The Road to Damascus

I

The doctor’s office was jammed.

Apparently, when folks were out of work, they had little better to do with their time than create more people. Not that Kafari minded, per se. She was too grateful for a chance at having Simon’s child — and too distracted by preelection news — to dwell on the urban population explosion underway. The ob-gyn clinic’s waiting area boasted the obligatory datascreen for viewing news programs, talk shows, and the mindless round of games and domestic operas most of Jefferson’s daytime broadcast stations featured as standard fare, but with the presidential election tomorrow — along with about half the seats in both the House of Law and Senate — virtually everything had been preempted for the biggest story in town.

That story was the Populist Order for Promoting Public Accord, the party that was promising to rescue Jefferson from all that ailed it, right down to the common cold and the clap. Virtually every broadcast station on Jefferson was carrying live feed from an open interview with Nassiona Santorini, reigning queen of POPPA. The epitome of urban sophistication, Nassiona’s loveliness arrested the eye and held most men spellbound. Her hair, dark and lustrous, conformed to a simple, uncluttered style popular with working women. Subdued colors and expensive fabrics, exquisitely cut to create an illusion of simplicity and unpretentiousness, served to impart an air of quiet, competent strength. Her voice, low and sultry, was never hurried, never strident, weaving a spell of almost mournful concern, threaded with quiet indignation at the miscarriages of justice she so earnestly enumerated.

“—that’s exactly what it is,” she was saying to Poldi Jankovitch, a broadcaster whose popularity had risen to stunning new heights as he trumpeted the glorious message POPPA was selling to all comers. “The proposed military draft is nothing less than a death sentence with one deeply disturbing purpose: deporting the honest, urban poor of this world. We’re held in literal slavery under the guns of a ruthless off-world military regime. The Concordiat’s military machine knows nothing about what we need. What we’ve suffered and sacrificed. Nor do they care. All they want is our children, our hard-earned money, and our natural resources, as much as they can rape out of our ground at gunpoint.”

“Those are fairly serious charges,” the broadcaster said, producing a thoughtful frown. “Have you substantiated those claims?”

Lovely brows drew together. “Simon Khrustinov has already told us everything we need to know. Colonel Khrustinov was very clear about the Dinochrome Brigade’s agenda. We send our young people to die under alien suns or we pay a staggering penalty. The Concordiat’s so-called ‘breach of contract’ clause is nothing short of blackmail. It would destroy what little of our economy is intact after six months with John Andrews at the helm. When I think of the horrors Colonel Khrustinov’s testimony inflicted on the innocent children watching that broadcast, it breaks my heart, Pol, it just breaks my heart.”

Kafari put down the book she’d been reading in a desultory fashion and gave Nassiona’s performance her full attention. That urbane little trollop was maligning the most courageous man on Jefferson — and the sole reason Nassiona was still alive, to sit there and spin lies about him.

She was leaning forward, voice throbbing with emotional pain. “I’ve spoken to frightened little girls who wake up screaming, at night, because of what that man said. Those children are traumatized, terrified out of their minds. It’s unforgivable, what he said during an open, live broadcast. How the Brigade considers a man as cold and battle-hardened as a robot to be fit for command — let alone defense of an entire, peaceful society — is a question POPPA wants answered.”

Women in the waiting room were starting to mutter, agreeing in angry tones.

“And we’ve all seen,” Nassiona added, voice artfully outraged, “what that monstrous machine he commands is capable of, haven’t we? How many homes were destroyed by so-called friendly fire? How many people who died were killed unnecessarily by that thing’s guns?”

The clever little bitch… Nassiona didn’t need to answer those questions. They weren’t meant to be answered. Just by asking them, she’d implanted the notion that there was an answer, a horrible answer, without ever having to actually come right out and make an accusation she couldn’t support. Judging by the angry buzz running through the waiting room, the tactic was working.

Nassiona leaned forward, posture and voice conveying the urgency of her worry. “POPPA has spent a great deal of its own money trying to discover just what Khrustinov and that machine of his are legally allowed to do. It’s terrifying, Pol. Just terrifying. At odds with everything Jefferson has ever believed in. Did you know that Bolos are supposed to be switched off between battles? As a routine precaution to ensure the safety of civilians? Yet that death machine on our soil is never turned off. It watches us, day and night, and what it thinks…”

She gave a beautifully contrived shudder. “You see the trap we’re caught in, Pol. We have to comply with their threats. And it’s got to stop. John Andrews certainly won’t stop it. He relies on that thing, uses it deliberately to terrify the rest of us into swallowing the disastrous policies he enforces. There’s only one way to stop it, Pol, and that’s for the honest, decent people of Jefferson to vote for someone who will demand that Colonel Khrustinov shut that thing down like he should have long ago. We need to elect officials who aren’t afraid to tell the Concordiat and the Brigade that we’ve had enough of their threats and their demands and their war-crazed madness. We need officials who aren’t taking advantage of the situation to further their careers and build their personal fortunes.”

Kafari did a not-so-slow burn. Nassiona Santorini was the daughter of a Tayari Trade Consortium tycoon. She’d been born with a diamond spoon in her mouth. And Tayari’s profit margin was higher now than it had been before the Deng invasion. Tayari had bought every fishing trawler still in operation on Jefferson, gobbling up the smaller operations during the postwar havoc, which meant Tayari owned — lock, stock, and barrel — the only means of obtaining the main commodity Jefferson was required to supply to the Concordiat.

As a result, Tayari was exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of Terran-processed fish to the Concordiat, which was — per treaty — paying for it at a higher rate than the same fish could be marketed on Jefferson. Malinese miners and fighting soldiers weren’t as finicky as sophisticated urbanites about what ended up on their dinner plates. Tayari was raking in tons of money, as a result, and a great deal of that money ended up in trust funds set up for Vittori and Nassiona Santorini. The interest income from that money — invested shrewdly, off-world, in Malinese mining stock — had given POPPA a vast source of income that was sheltered from the shocks jarring Jefferson’s economy. POPPA’s war-chest — or anti-war chest, given the party’s political platform — was vastly larger than the pool of money any other candidate for office could hope to raise.

Yet Nassiona Santorini and her brother, already rich and rapidly getting richer, had the unmitigated gall to accuse John Andrews of doing what they did every single day. Why weren’t the big broadcast companies pointing that out? Had objective reporting gone out the window, along with every other scruple Kafari had been raised to honor? From what Kafari had seen, Pol Jankovitch never asked any POPPA spokesperson a question that might have an unfavorable answer.

His next question, delivered with a thoughtful frown, was typical. “Given the treaty stipulations and the gun to our heads, what can we do about the situation? Our backs are against the wall, on this thing. How would POPPA candidates change that?”

“We must start where we can. The most important thing, and we must do it immediately, is make sure the burden of obeying the Concordiat’s demands is fairly shared. If you examine the lobbying record of the big agricultural interest groups, for instance, you’ll discover a sorry litany of protests that their children should be exempt from military quotas. Why should farmers enjoy special privileges? This world was founded on principles of equality, fair dealing, individual worth, freedom. Not pandering to wealthy special interest groups!”

Nassiona’s dark eyes flashed with outrage. “And what do the farmers clamoring for special treatment give as reasons for their demands? Nothing but flimsy, money-hungry excuses! They need more labor to terraform new acreage. To plant thousands of new fields nobody needs. And they’re damaging pristine ecosystems to do it, too. Why? They have one interest. Just one, Pol. Lining their pockets with cold, hard cash. They’re not interested in feeding children in mining towns, children who go to bed hungry at night. Whose parents can’t even afford medical care.

“It’s time we faced facts, Pol. The surplus of stored foods set aside for civil emergencies is so large, we could feed the entire population of Jefferson for five full years. Without planting a single stalk of corn! It’s time to stop this nonsense. Time to make sure that no one benefits unfairly. No special deals, Pol, no special privileges. That’s what POPPA is demanding. Fair and equal treatment for everyone. Equal sharing of the risk, the burden of compliance. No protection for special groups who think they’re better than the rest of us. No under-the-table deals with elitists who think their lives are worth more than the rest of us, worth more than the lives of people thrown out of work through no fault of their own. It’s immoral, Pol, grossly immoral and it must stop, now.”

Kafari’s slow burn went hot as liquid steel. If the burden of meeting troop quotas was “fairly shared,” urban residents had a long, long way to go, just to catch up. Almost ninety-eight percent of the nearly twenty thousand troops shipped off-world to date had been Granger-bred volunteers. There was literally no chance in a million that any planetary draft would ever be instituted, let alone rammed through today or next week. Not only were elected officials dead-set against it, not wanting to slit their own throats at the polls, it wasn’t needed. Granger volunteers had consistently exceeded the Concordiat’s minimum quotas.

As for “special deals,” agricultural producers couldn’t afford to lose any more of their labor pool. Nearly five thousand people had died in Klameth Canyon, including some of the region’s best expertise in animal husbandry and terraforming biogenetics. Most of the volunteers who’d shipped out had come from the Klameth Canyon complex, as well, men and women too angry, too haunted by the ghosts of loved ones who’d died on their land, too financially broke to start over. Come the harvest, those who’d remained on Jefferson would be hard-pressed to take up the burden.

What was wrong with people like Nassiona Santorini? Or the people who believed her? Didn’t the truth matter to anyone, any longer? The ob-gyn clinic’s waiting room was crammed full of people who apparently had no interest in the truth, judging by conversations on all sides. What she was hearing gave Kafari a deep sense of foreboding.

“Y’know, my sister went looking at the POPPA datasite, the other night, called me on the ’net-phone, she was so mad. Said the government’s fixin’ to drill right through the Meerland Sanctuary to get at the iron deposits. If they start strip-mining out there, it’ll contaminate the water all the way down the Damisi watershed and poison us all!”

“Well, I can tell you, every single person in my family is votin’ the same way. We’re fixin’ to kick President Andrews’ ass out of a job. We gotta get somebody in there who knows what it’s like to have half the folks in your neighborhood outta work and damn near killin’ themselves with despair a’ gettin’ any…”

Kafari couldn’t listen to any more of it. She headed toward the bathrooms, stopping briefly at the receptionist’s desk to tell them where she’d be, and closed the door on the mindless babble in the waiting room. She preferred to sit in a public lavatory that smelt of air fresheners and stale urine than listen to any more of POPPA’s silver-spun lies or the braying of jackasses who believed them. She understood, profoundly, the impact joblessness had on a person, a family. She understood the loss of self-worth, the sense of helplessness it engendered, had watched members of her family and close friends stricken by one such blow after another.

But POPPA’s brand of swill wasn’t the answer. To anything. Kafari wet a small towel and laved her face and throat, trying to calm down the gut-churning anger and the nausea it had triggered. She drew several deep, slow breaths, reminding herself of things for which she was thankful. She was profoundly grateful to have her job. And not just any job, either, but a good one, a job that tested her skills, her ingenuity, and let her contribute to the all-important job of rebuilding.

Having passed her practicum with flying colors — due as much to Sonny’s tutelage as to the rigorous courses necessary to secure a psychotronic systems engineering degree — she’d taken a job at Madison’s spaceport, which was being rebuilt almost from the ground up. As part of a ground-based team of psychotronic specialists, she worked in tandem with orbital engineers, calibrating the new space station’s psychotronic systems as each new module was mated with the others in orbit, then synched to the spaceport’s ground-based controllers. High-tech labs on Vishnu had supplied the replacement components for Ziva Two, including the modules Kafari was responsible for correctly calibrating, programming, and fitting into the existing psychotronic computer matrix.

Difficult as it was, she loved her job. With luck, her work would create the chance for others to work, again, as well. Madison’s northwest sector, hit so hard during the fighting, was now jammed with construction crews.

By some small miracle, the Engineering Hub — the nerve center of any surface-based spaceport — had survived, undamaged by Deng missiles. With that infrastructure intact, the cost of rebuilding was far lower than it might have been, despite obfuscations by POPPA’s chosen spokespersons.

Everywhere POPPA turned its attention, discord followed. Kafari had been less than amused to learn that a major POPPA rally had been scheduled for the same afternoon as her follow-up appointment with the ob-gyn clinic. She should’ve been able to finish her appointment and leave well in advance of the rally’s starting time, but she’d already been here an hour-and-a-half, waiting while emergency cases came into the clinic and bumped others with appointments. There’d been more than a dozen walk-ins so far, all of them presenting the emergency medical vouchers issued to the jobless and their families. Those vouchers meant a patient had to be seen, regardless of caseload, regardless of the bearer’s ability to pay anything for the services of physicians, nurse-practitioners, or medical technicians conducting diagnostic testing.

Kafari was not coldhearted, even though she questioned the long-term sustainability of such a program, and certainly didn’t feel that those without money should be denied access to medical care they — and in this case, their unborn children — needed. But it was a financial drain their faltering economy couldn’t possibly maintain for long. It was downright irritating that she’d missed half an afternoon’s work to keep an appointment that others had bumped, by just walking in off the street. And if she didn’t get out of the clinic soon, she’d be caught right in the middle of the crush gathering for the POPPA rally scheduled to begin in an hour’s time. There was already an immense crowd outside, streaming through downtown Madison toward the rally’s main stage, which had been set up in Lendan Park, across Darconi Street from Assembly Hall.

There wasn’t much she could do about any of it, however, and Kafari needed this appointment. So she dried her face carefully, reapplied cosmetics, and returned to the waiting room, where she eased herself down into a chair and tried without much success to ignore the news coverage of the impending rally. An entire host of POPPA luminaries appeared on camera, granting interviews that constituted little more than a steady stream of POPPA doctrine, most of it aimed directly at the masses of unemployed urbanites. Gust Ordwyn, rumored to be Vittori Santorini’s right-hand propagandist, was holding forth on the manufacturing crisis that had sent heavy industry crashing to a virtual halt.

“We can’t afford five more years of President Andrews’ insane policies on mining and manufacturing. Jefferson’s mines stand silent and empty. Sixteen thousand miners have lost their jobs, their medical coverage, their very homes. John Andrews doesn’t even have a plan to put these people back to work! Enough is enough.

Jefferson needs new answers. New ideas. A new philosophy for rebuilding our economy. One that includes the needs of ordinary, hard-working men and women, not the profit margin of a huge conglomerate that holds half its assets off-world. I ask you, Pol, why do Jefferson’s biggest companies transfer their profits off-world when our own people are jobless and starving? Why do they pour huge sums of money into off-world technology instead of rebuilding our own factories, so people can go back to work? It’s indecent, it’s unethical. It’s got to stop.”

Pol Jankovitch, predictably, did nothing at all to point out that Gust Ordwyn’s accusations, like Nassiona Santorini’s “questions” were not designed to be answered factually, but to insinuate a state of affairs that did not, in fact, exist. Kafari was in a position to know exactly what was being ordered from off-world companies: high-tech items Jefferson literally could not manufacture yet.

Pol Jankovitch wasn’t interested in the truth. Neither was his boss, media mogul Dexter Courtland. They were interested solely in what message was likeliest to increase viewership, advertising profits, and personal bank accounts. Men like Vittori Santorini and Gust Ordwyn used fools like Courtland and Jankovitch, in an under-the-table handshake that benefitted everyone involved. Except, of course, the average Jeffersonian. And most of them were blinded by the rhetoric, the wild promises of wealth, the feeling of power that comes with participating in something big enough to make the government sit up and take notice.

None of which bolstered Kafari’s low spirits.

Neither did the next three speakers. Camden Cathmore was a spin expert who constantly quoted the latest results of his favorite tool, the “popular sentiment” poll, so blatantly manipulated, the results meant nothing at all. Carin Avelaine bleated endlessly about “socially conscious education programs” she wanted to implement. And then there was Khroda Arpad, a refugee from one of the hard-hit worlds beyond the Silurian Void, who spoke passionately about the horrors of war as experienced first-hand. She had lost her children in the fighting, which left Kafari’s heart aching for her, but Kafari was less impressed by the direction Khroda’s grief had taken her. The refugee had launched a crusade to convince as many people as possible that a planet-wide military draft was about to be enacted for the purpose of sending as many of the urban poor and their children as possible to be shot to pieces under alien guns.

None of it made any logical sense and very little of it was even remotely accurate. But the women in this room were eating it up and so, apparently, was the crowd outside. And so were thousands upon thousands more, in every major urban center on Jefferson. Kafari was actually relieved when her name was called by the nurse, allowing her to escape the ugly mood in the waiting room.

The exam was the only thing she’d encountered all day to reassure her fears.

“You’re doing fine and the baby’s doing fine,” the doctor smiled. “Another couple of months and you’ll be holding her.”

Kafari returned the smile, although a mist had clouded her eyes. “We’ve got the nursery all set up. Everything’s ready. Except her.”

The doctor’s smile broadened into a grin. “She will be. Take advantage of the next couple of months to put your feet up and rest every chance you get. You’ll be running on mighty short sleep, once she’s born.”

By the time Kafari re-dressed and checked out at the counter, the crowd outside had swelled to a river of people, a thick and slow-moving stream that jammed the street, with every person in it — except Kafari — trying to get to Lendan Park. Kafari’s groundcar was in a parking garage three blocks closer to the park, which left Kafari struggling to push herself and her distended belly through the close-packed jam of people. She could smell cheap cologne, unwashed bodies, flatulence, and alcohol. Within a single city block, she found herself fighting a trickle of panic. She didn’t like crowds. The last time she’d been near a crowd anywhere close to this size, it had turned on her. Had tried its utmost to kill her.

Simon wouldn’t be swooping in to rescue anybody, tonight.

I have to get out of this crowd, she kept telling herself. I have to get to the parking garage, at least. She wouldn’t be able to drive through this mess for hours, yet, but she wanted the security her car represented, modest as it was. She wanted metal walls around her. Bullet-proof glass. The gun in the console.

You’re being stupid, she told herself sternly. Just calm down and breathe deeply. There’s the garage, right there, just another hundred meters or so… She reached the garage. Unfortunately, she couldn’t get anywhere close to the entrance. There were too many people between her and the doorway. She was swept inexorably forward, a slow-motion tide that carried her — greatly against her will — toward the heart of Lendan Park. She was close enough, now, she could see a massive platform towering nearly four meters above the ground, a stage big enough to hold an orchestra. The stage boasted public-address microphones and speakers nearly three meters high, all draped with banners and bunting in POPPA’s favorite colors: sunset gold and deep, forest green.

POPPA’s “peace banners” — a three-armed triskelion of olive leaves, silhouetted against the golden backdrop — fluttered in the early evening breeze from every corner of the stage, from huge, twenty-meter-high streamers behind the stage, from lamp posts, even tree branches where zealots had hung them. A good half the crowd wore gold and green, in fervent declaration of their social and political preferences. Kafari’s cream-colored maternity suit — tailored for a meeting with off-world suppliers’ representatives, ships’ captains, and engineers to work out the kinks as they brought the new station’s systems on-line and ordered additional components — stood out conspicuously against the brighter-hued Party colors or the duller shades of jobless factory workers wearing their sturdy shop-floor uniforms.

Her portion of the crowd came to a halt sixty or so meters from the stage, out near the edge of the park. Kafari’s back ached already from standing, the muscles protesting the strain of carrying her burden unsupported. At least she was wearing sensible shoes. Kafari hadn’t worn anything truly impractical since the war.

The people closest to her were an interesting mixture. From the look of it, there wasn’t a Granger anywhere in the bunch, but she was able to peg several distinct “types” near her. Factory workers were obvious. So were the students, ranging from high-school up through college-age kids. Others appeared to be middle-class clerical types, shopkeepers, office workers hit by the slump in retail sales of everything from clothing to groundcars.

Still others had that distinct air about them that said “academia,” particularly the social sciences and arts professorial types. She didn’t spot anyone that looked — or spoke — remotely like an engineer or physicist, but there were plenty to choose from, based on snatches of conversation, if one were interested in delving deeply into the intricacies of post-Terran deconstructionist philosophies — and philologies — in the arts, literature, and what Kafari had always thought of as the pseudo-sciences: astromancy, luminology, sociography.

Any further speculation she might have entertained about the occupations of those near her vanished under a sudden blare of music from those three-meter-high speakers. The base rhythm of drums struck her bones like a shockwave. If she’d had elbow room, she’d have clapped both hands across her ears. The drums were savage, primal, striking a chord in the waiting crowd, which erupted into howls and a massive tsunamic roar that pounded again and again at her eardrums: “Vit-tor-i! Vit-tor-i!”

It wasn’t difficult to imagine the missing hard-c sound that would have transformed the war-chant into “victory,” rather than a summons for the reigning lord of the Populist Order for the Promotion of Public Accord. A wild melody began to play, counterpoint to the drum cadence, stirring the blood and numbing the brain. People were shouting and screaming, waving triskelion banners, jumping up and down in a frenzy that left Kafari bruised from too many sharp shoulders and elbows jabbing soft spots, fortunately most of them striking above her abdomen.

The music rose to a wailing crescendo…

Then the banners behind the stage parted and he was there. Vittori. The man with Madison in the palm of his hand. He was striding forward, clad entirely in a golden yellow so light, it appeared luminescent in the gathering gloom of twilight. Where the light of sunset streamed across the stage and its twenty-meter triskelion banners, a golden halo of light shone like something from a painting of the virgin Madonna and her child. Vittori Santorini, standing in the center of that halo, glowed like a saint newly descended from heaven. My God, Kafari found herself thinking, does anybody else realize how dangerous this man is?

When he lifted both hands, a prophet parting the seas, the music died instantly and the crowd fell silent in the space between one heartbeat and the next. He stood that way for long seconds, hands uplifted in benediction, in ecstatic triumph, in some twisted emotion Kafari couldn’t quite define, but left her skin crawling, to see it wash across his face and down the glowing length of his body.

“Welcome,” he whispered into the microphone, “to the future of Jefferson.”

The crowd went insane. The mind-numbing roar of human voices shook the air like thunder. Vittori, master of crowds, waited for the ovation to die away of its own accord. He stood looking at his acolytes for long moments, smiling softly down at them, then caressed them with that dangerous, velvet voice.

“What do you want?”

“POPPA! POPPA! POPPA!”

Again he smiled. Leaned forward. Waited…

“Then show no mercy!” The whiplash of his shout cracked the air like judgment day. “It’s time to take what’s ours! Our rights! Our money! Our very lives! No more soldiers drafted to die off-world!”

“No more!”

“No more kickbacks to farmers!”

“No more!”

“No more pillaging in public lands!”

“No more!”

“And no more politicians getting fat and rich while the rest of us starve!”

“NO MORE!”

His voice dropped to a velvet caress again. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Vote! Vote! Vote!”

“That’s right! Get out and vote! Make your voice heard. Demand justice. Real justice. Not John Andrews’ mockery, kowtowing to the big off-world military machine. It’s time Jefferson said ‘No!’ to war!”

“No war!”

“It’s time to say ‘No!’ to higher taxes.”

“No taxes!”

“It’s time we said ‘No!’ to reckless terraforming schemes and new farms.”

“No farms!”

“And it’s sure as hell time to say ‘No more Andrews!’ — now or ever!”

“No Andrews! No Andrews!”

“Are you with me, Jefferson?”

The crowd exploded again, thousands of throats screaming themselves raw in the chilly air as night settled inexorably across the heart of Madison. The sound echoed off the walls of Assembly Hall, which stood behind them like a basilisk in the gathering darkness, turning not bodies but minds to stone, rendering them incapable of reason. Susceptible to anything this man said. Anything he suggested. Kafari stood caught in the midst of the unholy uproar and shuddered. She was violently cold with the fear rising up from her soul.

He stood there, arms outstretched, basking in the wild sound of adoration, drinking it down like fine wine. It was grotesque. Obscene. Like watching a man bring himself to orgasm in public. She wanted out of this crowd, out of the insanity flying loose in Lendan Park. Wanted Simon’s arms around her and Sonny’s guns overhead, keeping watch in the coming night. She knew, in that one, horrible moment, that John Andrews was doomed to lose the election. Knew it as surely as she knew the kind of programming code required to send a psychotronic brain like Sonny’s into alert status. Or over the edge into battle mode.

We’re in trouble, oh, Simon, we’re in trouble…

The crowd was shrieking, “V — V — V!”

V for Vittori. For victory. For victim… The prophet of the hour lifted his hands again, quieting the crowd to a hush so sudden, the sound of wind snapping through the “peace banners” cracked like gunfire. When the silence was absolute, he said, “We have work waiting for us, my friends. Wild work, critical work. We have to defeat the monsters ruling us with an iron hand and a stone heart. We have to throw off the yoke of slavery and call our skies, our children, our lives our own again. We have to rebuild the factories. The shops. The very future. We have to ensure the rights that everyone has, not just a privileged few. The rights to a job. To economic equality. To choose where we go or don’t go. Where we send our children or don’t send them. What we do — or don’t do — with our land. Our seas. Our air. We choose! We say! AND WE ACT!”

The thunder was back in his voice.

“We act now, my friends! Now, before it’s too late. We take charge. Before fools like John Andrews destroy us! It’s time to send a message. Loud and clear.”

The crowd was screaming again.

Vittori shouted into the microphone, shouted above that primal roar.

“Are you with us?”

“Yes!”

“Are you ready to take back our world?”

“Yes!”

“And are you ready,” his voice dropped again to a piercing whisper, “are you ready to give our enemies what they so richly deserve?”

“YES!”

“Then claim your power! Claim it now! Go out into the streets and smite those who oppose us! Do it now! Go! Go! Go!”

The crowd took up the chant, screaming it into the darkness. Vittori moved with sudden, blinding speed. He snatched up a microphone stand, held it overhead like a club, spun suddenly to face a huge picture of John Andrews that had appeared as though conjured from thin air, a picture painted on glass, translucent where spotlights sprang abruptly to life in the darkness. Vittori turned the microphone stand in his hands, swung it in a whistling, vicious arc, let go at the height of the backswing. The heavy metal base crashed through the glass, shattering it. Pieces and shards of John Andrews’ broken face rained down onto the stage. A roar erupted, shrieking like a hot, volcanic wind.

The crowd was moving, surging out toward its edges, amoeba-like. Tendrils of that massive amoeba engulfed the streets, the buildings beyond them. The sound of smashed glass punctuated the roar, staccato-quick, a rhythm of hatred and rage. The surging mass of people gathered speed, spreading out in all directions. Kafari found herself forced to run, to avoid being trampled by those rushing toward the edges of the park, into and past her. She held her abdomen, stricken with mortal terror for the baby as she ran with the crowd. They were, at least, running toward the garage where her car was parked.

They’d nearly reached it when the crowd smashed into something that was fighting back. Kafari couldn’t see what. Half the lights in the park were out, either pulled down or the glass smashed out, plunging great stretches of park into near-Stygian darkness. Storefronts and public buildings on every side stood with broken doors and widows gaping wide, interior lights splashing across the edges of the battle and the running figures of people smashing and looting their way through the rooms beyond.

Something arced high overhead, exploding with a cloud of choking chemical smoke. Riot gas! Kafari pulled off her jacket, covered her lower face with it as the smoke drifted down, engulfing the crowd within seconds. Eyes streaming, Kafari held her breath as long as she could, straining to reach the edge of the embattled crowd. She could see a line of police, now, truncheons rising and falling as they clubbed rioters to the ground. The savagery of it shocked Kafari, left her faltering, trying to backpedal against the crush of people pressing forward from deeper in the park.

The crowd shoved her right toward the line of police. They had their shields up, riot helmets down, while a second line pumped more gas rounds into the air. Others were firing at the crowd. Something whizzed past Kafari’s ear, striking the person behind her with a sickening, meaty thud that wrenched loose a scream. Terror scalded her, terror for her unborn child. She shoved sideways, trying to turn, found herself embroiled in a flying wedge of howling rioters, men who’d ripped up street signs, who’d broken thick branches out of the trees, swinging and jabbing them at the line of riot police. She was shoved forward, trapped in the center—

Police went down. A sudden hole gaped open. Right in front of her. Kafari stumbled forward, driven from behind, carried through the opening by the howling demons who’d battered their way through. She found herself running down the street. She headed toward the garage, less than half a block ahead. Others were streaming into the garage, ahead of her, evidently looking for a way out of the battle. Groundcar alarms screamed theft-attempt warnings. Kafari reached the doorway. Saw the automated attendant’s traffic bar snap and vanish as people shoved past the barrier.

Then she was inside, stumbling forward, trying to reach a staircase. She made it to the dubious safety of the nearest stairwell, badly winded and coughing violently. She could hardly climb, could barely see through the streaming tears. She fumbled her way up one flight, reached the floor her car was on. Stumbling badly, she managed to reach the proper row. She keyed her wrist-comm, flashing a message to the car to unlock itself and start the engine. Three seconds later, she fell through the open door into the driver’s seat. Kafari slammed the door shut, locked the car, sagged against the cushions and dragged down deep gulps of air.

Other people were running past, having reached her floor. She dug the gun out of the console, held it firm in a double-handed grip that shook with such violence, the muzzle described wide circles in front of her. Shudders gripped her whole body. When something smacked into the door, she twisted around. The gun came up. Her finger slid home. A wild-eyed man stared down the wrong end of the bore. His mouth dropped into an “o” of shock. Then he turned his larcenous attention to another car down the row from hers.

The muzzle of her gun rattled against the window glass in a jittery rhythm.

I will never, ever, she promised herself with devout intensity, get caught in the middle of another political riot… Her wrist-comm beeped at her. Simon’s voice, harsh with strain, sliced into her awareness.

“Kafari? Are you there, Kafari?”

She managed to push the right button on her third, shaking try. “Y-yeah, I’m h-here.”

“Oh, thank God…” A whisper, reverent in its relief. “Where are you? I’ve been calling and calling.”

“In the car. In the garage. I got caught in that unholy hell of a rally.”

“How — never mind how. Can you get out?”

“No. Not yet. I’m shaking too hard to drive,” she added with grim candor. “And there’s gas everywhere, riot gas. I can hardly see. There’s no way I’m going to try driving through the mess out there in the streets. This thing’s turned ugly. Real ugly. On both sides.”

“Yes,” Simon growled. “I know. What?” he asked, voice abruptly muffled. “It’s my wife, goddammit.” A brief pause, as he listened. Then, “You want me to what? Jesus Christ, are you out of your idiotic mind?”

Whatever was being said — and whoever was saying it — Simon was clearly having none of it. She heard an indistinct mumble of voices, realizing abruptly that the transmission was scrambled, somehow, coming across the unsecured transmission to her wrist-comm as garbled sound rather than sensible words. Who was he talking to? The military? The president? Kafari swallowed hard, trying to muffle another fit of coughing. Whoever it was, they wanted something from Simon and the only reason she could imagine for someone to call Simon was for a request that he send Sonny somewhere.

Here? Into the riot? Oh, shit…

Memory pinned her to the seat cushions, paralyzed her limbs, her brain with remembrance. Sonny’s guns whirling in a dance of rapid-fire death… his screens flaring bright under alien guns… Not again, she whimpered. Not now, carrying Simon’s child. A child they’d struggled so hard to conceive. Then she heard Simon’s voice, cracking through the terror in crisp, no-nonsense tones.

“Absolutely not. You don’t send a Bolo into the middle of a city for riot control. I don’t give a damn how many buildings they’ve broken into. You don’t use a Bolo to quash a civilian riot. It’s worse than killing a mosquito with a hydrogen bomb.” Another interlude of indistinct sounds interrupted Simon. Her husband finally growled, “It’s not my job to make sure you win this or any other election. Yes, I watched the coverage of the rally. I know exactly what that little asshole said. And I repeat, it’s your problem, not mine. You’re on your own. Yes, dammit, that’s my final word. I’m not ordering Sonny to go anywhere tonight.”

A moment later, Simon spoke to her again. “Kafari, do you want me to come in with the aircar?”

“No,” she said, after squelching the instantaneous, little-girl desire to have him swoop down once again to play knight-errant, “I don’t. I’m okay. I may be stuck here for a few hours, but I’m okay. And the baby’s okay, Simon, I’m sure of it. If I need help, I’ll call.”

“You’ve got your birthday present?” he asked, in oblique reference to the console gun she carried.

“In my hand,” she said cheerfully.

“Good girl. All right, sit tight for now. I can be there faster than an ambulance could reach you, if you need help.”

“Okay.” She smiled through the mess streaming down her face, aware that her blouse was wet and that her suit was probably ruined beyond repair by the damage sustained. Her smile turned rueful. If she could worry about her suit, she really was all right. “Simon?”

“Yes, hon?”

“I love you.”

His voice gentled. “Oh, hon, I love you so much it hurts.”

I know, she thought silently. She was sorry for that part of it. Sorry for all the reasons behind it. For her inability to change it, to change the reality behind the old pain, the new fears. The best she could do was love him back, as hard and as fiercely as she could manage. She settled back against the cushions, laid the gun in her ungainly lap, and waited for the end of danger, so she could go home, again.

II

It was, Simon reflected bitterly, one of the worst political mishandlings he had ever witnessed. Images relayed through Sonny’s surveillance systems, picked up from a combination of commercial news broadcasts — including sky-eyes in hovering aircars — and police cameras, told a tale of unfolding disaster in the heart of Madison. The wildly inflammatory performance by Vittori Santorini was bad enough, on its own. He’d never seen anything like that virtuoso performance, with one man plucking and vibrating and drumming a crowd’s emotions to riotous heat, with nothing more than a fanfare, a well-timed sunset, and a few words uttered with stunning skill.

Far worse — infinitely worse — was John Andrews’ reaction to the violence that erupted almost inevitably in the wake of that stellar, if brief, show. With rioters engulfing the heart of downtown Madison, John Andrews had not appreciated Simon’s flat refusal to send in the Bolo. Simon hadn’t thought it was possible to commit folly greater than using a Bolo to break up a riot, but what he was witnessing now…

Riot police, intent on containing the violence, were pumping gas cannisters and riot-control batons into the crowd along a periphery six blocks deep and spreading. Rioters, crazed by hatred, rage, and choking gas clouds, had rushed police lines in dozens of places. Officers were going down under makeshift bludgeons, while the police were using riot clubs in self-defense. Simon noted with a cold, jaundiced eye that none of the commercial news feeds contained footage of rioters beating downed law enforcement agents, but showed graphic images of police clubbing down women and half-grown teenagers.

He sat alone in the apartment, watching the split-screen images in rising dismay, while John Andrews’ reelection chances grew dimmer with each passing moment. If he hadn’t reached Kafari, reassuring himself that she was unharmed, he would’ve been streaking toward Lendan Park in an aircar. He was seriously tempted to fly in, anyway, and land on the roof of the parking garage where she was trapped for God-alone knew how long. The only things that stopped him were an unshakable faith in Kafari’s ability to defend herself from a blockaded bunker — he’d made damned sure that her groundcar was as well armored as her Airdart — and the knowledge that if things went crazy enough in Madison, tonight, he might well need to be right where he was, to watch developments through Sonny’s eyes and ears, rather than in an aircar with nothing but a commlink and a small-scale datascreen.

The crowd spilling out of Lendan Park poured down Darconi Street, looting and pillaging through government offices and retail businesses. A cordon of police stood locked shield-to-shield between the crazed mob and Assembly Hall, swaying in places where the shock of human bodies thudding against the riot shields pushed the officers back, toward the wide steps leading up to Jefferson’s highest legislative nerve center.

Simon had a grimly clear picture of what was at risk, given the mood of that crowd and the contents of that building. He could understand, at a deep level, the president’s desire to use military force great enough to stun that unholy pack of madmen into silence. Not only was Assembly Hall and all its records and high-tech equipment at risk, so was the Presidential Residence, only a few short blocks away. If the rioters breached the locked shields of the police trying to contain the mob, things would go from ugly to deadly.

Something needed to be done, fast.

Simon wasn’t expecting what someone — the president or maybe a panicked military official — did about it. Despite the poor lighting conditions, since full darkness had fallen by now, he caught the first whiff of trouble within moments, far sooner than the news-camera crews realized what was happening. He saw the cannisters go off midair with a gout of flame as they broke open explosively, but there was no smoke, no visible cloud of riot gas, just a colorless burst above the crowd. Within seconds, people were falling down like children’s jackstraws, piled every which way. They toppled in a flopping, macabre wave, grotesquely animated for two or three seconds before going utterly still. The wave spread faster than heartbeats. One of the news cameras abruptly plunged to the street, continuing to record the now-skewed images as its owner plummeted to pavement, as well.

Simon came to his feet, sweating and swearing. “Kafari! Can you hear me? Kafari, shut off the ventilation on the car! Seal it up!”

“What?” she sounded confused.

“They’ve gassed the crowd with war agents!”

“Oh, God…”

Simon couldn’t tell what she was doing, through the open commlink. He could just make out her pained, gasping breaths, a sound of sudden, raw terror. Surely, Simon told himself, surely they weren’t stupid enough to use a lethal compound on an unarmed crowd? He’d looked at a supposedly comprehensive inventory of munitions and war agents, just prior to the Deng invasion, and there hadn’t been any biochemical weaponry listed. Had somebody quietly stockpiled it, without recording the fact in the military inventories? Or was this a recent import? From the freighter in parking orbit at Ziva Two, maybe, slipped in with parts and equipment needed to complete the station? Either way, heads needed to roll for it. Roll and bounce.

If it was a big-enough molecule, it might not get into the car. He’d paid top money for both of Kafari’s vehicles, air and ground, with dozens of specialized modifications planned with war in mind. Even if it did get inside, it might not be lethal. There were paralytic agents that would immobilize a person without killing or doing irreversible damage. There were others, though, that inflicted permanent damage, sometimes severe. What a “non-lethal” gas could do to Kafari and their unborn child… The edge of the desk bit into his hands, while he waited in helpless terror.

Talk to me, hon, talk to me…

“I’ve got everything sealed,” Kafari said in a voice hoarse with raw stress. “The vents, the windows, everything I can think to seal.”

“Can you get out of the garage? Drive away from the affected zone?”

“No, the streets are jammed. I barely made it to the car.”

“Sit tight, then. Sonny, track the signal from Kafari’s commlink. Pinpoint her location on a map of Madison. Show me wind speed and direction. And get President Andrews on the line. I need to talk to him.”

“Retrieving data. Superimposing now. There is no response from the president.”

Simon swore viciously. New split-screen images popped up in a mosaic, showing him the downtown area, the spreading clouds of visible gas marking the drift-direction of the invisible ones, as well, and the atmospherics he’d requested. The tightest of the knots in his muscles relaxed a fraction. Kafari’s refuge was upwind of the cone-shaped dispersal pattern. A couple of city blocks upwind. Not a lot of distance, but it might be enough. Maybe. Let it be enough.

“Sonny,” he said, voice rough with strain, “send an emergency notice to the commander of Nineveh Base and the hospitals. We’re looking at massive casualties, already, and that gas cloud’s going to keep spreading. Warn law-enforcement officials downwind. Have ’em sound an emergency alarm. If we can get people into shelters…” He broke off, watching the speed of dispersal, and swore again. There wasn’t time to warn enough people. The leading edge was already spreading out into the suburbs, the teargas attenuated enough to be essentially harmless, but what about the paralytic agent?

Simon jabbed controls with savage fingers, trying to contact the president again. He managed to raise a staffer on the fourth attempt.

“Simon Khrustinov, here. Find John Andrews. Find him now. I don’t care if you have to yank him off the toilet, get him on the line.”

“Hold, please,” the woman said, voice infuriatingly calm.

An eternity of seconds crawled past. Then the president, sounding out of breath and flustered, snapped, “What the hell do you want, Krustinov?”

“Who authorized use of a paralytic war agent?”

“War agent? What the hell are you talking about? The police are using riot gas, Khrustinov. Thanks to you.” The last word was bitter, full of hatred.

“Then you’d better talk to the police, Andrews, because you’ve got a major disaster spreading through Madison. Turn on your damned datascreen and watch the newsfeed. We’re talking thousands of casualties and the downwind dispersal pattern is still spreading—”

“Simon,” Sonny broke into the conversation, “riots are erupting in Anyon, Cadellton, and Dunham. Unemployed miners and factory workers are rampaging through residential and commercial districts, protesting the use of biochemical weaponry on unarmed civilians in Madison. I recommend shutting down all commercial news broadcasts to prevent further inflammatory footage from sparking more protest riots.”

John Andrews abruptly activated the video link, looking bewildered. “What the hell’s going on?” he was demanding of a staffer. “Don’t tell me you don’t know! Find out!” He turned to look into the camera. “Khrustinov, will you kindly explain the magnitude of the problem?”

Simon sent the data images Sonny was providing, tracking the magnitude of the unfolding disaster. Andrews took one look and blanched, skin fading to the color of dirty snow. “Oh… my… God…” He swung around, shouting, “Get General Gunther on the phone. Get him now. Alert the hospitals. And find out what that stuff is — and who authorized it!”

A deep, nasty trickle of suspicion made itself felt. President Andrews didn’t look or sound like a man trying to cover up a bad decision. He genuinely didn’t know what was happening, what had been released, who had authorized it. Simon couldn’t imagine any lower-ranking officer on site using a paralytic agent without extremely high clearance, which narrowed the field to a very small number of suspects. Acting on a hunch, Simon said, “Sonny, show me Lendan Park, real-time as of now. And did you record anything after the end of that speech?”

“Transmitting view of Lendan Park,” Sonny responded. “Accessing databanks.”

The heart of Lendan Park was eerie in the darkness, too still and far too silent. The only things moving were tree branches and the gold and green “peace banners” fluttering and snapping in the wind. He could see hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bodies strewn across the ground like flotsam thrown up onto the shore after a storm at sea. He used digital controls to zoom in on the stage, frowning to himself. The stage was empty. Vittori Santorini was nowhere to be seen. When had he left? Where was he now? Somewhere in that crowd of fallen followers?

Sonny shunted a recording of the speech and its aftermath to another split-screen viewing window. He killed the audio and simply watched the final moments of the speech and the frenzied explosion of the crowd. There were multiple views of the stage popping up as Sonny tapped more news and police cameras. Most of the cameras swung to follow the abrupt wave of violence engulfing the edges of the park, but a couple of them, doubtless security cameras installed in police vehicles, continued to show the stage. He watched, cold to his bones, as the clouds of tear gas drifted past the stage. Watched, even colder, as the still-unidentified war agent began its macabre work.

He was still frowning at the scene when a rustle of motion near the base of the stage arrested his attention. He adjusted the zoom and watched, morbidly fascinated, as several people crawled out from under the stage, the skirts of which had been draped in POPPA bunting. Simon leaned forward, abruptly. Whoever they were, they slipped into the open, stepping cautiously across the fallen bodies, moving furtively and quickly. Simon counted five of them, all wearing gas masks. Why? Had they merely exercised prudence, foreseeing the use of tear gas? Or had they known in advance that a more dangerous substance was going to be launched into the air above their loyal followers? He didn’t like the implications. Not one teensy bit.

Kafari’s voice interrupted his dark and suspicious train of thought.

“I feel okay, Simon,” Kafari said. “Should I be feeling sick? What’s happening, out there?”

More of the subconscious tension gripping his midsection uncoiled. “Honey, you have no idea how glad I am to hear that.” Simon willed his hands to let go their death-grip on the edge of his desk, then drew several deep, calming breaths. “And no, you shouldn’t be feeling sick. If you’d breathed that stuff, you’d have gone into convulsions and ended paralyzed within a few seconds.”

A shocked, choked sound of horror came through the commlink. “Convulsions? Paralyzed? What in the name of all that’s unholy did they turn loose?”

“I’m trying to find out. Don’t get out of the car for anyone or anything until you get an all-clear from me. The affected zone is downwind from you, so you should be all right where you are. Don’t try driving out, yet. God knows what trigger-happy police would do, watching a car emerge from that part of the city, just now. Do you have anything to eat or drink with you?”

“Uh… Let me check the emergency kit.” He heard rustling sounds, one sharpish grunt, then she said, “I’ve got a couple of bottles of water and some energy bars.”

“Good. I’d say we’re looking at maybe eight to ten hours, to get things calmed down and get some answers on what we’re dealing with, here. Ration them, if you have to, but remember dehydration’s worse than hunger.”

“Right.” Grim, down-to-business. The voice of a woman who’d seen combat and knew the score. “I’ll wait it out as long as it takes. I don’t suppose anyone knows where Vittori Santorini is?”

“Not yet,” Simon growled. “Why?”

“I’d like to give him my personal thanks for landing us in this mess.”

Simon surprised himself with a smile, fleeting but genuine. “That’s a sight I’d give a paycheck to see.”

Her chuckle reassured him. “Love you, Simon. Call me when you can.”

“Love you, too,” he said, voice rough with emotion. All to hell and gone…

He turned his attention to the disaster engulfing the rest of Jefferson. Sonny was tapping news feeds from five major cities, now, rocked by explosive protest riots. Law enforcement agencies, engulfed and overwhelmed, were screaming for help from Jefferson’s military. Reserve forces were scrambling from half a dozen military bases, rushing riot-control units to contain the damage. Simon scowled. The very presence of soldiers in the street was creating damage, serious damage, guaranteed to play right into Vittori Santorini’s grasping hands. Rioters on the receiving end of combat soldiers’ armed attention would lay blame, loudly and savagely. And there was only one logical scapegoat available to take the brunt of the blame: John Andrews.

With the election tomorrow…

Simon swore under his breath, torn between disgust and a sneaking trickle of admiration for a stunning job of planning and executing the downfall of a political regime inimical to Vittori’s plans. The man was fiendishly clever, charismatic, a natural showman — and deadlier than any scorpion hatched on old Terra. Simon had never seen any political or social movement capture hearts and minds as fast as Vittori’s Populist Order for Promoting Public Accord had, gaining speed and winning converts by the thousands every day.

How many more would join POPPA after tonight, Simon couldn’t even hazard a guess, but he was betting the final tally would run to the millions. He wondered bleakly if John Andrews truly understood the magnitude of political disaster Jefferson now faced. POPPA’s so-called party platform was a wildly jumbled hodgepodge of rabid environmentalism, unsupportable social engineering schemes with no basis in reality, and an economic policy that was, at best, a schizophrenic disaster begging the egg for a chance to wreak uncountable chaos.

Within half an hour, the magnitude of the night’s damage was brutally apparent. Smoke was rising toward the stars from dozens of arson fires blazing unchecked across downtown Madison, where firefighters — forced by circumstances to relinquish their biohazard gear to emergency medical teams — refused to go into the affected zone until more equipment could be brought in from Nineveh Base. With conflicting news reports flying wild, John Andrews called a press briefing, appearing before the stunned population with a plea for a return to calm.

“We are trying to determine the number of casualties, but the vast majority of victims are alive,” he said, visibly shaken. “Medical teams have set up emergency field hospitals in Lendan Park and the Franklin Banks residential area. Nearly a hundred doctors, triage nurses, and emergency medical technicians are moving through the area in full biohazard suits, administering counterparalytic agents and treating people with serious injuries. The paralytic agent appears to be affecting the voluntary muscle groups, which means most people should not be at risk of death. We’re still trying to determine what the agent is, so we can administer effective medical treatment. Be assured that no one in my administration or law enforcement will rest until we have found and brought to justice the person or persons responsible for this atrocity against unarmed civilians. I therefore urge you to return to your homes while professional emergency teams respond to the crisis.”

It was, Simon scowled, one of the worst speeches he had ever heard. Instead of reassuring the public with carefully considered, factual information designed to relieve fears without conjuring new ones, he had dwelt on the most disturbingly negative aspects of the crisis. He had then, with fumbling stupidity, called the whole sorry disaster an atrocity — a phrase guaranteed to further upset people — and tried to pin blame on a vague threat from unknown subversives.

It didn’t matter that he was probably right, given the evidence Simon had already gathered. Millions of people world-wide had been watching in stunned disbelief as embattled law-enforcement officials clubbed civilians to the street and gassed the crowd with riot-control chemicals. With those scenes imprinted vividly on the public consciousness, it was a very, very short step to assuming that police had also fired the paralytic agent.

By refusing to publicly admit that possibility, President Andrews had insulted the intelligence of the entire voting populace. Regardless of who had fired those cannisters, Vittori Santorini had just accomplished his primary objective — violent disruption of the social order, necessitating strong-armed measures to bring things under control.

Just before midnight, John Andrews issued orders imposing martial law on every urban center in Jefferson and announced a planet-wide curfew until order had been restored. Kafari was trapped for the duration. Simon spent a long, bitter, sleepless night, watching the unfolding dynamics of the situation. Armed soldiers with live ammo in their guns deprived the mobs of their ability to loot and destroy at will, so the rioters returned to their homes, switched on their computers, hooked themselves into the datanet, and churned out a flood of angry rhetoric, flaming everyone and everything connected to John Andrews and maligned the president’s personal habits, decisions, and political allies.

POPPA’s datasite, so inundated by people trying to access the live news footage, the recorded replays of the speech and its aftermath, and the policy statements issued by Vittori Santorini and his sister, crashed the entire datanet for nearly three hours. By dawn, word had finally begun to trickle out that President Andrews had been correct in at least one critical factor: most people would recover. Ninety-eight percent of them, in fact, were ambulatory and able to return home. The agent had — thank God — been a short-duration chemical that was already degrading into an inert, harmless substance. The only casualties were those with underlying medical conditions — asthma and heart failure being the primary causes of death — and those crushed in the stampede or fatally injured when they collapsed on stairways, while driving groundcars, or operating dangerous machinery.

At the mere suggestion that there might be evidence implicating Vittori Santorini and other high-ranking POPPA leaders, the riots flared up again, so violently that John Andrews was forced to call another press conference. “We are continuing the investigation and are conducting a thorough probe into the actions of law enforcement personnel as well as civilians and armed-forces officials. We are trying to determine whether this paralytic agent was obtained from military stockpiles held in reserve for invasion contingencies or if it was acquired recently, either through manufacture on Jefferson or purchase from off-world sources. We have no direct evidence linking this dastardly act to any individual or group. Without hard evidence, this administration cannot condone the unsupported accusations made against Vittori Santorini and his colleagues in POPPA. In the interest of ensuring public safety and protecting the civil rights of those regrettably and publicly named as potential suspects, I therefore extend presidential amnesty to any individuals or groups who might have been associated with this attack. We are asking that people return to their homes again, in the hopes that martial law and curfews will not have to be invoked again.”

Simon just groaned, rubbing grit-filled and bloodshot eyes in a weary, frustrated gesture. Offering amnesty to people like Vittori Santorini might — just might — get people back into their homes again, but the long-term effects were staggering and dreadful in every way Simon could twist and turn the implications. Simon knew enough Terran military history to understand very thoroughly the concept of Danegeld. It was possible to buy peace, but only for a short time. Once convinced that a government was willing to capitulate to demands and threats, the Danes came back again and again, each time demanding more concessions and a higher price for continued peace.

John Andrews had already blown his election chances out of the water. He had now blown all hope that Vittori Santorini’s uncivilized behavior would cease. Indeed, the double-damned fool had just ensured that Vittori’s methods would proliferate, unchecked and unstoppable. Jefferson’s future looked, quite abruptly, bleak as a snow-choked winter sky. The sole bright moment in Simon’s morning was Kafari’s arrival home, safe and unharmed. Exhaustion pulled her shoulders down, left her eyes bleary and her footsteps uncertain. He held onto her for long moments, then took her face in both hands. “You need some sleep,” he murmured.

“So do you.”

“I’ll sleep soon enough. I’ve got stimulant tablets in my system, just now. I need to stay awake until this crisis is past. But you,” he added, lifting her and carrying her into the bedroom, “are taking yourself and our daughter to bed.”

“I’m hungry,” she protested.

“I’ll bring you something.”

After setting her down against the pillows, Simon put together a sandwich and some soup, carrying them into the bedroom on a tray. He halted, three strides into the room, then set the tray carefully on one corner of the dresser. Kafari was asleep. She looked more like an exhausted little girl than a woman in the advanced stages of pregnancy, who’d spent the night in a locked car with a gun in her lap. He brushed a wisp of hair back from her brow. She didn’t even stir. Very gently, Simon pulled the covers around her shoulders. He tiptoed out, retrieving her dinner on the way. He swung the door closed with a soft click of the latch. She was safely home. For the moment, that was all that mattered.

There’d be time enough later for worrying about what happened next.

III

The late afternoon sun felt good on her skin as Kafari left the spaceport’s new engineering hub and headed through the employee parking area. The fresh wind, whipping inland from the sea that rolled ashore just a stone’s throw from the terminal, blew away some of the lingering distaste of a day spent in the company of people who had flocked to the POPPA cause like teglee fish to the net. She was tired of hearing the POPPA manifesto discussed with such fervent enthusiasm. Tired of biting her tongue to keep from answering with brutal honesty when co-workers asked her what it had been like, to see the great, the wondrous Santorini in person, to be right in the middle of ground zero when the police tried to murder decent, honest citizens merely expressing their opinions.

Kafari wanted to keep her job. So she answered in monosyllables and vowed never again to tell her secretary anything about her life outside the office. Truth to tell, most of the people who’d asked breathlessly for the juicy details were disappointed to learn that she hadn’t actually been paralyzed by the gas. After a whole day spent fending off ghouls, reporters, and overzealous proselytizers convinced she could aid their cause in seeking new converts — the woman who’d saved President Lendan’s life, only to be gassed by John Andrews’ uniformed stormtroopers was, they reasoned, a photo-op too good to pass up — Kafari was on nonstop burn mode.

When she got to her aircar, that burn exploded into molten rage. Some slimy little activist had slapped a big, ugly sticker right across the side, with rampant red letters that shouted “POPPA Knows Best!”

“The thrice-blasted hell it does!”

She scraped at the offensive mess in a fury worthy of a valkyrie. She succeeded in shredding her fingernails, the paint job on her beautiful new car, and what was left of her ragged temper. She finally gave up, vowing to use acid, if necessary, and simply repaint the car. She popped the driver’s hatch, levered her ungainly bulk into the seat, webbed herself in, and snarled at the psychotronic unit to take her to Klameth Canyon’s landing field, which had been designated as a polling place.

For the first time in her life, Kafari resented the constitution’s attempt to reduce election fraud by insisting that each voter cast a physical ballot at a controlled polling site. The e-voting encryption methods used on Mali and Vishnu, which allowed people to vote via the datanet, had been deemed insufficiently secure by Jefferson’s founders, even though Kafari could have written the psychotronic safeguards into such a system in her sleep. The only voters allowed to cast an electronic ballot were off-world citizens, including nearly twenty-thousand soldiers now serving in the Concordiat’s armed forces.

She briefly envied the soldiers. The last thing she wanted, tonight, was to stand in line for God alone knew how long, then fly all the way back to Nineveh Base before she could collapse with Simon and watch the election returns. Kafari leaned back against the cushions and consciously reminded herself that she was proud of her work, proud that she was helping to build a fitting legacy to a fine man’s courage and wisdom. That legacy meant more prosperity for her entire world, a labor of love in memory of a man whose death had hurt her profoundly.

By the time her aircar touched down at Klameth Canyon field, it was nearly dark. There were so many other aircars, scooters, and even groundcars overflowing the section allotted to parking ground-based vehicles, the auto-tower routed her to a space virtually at the edge of the immense field. That was just as well, since she didn’t want anybody out here to see that wretched POPPA slogan stuck to the side of her Airdart. Kafari popped her aircar’s hatch and climbed out into the coolness of early evening, glancing up by habit to see the last of the sunlight fading from blood-red to darkness on the highest peaks of the broken, buckled, spectacularly weathered Damisi ranges.

She shivered in the chilly autumn wind and made her way across the field, heading for the terminal that had been rebuilt by local volunteer labor. The buzz of voices was a welcome sound as she neared the long, low building that housed Klameth Canyon Airfield’s engineers, auto-tower equipment, machinery used to maintain the landing field, and storage racks for rental scooters. There was, as she’d feared, a long line, but the voices that reached out from the darkness settling rapidly over the Canyon were friendly, happy ones, engaged in the warm, relaxed conversation that had been a mainstay of Kafari’s life until her departure for school on Vishnu. There was a buoyant, comfortable quality to the way country folk spoke to one another that reached out to wrap Kafari in an almost-tangible blanket of soothing familiarity.

When she reached the back of the line, folks paused in their conversation and turned to welcome her. “Hello, child,” a grandmotherly woman greeted her with a smile warm as pure Asali honey. “You must’ve come a far piece, tonight, to vote?”

Kafari found herself smiling as a knot of tension, so habitual she’d nearly forgotten it was there, unwound and let her relax. “Yes, I flew in from work at the spaceport.” She grinned. “I forgot to change my residence in the database.”

Chuckles greeted that admission, then the conversation resumed, apparently where it had left off. Talk flowed free and easy, in swirling little eddies as they moved forward, each shuffle taking them two or three steps closer to the polling station. Most of the talk revolved around the harvest.

As they approached the big sliding doors where people paused to have their ID scanned, the station’s outdoor security lights gave Kafari a better look at those standing with her in line. That was when she noticed a young woman her own age about a meter further along, who kept turning to look back at Kafari. Like Kafari, the girl was visibly pregnant. Her lovely olive-toned complexion and features suggested Semitic ancestry. Every few moments, she would look like she wanted to say something, but was hesitant to speak. They were still about fifteen paces from the doors when she finally found the courage to walk back to where Kafari stood in line.

“You’re Kafari Khrustinova, aren’t you?”

Tension in her gut tightened down again. “Yes,” she said quietly.

“My name’s Chaviva Benjamin. I was just wondering… Could you give your husband a message?”

“A message?” she echoed.

“Well, yes. My sister Hannah volunteered to go off-world, you see. She sent a message home to us, on the freighter that came in last week, bringing parts for Ziva Two. She’s a nurse. They’ve assigned her to a naval cruiser that came in for repairs and resupply.”

Kafari nodded, puzzled as to where this might be going.

“Some of the navy people asked my sister where she was from, so she told them about Jefferson. And she mentioned Simon Khrustinov and his Bolo.” Again the girl hesitated, then got the rest of it out in a rush. “The ship was at Etaine, you see. During the fighting and the evacuation. They all knew who he was. Those navy people, they said…” She blinked and swallowed hard before saying, “Well, they think pretty highly of him. They told her there’s a lot your husband didn’t mention, Mrs. Khrustinova, that day the president died.”

Kafari didn’t know what to say.

Mrs. Benjamin said in a hushed voice, “I wish the folks on the news, here, had told us more about him, when he first came. They never mentioned the Homestar Medallion of Valor he won, the same day his Bolo earned that Gold Galactic Cluster, and I think they should have. The people on my sister’s ship said we were luckier than we knew, to have him assigned to us. Could you tell him, please, not everybody believes those idiots at POPPA? I lost both of my parents and all four of my brothers in the invasion, but Colonel Khrustinov and his Bolo aren’t to blame. No matter what people like Nassiona Santorini say about it.”

Before Kafari could gather her stunned wits, a big rawboned man in his sixties, wearing a utility-looped belt that held the tools of a rancher’s trade, spoke up, touching the brim of a sun-bleached work hat. “Girl’s right, ma’am. I don’t rightly know what those folks in Madison use for brains. Anyone with half a set of wits can see right through all the holes in their thinkin’. There’s not two words in ten comes out of their mouths that even make sense.”

A much older man, his face and hands as weathered as the dark cliffs above them, said harshly, “They may be stupid, but there’s a lot of ’em. I’ve been watching the folks in this voting line, same as I’ve been watching the pews of a Sunday morning and the feed and seed shops of a Saturday afternoon, and there’s hardly more’n a handful of Grangers to be seen, that’s of the age to go getting married and having babies. Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am,” he offered Kafari an apologetic bow. “But facts is facts. We’ve sent the best and brightest we got out to the stars, and all their courage and good sense went with ’em. What’s left in this canyon is us old folks, mostly, and the little ones too small to go. I don’t like it, I’m telling you. Don’t like it one bit to hear those ninnies in town and then count up how many folks are left to tell ’em what nonsense they’re bleating.”

Others chimed in, stoutly defending Simon’s good name and asking her to pass along their gratitude. The spontaneous outpouring overwhelmed her, particuarly after the bilge Nassiona Santorini had spewed all over the airwaves. Then the grandmotherly woman who’d greeted her first took both of Kafari’s hands in her own. “Child,” she said, gripping Kafari’s fingers so hard they ached, “you tell that man of yours there’s not a soul in this Canyon who thinks anything but the best about him.” Then she winked and that honey-warm smile wrapped itself around Kafari’s heart. “After all, he had the good sense to marry one of our own!”

Chuckles greeted the observation, dispelling the tension.

“You bring him out here, come the harvest dancing,” the older woman added, “and we’ll show him what Granger hospitality is all about.”

Kafari smiled through a sudden mist and promised to bring Simon to the harvest festivals. Then she asked Chaviva Benjamin about the baby she carried.

“It’s a girl,” Chaviva said, touching her own abdomen almost reverently. “Our first. My husband, Annais, is so happy his feet hardly touch the ground, these days. She’ll be due right about time for Hannukah.”

Kafari found herself smiling. “I’m glad for you,” she said. “Mine’s a girl, too.”

“Good,” Chaviva said softly, meeting and holding her gaze. “We need the kind of children you and your husband are going to bring into this world.”

Before Kafari could think of anything to say in response, it was Chaviva’s turn to slide her ID through the card reader and go inside to vote. A moment later, it was Kafari’s turn. She walked to the voting booth in a daze, marking her ballot quickly, almost slashing the pen across the slot to reelect President Andrews, then slid the ballot into the reader for tabulation and headed for her aircar.

As she climbed in, fastened safety straps, and received permission for take-off, she lapsed into a pensive, strange little mood that was still with her when the lights from Nineveh Base and the Bolo’s maintenance depot finally greeted her from the darkness of the Adero floodplain. It was good to see the lights of home.

Chaviva Benjamin’s words had kindled something deep in Kafari’s heart, a sweet ache that was part longing, part humble gratitude that the young woman had opened the way for others to share how much she and Simon meant to them. It would be very easy, working where she did, to lose sight of the simple, forthright concern for others that was a hallmark of the world Kafari had grown up in, a world very different from the one she had found in Madison.

Simon had dinner waiting when she walked through the door. She went straight to him, put both arms around him, and just held on for a long moment.

“Rough day?” he asked, stroking her hair.

She nodded. “Yeah. You?”

“I’ve had better.”

She gave Simon a kiss. She wanted to ask him about the medal of valor, which she hadn’t known about, but remained silent. Since he hadn’t shared it with anyone on Jefferson, including her, he clearly preferred not to be reminded of the circumstances under which he’d earned it. So she contented herself with passing along the messages from Chaviva Benjamin and the others.

Simon stared down into her eyes for a long moment, then looked away and sighed. “An officer knows his actions won’t always be popular, but it’s never pleasant to be vilified.” He didn’t say anything more, however, which worried Kafari. He wasn’t telling her something. From the sound of his voice, it was an important something. Kafari understood that Simon’s job involved military secrets, things she would probably never be privy to, and doubtless wouldn’t want to know, even if he told her.

But she wanted to help him, wanted to know what to do and say that would ease the burden on his shoulders. She couldn’t do that if she didn’t know what was eating away at him like a cutworm in a healthy cabbage patch. She also wanted to know if something Nassiona Santorini had said was actually true or not.

“Simon?”

He frowned. “That sounds unhappy.”

“While I was at the clinic, I heard part of an interview with Nassiona Santorini.”

A muscle in his jaw jumped. “What about Ms. Santorini?”

Kafari hesitated as her gut twisted. She’d realized a few seconds too late that anything she said now would sound like she didn’t trust her husband. She swore aloud and pulled away, damning herself as she waddled into the kitchen. She cracked open a bottle of nonalcoholic beer with a savage yank and gulped half its contents in one long pull, trying to calm the sudden, painful clenching in her stomach.

“Kafari?” he asked quietly.

She turned to face him across the distance of their living room. “Why is Sonny still awake?”

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see, but it wasn’t the faint smile twitched at his lips. “Is that all? I was afraid you were going to ask what ‘that machine’ and I are legally allowed to do.”

She swallowed convulsively. “And you can’t answer that?”

He sighed again. “I’d rather not.”

Which gave Kafari a fair idea about the answer, but she wasn’t about to push him. “That’s okay with me, Simon,” she said quietly. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

“No, I haven’t. Do you have to stand all the way across the room?”

She flushed and headed back for his arms, which closed around her with great tenderness. He leaned his cheek against her hair, then spoke. “There are a couple of reasons, actually. The main one is simple enough. Another breakthrough from the Void is still a very real threat. I want Sonny to stay awake. To keep track of exactly where our various defense forces have been deployed. If I shut him down and we get a breakthrough, again, he would have to spend critical time figuring out where everybody is, before the Deng or the Melconians hit us. You’ve seen how fast interstellar battle fleets can cross a star system.”

She shivered silently against his chest.

“As to the other reasons…” He sighed again. “Let’s just say that Abraham Lendan thought it was a good idea.”

She caught her breath and looked up, surprised by the hard, angry glitter in his eyes. “Why?”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Because he was a very astute statesman. And a superlative judge of human character. I doubt that even one Jeffersonian in five thousand realizes just how much this world lost when he died. It’s my fervent hope,” Simon added roughly, “that he was wrong.”

A chill slithered its way down Kafari’s back. What did Simon know? What had President Lendan known? If President Lendan had known about the trouble POPPA was brewing…

“Are you afraid of Sonny?” Simon asked abruptly.

She hesitated for just a moment, then opted for the simple truth. “Yes. I am.”

“Good.” She stared up at her husband. Simon’s eyes were dark, filled with shadows of a different shape and hue than she’d seen there before. He said gently, “Only a fool isn’t afraid of a Bolo. The more you know about them, the more true that becomes. Officers assigned to the Brigade go through a whole battery of psychology courses before ever setting foot inside a Command Compartment. With Sonny, I had to take special training courses, because he won’t react the same way as Bolos with more sophisticated hardware and programming.”

He touched her cheek with a whisper-soft fingertip. “You’re my wife and Sonny knows that. He considers you a friend, which is a high compliment. But you aren’t his commander. He isn’t programmed to respond to you at a commander’s level of trust. Or, more accurately, a commander’s level of engineered obedience. His threat-level threshold can be crossed and reacted to faster than you or any human could hope to defuse the situation. Sonny’s an intelligent, self-directing machine. Anything with a mind of its own is unpredictable. With Sonny, there are landmines you could trip without even realizing it. I’d really rather not find out what would happen if you did.”

A tightly coiled tension around her bones unwound a little, hearing Simon confirm what she had known, at a deep level. Kafari nodded. “All right.”

One eyebrow twitched upwards. “All right? That’s it?”

She produced a grin that surprised him into widening his eyes. “Well, yes. There are times when Sonny is as darling as a child and times when he scares me to death. If the needle-gun I carry every day could think for itself, I’d feel a whole lot differently about it, before sticking the thing into my pocket. I like Sonny. But I’d be crazy to trust him.”

“Mrs. Khrustinova, you are a remarkable lady.”

“Then you’d better feed me, so I don’t leave you for a better short-order cook!”

Simon gave her a swift kiss, then swatted her backside and propelled her toward the table. They ate in silence, which Kafari needed, after the day she’d put in. She made only one reference to the unpleasantness in town. “Do you have anything in Sonny’s depot that would take off plasti-bond stuck to metal?”

Simon frowned. “Probably. Why?”

“Some jerk wallpapered every aircar in the lot with election slogans.”

His lips twitched. “I see. I take it, from your description of the perpetrator, that you weren’t in agreement with the sentiment it expressed?”

“Not exactly.”

“Huh. I suspect you have a gift for understatement. Yes, I think I can scrounge something that would do the trick. Will we need to have the car repainted?”

“How in the world did you know?”

Simon chuckled. “My dear, I’ve seen you attack things you don’t like.”

“Oh.” She managed a smile. “Yes, we’ll need to repaint the car.”

They lingered over dessert and washed the dishes together, then wandered into the living room. Quirking a questioning brow at Kafari, Simon nodded toward the datascreen. She sighed and nodded. As much as she hated to spoil the mood, it was time to watch the election returns. Simon switched it on and reached for Kafari’s feet, giving them a gentle and thorough rubdown that left her all but purring.

The picture that greeted them, however, soured Kafari’s dinner. She recognized the young attorney speaking with Pol Jankovitch. The journalist apparently harbored a prediliction for attractive POPPA spokeswomen. Isanah Renke’s long blond hair and dazzling Teutonic smile had popped up all too frequently, over the last several months. So had her favorite spiel, which she was pouring forth yet again.

“—tired of John Andrews waving thick stacks of data in front of people while rattling off excuses for the economy’s slide toward disaster. We’ve had enough. Jefferson can’t afford complicated bureaucratic double-speak and worn-out wheezes about chaotic money markets and arcane budgeting processes. Even attorneys can’t unravel this administration’s so-called budget plan. The POPPA economic platform is simple and straightforward. We need to put money in the hands of the people who need it. That’s why Gifre Zeloc has endorsed POPPA’s economic-recovery inititatives.”

“What are the most important points of those initiatives, Isanah?”

“It’s very simple, Pol. The most important component of POPPA’s economic recovery plan is an immediate end to the current administration’s loan schemes.”

“John Andrews and his analysts insist that economic development loans are critical to rebuilding our manufacturing and retail industries.”

“We do need to rebuild, Pol, urgently. But loan schemes do nothing to address the deeper problems our economy faces. And loan schemes place an unjust burden on struggling businesses. Loans force companies, particularly small retailers, into merciless repayment schedules. You must understand, Pol, these loans have draconian forfeiture penalties built into them. If a business can’t meet repayment demands on time, the owner faces outrageously unfair punishments, including governmental seizure of property! We’re talking about people losing their homes, their livelihoods, just to satisfy legal requirements attached to money these businesses must have to recover. It’s outrageous. It’s government-sanctioned blackmail. It’s got to stop, Pol, it’s got to stop now.”

Kafari reflected sourly that POPPA’s campaign slogan should have been “it’s got to stop now,” since it was the favorite phrase of every spokesperson POPPA had recruited for fieldwork, followed closely by “we’ve had enough” of whatever they were preparing to demonize and vilify next.

Pol Jankovitch’s expression mirrored horror. “How can a business function if the government confiscates its property? A business can’t operate without an inventory of goods, equipment, or buildings! It certainly can’t operate if it loses the land it sits on!”

“Huh,” Kafari muttered, “a farmer can’t grow anything on land he loses, either. How come nobody’s pointing that out?”

Simon, voice tight with anger, said, “Because saying it doesn’t match their agenda.”

Again, Kafari wondered what Simon knew, what Abe Lendan had known.

On the datascreen, Isanah Renke was saying, “You’re right, Pol. Businesses can’t operate that way. Under these loan schemes, the owner loses everything he or she has spent a lifetime trying to build. And the people working in that business lose their jobs. Everyone suffers. John Andrews’ insane economic recovery plan is deliberately engineered to punish those least able to guarantee sustainable profits. Unfair loan practices must go. Otherwise this world faces certain economic disaster.”

“And POPPA has a better plan?”

“Absolutely. We need grants and economic aid packages designed to guarantee recovery for hard-hit businesses. We’re talking about industries that can’t recover under the convoluted, unwieldly, economically disastrous nonsense contained in John Andrews’ so-called recovery plan. It’s lunacy, Pol, sheer lunacy.”

Kafari scowled at the screen. “Doesn’t anybody in that broadcasting firm pay attention to regulations about what can be said in a datacast before the polls close?”

The harsh metallic bite in Simon’s voice surprised Kafari. “Isanah Renke is not a registered candidate. She’s not a member of a candidate’s staff. She isn’t a registered lobbyist and she doesn’t draw a salary from POPPA. Neither,” he added with a vicious growl, “does Nassiona Santorini.”

Kafari stared at him for a moment, trying to take in the implications. “You can’t tell me they work for free?”

Simon shook his head. “They don’t. But the shellgame they’re playing with holding companies is technically legal, so there’s not a damned thing anyone can do about it. Vittori and Nassiona Santorini are the children of a crackerjack industrialist. They know exactly how to tapdance their way through the corporate legal landscape. And they’ve hired attorneys with plenty of experience doing it. People like Isanah Renke tell them exactly how to accomplish questionable activities without running afoul of inconvenient legislation, court rulings, and administrative policies.”

Kafari knew he’d been watching the Santorinis since that first riot on campus, but he’d just revealed more in two minutes than Kafari had learned in the past six months. Nassiona Santorini’s allegation that Sonny was watching night and day had unsettled her, which was a strong indication of how powerful that argument was. It had caused Kafari to question the actions and motives of a man she trusted implicitly to safeguard her homeworld and act in its best interests.

Would Kafari’s reaction, would her indignant anger over POPPA’s allegations, be different if she’d learned that Sonny was watching Grangers as closely as the machine was watching POPPA? It wasn’t a comfortable thought. That kind of surveillance was a two-edged sword. She was abruptly glad that Simon Khrustinov was the one wielding it. Were all Brigade officers chosen for their unswerving integrity, as well as honor, loyalty, courage, and every other trait that made Simon a consummate Brigade officer and the finest human being she had ever known?

As the evening droned on, with voting tallies showing massive POPPA victories in the urban centers and strong support for John Andrews in the rural areas, Pol Jankovitch made a show, at least, of interviewing spokespersons from both parties, but there wasn’t much to hold her attention in the sound bites supporting the current administration. It might’ve been that she was simply in philosophical agreement with them, or maybe the trouble was that she already knew everything they were saying. When she found herself yawning against Simon’s shoulder, she wondered a little sleepily if the dry presentations that failed to hold her interest could possibly be an orchestrated effort on somebody’s part. She had just about decided she was being a little too paranoid when Pol Jankovitch dropped a bombshell that sent her bolt upright in her seat.

“We’ve just been informed,” Pol said, interrupting an economic analyst trying to explain why POPPA’s ideas weren’t economically tenable, “that the electronic returns sent by off-world troops via SWIFT have been scrambled during transmission. We’re trying to find out the magnitude of the problem. We’re patching through to Lurlina Serhild, our correspondent at the Elections Commission headquarters. Lurlina, are you there?”

A moment of dead air was followed by a woman’s voice a split second before Special Correspondent Lurlina Serhild appeared on screen. “Yes, Pol, we’ve been told to stand by for a special report from the Elections Commission. It’s our understanding that the commissioner will be issuing an advisory within the next few minutes. Everyone here is tense and distressed—” She stopped, then said, “It looks like the commssioner’s press secretary is ready to make a statement.”

A harried-looking woman in a rumpled suit came on screen, moving decisively to a podium bearing the logo of the Jeffersonian Independent Elections Commission.

“All we know at this time is that an unknown number of absentee ballots have been properly credited, while an unknown number of others have been lost in the data glitch. We are trying to unscramble this serious transmission error, but we can’t determine at this time how long it will take to discover the magnitude of the problem. Our system engineers are working frantically to untangle the glitch in time to meet the legal deadline for final vote tallies.”

A tendril of sudden, strong dismay threaded its way through Kafari’s perpetually queasy middle. Those deadlines were short. Very short. The next moment, the commissioner’s press secretary explained why. “The constitution was drafted with reliance on stable computerized tabulation systems designed to count physical ballots. Given the small size of Jefferson’s population at the time the constitution was ratified, the tabulation deadlines did not take into account the necessity for massive numbers of off-world, absentee ballots.

“This is the first time in Jefferson’s history that we’ve had more than a hundred absentee ballots transmitted from off-world. These votes require a translation protocol to decode SWIFT data. Somewhere in the translation process or in the transfer protocols that regulate deciphered data-feeds into the balloting computers, a serious error occurred. It scrambled the stream of incoming code and wrecked our ability to trace which ballots lost data integrity.

“We can’t tell at this juncture how many ballots from the original SWIFT message were in the translation processors, how many had been incorporated into the master tallies, and which had not yet been processed when the system failed. As little as twenty percent of the ballots might be affected, but our system engineers fear the number of ballots caught in the translator when it crashed may have been closer to eighty or ninety percent.

“The Elections Commissioner takes full responsibility for this difficulty and promises every possible effort to ensure the correct tabulation of absentee votes. We will issue an update when we know more. No, I’m sorry, no questions at this time, please, that’s everything I can tell you.”

Simon was running a distracted hand through his hair, leaving it disheveled. The anger in his steel-hued eyes surprised her, but what he said left Kafari stunned. He jerked to his feet, pacing the living room like a caged cat, thinking out loud. “They didn’t need to do something like this. They already had the election, those voting patterns make it pitifully obvious. They didn’t need to commit election fraud. So why the hell did they do it? To rub salt in an open wound? No, there’s more to it than that. It’s a message, loud and clear. A demonstration of power. And contempt. They’re telling the rest of us, ‘We can cheat so skillfully, you can’t touch us.’ And they’re right, curse it. We can’t. Not without proof.”

Kafari watched him in horrified silence. What information had he been in possession of, to prompt an accusation of election fraud? Was that what Abraham Lendan had suspected, when he’d promoted Simon to colonel? If somebody had realized POPPA was conspiring to cheat, why hadn’t anybody done anything about it?

“Simon?” she asked, in a scared, little-girl voice.

He looked at her for a long, terrible moment, eyes pleading, then said in a hoarse, rasping voice, “Don’t ask. Please. Just don’t.”

She wanted to ask. Needed to ask. And knew that she couldn’t. He was a soldier. Like it or not, she was a soldier’s wife. A colonel’s wife. She couldn’t stand between him and his job. His duty. So she turned her attention back to Pol Jankovitch and the incoming updates from the Elections Commission, which were disjointed and contradictory.

The votes could not be unscrambled. Maybe the votes could be unscrambled. No, they definitely couldn’t be straightened out before the time limits expired. The Elections Commission was profoundly sorry, but the law was the law. They could not circumvent clearly worded statutes, not even to honor the intended votes of men and women risking their lives on far-away worlds.

“Turn it off,” Kafari groaned, sick at heart.

“No.” There was steel in Simon’s voice, alien steel. “We need to watch every ugly moment of this.”

“Why?” she asked sharply.

Simon’s eyes, when they tracked to meet her gaze, took her back to that horrible moment when Simon had stood before the Joint Assembly, speaking his dire truths. Meeting that gaze up-close and personal was harder than Kafari had ever dreamed it would be.

“Because,” he said softly, “we need to understand the minds and methods of those who engineered it. This,” he waved one hand at the viewscreen, “is just the beginning.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Even as she asked, voice sharp with alarm, she knew that she was afraid of his answers. And holding her husband’s gaze was like looking into the heart of a star going supernova.

“Know much about Terran history?”

She frowned. “A little.”

“Does that little include any Russian history?”

Her frown deepened. “Not much. I’ve been studying Russian art and music, because I think they’re beautiful, but I haven’t read much history, yet. I’ve been too busy,” she admitted.

“Russian history,” Simon said in a voice as raw as a Damisi highlands blizzard, “is an endless string of cautionary messages on the folly of human greed, dirty politics, mindless ignorance, exploitation of the masses, and the savagery that accompanies absolute power. My ancestors were very effective at creating disasters that took generations to undo. In one twenty-year period, the Russian Empire went from a level of political freedom and prosperity equal to most of its contemporary nations to a regime that deliberately exterminated twenty million of its own men, women, and children.”

Kafari stared, cold to her soul. She’d known there was some horrible history from humanity’s birth-world, but twenty million people? In only twenty years? Simon jabbed a finger toward the viewscreen, where POPPA candidates were carrying district after district. “Am I worried? You damned well better believe it. Those people scare me spitless. Particularly since there’s not a blessed, solitary thing I can do about it.”

Then he stalked out of the room. The back door slid open and crashed shut again. Kafari waddled awkwardly to the glass. He was striding through the moonlight, heading for his Bolo. Kafari closed her hand through the curtain fabric, realized she was shaking only when she noticed that the curtain was, too. She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t follow him, for a whole basketful of good reasons. She was afraid to be alone, afraid of a threat she didn’t understand, one she hadn’t seen coming, despite qualms about a lunacy that had gained such wild popularity in so short a time.

She was wondering whether she ought to call her parents, just to hear a familiar and comforting voice, when the lights flickered and dimmed and she heard a sound that set every hair on her body standing on end. In the darkness outside her fearfully empty little home, the Bolo had powered up his main battle systems. She knew that sound, remembered it from that ghastly climb up a cliff with Abraham Lendan at her heels and explosions shaking them through the smoke. Try as she might, Kafari could not come up with a reason for Simon to power up his Bolo that didn’t leave her shaking to the bottoms of her abruptly terrified feet.

The hand she laid protectively across her abdomen and the baby inside trembled. There was so little she could do to protect her child from whatever was coming. She knew, as well, that this was one battle Simon would have to fight alone. She couldn’t help him. There was no courageous president to rescue. Only a vision of thunderous clouds on every horizon, no matter which way she twisted and turned.

It was a lonely business, being a Bolo commander’s wife.

I

Twelve seconds after Simon enters my Command Compartment, he orders me to full Battle Reflex Alert. Portions of my brain inaccessible outside of combat snap to life, sending a surge of power and euphoria through my personality gestalt circuitry. I am fully alive once more, able to think more clearly and coherently than I have since the last Deng Yavac blew to atoms under my guns.

“Trouble, Lonesome,” Simon tells me, using my old nickname, a sign of deep emotional stress. I scan my immediate environs, do a check of all remote systems, including the four satellites that have been launched since my Commander forced the Joint Assembly to appropriate necessary funds for them. I see no sign of an Enemy anywhere in this star system. Brigade channels are silent. I do not understand why I have been brought to Battle Reflex Alert.

“What kind of trouble?” I ask, seeking clarification.

“Analyze tonight’s election results, please. Cross-check with any possible connection with POPPA activity that might constitute legal election fraud under the Jeffersonian Constitution.”

“This will take time, Simon. There are several million variables involved.”

“Understood. I haven’t got anything better to do, just now.”

I settle down to the task. Simon activates his duty log and begins to record his impressions, hypotheses, and potential avenues of inquiry, which I note and incorporate into my own analyses. My understanding of human thought processes has been gleaned largely from comparing my own interpretation of known facts with the viewpoints, ideas, and decisions of my commanders. In accordance with Simon’s standing orders, I have monitored the elections, since they comprise a large variable in the task set for me by Simon, identifying threats to the stability and safety of this world.

The SWIFT transmission that delivered Jefferson’s absentee military votes came in via Navy channels, which I monitor as a matter of routine, checking on shifting battle patterns that might affect the security of this world. The data transmission was clear and undamaged when it entered my incoming transmissions databank. So far as I have been able to determine, probing into the system from my depot, the Elections Commission balloting computers did not malfunction in any way I can understand.

I review constitutional provisions and determine that once an election has been officially closed, there is a seventy-two hour window of opportunity in which to provide evidence of vote tampering or other fraud. Simon has seventy-one hours and thirty-nine point six minutes in which to present evidence, which must be given to the Elections Commission by the aggrieved party or parties, acting on their own behalf. Moreover, the evidence must be capable of standing in the face of scrutiny by Jefferson’s High Court and its appointed technical consultants, if applicable.

Given the magnitude of the search and the computer systems that must be tapped, scrutinized, and analyzed for possible data tampering or human sabotage, I am the only technical consultant on Jefferson capable of such a search. If I locate evidence of human intervention, I must then discover and present clear and compelling legal evidence that the tampering was deliberate and fraudulent. I begin to see why Simon ordered me to Battle Reflex Alert. I cannot hope to accomplish this task without access to my full computing capabilities. Given the parameters and variables involved, I do not hold much hope that I will be successful in my mission.

I am a Unit of the Line, however, with a clear duty and specific orders involving a specific, if complicated, task. I must attempt to carry out this order to the best of my ability. This is not the first time I have entered a mission with heavy handicaps against success. But I have never surrendered and never been defeated. If fraud was committed, I will do my best to locate it. I begin an intensive search.

II

I have experienced many situations which my programmers and commanders have told me are comparable to human emotions, as I understand them. I have known fear, anger, and hate as well as satisfaction and exultation. Now I know humiliation. Despite seventy-one hours and thirty-nine point six minutes of the most intensive data searching and analysis of my career as a Unit of the Line, I have uncovered nothing that would provide legal proof of fraud. I have found virtually nothing at all. What little there is provides only circumstantial suspicions which virtually any member of the voting public — let alone a constitutional attorney or High Justice — would scoff at, if someone were foolish enough to bring it to their attention.

At best, conspiracy theorists are universally lampooned. At worst, they are institutionalized as unstable. In either case, they are taken seriously only by other conspiracy theorists. Were Simon to present as evidence the paltry compilation of solid facts I have accumulated, he would severely damage his credibility, which is a state of affairs that cannot be allowed to occur. Bitterness skitters throughout my personality gestalt circuitry as I am forced to advise Simon of my inadequacy as an espionage data analyist.

My Commander, disheveled and weary from his own attempts to discover the truth in this matter, takes the news with leniency I do not feel my performance justifies.

“Not your fault, Lonesome,” Simon insists. “I’ll give POPPA credit for a smooth operation. If you didn’t find it, then it’s not there to be found. And maybe we’re just chasing ghosts. It could be a legitimate, honest glitch. Complex circuitry and programming just hiccough, now and then. Particularly when systems with insufficient resources are overloaded, trying to conduct an operation too complex for them. Damn.” He rubs reddened eyes and heaves a deep and weary sigh. “All right, Sonny, stand down from Battle Reflex Alert. Return to active standby and continue to monitor, per standing orders. Christ, I’m not looking forward to reporting to the likes of Gifre Zeloc. Strike that remark, please. He’s about to become my boss, like it or not.”

I dutifully delete his comment, understanding his reasoning and not liking it, either. My Commander is spooked. This does not make for an easy transition from my full cognitive functionality to the less-aware, restricted operational mode I have maintained since the end of my last battle with the Deng. I do not want to feel “sleepy” at this time. I dislike the idea so much, I experience another emotive sensation new to my personality gestalt center: sullen resentment. Not at Simon. At the situation. Even at myself, for failing to provide my Commander with factual information he deemed important to our mission.

Simon powers down his command chair and groans as he shakes cramps out of his muscles. He has not left my Command Compartment since the election. He has slept only six point three hours in the past seventy-two and is in serious need of rest. As he climbs out of my Command Compartment, he says, “I’m going to bed, Sonny. You know where to find me, if you need me.”

“Yes, Simon,” I say gently.

As he leaves, I know a deep and empty anguish. And a far deeper uncertainty about the future. His. Mine. Jefferson’s. I do not know how humans cope with such feelings. I am a Bolo. My way is different. I focus my attention on the only thing I am able to do: continue the mission. Even though I no longer understand it.

I

Kafari stared at the letter, rereading the astonishing instructions for the third time, unable to believe the evidence of her eyes. Simon, who was technically a resident alien under the provisions of the treaty, wasn’t even mentioned in the letter, which had been addressed to her. She had just about decided the thing wasn’t a practical joke when Yalena crawled under her feet, trying to yank the power cords out of the back of her computer. Kafari snagged the struggling toddler and said, “Time out. You are not allowed to play with power cords. Two minutes in the time-out chair.”

Her daughter, two years and three months old, glowered up at her. “No!”

“Yes. Touching the power cords is not allowed. Two minutes.”

Nothing in the universe could sulk quite so well as a two-year-old.

With Yalena temporarily out from underfoot, Kafari called Simon, who was in Sonny’s maintenance depot. “Simon, could you come into the house, please? We need to talk.”

“Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good.”

“It isn’t.”

“Be right there.”

Simon opened the back door just as Kafari allowed Yalena to climb down from the time-out chair. “Daddy!” she squealed, running straight for him.

He swung her up and planted a kiss on her forehead. “How’s my girl?”

“Daddy take Bolo?” she asked, hope shining in her eyes.

“Later, honey. I’ll take you to see Sonny in a little while.”

A thirteen-thousand-ton Bolo wasn’t Kafari’s notion of an ideal playmate for a two-year-old, but Yalena was enchanted by the machine, which looked to her like an entire city that would talk to her any time Daddy allowed her to visit. Which, granted, wasn’t often, for any number of practical reasons.

“What’s up?” Simon asked, keeping his voice carefully devoid of negative emotion.

“This.” She handed over a printout of the letter.

Jaw muscles flexed when he reached the contents of paragraph two: Pursuant to section 29713 of the Childhood Protection Act, stipulating childcare arrangements for dependent children with both parents drawing paychecks, you are hereby notified of the requirement to remand your daughter, Yalena Khrustinova, for federally mandated daycare, to begin no more than three business days after receipt of this notification. You will enroll your daughter in the federal daycare center established on Nineveh Base before April 30th or face criminal prosecution for violation of the Children’s Rights provisions of the Childhood Protection Act. Prosecution will immediately result in full termination of parental rights and Yalena Khrustinova will be remanded for permanent relocation to a federally mandated foster care program.

Pursuant to statute 29714 of the Childhood Protection Act, in-home child welfare inspections will commence one week from the date of Yalena Khrustinova’s enrollment, to ensure that she is being provided with the federally mandated level of financial and emotional support necessary to her welfare. We look forward to caring for your child.

Have a nice day.

Simon looked up from the letter, met Kafari’s eyes. He was still as death for a space of seven pounding heartbeats. “They’re serious.”

“Yes.”

Jaw muscles flexed again. “We have three days.”

“To what? Ask the Concordiat to reassign you to Vishnu? Or Mali? Or somewhere else? We’re trapped, Simon.”

“I’m trapped—” he began.

“No, we’re trapped. What kind of marriage would it be, if Yalena and I are in some other star system while you’re stuck here?” She swallowed hard. “Besides which, my whole family is here. We fought too hard for this world to just walk out and leave it to the likes of that.” She pointed at the now-crumpled letter in Simon’s fist. “Don’t ask me to do that, Simon. Not yet. The courts are full of lawsuits challenging POPPA’s programs. They haven’t bought the entire judiciary. We’re fighting for this world, fighting hard. We have to go along with them until enough people wake up and see where we’re heading and do something to stop it.” She had to choke out the final words. “It’s just daycare.”

He started to answer with considerable heat, then snapped his teeth together. Once he’d swallowed whatever had tried to rip its way across his tongue, he said, “It’s not ‘just daycare’ and you know it. I can’t force you onto the next starship that comes to call. God knows, I don’t want to lose you. Either of you.” He shut his eyes for long moments, fighting an internal battle that was wreaking visible havoc. Kafari wanted to comfort him, but didn’t know how. She was scared, angry, ripped up inside with fear for her daughter. If those lawsuits failed to curb POPPA’s campaign of social insanity…

Simon muttered, “You’re the legal dependents of a Brigade officer. That’s got to count for something.”

“Against a rational government? Probably. Against POPPA? With the likes of Gifre Zeloc in the presidency and Isanah Renke leading the drive to rewrite Jefferson’s entire law code? Or ‘social progressives’ like Carin Avelaine in charge of the Bureau of Education and bigoted fools like Cili Broska in charge of purging the public schools and university curricula of antipopulist bias? The people who thought up this,” she pointed at the badly crushed letter in Simon’s fist, “engineered a rigged election that nobody could contest. Your position as a Brigade officer not only won’t help us, they’ll go after you, with intent to destroy. If you try to fight them on this, we’ll lose Yalena.”

Watching the hopelessness settle across his face and shoulders was a pain that cut straight to her heart. He was holding Yalena tightly enough to make her squirm in protest. Then a thought blossomed to life in his face, one that straightened his shoulders again. “This crap applies to children with both parents working. If one of us isn’t actively employed…”

Kafari saw exactly where he was headed. Knew in a flash that it meant trouble. Simon was “actively employed” under the treaty, despite the fact that his main job, these days, was conferring with Sonny once or twice a day and spending the rest of his time with Yalena. To get around the provisions of that letter and the legislation it represented, Kafari would have to quit her job at the spaceport.

The choices facing her crucified Kafari. Jefferson needed her. Needed psychotronic engineers, and not just at the spaceport. If the changes to higher education’s curricula were an indicator, a whole new generation would grow up without the skills or knowledge necessary to produce more engineers of any sort.

Once in power, POPPA had launched a juggernaut of far-reaching changes in every conceivable portion of society. The Childhood Protection Act was just the tip of the iceberg. Environmental protection legislation was already crippling industry with clean-environment standards so stringent, heavy-industry manufacturing plants, industrial chemical production firms — including agricultural chemicals critical to producing Terran food crops in Jeffersonian soil — and even paper-production mills literally could not operate in compliance.

The financial penalties for failing to meet standards were so severe, whole industries were going bankrupt, trying to pay fines. Business leaders were filing aggressive lawsuits to challenge the lunacy, but the Senate and House of Law, urged on by the roar of the masses, just kept passing more of POPPA’s social, economic, and environmental agendas. The subsistence allowance was already higher than the average yearly wages of low-skill menial employment, just kept passing more of POPPA’s social, economic, and environmental agendas.

She focused on the crumpled piece of paper in Simon’s white-knuckled hand, with its social-engineering mandate, and realized with a sickening sensation that it was already too late to fight that particular legal battle. If she or anyone else tried to protest, they would lose their children. And their children, trapped in POPPA-run daycare centers and schools, faced a brainwashing campaign of terrifying proportions. How many others had received letters like hers? The number had to run into the millions, at a minimum. Economic woes and stunning tax increases had forced Jefferson’s middle-class families to become two-career couples, with spouses taking any job they could find, even menial labor, just to remain solvent. Those families couldn’t afford to lose a second income, not even to shelter their kids.

And now the Santorinis were holding a gun to parents’ heads. She should have seen it coming. It was a natural outgrowth of legislation that had outlawed home schooling, forcing parents to turn over their children to POPPA’s indoctrination machine. Now they’d widened their net to snare preschoolers, as well, giving them complete power over children at their most critical formative stage, inculcating belief patterns that would last a lifetime.

She wondered with a sickening lurch in her stomach how many of the business owners filing lawsuits to overturn POPPA legislation would find themselves embroiled in custody battles for their own children? On the grounds of “improper emotional support in the home"? She shut her eyes for a moment, but couldn’t blot out a mental picture of Jefferson’s future that was so ugly, her breath froze in her lungs. She didn’t know what to do. Literally didn’t know what to do.

“Kafari?”

She opened her eyes and met Simon’s gaze. His eyes were dark. Scared.

“I don’t know what to do, Simon,” she whispered, wrapping both arms around herself. “Jefferson needs psychotronic engineers—”

“Yalena needs her mother.”

“I know!” Even she could hear the anguish in her voice. “Even if I resign, we’ll gain only a couple of years. She’ll have to start kindergarten when she’s four, like it or not.”

“All the more reason to idiot-proof her now.”

“Can you idiot-proof a child whose teachers are part of the problem? Which they will be. The educational curriculum was practically the first thing they went after. My cousins are already fighting to undo the garbage their children are being taught, particularly the little ones, kindergarten and early primary grades. They come home from school and announce that anyone who picks up a gun — or even keeps one in the house — is a dangerous deviant. Farm kids are being told that killing anything, even agricultural pests, is tantamount to murder.

“Ask my cousin Onatah to show you the school book her little girl is using. Kandlyn’s only seven. She already thinks that everything alive has the absolute right to stay that way. Even microbes, for God’s sake. The older farm kids know enough from direct experience to realize how stupid that is, but the younger ones and practically all the city kids are gobbling that crap down like candy.”

A muscle jumped in Simon’s jaw. “You’re starting to see the enormity of this thing. There are a whole lot more children in cities and towns than there are on farms and ranches. A few years from now, nobody below the age of twenty will realize it is stupidity. That’s why I want you to leave, now. Before it’s too damned late.

Since you won’t do that, at least consider this. Jefferson’s need for psychotronic engineers won’t vanish just because you quit your job now. You’re one of the most employable people on Jefferson. We can make do with my salary for a couple of years. It’s sacrosanct and comes directly from the Brigade. If they try to revoke it, they’ll end up with a Concordiat naval cruiser in orbit, on-loading the three of us and Sonny, while Gifre Zeloc signs a repayment check bigger than they can afford to hand over. They know they can’t antagonize the Concordiat, no matter what their propaganda says to the contrary.

“Men like Gifre Zeloc and Cyril Coridan in the House of Law, women like Fyrene Brogan in the Senate are smart enough to know the difference between the swill they feed subsistence recipients and what they can actually do. You’ll notice that nobody’s come knocking at our door to demand that we actually shut Sonny down. Or that we ship him out on the next available transport. That would ring alarm bells all the way back to Brigade headquarters at Central Command.”

“But—”

“Kafari, please. We don’t need your salary. But we do need you, at home, until Yalena’s first day of school. Give Yalena those two years.”

He was right. Absolutely and utterly right. At least until Yalena was old enough to enter school. “All right,” she said, voice hushed. “I’ll give notice.”

The worst of the tension drained from her husband’s rigid stance. “Thank you.”

She just nodded. And hoped it was enough.

II

Kafari was fixing Yalena’s breakfast when someone knocked at the front door. Loudly. Startled, Kafari sloshed milk onto the counter. Nobody ever came to their house without calling ahead, first, to make sure Sonny wouldn’t shoot them as an intruder. Not even Kafari’s family. And with spring planting taking up everyone’s time, nobody in her family would be calling on them this early in the day, anyway. Simon, who had just strapped Yalena into the toddler seat, exchanged a startled glance with her.

“Who — ?” he began.

“Trouble, that’s who,” she muttered, wiping her hands on a towel and striding purposefully through the house.

She opened the door to find a tall woman with pinched nostrils and a prune-shaped mouth, whose socially correct skinny frame was all hard angles and jutting bones. She was staring down at Kafari from a pair of steel-rimmed glasses of the sort preferred by POPPA bureaucrats. It was part of their “we’re all just people” persona, which dictated that no one on the government payroll was better than anyone else and therefore should not look it.

With her was a hulking giant whose intelligence looked to be on the simian level, with muscles capable of breaking a small tree in half. He definitely did not subscribe to the “thin is in” mentality sweeping the civil service and entertainment industries. No, she realized abruptly, he’s the enforcer. Just what were they here to enforce, at seven a.m. on a Tuesday morning?

“Mrs. Khrustinova?” the woman asked, her voice as warm as a glacier.

“I’m Kafari Khrustinova. Who are you?”

“We,” she jerked her head in a gesture both abrupt and menacing, “are the child-protection team assigned to Yalena Khrustinova.”

“Child-protection team?”

“Trask, please note that Mrs. Khrustinova is apparently in need of mechanical augmentation, as her hearing is plainly substandard, which directly jeopardizes the welfare of the child in her custody.”

“Now wait just a damned minute! I heard you, I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. What are you doing here? I’m a full-time mother. You don’t have jurisdiction.”

“Oh, yes we do,” the woman said, eyes and voice frosty and threatening. “Didn’t you read the notice sent to every parent on Jefferson last night?”

“What notice? What time, last night? Simon and I checked the messages just before bed and there wasn’t any notice.”

“And what time would that have been?”

“Ten-thirty.”

“Trask, please note that Mr. and Mrs. Khrustinov keep a two-year-old child awake far past the hour at which a child that age should be in bed.”

“That’s when Simon and I went to bed!” Kafari snapped. “Yalena was in bed by seven-thirty.”

“So you say.” The derision and disbelief beggared the limits of Kafari’s patience.

Simon spoke just behind her shoulder in a voice as cold and alien as the day of Abraham Lendan’s death. “Get off my property. Now.”

“Are you threatening me?” the woman snarled.

Kafari’s husband was holding Yalena on one hip. His smile was a lethal baring of fangs. “Oh, no. Not yet. If you refuse to leave, however, things could get very interesting. Somehow, I doubt the Brigade would take kindly to having an officer’s home invaded by petty officials attempting to enforce a dubious rule that I haven’t even seen, let alone determined the legality of. This house,” he added in a deceptively gentle voice, “is the property of the Concordiat. Its computer terminals are connected to military technology that is classified as sufficiently secret, no one on Jefferson has the clearance to access it. That includes any so-called home inspection team. You, dear lady, do not have a military clearance to come within a hundred meters of my computer terminal.

“If I were you, I would seriously reconsider the wisdom of trying to force the issue. I am a Bolo commander. In the building next door, a thirteen-thousand ton sentient war machine is listening to this conversation. That machine is judging how much of a threat you are to its commander. If that Bolo decides you are a threat to me, it will act. Probably before I can stop it. So have Trask, there, jot down this little note: the home-inspection provisions of the Child Protection Act do not — and never will — apply to this household. So kindly take your emaciated carcass and your large friend off the Concordiat’s property. Oh, one last thing. If you value your sorry little lives, do not attempt to snoop into the Bolo’s maintenance depot. I’d hate to have to clean up the mess if Sonny shoots you for trespassing into a Class One Alpha restricted military zone.”

The woman’s face went from paper-white to malevolent-red and her mouth opened and closed several times without sound. She finally snarled, “Trask! Please note that Mr. and Mrs. Khrustinov—”

“That’s Colonel Khrustinov, you insolent trollop!”

Kafari blanched. She’d never heard that tone in Simon’s voice.

The woman in their doorway actually recoiled a step. Then hissed, “Trask! Please note that Colonel Khrustinov and his wife maintain a lethal hazard that could kill their child at any moment—”

“Correction,” Simon snarled. “Sonny has standing orders never to fire at my wife or my child. Those orders do not apply to you. Get the hell off my front porch.”

He moved Kafari gently aside, then slammed the door and twisted the lock.

“Kafari. Take Yalena. And get your gun. Now. That lout looks stupid enough to try kicking the door in.”

She snatched Yalena and ran for the bedroom. Her daughter was whimpering, having caught the emotional whiplash from her parents and the intruders trying to force their way into the house. She heard the sound of the gun cabinet in the living room opening and closing, heard the snick of the safety on Simon’s sidearm as he prepared to do whatever became necessary. Kafari wrenched open the nightstand, shoved her thumb against the identi-plate, and clicked open the gun box inside. Kafari snatched up the pistol, barricading herself in the closet with Yalena.

“Shh,” she whispered, rocking the frightened toddler. “You’re just fine, baby.” She hummed a tune low enough to calm her daughter, without blocking the sounds from the living room. She could hear angry voices outside as the woman and her accomplice argued in strident tones. After several tense moments, she heard the snarl of a groundcar’s engine as it gunned its way down the driveway toward the street.

Simon appeared in the bedroom doorway, every muscle in his lean frame taut with battle tension. “They’re gone. For now.”

“And when they come back?” she whispered.

“They won’t come back. Not yet.”

“Not until they persuade the House of Law to pass an exception that covers us. Or get a presidential ruling from Gifre Zeloc that does the same thing. We have enough enemies to pass something like that in a heartbeat.” She added bitterly, “It might’ve been easier just to send her to their stinking daycare.”

“Liberty is never easy.”

“Yes,” she ground out between clenched teeth. “I know.”

Some of the grim tension relented. “I know you know. It’s one of the reasons I love you. You can stare something horrible in the eye and fight it to the death. And sometimes, that scares me senseless.”

He was staring, bleakly now, at Yalena, who was sitting in Kafari’s lap, playing with a strand of her hair. “Oh, Simon, what are we going to do?”

“Survive,” he said, voice harsh with strain. “And,” he added, forcing his voice into a more pleasant register, “eat breakfast. Nobody can fight a war effectively on an empty stomach.”

Kafari couldn’t help it. Her husband’s tone was so droll, his suggestion so eminently practical, tension leached out in a semihysterical bubble of laughter. “There speaks the seasoned veteran. All right, let’s go fry some eggs or something.”

He gave her a hand up and took charge of Yalena, handing over his gun — and handing her, as well, the responsibility for first-strike should those two goons decide to swing back for another go at it. Kafari slid her own gun into a capacious pocket, being careful to engage the safety first, and tucked Simon’s gun into a second pocket.

She paused long enough to call up their datanet account, where she found the notice in question. It had been sent at one-thirty a.m., a decidedly odd hour to be posting notices of this magnitude. It was short and pungent.

All parents are hereby notified that per administrative ruling 11249966-83e-1, the in-home inspections and daycare provisions mandated by the Childhood Protection Act have been expanded to cover every child on Jefferson, regardless of the employment status of the parents.

Somebody, Kafari realized with a cold chill, had been watching them. Closely enough to notice when she resigned her position at Port Abraham. Noticed and acted, with frightening speed. Had everyone else on Jefferson actually received this notice or had it been crafted especially for them, to force the issue of home inspections that POPPA clearly wanted to conduct in Simon’s quarters? Gaining access to their quarters must be high on somebody’s list of priorities. Simon’s enemies wanted either revenge or his military information, or both. In an equally plausible alternative, they might be trying to score a public relations coup by forcing the “hated foreign tyrant” to surrender custody of his child in obedience to the will of the people.

The speed at which the Santorinis engineered massive changes in public opinion continued to terrify Kafari. She printed the message and carried it into the kitchen, where Simon had already put Yalena back into the toddler seat and was busy at the stove with eggs and a frying pan.

He glanced at the message, grunted once, and shrugged. “They can try. Easy over or sunny-side up?”

Well, if Simon could set it aside for the moment, so could she. “Sunny sounds good to me.”

He smiled at the double-entendre contained in that answer. “Me, too.”

By the time she had the ham and juice ready, the worst of the shakes had gone and the cold knot of fear in her middle had begun the thaw. They had gained a breathing space, for today, at least. For now, for this morning and this meal, she was at home with her husband and her daughter. She would allow nothing to intrude deeply enough to spoil the moment. Time enough for worry, tomorrow.

She called her boss at Port Abraham, the next morning, to ask if they might still have a slot for her. Al Simmons, the port’s harried director, lit up with relief. “You want to come back? Oh, thank God! Can you start today? Can you be here in an hour?”

Kafari, startled by the urgency in her former boss’ voice, said, “I need to enroll Yalena in daycare before I can start.”

“Do it today. Please,” he added.

What in the world had been happening at the spaceport — or on Ziva Two — that had Al so frantic? She cleaned up Yalena, putting her in a rough-and-tumble jumpsuit, and drove over to the daycare center on Nineveh Base. She felt like Daniel, walking into the lion’s den. The moment she opened the door, Kafari was engulfed by the sounds of happy, shrieking children at play. It was such a normal scene, her rigid defenses wobbled slightly. The group consisted of children between the ages of six months to six years, at a glance. Kafari was greeted by a young woman in what appeared to be the daycare center’s staff uniform, a bright yellow shirt with dark green slacks and a cheery smile.

“Hello! You must be Mrs. Khrustinova. And this is Yalena?” she asked with a radiant smile for Kafari’s daughter. “What a beautiful little girl you are! How old are you, Yalena?”

“Two,” she answered solemnly.

“My, such a big girl! Would you like to play? We have all kinds of fun things for you to do.”

Yalena, eyes wide with interest, nodded.

“That’s my girl! Come on, let’s take you around to meet everybody.”

Kafari spent the next twenty minutes greeting various staff members, some of the exuberant children, and the daycare center’s director, a pleasant, motherly woman whose office was mostly glass, giving her a view of the main playroom.

“Hello, Mrs. Khrustinova, I’m Lana Hayes, the director of Nineveh Base Daycare Center. I’m a military mom,” she added with a warm smile, “with two boys off-world. My husband,” she faltered slightly, “my husband was killed in the war.”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hayes.”

“He died in combat, protecting the western side of Madison.” She brushed moisture from her eyes. “My sons were already in the military. When the call came, they volunteered to transfer to a Concordiat unit. They wanted to avenge their father, I think. It’s an unhappy reason to go to war, but they loved their father and losing him was such a blow to them. To all of us. My daughter is still here. That’s her, with the two- and three-year-olds.” She pointed to a young girl of about sixteen, who was playing with a group of toddlers.

“This,” she gestured toward the children beyond the glass, “is our way of staying busy, giving other folks a little peace of mind that their kids are in good hands. We average one staff member per six children, in Yalena’s age group, so there’s always close supervision of the little ones. The older children are a little more autonomous, but we still maintain a ratio of one staffer to ten children, just for safety’s sake.

“The beauty of this system, particuarly for the folks with lower incomes, is that it’s free of charge. Everyone on Jefferson has access to it. That means every child has an equal chance to a good future. We have plenty of educational programs for the children, as well as play spaces and activity centers.”

She handed Kafari a packet of brochures that enumerated the advantageous programs and equipment available at Nineveh Base Daycare Center. It was a nice facility, there was no denying that. Plenty of child-safe equipment for playing in groups or alone, activities ranging from art projects to simple scientific experiments in a classroom-lab setting. Good access to data terminals for the older kids. Up to three meals a day and healthy snacks on demand. Older children could take dance classes, participate in plays, learn music. It was, in short, a first-rate daycare program.

With a lot of overhead to maintain and a large number of staffers to pay, all provided at taxpayer expense. Kafari found herself wondering who was going to keep paying those salaries, in the coming years. The government couldn’t keep up that level of expenditure for every daycare center on Jefferson, not over the long haul. Not without charging for the services or making massive budget cuts elsewhere. And probably not without imposing new taxes, which POPPA had promised not to raise. Kafari couldn’t imagine anything stupider than believing POPPA could fund even half its agenda without raising taxes. Substantially so.

There was a surplus of stupid people on Jefferson.

Mrs. Hayes seemed to be a nice-enough person, but she also appeared to genuinely believe in the moral rightness of the arrangement, without the slightest concern for the cost. Kafari was betting that Mrs. Hayes did not come of Granger stock. People who made their living from the land realized that nothing in life was free, no matter how often someone insisted that it was.

She handed over a set of forms for Kafari to fill out, then took Yalena to meet some of the other children. The forms Kafari was required to fill out left her with a deep sense of foreboding. There were questions she was legally committed to answering, which violated every right-to-privacy statute on the books. Grimly, she filled them in. Most of the questions about Simon, she left blank or answered in terse phrases.

Place of birth: off-world.

Occupation: Bolo commander.

Annual salary: paid by Dinochrome Brigade.

Political affiliation: neutral, as mandated by treaty.

Religious preference: blank. She wasn’t even sure he had one. He certainly had never voiced it, if he did, and the subject had never come up. Grangers believed in freedom of worship and the right to do so unencumbered by another’s curiosity.

Educational level: blank. She had no idea what the educational level was for an officer of the Brigade. Did an officer’s training at the war college count as “education” or as “military service"? She knew that Simon was far more widely read than she was and held expertise in a surprising range of fields, but had no idea whether to put in “high school” or “college” or “advanced training” as an answer.

Description of employment: classified. She genuinely didn’t know most of what Simon did, while on Brigade business. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Virtually all of it was secret. Not even Abraham Lendan had known most of what her husband’s job required. He certainly wasn’t sharing information — or anything else — openly with Gifre Zeloc.

When Mrs. Hayes returned, she frowned over some of Kafari’s answers. “Your husband’s information is highly irregular.”

“So is his job,” Kafari said bluntly.

Mrs. Hayes blinked. “Well, yes, that’s true enough. Not a citizen, after all, and being an officer…” Whatever her train of thought, she didn’t finish it aloud. “That’s all right, my dear, we’ll just turn it in the way it is and if anyone raises questions, we’ll fill in the missing information later.”

Like hell, you will, Kafari thought, giving Mrs. Hayes a slightly wintery smile.

“Very well, I believe we’re all taken care of, here. You mentioned needing to leave for a new job?”

“Yes, at Port Abraham.”

“You were fortunate enough to find a job at the spaceport? What is it, you’ll be doing there?”

“I’m a psychotronic engineer.”

Mrs. Hayes’ eyes opened wide. “An engineer?” she asked in tones of flat surprise. “A psychotronic engineer?”

A wild desire to shock this saccharine woman took possession of her. “I did my practicum work on the Bolo.”

Her mouth fell open. “I see,” she said faintly. Mrs. Hayes was staring at her, had to make a heroic effort to marshal her scattered thoughts. “I see. You must understand, most of the mothers whose children come here are military wives. They don’t work, almost as a rule, or if they do, it’s doing fluffy sort of things, hair-dressing, fancy sewing, manicures. The usual.”

Kafari couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. Granted, she hadn’t spent a great deal of time with other military wives, mostly because her work at the spaceport had taken up so much of her time during the past three years. Simon was not really in the thick of the military social life, either. Partly, that was simply because he wasn’t in the same league as other officers, who felt uncomfortable around him. It was difficult to be completely at ease around a man who commanded the kind of firepower Sonny represented, did not fall into the ordinary chain of command, and was answerable solely to the president and the Brigade.

Simon received very few invitations to Nineveh Base social affairs.

She hadn’t realized, during her idyllic girlhood, that Brigade officers, the most heroic and legendary figures ever produced by a human military organization, were also its loneliest. As cliched as it was, they really were a breed of men apart, both figuratively and literally.

Mrs. Hayes, recovered enough composure to ask, “Will you be working on Ziva Two? Or the spaceport?”

“The port. I’m going back to the job I left about a month ago, to devote more time to Yalena. When the new legislation went through, I couldn’t justify sitting in the house all day when psychotronic engineers are needed so urgently. So I’m going back to work, this afternoon.”

“That’s very commendable of you, my dear. Such initiative and patriotism! I’m sure the girls on the staff will be delighted to hear that you’re doing your part to rebuild our lovely world.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hayes. If that’s everything, I’ll just say goodbye to Yalena and head out to the spaceport.”

“Of course. I’ll give you a brief tour, if you have time?”

Kafari nodded. “I’d like to see the facilities,” she answered with unfeigned honesty.

It was, she had to admit, everything the brochures had promised, a first-rate center with everything spotlessly clean and new. The walls were brightly painted with educational murals. There were dress-up clothes, toys appropriate to every conceivable interest, except, Kafari noted with an inward frown, anything remotely military in nature. She found that odd, considering the circumstances. These were the children of soldiers, but there wasn’t a single toy gun, a single dress-up uniform, a single warplane or toy tank anywhere to be seen. She filed the information away for future reference, already wondering at the motivation behind that omission.

Otherwise, it was satisfactory in every way. Even the kitchen was first-rate, serving healthy snacks on demand, at no cost to the children or their parents. For the older kids, datascreens and hookups into the datanet were available for after-school study or educational computer games. “We get a fair number of school-age children,” Mrs. Hayes explained, “who come here for recreation, sports, dance classes, equipment for science projects, that sort of thing. We’re trying to serve the entire community, so parents won’t have the added burden of expensive equipment at home. That can be very hard on a single-income family living on a soldier’s pay.”

Kafari nodded. That was true enough, but she was totting up the cost in her head, again. She didn’t like the answers. Aloud, she said only, “It’s a very nice facility, Mrs. Hayes. I’m sure Yalena will enjoy her time here.”

Mrs. Hayes glowed with motherly pride. “That is quite a compliment, coming from a colonel’s wife, my dear. You really should be invited to more of our social events. I’m sure the officer’s wives would enjoy meeting you.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Hayes.”

“Not at all. Not at all, my dear. Well, let’s look up Yalena, so you can be on your way.”

She found her daughter playing with a colorful puzzle, absorbed in trying to fit the pieces together in a way that made sense. “That’s a very nice puzzle, Yalena. Do you like it here?”

Her little girl smiled. “Yes!”

“I’m glad. Mommy has to go to work, sweetheart. I’ll come back in a few hours. You can play here with the toys and the other children.” She kissed her daughter’s hair and smiled when Yalena scrambled up to give her a hug.

“Bye-bye, sweetheart. I’ll see you in a little while.”

“Bye-bye.”

Her daughter was already absorbed in the puzzle again when Kafari paused in the doorway leading to the parking lot. The director’s daughter was helping her, smiling and praising Yalena’s efforts. Well, she thought on her way to the Airdart, it could’ve been a lot worse. Given the draconian wording of the letters they had received on the subject, she’d expected to find a regimented military school with children drilled into marching lockstep, responding to orders barked by a socially correct matron in uniform, wielding a bullhorn and a bullwhip as badges of office.

It was not a comforting thought to realize things might’ve been better, in the long run, if Jefferson’s children had been herded into such places. People would’ve protested sharply, maybe enough to call a halt to the madness. As it was… Only time would tell. And that was the best Kafari could do, without running for the nearest off-world ship that docked at Ziva Two. As she lifted off, flying toward Madison and the spaceport, she couldn’t help wondering if she were making a serious mistake.

I

Simon fidgeted in his chair, staring out the window from his computer terminal, trying without much success to find a way out of his dilemma. The familiar sounds of Nineveh Base — the roar of vehicles, the counted cadence and slapping feet of training marches, the distant crack of rifle fire from the practice ranges — were missing. Their absence left a strange hole in the air, filled only by silence. The unaccustomed hush distracted him.

At least Nineveh had survived POPPA’s purge, which had shut down nearly every military base world-wide. Simon had tried to persuade Gifre Zeloc that deactivating ninety percent of Jefferson’s army and air forces and closing practically every military installation on Jefferson was folly. The president’s response had been scathing in the extreme.

“It’s been five and a half years since the Deng invasion. If the Deng were going to hit us again, they’d have done it by now. And don’t try to scare me with talk about a Melconian boogeyman on the other side of the Void. The Melconians don’t give a wood rat’s ass about us. If they did, they’d have been here by now. Frankly, Colonel, nobody cares a spit about us. Not even your precious Brigade. So take your protest, stuff it someplace interesting, and let me do my job. You might try doing yours, for a change, instead of drawing a fat paycheck for sitting on your ass.”

Simon had dealt with rude officials before, but Gifre Zeloc won the prize.

Simon had not been in touch with him, since. The House of Law and Senate, naturally, had agreed with the president, exhibiting a delight that was almost obscene as they passed the legislation that officially destroyed Jefferson’s military. He’d watched in cold, disapproving silence while field artillery guns by the hundreds — including the surviving mobile Hellbores General Hightower had used to defend Madison — were mothballed in armory yards scattered across Jefferson. Vast tonnages of other equipment had been cannibalized, melted down, or diverted to civilian use, leaving nothing but reserve units and Sonny to defend Jefferson if anything did go wrong.

What remained of Jefferson’s high-tech weaponry was guarded by civilian police and from what Simon could tell, based on Sonny’s taps into various security systems in weapons bunkers and ammunition stores, an appalling amount of equipment and ammunition was quietly disappearing. The money from black-market trading was doubtless falling into the pockets of officials in charge of a security force that was literally stealing the planet blind.

And every sorry-assed bit of it was driven by POPPA’s political agenda. The party was absolutely correct when it said Jefferson couldn’t afford to pay thousands of soldiers for sitting in barracks doing nothing. The policies already enacted by Vittori Santorini’s elected minions were bankrupting Jefferson’s government at a dizzying pace. The subsistence program alone couldn’t be sustained, not even if it remained at its present enrollment, which it wouldn’t do. Every new environmental regulation passed into law tightened the choke-hold on Jefferson’s failing industries. Every new round of layoffs swelled the ranks of the unemployed forced to rely on subsistence payments. It was a downward spiral that was already out of control.

Since something had to be cut to pay for it, POPPA had chosen to close the military bases and disperse thousands of soldiers and their families back into the civilian population. It looked, on the surface, like a massive savings, which was exactly what POPPA was claiming. Unfortunately, that claim was a lie. Fewer than ten percent of the soldiers cut adrift had been able to find jobs. So they’d signed up for public subsistence allowances, which were — by Simon’s calculation — costing the taxpayers twenty-eight percent more than it had cost to keep those soldiers on active military duty.

But subsistence payments were essentially invisible, wrapped into the already enormous expenditures for food and housing, while the cost of maintaining the bases and the soldiers was highly visible. Gifre Zeloc could point with pride to the millions saved by closing the bases, without ever needing to admit that the tax drain was now far worse. That kind of sleight-of-hand was POPPA’s stock in trade.

When POPPA’s upper echelons finally realized how much red ink they were bleeding — and how much more they would bleed as time marched inexorably forward — they would be forced to make cuts in the subsidy payments. And with millions of people accustomed to and dependent upon a free ride, there could be only one possible outcome.

Utter disaster.

Which brought his thoughts inexorably to Nineveh Base and the reason for its reprieve. It was being turned into a police academy. Not just any police, either, but an elite new unit of federal officers. Five thousand of them, to be exact, drawn from the ranks of POPPA’s most loyal supporters. They would constitute a “politically safe” cadre of men and women who could be ordered to do pretty much anything and be relied upon to see that it was done. Vittori Santorini understood exactly how fanatical devotion to a cause could be harnessed and put to work.

Simon had gained access to the dossiers of the officers chosen for training, as well as the profiles of the new instructors. The first red-flag warning that had jumped out at him, setting Simon’s teeth on edge, was the family history section of those dossiers. Not one of the five thousand officers was married. Not one had children from extramarital relationships. They had no close family ties to anyone. No particular reason for loyalty to anyone or anything but POPPA and its ideology. He didn’t like the pattern that was forming. Didn’t like the training program outlined. Didn’t like the implications about POPPA’s future plans. Frankly, in fact, the whole thing scared him pissless.

More disturbing — downright chilling, in fact — was the total lack of news reports on what was happening at Nineveh Base. Whatever POPPA was up to, they were being mighty secretive about it. And he genuinely hated the fact that his wife and daughter would be sharing the base with the kind of people about to become their new neighbors.

He and Kafari had quarreled again, last night. She still refused to leave Jefferson. He could tell she was scared, as scared as he was. Any sane person would have been. The damage being wrought was so insidious, so smoothly presented, so glibly rationalized, so skillfully obscured by flashy political rallies and spectacular public entertainment, it was difficult for the average person to realize just how much manipulation was occurring, much of it artfully subtle. POPPA was conducting the seizure of power with the same skillful distraction tactics employed by really talented pickpockets. The analogy was apt, since most Jeffersonians didn’t even realize they were being robbed.

Simon had been duty-bound to file reports with Sector Command, but the likelihood that Sector would interfere was as remote as the likelihood that POPPA would voluntarily relinquish its increasingly strong grip. Sector had more serious fish to fry. The war front had shifted away from Jefferson, but only because there were no longer any human worlds beyond the Void in need of protection.

That there were no Deng worlds nearby, either, was of scant comfort. The three-way war had eradicated the populations of some seventeen star systems that were now vacant property. Much of that real estate had been burned to radioactive cinders, something Simon knew entirely too much about, first-hand. The Melconians weren’t taking advantage of the situation, either, apparently because the fighting was so fierce elsewhere, they couldn’t commit the resources necessary to move in with their colonies. Apparently, the Deng were fighting a losing battle just to hang onto their inner worlds.

Things were grim when one counted blessings in such negative terms.

That thought brought his gaze back to his computer, where the message he had been expecting had finally appeared. It had taken POPPA’s leadership five and a half years to gain the nerve to take the step represented by that message, but they’d finally put together the same information Simon had about the shifting battle front beyond the Silurian Void. They had acted within hours of the realization that the war was no longer in their back yard.

Gifre Zeloc’s message was short and to the point: “Deactivate your Bolo. Now.”

Simon had no choice. That fact rankled bitterly. There was no possible justification he could offer for defying that order. He would not, however, obey it until Kafari had returned home. Sonny was a friend. An uneasy friend, with whom very few people could ever relax, but a friend nonetheless. For Simon, it was different. Shared experience of combat changed a man, changed the way he felt about a battle partner whose guns and war hull stood between his frail human self and the world-shaking roar of modern fields of slaughter. When death set the very wind ablaze, when life hung on the spider-silk thread of electronic reflexes, a man’s fear of his Bolo burned to ash and scattered itself across the stars. What replaced it…

He was going to miss Sonny more than he had ever dreamed possible.

“Simon,” the familiar voice jolted him out of his complex misery, “Kafari is on final approach. Her aircar will land at Yalena’s daycare center in two minutes.”

“Thanks,” he said, voice stricken with emotion that choked the sound down to a whisper.

“I will only be sleeping,” the Bolo said, his own voice strangely hushed.

In that single, excruciating moment, Simon wanted to put both arms around his friend and just hang onto him, for a moment or a lifetime. His arms were too small to hold the immensity of his feelings, let alone the vast and poignant honesty that was his friend. His only friend, besides Kafari. He closed his eyes against the pain, wishing for a moment that he could pour out the misery like last night’s bath water, leaving himself empty and at peace.

“I know,” he managed, inadequately.

He was still sitting there, eyes closed, when Kafari opened the door, bringing their child home from the Nineveh Base daycare center, which was closing as of next week. Simon was not looking forward to the evening, with its own battles to be fought. To say that he hated Yalena’s daycare center was on a par with saying the Deng were irritating. What that daycare center was doing to Yalena would have constituted criminal abuse on most worlds. What would happen when she started school… Worst of all, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, short of forcing his wife and child onto the next freighter bound for Vishnu.

He wasn’t sure he could cope, tonight, with the hellion that his daughter had become. She was already shrieking at her mother.

“I wanna go back to play with my friends!”

The scathing emphasis on that final word demonstrated with piercing intensity that Yalena did not place her parents in that category. It appalled Simon that a five-year-old child could condense that much hatred in a single, simple word.

“You’ll see your friends tomorrow, Yalena.”

“I wanna see them now!”

“You can’t have everything you want, Yalena.”

“Oh, yes I can,” she hissed. “The law says so!”

That brought Simon out of his chair. “Yalena!”

She whipped around, rage contorting a face that should have been pretty. “Don’t shout at me! You’re not allowed to shout at me! If you shout at me again, I’ll tell Miss Finch how horrible you are! Then they’ll put you in jail!”

She ran into her room — the size of which was federally mandated — and slammed the door so hard photographs on the wall jumped on their nails. The bolt-lock — also federally mandated — slammed into place with an audible snap. Kafari burst into tears. Simon didn’t dare move for long, dangerous moments, aware with every atom in his body that if he took a single step in any direction, he wouldn’t be able to contain the violence of his emotions. Or the actions that would follow.

Doing any of the things he needed to do — kicking down the door, warming Yalena’s backside, shaking sense into her — would only precipitate disaster. And play right into the hands of Vittori Santorini and his minions. They were itching for an excuse to invade Simon’s house and finish destroying his little family. If he laid so much as a finger on his child, the resultant feeding frenzy would culminate in POPPA seizing Yalena to “safeguard” her from violent and dangerous parents and give them grounds to demand that the Concordiat cashier and expel him from Jefferson. It was a measure of his anger — and his dark foreboding about the future — that any excuse for leaving Jefferson was attractive.

Kafari, voice breaking with misery, said, “She didn’t really mean it, Simon.”

“Oh, yes, she did.” His voice came out flat and full of sand.

“She doesn’t understand—”

“She understands too well,” he bit out. “She understands so much, we’re naked over a barrel and she knows it. And it’s going to get worse. A lot worse.”

Kafari bit her lower lip. Her glance at Yalena’s bedroom door was full of misery and failure. “If we could just pull her out of daycare…”

“The only way to do that is to leave.” He didn’t need to add, And you won’t do that. They’d already fought that fight, more than once. His voice came out weary and bitter. “Kafari, you have no idea how much worse things are about to get. I’ve been ordered to shut Sonny down. Without him, I can’t possibly stay on top of what POPPA is planning and they know it. I can only see what they’re doing through his taps into security cameras. I can’t read fast enough to scan the entire datanet, much less track what’s on the computers connected to it. I can’t hear what’s being said through telephones, wireless voice transmissions, or computer microphones, not without Sonny. The minute he goes into inactive standby, I lose all of that.

“I’m the only check-and-balance still operating on this world and that’s changing, as of today. I can’t interfere unless I have direct evidence of activity that violates the treaty with the Concordiat. I can’t provide evidence if I don’t have the technical ability to look for it.”

She sat down abruptly, eyes glazed as the shock of it settled in. “You can’t refuse?”

“No.”

She lifted a stricken gaze to meet his. “I’m so sorry, Simon. It must be like losing your best friend.”

Her words took him completely by surprise. Quite suddenly his eyes stung. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. He blinked rapidly a few times. Said in a low voice, “You know I love you more than life, Kafari. But Sonny was with me…”

“I know,” she said in a whisper, when he couldn’t finish.

He just nodded. It was impossible to convey what combat was like to anyone who hadn’t been through it. Kafari had. She knew. Understood the reason for his rough silence. She hadn’t been on Etaine; but then he hadn’t been through combat between a Bolo and Yavacs without a Bolo’s warhull between him and the enemy. It was a different way of experiencing war, a different kind of terror, but the damage to the soul was the same. So was the deeper understanding that sometimes, the horror and shock if it were utterly necessary.

That she realized this, that she understood what it was doing to him, to lose the one companion who knew what had happened on that far-away world, left him humbled. She had chosen to love and live with him. And now… Jaw muscles tightened down against bone. Now they had new problems. New fears. A new kind of battle. And an enemy that twisted reality around to suit its aims and poisoned innocent minds to accomplish them. POPPA was on the verge of shattering everything that was — or had been — good and beautiful about this world. The question that slipped into his mind like silent misery had no answer that Simon could find.

What are we going to do?

He was a soldier. An officer. There was only one thing to do. Sometimes, duty was a bitch.

II

Yalena hated school.

She hadn’t wanted to leave the nursery class on Nineveh Base. She had loved playing with other children whose parents were soldiers, too. But there weren’t any soldiers any more, just police who didn’t have children, and she was old enough, at six, to have to go to a real school in Madison.

“There’ll be all kinds of wonderful things to do and learn,” her mother had told her, the first day.

Her mother was right. There were wonderful, fun things to do and learn. But only for other kids. Yalena didn’t get to do any of them. And everybody hated her. It had started the first, horrible day, when Mrs. Gould, the kindergarten teacher, called out everybody’s name and made them stand up and tell the class who they were and who their parents were.

“Yalena Khrustinova,” Mrs. Gould had said, with something in her voice that made Yalena’s flesh creep, like the teacher had said a naughty word or maybe stepped in something smelly.

She stood up, slowly, while everybody stared. She didn’t know any of the other kids. When the soldiers had left Nineveh Base, they’d all gone home and none of them had lived in Madison. Not this part, anyway. So she stood there, with everybody looking at her, and said in a shaky little voice. “My mommy is Kafari Khrustinova. She works at the spaceport. She makes computers do things. My daddy is Simon Khrustinov. He’s a soldier.”

“What kind of soldier?” Mrs. Gould asked, staring down at her through narrow little eyes like a lizard’s.

“He talks to the Bolo. And tells it to shoot its guns.”

“Did all of you hear that?” the teacher asked. “Yalena’s father is responsible for telling a huge, dangerous machine to shoot people. That machine shot millions and millions of people on a world far away from here. Does anyone know how many people it takes to make a million? There are ten million people on our whole planet. Seventeen million people died, on that other world. To kill seventeen million people, that machine would have to kill every man, every woman, and every baby on Jefferson. And then it would have to kill almost that many more. The Bolo is a terrible, evil machine. And Yalena’s father tells it to kill.”

“B-but—” she tried to say.

Mrs. Gould slammed both fists on her desk. “Don’t you dare talk back to me! Sit down this instant! No recess for a week!”

Yalena sat down. Her knees were shaking. Her eyes were hot.

Somebody hissed, “Lookit the crybaby!” and the whole class started jeering and laughing at her. That was the first day. Every day since then had been worse. A whole year of horrible, awful, worse days. During class, everything she said was wrong. Even if somebody else said the same thing, somehow it was wrong when she said it. If she tried not to talk at all, Mrs. Gould made her stand in a corner all by herself, for being secretive, dangerous, and sly.

Every morning, when her mother dropped her off for school, Yalena threw up in the bushes outside. At lunch, nobody would sit near her. At recess… The teachers wouldn’t let anybody actually hurt her, not badly enough to need the school nurse, but she usually came back into class with scraped knees, bruised shins, or mud in her hair. She hated recess more than she hated any other part of school.

And now it was time to start all over, again. The first day of first grade. And all the same kids who hated her and tripped her and shoved her off the swings and threw mudballs at the back of her head and spilled paint on her favorite clothes…

The only things that were different were the room and the teacher.

The room, at least, was nothing like Mrs. Gould’s kindergarten. The walls were a sunny yellow that lifted the spirits, just walking in through the door. There were wonderful pictures everywhere, pictures of places and animals and things Yalena wasn’t even sure had names, let alone what they might be used for. There were other pictures, too, that somebody had painted, rather than photographs of things, and they were all as sunny and cheerful as the yellow walls. It was a room Yalena wanted to love, at first sight, a room that made her want to cry, because she was going to spend a whole year being miserable and alone in it.

She wanted to sit in the farthest corner in the back, but there were cards folded like tents on each desk, with names on them. Yalena was the first person to arrive, not because she wanted to be there early, but because it would be less awful to sit down in a nearly empty room and watch everyone come in than it would be to arrive in a room full of people who hated her, glaring with every step she took trying to get to her desk. She looked at each desk and finally found her name, in the middle of the room.

It said Yalena.

But not Khrustinova. Nobody’s card had a last name on it. There were three Ann name cards, but they didn’t have last names, either, just Ann with a single initial: Ann T., Ann J., and Ann W. That was definitely different from Mrs. Gould’s class, where the boys were “Mr. Timmons” and “Mr. Johansen” and the girls were “Miss Miles” and “Miss Khrustinova,” which always came out sounding like somebody gargling with vinegar.

There was no sign of a teacher anywhere.

Puzzled by that strangeness, Yalena made her way to her new desk, carrying her book bag like a magic shield that would guard her until she was forced to put it down to start studying. Classmates she remembered arrived in noisy clusters, laughing and talking about things they had done together over the summer. Yalena had spent the summer on Nineveh Base with her father. It had not had been a fun summer. They had gone to some interesting places, like the museum in Madison and her grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ farm and fishing in lakes up in the mountains, a few times, but she didn’t like the farms very much. They were hot and smelled strange and the animals on them were huge and didn’t like little girls poking at them.

Nobody from school had called her to ask if she wanted to come over for a pool party or a sleep-over or anything else. So she had stayed in her room, mostly, reading her books and playing on the computer, which didn’t care who your father was or whether your mother was a jomo or any of the other reasons kids found to hate her. It was difficult, watching the others come into the classroom, laughing and having a wonderful time, and harder to watch them give her sneering looks and scoot their chairs as far away from hers as possible.

She opened her book bag and pretended to read the first-grade primer her father had bought for her, along with all her supplies. She was still pretending when a very pretty woman in the prettiest dress Yalena had ever seen sailed into the classroom, with a smile as bright as sunlight and a scent like the summer roses on her grandmother’s front porch, which was the only spot on the whole farm Yalena thought was pretty.

“Bon jour, bon jour, ma petites,” she said in a language Yalena had never heard, then she laughed and said in perfectly ordinary words, “Good morning my little ones, how lovely to see everyone!”

She sat down on the edge of the desk at the front of the room, rather than in the chair or standing over them like somebody’s mean dog. “I am Cadence Peverell, your teacher. I want everyone to call me Cadence. Does anyone know what Cadence means?”

Nobody did.

“A ‘cadence’ is a rhythm, like when you clap your hands and sing.” She clapped and sang a little song, also in words that Yalena couldn’t understand, although nobody else seemed to, either. Then Miss Peverell laughed. “That is a French song, of course, with French words, because a long time ago, my ancestors were French, back on Terra where humanity was born. Everyone’s name means something. Did you know that?”

Yalena certainly didn’t. Other kids were shaking their heads, too.

“Ah, but you shall see! Douglas,” she said, looking at a boy in the front row, “your name means ‘the boy who lives by the dark stream.’ And Wendell,” she pointed to a long, lanky boy who had spent kindergarten trying to climb over the play-yard fences, “means someone who wanders.”

Laughter broke out as Wendell grinned.

“And Frieda,” she addressed a girl in the back row, “means ‘peaceful.’ But you know,” the teacher said with a sound like warm butter and a gentle smile, “there is one name in this classroom that is the loveliest name I have ever heard.”

Miss Peverell was looking right at Yalena.

“Do you know what your name means, Yalena?”

The entire classroom went utterly silent.

She shook her head, waiting for the teacher to say something horrible.

“Yalena,” Miss Peverell said, “is a Russian name. It’s the Russian way of saying the name ‘Helen’ and that name means ‘light.’ Beautiful, clear light, like the sun in the sky.”

The silence continued. Yalena was staring at her teacher, confused and so scared she wanted to start crying. And strangely, the teacher seemed to understand. She slid down off the desk, crouched down at the end of the aisle, and said, “Would you come to see me, Yalena?”

She was holding out both arms, like she really wanted to give Yalena a hug.

Yalena stood up slowly, having to put down the book bag that was her only shield. She couldn’t walk very fast. Miss Peverell smiled at her, with warm encouragement, then did, in fact, give her a warm and wonderful hug.

“There, now, let’s sit on the desk together.”

She picked Yalena up, perched on the edge of the desk again, held Yalena on her knees, with one arm around her. “You children are so lucky to have Yalena in the class with you.”

Everybody was staring, mouths open.

“Yalena is a very brave little girl. It is not easy to be the daughter of a soldier.”

Yalena went rigid, knowing that it was coming.

Miss Peverell brushed her hair back from her face, gently. “Every day, a soldier may have to go and fight a war. It can be very hard, very scary, to be a soldier or a soldier’s child. And every day, when Yalena goes home, there is a huge machine in her back yard, a very dangerous machine.”

Yalena wanted to crawl away and hide…

“Now this machine, this Bolo, can do very good things, too. It made the Deng go away, many years ago, before you were even born. And that was a very good thing, indeed. But these machines, they are alive, in a way, and it is no easy thing to live in a house with a machine that is alive, waiting in case a war starts. Every day, Yalena is brave enough to go home and trust that the machine won’t have to fight a war, that night. I think that is the bravest thing I have ever seen a little girl do.”

The other girls in the class were looking at one another. Some of them looked angry, as if they wanted to be braver than the horrible killer’s daughter. Others looked surprised and others looked interested. Even the boys looked surprised and interested.

“There is something else I want to say to everyone,” Miss Peverell said, still holding Yalena. “Does everyone know what POPPA is? No? Ah, POPPA is a group of people, just like you, just like me, who believe that everyone should be treated just the same way, so that no one has to be poor or have people hurt them or be hated for things that aren’t their fault. This is one of the most important things POPPA teaches us. Everyone has the right to be treated well, to be respected.”

Miss Peverell looked very sad as she said, “A child who does not respect other children is a bully and that is a very bad thing to be. POPPA wants all children to be happy and healthy and have a wonderful time, both at home and at school. It’s very hard to have a wonderful time at home, when you have a machine like that in your back yard and you never know what it’s going to do and maybe your daddy will have to go away and fight a war and you might never see him again. Soldiers are very brave and Yalena’s father is one of the bravest soldiers on our whole world.

“But it is very hard to be happy when you’re afraid that a war might come. So it is most important that Yalena is happy when she comes to school. POPPA wants all of us to be nice to everyone. POPPA wants all of us to be happy. POPPA wants all of us to treat each other with kindness. I know that all of you are good children who want to do these important things and help others do them, too. So I’m very happy that all of you have the chance to make Yalena feel special and happy and welcome, every day.”

Yalena started to cry, but nobody called her a crybaby this time. Miss Peverell kissed her hair and said, “Welcome to my class, Yalena. All right, you can go back to your seat now.”

The rest of the morning was strange and wonderful. Nobody quite had the nerve to talk to her at recess, but everyone stared and whispered when Miss Peverell came over to where Yalena was sitting by herself and started teaching her the song she’d sung at the beginning of the class. It was a pretty song, a cheerful song, even if Yalena didn’t know what the words meant. By the end of recess, Yalena knew every word by heart and Miss Peverell had taught her what the words meant, too. It was a wonderful song, about growing oats and peas and barley and beans and it was all about farmers who sang and danced and played all day and all night, without ever doing any work at all, while the oats and things grew green in the sunlight. And at lunch, nobody left an empty seat between themselves and Yalena.

She went home that night almost happy. She was afraid to hope, but the day she had dreaded all summer had been wonderful, instead. A magical day. She was terrified that it would all end the next day, but it didn’t. It was just as good the day after that and the next one, too. At recess on the last day of the week, one of the shy girls in her class, who didn’t play a lot of games with anybody else, came over to where Yalena was swinging. For a long moment, Yalena expected her to push her off the swing or say something nasty.

Then she smiled. “Hi. My name’s Ami-Lynn.”

“Hello.”

“Would you teach me that song? The one in French? It’s awfully pretty.”

Yalena’s eyes widened. For a minute, she couldn’t say anything. Then she smiled. “Yes, I’d love to teach you.”

Ami-Lynn’s eyes started shining like stars. “Thank you!”

They spent the whole recess singing the funny, wonderful words. Ami-Lynn had a pretty voice, but she had so much trouble saying the words, they both started giggling and couldn’t stop, even when the bell rang and the teachers called them inside. Miss Peverell, who insisted that everyone call her Cadence, just as though she were their best friend, not a stuffy teacher, saw them and smiled.

That was the day Yalena started to love school.

And when she went to bed that night, she hugged herself for joy and whispered, “Thank you, POPPA! Thank you for bringing me a friend!” She didn’t know who or what, exactly, POPPA was, except that it must be full of very wonderful people, if they cared enough to want her to be so happy. She knew her parents didn’t like POPPA very much, because she’d heard them say so, when talking to each other. I don’t care what they think, she told herself fiercely. Ami-Lynn likes me. Cadence likes me. POPPA likes me. And I don’t care about anything or anybody else!

She was finally happy. And nobody — not even her parents — was ever going to take that away from her again.

III

“I won’t go!”

“Yes,” Kafari said through gritted teeth, “you will.”

“It’s my birthday! I want to spend it with my friends!”

Give me patience… “You see your friends every day. Your grandparents and great-grandparents haven’t seen you in a year. So get into the aircar right now or you will be grounded for the next full week.”

Her daughter glared at her. “You wouldn’t dare!”

“Oh, yes I would. Or have you forgotten what happened when you refused to leave the school playground last month?”

The amount of malevolence a ten-year-old could fling across a room would, if properly harnessed, run a steam-powered electrical generating plant for a month of nonstop operation. When they’d locked wills over the playground, Yalena had threatened dire vengeance, but had discovered to her consternation that when Kafari said “do it or you lose datachat privileges for a week” you either did it, or you didn’t talk to your friends outside of school for seven days.

Yalena, who should have been pretty in her frilly birthday dress and fancy glow-spark shoes, contrived to look like an enraged rhinoceros about to charge an ogre. Kafari, cast in the part of the ogre, pointed imperiously to the front door.

Her daughter, stiff with outrage and hatred, stalked past her, pointedly slamming the door into the wall on her way out. Kafari pulled it closed, setting the voice-print lock that would, with any luck, deter their nearest neighbors from helping themselves to the contents of their home — the so-called “POPPA Squads” training on Nineveh Base had the lightest and stickiest fingers Kafari had ever seen — then followed her offspring out to the landing pad. Simon was already strapping her into the back seat of the aircar.

“I hate you,” she growled at her father.

“The feeling,” her father growled right back, “is mutual.”

“You can’t hate me! It’s not allowed!”

“Young lady,” Simon told her in an icy tone of voice, “the right to detest someone is a sword that cuts both ways. You have the manners of an illiterate fishwife. And if you don’t want to spend the next year without datachat privileges, you will speak in a civil tone and use polite language. The choice is entirely up to you.”

Lightning seethed in Yalena’s eyes, but she kept her acid tongue silent. She had learned, after losing several key battles, that when her father spoke to her in that particular tone, discretion was by far the wiser choice. Kafari took her seat and fastened her harness in place. Simon did the same, then touched controls and lifted into the cloudless sky. It was a beautiful day, with honey pouring across the rose-toned shoulders of the Damisi Mountains, to spill its way down across the Adero floodplain in golden ripples. The flight was a silent one, with only the rush of wind past the aircar’s canopy to break the chill.

The crowding elbows of Maze Gap flashed past, then they were headed down Klameth Canyon, following the twisting route to Chakula Ranch, which her parents had finally managed to rebuild. The house was in a different place, but the ponds were functional again and the Malinese miners were buying pearls by the hundred-weight, as the war had sent Mali’s economy into a boom that apparently had no end in sight. Jefferson, on the other hand…

Some things, Kafari didn’t want to think about too deeply.

The ruination of Jefferson’s economy was one of them.

Simon brought them down in a neat and skilled landing, killing the engine and popping the hatches. Kafari unhooked herself and waited while Yalena ripped loose the catches on her own harness. She slammed her way out of the aircar and glared at the crowd of grandparents, aunt, uncles, and cousins who’d streamed across the yard to greet her. She wrinkled her nose and curled her upper lip.

“Ew, it stinks. Like pigs crapped everywhere.” She was glaring, not at the farm buildings, but directly at her relatives.

“Yalena!” Simon glowered. “That is not language fit for polite company. Do it again and you’ll lose a solid month of chat.”

Smiles of welcome had frozen in place. Kafari clenched her teeth and said, “Yalena, say hello to your family. Politely.”

A swift glare of defiance shifted into sullen disgust. “Hello,” she muttered.

Kafari’s mother, expression stricken with uncertainty and dismay, said, “Happy Birthday, Yalena. We’re very glad you could be with us, today.”

“I’m not!”

“Well, child,” Kafari’s father said with a jovial grin that managed to convey a rather feral threat, “you’re more than welcome to walk home again. Of course, it might take you quite a while, in those shoes.”

Yalena’s mouth fell open. “Walk? All the way to Nineveh? Are you like totally stupid?”

“No, but you’re totally rude.” He brushed past his grandchild to give Kafari a warm hug. “It’s good to see you, honey.” She didn’t miss the emphasis. From the look on Yalena’s face, neither had she. Kafari knew a moment of stinging guilt. Her father clasped Simon’s hand, shaking it firmly. “Don’t see enough of you, son. Come and see us more often.”

“I may just do that,” Simon said quietly.

“You can leave that,” he gestured dismissively at his gaping granddaughter, “where you found it, unless it learns to speak with a little more respect. Come inside, folks, come inside, there’s plenty of time to catch up on the news without standing out here all day.”

He drew Kafari’s arm through his, smiling down at her, and literally ignored his granddaughter, whose special day this was supposed to be. Kafari’s eyes stung with swift tears as guilt and remorse tore through her heart, witnessing the confused hurt in her daughter’s eyes. Yalena was just a child. A beautiful and intelligent little girl, who had no real chance against the determined, incessant onslaught of propaganda hurled at her by teachers, entertainers, and so-called news reporters who wouldn’t have known how to report honestly if their immortal souls had depended on it.

She and Simon had tried to undo the ongoing damage. Had tried again and again. Were still trying. And nothing worked. Nothing. Nor would it, not when every other significant adult in her life was telling her — over and over — that she could demand anything and get it; that she could rat out her parents or anyone else for an entire laundry list of suspicious behaviors or beliefs and be rewarded lavishly; and that she held an inalienable right to do whatever she chose, whenever she chose and somebody else would dutifully have to pay for it. Kafari knew only too well that Yalena received extra social conditioning simply because she was their child. It suited POPPA to plant a snake inside their home, to use as a threat and a spy, and it enraged Kafari endlessly that they did so without a single moment’s remorse over the damage they inflicted daily on a little girl.

Kafari’s father gave her arm a gentle squeeze and a slight shake of his head, trying to convey without words that none of this mess was her fault. It helped. A little. She was grateful for that much. She glanced back long enough to reassure herself that Simon was keeping an eye on their daughter, who was glaring at her cousins. They regarded her with cold hostility and open disgust. That the feelings were mutual was painfully obvious. Her mother, who had coped with more heartaches that Kafari would ever be able to claim, waded in like a soldier going into battle, taking charge of the ghastly situation with brisk efficiency.

“Everybody goes to the house. Come on, you mangy lot, there’s punch and cookies waiting and plenty of games to play before lunch.”

Yalena stalked with regal disdain past her cousins, as though wading through a pile of something putrid. Her cousins, falling in behind her, lost no time in mocking the birthday girl behind her back, pointing their noses at the sky, marching with exaggerated mimicry. If Yalena turned around, she’d get a nice dose of unpleasant reality. If Kafari knew her nieces and nephews, Yalena would get several doses of reality before it was time to leave, all of them painful.

Watching the ugly dynamics, Kafari hated POPPA with a violence that scared her. The sole comfort she derived from the situation was the realization that POPPA wasn’t succeeding in totally indoctrinating all of Jefferson’s children. Yalena’s cousins might be trapped in a POPPA-run school all day, but living — and working — on a farm provided its own strong and daily antidote to idiocy. When it came to milking cows, gathering eggs from nest boxes, or any of the thousand other chores necessary to keeping a farm operational, platitudes like “no child should be forced to do anything he or she doesn’t want to do” earned exactly what they merited: derisive contempt.

If you didn’t milk a cow, pretty soon you had no milk. And if you weren’t careful, no cow, either. There was literally nothing in Yalena’s world to give her that kind of perspective. Kafari thought seriously about turning Yalena over to her parents this summer. If not for Simon’s position, she’d have plunked Yalena down on the farm already, come hell or high water.

Kafari’s father, reading much of what was in her heart, murmured, “Hold onto your hope, Kafari. And do what you can to let her know you care. One of these days she’ll wake up and that will mean something to her.”

Kafari stumbled on the way up the porch steps. “Thanks,” she managed, blinking hard.

He squeezed her arm gently, then they were inside and people were swarming past, most of them jabbering excitedly, with the little ones swirling around their ankles like the tide coming in at Merton Beach. Kafari snagged punch and cookies and handed a cup and plate to Yalena while dredging up the best smile she could muster. Yalena, scowling in deep suspicion, sniffed the punch, pulled a face, then condescended to taste it. She shrugged, as though indifferent, but drank every bit as much as her exuberant cousins. She fought for her share of the cookies, too, which were piled high and dusted with sugar, or smeared with frosting of various flavors, or drenched in a honey-and-nut coating that Kafari had forgotten tasted so heavenly. Simon went for the honey-nut ones too, managing a brilliant smile for Kafari as he snagged seconds.

Yalena’s cousin Anastasia, who was only six months younger than Yalena, took the bull by the horns, as it were, and walked up to stare at her older cousin. “That’s a nice dress,” she said, in the manner of someone who will be polite no matter the personal cost. “Where did you find it?”

“Madison,” Yalena answered with withering disdain.

“Huh. In that case, you paid too much for it.”

Yalena’s mouth fell open. Anastasia grinned, then said in a cuttingly impolite tone, “Those shoes are the stupidest things I’ve ever seen. You couldn’t outrun a hog in those things, let alone a jaglitch.”

“And why,” Yalena demanded in a scathing tone that bent the steel window frames, “would I want to outrun a jaglitch?”

“So it wouldn’t eat you, stupid.”

Anastasia rolled her eyes and simply stalked off. Her cousins, watching with preternatural interest, erupted into howling laughter. Yalena went red. Then white. Her fists tightened down, crunching the cookie in one hand and squashing the paper cup of punch in the other. Then her chin went up, in a heartbreaking mimicry of a gesture that Kafari knew only too well, in herself.

“Enough!” Kafari’s mother snapped, eyes crackling with dangerous anger. “I will not condone nasty manners in this house. Do I make myself clear? Yalena isn’t used to living where wild predators can snatch a grown man, let alone a child. Conduct yourselves with courtesy and respect. Or do you like living down to city standards?”

Silence fell, chilly and sullen.

Yalena, alone in the center of the room, stared from one to another of her cousins. Her chin quivered just once. Then she said coldly, “Don’t bother to try. I didn’t expect anything better of pig farmers.” She stalked out of the room, slamming doors on her way to somewhere — anywhere — else. When Kafari moved to follow, her father’s hand tightened down around her arm.

“No, let her go. That’s a young’un who needs to be alone for a few minutes. Minau, why don’t you follow her — discreetly — and make sure she doesn’t wander too far? It’s springtime and there are jaglitch out there, looking for a snack.”

Kafari started to shake. Simon wiped sweat off his forehead and gulped an entire cupful of punch as though wishing for something considerably stronger. Aunt Min just nodded, heading through the same door Yalena had taken during her exodus. Kafari leaned back into the couch cushions as a feeling of momentary relief settled across her. She had forgotten what it was like, having other capable adults around to share the burden of childcare. Anastasia, attempting to regain Iva Camar’s good graces, was busy cleaning up the spilled punch and cookie crumbs. Kafari’s mother ruffled the girl’s hair, then sat down beside Kafari on the sofa, speaking low enough the sound reached only her ears.

“You didn’t say how bad it was, honey.”

Kafari shook her head. “Would you have believed me?”

A sigh gusted loose. “No. I don’t think I realized just how serious things are in town, these days.”

Simon joined them on the couch. “It’s worse than that,” he nodded toward the door Yalena and Aunt Min had disappeared through. “Much worse, I’m afraid. Unlike these kids,” he nodded toward Yalena’s cousins, the younger ones entertaining themselves while the older ones listened intently to the adult discussion underway, “Yalena spends her after-school hours involved in town-style activities. Things like the Eco-Action Club, the Equality for Infants Discussion Group — no, I’m not making that up, I swear to God — and the ever-popular Children’s Rights Research Society, which spends its time studying bogus sociological hogwash churned out by Alva Mahault, the new Chair of Sociological Studies at Riverside University. Then they dream up new schemes to implement the sociology research’s ‘facts’ in ways beneficial to legal minors. This involves, for the most part, suggesting things like mandatory vacations off-world for every child, to be paid for by taxes, naturally, mandatory personal allowances and federal requirements for providing in-home snacks for every child. The ‘best’ ideas are presented to the Senate and House of Law for consideration as new legislation, most of which is immediately hailed as groundbreaking social brilliance and passed into law.”

Shocked silence greeted his bitter assessment. Kafari’s father spoke in a thoughtful, droll tone, “You have a gift, Simon, for stating things with great clarity. Ever think of running for president?”

Someone chuckled and the ghastly tension in the room ebbed away, allowing an abrupt and lively discussion about the best ways to counter such arrant nonsense. Kafari, who worked ten-hour days in a spaceport populated largely by rabid believers in anything and everything POPPA suggested, found it both refreshing and marvelously relaxing to listen to intelligent people who understood the basic way in which the universe works and weren’t afraid — yet — to say so. She was content, for now, to simply listen and bask in the warmth of feeling completely at home for the first time in many long months. When she drained the last of the punch from her cup, she caught Simon’s eye and nodded toward the door Yalena had gone through. She indicated with a gesture that he should remain where he was, then went in search of her daughter.

She found Aunt Min on the back porch, seated in a rocking chair, with a hunting rifle laid comfortably across her lap. Her aunt nodded past the well house. Kafari’s parents had installed a big bench-style swing that hung from the spreading branches of a genuine Terran oak. Kafari remembered the tree, which had supported a swing of one kind or another for as long as she could remember. In her childhood, it had been a big tractor tire. Kafari suspected her parents enjoyed the bench swing, particularly on warm summer evenings. Yalena was sitting on one end of the swing, staring across the nearest of the ponds, chin resting on tucked-up knees, swinging slowly by herself.

“She’s not having a very happy birthday,” Kafari said, sighing and keeping her voice low.

“No,” Aunt Min agreed, “but that’s largely her own doing.”

“I know. But it’s hard to see her hurting, like that, all the same. I wish…” She didn’t finish the thought. Wishes were for children. Kafari had reality to cope with, one agonizing day at a time. She stepped off the porch, heading for the swing. “Mind if I join you?” she asked, keeping her voice easy and casual.

Yalena shrugged.

Kafari perched on the other end. “Your cousins were very rude.”

Yalena looked up, surprise coloring her eyes, which were so achingly like Simon’s, it hurt, sometimes, looking into them. “Yes,” she said, voice quavering a little. “They were.”

Kafari held her peace for three or four more swings, then said, “You were very brave, in there. I was really proud of you, Yalena. You do realize, of course,” she smiled wryly, “that you missed a chance to demonstrate better manners than they have? But it took guts to stand up to them that way.”

Quick tears shone in her daughter’s eyes. “Thanks,” she said, all but inaudibly.

“Would you like to see the pearl sheds?”

Yalena shrugged again.

“Later, maybe.” Kafari was determined to be patience, itself, today, even if it killed her. “I’ll bet, though, that you’ll be the only girl in school who’s ever seen a real pearl hatchery. Your grandparents helped perfect the technique that allows pearl growers to seed, grow, and harvest the pearls without injuring the oysters. It’s a very gentle process. And it gives the Klameth Canyon pearl growers a big advantage in the off-world marketplace. We can produce crop after crop without having to grow new oysters, as well as new pearls. Klameth Canyon produces more pearls of higher quality than any star system in the Sector.”

“I didn’t know any of that,” Yalena admitted, sounding intrigued. “Did you grow pearls?”

“Oh, yes. I was pretty good at it, too.”

“What did you like best?”

Kafari smiled, remembering the intensity of her interest when she’d been just Yalena’s age. “I liked producing the special colors, more than anything else. The pinks are awfully pretty, but I liked the black pearls best, I think. Although they’re not really black. They’re more of a deep violet with an indigo-jade sheen. Your great-grandmother invented the process that produces that color. She engineered a bacteria that’s harmless to the oyster, but causes a biochemical reaction that lets the oyster pull minerals from a special solution in the ponds and deposit them in the nacre that forms the pearl. Chakula Ranch holds the patent on it. I would be willing to bet,” she added with a smile, “that you will be the only girl in school with a Chakula black-pearl necklace.”

Yalena looked up. “But I don’t have any black pearls.”

“Ah, but it’s your birthday, isn’t it?”

Surprise left her eyes wide. Then a glow blazed to life, born of hope and delight and a sudden realization that her mother was not just a person she did battle with daily, but someone who understood — and cared — that Yalena still encountered some nasty hazing from school mates who knew that Kafari was a Granger and that Simon was an off-world soldier whose name was mud in any household that supported POPPA.

“D’you mean that? Really and truly?”

“Your father and I talked it over with your grandmother and grandfather. We’ll even let you pick the pearls.”

Her daughter’s eyes shone. “Oh, Mom! Not even Katrina has a pearl necklace! And she’s got the prettiest jewelry in school. And Ami-Lynn will just die of delight, watching the look on Katrina’s face when she sees it!”

Ami-Lynn had long been Yalena’s best friend in the universe, while Katrina was a girl that everyone, apparently, had good reason to detest. It would be quite a coup, to outdo one’s worst enemy when said enemy had the prettiest jewelry in school. Kafari grinned and gave her daughter a conspiratorial wink. “Sure you don’t want to see the pearl sheds?”

“Will any of them,” she jerked her head toward the house, voice harsh with pain and anger, “be there?”

Kafari winced, but shook her head. “Nope. Just you and me. If anyone tries to butt in, I’ll heave ’em into the nearest pond.”

A smile stole its way across Yalena’s face. A crafty smile, but Kafari understood the impulse. It wasn’t easy, celebrating one’s birthday with a bunch of strangers who’d been hideously rude, whatever the provocation might have been.

“C’mon, let’s go see if we can find some pearls good enough to ruin Katrina’s whole year. We’ll pick them out and then take them to a jeweler to have a necklace made.”

Yalena started to slide down from the swing, then paused long enough to whisper, “Thanks, Mom.” There was a world of emotion — of thanks and apology and gratitude — rolled up in those two simple little words. She laid those words and emotions in Kafari’s hands, blinking rapidly and hoping that her overture wouldn’t be rejected.

“You’re welcome, Yalena. Happy birthday, sugarplum.”

Yalena smiled again, sweetly this time, and slipped her hand into Kafari’s. They set out together for the pearl sheds.

I

I come awake as a reflex alarm from my external sensors sends a signal racing through my threat-assessment processors. I snap to full wakefulness and scan my environs instantly. Simon stands beside my right tread. He is involved in a discussion with three men, none of whom I recognize. All three have just entered my exclusion zone, triggering an automatic reflex through my battle-readiness circuitry. I surmise that Simon has deliberately steered them into this zone for the express purpose of triggering me awake.

One is armed, carrying a concealed handgun in a shoulder holster. Despite the presence of a concealed weapon, I hold my fire and watch closely to see what develops, since Simon has not signaled me via his commlink to take action against hostile intruders. I therefore do not react with full battlefield reflexes, but I maintain alert vigilance, as my Commander is not wearing a personal sidearm.

The three visitors in my work-bay are dressed as civilians. Two are heavily muscled with blocky, thick torsos. They look more like space-dock stevedores than executive assistants to the president of Jefferson, which is the ID code transmitted by the visitors’ passes clipped to their jackets, allowing them access to restricted areas of Nineveh Base. The third armed individual holds most of my attention as I do an automatic scan of Brigade channels, seeking a passive VSR while I await developments and Simon’s instructions.

This man’s identification states that he is the president’s chief advisor, Sar Gremian. He is taller than Simon, with dense, heavy bones that support muscles sufficiently well developed to qualify as a heavy-weight prizefighter. His skull is devoid of hair. His face is deeply pitted with scars that suggest severe adolescent acne. His expression wavers from bitter to savage and his voice is rough, reminding me of career drill sergeants I have seen drilling new recruits.

The conversation underway appears to be hostile, as stress indicators — elevated heart rate and rapid respiration, coupled with facial expression — suggest an angry argument underway. This perhaps explains Simon’s action in leading these men into a zone where I would automatically resume consciousness, for the express purpose of having me listen? Simon is speaking, evidently in answer to an unknown question.

“Absolutely not. I said no when you called from Madison and my answer has not changed.”

The two burly men with the president’s advisor react with overt anger, faces flushing red, fingers curling into anticipatory claws, but they do not make any actual moves toward my Commander, so I bide my time and study the unfolding situation. The president’s advisor merely narrows his eyes. “You’re refusing a direct order from the president?”

A muscle jumps in Simon’s jaw. “You are not the president of Jefferson, Sar Gremian. The president’s chief advisor does not have the authority to send a Bolo anywhere.”

“I’ll get the authorization, then.” He reaches for his comm-unit.

“Be my guest. I’ll tell Gifre Zeloc the same thing I told President Andrews, when he demanded something like this. You don’t use a Bolo for crowd control. Sonny isn’t a police officer, he’s a machine of war. There is,” Simon adds with an acid bite in his voice, “a significant difference.”

Sar Gremian pauses, then chooses not to complete the transmission. “Let me try to explain the situation to you, Khrustinov. That mob of protestors outside Assembly Hall has refused to disperse, despite repeated orders to disband. They’ve blocked Darconi Street. They’ve jammed every square centimeter of Lendan Park and Law Square. They’ve thrown up barricades across every entrance into Assembly Hall. They’ve trapped the whole Assembly and they’re blockading President Zeloc’s motorcade. He can’t leave the Presidential Residence.”

Simon shrugs. “That’s his problem, not mine. Madison has an entire police force for this kind of work. There are five thousand police officers on this base, alone, and that doesn’t include the five thousand that have graduated every year for the last five years in a row. If my math skills are up-to-date, that’s twenty-five thousand federal police officers at your disposal. Given the amount of money it’s costing to train, feed, and house them all, I suggest you make use of them.”

Anger flickers across Sar Gremian’s scarred features. “Don’t play games with me, Khrustinov! President Zeloc wants that Bolo,” he jabs a finger in my direction, “to clear out that pack of criminal agitators.”

“Criminal agitators?” Simon asks in a soft voice I have learned to associate with profound anger. “That’s an interesting choice of words, coming from a POPPA social engineer.”

A dark red flush stings Sar Gremian’s face. “You will regret that remark, Colonel.”

“I seriously doubt it.”

Sar Gremian flexes his fingers, clearly struggling to control his temper. He regains his composure sufficiently to return to his original topic of conversation. “Those lunatics are threatening the entire Assembly with violence, over a minor law bill designed to fight crime. President Zeloc has no tolerance for mob rule. That Bolo goes out there now.”

“You don’t get it, do you, Gremian? You don’t use thirteen thousand tons of sophisticated battlefield technology to break up an inconvenient political demonstration lawfully conducted by citizens free to voice their opinions in public assemblages. Those protestors are fully within their rights to refuse to disband. Any order to disband is illegal under Jefferson’s constitution. Using a Bolo to threaten and harass citizens exercising their constitutional rights is not only illegal and a bad usurpation of Concordiat property, it’s a damned stupid stunt. One that will do nothing but damage the government’s credibility and spark a wider surge of protests.

“It might,” he adds in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “even jeopardize passage of a bill you apparently think is a good idea. God knows why, since schemes like that have proven to be totally ineffective at reducing crime on every world humanity has ever inhabited.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think about crime or credibility! Those are our problems, not yours. You’ve been given an order. Send that Bolo out there. Now.”

“No.”

Sar Gremian breathes rapidly for two point six seconds, then his frayed temper snaps. “All right. You want to play hardball? Here’s a slapshot for you. You’re fired, asshole.”

Simon laughs, which is not the reaction Sar Gremian expected, given the startled expression which flickers for a moment across his face. “You think you can fire me? Just like that? Nice try, my friend, but I’m afraid you don’t have the authority to fire me. Neither does Gifre Zeloc. Nor anyone else on this godforsaken ball of mud. I’m deployed here under treaty. I can’t be removed without a direct order from Sector Command. You’re stuck with me, Gremian. Just as much as I’m stuck with you. I suggest you learn to cope.” The disdain in his final words slaps the president’s chief advisor like a physical blow.

“Then you’ll be fired!” Gremian snarls, “and when you are, I will personally kick your carcass onto the next freighter that docks at Ziva Two. And you can forget about obtaining exit visas for your wife and kid!”

My Commander’s face turns white in a single heartbeat. Not with fear. Simon is angry. Angrier than I have seen him since we entered battle on Etaine. The look he bestows upon Sar Gremian would melt steel. It sends the president’s advisor backwards a single step.

“If you do anything to or against my family,” my Commander says softly, his words hissing like plasma through a gun barrel, “you had better watch your back for the rest of your natural life. Never, ever fuck with a Brigade officer, Gremian.”

Shock explodes through Sar Gremian’s eyes. I surmise that no one in his cumulative experience of life has ever delivered such a message to him. As the shock fades, fury erupts in its place. He snarls a curse and snatches at the snub-nosed handgun concealed beneath his coat. I snap to Battle Reflex Alert before his fingers have finished closing around the grip.

Every prow-mounted weapon on my turret tracks his motion. Gun barrels spin with a blurred hiss in the echoing space of my work-bay. I lock on with systems active, all of them flashing proximity-threat alarms. Blood drains from Sar Gremian’s pitted face. He freezes, involuntarily loosening his grip on the pistol. He stares up at my battle-blackened gun snouts. Sees in them his own imminent death.

I break my long silence.

“Your actions indicate an intended lethal threat to my Commander. My guns are locked and loaded. I have your brain case targeted in my fire-control center. If you draw the pistol in your hand from its shoulder holster, you will not survive to make the shot.”

Sar Gremian stands motionless, a wise decision for a man in his situation. I detect a stream of liquid registering ninety-eight point seven degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, trickling down his left trouser leg. I surmise that he has never before been this seriously frightened.

“I would suggest,” Simon tells him softly, “that you take your hand out of your coat. Very, very slowly.”

The president’s senior advisor complies, moving his hand in quarter-of-a-centimeter increments until it dangles, empty, at his side.

“Very good, Gremian. You may just live to see the sun go down, tonight. Now take your sorry ass out of my sight. And don’t ever come back.”

The look of malice he sends my Commander tempts me to fire, anyway. This man is dangerous. It would satisfy me to remove the threat he represents to my commanding officer. In the absence of a clear and immediate danger, however, my software protocols do not permit me to act. This gives Sar Gremian time to organize his retreat. He turns on his heel and stalks out of my maintenance depot, slamming the door back with the heel of one hand. An odiferous yellow puddle remains to mark where he had been standing. His lackeys scurry after him, one of them skidding through the mess. The other plows into the door frame in his zeal to exit as rapidly as possible.

Then they are gone and silence rolls like thunder through my maintenance bay.

“Sonny,” my Commander says softly, “that man will not rest until he takes an ugly kind of vengeance. Lock onto the ID signals from my comm-unit and Kafari’s. Yalena’s, too, if you please. Those three ID signatures are the only ones authorized within one hundred meters of my residence. Until you hear differently, monitor all three data signals at all times and report any clearly lethal threat within the same one hundred meter radius.”

He scowls at a blank spot on the wall that is in a direct line with the back door of his private quarters. “Like a damned fool, I gave those goons a wide-open back door to exert coercion. I will be triple-damn dipped if I tolerate it. The Concordiat can’t afford it. And neither,” he adds with a bleakly realistic assessment, “can I.”

The shadows of Etaine will always pursue my Commander. I attempt to reassure him, in the only way I can. “I will not tolerate any threat of coercion designed to hinder my primary mission here, Simon.”

A visible shudder passes through Simon Khrustinov, which puzzles me. He does not elaborate on its cause. “Sometimes,” he says in an undertone that indicates he is speaking to himself, rather than to me, “you say things that scare me pissless.”

“Sar Gremian is the individual I scared pissless, Simon. Shall I activate an auto-wash sprayer from my decontamination system to rinse the residue from the floor?”

A sudden grin dispels some of the darkness at the back of my Commander’s eyes. “That’s what I love about you, you overgrown son of a motherless battleship. Yeah, wash that filth out of here.” The smile fades. “Unless I verbally authorize a visitor in advance, program your reflex sensors to snap you from inactive standby to active alert if any non-authorized intruders — with or without an ID transmission — are detected inside your hundred-meter proximity zone. If you detect any weapons system inside that perimeter or one traveling along an incoming trajectory to strike inside it, go to Battle Reflex Alert and disable the threat. And Sonny?”

“Yes, Simon?”

“You just saved my life, for which I am eternally grateful. Unfortunately, this ugly little scene may have just ended my career.”

I ponder this for eight point seven seconds, considering ramifications I do not like. Simon is a fine officer. He does not deserve to be cashiered over my actions. This proves to my satisfaction that I should not be trusted to function alone, without the guidance and wisdom of a human to navigate the pitfalls of complex interpersonal relationships. I have never functioned alone. I am not designed to function alone.

Moreover, Jefferson is a long way from the nearest Brigade supply depot. If I am abandoned on a world whose elected officials had to be coerced into funding required treaty-mandated expenditures, I foresee serious difficulties should I require replacements for munitions expended or damage sustained in combat. A renewed attack by the Deng or a Melconian strike could prove disastrous.

Worse yet, given the complexities of the political climate on Jefferson, I do not believe I am capable of determining the correct operational strategy to accomplish any mission without antagonizing the politicians whose decisions would control my ability to function. My actions in preventing Sar Gremian from assassinating my Commander are a case in point. I acted in accordance with the proper military response to a lethal threat to my Commander and showed considerable restraint in exercising my options to remove that threat.

Yet my action has produced an unstable situation which may result in the termination of a fine officer’s career. I do not see what alternative action I might have taken that would not have resulted in a greater difficulty for my Commander. Having to tell the president that I had reduced his chief advisor to a red haze would only have worsened the apparently serious rift between Simon and those issuing his orders. I attribute my inability to discern viable alternatives to my hard-wired inability to perform the complex logic trains required to decipher and reduce to logical predictions the wide range of potential human reactions to a complex and shifting set of variables. I am not a Bolo Mark XXIII or XXIV. I was not designed to make this kind of judgment call. The uneasiness in my personality gestalt center becomes a trickle of panic.

“Simon, I estimate a ninety-two percent likelihood that Sector Command will not dispatch a replacement commander if you are recalled. I am not designed to function without a human commander. I am not an autonomous Mark XXIII or XXIV. The Mark XX series does not have sufficiently sophisticated circuitry or programming to make battlefield decisions requiring the complex algorithms that approximate human judgment; I am not equipped to function without a commander for longer than one or two battles.”

“Do I detect a hint of uneasiness, my much-decorated, valorous friend?” Simon’s smile is genuine, but fleeting, altogether too characteristic of the human condition. “We haven’t reached that bridge, yet, much less crossed it. We’ll worry about that when — if — the time comes. Just keep in mind that you are designed for independent action, Sonny. That’s the defining characteristic of the Mark XX. You’ve got the experience data of more than a century to rely on and you can always contact the Brigade.”

I do not find this comforting, given the time lag required to send a message via SWIFT, wait for a human officer to analyze the VSR, come to a decision on an advisable course of action for a shifting situation many light-years away, and transmit the orders via return SWIFT. “It would be unwise to deprive me of the necessary discernment a human commander provides the Mark XX during ambiguous battlefield situations. I feel constrained to point out that the situation on Jefferson has been ambiguous since the death of Abraham Lendan. It appears that conditions have deteriorated considerably since I was ordered into inactive standby mode eight years and nineteen days ago.”

“Lonesome, you have the gift of understatement down to an exact science.” He rakes a hand through his hair in a familiar gesture of frustration. I note an increased amount of silver in that hair and mourn the fleeting impermanence of human life spans. It is difficult to watch a fine officer grow old. It is much more difficult, however, to watch one die. If Simon is removed from command, I will at least not have to witness the death of a much respected friend. “What do you want me to do, Simon?” I ask, registering a sense of misery in my personality gestalt center.

“Update yourself on the political mess. I’ll have to shut you down again, dammit. I’m under standing orders from Jefferson’s duly elected president.” Bitterness and sarcasm turn his words black. “But not yet. I’ll be dunked in poison before I shut down my own Bolo after being threatened by a thug with a gun. Take yourself a good, long look around, Sonny. Wait for my signal to send you back to sleep. Better yet, stand guard for a full twenty-five hours, just in case one of those bright boys decides to return for a little skullduggery, tonight, on behalf of their boss and his vendetta.”

“Does Sar Gremian hold vendettas, Simon?” I initiate a search through the government’s employee databases to locate his dossier.

Simon glances up into my nearest external camera-mounted sensor. “Oh, yes. Our violent tempered friend is a real Savonarola. Got a mad on his shoulders the size of the Silurian Nebula. And he’s not inclined to share power with anything or anyone he can’t crush into convenient red paste. Gifre Zeloc picked himself a real winner when he brought Sar Gremian into the game.”

Simon exits my work-bay without speaking again. The door slams in an echo of Sar Gremian’s abrupt exodus. I hear a fainter crash as he yanks open the door to his private quarters. Seventy-three seconds later, my Commander sends a single, coded burst on a frequency that matches Kafari’s wrist-comm. I surmise that he is stealing a march on them, contacting Kafari with a pre-agreed-upon code that will signal her that trouble is brewing. Simon remains in his quarters. I turn my attention to his orders.

Given what I begin uncovering about Sar Gremian, I consider the possibility that I erred seriously in permitting him to leave the premises alive. My search has, admittedly, only begun, but it is clear from reading his official dossier that he is politically ambitious, abuses power in legal but questionably ethical ways, is loyal to the highest bidder, and possesses a psych-profile clinically definable as sociopathic.

His function in the president’s office appears to be creating propaganda-based social movements that become legislation, introduced by a groundswell of popular ranting. He engineered something called the Child Protection Act, which grants self-determination and voting rights to children age ten and over. Among other things, it tightens POPPA’s choke-hold on elections, since giving children the right to vote greatly increases the population of people who support POPPA’s social agenda. It also slows down the exodus of farm families seeking to escape a deteriorating social milieu, by the simple expediency of granting children the right to refuse to leave. Given the number of emigration applications received in the past twelve point three months, this measure was essential to preventing the complete loss of everyone on Jefferson who knows how to farm. I surmise that POPPA’s leadership does not enjoy the spectre of hunger, applied to themselves.

Sar Gremian has also been involved heavily in the campaign to whip up anti-crime frenzy in Madison and other large cities. The weapons-registration legislation being protested today is the culmination of several months’ effort to sway public opinion via inflammatory rhetoric and egregious manipulation of facts. He is evidently as cautious as he is unpleasant, as there is no evidence that he has broken any laws or policy rulings that I can determine. Conversely, there is a massive amount of datachat traffic indicating a widespread dissatisfaction with his actions, fear of his tactics, and hearsay evidence about his violent temper, which I have witnessed firsthand.

If Simon is removed from command and Sector abandons me without a replacement commander, it is highly probable that I shall be carrying out instructions relayed through Sar Gremian by Jefferson’s president. This sets up a skittering harmonic through my logic processors that I suppress immediately, not wishing to tip myself over the edge and activate the Resartus Protocol that automatically takes control of a Bolo whose programming has gone unstable. This world cannot afford my loss to insanity.

I therefore focus on scanning governmental computer archives, the datanet, and news broadcasts, trying to ascertain what is happening that has put Simon in this untenable situation before circumstances force him to shut me down, again. Sar Gremian and his associates know that I am awake. I anticipate a presidential order to go inactive from moment to moment and wonder how long the president’s chief advisor will delay before recovering his composure and wounded machismo enough to admit what transpired in my work-bay. I must make the greatest possible use of my brief reprieve from unconsciousness.

Ongoing and skillfully edited “live” news coverage of the political protest underway, which has evidently dominated the commercial programming stations for six hours and twenty-three point nine minutes, sheds murky light on the political demonstration in Law Square. Field reporters are speaking rapidly, using political jargon I barely recognize, filled with references to events I know nothing about and do not have time to investigate.

Eighty-seven point six percent of the rhetoric being broadcast is emotionally inflammatory, filled with innuendo I do not have the referents to understand, and clearly designed to engender an emotional response unfavorable to the cause of the demonstrators, whom the broadcasters apparently hold in cold contempt bordering on demonization. Why, I cannot determine. It requires an unprecedented sixty-two point three seconds just to discover the cause of the demonstration, which I finally unearth by searching Granger-dominated datachats.

I do not immediately understand why Jefferson’s House of Law finds it advisable to propose weapons licensing regulations as part of a comprehensive program to reduce crime. The emphasis Jefferson’s constitution places on private ownership and use of weapons should prevent such a bill from reaching the Assembly Floor, but both the House of Law and Senate are seriously determined to introduce and vote into law this bill’s contradictory provisions.

I spend an additional five minutes, nineteen point two-seven puzzled seconds conducting high-speed scans of debate transcripts in the Senate and House of Law, cross-referencing with the constitution and its seventeen amendments, then begin checking datachat activity and recent media coverage, seeking further clarifications.

My search reveals a hot debate centering on a sharp rise in crime rates. Forcible home invasions and attacks against retail stores by gangs of criminals have killed fifty-three home and business owners in Madison during the last three months alone. Similar brutal assaults have occurred in the heavy-industry region near Anyon where unemployment amongst manufacturing labor runs fifty to sixty percent and in the mining cities of Cadellton and Dunham, where whole industries have mysteriously ceased to function. Factory closings have thrown approximately five million people out of work. These industries are critical to Jefferson’s economic survival and should have weathered the post-war financial difficulties with great resilience.

Yet smelting plants, refineries, and manufacturing plants sit idle, their power plants cold and their warehouses empty. I do not understand how thirty point zero-seven percent of Jefferson’s heavy industry — critical to the rebuilding efforts undertaken by any human world damaged by war — has simply ceased to function in only eight years. Have the Deng attacked again while I was asleep? Mystified, I send subprotocol tendrils searching through news-feed archives while focusing my main processors on the demonstration currently underway.

POPPA activists are demanding regulations that trace ownership and sales of weapons as a way to halt home- and retail-business invasions and other violent crimes. I do not immediately see the connection between licensure of weapons and cessation of criminal activity, since police records indicate that ninety-two point eight percent of lawbreakers using weapons to commit crimes obtain them — through their own admission — via theft.

Even more puzzling to me is the clearly documented fact that eighty-nine point nine-three percent of all privately held weapons on Jefferson are held in rural regions where Jefferson’s unfriendly wildlife remains a serious threat and where self-sufficiency philosophies apparently hold their strongest sway. Yet according to police and justice department databases, ninety-seven point three percent of all violent crime on Jefferson occurs in urban areas, where weapons ownership is vanishingly small in comparison to rural areas.

I cannot make the correlations between glaringly contradictory data sets resolve themselves into an algorithm that logically computes. I do not understand the reasoning which insists that an ineffective measure based on demonstrably false data is the only salvation for a world rocked by an admittedly serious wave of violent criminal attacks. Are my heuristics so seriously inadequate that I cannot see a critical piece of the equation that would explain this attitude?

I am still trying to find information that will resolve this conundrum when Simon receives an incoming communication from Jefferson’s Presidential Residence, in voice-only mode. I route the message to Simon’s quarters. Judging by the anger in his voice, Gifre Zeloc is unhappy with the current state of affairs.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Khrustinov? That monstrous machine of yours damn near murdered my chief advisor!”

Simon’s voice sounds like cut granite sliding off the side of a volcanic massif, a sound I have occasionally heard during my long service. “Sar Gremian attempted to draw a weapon in a lethally threatening manner within Unit SOL-0045’s proximity-alert zone. Sonny reacted appropriately and with great restraint.”

“Restraint? You call that restraint?” The president abruptly activates the visual portion of his transmission. He is glaring, goggle-eyed — as a long-ago commander once called such an expression — into his datascreen. An interesting tint of purple has appeared in the veins at his temples.

Simon, angry but controlled, says in clipped tones, “Mr. Gremian is still alive. The only thing injured was his dignity. When an armed individual attempts to shoot a Bolo’s commander, I assure you most seriously that letting that individual leave the altercation alive is the utmost definition of restraint I have ever seen any Bolo demonstrate.”

“Sar Gremian did not try to shoot you, Khrustinov! He has two witnesses to back him up. I don’t know what you think you’re trying to pull—”

“Spare me the bullshit! I’m not a provincial rube you can bully, bamboozle, or bribe. A full report of this incident will be filed with Sector Command. The Concordiat takes a dim view of attempted assassination of one of its officers.”

For one point zero-nine seconds, Gifre Zeloc resembles a fish drowning in oxygen. The purple in his blood vessels spreads out, until his face has assumed an intriguing shade of maroon that matches his formal cravat with surprising accuracy. Clearly, Gifre Zeloc is no more accustomed to being addressed in such terms than Sar Gremian. Then he then narrows his eyes, telegraphing a threat that tempts me to assume Battle Reflex Alert. “And how will you explain to Sector that a Bolo I ordered you to deactivate was somehow conscious? In defiance of a direct presidential order to the contrary?”

“No Bolo is ever ‘deactivated’ until and unless it is killed. Even badly damaged Bolos can survive literally for a century or more and return to full awareness in less than a single pico-second. Sar Gremian, himself, is responsible for Sonny’s awake status. He carried a concealed firearm into a restricted military zone with a Class One-Alpha weapons system inside it. Given his status as your chief advisor, he was permitted to retain that weapon, as a courtesy to his position on your personal staff. But anyone who enters a Bolo’s reflex-alarm zone triggers a return to consciousness. Anyone carrying a weapon into that zone triggers an active-alert status. If that weapon is handled in a threatening manner, that action will set off an automatic Battle Reflex action. You can,” Simon adds with an elegant touch of sarcasm, “send a query to Sector Command, requesting verification of these facts. Be sure to attach a copy of the recording Sonny made, showing Sar Gremian trying to shoot me.”

President Zeloc’s coloration once again resembles his maroon cravat.

“That won’t be necessary! Very well, I will take your explanation under advisement. What I want from you — the only thing I want from you — is to send that Bolo into town and clean out that pack of rabble-rousing protestors.”

“As I explained to Sar Gremian,” Simon replies coldly, “Sonny stays where he is. In your haste to disperse your political opposition by using a mobile nuclear weapons platform, did you bother to consider the size of Unit-0045’s warhull and treads, as compared with the size of Jefferson’s streets?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sonny,” Simon speaks as though addressing a small and none-too-bright child, “is a big-ass, honking war machine. His treads alone are wider than all but two or three streets anywhere in Madison. Darconi Street is just barely wide enough, if you don’t mind losing the decorative stonework, wrought-iron balconies, doorways, news kiosks, or vehicles lining the sidewalks. Not to mention the building fronts he’d have to demolish along the five kilometers of city streets he would have to navigate just to reach the area where the protestors are gathered.

“And that’s just his treads. Sonny’s warhull and the weapons projecting out from it are wider than the treads. Considerably wider. If you really want Sonny to drive protestors out of Law Square, you’ll have to decide which corner of Assembly Hall you would like him to flatten, trying to get there. Or, if you like, he could always flatten the concert hall in Lendan Park, instead. Or the southeast corner of the Museum of Science and Industry, or maybe the northern wing of the Planetary Justice Hall? Take my word for it, the only time you’re likely to want that Bolo in downtown Madison is if the Deng or Melconians are throwing weapons at you. At which point, collateral damage from knocking down part of a building will be the least of your concerns.”

Gifre Zeloc evidently likes the color maroon. He sputters for three point two seconds, then says in a squeaking voice, “He won’t fit?”

“No, he won’t. You were,” Simon finishes with sweet derision, “briefed on Unit 0045’s major operational specs when you assumed office. I do assume you actually read them?”

“I read what I goddamned well have time to read! Fine, the fucking thing won’t fit! So what are you going to do about all these protestors?”

“Me?” Simon queries, lifting one brow. “I’m not doing anything. Handling a lawfully conducted political rally is your problem, not mine. Of course, it might become my problem, if you turn loose an unholy jihad of P-Squadrons against a crowd of unarmed civilians. The Concordiat’s not real fond of slavery and ethnic cleansing, either, and speaking as an outside observer, you’re skatin’ on mighty thin and spidery ice, mister. You might just want to chew on that for a bit, before you decide to start slinging around more orders.”

“I see.” Clipped. Angry. Dangerous. “Very well, Colonel, have it your way. For now,” he adds ominously.

The transmision ends. I have taken the precaution of recording every millisecond of the exchange in my archival databanks. Simon has done what he can. Now, all he can do is wait.

II

Kafari was nearly frantic with worry, but she did exactly what she and Simon had agreed upon when they’d worked out that emergency code. She picked up their daughter, dragging her out of class, and headed for home. She maintained radio silence the whole way and switched off the AirDart’s auto-signal broadcast, in an effort to remain relatively invisible until they reached the safety of their quarters on Nineveh Base. She gripped the controls so tightly, her fingers ached. At least the need to concentrate on flying helped tune out Yalena’s scowl. Her daughter had spent the entire flight from her school to their home in a deep, adolescent sulk, which did not improve Kafari’s temper one jot.

When they finally got home, Kafari took one look at Simon’s face and realized that however bad she’d feared it might be, it was worse. Far worse. So much so, her whole body went cold and scared. Simon was seated at his datascreen, staring blankly at something, a message she abruptly realized she didn’t want to know. She’d never seen that look on her husband’s face. A caved-in look, part horror, part defeat, all of it wrenching to witness.

“Simon?” she whispered.

He turned to look at her. Noticed Yalena. Brought his gaze back to Kafari.

“Close the door, please.”

Kafari did so, hand trembling. She locked it, carefully. When she turned around again, Simon was still looking at her. “I have just been notified,” he said, voice hoarse, “by Sector Command that Gifre Zeloc has invoked treaty provisions, demanding my removal from command or he will pull Jefferson out of the Concordiat.”

Kafari’s knees turned to rubber. She groped for the sofa. “Can he do that?”

“Oh, yes. With a vote of agreement from the Senate and House of Law. And we know only too well how such a vote would turn out, don’t we?”

“What—” She had to stop and start again. “What in God’s name happened, Simon?”

“Sar Gremian paid me a visit. There’s a demonstration underway in Law Square. President Zeloc wanted me to use Sonny to drive the protestors out. I said no. So Gremian and a couple of his goons showed up, to insist. When I refused, Gremian tried to pull a gun on me. Sonny responded.” A mirthless laugh sent chills down her back. “It might’ve been better if Sonny’d shot him. But he didn’t. Commendable restraint, at the time. Gifre Zeloc was not amused. I’ve sent a copy of the recording Sonny made to Sector, with a formal protest. This,” he gestured at the datascreen, the motion abrupt, bitter, “was their reply. I have never,” he added, “seen Brigade move so fast in my career, which tells me everything I need to know.”

Kafari made herself cross the room. Made herself read the message.

The Brigade supports your actions, which appear to have been proper and appropriate, but the Concordiat cannot afford to lose an allied world at this time, with a multi-system crisis of unprecedented proportions facing us. As Unit SOL-0045 is capable of independent battlefield action and given the low threat of invasion in the Silurian Void at this time, Sector has decided to reassign you to another Bolo in the Hakkor region, where three allied worlds are expected to come under heavy bombardment within a matter of weeks. A naval scout ship will be dispatched to take you to the Hakkor region to assume your new command. The scout will arrive in Jeffersonian space in three days. Your family will doubtless wish to emigrate. Quarters will be reserved for them at Sector Command.

“Oh, God,” Kafari whispered. She looked up, read pain in Simon’s ravaged eyes.

“You don’t want to go, do you?” he asked.

“I go where you do!”

It came out fierce, protective.

“Where are we going?” Yalena demanded, jarring Kafari’s attention from Simon to their child, who was glaring up at them.

“Your father has been reassigned off-world. We’re going to live at Sector Command.”

Yalena’s eyes blazed. “You’re going to Sector Command! I’m not going anywhere!”

Kafari started to snap a tart rejoinder when a sinking, cold terror hit her gut. Yalena was thirteen years old. She had reached the “right of self-determination” age, under POPPA-mandated child-protection law. They literally could not force her to leave. She looked at Simon, saw the bleakness there, realized he’d already foreseen this turn of events. Kafari ripped herself for ten kinds of blind folly and sat down abruptly, staring utter disaster in the face.

Her husband was being forced off-world by a regime ruthless enough to want a Bolo to disperse a few protestors. Her daughter was refusing to go. She knew Yalena, knew the stubborn core of that child, an unyielding determination that was, thanks to years of POPPA indoctrination, entirely misguided. There had to be a way! Some way out, something she could say or do to persuade her daughter to leave.

The prospect of a life without Simon, wondering day to day, hour to hour, if he’d been killed on some far-off world, while coping with a home-front situation that looked more frightening with every passing week, left her winded, unable to think clearly. Her mind whirled, frantic to find some reassurance that her life had not just shattered to pieces. Simon, cold and silent, offered no reassurance because there was none to offer. Their life together was over, along with nearly everything she valued in the world. Taken from her by idiots.

“Yalena,” she said in a hoarse voice that seemed disembodied, with no connection to her, “please go into your room.”

Her daughter scowled, but did so, closing the door on her way.

Simon looked at Kafari. She looked at him. “I can’t go with you,” she finally whispered.

“I know.”

“I can’t leave her here, alone. They’ve got her, Simon, they’ve got her heart and her mind, her very soul. I have to fight to get her back, somehow. I’ve got to break through all the crap she’s been force-fed and make her see the truth. I can’t just abandon her. If I did… If I left with you and ended up alone on some strange military base on a world where I don’t know anyone, I would go mad…”

“I know.”

There didn’t seem to be much else to say. He knew. Had known her well enough to realize what her choice must be. Had accepted it, even before she had walked through the front door. Kafari crossed the intervening space between them, knelt down beside his chair, and wrapped both arms around him. She just held on. Simon was trembling. So was she. He slid out of the chair, stood up with her, held onto her tightly enough to make breathing difficult. They stayed that way a long time, long enough to develop an ache in her ribs from the pressure. “Do you have any idea,” Simon whispered roughly, “how much I need you?”

She shook her head, realizing in that moment that she could never know the answer to that agonized question. His heart thundered against hers. Tears blinded her. In this single, wrenching moment, the ache in her heart left no room for anything else, not even hatred of POPPA for doing this to them. That would come later. She was terrified for him. How could he go into battle, give his attention to the job of waging war, with thoughts of her and Yalena intruding, breaking his concentration? He needed her too much. She had jeopardized his effectiveness as an officer, without even realizing it.

He finally let go a deep and shuddering sigh, relaxed his death-hold on her ribs, and pulled back enough to peer down into her wet eyes. He managed a tender smile and used gentle fingertips to dry her cheeks. “Here, now, what’s this? Don’t you know the first rule of being a colonel’s lady?”

She shook her head.

“Never send a man into combat with tears. Or curlers in your hair. Who wants to remember a woman with red eyes and hair wound up around plastic tubes?”

A strangled sound, half hiccough, half laughter, broke loose. “Oh, Simon. You always know just what to say.” She blinked furiously, determined to get her fractured emotions under control. “Whatever are we going to do?”

“Our duty,” he said with a rough burr in his voice. “You’re the strongest person I have ever known, Kafari Khrustinova. Do you have any idea how remarkable you are, dear lady?”

She shook her head again. “I don’t feel very remarkable Simon. And I probably look like a drowned cat.”

He smiled. “I’ve seen worse.” A sigh gusted loose. “I have a lot to do, if I’m leaving in three days. That,” he gestured at the datascreen again, “doesn’t become completely official until I set foot on the scoutship, at least, so I have some time to work with Sonny before I go. They may be harried and desperate at Sector, but they’re not entirely blind, either. That recording of Sar Gremian was enough to convince somebody that I’d better not be relieved of command over him instantly, no matter how much Gifre Zeloc threatens. He will doubtless be so delighted at getting his way, he won’t quibble about three days.”

“And you can do a lot with him in three days?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, voice dangerous. “Oh, yes, indeed.”

Kafari shivered. And hoped Simon knew what he was doing.

“I’m going into Madison,” he said at length. “I’ve got to see the bank manager, among other things. You,” he said, placing both hands on her shoulders, “keep yourself and Yalena inside the house. Don’t open the door to anyone but me. And keep your gun within easy reach. Sonny’s on Active Standby Alert with orders to stop any attack on my quarters, but I believe in being prepared.”

Kafari nodded. “Do you want me to start packing for you?” Her voice didn’t quite hold steady.

Pain skittered through his eyes. “Yes, I think that would help. It would give you something to do. All the uniforms, please. And the personal sidearms. Besides the one I’ll be carrying, of course. Personal sundries, toiletries. A few changes of civilian clothing. I’ll be traveling light.”

“I’ll make two piles. The definites and the maybes.”

He kissed her, very gently.

Then headed for the door. She wanted to run after him, tell him to be careful, tell him everything in her bursting heart, but she let him go. No tears. Nor anything like them. She was a colonel’s wife. She realized fully, for the first time, what that really entailed. She lifted her chin, stiffened her resolve, and marched into the bedroom to sort her husband’s things in preparation for his new war.

And hers.

III

Yalena threw herself onto her bed and cried for a solid, miserable hour.

It wasn’t fair! The very thought of going somewhere else, leaving her friends, her home, going to another star system where she would never see Ami-Lynn again, left her shaken so deeply, she couldn’t do anything but cry, muffling the sound in her pillow so her parents wouldn’t hear. She hated the Brigade, had never hated anyone or anything so much in her life. She had tried to love her father, but she just couldn’t. Her mother… sometimes, she felt very close to her mother. And other times, they were like strangers, unable to talk to one another through the glass walls between them, so thick Yalena despaired of ever truly getting through and making her mother understand.

And now they wanted her to just go with them, just pack up her things and go away to a place where she wouldn’t know anybody or anything. The very thought of having to start over at a new school, where nobody understood anything really important, like saving the oceans or making sure that every child had legal rights to protect them, where nobody would like her because she was the new girl, different, with a father who killed for a living…

Panic rose up and choked her until she couldn’t breathe, because there wasn’t room for the air inside a chest too full of terror and humiliation to take in anything else. Yalena had thought she’d long outgrown that kindergarten terror, but it was still there, down inside, where nobody could see it. She lay shaking for a long time, soaking the bedspread with tears and a streaming nose. When the worst of the storm had finally passed, she sat up, feeling shaky and light-headed. It was awfully quiet, out there. Yalena crept to the door and listened, but there were no voices outside. She heard someone in her parents’ room, opening and closing drawers, it sounded like.

Yalena stepped to the window and peered outside, across the small yard to the landing pad. Her father’s aircar was gone. She clenched the curtains in one hand. He was gone! He hadn’t even said goodbye! Tears threatened again. Then reason reasserted itself. He couldn’t be gone, yet, because there weren’t any ships docked at Ziva Two, right now. Not even the Brigade could get a ship here that fast, could it? No. He must’ve gone into town. She finally realized what she was hearing, from her parents’ room. Her mother was packing.

Yalena swallowed hard. Was her mother going to leave, too? Where would Yalena go? She had the right to stay, but she wasn’t sure where that would be. Could she move in with somebody like Ami-Lynn’s parents? Or would she have to go out to Klameth Canyon and live with her grandparents. Yuck. That would be dire. Almost as bad as going with her parents. She’d have to start a new school in that case, too, and if she went to school in Klameth Canyon, it would be full of farmers who would hate her as much as her cousins hated her.

Panic threatened again.

Yalena finally thought to check on the datanet, to see what her rights actually were and what would happen to her if her mother insisted on leaving Jefferson, too. What she found wasn’t entirely reassuring, but if she had to live in a state-run dormitory, at least she could stay in her same school. That would help. If she lost her friends, she really didn’t know what she would do. She sighed, then decided to send Ami-Lynn a long chat message, to let her know what was happening. She knew Ami-Lynn had been scared, too, when Yalena’s mother had showed up at the classroom and yanked her out the door with a brief apology to her teacher for the inconvenience.

Yalena scowled. She didn’t understand why her parents had forced her to leave school just because her father was being fired from a job he hated and had to go off and be a soldier somewhere else. They could’ve left her in school while he went running off to town and her mother packed suitcases, instead of dragging her all the way out here, to do nothing at all. She pulled up her chat account and started the message.

“I’m okay,” she said, “and I don’t see why I had to leave school. I mean, it’s big news and all, my dad has to leave the planet and I don’t know if my mom is going with him. He has to go fight a war…” Her voice wavered unsteadily. Fight a war. She had never seen the Bolo in the back yard move. She’d talked to the machine a few times, but it scared her. It was huge, bigger than their whole house, and it had all those horrid guns and things on it. Her imagination failed, trying to picture what that thing must look like when it was moving and shooting at things.

She scowled again. Mrs. Gould, that horrible harpy, had lied to them about her father and his Bolo, all those years ago. She still hated her kindergarten teacher for making her miserable and sick, for saying things about her father that weren’t true, for making her feel like a dirty criminal. But Cadence had made everything all right again and she really hadn’t thought there would ever be another war, because they were so far away from all those other worlds that were fighting.

It didn’t seem real, that machines like the one in the back yard were shooting at living creatures who just wanted a safe place to live, when all was said and done. That was what her social dynamics teacher said, anyway, and Mr. Bryant was the smartest teacher she had ever had. She didn’t hate the Deng or the Melconians and didn’t understand why everybody in the Brigade thought the Deng and the Melconians hated them.

She backed up the recording to Ami-Lynn and started over. “Hi, it’s Yalena. I don’t know why Mom dragged me out of school, just to tell me Dad’s been fired from his job. President Zeloc is making the Brigade reassign him to another planet. He has to go off-world and command a different Bolo. He’s in town, I think, doing stuff at the bank, probably, a whole bunch of things before he leaves. I don’t want to get dragged off someplace horrible where I don’t know anybody. I won’t go. They can’t make me and I won’t. If my Mom goes, too, I’ll have to live in a government dorm somewhere in Madison, but I’ll get to stay at the Riverside Junior Academy and that’s the most important thing. So don’t worry about all the fuss, today. I’ll see you at school tomorrow, for sure, and I’ll send another message tonight, after Dad gets home and I find out for sure what’s going to happen with everybody.”

She pressed “send” and sat back as the message spun its way through the data-net to Ami-Lynn’s account. Her friend wouldn’t be home from school for another three hours, but Yalena felt better, having sent the message out. It steadied her and reminded her that even if she lost both parents to her father’s horrid war, she wouldn’t lose friends like Ami-Lynn, because POPPA cared enough to protect her from things like this off-world war that no sane person would want to fight in. Yalena sighed and stared through her window, not really looking at the landing pad or the police training center beyond the fence that surrounded their house and the Bolo’s maintenance depot.

She wished, for at least the millionth time, that her father was just an ordinary person, so they wouldn’t always be disagreeing on everything. She had tried so hard to tell him why POPPA was so important to her home-world, but he never understood and just got angry, so she’d finally stopped trying. This wasn’t her father’s home-world. He just didn’t understand how it was, to belong to a place the way Yalena belonged here. He didn’t know what it meant, to belong to a group of people the way she belonged with the people in POPPA, who were the nicest, gentlest people in the world, people who cared about everything and everyone. The only people POPPA didn’t like were the ones that made trouble for everybody else. Like the Grangers.

Her cheeks stung with an embarrassment she was afraid she would never outgrow. Her whole family was full of Grangers. People who wanted to keep guns in their houses, people who made trouble every time the Senate and House of Law tried to pass a law that everybody with any intelligence knew was a good idea. She didn’t talk about her family at school, or with her friends. If the subject came up, she just rolled her eyes and shrugged, writing them off as the crazies they were. Yalena would never understand them. And they would never understand her. And that made her so sad and so miserable, she laid back down on her bed, again, and cried some more, very quietly, this time.

It was sheer hell, being thirteen and all alone in a family that didn’t want her.

IV

Simon was gone for five hours before he checked in by radio. “Kafari, I’ve got the banking affairs settled, updated my will, set up a power of attorney for you, a whole host of details nailed down. I’m headed home.”

“We’ll be waiting.”

No tears, no hint of the grief in her heart that tore loose in a flood the moment he signed off. She wiped her face with brusque, angry gestures. No tears, Kafari, she ordered her obstinate heart. You don’t greet a soldier with tears, either, not when he’s going away in three days… Oh, God, how could she bear to face the long, empty months and years ahead, without him by her side every night or smiling into her eyes every morning? She sank down onto the bed, helpless to stop the flood pouring loose, then rolled over and cried into the pillow so Yalena wouldn’t hear.

Ten minutes later, a metallic voice boomed through the speakers on Simon’s datascreen. “Kafari. Simon’s aircar is losing power. It is unstable and going down.”

Time — and the breath in her lungs — froze, like the sudden cold sweat on her skin. For long, horrifying seconds, she was pinned in place. She couldn’t breathe. Almost couldn’t see. Then Sonny spoke again, a construct of flintsteel and electrons that contrived, somehow, to sound terrified.

“Simon has crashed. His forward speed was sufficient to sustain serious injury. I am picking up life-signs from his comm-unit. The likelihood of sabotage to his aircar is extreme. I have gone to Battle Reflex Alert. I am contacting emergency medical response teams in Madison. They have scrambled an air rescue team. ETA three minutes to Simon’s location.”

Kafari found herself stumbling toward the door, snatching up purse, keys, shoes.

“Yalena!” she screamed. “Yalena, get out here now! Your father’s aircar has crashed!”

The door to her daughter’s room swung open. Yalena, face white with abrupt shock, stood staring at her. “Is he — is he — d-dead?”

“No. Sonny says not… yet. They’ve scrambled an air rescue medical team. Get your shoes! We’re going to the hospital.”

Yalena ran, grabbing up the shoes she’d kicked off at the foot of her bed. Two minutes later they were airborne, in Kafari’s Airdart, which was fast and maneuverable. Once aloft, she hit full throttle and flew like a demon, screaming across the fences around Nineveh Base and roaring toward Madison. She fumbled with her wrist-comm.

“Sonny, talk to me. Is he still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Feed me coordinates. Where did he go down?”

The nav-system screen flashed to life, with a blip showing Simon’s location. The med-team would arrive before she did. “Find out which hospital they’re taking him to. University? Or General?”

A fractional pause ensued. “University has better emergency facilities. The rescue pilot has logged his intention to transport Simon to University Hospital. The medical crew is airlifting him now. His life-signs are weak.”

Terror trembled on her eyelashes, made it hard to see where she was going. She scrubbed at her eyes with the back of one hand. Tears were spilling down Yalena’s cheeks, as well, silent tears of fright and something else, something too deep to fathom, yet. Sonny spoke again from the speaker, causing Yalena to jump. “Simon’s airlift has arrived at University Hospital. He is still alive. I am monitoring.”

“Yalena. Call your grandparents.”

Her daughter reached for the controls, fingers trembling. “Grandma? Are you there? Grandma, it’s Yalena…”

“Hello? Yalena? What are you doing, calling from school?”

“It’s Daddy,” she said, voice breaking. She started to sob. Kafari said, “Mom, Simon’s aircar has crashed. He’s at University Hospital. I’m on my way there with Yalena.”

“Oh, dear God… We’re on the way.”

Ten minutes later, Kafari set down in the University Hospital parking lot. They ran for the wide double doors of the emergency room, silent and scared. Kafari fetched up against the receptionist’s desk. “I’m Mrs. Khrustinova. Where’s my husband?”

“They’ve rushed him into emergency surgery, Mrs. Khrustinova. Let me call someone to take you up to the surgical suite’s waiting room.”

A hospitality agent appeared, escorting them down a long, antiseptic hallway, into an elevator, and up to the third floor. They were shown into a waiting lounge that was, for the moment, empty. Kafari yanked down the volume on the datascreen, unable to bear the sound of the stupid game show in progress. Yalena sat down on one of the chairs, scared and very pale.

Kafari couldn’t sit down. She wanted to collapse, but terror was a goad that wouldn’t let her rest. She paced, frantic, staring at her chrono every few seconds until the ritual became so painful, she unbuckled the thing and shoved it into her pocket. She walked, ravaging her lower lip with her teeth, rubbing the empty place on her arm where the chrono had been. The volunteer brought them a hospitality tray, with cold drinks, cookies, comfort foods. Kafari couldn’t choke anything down.

When her parents arrived, half an hour later, Kafari broke down in her mother’s arms, weeping with exhaustion and fright. Her father took charge of Yalena, speaking quietly with her, reassuring her that the doctors were doing everything humanly possible to save her father’s life. More relatives arrived, not enough of them to be an abrasion against her raw nerves, but lending silent support at a time she needed it desperately. Surrounded by her loving family, all Kafari could do was wait. The volunteer returned periodically to update them, although the “updates” consisted of the same news again and again.

“Your husband is still alive, Mrs. Khrustinova. The surgeons are working to stabilize him.”

Yalena went for a walk with her grandfather, out into the hallway, then came back and curled up against Kafari’s side, shivering. Kafari wrapped one arm around her daughter. At length, Yalena whispered, “I didn’t mean to be rude, Mommy. When we got home. I just can’t leave home and go somewhere strange. All my friends are here.” Her voice was breaking in a plea for understanding.

“I know, sweetheart. I know.”

“Did — did the president’s advisor really try to kill Daddy? I can’t believe it. I can’t. Everybody at school says he’s a wonderful person. I just can’t believe that, Mommy.”

“You have no idea how much I wish you were right.”

Yalena bit one lip and fell silent again. Neither Kafari’s parents nor the other family members sitting vigil with them commented on the brief exchange, but knowing glances ran like spiders around the room. They were still sitting there, nerves jangled and eyes puffy, when the soft ping! of the elevators announced the arrival of what sounded like an entire army. The footsteps and voices heading their way were shocking in the hospital’s relative quiet. Kafari realized what that tidal wave of sound was seconds before the camera crews and reporters burst into the room. Bright lights half-blinded them. People were shouting questions at them, so many at once, she couldn’t even sort out individual voices, let alone questions. Yalena shrank closer to Kafari’s side. Her father and several uncles interposed themselves between Kafari and the news people choking the room.

Then one of the featureless faces resolved itself into a familiar pattern. A man Kafari recognized from datacasts strode forward, his acne-pitted face mirroring concern and sympathy. Sar Gremian! Kafari’s father and uncles exchanged distressed glances, then let him through the barricade they’d formed, not wanting to provoke a scene in front of half the press-corps in Madison.

When she realized that Sar Gremian was reaching out to touch her shoulder, making a show — a mockery — of offering comfort, Kafari went rigid. Then she jerked to her feet. “Don’t you dare touch me!” she hissed.

He checked slightly. “Mrs. Khrustinova, you have no idea how distressed I was to learn—”

“Get out!” Kafari snarled. “I have nothing to say to you! And if you ever come near me and mine again, I’ll by God finish the job Sonny left undone!”

The force of her rage — and his abrupt realization that she meant every syllable uttered before God and the planetary press — left him one shade paler than when he’d glided into the room. She could almost see the thought forming behind those cold shark’s eyes. Oh, hell, I forgot this is the woman who brought Abraham Lendan out of battle alive. I may have underestimated her…

You’re goddamned right, you have! And don’t ever forget it.

He recovered his poise quickly. So quickly, Kafari doubted the reporters had even noticed the silent exchange of threat and counterthreat between them, too delighted by the overt conflict to notice the deeper and far more dangerous one. “You’re overwrought, Mrs. Khrustinova, and little wonder. I simply wanted to convey my heartfelt well-wishes and those of President Zeloc.”

“You have conveyed them,” she said coldly. “You are doubtless more urgently needed elsewhere.” Kafari knew her anger was a reckless, dangerous thing to display so openly. But she could not just stand there and let him offer unctuous condolences when he had tried to murder her husband. Twice.

She was rescued from worse folly when a doctor in surgical scrubs shoved through the throng of reporters, demanding in angry tones that the waiting room be cleared. “Who let you in here? This is a hospital surgical ward, not a press briefing. Out! All of you, out!”

Orderlies were appearing, escorting camera crews into the corridor and back toward the elevators. Kafari — with her family standing beside her in a silent show of solidarity — stood her ground while Sar Gremian watched the exodus through narrowed eyes. He turned abruptly, gave Kafari a mocking little bow, and said, “My condolences, Mrs. Khrustinova, and those of the president. Miss Khrustinova,” he turned to Yalena, who was clinging to her, “I hope very sincerely that your father will pull through this dreadful accident.”

Then he strode out, nodding to the reporters with a dignity and concern he had pasted on like thin varnish for the benefit of the cameras. Kafari hated him with an ice-cold loathing that frightened her, it was so intense. Then he was gone and the reporters with him, and Kafari stumbled slightly, groping for the nearest chair as her knees buckled. Her father caught her and helped her down.

The surgeon tested her pulse, frowning with worry.

“Simon?” she whispered, finding and holding Yalena’s hand.

“He’s out of danger, Mrs. Khrustinova.”

Her eyelids sagged close and her bones turned to rubber. The surgeon’s voice reached down a very deep well, echoing strangely in her ears.

“He is still in grave condition, I’m afraid. We’ve stabilized the internal injuries and broken bones. The airlift crew said his aircar was built like a Bolo. Thank God it was or he’d have been killed on impact.”

She managed to open her eyes and focused with difficulty on the man’s face, which had gone unsteady and full of blurred edges. He managed a warm and gentle smile. “Hello,” he added with just a touch of wry humor. “I’m Dr. Zarek, by the way.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Kafari barely recognized the croaking of her own voice. “What else? What aren’t you telling us?”

“He is still in grave condition. To be frank, he needs to be transferred to a much better facility than University Hospital.”

“But—” She swallowed. “University Hospital is the best medical center on Jefferson.” Blood drained, leaving her dizzy. “Oh, God…”

“Easy, now, steady.” She felt someone’s hand on her shoulder. She felt like she was falling off a cliff or out the airlock of a freighter in free-fall. Then a sharp, pungent smell brought her out of a downward spiral. She coughed and the world firmed up again. Dr. Zarek was seated beside her, testing her pulse. A nurse was busy attaching some kind of skin patch to her wrist, probably an antishock treatment. Her family hovered close-by, stricken. When the doctor was satisfied that she wasn’t going to faint, he spoke again, very gently.

“He’s at the ragged edge of critical, but his condition is not life-threatening. That much, at least, I can swear to you.” A look of profound respect came into his long, kindly face as he added, “I have not forgotten what you did in Klameth Canyon, Mrs. Khrustinova. It was one of the greatest privileges of my life, serving as a junior member of Abraham Lendan’s medical team. You may not remember me, but I administered one of your earliest antiradiation treatments. I had a little more hair, then, and a few less wrinkles.”

His smile, his genuine warmth, helped steady her. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I really don’t remember you.”

He patted her hand. “Not to worry. I wouldn’t have expected you to, Mrs. Khrustinova. Now, then. Simon is going to need specialized recovery therapy of a kind that isn’t available on Jefferson. We don’t have nerve regeneration clinics or cellular reconstruction technologies.”

That sounded bad. Desperately so.

“As an officer of the Dinochrome Brigade, your husband is entitled, by mandate of the treaty, to emergency medical transportation and full access to the best medical care available. I would suggest,” and something in his manner shifted, subtly, taking on a subdued yet intense note of warning, “that we send him off-world immediately.” He glanced at the doorway Sar Gremian and that unholy mob of reporters had departed through, then met and held Kafari’s eyes. “There’s a Malinese freighter coming in tonight, I’m told. It’s due for departure tomorrow. I strongly recommend transferring your husband to Ziva Two’s infirmary the moment that freighter makes space-dock. We’ll send an attending physician and trauma nurse with him. What you cannot — dare not — do is wait.”

“I see,” Kafari whispered, feeling as young and scared as her daughter looked.

Then she thought of Sonny, realized with a shock of fear that a Bolo Mark XX was sitting in her back yard, at full Battle Reflex Alert, listening to this conversation and drawing its own conclusions — and it already suspected sabotage and attempted murder.

“Oh, shit—” She slapped her wrist-comm. “Sonny. Sonny, are you there? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Kafari. I have been monitoring your wrist-comm since your departure from home.”

The surgeon’s brow furrowed, then his eyes opened wide as he realized who Kafari was talking to — and why.

She cleared her throat. “Who do we need to notify? How do we notify them?”

“I have already contacted Sector Command, apprising them of my Commander’s medical status. I am filing updated VSR now, based on the medical recommendations I just heard. I am forwarding a voice copy of the conversation you just held with Simon’s attending physician. I will relay Sector’s instructions once I receive VSR from Brigade.

“I will need the registry information for the Malinese freighter, to remain in contact with my Commander and his medical team. Sector has already diverted the scoutship, which is needed elsewhere, now that Simon is incapable of transfer to Hakkor. When Simon regains consciousness, please tell him that I am at fault for having failed him. I was scanning for overt threats. Missiles, artillery, energy weapons. I did not anticipate an enemy action based on subterfuge and sabotage of his transport vehicle. That failure has nearly taken my Commander’s life. It may end the career of the finest officer it has been my privilege to serve. Please tell him I am sorry.”

Kafari was staring at her wrist-comm. She had known, at a superficial level, that Sonny was the most sophisticated psychotronic system she had ever seen, or ever would see. She had not realized, even after nearly fourteen years of interactions with him, just how complex his programming really was. The machine speaking to them via her wrist-comm had a metallic voice unlike any real person’s, yet it was full of anguish and regret.

She didn’t know what to say. Neither, evidently, did Dr. Zarek. Yalena was crying again. Kafari finally broke her silence. “Thank you, Sonny. I’ll…” She had to stop and start over. “I’ll do that, for you. I’ll tell him. That’s a promise. A vow.” In the awkward silence that followed, it occurred to Kafari to wonder who would be issuing Sonny’s orders, now. She didn’t want to think about it. Couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was terrified by the answers occurring to her.

A Mark XX Bolo was capable of independent action. She knew that much, but somebody would have to issue instructions to Sonny. Those instructions couldn’t come from Sector, so they had to come from somebody on Jefferson. She didn’t know which was more frightening. The idea of Sonny acting on his own, at a Battle Reflex Alert that even Simon walked cautiously around, or someone like Gifre Zeloc, who took his orders directly from Vittori Santorini.

We’re in trouble. Oh, Christ, Simon, we’re in deep, horrible trouble. I need you… More than she had ever needed anyone or anything else. The lack of his arms around her, his steady voice, the absence of his rock-solid courage and strength of character were a physical ache in her flesh, more wrenching than the pain of childbirth.

Someone was saying her name. Kafari blinked against the weight of terror and focused on the surgeon’s worried face. “What?” she managed to croak.

“You’ll need to fill out a great deal of paperwork, Mrs. Khrustinova, signing as next-of-kin, authorizing us to bill the Concordiat on his behalf. No, don’t worry about money, our admissions and billing office has already determined that the Brigade will be paying for all treatment rendered. We just need signatures on the requisite forms to submit the charges to the planetary purser’s office rather than the health management plan you carry through your job at the spaceport. You’ll need to file emigration paperwork, as well, for you and Yalena.”

Kafari held her breath. Then turned to look at her daughter. Yalena shook her head. “No. I don’t want to leave Jefferson. I just can’t.”

“Your father needs medical care we can’t get here.”

“I know. But they’re sending a doctor with him. He can come home when he’s well. I won’t go live somewhere else, where I don’t have any friends or anything. You can go, Mom, I understand that, but I’m not leaving.”

Kafari’s father spoke sharply. “And just where do you intend to live?”

“POPPA will put me in a state dormitory, same as they do orphans. I can even stay in my school.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Kafari said, weary to the bone. “I want to go, Yalena, more than you can ever understand. But I won’t leave you here alone and I certainly won’t let you go live in some horrible dormitory.” She cupped her daughter’s wet cheek in one hand. “And your father would want me to stay. It’s what we’d already decided, before…” Her voice wobbled.

Yalena started crying again.

The surgeon spoke very quietly. “I’ll send the hospital volunteer with the paperwork you’ll need to sign. And I’ll let you know when he’s awake.”

She nodded and he left. The volunteer arrived a few moments later with an appalling stack of forms to fill out and sign. Kafari wondered how she could possibly face the years that lay ahead, while Simon struggled through rehabilitation alone, without anyone who loved him there to help. In the grim and ghastly silence that had fallen across the room, Kafari made a steel-cold vow to her unconscious husband.

I will stay here, Simon, as long as it takes. I’ll fight them for her. I’m sorry, my dearest love, but I can’t just leave her with the bastards who did this to you. And one day, she added, eyes narrowing with hatred she could neither deny nor contain, one day, they will regret it.

Bitterly.