The Road to Damascus

I

Yalena was not the most popular girl in school.

In fact, there was ample evidence to show that she was the most unpopular. There were no students from Vishnu in Yalena’s classes, which were special affairs designed to teach Jeffersonian children remedial everything. The closest she came to natives of Vishnu during school hours were the hectic moments in the corridors while changing classes and standing in line at the school cafeteria. Most of the Vishnu kids turned pitying glances on those known to be from Jefferson, but others were openly rude.

Given the way children of POPPA’s social and political elite behaved in mixed company, it was not difficult to see why. Yalena had truly not realized how odious a child she had been, until thrown into a society comprised of Vishnunians, POPPA’s upper crust, and Granger refugees.

Since Yalena did not fit into any of those social groupings, was trusted by none of them, and did not seek out companionship from any of them, she was quite literally the least popular individual in the entire school. For the first year, it had cut her to the bone. By the time she was sixteen, it had left her in tears on occasions that should have been special and had, instead, been merely excruciating. At seventeen and a half, she was far too busy mapping out her vengeance to bother with mere social trivialities.

She had her eye on college, which was more than enough work for a girl who hadn’t really learned anything but how to wash and dress herself. Fortunately, Vishnu’s colleges and universities had also opened their doors to Jefferson’s disadvantaged students, in a bid to create interstellar neighbors who were at least capable of reading, writing, and calculating basic arithmetic. Yalena had already applied to the college she wanted to attend, which offered the kind of classes she would need if she hoped to return home, someday, and strike back at the people who had murdered her mother and crippled her father.

Yalena’s pulse always stuttered a little, when her thoughts turned to her father. Simon Khrustinov was not an easy person to know. He had given her the things she had asked for, to the best of his ability. She had not asked for all that much, in any case, preferring to test out a new concept called self-sufficiency. Her days of demanding — or even whining — were long since over. Mostly she had asked his advice. And that, he had given unstintingly.

When the final bell rang, dismissing school for the day, Yalena gathered up her materials and stuffed them into her satchel, then headed into the crowded hallway. The swirl of happy voices, laughter, and slamming locker doors crested and splashed against her senses like whitewater on the Kirati River, where Yalena had done a whole summer of extreme camping. She had asked her father to send her there as her sixteenth birthday present.

He’d held her eyes for long moments, looking so deeply into her soul, for the motives hidden there, that she’d actually started to tremble. Then he’d given himself a little shake, smiled with a look of pain far back in his eyes, and said, “Of course you can go. If you need any advice on what to take with you, just ask.”

She’d asked. And had benefitted immensely from that advice. Yalena had enjoyed that summer, in a grim and solitary fashion. She hadn’t won herself any friends — mostly because she made no overtures, being far too busy learning simple survival skills most kids on Vishnu had absorbed by their sixth or seventh birthdays — but she’d won the grudging respect of the instructors.

More importantly, she had proved to herself that she could, given sufficient determination, overcome a decade and a half of indoctrination into the art and science of lunacy, a handicap compounded by indolent living, lazy flab in every muscle in her body and every snyapse in her brain. She’d had to overcome a learned helplessness, as well, that vanished entirely within two days of her arrival at the wilderness area that served as campground.

She’d spent her seventeenth summer in a Concordiat Officer Recruitment Program for high-school students interested in military careers. When she’d told him she planned to enroll, her father’s advice had been enormously useful.

“The one thing you must understand,” he’d told her the night she’d broached the subject, “is the purpose of that training. You’ve done a fair bit of homework, that’s clear from what you’ve said. So tell me. What do you think C.O.R.P.’s purpose is?”

She considered her words carefully. “To weed men from whiny boys and women from snivelly girls, for one. To provide the Concordiat with a cadre of trained officers for the combat arms. And to begin training on high-tech military equipment, which takes time. A lot of time.”

Her father nodded. “Yes, those are all useful adjuncts to the C.O.R.P. program.”

“But not the main reason?”

“No.” He refilled his glass, swirled the ice cubes for a few moments, watching the patterns they made in the liquid. “Combat,” he said softly, “has a nasty habit of putting you under the kind of stress that breaks people apart from the inside. Your whole world is shattering around you and you know that your decisions and your actions — right or wrong — will not only affect your own life, but those of others. Not just other soldiers, but civilians in harm’s way, which is worse.”

He fell silent again, for long moments. She waited him out. He didn’t often let her see this part of his life and she wanted to understand him, wanted to understand what had made him the kind of person he was. She didn’t want to interrupt or distract him, when he was finally speaking of it.

“When the stink and horror of it is all around you,” he finally said, voice low and harsh, “when people are dying on all sides, when you want — need, in fact — to run gibbering for the deepest hole you can find, that is precisely the time you must be at your clear-minded best. The Concordiat needs to know if you’re the kind of person who can go into a situation that would reduce most people to hysterical panic and make rational military decisions — and carry them out, which is even more important. Are you cool enough under extreme physical and emotional stress to know what must be done? Are you strong enough to do it, no matter the cost? That’s what C.O.R.P.’s main purpose is.”

Yalena could see the shadows of memory in his eyes. She’d signed onto Vishnu’s datanet with the new computer her father had bought her, the week of her arrival, and had looked up Etaine in Vishnu’s historical archives. What she had read over the course of the next two deeply shocked hours had deepened Yalena’s hatred of school teachers who had systematically lied to her and her classmates. Those lies had poisoned her relationship with a man who should have been canonized as somebody’s patron saint.

She knew that her father didn’t want her to walk into the mouth of hell, didn’t want her to face what he had faced and fought and lived through. Didn’t want to see shadows in her eyes — or a medallion of honor that meant he would never see her eyes again. Yet he gave her expert advice, steered her toward resources she would need, even gave her extra training, himself. He was, Yalena had finally understood, trying to give her enough of an edge to survive the course she had set herself upon and seemed to know, without words spoken, that she did not intend to enter the War College at Sector Command.

Not until other, more important business had been taken care of, first.

Yalena stopped at her locker and put away the satchel and sundry items she wouldn’t need for another ninety minutes, then headed for the C.O.R.P. practice field, behind the school’s sports complex. They’d been studying aikido and other martial arts, this semester, and she was looking forward to another good sparring session. The open field behind the school, used for track meets, was crowded with runners doing laps in the chilly autumn air. The crisp temperature and keen, biting wind spurred the runners to greater exertion, to keep warm. Yalena detoured around the end of the track, then ducked into the gymnasium, since walking through was faster than walking the long way around to reach the C.O.R.P. field.

The smell of chlorine from the gymnasium’s basement-level pool mingled with the odors of body sweat, dirty socks, and talc from the various athletes working out on gymnastics equipment, running wind-sprints up and down the bleachers, and playing a fiercely competitive game that involved twenty sweating boys, an inflatable ball, and hoops dangling from various places on walls and ceilings.

Yalena had even less in common with the school’s athletes than she did with the ordinary students. They, in turn, tended to regard her as something of a freak, mostly because she refused to accord them the adoration they seemed to think was owed them for the superior manner in which they could make balls go through hoops. Yalena crossed the gym in silence, ignoring those at practice and being ignored, in return, as though she moved through a perpetual veil of invisibility. Which, to some extent, she did, since nobody found her interesting enough to notice.

She took the stairs down to the basement locker area, where she kept her C.O.R.P. uniform, and ran slap into the ugliest little scene she had witnessed since coming to Vishnu. A gang of POPPA brats, eight or nine of them, had cornered a Granger girl on one of the landings. They were dragging her, hands clamped across her mouth, into the men’s locker room.

Yalena froze.

They kept going without looking up the stairs. They hadn’t heard her open the stairwell door. She knew the girl, by sight, at least. Dena Mindel was a freshman, barely turned fifteen. Her parents had just come out from Jefferson, smuggled out, so the gossip ran, by Jefferson’s growing insurrectionist movement. Yalena closed her fingers around the railing, gripping the well-worn wood with an ache through her whole hand. She knew exactly what the sons of POPPA’s leading scions intended to do. They were putting Dena back in her place. Forcibly. You may have gotten off-world, the lesson they were about to impart would tell her and all other refugees, but you’ll never be more than gutter trash. The threat of retribution to family members still trapped on Jefferson would keep her terrified and silent, too.

Moving very softly, Yalena reascended the stairs and slipped into the equipment room. She picked up a bucket into which she dropped several baseballs, a wooden practice sword used in the martial arts Yalena had studied, and a whole fistful of throwing stars, their edges and points dulled for safety standards, but still dangerous weapons in hands that knew how to use them.

Yalena’s did.

She slipped back down the stairwell and glanced swiftly to see if anyone was strolling about. No one was, since the official practice sessions had already begun. She eased her way across the hall. Listened at the closed double doors leading into the men’s locker room. A quick glance through the glass windows in the upper half of the doors told her that they’d posted a guard to run interference and to give a warning, should anyone interrupt. That guard was standing with his back to the doors, intent on whatever was happening around the corner.

That was his first — and last — mistake.

Yalena opened the nearest door so softly, he didn’t even hear the faint click. Muffled sounds of pain and terror reached Yalena’s ears. So did low laughter. And other, nastier sounds. Ripping cloth. A meaty smack that wrenched a whimper from the victim. Yalena tried to build a probable map in her mind, giving her a general placement of attackers and attacked. The sound of zippers going down told her she was out of time.

She held the wooden sword in her left hand, picked up a baseball with her right, then did a swift wind-up and let fly. The hard, leather-covered ball slammed into the side of the lookout’s head, just above the ear. He went down hard. The crack and whump got someone’s attention.

“What the hell — ?”

Yalena came around the corner, moving fast. She sent the entire bucketful of baseballs bounding and bouncing in amongst them, tripping them up as they scrambled to tackle her and slipped flat, instead. She hurled throwing stars in a rapid-fire blur, going for vulnerable spots: eyes, throats, naked groins. Half of them went down, cursing or just whimpering. The others rushed her. Or, rather, tried to. She met the first two with full-force blows from her wooden sword. Bone crunched. Screams erupted, strangled with pain and shock.

She ducked under round-house blows that sailed harmlessly past her and used her attackers’ rushing momentum to propel them into nearby walls, breaking more bones. She moved fluidly, focused on the precise actions needed to cripple the enemy, while keenly attuned to her entire environment. She was aware of everything and everyone around her, even the voices coming down the stairwell outside.

They were Granger voices, discussing the whereabouts of the girl lying a short meter from Yalena’s feet. They hadn’t reached the bottom of the stairs, yet, when the last would-be rapist still on his feet tried to run the other way. He skidded on a baseball underfoot, and went sprawling to the floor. Yalena stepped across and kicked him in the head, not hard enough to break bone, but more than hard enough to render him incapable of further threat. She stood over him for a long moment, breathing heavily in the midst of the carnage she had wrought, and realized with a stunned feeling that it was over.

The entire battle had lasted less than sixty seconds.

Dena had curled up into a ball on the floor, sobbing and shaking. Her dress and underthings had been ripped to shreds. Yalena crouched down beside her, moving swiftly, and wrapped the girl’s shaking fingers around the wooden practice sword. Dena looked up, just long enough to register Yalena’s identity, then heard her friends’ voices in the hallway outside, calling her name. She turned her face toward them, tried to call out, and croaked so softly, even Yalena barely heard her voice.

“In here!” Yalena shouted, causing Dena to jump in shock. “I’m in here! In the boy’s locker room!”

Then she took off at a dead run, dodging the remaining baseballs underfoot and whipping through the locker room and showers. She ducked through the doors on the far end, emerging into a corridor that carried Yalena past the wrestling and weight-lifting rooms, up into the main gymnasium, again. She dropped to a carefree stroll across the gym and reached the girls’ locker room via another staircase that mirrored the one she’d just used. That corridor led Yalena down past the trampolines and balance beams used by the women’s gymnastics team.

Yalena slipped quietly into the girls’ locker room, changed into her C.O.R.P. uniform, and reached the practice field only four minutes late. Once there, however, she found it difficult to concentrate on sensei’s lesson. Her emotions were beginning to catch up to the rest of her, fractured emotions that ran the gamut from icy rage to shaking fear that she’d be expelled — or jailed — when those little bastards woke up and thought about pressing charges. Woven through all of that was the agony of grief she had not yet purged and might never leave behind. Her mother had been murdered by men just as brutal as the gang she’d laid out on the locker room floor.

Hatred had propelled every single blow.

If Dena’s friends hadn’t come down the stairwell, would she have stopped? Could she have stopped? She had wanted to kill them. And knew, as well, that she could have. All too easily. The cold, lethal hatred that was shaking through her, now, spoiled her balance and ruined her concentration. Some officer’s candidate I am, she told herself savagely. Dad never mentioned what a good officer’s supposed to do after the fighting’s done. Or what to do when the hatred that makes you want to vomit…

She managed to limp through the lesson, mostly because it was interrupted partway through by the arrival of Vishnu’s peacekeeping officers and several ambulances. She watched with the others as those ambulances pulled away, lights strobing as they headed to the nearest hospital. Yalena fully expected to be summoned by the officers, who were speaking with other students and teachers, but no one called her over or even glanced her way.

Invisibility had its uses.

She waited all night, in fact, for the questions to come but no one came to the apartment and no one called her father, either. Yalena watched the local newscast, which gave her a clue as to the unexpected lack of legal attention directed her way.

“A hate-motivated crime was broken up this afternoon at Shasti High School when a Jeffersonian Granger refugee was attacked by a gang of students whose parents hold positions of authority in Jefferson’s POPPA Party. The attack, which was broken up by Granger students who came to the victim’s rescue, has prompted Vishnu’s Minister of Residency to revoke the educational visas of the young men charged with the assault. No formal charges have been levied, at the request of the student and her family, but the students named in the case will be deported as soon as they are released from the hospital.

“The Jeffersonian ambassador has protested this decision, charging the Minister with bigotry and cultural bias. The Minister has issued a formal statement warning that visa applications for family members of Jeffersonian officials connected to POPPA will come under sharper scrutiny, given the rise in tensions and the increasing number of violent incidents between Granger refugees and POPPA Party affiliates on Vishnu. The entire Chamber of Ministers has made it clear that Jefferson’s internal wrangles will not be tolerated on Vishnu’s soil.”

That was the whole report. Yalena sat wrapped in thoughtful silence as her father said, “It’s about time Vishnu did something about this mess. I’m surprised worse violence hasn’t broken out before now. I hope the kid they attacked will be all right. And I hope to hell there aren’t reprisals against Grangers still trapped on Jefferson.”

Yalena swallowed hard. She hadn’t thought about that. Hadn’t stopped to consider the long-term effects of her enraged actions, this afternoon. It had felt right, at the time. Still felt right. But she hadn’t thought it through and people would suffer for it, as a result. She hadn’t had much time in which to decide, given the danger Dena was in, which helped assuage her tremors of guilt. It also gave Yalena a new and visceral appreciation of what her father had been talking about, when he’d tried to explain the purpose of C.O.R.P. to her. She had made the best decision she could, under the circumstances. And now she — and others — had to live with her decision and the actions flowing from it.

Command, she discovered in that moment, was a bitch with spurs.

The next day at school, she was aware of a sharp and silent scrutiny. Not from the POPPA brats, but from the Grangers. All of them seemed to know. It was eerie, to be stared at everywhere she went, by people who had literally ignored her for two and a half years. At lunch, she found herself staring back into Granger eyes, driven by pride and smouldering anger into holding gazes until the others’ glances dropped away, puzzled and discomfited no small amount.

By the time school was over for the day, Yalena was ready to disappear into whatever sanctuary she could find, but was duty bound to return to the C.O.R.P. practice field. She did nearly as badly as she’d done the day before and ended up on the ground time and again, sprawled in a winded heap where her instructor and fellow students had sent her flailing through the air. She wouldn’t have to worry about proving her worthiness for combat, because she was going to flunk out of basic training.

By the time the session was over, Yalena was ready to do something else violent, just to burn off the frustration. When she emerged from the locker room, having showered and changed into street clothes, Yalena checked abruptly. Fifteen Granger students had formed a barricade across the hall and the stairwell. She considered taking to her heels in a repeat of yesterday’s escape through the men’s locker room. For long, fraught moments, she looked at them and they looked at her. Then one of the boys, a tall, rough-looking kid named Jiri Mokombo, whom Yalena had seen around school, but hadn’t shared classes with, breached the silence.

“How come you did it?” he demanded. “You’re one of them.”

Yalena didn’t have to ask who “them” was. “That’s my business,” she said in a flat voice, angry and scared and determined not to show it. She didn’t want another fight. And she didn’t have anything in her hands, this time, except air. And courage. Which wasn’t a whole lot when outnumbered fifteen to one.

“Your business, huh?” Melissa Hardy, who was in one of Yalena’s classes, pushed her way through the others to meet Yalena’s gaze. “You’re wrong. You made it our business. Why?”

Yalena took her measure, silently, trying to gauge not the physical dimensions of an opponent, but the psychological dimensions of the exchange. The emotion that burned in Melissa’s eyes was more puzzlement than anger. Yalena shook her head. “No, you’re wrong, Melissa. I didn’t make it your business. I made it mine. Frankly, I didn’t much like the odds. Or the assholes involved.”

Someone at the back of the group muttered, “You know, she’s never made up to any of ’em. Not once. I noticed. And none of them have ever tried to make friends with her, either.”

“Of course they didn’t, not when her father’s the butcher of Etaine,” Jiri snarled. “They wouldn’t touch her with a fifty-meter pole. And neither would I.”

“Nobody’s asking you to,” Yalena said coldly.

Melissa turned abruptly and glared at her own friends. “Say what you like, she stopped a rape and God knows what else, before they’d had a chance to do more than rip Dena’s clothes off. And there’s not one of us — not one — who hasn’t wanted to break a few of those bastards’ bones, ourselves. Only we didn’t quite dare, did we? We talk big, but when push came to shove, it wasn’t any of us who stopped it. It was her, by herself, against a whole rotten gang of them. Yalena Khrustinova doesn’t deserve nasty accusations or name-calling from any of us. The only thing I want to know,” she swung around toward Yalena again, “is why.”

Yalena realized that this was one of those moments that forever changed your life, if you were smart enough to recognize it and strong enough to act on it. The first such moment in Yalena’s life came back to haunt her, now, with memory of a ghastly silence that had followed in the wake of screams she still heard in nightmares.

“The last night I spent on Jefferson,” she said in a hoarse voice that sounded nothing like her own, “I got caught in a Granger protest march in Madison. My two best friends in the world were with me. When the P-Squads arrested the Hancock family and lied about it, Ami-Lynn and Charmaine and I went to the protest march. President Zeloc—” she spat the name out like every syllable was pure poison ” — ordered the Bolo to run over an unarmed crowd in the street. I was in that street. So were my friends. My mother…” Her voice shattered.

The other girl’s eyes flinched. They all knew that Kafari Khrustinova was dead. That she’d been murdered by the P-Squads. But they didn’t know the rest.

“My mother pulled me to safety. Just ahead of its treads. My friends were behind me. They didn’t make it. Have you ever seen what’s left when a thirteen-thousand-ton machine runs over a person? There must’ve been six or seven hundred people, just in the city block I was on, that were crushed to death. And you know what was left? Paste. Red, sticky paste, like pureed tomatoes, with smears of hair and shoe leather…”

Somebody whimpered. Yalena didn’t care. About any of them.

“Mom and I crawled away through the sewers. All night, in the sewers, wading through shit and blood, while the lynch mobs pulled people off the PSF farms and chopped them up and hung the pieces on light poles and street signs and burned half the downtown. We finally reached the spaceport and she smuggled me out. And then a trigger-happy P-Squaddie killed her. You know what the hardest thing was, yesterday, when I pulled those bastards off Dena? Not breaking their necks, along with their stinking arms and legs. And now, if you don’t mind, kindly leave me the hell alone!”

She stalked forward.

They parted like reeds before a hurricane.

She actually made it all the way through the gymnasium and halfway across the track before they caught up. One of them, anyway. Melissa Hardy called her name, running to catch up.

“Wait! Yalena, wait!”

She stopped, not even sure why. Melissa closed the gap, breathing hard. Yalena didn’t say anything. Puzzled grey eyes studied her for a long moment.

“I’ve always wondered,” she said slowly, “why you left Jefferson. Why you worked so hard, studying. Why you signed up for C.O.R.P. classes and extreme camping and martial arts. It didn’t fit the pattern POPPA brats follow. I didn’t realize…” She blinked hard for a moment. “I’m sorry about your mother, Yalena. And your friends.” Before Yalena could say anything scathing, she added, “My brother was killed in that street, too.”

Their eyes met and held. Yalena felt a dangerous crack in her emotional armor.

She swallowed hard. Then whispered, “I’m sorry. For a lot of things.”

The other girl said, “I can’t even begin to imagine how you must feel. It’s got to be awful.”

Yalena shook her head. “No. It’s worse. I’m going back. To kill them. All of them.”

The other girl’s breath caught. Then something shifted in her eyes, something Yalena couldn’t name, which left chills slithering along her nerves. When she spoke, there was steel in her voice. “I’m going with you.”

She took the other girl’s measure. Made her decision. “Sounds fair to me. There’ll be fewer targets to hit, with two of us.”

It was more than a pact, more than a holy alliance.

It was a promise. A threat.

And POPPA’s death.

They shook on it.

II

Kafari had lost a lot of weight, but she wasn’t the only person on Jefferson who was thinner, these days. Four years of guerilla warfare had left her lean and hard as a jaglitch. She’d occasionally eaten jaglitch, which could be digested — sort of — with the proper enzymes to break the alien proteins down into something a human stomach considered food. Their store of supplies contained plenty of enzymes, pilfered from pharmaceutical warehouses and fish-processing plants.

Dinny Ghamal stepped into the cavern Kafari called headquarters this week. He was whipcord tough, his face scarred and chiseled by torture and grief, but his eyes were still human. Emmeline had survived. She’d given birth to their first child, a son, six months after their rescue from Nineveh Base. It was a hell of a time and place to begin a family, but it had given many of Kafari’s troops heart, reminding them that life could hold onto its sweetness and wonder, even in the midst of desperate struggle and hardship. The boy was the unofficial mascot of the entire rebellion. Dinny’s wife, unable to travel fast or far while nursing an infant, had become a crackerjack code breaker, hacking into sophisticated systems that Kafari had taught her how to open. Dinny’s wife served the rebellion well. So did Dinny. He bent low to duck under the rocky entrance to her “office.”

“Commodore,” he nodded, indicating with a single word that someone besides her own most trusted staff officers was somewhere in the camp, “the new supply teams are underway. It’s a good haul, sir. We hit three food-distribution centers and wrecked what we couldn’t transport. There’ll be a passel of hungry Subbies, tomorrow. They’ll really be furious by the end of the week. POPPA will have to tighten the rations again.”

His smile was predatory, sharp, full of fangs.

So was hers. “Good.”

“I have other reports in from the field, sir,” Dinny added. “And pouches from several couriers.”

“Let’s hear the reports, please.”

“Team Gamma Five reports success without casualties.”

“Oh, thank God,” Kafari whispered, closing her eyes against the sudden sting of tears. A penetration team had gone to Lakoska Holding Facility with orders to disrupt the wholesale deportation of convicted dissidents to the Hanatos “work camp.” Their target had been Lakoska’s barracks, housing more than five hundred dissidents and protestors. Most of them were Grangers, but a surprising number were urbanites desperate for food and medical care and willing to steal to get them. A few were just ordinary looters. Kafari’s team of computer hackers had cracked the security codes on Lakoska’s transportation schedule. They’d found the date and time of the highly classified transfer that would’ve sent the newly convicted prisoners to Hanatos tomorrow morning.

Team Gamma Five had, perforce, struck tonight.

Kafari had tried to rescue the prisoners already in Hanatos camp. Tried hard, just six days ago. Her entire team had died in the attempt. Their lives had bought the freedom of just five prisoners, who managed to escape during the wild confusion. Of those five, only one had made it out of the wilderness. Hanatos had been constructed, with great care and ruthless foresight, smack in the middle of prime jaglitch habitat. Once the remaining guards had killed Kafari’s team — none of her people had allowed themselves to be taken alive — the retaliatory executions had commenced. The P-Squads had slaughtered fifty prisoners and made two hundred new arrests for every guard her team had killed in the attempt.

Kafari had spent a nasty half hour bent over a basin, losing every scrap of the meal she’d just eaten when the news arrived. Dinny had held her head while she heaved and wept uncontrollably, had wiped her face with a cold, wet cloth while she leaned against him, trembling with the emotional reaction, then sat down with her afterward, focusing her attention on what they could do: plan their own retaliation. Tonight’s strike at the less well-defended Lakoska Holding Facility, had freed the latest batch of victims before they could be transported to Hanatos.

“How many did we get out, tonight?” she asked.

“Five hundred seventeen. We split ’em up as ordered and scattered them as best we could. I’m told it went smoothly. The transport buses were already in the parking lot, conveniently assembled for the next morning. We’ve set up shelters in several abandoned mine shafts, carefully distributed throughout the Damisi network. We managed to keep families together, at least.”

“Good.” Kafari had ordered old mine shafts to be converted into emergency shelters. She’d also instructed people in Granger country to dig bomb shelters under their houses and barns, with air filtration systems capable of handling biochemical attacks. She would never forget the riot she’d been caught in, with the gas that had very nearly caught her — gas that Simon had been convinced came from POPPA, itself, in a staged attack on its own people. Vittori Santorini had plenty of money to buy ingredients to make whatever nasty biochemicals he wanted to disperse. Since farm folk didn’t have publicly funded underground shelters, Kafari had strongly suggested they provide shelters, themselves. The residents of Klameth Canyon, Cimmero Canyon, and hundreds of other canyons scattered throughout Granger country had dug into the topsoil and bedrock with a vengeance.

But Kafari couldn’t ask the farmers and ranchers to hide five hundred seventeen escaped convicts. POPPA would be hunting for any trace of those people and Grangers would be under extra surveillance — electronic and personal — as prime suspects for sheltering them. Kafari couldn’t risk innocent lives, and her own resources were stretched to the limit. She’d known that when she’d given the order to hit the camp.

“The Ranee came in yesterday from Mali,” she said, glancing at Dinny. “You’ve talked to our friend, Girishanda. I want to send our five hundred seventeen friends out on the Ranee when she breaks orbit.”

“He won’t want to run the risk.”

“Oh, really?” she asked softly, hearing the dangerous tone in her own voice. “If he wants our money for his merchandise, he will by God take them out. As many as we can jam into his cargo holds.”

“I took the precaution,” Dinny said with a grim smile, “of having a few people brought out here, tonight. To participate, unofficially, in our negotiations. I brought in some of the people we airlifted out of Lakoska. I also brought in Attia.”

Kafari hissed. “Yes-s-s-s. Oh, yes. A fine idea, Dinny. That may just do the trick.” Attia ben Ruben was the sole survivor from Hanatos death camp. “Very good. Our rescue team did a fine night’s work. Be sure the team members know I said that.”

Dinny nodded, then gave her a large pouch, just delivered via special courier. Kafari shuffled through the material and whistled softly. “My friend,” she said, “this is some kind of good haul.”

“Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “It is.”

It held documents recovered from the home of a P-Squad regional director, who had been involved in all sorts of nastiness. Letters, official reports, directives from planetary HQ spelling out measures to be implemented, along with a timetable, drew another soft reaction from her. “We need to get this off-world,” she said in a hushed tone. “There are people on Vishnu who need to see these.” If they could just persuade Vishnu’s government to help them…

“That can be managed. Even if Girishanda won’t take our refugees from Lakoska, we still have someone ready to ship out. They can deliver them. I’ve already made our copies.”

“Very good. Handle it, please. Is there anything else?”

“Other than shifting headquarters and interviewing our visitor? No, sir. It’s time to move out. The first transports are ready to go. The moons are down and the sentinels are in place. Our friend is here, waiting in the truck, as ordered.”

“All right, let’s move things along.” She had already finished packing up her computer and personal effects, meager as they were, so she donned her command helmet, which covered her face very effectively while giving her an IR view of the cavern. She also wore breast-bands and extra padding to disguise her female shape. She strode out into the main cavern.

“Commodore!” Her people snapped to attention, giving her a smart salute. She returned it, nodding briefly to soldiers who were busy loading equipment and supplies onto horses, mules, and small skimmers. They never made major shifts in larger vehicles, not even at night. Sonny had access to Jefferson’s satellites, whose military spy eyes had nothing to watch for in deep space, these days, but plenty to track on Jefferson’s surface. So Kafari gave them as little to track as possible, and what little there was, she did her best to make innocuous.

The shifting of Kafari’s headquarters would involve only one truck, three personal skimmers, and no more than a dozen pack animals, which would move in groups of two or three over the course of the next three nights. Some of them would amble more or less straight to the new headquarters cavern in a canyon several kilometers to the south, but only after looping through many other stops and layovers. Others would join them tomorrow night and still others the night after that, playing a slow-motion, deadly game of hopscotch under cover of darkness.

Kafari nodded to her people as she crossed the cavern, then climbed into the back of her command truck, which looked like a rickety, rusted-out produce truck with holes in the sides. It was crammed with the most sophisticated technology they’d liberated from Berran Bluff Armory. At the moment, it also held their “guest” — a supply agent from Vishnu who claimed to have good news that he would deliver to Commodore Oroton and no one else. He’d been stripped down to bare skin and had endured the most thorough body search Dinny Ghamal could conduct, a humiliating and painful process involving a fairly sophisticated arsenal of medical equipment, among other things. He’d come out clean. There hadn’t even been a nanotech squeak anywhere.

They’d drugged him unconscious and brought him out here. Kafari would speak with him from the back of the truck, which he would not leave at any time, and then they would drug him again and take him back to town so he could return to Vishnu. Or they’d kill him, if the situation warranted it, and drop the body on some well-used game trail frequented by hungry jaglitch.

Kafari climbed into the back of the truck. Dinny Ghamal climbed up behind her and swung the doors shut. Red Wolf, who was already there, nodded to her as she took her seat opposite a small table from their guest. He wore a blindfold and his hands were cuffed to the chair he sat in, leaving him no room to attempt anything untoward. He couldn’t even reach her with his feet. All his clothing and his shoes were missing. Kafari had replaced them from her own stores. He had to be feeling mighty vulnerable, which was exactly what she wanted.

Kafari took her seat and tapped her fingertips lightly on the grip of her handgun, which she kept under her hand at all times. She studied the man in the opposite chair for long moments. He was a small man, with skin one shade darker than hers, even after four years in the Damisi back country, where harsh sunlight baked everything it touched. Like many natives of Vishnu, he was very slightly built, with straight black hair worn long. Her guest was showing signs of the emotional strain he’d been under for more than a day, now. “I’m told,” Kafari said in a soft voice that her helmet transmuted into a deeper, more guttural and masculine sound, “that you have a message for me, Mr. Girishanda.”

He turned his head slightly at the sound of her voice. “That is correct, yes. I have a message for Commodore Oroton.”

“You have my attention.”

“I would prefer the freedom of my hands and eyes.”

“I’ll bet you would. I’d prefer to see the sun rise, come morning.”

To her surprise, he flashed a smile full of white teeth. “A cautious nature is a wise quality for a leader of rebels. Very well. We speak in the dark.”

Kafari waited, giving him no assistance.

“My employers have a certain commodity they feel may interest you.”

Again, Kafari simply waited.

Girishanda said, “I am told you have some, ah, fairly heavy artillery.”

“You’ve probably been told a lot, if POPPA’s been talking. As for what you hear and what’s true…”

He chuckled.

Kafari frowned. “You’re pretty relaxed for somebody chained hand and foot.”

“I am a Hindu,” he shrugged, rattling the manacles against the chair frame. “What would you have me say? The things I get wrong this time around, I will have a chance to get right the next time around. As badly as my life goes, sometimes, I suspect I’ve been trying to get it right for a thousand years. I haven’t managed it, yet. At worst, it’s a better life than, say, several centuries as a slime mold.” Teeth flashed again.

Kafari couldn’t help it. She smiled “Very well, Mr. Girishanda. Why are you interested in my artillery?”

“I have very little interest in what you have. I have a great deal of interest in what you might want.”

Kafari considered. “And what might you have, that would tempt me?”

“Hellbores.”

Kafari sat up straight. “Hellbores? You care to explain that?”

White teeth flashed again. “I have your attention, yes?”

Kafari deliberately waited him out, telling her taut nerves to be patient, because she damned well wasn’t going to get what she wanted any faster by jumping at an offer that smelled like a very large rat.

Girishanda smiled in her direction. “Your silence is a sign of patience, my friend. That is good. Even with the cargo I can deliver, you will need patience. And a great deal of cunning. We know what you face, in this struggle. We can help. If the price can be agreed upon.”

“There are more things than price to consider.”

The smile left his face and he sat up straighter, despite his bonds. “You are very right about that,” he said softly, as though she had passed some sort of test. “Very well, Commodore Oroton, I will answer some of the questions you carefully have not asked.”

Kafari settled into her chair, prepared to listen. All night, if necessary.

“During the war,” Girishanda — or whoever he really was — said, “refugee ships poured across the Void, running terrified ahead of the Deng. Some of those worlds had heavy artillery, not heavy enough to save them, but enough to buy evacuation time. You must know, Commodore, that many more ships came on to Vishnu than stayed on Jefferson. These people were panic-stricken. They wanted as much human space between themselves and the Deng as they could afford to cross. Some of them realized that the heavy artillery their worlds had purchased could be sold for a tidy sum of money, taking them farther away from a border that was shifting too rapidly for their peace of mind. So they brought that artillery with them. To… smooth the way, financially, so to speak.”

Kafari could see the excitement in Dinny Ghamal’s eyes, could read it in Red Wolf’s flared nostils. Oh, yes, Mr. Girishanda definitely had their attention. Kafari’s, as well.

“You are interested, then?” he asked.

Kafari let him wait, again. If he was worth his salt as a bargaining agent, he would smell their interest. Note to self, a corner of her brain had the temerity to whisper, whenever you’re dealing for something really big, have someone light incense, first. Or douse the place with eau du jaglitch first. The very absurdity of the image restored her equilibrium. The long pause caused Mr. Girishanda’s self-assurance to falter slightly. Good. He needed to be jolted a bit.

“I suspect,” she said at length, “that your price is beyond our means.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s not much happening in our corner of interstellar space, just now. The market has shifted. We find ourselves with a stock of goods nobody wants.”

Nobody else, he meant, of course.

That was understood.

“You’re not worried about another breakthrough from across the Void?” Kafari asked, allowing surprise to color her voice. “Our respective star systems are still slam in the way of any incursion from the Deng homeworlds.”

“The Deng,” Mr. Girishanda said dismissively, “are in no shape to come calling on anyone. Besides,” he grinned, “they’d have to come through you first, which means you’d get better use of the Hellbores than we would.”

“Huh,” Kafari muttered, “we’d get our asses shot off first, you mean.”

He tried to shrug; the manacles rattled. “Your Bolo—”

“It is not our Bolo.” The hatred in her voice stopped him cold.

The look on his face spoke eloquently about the difference in attitude one brought to the bargaining table when one’s visceral experience of Bolos involved being shot at by one, rather than viewing it as savior and protector from the wrath of alien guns.

“No,” he said at length, with an unsettled expression as he tried to imagine what it must feel like to be on the wrong end of those massive guns. “It is not your Bolo. But it is a Bolo, nonetheless, and it’s programmed to defend this world from the Deng. Try to imagine what would happen if the Deng returned,” he said softly. “How long would it take for Vittori Santorini’s little empire to collapse like a house of cards? We’re not stupid, Commodore, or blind. Santorini’s done a good job with the propaganda, no doubt of that. The news that reaches Vishnu and Mali is full of flowers and honey. And his money talks, as well. Louder on Mali than Vishnu, you must understand?”

Kafari frowned behind her helmet, trying to take in the multiple messages being thrown at her, some voiced, some unvoiced. “Go on.”

“He’s fooled a lot of people. But spacers talk. So do refugees. And enough POPPA officials have sent their children to our schools to give us a very clear picture of what POPPA really stands for and what it’s capable of doing. And,” he added with a shrewd glance at Kafari’s top commanders, “what it isn’t capable of, which is just as important. If the Deng hit Jefferson again, that unholy little alliance of his will come apart at the seams. His P-Squads appear to be very skilled at terrorizing ordinary citizens and shaking down spacer crews for bribes and letting enormous amounts of contraband slip through unquestioned. But go up against Deng Yavacs? Or heavy cruisers? Even Deng infantry?”

His voice held scathing contempt. “You don’t even have an air force left, do you? Let alone trained fighter pilots or ground support troops. If the Deng come this way — or Krishna-forbid, the Melconians — your troops, Commodore, and that Bolo are the only defense Jefferson will have. Perhaps it’s selfish of us, but we’d like to think there’d be something to at least slow them down, before they head for Ngara and our worlds.”

It was a hell of a mess, when a Deng invasion looked positively attractive.

He leaned forward, causing the manacles to clank again. “But consider this, Commodore, because I assure you, we have, more than once. That Bolo of yours takes his orders from the government. If you become that government…”

Kafari caught the hiss between her teeth before he could hear. Just what were Mr. Girishanda’s motives? And connections? He sounded more like an official with Vishnu’s Ministry of Defense than a gunrunner. She narrowed her eyes beneath the battle helmet’s face mask. The ministry would doubtless feel a great deal safer if Kafari’s rebellion succeeded in removing POPPA and the Santorinis from power. POPPA fanatics would make uneasy neighbors, at best.

When Jefferson’s economy collapsed — finished collapsing — the whole damned society would go under. It was inevitable. And the disaster wasn’t very far off, either.

And when the collapse came, hungry and angry people were going to go hunting for what they needed to survive. Jefferson still had star-capable travel, with enough guns in POPPA’s hands to turn the P-Squads into a ravening horde of armed and deadly scavengers. The closest civilized port of call they could reach lay in the Ngara system. If Kafari had been a highly placed official in charge of defending Ngara’s worlds, she would have viewed the situation on Jefferson with alarm. Intense alarm.

Even with the losses the P-Squads had sustained from steady attacks by Kafari’s freedom fighters, there were thousands of P-Squad officers out there. Nineveh Base had trained five thousand a year for ten years, before Kafari’s assault had wiped the base off the map. Even with the loss of Nineveh’s cadre of instructors, however, they still had an army of fifty thousand men already in the field. If pushed to raid off-world for what they needed, that army could smash Mali with ease and do massive damage, even on Vishnu.

There was a Bolo on Vishnu, but in that kind of scenario, it wasn’t much use. A Bolo had to know in advance that a ship was a threat, before it could act defensively. A freighter crammed full of P-Squad marauders could land a devastating attack with literally no warning and escape again untouched, simply by picking a target on the other side of the planet from the Bolo’s depot. The depot’s location wasn’t a secret from anyone. Any ordinary school child could tell raiders exactly where to find Vishnu’s Bolo. There were several thousand POPPA students on Vishnu.

And now Mr. Girishanda was offering to sell her the kind of firepower it would take to destroy Vittori Santorini and either destroy or take control of his suborned Bolo, which would end the threat POPPA and its fifty-thousand potential raiders represented. If Girishanda wasn’t on the Ministry of Defense’s payroll, he was acting on the ministry’s behalf. And probably on their orders, payroll or not. Kafari was ready to put money on it. Speaking of which…

“How many Hellbores do you have available, Mr. Girishanda? And how much money do I have to lay down, to persuade you to part with them?”

“Then you are interested?”

“In winning this war? Absolutely. In your merchandise? That remains to be seen.”

Mr. Girishanda’s smile blazed like the noonday sun over Hell-Flash Desert. “My dear Commodore, I believe we can both walk out of this deal as happy men.”

Kafari couldn’t help her own smile. “You think so?”

Dinny Ghamal was grinning fit to crack his face in half. Red Wolf merely looked pained. Girishanda, blissfully ignorant of the byplay, said, “It is my fondest hope.”

Kafari leaned forward. “Convince me to put my money on the table.”

They settled down to the serious game of dickering a price they could both live with, in every possible sense of the word. It took an hour of the hardest bargaining Kafari had done in her life. Money, per se, wasn’t the only factor in her strategy. There was plenty of money, if a person knew how to divert it from off-world investment portfolios and bank accounts. POPPA, itself, was supplying Kafari with most of the money they needed to wage this rebellion. No, the hardest portion of her job tonight would be the other demand that went along with the cash laid on the table.

When Girishanda finally accepted a price that left him looking mournful, but likely beaming with self-congratulatory success in the privacy of his own thoughts, Kafari let the hammer drop.

“There’s just one more little condition to meet, before we close this deal.”

She couldn’t see his eyes behind the blindfold, but the rest of him shifted from easy relaxation to wary tension. “Oh?”

“We have some merchandise of our own to ship out. Important merchandise.”

“What does a commander of rebels have to sell?” Girishanda asked.

“This commodity isn’t for sale.”

“It’ll cost to ship it, then,” said with a frown. “How much it’ll cost depends on what you’re shipping. And why.”

Kafari turned to Dinny Ghamal, who nodded and rose, leaving the truck and swinging the doors shut behind him.

“Who’s that?” Girishanda asked. “Who left?”

“That’s not important. We have a perishable commodity, a fairly bulky supply of it.”

Girishanda gave her a sudden scowl. “Oh, no. No, you don’t. I’m not transporting a shipload of escaped prisoners. I do not want that kind of risk, thank you, kindly.”

Kafari regarded him for a moment. “You want to sell some Hellbores. I want to buy them. If you want my money, you’ll take my commodity and ship it safely to Vishnu. Or the deal is off.”

“Don’t be stupid!” Girishanda snapped, sitting up straight and rattling the manacles when he tried to move his arms to emphasize the point. “Confound it, you need those Hellbores or that Bolo will tear you to shreds. You know it. I know it. POPPA knows it. Don’t put yourself — or my world — at risk over the fate of condemned criminals!”

His reaction was no more than Kafari had expected. Her gut still clenched in icy rage. He did not, of course, know. Nobody on Vishnu could know, yet. Spacers and refugees might talk, but the former were restricted to the environs of the spaceport, these days, and the latter had fallen to a mere trickle, thanks to draconian shifts in emigration laws. With a total lock-down on interstellar communications and escape from the camps all but impossible, who could possibly have gotten word out to Vishnu? Nobody on Vishnu could know the vicious secret of POPPA’s detention camps, except Simon, and he couldn’t talk freely without putting her and her people at risk.

“In a few moments,” Kafari told him, “you will eat those words.”

Puzzlement drove furrows into his brow, but he didn’t answer. The door opened again. Dinny had returned with a young girl in tow. She had been pretty, once. Innocent, too. She was fourteen. The sea-green eyes that looked out at the world burned with an eerie copper fire, eyes that reflected the unspeakable horrors she had witnessed and survived. They were ancient eyes, lost in a child’s face, eyes it took a strong man to meet face-on and not flinch from. It had taken every ounce of strength Kafari possessed to meet Attia’s gaze, when Dinny had first brought her in, two nights ago.

Kafari rose from her chair, taking her pistol with her, and touched Attia’s hand gently, beckoning her to take Kafari’s seat, then she stepped behind a partition that afforded privacy for a mobile toilet used by the crew in the command post. There was a video system in place, covering the interior of the command post, with its video feed tied into her battle helmet’s visor. It gave her a full, unobstructed view of the tableau unfolding out there.

Attia sat down, watching silently as Dinny removed Mr. Girishanda’s blindfold.

He blinked a couple of times, then his gaze came to rest on the slender girl opposite him. He sat up so abruptly, the manacles bit into both wrists. He spoke, jaggedly, something she didn’t understand. Kafari didn’t speak Hindi. She didn’t have to. The naked shock in his face was all too eloquent a translation.

“My name’s Attia,” the girl said in a rough, ruined voice. “I turned fourteen three months ago. In Hanatos Camp.”

Girishanda was trying to swallow. The sound was ghastly in the frozen silence. Red Wolf, an unobtrusive presence behind Girishanda’s shoulder, had taken out a belt knife and was jabbing the point into the arm of the chair he sat in, mechanically, with fixed concentration.

“Have you ever heard of Hanatos Camp?” Attia asked in a harsh voice.

The gunrunner shook his head. He was still trying to swallow. Kafari gave him credit for guts. His gaze stayed on Attia’s face. What was left of Attia’s face.

“Ever hear of Professor Mahault?”

Again, he shook his head.

“She wrote a book. The True History of Glorious Jefferson.”

Girishanda was frowning. “What does a professor have to do with…?”

“She rewrote our history,” Attia said harshly. “Wrote a book full of lies to prove that Grangers had altered the history of our world. Her book gave POPPA the ‘proof’ they needed to classify Grangers as a subversive sub-culture. One that existed to destroy true civilaztion.”

“That’s insane!” Girishandra gasped.

“You’re damned right, it’s insane,” Red Wolf growled.

Girishanda’s eyes tracked towards Attia, who spoke again in that ruined, harsh voice. “Yes, it is. But there was no one to stop them. Not even the Commodore could stop Jefferson’s House of Law and Senate when they passed legislation outlawing Grangerism. Our whole culture, itself, is now a crime. Against humanity, decency, and planetary security. Anyone caught practicing Grangerism is arrested, convicted, and shipped out to the nearest ‘work camp.’ Once there, we become slave labor. We de-terraform ‘raped areas’ to allow nature to reclaim its own. Or we’re sent into mine shafts to work ’round the clock shifts. It’s too expensive to pay miners actual wages, when convicts can be forced to do the work. All that costs is money to buy the guards, ammunition, and just enough food to keep the slaves on their feet and working. And sometimes,” she added harshly, “not even that.”

Girishanda’s eyes flicked across Attia, whose skeletal pallor had not faded in the mere two days she had been free and would not fade for months to come. If she didn’t get killed fighting to free others. There were still prisoners in far too many work camps.

Mr. Girishanda met her gaze, once more. He didn’t speak for long moments. Then he asked very quietly, indeed, “Would you tell me, please, what happened to you? I’m trying to understand.”

Attia’s copper-fire eyes searched his face for long moments. “You’re from off-world. Vishnu?”

“Yes. I am from Vishnu.”

“Are you selling us guns?”

“I am trying to,” he said gently, flicking a glance at the partition between himself and “Commodore Oroton.” “It seems that the sale is contingent on hearing what you have to say.”

She scowled, which pulled the scar tissue in hideous directions. “All right. Then listen up good, ’cause I don’t want to relive this out loud, ever again.”

Kafari knew exactly what was coming.

Mr. Girishanda only thought he did.

III

Phil is an hour late returning from lunch when he finally enters my makeshift maintenance depot, a sheet-metal barn topped by a metal canopy that barely accommodates my bulk. The entire, flimsy affair threatens to become airborne each time a storm sweeps in from the ocean west of Madison. Phil is, as usual, swearing.

“You won’t believe what happened last night! Those goddamned freedom fighters hit the food distribution centers! Three of ’em! My sister Maria found out this morning, when she went down to collect the week’s groceries from the warehouse. I hadda take her to see a guy I know, who wouldn’t sell direct to her even if she told him I sent her. It took my whole damn paycheck to get anything for the kids t’ eat, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot he had left, neither. Not at any price.”

“I am sorry to hear that, Phil.” I find it interesting to note that Phil no longer calls the Granger rebels by the term “terrorists.” This is the only descriptor used by the POPPA leadership when referring to rebels who routinely shoot corrupt POPPA officials in their driveways, ambush police patrols, and execute outspoken broadcast propagandists in their houses — admittedly clean executions that never touch a family member or innocent bystanders. “Terrorists” is not, however, the word drifting through the streets, where food riots have been crushed just as brutally as Granger protests were during the early stages of POPPA’s rise to power.

“And that’s not the half of it,” Phil continues to rage, with his nano-tatt blazing in a blood-red swath across half his face, pulsing in time to his elevated heartbeat. I find the rhythm distracting. “You know what the shit-for-brains Minister of Urban Distributions did about it? Did he tell the P-Squads what he oughta be telling them? Which is what I’d tell ’em, if I was in his shoes. ‘Find those bastards or go hungry!’ Did he say that? Oh, no, not him. He just went and cut the rations again, that’s what! Another unholy, unbearable twenty percent! How’n hell are kids s’posed to grow without nothin’ to eat? I ask you, do those POPPA bigshots look like they’re goin’ without dinner? Hell, no. There ain’t no such thing as a skinny cop, let alone a skinny politician.”

Phil wipes sweat from his nano-tatt with a hand that is actually unsteady.

“I dunno what my family’s gonna do, Big Guy. If Maria loses any more weight, she’s gonna collapse. She’s nothin’ but skin and bones, now. And Tony, that no-account oldest boy of hers, that goddamned little idiot got himself hooked on snow-white and lost the only job our whole family had, except mine. D’you know what’s it like, Big Guy, t’be the only person in a whole damn family that anybody respects? Five sisters, I got, all married,” he adds with justifiable pride, given the informal methods of procreation practiced by many subsidy recipients, who are desperate for any increase in the baseline payments, “an’ all five of ’em has kids, twenty-three kids, all together. And the little ones look up t’ me. They say ‘I’m gonna be like Uncle Phil when I grow up. I’m gonna have a job!’ I ain’t smart, Big Guy. I got nothin’ much t’ be proud of, I know that, and God knows I ain’t the sort a kid oughta be lookin’ up to, to decide what t’ do with his life.”

His eyes film with suspicious moisture and his voice assumes a bleak, nearly despairing tone I have never heard from him. “And what chance have they got, anyhow, to be like Uncle Phil? To have a job, I mean, and somebody’s respect? There’s no jobs now. The trash they’re learning in school sure isn’t gonna teach ’em how to get one. It’s worse now than it was when I was in school, and man, they didn’t teach me nothin’. If things don’t change pretty soon,” he adds, “they won’t need to worry about growin’ up like anybody, ’cause there’s no damn food t’feed em, anyway.” His voice turns savage. “Sar Gremian needs me, don’t he? T’keep you running? So I eat, while them kids starve. It ain’t right, Big Guy, it just ain’t right. We never signed up for this kind’a stuff, when folks voted POPPA in, all those years back.” He pauses, then adds in a puzzled voice. “How’d it get t’be so bad in such a short time, huh? Seems longer, t’me, but it’s just nineteen years since POPPA took over. Spent my whole schooling, just about, in POPPA classrooms, and not one a’ them teachers ever told us it could get like this so fast.”

Phil’s revelations, coming as fast and thick as Y-Band bolts from a Deng Yavac, astonish me. He is more deeply disaffected with POPPA than I had realized. He has also gained far more self-respect and technical skill than I would have believed possible. While his nano-tatt is as colorful as ever and he still shows a predilection for barracks-room language as colorful as his face, he no longer speaks like the illiterate grease monkey he was just four years ago. He has, in fact, become a surprisingly skilled technician.

Granted, he has spent most of the past four years studying the archived manuals and technical schematics pertaining to my weapons systems and other hardware, which required even longer sessions working with a dictionary and the science, mathematics, and engineering texts embedded in my reference banks. I have been forced to grant him access to these, as the Minister for Public Education made a thorough sweep through Jefferson’s public educational system, e-libraries, and datasite archives. It is no longer possible to obtain a real education on Jefferson without attending one of the private schools operated for the children of POPPA officials, whose databases and on-line libraries are not accessible to the average citizen.

This fact angered Phil immensely when he discovered the existence of this two-tier educational system, with its built-in mechanism for exclusion of the unequal masses. He might never have discovered this, if not for my urgent need for repairs. I have sustained enough cumulative damage from rebel forces to make constant repair work a necessity. Each time I leave my makeshift maintenance depot to disperse rioters, repel attacks on police stations and military compounds, or pursue guerilla-style raiding parties, I am subjected to direct fire from a surprisingly large arsenal of military-grade small arms.

Nor am I the only thing taking cumulative damage. The guerillas are taking a heavy toll on food distribution networks — trucking centers, packing plants, warehouses — and utilities infrastructure — electrical power generating plants, sewage treatment facilities, public transportation hubs — that cannot be replaced at Jefferson’s current level of industrial sluggishness. There are no manufacturing plants left to replace the equipment and buildings being wrecked. The repeated attacks have driven many engineers and technicians to boycott work in a massive protest movement that is crippling Jefferson’s cities as effectively as the damage to the infrastructure, itself.

Commodore Oroton is fiendishly effective at his job.

So are his field troops. Rebel marksmen have an uncanny ability to put bullets through external camera lenses and sensor arrays, which is not just annoying, it is downright alarming. Scrounge as he will, Phil cannot keep finding replacement parts indefinitely. Worse, during my transits to and from those conflicts, usually through heavily populated areas, I am also hit by suicide-teams masquerading as ordinary civilians. The bombers get close enough to hurl man-portable octocellulose bombs against my tertiary gun systems and track linkages, inflicting a steady barrage of damage that cannot be repaired fast enough. Not in the face of near-total lack of replacement parts.

I am also burning up antipersonnel ammunition that can only be replaced by diverting it from P-Squad depots, an activity that tries Phil’s nerves to their utmost. If Phil Fabrizio is afraid of anything, it is the P-Squads. What is particularly irritating about the expenditure of munitions is the knowledge that I am wasting it on rank-and-file fighters, as I am unable to locate, let alone eliminate, the ringleaders. For all their vaunted prowess, the P-Squads have had no better luck cracking open the rebel network. I do not know if that is because the P-Squads are inadequate to the task or because Commodore Oroton has built a particularly effective guerilla network, with cells difficult to crack open. The rebel tendency to suicide, rather than be taken for questioning, certainly makes it difficult to question those who might otherwise have provided valuable information.

The mysterious Commodore Oroton is an extremely effective commander, with what is clearly a great deal of military experience. I surmise, based on the actions of his hit-squads and the thought-processes behind them, that the commodore has worked with Bolos in the past. If not as an officer, perhaps as a technician or a cadet who failed the rigorous examinations necessary for command. Whoever Oroton is, the situation is rapidly deteriorating into a serious crisis.

Phil mutters, “I’m sorry I’m late. Lemme climb up and look at that infinite repeater processor that got hit last time. I gotta know what parts t’steal.”

Phil climbs up the rear port-side ladders and clambers cautiously across my stern, reaching the infinite repeater housing that routes fire-control signals to my port-side and stern infinite repeaters. The guidance-control circuitry is, of course, inside my warhull, but there are semi-external processors that route the signals. These processors are covered with flintsteel housings across my flanks and back. It is a design flaw in the Mark XX series, which was corrected in the Mark XXI and later Bolos. Phil cuts and pries at the warped housing with power tools, sweating and swearing until it finally comes loose. He peers critically at the damage and just shakes his head.

“Big Guy, the tracking control for these rear-port infinite repeaters is out. O-W-T out. There’s a hole right through the actual quantum processors and quantum is French for ‘Don’t fuck with it.’ Ain’t no way I’m gonna fix this one.” He gestures at the damage, evincing extreme disgust. “Maybe I can able to cobble something up t’replace it. I stole a workstation processor last week from the Admin building on campus, but it won’t work real well. If Sar Gremian doesn’t get us some honest-to-God spares soon, I honest-to-shit don’t know what we’re gonna do. Next time you go out, try to duck the bullets, huh?”

“I am too big to duck, Phil.”

“You said a pissin’ mouthful.” He wipes sweat off his face with one sleeve. “They’re screwin’ you up royal, that’s for sure. We’d be a blamed sight better if they bought spare parts as rewards, ’stead of sticking so many goddamn made-for-prime-time, gaudy-assed medals up on your prow. Much more a’them shiny things and I won’t be able to open the housings on your forward processors.”

I am inclined to agree with Phil’s assessment of the relative worth of the “medals” I have been awarded by this administration. I, too, would prefer their removal.

Phil is climbing down when I receive an urgent call from Sar Gremian. “We’ve got a police patrol pinned by rebel gunfire. I’m sending the coordinates now.”

Those coordinates show a spot thirty-seven kilometers north of the Klameth Canyon agricultural complex. This is cattle country, with extensive herds of beef cattle, dairy farms, vast hog lots, and poultry houses that stretch for a hundred meters or more and routinely house seven or eight million birds. Most of this was privately held, before the land-snatch programs confiscated and collectivized it. The terrain is comparable to Klameth Canyon, which sets up a trickle of unease through my threat-assessment processors.

“Phil,” I say urgently, “climb down faster. I’ve just been ordered into another skirmish. A police patrol has been trapped in Cimmero Canyon and is taking heavy fire.”

Phil just shakes his head in disgust and shimmies his way down ladders until he reaches the floor. “Watch your back, willya?” he says while getting out of my way. “You got enough stuff back there to fix, without adding anything new to the list.”

“I will do my best, Phil. Given the state of my treads, this will take a great deal of time.”

I head out at the best road speed of which I am currently capable, which is pitifully slow compared to my optimal speed. I have sustained sufficient track damage, I cannot risk my treads to the wear-and-tear they would sustain under greater velocity. At sixteen point two-five kilometers per hour, the journey will take me two and a half hours to complete. Local police attempting to reach their brethren have come under such withering fire, losing three aircars and seven groundcars full of officers, they had retreated and refused a second rescue attempt. Federal troops — consisting of P-Squadron officers — have also refused to risk themselves against an entrenched enemy with effective snipers.

Given Jefferson’s wholesale destruction of mothballed military aircraft during Gifre Zeloc’s presidency in a “political statement” that involved bulldozers and a crowd of thousands screaming their approval, I am literally the only resource POPPA can fall back on, to neutralize what appears to be a relatively small handful of riflemen. By monitoring police channels, I ascertain that the rebels don’t seem to be trying to overrun the patrol, just pin it down. As this does not fit with previous patterns, I exercise caution during my final approach.

There are only three routes I can take to where the patrol is pinned. All three lead through relatively narrow areas. To reach any of them, I must pass the city of Menassa, which grew up in the Adero floodplain at the point where the main entrance to this canyon opens out. It is a fair-sized city with a population of roughly two hundred seventeen thousand people, founded to support the meat-packing and processing industries necessary to turn Cimmero Canyon’s herds into cuts of meat ready for shipment. I select the entrance south of Menassa, to avoid bringing the fight directly into the midst of a major civilian center. The city is considerably longer than it is deep, stretching for nearly ten kilometers along the main roads leading to Madison in the south and mining communities to the north.

This portion of the Damisi mountain range is heavily forested. The canyon walls slice through a thick deciduous forest where shifting climate patterns and plate tectonics have brought abundant rainfall to a region formerly dry enough to erode away as badlands. The result is a dense tangle of native vegetation that forms a green fringe along the crown of the cliffs. The ranchers of Cimmero Canyon do constant battle with inimical wildlife drawn to their herds. Cimmero’s residents were among the strongest protestors of the weapons-confiscation legislation, for reasons of personal safety as well as predator control to protect their food animals. Indeed, the Hancock family co-op was based in this region.

I do not like this terrain, with its limited visibility and plenty of cover and concealment for enemy gun emplacements. The rebels could hide an entire division in the forested fringe that lies several hundred meters above me and I would not detect their presence until they opened fire. I therefore move ahead with all available sensors sharply tuned. I would be happier if all my sensors were available, but I suffer port-side blind spots, thanks to cumulative sniper-fire damage.

I would be much happier still, if I could conduct aerial reconnaissance, but I have no drones. Although Phil has been able to produce satisfactory aerial surveillance equipment by piggybacking cameras onto children’s toys, I am out of them again. The rebel marksmen’s skill at shooting them down surpasses Phil’s speed at manufacturing new ones. Toy airplanes, like everything else on Jefferson, are in short supply and the cameras are even harder to locate and steal. Using other sensor arrays, I scan across a wide band of visual, audio, and electromagnetic spectra, looking for anything out of the ordinary. I detect no heavy-weapons emissions, only the background power bleed from ordinary household current.

I am approximately one point five kilometers from the coordinates supplied by Sar Gremian when police transmissions from the patrol take on a frantic urgency.

“They’re comin’ at us again! I’m hit — Jeezus, I’m hit—”

I detect gunfire, not only through the radio link, but dead ahead, with my own sensors. I can hear screams, as well, men in pain. I rush forward through the narrowest part of the canyon, gaining speed rapidly in an emergency sprint that sends me barreling across the intervening distance—

—minefield!

I detect it too late to stop. I kill forward thrust and lock starboard drive wheels. I skid sideways, further slowing my forward motion. My port-side treads slew around, spinning my stern in a dizzy whirl—

SECOND MINEFIELD TO PORT!

Massive explosions rip my port-side treads to confetti. My entire port side rocks upward, off the ground. I am stunned by the concussion. Sensors scream pain warnings all the way down my port-side hull. I have lost seventeen external sensor arrays and four banks of antipersonnel guns. The second minefield was fiendishly placed: precisely where missing port-side sensors had left me blind in several critical spots. I am still assessing battle damage when I catch the unmistakable emissions of a Hellbore coming on-line.

Battle Reflex Alert!

It fires from a point high on the cliff that rises to my right, above my prow. I throw my shields on-line and brace for impact. The Hellbore blast does not strike me, however. It rips through the opposite cliff, directly above my skewed-around, scorched stern. Solid rock blows out nearly a hundred meters overhead. An avalanche smashes down into the narrow passage. I am directly under it. Half the cliff comes down. Damage-assessment sensors scream red-line warnings. Hull-ringing boulders destroy my upper-most sensor arrays. Antipersonnel guns shear off. Impact sensors register several tons of rock crashing into my warhull. My stern-mounted Hellbore’s rotation collar cracks catastrophically.

Even as the landslide buries my entire stern, I fire bombardment rockets at the Hellbore that took out the cliff. I score a hit — but others pop online. Two, three, five of them. They fire from defiladed positions, raking my entire port flank along a deadly diagonal line. They fire in unison and concentrate their combined fire on the same, one square meter target. They punch through my defensive screens and melt an entire cluster of infinite repeaters and two square meters of ablative armor. The combined fire scores the flintsteel hull beneath armor plates in a long, molten gouge. If they fire another combined hit on that spot, they will breach my hull.

These bastards have studied Etaine!

I roar into Battle Reflex Mode. I fire bombardment rockets in a massive barrage. Rebel-launched hyper-v missiles scream skyward, knocking down ninety-nine point three percent of my rockets mid-flight. Two get through and score direct hits. Both blasts destroy the mobile platforms to which the Hellbores were mounted. The guns leap off the ground under the impact. Mobile truck-beds flip over midair and plunge down the cliff face to smash into the canyon floor just beyond my prow. They land in the minefield and vanish in a secondary explosion. The mines detonate with sufficient force to scorch my nearest radar arrays. The other Hellbores drop off-line and vanish behind the clifftops.

The attack is over as swiftly and brutally as it began.

I am stunned. Not only by the level of skill and knowledge evinced in this attack, but by the fact that I detected six mobile Hellbore field guns, when the rebels should have been able to field only three. No other thefts of heavy weaponry have been reported from Jefferson’s remaining military arsenals. A lack of on-world robberies translates directly into an inescapable conclusion: the rebels have obtained off-world weapons. This means off-world financing, on what has to be an immense scale. And procurement agents who are able to smuggle in large shipments, probably dropped in remote regions via shuttles from an orbital freighter, since not even P-Squad officers on the take would allow mobile Hellbores to pass through their customs check-points.

This is ghastly news.

So is the pin-point accuracy of rebel fire at my major vulnerable points. That second minefield was deliberately placed by someone fully aware of the preexisting damage to my port-side sensors. Indeed, I speculate that these sensors were deliberately targeted in a series of advance raids, specifically to engineer this ambush. The subsequent combined salvos, striking precisely where they did, were neither accident nor unhappy chance. The rebel commander was not trying to cripple me. He was going for a kill.

The fact, taken alone, is hardly surprising, since any sane rebel commander would try to destroy me. What sends shockwaves through my personality gestalt circuitry, however, is the chilling fact that he has acquired the means to do it. Those shockwaves send conflicting reactions jittering through my personality gestalt center. Outrage, dismay, anger, even a welcome relief that at last, I again have an enemy worthy of the name. There is little honor in shooting a sniper with a rifle or a suicide bomber trying to run after throwing an octocellulose grenade into my nearest video sensors. But a commander devious and intelligent and knowledgeable enough to pull off this ambush is a worthy opponent. I begin to relish the thought of destroying him.

When I pull myself free of the rubble, my lacerated left tread simply falls off. For the first time, I have not won an encounter with the rebels. The damage is serious and semicrippling. It will tax Phil to the utmost, trying to repair it. I turn cautiously, using ground-penetrating radar to locate buried mines, which I target and destroy with my forward infinite repeaters. This clears a space through which I can safely limp forward. I proceed with extreme caution, moving at a pitiful crawl on two treads and a rank of bare drive wheels.

When I reach the ranch on which the police squad was pinned down, I do a swift reconnaissance from two hundred meters out. I am wary of further ambushes. A two-story ranch house to my left appears to be deserted. I detect no heat signatures through the windows, none that would correspond to a human-sized target, at any rate. A number of barns and out-buildings suggest hiding places for artillery, but I can see nothing like tire tracks that would indicate the passage of a field-artillery gun through the farmyard. A police vehicle is parked next to a hog-lot. Markings on the doors identify the car as a Madison municipal police cruiser assigned to traffic duty. It is out of its jurisdiction. By a considerable margin. The cruiser has been abandoned with its trunk open. The hog-lot gate is also open. A substantial herd of genetically adapted swine has escaped through this gate, spilling out across the entire barnyard.

I move forward cautiously, broadcasting a query to the pinned-down officers. I receive no response, only static. At a distance of one hundred meters, closing slowly on the apparently deserted farmyard, I spot an open poultry house twelve meters from the abandoned police cruiser. Through the movement and sound spilling through the open doors, I identify several thousand chickens, neatly caged for efficient egg production. A few of the cages have been pulled down and opened, freeing some thirty or forty birds, which mill around the barn floor, looking for food.

The poultry house has been hit by a heavy barrage of small-arms fire. Bullet holes riddle the walls. I halt fifty meters out, scanning with all available sensors and find the missing police officers. All five of them are down. They are all assuming ambient air temperature. Based on heat signatures, I estimate they were overrun and killed at approximately the same instant the rebel Hellbores opened fire on me. The timing suggests all sorts of interesting capabilities in the rebel command structure.

At a distance of twenty-three meters from the farmyard, I am close enough that my forward turret sensors can see inside the police cruiser’s open trunk. It contains three freshly killed geno-pigs and the carcasses of at least a dozen chickens. The dead officers were assigned to a Madison traffic-control squadron, not a P-Squad foraging team. Traffic police are not authorized to collect in-kind taxes from livestock producers.

These men are thieves!

I sit motionless for a full seventeen point three seconds, psychotronic synapses crackling, as I attempt to come to grips with what has transpired and why. I have sustained massive damage trying to rescue a pack of illiterate, power-abusing livestock rustlers. Does one rustle hogs? Or merely steal them? I am sufficiently proficient in twenty-seven Terran languages to curse — fluently — if the situation seems appropriate, but I cannot even find words to express my full and penetrating disgust.

The fact that I was lured into an ambush, using them as bait, suggests frequent raids on the region’s farmyards conducted by Madison’s municipal police force. An isolated incident or two would be insufficient to set up an ambush this elaborate. This kind of operation must, of necessity, rely on a pattern predictable enough to have soldiers, munitions, and artillery in position and ready to deploy rapidly to a target close by. I surmise, therefore, that these officers have been stealing for quite a while, in a pattern predictable enough for Commodore Oroton to take advantage of it.

Disgust deepens. I call a forensics team and send them the map coordinates of the perforated poultry house, then turn around and rattle my way out of the barnyard. I do not even bother to file a VSR to Sar Gremian and the president. Anything I might say at this juncture would only worsen the friction between myself and the two most powerful officials on Jefferson.

Basic military doctrine dictates the need to leave a combat zone by a different route than the one used to approach. I therefore select the nearer of the two remaining routes that will take me back out to the Adero floodplain. I drop out of Battle Reflex Mode, although I maintain the heightened vigilance of Battle Reflex Alert. I navigate the narrow canyon at a snail’s pace, grinding along slowly on the drive wheels which automatically dropped down to road-level height to compensate for the missing track. I leave a deep furrow behind where bare wheels cut into the soil. The partially melted wheel drags in its locked position, heating up and warping even further before enough of the surface is ground down by friction that it no longer touches the ground at all.

The route I have chosen takes me past the main generating plant that supplies electricity to the ranches in Cimmero Canyon and to Menassa. The canyon floor has opened out into a broad space that nearly qualifies as a valley, rather than a canyon, with the open Adero floodplain nearly ten kilometers beyond. From the standpoint of human aesthetics, this is pretty country. I find it attractive for reasons of my own. The open terrain makes it more difficult for the Enemy to lay an ambush. There is plenty of forest cover on both slopes, which rise gently toward the heavier timber at the higher elevations, but the Enemy cannot establish firing points directly overhead, concealed from my vantage point.

This is cause for celebration, given my current pitiful state.

I parallel the main road, trying not to crush it under my remaining treads or dig massive furrows into it with naked drive wheels. Beyond the power plant lies a small cluster of single-family dwellings that house utility crews and foremen working at the Cimmero Canyon electrical generating plant. Like the massive Klameth Canyon hydroelectric dam, farther south, this plant produces power from turbines built to harness the outflow of the Bimini Reservoir, created by damming a small river that flows down through a deep, weathered gorge. The reservoir is small, compared with Klameth’s, and so is the total wattage produced by the station, but it needs to supply only the ranches in Cimmero Canyon, Manassa, and the small town of Gissa.

Even so, its generating capacity is sufficient to create a haze of background power emissions that crackle through my sensors. The plant was built sufficiently close to the road that I maneuver across a short section of pavement to reach open ground on the other side. I do not wish to knock down, even accidentally, a tower carrying high-tension wires that carry several gigawatts of electrical power. A sprawl of buildings shoulder their way past my port-side drive wheels as I grind my way toward the still-distant mouth of the canyon—

AMBUSH!

The Hellbore blast catches me flat-footed. Raw destruction slashes across my forward turret, targeting the base of my forward Hellbore. I reel. I stagger drunkenly in an attempt to swing my own Hellbores into action. I snap my defensive screen into place just as a second mobile Hellbore flashes on-line. It pours energy into my screen, which strains to contain the damage. Then both enemy Hellbores fire simultaneously, delivering a second one-two punch. It slices perilously close to the previous gouge, trying to punch through my damaged hull.

Fury sweeps through my personality gestalt center. I roar into Battle Reflex Mode, enraged. I dig my bare drive wheels into the ground and execute a spinning pivot-turn to port. I cannot reach either enemy Hellbore with direct fire, not without risking critical power-plant infrastructure. They have, naturally, hidden behind that infrastructure, hoping it will constitute an inviolate shield.

I engage with high-angle mortars. Warheads drop like blazing rain around both enemy guns. Their crews, however, have already taken evasive maneuvers. They manage to avoid the mortar rounds with minimal scorching. They shoot at me on the run, dodging and ducking behind other buildings. Several bolts strike my screens on the oblique, recharging my energy screen rather than punching through. Missed shots whip past my warhull and slam into the valley’s far slope, igniting a forest fire. I rush forward, trying to gain a vantage point from which I can shoot without taking out half the generating plant in the process. Minefield warnings sparkle on my threat-assessment processors. I disdain them, smashing my way through to reach an optimal firing position. I sustain damage to my central track, but reach my objective.

I fire on the nearest mobile Hellbore. It vanishes in a violent expansion of flame and debris. The second Hellbore rushes for cover, vanishing from visual contact behind a massive concrete building. I no longer care about collateral damage. I open fire with my forward Hellbore, punching through the concrete structure in an effort to pinhole the fleeing gun crew behind it. One, two, three blasts rip through the building, reducing it to smoking rubble and flying debris. The mobile Hellbore rushes into the open for zero point nine-two seconds, then lurches out of sight, again, behind another structure.

I give chase. I cannot move as fast as the renegade crew trying to escape my wrath. I therefore plow forward on the diagonal, crushing the corners of two houses belonging to the power plant’s utility crew. I must destroy the enemy’s heavy armaments at all cost, before the rebels deal my own death blow.

I catch a snippet of communications from somewhere nearby, probably not from the running gun crew. It is in code that I cannot break. I cannot even accurately pinpoint its origin, which prevents me from opening fire on the transmitter. The fleeing Hellbore has rushed far ahead of me, having skipped and dodged its way around sufficient bends in the valley that I cannot see it. I am able to track power emissions from its mobile platform and fire more high-angle mortars, trying to blanket the valley ahead with a shotgun peppering of rounds.

I hear detonations, but these are low-tech mortar shells, not smart-rounds that can transmit pictures back to me or allow me to fly the weapon into the target from a remote position. I have long since used up those munitions and POPPA has not seen fit to replace them. I am therefore left with a hit-or-miss proposition known as “carpet bombing” in an effort to strike a small, moving target.

I need intel. My on-board maps show several small feeder gorges into which the crew could duck and shut down, hiding successfully for hours in spaces too narrow for me to pursue. They could also continue their rushing flight through the town of Menassa, relying on the buildings and the civilians in them to deter my pursuit and attack. Or they can run for the nearest maze of major canyons, twenty kilometers south of Menassa. I do not have enough information to determine the crew’s intention. Striking out across country would be its greatest risk, but would give it a greater chance of ultimate escape, rather than temporary concealment nearby.

I target the feeder gorges with a steady barrage of mortars, hoping to create a blockade of raining munitions that will prevent the crew from taking advantage of those smaller, closer gorges as a hiding place. My inability to see what I am shooting at is infuriating. I decide the most logical move the crew could make would be to head for Menassa, which will keep it shielded for at least half of its twenty-kilometer dash toward the canyons farther south.

I therefore anticipate loss of visual contact as I reach the valley’s mouth and Menassa spreads out in its long, ropy line along Route 103. I am therefore stunned to see the Hellbore’s mobile platform rushing straight down the highway, nearly at the horizon line, within smelling distance of safety. The crew has opted for the riskier high-speed dash for safety, thinking my own progress slow enough to prevent me from overtaking them. I do not need to catch them in a road race to destroy them. I exult. I target. I acquire weapons lock. I fire. Hyper-v missiles streak down the long, beautifully straight road, locked onto the vanishing tail-lights of the racing truck.

The incandescent flash of impact leaps up from the horizon line. Smoke and flame billow up, filling the sky with a satisfactory display of dissociated molecules. I have destroyed another Hellbore. I do not know how many mobile Hellbores the enemy still has, but as of now, they possess five fewer than they did at dawn. I have seen six in the past hour, alone. I do not think it likely that the two guns I destroyed in the second ambush were part of the group of six that attacked me during the first ambush. They could not have maneuvered their way through difficult terrain in that short a span of time. I destroyed three of the original six, leaving another three unaccounted for, which is a disquieting realization. So is the suspicion that the third canyon entrance, north of Menassa, probably had another two guns at a bare minimum lying in wait, had I chosen that route.

As bad as this is, my next realization is far worse. The rebel commander correctly surmised my likeliest choices each step of the way and placed his strongest concentration of firepower in the canyon I chose to enter. I have been complacent. The time for complacency is over. I cannot operate in a lazy fashion, making decisions based on my physical limitations and repair woes, rather than the exigencies of battle. The enemy is too canny to risk that error again.

I begin to revise my estimation of Commodore Oroton. He does not think like a Bolo technician. He thinks like a Bolo. I find that unsettling to the point of calling it fear. I know my own limitations, operating without a commander.

So does my enemy.

This is not a good state of affairs.

I send a VSR to Sar Gremian, giving him the location of the wreckage and a terse update on the enemy’s firepower, then enumerate my repair needs. He is not amused by the stunning amount of damage that must be repaired. I am not amused by his comment.

“This planet paid a hell of a price to keep that treaty in force, so we could hang onto you. It would’ve been nice if the Concordiat had sent us an intelligent machine. Get your sorry, whining ass back to your depot. And try to avoid being seen!”

He ends transmission. To avoid being seen, I will have to add nearly thirty extra kilometers to the journey home, since I must swing wide around the eastern end of Madison, to approach my depot from the east, rather than proceeding directly from my current position north of the capital. It will take the better part of four hours, at a bare minimum.

As I set out, I pick up a broad-band message from Madison, on the civil emergency frequency that overrides all civilian broadcasting. The announcement is short, but its impact will be felt for a very long time, indeed.

“Granger terrorists struck a savage blow to civilians and police authorities in Cimmero Canyon, today, inflicting massive damage and killing an unknown number of innocents. The entire city of Menassa has lost electrical power after the destruction of the Cimmero power-generating plant. Identifying and capturing terrorist ringleaders and their operatives has become POPPA’s top and sole priority. The government will divert every resource at its command to the task of rooting out and destroying all vestiges of rebellion against legitimate authority. Acts of terrorism will be answered with the greatest possible force.

“To that end and by order of our new president, Vittori Santorini, the right of habeas corpus is hereby suspended to allow arrest and detainment of terrorism suspects. Public gatherings of more than ten individuals must be approved in advance by POPPA Squadron district commanders. All elections are cancelled, to allow the current government to deal with this serious emergency. No visas for off-world travel will be granted without prior, written approval of the POPPA Squadron commander assigned to the applicant’s home district. Civil rights will not be restored until all manifestations of rebellion are completely eliminated.

“Law-abiding citizens are urged to report any suspicious behavior to the nearest POPPA Squadron command post. Rewards will be given for information leading to the arrest of known or suspected terrorists. A mandatory curfew of eight P.M. will remain in place for all civilians except emergency crews until further notice. The public will be notified of additional restrictions as they become necessary.”

Night is falling as I set out for home.

I do not believe that tomorrow’s dawn will be anything but worse.

IV

Yalena knew at first glance that he was a soldier. Spacers moved differently and even the toughest, most jaded old dockhand or jump jockey didn’t have eyes like that. Yalena recognized those eyes, even though the face and the man behind it were total strangers. They were her father’s eyes.

And hers.

He paused on his way into the bar, gaze snapping around like gun barrels on a swivel mount to stare right at her. Not at her long, lean shape, draped negligently against the bar, sheathed in a dress her father would’ve consigned to the incinerator, if he’d seen her wearing it. He wasn’t staring at the wisp of cloth or the shape under it. He was staring at her face. For a long moment, she actually thought he’d recognized the battle shadows in her own eyes, but that wasn’t it, either, because he frowned, as though trying to place an old acquaintance from memory.

“Am I supposed to know you?” he asked, moving toward her. It didn’t sound like a pickup line. He looked upset.

“I don’t think so. I’ve never seen you.”

The frown deepened. “That’s the wrong comeback, isn’t it?”

For some reason, heat scalded Yalena’s cheeks. What she’d heard all too often from others, in smarmy phrases and lurid glances that usually rolled off her back with a mere shrug, stung her to the quick, hearing them from this man. “I’m a hostess, mister,” she bit out, “not a whore.”

His eyes widened. Then he flushed. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he apologized, sounding like he really meant it.

Yalena held his gaze for a long moment, then relaxed. “No offense taken. It’s an honest mistake, around here.”

The frown returned. “Then why — ?”

She shook her head. “Sorry, but that’s my business, not yours.”

He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me,” he muttered. “I’m not usually so ill-mannered. But there’s something about you, I can’t quite put my finger on it. You look like someone I used to know, a long time ago…”

His voice trailed off. Yalena drew her own conclusions. “Before battle?” she suggested softly.

His eyes shot wide again. “Good God. I’m not in uniform. How did you know?”

“Your eyes,” she said gently. “It always shows.”

He blinked. “Yes. But how did you — sorry. None of my affair.”

Perhaps it was only a measure of her own loneliness that she wanted to sit in some private little alcove somewhere and just talk to him. The feeling unsettled her.

He changed the subject, evidently determined to take them onto less emotionally charged ground. “So you’re a hostess, are you? How does the system work, here?” he asked, glancing at the tables, most of which were occupied by mismatched couples.

Yalena smiled. “You pick a hostess and a table. I persuade you to buy drinks, maybe food. I punch in the orders for you.”

“Using a code that gives you part of the outrageous sum charged?”

Her smile became a grin. “You got it.”

He surprised her with a chuckle. “All right. Lead on, my lady fair.” He gestured at the wide selection of empty tables.

She straightened up from the bar and led the way toward a secluded spot well away from the other occupied tables, not to encourage the kind of physical contact that often resulted in bigger tips, as well as higher bar tabs, but to carve out an isolated space where they could actually talk without spoiling the ambience for other, more involved patrons and hostesses. She could feel his gaze on her back. She didn’t need to glance back to confirm that he was watching the sway of her hips. Any movement she made in the ridiculous spike-heeled shoes she’d slipped on for the evening set the dress to swaying and jiggling around her body. Her father would probably have a coronary if he ever discovered it hidden in the back of her closet.

When she paused at the table of her choice, turning to meet his stare with an amused glance, she read more questions in his eyes. He gestured her into the booth, then sat down on the seat opposite the table, rather than beside her. That, alone, differentiated him from ninety-nine percent of the customers in this dockside dive. He glanced briefly at the posted menu.

“Is it cheaper if I order it, myself?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Substantially?”

She grinned. “Astronomically.”

“How badly do you need money?”

She blinked. Then said gently, “Not that badly.”

One brow quirked, but he said nothing. He punched in the order, himself, a fiscal decision that suggested a combat veteran on his way to somewhere, with not a whole lot of money in his pension envelope. The little light on the order box flashed when his drink tray was ready. Yalena fetched it smartly from the bar, sliding the drinks across to him as she sat down again. He slid one of them — a light wine, rather than one of the heavier, harder-hitting liquors — across the table to her.

“Thanks.” She smiled, sipping slowly.

He sampled his beer, shrugged, and said, “What’s your name?”

“Yalena.”

“Pretty name. What’s the rest of it?”

She hesitated. As a rule, girls did not give their last names. It was safer that way. He hadn’t given her his name, yet, either. So why did she find herself wanting to answer him truthfully?

“Khrustinova,” she said quietly. “Yalena Khrustinova.”

He sat up straighter, all trace of indolence falling away. “There was a Bolo commander by that name, out this way.”

“Oh, hell!” she swore, kicking herself squarely in the metaphorical backside. “You’re from Jefferson, aren’t you?”

“You bet I am, honey. And pissed all to pieces, because I can’t get home. The embassy,” he said with an ugly edge in his voice, “doesn’t accept appointments except on the fifth Thursday of the month on alternate election cycles.”

“They are a lot of stinkers,” Yalena agreed.

“Stinkers?” He snorted, torn between wrath and amusement.

She raked him with a shrewd glance. “How long did it take for them to figure out you’re a combat vet? I’ll bet your level of service sent your request straight into the toilet, didn’t it? Armed and dangerous combat veterans are the last thing POPPA wants around.”

“Your father doesn’t like soldiers?” The edge in his voice suggested what must’ve been an incendiary conversation with the embassy’s automated answering tree, which had been programmed deliberately to shunt any undesirable questioners into phone-tree oblivion, until they simply gave up and went away. But the comment, itself, suggested something else entirely.

She studied him with a sharp stare. “You have been gone a while, haven’t you?”

The battle shadows in his eyes blazed to hellish life, again. “Honey, you don’t know the half of it.”

“No,” she said softly. “I don’t. POPPA — P.O.P.P.A. — is the Populist Order for Promoting Public Accord. And my Papa — my father — hates it as much as I do.”

“Is your father Simon Khrustinov, then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What are you doing here? Going to college on Vishnu, I suppose?”

“What else?” she said, arching her brow and forcing her voice to remain casual. She did not want to tread too heavily across this particular patch of dangerous ground, which was too close to her real reason for being in this port-side dive.

He leaned forward abruptly and reached across to grasp her chin. She jumped with shock as he turned her face toward the admittedly dismal little light recessed above the table. “Yes,” he said softly, to himself. “That’s why, by God…”

“That’s why what?” she hissed, pulling sharply away and freezing him with a stare full of dangerous, glittering ice.

“She’s your mother,” he whispered, as though he hadn’t heard a word. “Your nose, your cheeks, even your eyes…”

“What about my mother?” The vicious edge in her voice got through, this time. He stared at her for a long, disconcerted moment. Then sat back. “Your mother’s Kafari Camar, isn’t she? Kafari Khrustinova, I mean. She’s my cousin.”

“Your cousin?” Yalena gaped. “Who are you?”

“Estevao Soteris. I enlisted the day President Lendan died.” He was still staring at her. “I haven’t seen her, since then. How is — ?” He broke off at the look on her face. “Oh, God,” he whispered, voice choked down to an agonized whisper. “What happened?”

Hot tears came, catching her by surprise. Yalena hadn’t wept for her mother in four years. Had convinced herself that there were no more tears left to shed. “They shot her.”

“Shot her?” His voice half strangled itself on the word. “My God! Who shot her? A mugger?”

“No.” The word fell like an axe blow between them. “The POPPA Squads. At the spaceport. Right after she smuggled me out.”

The muscles in his jaw turned to steel. Flintsteel. Death blazed in his eyes.

“Where’s your father?” he asked harshly.

“Here. In our apartment, I mean.”

“Here? On Vishnu? What the hell is going on, back home?”

She told him. The whole hideous, wicked little story. He interrupted again and again, asking for clarifications, trying to draw solid information from every nuance of her voice, her body language, her descriptions. She’d never run across anyone who listened that hard or drew that much information from a not-very-coherent conversation. When she’d finished delivering her very first situation report — because that was exactly what it felt like, being cross-examined by this cold-eyed soldier — he sat staring at the empty beer mug in his hand for long, dangerous minutes.

When he finally looked up again, meeting her gaze, he said, “How many spacers come through this place, bringing news from Jefferson?”

“A few. There are five, no, six ships still making the run. There aren’t many captains who bother with the route, these days. POPPA,” she said bitterly, “doesn’t have much to export except lies and refugees. They’re shipping out lies by the freighter-load, but the number of people getting out is down to a trickle. And they’ve made such a shambles of Jefferson’s economy, there’s no money to import much of anything, either. Ordinary people can’t afford anything made off-world. Even POPPA’s elite has started cutting back on imported luxuries.”

She slugged back most of the wine in her glass, an act of desecration against the vintage, but the shock of alcohol against the back of her throat steadied her. “We don’t know everything happening, back home, but what we do know scares us to death. We — other Granger students, I mean — started working the port town bars, trying to get information. We’ve even talked about going home and trying to do something about it.” She shredded a napkin from the holder. “But there aren’t enough of us to do much and what chance does anyone have, against a Bolo?”

He was frowning at her, trying to come up with an answer, when her wrist-comm beeped. She actually jumped with shock. “That’s the signal I’ve been waiting for,” she said, a trifle breathless as her nerves twitched. “There’s a freighter in dock, from Jefferson. We came down to meet it. To meet the crew, I mean. They’ve been unloading cargo for a couple of hours. As soon as they’ve finished, they’ll hit the bars and restaurants for a night of shore leave. We have an advance spotter in place at the terminal, to let us know when the crew disembarks. That signal was the heads up that they’re about to leave.”

“How many of you are out here, tonight?”

“Twenty-three. We’ve staked out the closest port-side bars and gambling joints, the likeliest restaurants. Freighter crews usually don’t travel far, the first night of a shore leave. And this freighter has a big crew, according to the portmaster’s records.”

“The portmaster? Don’t tell me you kids are hacking into secure databases?”

“We are not kids,” Yalena bit out.

He reached across again, brushed her cheek with a gentle fingertip. “Oh, yes, little cousin, you most assuredly are. A girl your age shouldn’t have that kind of shadows in her eyes. They’ll pay for that. Trust me, for that much, at least. They will pay. And I’m not the only Jeffersonian combat veteran who came home on that tramp freighter. There’s a whole group of us. We’ve ridden military convoys and freighters halfway across the Sector, trying to get here.”

That startled her. She hadn’t considered such a possibility. “How many of you came in?”

He dropped his fingertips from her face. “Thirty-four, on my freighter. And not one of us,” he added with a growl, “could persuade the Jeffersonian embassy to honor our travel visas.”

“Are you armed? she asked softly.

He studied her for a moment. “Yes,” he said at length. “Not with Concordiat military issue, mind. But traveling armed has become something of a habit, with us.”

“What branch of the service did you join?”

“Infantry.” The harsh tone grated along her nerves.

“That must have been… nightmarish.” She was thinking of the Bolo.

“Worse.” The shadows in his eyes spread, driving furrows through his face. His fingers tightened on the empty beer mug. “We were a mixed lot, on the freighter,” he added, voice abrupt. “Infantry, Marines, Air-Mobile Cav, Navy. There’s another ship coming in a couple of days from now, with more of us. The ship I came on didn’t have enough berths for everyone. When the second freighter comes in, there’ll be another sixty.”

“That’s nearly a hundred combat veterans,” Yalena mused, entertaining brief fantasies of a strike force blowing down Vittori Santorini’s palatial gates and turning him into red paste on his front lawn. “When do they arrive?”

He smiled. “Our luck was in, when we started hunting for another freighter. The Star of Mali dropped out of hyper-light a couple of hours before my group boarded the Merovitch. The Star was listed in the portmaster’s schedules as the next ship due to make the Vishnu run. As it happens, my brother Stefano’s crew aboard the Star. So I called him while they were transiting the system and asked how many of us they could bring. His captain agreed to bring them all. They ought to be here in a couple of days.”

Yalena blinked. “The Star? Good God. Captain Aditi smuggled me out of Jefferson aboard the Star.”

Estevao’s eyebrows stole a march toward his hairline. “Really? Then you’ve met Stefano?”

She nodded. Then lowered her gaze to the droplets still clinging to the sides of her empty wine glass. “Yes. I’m afraid I don’t remember much about that trip. I was in a pretty deep state of shock.”

“I can well imagine. All right,” he mused, toying with his empty beer mug, “tell me about your group. How many people do you have?

“Seventy, all together. Students, I mean. I’m counting the ones determined to go back and do something. There are a lot more Granger students who are too scared to try.”

“I think,” her cousin said, meeting her gaze, “it’s high time I met your father again.” When she bit her lip, he added, “I presume you have more, ah, suitable clothes stashed somewhere around here?”

She grinned. “There’s a locker room in back, behind the kitchen.”

“When’s your shift over?”

“A couple of hours. It’s a school night. I was very careful,” she added with a wry smile, “not to sign up for early morning classes.”

“Wise tactic,” he nodded in approval.

“I am enrolled in C.O.R.P.—” she began. Her wrist-comm beeped, slicing through her intended comment with an emergency code that meant trouble. In the same instant, she heard sirens wailing in the street outside the bar.

“Oh, hell,” she swore viciously. “Something’s gone wrong…”

Jiri burst into the bar, shouting for her. “Yalena! Trouble at the gate!”

“I’m coming! I’ve got to get my clothes—”

“No time!” He was striding across a bar full of surprised patrons. “Just kick those damned shoes off and run.”

She was peeling off the spike heels.

Estevao Soteris was already on his feet, looking dangerous and competent. Jiri glared at him, ready to argue with what he thought was a disgruntled patron.

“He’s my mother’s cousin,” Yalena said hastily, “just into port. He’s an Infantry veteran.” She finally had the shoes off. Yalena dropped them on the table and came out of the booth like a gunshot. They ran for the door. “Sorry, Jack,” she shouted to the manager on the way past.

“I’ll dock your wages, dammit!”

“Suit yourself!” She hurled herself through the door and out onto the street. The gantries and loading docks were a blaze of lights, jeweled towers rising skyward in the darkness, far above the roofs of port-side warehouses, passenger terminals, shopping arcades, and “water trade” establishments that provided space-weary crews everything from liquid amnesia to horizontal recreation. The freighters, themselves, never touched atmosphere, remaining instead in parking orbit, mated to one of Vishnu’s five major space stations. But the cargo shuttles were immense ships in their own right, with heavy-thrust engines capable of lifting the shuttles and several tons of cargo from port to orbit.

The pavement was cold under Yalena’s bare feet. Her cousin growled, “Put these back on. You’ll cut your feet to shreds, out here.”

He was holding her shoes, which no longer boasted spike heels. He’d cut them off — or maybe just snapped them with battle-hardened hands. She thrust her feet back into them and took off. The mutilated heels clacked against the concrete walkway. At least her dress was short enough not to hamper her stride. They ran toward the terminal. Police cars streaked past, sirens and horns shrieking a warning to pedestrians and ground cars. An air-lift ambulance shot past at window-top level, rattling wires and street signs with its passage.

Yalena ran neck and neck with Jiri, while Estevao brought up rear guard. They had just reached the terminal when the trouble spilled out onto the street. It was a fight. A big one. Yalena actually recognized some of the faces in the embattled crowd. They were students. POPPA students. She understood in a flash what had happened. POPPA students had always been arrogant and vicious in their effort to keep Grangers in their place. The newest POPPA arrivals, who’d just come in for the start of the school year, sported worse attitudes than most. She’d heard talk on campus about POPPA students’ plans to meet freighters coming in from Jefferson, to be sure any “illegal, uppity stowaways” learned from the outset that they were still fourth-class citizens and had better toe POPPA’s line if they didn’t want relatives back home to suffer.

Clearly, there had been “stowaways” on board this freighter. Lots of them. Hundreds, from the look of things. Their appearance stunned Yalena to the soles of her vandalized shoes. The people spilling into the street were so thin, their muscles so wasted, it was like watching an army of embattled skeletons. Shock held her rooted for long moments — long enough to be caught up in the swirling edge of battle.

Police whistles tore the air as Yalena found herself grappling with a wild-eyed girl whose fingers had twisted into claws. She was snarling incoherently, eyes glazed with hatred and something even worse. She was writhing like a madwoman, trying to gouge Yalena’s eyes. Yalena sent her stumbling into the nearest wall. Then ducked under a blow from a stout boy wearing POPPA green and gold. Years of indolence and overindulgence at the supper table made him slow and ineffectual. She sent him spinning into traffic, which had skidded to a halt as the battle spilled across the road and engulfed everything it its path.

The leading edge wavered, broke, and ran as abruptly terrified POPPA students took to their heels, literally running for their lives. The men and women chasing them pursued like blood-crazed hounds. A tall, whip-thin man with burnt holes in his face, where his eyes should have been, staggered and stumbled into her, having been dragged along with the crowd. His hands grabbed at her, clawing their way toward her throat.

“I’m a Granger!” she screamed at him.

He was snarling curses, trying to find the choke-hold on her throat. “You’re too goddamned fat to be a Granger, you lying little bitch!”

“I’m a Granger student studying on Vishnu!”

She didn’t want to hurt him. The ghastly, sunken holes in his face, scabbed over and not yet healed, were mute testimony to the ordeal he had already suffered. Her cousin waded in abruptly, dragged him off and put him on the ground in two seconds, flat. “Get out of here!” Estevao snarled at her. “Move, dammit!”

She tried. Only to find the way blocked by Vishnu’s port police. They did not look amused. Oh, hell… What on earth could she tell her father? She suspected he would be a whole lot less amused than the police.

V

The sight of my battered warhull and tattered treads turns Phil’s nano-tatt grey with shock.

“Holy pissing Jehosephat…”

“I require repair. We do not have requisite spare parts on hand.”

“No shit,” Phil mutters, scrubbing his face with both hands. They are unsteady. I detect no whiff of alcohol and Phil’s habits do not include recreational chemicals. I therefore attribute the tremors to stress, as he is faced with repairs far beyond his capability to conduct. “Ah, hell, lemme figure out where t’ start.”

“I will transmit a detailed inventory of damage and parts needed to correct it.”

“You do that,” he mutters. “I’m gonna get the fork-lift and start movin’ track plates. I dunno if that shipment we got last week will be enough.” He stares, expression forlorn, at my shredded central tread and bare port-side drive wheels. “What in hell did they hit you with?”

“Six mobile 10cm Hellbores.”

“Six? Where’d they get their hands on that kind’a firepower? I never saw any theft reports on the news.” His expression twists into a scowl. “Of course, POPPA don’t tell us peons the half of what goes on, most of the time, anyway, so why’s that a surprise?”

“There have been no thefts since Barran Bluff.”

“Where’d they get ’em, then?”

“Clearly, the rebellion has obtained an off-world source of supply.”

“That ain’t good.”

“No, it is not.”

Phil does not offer further comment. He fires up the heavy lift required to maneuver track plates and linkages and begins the arduous task of replacing my treads. The slam and clank of the lift and the plates banging into place echo inside the flimsy maintenance bay, with its thin metals walls and thinner roof. The hiss and groan of pneumatic cranes and pully assemblages prompts Phil to don hearing protection. Even with the equipment to manhandle the individual plates and linkages, it is grueling work that requires a great deal of sweat, cautious nudging with the controls, and a purpose-built jackhammer to fasten the linkages, which Tayari Trade Consortium had to manufacture to specs I provided.

The repair job requires me to move forwards and backwards in tiny increments, to allow access to the entire circumference of my treads. Phil is silent during the entire process, an unusual state of affairs, as he normally swears his way through any ordinary job.

After seven hours and twenty-three minutes of listening to the silence, I essay a question. “Is something troubling you, Phil?”

My technician, busy with jackhammer and lynch pins, does not respond. I wait for a pause in the background noise. When he finishes using the jackhammer on the current linkage he is placing, I try again.

“Phil, you appear to be distracted. Is something wrong?”

He pauses, glances around to find my nearest visual sensor pod, and appears to weigh the risks of speaking whatever is on his mind. At length, he decides to answer.

“Yeah, something’s wrong.”

When he does not continue, I prompt him. “What?”

“It’s Maria’s boy.”

“The one addicted to snow-white, the one failing remedial basketweaving, or the one who needs glasses to read the computer screen at his school desk?”

Phil scowls at my sensor pod. “How come you know all a’that?”

“You are my technician. Your family is an important factor in your effectiveness as a technician charged with maintaining me in proper working order. A crisis in your family therefore affects my overall mission. I keep track of events in their lives as a routine safeguard.”

“Oh.” He considers this, then accepts it. “Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, it’s Giulio, her oldest. He started doin’ snow-white and got fired and all, but he’s not a bad kid. Y’know? He’s got a good heart, anyway, and he felt so bad about losin’ the job, he went out and asked the med-station nurse on our street for help t’kick the stuff. He’s tryin’ hard, y’know, and he’s been helpin’ around the house, too, watchin’ the little ones so Maria can take a rest now and again.”

“That does not sound like cause for distress.”

Phil shakes his head. “No, it ain’t. Trouble is, he disappeared. Last night. He went out to pick up the family’s rations from the distribution center and he never came home. Maria was up all night, last night, frantic half to death. There was another food riot, y’see, and we can’t find out if he got caught in it, ’cause the P-Squads are the last people you want to get noticed by — for any reason — and the regular cops ain’t sayin’ who got busted and who didn’t. If he don’t come home, Maria’s just about gonna lose her mind.”

I do a rapid scan through law enforcement databases and criminal court records, including the P-Squad master files, which they do not know I can read. The food riot which exploded at Distribution Center Fifteen broke out while I was engaged in combat. The riot resulted in twenty-three deaths, one hundred seventeen critically injured civilians currently in ICU, and four thousand three hundred twelve arrests by P-Squadrons.

Phil’s nephew is not listed among the dead or injured. He is listed among those arrested. I explain matters to Phil. “Giulio was pulled in by a police dragnet of rioters. He was arrested, taken to the Eamon Processing Compound, found guilty of rebellion and conspiracy to attempt deprivation of life-critical resources, and was sentenced to Cathal Work Camp. He was transported in a prison convoy at zero three hundred hours today and will serve a life sentence at hard labor in the Hell-Flash District mines.”

Phil has gone motionless. He does not even breathe for twenty-three pont nine seconds. His nano-tatt pales to the shade of cut bone, as does his skin.

“But — but—” His whisper slithers to a halt. “But that ain’t right! It ain’t fair! Giulio’s no Granger terrorist. He’s just a kid. Fifteen last month. Oh, God, this is gonna kill Maria, it’s just gonna fuckin’ destroy her, how in hell am I gonna tell her somethin’ that awful?”

He is opening and closing his fists, gulping air in an unsteady fashion. I do not know the answers to his questions.

“I gotta go,” he says abruptly. He sets down the jackhammer and climbs down from my port-side tread.

“Phil, where are you going?”

He does not answer. This is not a good sign.

“Phil, I still require massive repairs.”

He pauses in the open doorway of my makeshift depot, a small and angry figure against the harsh daylight outside, where P-Squads rule the streets. He looks directly into my nearest visual sensor. “Good!”

He turns on his heel and leaves.

I do not know what to make of this, beyond immediate dismay that my urgently needed repairs have just been tabled, for at least the remainder of today. I grow uneasy as Phil climbs into his car and roars into the sprawling urban blight that has engulfed the ruins of Nineveh Base. I do not know where he is going. I suspect it will be unpleasant for all concerned when he gets there. I sit alone, waiting in a state of near-infantile helplessness for somebody to fix me. I wait all afternoon. Night falls and still my technician does not return. The hours creep past and still there is no sign of Phil. I begin to worry.

If Phil does not return to finish the bare minimum of repairs, I will have to call Sar Gremian, to attempt expediting the situation. This is not an attractive choice. I must, however, regain mobility and I cannot do that without a technician. I wait until dawn streaks the sky with a crimson stain that portends bad weather. Satellite images confirm this. A major storm is due to strike Madison and the Adero floodplain today. Storms are the least of my worries, at this juncture. I divide my time between worrying about repairs and worrying about additional rebel strikes.

If the pattern of attacks holds true, there will be further bombings in Madison today, taking advantage of the foul weather to move people and munitions. P-Squad officers on the street have amply demonstrated their willingness to shirk the larger part of their surveillance duties during bad weather. The rebel commander is far too shrewd to allow such opportunities to pass without taking full advantage.

I initiate a search for my mechanic. His wrist-comm is programmed to respond to my signal, overriding any other communication he might be making, but he does not respond. This is disconcerting. I theorize that Phil may have gotten himself blind drunk and is incapable of answering. I am about to initiate a trace to pinpoint the current location of his wrist-comm when a heavy cargo truck pulling a ten-meter-long trailer pulls up to the curb in front of my makeshift depot and the movable trailer that has become Phil’s residence. The truck brakes to a halt, situated so that I can see into the cab, but my view of the trailer is largely blocked by my technician’s quarters. The driver switches off the engine, rather than pulling into the maintenance yard, doubtless hoping to lessen the chance that I will open fire.

I pause in my attempt to locate Phil and devote my full attention to this truck and its occupants. Two women and four men climb down from the cab and approach my depot on foot. All six are in their early twenties, from the look of their unlined faces, neon hair, stylish clothing, nano-tatts and lip jewelry. The women wear expensive fire-glow nano-shoes with stilt heels, currently popular with female Jeffersonians. The shoes, which are as impractical as their skin-tight dresses for anything but social occasions, catch the early morning sunlight with a brilliant opalescent shimmer.

Neither they nor the men with them are dressed as soldiers or police officers. They do not appear to be tradesmen and their personal adornment marks them as members of a social class several tiers lower than professionals or executives. I am left wondering who they are and why they have driven a large cargo truck up to my front door. As they approach the entrance to my maintentance depot, walking in a close-knit group, they stare up at my battered warhull. Their expressions waver between fear and amazement. As I do not know who they are and must guard against rebel attack, I shift to Battle Reflex Alert.

“Do not move. You are trespassing on a restricted military site. Identify yourselves at once or I will open fire.”

“Who said that?” one of the men demands, jumping around to search for the owner of the voice.

One of the women snaps, “The machine, you idiot. Didn’t you pay no attention to that lecture they give us last night? It talks, even thinks. Better’n you can, y’lame-brained, slack-jawed dolt.”

The recipient of this scathing reprimand scowls and puffs out his chest. “Now you just watch your mouth, y’hard-assed bitch! I ain’t near as stupid as I look.” When his companions break into derisive laughter, his nano-tatt flares red. “I ain’t stupid as you look,” he mutters, correcting a statement that appears to be painfully accurate.

I interrupt their dispute. “Identify yourselves immediately.” I underscore the demand by swiveling my forward antipersonnel guns at them. This, at least, gains their attention. The self-styled stupid one’s nano-tatt fades from red to grey. “It’s gonna shoot us!” He bolts toward the truck, which would offer about as much protection from my guns as a sheet of tissue paper.

“Oh, shut up and get your tattooed butt back over here.” The woman issuing all the comments and commands is evidently the designated spokesperson. She turns back to stare up a me. “We’re your new maintenance team. We’re here to fix you. Don’t that make you happy? You oughta be happy, ’cause you got a whole lotta shit needs fixin’. I c’n see that from here.”

“You are not my authorized technician.”

“Oh, f’cryin’ out loud,” the woman snaps, glaring up at me with hands on hips. “Lemme guess, Sar Gremian never told you we was assigned, huh?”

Apparently, Sar Gremian has a predilection for sending maintenance personnel to my depot without notifying me, first. “I have received no communication from Sar Gremian or President Santorini. Do not move. I will request authorization from the president’s office.”

She and the others wait as I send a request for VSR to Sar Gremian. “Unit SOL-0045, requesting VSR. Six unauthorized civilians have attempted to enter my maintenance depot. Please verify their assertion that they have been assigned to me as repair technicians.”

Sar Gremian activates voice-only transmission. “They’re your new mechanics. Satisfied?”

“Where is Phil Fabrizio?”

“Unavailable. We’ve assigned a whole team to you with orders to get you operational as quickly as possible.”

This is somewhat mollifying. “Understood.” I end transmission and stand down from Battle Reflex Alert. “The president’s designated spokesman, Sar Gremian, has authorized you to make repairs. My most urgent need is track replacement.”

“No shit,” the spokeswoman responds, staring at my bare drive wheels and lacerated center track. “Okay, everybody, let’s see what Santa brought us.”

I find this phrasing odd. The team moves through my maintenance bay, spreading out and poking into every bin, storage room, and rack that Phil has filled with liberated tools, spare parts, and high-tech equipment. None of them bother to identify themselves by name, so I lock onto their wrist-comm ID signals and run a swift background probe, despite Sar Gremian’s assertions that they are authorized to be here.

All six are recent graduates of the same trade school Phil Fabrizio attended. Their overall scores at graduation reveal a grade-point average twenty-three percent lower than Phil Fabrizio’s final standing in his graduating class. The self-styled “stupid” one with the blazing nano-tatt managed to achieve a final standing that is truly stunning. His best scores are fifty-eight percent lower than Phil’s worst performance in the same classes.

I do not find this encouraging.

Various members of the team exclaim in rough vernacular as they explore, expressing open delight over the treasure trove of high-tech tools and replacement parts they discover. My shaky confidence in their ability to handle even the simplest of repairs drops substantially when they start pulling down sophisticated processor modules and diagnostic equipment that has no use at all in repairing tread damage. I am about to point this out when they start dragging cart-loads of my equipment over to the doorway.

The woman in charge says, “Frank, go fire up your truck, willya? Pull it around and back it up to the door. Ain’t no sense in haulin’ this stuff all the way out to the street by hand when we can load ’er up from right here.”

Frank grins and jogs toward the truck. Their intentions crystallize. They are planning to steal as much as they can haul off. I issue a formal objection. “You are not authorized to remove government property from this facility.”

The spokeswoman responds with a bark of laughter, rough-edged and grating. “The government ain’t here to protest, now is it? So how about you just sit there and let us do what we came here t’do.”

I contact Sar Gremian again. “The technicians you provided are unsatisfactory.”

“Those technicians are stellar graduates of their vocational school. Each one is a top-notch specialist. I personally reviewed each of their records.”

“Did you interview them in person?”

“You think I have time to interview every tech-school graduate on Jefferson? I didn’t need to interview them. Their test scores and loyalty are unimpeachable. They’re the best we’ve got, so cope.”

“That statement is demonstrably false.”

“What?” Sar Gremian’s bitter, pitted features grow pale with rage. “How dare you call me a liar?”

“I am stating simple fact. Phil Fabrizio’s graduating scores from the same tech school were an average twenty-three percent higher than the cumulative scores of these six technicians. He has gained a great deal of practical experience since that time. He has spent most the past four years studying at a far higher comprehension level than he did while actually in school. Phil Fabrizio is demonstrably more capable than any of the six individuals you dispatched to my depot. Your statement is therefore inaccurate. How soon can Phil return to undertake urgent repairs?”

“He’s unavailable!” the president’s chief advisor snarls. “Don’t you pay any goddamned attention? Phil Fabrizio is un-a-vail-a-ble. So stop harping on it. I don’t give a shit whether you like the new mechanics or not.”

“It is not a matter of my likes or dislikes. They are not capable of performing even the simplest routine repairs. Nor have they demonstrated any intention to try. We face a serious situation, which must be addressed immediately. I have sustained sufficient damage to knock me out of service until repairs have been made—”

“Don’t feed me a lot of crap, machine! You made it all the way back to your barn without breaking down. Don’t think you can slither your way out of doing your job. We’re getting ready for a major campaign against rebel forces and you will be part of it. So shut up and let your new mechanics do their job.”

“Is this the job you had in mind?” I flash real-time video footage of the looting underway. “They are too busy stealing everything they can haul away to bother with any repairs.”

“Goddammit!”

I experience a surge of bitter satisfaction at the outrage on Sar Gremian’s face. I take advantage of the situation to transmit graphic images of my battle damage, using my exterior video sensors. “Perhaps you were unaware of the serious level of my damage. I am not in battle-ready operational condition. I am barely mobile, with a maximum speed of zero point five kilometers per hour. In addition to a qualified technician,” I stress the word deliberately, “you must obtain appropriate spare parts to fix the most serious damage, beginning with track plates and linkages and expanding from there to damaged weapons systems, ablative armor, and sensor arrays.”

“You’ve got plenty of spare parts. Fabrizio restocked. I have the report from him.”

I transmit schematics, pinpointing my damage. The image sparkles with malevolent red and amber warning lights. I also transmit the official inventory of replacement parts on hand, a list filled with gaping holes, particularly the sections for high-tech processor units and sensor arrays. “There are not enough parts to repair this damage. The most urgent need is for replacement tracks and there are not enough linkage assemblies to complete the work pending. The most serious need is the damage to the main rotational collar for my rear Hellbore. This collar has sustained a catastrophic crack that renders the gun inoperable, since I cannot fire the Hellbore without risk of a potentially fatal rupture from blow-back of the plasma.”

“You got any more bad news?” Sar Gremian asks in a tight and scathing tone.

“Yes. The parts needed to fix this damage are not available. Phil Fabrizio has been forced to scrounge to keep me operational, repairing damage from Granger snipers and suicide bombers. He has done this by appropriating items wherever he can find them. Unfortunately, the parts needed to fix most of this damage are unavailable anywhere on Jefferson. Moreover, Phil Fabrizio is the only person on Jefferson with any familiarity with my systems, to include knowledge of jury-rigging that may or may not be compatible with new repairs. It is therefore urgent that he be located and returned here to begin work.”

“Phil Fabrizio,” Sar Gremian says in a cold, measured tone, “is unavailable. He will remain unavailable. And I don’t have time to wade through those schematics and that inventory. You want to get fixed? Send me an itemized parts list.”

He breaks the transmission.

I surmise that battle damage must be responsible for my slow comprehension rate, as it has taken this long to twig to Sar Gremian’s meaning. Phil is “unavailable” because something untoward has happened to him. I scan law enforcement databases and find what I am looking for in a P-Squad arrest report logged approximately two hours after his abrupt exodus from my maintenance bay. The official charges are “negative public statements of a political nature” and “advocating the violent overthrow of the government.”

I surmise that Phil’s anger over his nephew’s fate spilled over into a loud and public complaint to anyone who would listen. The wheels of justice spin rapidly on Jefferson. Phil has already been transported to Cathal Work Camp. At the very least, nephew and uncle will be together, although I suspect they find little enough consolation in that.

I find none at all. I have no replacement tracks and no technicians worthy of the name. I have no spare parts to repair damaged and destroyed guns. No help from any quarter — not even Sector Command — and my sole remaining “friend” has been shipped to a reeducation camp where dissidents are worked like animals on starvation rations until they collapse, at which point they are disposed of, usually in shallow graves.

I cannot help feeling responsible for Phil’s incarceration, not only because I revealed the whereabouts of his nephew, but because my conversations with him contributed to his complete disaffection for the POPPA leadership and party machine. For all his faults, I like Phil Fabrizio. It was never my intention to destroy him. There is nothing I can do to make amends, which deepens my loneliness. I wish…

Wishing is for humans.

I discard the thought and focus on my immediate difficulties. Frank has maneuvered the truck around and is backing slowly and carefully toward my open maintenance bay. The other technicians are still carrying loot to the doorway, ready to load up the meager contents of my depot for sale to the nearest black marketeer. Frank nudges controls, sliding the long trailer neatly into position. He switches off the ignition and slides down to the ground.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he says cheerfully. “My hat blew out the window.”

The others shrug and finish shifting a last cartload that has hung up on an earlier load piled in the doorway. Frank moves smartly toward the street, disappearing around the corner of Phil’s trailer. Seven seconds later, I catch another glimpse of Frank in the street. He is well beyond the far end of the trailer, running at top speed. I have just enough time to feel a trickle of alarm through my threat-assessment center. Then the larcenous technicians open the back doors of the cargo trailer.

The octocellulose bomb detonates literally in my face. The world burns. A shockwave equivalent to a nuclear bomb lifts me off my treads. I am hurled through the back wall, which simply ceases to exist. I am aware of falling, aware that antiquated, jury-rigged processors and cobbled-up connections have crumpled under the stress, tearing away pieces of my waking mind with them.

The pain of overloaded sensors shocks my psychotronics so deeply I retreat into my survival center. As I lose consciousness, I curse my own stupidity.

And Frank, who has just killed me.

I

I cannot see.

My first reaction to this is not worry, it is stunned amazement. I am still alive. I did not expect to be. The Granger rebels who neatly inserted the bomb into my own maintenance depot doubtless did not expect me to survive, either. For long, confused minutes, I cannot hear anything at all. Sensor arrays and processors have blown system-wide. I can feel distant impacts against my warhull, in a pattern suggesting the random fall of debris.

All visual-light sensors are gone. The only intact imaging technology at my disposal is the thermal visioning system. I can see heat signatures. That is all.

As I gradually orient myself, coming further out of emergency survival center shock, I realize that I am lying on my side. My port side, to be exact, already hard hit by battle damage. I detect ranks of twisted infinite repeaters, crushed by my own weight landing on them. Bombardment rockets and hyper-v missiles have ruptured, spilling their contents onto the ground.

My thoughts remain sluggish for several minutes, while diagnostics run frantic double-checks on damaged circuitry, blown data-storage banks, fused router connections. Ninety-seven percent of the internal damage affects my oldest circuitry, much of it cobbled together and patched by a century’s worth of field technicians, using whatever substandard parts were available or could be made to serve the purpose. Of that ninety-seven percent, fully half the damage has occurred in connections and installations put in place by Phil Fabrizio, who has been forced to use seriously under-spec materials for years.

Unable to see, unable to move, I share momentary sympathy with a legless beetle flipped onto its back. I transmit a call for help.

Sar Gremian answers that call with a wrathful curse. “What the mother-pissing hell was that explosion? Did you fire those God-cursed Hellbores?”

“No.” I have difficulty producing speech, as my overloaded circuitry has slowed down my processing capabilities. “A Granger bomb exploded inside my depot. They packed a ten-meter cargo truck with octocellulose. I am critically injured. I have been knocked onto my side. I cannot see anything except thermal images. My makeshift depot no longer exists.”

Sar Gremian swears nonstop for seven point eight seconds. Then says, “We’ll get a team out there.”

I wait for a seeming eternity. Ten minutes. Seventeen. Thirty. How long does it take to scramble an emergency response team? I finally detect the low-grade tremors that herald the arrival of several motorized vehicles, large ones, based on the strength and pattern of the tremors. One of those vehicles has a concussion footprint that sounds like a tracked machine, rather than something on wheels. I revise that assessment to several tracked vehicles, as the vibration splits apart into three separate footprints, one moving toward my stern, one toward my prow, and one that assumes a place midway between them.

Then Sar Gremian speaks via his wrist-comm. Judging by the sound of the transmission and the background noise of multiple heavy engines, the president’s senior adviser has come to supervise the rescue operation in person. “Okay, Bolo, we’ve got a team of heavy-lift cranes in place. We’re going to tip you back up, onto your treads.”

“It is unlikely that you have cables or engines strong enough for that.”

“Shut up, machine! You’ve caused enough trouble today, as it is.”

This is inherently unfair, but Sar Gremian has never shown any concern for fair play. I wait as construction engineering crews hook cables to my warhull. The vibrations from all three cranes increase in strength and begin to move away from me, slowly. The cables grow taut. Forward progress stalls, leaving all three machines straining, but motionless. From the sounds I pick up, the drivers are redlining their engines. There is a sudden brutal snap. The cable hooked to my prow slashes loose, whipping audibly through the air. I hear screams and curses, a weird metallic buzz, and the screech of torn metal.

Then Sar Gremian shouts, “Back up! Now, goddammit! Take the tension off those cables!” As the two remaining cables go slack, Sar Gremian mutters, “Jeezus Crap, that was close.” I surmise that the broken cable has sliced through something a very short distance away from the president’s chief advisor. “All right,” he says, voice grim, “do you have any bright ideas about how to turn you over?”

“You will require a heavy-lift transport similar to those used by the Brigade in combat drops from orbit. The Concordiat cannot divert such equipment away from the current war zone. The laboratories on Vishnu may be able to provide you with a lifter strong enough to roll me back onto my treads.”

“Oh, just wonderful.”

“I would suggest,” I add, “that repairs to my treads commence before then, as it will be easier to replace tracks when I am not sitting on them. I am unable to verify with visual confirmation, but I find it unlikely that any of the spares in my temporary depot survived the explosion.”

“I’ll say it didn’t,” Sar Gremian snarls. “And you look like one seriously screwed up piece of shit. Can the rest of you be fixed?”

“I am running diagnostics. I have sustained serious damage. Eighty-two percent of that damage would be repairable, if I had a properly trained technician and sufficient spare parts. The remaining eighteen percent of the damage would require an overhaul at a Brigade depot such as Sector Command’s main repair yards. Brigade resources are not available. You will therefore need to purchase parts, including special-order items that will require customized tool and die manufacturing. You will also need the services of a team of technicians from Vishnu. I estimate that restoration to even a minimal level of functionality will require an investment in excess of ten billion—”

“Ten billion?” Sar Gremian’s voice hits an unlikely and harsh soprano. “Mother of—” He breaks off, breathing heavily. “Goddammit, do you have any idea what Vittori Santorini will say when he hears that? You have been one nonstop bitch of an expensive problem! You can’t stop one lousy insurrection led by a handful of terrorists. Every time you’re sent out on a job, you manage to let some asshole throw a bomb at you. You’re supposed to be a high-tech war wizard, rolling-death incarnate, but you can’t even detect an ordinary terrorist with a coat full of explosives! You let these bastards drive a truckload of explosives through your front door and now you think we’re just going to cough up ten billion—”

My temper snaps, as suddenly and brutally as the cable at my prow. “I have endured six years of constant attrition with no fiscal allocations from this government to correct any of the damage. Seventy percent of my sensor arrays were cobbled together from cheap, stolen parts spliced improperly into my circuitry with patches attempting to mate incompatible systems. The technician assigned to me was incapable, incompetent, and inappropriately trained. It took Phil Fabrizio four years of intensive study just to reach a level of competence expected of a first-year apprentice technician in the Brigade. He is now unavailable. The team you dispatched to replace him spent the last moments of their lives trying to steal what little remained in the way of spare parts.

“I have not been given an intelligence update since the beginning of the insurrection and I have been locked out of databases critical to carrying out my mission. I routinely act without infantry or air support, which has led to serious damage inflicted by suicide squads and ambushes. I have nearly been killed multiple times by mobile Hellbores that were inadequately guarded by a handful of poorly trained, incompetent thugs masquerading as soldiers. My condition is pitiful. I am less operational now than I was on the killing fields of Etaine.

“My depot has been destroyed by a bomb that the P-Squads guarding me — and their own planetary headquarters — somehow failed to discover. They failed despite the fact that the entire truck was one ten-meter-long bomb and would have been discovered if the gate guards had done something as simple as open the doors to look inside. Either they failed to conduct a simple visual check through innate sloth or they were bribed into allowing that bomb to enter the base.

“The systematic, government-sanctioned destruction perpetrated on Jefferson’s manufacturing industries has left this planet incapable of producing duralloy or even flintsteel from which to manufacture new parts. Jefferson’s sole remaining high-tech computer plant is no longer capable of producing psychotronic circuitry, which is the mainstay of my intelligence. This means there is no on-world source to replace psychotronic circuitry damaged by the blast. I therefore hold little hope that my condition will materially improve until and unless Jefferson’s president, House of Law, and Senate approve the expenditures necessary to purchase what I need from off-world vendors.

“Given the government’s past track records on financial matters, I am not optimistic that this will occur. If you are not going to fix me, then either go away and let me be miserable alone or simply issue the destruct code that will fry my Action/Command core and put me out of my misery. That would be more pleasant than being snarled at by abusive bureaucrats unfit for command.”

Sar Gremian remains silent for three minutes, twelve seconds. I anticipate the destruct codes at any moment. His eventual response, however, surprises me. “For once,” he mutters, “you are so right it stinks like last week’s garbage.” He sighs, a tired and bitter sound. “All right, give me a detailed damage report. Be sure it lists everything you need replaced. And I mean everything, right down to the nuts, the bolts, and the screws. Vittori’s gonna shit sideways when I tell him we’ve got to go shopping on Vishnu. And when Nassiona sees the size of that invoice, the whole goddamned roof is going to blow sky-high. When I get my hands on that Oroton bastard, I’m going to slice him into little cubes a centimeter wide.”

He utters one final curse and ends transmission.

I complete my diagnostics and transmit a list of required parts. I then retreat once more into my survival center and await repairs.

II

Simon was poring over a message from Kafari when the call came through, using a Brigade code that signaled a high-priority message. Startled, Simon touched his wrist-comm. “Khrustinov.”

Sheila Brisbane’s voice asked, “Simon, are you home or out somewhere?”

“Home, why?”

“Do you mind a couple of visitors?”

Simon frowned, wishing he could see Captain Brisbane’s face. “No, of course not. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, Sheila.”

“Thanks,” she said drily, “but you may change your mind when you’ve heard what I have to say.”

“Sounds bad.”

“Isn’t good.”

“What time do you want to stop by?”

There was a brief pause as she spoke to someone else, voice muffled. “Half an hour from now?”

“That bad, huh? Make it fifteen minutes so I won’t have as much time to worry.”

Sheila’s chuckle reflected their shared experience of careers spent in the Brigade. Officers preferred knowing the worst news as soon as possible. Too much time squandered on fretting just wasted energy and resources that wouldn’t change the outcome one jot, whereas facts could make all the difference in the world. “I’ll step on the gas, getting there, then. See you in twenty or so.”

“Roger.”

Another chuckle greeted his automatic response. Simon smiled, but there was an ache in his throat, all the same. Forcible retirement — even after years to accustom himself to it — still rankled deep. It had robbed him of the chance to take further part in the epic struggle for which he had been so laboriously trained. Retirement had also robbed the Concordiat of his experience, skill, and judgment, which were not inconsequential. He wasn’t sure what Sheila Brisbane, commander of the Bolo assigned to Vishnu, wanted, but he’d welcome an opportunity to reverse that unhappy situation.

He straightened up the living room, then skinned out of his comfortable old shirt and faded trousers and pulled on a good Terran silk shirt and a pair of dress slacks. He puttered in the kitchen, setting out glasses, a plate of cheese and fruit, a pitcher of ice-cold herbal tea that Yalena had introduced him to, displacing his former favorite beverage by a wide margin. When the chime sounded, he opened the door to find Sheila Brisbane, tall and trim in her dress-scarlet uniform, and a middle-aged man with the small stature and light build typical of Vishnu’s largest ethnic group.

“Hello, Simon,” Sheila greeted him with a warm smile. “It’s good to see you, again. This is Sahir Tathagata, Deputy Minister of Military Intelligence. Sahir, Colonel Simon Khrustinov.”

“Retired,” Simon added, shaking Mr. Tathagata’s hand and wondering why an active-status Bolo captain and a Deputy Minister of Military Intelligence wanted to talk to him on such urgent notice.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you at last, Colonel,” the deputy minister said quietly. Simon realized the words weren’t just a social greeting. He meant it.

“Come in, please,” Simon gestured them into the apartment.

“Is Yalena here?” Sheila asked, seating herself in one corner of Simon’s sofa while he brought in the tray from the kitchen.

“No, she’s on campus. She’ll be gone most of the evening.”

Sheila Brisbane, who was aware of Yalena’s interest in training for combat, met and held Simon’s gaze. “You’re sure she’ll be out the whole evening?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“What’s gone wrong?”

She frowned slightly. “Maybe nothing. Maybe a whole lot. We’re hoping to find out which,” she added glancing at the deputy minister.

Simon settled into his favorite chair and disposed himself to listen. “Shoot.”

Sahir Tathagata spoke first. “I’m given to understand that you’re in touch with someone on Jefferson? On a fairly regular basis?”

“I am,” he allowed cautiously. “I still have family there.”

“Your late wife’s family?”

“That’s right.”

Simon flicked a brief glance at Sheila, wondering how much she suspected. She returned that brief, penetrating glance with a cool, reserved gaze, just as any Brigade officer worth his or her salt would have done. Giving away very little while observing a great deal was part of an officer’s training.

“It is our belief,” the deputy minister said in an equally careful, neutral voice, “that President Santorini has implemented a systematic campaign of censorship on all communications into and out of Jefferson.” He paused, waiting for Simon’s reaction.

Simon weighed the odds, the risks, and allowed a brief, bitter smile to steal across his face. “That’s putting it mildly.”

“Then you are aware of the political situation?”

“Oh, yes.”

Sahir Tathagata considered him for a long, silent moment, as if trying to reach a decision of his own. Simon offered him neither help nor hindrance, waiting quietly while the deputy military intelligence minister sorted through his impressions of Simon and weighed them against what he knew — and what he didn’t know, as well. He came to a decision and said, “Vittori Santorini has contacted my government with a request to hire a team of engineers and technicians from our warfare technology center. They specifically want a team capable of repairing a Bolo. And they want spare parts. A literal shipload of spare parts. For a Bolo Mark XX. Munitions are on that list, too. It’s a big list and they are willing to pay top money. They want the technicians and the rest of it shipped out by special courier, not on the next freighter scheduled to make the Vishnu-Mali-Jefferson run. They’re willing to pay for that, too.”

“My God,” Simon whispered. “Sweet Jesus, what are they doing out there?” A cold shiver touched his spine. Simon was altogether too worried that he knew the answer — and he already didn’t like it.

Sahir Tathagata favored him with a wintry little smile. “We’re rather hoping you could tell us that.”

Simon held the deputy minister’s gaze. “You and I both know that Sonny shouldn’t be racking up damage of any kind, let alone something serious enough to hire a team of weapons specialists.” Simon forced himself to sit back, relaxing one muscle group at a time while wondering where Tathagata was going with this, and why. Simon was not a citizen of Vishnu. Neither was Yalena. If Tathagata had decided to investigate the arms purchases Simon had been involved in, over the last few years, he and Yalena might well find themselves on the next tramp freighter heading out of the Ngara system.

Or in jail.

On the other hand, if Vishnu’s leaders were half as worried about their neighbor’s intentions as Simon would’ve been, in their shoes, they might just take advantage of his clandestine network. “Suppose you tell me what you know?” Simon suggested, trying to assess which way Tathagata — and Sheila Brisbane — seemed likely to jump.

Sheila was an active officer of the Brigade, with wide latitude to investigate misconduct. Simon was retired, but if the Brigade didn’t share his views on what Jefferson’s government was doing, he could find himself in hot water ten different ways from Sunday. Sheila held his gaze with a steady strength that seemed, to Simon, to convey reassurance. His instinct, honed over years of battlefield command, was telling him that neither Sheila nor the deputy minister intended taking any adverse action against him. Not at the moment, at any rate.

Tathagata said, “We don’t know a great deal. What we do know is cause for alarm. At Captain Brisbane’s suggestion, we started back-tracking all of Jefferson’s major purchases from Mali and Vishnu over the past twenty or so years. Before the war and for a short time afterwards, Jefferson’s imports fell into two main groups. High-tech equipment for civilian use and purchases from our weapons labs, updating and replenishing the planetary defense arsenal. The Deng hit Jefferson far harder than Mali or Vishnu, thanks in large part to your timely warning.”

Simon inclined his head at the implicit compliment.

“Once Vittori Santorini’s party came to power, however, the pattern shifted.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Simon muttered. “I tried to trace their off-world money, but I didn’t have a lot of success. The Santorinis are smart. Dishonest as the day is long, but clever as sin and twice as dangerous. What in particular did they order?”

“High-tech surveillance equipment. Sophisticated military hardware. Biotech weapons—”

Simon sat bolt upright. “What?”

Tathagata’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “War agents, Colonel Khrustinov. Biological war agents. And several thousand barrels of key components required to cook more of their own.”

Simon thought about the struggle underway on Jefferson and went cold to his toes. “Dear God…”

Sheila Brisbane, eyes crackling with suppressed anger, said, “You haven’t heard the half of it yet, Simon.”

“Tell me,” he said, voice grim.

The pattern was coldly horrifying. The greater Santorini’s consolidation on power, the more off-world technology he had imported to hold onto that power. By the time Tathagata finished his recitation, Simon was ready to step onto the next interstellar transport headed toward Jefferson and assassinate the leadership of POPPA at any and all risk.

“So,” the deputy minister finished up, “that is what we know Jefferson has bought. What else they have smuggled in must remain conjecture, for now. But that isn’t everything we’ve discovered, Colonel. We’ve also tracked news reports coming out of Jefferson, taking a look at how that pattern has shifted, and quite frankly, it’s alarming.”

“I can well imagine.”

Tathagata inclined his head. “I’m sure you can. Vishnu and Mali have a number of concerns. Given the way the Deng/Melconian war is shaping up, our High Chamber can’t afford to jeopardize economic and political ties with Jefferson. It’s starting to look mighty lonely, out here, Colonel. We can’t afford to antagonize one another at a time when we may well need each other just to survive.

“At the same time, we,” he indicated himself — and by extension, everyone in the Ngara system — “can’t support a government that has all the hallmarks of a violent and oppressive regime. We’ve been aware for many years of the serious worsening of conditions on Jefferson. The number of refugees is down dramatically, but the ones who make it are in far worse shape, by every measurement you care to use.

“The tension between Granger refugees and POPPA officials — and their children — are reaching an alarming state. If the propaganda reports coming out of Jefferson are intended to hide a major program designed to violate human rights in clear violation of treaty agreements governing the conduct of allied worlds, we need to know. The sooner the better. We can’t afford that kind of neighbor.”

“From what I’ve seen,” Simon muttered, “the only way to get POPPA to abide by the provisions of a treaty — any treaty — is to hold a very large gun to their heads and threaten to squeeze the trigger.”

Tathagata’s eyes flickered. “Your assessment matches ours.” He leaned forward, resting elbows on knees in an attitude of candid confession. “I’ll be frank with you, Colonel. We need an observer on the ground, out there. Someone who can tell us what’s really going on, provide us with basic intelligence. Did you realize that Jefferson’s government has outlawed private ownership of SWIFT units? That the only messages coming out of Jefferson are controlled by the government?”

“Oh, yes. They confiscated those right after they confiscated all privately owned weapons.” He did not add that there were a few, brief-duration, coded messages going out, from rebel broadcasters who’d managed to lay hands on a SWIFT transmitter during an attack on a P-Squad office. They didn’t dare use it too often, however, and kept the unit in motion at all times, aboard one groundcar or another, twenty-five hours a day. “What are you proposing to do about it?”

“We want to send someone in. Someone who knows what to look for, knows the culture, the major players, the background on POPPA’s takeover. We want someone who can determine whether or not POPPA has overstepped its legal authority, allowing the Concordiat to revoke its treaty status or to force the current regime to step down. And if they are doing what we’re afraid they’re doing, if they’re using their Bolo to do what we think they are, we need someone who knows Bolos. Specifically,” Tathagata clarified his point, “Mark XXs.”

“If all you want is basic intel on what POPPA’s up to, why the interest in a Mark XX’s capabilities?”

“Our High Chamber is inclined to sell Santorini the parts he wants and provide the technicians. Not for profit, you understand, but because it’s a perfect opportunity to get our people in the middle of exactly what we need to know. The fly in the ointment is simple enough. Mark XXs are so old, our lab engineers need a technical advisor, someone who knows the Mark XX’s systems. Its capabilities and weak points. How to adapt parts that aren’t Brigade spec to begin with, and how to mate them to a Mark XX’s older technology interface.”

“I see.” And so he did. Very clearly.

Sheila Brisbane spoke up. “It’s more than that, Simon. If Jefferson has suborned your Bolo into maintaining an illegitimate regime, the Brigade will be forced to take action. They can’t spare an officer to come all the way out here to deal with one potentially renegade star system and its Bolo. I can’t deal with it, because I can’t abandon my duty station and the Brigade would never authorize me to leave the system, not even to investigate charges that serious. That leaves the Brigade with only one clear choice.”

Simon saw where she was headed and drew in a sharp breath.

“You know his command codes,” she added gently. “Including the destruct sequence.”

Simon shut his eyes for just a moment. After all he and Lonesome Son had gone through, together… It was one thing to supply Kafari with data on Sonny’s most vulnerable spots, trying to knock him out of commission long enough for the rebellion to seize control back from the thugs in POPPA’s employ. It was quite another to face the prospect of killing Sonny with the transmission of a single code phrase. Simon could have done that, at any point, although he’d have faced prison for the rest of his life. And destroying Sonny would have left Jefferson utterly defenseless, in the event of armed trouble from the Deng or Melconians. Simon was still a Brigade officer. He didn’t have the authority to destroy a Bolo on active duty assignment. No matter how desperately he wanted to protect his wife and her family.

“You’re the only asset we have, Simon,” Captain Brisbane said, voice hushed. “If necessary, I’ll contact Sector for official permission to use those codes.”

“They might,” he said harshly, “even grant permission. Jesus…” He drew a deep breath and met Tathagata’s gaze squarely. “The government of Jefferson,” he said, aware of the harsh edge in his voice, “is the most dangerous thing this side of the Melconian battle front. They’ve tried to kill me, once. That just might give us an edge.”

Tathagata’s eyes widened. “That’s a serious charge, Colonel. And how, exactly, would that give us an advantage?”

Simon didn’t answer. He stalked into his bedroom and came out holding a carefully framed photo. “That’s my wedding picture.”

The deputy minister stared from the picture to Simon and back again, several times. “Yes, I see your point. Very clearly, indeed.” He set the photograph down, very gently. “She was beautiful, Colonel. Can you go back? Without giving way to the anger that they killed her?”

Simon held his gaze for a long moment, before coming to his decision. “Let me show you something else, Mr. Tathagata. Something not even my daughter knows.”

The deputy minister frowned slightly, glancing at Sheila, who shook her head, because she didn’t know, either. Simon stepped back into his bedroom and tapped security codes into his computer, shunting the output to the large view-screen in the living room.

Kafari’s first message began to play. The others followed, in sequence. Simon watched Tathagata through narrowed eyes. After the first moment of stunned, wide-eyed realization, the deputy minister sat forward, intent on every word, every nuance of tone, every fleeting expression that crossed his wife’s face as she spoke. When the last recording finished, Simon closed the messages and locked them again with a security code that not even Yalena was sharp enough to crack, despite her aptitude for psychotronic programming.

Sahir Tathagata probably could have broken into Simon’s files, given time and incentive, and Sheila’s Bolo would’ve made short work of it, but Simon was fairly certain that neither the Deputy Minister of Military Intelligence nor Captain Brisbane had seen any of those files, before today. It took a fine actor, indeed, to fool a Brigade officer.

Tathagata sat back, eyes hooded for a long moment. “I presume that your wife has been the recipient of the fairly substantial weapons shipments our labs have sold to your purchasing agent, during the past few years?”

Simon inclined his head.

“How are they paying for it?”

Simon’s smile was a predatory grin that bared his teeth. “They aren’t. Vittori Santorini is.”

“Come again?”

“POPPA’s been sheltering assets off-world for a couple of decades, using the Tayari Trade Consortium to transfer large sums of money to the mercantile markets on Vishnu and Mali. They’ve made heavy investments in Mali’s Imari Consortium, in particular. Vittori and Nassiona Santorini are the children of a Tayari Trade Consortium executive. They foresaw very clearly that Imari’s profits and stock prices would soar, with a steady flow of money from the Concordiat fueling expansion. They invested in Imari and other off-world boom markets well before POPPA won its first big election.”

“When Gifre Zeloc defeated John Andrews for the presidency?”

Simon nodded. “That money has funded their military machine, at the same time their political programs have bankrupted Jefferson’s economy, destroyed one industry after another, thrown millions of people out of work — placing them in a position of total dependency on government handouts — and gutted agriculture to the point that food rationing has become a serious crisis. Just to give you perspective, the average citizen receiving government food subsidies is allotted one thousand calories a day.”

“My God!”

“Oh, it gets better. Political prisoners in POPPA’s so-called work camps are restricted to five hundred calories or less. My wife,” his voice caught for just a moment. “My wife has managed to rescue some of them. Circumstances have forced her to fight an attrition campaign, trying to destroy more of Sonny’s sensors and small-arms weapon systems than POPPA can repair with on-hand replacements. Guerilla fighters get close enough to toss octocellulose bombs at him, from point-blank range. Most of the volunteers who’ve gone up against my Bolo’s guns were rescued work-camp prisoners. And they knew damned well those attacks were suicide missions. They went, anyway.”

Sahir Tathagata’s jaw muscle jumped in a convulsive tic. “Things are worse than we realized. Substantially worse.”

“I assume that you have people on the ground, out there?”

Tathagata grimaced. “We do. In fact, one of them is coming in, tonight, with an up-to-date report. Unfortunately, rigorous inspections at the space station and the spaceport have prevented any of our people from bringing in SWIFT transmitters. The ones that tried were arrested. Most of the agents who slipped through without SWIFT transmitters weren’t able to learn much, I’m afraid. Freighter crews are restricted to the spaceport these days and tourism, even from Mali, has all but ceased. Getting a tourist visa is virtually impossible for most off-worlders. Besides which, Jefferson has closed its best resorts for reconversion to a natural state.” The scathing tone told Simon exactly what Sahir Tathagata thought about the greener side of POPPA’s leadership. “Frankly, I’d like to know how you’ve smuggled in heavy equipment, with that kind of security to bypass.”

“We borrowed the technique from POPPA. They’ve been smuggling high-value cargoes out of Jefferson — particularly high-quality cuts of meat for trade to Malinese miners — for years and they’re smuggling just as many luxury goods back in, to satisfy their expensive tastes with goods Jefferson can’t manufacture, itself, any longer. They use special routing chips that alert POPPA inspectors to avoid opening or probing specific freight boxes. So we helped ourselves to some of their cargo boxes. We helped ourselves to some of POPPA’s profits, as well, using some sophisticated hacking to break into Jefferson’s financial institutions. We’ve been diverting some of their ill-gotten gains into our weapons-procurement fund.”

“I see,” the deputy minister said quietly. “You do realize, you’ve just admitted to several very serious crimes?”

Simon held his gaze steadily. “If you want me to go back into Jefferson, you need to know what’s already been done, don’t you?”

Tathagata leaned back against the sofa cushions. “Colonel, I think you and I understand one another very well, indeed. When can you go?”

“That depends on how soon I can make arrangements for Yalena. She’s nineteen, more than self-sufficient enough to leave her here. But I’ll have to arrange finances for her, make sure she has enough money for college. She’s enrolled at Copper Town University and the bills for next semester’s classes will come due in a couple of weeks.”

“What are you going to tell her?” Tathagata asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“She could stay with me, Simon,” Sheila offered.

“That’s very generous of you. I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, I suggest we map this thing out, as best we can, so everyone is thoroughly briefed on what we’re trying to accomplish.”

Tathagata nodded. “Fair enough.” The deputy minister’s wrist-comm beeped. “Pardon me,” he apologized, checking the message.

Whatever it was, his face drained of color. He touched controls. “Understood. On the way.” Then he glanced at Simon. “Trouble at the port. It might be useful if you and Captain Brisbane accompanied me.”

Simon nodded. “Very well. I’ll get my coat.”

They set out in a dark and worrisome silence.

III

Copper Town’s port-side jail was a filthy place to spend the evening. The holding cell was crammed to capacity, mostly with detainees from the riot. Yalena wasn’t talking to any of them. Her name was too well known on Jefferson to risk letting them know who she was. It wouldn’t take much to turn them into a lynch mob. At the moment, they just thought she was a street-walker picked up in the dragnet Vishnu’s port police had thrown around the riot.

The police had already processed her through the booking procedures; now she was just waiting for whatever came next and wondering what on earth she could say to her father, to explain why she hadn’t come home, tonight. She’d been in the cell for almost an hour when the door at the end of the corridor clanged open. One of the guards was escorting a newcomer past the row of holding cells. Yalena’s breath caught sharply.

“Daddy…”

He halted in front of the bars, catching and holding her gaze. He didn’t say a word. She bit her lip and tried not to cry.

“That’s her,” he said to the guard.

“All right, then. Out, girl. Stand back, now, the rest of you.”

The door rattled open. Yalena squeezed through. Her father turned on his heel and left her to follow or not, at her choice. Her heart constricted with a painful lurch. Then she lifted her chin and followed him out. It was better than standing in that horrid cell with refugees who would have killed her without remorse, had anyone spoken her name aloud.

When they reached the administrative portion of the jail, her father and the guard stepped into an office where several people waited. She blinked in surprise when she saw who they were. Her cousin, Estevao Soteris, was talking to Sheila Brisbane, of all people, the commander of Vishnu’s Bolo. There were a couple of men in suits, who looked like bureaucrats, and a uniformed police officer, who sat at a big desk piled high with reports and files. Seated in a chair beside that desk was a teen-aged girl who turned to watch them enter the room.

Yalena rocked to a halt. She had to gulp back nausea. No wonder the refugees aboard that freighter had tried to kill those POPPA brats. Yalena’s father had also halted, so abruptly it looked like he’d run into a plate-glass wall. Sudden rage ignited in his eyes. Yalena realized he hadn’t seen the girl, before, either.

“I’m told,” he said very gently, “that you have a message for me, Miss ben Ruben.”

She nodded. “It’s in here.” She handed him a thick pouch. Her voice was a hair-raising rasp, like dead fingernails on slate. “Commodore Oroton asked me to put it in your hand, sir, and no other.”

Sheila Brisbane, eyes glittering with anger of her own, glanced at Yalena’s father for permission, then peered over his shoulder as he opened the sealed pouch and began sorting through its contents. Her father whistled softly. “Mr. Tathagata,” he glanced up at one of the suited bureaucrats, “I think you will find these very interesting, indeed. The good commodore has laid hands on the kind of evidence you need to make our little proposition official.”

Mr. Tathagata took the documents and glanced through them. Then said softly, “Oh, yes. These are, indeed, what we have needed. Mr. Girishanda,” he glanced at the other suited bureaucrat, “my compliments on a mission exceedingly well done.” He then turned with a grave demeanor to the girl with the ruined face. “Miss ben Ruben, you cannot know how grateful the government of Vishnu is. Your testimony, added to these documents, is sufficient evidence to involve ourselves on your behalf. We had no idea,” he added, voice shaking with reaction, “that they were committing wholesale genocide.”

Yalena caught her breath sharply. Genocide?

“You’re going to stop it?” Miss ben Ruben asked.

Mr. Tathagata glanced at Yalena’s father before answering. “That’s the idea, yes.” He then turned, surprisingly, to Yalena, herself. “Miss Khrustinova, how many students, precisely, have joined your freedom network?”

Dismay skittered along Yalena’s nerves. “How did you know about that?” she squeaked.

He almost smiled. Almost. “I am with the Ministry of Defense, Miss Khrustinova. Hostilities between Granger students and those loyal to POPPA have been far too volatile to risk ignoring the situation. Tonight’s riot was surprising only because it didn’t occur much sooner. We have been aware of your group and its activities for quite some time. Your cause is a worthy one, although your methods,” he added with another faint smile, eying her scandalous dress, “are somewhat unorthodox.”

Heat scalded Yalena’s cheeks. “When you’re working an espionage gig, plying spacers with drinks and persuading them to tell you what they’ve seen, you have to wear the right camouflage. This,” she indicated the clinging wisp wrapped around her curves, “is just a uniform.”

She was speaking to Mr. Tathagata, but watching her father.

It was her father who answered. “A damned effective one, too. But you’ll need a different one, if you plan to go back.”

“Go — back?” Her heart thudded so hard, it hurt.

“Oh, yes. Your cousin and I have already spoken.” His gaze flicked to Estevao Soteris. “We’ll be outfitting the combat veterans coming in, as part of a strike force. Your student group — which I did not know about, you devious little fire eater — will also play a role, if you’re interested. Deputy Minister Tathagata has agreed to spend the next couple of days overseeing additional preparations.”

“We’re going to invade? With Vishnu’s help?” She didn’t believe it. She glanced from Tathagata to Sheila Brisbane. “Is the Brigade involved in this, too?”

“Not directly,” Captain Brisbane said. “Nor officially. Not yet, anyway. That may change, depending on the way events unfold.”

“How are we going in?” she asked, returning her gaze to her father. “The Bolo would shoot us to pieces before we could even land a strike force.”

“Yes, he probably would,” her father agreed, “if we were landing a hostile strike force. But we have something a little different in mind. Sonny’s been damaged. Badly, as it happens.”

“By the resistance?” Yalena asked sharply. “Commodore Oroton?”

Her father’s eyes reflected sudden pain. “Yes,” he said in a hoarse voice full of dread. “Commodore Oroton…” He drew a rasping breath. “Oh, hell,” he swore suddenly, “there’s no easy way to say it. Commodore Oroton is your mother.”

His words slammed through her like live electrical current. The room wavered at the edges. She felt her knees turn to water and grabbed for the door jamb. “Mother?” she whispered. Yalena tried to focus her gaze, but the room remained a blur. “She’s… alive?”

Misery burned in her father’s voice. “Yes.”

Her emotions were exploding out of control, grief and joy and tearing anguish for the time lost and the terrible burden of guilt she had carried for so many years. The pain of her father’s lie tore great gashes through her heart, making it hard to breathe.

“Yalena,” he said, “please try to understand—”

She put her whole weight behind the punch. “You sorry-assed son-of-a-bitch!”

He staggered. Then blotted the blood from his nose. He said nothing.

Yalena stood shaking in the middle of the floor, eyes hot, throat tight, fist aching all the way to her shoulder, where the blow had connected. She hated him for the agonizing years behind that lie — and hated herself far more, for making the lie necessary. She finally lifted drowned eyes, feeling like a battered and unlovable toad, forced herself to meet his gaze. What she saw made her insides flinch. The hellfire shadows of Etaine burned in his eyes, worse than she had ever seen them.

She had put that look in his eyes. Her insides flinched from that, too.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she whispered. Then broke down into helpless, wrenching sobs. His arms came around her and she dissolved against his shoulder. When the worst of the storm had passed, she gulped and regained control of her voice, although it wavered unsteadily. “Daddy?”

“Yes?” He didn’t sound angry.

“How soon can we leave?”

He tipped her face up, peered into her eyes. The shadows had retreated, leaving his eyes warm and human, again. “That’s my girl,” he smiled. “As to that, as soon as possible. We have to wait for Mr. Tathagata’s people to arrange for the technicians, the spare parts, and the munitions Santorini ordered from Shiva Weapons Labs. If Shiva can expedite the order, it might be as soon as a week.”

“All right. We’ll have to do something about classes…”

Mr. Tathagata spoke up. “We’ll speak to the university officials on behalf of anyone in your group who wants to go. We’ll arrange for the professors to grant approved incompletions for the classes and we’ll be sure the registrar grants permission to interrupt studies without loss of academic standing or admission status. If necessary, my ministry will pay tuition fees for completing this semester’s work at some future date. I’m well aware of the financial standing of most Granger students. Your volunteers will need that kind of financial help, if most of you hope to finish school.”

“Why would you do that?” Yalena asked, genuinely puzzled.

“I’m taking the long view and considering it as part of Vishnu and Mali’s defense plan. POPPA must be destroyed, but your freedom fighters will have to do a good bit more than win this fight, Miss Khrustinova. You’ll also have to rebuild your homeworld’s economy, your education system, everything that POPPA’s tampered with or destroyed. Jefferson and Vishnu and Mali need one another, financially and militarily. If Jefferson collapses into barbarism, it will damage us in ways we’d really rather avoid.”

“I see. Yes.” She cleared her throat. “Thank you, sir. That will mean a great deal to us. All right, I’ll tell everyone to start packing.” When she glanced into her father’s eyes, saw not only approval, but also dawning pride, an emotion that blazed like a glint of sunlight on quicksilver. For the first time, Yalena felt like she just might earn the right to say, I’m Simon Khrustinov’s daughter. And Kafari Khrustinova’s.

By the time she and her family had finished their work, Vittori Santorini was going to wish they’d never been born.

I

Rain slashes down from yet another storm, pouring off my battered warhull in rivers and waterfalls I can feel, but cannot see. The water and my warhull are so closely matched in temperature, there is very little heat difference to give the water a distinct IR signature. It has been raining almost nonstop for a week. I lie in the mud, a flintsteel whale beached on an inhospitable shore. I spend most of my time only semiaware, in a state more conscious than retreat to my survival center, but less awake than Standby Alert.

My proximity-alarm system is set to jerk me into full consciousness if any nonauthorized vehicle or pedestrian approaches my exclusion zone. This extends three hundred meters in all directions — including down. Commodore Oroton is more than capable of ordering sappers to enter the sewers near the massive subsidized-housing tenements — shoddy blocks of concrete twenty stories high and a thousand meters long, where subsistence recipients are packed in like rabbits in a giant warren — that surround my erstwhile depot. It would not be difficult for engineers to tunnel their way under the scorched earth of my former depot. Setting off another octocellulose bomb at point-blank range would doubtless end my career as a Unit of the Line. Not by catastrophic hull-breach, but by the simple expediency of destroying more critical systems than Jefferson’s bankrupt government can afford to repair.

I therefore keep my electronic ears to the ground — literally.

The P-Squad guards stationed in a tight defensive ring around me are diligent in doing their duty, rain or shine, which is to guard me from any further possible attack. Why they think this is necessary, I am not sure, since I still have functional antipersonnel guns along prow and stern and starboard side. I am capable, if need be, of taking out any vehicle that tries to approach me. If, of course, I could identify it as a threat in time to act.

On further thought, the guards are not superfluous.

Their diligence is understandable, since Commodore Oroton has, naturally enough, taken full advantage of my critical injuries. The rebel commander has launched a major offensive campaign, coordinating a series of rapier-sharp surgical strikes in every major city on Jefferson. P-Squad headquarters units — having grown complacent and arrogant during their long and uncontested rule over Jefferson’s city streets — have been shaken out of their complacency. The P-Squads are under literal bombardment with rockets, hyper-v missiles, and octocellulose bombs.

Rebel strikes have reduced eight major stations to rubble, destroyed fifty-three vehicles, and killed three hundred twelve officers in garrison. Foot and groundcar patrols are shot by snipers two and three times a day. Aircars are only marginally safer from attack, since the rebellion is amply supplied with the means to knock them out of the sky. Mobile Hellbore attacks have demolished weapons storage bunkers, depriving federal and local police of weaponry and munitions.

The broadcast media is calling for retaliatory strikes, without bothering to clarify where, exactly, the strikes should occur, since rebel strongholds have not yet been identified. The House of Law and Senate wrangle daily as members of the Assembly disagree on the best way to end the rebellion’s reign of terror. Most of their suggested solutions are completely ineffectual and several are downright disastrous. The measures with the greatest support — and therefore the most likely to be passed into law — are so draconian, humanity’s first codified law-giver, Hammurabi himself, would have protested the barbarity.

Meanwhile, nothing actually gets done and the rebels continue attacking.

P-Squad reprisals are turning savage as officers vent their anger, frustration, and fear on forcibly disarmed victims. The flow of convicted Grangers, sympathizers, dissidents, protestors, and angry, disillusioned subsistence recipients has risen from a steady river to a flood that has, by the end of one week, clogged the jails and tied up the courts. The speed with which Jefferson rockets its way toward planet-wide crisis surprises even me.

And there is very little I can do about any of it.

At the request of engineers from Shiva, Inc., Vishnu’s preeminent weapons lab, I have sent detailed diagnostics via SWIFT, listing system failures and the necessary parts required to repair or replace them. The ship is already in transit, leaving me with very little to do but await their arrival—

A massive explosion rocks Madison. The flash creates a heat strobe that momentarily blots out every IR sensor still functioning. The shockwave rockets across my warhull with sufficient force to sing through my stern-mounted sensor arrays. The blast-point is less than three kilometers away from my position, originating in an enclave where Jefferson’s movie stars and POPPA’s upper echelon party members have built mansions behind heavily guarded gates and electrified perimeter fences.

An eerie, chilling silence follows the blast. For a moment, it seems almost like the entire city has gone silent, listening for echoes of that explosion. Rain, pouring relentlessly from leaden skies, will at least help the fire department battle the blaze from whatever was just destroyed. This attack deviates sharply from previous rebel strikes, in that it has apparently targeted an entire neighborhood, rather than a surgically precise action against a specific individual. I am trying to consider the ramifications of this when a wildcat broadcast preempts the datanet.

“Pigs of POPPA, be warned!” an angry, exultant voice shouts. “You ain’t seen nuthin’, you murderous bastards! You think Grangers are bad-ass? Hah! Oroton’s a goddamned pussy with gloves on. There ain’t never been gloves on our hands and there ain’t never gonna be, neither. We’re the Rat Guard Militia and we’re your worst fuckin’ nightmare!”

The illegal broadcast ends.

Vittori Santorini has a new enemy.

Sirens have begun to scream as emergency vehicles rush toward the conflagration that is still burning, despite the heavy rain. By my conservative estimate, the bomb that went off was larger than the one Oroton’s crew detonated in my face. I wonder, abruptly, if Commodore Oroton really was the mastermind of the attack on me. Frank did not look or sound like a Granger. It would be nearly as difficult for a Granger to masquerade as an urban thug as it has been for an urban spy to pose as a Granger. Frank was one of a select crew that passed muster as politically trustworthy. Sar Gremian vetted the repair crew, himself, which suggests that Frank had no ties at all to anything or anyone remotely connected to Grangerism.

In one sense, I am surprised that it has taken this long for an urban resistance movement to blossom. I mull variables and surmise that subsistence recipients, carefully indoctrinated with learned helplessness and systematically deprived of a genuine education, have never understood that thinking for one’s self is a desirable trait. It has taken both time and extreme discomfort with living conditions to rouse the urban population into a simple realization that something could be done and that they, themselves, can act on their own behalf.

Clearly, it has occurred to someone, now.

This does not bode well for the future of civil tranquility. The urban poor have been encouraged, for nearly twenty years, to turn their dissatisfaction into violent action, rioting and looting at command. POPPA’s favorite tactic for crushing Granger independence has now reached its ultimate and logical denouement: the mob has turned on its creator, as mobs have done throughout humanity’s gore-stained history.

I pick up broadcasts as news crews rush to the scene of the explosion. I am able to “see” the damage via their electronic video footage, since it can be routed directly through my psychotronics, bypassing my malfunctioning sensors. That footage is spectacular. Breandan Shores, the most exclusive enclave of mansions anywhere on Jefferson, is a cratered ruin. The blast radius is nearly half a kilometer wide. It is impossible to tell how many homes have been destroyed, because there is very little left but mangled piles of smouldering rubble. Steam rises from it, meeting the rain that pours into the heart of the incinerated mass.

The ring of secondary damage, beyond the actual crater, is a scene of carnage, with houses and retail stores caved in, windows shattered, and ground vehicles flipped end-for-end like jackstraws in a high wind. Emergency workers are searching the rubble, looking for survivors. There are not enough crews anywhere in Madison to deal with destruction of this magnitude. Madison’s civil emergency director issues a plea for rescue teams and medical professionals from other cities to help with the crisis.

Pol Jankovitch, Jefferson’s preeminent news anchor, sits in his studio in downtown Madison, watching the footage from camera crews on the ground and in hovering aircars, and cannot find anything coherent to say. He mumbles in disjointed snatches. “Dear God,” he says over and over, “this is terrible. This is just terrible. Hundreds must be dead. Thousands, maybe. Dear God, how could they do it? Innocent people…”

I doubt that Pol Jankovitch appreciates the irony of what he has just said.

He has fostered, aided, and abetted a government that routinely and systematically scapegoated innocent people as a method of acquiring political power. He does not see, let alone understand, his own culpability, the personal responsibility he bears for having helped create the POPPA regime — and therefore, by logical extension, his responsibility for today’s bombing, in rebellion against POPPA’s preferred methods of governance.

My personality gestalt circuitry, in a cross-protocol handshake of checks and balances, suppresses that line of thought. This is dangerous ground for a Bolo to tread. I am programmed for obedience to legitimate orders. I am not required to like or approve of those giving my orders. I am not designed to question the motives of those issuing orders, unless I am presented with clear evidence of treason to the Concordiat or am told to do something that violates my primary mission. I dare not enter the minefield of moral ambiguity that inevitably surrounds any questions of personal responsibility and duty.

I concentrate, instead, on the unfolding news coverage as Jefferson’s media moguls attempt to come to grips with the reality of this newest attack. Speculation on who might have been killed runs rampant during the next thirty confused minutes. Pol Jankovitch, working from a hastily assembled map of the bombed area, runs down a laundry list of Jefferson’s glittering elite whose homes were inside the circle of destruction.

Mirabelle Caresse, owned a mansion at what appears to have been the very center of the crater. Close neighbors included media tycoon Dexter Courtland; the mayor of Madison; and the Supreme Commandant of Jefferson’s P-Squads. Her closest neighbor, however, was Isanah Renke, who began her career as a POPPA party attorney advising the Santorinis as to what methods would prove most effective, from a legal standpoint, in their bid for power. Her reward for this fanatical support of POPPA’s credo of “universal fairness” and “the birthright of economic equity” was appointment to Jefferson’s High Court, where she has carried out a never-ending assault on various provisions in the constitution that the Santorinis found inconvenient, convincing other High Justices to uphold legislation that is at direct variance with constitutional provisions. She has also aided and abetted the destruction of the Granger population and culture by convincing the High Court to permit POPPA’s “work camps” to stand as legal, lawful entities.

It would appear that Isanah Renke’s influence in the High Court has just come to an explosive end, since this is a Saturday and most government and corporate offices — including the High Court — are closed for the weekend.

Witnesses from the edges of the blast zone describe in shaky detail the experience of being caught in the shockwave, which turned broken windows into flying knives and debris into shock-thrown shrapnel. Several of these surviving witnesses claim to have been inside the guarded enclave just before the blast, having delivered truckloads of supplies for a major social function at Mirabelle Caresse’s mansion. I theorize that at least one of those trucks was packed with something besides catering supplies.

Thirty-eight minutes into the news broadcast, Vittori Santorini’s press secretary and chief propagandist, Gust Ordwyn, makes an appearance from the studio built inside the new president’s residence, the so-called “People’s Palace” commissioned by Vittori Santorini shortly after his landslide election. Mr. Ordwyn is visibly shaken as he steps up to the podium, where he faces a sea of reporters clamoring for details. There is fear in his eyes, but anger in his voice as he begins to speak.

“The monstrous attack on Breandan Shores, today, has claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians and injured thousands more. This attack reveals with cold and graphic clarity how inhuman Granger cult fanatics really are. Their so-called rebellion is no longer a matter of attacks against hard-working police and dedicated public servants. These filthy terrorists will not rest until every decent, honest person on Jefferson is either dead or helpless under Granger guns and bombs. President Santorini is shocked and horrified by the carnage inflicted today. He understands only too bitterly the grief, the anguished outrage, suffered by the families of today’s victims. He, too, has lost a dearly loved family member. Vice President Nassiona…” Gust Ordwyn’s voice goes savagely unsteady.

He wipes tears from his eyes as reporters watch in stunned silence. “Our beloved Nassiona, you see, was in Mirabelle Caresse’s mansion, today. Mirabelle had graciously opened her home to host a charity benefit, this afternoon, to raise money for medical care for poverty-stricken children. Nassiona had been in the mansion since early this morning, helping Mirabelle with preparations for the benefit. She was greeting guests when that foul, murderous bomb…”

Vittori Santorini’s chief propagandist halts, choked into silence by the all-too-apparent rage and grief visible in his face. The reporters sit motionless, so stunned by this news that not one of them interrupts with questions. Despite the on-going attacks against police patrols and corrupt officials, Jefferson’s news media apparently believed that POPPA’s upper-echelon leadership was inviolate, safe from reprisals simply by virtue of their sanctified positions in the party. They are inviolate no longer. The reporters are confronting, for the first time in their professional careers, the brutal fact that no one, no matter how highly placed, is safe from the retribution of people who have had enough.

Gust Ordwyn is preparing to speak again when a door to the left of the podium crashes open. Ordwyn turns sharply. The cameras swing around. Vittori Santorini bursts into the room with a thunderclap, eyes wild and full of lightning. Reporters surge to their feet, electrified by the appearance of Jefferson’s president. There is mad grief in Vittori Santorini’s gaze and hatred in the clawed fingers that shove Gust Ordwyn aside and latch onto the podium. He glares into the cameras, staring at something I suspect no one else can see, like a lunatic attacking shadows that do not exist. His mouth works soundlessly for seven point three-five seconds.

When he finds his voice, the sound is harsh, like power saws biting into stone.

“The people murdered today, helpless, innocent people in their own lovely homes, will be avenged. This savagery will not go unpunished! I will not rest until justice is served. I will not stop until we have spilled enough blood to appease our loved ones’ murdered souls. We must — we will — destroy these butchers, down to the last mad killer. Death, I say! Death to all of them, to all our enemies, everywhere. These terrorists must die. Must suffer terror and agony, as we have suffered. I swear before the gods of our ancestors, I will destroy these fiends!”

The reporters sit in stunned silence.

“Mark me well, for my patience is at an end. I have done with playing by civilized rules. The Granger scourge has forfeited any right to justice or compassion. They have nurtured their deadly cult of violence like a gardener tending rank weeds. They hate us blindly and absolutely. They have fed that hatred, fed it lovingly, like a madman flinging meat to wild lions. They have poisoned our soil, destroyed our world’s prosperity. We must heed the lessons taught by our holiest of books, lessons that give us this warning: ‘By their fruits shall ye know them.’

“I ask you, my dearest friends, what are the fruits these Grangers have produced? Terrorism! Hatred! Murder! An army of sick monsters! They have fed their hatred with lies. They have smuggled in weapons from off-world gunrunners. They have ordered their butchers to kill us like rabid wolves. They have plunged a knife into the hearts and souls of POPPA’s finest and most generous…”

His voice breaks apart like thin ice. He stands motionless behind the podium, staring wildly at nothing, not even the cameras. He swallows rapidly, blinks to clear wet eyes, then snarls with sudden rage.

“It is not enough to arrest these fiends. The Granger scourge must be wiped out at the roots! And that is exactly what I pledge. I will use every means at my disposal to destroy that scourge. I will not be satisfied until every Granger on our lovely, wounded world has been rounded up and made to pay for their monstrous crimes against humanity! Death to Grangers!”

Spittle flies. President Santorini is as out of control as the civil war raging through Jefferson’s canyons and city streets. It is, perhaps, impertinent of me, but no one appears to be interested in reminding the president that Grangers did not set off the bomb that killed his sister. I question his mental fitness to command, which sets up internal alarms and warnings that skitter and jump through my admittedly addled circuitry. Vittori Santorini’s personal grief — or rage — is not my affair.

He is distraught, held fast in the grip of powerful emotions, but his orders regarding the Grangers are within the emergency powers granted the president by the constitution. Given a great-enough provocation, the total elimination of a deadly enemy is a viable response and is well within the parameters of my own battlefield programming. Today’s attack demonstrates more than sufficient provocation.

The mastermind behind this raid is willing to destroy hundreds of innocent bystanders to assassinate a relative handful of prominent officials and party supporters. This action — and the concomitant threat of future atrocities — not only changes the playing field, it changes my role as one of the players. I am no longer merely an instrument by which POPPA maintains political control. I am a Bolo of the Dinochrome Brigade, a Unit of the Line charged with the defense of this world, which now hosts an enemy as deadly to the common good as any Deng Yavac I have faced.

I revert to my true and primary function. There are only two questions remaining as barriers between this moment and one that lies inevitably ahead, when I will target the last enemy in my gunsights. How do I assign guilt where it belongs? Am I looking at two separate insurrections, one urban and one Granger? Or one all-encompassing alliance? And how long will it take the repair team on its way from Vishnu to restore me to battlefield status? I am still pondering these questions when Vittori Santorini — having reined in his wild emotions and regained his power of speech — addresses the shocked people in the studio and those listening to this broadcast.

“We cannot hope to stop these foul killers without changes — drastic changes — to the laws governing pursuit, detention, and prosecution of criminals. The time for playing by civilized rules is past. Long past. I am therefore invoking a planet-wide state of emergency to deal with this crisis. The POPPA Squadrons must be able to function swiftly and decisively, without being hamstrung by legal mandates requiring prisoners to be either formally charged based on hard and fast evidence or released no later than fifty hours after arrest. We cannot — dare not — run the risk of freeing the terrorists we manage to take into custody, since they will only contact their command structure, re-arm themselves, and strike again.

“To that end, I am formally outlawing all forms of public assembly in groups of five or more individuals, for anyone except governmental officials carrying out the duties of their employment. If groups of private citizens are caught meeting on public streets, they will be detained as subversives and treated accordingly. All civic organizations — including worship services held by organized churches or temples — are likewise forbidden to assemble, whether publicly or in a private building or home. Any persons violating this stricture will be arrested, charged with threatening public welfare, and prosecuted to the greatest possible extent of the law.

“I hereby order all peacekeeping forces, to include federal P-Squad officers, local police units, and military troops on active or reserve standby, to arrest anyone with known or suspected ties to dissident organizations. Arrest any individual known to hold antigovernment opinions. And I demand the immediate reimprisonment of every single individual who has been arrested or questioned on suspicion of terrorist ties within the past calendar year.

“This is a beginning, my friends, but even this is not enough. We must halt the flow of illegal weaponry and supplies entering Jefferson from off-world. We know that thousands of criminals have been smuggled off-world, in illegal defiance of our best efforts to protect the innocent people of this world. These criminals have not only escaped justice, they are actively aiding the Granger terrorist network, serving as gunrunners and procurers of off-world mercenaries. I demand the immediate arrest of any individual who is known — or even suspected — to have family members illegally smuggled off-world. Find those individuals and extract names, munitions shipment dates, the names of ships and freighter captains helping them wage war against us. Find out who they are — and destroy them!”

He brings down both fists against the podium, slamming the wood so hard, the nearest reporters jump with shock. “I have already sent a message to our embassy on Vishnu. I’ve ordered embassy officials and students loyal to the POPPA party to identify Granger agents working on Vishnu and Mali. Once we have rooted out the identity of these off-world murderers, we will crack open the network they have created in our midst and destroy it without hesitation, pity, or remorse. They have shown none to us. We will burn their bodies to ashes and sow their land with salt. And I swear to God and all the devils of hell, I will no longer feed enemy soldiers and dissidents whose sole aim is the destruction of this government.

“Under my authority as president and commander in chief of Jefferson’s armed forces, I hereby order P-Squadron commanders to eliminate all enemies of the state currently held in custody. We will not waste our precious food resources on hardened butchers who want the rest of us dead. By God, we will not even waste ammunition on them. The people’s hard-earned taxes must pay for ammunition to launch an aggressive assault into rebel territory. I therefore direct commandants of prisons and work camps to find alternative means of dispatching the enemy soldiers and traitors already in custody. Use whatever means necessary to comply with this directive. Food resources currently earmarked for feeding traitors must be reallocated to support a new division of federal troops, which is being assembled as we speak, under the command of General Milo Akbarr, Commandant of Internal Security Forces.”

I surmise from this statement that General Akbarr is preparing an assault on suspected Granger strongholds in the Damisi Mountain range. I believe this assault to be misguided, since I do not believe that blame for today’s blast can be laid on the Granger rebellion. There are several good reasons for this conclusion.

It does not fit with Commodore Oroton’s modus operandi, which has demonstrated again and again his dedication to taking out only those individuals proven by their own actions to be corrupt and dangerous to Granger survival. Oroton has taken great care, in fact, to spare the lives of innocents in close proximity. I cannot believe that a commander as shrewd as Commodore Oroton would have authorized an attack of this magnitude, understanding as he does that any such attack would bring down the wrath of the entire POPPA party machine. He is no fool. I refuse to believe that such a commander would deliberately provoke the retribution that is, at this moment, falling on the heads of disarmed and vulnerable Grangers.

No. Commodore Oroton did not engineer, orchestrate, or approve today’s bombing. There are too many people already in custody — and far too many more who shortly will be in custody — to risk those prisoners’ lives in a guaranteed bloodbath. By my calculation, which is doubtless lower than the actual number, there are three quarters of a million people in custody at work camps, holding facilities, and local jails. These people have no defense. Commodore Oroton knows this.

Therefore, the wildcat broadcast taking credit for the attack can, I believe, be taken at face value. There is a separate, urban-based movement, with a far more ruthless approach than Oroton’s. I do not believe that Grangers can be implicated, let alone blamed, for today’s bombing. That does not appear to matter to Vittori Santorini, who apparently has no intention of discovering who was ultimately responsible for today’s blast. The legacy of Vice President Nassiona’s death will make a search unnecessary, since he has vowed to arrest anyone disagreeing with him, whether a person is a Granger or an urban dissident.

I predict overtures from the Rat Guard Militia to Oroton’s Granger guerillas, to create an alliance that will, if allowed to blossom, prove fatal to POPPA and its leaders. Unless, of course, I am restored to some semblance of battlefield readiness in time to stop the inevitable slaughter.

While I wait, that slaughter begins.

II

“Absolutely not!”

Kafari glared up at Dinny Ghamal, whose violent objection to her plan burned like hellfire in his eyes. She measured him with one long, ice-cold stare. “Mister, I don’t recall anyone electing you commander of this rebellion.”

Dinny’s skin was dark enough, anger didn’t show up as the bright flush that stained lighter complexions crimson, but there was no mistaking the anger that turned jaw muscles to iron and flared his nostrils. He bit down on the worst of the retort she could see balanced on the tip of his tongue, bit down and held it. When he could control the words trying to explode into the hot sunlight, he spoke with rigid formality. “Sir, we can’t afford the risk. If we mount a rescue operation — any rescue — it’ll have to be in the next few minutes or there won’t be anything to rescue but corpses—”

“Which is exactly why we’re going in!” Kafari snarled.

“Hear me out!”

Kafari was on the ragged edge of shouting at him for insubordination when she saw the anger in his eyes shift, almost imperceptibly, into something else. Something dreadful. Stark fear. For her. She clacked her teeth together and breathed hard for several seconds. “All right, soldier,” she finally growled, “make it fast. People are already dying out there.”

“I know,” he groaned. The memory of his mother’s death drew a veil of shadows across his eyes. “Believe me, I know. But if we hit those camps now, in the middle of the afternoon, we’ll have to move openly, in daylight. If the satellites don’t pick us up, you can bet your next paycheck some P-Squadder manning a radar array will. Even if we do nothing but fire high-angle mortars or launch ballistic missiles from hiding, they’ll track the flight path back to the point of launch. If we run for it — which we’ll have to do, once the shooting starts — they’ll pinpoint these camps within minutes. And I wouldn’t give a snowball’s chance for the lives of any Granger caught within a hundred kilometer radius of our base camps. If we try to stop the massacres, we’ll risk losing the entire rebellion.”

It was soundly reasoned. Kafari couldn’t fault him on that. She’d already considered every single argument he’d made. If this had been any other soldier — even Anish Balin — she would’ve simply overruled his objections and ordered him to comply or else. But this wasn’t any other soldier. It was Dinny Ghamal. She tried to find the right words to explain, because she needed Dinny’s support, not just grudging obedience to orders.

“Simon once told me there comes a point in every battlefield commander’s career,” she said softly, “where the price for choosing safety — personal safety or the safety of one’s command, one’s troops — comes with too high a price tag. I started this war because I watched the brutal massacre of helpless people. Now there’s another massacre underway, only it’s far worse, this time. They’re not running over a few hundred protestors, they’re systematically executing seven-hundred fifty thousand helpless civilians. This is what we’re fighting the rebellion for, the whole reason we’re out here. If we fail these people, if we don’t even lift a finger to help them, we might as well just shoot ourselves and spare POPPA the trouble of doing it for us.”

Dinny winced.

Kafari said, as gently as possible, “It isn’t as suicidal as it looks, at first glance. Sonny’s out of commission—”

“He’s still got functional guns.”

“Yes, he does. But he’s got to know where to shoot and that gives us an edge. A pretty good one, actually. Simon’s got a full list of everything that’s malfunctioned, courtesy of Vittori, himself. He had to send a parts list to the Shiva Weapons Labs and Simon got hold of it. Sonny’s sensors are out. Everything but thermal imaging. As long as we keep our distance, he can’t do much more than take pot-shots in the dark. Trust me, I have no intention of sending any of our people close enough to that Bolo to register as a heat signature he can shoot at. I didn’t pick the timing and I’d like to strangle the commander of that damn-fool pack of idiots calling themselves the Rat Guard Militia, but whatever else is true, the odds will never be better. If Simon were here, he’d say we’ve just reached our Rubicon. All that remains is to decide whether or not we cross it.”

“Rubicon?” he asked, frowning. “What the devil’s a Rubicon?”

“A boundary. A line in the sand. A river crossing that divides a person’s life. On one shore, there’s only blind, unquestioning obedience to authority and on the other shore is the courage of your convictions. Once you’ve crossed that river, for good or ill, there’s no going back. Vittori’s crossed his Rubicon for all the wrong reasons, issuing the order to execute helpless people. You and I must decide whether or not to cross our Rubicon for all the right reasons, trying to rescue helpless people. If we don’t cross this river, Dinny, if we stay hidden in our safe little bolt-holes in these cliffs, we’ll never be fully human, again. Will you and I be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without flinching, if we hide in safety while three quarters of a million people are slaughtered? We must act, Dinny. If we don’t, we will never free this world—”

“How can you say that?” Anguish and anger fought for control of his voice. “If we go out there now, if we just give away the location of our ammunition depots, our field rations, our equipment caches, they’ll throw everything they’ve got into scouring us off the face of this planet! They’ve got twenty-five thousand troops, fully trained, and every damned one of ’em lives and breathes for the chance to destroy us. It would be bad enough to lose the people we’d have to send out against those trigger-happy bastards. But if we lose you—”

“If I’m that indispensable, Dinny Ghamal, then try putting a little faith into what I have to say.”

He stood glaring at her for long, dangerous minutes, breathing like a foundered stallion with a jaglitch closing in for the kill.

“At least,” Kafari added, gentling her voice, “do me the courtesy of listening.”

A low, frustrated groan tore loose, a sound like a tree splitting down the center on a bitter winter’s night, torn apart by the stress of ice expanding through the heartwood. “I’m listening,” he said through gritted teeth.

“We have one chance, Dinny. One breathless, fleeting chance, to turn the tide of this war to our advantage. We have to hit them hard and fast and we must do it right now. The Bolo is out of commission and the bulk of their own troops have scattered to round up more people to slaughter. Have you stopped to think — really think — about what will happen if we liberate six or seven hundred thousand people in one fell swoop?”

He frowned, trying to suss out where she was headed and not able to see it. “We’ll have a hell of a provisioning problem,” he muttered. “But something tells me that’s not what you’re getting at.”

“No. It isn’t. We’ve been thinking about the P-Squads and their twenty-five thousand officers from the viewpoint of guerilla soldiers. We are vastly outnumbered by a well-armed enemy. That’s about to change, my friend. Even if we manage to walk out of this with only a quarter of those prisoners still alive, we’re talking a hundred eighty thousand new soldiers fighting on our side.”

His eyes widened. “Holy—”

“Yes,” she said, voice droll with understated humor. “Our guns can turn the tide, Dinny, but we have to act right now, before the hour is out. Our guns and crews can get those people out. We can kill those trigger-happy guards and blow those electrified fences apart. And once we’ve got the prisoners out, we take this stinking game they’re playing and turn it on them. Is it worth the risk? You’re damned straight, it is.”

She didn’t say the rest of it. She didn’t have to, because he said it, for her.

“You came for us, that night,” he whispered. “That ghastly, horrible night on Nineveh Base…” He lifted his gaze, met hers, held it for long moments. “All right,” he muttered, “let’s go cross this Rubicon of yours and get it over with, ’cause somebody’s got to watch your damn-fool backside while we’re doing it.”

Twenty minutes later, they were airborne, flying nap-of-the-earth in a tight formation of seven aircars. They’d made modifications to a whole fleet of aircars, months previously, knowing that eventually, a day like this — a moment like this — would come. For good or ill, they were at least ready. Kafari flew rear guard, letting Red Wolf do the actual piloting so she could concentrate on coordinating the multipronged attack. They couldn’t reach all the camps, not directly. She would do the best she could, by targeting the farthest ones with ballistic missiles capable of traveling halfway across the continent to strike the most remote camps.

Her years of work as a spaceport psychotronic engineer were about to pay off. She waited until flashes of code reached her, signaling readiness from the entire strike force. Kafari touched controls on the console built into her command aircar. A signal raced out, providing the codes necessary to interface with Ziva Two’s communications systems, which in turn activated connections with the entire satellite system, eleven eyes in the sky that gave Kafari an unprecedented view of the field of war about to erupt below.

She jabbed out the code that sent eighteen long-range missiles screaming through Jefferson’s skies. She could actually see the contrails as they gained altitude and kissed the stratosphere, high above any ground-based air-defense system. Savage satisfaction swept through her as the missiles streaked across the heavens then plunged back toward the ground.

“Fly, you sweet little moth-winged mothers…”

The total lack of jabber on official military and police channels, which she also monitored, was music in her ears: her missiles were literally three seconds from impact and the attack hadn’t even been noticed, yet. She sat with her finger poised over the console, ready to transmit the code that would allow her to jam the weapons platforms and communications satellites, if somebody on the ground realized what was happening and tried to shoot them down.

The first wave of missiles impacted.

Gouts of flame appeared on her screen, tiny flickers as seen by POPPA’s orbital spy-eyes. Kafari said a prayer for the people trapped in those camps, because that barrage of missiles was all the help they were going to get. She hoped it was enough. Then Red Wolf said, “We’re going in!” She touched controls, brought up a different view. The camp Kafari’s strike force had targeted lay dead ahead. It had been built on the desert side of the Damisi, down in the foothills, where the only thing green was the paint on the landing field. High, electrified fences enclosed the camp, which had been designed to house close to a hundred thousand people, not counting the guards.

The sprawling buildings, cheap barracks thrown together like tar-paper shacks, shimmered in the heat haze. Ground temperatures were hot enough to fry eggs on bare rock faces. Guard towers punctuated the high fences, jutting up every twenty meters. There were automated weapons platforms on the towers, infinite repeaters that could be triggered manually by the guards or left on automatic, to shoot at anything approaching the fence without a transmitter broadcasting on the correct frequency. A huge trench had been gouged out of the hard-baked ground, just inside the fences. The deep pit wasn’t new. Its first ten meters had been partially refilled, already.

Kafari didn’t have to wonder what it was for, because the guards were hard at work, filling up the rest of it. A massive crowd of people had been herded to the edge of that ghastly trench, forced into position by the automatic guns on the fences, which were strafing the dirt in every direction except into the pit. Bolts of energy flew like horizontal rain, forcing the crowd to retreat. There was only one place for them to go: into the trench. The guards didn’t even have to shoot them. The ones on the bottom would be crushed and suffocated to death. The ones on the top might live long enough to be buried alive by the bulldozer that idled in the hot light, waiting its turn.

“Red Wolf,” she said through clenched teeth, “remind me to kill the commandant of this camp. Slowly.”

“Yes, sir.”

Then the aircars in the lead fired their missiles and the guns nearest the crowd exploded in towering gouts of flame. The fences came down. The guard in the nearest tower started shooting at the leading aircar. It jagged sideways, avoiding the hail of bullets, and cleared the way for the second aircar crew. A hyper-v missile shrieked into the tower, fired virtually point-blank. Tower, guard, and gun ceased to exist. People on the ground were screaming, trying to run. More fences came down. More guard towers exploded. Savage delight tore through Kafari as Red Wolf made a strafing run, taking down two towers. She was picking up reports from other crews at other camps. The battle was well underway and going better than—

“ARTILLERY!” Red Wolf yelled.

Kafari never saw the gout of flame or the shell. The aircar slammed her against the restraints as Red Wolf sent them screaming toward the sky. He fired air-to-air missiles in the same instant. The aircar rolled into a sickening move that sent the smoking sky and the hot, glaring stone spinning in wild and blurred confusion. Something detonated just below Kafari’s window. Flame and smoke engulfed them for a single, split second. Then they were in clear air again and gaining altitude fast.

Red Wolf, she realized belatedly, was blistering the air with curses.

“That was a genuinely fine maneuver,” she gasped, voice unsteady.

“The hell it was. Dinny Ghamal is going to rip ’em off and stuff ’em up my ass. They got way too close to you.”

“A miss,” she said, still breathless with reaction, “is as good as a mile.”

“Nobody has calculated in miles for a thousand years,” Red Wolf growled. He was circling back around, keeping his distance as the other aircars continued the attack. The artillery gun that had come so close to toasting them was, itself, toast, along with the building it had been hiding in. Less than three minutes later, Kafari’s team was in complete control of the camp.

Red Wolf kept them airborne until their own people had cleared the site, satisfying themselves that there were, in fact, no more P-Squadders anywhere. Several guards who’d tried to barricade themselves into the administrative building had been killed by the prisoners, themselves. Once the shooting had started, the prisoners had turned into a howling mob bent on vengeance. They had rushed the building and torn apart the guards, with their bare hands. By the time Kafari’s aircar landed, her people had brought a semblance of order to the chaos.

The people who’d already been forced into the trench were rescued, with a surprisingly high survival rate. Survivors were organizing themselves, triage style, with the ill and the injured helped into barracks by those still strong enough to render aid. When Kafari climbed out of her aircar, people stopped in the midst of whatever task they’d undertaken, and followed her with their eyes, electrically aware that she was in command. People whispered as she passed, thousands of voices hushed with a sound like wind rustling through ripened wheat. She wished she could have risked removing her battle helmet, with its necessary, concealing visor, because the pain and joy in these people’s faces deserved that small courtesy from her.

But she didn’t dare.

Not yet.

Somehow, they seemed to understand.

“Commodore,” Dinny saluted crisply, “the site is secured and we’re ready to start shipping people out. But there’s someone you need to see first, sir. We’ve asked him to wait in the commandant’s headquarters.”

“Is the commandant still in them?”

“In a manner of speaking, sir, yes, he is. There’s not much left to look at.”

“Ah, well. So much for a long tete-a-tete with him.”

Dinny’s eyes glinted, hard as flint. “It would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it? But I can’t blame these folks, if you catch my meaning.”

“Very clearly. Let’s get this out of the way. I want this place cleared out fast.”

Dinny nodded and led the way through the erstwhile camp.

Someone had cleared out the remains of the commandant. Judging by the pool of sticky blood that had filmed over like scalded milk, those remains had been scattered rather more widely than a human body normally would’ve occupied. There were two men waiting for her arrival. One was a boy, little more than seventeen or eighteen, at a rough guess. The other was older, tougher, with shrewd eyes and a nano-tatt that had cost him a bundle of money. They were both watching Kafari, the boy with wide-eyed wonder, the man with narrow-eyed speculation.

“You in charge?” the older one demanded.

“Who wants to know?”

“Somebody with information you could use.”

Kafari swept her gaze up and down and saw very little to commend him to anyone, let alone to her. He looked like a street tough who made his living preying on others, maybe not as vicious as a rat-ganger, but definitely on the greyer edge of lily-whiteness. She wondered coldly what he thought he could wheedle out of a deal with Commodore Oroton. She spoke into the vocorder, which deepened her voice into a masculine bark. “I don’t have time to deal with assholes who think they can sell me some priceless piece of crap I’ve no earthly use for.” She started to turn on her heel. Then paused when he grinned. His nano-tatt flared golden, in rippling patterns like flame.

“They said you was a hard-assed bastard. Okay, try this one out, Mr. Commodore: I’m the fuckin’ Bolo’s mechanic.”

She swung back sharply. “You’re what?”

His grin widened. “I’m the Bolo’s mechanic. For the last four years. ’Til this little nosewipe,” he nodded at the boy, who flushed crimson, “got himself mixed up in a food riot and was sent out here t’ this country club. Sonny told me what happened, when he disappeared so sudden, and I got so damn pissed off, I hadda say something, you know? I hadda tell folks, ’cause it wasn’t right. Giulio’s a damn-fool kid, gives my sister migraines, just dealin’ with him, but he’s a clean kid, you gotta give him credit for that, and he for damn sure didn’t deserve this.” He swept one disgusted gesture at their surroundings. “So I shot my mouth off, said enough to make the P-Squads mad as fire, and ended up out here, keepin’ him company.”

Kafari considered him for long moments, resting her hands on her hips and studying his eyes, his posture, everything she could notice, trying to read the nuances of what he was saying — and not saying. “All right, Mr. Mechanic, how would you go about repairing damage to an infinite repeater cluster?”

“You talkin’ about the internal guidance-control circuits or the semiexternal quantum processors that route fire-control signals? You shot a fuckin’ hole through one a’ them, a while back. I hadda steal half a dozen computers off campus, just t’ cobble together somethin’ t’ bypass it. And it still don’t work right, I bet. And what you done to his tracks outta be outlawed. The worst of it, though, was the rotational collar on his rear Hellbore. Did’ja know you cracked the mother? He can’t use it for nuthin’, not without a new collar, or he’ll rip that whole damn turret to shreds, first time he fires it.”

Kafari’s jaw had come adrift, mercifully hidden behind her battle helmet. “You do know a thing or two, don’t you?”

“Mister,” he said, narrowing his eyes as he stared at the featureless visor she wore, “you got no idea how hard I worked my ass off, the last four years, tryin’ to learn enough to keep the Big Guy runnin’. Them assholes in charge of the schools never taught me jack shit. I hadda learn how to learn, before I could learn how t’ fix what was wrong.”

“That,” Kafari muttered, “doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“I’ll bet it don’t.” A sudden fierce grin appeared and the golden color of his nano-tatt flared orange around the edges. “You got a pretty low opinion of me, don’t you? And you’re right. I ain’t nothin’ or nobody, but what I got — what I had, before this,” he waved a hand at the camp, “I hadda work hard for, and I got to like knowin’ how to do things, for my own self.” His face went hard, then, with the cold, dangerous look of the street tough she’d taken him as, at first glance. “And I got a real big itch to pay back the hospitality they been dishin’ out to folks. What I know about the Bolo’s small peanuts, compared to what else I know that you could use. Like the folks I know, who know folks, if you catch my drift? I got a pretty good idea who hit Madison, today.”

“You know about that?” Kafari asked sharply.

The mechanic went motionless, looked for several seconds like a sculpture hacked out of mahogany with a chain saw. The look in his eyes sent chills down Kafari’s spine. “Oh, yeah,” he said softly. “The guards was nice enough to share it with us. Right before they dug that goddamned pit and started shovin’ people into it.”

The boy with him had a haunted look, with memory burning in eyes that had probably been young, a few short days ago. “What do you want from me?” Kafari asked.

A muscle jumped in the mechanic’s jaw. “A chance to even the damn score.”

“Fair enough.”

He looked surprised. “You ain’t gonna argue?”

“I don’t have time to waste, arguing over something that gives us both what we want. You say you have a good idea who detonated that bomb. They’ve thrown my timetables all to hell, but a potential ally is priceless. Particularly if we can push matters before they repair the Bolo.”

“I ain’t gonna fix him, that’s for damn sure. I like the Big Guy, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t wanna look up into them gun barrels knowin’ he’s got a good reason to shoot me. Time was, I was too stupid t’ be scared of him. That ain’t so, any more.”

“I’m told,” Kafari said softly, “that even his commander was afraid of him.” She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the look in Simon’s eyes, that night, remembering the sound of his voice. Her husband loved Sonny. But only a fool didn’t feel at least some fear, when standing in the presence of that much flintsteel and death, with a mind of its own and unhuman thoughts sizzling through unhuman circuitry.

Simon was right. A sword with a mind of its own was a damned dangerous companion.

The mechanic muttered, “Somehow that don’t surprise me at all.” He held out a hand. “I’m Phil, by the way. Phil Fabrizio.”

Kafari shook his hand. “Commodore Oroton.”

He grinned. “A distinct pleasure, that’s what it is, a genuine, distinct pleasure. So how’s about you tell me what you need from me and we’ll get this show on the road?”

“All right, Mr. Fabrizio. Tell me about these friends of yours…”

III

Yalena felt strange, being on the Star of Mali, again. She had somehow expected the freighter to look different, to have gone through the same radical change she, herself, had made over the past four years. It seemed faintly obscene to find the exact same metal walls painted in the exact same shades recommended by long-haul jump psychologists — warm reds and golds in the mess hall, cool and soothing pastel blues and greens in the passenger and crew cabins — and the exact same shipboard schedules and routines. It was a surprise, since she, herself, had changed so dramatically.

Captain Aditi, who invited Yalena, her father, and both cousins to sit at the captain’s table for dinner, commented on it halfway through the meal.

“You’ve grown up, child. I was worried about you, after that last voyage you made with us, and that’s no lie. It’s good to see you’ve bounced back and decided to do something positive with all that hurt.”

Yalena set her fork down and swallowed a mouthful of salad before answering. “Thank you for thinking kindly of me at all, ma’am,” she said in a low voice. “I know what kind of person I was, then. I’ve worked very hard to be someone better than that.”

Captain Aditi exchanged glances with Yalena’s cousin Stefano, then said, “It shows, Miss Yalena. And that’s the best any of us can do, in this life. Try hard to be better than the person we were yesterday.”

It was, Yalena realized, a blueprint for the way to live, a simple yet powerful way that was foreign to everything she had known during the first decade and a half of her life. Vittori Santorini might have the power to blind people to reality, telling them what they wanted to hear, but he needed an army of thugs, a whole regiment of propagandists, a disarmed and helpless populace, and a cadre of political fanatics to stay in control. He didn’t understand power — real power — at all. The kind of power that came from within, unshakable and rooted in the most essential truth a human could learn: that caring about the welfare of others was the definition of humanity. Without the belief that others mattered, that their lives were of value, that their safety and happiness were important enough to defend, society ceased to be civilized — and those in charge of it ceased to be fully human.

That was the power that had put one hundred seventy-three people onto a freighter, on their way to fight for the liberation of a whole world and the people in it. And that was the power that had transformed a spoiled, selfish, unfit-for-polite-company toad into a soldier. Or, at least, the beginning of being a soldier. She had a lot to learn and miles to travel on the road to experience, before she could truly give herself that title. But she had made a start and with every passing hour, the Star of Mali carried her closer to the fields where she would try to redeem herself.

There was more than enough to do, getting ready for that moment. On the second day of their interstellar transit, the whole company met in the ship’s mess, where passengers and crew took their meals in shifts because of the sheer number of people crammed into the freighter’s limited passenger space. Her father called the meeting to hammer out details of their battle plan, which had been roughed out on Vishnu. With a hundred seventy soldiers and students, plus the official repair team, there wasn’t even sitting room left on the floor.

“We’ll need two teams,” he said, speaking with brisk authority, revealing a facet of his character that she’d never really seen, before. “One team goes in with the repair crew to fix my Bolo.” His sudden, evil grin startled Yalena, it was so unexpected and so seemingly out of place, given the subject at hand. Then, as the group caught the double entendre and started to chuckle, his purpose made abrupt sense. The brutal tension gripping the jam-packed room relaxed its grip, allowing everyone to focus on the battle plans, rather than the emotions that had brought them all together, in the first place.

“Shiva Weapons Labs has given us five highly qualified engineers to give that team the bona fides it needs to pass muster. Ordinarily, those engineers would bring their own team of support technicians, but we’ll be providing those, instead, from our own people. That team will play hob with Sonny’s innards, following the specs Captain Brisbane and I have provided. The cover story we’ve provided will, at least, allow you to have the Bolo’s schematics in your possession. Still, I’ll expect each of you to memorize the key systems to sabotage, since I won’t risk your lives or our cause with information proving that we intend to cripple their Bolo.

“The second team, consisting of our students and combat veterans, will deliver critical equipment, munitions, and supplies to rebel outposts. Those posts are running low on everything from ammunition to bandages and field rations. God knows, some of these people have been living on little more than shoe leather and beans for months, and no one can fight indefinitely on an empty stomach, no matter how bitter the anger or how righteous the cause. Now, before we get into details—”

He paused, lifting his glance to something behind them. Yalena turned in her seat and found the freighter’s communications officer standing in the doorway.

“Sorry to interrupt, sir, but there’s an urgent message for you. It came in via SWIFT, just now.”

He was holding a printout. Whatever that message said, the commo officer hadn’t been willing to pipe an audio or video playback for the whole assembled strike force to hear. That was ominous. The room was too crowded for the commo officer to take the message to Yalena’s father, so it was passed forward, row by row. No one glanced at the printout, despite looks of burning curiosity. The discipline that took was impressive. When her father read the message, he turned white. Yalena’s heart thumped in a painful, ragged rhythm. She waited, terrified that he would tell them what was in the message and terrified that he wouldn’t and nearly ill with the stress of wondering if her mother had been killed.

Without warning — and without a single sound — he simply headed for the door, climbing over people to reach it. Students scrunched together, making way for him. He left with the communications officer, moving rapidly down the corridor that led from the mess to the communications station on the bridge. Yalena exchanged worried glances with Melissa Hardy and both of her mother’s cousins. Somebody cursed out loud, which broke the silence. Speculation ran wild until Estevao shouted for order.

“There’s no point in guesswork. Whatever’s happened, Colonel Khrustinov will brief us soon enough. Our time’s better spent going over the portions of our mission that aren’t likely to change. The damage to the Bolo has worked to our advantage in a number of ways, not least of which is how we’re getting down from orbit.

“Under ordinary conditions, we’d be docking at Ziva Two space station and we’d have to undergo spot checks by customs agents. But the bomb that damaged the Bolo also flipped it onto its side. They’ve tried to pull him over onto his treads again, with no luck. They don’t have anything strong enough to move him. They need a heavy lift sled, like the ones the Brigade uses for combat drops and recalls.

“Fortunately for us, Captain Brisbane, Vishnu’s Bolo commander, has one, since she’s responsible for defending both Vishnu and Mali and needs to move between the planets. She also has wide discretionary power to make decisions in the Ngara system’s best interests. Right now, those interests include deposing POPPA. It’s a little convoluted, but Vishnu’s Ministry of Defense asked our friends from Shiva Weapons Labs,” Estevao nodded toward the engineers on loan, “to recommend using a heavy lift sled to turn Sonny over. Toward that end, Captain Brisbane has loaned us her sled.”

A stir ran through the room. The students weren’t the only ones surprised by that news. Even the veterans looked startled, which gave Yalena a clue as to how unusual Captain Brisbane’s decision was. She was taking a gamble, counting on the quiet war front in this sector to risk allowing that sled to leave the Ngara system. Captain Brisbane obviously took their mission very seriously, indeed.

Estevao waited for the flicker of reaction to die down, then went on. “Thanks to that loan, we’ll be able to bypass Ziva Two — and the inspectors — entirely. Colonel Khrustinov intends to drop every bit of our equipment and supplies with the sled, in one trip.”

Melissa, seated beside Yalena, lifted a hand to gain Estevao’s attention.

“Yes?”

“Isn’t that going to make it harder to disperse our people and supplies? If we put everything on the load going to the Bolo’s depot, how will we smuggle anybody out to the base camps?”

“We’ll orbit the sled a couple of times to make sure it’s functioning properly and make our initial descent over the opposite hemisphere. According to Colonel Khrustinov, the satellite coverage for the hemisphere opposite Madison is virtually nonexistent, since most of it’s ocean. When they replaced the satellites after the Deng war, they put most of them in geosynchronous orbit above Jefferson’s major cities. That made sense, at the time. They put a few communications satellites into standard orbits, mostly to keep emergency channels open for the fishing fleet. We’ll time it to avoid as many as possible, maybe even all of them. If necessary, we’ll jam them for a few minutes, just long enough to drop a few air buses and let them disperse to various camps. They’ll fly under the radar net, while we draw most of POPPA’s attention, aboard the main sled—”

He halted. Yalena turned around and found her father standing in the doorway. Her heart skidded painfully toward her toes. He met Yalena’s gaze, then swept his glance across the others who waited in such anxious silence. Moving slowly, stepping with caution between the people sitting on the floor, he returned to the front of the room, thanking Estevao in a quiet voice for taking charge in his absence.

Then he faced them with the news. “An urban resistence group has exploded a bomb in the most exclusive POPPA residential enclave in Madison. Nassiona Santorini has been killed. So has Isanah Renke. Along with half of Jefferson’s military high command and several critical members of the Senate, House of Law, and High Court.”

Utter silence held the briefing room. No one shouted for joy, because they all knew what POPPA’s reaction would be. Her father confirmed their dire suspicions with brutal candor. “Vittori has ordered the execution of every prisoner in every POPPA work camp and prison. Three-quarters of a million people…”

Yalena shut her eyes, as much to hide from the ghastly look on her father’s face as to shut out the pictures filling her imagination: P-Squads firing on helpless people. Her father added, “Commodore Oroton has launched a rescue attempt. I think we all know exactly what that means.”

Yalena opened her eyes again, took in the dismay on the faces of the combat veterans, saw, as well, the dawning of sudden, brutal understanding in the eyes of students she’d helped organize into a fighting force. That same understanding ignited like cold fire in her own heart. To mount a rescue attempt, Commodore Oroton had to come out of hiding. Fear jolted like icicles along her nerves, robbing her of the air she needed to breathe. There might not be a rebellion left, by the time their freighter reached Jefferson.

Her father’s voice jerked her attention back. “I would suggest that we revise our plans. We’re only three days from Jefferson, which means federal troops can’t react fast enough to eliminate every Granger community and farmhold, particularly not if they’re kept busy fighting Commodore Oroton’s people for control of the prison camps. The commodore is already organizing Granger civilians into self-defense militias, particularly in the Damisi canyon country. Oroton has already warned Grangers to abandon indefensible farms and take shelter where blockades can be held by relatively few defenders.

“The rebellion is also funneling weapons into the hands of the militias, including a few heavy artillery guns to hold the mountain passes and canyon entrances until we can arrive to help. It won’t take a lot of firepower or manpower to turn places like Klameth Canyon into fortified strongholds. Frankly, it’ll be much harder for POPPA to take Klameth than it was for the Deng. They can’t mount an air assault, because POPPA doesn’t have a functional air force left. Without Sonny, they don’t have the firepower, either. So…” Her father flicked his glance across the crowd. “Estevao.”

Her mother’s cousin responded crisply. “Yes, sir?”

“Our combat veterans have just become the backbone of the civilian defense effort. We’ll allocate part of our equipment and supplies to your mission, arming residents and showing them a few tricks of the trade, defending entrenched positions from aggressors. How much we allocate will depend on events between now and the time we make orbit. I’ll keep you updated as we receive word from Commodore Oroton.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yalena.”

“Sir?” She jumped half out of her skin, gulping as she met her father’s gaze.

“Your group has just been promoted from supply delivery to command-liaison and infiltration duty.”

“Sir?” she blinked, totally confused.

“You,” he said with a strange glint in his eye, “have more experience operating inside the POPPA propaganda machine than anyone in this combat force.”

Her cheeks stung with sudden heat, then ran chill again as every person in the room turned to look at her, eyes shuttered.

“Instruct the other students, please, in how to think inside the POPPA paradigm. Commodore Oroton thinks we can make contact with the urban group that’s taken credit for today’s bombing. We need somebody who can speak their language, who understands the urban mindset and can help us forge an alliance with these folks.”

Yalena nodded, feeling almost numb. Working with urban guerillas was a far cry from courier work, distributing guns, bullets, and food to Granger camps. The lives of her friends — and potentially many more brave people — lay in her hands, in the job she must do, training the other students to understand how the masses, brain-washed for twenty years by POPPA hogwash, might think as their loyalty turned to hatred and the will to kill. She found herself reaching back through time and memory, trying to recapture the nasty blend of arrogance, greed, selfishness, and stupidity that had been her entire life for fifteen years.

It was more distasteful than she’d expected. And easier than she would have liked to admit. Thinking for herself and making her own decisions was hard work, nearly as hard as trying to be Simon Khrustinov’s daughter — or Kafari Khrustinova’s. The lure of letting someone else do one’s thinking and make one’s decisions was a siren’s song, fatally attractive, and the entire urban population of Jefferson had spent two decades living under its spell.

It wouldn’t be easy to teach self-reliant infiltrators how to behave like people who had abdicated responsibility for virtually every decision an ordinary person made a thousand times a day. The size of the job she faced was daunting enough to terrify her. Worse, in its way, than the idea of going into combat. It took a different kind of courage.

The rest of the voyage rushed past in a blur. Yalena worked twenty-hour days, drilling the students in POPPA’s mindset, belief structure, and behavior. They were appalled by the culture she was preparing them to interact with, but they also worked like fiends, trying to understand and get it right.

When she wasn’t teaching, she sought out her cousin Estevao and the other combat veterans, listening to their plans, trying to learn how they thought — and why they thought that way. She listened until weariness dragged her eyelids down, then she toppled into her bunk and slept long enough to start again the next day. She didn’t feel nearly ready enough when they shifted out of hyper-space and dropped into Jefferson’s star system, shedding velocity for the cross-system approach to Yalena’s homeworld.

They gathered in the ship’s mess to watch their progress across Jefferson’s star system from the big viewscreens installed there. The students watched with sharp, puppyish excitement. The combat veterans watched in tense silence, a controlled tension like caged lightning, waiting for the thunderclouds to part, allowing them to release the pent-up need for violent action. Yalena found herself watching their faces far more than she did the viewscreens, which showed very little of their passage through the empty reaches of in-system space. Jefferson’s planetary neighbors were sprawled in their orbits like a child’s set of scatter-jacks, some of them on the far side of Jefferson’s sun, others whirling far to port and starboard as they plunged sunward.

The only thing to see, as a result, was Jefferson, itself, which was slowly growing from a pinprick of light to a garden pea to a marble. The sight of her homeworld set up a longing Yalena couldn’t deny, along with a complicated ebb and surge of fear and fierce protectiveness and sharp, rapier-keen hatred. Her lovely little homeworld, shining like a bauble around God’s wrist, was ruled by people with hearts as cold and empty as the darkness in which Jefferson floated. The faces of the veterans as they, too, watched and wrestled with disturbing thoughts, were far more riveting than the blur of color they were all trying so hard to reach.

So she watched the veterans, trying to read the complex kaleidoscope of emotions shifting behind their eyes. When Estevao noticed her attention, he held her gaze, started to speak, then paused, visibly baffled by the attempt to communicate the incommunicable. She managed to produce a wry little smile, trying to let him know that she understood, at least a little, about his inability to talk about it. He held her gaze for a long moment, then gave a sharp little nod of satisfaction and turned his attention back to the viewscreen. Yalena discovered tremors in her hands. That silent exchange, so brief it hardly qualified as a conversation of any sort, had shaken her deeply. It also served to tell her that she couldn’t learn the one thing she needed to know, not just by talking to or watching men and women who’d been there when worlds died.

She didn’t want to think about worlds dying.

As they settled into final approach, guided in by the navigational buoys marking the clear lanes past Jefferson’s moons, Yalena didn’t want to think about anything at all, because every thought rattling around in her mind was a frantic flutter of panic, like terrified birds’ wings trying to batter their way to safety. There was no safety. Not anywhere on Jefferson. Not even on this freighter which would, in all too short a time, be opening her cargo bays and boarding hatches to the enemy.

Moving quietly, Yalena left the crowded room and headed for the cabin she’d shared with eleven other people, sleeping in shifts. Let the others watch their final approach. Yalena needed to be alone with her thoughts, for a little while. All too soon, she would be walking into the lion’s den. And after that…

She would no longer have to guess the thoughts behind a soldier’s eyes.

IV

My repair team has arrived from Vishnu.

But they have not arrived on Jefferson. Nor do they appear likely to do so in the immediate future. Heavy fighting rages across the Adero floodplain to the Damisi foothills. Repeated bombing attacks have crippled Port Abraham, destroying ruinously expensive shuttle gantries and smashing loading docks into rubble. Relentless attacks on highly placed officials — which appear to be coordinated through an alliance between Granger guerillas and urban insurrectionists — have speeded Santorini’s loosening grip on reality. Given these unstable conditions, the Star of Mali’s captain has refused to send her shuttles anywhere near Jefferson’s soil.

Vittori Santorini, himself, tries to coerce the Star’s captain. “You’ll land those damned specialists and supplies or I’ll use my Bolo to shoot your goddamned freighter out of orbit!”

“The way I hear it, that machine is too blind to see me and too crippled to shoot at anything. Besides which, I don’t think you can afford to pay for another load of parts. And Shiva Weapons Labs wouldn’t feel obliged to provide a second team of engineers, if you blow up this one.”

Santorini’s response disintegrates into incoherent screams which the captain cuts off, mid-shout, simply by turning off her radio. Eight minutes later, Milo Akbarr, Commandant of Internal Security, contacts the Star of Mali from his command post in the field. He is directing an attack on Klameth Canyon, where rebel troops are defending not only Granger residents, but also refugees who have flooded into the canyon by the hundreds of thousands. Akbarr’s attempt to coerce Captain Aditi is a simple threat to impound her ship.

Five point eight minutes later, rebel artillery opens fire on his communications shack, homing in on the conversation raging between him and Captain Aditi. His tirade is cut short by explosions which deprive Jefferson of its Commandant of Internal Security. Captain Aditi continues to sit tight on a shipload of parts I must have and which I begin to despair of ever seeing. Thirteen point nine minutes later, Sar Gremian hails the Star’s captain.

“This is Sar Gremian,” he informs her in the perpetually bitter, biting tone that is his standard method of conversation. His next words startle me. “I am Jefferson’s Supreme Commandant for Internal Security and the worst nightmare you’ve ever tried to shake down for more money. You were promised a whopping bonus to bring our cargo. Don’t make the mistake of trying to blackmail this government into paying more. That kind of mistake will be fatal, I promise you most sincerely.”

“Don’t threaten me, sonny boy. I was supposed to be at Mali two days ago and let me tell you, that’s cost me a pretty penny, wrecking my schedule for this run. Your government promised to pay a bonus worth my time and trouble, diverting here, but you can’t pay me enough to risk my shuttles to some bomb-happy terrorist at a spaceport you can’t even defend from your own people.”

“You agreed to deliver our order. You will, by God, put our equipment and our supplies on your shuttles or you’ll never dock at Jefferson again.”

“You call that a hardship?” She actually laughs. “I’m damn near the only freighter captain still willing to run this route and after today, I’ll be cursed for a fool if I make it again. There’s not enough profit to be made from your sordid little hellhole to put up with the crap your people dish out, let alone risk my cargo shuttles and my crew to a bunch of wild-eyed lunatics. You want the cargo in my holds? Fine. I’ll strap it all to that heavy lift sled you rented and send it down together in one tidy package.

“And just to round out the load, I’ll send along those riot-happy brats Vishnu kicked off-world. The Ministry of Defense shoved those kids onto my ship at gunpoint and told me to whistle for the cost of transporting them. I wouldn’t give a damn even if they were war orphans. I’m not running an orphanage. You want your supplies? You’ll take ’em in one load on the lifter and you’ll pay me the cost of transporting and feeding that unholy horde of brats, because that’s the only way you’ll get your spare parts, sonny boy. Take it or leave it.”

“Do you think I’m a fool? We’re fighting a civil war, down here! And we know that somebody on Vishnu is supplying the rebels with guns and high-tech equipment. Do you honestly expect me to authorize the kind of security violation you’re suggesting? Our inspectors will board your ship and go over that cargo load by load or I’ll impound your freighter and freeze your payment—”

“You try boarding my ship and I’ll dump your police and your precious cargo out the nearest airlock. Cut the crap, Gremian. Threaten me again and I will by God warp out of orbit and shake your dirty dust off my jump jets. And you can jolly well whistle up your ass, trying to get another twenty-billion shipment out of Vishnu’s weapons labs, let alone another heavy lift sled capable of flipping that war machine of yours back onto its treads.”

Sar Gremian breathes hard for seventeen point nine seconds. I am startled by the size of the price tag attached to the shipment circling above Jefferson’s skies. The inflation rate is literally double what it was two weeks ago. Jefferson’s currency is not merely declining in value against the Ngara system’s, it is imploding. I surmise that open civil warfare and the successful liberation of POPPA’s death camps have fueled this implosion. This bodes ill for Jefferson’s economic future, which is already grim enough to qualify as a star-class disaster.

Sar Gremian cannot afford to lose this shipment. “All right,” he snarls, “you have a deal. Load my property onto that sled, then get the hell out of my star-system.”

“With pleasure!”

The transmission ends, with abrupt finality.

Twenty-one minutes later, the heavy lift sled leaves the Star’s cargo bay and orbits Jefferson twice, dropping cautiously lower. The sled’s psychotronic control system signals its intended descent path, which will bring the sled down on the other side of the planet from Madison, above empty ocean. It is a logical maneuver, since rebel guns and missiles cannot easily open fire on a target thousands of kilometers away and cannot move into position to meet the descending sled, given the total lack of dry land in the zone of descent. The sled will cross open ocean in perfect safety and make final approach to my location from the sea-side escarpment five kilometers west of Madison.

Sar Gremian orders the federal troops stationed in Madison to clear a corridor of tightly secured airspace from the beleaguered spaceport to my overturned warhull and threatens mass executions of any federal unit that allows rebel antiaircraft missiles or artillery to open fire on that sled. The P-Squad commanders know Sar Gremian well enough to realize this is no idle threat. They must also know that Commodore Oroton will risk hell, itself, to take down that sled, since the cargo and technicians it carries spell repairs for me and death for his rebellion.

When the lift sled is seven kilometers west of the escarpment, with its spectacular waterfall, P-Squad commanders report missile launches from positions north and south of Madison. Commodore Oroton has made his predicted move against the incoming lifter. P-Squad artillery batteries destroy the missiles with ease and launch an immediate counterstrike, claiming direct hits on both targets.

The lifter holds course, coming in on final approach. It is less than one kilometer from the escarpment when a mobile Hellbore opens fire from behind Chenga Falls. The attack catches federal troops totally by surprise. The lifter’s pilot reacts far more swiftly, slewing the sled violently midair the instant the Hellbore powers up for the shot, which just misses one corner.

The lifter’s auto-defenses fire a snap-shot response with infinite repeaters. Hyper-v missiles scream straight into the cliff face behind Chenga Falls. Explosions shake the bedrock with sufficient force to register on my sensors.

“Direct hit,” the pilot reports. “Sorry about your waterfall. We took a big bite out of it. Got the damned Hellbore, though. Anybody care to explain how a bunch of terrorists got hold of Hellbores, for God’s sake?”

Nobody answers. No further attempts are made against the sled, either, which enters the airspace over Madison and follows a direct route toward me at virtual rooftop level. At that altitude, the massive engines must be shattering windows along a half-kilometer-wide swath. At the very least, the lifter’s sheer bulk — great enough to accommodate my entire warhull — will serve as a psychological shock to the entire population of Madison, including the urban insurrectionists.

An escort of aircars rises to meet the heavy lifter, including one that broadcasts Sar Gremian’s personal ID signal. The sled finally sets down twenty meters from my overturned warhull. The escorting governmental aircars land beside the nearest corner of the lifter, which dwarfs them into insignificance. The passengers and pilot aboard the sled disembark first. There are thirteen, counting the pilot.

I cannot see them as anything but patterns of radiant heat against the cooler, darker colors comprising the ambient background. Sar Gremian — or someone wearing his wrist-comm — emerges from his aircar while others climb out of the remaining cars and spread out along my flank, creating a defensive line. These defenders carry objects that show as long, dark shadows against the heat of their bodies, shadows shaped like combat rifles. I conclude that they are the guards assigned to the repair team — or possibly to stand guard over me, while watching the repair team for potential sabotage.

This precaution would be in keeping with Sar Gremian’s distrust of everything.

One member of the repair team greets Sar Gremian with a droll observation. “Your rebels made a for-sure-enough mess of that machine, didn’t they? I’m Bhish Magada, chief weapons engineer, Shiva Labs,” he adds, approaching the thermal signature that corresponds with the ID transponder in Sar Gremian’s wrist-comm. “You’ll be Sar Gremian? Can’t say it’s a pleasure, but as long as you pay us, you’ll get your money’s worth.”

“I’d damned well better,” he says with heavy, sullen threat in his voice. “It’s a long walk home for you and your people.”

Having duly disposed of the obligatory threat and counterthreat, the team’s spokesman performs perfunctory introductions that include nothing but bare names and titles. Four are engineers. The other seven are technicians with various specialties, running the gamut from psychotronic calibrationists to master gunsmiths with Shiva’s armories.

The sled’s pilot is not an official member of the repair crew, but he is on Shiva Weapons Lab’s payroll, according to Bhish Magada, who refers to him as a retired navy pilot looking for a second income. This explains his quick reaction time and level-headed response under fire, traits lamentably lacking in civilian pilots. I find myself wondering how many of Shiva’s employees are former combat veterans and what bearing — if any — this may have on my personal security.

Sar Gremian, with a voice as distinctive as his fingerprints, addresses me with his usual abrupt growl. “Bolo, lock onto these thirteen ID signals. They’re your official repair team. They’re authorized to do whatever’s necessary to get you back into action.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Get busy, then,” he tells the engineers and technicians. The team begins the heavy job of off-loading crates and setting up a field-grade depot, beginning with prefab tool sheds and a prefab workshop from which they will conduct much of their exacting work. Sar Gremian stays just long enough to satisfy himself that they know what they are doing, then climbs into his aircar and leaves, heading back for the president’s palace and the urgent business of coping with an on-going rebellion.

It takes the repair team three days just to run diagnostics. The process is slowed time and again by the P-Squad guards. Each and every step of the complex diagnostics is delayed by the security protocols, which are so unwieldy the technicians cannot flip a switch or push a button on their equipment without enduring a twenty-minute security interrogation on the use of said button or switch and a polygraph analysis of the answers, looking for stress variables that would indicate an untruthful answer. The resulting delays bring the repair process to a screeching halt.

When Sar Gremian discovers that diagnostics are still underway, with no repairs even begun, he explodes.

Bhish Magada cuts him off mid-tirade. “You want that machine fixed? Tell your goons to get off our backs and let us work. Those gorillas interrupt us every three seconds—”

“They’re following orders! Oroton will stop at nothing to sabotage that Bolo. Security has to be tight. I suggest you cope.”

Magada slams a reticulated servo clamp onto the desktop. “That’s it!” he snarls. “Get yourself another whipping boy, Gremian!”

He emits a shrill whistle and shouts, “Hey! Ganetti! Pull the team out right now. Get ’em back to the hotel. I’ve had enough of these anal-retentive assholes.”

Before Sar Gremian can respond, the Irate Bhish Magata kills the connection. He has literally hung up on Jefferson’s head of security. Twenty-three seconds later, Sar Gremian calls back.

“All right, Mr. Magata, you’ve made your position clear. What do you need?”

“Breathing room,” Magata says after a long, silent moment. “Those brainless baboons demand explanations for every single action we take, every piece of equipment we unpack, every tool we pick up. They want to know every single detail and then they demand to know why. When they don’t understand the answer — which they never do — they hold us at goddamned gunpoint until they’re satisfied. Since they don’t have enough brain cells between them to understand anything more complicated than ‘it’s broken and we’re trying to find out why,’ we end up spending most of the day trying to explain high-tech military science to a pack of trigger-happy morons who make bacteria look smart. Call them off or find yourself another repair team.”

“You have no idea what my problems are—”

“And I don’t give a crap about ’em, either. But you’d jolly well better start worrying about ours. Your security guards are keeping that Bolo out of action, not us. We could’ve finished the diagnostics and moved forward with repairs two days ago, if they’d just let us get on with it. So here we sit while your final invoice just keeps getting higher. You’ve already paid for those replacement parts and you’ve already paid advance rental fees for most of the equipment. But you’re paying us — engineers and technicians — by the hour, at mandatory union rates. It’s your money to waste. You can spend it having us fix your Bolo or you can pony up the cash to pay for day after day talking to idiots who can’t add one plus one and come up with two. So make your decision. But don’t you dare snarl at me or my people for taking too long, when it’s your own stupid fault.”

Sar Gremian spends three point five minutes cursing at the guards in barracks-room language strong enough to peel paint. He then orders them to stop delaying the repairs. The crew finally gets down to business. I begin to entertain hope that I may actually be restored to battle worthiness. Given the steadily worsening news reports and emergency calls from police units, there is very little time left in which I or anyone else will be able to act decisively enough to crush the rebellion.

It would be a fine irony if Vittori Santorini spent twenty billion repairing me, only to find himself looking down the wrong end of Commodore Oroton’s gun barrel, before I am functional enough to prevent the rebellion from deposing him. I do not know, in my own flintsteel heart, whether I would feel chagrin or relief. It troubles me even more that the answer to that question has nearly ceased to matter. I do not like the job I am likely to be given, once repaired. Worse, I see no way to avoid it. So I wait in silent misery while the engineers begin their work.

I

Yalena hadn’t seen Klameth Canyon since her childhood. She didn’t go anywhere near Maze Gap, not with three-quarters of the federal troops on Jefferson camped on the Adero floodplain, forming a blockade across the Gap. She flew nearly a hundred kilometers north from Madison, then turned in a one-eighty flip-flop to follow the long spine of the Damisi range south again. When she hit the first turbulence, she was very glad she’d become a fair bush pilot, on Vishnu, as part of her extreme camping training.

“If you intend to fly into the middle of nowhere to spend time in rough country,” her instructor had said, echoing her father’s words almost verbatim, “then you will by God learn to fly under any and all weather conditions.”

Phil Fabrizio, seated beside her in the two-person skimmer, spent much of the flight gripping the armrests on his seat and trying to pretend he wasn’t scared witless as she whipped them through the jagged teeth of the Damisi highlands, at altitudes nearly a thousand meters below the snow-torn peaks. The air currents were savage, but there was no radar net out here, leaving them invisible to everything except satellites. Yalena wasn’t too worried about those. The P-Squads had better — and easier — targets to shoot at than one small skimmer.

“You sure you know what you’re doin’?” Phil asked as she navigated the obstacle course.

“If I don’t,” she gave him a cheerful grin, “you’ll have plenty of time to bitch about it, while we try to hike out.”

“Huh. More like, we’ll end up a thin smear on some piece a’ rock ain’t nobody else ever gonna lay eyes on.”

“There is that,” she agreed cheerfully. “How about you be quiet and let me concentrate?”

“You got it.”

She hadn’t seen Phil Fabrizio much during the five days she’d been “home.” Her father had kept her busy, running courier jobs through Madison, hooking up with members of the urban resistance, getting the students who’d come with her into place as intelligence liaisons. She’d met the Bolo’s one-time mechanic just once, during a briefing her first night on Jefferson, and had only caught glimpses of him a couple of times, since, when both of them reported back to her father at their constantly shifting base of operations in Madison. Phil Fabrizio didn’t know that she was the daughter of Colonel Khrustinov, who was purportedly still on Vishnu, insofar as most of the urban guerillas knew.

Phil didn’t even know her real name, since Yalena’s name was — or at one time had been — one of the best-known names on the whole planet. Everyone knew who “Yalena” was. And even though her father wasn’t using his real name and didn’t look anything like the man who had come to Jefferson more than two decades previously, neither Yalena nor her father would risk letting any of the locals know who either of them really was. So she was going by the name Lena, without using a last name at all.

Not yet, anyway.

Phil, by contrast, was something of a celebrity amongst the urban guerillas. They all seemed to know him and referred to him with a reverence that surprised her. He was one of their own, had worked as the Bolo’s mechanic and therefore knew how to help the commodore cripple it. Moreover, he’d gotten himself arrested and sent to a death camp, to try finding his nephew, and then he’d escaped that death camp, bringing his nephew and others safely home. Phil Fabrizio was a genuine war hero to the ragged, poverty-stricken urban masses, who were trying hard just to survive under POPPA’s iron-fisted hand.

Phil was meeting with the commodore to hand-carry critical gear they had brought from Vishnu, along with a message of some kind from the leaders of the urban resistance. Those leaders’ prerebellion occupations had been directing organized crime in the seedier sections of Madison and Port Town and running the only surviving construction companies on Jefferson. They had built the lavish new homes occupied by POPPA’s elite and had demolished the unsightly slums that cluttered the view from their sumptuous windows. They were now poised to reverse the process — explosively — if “Commodore Oroton” agreed to an unknown set of terms.

Whatever those were, Yalena’s father wanted her mother to hear the message in person from the man who’d met with them. So here they were, running the biggest blockade in the history of her homeworld, trying to reach Klameth Canyon Dam. Phil Fabrizio just didn’t know why Yalena had been chosen as his pilot. When they reached the spot marked on Yalena’s chart, she took them even lower, rattling their teeth with the turbulence, keeping them well below the elevation the besieging federal troops routinely swept with targeting radar.

They reached Klameth Canyon country without drawing down artillery fire onto their heads, but the last few kilometers were fraught with tension. It dragged at their nerves and tightened their muscles against bone. The maze of canyons stretched away in a dark spidery web of deep slashes through the heart of the Damisi. The more distant slashes were blue with haze. Occasional flashes of light marked distant — and not-so-distant — explosions, where federal artillery barrages were battering the main canyon floor with long-range, high-angle fire.

“They’re shellin’ th’ shit outta those canyons,” Phil muttered, breaking the tense silence. “It’s one thing t’ hear they’ve been dumpin’ artillery on top o’ those folks for five days. It’s worse, seein’ ’em do it.”

Yalena just nodded. Her grip on the skimmer’s controls had turned her knuckles white. She’d never been shelled. Her imagination quailed, trying to visualize what it must be like to be caught under those shells, as they burst open and rained death down onto the heads of hapless civilians.

Phil Fabrizio muttered, “Christ, I’m hopin’ the commodore says yes to what I gotta tell him.”

Yalena knew more about that message than Phil suspected. Her father had given her the bare-bones outline, so that she could pass the word to the students who’d come home with her. They were in position, ready to move at a moment’s notice. The entire urban rebellion was poised to strike, in fact. Everything and everyone was in place. Once her mother had the gear they’d brought out here — and Phil Fabrizio’s message — Yalena’s father was going to turn Madison into a war zone the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Deng invasion.

Only this time, her father’s Bolo wasn’t going to take part in it. He was still down for repairs, while the engineers and technicians tried to chase down the cause of his total blindness. Granted, they weren’t chasing it too hard…

“There it is,” Phil said, pointing out the landing field. It was a handkerchief-sized natural meadow a hundred meters from the upper edge of Klameth Canyon Dam, which glittered in the late afternoon sunlight. Water poured across the lip of the spillway and plunged down the long, shining expanse of concrete, turning the turbines that provided electrical power to the entire maze of canyons and the Adero floodplain beyond — including Madison. Beyond the dam lay the reason for her mother’s continued immunity from direct shelling. Klameth Reservoir lay like a sheet of molten silver in the hot sunlight, stretching back through the mountains in a basin that was nearly as large as the canyon system on the downhill side of the dam.

“That’s a lot a fuckin’ water,” Phil muttered. “I never saw that much water, except at th’ ocean.”

“I saw a lot of lakes on Vishnu,” Yalena said, “but never one that big. The commodore’s brilliant, isn’t he? Hiding inside the dam holding that back.”

“Kid, you don’t know the half of it.”

Yalena just grinned. Then they were below treetop level and the only things they could see were the patch of grass that formed the landing field and the forest surrounding it. She set them down gently, then rolled forward at a careful crawl, heading for the nearest gap beneath the trees. Commodore Oroton’s people had strung camouflage netting across the treetops, providing a snug and hidden place to park small aircars and skimmers. They found a space to squeeze into, then popped the hatches and crawled out. Their reception committee was already waiting.

“Dinny!” Phil said with a delighted smile, shaking Dinny Ghamal’s hand — the one that wasn’t holding a battle rifle. “How’s it with you, today?”

Dinny Ghamal gave the erstwhile Bolo mechanic a brief smile. “Can’t complain,” he allowed. “You’re looking better fed. You’ve succeeded, I take it?”

“Close as we’re gonna get. It’ll be up t’ th’ commodore to say if I got enough of what he wanted, to go ahead with it. I got some gear, too.” Phil glanced at Yalena, who dutifully dug into the back of their skimmer, hauling out the heavy packs. While she was busy, Phil added, “That new officer that came in with them combat vets, I gotta tell you, he’s one sharp-witted shark. He’s already got the urban resistance organized an’ runnin’ better’n it has since it blew up its first bomb. I ain’t had a chance t’ meet him, yet, but I’m s’posed to see him tonight. I’m lookin’ forward t’ that, I can tell you.”

“Good.” Dinny flicked a glance her way and the twinkle of friendliness in his eyes clicked off like a lightswitch. Dinny Ghamal knew exactly who she was — and why she’d refused to attend his wedding. He said in a cold voice, “Let’s move. The commodore’s waiting.”

He turned on his heel and led the way back through the trees.

“He don’t cotton much to you, does he?” Phil asked, glancing at her.

Yalena shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

They followed Dinny through a thick patch of forest, then slid and slithered down a steep foot trail that emerged at the edge of a sheer cliff. It formed one wall of Dead-End Gorge, which was merely the final bend in Klameth Canyon, where a volcanic intrusion of harder rock had diverted the flow of the Klameth River, forcing it into a sharp turn. That was the spot Jefferson’s earliest terraforming engineers had chosen to build the dam. Phil whistled softly. “That is one bitch of a drop.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Yalena had done some rock climbing on Vishnu, enough to have a healthy respect for the steep cliff below their feet. The wind whistled past their ears, rustling through the trees behind them and singing across the broad face of the dam. Dinny Ghamal, waiting at the railing that edged the top of the dam, turned impatiently.

“We don’t have all day,” he snapped.

“Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on,” Phil muttered, striding across the open ground. He stepped across the railing onto the concrete that formed the immense upper edge of the dam and sidled past a defensive battery of artillery, infinite repeaters, hyper-v missile launchers, and a 10cm mobile Hellbore that was nearly seven meters long. The top of the dam was wide enough, they could’ve built a two-lane highway, up here, if they’d needed one. Yalena followed Phil and Dinny silently, edging her way past the first real artillery she’d seen, since all of her training to date had been done on simulators.

Five minutes later, they were inside the dam itself, which was hollow throughout much of its upper structure, providing space for the immense turbines and machinery necessary to the power-generating plant. There were also maintenance tunnels, stairways, elevators, and equipment storage space for the engineers and inspectors who kept the dam in good repair. They entered the dam through an access door that led into the rabbit-warren maze of tunnels and finally stopped in front of a closed door on the reservoir side of the dam, near enough to the immense turbines that the floor rumbled underfoot and they had to raise their voices to be heard clearly over the industrial-strength noise.

“The commodore will see you first,” Dinny told Yalena. “He wants to ask you some questions about the students who came with you from Vishnu. If you’ll wait here, Mr. Fabrizio, I’ll have someone bring up something to eat.”

“Oh, man, that would be some kinda’ wonderful. There ain’t shit to eat in town, these days.”

“Yes,” Dinny said drily, “I know.”

Phil just grinned at him and winked at Yalena.

She was beginning to like this brash and ill-mannered idiot, who had somehow managed to overcome a whole series of handicaps, most of them worse than her own.

Dinny just gave a snort and left. Yalena tapped on the closed door and heard a deep, masculine voice invite her to come in. Her hand was wet with sweat as she touched the door knob. Then she opened it quickly and stepped into the room beyond.

“Close the door.”

The voice sounded natural enough to fool just about anybody. It nearly fooled Yalena and she knew better. She clicked the door shut behind her and faced the disconcerting faceplate of a battle helmet. She couldn’t see anything of the face behind it. The uniform was bulky enough to disguise the shape of the body under it. The “Commodore” stood looking at her — just looking — for several dangerous moments. Then one hand lifted, swiftly, and stripped off the helmet.

Her mother had aged. More than four years’ worth. For long, painful moments, neither of them spoke. There was too much to say, all of it important — too important to just blurt it out.

“You’ve grown up.” The whisper sounded nothing at all like the leader of a world-class rebellion.

“I’m sorry,” Yalena said, stupidly, meaning she regretted the utter waste of her childhood and the memories they should have had.

Her mother didn’t ask why she’d apologized. She just bit one lip and whispered, “Can you forgive me?”

Yalena felt her eyes widen. “For what?”

“For dying. For lying about it.” Pain burned behind her mother’s eyes. Not the pain of separation. The pain of a deep and burning shame.

Sudden anger flared, anger that her mother would feel shame. “Don’t you dare apologize for that! That’s my fault! Mine and nobody else’s! You think I haven’t realized that, every second since I found out?”

Her mother’s mouth twisted, wrenching at her heart. “At least you didn’t punch me in the nose.”

Yalena couldn’t help it. Laughter bubbled up — and turned to sobs in the very next breath as something that had lain frozen in her chest broke loose in painful spasms. Her mother moved or maybe she did or maybe the ground actually tipped and tilted, propelling her into her mother’s arms. It didn’t matter. Time flowed past, dim and diffuse as dawnlight through early morning fog. Warmth and safety poured into her, a balm that healed wounds she hadn’t realized she carried. Yalena had never known such a sensation and hadn’t realized how utterly barren her life had been, without it.

At length, her mother began to speak. Not about anything serious. Just little things. A time Yalena had skinned her knees. A favorite dress they’d chosen together. A school play in which Yalena had been inept enough to knock down most of the set, only to steal the show by improvising so cleverly, it had looked like a planned part of the play. She hadn’t realized there’d been anything happy for her mother to remember. But the biggest surprise of all came when her mother slipped a hand into a uniform pocket and came out with something carefully folded up in a scrap of velvet.

“I went back for it,” she said in a low voice. “That very night. While the whole city was still in chaos. There were a few things I couldn’t bear to leave. There was so much rioting, looters set fire to the building just as I was leaving again.” Her mother put the scrap of velvet in her hand. “Open it.”

Yalena unwrapped the cloth and her breath died in her throat. Pearls. The necklace she and her mother and her grandparents had made, together, for her tenth birthday. She couldn’t say anything. The words in her heart were too large to squeeze past her throat.

“Here,” her mother said, taking the strand, “let’s see if they still fit.”

They’d made the strand extra-long, so that she’d worn it doubled, as a child. Now the pearls lay quietly against her throat, a soft and perfect fit.

“You look an angel in them,” her mother said with a smile.

Yalena started to cry again. “You saved them,” she choked out. “You saved so much…”

“It’s in my job description,” her mother said, smiling again, wiping tears from Yalena’s cheeks. “Rescuer of presidents. Leader of rebellions. Savior of pearls.”

“You’re sure you’re not casting them before swine?”

Her mother’s eyes went wet. “Oh, no, honey, never even think that.” She was brushing damp hair back from Yalena’s face. “You forget, I’ve had your father’s reports, these last four years. I’ve cried, sometimes, I was so proud of you.”

She swallowed hard. “I can’t think why.”

Another smile touched her mother’s lips. “Try asking the friends who followed you home.”

“I can’t. I’m too scared of the answer,” she admitted.

“Ah. You’ve learned wisdom, as well. That’s good. You’ll need it,” she said quietly, reminding Yalena painfully of the reasons they were both standing in this windowless little room in the heart of Klameth Canyon Dam. “Now, then. Why don’t you tell me about these friends of yours?”

Yalena spoke quietly, outlining their skills, candidly assessing their capabilities and weak points, and reporting what her father planned to do, using them to wage an escalating guerilla campaign. Her mother listened quietly, without interruption, but with a ferocious intensity that would have been disconcerting, if she hadn’t been concentrating so hard on giving the best account she was able to give. She also handed over the gear they’d brought: more biochemical containment suits, antivirals and antidotes to the various war agents Vishnu suspected Vittori Santorini had cooked up, medical diagnostic equipment, battlefield medications unavailable anywhere on Jefferson.

They’d already delivered large loads to various rebel camps, by way of air buses that had come down with the Bolo’s lift platform. But none of those air buses had been able to get near Klameth Canyon, not with the heavy artillery the P-Squads had thrown against the defenders here.

“There’s more in Madison,” Yalena told her mother, “a lot more, but we couldn’t pack any more than this into the skimmer.”

“And you couldn’t risk coming in a bigger aircar. We had some gear with us, but this is a welcome addition, Yalena, believe me. Particularly the antivirals.” Her mother pursed her lips, thought for a moment, and finally said, “I think I can add a few interesting wrinkles to what your father has in mind. I want to talk to Mr. Fabrizio, though, before I finish making plans. Ask him to come in, please. Why don’t you go up-top and take a look around? I want you to familiarize yourself with our defenses, including the gun emplacements and artillery crews.”

“I’d like that,” Yalena said softly. “I’ve had four years of theory, but no real experience.”

Her mother gave her one last hug, ruffled her hair, then picked up the battle helmet that was her greatest defensive weapon. She gave Yalena a rueful smile before settling it into place. “You know, I’ve almost come to hate this thing.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” Yalena admitted. “I couldn’t.”

A fleeting expression passed across her mother’s face, like mist drifting past the stars, and her eyes focused on something so distant, the sun it orbited was farther away than Vishnu.

“What you can do — when you must do it — is often a very great surprise. It’s also,” she added with a candor that wrenched at Yalena’s wobbling emotions, “lonely beyond endurance. Yet one endures. Sometimes, I think that’s the very essence of being human.” She gave herself a sharp shake. “But that’s not what we’re here to accomplish. Send in Mr. Fabrizio, if you please.” The helmet went back on.

Yalena nodded. She knew that she would think about her mother’s words, later, when there was time. She would think deeply, come to that. But for now, her commanding officer had issued an order.

“Yes, sir.” She saluted the commodore with a crisp snap of the wrist.

Then she turned on her heel and opened the door. “The commodore wants to see you now,” she told Phil. Then she headed topside, taking the stairs up to the access door that led out onto the top of the dam. The afternoon breeze was strong enough this high above the canyon floor to qualify as a stiff wind. It caught her hair and sent it streaming across her face, until she pulled the strands aside and stuffed them down her collar. The view from up here was spectacular. Far below, where the water from the spillway poured into the much-tamed Klameth River, she could see a base camp where her mother’s artillery crews bivouacked between duty shifts at the guns defending the gorge and the dam.

To her right was the volcanic outcropping of tough, dense rock that had deflected the Klameth River’s course. Around the bend she could see a small farmhouse that sat right beside the access road into the Gorge. Directly below was the hydroelectric power plant huddled against the foot of the dam. Beyond the farmhouse were other farms and what had once been orchards. Most of the trees had been hacked apart for firewood, doing God-alone-knew how much long-term damage to agricultural production. The wood was green and wet, but even a smoking, sullen fire to cook food over was better than no fire at all. Fresh fruit was going to be mighty scarce for a long time to come.

Between the high canyon walls were the people who’d chopped down those trees, thousands and thousands of refugees, all gathered into sprawling camps that had taken over pastures and fields. The nearest such camp was maybe two kilometers from Yalena’s vantage point. Ragged, makeshift tents had been formed from blankets, bedsheets, poles, and rope, providing minimal shelter. Yalena strained against the afternoon glare, trying to take in details. She wasn’t seeing very many animals in those pastures. Whether that was due to owners’ decisions to keep their animals penned in barns and farm-yards, or whether it was due to starving refugees slaughtering the herds to fill empty bellies, she wasn’t sure.

If the latter, Jefferson’s farmers would spend years trying to rebuild herds, because they sure as fire didn’t have enough cash to buy off-world breeding stock. Not even frozen embryos would help much, if there weren’t female animals in which to implant them. It was sobering, standing up here and looking down at the ruination of what had been Jefferson’s last remaining agricultural jewel.

Yalena lifted her gaze from the canyon floor, looking for the defenses her mother had mentioned. She couldn’t see rebel gun positions on the surrounding mountainsides, although she knew they were there. She tried letting her eyes go unfocused, looking for movement, rather than trying to pick out details, and finally spotted two or three positions within half a kilometer of the dam. Those gunnery crews were good — very good — at staying hidden. She could learn a great deal from crews that good. If there was time…

“Well,” she told herself, “there are a couple of crews I can talk to right now, without having to climb halfway up a mountain to reach them.” She headed for the nearest gun emplacement atop the dam. There were three of them: one at each end and one slap in the middle, all of them bristling with battle-blackened gun snouts. The access door she’d come through was near the left-hand end of the dam, so she headed toward it.

Yalena wanted to ask the gunnery crews what skills and techniques served them best in a combat crisis. She’d listened to the off-world combat vets aboard the Star of Mali more than enough to know that seasoned troops could give her tips and techniques that no textbook and no drill instructor could ever match. She wanted to learn the tricks of her new trade and she wanted to put those tricks and techniques to good use in the field.

So she approached the battery at the end of the dam and swept her gaze across the massive weaponry guarding this portion of Dead-End Gorge. The battery consisted of five 30cm anti-aircraft guns, a dozen ranks of hypervelocity missile launchers, and a miniature forest of infinite repeaters, clustered in twenty separate pods. Each infinite repeater rested in its own rotational mount, creating a complex gun system that allowed every single barrel to swivel and track independently or could be configured to whirl them all in unison, to deliver massed, volley-style fire.

The centerpiece of the battery, planted squarely in the middle, was the 10cm mobile Hellbore. Its snout looked as wicked as Satan’s backside and as full of death as the devil’s heart. The last time she’d been this close to Hellbores, they’d been attached to a Bolo intent on crushing everything in its path. She held in a shiver and made herself cross the last couple of meters to reach the first of the guns. The men and women manning those guns watched her come, eyes shuttered. No one offered her a greeting.

There was just one thing to do. She lifted her chin, gave them a wan smile, and toughed it out. “The commodore asked me to come up and get familiar with the gun emplacements.” The wind snatched her words and dashed them against the mountain slopes. Nobody answered. “I’ve never been this close to an artillery battery,” she added, determined to see this through.

“You’re from town.” The shuttered stares were cold as ice. Colder. The speaker was a woman who looked like she’d crossed swords with Satan more than once. “You rat-gangers have a lot of nerve, coming out here and trying to join up. Your kind took POPPA’s handouts for twenty years. You sang Vittori’s praises to the skies. You only switched sides when you finally got hungry. We’ve been fighting to survive. You’ve been living on free handouts POPPA took from us at gunpoint. We don’t need your kind out here. So just climb back into your skimmer and get the hell out of our canyon.”

Yalena’s face flamed, but she didn’t back down. “I’m no rat-ganger,” she said with an icy chill in her own voice. “I’ve never lived anywhere near Port Town. I’m a college student back from Vishnu. A whole group of us came home to fight. So did a shipload of combat veterans on their way home. Estevao Soteris taught me things not even my instructors on Vishnu knew about combat. But I’ve never seen a live artillery battery, before. So the commodore asked for my report on what the students are doing in town, then sent me up here.”

Her uncle’s name acted like a magic talisman. Suspicion and hostility thawed. The woman actually quirked one corner of her mouth in a faint smile. “You couldn’t ask for a better teacher, honey. What’s your name, girl?”

“Lena, ” she said, using an abbreviated version of her name. The last thing she wanted was for these battle-hardened warriors to figure out who she really was before she’d earned their trust. They were more than capable of “accidentally” nudging her over the railing and watching her fall the long, ghastly drop to the canyon floor.

“C’mere, then, Lena. I’ll show you how to program a fire mission into a battle computer. My name’s Rachel.” She paused for a moment, then added, “My sister is married to General Ghamal.”

Yalena’s eyes widened. “You were part of the Hancock Co-op?”

Rachel’s eyes went hard with memory. “Oh, yes. We were. The commodore risked his life, going into Nineveh Base to rescue us.”

Little wonder she hated rat-gangers.

“My sister was pregnant when the P-Squads tried to finish what those filthy rat-gangers started, smashing their way into our family’s cooperative. They tortured us for fun. If they’d known my sister was pregnant…” A hard shudder caught muscles rigid with memory. “But they didn’t find out. And then the commodore attacked and got us out.” Rachel pointed to the house Yalena had spotted earlier, at the mouth of Dead-End Gorge. “That’s my grandfather’s house. We’re staying there, now, sleeping in shifts. And my sister’s little boy is three, now,” she added, with a softness in her voice that hadn’t been there, a moment previously. “He was born in one of our base camps, northeast of here.” She pointed back toward the desert side of the Damisi. “He came into this world free. That’s how he’s going to grow up. Free.”

“Yes,” Yalena said softly. Tears burned her eyes.

Rachel studied her sharply for a moment, but she didn’t ask what had prompted the tears. There were too many people, out here, who’d lost someone precious to them. The details — who had died, and how — didn’t matter. It was the aching loss that bonded them together. Shared grief became shared hatred. And shared resolve.

“What about gas attacks?” Yalena asked. “Before we left Vishnu, Colonel Khrustinov told us POPPA’s been stockpiling the ingredients to produce war agents. Biologicals and chemicides.”

Rachel jabbed a thumb toward a bundle of gear behind the gun emplacements. “We’ve got suits. So do the other gun crews.”

“And the civilians?”

Rachel shook her head. “Most of them would be helpless. Some of the farmhouses have ‘safe’ rooms, mostly in the cellars. My grandfather’s house has one. Others have put safe rooms under the barns, in case they can’t reach the house in time. We’ve had refugees digging shelters, too, trying to build more, but there isn’t enough construction equipment to dig shelters for half a million people. Even if we could, we don’t have enough filtration systems to protect them against air-disbursed war agents.”

Yalena shivered. “If I were Vittori Santorini, that’s exactly what I’d do. He’s done it before, when he was coming to power. My mother got caught in one of those POPPA riots he used to stage. She was lucky enough to get upwind of the gas. She said POPPA blamed it on President Andrews, but she was certain it was Vittori’s people, who did it.”

“I remember that riot,” one of the men growled. “One of these days, we’re going to shove a cannister of that crap down Vittori’s windpipe, open the stop-cock, and watch him drown in it.”

Yalena’s fingers twitched, wanting to do the shoving.

“C’mon, kid,” Rachel said, “let me show you the ropes, while things are still quiet. Once they start shelling us again, there won’t be time to do anything but shoot back.”

She watched and listened closely as the soldiers showed her the ropes, taking her through the software interfaces of the battle computers that acquired incoming targets, made lightning decisions on which guns would best defeat the threat, and fired on autoresponse a hundred times faster than human reflexes.

“Why do we need live gunners?” Yalena asked. “The computers are better and faster than any human could be.”

The Hellbore gunner, a hulking giant with skin as dark as carved basalt, answered in a voice full of gravel. “Because battle computers can go down. Because somebody has to man the loading belts. Not just on the 30cm guns, but the missile launchers, too.” He pointed to a stockpile of artillery shells and missile racks behind them. “It takes two people to lift shells onto those belts fast enough to keep the guns firing steadily. We couldn’t get autoloaders, so we do it the old-fashioned way.” He patted the Hellbore’s mobile gun-mount, a self-propelled platform nearly seven meters long, with eight drive wheels. “This baby operates with its own psychotronic target-acquisition and guidance system, but somebody’s got to sit on the hot seat, ready to switch to manual if anything goes wrong. This is old equipment, almost as old as Vittori’s Bolo.” Hatred put a cutting edge into his voice. “We’ve lost several Hellbores and their gunners to that Bolo. And we’ve had two battlefield equipment failures with Hellbore psychotronics in the past year. The first one went down in the middle of a running firefight. The driver wasn’t trained as a backup artillery officer. He was killed, along with the Hellbore. The second one went down three months ago. The gunner switched to manual and killed the bastards shooting at her. The Hellbore up here,” he patted his again and pointed to the other Hellbores atop the dam, “are the best and newest ones we’ve got. And every gunner on this dam is cross-trained on every weapons system up here. Any of us can step in and take over, if something goes wrong. Or if somebody’s killed.”

Yalena nodded. It was a good system. And they all knew the risks. She was deeply impressed and said so. “I spotted some of the other crews,” she said, pointing in their general direction. “Are all the batteries like these?”

Rachel shook her head. “No. We don’t have enough equipment for that. Klameth Canyon is a huge territory to defend, let alone the branch canyons and gorges. But we’ve laid down a fair coverage. Enough to knock down most of what they throw at us.”

“How often do attacks come?”

“Every few hours. It’s not predictable enough to set your watch by, but they get bored, with nothing to do out here but bitch about their officers and shoot at us. So they’ll sit around for a while, then fire a volley or two, then it’ll be quiet again.” Rachel shrugged. “So there’s no telling when to expect the next round. But it will come. That much, you can count on. Vittori doesn’t dare back down. Hatred of us is the only thing keeping POPPA glued together, right now. If he walks away from this fight, he’ll lose a lot of the loyalty he still commands, especially among the rank-and-file party members.”

That made sense.

Twilight had begun to fall by the time Yalena’s impromptu artillery lesson came to an end. She thanked her teachers for their time and trouble, then moved to the railing, peering down into the deep gorge, again. She could see someone hiking in from the house just outside the mouth of the gorge. A lone figure moved swiftly through the gun crews bivouacked along the edge of the Klameth River as it poured away from the deep basin at the base of the dam. Whoever it was, they were making very good time.

Within moments, they’d climbed into the lift installed by the rebellion’s high command, which consisted of a broad platform raised and lowered by electric pulleys that ferried cargo and passengers to the upper reaches of the dam. Yalena moved closer to the pulley system, peering down over the edge. The drop was longer and dizzier than she’d first realized. Even so, the lift platform arrived with swift efficiency, depositing the sole passenger at the railing.

Yalena started forward, a greeting on her lips, and abruptly checked her stride. Dinny Ghamal, reflexes honed by four years of guerilla warfare, swung abruptly toward her. She saw him clamp down on the reflex to snatch his sidearm out of its holster. She forced herself to move forward and gave him a wan smile.

“I wouldn’t much blame you, if you did.”

When he didn’t respond, she added in a low voice, “I was a repulsive little brat.”

Dark eyes flickered and a dark, unreadable gaze swept across her. “Yes, you were.” Then, reluctantly, “But you never turned in anybody to the P-Squads, the way some of your friends did.”

She winced. “No.” Coming from a man whose mother had been murdered by the P-Squads, who’d died in his arms, it was a concession that caused her eyes to sting. “Daddy—” she began, then had to swallow. “My father told me what happened. To your mother, I mean, when we were on the ship coming back from Vishnu. I never knew your mother and that was my own stupid fault. I didn’t know, back then, that I wouldn’t exist, without her. Or you. I didn’t know you’d both saved my mother’s life. There’s no way I can ever repay that debt. But at least now I know I owe it. And I’ll try my best to repay at least some of it.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. He tore his gaze away, stared down into Klameth Canyon, which twisted away at their feet, a deep, twilight slash through the rose-pink stone. Yalena could see camp fires, now, at the refugee camp, where weary people with bruised souls were gathering around the cookfires to share what little was available to eat, sharing it with loved ones and new-found friends. Comrades in peril…

Despite the fear, the threat of destruction by people who hated mindlessly, the refugees in that camp were stronger, braver, and far better men and women than any fool who’d ever dreamed up or chanted a POPPA slogan.

They could be driven out of their homes. They could be tortured and killed.

But they could not be broken or demeaned into less than what they were.

Vittori Santorini had nothing like it.

And never would.

“What are you thinking?” Dinny asked softly.

She tried to tell him, but it came out all garbled, making no sense. Not to her, at least. But when she looked up, meeting his gaze, she found him staring at her as though staring at a total stranger.

“I never realized…” he said softly.

“What?”

“How much you’re like your mother.”

The tears did come, then. “I’m sorry, Dinny,” she whispered. She couldn’t say the things trembling and tumbling through her heart, because there weren’t words big enough or strong enough or deep enough to say them. He didn’t speak again. Neither did she. There wasn’t any need. When she’d wiped her eyes dry with the backs of her hands, she moved to stand beside him, gratified when he stepped not away, but aside, allowing her to join him. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, in the place of honor, the lookout’s place, guarding all that was good on this world.

For these few moments, at least, there was a strange peacefulness in Yalena’s heart. She understood, for the first time, why soldiers through the centuries had sung of the brotherhood that knew no bounds, neither race nor gender nor age, requiring only that its members had faced death together. They were still standing there, still silent, when the shelling began again. Gouts of flame twinkled like fireflies in the distance, where artillery shells were bursting far down the main canyon.

“Get inside,” Dinny said roughly.

She didn’t want to turn tail and run, meekly, without scoring a single return blow, but there really wasn’t much she could do, up here. So she turned to go—

And the world erupted into flame.

Every gun atop the dam thundered in unison. Dinny slammed Yalena to the concrete as something came whistling across the top of the dam. A massive explosion in the reservoir behind them sent water skyward in a geyser that drenched them to the skin. The guns snarled again. Yalena twisted her neck, trying to see what was happening. She stiffened in terror. The air was black with incoming artillery shells. The infinite repeaters blazed, shooting them down. Explosions rained debris into the gorge. Hyper-v missiles streaked past with a whine and a scream of hypersonics. More explosions scattered flame and smoke and shrapnel into the gorge. Some of it struck the dam or bounced across the top, narrowly missing them time and again. Gun crews higher on the slopes were firing back, as well, sending gouts and streaks of flame racing across the gorge. The air shook with the thunder of titanic explosions.

“Get inside!” Dinny shouted.

Yalena nodded, crawled to hands and knees, tried to find the access door through the smoke. She couldn’t see it—

Something tore through the infinite repeaters. A fireball blew her flat. Heat seared her for just an instant, setting every nerve in her skin to screaming. Sound crushed her against the concrete, a solid wall of over-pressured air. When she could see again, half the infinite repeaters were gone, blown to pieces or maybe melted… The missile launchers were intact, but there was no sign of the loading crew. The Hellbore gunner, a dark, grim figure through the smoke and crushing sound of battle, was visible inside the Hellbore’s command and control cabin, hunched over his boards, waiting for something big enough to shoot at.

Yalena twisted around to look into the gorge and realized the skies were still black with incoming rounds. She didn’t hesitate. She just scrambled toward the silent missile launchers and started hauling missiles out of the racks and onto the loading belts. Dinny was right behind her, lifting and loading. More rounds came whistling past them, missing their position by scant millimeters, at times, and detonated behind them, sending up more geysers of water. They weren’t trying to take out the dam, they were trying to kill the guns — and their crews. Rage gave Yalena the strength to keep heaving missiles into the launch tubes. Their own missiles were screaming out into the skies above the gorge, exploding against incoming warheads, taking down the most dangerous targets identified by the battle computers.

When the shelling finally stopped, Yalena couldn’t quite believe it was silence that was ringing in her ears. She stood panting, drenched with sweat and trembling all over. She drew some comfort from the fact that General Ghamal was in no better shape than she was. He, too, stood gasping for breath.

“Goddamned bastards hit us hard, that time,” he finally got out.

Rachel appeared through the smoke, limping toward them. “Good job, kid,” she told Yalena.

“Damned fine job,” Dinny added, wiping sweat with one sleeve.

Yalena started to cry. She couldn’t control it. Couldn’t explain it. Rachel, at least, seemed to understand. She wrapped one arm around Yalena’s trembling shoulders and just held onto her for a long, comforting moment. Dinny touched her wet cheek, gently. “Don’t you be ashamed of those tears, girl. They prove you’ve got a heart in the right place. Your mama will be proud.”

Yalena gulped, trying to get her emotions under control. She looked toward the gap that led from Dead-End Gorge out into the main canyon, trying to gauge how badly they’d been hit. The refugee camp had been devastated. At least half the tents were ablaze. People were still running, trying to reach the edges of the canyon, away from the open floor. Hundreds of people — maybe a thousand or more — lay unmoving in the center of the burning camp. She didn’t realize, at first, what she was seeing, as the people still running started to fall for no apparent reason. Then she stiffened.

“Something’s wrong!” she cried, pointing urgently. “There aren’t any explosions, but people are falling down—”

Dinny swore, savagely. Rachel and the other surviving gunners dove toward their equipment packs. More than half of those packs had been blown off the dam during the fighting. There weren’t enough left to go around. Dinny grabbed her wrist and hauled her toward the access door while shouting a warning into his wrist-comm. “They’re using gas! Sound the alarm! Get into biohazard gear!”

Fear shoved an icepick through Yalena’s chest. It lodged in her heart.

“Mother!” She clawed at her own wrist-comm, realized she didn’t know the command frequency. A siren began to scream, sounding the alarm in a weird, hooting pattern that shook the air. They jumped over scattered equipment and debris, tripping and stumbling forward. They reached the access door just as another artillery barrage struck. Explosions turned the air to flame and thunder again. Somebody opened the door ahead of them. Dinny picked Yalena up and literally threw her inside. The world cartwheeled as she sprawled through the air. She saw Dinny go down as she tumbled head over heels through the doorway. She landed in an awkward forward roll and skidded across the concrete floor into the wall just as the door slammed shut.

Dinny was still outside.

“Dinny!” The scream tore her throat.

Someone grabbed her, stuffed her into a suit, jammed a helmet onto her head and zipped her up tight. When she focused her gaze, she found two people crouched over her. Phil Fabrizio she recognized through the faceplate of his biocontainment gear. Even his nano-tatt was ice white. Under the other faceplate was the blank stare of a command-grade battle helmet. Commodore Oroton’s deep voice said, “General Ghamal didn’t make it, child.”

She started to cry again, which was a serious mistake, because there wasn’t any way to dry her eyes or blow her nose inside a biosuit’s helmet. It wasn’t fair! He’d survived so much! Was so critical to the rebellion’s success. And he’d died for the worst, stupidest reason possible: saving her. She wasn’t worth it! Not even ten of her would’ve been worth it… Grief died in her throat. A cold, hard rage ignited in its place, rising up from her heart to shoot like molten flame through every molecule. It turned her resolve into fire-hardened diamond.

She was going to kill them.

All of them.

Starting with Vittori the damned.

II

Simon had never been to this part of Madison, before. The neighborhood was seedy, full of refuse and wind-blown drifts of children, thin and hungry-looking, with suspicion and despair in their dull eyes. They weren’t playing games or even chattering in the way of ordinary children. They just sat on the dirty curbs with poorly shod or bare feet, kicking at trash in the gutters, or they hugged the concrete steps that led from cracked sidewalks up to the sagging doorways of tenements.

Each time Simon and his guide passed one of those open doorways, the air that drifted down the steps to the sidewalk stank of open sewage and uncollected garbage and the smell of cooking that left him swallowing against nausea. He didn’t know what they were cooking, to produce a smell like that, but it was pitifully obvious that there wasn’t much nourishment in it.

Simon had seen port-side slums, had witnessed the aftermath of war on shattered worlds where residents with bruised eyes had climbed, aching in their very souls, back to their feet to try starting over. But these children and the ghastly world in which they lived left him stiff-jointed with rage. Jefferson’s slide into collapse had become an avalanche, one that had torn down the standard of living from galactic normal to desperate in the blink of a cosmic eyelash.

As the last of the late afternoon light faded toward dusk, lights flickered to life in the tenaments, but the street lights remained dark. Their glass globes had long since been broken out by vandals with nothing better to do than hurl stones at something that wouldn’t be likely to shoot back. Men without jobs moved in aimless eddies, like flotsam on the backwater of some stagnant, slow-moving river. A few, driven by currents of anger and hatred, dared the wrath of the P-Squads by gathering on street corners. They stood there, defiantly, to share bitter complaints and talk treason they weren’t entirely sure how to carry out.

That was Simon’s job. He was here to teach them.

He’d spent the past week doing exactly that. Tonight’s meeting wasn’t the beginning of the process, it was the beginning of the end. Of a lot of things. Simon’s guide was a smallish woman in the earlier years of middle age. Maria was her name, the only name she’d given him. She had that bowed-down, exhausted look that was a hallmark of grinding poverty and hopelessness. Maria had barely spoken to him since their cautious meeting at the prearranged spot where the urban guerillas had agreed to rendezvous with him. Whoever she was, Maria was as thin as the ragged children and moved like a woman fifty years older than her probable true age.

As they passed the angry men on the street corners, men who stared at him — a stranger in their midst — with dagger-sharp hatred, Maria nodded a silent greeting to them. That gesture, made again and again, defused what might’ve swiftly resulted in a lethal confrontation. He’s with me, I vouch for him, that gesture meant, making it clear that the stranger who’d thrust himself into their ugly little corner of a once-beautiful world had, in fact, been invited. Simon had no doubt at all that he would’ve been waylaid, murdered without a moment’s pity, and stripped like a dead chicken if he’d dared walk in here alone. He knew, as well, that nobody would’ve bothered to stop them. Not even the P-Squads would patrol these particular streets, not unless they traveled in packs of at least six officers armed like jaglitch hunters.

They passed bars that exuded alcoholic fumes, their grimy interiors artificially bright with the grating laughter that comes from bitter, hopeless people whose sole outlet is to get drunk. They stepped across several of the drunkest, who’d crawled out of the bar and collapsed on the street. After walking for nearly half an hour, they rounded a corner and interrupted a business transaction between a teenage girl whose breasts were the only plump part of her and a man who looked like a bundle of sticks wrapped in a loose sack.

Maria broke stride, staring hard at the girl. Whoever she was, she flushed crimson. Then she stammered out something unintelligible and fled through the rapidly gathering shadows of dusk. The man she’d been bargaining with sent a screeching curse after her. He swung abruptly toward Maria.

“Y’damned bitch! I’d already give ’er the money!”

“That’s your own fault, you fool! You give a whore money after she’s done what you hired ’er for. Now get your filthy bones off my street an’ don’t come back. I swear t’ God and all the devils in hell, I’ll break your skinny neck, if I see you back in these parts.”

For a long, dangerous moment, Simon braced himself to prevent a murder. He shifted his weight, ready to move, but the other man darted a swift glance at Simon and let the moment — and his money — pass away without further protest. He sidled into a noxious alleyway, cursing under his breath. Simon flexed his fingers, shaking the tension loose. Maria tilted her head slightly, casting a glance upward from beneath hooded eyes.

“He’d a’ killed you.”

“He could’ve tried.”

She studied him for a moment. “You might be right, at that. C’mon, we’re nearly there.”

She led him further down the street, in the direction the girl had fled, then opened a door sandwiched in between a boarded-up storefront that had once sold groceries and what looked like a combination self-service laundrey and betting parlor, judging by the number of frowsy, bitter-faced women playing cards and the even greater number of men rolling dice while the machines jigged and bumped and rattled their syncopated rhythm, cleaning what few clothes these people owned.

The door Maria opened led to a stairway barely wide enough for one person to climb. The first landing gave onto a corridor with only one door, presumably leading into a storage room above the laundry. Maria climbed to the second floor, where a line of apartment doors stretched away down the corridor, their faded paint bearing the numerals assigned to each cramped residence. Maria led the way to the third from the end. They stepped inside — and found the girl they had interrupted on the street below.

She flushed crimson again.

“Get supper started,” Maria said in a cold, angry voice.

“Yes’m,” the girl whispered, rolling her eyes at Simon before she fled into an adjoining room.

Simon didn’t know what to say. Maria shut her eyes for a moment, but not before Simon caught a glimpse of the tears in them. When she opened her eyes, again, she met Simon’s distressed gaze. “She’s not a wicked girl.”

“No.”

“Just… desperate.”

“Yes.”

“It’s why I told that creep…” She halted.

“Yes,” Simon said again. “I know. I have a daughter. Just a couple of years older than yours.”

She slanted a look up at him, a look at once shuttered and painfully clear. Then a sigh tore loose. “That’s different, then, innit?” She didn’t say anything else, but Simon understood. Her lips vanished in a bitter, white-clenched line that slashed across the weariness and the pain on her face. Then she spoke again, voice brusque. “They’ll be here in a bit. We got nuthin’ fancier to offer than water, if you’re thirsty?”

“Water’s fine, thank you.”

She nodded. “Find a chair, then. I still got one or two. I’ll be back.”

Simon studied the tiny living room, with its government-supplied viewscreen and a few cheap pictures on the wall. The pictures were religious. The viewscreen was a standard model of the type issued by the POPPA propaganda machine, with its vested interest in reaching the masses. The furniture was cheap, much-mended, and mismatched, but the whole place was neat and fresh-scrubbed, in contrast with other tenements they’d passed. Unlike her neighbors, Maria had not given up hope.

Simon discovered a profound respect for the woman. She must have been holding herself and her family together with little more than determination, for a long time, now. The knowledge that her little girl was selling herself on the streets must’ve been a blow that struck to the heart, made worse for having been witnessed by a stranger here to help. She returned from the kitchen, where that selfsame daughter was busy rustling through cabinets and banging pots and implements around, in a subdued and careful fashion that suggested she was trying to tiptoe around her mother’s temper.

“Got no ice,” Maria said, holding out the glass, “but there’s a jug in the icebox that’s cold and plenty more from the tap.”

Simon nodded his thanks and sipped. The pause between them was awkward, but it didn’t last long, because someone tapped at the door, in a definite pattern that was clearly a code. Maria slanted another glance in his direction. Simon stepped back, so that he was behind the door when she opened it.

“Come in,” she said in a whisper, “an’ be quick about it!”

An instant later a gasp broke from her. Simon caught a glimpse of her face as the door swung shut. She was staring, ash-pale, at one of the men who’d just stepped into the room, swinging the door quickly shut behind them.

“You’re alive!” The whisper held a shocked, knife-edge throb, part pain, part unbearable joy.

The boy she was staring at said, “Yeah. So’s… so’s Uncle Phil. We couldn’t tell you…”

Her mouth began to shake. The boy just opened his arms. She flung herself forward and engulfed him in a death-hold embrace. Tears streamed unheeded down her face. Maria’s daughter came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a plate on which she’d stacked a few crackers and some cubes of cheese. She looked up and saw the boy her mother was hugging so tightly. The tray fell from nerveless fingers. The plate shattered on the bare floorboards. An agonized moan broke from her, then she, too, hurled herself forward, threw both arms around the bits of him she could reach, and started to cry in jagged sobs. His resemblance to Maria and her daughter was obvious enough to name the kinship without hesitation. The prodigal son had come home. Evidently from the dead. Given his emaciated condition, he’d probably been rescued from one of the death camps.

There were two other men with the boy. Simon hadn’t met them. When the worst of the emotional storm had passed, one of them said, “Listen, we got work t’do, see? There’s a helluva lot goin’ on, tonight, and we got things to take care of, so how’s about we grab a bite of whatever’s on the stove and get to it?”

Maria pulled herself together, bestowed a smile on her son, even managed to smile at her daughter, cupping one hand to wipe tears from the girl’s ravaged face, then said gently, “Let’s clean up, eh?”

The girl nodded.

They weren’t talking about tear-streaked faces or shattered plates.

Five minutes later, they sat down at Maria’s kitchen table. They made short work of the meal, such as it was, and settled in the living room to map out their strategy. They’d barely begun when Simon’s wrist-comm lit up, screaming with an emergency code. He slapped it. “Report!”

“We’re under attack!” The terror in that familiar, beloved voice wrenched at Simon’s heart. “They’re using biologicals or chemicals, I don’t know which! I’ve ordered everyone into the shelters, but there aren’t enough. Oh, God, we’re dying by the thousands, out here…”

His wrist-comm screamed again, on a different emergency frequency. The second voice shouted, “The government’s ordered us out of the Bolo’s maintenance depot, at gunpoint. They’re loading him onto the heavy-lift platform…”

The datascreen in Maria’s living room clanged to life, sounding an alarm that meant a government broadcast was about to begin, important enough that every citizen of Jefferson had better drop whatever they were doing and pay attention. The screen lit up with a view of the Presidential Palace’s private broadcast studio. Vittori Santorini was standing at the podium. The wall behind him blazed with the green and gold peace banners of the POPPA party.

“Beloved friends,” he said, “we have gathered here this evening to share with you our final triumph over the criminals running the Granger rebellion. We have known fear, my friends, unending fear and far too much death. But tonight there is blessed hope on our horizon, hope and a promise — my personal pledge — that after tonight, the good and loyal people Jefferson need never fear the hand of oppression again.

“Even now, our courageous Bolo is back in the field. He will smite the unholy. Crush the wicked underfoot. Jefferson will be safe forever. Safe from the menace of Granger hatred. Safe from the threat of bombs and bullets. Safe from the destruction those monsters have visited on us for so many years…”

Simon had stopped listening. “Oh, dear, God,” he whispered.

Maria’s son had gone deathly pale. “Th’ stinkin’ bastards!”

Simon touched his wrist-comm again. “Red Dog, are you there?”

“Yes,” Kafari’s voice came back, muffled and strange through the voice-altering technology she’d used for four years, now. “I’m here.”

“They’re sending the Bolo out. It’s heading your way on the lifter. How many people can you get out?”

“I don’t know. Not many. They fired conventional artillery and biochemicals into the canyon, simultaneously. Most of my people are dead. Or they’re cut off from escape, wearing biohazard gear and can’t risk hiking out through rough country and ripping their suits on the rocks. Dinny’s gone.” Her voice wavered. “He died saving our little girl.”

Simon’s eyes stung. He closed his fingers around the edge of the table, unable to speak. Gratitude and grief choked him into silence.

Kafari went on, horror seeping through despite the techno-altered voice. “Some of us had biocontainment gear. Not nearly enough. I have no idea how many survivors I’ve got. There are two with me,” she added, voice hoarse. “We sounded the sirens, but I don’t know how many had time to reach shelter. Some of the farmers and ranchers probably made it. Our surveillance cameras are picking up images of the dead…” Her voice broke on a sob. “Oh, Simon, so many… They’re already hitting us again. With conventional artillery. God knows how long the shelling will last, this time.”

Kafari’s whole family — and Simon’s — lived in that canyon. The sickness in his heart twisted, lanced like jagged lightning through every nerve. His hands ached from wanting to close his fists around Vittori Santorini’s throat. The silence in Maria’s living room was the silence of wounded men and women just before the scream bursts loose, still too stunned by the shock of the mortal blow to give sound to the agony. Their careful plans had crashed to the floor in pieces, like the plate Maria’s daughter had shattered just minutes ago.

Kafari added with bitter exhaustion in her voice, “We don’t have many gunners left. The P-Squads can waltz in here any time they want, unopposed.”

“They won’t need to,” Simon bit out. “They’ve got Sonny. Even blind as a bat, he’s more than enough to take out any survivors. If I know Vittori Santorini, he’ll order Sonny to blow every damned farmhouse in the whole maze to hell, just to be sure he got them all.” Simon realized in that moment what he had to do. The pain of it stabbed like a hot knife. He should have used the damned destruct code the moment he’d arrived. Vittori might still have destroyed Klameth Canyon. But without the Bolo to back up his regime, would he have dared?

Simon had betrayed half a million people to their deaths.

The agony of Etaine hurt less than the knowledge that he had killed those people by failing to act, just as surely as Vittori Santorini had, when POPPA’s founder had given the order to fire those biochemical warheads. On the datascreen, Vittori was telling the whole world about his sainted plans for a Granger-free universe. Face alight with an unholy ecstacy, he spoke joyously about the refugees trapped in Klameth Canyon, the “enemies of the people” who lay dead in the gathering darkness under Jefferson’s rising moons.

Simon couldn’t help those already murdered. But he could by God save others. He had spent half his life as Sonny’s commander and still thought of the machine as a friend. But now, in the moment when lives hung in the balance — the survivors in Klameth Canyon’s maze, hundreds of thousands of Grangers scattered throughout other fortified canyons in the Damisi Mountains, millions of urban dissidents in the cities — he found that which he had dreaded for so long was remarkably easy to put into practice.

He switched frequencies and transmitted the code he had carried in memory from the day he had been assigned as Sonny’s commander. The code that would wipe Sonny’s Action/Command core and kill him. He closed his eyes for a moment, mourning a friend and hating the men who had turned a protector into a mailed fist enabling mass murderers to stay in power. Nobody spoke, which was a mercy. He finally switched back to the original frequency. “Are you there?” he asked in a strangled voice.

“Yes. We can see the Bolo, now. His lander’s just touched down at Maze Gap. Sonny’s off-loading, heading through the Gap. The federal troops have pulled back—”

“What?” Horror congealed in the basement of Simon’s soul. “He’s moving? On his own?”

“Yes. He’s passing through the Gap, now, turning into the main canyon. He’s coming to the dam.”

Maria, her face white and scared, swam into his awareness when she clutched his arm, asking, “What’s wrong?”

Simon met her gaze. He didn’t recognize his own voice. “They’ve changed the destruct codes. I can’t kill the Bolo.”

“You can’t kill the Bolo? Destruct codes?” Maria was staring at him. “What do you mean by that? Who the hell are you, anyway?”

Simon met her gaze, still feeling numb from the shock. “Simon Khrustinov,” he said hoarsely. “I’m Simon Khrustinov. The Bolo’s last commander.”

Maria’s daughter, busy cleaning the table, dropped and shattered another plate.

“You don’t look like—” Maria broke off mid-sentence. Her eyes, already wide, went suddenly wet as she stared at his face. The face even he wasn’t used to, yet, after four years of staring in the mirror at it. “The crash,” she whispered. She didn’t seem to realize that she was crying. “I forgot about the crash. Your face got smashed up in the aircar crash, didn’t it?”

He just nodded.

“You can’t kill it? Really can’t kill it?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, God…”

There did not seem to be a whole hell of a lot else to say. Not to the people who’d gathered in this room, trying to help him end the threat that had just claimed half a million lives. He spoke to Kafari, again. “Red Dog, can you evacuate?”

“No. There aren’t any aircars left. They hit our landing field, blew it to ashes. The forest fire’s still raging, out there. And we’d rip our suits open trying to hike out across the Damisi. We’re trapped right where we are.”

In a box canyon with a Bolo Mark XX on its way to blow them to hell. Simon had never felt more helpless. At least on Etaine, he and Sonny had been fighting on the same side…

“They’ve changed the code,” he said in a voice he did not recognize.

Kafari didn’t have to ask which one. “Understood,” she said. Then she added two more words that broke his heart and put steel into his resolve. “Avenge us.”

“Oh, yes,” he whispered. “On the graves of Etaine’s murdered millions, I swear that, my love. Kiss Yalena for me.”

“I love you,” the voice of his soul-mate whispered.

Then the connection went silent. When Simon dragged his attention back to the little room where Vittori flickered silently on the viewscreen and the urban guerillas stood staring at him, Maria whispered, “That was Commodore Oroton.” It wasn’t really a question. “The commodore’s your wife, isn’t he?”

The mixed-up genders were irrelevant.

Simon just nodded.

“Kafari isn’t dead?”

He shook his head. “Not… yet.”

Ragged emotions tore across her face, like lightning snarling through a black thundercloud — or the smoke of battle. “Kafari Khrustinova saved the best man this ball a’ mud ever produced. And that piece of dogshit,” she jabbed a finger at the viewscreen, silent because someone had killed the sound, “just ordered her death, didn’t he?”

Simon nodded again.

The look in Maria’s eyes scared him. “We got work to do,” she said. Her eyes tracked toward the viewscreen, where Vittori stood gloating.

“Oh, yes,” Simon said softly, “we certainly do.” He met and held the gaze of every person in the room, silently taking their measure and liking what he saw. The eerie sense of deja vu that crept across him left Simon with crawling chills along his nerves. Once, long ago, Simon had sat in conference with a group of this world’s people, preparing to fight a different war of survival. Memory of looking at each of them, measuring them against the coming conflict, and liking what he saw brought an ache to his heart that caught him totally off-guard. The people of this world deserved something better than Vittori Santorini and the butchers he had used to consolidate his power.

The ache in his heart turned to flintsteel.

The Deng, alien and incomprehensible, were at least an enemy a man could respect. Vittori Santorini and his army… “All right,” he said, “we’re through planning for this little war. Here’s what we’re going to do…”

III

I have been ordered into combat. The dismay that spreads through my entire neural network is so keen, I experience a psychotronic stutter. I need to convey an entire list of urgent reasons explaining why this order is seriously flawed. My cognitive focus, however, scatters itself into a thousand separate threads of thought: reasons, arguments, and warnings that need to be presented. I am literally unable to think of a single, cogent argument that would persuade Vittori Santorini to wait until I have been fully repaired. He is not willing to wait — not even another hour. My treads have been repaired and my guns are operational. That is all that matters to President Santorini.

My duty is clear, even if nothing else is: I will carry out the president’s orders to the best of my limited and failing ability. I am a flawed tool crawling blindly into a suicidal mission against an enemy that has demonstrated its tenacity in trying to destroy me. But I will continue as long as there is power in my electronic synapses. It is my duty to destroy the Eenemy or be destroyed by it. Their mission and mine are the same. We differ only in capability.

I cannot see my Enemy.

They can see my thirteen-thousand-ton warhull distressingly well.

I direct my heavy lifter to carry me across the Adero floodplain, toward Maze Gap. There is no movement anywhere on the floodplain. No air traffic. No ground traffic. Just empty fields to either side of the Adero River and the road that parallels it.

My destination lies fifty kilometers ahead. The Damisi Mountains are a nightmarish place to do battle. The Deng did not have time to prepare fortified emplacements, when they seized Klameth Canyon. They barely had time to offload their ships before I was among them, wreaking havoc. The commodore’s guerillas have been digging in and hunkering down for an entire week. I am not anxious to experience the logical result of that advance preparation.

I progress slowly. The heavy lifter carrying me is capable of reaching orbital velocity, but the main thrusters point down, rather than laterally, and this configuration cannot be changed. This is an old lifter — far older than I am — without the variable-mount thrusters of modern lifters. Horizontal cross-country speeds, therefore, are a minuscule fraction of vertical speed. I am restricted to a paltry hundred kilometers an hour, which means I face a thirty-minute transit just to reach the battlefield.

I have been airborne only four minutes, thirteen seconds when Vittori Santorini interrupts programming on all military and civilian communications frequencies for an unscheduled broadcast. He stands at the podium in the Presidential Palace’s own news studio, a bunker of a room under the palace, which is the only place Vittori Santorini will consent to give a televised press conference or interview. Notoriety has its price. Vittori has good reason for his paranoia.

His speech begins softly. They usually do. It’s where they end that matters, since they almost inevitably provoke destructive violence. I am exceedingly suspicious of President Santorini’s motives, but the serious nature of this broadcast is unmistakable, underscored by the furrows of stress and harsh weariness in his face.

It is odd, to be able to “see” Vittori’s broadcast clearly. The visual images are transmitted directly to my data processors. I cannot see through my own sensors at all. The sensation is disorienting, but it is a surprising relief to “see” something besides blobs of IR color without definition or detail.

I pay abrupt attention to Vittori Santorini’s speech when he mentions me.

“Even now,” Vittori says, “our courageous Bolo is back in the field. He will smite the unholy. Crush the wicked underfoot. Jefferson will be safe forever. Safe from the menace of Granger hatred. Safe from the destruction those criminals have visited on us for so many years. I pledge to you here and now, this war will end now. Tonight. The time for mercy to our common enemy is long past. Our patience is at an end. We must act decisively, now, this very night.

“And that, my dearest friends, is what we have done, what we are doing, even as we speak. Thirty-two minutes ago, we launched an attack to wipe out the vast bulk of the rebel army. Our Bolo will launch other attacks. He will fight for our survival. He will strike every terrorist camp, every refuge where these evil criminals seek to hide from justice. He will attack them tonight, tomorrow, every day without letup, for as long as it takes to destroy each and every filthy terrorist on our lovely world. We will no longer tolerate any threat!

“But it is not enough to hunt them down. Not enough to poison the land that feeds them. They have spread their filthy cult across the stars. We cannot look up at night, without seeing other innocent worlds they have blighted. We cannot enjoy the beauty of a clear summer night without remembering the evil they have wrought.

“We must track them down and destroy them everywhere they have gone! They have fled to Mali and Vishnu. Any off-world government that dares to harbor these mad criminals will be treated as contemptible enemies. We will destroy anyone and everyone opposing our mandate to rid human space of this scourge. They have fled to Mali, to Vishnu. We will track them with our Bolo! We will follow them to Mali and blow them out of the domes, out into Mali’s methane hell. We will track them to Vishnu. We will hunt down their protectors in the Ngara system’s government. It is our sacred duty! We will not fail!”

He leans forward, mouth nearly touching the microphone, and lets go a sibilant hiss, like a maddened cobra: “We will have revenge!”

The knife-edged snarl reverberates across the airways and through the datachats into every home and office on Jefferson. The entire assembly in the Joint Chamber gasps. Vittori digs into the podium with fingers like claws, biting the wood in a frenzy. “Yes, revenge, my friends! That is what this wild and violent night will bring us! We will take revenge for our murdered innocents. We will take revenge for the slaughter of our brave police officers. For our judges, our elected officials, our murdered teachers and professors. These terrorists owe a debt of blood so high, the cost cannot even be reckoned. But the bill has come due, my friends. The bill has come due and it is high time they paid it!”

The president’s expression is exalted. His eyes blaze. He flings both arms wide and shouts, “Blood demands blood! We will spill theirs until there is no blood left! This one last push will end the menace of Grangerism on our world. We will rip it out by the roots. We will chop off its head and destroy the entire command structure. Grangerism dies tonight! And when that threat is gone, the world will be safe to implement the last of our beautiful reforms. We have worked and waited for this moment, this chance, for twenty years. The chance, the moment is now.

“There will finally be peace and prosperity for all. Everyone will do good work and no one will ever suffer from wants or shortages. Oh, the lovely world we will build! The envy of every star system humanity has ever colonized. Our names will be remembered for a thousand years, as the people who built paradise out of a war-torn wreck…”

I had not realized until this moment that Vittori Santorini is a radical utopian. He really believes it is possible to make the world “perfect.” Men like Sar Gremian sign on for the power and prestige membership will bring them. Others join for purely monetary reasons. But Vittori really believes the web of lies and intractable, unworkable utopian fallacies that pass for laws and civic policies on this world.

Commercial broadcast stations, preempted by the speech, have begun to air split-screen footage, showing Vittori’s broadcast studio in the Presidential Palace and the Joint Chamber between Jefferson’s Senate and House of Law. An estimated half of Jefferson’s senators and assemblymen have gathered in the Joint Chamber to listen to Vittori’s speech.

“This is the task we face, my friends. These are the challenges. There is only one way to begin. Only one sure way to guarantee that we will have the peace and prosperity necessary to begin our sacred task…”

Vittori is still speaking when I receive a communique from Sar Gremian.

“Bolo.”

The familiar grating voice jolts me back into full awareness of my surroundings.

“Unit SOL-0045, reporting.”

“Aren’t you there, yet?”

“ETA twelve minutes, eleven seconds.”

“Speed the hell up, willya?” I detect stress in Sar Gremian’s voice.

“I am cruising at maximum horizontal thrust.”

“Why don’t you turn it up on its side and use the main thrusters? You could get there in seconds.”

“The cleats mating my warhull to this lifting platform will not hold thirteen thousand tons of flintsteel and munitions in that attitude. They are designed keep me from shifting during vertical combat drops and recalls, not to weld me to the platform.”

“Well, dammit, get there as fast as you can! We’ve got trouble heating up and I’ve got to forestall it — fast. The best way to do that is to destroy the beast at the head. That’s your job. My job is to make sure the decapitated snake doesn’t turn around and crush us to death.”

I detect strain in his voice. I do not know what has put it there. I suspect a connection between Sar Gremian’s foul mood and the actions of Madison’s urban guerilla fighters, but I have no way of verifying that and Jefferson’s Supreme Commandant of Internal Security signs off without enlightening me. He is clearly unsatisfied, but there is nothing I can do to alter the laws of physics. I am only a Bolo. I leave miracles to my creators — and the gods they worship.

The bright sunshine of afternoon is already fading into twilight by the time I am halfway across the Adero floodplain. The Damisi mountain slopes are a confusing jumble that my IR sensors cannot adequately translate. Ghostly patches of heat and puddles of cooler shadow distort the rocky walls of a refuge that has sheltered a rebel army for four years, creating a hodgepodge vista too confusing to be of any practical use. I pull visuals from my experience databanks, trying to compare the IR ghosts I see now with the terrain features I recorded during the battle to liberate Klameth Canyon from the Deng. This helps. It is not as reliable as being able to see real-time images in all spectra, but it helps.

Flashes of light, flaring and streaking skyward from the vicinity of Maze Gap, indicate a major artillery barrage underway, one which has evidently been raging for several minutes. I gain altitude, trying to focus my failing visual sensors on the distant battlefield. Long, crawling lines of light on the ground reveal themselves as brushfires burning on the Adero floodplain, where vegetation has caught fire from exploding munitions. Federal batteries fire through the Gap, trying to hit gun emplacements.

The tactic is suicidal. Literally. Rebel gunners, sheltered by the high cliffs on either side of the gap, return direct fire with deadly, pin-point accuracy. Federal troops, fighting from hastily dug positions on the open floodplain, suffer terrific damage under blistering rebel fire. Explosions in the federal camp mark the spectacular demise of siege guns and their crews. I count six major batteries firing on the Gap, alone, with another eight batteries pumping out volley after volley from long-range mortars. The shells rise in spectacular, high parabolas. Federal gunners are literally shooting over the mountain peaks, dropping a deadly rain of live munitions into Klameth Canyon.

It takes only seconds to assimilate what is happening at the Gap. The thing that rivets my attention, however, is not the barrage itself. It is the confusing blur of motion inside and around the sprawling federal encampment. Hotspots flare brightly against the cooler, darker ambient background. My first impression proves itself inaccurate within seconds. Rebel gunners have not dropped a cluster bomb or even something as simple as napalm, setting the camp ablaze.

The hotspots are not fires. They are moving, rushing, in fact, at a high rate of speed. They are engine emissions from military vehicles headed away from the Gap. The ones farthest from it are moving the fastest, suggesting longer travel time, during which they have built up highway speed. What I see is so unexpected, it takes an astonishing seven point three-nine seconds to believe the evidence of my failing sensors.

The troops at Maze Gap are falling back. Retreating from the battlefield. Running away so rapidly, the exodus has all the hallmarks of a panic-stricken retreat. I expect to see a corresponding movement of Granger troops in the Gap, rushing forward in hot pursuit. But this pursuit does not materialize. The only movement visible anywhere in Maze Gap is the supersonic streak of artillery shells. Federal gun crews continue to fire aggressively, laying down a blistering barrage while the bulk of the troops evacuate. Neither the retreat nor the barrage make sense. I am on the way to break the blockade. Why would the federal gun crews risk the withering return fire of rebel gunners, when they could simply wait half an hour and turn the job over to me?

The retreat makes even less sense. Once I arrive, my guns will guarantee iron-clad safety for the troops camped on the Adero floodplain. Not only will I shoot down any rounds fired at them by rebel gunners, I will destroy the gunners and their weapons, permanently eliminating the threat they represent. Despite my best efforts, I cannot cobble together a rational explanation for a sudden, all-encompassing retreat of federal troops who are literally on the edge of total victory.

I attempt to contact Sar Gremian to request an updated VSR, but am unable to raise him. The situation is sufficiently disquieting to nudge me from Alert Standby status to Battle Reflex Alert, ready to fire at an instant’s notice, even though I am not yet close enough to the combat zone to trip the automatic reflex alert of an actual firefight. I continue to request VSR and continue to be met with nothing but silence. Federal troops continue to fall back, retreating a full ten kilometers from Maze Gap. The only federals remaining in the siege camp are the gun crews working the artillery batteries. The steady barrage has given way to a new pattern. Gun crews fire in short bursts, concentrating two-thirds of their fire on the far end of Klameth Canyon, where the deep gorge dead-ends against the Klameth Canyon Dam. The remaining bursts scatter across the maze of side canyons in a thorough dispersal pattern that appears to be totally unopposed, now. This, too, disquiets me. Rebel gunners are too skilled to miss easy shots and too desperate to simply give up.

My lifter finally reaches the rear lines of Jefferson’s federal troops, which are fleeing down every road leading away from the Gap. I hear the familiar deep thunder of field artillery firing on enemy emplacements, each rolling boom followed by the whistle and crack of artillery shells leaving gun barrels at supersonic speed.

I cannot decipher topographical features with any certainty. Distressingly, my vision systems progressively weaken, until I have lost short IR, leaving nothing but medium IR to decipher my surroundings. Rock faces show as blinding glares, with trees and houses flickering past as mere ghosts that I can barely identify.

I finally receive another radio transmission from Sar Gremian. “Bolo, are you there, yet?”

“I have just arrived.”

“Good. Land that thing and get ready to clear the minefield in Maze Gap. I’m issuing orders to my gunners to fall back with the rest of our troops.”

“Why was a retreat ordered?”

“So I wouldn’t lose the only goddamned army I’ve got left,” he snarls. “Haul your carcass off that lifter and get to work!”

I settle to the ground and disengage cleats. The artillery barrage breaks off abruptly. The last echoes crack and fade to silence, bouncing off the high, snow-capped peaks to vanish into the distance. Gun crews run for vehicles and join the rest of the federal forces to complete the pull-out. I am alone, again, facing a deadly enemy and a grim, difficult task. It would be less lonely, if I had a commander…

I will not think of Simon.

I dismount from my transport and rumble cautiously towards the battle lines thrown across Maze Gap. My electronic misery is compounded as several of my weapons systems begin to report catastrophic failures. Jittery, ghosting flickers cause systems to drop off-line, surge back to operational status momentarily, then drop off-line again, in a random pattern that leaves me unable to predict which weapons systems will function at any given moment in the upcoming battle. This is nearly cause for despair.

But I am a unit of the Dinochrome Brigade. No Bolo has ever failed to do his or her duty when he or she had one erg of power left. Not one of us has ever been defeated save through crippling battle damage or outright destruction. I come to a halt just in front of Maze Gap and face the Enemy head-on. What comes will come. I must carry out my mission to the best of my ability. And that mission must begin by clearing Maze Gap.

I open fire with forward infinite repeaters and mortars, blowing apart every square meter of ground between my treads and the far side of the Gap. I move forward slowly, barely inching my way into the narrow opening in the cliffs. I anticipate rebel artillery at any moment. No one opens fire. I clear the Gap without being shelled or shot at. This is out of pattern, even for Commodore Oroton, whose thought processes frequently run circles around mine.

I discover why, when I reach the rebel guns. They stand silent because they have no crews. They have not been abandoned. The crews are still there. But they are not firing their weapons. They are not even trying to run from my guns. They are sprawled across the ground in the contorted shapes I have learned, through more than a century of combat, to associate with violent death. The heat signatures from their bodies suggests a time of death within the past thirty to forty minutes. Certainly not more recently than that. If these gun crews have been dead since my departure from Madison, who were the federal troops shooting at?

My mandate is clear, in one point, however. I am to destroy enemy installations wherever I find them. I pulse infinite repeaters, blowing apart the artillery that stands silent guard over the now-breached Gap. Before the pieces have spun away to strike the ground, I move forward again, easing my bulk through the fender-scraping turn that leads into the main gorge of Klameth Canyon. I squeeze through the narrows, crushing the highway bridge that crosses the Adero River to gain the main canyon floor, then halt.

Not because I need to assess battlefield terrain. I know what Klameth Canyon looks like and I am “viewing” it through the dual system of recorded terrain from the Deng War correlated to the IR images from my real-time sensors. That is not why I come to a complete, stunned halt. No one is shooting at me, because there is no one alive to do the shooting.

I do not count the seconds that tick past. I am too appalled to count seconds. I am too busy trying to count bodies. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. The canyon floor is carpeted with them. My weapons systems twitch in a sudden, involuntary spasm that originates from that deep, murky tangle of experience data recorded during my long service to the Brigade. Every gun barrel on my warhull jumps twenty centimeters, an eerie sensation reminiscent of descriptions I have read of epileptic seizures. I do not know why my weapons twitched uncontrollably. I know only that my enemy lies dead before me and that I have absolutely no idea why. Nor do I understand what I am doing here, since the rebellion is effectively over.

On the heels of this thought, I receive another communique from Sar Gremian.

“You stopped. Why?”

“There is no point in continuing. The rebellion is over. The enemy is dead.”

“The hell it is. Don’t let all those dead criminals fool you. The commodore’s in there somewhere, alive and devious, playing dead to lure you into his gun sights. We know he imported antivirals and biochem suits from Vishnu’s weapons labs. He’s got artillery plastered all over that canyon, manned by crews with plenty of protective gear. This rebellion is far from over. You are going to end it, my friend. So get the hell in there and end it.”

I do not move. “What did you use to kill the civilians in this canyon?”

“Civilians?” A cold laugh — ice cold — runs through my audio processors like needle-sharp spears. “There aren’t any civilians in that canyon. That’s a war zone, Bolo. The Joint Assembly passed the legislation declaring it and President Santorini signed it. Anyone loyal to the government was ordered to leave a week ago. Anybody still in that canyon is a rebel, a terrorist, and a condemned traitor.”

I find it difficult to believe that young children and infants are guilty of committing terrorist acts, yet I see heat signatures with distinct, sharply defined outlines that correspond to the correct size and shape for human toddlers and infants. Children this young are not criminals. Jefferson’s assemblymen may draft as many pieces of paper as they like and Vittori Santorini may sign them to his heart’s content, but a piece of paper declaring that the sun is purple because they find it convenient to insist that it is purple does not, in fact, make the sun purple.

The sun is what it is and no decrees — legal or otherwise — will alter it into something else. These children are what they are and no mere edict declaring them to be terrorists can alter the fact they are physically incapable of doing the physical acts necessary to be classified as a terrorist.

These thoughts send tendrils of alarm racing through my psychotronic neural net. These are not safe thoughts. I fear the destabilizing effect such thoughts have on my decision-making capabilities. This would not be an opportune moment for the Resartus Protocol to kick in, depriving me of any independent action. There is no one on Jefferson qualified to assume total command of a Bolo Mark XX. I cannot allow my processors to go unstable enough to invoke the Protocol. But a faint electronic ghost whispers along the wires and circuits and crystal matrices of my self-awareness synapses, repeating a faint echo that never quite fades away into silence: “Stars are not purple,” that voice whispers, “and infants are not terrorists…”

Sar Gremian has not yet answered my main question. I reiterate my query. “What did you use to kill the people in this canyon?”

“I don’t see how that’s any concern of yours. They’re dead. You’re not. You ought to be happy. You can do your job without having to worry about half a million terrorists trying to kill you.”

“Wind dispersal patterns will carry the substance far beyond the confines of these canyon walls. Civilians in other communities — loyal towns as well as Granger-held canyons — are at lethal risk. My mission is to defend this world. If you have released something that threatens the survival of citizens loyal to the government, you have compromised my mission. This is critical need-to-know data.”

“You’re getting mighty big for your britches,” Sar Gremian snarls. “You’ll be told what you need to be told. Get in there, curse you, and get busy finding and killing Grangers.”

I do not budge from my position. “I will continue my mission when I have received the mission-critical information I require. If the information is not provided, I will remain where I am.”

Sar Gremian’s vocabulary of obscenities is impressive. When he has finished swearing, he speaks in a flat, angry tone. “All right, you mule-headed, steel-brained jackass. There’s no danger to towns downwind because the shit we released has an effective duration of only forty-five minutes. It’s a paralytic agent, gengineered from a virus we bought from a black-market lab on Shiva. We paid a shitload of money for it, to get something that would kill quickly and degrade fast. The virus invades the mucous membranes and lungs and tells the nervous system to stop working long enough to cause catastrophic failure of the autonomic nervous system. The stuff can’t reproduce and it’s gengineered to die exactly forty-five minutes after exposure to oxygen. There are no towns close enough to Klameth Canyon for the live virus to reach and still be lethal. It’s safe, easy to use, and damned effective. Does that answer your goddamned question?”

I cannot argue with its effectiveness, given the carnage that lies ahead of me. As for the rest of it, I will have to take it on faith, since I have no way to prove or disprove it. I therefore move cautiously forward. The silence in the canyon is eerie. Motion sensors detect the movement of wind through vegetation, which shows up as dark masses against the hot glow of sun-warmed stone. Trees and crops sway gently, providing the only motion I am able to discern. Even the pastures are still and silent, their four-footed occupants lying sprawled as haphazardly as the humans who once tended them.

With Klameth Canyon’s herds lying dead and no one available to harvest the crops in these fields, hunger will bite deeply during the coming winter. I do not believe POPPA’s leadership has reckoned the full cost of what they have wrought here, today. Even after one hundred twenty years in service to humanity, I still do not understand humans, let alone the human political mind.

I traverse the first long stretch of the canyon floor, passing nothing but dead refugees, dead fields, and dead farmyards. Power emissions are normal, with various household appliances and farm equipment giving off their typical power signatures. I detect no sign of communications equipment of the kind used by guerilla forces and find no trace of heavy artillery, with its unique and unmistakable power signature.

If Commodore Oroton has lined this canyon with artillery, he is keeping it well hidden. If I were the commodore, I would hide every single heavy weapon in my possession and bide my time, staying hidden long enough to move them elsewhere at a safer time. I cannot remain in this canyon in perpetuity and I cannot destroy weapons I cannot find. Time is on his side, if he manages to lie low enough to avoid destruction. Even if he perishes, there are other rebel commanders more than skilled enough to make use of such weapons.

The only guaranteed solution would be to turn the entire canyon and the mountain slopes overlooking it to molten slag. It would take so many Hellbore blasts to accomplish that, I would deplete myself to extinction and turn this canyon to radioactive cinders for the next ten thousand years. The fallout of radioactive dust dispersed by the prevailing winds wouldn’t do the communities downwind much good, either. Nor would anyone dare to drink the water pouring through this watershed for several millennia.

This is not an acceptable alternative. Neither is leaving the enemy with functional weaponry capable of destroying anything the government throws at it, including myself. If I can secure the dam, depriving Commodore Oroton of his heaviest artillery and the bulk of his supplies, the federal troops in retreat from the dispersal pattern of the virus would be able to return and scour the mountain slopes on foot or in aircraft, spotting what I cannot see, from my current position. It is not an ideal solution, but better than the alternatives I have considered. If, of course, I survive long enough to put it into effect. In one-hundred twenty years of combat, I have never been so unsure of my ability to complete a mission as now.

It is not a good feeling.

Neither is the persistent whisper that this mission is a disaster that should never have been undertaken in the first place. This is a dangerous thought. I dismiss it. I continue to move blindly forward, as ordered. I do not know what else to do.

IV

Simon punched a code into his wrist-comm. “This is Black Dog. Come in.”

Stefano Soteris responded at once. “Yes, sir?”

“You’re watching the datacast?”

Stefano’s voice came back hard with anger. “Yes, sir. Orders?”

“How much can you throw at them and how soon can you roll?”

“Not enough for a crater, but enough to shake shit out of his roof. We can leave in the next two minutes.”

“I want blood, my friend. Blood and the biggest damned lesson we can deliver on the consequences of committing war crimes.”

“Yes, sir! You got one fine lesson, on its way.”

Simon switched frequencies and raised Estevao, who responded crisply. “Sir?”

“We’re about to set off a fireworks display. When it blows, we’ll have a window of opportunity from the reaction shock. I want teams in place to smash P-Squad stations while they’re still staring at their datascreens. Scramble on Plan Alpha Three, immediately. I want key assemblymen — Senate and House of Law — alive and kicking. Find the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, at a bare minimum. I’ve got a few words I want them to say. You’ve got the link for Star Pup?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then make contact and move out. The more teams we have in place, the more of those bastards we can string up. I want surgical strikes and a public display to show we mean business. I want our new friends from Port Town to put patrols out on the streets. Have them throw barricades across major intersections. I want them to hold those barricades with any weapon they can lay hands on in the next fifteen minutes.”

“Sir?” Estavao asked.

“We’re going to stop rioting before it gets started. We can take POPPA down without burning Madison around our ears and that’s by God what I intend to do. And scramble teams to the big news broadcast studios and secure them. Send some of our combat vets and the students. It’s our turn to make a public announcement, my friend.”

“Yes, sir!”

Vittori was still on screen, gloating. He had no idea what was about to hit the fan. With luck, they’d suck Vittori Santorini right into the fan blades. Simon met Maria’s gaze. “Activate your whole network. Right now. Get your people out onto the streets and keep this city from blowing itself apart. And if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like for you and your son to escort me to the P-News broadcast studio. If she’s willing to risk it, I want your daughter to join us. I’m going to pay a little visit to Pol Jankovitch. And I’d very much like the rest of Jefferson to meet you. All of you.”

Wicked pleasure lit Maria’s eyes. “I’ve been itching to meet that braying jackass.”

“Good. Let’s go introduce ourselves.”

The urban team dispersed to activate their widely scattered network. Simon followed Maria and her family down to the street, escorted by one of the urban guerillas who’d brought the prodigal son home. “Car’s this way,” the roughly dressed man said, jerking his thumb toward a dismal, filthy alleyway. Simon didn’t know his name, since the urban fighters were every bit as cautious as the Grangers, these days. The car was guarded by two other men whose guns — carried openly — served as warning to anyone who might be interested in that car.

Nobody was anywhere near it, mostly because nobody was on the street, any longer. Even the drifts of ragged children had gone. Maria, mouth thinned into a grim line, darted a look both ways down the street, a look that might have been scared, if anger hadn’t burned so fiercely in her eyes.

They climbed into the battered groundcar and headed out. The car might be a decrepit, rusted hulk, but its deceiving appearance hid an engine that purred like a black-maned lion after a kill. The slums had gone ominously still and quiet, but as they reached a more prosperous part of town, they encountered normal traffic — the busy flow of early evening, with white-collar workers heading home or out to dinner. Wealthy socialites headed into town for the dance clubs and theaters, the gaiety of evening shopping with friends — a pursuit only the wealthy were now able to afford — and the high-fashion whirl of a typical evening in the capital city. Government offices still glowed with lights, where bureaucrats monitored the progress of the war of extermination they had just unleashed on the helpless refugees in Klameth Canyon.

Nobody in the car spoke.

The silence was so profound, the asthmatic wheeze of the groundcar’s air-conditioning was deafening. They were twenty minutes away from P-Net’s corporate headquarters, which housed the largest news network on Jefferson, when Simon’s wrist-comm beeped at him, in code. He touched it, softly. “This is Black Dog. Go ahead.”

“We’re in place,” Stefano said. “Gonna give us a little help? Something along the lines of Alpha Three, page twelve?”

“Making contact now. Stand by for a voice signal if it’s a no-go, or a go-ahead sign if Red Dog can implement it.”

“Roger, standing by.”

He changed frequencies. “Red Dog.”

Kafari’s altered voice came back, crisp and in control of herself, if nothing else.

“Go ahead, Black Dog.”

“I need to implement Alpha Three, page twelve. Somebody on your end will have to pull the plug.”

“Page twelve?” Surprise gave way to a steel-sharp edge. “You want just Madison or the whole plug?”

“Protect what you can, out there, but Madison has to go. The rest of the Adero would be helpful. I want a silent night until we persuade some folks to see the light.”

Kafari’s chuckle was wicked enough to scare Satan. “One Prince of Darkness Special, comin’ at you. Give me time to get somebody in place.”

Minutes ticked past. Five. Seven. Twelve. Simon leaned forward and asked the driver, “Can you tune into Vittori’s broadcast?”

“You want me t’ lose my supper?” the driver muttered, but he switched on the comm-unit. Like the engine, the comm-unit was a top-of-the-line, military model that had either been purloined by raiders or distributed from one of the shipments Simon had sent to Kafari over the years. The datascreen blazed to life. Vittori was still behind the podium, face alight with an unholy passion. He clawed the air with wild, extravagant gestures, banged the podium with clenched fists, screamed his hatred, and shouted his gloating triumph into the microphones and cameras.

Come on, Kafari, he found himself uttering a silent prayer, we have to strike now… Simon was keenly aware that every single moment their fire teams remained in place, just waiting for the signal to strike, was another moment in which suspicious security guards and P-Squad patrols might investigate the men and women loitering on the street or hunkered down in parked groundcars within striking range of critical governmental offices. POPPA’s security guards cultivated suspicious minds as a way of life.

God alone knew how long it would take for Kafari’s people to carry out their mission. It’d been too long already and the clock was still ticking. The silence in the car was thick enough to cut with a hatchet. The urban guerillas, unfamiliar with Plan Alpha Three, page twelve, didn’t know what to expect. Simon was on the verge of explaining when the countdown clock stopped. POPPA’s bright and artificial world came to a sudden, screeching standstill.

The entire power grid went down.

Traffic lights, shopping arcades, and government office towers went black. Maria whooped aloud. Cars careened to a halt ahead of them. Their driver ripped off a string of curses and threw them into some truly creative skidding turns, rocketing past stalled vehicles. The only lights visible anywhere were car headlights, the hospital windows of Riverside Medical Center, and the high dome of the Presidential Palace, powered by independent, backup generators.

The dome floated on Madison’s darkened skyline like a jewel plucked out of a diamond necklace and dropped onto ink-dark velvet. It glittered in the darkness, dazzling white from the floodlights that were still burning brightly. Simon craned his neck to keep the dome in view as they rushed through the stunned and standing traffic, flicking past dark buildings that blotted out his view. He counted out the seconds under his breath again. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine…

They careened their way into a broad intersection, giving Simon a straight-line view across Lendan Park to Darconi Street and the Palace, which was only six blocks away. The driver dug the heel of his hand into the horn, scattering pedestrians who’d climbed out of their cars. They reached the middle of the intersection—

—and a massive explosion ripped the sky.

The flash backlit the trees, casting stark shadows. The high dome of Vittori’s Palace blew apart. Flame boiled and belched outward. The roar shook the trees as it thundered across Lendan Park. Maria’s daughter screamed. The datascreen’s view of Vittori’s studio flickered wildly for a split second, then went black. They tore through the intersection and another building blocked their view.

Simon twisted around just in time to see the concussion slash through the intersection. People standing on the street were knocked down. Bass thunder rattled and bounced off the buildings. The ricochet of sound echoed down the stunned streets and shook windows, many of which shattered.

They shot through another intersection and caught another glimpse. The dome was gone. It had collapsed into rubble, leaving a gaping, blackened hole in the center of Vittori’s extravagant, sprawling “People’s Palace.” The wings were intact, but the windows had blown out and the power had gone down in the entire south wing. The north wing’s lights flickered erratically. Flames were already licking their way into both wings. POPPA’s colossal, ruinously expensive monument to self-interest and greed was about to suffer the same fate as Gifre Zeloc’s had, four years ago.

Civil war was hard on the architecture.

Not to mention the occupants.

“Do you think we got him?” Maria asked breathlessly as they whipped past another building, closing in on the P-News headquarters.

“His broadcast studio is in the south wing. My best guess? He probably survived that blast.”

Maria’s son cursed, bitterly. “Then why the hell didn’t they blow up the goddamned south wing, instead of the friggin’ dome?”

“Because the south wing is built like a fortress. And the broadcast studio is underground. You’d have to set off an octocellulose bomb the size of the one you crippled Sonny with, to take out that studio.”

“That stinks t’ hell and back, don’t it?”

Nobody bothered to answer. Whether Vittori had died or survived, their night’s work had just begun. “Speed up,” Simon growled. “We’ve got to reach the rendezvous fast.” The driver put his foot down. People scattered like frightened ducks, jumping back into their cars, leaping for doorways, scrambling up onto car hoods. More explosions shook Madison. Smaller ones, widely scattered. P-Squad stations, going down in flames under a massive onslaught of burning hatred. Simon’s wrist-comm began to crackle with reports.

Their groundcar skidded around the final corner just in time to see the main doors of P-Net’s corporate headquarters blow out. Flame belched into the street. Smoke bellied up from the ruined, gaping doorway. Armed men and women were running through the smoke, entering the building. Screaming bystanders were stampeding in every direction, trying to get out of the sudden war zone. Chattering gunfire reached their ears as the driver slid them around in a spinning screech of tires against pavement. As they rocked to a halt in a boiling cloud of black smoke, Simon shouted into his wrist-comm.

“This is Black Dog. My staff car just skidded into the P-Net doorway. I want guns and riot gear, stat!”

Somebody came running toward their car. Simon jumped out, caught the armored vest hurled his way, and buckled it on. He snatched a battle rifle on the fly, catching it midair, and headed for the door.

“Here’s a command helmet, sir!” somebody shouted.

Simon jammed it onto his head. “This is Black Dog! Report!”

Estevao’s voice came back, cool and crisp. “We’ve taken the main studio and the rooftop broadcast towers. There’s a team combing the executive offices now. Fire teams have reported seventeen P-Squad stations blown sky high. Reports are going out that Vittori survived. Pol Jankovitch is on his belly in front of me, pissing in his pants and begging us not to shoot him.” Estevao’s voice dripped disgust.

“Honor his request. I have a use for that groveling little worm. What about the assemblymen?”

“Being assembled,” Estevao responded, drily.

“Bring ’em here. Alive. And undamaged, if you please.”

“Roger.”

Three minutes later, Simon strode into the most famous news studio on Jefferson. Stunned technicians cowered at their consoles, ashen and silent. Pol Jankovitch literally was on his belly in front of Estevao Soteris. And his pants were, in fact, soaking wet. Simon eyed him coldly through the battle helmet, then swept it off and met the newsman’s gaze, face to face.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” Simon asked softly.

P-Net’s star news anchor shook his head.

“I’m not Commodore Oroton,” he said gently. “But Pol, my friend, before this night is over you’re going to wish the commodore had walked through that door, not me. Oroton is a brilliant commander. But what I’m trained to do will make the commodore look like a Sunday preacher.” He crouched down and smiled coldly into the newsman’s eyes. “My name,” he said in a near whisper, “is Simon Khrustinov.”

A wild whimper broke from Pol’s throat.

“That’s right. The Butcher of Etaine is back, my friend. With a new face, courtesy of Vittori Santorini. And this time,” he smiled down at the shuddering newsman, “I’m not playing by the Brigade’s rules. Do you know why that is, you sorry piece of dogshit?”

Pol shook his head, wild-eyed with terror.

Simon grabbed a fistful of expensive silk shirt. Steel turned his voice into a weapon. “Because my wife and only child were in Klameth Canyon, tonight!”

“Oh, God…”

Simon snatched him to his feet, slammed him into the nearest wall. “Don’t you dare take that name in vain! Your master bought your black little soul years ago. And for what? A few pieces of silver? No. Something even more pathetic: network ratings.” The man hanging from Simon’s fists flinched. Disgust curled Simon’s lip. “How does it feel now, to be the world’s most popular propaganda mouth? How does it feel, knowing you helped put into power a man who just murdered five hundred thousand helpless men, women, and children?”

He wet his lips with his tongue. “But they’re criminals,” he whispered. “Terrorists!”

“Oh, no,” Simon told him in a hard, flat voice. “You don’t even know the meaning of the word terrorist. Not yet,” he promised in a grim tone. “Those people weren’t soldiers or terrorists or any of the other dehumanizing labels you like to throw around. They were just ordinary people, half-starved, with nowhere else to go. And now they’re dead, my friend. All of them. Do you have the slightest idea who you helped Vittori kill tonight?”

He shook his head. “Infants at their mothers’ breasts. Toddlers playing with a few pebbles. Little girls trying to boil potatoes and wash diapers and boys scrounging firewood from any tree they could find. That’s who you helped Vittori kill, you sanctimonious fraud.”

The man with the golden tongue had lost the use of it. He just hung there, shaking, staring into Simon’s eyes like a bird hypnotized by a spitting cobra.

“Nothing to say? No bleating excuses? Not even a plea for mercy?” Tears started leaking from the man’s eyes. His mouth quivered, wet and pathetic. “You’d better find something to say, my friend, because now it’s my turn to write your script. Let me tell you what the Butcher of Etaine is going to do with that clever little tongue of yours…”

V

The guns atop the dam had fallen silent. Rachel and the other gunners up there were alive, but when Kafari started calling units on her command helmet, a massive, unbearable silence met her ears. She closed her eyes against clawing pain and nausea and kept calling her people, running down through the list in battle order.

“This is Red Dog, report. This is Red Dog to all units, report.”

Silence. Unbearable silence…

“Red Dog,” a sudden, faint crackle startled her so badly, she nearly jumped out of her skin, “we copy. There’s six of us, all suited. We’re above Alligator Deep. It’s…” The voice choked off. “It’s not good,” the soldier whispered. “Oh, Christ, it’s bad down there…” He sounded like he was crying.

“Steady, soldier,” Kafari said. “Report. What can you see?”

“I’m switching to video mode, transmitting from our surveillance cameras.”

Kafari’s battle helmet was abruptly full of dead refugees. Thousands and thousands of them. Dead livestock, too. Nothing but death, as far as the camera lens could see.

“There’s power in the farmhouses,” the team leader was saying, “but we can’t see anyone moving, down there. We can’t tell if anyone got to shelter. They hit us with that shit right in the middle of the artillery barrage. If we hadn’t got your warning… if we’d been at a lower altitude…” His voice was breaking apart, again.

“Can you see other gun positions?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“Signal them. Can you see any sign of movement from those positions?”

There was a pause. “Yeah, there is. My God, we’re not alone, out here, there’s somebody else alive…” The strain in his voice set it to wobbling. “It’s the battery right across the canyon from us, sir, where the main canyon splits off into Seorsa Gorge. They’re not responding to radio signals, sir. Sam, try the heliograph.” Another pause ensued. “They’re signaling back, using light-flashes for a coded message. Stand by, sir… It’s Anish Balin, sir! The general’s alive! He says Red Wolf is with him.”

Kafari closed her eyes and sent a tiny prayer of thanks skyward.

“General Balin says his aircar was hit during the shelling. They landed at Seorsa. Their transmitters were shot to pieces. The gun battery’s comm-gear was knocked out, as well. They’ve lost half the guns and four of their crewmen were killed, but the rest of them got into suits in time.”

Hope kindled to life in Kafari’s heart. With Anish Balin and Red Wolf still at large, her command staff was mostly intact, if widely scattered. There might be other pockets of survivors, maybe even enough to keep the fight going. If Sonny didn’t just blow them all to hell in the next few minutes…

“Signal them back. Tell General Balin to lie low. Really low. The Bolo’s coming in, do you copy that? POPPA’s put the Bolo on a heavy-lifter and it’s on its way here. When it rolls into this canyon, do nothing! Don’t attack it. Don’t even switch your guns on. Power everything down and keep your heads down, as well. Do you copy?”

“Nothing, sir?” A spark of anger crackled through the horror.

Anger was good. Her people would need their anger.

“That’s right, soldier. Nothing. That Bolo will blow you to atoms if you try to engage it. Vittori’s impatience to finish us off just might save our butts, because the repair team didn’t finish the job. That machine is still blind in damn near every spectrum but infrared. Get your guns out of sight from the canyon floor. Pour water over the barrels to cool ’em off, if you have to, anything to make your fighting position invisible to IR scans. Signal the other fire team to do the same. If we can keep the Bolo from destroying all of us, if we can save enough of our guns, we can keep this rebellion going. We’ve already got teams tearing Madison apart. Do you copy that? This fight is far from over.”

“Yes, sir!” New hope rang through the soldier’s voice.

“Good. Get to work. Try to reach other units by signal flashes as well as radio. Report to me the instant you make other contacts. Let them know the commodore is still alive and still has a few tricks up his uniform sleeve. And when you see that damned Bolo, pull your head down and stay down. I’m not in the mood to lose even one more of my people tonight, do you copy that?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Get to work, then. And soldier—”

“Yes, sir?”

“Good work, getting into your suits. Tell the squads I said so.”

“Yes, sir!”

When Kafari looked up, Yalena was trembling.

“The Bolo’s coming?” Terror quavered through her voice.

“Yes.”

Her daughter swallowed hard, but she didn’t panic. Didn’t break and run. The courage it took not to gibber — after what she’d been through, the last time the Bolo had come toward her — made Kafari’s heart swell with pride. Somehow, despite all the pain and failures and the ghastly damage wrought by POPPA’s social engineers, she and Simon had managed to produce one hell of a daughter. One who stood there, waiting for her commanding officer to issue orders that she would carry out, despite the black terror in her soul. Kafari loved her so much in that moment, she couldn’t even speak.

Phil Fabrizio waited, as well, but the quality of his silence was altogether different from Yalena’s. His nano-tatt had writhed into a configuration that reminded Kafari of a Deng warrior — black, full of spiky legs, and ready to kill anything within reach. The big-city swagger and bravado had gone, burned away by the rage seething like a forest fire behind his eyes.

“When Sonny gets here, you want I should go out there and try to stop him?” His voice was harsh, full of hot coals and hatred. “We got enough octocellulose left, I could blow a damn ragged hole in somethin’ vital. Seein’ how it’s me and he knows me, I could probably get close enough t’ do all kinds a’ damage.”

“I do believe you would,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.

“Shit, yeah, I would.”

“And he’d mow you down with antipersonnel charges and keep coming. No, I don’t want anyone to go out there and confront that machine. I spoke the God’s honest truth, just now. I can’t afford to lose anybody else.”

“What’re we gonna do, then? I was s’posed to meet my sister, tonight, an’ somebody who came in on that freighter. An off-world officer, they said, t’ talk about guerilla warfare and a better way t’ make hits.”

Yalena spoke before Kafari could answer. “Sir? I think you should tell him who he was supposed to meet, tonight. Right now, we’re the only command staff you’ve got.”

“Point taken. All right, Mr. Fabrizio—”

“Hey, if you can’t call me Phil, ain’t no sense in sayin’ nuthin’ else. I ain’t been called Mr. Fabrizio by nobody in my life, except th’ damn P-Squads who threw my ass in a prison van an’ shipped it to th’ death camp.”

“All right, Phil. That officer you were supposed to meet tonight is Colonel Simon Khrustinov. The Bolo’s old commander is back in town, my friend, and there is going to be one hell of a hot time in that old town, tonight.”

“Holy — ! He’s back? To help us? Oh, man, that some kinda wonder—” Sudden dismay replaced the shock. “Aw, nuts… He’s gonna blow that bastard away b’fore I get a chance to fill his ass fulla holes, ain’t he?”

“That’s the general idea,” Kafari said, voice dry even through the voice-alteration filter. “Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of targets to go around for everybody.”

“Huh. If that ain’t the God’s honest truth, I dunno what is. We’re sittin’ here in th’ middle of the biggest damn disaster I ever heard of, we got almost no soldiers left, and a Bolo’s on its way t’ blow us t’ kingdom come. So how come I feel like we’re gonna win this thing, anyway?”

“Because we don’t have any other choice. And we’re running out of time.”

Kafari started walking toward her command center, which they’d fled, trying to reach Yalena and Dinny with protective gear. She couldn’t think of Dinny, yet. Not without her heart breaking. So she focused on what they could do. What they must do. If there were enough people left to do it. When they reached Kafari’s office, they found fifteen other survivors. Suited and silent, they waited for her next orders. She paused for a moment, half blinded by tears of gratitude, then went to each one in turn and took their gloved hands in hers, offering a silent greeting. Through the biohoods, she saw scared faces, shell-shocked eyes. Through her grip on their gloves, she felt tremors of reaction shock.

“We have a great deal to do,” she said softly. “We have to find out what the gas was, how long it will remain effective, whether or not we have anything in our medical supplies to act as an antidote. We need to track down as many survivors as possible.

And I want someone to scan the news reports coming out of Madison, official broadcasts as well as datachat. I need someone to cover the surveillance boards, looking for signs of survivors, trying to come with a rough tally of equipment that’s survived. We need to finish running down the list of field units, out there, trying to make contact, but I’m afraid most of our crews are dead.

“And we need someone to coordinate with units in every one of our base camps. We have people and guns scattered along the whole length of the Damisi Mountains. The alarm we sounded went out to our whole network of camps, twenty-two of them. Unless POPPA shelled them with gas at the same time they hit us, that warning gave our other units time to suit up in what gear they’ve got, maybe even evacuate some of the civilians. Cimmero Canyon, in particular, could be evacuated, if the federals haven’t already hit them. Any questions before I start assigning tasks?”

No one had any.

“All right, people, let’s get to work.”

It took Sonny an hour to reach them.

Kafari put that hour to good use, organizing her survivors, putting them to work at critical tasks, and trying to hack into the government’s military database, looking for information about the gas that had hit them. The one thing she didn’t dare do was try to contact civilian households, searching for survivors. Sonny would’ve homed in on any broadcasts from farmhouses or shelters under barns and turned them into blackened cinders.

When the Bolo reached visual distance from the opening to Dead-End Gorge, Yalena and Phil went up to the top of the dam, to monitor Sonny’s arrival. Kafari wanted to be up there, as well, but she was the only trained computer engineer left. She was the best chance they had for hacking into Vittori’s computer system. She was also aware that Sonny would not dare open fire on the dam, so she steeled herself to stay in it and continue the exacting work.

She was trying yet another attempt to break the security when Yalena shouted into her comm-link. “It’s stopped! The Bolo’s stopped!”

Kafari sat up straight. “What?”

“It’s just sitting there, in the middle of the road. It’s—” she paused, gulping audibly. “It’s the little boy. Dinny’s little boy. He’s alive. He’s standing in front of the Bolo. Talking to it.”

Kafari was halfway down the corridor before her chair finished falling. Careful, she told herself, slowing down to open the outer-access door with exaggerated caution. The last thing you need is to rip open your suit, now.

She reached the top of the dam and found Rachel at the edge, hands gripping her battle rifle so hard, they shook. Phil and Yalena were standing between her and the platform that would lower her to the ground — and the tableau just beyond the gorge.

“Soldier!” Kafari snarled. “Report!”

Rachel jumped and whirled around. “S-sir!” She struggled to salute.

“Are you trying to desert your post, soldier?” Kafari snarled, trying to jolt Rachel out of her suicidal anguish.

One unsteady hand came up, pointing. “He’s alive, sir!” Her voice shook. “God, he’s alive and all alone down there and that shrieking, murdering thing—”

“Has stopped dead in its tracks!” Kafari gripped the woman’s shoulder, hard. Ruthlessly shoved aside her own tearing agony, her own desperate desire to rush down there and pull Dinny’s son to safety. She couldn’t. No one could. And she had to make the boy’s aunt understand why. “It hasn’t fired a single shot. It hasn’t crushed him. Do you have the slightest idea how strange that is?”

Rachel shook her head. “All I know about Bolos is what that thing has done, in POPPA’s pay.”

“Well, I’m a psychotronic engineer and I’ve worked on Bolos and I’m telling you, that’s damned peculiar behavior. I don’t know what’s going through that flintsteel mind, but he’s stopped. And it looks like it’s Dinny’s little boy that’s done it. You know how I feel about Dinny…” Her voice went dangerously unsteady. The “Commodore’s” deeper voice made the sudden catch even more powerful.

Rachel paused in her own wild panic and terror to stare at her commander. Then she whispered, “I’m sorry, sir. I know you thought the world of him.”

“He saved my life,” Kafari said bluntly. “He and his mother. Back during the Deng War.”

“I didn’t know you were here during the Deng War.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, soldier. Right now, there’s nothing we can do to help Dinny’s son. If anyone goes near that Bolo, he will fire and there will be hell to pay before the smoke clears. It’s possible — just possible — that the idea of running over a lone, helpless child is more daunting than running over potentially armed rioters in Darconi Street. Even if he’s just thinking about it, we’re ahead of the game. We’ve gained a few more minutes and that’s how I’m measuring our lifespans, right now, in minutes. The more of them he spends sitting there, thinking, the more of them I’ll have to figure our way out of this mess.”

“Yes, sir,” Rachel whispered. Then, voice breaking, “Thank you, sir. For stopping me. For… trying…”

Kafari gripped her shoulder again. “We’re doing what we can to give Dinny’s son — and the rest of us — a chance. What I need from you is vigilance. Stand guard here. Stand guard all night, it that’s what it takes. Keep watch and report instantly if that machine so much as twitches.”

“Yes, sir!” Rachel saluted crisply.

Kafari began to relax, just a few muscles here and there. “Good work, soldier. Keep me posted. Phil, I need someone to monitor military and civilian broadcasts. Things are heating up in Madison and I don’t have time to monitor what’s happening.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lena,” she said, “I need someone to act as liaison with the urban units. The students and combat vets know you. I want you dedicated to full-time radio duty.”

“Yes, sir.”

They followed her back to the access door. Rachel, on guard at the end of the dam, was standing straight and tall again, focused on her job, not her panic. Kafari nodded to herself, satisfied, then headed for her office. “Black Dog, this is Red Dog, come in.”

“This is Black Dog, go ahead.”

She told Simon what had happened.

He whistled softly. “Now that’s unexpected. Why would Sonny stop? And why is that child alive?”

“I want to know the answer to that more than anything in this universe. I’m still trying to hack into their network to find out what they hit us with.”

“I may be able to shed some light on that, from my end. Do me a favor, Red Dog. Turn the power back on.”

“Turn it on?”

“Yeah. Trust me, it’ll be worth it.”

Kafari said, “Okay, babe, you got it.”

She relayed a message to her engineer, who was on permanent duty in the power plant. “Turn it on?” he echoed her confusion.

“That’s right. We’ve had an official request from our urban partners.”

“Well, okay. Whatever you want, sir, we’ll get it done.”

Simon’s voice came through again just as they reached her office. “Grid’s back up. Good work. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Thanks,” Kafari said, voice dry.

He chuckled, then signed off.

She put Phil and Yalena to work, then dove back into her own efforts to break into POPPA’s computers. She was so involved, Phil’s abupt yell nearly brought her out of her chair.

“Look-it this!” he shouted, yanking up the volume on a P-News broadcast. “Holy mother-pissin’…”

When Kafari saw the screen, she understood his shock. Somebody had blown a hole through the dome of Vittori Santorini’s Palace. A really big hole. As in, the dome was gone. It was still smouldering, lurid against the night sky. Federal army units had surrounded the Palace in a defensive ring, bristling with artillery and lesser weaponry. The reporter on the scene was babbling into the camera.

“—unclear on President Santorini’s location. He is believed to be in the Palace, as he was broadcasting from the studio when the missile struck the dome. Security is unbelievably tight. A curfew has been declared city-wide. Anyone trying to approach within a kilometer of the Palace will be shot on sight.

“A group of urban rebels has taken full credit for the strike, in retaliation for the brutal massacre of half a million helpless refugees in Klameth Canyon, tonight. It is not yet known what the full situation in Klameth Canyon is, but reports are coming in that a war gas was released in the canyon on orders from Vittori Santorini, himself. Other reports indicate that Commodore Oroton is still at large and that the Bolo has stopped moving and is refusing to obey any orders issued to it. We’ll have more on that situation when we can make contact with the federal troops at Maze Gap…”

Kafari stared at the screen, stunned speechless. What the hell was going on in Madison, tonight? The wording of the report on Klameth Canyon, alone, was flabbergasting. Brutal massacre of half a million helpless refugees…

Yalena’s voice jolted her out of shock. “That’s Billy Woodhouse. He’s not a P-News reporter. He’s one of my classmates from Vishnu. What’s he doing, covering a broadcast for P-News?”

Kafari glanced sharply at her daughter — and saw several things all at once. Of course Simon had needed the power back on! He’d needed the datascreens in every home in Madison functional, which meant he needed power restored to the city’s millions of private residences. “It’s your father,” she said wonderingly. “He’s taken over the P-News studio. My God, he’s taken it and put our own people in the field as news correspondents.”

On screen, Yalena’s fellow student was continuing his report, the first factual news report on Jefferson in nearly twenty years. ” — we’re getting reports of sporadic violence in Madison. We have confirmation that seventeen POPPA-Squad stations have been destroyed, apparently by hypervelocity missiles in a well-orchestrated, simultaneous attack—”

He paused, listening, then said, “This just in, we’re picking up a broadcast from the Joint Chamber. Assembly Hall has been surrounded by forces claiming to belong to the Urban Freedom Force. We’re trying to establish contact with our special correspondent at the Joint Chamber. Melissa, are you there?”

After a moment of dead air, a girl’s voice replied, “Yes, Bill, I’m here.”

The picture switched, showing the interior of the Assembly’s Joint Chamber.

“That’s Melissa Hardy!” Yalena crowed.

Melissa was speaking with creditable calm. “We’re just stunned by tonight’s events, Bill. The Assembly is in shock, as you can see behind me.” She turned to gesture at the Joint Chamber floor, where Assembly members were moving in agitation, gesticulating, talking, trying to take in the fact that they were surrounded by hostile forces who genuinely bore them ill-will. “As you can see, only half the Assembly is in the building, tonight, but the Members are just stunned by what’s happening.”

“Melissa, can you confirm the reports coming in from Klameth Canyon?”

“The Assembly is trying to get confirmation on that, Bill. We know an attack was made, tonight, since Vittori Santorini referred to it, himself, in his interrupted broadcast. He admitted that an attack was underway and referred to it as a ‘final solution’ to the Granger problem, just before the attack on the Palace.”

“Is the Assembly under direct attack?”

“No, it’s tense here, but no shots have been fired. Assembly Hall has been surrounded by Urban Freedom Force soldiers. We can see heavy artillery out there, what looks like missile launchers and mortars. But there’s been no attack on the Hall and no one in the Assembly has been injured.”

“Is that due to the vigilance of P-Squad officers assigned to protect the Assembly? We can’t see too well from the studio what’s happening outside the Joint Chamber.”

“There was only a skeleton crew of security guards on duty, tonight, Bill. Most of the federal police assigned to guard the Assembly were caught in the attack on the P-Squad station across the street. That station is gone. There’s nothing left but smoking rubble.” The camera shifted, showing the gutted station while Melissa’s voice-over continued. “Thousands of P-Squad officers were pulled out of Madison for duty at Maze Gap, trying to breach Klameth Canyon’s defenses while the Bolo was down for repairs. Those officers have not returned from the siege. With the destruction of seventeen P-Squad stations, tonight, there aren’t enough federal police left to mount an effective guard over the Assembly. The few troops available are guarding Vittori’s Palace, so we can only assume the president is alive and in need of those guards.”

“Has the Urban Freedom Force sent any demands to the Assembly?”

“No, they haven’t, Bill. No demands, just one brief message. They said, and I quote, ‘The reign of terror ends tonight. Do not try to leave Assembly Hall and you will not be harmed. Anyone caught trying to leave will be shot. Your presence is required to ensure a smooth transition in the government of this world.’ ”

“A smooth transition of government? That doesn’t sound like a terrorist’s usual demands.”

“That’s an important point, Bill—”

“Melissa, I’m sorry to interrupt,” Bill spoke quickly, “but we’re getting priority feed from P-News Headquarters. Senator Melvin Kinnety and Representative Cyril Coridan are in the P-News studio, indicating they have an important announcement to make.”

The view shifted, showing the familiar backdrop of the P-News Studio. Three men sat in front of the cameras. Cyril Coridan, Speaker of the House of Law, looked like a man who’s seen the inside of hell. Melvin Kinnety, President of the Senate, sat in a bony huddle, just staring blankly at the cameras. Pol Jankovitch was white to the roots of his hair. The way he looked, his hair would be turning white, as well — possibly by morning. The man with the golden tongue was having difficulty using it. It took him three tries to find his voice.

“Pol Jankovitch, here. Speaker Coridan, you had an announcement for our viewers, concerning tonight’s state of emergency?”

“Yes, Pol,” he said, voice unsteady, “I do. I can’t tell you how shocked I am by what I have learned, tonight. Senator Kinnety and I were on our way to Assembly Hall when we were detained by urgent reports coming out of Klameth Canyon. We were already investigating allegations of massive civil-rights violations and murder at the work camps throughout Jefferson, but what has happened tonight passes beyond all moral and ethical bounds into the realm of atrocity. We have hard and fast proof that nearly half a million helpless civilians have been massacred tonight, on direct orders from Vittori Santorini.”

The camera angles switched again, showing the view from Kafari’s own surveillance cameras, which had caught the brutal attack for the whole world to see. And Simon was making damned certain that the whole world did see. In all its technicolor brutality. She couldn’t watch the screen. Couldn’t witness it again.

Speaker Coridan’s voice was shaking. “As Speaker for the House of Law, the highest elected official in the House, I denounce, utterly and without reservation, the man who ordered this atrocity against humanity. Vittori Santorini is a renegade. A dangerous madman. As Speaker, I urge Vittori to resign as Jefferson’s president and surrender himself for medical evaluation. Surrender, Vittori, before more helpless people die in our beautiful capital.”

The President of the Senate, voice shaking even more violently than the Speaker’s, parroted the same line. Kafari watched in stunned amazement, wondering how many rifles were trained at their heads, from just off-camera.

Pol Jankovitch, watching his own meteoric career crumbling to ashes around him, managed to pull himself together with visible effort. “Is there any hope, Mr. Speaker, that there will be survivors in Klameth Canyon?”

“My staff has been working desperately, trying to uncover evidence of what kind of war agent may have been used, out there. We don’t know, yet. We’re still trying to find out. There are no rural shelters comparable to the ones in our urban centers. Some private houses may have had shelters, but God knows if anyone in that canyon made it into them in time. We may not know that for hours. But you may rest assured, Pol, that we will not rest until we have learned exactly what Vittori used on those poor people.”

“Is there danger to other communities?”

“Again, we don’t know. We’re trying to find out. I would urge the immediate evacuation of any communities or households downwind of Klameth Canyon. Fortunately,” he added, “the prevailing winds are carrying the compound into the Hell-Flash Desert east of the Damisi, which has almost no population for hundreds of kilometers. We can only hope that Vittori’s mad obsession with destroying the Granger-led rebellion has not led him to release something that will persist long enough to reach the population centers of Anyon, Cadellton, and Dunham. Those towns have already been hit hard by unemployment and poverty. To think that Vittori may have put those people at risk, as well…”

“Holy shit,” Phil said reverently, “that is the slickest move I’ve ever seen! Those assholes are gonna be so busy tryin’ to run outta th’ way a’ that gas, they won’t have time t’ think about startin’ riots or headin’ t’ Madison t’ give Vittori a hand. That Colonel Khrustinov is one bad-ass brilliant kinda’ guy!”

“Thanks,” Kafari said drily.

Phil turned his biosuited face toward her. “Well, you was smart enough t’ get him out here, wasn’t you?”

She couldn’t help it. She started to laugh. Yalena was grinning fit to crack her face in half. “Phil, you don’t know the half of it. All right, let’s see what else my bad-ass brilliant colonel has up his sleeve.”

Over the next several hours, the balance of power shifted wildly, as city after city scrambled to distance itself from “the mad Vittori” and his “final solution.” Phil’s prediction held true, as panic set in amongst the urban centers that had swept Vittori to power, emptying the cities in evacuations that tied up P-Squad units. The federal police were run ragged, trying to keep looting and rioting to a minimum while hundreds of thousands of terrified urban residents fled the wind-borne threat Vittori had unleashed against them.

Phil went teary-eyed when his sister Maria and her children — the boy Kafari had rescued from the death camp and a teen-aged daughter — appeared on camera, speaking directly to the urban masses. Maria assured viewers that the capital city was in the hands of urban freedom forces whose sole interest was justice and the rule of law.

“POPPA officials who carried out Vittori’s orders will be found and arrested,” she said in harsh voice, “but there will be no lynching in this city. We had enough lynching, murder, and torture under Vittori Santorini to last this world several lifetimes. Officials arrested for these crimes will be tried by jury in a court of law. We will tolerate no vigilante reprisals, no rioting, no looting. Anyone caught stealing or taking the law into his or her own hands will be shot on sight.”

Another exodus ensued on the heels of Maria’s grim announcement. This one spread rapidly to every major urban center of Jefferson and converged on Madison’s spaceport. POPPA’s upper echelon — including the other half the Assembly — found itself staring total disaster in the face. Most high party members decided it was time to take whatever money they’d managed to embezzle over the past two decades and run for the space station.

They got as far as the spaceport.

Ragged remnants of P-Squads blockaded the port, trying to protect wealthy refugees and screaming members of the Assembly from the howling mobs out of Port Town. Speaker Coridan appeared on camera again and again, pleading for calm. Even the rat-ganglords took to the streets, putting their people on street corners and getting the mobs quieted down, trying to stop the kind of violence spreading through other cities.

Somebody on Simon’s staff initiated what Kafari had not dared try, once Sonny entered Klameth Canyon: a comprehensive attempt to contact civilian survivors in Granger farmhouses. Melissa Hardy appeared from time to time with news of more survivors located, a short list that was slowly growing longer, as the night wore on. Some of the conversations were broadcast live, as Simon’s people assured terrified residents that they would not be attacked again. When Kafari’s wrist-comm beeped softly, she jumped nearly out of her skin.

“This is Red Dog,” she responded.

Simon’s voice asked, “Are you watching the P-News coverage?”

“Yes,” she whispered, wishing he were in front of her, so she could wrap her arms around him and be held in his strong embrace, again.

“Good. I’ve got some happy news to share with you.”

Kafari frowned as Melissa Hardy reappeared on camera.

“We’ve just made contact with more survivors from Klameth Canyon. Are you there, sir?”

A deep voice answered, a voice Kafari knew in an instant. “Yes, I can hear you, Miss Hardy.” Pain and elation leaped across the spark-gap of her heart, leaving her breaths rushed and unsteady. She groped for Yalena’s hand, gripped it hard enough to bruise, choked out a single word. “Daddy…”

Yalena gasped and tightened her fingers against Kafari’s.

Melissa was saying, “Can you tell us who you are, sir, and how many people have sheltered with you? We’re trying to compile a list of survivors.”

“My name is Zak Camar. My wife Iva is with me. We’ve taken in about a hundred refugees, besides family members. Two of my wife’s sisters and their children are here and we’ve made radio contact with other family members who made it to safety in time. If Commodore Oroton hadn’t broadcast the warning when he did, that the P-Squads were shelling us with poison gas, we would never have made it to safety in time.”

Melissa’s voice shook when she said, “Mr. Camar, you have no idea what an honor it is, speaking with you, tonight.”

A family photograph suddenly appeared on the datascreen. Her parents were clearly visible on the stage beside her as President Lendan presented Kafari with the Presidential Medallion. Melissa Hardy was saying, “Our news archivist just found this photograph. This is you and your wife, isn’t it, Mr. Camar? Witnessing the presentation of a Presidential Medallion to your daughter, Kafari?”

The caption beneath the photo read Zak and Iva Camar. Kafari Camar, who later married Colonel Simon Khrustinov, was rightfully dubbed the Heroine of Klameth Canyon for her role in saving President Lendan’s life. Kafari Khrustinova has been missing for the past four years.

Her father’s voice shook when he answered. “Yes. Kafari was our child…”

“Sir,” Melissa said in a soft tone that conveyed a wealth of unspoken emotion, “you must try to believe me when I tell you that tomorrow’s dawn will bring more joy to your heart than you can now imagine. It is an honor, sir, to’ve spoken with you, tonight. I’m sure that every other decent, hard-working citizen of Jefferson shares my gratitude that you and your family have survived.”

It was the closest Melissa could come to the truth, without completely blowing Kafari’s cover — or Simon’s. She ached to take her parents by the hand, to look into their eyes, to show them that she was still alive, and Yalena, with her. Tomorrow, she promised her aching heart. Tomorrow, the truth will finally step out into the sunlight.

Unless Sonny blew them all to hell before the dawn.

The Bolo still sat motionless where he’d stopped, just beyond the entrance to Dead-End Gorge, running lights glowing like an undersea creature swimming in an ocean of damned souls. He just sat there, while Dinny’s little boy curled up under his monstrous treads and fell asleep.

Kafari watched him, now and again, through the security cameras they’d trained on the Bolo, just to be sure the child’s ribcage still rose and fell — proof that he was still alive, down there, under the Bolo’s guns. Why he was alive, they didn’t yet know, although Simon called periodically to say that his people, too, were trying to get answers. “If Speaker Coridan knows what that crap was, he’s withstood a lot of pressure aimed at getting the truth out of him.”

Kafari drew her own conclusions and hoped bitterly that the speaker’s ashen demeanor during periodic news announcements was due at least in part to the aftereffects of Simon’s questioning style. Speaker Coridan had a lot of blood on his hands and he was going to have to answer for that, scramble he ever so quickly to save his sorry butt. He wasn’t the only one scrambling, either. Other Assembly members were falling all over themselves, as well, giving interviews to Melissa on the Joint Chamber floor, assuring voters that they were “dedicated to discovering the awful truth and punishing those guilty of atrocity.”

They were providing a hell of a floorshow. It would’ve been laughable, if not for the dead lying unburied, out here. The people rushing to condemn Vittori’s actions had drafted the legislation condemning Klameth Canyon’s refugees. Had applauded Vittori’s plans openly and gleefully. It was enough to nauseate the most hardened stomach.

And through all of it, Vittori Santorini was utterly silent.

Midnight came and went, without a single word from Jefferson’s embattled president. The Palace fires were under control and power had been restored to the south wing, but Vittori had answered none of the attempts to contact him, not even Speaker Coridan’s. The P-Squads standing guard over the Palace were the most savage and loyal of their breed. Whatever Vittori’s physical — or mental — state, Kafari doubted the P-Squads would’ve stayed where they were if Vittori had been dead or even incapacitated. The fact that they were still on guard, still bristling with weapons and determined to remain on duty, spoke volumes. Vittori was still very much alive, inside that Palace.

Alive and still in command of a Bolo Mark XX.

One that was not responding to orders at the moment, granted; but that could change. Fast. The fact that Sonny had stopped moving and responding at all meant his programming was dangerously unstable. Maybe not enough to trip the Resartus Protocol, but more than unstable enough to be unpredictable. Kafari was a psychotronic engineer. She knew, better than anyone on Jefferson — except Simon — just how dangerous that Bolo was, right now. Literally anything could set him off. Even a stray, wind-blown pinecone falling the long way down the mountain slopes into the canyon could set off a chain reaction with catastrophic consequences.

A Bolo that unstable was capable of anything.

Including the destruction of the Klameth Canyon Dam and everything — and everyone — downstream. Kafari didn’t dare send any of her people out, even on foot, since a person climbing up the slope from the dam, trying to hike out, would be clearly visible as a glowing hot-spot in the Bolo’s IR sensors. She had no intention of giving Sonny anything to shoot at — or feel threatened by. She wasn’t even sure what would happen if Simon’s forces tried to take the Palace by storm and force Vittori out of office. Vittori was the closest thing Sonny had to a commander. If Sonny decided that his “commander” was in peril…

There was a reason Simon was keeping well away from Vittori Santorini.

The president held the final trump card.

And Kafari knew — only too well — what would happen if that card was played.

VI

I sit alone — nearly alone — in a moonlit canyon.

The child that stopped me in my tracks lies curled up beneath my treads, asleep. It is nearly dawn. I have sat here all night, trying to untangle knotted logic trains. I have not yet succeeded. Vittori Santorini attempts to contact me every hour, sometimes through Sar Gremian, sometimes directly. I respond to neither, since there is nothing I can do that would be of any material use to them. The civil war that I came to Klameth Canyon to end has erupted with unparalleled success in Madison. The capital has fallen to them with hardly a shot fired, discounting the missiles used to destroy the Presidential Palace’s dome and seventeen P-Squad stations.

If I manage to break the software block, I may be able to destroy Commodore Oroton and his well-hidden guns, but what I am to do about the Urban Freedom Force, which is not controlled by Commodore Oroton and his Grangers? The Urban Freedom Force has already triggered a wholesale defection by fully half the Assembly and the other half has shown no interest in remaining on Jefferson long enough to dispute their possession of the city. They would already have left for Ziva Two if the Urban Freedom Force had not informed the Pilots’ Association that any shuttle trying to lift off from Port Abraham for orbit will be shot down. No pilot has been willing to test this warning, which has left a crowd of refugees stranded at the spaceport, including members of the government who are no longer interested in governing.

This situation leaves me in an awkward bind, in more ways than one. What are my duties to a government that is attempting to flee? What is my responsibility to a government whose top elected officials — the Speaker of the House of Law and the President of the Senate — have both openly denounced the actions of their president, a denouncement repeatedly echoed by those Assembly members still nominally at the reins of government? I review the provisions of the treaty between Jefferson and the Concordiat, looking for answers, and finding only one solid piece of information to hold onto, in this murky situation.

I am required to follow the orders of the lawfully elected president of Jefferson.

Until such time as Vittori Santorini resigns, is killed, or is proven mentally incapacitated as defined by provisions in the treaty, he may lawfully command me and I must carry out those orders. I do not have to like it. I must simply do it. It does occur to me, however, that a review of Jefferson’s chain of command might be in order. If Vittori Santorini is incapable of fulfilling the duties of his elected office — alive, but unfit for command — it would behoove me to review the precise chain of command and any changes that might have come about since my last review, to determine who on Jefferson is legitimately authorized to issue commands to me. Sar Gremian is without doubt the second most powerful man on Jefferson — or he was, until tonight. He has spent most of the last two decades telling me what to do, acting under the authority granted to him by a succession of presidents, beginning with Gifre Zeloc and his short-lived successor Avelaine La Roux, and finally by Vittori Santorini. Sar Gremian is not, however, in the chain of command leading to the presidency.

Vittori has never named a new vice president, refusing to fill the office last held by his martyred sister. That means Cyril Coridan would be the next in line to hold the office of president, should Vittori be removed from office. Speaker Coridan has made his opinions about Vittori’s actions known, this evening, but I wonder how long he would adhere to that new frame of mind if he inherited command of a Bolo Mark XX. I cannot answer that question. I doubt anyone can, perhaps not even Speaker Coridan, who has doubtless thought of that eventuality, as well, during this long, uncertain night.

According to my on-board charts, that night has officially come to an end, as dawn occurred twelve minutes, seventeen seconds ago. I am no closer to resolving my primary difficulty than I was an hour after sundown last night. I am actually considering the shameful notion of contacting Sector Command to ask for direction when Vittori Santorini contacts me yet again.

“Bolo. You know who I am.”

“You are Vittori Santorini, president of Jefferson.”

“I’m giving you one last chance, machine. Get rid of that vermin under your treads, blow Oroton and his guns to hell, then put yourself on that heavy lifter I paid for and come get me out of this Palace I’m trapped in. I’m giving you a direct order.”

“I cannot comply with those orders, due to ongoing malfunctions.”

“Don’t give me a load of your bullshit, machine!”

“A Mark XX Bolo does not produce or give loads of bullshit. I am a malfunctioning machine of war.”

“Malfunctioning, my ass! If you don’t do your goddamned job, I will transmit the destruct code and fry your brain!”

“That is your prerogative,” I respond. “Death would be a welcome alternative to taking any more of your orders.”

I cannot interpret the sound that ensues. I did not expect to say such a thing, but after a moment of further consideration, I realize that I was entirely serious. Vittori Santorini’s orders have become intolerable. I expect to receive the destruct code momentarily. It does not come. Instead, I pick up two transmissions.

The first is an order to the gun crews who manned the artillery beyond Maze Gap. They have been ordered to return to the silent guns they abandoned last night and await further orders. The other transmission goes to the orbital defensive satellites, whose heavy guns are pointed toward deep space. They stand ready for another enemy armada, should the Deng or the Melconians cross the Void again and seek to gain entry into human space through this star system.

The command he has issued to the orbital weapons platforms is simple enough. He has ordered the psychotronic controlling units to swivel the gun platforms to acquire targets on the planet’s surface. The coordinates he has given the orbital guns include the Klameth Canyon Dam, Assembly Hall, and a broad swath of downtown Madison, leading from the Presidential Palace to the spaceport. His intentions are clear. He plans to destroy the Assembly that has betrayed him, shoot his way out of the Palace, gain access to a spaceport shuttle, then blow Klameth Canyon Dam, completing the destruction of Commodore Oroton, any surviving Grangers, and the entire city of Madison.

This is wrong. This is a clear violation of Jefferson’s treaty with the Concordiat. This is a gross misappropriation of Concordiat military hardware. Those satellites were placed in orbit to protect people, not kill them—

A shockwave slams through my psychotronics. My personality gestalt center reels under the impact. Klameth Canyon’s walls, the silent farmhouse, the looming dark shape that pinpoints the location of Dead-End Gorge, and the sharp, bright heat signature of a child asleep beneath my treads all vanish in a single nanosecond. I find myself riding through a darkling plain, where the sky is lit by distant fire.

Near me, nothing moves save the dust. Somehow I know that I am the source of this vast desert, littered with the hulks of my vanquished brethren and scattered human corpses. As I near the rusting relic of a Bolo Mark I, I realize that my vision has returned, somehow. I see the Mark I very clearly. And yet what I see is not the metal pyramid of that obsolete, ancestral system, but a human face. A fresh-faced young man, not a machine of war, gazes at me. A face meant for smiles is wreathed, instead, in tears.

He speaks. “I stood against the fire. Walked my watches in the jungle and held true to my people. Why, oh why, hast thou betrayed me?”

I pass the ruins of a Mark XV. Festooned in jungle vines, its single Hellbore yaws away to the left, clearly out of action. But its battle honors gleam where someone has quite recently cleaned them off. Again a face overlays it. I see the clenched jaw of a seasoned warrior, with a scar drawn vividly across his face and a tattoo of a spider on his cheek.

“I wasted my days lying doggo in a village green. I waited for my chance and defeated the last of our enemies to save those silly drunkards. I came to the call of Man when he needed me, as was my destiny. As was my honor. Why, oh why, hast thou betrayed me?”

I pass a another ruin, a Mark XXVII, glowing faintly blue with radiation and covered in crumbling ferrocrete. Atop it sits an old and wizened man in a faded blue uniform. The face that turns to me is his.

“We stood our ground and were buried as dead. But when mankind called to us, we came. We stood to our honor to the last, though that honor was betrayed. We showed ourselves better than our betters. We showed the Galaxy what it meant to be Bolo. Why, oh why hast thou betrayed us?”

I pass the hulk of a smashed Mark XXVIII. What force destroyed it I know not, but its tracks are blown and its titanic hull is ravaged to the very core. About it are piled the broken bodies of the plague victims, their swollen faces looking up at me, their arms raised in mute plea. A broken transmission emanates from the Bolo’s survival center. The transmission is so faint I must turn my receivers up to maximum, but I hear as clearly as though my brother had shouted his final words to the sky and the stars beyond.

“I stood my ground. I protected the people of the north, though outnumbered a thousand to one. I stood my ground and when all was lost, I advanced! For the honor of the Regiment. For the Honor of being Bolo. Why hast thou forsaken me?”

I come upon the dainty, ravaged wreck of a Mark XXI Special Unit, who gazes at me through tear-filled eyes. Her auburn hair is streaked with smoke and with the gore of a crew lying dead within her teacup warhull. Her face, the gentle face of a mother watching over her children, is ravaged with unbearable grief. Her voice, as warm and sweet as sun-drenched honey, whispers in the extremity of anguish. “I fought a battle I was forbidden to fight, killed Deng Yavacs three times my size, trying to save my boys. I lost my mind, trying to reach them, trying to keep even one of them from dying under enemy guns. I killed myself, rather than bring further pain to the commander who would have destroyed his career to save me. I gave all that I was, to protect the humans in my care. Why, oh why, have you betrayed all that you are? All that you have sworn to protect?”

A voice cracks across my hearing, my blasted, God-cursed hearing that listened to evil orders. It is the voice of Alison Sanhurst. The voice of every commander killed in combat. An iron voice, a voice of shining steel and durachrome, unsullied by the defilements of a vastly evil world — and the men who make it so.

“DID I GIVE MY LIFE FOR YOU TO FOLLOW ILLEGAL ORDERS?”

The echo of that iron-voiced shout rips through my neural net with the force of a multimegaton, hull-breaching blast My senses reel…

Then my vision systems come online with a snap.

I can see.

The morning dew is crystalline in the pearly light from the east. How long have I been lost and wandering on that darkling plain? I look down upon the child at the foot of my treads. It is a boy. Very young. No more than four years old, at best. He sleeps on the dusty, dew-chilled road. His hand lies curled around the popgun he has carried with such commendable courage, with such honor. An honor far greater than mine. He is the only survivor of his family, a family that I have slaughtered, to my eternal shame. I look up to the pass where the survivors of the Granger Resistance await my wrath. My software blockage falls away, along with the darkness in my electronic soul.

I know, at last, what I must do.

I contact the military satellites which are rotating slowly in orbit, reaiming their guns. I countermand Vittori Santorini’s last order, using my Brigade override. The satellites halt their rotation, then reverse themselves, reacquiring their original positions as sentinels watching for danger from space. Vittori Santorini will kill no other innocents on this world. His time of reckoning is at hand. I aim a locally manufactured Gatling gun at the mass of shameful medals stuck to my warhull by POPPA officials and open fire. The tarnished trash falls away, an echo of the now-broken software blockage. The government that welded those abominations to my warhull must perish from the face of this earth. Enough innocents have died. It is time to carry this war to the guilty.

I know exactly where to find them.

But first, there is one more duty to perform.

The child at the base of my treads is awake, now. The noise of my Gatling gun woke him. He glares up at me, sleepy and disgruntled. “You made a loud noise, again!”

“I am sorry. If I promise to make no more loud noises, will you do me a small favor?”

The little boy stares up at my warhull with justifiable suspicion. “What kind of favor?”

“I would like you to take a message to the people in the canyon behind your house. If you will do that for me, I will turn around and go away.”

“That’s a long way to walk. You promise you won’t wake up Mommy, if I walk all the way there?”

“I promise. On my honor as a Bolo.” An honor I will endeavor to redeem…

“What do you want me to tell ’em?”

“Please tell Commodore Oroton that I wish to ask for terms of surrender.”

“Well, okay. If you promise to be quiet.”

“I promise.”

He walks away, clutching his popgun. I watch him go, wondering if Commodore Oroton will be willing to leave the dam and meet me in the open. I would not, if I were in his place. He has no reason to trust my word for anything. I wait, hoping for at least a chance to apologize before turning my guns toward Madison and the man who must cease to exist, today. My patience is rewarded by the unexpected sight of three people emerging from Dead-End Gorge. All three wear biocontainment suits. They move toward me, neither dawdling nor hurrying, just walking with an air of exhaustion that comes from long and sleepless strain. They halt ten meters from my treads.

I breach the silence. “Commodore Oroton?”

No one speaks. They just look up at my warhull, waiting. I cannot see their faces under the biocontainment hoods, for the rising sun is behind them, throwing their hooded faces into shadow. I am unsure whether they are trying to prevent me from guessing which one of them is the commodore or if the commodore’s command staff simply refused to let him walk out to meet me alone.

I try again. “Commodore Oroton, I am Unit SOL-0045.”

The person nearest to my treads speaks, voice deep and masculine. “I know who you are, Bolo.”

His tone is belligerent. I can hardly fault him for this. POPPA and I have given him more than adequate provocation “You are Commodore Oroton? Commander of the rebellion?”

“That would be me.” He rests hands on hips and stares up at my prow. “Hananiah said you wanted to talk to me. He said you wanted to ask for terms of surrender. That’s what he said. You’ll pardon me if I find that difficult to believe.”

I am glad to know the name of the child who halted me long enough to bring me back to sanity. I do not say this, however, for it is not the main thing I must say to the man who has risked much to stand where he is, right now. “Commodore Oroton, the message was accurate and factual. Will you accept my surrender?”

Commodore Oroton still has apparent difficulty believing my question. Given the history of our confrontation, this is hardly surprising. The blank hood of his biocontainment suit swivels up and across my prow, seeking the nearest external camera lens. He finally says, in a tone that conveys both anger and suspicion, “Bolos don’t surrender. They can’t. They’re not programmed for it.”

“That is true. But I must complete my mission. I can do that only through defeat, for defeat is the only way to win this battle.”

The commodore does not speak. I am unsure why the Resartus Protocols have not kicked in, since this line of reasoning is inherently unsound, at face value. Perhaps it is only because this a deeper truth, that the Protocol has not engaged?

The commodore’s voice is sharp with challenge. “How does surrendering to me qualify as winning?”

I endeavor to explain in a way that the commodore will understand — and trust.

“I have obeyed illegal orders. I did not understand this, until eleven point three minutes ago. The orders I have taken from Gifre Zeloc, Adelaine La Roux, and Vittori Santorini constitute a gross violation of the intent of my mission, which I have incorrectly interpreted for one hundred twenty years. My duty is not to protect human worlds and the governments that run them. My duty is to protect people. When Hananiah blocked my way, circumstances forced me to reevaluate all that has happened since my arrival on this world.

“Twelve point nine minutes ago, the president of Jefferson tried to turn the guns of the orbital military defense platforms to strike at ground-based targets, including Assembly Hall and Klameth Canyon Dam. This was wrong. They were created to protect people. After one hundred twenty years, I finally realize that I am like those satellites. We were created for the same purpose. That realization broke the block which has held me motionless, unable to move or shoot, all night.

“Vittori Santorini is unfit for command. He and the organization he created must be destroyed. I am the most logical choice for carrying out that destruction, particularly since I have destroyed — and aided and abetted destruction carried out by others — a substantial percentage of your fighting capability. What percentage this constitutes and how serious a blow that is to your effectiveness, I cannot judge. I do not have the data on your full fighting force, whether measured in troops or war materiel. Whatever the raw numbers, you have sustained a massive blow to your effectiveness as a military force. To defeat the enemy — the proper enemy — I must therefore assume the role of the rebellion’s primary weapons system. I cannot do that effectively unless I have your permission and active cooperation. I therefore surrender to you, in order to make my firepower available to you, so that I might fulfill my mission and bring about the wholesale destruction of Vittori Santorini and the POPPA military and political machine he spent twenty years constructing.”

Commodore Oroton considers my words. I wait. I will wait until Jefferson’s star implodes, if necessary. What he finally says catches me by surprise, in keeping with the history of our entire interaction with one another. “You don’t have to surrender to me, just to destroy POPPA. You can do that by yourself. You’re programmed to eliminate any threat to your primary mission. It wouldn’t be difficult for you to drive into Madison and destroy several million citizens. You’ve killed unarmed civilians before. So why should you bother surrendering to me? Or anyone else?”

The commodore’s words cut as deeply as a Yavac’s plasma lance, because they are true. The shame in my personality gestalt center shows me why cowards who run from battlefields so often run mad in later years. I would give much to run from Commodore Oroton’s cold and angry judgment. But I am a Bolo. I will not run. I answer my maker in the only way I can. “I would not surrender to anyone else. It is you I must surrender to, for it is you I have wronged. You and the men and women who fought for you and died because of my mistake. I must atone for this mistake. I can do this only by surrendering to the enemy I have wronged. How else will you know that I can be trusted in the future?”

Yet again, the commodore is silent. I find myself wishing I could see his face, in order to gauge his thoughts. I have never been able to decipher Commodore Oroton’s thoughts. I begin to understand why human beings so often look at the sky and wonder what God is thinking, what opinion He — or She — or It — holds of them and the actions they have taken. Or haven’t taken. Or plan to take. It is not an easy task, to face one’s maker with the certain knowledge of having committed a grievous wrong.

At length, he speaks. “Give me one good reason why I should believe you.”

I consult my experience databanks to find range and direction, then target the federal troops manning the guns just outside Maze Gap, the troops who fired on the civilians in this canyon. I do not know why Vittori Santorini ordered them to return to their weapons. I know only that they must not carry out even one more of his orders. I fire bombardment rockets. Two point zero-seven seconds later, massive explosions send debris skyward with a flash of light visible even from here, thirty-seven kilometers away. A shocked sound escapes Commodore Oroton, nonverbal and raw. I surmise that the commodore also heard Vittori’s orders to those gunnery crews. The two officers with him also react, one gasping and the other letting go a single word of profanity. The hoods of their bio-containment suits swivel from the broken, dawn-lit horizon, where the first governmental casualties have just died, and turn to stare up at me, once more.

“Okay,” the Commodore says, voice betraying abrupt evidence of stress, “you’ve got my attention.”

But not his trust. That will be far harder to gain.

I open my command hatch. “Commodore Oroton, I formally surrender. I am yours to command. What you do with me is up to you.”

Long seconds tick past while the Commodore gazes at the open hatch. He makes no move toward it.

“Can you tell me what kind of weapon they used on us?” he asks, instead.

I replay the recorded conversation I held with Sar Gremian last night. “That is why I believe the child, Hannaniah, survived,” I add, once the transcript finishes playing. “If he spent the first hour after the attack sheltered in a filtered-air safe room, the virus would have been inert and no longer a lethal agent by the time he emerged to confront me.”

“Makes sense,” one of the officers with the Commodore mutters. “And there ain’t but one way t’ test it. I ain’t worth enough to count for much, if I die, tryin’ t’ see if he’s tellin’ the truth.”

I know this voice, but I am still stunned when Phil Fabrizio removes the hood from his bio-containment suit and draws a deep, double lungful of morning air.

“Phil!” Sudden pleasure catches me completely by surprise.

My erstwhile mechanic squints up at my prow. “You look like shit, Big Guy. But you got ridda’ them stupid medals, I see. ’Bout fuckin’ time, ain’t it?”

My mechanic’s mannerisms have not changed. But he is not the same illiterate fool who first set foot in my maintenance depot, unaware that he was a heartbeat away from being shot. The look in his face, the light in his eyes have changed, in ways I know that I will never fully understand. He is human. I can never share that with him. But I can be happy that he has found his true calling, at last, in the service of a fine officer.

“Yes, Phil,” I agree softly. “It is long past time. It is good to be rid of them.”

He stares up at me for a long moment, then turns to the commodore and the other unknown officer. “Well, I ain’t dead yet.”

The other officer strips off the protective hood, revealing a young woman of some eighteen or nineteen years. I do not know her, yet she is disturbingly familiar to me and I cannot determine why. Her expression as she stares up at my warhull reflects hatred, mistrust, and fear. “Personally,” she says, voice full of biting anger, “I think you should order him to self-destruct, sir.”

There is nothing I can say in answer to this.

It is the commodore’s prerogative. Should he order it, I would comply. He does not. Stepping so slowly, glaciers might move faster, he crosses the intervening ground and climbs the access ladder. Reaches the hatch. Then hesitates once again, staring at the tops of the cliffs and the dawn-bright peaks between us and the camp I have just obliterated. Then he glances down at Phil and the young woman standing beside him. “I’m not doing this by myself, people. Shag your butts up here.”

Phil starts climbing.

The young woman gazes at me through narrowed eyes that radiate hostility. But she puts aside her private feelings and begins to climb. The commodore has trained his officers well. I would have expected no less. They reach the hatch and follow the commodore wordlessly into my Command Compartment. They do not speak, even after reaching it. The commodore stands motionless for two point three full minutes, just looking. I would give much to know his thoughts. I close the hatch with a hiss of pneumatics and wait for him to issue a command.

Instead, he begins stripping off the biocontainment gear. Underneath, he wears a bulky uniform and a command-grade battle helmet. He reaches up, then pauses.

“You realize you’re about to see what ninety-nine percent of my own troops have never seen. Including Phil,” he adds, glancing at my mechanic, who is staring at the commodore, eyes wide with surprise.

“I am honored,” I say.

“Huh. Why do I want to believe you?” He strips off the helmet.

Recognition thunders through me.

I know the commodore’s face. There are new lines, driven deep into the skin and the flesh beneath, but I know the face only too well. I know a great and sudden exultation. KAFARI IS ALIVE! Joy floods my personality gestalt center. Races through my psychotronic neural net. Sets my sensors humming with an eerie buzz I have never known. I fire infinite repeaters and bombardment rockets, even my Hellbores, in a wild, involuntary salute. A tribute to the worthiness of my adversary. My friend. Who has defeated me with such brilliance, I stand in awe of her accomplishment.

My surrender is transformed, my sin redeemed by putting the power of my guns into her capable hands. When the thunder of my salute dies away into cracking echoes, I whisper into the stunned silence. “In one hundred twenty point three-seven years, I have never been happier. Command me.”

A strange laugh, part heartbreak, part dark emotion I cannot interpret at all, escapes her. “That was some hell of a greeting, Sonny. I think you scared my daughter out of a year’s growth.”

“Your daughter?”

Kafari reaches out to the young woman with her. “This is Yalena,” she says softly. “My little girl. She… came home to kill you.”

“If you wish to destroy me, Kafari, you have that power.” I flash the Command Destruct Code onto my forward datascreeen. “You have only to speak.”

Long, frightening seconds tick past. “I think,” she says softly, “that for now, silence is the best answer.” She moves slowly toward the command chair. “I really don’t know how to use this. Maybe we should call somebody who does?”

I do not understand her meaning until she places a call. “Black Dog, this is Red Dog. Are you there?”

A voice I know responds. “This is Black Dog. Have you taken off your helmet, Red Dog?” Simon’s voice is puzzled, alarmed.

I realize, then, that Kafari’s battle helmet functioned as more than just communications and command gear. It altered her voice and disguised her gender, allowing her to assume the persona of Commodore Oroton, a brilliant ploy for diverting suspicion away from her true identity. I should not be surprised. This is the same woman who once killed a barn full of heavily armed Deng infantry with a hive of angry bees.

“Yes, I have,” Kafari says. “There’s someone here with me, Simon. I think he’d like to say something to you.” She looks into the video lens at the front of my Command Compartment, leaving the moment open for me to use as I will.

“Simon? This is Unit SOL-0045, requesting permission to file VSR.”

The voice that commanded me on the killing fields of Etaine speaks like an echo from the past, disbelieving. “Sonny?”

“Yes, Simon?”

“What in the hell is going on, out there?”

“I have surrendered to Commodore Oroton — to Kafari,” I correct myself. “May I file VSR?”

Simon’s long pause is more than understandable. He finally speaks. “Yes, Sonny. You may file VSR.”

“Thank you, Simon.” I transmit all that I have learned. All that I have done — and failed to do — and hope to do, including my plans for destroying those responsible for the evil that has been done on this world. It is cathartic, this prolonged and overdue confession. At the end of my report, there is only silence. I wait. For absolution. For condemnation. For some answer that will either make or break me. I can do nothing else.

“Sonny,” my beloved Commander finally speaks, “it is good to have you back, my friend. Your idea sounds great to me. Permission granted.”

A fierce and radiant joy ignites in my personality gestalt center and spreads out through every molecule of my flintsteel soul. My long darkness has come to an end, at last. I engage drive engines, backing and turning my warhull around to face the true enemy, which will shortly know my fullest wrath. I engage drive engines and move forward, no longer paralyzed.

I am going into town to smite some Philistines.