschalk ‘s harpy was on top of him, pawing, digging, trying to get at the child. The rebel leader himself was visible behind her, his beard and shirt spattered with red. The woman shoved roughly at Lessing, cursed him, and dragged the limp, dirt-blackened child out. She cradled her, crooned to her, then rose and lurched away.

The pain was beginning now. Soon it would be agony, if he didn’t bleed to death first.

The lib-rebs were innocent this time. They had died here just as Lessing’s people had. Jason Hollister — “Teen” from the Marvelous Gap spesh-op — had given the teddy bear to the kid. Lessing hadn’t seen Hollister among the prisoners, which meant he had already left before the surrender. Right now the bastard was probably watching his bloody triumph on Home-Net in some roach-heaven hotel in San Francisco!

Automatic weapons fire chattered. Screams and shots echoed back and forth in the chaos, and he smelled smoke. So much for good publicity! A woman shrieked and kept on shrieking; Lessing wondered if it were Gottschalk’s witch — or could it be Jennifer?

He went to sleep, shooting or no shooting.

Much, much later he awoke from a lazy afternoon in the movies with Emily Pietrick. Their own love scene had been much juicier than the one on the screen. Now he was both bored and homy again.

Without warning the fabric of that universe ripped apart, and he heard someone say, “He may need a transplant for the eye. Got one in stock?”

A second voice mumbled, “Yah. Think so. Up in Klamath Falls.”

“Get it here, just in case. It’s the arm that’ll be tough, though. Caltrop ripped down through his cheek and into his shoulder. Lots of damage. What’s his blood type?”

“On his dog-tag, doc.” Fingers fumbled at his throat.

“Urn. Get him a stretcher and prep him for immediate ops. The lib-reb woman’s dead, though. Need a body-bag for her. Her husband too. Christ, our guys went nuts with the automatics!”

“Serves the poggers right! It was their fuckin’ bomb! How’s the kid the colonel landed on?”

“Scared out of her weenies, but okay.”

“What a gubbin’ mess…!”

He went back into the theater to find Emily. Maybe the movie would be better the second time around.