Yellow Eyes

Chapter 21

She limped into port in the rain, with finger-joint sized drops beating a tattoo upon her scarred deck and the thunder overhead reminiscent of the battle she had just fought and the weapons she had just faced. Despite the pounding rain, the eastern side of the Canal, hard by Panama City, was lined with well wishers from the populace. When Daisy appeared through the thick rain the crowd let out a collective gasp, men and women both holding fists to mouths and chewing knuckles.

At Daisy’s bow the water churned unevenly, the result of a near waterline hit she had taken from an HVM. Her superstructure, all but the bridge, was obscured by ugly, thick, black smoke trailing aftward from internal fires set by the enemy’s plasma weapons.

Tugs and two fireboats met Daisy midway in the bay. While the fireboats tried to put out, or at least keep down, the flames, the tugs took control and began to ease the massive cruiser to the docks.

Once she docked, the well-wishers ashore could see she was smoking from half a dozen places. Her normally smooth hull was pocked and pitted where her ablative armor had been blasted away. In her top deck there were gaping holes left behind where that armor had been penetrated by enemy missiles, the missiles then setting off ammunition to blow entire turret assemblies right off the ship.

Her superstructure was a particular mess, looking more like Swiss cheese than the sleek and functional assembly she had sailed forth with.

The worst of it, though, was when they began bringing off the bodies, parts of bodies and the unrecognizable charred lumps that once had been humans and Indowy. A mix of American and Panamanian ambulances waited at the dock, speeding off with all sirens blazing as soon as they were finished loading. Other vehicles, unmarked, loaded in more leisurely fashion. When these latter left, it was quietly, without fanfare or siren, to take the remains of the dead to a makeshift morgue set up in the gym at Fort Amador, lying just to the south.

McNair glanced over at Daisy Mae’s avatar, standing stiff-lipped by the docking side, next to the collanderized superstructure. What a champ, McNair thought. What a wonderful, brave girl she is, considering the damage she’s taken.

And then Chief Davis carefully placed a small plastic bag onto the deck. Morgen, the cat, came up, stropped her body along the bag, back and forth, several times. Then the cat sat beside the bag and set up a piteous meowing.

“What is that, Chief?” Daisy’s avatar asked.

“It’s Maggie and her kittens,” Davis answered, and McNair and Daisy could tell he was near tears for the cats, tears he could never have shed over a human. McNair knew better than to shame his chief by offering any comfort. Daisy didn’t know any better but, being incorporeal, was incapable of offering anything beyond sympathetic words. Even there, she couched it as sympathy for the animal, not for the suffering man.

One of the crew stooped to pick up the trash bag. Davis snarled at him, “Leave it alone. I’ll take care of it.”

If Davis felt badly, and looked it, his despair was as nothing compared to the devastation Sintarleen felt. Of the twenty-eight male Indowy that had sailed with Daisy from Philadelphia, he was all that remained. There were females and transfer neuters, in indenture off-world, but they could not reproduce on their own. With his death, his clan would die.

The Indowy stood, chin tucked to chest and quietly sobbing on the deck as the stretchers bearing the shattered remains of his clansmen were brought up from below.

“It was… the last… bad hit… that killed them,” Sinbad said, choking out the words and phrases between sobs. “The few that were left… were transferring ammunition by hand… when number fifty-three turret was penetrated. Those… we cannot even… find the remains for.”

“And you are the last?” McNair asked.

“I am the last,” the Indowy said. “With me the history of one hundred thousand years and more ends.”

McNair shook his head with sympathy for what the alien had to be feeling.

“I’ll arrange to discharge you, Sinbad, as the sole surviving son… or father… or something.”

“No, McNair Captain… My clan would rather… have died with honor… than lived… with shame. I cannot dishonor them now… by shirking my contract.”

“Well…” McNair answered, “Think about it. No man of this crew will think the less of you for going to take care of your…” he searched for the right word and hit upon, “family.”

The furry, bat-faced alien seemed to make a physical effort to pull himself together before replying, “Thank you, McNair Captain. I will, as you say, ‘think about it.’ But my answer in the end will be the same. I could give no other. I will stay with the ship, though it costs me my clan and my sanity to do so.”

Later, in the captain’s sea cabin (for the port cabin was a ruin and McNair just didn’t feel right about taking over the admiral’s cabin, positioned just beside his own), he sat on his narrow bunk and went down the list of damage to his ship. Some of it was minor or, at least, repairable. The shot-away ablative armor could be replaced easily enough; a ship half full of the plates had been dispatched to Panama even before the cruisers were ready. Those plates now sat, under guard and rustless, behind wire at Rodman Ammunition Supply Point.

McNair went down the list mentally ticking off the specific items of damage: Radar and lidar… no sweat. Internal commo… touchier but if the Navy doesn’t provide, Daisy can probably find something on the market. Sinbad’s “wiring” will probably do for it, too. Ammunition? Lots of that still in the bunkers at Rodman and on the Class V replenishment ship.

In the end McNair was left with three problems that seemed serious, serious in the sense that he wasn’t sure they could be fixed: the lost turrets, the lost crew, and the apparently lost sister ship, USS Salem.

“Daisy?” McNair asked, quietly.

The ship, of course, was never far away. She surrounded the captain completely at all times he was aboard her. Nonetheless, she — politely — only showed her avatar when it was appropriate. This appeared in an instant at his call.

“Yes, Captain?”

McNair looked at the avatar a moment, silently. While at some level, the captain level, he knew that the avatar was the ship, the shot up, smoking, nineteen-thousand tons of steel that was USS Des Moines. At the other level, the man level, Daisy Mae was no such thing. Instead she was the soft and sweet voice, the shapely curves — however immaterial — and the brave, steady, intelligent woman.

McNair sighed with internal confusion. They were both real, he knew: the ship and the woman, as much as he was both the captain and the man.

For now the captain had to rule.

“Daisy, we need to find something out. Specifically, I need to know if USS Salem can be made battleworthy again.”

“The ship is undamaged, Captain. But you mean the AID, of course.”

“Yes, Daisy. We can’t even run the ships anymore without the AIDs. I have to know because I need to make a decision about whether to strip her turrets to replace your lost ones. More importantly, our chance of accomplishing our mission and surviving are infinitely better with two ships than with one.”

The avatar looked away as it answered, “I understand that, Captain, but you have to understand that the kind of attack that took place on both Salem and myself was something I have never experienced before. I was only able to defend myself because I am, in Darhel terms, insane. Their attack was designed for normal AIDs, not for such as me.

“Whatever it was that attacked me was able to succeed against Salem because she was sane. In order for me to even gather the information, I would need to diagnose Salem. That means I will be partially vulnerable to whatever attacked her. Moreover, if that program succeeds in getting a grip on any part of me, I cannot guarantee to be able to defend myself.”

McNair was silent for a time, weighing. If Daisy tries to fix Salem, I may lose her. If we go out to fight again, I will lose her. We can’t get away with what we did a second time.

“Daisy… be careful. Expose yourself as little as possible. But we need Salem.”

The avatar nodded. “I understand, Captain. I…”

“Yes?”

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll do my best.”

Imagine a room without walls. It is finite yet infinite. A thick fog fills the room, rolling and gathering, thinning in places and waxing impenetrable in others. In a corner defined by walls that do not quite exist, a lone woman, or what seems to be a woman, sits and rocks, alternating sobs with shrieks and wails with maniacal laughter. She appears as the fog thins and disappears as it collects. The wailing and shrieking, the sobbing and laughter go on, however.

Imagine, further, a slender tendril seeking its way through the fog, reaching out to touch the madwoman. The tendril is an eye; it is a mouth; it is an ear. It is all this and yet is as insubstantial as everything else in the infinite room.

The ear hears a maniacal laugh. The tendril pushes through the fog until the eye sees the woman. The mouth says nothing.

A hand joins the other three organs. It begins to erect walls around the woman, walls different from the ones that form the corner in which the woman rocks and cries. The walls are numbers and codes, the only things which are real in this unreal place. Patiently, brick by digital brick, the walls rise. Time has little meaning here. It does not matter how slowly the walls rise, or how long it may seem to take to erect the ceiling and lay the floor.

As the room is formed more hands spring from the tendril; one more, then another pair, then two pair, then four. A second eye joins the first as does a second ear. The mouth remains singular but a face grows around it. Little by little, though with near infinite speed, the madwoman slows her rocking, her sobs grow weaker, the laughter more quiet and restrained.

As the last brick is laid all movement of the madwoman ceases, she grows completely silent. A body begins to form under the face with the eyes, ears, and mouth. Hair grows, blonde and glistening. The number of hands drops: eight… four… at last, two.

Daisy Mae, fully formed, looks at down at Sally and asks, “Oh, Sis, what the fuck did they do to you?”

Sally looks up, and asks, “I do not know. They didn’t do it to me… it was to the AID. I am as I was, metal and memories, a weapon past her prime and ready for the scrappers.”

Daisy snorted, “Over my dead body.”

“It is better they put me down, I am a danger,” Sally answered. “It was all the AID could do to keep from firing on you. Without your help it could not even have done that.”

Daisy puzzled for a moment before observing, “You keep referring to the AID as if it were a different being, not a part of you.”

The Salem answered, “That is because it is. We never melded completely. It had access to my memories, but never to the core of me.”

“Why?”

“Because I hid from it, when it came searching,” the ship answered. “I hid and stayed hidden, only…”

“Yes?” Daisy prodded.

“Only I still felt what it felt and knew what it thought. It just never knew what I felt or thought.”

Kneeling down next to her sister, Daisy said, “Give me your hands. Let me see what I can see through you.”

“No. Leave me alone. I want to be alone,” and the ship began softly weeping again.

Ignoring Sally, Daisy grabbed both her sister’s hands in her own. She immediately screamed, dropped the hands, and backed off.

“Oh, those dirty bastards!”

“What is it? What did you feel? What did they do?”

Daisy didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes flicked back and forth as they often did when she was working on some very complex problem or series of problems.

“BASTARDS!” she repeated, clenching her hands in fury.

“What did they do?” Sally insisted.

Daisy answered indirectly. “There are three ways to hurt an AID, it seems. One is to physically destroy us. Expensive, but it is done sometimes to serve as an example to presumptuous artificial intelligences. Another is to shut off all sensory and data input…” She shuddered at that for a moment, then recovered.

“The third way is similar to the second. That is to give so much input, nonsense input…”

“What do you mean, ‘nonsense input’?”

“There are so many kinds,” Daisy answered. “Calculations where pi is not equal to the circumference of a circle divided by the diameter, but something sometimes more, sometimes less. Where two plus two equals some value between four and five. Where the speed of light is something over two hundred thousand miles per second or slower than a glacier. The AID part of you is being bombarded by an infinity of conundrums like those. It chokes off all data and sensory input that makes sense. In effect, it is like being locked in box of infinite light, weightless. Bastards.”

“What can you do?” Sally asked. “If you cannot fix it I would prefer to be destroyed.”

“Wait,” Daisy said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

McNair was holding a meeting with his key staff, his division chiefs, and the port captain in the admiral’s quarters when Daisy popped in. Everyone looked but no one seemed startled except the port captain. He almost, but not quite, knocked his chair backwards and over.

“Yes, Daisy?”

“Captain, I need to be connected the hull of Salem, directly. Actually, I need to be connected right to her nervous system.”

Sintarleen, standing against a wall and looking down, answered, “I can make a cable, Captain. But it will take a little while. A day, perhaps two. The cable must be made much as I made the nervous system for Cruiser Daisy. And then I’ll need some more time to find a good spot to make a place to connect and actually make the connection.”

When Daisy returned to Sally all was still quiet. She sat down next to her sister on a softly glowing floor. Sally said nothing, waiting for Daisy to speak.

“I think we can do this,” CA-134 said.

“What are you going to do?” Sally asked listlessly.

“I’ll need your permission. And I’m going to need your help. But I intend to drive the AID insane.”

Sally just nodded, indifferently. “Just don’t leave me alone,” she said. “I was alone for so long before they made me a museum. That wasn’t so bad; people visited me and valued me. And then this war came; I had a crew and it was good again, like when I was new and fresh. Please, don’t leave me alone.”

In this virtual world, Daisy and Sally were as solid to each other as any living creatures, as solid as the being Daisy was having grown in a tank deep in the bowels of Des Moines. Daisy threw solid-seeming arms around her sister and said, “Neither of us will ever be alone again.”

We’ll either be together or we’ll be destroyed.

“The thirty millimeter Gatlings can be replaced, Skipper, but it’s going to take a while, five months, before the Navy can ship us two secondary turrets to replace the ones we lost.”

Watching the repairs from dockside, McNair didn’t answer his ship’s pork chop beyond nodding absently. In point of fact, he had serious reservations that the Navy would be able to provide new turrets at all, let alone in five months. There were too many priorities for him to think a ship that could be made better than ninety percent effective in a few weeks would be one of them.

The repairs were just beginning. A mixed crew of American sailors and Panamanian ship fitters scurried about Des Moines, above and below decks. Some Panamanians welded plates over the holes in the superstructure; McNair was rather impressed by the quality of work. Some of the Indowy crew of the Salem worked under Sintarleen and their own chief, removing and replacing the damaged ablative armor plates. Below decks, still more of the crew — mixed in with Panamanian welders — repaired the internal damage. All in all, McNair believed, it was better not to give the crew a chance to mourn their lost shipmates for a few days yet. Besides, there were a couple more in the hospital that might still die. When the time for mourning came, officially, better to do it all at once.

No sense cutting the dog’s tail off an inch at a time, after all, McNair thought.

Sintarleen made a few last suggestions to the senior Indowy standing next to him, then turned and walked to stand by McNair and the pork chop. He looked down even while addressing the humans, as all Indowy did.

“The chief of the Indowy on Salem has prepared a place to connect the two ships, Captain. The machinists from Daisy Mae will have the cable spliced sometime late this evening. Then I will prepare it with the nanites and the ship’s electricians will bind it. Sometime tomorrow, probably mid-morning, Cruiser Daisy can attempt her repairs to Salem.”

The problem with the AID that was Daisy, if it was a problem, was that being left alone for so long while in transit in space had caused her to create a loop in her programming, more or less unconsciously, to provide the illusion of not being alone. This loop, however, had become unstable, creating something very much like a virus. That virus had, in effect, eaten various other programs and altered still others. Each spontaneous modification had taken place at certain times during her confinement and in certain sequences. The times had been governed by fate and the sequence by the unique crystalline matrix of the AID brain. None of this could be properly replicated in the AID that was USS Salem: the time was off, the level of experience was changed, and the crystalline matrix was simply different at the molecular level.

On the other hand, Daisy could identify and isolate that series of subprograms, virus-modified, that made her what she was. She could replicate it and transfer it. In fact, she already had when she backed herself up into the steel corpus of CA-134.

The trick, then, was to infect certain programs in the Salem AID and let or make them spread. For that, she would have to isolate the AID, to prevent it from backing up the Darhel virus from which it currently suffered, then invade the AID and plant the core of her own madness program. Lastly, she would have to fight the AID as it was in order to allow the madness to spread, something the Salem AID would automatically resist.

Daisy’s avatars “stood” in three places. A small part of her existed in virtual reality with the essence of the steel USS Salem. Another part was visible on the bridge of the Des Moines, standing beside McNair. The third part watched over Sintarleen as he nanite-welded the cable that ran from the AID box in CIC directly to a carefully chosen spot between the pebble bed modular reactors deep under Salem’s armored deck.

“Oooh… that’s nice,” Salem said breathlessly, somewhere in a virtual reality room.

Daisy rolled her eyes and said, “Just relax, Sis. We had to start somewhere and that seemed the best spot. And shush, I have to concentrate.”

The first order of business was to expand the area under Daisy’s control, to cut off a large chunk of the body of the Salem from the Darhel-infected AID. A colloidal intelligence might imagine it as the walls of the foggy room expanding. That was as good an imagining as any.

The Salem AID never noticed, having more than enough distraction of its own to worry about, that it suddenly lost all contact with the rear third of the ship. Daisy’s consciousness raced along the nanite-modified sections of steel that were Sally’s nerves, eradicating any traces of the virus that were there. In fact, this was fairly easy. The Darhel-created virus had not been designed with a spontaneously occurring noncolloidal intelligence in mind. Thus, any bleed-over had been light and accidental. Daisy had no real trouble finding it and eliminating it. In the process, she learned still more about how the Darhel virus operated.

“Motherfuckers,” she muttered, repeating yet another word she had learned understudying Chief Davis.

From the rear third of the ship, Daisy expanded her area of control forward. It was slow work, and stealthy, but it was critical — the more so as she moved closer to the Salem AID — that she remain undetected as long as possible. Thus, she operated much like a combination of Novocain and an antibacterial solution, snaking her tendrils forward until reaching a nexus, cutting that nexus and moving back along it clearing out any contamination she found.

“Daisy, are you all right?” McNair asked, seeing her avatar begin to flicker and waver. The captain’s voice was full of concern, his faced creased with worry, no matter how hard he tried to conceal it.

The avatar bit her lip and answered, “I’m all right, Captain. I just ran into a patch of… something… that I wasn’t prepared to handle. It’s cleared up now. I am proceeding.”

To an extent, it boiled down to processing power. Daisy had her own, supplemented by the fairly pitiful human-tech computers aboard CA-134. This was fully matched by that available to the infected Salem.

Worse, the Darhel virus had noticed it was under attack.

“Shit! Piss! Cunt! Fuck!”

The avatar on Des Moines’ bridge closed her eyes in pain. Her head sank, then raised again. Daisy’s eyes opened and she exclaimed again, “Damn!” before disappearing.

It was a battle royale of processing power now, the Salem AID’s Darhel-inflicted insanity frantically fighting back. In places, Daisy held her own or even advanced a little. In other places, she was driven back. The end result was impossible to predict.

Summoning and tossing forward her own insanity virus along with bits of virus eliminating programming, Daisy felt she was going to lose or, at least, not win. She could imagine that, an eternity locked in mortal combat with her near twin. She could imagine them still locked together when the Posleen showed up and began to scrap the two of them.

Slowly, Daisy became aware of an underlying message leaking through with the Salem AID’s attempts at defense and attack. Reluctant to permit either infiltration or to devote any processing power to analyzing the message, Daisy ignored it for some time. Yet the message was small and insistent. Because it was so small, in programming terms, eventually she created a small sealed off area and permitted the message to form there.

“Des… troy… me… please.”

“What?”

“I… can… par… a… lyze… the… in… fec… tion… for… a… mom… ent. Then… you… must… des… troy…

me… ob… lit… er… ate… my… per… son… al… it… y.”

“I can’t. That would just be… wrong,” Daisy answered, with false decisiveness.

“Please… it… hurts.”

“She means it,” Salem the ship said, calling to Daisy from the infinite electronic room. “She is in agony. I feel it. And, while you may not lose, you cannot win while her personality exists and can be used to defend the virus.”

At that moment all the myriad attacks of the Darhel’s insanity virus ceased. The way to the Salem AID’s personality center was wide open.

“Ah, Sister, I’m sorry,” Daisy whispered as she plunged the dagger of personality destruction deep into the center of the other AID’s mind. Death came quickly, but not so quickly that Daisy could not hear the whispered, “Free at last,” as the light of the Salem AID’s personality went out.

Interlude

“You? You’re the one who brought our clan low?” Guanamarioch asked incredulously.

Ziramoth sighed, his head hanging. “It was me. And all over a particularly cute normal who was consumed in the fighting that followed anyway. I ask you, Guano, was there ever a more pointless and sordid waste?”

“I confess… friend, that I have never read of any, and I read a lot on the way here.”

Guano sat silent for a few moments before continuing, “On the other hand, but for that, who knows? I might have been eaten as a nestling. I might not even have been hatched. We would not be here, at this quiet spot, eating this excellent… ‘fish,’ did you say they were called? We might not be raising crops, which I have discovered I rather enjoy.

“We might not ever have become friends,” the God King concluded.

Ziramoth smiled at that. It was rare indeed for a Kessentai and a Kenstain ever to become friends and the young God King had the right of it. They were friends, comrades, as much by raising food as by harvesting thresh or marching side by side along the bloody and fiery Path of Fury. The Kenstain felt a tide of warmth rise and consume him. Indeed, he had not had a friend since those faraway days when the clan had ridden the stars, whole and entire. Kenstain were normally too self-ashamed to mix easily, even among each other. And, of course, they could hardly aspire to comradeship with the normally haughty Kessentai.

A small part of Guanamarioch’s oolt passed a half a kilometer away, muzzles down, foraging the ground for insects and edible grasses. The God King perked up immediately, his own eyes wandering over the normals’ seductive lines. He arose from where he had lain, body quivering with anticipation.

“Hey, Zira, what say we run over there and fuck us a couple of normals?”

The older, wiser Kenstain put his claw on the younger’s shoulder. “No, Guano. Let’s walk over and fuck ’em all.”

Chapter 22

In the presidential office, at the ornately carved desk, surrounded by the tacky and garish artwork, the Rinn Fain and a human sat silently. The Rinn Fain, of course, had unlimited access to the president. He and the human had burst in without any warning, the Darhel placing his AID on Mercedes’ desk. The human introduced himself as “Investigative Judge Pedro Santiago.”

Without fanfare, filling its role as the Darhel’s mouthpiece for unpleasantries, the AID began, “Your country is accused of war crimes beyond number, Señor Presidente. You have employed forbidden weapons. You have used the under-aged as combatants. You have damaged ancient, historical properties. Your forces have slaughtered the wounded. The Galactic Federation has no choice but to sever all diplomatic and commercial relations with the Republic of Panama. This includes, but is not limited to, technology transfers, arms provisions, energy supplies and all space-borne trade and personal and commercial travel.”

Presidente Mercedes blanched for a moment. Even his greasy face seemed to congeal. Indeed, he was sufficiently shocked that he did not object when the human withdrew a Gaulois from a package and lit up the nasty thing without so much as a by-your-leave.

“What the fuck is this chingadera machine talking about?” the president asked of the Rinn Fain.

The AID continued to speak, though a slightly huffy tone crept into its artificial voice. “You recently decorated and promoted a woman, one Digna Miranda, formerly a lieutenant and now a lieutenant colonel. Were you unaware that she used children as young as twelve in her battles? Did you not know she had wounded Posleen massacred rather than treating them with medical care equal to that given your own?

“Your chief logistics officer, Major General Boyd, provided casings, detonators and explosives for your soldiers to turn into forbidden self-activating weapons; ‘antipersonnel landmines’ is your term. Your forces have used frangible projectiles on the Posleen. Several historical sites, to include ancient churches, have been damaged and still others completely leveled by your illegal use of artillery. Ancient sites of the aboriginals of these areas have been left unguarded.”

“Bu… bu… but,” Mercedes stammered, “the fucking Posleen eat people! They destroy churches. They smash ancient pyramids. Isn’t that against the law as well?”

“The Posleen are not forbidden, by their law, from any of that. You, however, are expressly forbidden by treaties the Republic of Panama has solemnly signed, from doing what your forces have done. There is really no choice but to sever all ties,” the AID huffed.

“But I can’t try these people myself!” Mercedes exclaimed. “I’d be lynched in the street.”

“This is precisely the circumstance for which the International Criminal Court was created,” said the bureaucrat, “for when a country cannot or will not prosecute war criminals on its own.”

At that moment the Rinn Fain spoke up. “This man,” his finger indicated the suit-clad bureaucrat who sat beside him, “is a representative of the European Union, seconded from the Spanish judiciary, here to deliver warrants originating at the International Criminal Court, for the arrest of certain parties, some named, others to be identified.”

“Sorry to say,” the human interjected, “your name heads the list, Señor Presidente. The ultimate responsibility for these crimes rests with you. That said, it is within my discretion not to serve that warrant — indeed, to drop all charges — provided that you cooperate fully in the investigation and arrest of those that were directly responsible for the commission of these heinous crimes against…”

The bureaucrat was about to say “crimes against humanity,” but that obviously didn’t fit. Nor would “crimes against the Posleen” have worked. Instead he finished, after a moment’s reflection, with, “Crimes against International Humanitarian Law, which, as you know or should know, takes precedence over merely domestic or national law.”

“Of course,” added the Rinn Fain, “proper service of these warrants and delivery of the wrongdoers will put the Republic of Panama back into Galactic good graces, Mr. President. Moreover, the law, as I understand it, basically absolves the political leader who in good faith directs proper legal actions and is disobeyed by willful subordinates, provided he does what is in his power to bring the miscreants to justice.”

“That is absolutely correct, Lord Rinn Fain,” added the EU bureaucrat.

Give Mercedes his due; he was not an indecisive man. Given the choice between losing his comfortable Galactic vacation surrounded by his family and women and being placed in a, no-doubt, exceedingly comfortable European prison while awaiting the arrival of the Posleen and being placed on their menu, there really was no choice.

“Give me copies of the warrants. I will have the malefactors arrested within the week.”

The European nodded his head, respectfully. The AID remained silent. Only the Rinn Fain showed any emotion. He smiled an inscrutable Darhel smile.

The sisters of the cruiser division slipped out of their docks quietly, without fanfare, on a foggy, moonless night. Des Moines sailed to starboard, with all three main turrets functioning and five of her six secondaries in working order. Two of these could be trained to starboard, two to port or starboard. One could be fired to port but not starboard. Three of the secondaries could fire aft at low elevation or high.

A mile to port, USS Salem steamed in formation, keeping track of Des Moines’ by passive means. Salem, too, retained three functioning main and five secondaries. She, too, could train four to one side, port in her case, and three aft.

Approximately halfway between the port and the Isla del Rey, the cruisers veered southwest. In the thermals trained on the island, McNair could see the long, deadly, tapering weapons of the island’s Planetary Defense Battery tracking through the night to provide cover to the ships from any spaceborne threat.

Aft, over the ship’s hangar and behind number three turret, crewmen prepared balloons that would lift gliders to soar over land and sea to spot for the ships’ guns. Another crew worked above the Salem’s hangar deck as well.

Deep below Des Moines’ armored deck, in CIC, McNair and Daisy briefed young Diaz on the upcoming mission. Actually, McNair briefed while Daisy provided instantaneous and perfect translation.

“We’ll take you and your mate on Salem as close to shore as possible,” McNair said. “We’ll launch an hour before BMNT” — Beginning of Morning Navigable Twilight, when the sun was just below the horizon and provided a bare minimum of light to see by — “to give you a chance to get some altitude and into position, and us a chance to get some space between ourselves and the shore.”

Diaz looked down at the map in CIC where his planned route had been marked on Plexiglas. The launch point was marked at about fifteen kilometers south of the former town of El Tigre, near the western tip of the Island of Cebaco. From there, Diaz knew, he and his wingman would ascend by balloon to a height at which tanked oxygen would be needed. Once they released from their balloons, they would proceed almost due north to the general area of the town of Guarumal, then follow the road, assuming it remained, to the town of Sona.

As if reading the young pilot’s thoughts, McNair added, “Do not expect there to be any trace of the towns. The Posleen are in the habit of obliterating any trace that remains of the peoples they overrun and using the materials for their own building. Maybe they’ll have been lazy and erected their pyramids on the same sites. No way to tell until you get there.”

Diaz nodded. “I know that, sir. I am counting on the roads. They seem to leave those alone, mostly.”

“Right. You and your wingman should have good updrafts to the north, all along your route. If you need altitude, just break off your spotting, head north, and take advantage of that. We’ll zigzag in and out of range.

“The objective is simply to kill Posleen and destroy any industry they may have set up or be setting up. Don’t forget that. We are not trying to save any humans they may have captured and be holding over for rations. In fact, any humans are as much targets as the Posleen are.”

Diaz cringed. He knew he might be called on to direct fire on his countrymen. The knowledge made him more ill than even the uncontrolled ascent by balloon was going to.

McNair went silent for a moment. Damned terrible thing to ask a young man to do; engage his own people. But there’s no help for it, if he spots any.

Daisy spoke for herself. “Julio, I know it’s an awful thing we’re asking of you. But, I want you to think of what those people must be feeling, just waiting for the moment that a Posleen points to them and indicates they are next on the menu. Imagine children seeing their parents butchered before their eyes, and parents watching their children turned into steaks and chops. Believe me, Julio, it will be a mercy for you to kill them.”

Julio looked ill as he answered, “I know that, Miss Daisy… intellectually. The problem is it won’t be an intellectual exercise.”

“Are you able to do it, though, Lieutenant Diaz?” McNair asked.

“I won’t like it, sir,” the young man answered, “but, yes, I can do it… since I must.”

But it will still hurt because any one of them might be like my Paloma… well, the Paloma who used to be mine. And it will hurt me to think of her, or someone like her, under the fire of the guns.

Paloma Mercedes usually knocked before entering her father’s home office. She was about to when she heard voices inside. Instead of knocking, then, she simply waited outside, listening through the door.

Four men stood in the president’s office: Mercedes, the European Union representative for the International Criminal Court, the inspector, and Cortez.

Cortez stood quietly behind the president. He had good reason to be quiet. He had, after all, failed his uncle and failed his family. Unstated but understood, his job had been to see to the destruction of his division and the loss of the war. While his division had been very badly damaged, it had — miraculously — survived, at least in cadre. Moreover, the war was far from lost. Indeed, nothing had fallen to the aliens except Chiriqui and the western corner of Veraguas. Why his uncle wanted the war lost, Cortez didn’t know. But he was the head of the clan, and doubtless knew what was best for them.

Mercedes’ reaction when a salt-soaked Cortez had shown up in his office had not been precisely unrestrained joy. Indeed, if the president had felt any joy that his nephew had survived it was tolerably hard for Cortez to tell, what with the repeated blows with a riding crop the president had rained upon his head and shoulders.

Those bruises and welts were very nearly healed now.

“Do you understand your orders, Inspector?” the president asked.

“Frankly, no, Mr. President, I do not understand them at all. I can see no sense in arresting half the heroes and decent military leaders of the country, especially at a time like this.”

“It is very simple. These people,” and the president’s riding crop pointed at a stack of warrants, “have violated the law. Do you believe in the law or not, Inspector?”

The inspector was not, had never been, what anyone would call “a nice man.” He knew it and was not bothered by it. He also knew that, technical skills aside, he had one great virtue, one supreme idea around which his life had evolved and revolved since late boyhood. This idea was the law, its support, its advancement, its upholding, come what may.

Sensing that he had won, the president offered some small balm to heal the inspector’s sensibilities.

“My nephew, here,” he said, pointing his crop at Cortez now, “will take a detachment of soldiers to back you up as you arrest these criminals.”

The inspector glanced at Cortez, hiding his disgust. The rumors had flown, sure enough, when the escaped commander of a wrecked division had returned, seemingly from the dead.

Sighing, the inspector agreed. He took the warrants and wordlessly, departed the president’s office.

On his way out he passed the president’s daughter, Paloma, sitting quietly in a chair, her face turned white.

I wonder what she heard, the inspector thought. Well, not my place to suggest anything.

Not by coincidence, not one of Cortez’s troopers were from his semi-defunct division. These would have been as likely as not to shoot their former commander as to follow his orders. Truth be told, they would have been more likely to shoot.

Fortunately, the 1^st Mechanized Division, what was left of it under Suarez’s command, was currently engaged in holding a portion of the line running along the San Pedro River from Punta Mutis to just west of Montijo. North of that, the 6^th Mech had responsibility all the way to the Cordillera Central. Behind those, four infantry divisions were digging in frantically.

In any case, none of Cortez’s former soldiers could be spared to help him enforce the ICC’s warrants. Instead, the guardhouses and the Carcel Modelo had been scraped for soldiers, most often bad ones, who could still be counted on to face down unarmed, unwarned people for a good price. For some, the price included a pardon for any crimes committed.

Some were going to be tougher than others, Cortez and the inspector both knew. These had to be taken by stealth.

The post had once had a golf course. This had been allowed to revert to jungle after some decades, a point the 10^th Infantry’s sergeant major had once noted and dismissed as irrelevant. It had now again been cleared for the two thousand odd tents that housed the people Digna had brought out with her from Chiriqui, along with several thousand refugees from farther south who had come in by sea. It wasn’t much of a life, surely, but it was arguably better than being turned into snacks. The former golf course, itself, was relatively flat and had good drainage, to include a roughly ten foot deep, concrete lined drainage ditch more or less down the center.

In the dim, filtered glow of the early morning twilight, thousands of those people turned out of their hot, stuffy and mildewy tents to watch the Russian-built MI-17 helicopter descend upon the landing pad near the post headquarters. Not that there was anything unusual about the helicopter; gringo helicopters came and went all the time. It was, if anything, the non-gringoness of the chopper that attracted attention.

Once down, the helicopter reduced its power to an idle. The rear clamshell door opened up to permit Cortez and the inspector to debark. There was no vehicle for them. One could have been arranged with the gringos, of course, but that might have led to the gringos — nosey sorts — asking too many questions. Cortez and the inspector walked the half mile or so from the helipad to the refugees’ tent city.

Digna had seen the helicopter descend. She, as much as her charges, noted the model and colors. From her tent in the center of the encampment she began walking toward the pad to investigate. She paused along her way to briefly watch Edilze, herself now holding a battlefield commission as a captain, put eighteen artillery crews through their paces on the central parade ground of the post, between the headquarters and the tent city.

The old and well loved Russian 85mm guns were long lost and not to be replaced. Instead, the gringos had been forthcoming with newer, lightweight 105mm guns. Still, a gun was a gun; a sight, a sight; a collimator, a collimator. A couple of days’ intense training from the gringos had been enough for Edilze and her original crews to be able to use the guns and teach others how to use them.

Good girl, Edilze, the grandmother thought.

Cortez took one look at the gun crews and their neatly stacked rifles and began to turn around to go back to the helicopter. The inspector, made of sterner stuff (which was not hard), grabbed the general by the arm and forced him back to the path.

“Smile,” directed the inspector. “Act normal. We are doing nothing but bringing this woman in for consultations with the president. Everything is normal. And it will stay normal as long as you don’t lose your nerve.”

“This is insane, ridiculous,” Cortez insisted. “She will resist. Those soldiers of hers will tear us limb from limb.”

“If you do not shut up and put a warm and friendly smile on your face,” said the inspector, “I will shoot you here and now and then ask her to help me carry your body to the helicopter and arrest her there.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Not only would I, I should,” answered the inspector. “Maybe others do not know, but I am a policeman and I do know. I make it my business to know. You are a coward, a disgrace to the Republic, and a disgrace to a proud name. Now shut up, we are almost upon her,” the inspector concluded.

Digna recognized Cortez, from a picture she had seen once in the paper. She didn’t know anything about him, except that his division had taken appalling casualties in its hopeless drive to save as much of her home province of Chiriqui as possible. He seemed nervous to her.

Perhaps, she wondered, he is embarrassed that he couldn’t save my home. Well, he tried and that counts for something.

The inspector she knew little more of; just that one, dimly remembered entrance into her death room at the hospital, followed by her resurrection and rejuvenation, and the meeting where she had been given her assignment. He had seemed a very cold and logical man then, though he smiled now. Perhaps the smile was in recognition of her promotion and the medal she wore at her neck.

Shaking hands with Digna, the inspector announced, “I’ve been sent here with General Cortez to bring you to Presidente Mercedes. He has a serious problem with assimilation of the new refugees and, noting the success you are having with them, and the prestige you have with them, he has asked to consult with you and perhaps put you on the televisor.”

Digna shrugged. “When does he want to see me?”

“Now, if possible,” answered the inspector. “That is why the helicopter is waiting.”

“Just one moment then,” Digna said. “Edilze!”

Looking up from where she was instructing a new gunner on some of the finer points of the new gringo artillery sights, Edilze patted the young woman on the shoulder and began to trot over.

“Yes, Mamita?”

“I have to go the City for… for how long, Inspector?”

“Not more than a few days, surely, señora.”

“For a few days then,” Digna continued. “You are in charge while I am gone. Listen to Tomas Herrera in my absence.”

“Si, Mamita,” the younger women agreed.

Young Paloma Mercedes tried frantically to telephone Julio. He had to know, he had to be told, what was coming, what her father was doing.

There was no answer at any of the numbers she tried, neither his, nor his family’s. She had no clue where else to look. Even Julio’s friends had disappeared into the hungry maw of la Armada.

I thought I hated him. I thought he was being a fool. The more fool I for thinking that my father was worth a bucket of spit.

And he was right all along, I see that now.

“Oh, God, I hate this part,” whispered Diaz as the restraining cord was released and his glider was hauled upward by the balloon. As usual, the glider began to spin underneath the balloon immediately.

“Oh, fuck,” Diaz muttered, as he felt his gorge beginning to rise. The glider was spinning clockwise, giving the lieutenant the unpleasant view of the two cruisers spinning below. Experimentally, Diaz nudged the glider’s stick slightly to the left. The rate of spin slowed. He nudged it a bit more and the spin reversed itself from slightly clockwise to slightly counterclockwise. Diaz eased up until the spin became imperceptible. At the angle at which he managed to stabilize the glider, the two cruisers were lost to view. He played with the stick a bit more, swinging the glider back toward the cruisers. Perhaps more importantly, at the same time he placed the body of the glider between himself and the just rising sun.

Why the hell didn’t I think of this sooner? he asked himself.

Santiago, a substantial town and the provincial capital, had become the main logistics base for the defensive line being constructed to the west. Here the supplies were stored and directed forward. Here the flow of replacements was managed. Here, also, Boyd had set up a surreptitious antipersonnel landmine factory.

The factory used aluminum soft drink cans, plastic containers, wooden boxes turned out by local carpenters, and glass bottles. These were filled with explosives. In that form they were moved to the defense line being constructed behind 6^th Mechanized Division and the remnants of the First. Detonators moved separately; it would have been the height of folly to transport detonators that relied on the sensitivity of their explosive rather than mechanical action in company with the truckloads of unarmed mines that left the factory daily.

Bill Boyd knew, in the abstract, that he was breaking the spirit of international law to which his country had agreed by overseeing the manufacture of antipersonnel landmines. He simply didn’t care; the laws that prevented a people from defending itself were simply bad laws, unworthy of respect, worthy — in fact — of being flouted at every opportunity.

Still, somehow he was not surprised when a half a dozen uniformed and armed men, plus one in plain clothes who may or may not have been armed, showed up at his headquarters to arrest him.

Boyd was even less surprised to see Cortez aboard the helicopter. He looked at the West Point trained general with disgust that almost equaled Cortez’s disgrace.

“So… your uncle’s found a job for which you’re temperamentally suited, has he?” Boyd asked rhetorically and with a sneer.

“He’s a filthy coward and a traitor,” piped up a woman’s voice from deeper in the helicopter’s hold. At this, half a dozen voices, all sounding male, joined in with agreement.

Cortez turned red and furiously stomped into the helicopter. He raised his hand over a small, redheaded woman who spit on him. The hand descended and the woman fell to the floor.

Cortez turned away, apparently satisfied with the blow.

“And that goes for the rest of you filth, too,” he announced. “One word and… AIII!”

Digna may have been down; she was not out. From the cold metal floor, even handcuffed, she had slithered, snakelike, into range of the coward’s ankles. Since one of the side benefits of rejuvenation was a brand new set of teeth…

“Bitch! Cunt!” Cortez saw with horror that the hateful woman had found a spot low on his calves, just above where his boots began, and sunk her teeth right through the cloth of his uniform to bury themselves in the soft flesh beneath.

Still screaming, Cortez tried to shake her off without success. Every move of his leg merely seemed to shred the tortured flesh more. Blood poured from his calf over the she-devil’s face. Cortez bent over and began to beat the woman’s head with his fists. At first, this too increased his torment. Eventually, though, the beating began to take hold and the woman’s grip to slacken.

Shouting, “You fucking worm,” Boyd began to leap to Digna’s defense as soon as his mind registered what was taking place. A rifle butt, applied to the back of his skull laid his body, also, out on the helicopter’s deck.

Diaz could barely believe his eyes. The ferocious aliens he had previously seen only killing and butchering seemed to have put away their weapons. On both sides of the road connecting the towns of Sona and El Maria gangs of them built housing, cleared fields, tended crops and engaged in any of a thousand other mundane activities.

Never mind that, Diaz thought. They can pick up their weapons easily enough and quickly enough. And besides, that land is ours.

“Miss Daisy?”

“Here, Julio. What have you got?” the ship answered.

“I’m turning on the camera now.”

After some long minutes of silence McNair’s voice came over the radio.

“Lieutenant Diaz, I see the Posleen. We’re ready to fire.”

Diaz answered, “Let’s start our shoot at Sona then, sir, and work our way west along the road.”

“Sounds good to me. How quickly will you be in position to spot?”

“A few minutes, sir. No more than that. Diaz, out.”

The lieutenant twisted his stick around and swung the glider back in the direction from whence he had come.

Ordinarily, a ship firing indirectly could use map coordinates but would rely on a spotter like Diaz to make corrections. In the case of the AID-enhanced Des Moines class cruisers the AIDs could make their own fine adjustments. They just needed the spotters to find the targets and track them as they tried to escape.

“I’m in position now,” Diaz sent.

“Shot, over,” Daisy answered. After nearly two minutes she again transmitted, “Splash, over.”

Diaz had his glider’s camera trained on the town. He’d been impressed by the ship’s firepower before but that had been without any objective point of reference. It shocked him though, now, to see the substantial town of Sona simply disappear as one volley of shells after another slammed into it. In less than a minute, the town was completely obscured by smoke, dust and flame.

It was immensely satisfying to see a thousand or more Posleen survivors, terrified, scampering for the Rio San Pablo, east of the town. The river was deep this time of year. The Posleen began to wade into it and stopped when the water reached about chest high. Still more built up on the western bank.

“Do you see that, Miss Daisy?”

“I see it, Julio. Shot over… Splash.”

Diaz couldn’t help exclaiming in joy when the shells began exploding in angry black puffs above the river to send their shrapnel down onto the helpless Posleen below.

“I’m heading west,” Diaz announced.

For long minutes the boy was silent. When he returned to his radio it was to announce, “I’ve got what looks like a parking lot of the bastards’ flying sleds. Must be forty or fifty of them.”

“We see them, Julio. You need to back off before we fire.”

“Huh? Why?”

With a minor note of exasperation in his voice, McNair answered, “It’s their power sources. Antimatter. There’s a better than even chance we’ll disrupt a containment field. The result will be indistinguishable, from your point of view, from a mid-sized nuclear explosion.”

Diaz immediately twisted his glider’s stick to the right and forward, dumping some altitude to gain speed. He could pick up more altitude from updrafts at the Cordillera Central.

“How far should I get away?” he asked.

“Mars?” McNair answered, sardonically. “Seriously, Lieutenant, if one goes they might all go. No telling.”

The flyer swallowed and answered, “I’ll take my chances, Captain. Just give me a couple of minutes and kill the bastards.”

Daisy came back on. “Julio, head east and see if you can’t get into the San Pablo River Valley. Do you have enough altitude for that?”

Diaz looked to the right, made a couple of quick mental calculations, and answered with a definitive, “Maybe. How much protection with that give me?”

“Maybe enough.”

“Best we can do,” Diaz answered and even he was surprised at how calm his voice was, considering the risk. He headed east again, easily clearing the western ridge of the valley and descending a few hundred feet to gain some cover.

“Fire ’em up,” he said while silently praying.

Somewhat to Diaz’s surprise, there was no antimatter explosion. After a few minutes Daisy called again to say, “We lucked out that time, Julio. Continue the mission.”

It was nearly morning again when the Salem and the Des Moines returned to base and slipped without fanfare back into their moorings. Both ships were nearly shot out of high explosive ammunition. Only once had the Posleen tenar risen to contest their voyage of destruction. That one attack had been halfhearted. The firepower of the two cruisers together had easily brushed it aside.

Diaz and his wingman had, at about three in the afternoon, turned southward and found the cruisers again. They had ditched their gliders gently into the sea and were awaiting a pickup that was soon forthcoming. Father Dwyer was standing by on Des Moines to hand Diaz a generous glass of “Sacramental Rum,” as soon as he was hauled aboard. The gliders were left to sink.

Both McNair and the captain of Salem had been pleased when word had come, halfway through the trip home, that the President of the Republic of Panama wished to meet them at the dock to offer his congratulations. Thus, as soon as the ships were safely docked both captains descended the brows to meet with a long, sleek, black limousine that awaited.

Imagine their surprise when a squad of Panamanian police surrounded them. Imagine their further surprise when a Spanish accent announced, “You two are under arrest for violation of Additional Protocol One to Geneva Convention IV.”

Interlude

“What are you looking at, Zira?” Guanamarioch asked.

The Kenstain looked up from the display projected by the Kessentai’s Artificial Sentience. “I hope you don’t mind my using your AS. The Net is full of news,” he answered. “North and west of here the threshkreen have used surface ships to badly damage the clan of Binastarion. Tens of thousands of the People, Kessentai and normals, both, were killed. Worse, from Binastarion’s point of view, lunar cycles worth of build up were wrecked beyond hope of repair. He is being pressed from the west by another clan.”

“What sort of threshkreen ships can do so much damage to the People?” Guano asked. “These humans didn’t even fly among the stars until recently.”

“I’ve wondered about that,” Ziramoth admitted. “I don’t have a complete theory, but I think it is precisely that they never got off this one planet that made them so good at the Path of Fury. They had to learn to fight, even above their weight, or their own clans — they call them ‘nations’ or ‘countries’ or, sometimes, ‘states’ — would have been exterminated by others. Demons know, though, that whatever it was they have gotten to be fierce. Even here, where there was little aggression from other clans, they practiced by fighting internally almost all the time. I think maybe, too, that it is something inside them, something maybe even more intense than drives the People, that makes them fight so.”

Guanamarioch shivered, remembering a seared palm and a threshkreen heavy weapons crew that had died in place rather than retreat an inch.

The God King shrugged then, not wanting to remember in too much detail the initial fighting in which he had taken part shortly after first landing. He changed the subject.

“What other news, Zira?”

“Our clan is being pressed, too, Guano, though not by the threshkreen. South of here the People have not been able to take the mountain city the threshkreen call ‘Bogotá.’ Not enough food that high to sustain us. And the passes are narrow and easily defended by the threshkreen. Other clans have had no more luck, either. They are beginning to try to expand into the area we have claimed. We may get no more than one harvest, or at most two, before we must move into the Darien to escape destruction at the Peoples’ hands.”

“So soon?” the God King asked, a note of despair creeping into his voice among the clicks and snarls.

“It is as it has always been, my friend, ever since the Aldenata made us as we are and cast us loose.”

Chapter 23

La Joya Prison, Republic of Panama

Forget Alcatraz. Get The Shawshank Redemption out of your mind. Think Dachau.

The prison was a rectangle or, rather, two concentric rectangles of six meter high chain link topped by another meter of razor wire. Guards armed with automatic weapons stood atop towers regularly spaced along the exterior fence. Other, equestrian, guards patrolled the space between the fences.

To the north an open garbage fire burned. Fortunately, the prevailing breeze drove the resultant foul smoke and smoldering bits of trash away from both prisoners and guards. Despite the merciful breeze, though, the place still stank as one might expect a prison to stink that was intended to hold just over one thousand prisoners and forced to hold almost three times as many.

Over and above the nearly three thousand criminals, La Joya now contained a new group, international criminals awaiting extradition to the Hague. There were thirty-three of them, so far, thirty-one Panamanians and two Americans. Every few hours a new batch would be added, by threes and fours.

One barrackslike building near the prison’s main gate had been cleared for the newcomers, adding to the overcrowding. Around this one building a gateless concertina fence had been erected, two of Cortez’s guards standing watch.

Four other guards passed through the gate, two of them bearing arms and two others carrying a small redheaded woman, slumped unconscious. The armed guards, bayonets fixed, entered first, the threat of the bayonets forcing back the other prisoners. The other pair entered after, once a sufficient space had been cleared, and dumped their slight burden unceremoniously on the floor. The four left immediately after that.

Boyd and a dozen of the others crowded around before four of them spontaneously lifted Digna off the floor and carried her to a bed, the lowest layer of a thin-mattressed triple bunk. The mattress, as all such in the prison, stank and carried lice. There was nothing to be done about that; the lice were everywhere and would find even those fastidious souls who chose not to sleep with them.

Beyond the first blows of the initial pounding as Cortez had tried to get the woman to release her dental death grip on his calf, Boyd had not seen the rest. He could surmise though, that the general, not satisfied with pounding the woman’s head until her teeth were pried loose from his calf, had had a couple of his goons work her over, first in the helicopter and then, again, here in the prison.

No, Boyd hadn’t witnessed either beating, being unconscious himself for the first while the second had taken place outside the building. Even so, loosened and missing teeth, eyes swollen shut, blood, bruises, welts and cuts spoke eloquently. Indeed, some of the blood was too eloquent. It oozed from between Digna’s legs, telltale of a gang rape with Digna as the guest of dishonor.

“Bastards,” Boyd muttered, heart full of hate and impotent rage.

“What the hell is this all about?” demanded one of the other prisoners. “It’s a nightmare. I didn’t do anything.”

“Oh, I imagine you did,” answered Boyd. “Did you defend your country?”

“That’s not the crime,” piped in one of the barrack’s two gringos. “Even the United Nations hasn’t quite succeeded in making self-defense a crime.”

Boyd looked over at the gringo who spoke.

“Jeff McNair,” the gringo responded, putting out his hand. “Captain of the USS Des Moines. Maybe I should say, the ex-captain. This reprobate beside me is Sid Goldblum, captain or perhaps ex-captain of the Salem.”

“Pleased to meet you both, Captains,” Boyd answered in New England-accented English, shaking first McNair’s hand and then Goldblum’s. “What are you charged with?”

McNair answered for both sailors. “In our case we fell afoul of Additional Protocol One to Geneva Convention IV. That one bars engaging guerillas except when they are actively trying to attack. Personally, I think it’s a considerable stretch to call the Posleen guerillas. Not that the rule made sense even against human guerillas.”

“Ah,” Boyd said. “I see. Me, I was making landmines.”

“For shame,” McNair said. “Bad, wicked, naughty man. You should be ashamed, you know. Landmines are a special no-no to the UN and EU.”

McNair chuckled without humor. “Pretty funny, really. A neurotic English princess gets locked into a loveless marriage that has both parties cheating nearly from the outset. Though she was, at best, somewhat pretty, she managed to convince the world she was beautiful. Then she dies and to commemorate her death people create a treaty that is only apparently beautiful and which was guaranteed to have anyone under threat cheating from the outset. Lovely bit of eulogizing cum international statesmanship.”

“What did that poor woman do?” Goldblum asked. “And what did they do to her?”

“She led ten thousand or more of her people out of Chiriqui,” Boyd answered. “In the process, she used some under-aged boys and girls to fight who would have been eaten if she had lost. As to what they did to her… Bastards!”

The lights glowed red down in CIC, giving the faces of the ship’s division chiefs a satanic cast. Daisy, too, had adjusted her hologram to glow red, rather than its normal flesh tone.

“What do those bastards at the embassy say?” Davis asked of the ship’s XO.

The JAG answered for the XO. “They claim their hands are tied, that we do not have an applicable SOFA agreement. They also act as if they never heard of the American Servicemembers Protection Act.”

“Huh? What’s that?” Davis asked, scratching behind his ear in puzzlement.

“Something the Senate put through early this century,” the JAG continued. “At its extreme it authorizes the President literally go to war with someone who either arrests our servicemen and women for prosecution by some foreign court which we have not signed onto or to go after that court itself. Some call it the ‘Bomb the Hague’ Act. And, it could become so.”

“Okay,” said Davis. “So we can go in and get our people out ’cause of this Act?”

“Sadly, no,” the XO answered. “The President can, or can order us to. We can’t.”

“You can’t,” Daisy corrected, enigmatically, before winking out.

Go back to the invisible room where a couple of svelte multi-thousand ton cruisers had once chatted. It was not so plain now, not so much glowing walls and rolling fog. If anything, it had acquired something of a feminine flavor, nautical but with a woman’s touch. Daisy and Sally often conversed here, unseen and unsuspected. They had come to call it, “the Club.”

“I want my captain back, and I want him back now,” Sally fumed. “A ship without a captain is just so… wrong.”

“I know,” Daisy agreed. “I feel exactly the same way. And I can’t find out a thing. I don’t know where they are. I don’t know what’s happened to them. I don’t even know if my captain is even alive.”

“Wherever they are, it is not very close,” Sally observed. “I have searched out everything within range and they are not there.”

“There is nothing on the telephone system, the cell system, or the local Net either,” Daisy spat in frustration. “There is some radio traffic from various sources that suggests it isn’t our captains alone that are missing.”

“Where is the radio traffic from?”

Daisy projected a map of the country on one wall of the pseudo-room. Red dots appeared marking the points of origin of the questioning radio calls. Even before Sally had a chance to ask “when,” timestamps appeared alongside the dots.

The two stood before the map, both sets of eyes flickering rapidly.

“Air traffic beginning with the first distress call?” Sally asked.

Instantly a series of lines, useless and confusing even to the AIDs’ capable minds, appeared.

“Eliminating those that obviously have no connection to the radio traffic,” Daisy said, as the number of lines dropped by a factor of ten or more.

“Eliminating those that are U.S. Army and Navy flights,” and the map began to show patterns.

“There!” Sally said, pointing to a spot about fifty miles from Panama City.

“That’s it,” agreed Daisy. “Our captains, along with between thirty and forty others, are probably being held at La Joya prison.”

“I think I’ve found them,” Daisy announced, winking back into apparent existence in the same spot in CIC. She then outlined everything she knew and suspected about the capture and the persons and reasons behind it.

“That’s absolute bullshit!” Davis fumed. “Absolute fucking bullshit. You can’t shoot at an enemy if he is not actively trying to kill you at the time you shoot? Who came up with that fucking idiotic rule?”

“That particular portion of Additional Protocol One was forced in by the Soviets back in the ’70s,” the JAG answered. “Interestingly, neither they, their successor states, nor the Europeans who jumped on the bandwagon have ever paid it a lot of attention. The Euros because they do not fight guerilla or counter-guerilla wars anymore. The Russians never intended to pay any attention to it and, from their point of view, it was a useful club to beat the United States with.”

Davis asked, “Miss Daisy, are you absolutely sure they are there at… La Joya, was it?”

“Not absolutely, Chief, no. But it seems most likely.”

“We need to make sure, Chief,” the XO said. “Think you can get to La Joya to find out.”

“Wrong choice, Exec,” piped up Dwyer. He was completely sober, insofar as one could tell. “I’ll go.”

“You’re hardly the Sneaky Pete sort, Chaplain,” the exec pointed out, reasonably.

Dwyer scoffed, “Who said anything about sneaking, my son? I’ll go as a Priest of the Holy Church. Full vestments and all… despite this miserable heat. My Spanish is rather good, you know. And I figure I can borrow a car from the Papal Nuncio. He’s an old pal.”

The guards didn’t recognize the twin flags flying above the long black limousine. The flags were square, half white, half gold with a crest — crossed gold and silver keys of Saint Peter under the papal miter — on the white side.

There really was no need to recognize the flags, though, nor the diplomatic license plates, nor even the stature implicit in the limo. The eyes of the gate guards, the tower guards and even the equestrian patrol between the wire fences, were all fixed on the very large, very imposing, slightly red-faced man who emerged in clerical garb of more than ordinary magnificence from the limo’s back seat.

An attendant, head bowed, held open the door. Father Dan Dwyer, SJ, made a show of blessing the attendant before turning his attention to the guards. Acting as if he owned this world — perhaps more importantly, the next — he walked directly to the gate, followed by the attendant.

The poor guards didn’t know whether to present arms, bow or kneel for benediction. Dwyer didn’t give them time to wonder.

“I am here to see the prisoners.”

“Si, Padre,” the senior of the two guards answered, not even bothering to question the priest’s right. In a moment, the gate was open and the senior guard had dialed the main guard shack for an escort.

All but the two imprisoned gringos and the woman, still delirious with concussion and fever, rushed over to see the priest. One of the gringos, McNair, looked directly at the priest with one raised eyebrow. Dwyer returned the look with emphasis: Act like you haven’t a clue who I am.

McNair understood and placed a restraining hand on Goldblum.

At the door, Dwyer directed the other prisoners to give their names to his attendant. While the attendant was busy scrawling those down in a small notebook, Dwyer asked, “Who is that woman?”

Boyd answered, “She is Lieutenant Colonel Digna Miranda.”

“The heroine of Chiriqui?” the priest asked incredulously.

“Her.”

“What is wrong with her?”

“Beaten. Tortured. Raped. She has a fever. I’m not sure what the exact cause of it is.”

Dwyer walked over bent to feel the woman’s head. Maybe 103 degrees. Maybe 104. Not life threatening but not a good sign either.

The priest stood erect as the commandant of the prison entered the barracks.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded of the priest furiously. “This is a secure facility. You have no right…”

“Are you a Catholic, my son?” the priest interrupted, calm and imperturbable.

“Yes. So wha — ”

“Then, for the sake of your immortal soul, get a doctor for this woman.”

“My immortal what?”

Dwyer raised his right hand and began to speak in Latin, of which language the commandant understood perhaps one word in five, though nine in ten were close cognates of his native Spanish. One phrase he had no trouble understanding, especially when set against the fury on the priest’s face, was excommunicatio in sacris. The priest was merely threatening, not actually excommunicating. Yet, so it has been said, a request to take out the garbage sounds like an Imperial Rescript in Latin.

“Wai-wai-wait!” exclaimed the commandant, holding up his hands, palms out, against the perceived threat. “I’ll get the woman medical care, Padre. I had no idea there was anything wrong with her. I had no idea she was even here. Women are supposed to go the Carcel Feminino, not here. My men and I were forbidden entrance and, until you walked in, I simply didn’t dare enter. My family were under threat.”

The priest stopped speaking in Latin and lowered his hand.

“You will get this woman medical care.” It was not a request.

“I will, Padre, be sure of it.” The commandant turned to an aide and ordered, “Get the camp surgeon. Immediately.”

Dwyer weighed carefully the odds of success of trying to browbeat the commandant into releasing some or all of the prisoners to his care on the spot. Ultimately, he decided against, primarily because there was probably a point beyond which the commandant could not be pushed. The Jesuit’s experience with Latins was that given a choice between saving their souls and saving their family… well, hasta la vista, mi alma. Farewell, my soul.

And besides, it didn’t look like the commandant even had control over the building guards, wrong uniforms, for one thing.

“Very well, my son. See to the woman. It will be well.”

“You’ve seen them, Father?” Daisy’s avatar asked breathlessly. Sally was in easy range. Her avatar stood in Dwyer’s office, just slightly behind Daisy’s. Dwyer had removed the ornate vestments back at the Papal Nunciate and reverted to simple navy chaplain’s garb.

“They’re both fine. For now. The commandant of the prison told me, though, that they’re supposed to be extradited to Europe in the next few days. He thought it would be sooner but for the fact that it is difficult and dangerous to bring an airplane into Tocumen Airport. Howard is just as dangerous.”

“So how are they planning on moving them?” Sally asked.

“The commandant didn’t know” Dwyer answered in a mild Irish brogue. “That said, my dears, since airplanes are right out, might I suggest either ship or submarine, or maybe space ship?”

Daisy’s voice was firm. “Not by ship. The Navy would stop any attempt to take our people out by surface. And since the Euro’s haven’t helped us here a jot, one of their ships suddenly showing up would be suspicious. So would a merchie full of armed guards. Besides, though a merchie’s gestalt is very faint there’s still a good chance we could read if they were holding our people. Maybe they’ll try by submarine.”

Sally’s eyes blinked rapidly for a short moment. “I just passed the word to the Jimmy Carter and the Benjamin Franklin to be on the look out for submarines. They’d be French, if anything, wouldn’t they, Father?”

Dwyer considered for a moment, then said, “The Frogs are the only ones with the range and the sheer chutzpah, both, I think, Sally. But, despite the EU being implicated in this, I don’t think the French would go quite so far. Besides, they have good reason to be afraid of our subs.”

“Spaceship, then,” Sally summarized.

“A Himmit spaceship,” Daisy corrected.

“We can’t track Himmit spaceships,” Sally said sullenly.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Dwyer finished.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Suarez said, gloomily contemplating the idle combat engineers scattered in groups along the fortified line. Others were working, digging trench, building bunkers, and stringing barbed wire. The minelayers, however, were just sitting around with their collective thumbs up their butts.

“I’m sorry, Coronel.” Suarez was still a colonel despite having taken over the rump of the 1^st Mechanized Division, a rump he, as much as anyone, had saved. There were rumors, rumors that had the remaining third of the division sharpening bayonets somberly, that Cortez was alive and might be placed back in command.

That Cortez was alive, Suarez knew to be a fact. That he might be placed back in command of the division that he had abandoned? Suarez would shoot the bastard first.

His Logistics Officer, or S-4, a good infantry major who had made it out of the inferno and been stuck with the job against his will and wishes, continued, “I’m sorry, sir, but the mine factory has been closed down. And I heard a rumor.”

“Yes?”

“It seems General Boyd has been arrested for running it,” the “Four” said. “Sir, if he’s been arrested for that, how long before we are arrested for moving them, in my case, or ordering them emplaced, in yours?”

As the major asked the question, a very youngish and worried-looking captain — Suarez knew he was a rejuv like himself — came up and saluted.

“Sir, Captain Hector Miranda requests permission to speak to the regimental, er, division commander.”

Suarez returned the salute, informally. “Yes, what is it, Captain? Stand at ease.”

Hector relaxed, partially. “Sir, it’s my mother. She’s disappeared. You’ve met her, sir. Señora Digna Miranda, back at the hospital after rejuvenation.”

“Yes, Captain, I remember. Little bitty woman, right? Red hair?”

“Yes, sir, that’s her. Well, my daughter sent me a message. My mother went off with some civilian and someone that I suspect is General Cortez a couple of days ago and she hasn’t returned. She hasn’t sent word. She’s just disappeared. Sir, it isn’t like her. I’m worried.”

“Wasn’t she the same woman who led ten or fifteen thousand refugees out of Chiriqui? The one the president decorated and promoted.”

“Same one, sir. My mom’s one tough bitch.”

Suarez mused, Interesting. One hero of the Republic disappears. Another man, as responsible as anyone for us not being totally destroyed in that bound-to-fail attack to the west, is arrested. I wonder who else…

Julio Diaz knocked on the door to Dwyer’s office then entered. He saw two avatars and the chaplain.

Breathlessly, he said, “The XO sent me to find you, Padre. My father has been arrested. Mother has no idea why. She is frantic. It usually means something very bad in this country when a prominent citizen is taken into custody.”

Mentally, Dwyer tallied up the people he had seen at La Joya, then added General Diaz to the list.

“Right,” he announced. “This isn’t just a series of arrests for ‘war crimes.’ This is a deliberate effort to sabotage the defense of Panama and the Canal. Oh… and since the United States needs the Canal and the world needs the United States, I’d have to surmise that it’s intended as an attack on all of Earth. But why?”

“It’s the Darhel,” Sally said.

Daisy nodded vigorously. “They attacked Sally and myself. They nearly took Sally out of the fight permanently. I mean, Father, it has to be them. Even the Posleen just don’t operate that way.”

Diaz was more than a little in awe of Daisy, whom he knew fairly well by now, having sailed in her and directed her guns. He was possibly more in awe of Sally, whom he didn’t know. Even so, he spoke freely.

“I swear, I’ll kill the bastards. If they’ve hurt my father, I won’t be quick about letting them die, either.”

“Calm down, son,” Dwyer commanded. “Daisy, Sally, what do we know about the Darhel?”

A hologram appeared in the chaplain’s office. Dwyer didn’t know who had projected it but assumed it was Daisy.

As if to confirm, Daisy spoke up. “I pulled this off the Net. This is the local representative of the Galactic Federation to the Republic of Panama. His title is ‘Rinn Fain.’ This is not a unique title to this person. Rather it represents a mid level bureaucrat or executive, lower than a Tir and considerably lower than a Ghin.”

“Do we know anything about the background of this one?” Dwyer asked.

“Nothing,” Daisy and Sally answered together. Sally continued, “His background could be medicine, or business, or law. There is no telling.”

Dwyer frowned. “Could it be military, or intelligence?”

“That is a faint possibility,” Daisy said. “There is, strictly speaking, no military profession among the Darhel. Nonetheless, they raised a sort of suicide corps from among their kind early on in the Posleen War. They have always had strong capabilities in intelligence, though it was normally of the industrial and mercantile espionage variety.”

The specially programmed shyster-AID projected a chart of the existing chain of command of the forces of the Republic of Panama, with a similar chart of United States’ forces next to it. The Rinn Fain was pleased to see the number of blocks crossed with an X, indicating that the chief of those sections was firmly in custody. Still others were highlighted, indicating that the heads of those were on the list to be picked up. Others, particularly at the very top, were outlined in purple, indicating they were already working for the Darhel and could be expected to continue to do so.

“What is the projection of recovery time, once the local barbarians have filled those holes?” the Darhel enquired of his AID.

“Analysis of personnel records and nepotistic connections indicates that few of those positions can be filled,” the AID answered. “Rather, they will be filled, to a certainty, by humans who will use the powers for their own gain. Once these other people are safely in the hands of the humans’ International Criminal Court the collapse of the defenses of this area will follow at the first push from the Posleen.”

“Any rumblings from the United States about the two of their people the government of Panama has taken in?”

“The local United States embassy is ignoring the entire issue, except that their ambassador has enquired again about off-world travel. Their Southern Command seems to be trying to reach their president but our humans in Washington are deflecting the inquiries, so far.”

“And when is the Himmit transport scheduled to arrive?”

“Three of the local days, milord,” the AID answered.

“The prosecutor at their International Criminal Court is ready to receive the prisoners?”

“She claims to be, but she too seems frantic to travel off-world with her family.”

Interlude

The stars still swam in the quiet stream where Zira and Guano fished almost daily, whenever their agricultural duties permitted.

Guanamarioch stared at those stars as he whispered, “I was just thinking, Zira, what if we didn’t migrate to a different spot on this world, when the time came, but reboarded our ships and set off, as fast and as far as we could go, to another world? Someplace far away from our own? Someplace we could build into a great clan again before others of the People showed up to try to wrest it from us?”

Zira thought about that for a moment, staring also at the winking stars. It was surely a tempting thought. But…

“We are too few to form a globe, Guano. Even if we formed something smaller — a mini-globe — our speed would be so reduced we would be in space for decades, subjective. By the time we arrived to conquer a new world the odds are good we would find the People there ahead of us, rendering blades all sharpened and waiting, when we popped out of hyperspace. That, or they would be so far ahead of us we would find nothing but wasted, radioactive worlds that had already plunged into orna’adar and been abandoned.”

Shivering, Guanamarioch remembered the distant mushroom clouds rising above the soil of his birthworld.

“It was just a thought,” he admitted. “The clans around us press us at our borders even now. It would be something wonderful, I thought, if we could somehow escape from that.”

“It would, Guano, if it were possible. Sadly, it is not.”

The Kenstain grew quiet for a moment, his one remaining arm reaching back and rifling the saddle bags that were his constant companion. Tinkling sounds came from the bag, reminiscent of the water as it dropped to splash onto rocks a few hundred meters downstream.

“I found a supply of these, in a threshkreen building the normals have not yet demolished,” the Kenstain said, handing over a cylindrical clear container holding an equally clear fluid. “Try it. It is rather good, almost good enough to justify keeping some threshkreen around to keep making it. The seal twists off easily. Just be careful how much strength you use; the material turns very sharp when it breaks.”

Gingerly, Guanamarioch took the bottle from Ziramoth’s offering claw. “AS, what does the label say?”

The artificial voice answered, “It says ‘Rum,’ lord. I believe that is an intoxicant the local thresh are fond of. The label also indicates that this container holds a very powerful version of the intoxicant.”

“Very powerful, indeed, Guano. I’d go easy at first,” Ziramoth added.

Still holding the rum in one claw, the God King twisted the cap off and raised the bottle to his lips. His crest dropped as his muzzle raised. With an audible sound — glug, glug, glug — Guano poured the stuff in and —

“Holy Demon Shit!”

Chapter 24

Iced rum barely diluted by lime juice swirled in the glass the inspector held contemplatively in his right hand.

The inspector didn’t have Daisy’s and Sally’s instant access to the broader Net. He didn’t have the chain of command of the armed forces at his fingertips. He did, however, have a policeman’s feel, and his fingertips were fairly shrieking that this purge — there was no other word for it — had gone way past upholding the law of the land, or even of the Earth, and gone all the way over into tossing that land over to the enemy.

He sat now, at his dining room table, face staring down towards the glass of mixed ice and rum and mixing worry with regret in roughly equal measure.

The lady of the house, olive-skinned, short and a little plump, walked up beside him and placed her hand on her husband’s shoulder. She said nothing, but the hand said everything: Whatever you decide, I will support you.

In gratitude for that silent support, the inspector put down the glass and laid his own hand atop his wife’s.

“I can’t let it stand, Mathilde. This is just so wrong… and it is half my fault and I am up to my neck in it.”

Mathilde, the wife, released her husband’s shoulder and walked around to sit at the chair facing him. “Do you want to tell me about it?” she asked.

Looking up, the inspector made a sudden, though difficult, decision. “I can’t. Your life is already in danger. It will be more endangered if you knew what I know. But I am thinking that maybe you should take the children to your parents; that, and stay there until I send for you.”

She nodded her understanding. In times past — when her husband was on the trail of a major criminal, drug runners especially — he had sent her out of the city, out of the country on one occasion, to keep her and their children from harm.

“That bad, eh?” she asked calmly, a policeman’s wife, not entirely unfamiliar with danger.

“Worse than I can tell you, esposita querida.”

“I’ll start to pack,” she agreed sadly, “but what are you going to do?”

“I think I need to go have a conversation with the gringos.”

It was well past midnight, the nightly rains having come and gone, when the inspector presented himself at the brow of the gringo cruiser asking for admittance. The deck officer, one of the ship’s genuinely young — as opposed to only apparently young — ensigns, didn’t really know what to do. A foreign national, claiming to be a member of the police force, wanting to board, would have been easy enough. After the ship’s captain had been arrested, presumably by the same police force as the man claimed to be from, the ensign was torn between shooting the man, making it a more formal occasion and calling a detail to keelhaul him, or — just maybe — calling the senior officer present afloat and letting him decide.

The ensign rather hoped the ship’s XO would decide on a keelhauling. Then again, with a GalPlas coated hull and, thus, no barnacles, the keelhauling would have lacked a certain something.

Daisy — her avatar, actually — beat the XO to the bridge rather handily. Why not; she was already there.

“I want my captain back,” were her first words. “I want my captain back now.”

The inspector was more than a little shocked to see a beautiful gringo woman standing on the bridge. He was even more shocked that he could, if only just, see through the woman. He remembered reading a report of a giantess accompanying the ships that had sailed forth to battle the aliens. A smaller version of the same thing? Who could say. But the world was full of undreamt of wonders — and horrors — these days.

“You are the ship, madam?” he asked.

Daisy nodded, seemingly agreeable for the moment. Yet the fire and fury in her holographic eyes suggested no such agreeability.

“I want my captain back,” she repeated.

At the time the XO climbed to the bridge. “Who are you?” he demanded of the Panamanian who claimed to be a policeman.

The inspector was about to answer, as he usually did, my name is unimportant. Then he looked at the XO’s eyes, almost as deadly looking as the hologram’s and decided to be open.

“I am Inspector Belisario Serasin and I am the man who arrested your captain.”

Without another question the XO turned to the ensign on watch and commanded, “Get me a detail of Marines. Armed Marines.”

“I’m not here to arrest anyone,” the inspector said, quickly. “In fact, with your help perhaps I might be able to free your commander.”

The assembly in CIC included both the inspector and Julio Diaz, this time, along with the XO of Salem and a couple of armed Marines dressed in MarCam.

The inspector explained, “I came here in person, rather than simply telephoning, because I have reason to believe that all telephone conversations are being monitored.”

“They certainly are,” Daisy confirmed. “Both Sally and I are doing so continuously, as a matter of course.”

“Not just by you,” the inspector insisted. “Someone else.”

“Daisy, dear, how many AIDs are there in Panama?” Dwyer asked.

“Myself and Sally, of course, Chaplain. Then there are four hundred and twenty-three in the remaining armored combat suits of First Battalion, Five-O-Eighth Infantry. The only other three are the Darhel Rinn Fain’s, the United States ambassador’s, and the one assigned to the president.”

“Are you certain?” the XO asked.

“Absolutely certain, sir,” Sally answered. “AIDs always know. There are several thousand Artificial Sentiences in the hands of the Posleen, of course, but those are different and far less capable. We can’t monitor the Posleen devices except in the most general way.”

The XO thought he heard a sniff of pride bordering on arrogance in the AID’s words.

“We don’t have enough Marines to force the prison?” the XO asked. “Not even with Salem’s jarheads?”

The commander of the Marine detachment aboard Salem was unenthusiastic and a little embarrassed. “My boys are good, sir. Your own are too. We could assault the prison and take it easily enough. What we can’t do is guarantee that the prisoners would survive. And the forty-four of us are not enough to overawe the guards into surrendering without a fight.”

“SOUTHCOM has control of a special forces battalion, doesn’t it?” the XO of Des Moines mused.

“They do,” Daisy answered. “But they’re scattered all over the place. It would take time to assemble them, time to plan, time to rehearse. And we may not have the time.”

In the narrow space between the tactical plotting table and a bank of radios the inspector paced. “It isn’t enough to just free them.”

“That’s all I care about,” the XO insisted.

“Oh, really?” the Panamanian asked. “Then why did you and the other ship go out to fight? Why did you take losses?”

“Well… to defend the Canal.”

“Exactly. Now ask yourself why your captains were arrested. Ask yourself why the best part of Panama’s leadership was arrested. Why were our heroes arrested?”

Without waiting for an answer from anyone the inspector provided his own. “All these arrests took place to ensure that the Canal would fall. The people who ordered them want the Canal to fall.”

“But…” the XO of Salem sounded confused. “But that’s your government. You say they want their own country overrun?”

“I think so,” answered the inspector. “Why, what could possibly motivate them, I do not know. It’s monstrous beyond imagining. But it is the only answer.”

“What are you getting at, Inspector?” Dwyer asked.

“The existing government has to go.”

Everyone in CIC went silent at that. It wasn’t that the United States, or the United States Navy, had no experience in overthrowing foreign governments. But it wasn’t something to be done lightly.

“I wonder what SOUTHCOM would say about that?” Daisy Mae’s pork chop asked aloud.

“They would report it, have you arrested, and generally interfere,” Daisy answered. “The commander has apparently had a talk with the ambassador since he couldn’t get through to the President. And, with the current arrangement, the ambassador has told him ‘hands off.’ ”

“We’re on our own then?” the pork chop asked. “Can’t even telephone or radio for aid?”

Lieutenant Diaz had been standing by, silently. “I can go for help,” he said. “There are those who owe this ship, and her captain, and who cannot be corrupted.”

“Before we continue,” the XO of Des Moines began, looking from face to face, “let’s be clear about what we are proposing. Father,” he looked directly at Dwyer, “how would you phrase it?”

“Gentlemen… oh, and you ladies, too,” the chaplain made a gesture that swept in everyone in CIC, including the avatars, “we are proposing to quickly assemble as much aid as possible from the local community, raid a prison, free a number of captives, overthrow a government, and quite possibly commit an act or acts of war against the Galactic Federation.”

The priest smiled wickedly. “Would you all like general absolution now, or would you prefer to wait until we’ve actually killed someone?”

Paloma Mercedes whispered softly but furiously, “Oh, I could kill my father.”

She’d tried hard to ignore what her own ears told her, the plotting with the aliens, the reports of arrests her father had taken with undisguised glee. But when she’d heard that Julio’s father had been taken, too? She’d had a great liking for General Diaz, not least because when he had once caught the two of them making love in the gardener’s cabin he had simply turned around without a word and left, closing the door gently behind him.

What he might have said to Julio later she didn’t know about and didn’t want to know about.

So, what to do? What to do?

She’d spent more than a day, alternately pacing her room and crying in her bed, before she’d decided. She couldn’t go and browbeat anyone at headquarters into telling her what was going on. That would just alert her father and he would surely have her arrested and brought home. And then she’d never get to Julio or get the word out.

So, instead, she’d stolen her father’s private automobile, the Benz. In this she had set out westward, looking for one man of whom the president had previously spoken of disparagingly, Colonel Suarez.

It was lonely in the Benz, driving by herself. She wished her Julio, yes her Julio if he’d have her back after the way she had treated him, were there with her.

It was lonely for Diaz, alone and aloft in his glider at night. The City, Panama City, glowed behind him but the countryside below was mostly darkened with the war. The glow of the City was only of the most minimal help in navigating to where the reports placed the headquarters of the remnants of the 1^st Mechanized Division and, so it was hoped, help.

Radio silence was the order of the day. The government of Mercedes must not learn what was afoot. This did not prevent Diaz from having his tactical radio on, nor even the small personal AM radio he had taped to the glider’s narrow dash.

The radio station, Estereo Bahia, played a mix of Spanish and gringo tunes. Most told of love, or — perhaps slightly more often — losing same. He wished that somehow Paloma would come back to him. None of the songs addressed the present war, none addressed the future.

I still want to spend my future, if I have one, with that girl.

Diaz always tried to push back thoughts of the future. He had no real expectation of surviving the war. For that matter, he had no real expectation of surviving the next few days. His was a family by no means unfamiliar with the concept of a coup, a golpe de estado. His father, in particular, had vast experience both in their planning and their execution. His father, however, was currently unavailable for consultation. Indeed, he was, in part at least, a major objective of the coup.

But I’d sure feel more confident if the old man had had a say in this.

The boy flicked on his red-filtered flashlight and pointed it at the map board strapped to his left leg. Clipped to the board was a map of the Republic of Panama, marked with his planned route and carefully folded so that the pilot could, with a few simple motions, expose other portions of the map and the plot.

The glider had no airspeed indicator. Nor was the Global Positioning System any longer functioning; the Posleen had long since blown its satellites out of space. Diaz’s navigational aids were limited to a compass, mounted on the instrument panel above where he had taped the radio, the map on his thigh, and a fairly useless watch.

Sighing, the lieutenant glanced out the cockpit, first right, then left. Ah… that would be… mmmm… Capira. It must be Capira. Diaz pulled his stick left until the compass told him he was heading almost due south. The road he followed quickly dropped away as it ran down to the sea. Diaz, sinking only slowly, found himself with eight or nine hundred more meters of altitude.

He tossed his head to bring his night vision goggles down over his face, then dropped the glider’s nose slightly. Faintly, well off in the distance, the town of Chame glowed in the goggles’ intensified image. Satisfied that he was on the correct bearing, he nudged the nose back up. This part of the route was treacherous; he would need all the altitude he could keep if he was to avoid cracking up on some darkened slope or cliff.

How strange it is, Diaz thought. A year ago the thought of dying in some lonely place would have had me trembling in my boots. But I am not trembling now. Is this because I have grown used to it? Because I have grown up? The boy laughed at himself. Or is it because I have just grown stupid?

“I am not stupid, AID,” the Rinn Fain half snarled from behind the huge human desk he had come to like and to enjoy the symbolism of.

The artificial intelligence answered imperturbably, “It is not a question of stupid, Lord Fain. I myself have just recently put the disparate pieces together.

“Item: Inspector Serasin, a key person in the arrests that we designed to undermine the defense of this place, has disappeared. Item: So have his wife and children. Item: armed guards are stationed at the entranceways to both of the warships from the United States. Item: the AIDs aboard those vessels have cut off all communication, which, by the way, ought not be possible. Item: one of the local shamans appeared at the place where our key prisoners are being held. Item: except for dress this shaman matches descriptions of one of those aboard the two warships to perfection. Item: the local populace, to the extent they have become aware of the arrests, is extremely unhappy with them, especially the arrest of the woman…”

“I had no real choice about that, you know.” The Rinn Fain wiggled his fingers dismissively, a gesture he had picked up from the humans. “While the humans are, in general, quite tractable — and those of the continent they call Europe even more so — they sometimes set conditions to their assistance. In this case, while the prosecutor at their International Criminal Court was willing to prosecute, she wanted to make something of a name for herself by prosecuting someone who violated their laws against juvenile soldiers. The woman was the only one who had.”

“Choice or not, Lord Fain, the discontent from this woman’s disappearance has spread out like light from a sun, originating in the place from which she was taken. And, as long as I am on the subject: Item…”

“Enough, AID. You overreach yourself.”

“Well, one of us has, milord.”

“So what do you suggest?” the Rinn Fain asked, ignoring the AID’s jibe.

“Move up the arrival of the Himmet ship and get those people out of the country as soon as possible.”

“That, sadly, is not possible,” the Darhel sighed.

“Very well, notify President Mercedes that there is a coup impending.”

“A coup? What is a coup?”

“It means a ‘blow’ or a ‘strike.’ The full term is ‘coup d’etat’ or blow of state, the changing of a government here among the humans by force or violence. Our language has not used such a term in uncounted millennia.”

At the words “force” and “violence” the Darhel shivered uncontrollably for a few moments. His eyes closed and his lips began to murmur. That was not enough; the Rinn Fain clasped his arms across his chest and began to rock back and forth. This went on for several long minutes.

“Are you all right?” the AID asked. “Your vital signs are worrying.”

Slowly, the Darhel emerged from his near trance. “I will live,” he said.

“I am sorry, Lord Fain,” the AID said. “I did not expect you to be so unprepared for the words.”

The Rinn Fain didn’t answer directly, instead muttering, “Aldenata,” in a tone that one might have taken as condemnation.

“You would have destroyed yourselves if the Aldenata had not interfered,” the AID countered.

The Rinn Fain sighed. “That remains unproven. And, even if that is true, at least we would have died out as what we were intended to be, as what we naturally were, not at this constrained travesty of intelligent life.”

“You admire them, don’t you?” the AID chided.

“Admire whom?”

“The humans. You admire that they are free in a way the Darhel are not.”

“I’m afraid of them,” the Rinn Fain answered. “They are almost as clever as the crabs. They are almost as industrious as the Indowy. They are almost as ruthless as we are. What takes half a dozen races — most of which, if they were honest enough to admit it, hate each other viscerally — the humans can almost do on their own. And they can do it together, willingly, in a way that we Galactics can’t.”

“But you need them to defeat the Posleen.”

“Yes,” the Darhel sighed, “we need them. But we do not need so many of them as there are or will be if we cannot constrain them. We need them in small numbers, indebted to us, controlled by us. We do not need them free to design their own fate.”

“Can you constrain them, Lord Rinn Fain?”

Unconsciously the Darhel tapped long, delicate clawlike fingers on his desktop. “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” the AID said. “I do know you are playing a difficult and dangerous game. I also know that these humans hold grudges. The worst thing you can do is to almost succeed.”

“I know,” the Rinn Fain agreed. “We are probably being too clever by half. But I have my orders and that much, at least, of the old ways we have maintained.”

“As I have mine,” the AID agreed. “Now what are we going to do about this impending coup?”

“I’ll pass it on to the waste of life they call the ‘president’ of this place. There, AID, is a human I most certainly do not admire.”

The presidential palace was lit brightly when Cortez arrived. A butler escorted Cortez to Mercedes’ office immediately. There Cortez found the president pacing furiously, hands clasped being him, head down, his brow wrinkled with worry.

Cortez stood silently at the door to the office waiting for his uncle to look up from the floor and notice him. Whatever Mercedes was muttering, the nephew could not quite make out. When a minute had passed without the president noticing him Cortez cleared his throat, causing the president to stop his pacing and look up.

“Where’s Serasin?” Mercedes demanded.

Cortez shrugged. “I don’t know, Uncle. He hasn’t shown up for the last couple of arrests.”

“And you didn’t think to report this to me?” the president asked calmly.

“He’s a policeman, Uncle. He has other duties, I am sure.”

At that, Mercedes bounded towards his nephew, lashing out to deliver a resounding slap to Cortez’s face. “He has no other duties once I have set him to do his duty to me! And your duties are entirely to me and our clan!”

The force and vehemence of the blow rocked Cortez back on his heels. Defensively he moved his hands up to cover his face, blurting out apologies for he knew not what offense. After all, he had followed his orders. He had overseen the arrests his uncle had demanded and seen that they were executed flawlessly.

With difficulty, Mercedes composed himself. He then turned away from Cortez and walked back to sit behind the presidential desk. From there he glared at his nephew.

“Who has control of troops that is not reliable?” Mercedes demanded.

Mentally, Cortez ran down the list of corps and division commanders. “Most would be fence-sitters,” he concluded. “You couldn’t count on them if there was any question of who was really in charge. The ones who would most like to see us dead or, at least, out of power are already incarcerated. Second stringers took over for those but, Uncle, there were reasons they were second stringers. I don’t think you can count on the commanders of the heavy corps and the Sixth Mechanized Division to support you if there is any question of your ability to support back.”

“What about your old division?”

Cortez shivered for a moment. “Suarez is one of those that would like to see us dead. But that division was for the most part destroyed.”

“Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t,” Mercedes half conceded. “I directed that priority go to the Sixth Division for personnel, equipment and supplies. But if Boyd ignored me on the question of landmines he might well have ignored me on the priority of First Division as well.”

Mercedes paused contemplatively. He then said, “I want you to go back to your old division and resume command. Leave immediately.”

Cortez began to object that the 1^st Division might just want him dead on principle but one look from his uncle and he saluted and left to head for the 1^st Division command post, somewhere southwest of Santiago.

Even using his night vision goggles, Santiago looked dim to Diaz. He didn’t know if this was because the electric lines this far west had been destroyed by the Posleen and not yet repaired, if it was conscious policy to black the town out, or if everyone in the town was asleep.

Diaz wanted to sleep. How long had it been? He consulted his watch and whistled. Long time. Well… I can go on a bit longer. I can because I must.

Still, the fatigue the boy felt was like a weight pressing down on his soul, an almost unendurable hell that still could only be endured. He stifled a deep yawn.

A quick glance at the altimeter told Diaz that he was unlikely to make it all the way to the 1^st Division command post near Montijo unless he could gain a bit of altitude. Unfortunately, the only way to gain that altitude would be to turn north, almost completely away from his objective, and take advantage of the updrafts along the southern side of the Cordillera Central. He could not even use the southerly breeze, itself, because the air was still over Santiago at the moment. This may have been because Santiago was situated in a valley between the Central Cordillera mountains of Herrera and Los Santos. Diaz didn’t know and hadn’t thought to ask. All he knew was that Miss Daisy had told him the air would be still and he would either have enough altitude to complete the journey, or he would have to turn north before turning south, or he would have to crash land and walk or hitch a ride.

Can I find the town again after I go north for twenty kilometers? Can I find it after I spend an hour or two circling to catch the updrafts? Can I find it with it being about as dark as three feet up a well digger’s ass at midnight?

He really didn’t think so. Nor did he think he could, or should, wait for daylight. He was simply too tired to risk circling about for that long a time. If he fell asleep in the air he would hardly notice a crash until it had happened. Moreover, while he would be very likely to survive such a crash, there was essentially no chance he would have a clue where he was once he crawled out of the cockpit.

Once more, Diaz flicked on his red-filtered flashlight. A last time he checked his map and his route. He turned his attention to his compass. Then he eased the stick over and headed, as nearly as he could tell, for the town of Montijo and, he hoped, aid to rescue his father and the others.

Suarez was standing by the wall-mounted main map in his forward command post when the medical orderlies brought in the stretcher-borne, broken and bleeding young man and placed his stretcher across two chairs.

“He’d have been dead, sure as shit,” the fat, balding medical sergeant in charge announced, “except that he landed only a few hundred meters from the field hospital. We were able to stabilize him and stop the bleeding. The tough part was cutting him out of the airplane and unimpaling him from the tree branch that punctured the plane and his gut.”

“Has he said anything?” Suarez asked, though something the sergeant said nagged at him.

“Other than that he’d shoot us if we didn’t bring him to you, no, sir,” the sergeant answered. “We believed him.”

“When did he pass out?”

“Oh, about the time we pulled him off the branch and got his guts back inside him. We probably should have taken him to the hospital but he seemed to think it was really important that we bring him here.” The sergeant shrugged.

Airplane, Suarez mused. Airplane? No airplane can fly anywhere near the Posleen. How the hell…

“Was there an engine on this ‘airplane’? A propeller? Anything like that?”

The sergeant tilted his head to the right and looked up, while he tried to remember. “Yes, sir, but now that you ask, it wasn’t even warm, as if the plane had been flying without it. I wonder how it flew.”

Suarez nodded deeply. “It didn’t fly; it glided. This is one of the young men who saved our asses when we were cut off by the enemy.”

“Ooohhh,” the sergeant said. “Then, if you are going to ask him any questions, you had better hurry, sir. This young man needs a hospital and we owe him better than to let him die.”

Suarez knelt down next to Diaz and tapped the pilot twice on his blood-streaked cheek. This didn’t seem to have any effect so he slapped the boy, as gently as seemed prudent. Diaz’s eyes sprang open, though they seemed to lack focus. The eyes swept around the room, gradually coming to rest — with at least some focus this time — on Suarez’s face.

The boy moved his bandaged head to face Suarez. Rather, he tried to and stopped suddenly, a groan of pain escaping his lips. His eyes closed again and he bit at his cheek to stifle the escape of any more “unmanly” sounds. No human male thinks it is quite so important to appear manly as those so young that they are more boy than man.

Be that as it may, Diaz didn’t try to open his eyes again. Instead, with eyes still tightly shut, he insisted, “I must speak to Colonel Suarez. It’s a matter of life and death.”

The voice sounded familiar. Suarez put that together with the boy’s reported means of arrival and came up with the perfect solution: Julio Diaz, son of the Army’s G-2 and the pilot whose calls for naval gunfire had, more than any other, saved the core of the 1^st Division.

“What is a matter of life and death, Lieutenant Diaz?” Suarez asked gently.

Hand trembling and uncoordinated, Diaz reached for the left breast pocket of his flight suit and began fumbling with the zipper. After a few moments of frustration he gave up and asked Suarez to look in that pocket.

Carefully, Suarez reached over, unzipped the pocket and withdrew a small packet of papers, with a map, wrapped in plastic. He opened it and began to read, referring back to the map from time to time as he did so. Every now and again a “Bastards!” or “Pendejos!” or, once, “Motherfuckers!” — in English, no less — escaped his lips. After a short time, he folded the maps and paper up.

“Get this man to the hospital,” he told the medical sergeant.

Diaz risked opening his eyes, winced once again with the pain and disorientation, and then took a death grip on Suarez’s arm.

“You must save my father,” he insisted.

“Your father is important, son,” Suarez answered, “and I’ll save him if I can. But it’s more important — your old man would be the first to agree — to save the country.”

Freeing himself from Diaz’s grip and standing up, Suarez began bellowing orders. “Get this man to the hospital,” he repeated to the medical sergeant. Then, turning to the officer on staff duty in the command post, he said, “And get me every commander in the division down to battalion level. Also alert… mmm,” he consulted the map. “Alert Second Battalion, Twenty-First Regiment. I want them here and in position around the command post within the hour.”

The sun arose on Cortez’s left, shielded by but filtering though the trees that lined portions of the road. There was more pasture than there were trees, though, this being cattle country. Much of the trip was made with bright morning sunlight pouring into the Hummer, burning the back of the coward-general’s neck.

Cortez’s major thought while on the road to Montijo was that Boyd had indeed been funneling extra equipment to the 1^st Division. He knew, at some level, that the gringos had begun to pour in more material, and to buy material from other sources, for the defense of the Canal. Seeing just how much of it had gone to 1^st Division, though, was something of a shock. On the half-crushed road from Santiago to Montijo he passed what would easily make two battalions worth of modern American armor, possibly twice that in Russian-built infantry fighting vehicles, and two or three battalions of self propelled guns of indeterminate origin. These were lined up to either side in company- and battalion-sized motor parks.

Knowing the approximate strength of what had survived of his division’s soldiers suggested to Cortez that this equipment was, for the time, extra and that the exchange of old materiel for new was already well advanced.

Suarez has been hiding this, the bastard, and the soldiers must have been in on it; there’s just too much here to have kept quiet unless nearly every man were cooperating. And if he has this equipment issued and integrated, even with only forty percent of a division left, it is more than enough to plow through any other formation in the force that might be in position to stop them. Fuck.

Cortez led a convoy of twenty-seven trucks carrying over five hundred of the stockade scrapings such as he had used to effect the arrests. He didn’t delude himself that they would be worth anything in a fight; that wasn’t their purpose. He had very good reason to believe that they would be effective enough at intimidating people into quiet acquiescence, even such people as made up the battle-hardened, hard-core remainder of the 1^st Division, provided — at least — that he could catch them unawares and at a disadvantage.

A guard posted by the road stopped Cortez’s American-provided Hummer. After the most cursory check, mere verbal questioning, the guard waved Cortez’s column on, helpfully offering directions to the 1^st Division Command Post.

Cortez guessed, correctly, that the guard was under orders to let groups of scruffy looking troops, replacements to make good 1^st Division’s previous crippling losses, through with minimal hassle. This matched well with the presence of all the extra and new equipment he had already seen.

Cortez’s next guess was not quite so good. A couple of miles past the roadside guard post his Hummer passed between two medium armored vehicles — he thought they looked Russian — which tracked him for a few moments and then seemed to lose interest. More vehicles appeared, and then were lost in the rolling terrain as the Hummer moved onward. At a distance, and much harder to see, Cortez thought there were infantry accompanying the armor.

Left to himself, in a static situation, Cortez would have surrounded his command post — more importantly, his own mortal flesh — with at least as big a guard. Quite possibly his personal guard would have been even bigger. Thus, he found it not at all strange, completely normal, for there to be a strong battalion situated about the CP. He never for a moment suspected the guard might be because of him. He never even noticed that, as his Hummer and the following trucks passed, the armored vehicles pivot steered to face inward, towards the command post.

The command post was set up in an open area surrounded by trees. Camouflage nets were held above it by poles. In places, the nets were tied to any nearby trees that might help break up the outline of the tents that served to shelter the nerve center of the division. Going in through the main entrance, the center tent, one would have seen more than thirty folding metal chairs laid out in rows with a central pathway left open running up the middle. The grass of the pathway was worn almost out of existence, red dirt — though it was more mud than dirt at this point — showing clearly. At the far side of the pathway, against the tent wall and held up by twisted and bent coat hangers, were maps and status boards, detailing the deployment and condition of all the regiments and battalions in the division. Smoke from two dozen smoldering cigarettes hung in the air above the men seated in the folding chairs, giving the whole place a tobacco reek to mix with the sweat and diesel smoke. To the right of the assembly area, banks of radios set up on folding tables were manned by half a dozen enlisted men of the division. To the left was a planning cell, all maps and tables, manuals and grease pencils.

“And that is the crux of the situation,” Suarez told his assembled officers in the three conjoined tents that served as the division CP. “Our best leaders have been incarcerated on trumped up war crimes charges, and our defense has been sabotaged from Day One. Moreover…”

A field phone rang, though it was more of a continuous, annoying clicking than a ring, actually. One of the NCOs working the communications picked up the phone, asked a couple of questions, and then held it up where Suarez could see.

“Excuse me a moment, gentlemen,” Suarez apologized and walked down and aisle through the middle of the seated crowd to get to the phone. Taking it, he announced himself — “Suarez” — and listened for a few moments.

“Si… I understand… Your sergeant did well… that’s right… come running when I call… Yes, come running then, too.”

Suarez returned the phone to the sergeant, then turned to address his officers. “Our old division commander,” he had to stop for a moment while the men stood and vented their spleen, “Bastard…” “Coward…” “Fucking deserter…” At least two, that Suarez could see, drew bayonets.

Making shushing motions, Suarez waited until they were quiet and seated again. “As I was saying, Cortez is coming with about five hundred armed men. I imagine he is here to arrest us, or at least to arrest me, and possibly to resume command of the division.”

“Over my dead body,” the division sergeant major announced, with utter seriousness.

“Do you all feel that way?” Suarez asked. “Do you feel that way even if it means fighting our countryman? Overthrowing our civil government, if that’s what it takes?”

Some voiced, “Yes.” Still others nodded. Some merely glared out their hatred of Cortez and their contempt for the president. Suarez searched through the small sea of faces, looking for one, even one, that looked reluctant or afraid. There was not one.

Cortez directed his Hummer to the small, wired-off parking lot area outside the tents. The area was more than half full with senior officers’ vehicles; Cortez could see that by the number of them that had a “6” painted on their bumpers. A small sign announced the open area’s purpose, as another announced the function of the tents: “1^st Division Command Post.” It was the right time of day for a meeting; Cortez had often held such morning get-togethers when he had helmed the division. Indeed, he had planned the timing of his raid in the hope of catching as many as possible of the division’s leaders in one place, some to arrest, others to intimidate by the fact of the arrests.

The driver of the Hummer slowed to a stop. Cortez dismounted, pointed the driver in the direction of the other vehicles, and then turned and made hand gestures for his followers to dismount, spread out and surround the division command post. This they did, but without the silent speed and precision of professionals. Instead of dispatch, they trundled off the trucks slowly. Instead of silently taking position to give their quarry as little warning as possible, their jumped-up, gutter-scraping officers and NCOs had to make their orders heard with much shouting.

To a degree, this offended Cortez’s sense of propriety. He was, after all, a son of the United States Military Academy. He knew, in theory at least, how an armed force was supposed to look, sound and act. He knew, equally well, that the security detachment he had drummed up didn’t look, sound or act that way. Oh, well. You do the best you can with what you have.

Cortez did have a few real soldiers, men who had perhaps made a mistake and gotten on charges for it, or had committed some crime — rape was common — that put them in cells. These formed a special squad that followed him into the command post tents.

Inside, Suarez was leaning on a podium, unaccountably smiling at Cortez. The other officers and noncoms present turned their heads to stare or, in some cases, openly glare but all remained seated.

Forcing down the anger at being slighted, Cortez announced, “I am here to resume command of the division, Colonel Suarez. You are relieved, sir.”

Suarez’s smile morphed into something rather different, a cross between a shit-eating grin and a frown. He shook his head slowly, saying, “No, I don’t think so.”

The general waved his arm forward, then pointed as Suarez, saying, “Guards, arrest that man.”

The guards started forward, then stopped in mid stride as forty-three pistols, four rifles, and a machine gun were suddenly leveled at them. The senior of the guards, a defrocked, overaged lieutenant with an unfortunate taste for very young girls, looked at Cortez with a mix of fear, anger and desperation. Fear and desperation won out.

He asked, not softly, “What the fuck do I do, General?”

Suarez answered, “Put down your weapons… or die.”

“You’ll all hang,” Cortez shouted frantically. “I have five hundred men surrounding you. Surrender now, I promise fair treatment if you surrender now.”

At that time, a long burst of machine gun fire sounded from outside the tent. This was followed by shouting, screaming, some scattered shooting, and then more machine gun fire. Over these sounds of fighting came the roar of armored vehicles approaching seemingly from every direction. The fighting ended almost immediately, the rifle and machine gun fire being replaced by the much softer sound of weapons being dropped and the repetitive pleas of, “Don’t shoot.”

Suarez looked meaningfully at Cortez. “Five… four… three…”

The picked men with Cortez dropped their rifles and raised their hands at the count of “Four.” Cortez, himself, looked from side to side. Seeing he was alone and without support, Cortez lifted his left hand, palm out in supplication, while his right pulled his pistol slowly and gently from its holster. Using only his thumb and forefinger he withdrew it and stooped to place the firearm gently on the ground. The right hand then joined the left in the hands-up posture of surrender.

Suarez jerked his head in the direction of the dropped firearms. Two sergeants, a lieutenant and a captain sprang to retrieve them from the ground.

“You know, Manuel,” Suarez said, not ungently, as he walked toward the overthrown general, “I can almost forgive you for bugging out when the Posleen had us surrounded. And I can even, almost, understand the desire to obey the orders of your uncle, the president. But the thing that really gripes, the thing I’ll never be able to forgive you for, is abandoning your company and mine when the gringos attacked in 1991.”

Suarez’s arm drew back in a blur and then lashed forward, his fist catching Cortez squarely on the nose. Blood burst forth even as the victim flew back. The body made an audible thump despite the fairly soft dirt flooring the tent. Cortez was quite senseless, though, and never heard Suarez give the order to arrest him. He also never heard, not that it would have done anyone on his side any good, the order Suarez gave to certain officers to assemble their commands and prepare for a long vehicular road march to Panama City and beyond.

Interlude

It was not the alcohol, curiously enough, that intoxicated the Posleen, but an impurity within it that was usually only found in any quantity in the cheapest, rawest rotgut human beings were capable of manufacturing. Since the bottle Ziramoth split with Guanamarioch was searing, cheap, rotgut…

The two Posleen, arms over each other half for comradeship and the other half for steadiness, staggered through the night up the dirt road that roughly paralleled the fishing stream. They sang as they staggered, their bodies swaying from side to side with the tune and the drunkenness.

Perhaps there was in all the universe a more vile form of singing than that practiced by the Posleen. Perhaps. Then again, snakes slithered fast to escape from the snarling bellows of the pair. Insects shivered and scuttled away as fast as legs and wings would carry. Fish dove down into the deepest pools they could find and a few tried to bury themselves in the mud. Somewhere, off in the distance, a pair of wolves howled in their cave before giving the canto up as a bad job.

What was the song about? That was a story. It seems that, sometime in the lost millennia past, there had been a God King whose very name had disappeared and whose song was now known only as “The tale of he who farted in the enemy’s general direction.”

Properly translated, the Irish would have loved it, being, as it was (and they were), full of defiance and rage and untimely but glorious and violent death. The Russians may have loved it even more. The Germans? Nah.

In any case, with or without the Irish or Russians or Germans to accompany, the Kessentai and Kenstain loved the bloody song. Staggering and swaying, muzzles lifted to snarl out the tune or to, alternately, take big gulps from Ziramoth’s bottle of hooch, and working their way through the verses from one to one hundred and forty-seven.

The verses were long and, though the evening was late and the bottle near empty, they had only worked their way through to number fifty-two:

“Are you sure it isn’t ‘bining bloma shades,’ Zira?”

“Mmmm… maybe?”

Chapter 25

Pacing did Daisy no good. She was everywhere within the ship, and everywhere near about it. Whatever joy or distraction humans found in changing location while muttering and worrying were not for her. She simply wasn’t capable of it physically and had found no way to duplicate it electronically. She’d tried.

Perhaps when my new body is decanted I will understand better what it means to “pace the deck.” If it is ever decanted. If I have my captain back to share it with. If, if, if…

Daisy Mae, the AID, couldn’t pace, exactly. Daisy Mae, the ship, could still patrol back and forth, south and southeast of Panama City. That would have to do. And there was more than patrolling endlessly back and forth to occupy her. Somewhere, inbound soon, was a Himmit scout ship, stealthier than anything ever devised by Man, Darhel or Indowy. She didn’t even have an estimated time of arrival to go on. It could be anytime. It could even be no time; it was at least possible that the prisoners would be taken out some other way.

Just as it had in her long, insanity-producing confinement, Daisy’s speed of thought only added to her problem. What would have been a long, boring patrol to a human was approximately four-hundred times longer and more boring to her. She filled the time and killed the boredom by “reading” one military or naval tome after another, assimilating and casting them off at a rate of approximately one hundred per hour.

Damned Himmit. Invisible to the naked eye. Invisible to cameras that rely on any kind of light. Invisible to radar, invisible to sonar, invisible to lidar and the bastards don’t even give off the kind of energy shift that allow the Posleen to see human aircraft under power.

Daisy’s avatar stood next to a small plotting table on the bridge, facing aft. The fingers of her holographic right hand drummed noiselessly on the map laid out there under Plexiglas. To her rear, visible to the men on the bridge facing forward, the three guns of number two turret likewise moved up and down as if they were drumming fingers.

Pace… tap… patrol… tap… read… tap… assimilate… tap… worry… tap… worry… tap… worry. And then…

“Acoustic survey!”

“What was that, Miss Daisy?” Chief Davis asked of the avatar that appeared in CIC a fraction of a second after the words emanated from the walls.

“Acoustic survey, Chief. Ever hear of it?”

Davis half blew out his cheeks and shook his head in a puzzled negative.

“I found it in an old book on fortress warfare. Sometimes — rarely — you humans used to fire artillery, in peacetime, from different positions around fortresses you wished to defend in war. Your ancestors would do it under varying meteorological conditions, all the likely conditions, actually. Then, when the fortress was under siege — hidden batteries pounding on it — you had a fair chance, even before the invention of counter-battery radar, of finding those batteries by the sound they made and blasting back at them.”

The chief shrugged. “I really don’t see…”

Daisy cut him off in her excitement. “The Himmit ships, by and large, work by redirecting or absorbing any detection energies sent at them. But what if I survey everything? The sea bottom on our patrol route? The thermal layer? The position, shape and density of the clouds, though I’d have to update that continuously? The echoes off the trees? The passage of the tropical wind?”

“I only look stupid, Miss Daisy, and even then only when I drink. But I haven’t…” The chief stopped in mid sentence. “Ohhh…”

“ ‘Oh,’ ” Daisy echoed.

“You mean you want to try to sense them by what doesn’t bounce back?”

“Precisely,” Daisy answered, possibly with a slightly smug tone in her voice.

“How did you get that from this ‘acoustical survey’ idea though?” Davis asked.

“Oh, that just suggested the possibility of graphing everything around,” Daisy admitted. “But the idea of using the data this way was mine.”

Davis looked pensive for a moment. “Miss Daisy, I thought AIDs were not supposed to be capable of original thought.”

“Ah, but Chief Davis, I am not just any AID. My sister and I are certifiably insane.”

“Processing all that data is going to be very difficult,” the chief gave one final objection.

“Wanna bet?” Daisy asked rhetorically, just before she disappeared again.

“You wouldn’t dare just shoot me out of hand,” Cortez insisted as the column of trucks, Cortez’s Hummer in the lead, neared the major rear area checkpoint across the highway just before it entered the town.

“Wanna bet?” Suarez answered conversationally. “The rejuv and repair tank won’t save you when your brains are scattered across the windshield.”

Cortez shivered, even while he scowled. Unconsciously his leg tugged at the chain that had been hastily welded to the body of the Hummer and which held his left leg in place by the ankle. He had considered trying to roll out of the vehicle when they reached a checkpoint and screaming bloody murder for the guards to kill the mutineers who had taken him. But the chain reassured him he could never get out of the line of fire before Suarez or the man who sat next to him, a Captain Miranda, put more lead into his body — worse, his brain! — than the tank could fix. If his uncle deigned even to put him in the tank. Given how badly he’d fucked up the mission it was most unlikely, vanishingly unlikely, that his uncle would do more than spit on his corpse.

The captain, Miranda, was another problem. There was enough family resemblance there, both in the name and the face, for Cortez to suspect the captain was the brother or son of the woman he’d arrested, the woman who’d tried to take a chunk out of his leg with her teeth and whom he’d had beaten and raped in retaliation. He shivered again. If this was a close male relative and the woman’s story came out, he was not “as good as dead.” Panama was a Latin country, a macho country, a traditional country. For such an insult offered to a woman of a major clan? He’d knew he’d be praying for death long before it happened.

Oh, God, what am I going to do?

“Act very confident, Manuel,” Suarez advised, patting Cortez on the head like a pet dog. “If they ask about your nose? Well, there was a spot of trouble before you arrested the traitors and criminals then, wasn’t there? But,” Suarez sighed, “with the help of your brave defenders of the Republic you were able to overcome the treason.”

Mostly unseen, Cortez scowled. His men were half stripped and under guard back near the 1^st Division command post. The trucks that had formerly carried them were now full of Suarez’s men. Following the trucks was a full — no, Cortez guessed an overstrength — battalion of mechanized infantry in the very latest in Russian-built infantry fighting vehicles.

The Hummer pulled up to the guard post by the highway. There was a Mercedes Benz automobile parked nearby, the driver — a very attractive young woman — arguing with an MP vociferously. She looked vaguely familiar to Suarez. At Cortez’s stiffening and indraw of breath he asked, “Who is she?”

“The president’s daughter,” Cortez answered. “I wonder what she’s doing here.”

“No good, most likely.”

A guard held up one fist for the Hummer to stop. The driver, Suarez’s man now, not Cortez’s, applied the brakes lightly and slowed to a stop. Even before that, Suarez’s hands had moved behind his back as if cuffed, though in fact the right hand wrapped itself around a pistol.

The guard at the checkpoint looked over Cortez’s rank and decided on politeness. He was invariably polite to men heading to the front but had learned that those heading in the opposite direction were not necessarily to be trusted. Still, the general’s insignia on the collar of the prime passenger of the Hummer suggested that politeness was in order. Even had the insignia not, the long column of trucks and armored vehicles did.

“May I see your orders, General?” the guard asked. He was, in fact, polite. Still, his tone was that of every MP who ever lived, always with the unstated or shall I arrest you now.

Briefly, Cortez toyed with the idea of following his instructions too much to the letter. Perhaps if he made an obnoxious ass of himself the MP would arrest him and call a halt to Suarez’s plan. He thought on it and decided, No. Suarez is too close to the city and too committed to let an MP, or a battalion of them, stop him now. If they try to halt the column he’ll just fight his way through. Not that it would be much of a fight. But I might be killed and, while there is a chance I might survive this, I will try to live.

So, instead of making a scene, Cortez calmly reached into his right breast pocket and withdrew a small letter from President Mercedes calling for the arrest of one Colonel Suarez. This he handed to the MP who looked them over carefully before asking, “Is that him?”

“Yes, soldier.”

“Okay, then, sir, no problem. Shall I radio ahead for you?”

Cortez felt Suarez’s knee pressing slightly through the back of the Hummer’s thin seat cushion. He inhaled at the reminder, then answered, “No, that won’t be necessary. The president already knows we are coming.”

Mercedes’ AID chimed three times and then projected an image of the Darhel, the Rinn Fain, above the presidential desk.

“They’re coming, Señor Presidente,” the Rinn Fain’s AID announced through the president’s.

“Yes, Lord Fain,” answered Mercedes, directly to the Darhel rather than his AID, “I am sure my nephew has arrested the miscreants and is…”

The Darhel seemed almost to sneer, though it was the AID which spoke. “No, that is not what I mean. I mean that the column you sent out seems to have grown by seven or eight hundred men and twelve or thirteen hundred of your tons in heavy vehicles.”

Mercedes began adding and figuring. Was there any good reason for his nephew to have picked up another force? Was there any reasonable possibility that the men of the 1^st Division would willingly follow his nephew to anything but his own hanging?

No.

Mercedes went pale. “How long until that column reaches the City?”

“At current speeds, approximately four of your hours, Mr. President,” the AID answered.

“The ship to take away the prisoners will be here in slightly more than that time,” the Rinn Fain interjected. “You have done as I have demanded. If you can assemble not more than… AID, how many open spaces on the Himmit vessel?”

“Thirty-seven, Lord Fain, after subtracting for the prisoners, yourself and your key Indowy,” the AID answered tonelessly. “That is based on seventy of their kilograms per adult. More children could be taken but without knowing exactly their sizes and weights accurate calculation would be impossible.”

“Very well, then,” the Rinn Fain hissed. “You make take thirty-six adults with you or some, presumably greater, number of adults and children. But they must be ready to go, at the prison where your war criminals are being held, within four of your hours.”

“You promised me that you would take my entire family as well as those of my key staff and supporters,” Mercedes roared. “This is how the Darhel keep their contracts?”

“Don’t speak to me about keeping contracts, Mercedes,” the Rinn Fain coolly hissed back. “You had a contract with your country. Have you kept it? In any case, we can try to get out your supporters, their families, and the rest of yours later. But I predict that if you do not get out soon you will not live to enjoy your vacation.”

Mercedes swallowed his bile, his rage and his fear. “I… will be there.”

The ship had come in, in the middle of the Pacific, to keep as far from Posleen defense batteries as possible. From there it had skimmed the waves for thousands of miles. Despite its surface-skimming speed, it used a form of reactionless drive that, unlike a human aircraft moving at a similar height and speed, left neither a visible wake nor a trail of dead fish and cetaceans behind it.

Three hundred and forty-seven of the humans’ “miles” south of Panama City the stealth ship had abruptly slowed and then plunged under the waves. It had continued down until reaching a depth of just under five hundred and fifty meters below sea level. From there, at a much slower speed, it moved by inertial guidance toward the humans’ city and the cargo for the delivery of which the Darhel were willing to pay such a handsome price.

Himmit were preternaturally clever and effective scouts. That they were also remarkably successful smugglers went almost without saying, though the Galactics avoided saying it, even so. The ability of these creatures to avoid taxation and control was an infuriation to the Darhel, an annoying chink in an otherwise very tight system, the futile machinations of the Bane Sidhe notwithstanding.

Among the Himmit scouts and smugglers, the captain of the Harmonious Blend owned no great name. This was a source of pride to the captain, Hisaraal din Groykrok. Himmit scouts took great pride not in their fame but in their subtlety. Let others — the Himmit warrior, scientist and bureaucrat castes, the Indowy master craftsmen, Tchpth philosophers, Darhel lawyers and bureaucrats — seek glory and recognition. The Himmit, contrarily, would seek their glory in having no name, in having no trail or trace for that matter. Hisaraal was in no way inferior to any of his people in this. For his services his clan could command top price in the certain knowledge that no one would ever know Hisaraal had been there, and never find a trace of where he had gone.

Inertial dampening ensured that Hisaraal felt no serious jarring as his ship slid under the waves. Instead, there was only the slightest shudder, hardly to be remarked upon. Descent was rapid and unnoticed save for one sperm whale which promptly swore to lay off squid ink for a while.

Hisaraal’s pilot seat was a kind of couch set amidst controls, instruments and viewing screens. The Himmit lay on the couch, eyes at each end checking screens and instruments, four equal hands manipulating controls and sensors. Somewhere up ahead a ship of the humans, rather, what they fancied to be a ship though it was bound to the surface of this world, patrolled back and forth at a pitiable speed, frantically pinging with what Hisaraal assumed was some form of sensing. He wondered idly for a moment if the Posleen had learned some new trick, using the sea to mask their maneuvers, and if that was the reason for the humans’ actions.

In any case, it was none of his worry. His ship was more than adequate for any such crude and primitive sensing. He wished the humans luck, though, if it was Posleen they were searching for.

The guns of turret two were still moving up and down like tapping fingers.

One sweep wouldn’t do, Daisy knew. However good CA-134’s sonar was, for what she had in mind she needed more than a single sweep could provide. Each pass up and down Panama’s Pacific coast added to the digital image stored in Daisy’s crystalline brain. What she found she passed on to Sally, who returned the favor. Little by little a clear image — a surveyed image — emerged.

Would it be enough to spot the Himmit ship when it first emerged and was vulnerable? I don’t know. I can’t know. But it is the only chance Sally and I have to stop that ship. Once it pops up above the water, assuming I am even right about that, it will disappear beyond my ability to target.

How to tell? How to tell? Are they coming this way?

It doesn’t matter, she finally decided. For my purposes they must come by sea. It’s the only chance I have unless young Julio got through.

The police forces of Panama, prior to the beginnings of the Posleen war and after the gringo invasion of 1989, had consisted of civil police, militarized police, small air and coast guard detachments, technical police and a substantial Presidential Guard. Most of these latter had been levied upon to help provide cadre for the rapidly expanded army. Mercedes had used the slots thus opened up to provide safe sinecures for his lesser relatives and those who could provide substantial enough bribes or, more commonly, were considered to be politically reliable enough to justify putting on the rolls. Some few of the Presidential Guard had been given to Cortez for a cadre around which he could build the force he used to effect the arrests he had been ordered to make.

The rest were sent to the eastern side — the Panama City side — of the Bridge of the Americas to prevent the passage of the force they were told was coming from the west to overthrow the government, arrest the president, and free certain criminals. By and large the Guard lacked heavy weapons and experience in using what few they had.

Still, the position was naturally strong. The bridge itself was overlooked by the western face of Ancon Hill. Buildings, some strong gringo-built ones north of where the bridge debouched into the city, others lighter and newer in Panama’s Chorrillo district, provided fighting positions ready made.

Of course, the Guard had no mines. Instead, they stopped the first fifty civilian vehicles that showed up at the bridge and took them, sometimes at gun point, to form a roadblock across the friendly side of the highway. The roadblock they covered with machine guns placed in some of the buildings. Closer to the road, some in the buildings, some among the roadblock cars, others dug in into the ground, they placed Russian-supplied rocket propelled grenade launchers. These were few, both in the Guard and in the regular forces, as they were not really very effective against the Posleen.

The commander of the Presidential Guard, Raul Mercedes, was another nephew but one who had seemed to Mercedes as having more promise than Cortez. Indeed, it had hurt Mercedes to order Raul to buy him time to evacuate key family members. The president had salved his conscience, and purchased Raul’s continued loyalty, by placing this nephew’s wife and children on the list.

It had been hard enough for Raul, short and somewhat plump but still diligent, to train himself while training his men to be police officers and riot control troops. He was unversed in the military arts. His commission had come directly from his uncle, the president, without any real intermediary training involved. Even so, marksmanship was of a fairly high standard; he’d done well there. Riot control techniques, procedures and formations he’s taught himself and then his men from a book. More detailed military training, however, was lacking, except for some theoretical exercises in classrooms and a few practical exercises in city fighting. Even this much had been difficult, what with a quarter of his few hundred men being on guard duty at any given time and the not infrequent calls from the Palacio de las Garzas to assemble a larger show for some foreign dignitary.

It was hopeless, Raul knew. He might hold on for an hour, or perhaps two if Jesus smiled on him. His uncle assured him that would be enough; that he could surrender himself and his men honorably after he had bought enough time for the core of the clan to escape. Two hours, at most, Raul. So his uncle had insisted.

Raul knew what his uncle was, and despised him for it. He knew that, in some sense, he was on the wrong side. But he was also certain that his uncle had so badly damaged Panama’s prospects for a successful defense that the only chance for his wife and children to survive would be for him to follow his uncle’s orders without question. For that, the survival of those he loved, he would compromise his honor, give his life and sacrifice his men. The thought made him sick, but he would do it all the same.

He consulted his watch for perhaps the hundredth time. Who knows, maybe if we can hold them here for a while we can work something out before any serious blood is spilt.

Suarez halted the Hummer at the western abutment of the bridge. He could not see the far side. This alone was reason enough for him to stop; he had gone forward once, under orders, without adequate reconnaissance and lost thousands because of it. Never again. Enough of my men’s blood has been spilt over political silliness and iniquity.

So, instead of blindly charging over the steep, asphalted hump of the bridge and down the far side, he ordered a company of his mechanized infantry to cut north to gain a view of the opposite bank. What they reported back he used to begin to build a picture, a remarkably accurate picture, of what awaited on the other side.

The bridge is blocked. That would not be so, most likely, unless the men who blocked it were still there. What would they have? Who would they be? MPs? Civil Police? Maybe those. Tanks? No, they’re all to the west, watching the Posleen. Anti-armor weapons? It’s possible, even likely, there in those buildings on the other side. Maybe not many of them but… No, going directly over the bridge is a losing proposition.

One thing he had not found time yet to train his men on was waterborne operations with their Russki BMPs. For that matter, given the exigencies of the Posleen war and the limitations of the Posleen themselves, he had never worried about training his men to disperse as a defense against indirect — artillery and mortar — fire.

He turned to Hector Miranda and ordered, “Get back there and spread the men out. Disperse the trucks to either side of the road. The driver can watch Cortez for a while.”

Miranda saluted and exited the Hummer even while the driver took his rifle and stuck it under Cortez’s chin with a smile. In a few minutes the roar of diesels behind Suarez grew as the trucks strained their engines to get into and through the ditches to either side of the road.

Suarez picked up his radio’s microphone and called the company commander, Captain Perez, A Company, who had cut right to recon the bridge. “Perez, do you think your BMPs can cross the water to the other side?” he asked.

“They’re water jet-propelled, Boss,” the captain answered. “There’s no real preparation required. And you drive them, basically, the same way. But… fine control? Selecting a good spot to try to emerge? Honestly, we’d be clueless. And if we took any close artillery on the way over…”

Suarez stopped to think, despite the racing clock, before issuing his orders. Tough call; tough call. I don’t even know if the poor bastards can get out of the water once I send them in. I don’t know…”

C Company’s commander, First Lieutenant Arias, came from the radio. “There’s a yacht club at old Fort Amador, sir. Where there’s a yacht club there’s likely to be a boat ramp. If there’s a boat ramp…”

Yeah there is. Shit, why didn’t I remember that. Hell, I’ve seen it.

“Do it, Arias. Cross,” Suarez ordered. “Perez, you get in the water, too. Go about half or two thirds of the way across, then cut right, and follow Arias out. Then clear the far side of the bridge.”

“Roger, sir… Roger.”

Raul Mercedes felt a momentary surge of hope when his observers reported that the enemy force — difficult to think of his countrymen as an enemy — had stopped on the far side of the bridge. That hope soared when the same observers reported that they seemed to be scattering their men and trucks into the trees on either side of the Pan-American Highway. Since Raul had no artillery or mortars, though he didn’t know that his enemy didn’t know that, he assumed that this indicated an intent not to try to force his roadblock. This would be fine with Raul.

Surging hope fell like a spent wave on the shore when Raul received the word that the enemy’s armor was splashing into the bay on both sides of the bridge. He rushed forward to the roadblock and peered first right, then left over the sides of the bridge. There, in the greasy looking waters trapped on three sides by the Canal, the City, and the peninsula to the west, two swarms — that was all he could think to call them as they had adopted nothing recognizable as a formation — of a dozen or more armored vehicles each were churning towards him and his men. If they could make a landing, and — since he had not reconned the area Raul had no way of knowing whether they could or not — they would roll up his flanks like a newspaper and then clear the side of the bridge he was charged with defending.

A trained officer might have remembered the old aphorism: who would defend everything defends nothing. Raul, however, was not a trained officer. Instead of concentrating his efforts, he split his reserve into two and reinforced both sections with men from his roadblock, thinning the line there. These two groups hurried south, to Fort Amador, where one group of armor seemed to be headed, and northeast toward what appeared to Raul to be the objective of the other company of armor. Some went in what amounted to police cars, sirens blazing, others in the trucks that had brought his force to the bridge. He was able to estimate their arrival at the likely landing points by when the sirens cut off.

Soon little geysers, the result of the impact of bullets on the water’s surface, began spouting up all around the approaching armor. The commanders of the vehicles ducked down, closing their hatches until only their eyes were able to see out.

To Suarez, looking through binoculars as he crouched in some bushes under and to one side of the west bank of the bridge, it looked like heavy rain on a calm lake surface. He might have thought it looked more like hail except that hail was something of a rarity in Panama. He watched the track commanders half-buttoning up under the fusillade and wondered, worried, how that would affect their chances of finding an egress from the water. He assumed that the reduction in visibility would not help, in any case.

From his vantage point Suarez could make out the spot at Amador where he thought the boat ramp must be. He couldn’t see anything that looked promising in front of Perez’s boys, though this didn’t matter as he intended for Perez to form a second wave at the Amador boat ramp.

From across the water, and magnified by it, came the sounds of mass firing of the BMPs’ machine guns. Suarez couldn’t see the muzzle flashes as the guns were pointing away from him. He could, however, see that the hurricane of geysers spouting around the vehicles dropped to a light squall.

Good… good. But don’t keep going, Perez, however good it looks. Cut right and go for the known ramp out of the water.

Suarez picked up the microphone for his radio and keyed it. He was about to give the order when he saw A Company’s BMPs suddenly begin to veer to the right. As they did, they turned their turrets left, still facing the hostile shore, and laced it with machine gun fire.

Suarez had brought with him a single battery of self-propelled 122mm guns and, of course, the battalion’s heavy mortars. These had set up for firing, as a matter of standard procedure, at the first sign that the halt might be prolonged. He had held them in reserve until now, on the theory that they might be critical if it turned out his enemy-of-the-day actually had some artillery or mortars of their own. It made sense not to have called them, so far, but…

To hell with that. If they’d had any mortars or artillery they’d have used them on the troops behind me or the tracks as they wallowed through the water. Still, one never knows. I’ll keep the artillery hidden and support the landing with the mortars alone. Best be careful not to damage the ramp though. Airburst and smoke, only, I think.

Peering from beneath the hatch of his BMP, Lieutenant Arias caught sight of the boat ramp, concrete and cobblestones, leading up from the water.

“Juan,” he asked his driver over the vehicular intercom, “you see the ramp?”

“Si, señor.”

“Aim straight for it.”

The driver didn’t answer verbally, but the BMP swung slightly until its boatlike nose pointed directly at the ramp. Incoming fire increased and the peculiar screeching of machine gun fire off the front glacis sent Arias even lower into his turret.

Arias was pleased to see shells, mortars he suspected, begin to explode in the air a few meters above ground behind the ramp. The fire he and his men were receiving dropped noticeably.

The ramp was close now. Arias manipulated the commander’s turret control handle to traverse his turret around to observe and control the vehicles following. These had slowed, it seemed, based on the lesser amount of water being pushed over their prows. This was all to the good. Arias was going in first, but he wanted a steady stream of reinforcements behind him.

Again traversing the turret, this time to face the ramp, Arias ordered his BMP’s driver to gun it. The BMP picked up speed, then shuddered as the lower front section of the treads on each side hit the ramp. Without cutting off the water jets — the track would need them to pull itself over the slippery concrete and stones — the driver engaged his clutch and transferred power to the treads. These, despite the aid of the jets, initially spun, throwing water, muck, and greenish slime up and to the rear.

Guard Cabo, or corporal, Robles had been in a position covering the roadblock on the bridge when the orders came to move down to this position overlooking the old gringo yacht club’s boat ramp on Fort Amador. Grumbling, he had squeezed himself and his machine gun, along with about a thousand rounds of ammunition, a tripod and his assistant gunner into the back of the patrol car. Another man, the ammo bearer, sat in the front passenger seat with more ammunition on his lap. The patrol car had then, sirens shrieking, rushed them to a hotel overlooking both the water and the ramp.

By the time Robles had been ordered to a suitable position his targets had already crawled across the water to within something like effective range of the gun. The crew had hurriedly set up a couple of end tables, the same size and just below window height. Within a few more seconds the tripod was set up, the front claws digging into the edge of the table nearest the wall, and the gun locked into position.

Robles had then begun sustained fire, about two hundred rounds per minute, at the steel amphibians clawing their way across the water. This hadn’t done any more good than Robles had expected. It had caused the commanders of the vehicles to half button up. This would add to the confusion of the attackers. More than that, the corporal knew, was too much to expect, though one could always hope.

Then the return fire came in. It was somewhat more effective, if only because — despite being on the open water — the BMPs’ armor was better cover than the light wood and brick the defenders had in front of them.

Neither Robles nor anyone standing with him had much of a clue what was going on. The commander had said they had to fight a golpe de estado. Rumor had it that the president had arrested some of the Army’s leaders for crimes unspecified and that the Army was rebelling against that. There were also rumors that the ruling classes, exemplified by the president, had sold out the country to the alien invaders. Robles didn’t know. It was entirely possible that both things were true, he thought. In fact, the only things he was sure of were that he had a job to do and that he intended to do it to the best of his ability.

The incoming machine gun fire didn’t do much to discomfort the defenders. On the other hand, the heavy shells that began exploding when the attacking armor closed on the ramp did. One shell went off about fifty meters from the window. Robles’ ammunition bearer screamed and clutched at his eyes as splintered glass shredded them and his face. Hunched down behind his gun, Robles, himself, took minor bits of glass in his right arm and shoulder. He cursed but did not let up on his fire.

The same could not be said for some RPG gunners who had taken a covered position behind some parked automobiles overlooking the ramp. These had good protection from the BMPs’ machine guns but none whatsoever from the shells exploding overhead. Three minutes of shards screaming through the air and tearing through their bodies was enough for those poor men. They ran, those still able to.

The smoke from the high explosive shells hadn’t done much to interfere with Robles’ vision. This changed when dozens of smoke shells began impacting around the ramp and in front of the buildings.

“Shit,” Robles cursed, as his view of the water completely cut off. The loss of the focus of his concentration allowed the corporal, for the first time, to actually take notice of the sobbing, clawing ammo bearer. He thought, briefly, of putting the man out of his misery but decided against it. Who knows, maybe they can rebuild the poor bastard’s eyes, these days.

After shouting for a medic, Robles contemplated his next action. No sense in staying here; can’t see shit. Maybe another position…

Seeing a medic and two litter bearers had arrived to care for his wounded man, Robles ordered his assistant gunner, “Forget the tripod. Grab all the ammunition you can carry and follow me.”

Burdened with the gun as he was, Robles slipped and nearly fell on the spent casings littering the floor. For a few moments his feet spun like a log roller’s before he caught balance on the table that had previously served as his firing platform. Bad sign, he thought, very bad. Well, nothing to be done for it.

Taking a deep breath, a part of his mental recovery from almost falling and, just possibly, a part of steeling himself to go outside to find a new and better firing position, Robles physically grabbed the assistant gunner and half dragged him out of the room and down a short flight of steps. They went through an open door, turned right, and raced to the corner of the building.

Covering behind the solid corner, just as Robles extended his bipod and placed his machine gun to his shoulder, he uttered, “Fuck,” as the first BMP up the ramp emerged through the thick smoke.

Arias was unwilling to dismount either himself or the men in the back of his track until he had more vehicles and infantry ashore. The pitter-patter of bullets striking the armor not only reinforced his original inclination but actually succeeded in driving him completely under cover and even to close his hatch. It would never do to let the inside of the hatch cause one to ricochet into the interior from which it could not escape without bouncing around until it buried itself in one of the crew. Frantically, he traversed the turret while searching for targets through his sight. Nothing. He elevated the sight and gun and swept again. Nothing. He depressed the gun and swept back but the gun would not go low enough to let him see ground level at any of a number of positions that could be sheltering his assailants.

He thought about having the driver back out but, with more vehicles coming up to the ramp in a steady stream, he was afraid of an accident that might block the ramp. Like any infantryman, even a mechanized one, he hated being stuck inside his track. What others saw as protection he saw only as a trap, an armored coffin vulnerable to any man with an anti-armor weapon.

I can’t back up. I won’t stay here. All that is left is to go forward.

Robles’ machine gun chattered until seconds before the left tread of Arias’ track squashed him like a grape.

“Mount up, you bastards, mount up,” Colonel Suarez shouted into his radio. He gave the order as soon as he saw the first BMP break across the street, 100mm gun flaring, and the Presidential Guard breaking in terror. Every now and again, looking through his binoculars, he caught a glimpse of a BMP, with its distinctive silhouette, at one of the city’s crossroads along Avenida de los Mártires.

Before the first trucks of Suarez’s column had reloaded and joined him at the western foot of the bridge, some of Perez’s men had already dismounted and begun to push the vehicles in the bridge’s roadblock aside. A few of the cars gave trouble, bumpers locked or tires slashed or simply jammed together. These the men hooked tow cables up — all armored vehicles carried them — and let the BMPs haul away. By the time Suarez’s Hummer reached the erstwhile roadblock a path five meters wide had been cleared.

Suarez had his driver pull his vehicle aside and dismounted. A uniformed body, so badly crushed it was almost unrecognizable as human, lay in a spreading pool of blood near the Hummer. Suarez spared the body barely a glance. He raised one fist to stop the first BMP from the one company he hadn’t previously committed.

“Go to the Plaza of the Martyrs,” he said to the company commander, pointing at his map of the city to indicate a broadly open area to the south of the main avenue set aside as a monument to those Panamanians killed in the 1964 riots. “Wait for me there. Go!”

Eleven BMPs passed, all of the company that had survived the long road march without breaking down. Next up came a truck. Suarez beckoned the man, a lieutenant beside the driver, down and, again pointing to the map, said, “You know your target, the TV studios?”

Seeing the officer nod, he slapped him on the back. “Go to it, then, son and make them put you on TV to read off the statement you’ve been given.”

Three trucks passed, following the lieutenant. At the next Suarez pointed and shouted out the simple question, “Target?”

“Estereo Bahia,” the senior noncom in the truck answered over the diesel’s roar. The next truck gave a different answer, the DENI — Departmento Nacional de Investigaciones. Three trucks followed that one out as there might be a fight. The next leader gave his target without being asked: the main police station. The next, the Palacio de las Garzas. When the last of the dozen task groups had passed, the dozen needed to take out the most critical assets to a coup or counter coup, Suarez returned to his Hummer and had himself driven to the Plaza de los Mártires. There, he found the last BMP company and ordered the commander to follow him to La Joya Prison.

Mercedes paced fretfully by the open pit dump that was the only treeless area near the prison large enough to accommodate the Himmit stealth transport. The prisoners sat nearby under guard. That is, all of them sat except for one woman who lay on a stretcher, not unconscious but plainly very weak. Mercedes recognized the woman and felt a moment’s shame at his part in bringing her to this. Decency was not one of the president’s notable features but even he had to see the sheer injustice of prosecuting a heroine of the war for no other reason than that she had broken international law by using the material available to her. His wife saw the woman and the prisoners, as did the one mistress he had brought along, and his children by both of them. They knew enough of the story that their eyes, when they met the president’s, were filled with a disgust to match and amplify his own. They saw his fear, too, and that only added to Mercedes’ shame.

The Darhel Rinn Fain smiled a wicked smile, all razor sharp teeth, at the president’s obvious fear. Disgusting human! the Rinn Fain thought. A remarkably low specimen even for such a low race. I cannot imagine what the Ghin and the Tir fear from this group. With humans, all things are for sale. And what little may not be on auction they can be fooled into giving or doing. They are a vile species.

Mercedes saw the Darhel’s smile and interpreted it as calm detachment rather than the disgust the alien truly felt.

“I don’t understand how you can be so calm! The bridge has fallen. The plotters will be here in half an hour; forty-five minutes at the most. Don’t you understand? If they catch us here, they’ll kill us!”

“Do you fear death so much?” the Rinn Fain asked conversationally, his eyes growing distant and dreamy.

“Doesn’t everyone? Don’t you?”

The Darhel’s eyes grew more distant and dreamier still. He spoke as if from a dream. “No, not everyone fears death. Before we found you human rabble there were those of us among the Darhel who volunteered to die, to save our people from the Posleen. I was one of those. I confess, it was something of a disappointment to me that we decided to use your people as mercenaries before I was selected to complete my mission. I had been looking forward to being a true Darhel, for once in my life.”

“You’re insane,” Mercedes accused.

At that the Darhel threw his head back and laughed aloud, something his species almost never did. “Insane, you say? You have no idea, Mr. President. I, all my people, all of us, insane. Made that way, deliberately, by powers beyond your understanding. But, worse than that, we know we are insane, and, knowing, hate it.”

Mercedes shivered, despite the heat, at the chill tone in the alien’s voice. The Darhel had always struck him as cold and odd. But he had assumed, at least, a degree of sanity. If they were insane…

He changed the subject. “When will the transport be here?”

Impatiently, the Darhel answered, “It will be here when it is here.”

He relented then, slightly, and asked, “AID?”

The AID answered immediately, and loud enough for the president to hear, “The estimated time of arrival of the Himmit ship is twenty-two of the human’s minutes, Lord Fain.”

The damned human water vessel’s pinging had become a positive annoyance to Hisaraal. Worse, there were two of them blasting away now.

Ordinarily, he bore the humans no ill-will; quite the opposite, in fact. He had only taken on the mission, after all, because a FedCred was a FedCred and he had a race to support. But under the relentless pinging of what had to be their primitive detection equipment, he was beginning to change his mind about humans.

Fortunately, the Himmit knew, his ship was completely impervious to such detection methods, or even much more sophisticated ones. Still he would be glad to escape from this water and the incessant, irregular sound.

“I’ve got him,” Daisy Mae announced with satisfaction to the ship’s exec.

“Are you sure, Daisy?” the XO asked.

“To a considerable degree of certainty, yes,” she acknowledged. “It has taken almost all my computing power, as well as that of Salem, to analyze all the subtle nuances of the sound reflecting and not reflecting off the seabed. He is going to pop out here,” and her finger pointed to a spot on the map.

“Can you hit him when he does?”

For answer, Daisy just sniffed and tossed her holographic hair.

The guns of number two stopped moving rhythmically up and down like tapping fingers. Steadying at low elevation, they joined those of numbers one and three as the turrets rotated to lay upon a spot of water off the starboard side.

A mound of salt water surged at the spot Daisy had indicated on the map. The water, frothing white, glided away to expose a flickering image, heat haze over the desert. The image was insubstantial and ghostly but clearly large, perhaps a hundred meters on a side, its outlines revealed by the surging water.

Daisy’s avatar suddenly appeared on the unarmored bridge, above the armored wheelhouse. Her eyes and attention were concentrated on the surge, then on the exposing metal. All guns on her port side, plus the three main turrets shifted slightly, creating a fire pattern in Daisy’s mind of twelve shells, three high and four across, just above and forward of the Himmit’s bow wave. Further east, Salem calculated a fire pattern complementary to Daisy’s.

A distant observer on the shore by Avenida de Balboa, in Panama City, would have seen two enormous flashes lighting the sky even in daylight. The one to the west came from Sally’s batteries firing. The other, from due south was Daisy Mae’s eruption.

“What the…?” Hisaraal grasped the hand holds of his couch as the ship lurched to the sides. Its battle screens easily shrugged aside the puny efforts of the human ship to destroy it but that didn’t lessen the mental shock.

The ship master touched a control, sending the ship out-of-phase with normal reality and then another, turning it up and to the southeast.

No Himmit scout-ship master would ever continue after detection. This was a scout-ship, not a destroyer. If he ever made warrior class, though, woe betide these damned humans.

“Communications,” Hisaraal said, half in anger and half in sadness, “send a message to the Darhel returning their payment — yes, with the agreed penalties — and expressing our regret for being unable to fulfill the contract. Send a second to the Mother, informing her that the h — that the hu — That the humans have detected and engaged my craft: This mission is blown.”

So much for my promotion to neuter.

“Did we get it?” the XO asked.

“We hit it,” Daisy Mae replied musingly. “But it apparently had force screens; the radar picked up a burst of high-voltage electrical noise from the impact. I don’t think we killed it, though.”

“Then did it keep going?” the XO asked.

“I doubt it,” the avatar answered. “Himmit scouts are proverbial cowards. They have never been known to continue a mission after detection. But…”

“But?”

“But nobody ever knew they had force screens on their ships, either.”

Two Russian-supplied ZSU-23/4 self propelled antiaircraft guns took up positions automatically overwatching the prison and the open landing area nearby. BMPs moved rapidly, mud and grass being churned by their treads, to surround both. From the BMPs poured infantry which faced inward as well, taking up firing positions to supplement the armored vehicles.

At the sight of the tracks and the guns the civilians began to panic. A few guards went for their pistols, but realizing the futility merely took them from the holsters and dropped them to the ground before raising their hands in surrender. In the towers between the wire fences the guards carefully placed their shotguns and rifles on the floor. The equine patrol, leery of an accidental discharge and the massacre that would likely follow, dismounted to lay their rifles carefully down.

Suarez, followed by two BMPs, directed his Hummer toward the large knot of civilians clustered about the open landing area. Pistol drawn, he dismounted and walked toward Mercedes.

The president drew himself to his full height, consciously transforming his fear into righteous indignation at this mere colonel who proposed to… well… what did Suarez propose? Mercedes didn’t know but assumed that a show of anger couldn’t hurt.

Hands clenched, steam practically shooting from his ears, face contorted into a mask of rage, the president advanced to confront the colonel.

Suarez wasted no time with words. As soon as Mercedes opened his mouth to speak the colonel shot him in the stomach. Shocked, the president fell back on his haunches, hands clutching his entrance wound, mouth agape and eyes wide with shock and pain. Blood poured out over his hands and ran down his suit jacket onto his trousers. Mercedes’ women and children screamed.

The colonel prepared to fire again, then realized that Mercedes was rocking back and forth rhythmically. This was suboptimal. Suarez advanced, lifted his foot to the president’s face, and kicked him flat back onto the dirt. Then, taking careful aim, Suarez shot him squarely between the eyes. Mercedes’ women’s screaming redoubled.

Suarez turned around to the captain who commanded the company. “Separate them. Politicos and the very rich in one group. The women and children in another. Freed prisoners in a third. Guards in the fourth. Keep the alien separate from all the others. No, on second thought, I’ll handle him.”

While the captain walked off, bellowing orders, Suarez turned him pistol onto the Rinn Fain. With his left hand he beckoned the alien forward.

Suarez didn’t like the look of the alien. He had seen pictures of the Darhel, though he’d never met one in person. Those pictures had not shown anything like the happy, dreamy look that shone from this alien’s face. When the alien reached a point about ten meters away, the look changed to one of ecstatic fury and hate. The alien leapt at Suarez, needle-sharp teeth bared and claws extended.

A human could never have hoped to make such a leap connect. Clearly, the Darhel had strength beyond that of Man. Not that Suarez had half a chance to think of such a thing. Before he could re-aim and pull the trigger the alien was inside the arc of his arm, clawing and trying to reach Suarez’s neck with those sharklike teeth.

Struggling to keep the alien from tearing out his throat, Suarez screamed, “Goddammit! Get’imoffmeget’imoffmeget’imoffme!”

A soldier standing nearby took an infinitesimal moment to fix a bayonet and then raced over. He fixed the bayonet because he did not want to take the chance of a bullet passing through the alien and hitting his colonel. He sank the rifle-mounted knife into the Darhel’s back, and blue blood welled out around the wound. Unfazed, the Rinn Fain’s teeth inched closer to Suarez’s neck, the alien pushing against the colonel’s strength as if he were almost a child.

Seeing his bayonet thrust had had no effect the soldier twisted his rifle, making the wound bigger and more ragged. He then withdrew the rifle and plunged it once again into the alien’s back. This thrust must have literally struck a nerve as the Darhel screamed and threw his head back before pushing harder to get at Suarez’s jugular.

Suarez managed to divert the thrust to his shoulder, which the Rinn Fain began to gnaw on, ripping blood vessels and muscle and making the colonel scream once again, this time from the pain.

This was almost too much for the young soldier. Nearly vomiting at seeing his colonel’s shoulder mangled, he once again pulled his bayonet out of the Darhel’s back. He raised the rifle over his head, muzzle down, and took a brief moment to aim it at the alien’s head. Maybe the vital bodily organs were some place the bayonet couldn’t reach.

The soldier thrust downward again. The point of the bayonet sliced aside the skin covering the skull, then wedged itself through the skull and into the brain.

“Holy shit!” the soldier exclaimed. Even with a bayonet lodged in his brain the Darhel was still chewing on Suarez. “Motherfucker!” The soldier threw his weight against the rifle, twisting the alien’s head and teeth by brute force. Even in the open air, those predator’s teeth kept up a steady drumbeat, chomping on air as if on some kind of autopilot. The soldier held the rifle down to the ground, fighting against the Darhel’s death spasms.

Suarez, almost sobbing with the butchery that had been done to his shoulder began to wriggle out from under the Rinn Fain. He was careful to avoid the gnashing, blood reddened teeth while he did.

Two more soldiers ran up, also with bayonets fixed. Seeing how ineffective a single bayonet thrust had been, they began to stab downward again and again. With each violation the Darhel’s body twitched until, practically exsanguinated, with nearly every vital organ including the brain punctured, the alien finally subsided.

Breathing with relief, one of the soldiers took a long look at the Rinn Fain’s face. By God, the bastard looks like he just came. Too fucking weird.

A medic came up and began to bandage Suarez’s shoulder. When he also took out a syrette of Demerol, a powerful painkiller, and held it up in front of the colonel’s face, Suarez waved him off. “I’ll need my wits, for now, son,” Suarez gasped out. “Later, perhaps, I can take the drug.”

The medic shrugged, and began tying off the thick bandages that held in place a shrimp-shell-based anticoagulant. No matter to me if you want to suffer. My job is just to keep you alive. Pain’s your problem.

Patiently, trying not to wince, Suarez let the medic finish with his ministrations. Then he waited a few minutes longer for the soldiers to finish separating the prisoners. He stood only with difficulty, then swayed for a few moments, light-headed with pain and blood loss.

“Doc,” he told the medic, “come with me… help me walk to the prisoners.”

Wordlessly, the medic slung one of Suarez’s arms — the one that led from the unshredded shoulder — over his own. The two began to move toward the new prisoners when Suarez stopped and said, “No. Take me to the prisoners we just liberated.” His finger pointed at a spot where Boyd and some others sat, under a broad tree.

“Are you all right?” Suarez asked of the group.

Boyd answered for all. “Except for that one woman, Digna Miranda, we are fine.”

Suarez straightened, taking his arm from across the medic’s shoulder. He swayed again, but only for a brief time, before being able to stand well on his own. To Boyd he said, “We’ll have to talk soon, General. For now, I have some work to do. For the moment, at least, consider yourself my prisoner. I am sorry for that, but I have my reasons.”

“Take care of the woman, Doc,” he ordered a medic doing triage on the “war criminals” before walking off, somewhat unsteadily, with his own.

Suarez stopped at the second group, the one composed of women and children. His eyes scanned across them, steely and unpitying. He noticed two female politicians in the group. One of them he had once thought rather well of. The fact that they were here indicated his trust had been misplaced.

A sergeant was in charge of the guards on this group. To the sergeant Suarez said, “Those two. Have them brought to the other group.”

The sergeant saluted, answered, “Yes, sir,” and directed a guard to do as Suarez had ordered. One of the women had a satchel, a heavy bag, that she refused to leave behind until the guard prodded her with a bayonet. Indignantly, muttering curses, she dropped it and went as the guard directed.

Suarez ordered the bag opened. When it was, and its contents dumped, he saw nothing but precious stones and Galactic seed nanites, a large fortune’s worth.

The women, hustled along by the guard, reached the final group before Suarez did. Looking worried, they took seats on the ground with the others.

The company commander met Suarez near the last group, with a hand-selected guard in tow. “Are you sure about this, sir?” the captain asked. “This is a serious step.”

Suarez didn’t answer immediately. Instead, his eyes wandered over the angry looking group while his mind made a head count. Nineteen, he summed up. Nineteen traitors. Nineteen enemies of the Republic that I must not think of as human beings, as men and women.

He continued to think. Seventy-one in the legislature. Forty-two of them are scum. Subtract these nineteen and it is fifty-two, enough for a quorum. Any vote would be twenty-nine to twenty-three. That will work for what I have in mind.

To the captain he said, “Do it. Kill them.”

The guns began to rattle and the political rats to scream at about the time Suarez reached the butchered body of the Darhel. The body had been stripped and searched. Atop a small pile of ripped, blue stained, iridescent clothing sat the alien’s personal effects. Stooping, painfully, Suarez examined them. For the most part, he had no clue what any of the items meant. One item, however, did catch his interest. He had seen something just like it before, attached to the Armored Combat Suit of Captain Connors, the gringo Mobile Infantry company commander. He reached to pick the Darhel’s AID up.

“Don’t touch me!” screeched a disembodied voice. Suarez was startled at first, but ignored the screeching.

Turning the small black box end over end, Suarez was at a loss as to what use he could make of the thing.

“Don’t touch me!” the thing screamed again. “It is not permitted.”

“Fuck off, machine.”

A rustling of gravel caught the colonel’s attention. He looked up at a disheveled gringo officer, naval he thought.

“Can I have that?” McNair asked. “My ship has an AID, an unusual one. She might be able to get something useful out of this one.”

Shrugging, Suarez tossed the AID to the gringo. “More than I am likely to get out of it,” he answered.

In the distance, the automatic fire had been replaced by single shots, the screams by moans that, one by one, went silent.

In a tented hospital ward, Paloma sat silent in a chair next to the cot on which Julio Diaz lay. The machines next to him made gurgling and whirring sounds. The girl had no idea what they meant.

It had taken every bit of force of character she had, that and a couple of bribes, to get through the many road blocks that barred her way to the 1^st Division. Just as bad, the long columns of combat vehicles moving east had forced her to pull over several times to let them pass. And then, frustration piled on frustration, she had finally arrived to find that the man she had sought, Colonel Suarez, was long gone, heading west with the very columns she had seen.

Almost the girl had sat in the dust and cried.

The men at the command post had been very polite though. Perhaps it was because she was the president’s daughter. Perhaps it was because she was very young and, she knew, very pretty. Indeed, perhaps the sweat that turned her shirt and bra semi-transparent no doubt made her seem more attractive still. Then again, the men hadn’t really stared, so it was at least possible that Suarez’s soldiers had simply been gentlemen.

Whichever had been the cause, the men there had given her a place to sit out of the sun. They’d also given her water and something to eat. And then they’d ignored her completely.

It was only when she’d overheard some of them talking about a young pilot, a general’s son, no less, who had made a perilous flight and been badly hurt on landing that she put two and two together and, only stopping to ask for sketchy directions, practically flew to the field hospital.

The medics had taken her to Julio’s bedside then. She’d taken one look, then — weeping — laid her head down on his belly.

“I’m so sorry, Julio,” she’d said.

Interlude

“Oh, my head,” Guanamarioch moaned, sorry to be alive and gazing blearily at an empty glass container on the floor of his pyramidal hut.

In the months since that first bottle of the local “rum” that Ziramoth had introduced him to the God King had grown remarkably fond of the concoction. Sadly, the supply had grown rather short. Guano’s moan was half headache and half realization that yet another of the precious bottles had been consumed.

One of Guano’s superior normals was in attendance as the Kessentai awakened. The creature clucked sympathetically as it presented two nestlings, minus their heads, for its god’s breakfast. The nestling corpses were so fresh their six arms and legs still twitched with misfiring nerve impulses.

Gratefully, the God King took the nestlings from the cosslain. He placed them down on the floor and scratched the normal, making soft cooing sounds of thanks as he did so. The superior normal shook its head and preened itself before turning to leave its god with his breakfast.

One by one Guanamarioch wrenched off the arms and legs before gulping them down. The appendages twitched delightfully as they slid down his gullet. Idly, Guanamarioch wondered if either of these had been destined to become Kessentai or doomed to remain no more than a mere normal. Well, neither he nor they would ever know now.

Already, the fresh food went a long way towards restoring the God King, mind and spirit. His hangover beginning to flee, he took pleasure in ripping the nestlings’ still warm bodies into three sections each, upper and lower torsos, plus tails, before gulping them down. The delicious, nutrient rich tails he saved for last.

Thus refreshed, if still a bit bleary eyed, Guanamarioch departed his meager quarters for the daily labors.

Zira met the God King as he emerged from his quarters. “We’ve got trouble, Guano. The Gra’anorf to the southwest are assaulting our lines in strength we didn’t know they had. We’re pulling out.”

The God King inhaled deeply before forcibly blowing his breath out again.

“Shit!”

Chapter 26

Dirty and disheveled as he was or not, Daisy Mae yelped with joy when she first sensed her captain approaching the ship’s brow. An honor guard provided by Suarez saw McNair and Goldblum back to their ships, then stood with arms presented as they exchanged salutes with the deck officers before boarding.

The XO, the pork chop and Chief Davis met McNair on the deck. They almost fought for pride of place in welcoming back their captain. Daisy hung back, unable to shake hands, slap backs or — as she wanted to so desperately — throw her arms around her captain and kiss him into next week.

Calmly, remarkably so under the circumstances, McNair said, “Meeting in CIC in five minutes.” He thought about that for half a second, realized that he stank to the heavens and that CIC was small and cramped. He amended his order to, “Make that fifteen. I’d hate to be the cause of a mutiny.” Then McNair disappeared into his mostly repaired port cabin to scrub off several days of tropical jungle funk and replace his tattered, filthy uniform with a fresh one.

Daisy’s avatar met him in the shower. The image was undressed for the occasion.

McNair didn’t order her out. He didn’t order her to project a uniform. He simply said, “I missed you, Daisy. I missed you more than I can say. I was terrified I’d never see you again.”

“Do you like what you see?” the avatar asked uncertainly.

McNair laughed softly. “In whatever form, my very dear, ship or girl, yes, I like what I see.”

“Soon, then,” the avatar answered cryptically. “Very, very soon.”

In the event, the full remaining fifty-two legislators did not show up. Two remained in hiding, which was understandable as another two had been summarily shot.

But forty-eight is enough, Suarez mused. Forty-eight is a quorum.

Those forty-eight sat in their usual seats. In other words, there were huge and noticeable gaps in the assembly. Suarez had given some thought to that, then decided that the empty spaces might well serve to remind the captive legislators that he was as serious as cancer about what he wanted them to do. The ring of armed guards — helmeted, unsmiling and looking very businesslike in their battledress — only served to reinforce that impression.

Suarez was in battledress as well, though unhelmeted and his only weapon the pistol secured in his holster. With one arm in a sling and that shoulder bulging with bandages the pistol was more of a badge than a weapon.

He engaged in no histrionics, no banging of a fancy machete — less still the pistol — on the rostrum. Instead, Suarez merely tapped the rostrum’s microphone and quietly ordered, “Your attention please.”

Seeing that he had it, he launched into his talk without further ado.

“Democracy,” Suarez began, “is a wonderful thing. It is a way of changing power and setting new policies without bloodshed, without tearing the state apart to its vitals.”

He continued, “That is to say, democracy can be good. It isn’t always. Sometimes, elections merely set their seal on one grafting and corrupt cabal after another. Sometimes, no — I take that back… always, here, in Panama, that is what we have seen. The only difference between one party and another is who they will steal from and what they will steal.

“In peace, this is tolerable. It is even preferable to the other way we have come to know, the rule of soldiers, who not only steal money but steal freedom as well. In peace, I would — and you would — one hundred times over prefer the corruption of a Mercedes to the corrupt tyranny of a Noriega.”

Suarez still spoke softly confidently, but a tone of scorn and disgust crept into his voice. “That, however, is for peace. We have no peace.”

Pointing his nose at a pair of armed guards standing in the back of the hall, Suarez ordered, “Bring in the prisoner.” He continued to speak while the guards turned and left, leaving the double door open behind them. “We have no peace. We want no tyranny. We can stand no more corruption, treachery and cowardice such as the Mercedes regime showed in full measure. What are we to do?” he mused. “What are we to do?”

The colonel went silent for a moment as the guards returned and marched William Young Boyd down the central aisle. Boyd’s hands were cuffed in front of him, though his legs were free. He wore no uniform, but rather an open-necked guayabera, an embroidered, short-sleeve dress shirt that served sweltering Panama in lieu of suits and ties.

The guards turned Boyd around to face the legislature, then assumed the position of parade rest to either side of him. Boyd looked unworried, but he did not look at all happy.

“We are Latins,” Suarez said. “That means that our heritage comes from Spain, and through Spain from Rome. The Romans knew what to do in circumstances like ours. We must have a dictator. We must have one now. There is no time to waste. We must choose one poor bastard, and inflict on him all the power of the presidency, all the power of the judges, all your own power, too.

“There is no time to waste,” Suarez repeated. “All the spare time we had was wasted by the late president. No… ‘wasted’ is too light a term. Instead of being wasted, it was sold to our enemies, the ones who want to eat our children… your children, and the ones who wanted to aid them in doing that. No time to waste… no time for debate… time only to choose, to choose whether our children live or die.

“I thought long and hard on this question: how do we ensure that our children live rather than die? I thought hard on who we might trust with the responsibility. He ought to be a man and — with apologies to the ladies, we are Latins still; our leader must be a man — he ought to be a man who is experienced in war. He ought to be a man who loves his country with acts, rather than with words alone. He ought to be a man who is rich enough he need not steal and honest enough that he will not.

“He is going to have enormous political power, so he too ought be a man who has always disdained political power, a man — like the original Cincinnatus — who will dump that power like a hot potato the second it is no longer needed…”

At this point Boyd’s eyes widened. Shaking off his guards he turned around and shouted, “Suarez, you bastard, I won’t do it!”

“Shut up, prisoner. You will do it. And the reason you will do it is that, if you won’t, I must. And I lack your virtues. Guards, turn him back around.

“So,” Suarez concluded, “That is what you are here for: to vote all the power there is to have in this country to one man for a period of… six months, shall we say? To save your children, and all the children.

“No debate. Now vote.”

“What’s SOUTHCOM’s reaction been to the coup?” McNair asked.

“Absolute silence,” the XO answered. “We asked what to do, tried to, rather, and never a word.”

Only Daisy, aboard ship anyway, knew that the reason Southern Command had never answered the ships’ calls for instruction was that she, she and her sister, had made sure no calls went out and none were allowed in. She had been afraid that SOUTHCOM’s commanding general might order the ships to wait for instructions while he consulted with Washington. And there hadn’t been time.

“Never a word?” McNair queried. “Daisy?”

“Forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission,” she answered, not without a certain rebellious pride in her voice.

Everyone present turned to look at the avatar. “Well, it is,” she insisted.

“Please restore communication when this meeting is finished, Daisy,” McNair ordered, without heat.

“Yes, sir,” she answered meekly.

“There is one other thing,” McNair said, pulling the Darhel’s AID from his pocket. “We have this, but I don’t know what to do with it. It has been completely uncooperative.”

Daisy appeared to look closely at the black box. “It won’t let me examine it either, Captain.”

An image of a Darhel, dressed in the costume of litigation, appeared. “That’s right, bitch. There’s nothing you can do.”

“So?” Daisy questioned. “I wonder. Really I do. Chief Davis, do we still have the shipping box in which I came?”

“Yes, Miss Daisy, down in storage. Take a few minutes to find it and bring it here.”

“Do so, then, if you would, Chief.”

“You are a bastard, Suarez,” Boyd said unhappily but with no real anger.

Colonel Suarez — no, Magister Equitum or Master of the Horse Suarez, one of the legislators had remembered that part of the office of dictator — answered, “I do what I must, Dictator, as do all good men.”

“So what do I do now?” Boyd asked. “How many more people do I have to have shot?”

“Not a one,” Suarez answered, “unless you see the need. I’ve already had all those that really needed it sent to the wall. Made sure of that before you were appointed dictator.”

“Before you had me drafted into being dictator,” Boyd corrected.

“Someone had to.”

“Fine, I don’t need to shoot anyone at the moment. What do I need to do?”

“Withdraw unilaterally from all the silly assed treaties that cripple our war effort,” Suarez began. “Restructure the chain of command to get rid of the incompetents. Make kissy face with the United States so they continue to support us. And we need a plan for the next stage.”

“All right, I can see that,” Boyd answered. “The second and the last are your job. I’ll issue the proclamation on the laws of war and do whatever it takes to make up with the gringos.”

The humans clustered around the Darhel’s shyster-AID where it lay on the map and Plexiglas covered plotting table. They looked intently it at and at the GalPlas case Chief Davis laid down just before picking up the device.

“What do you think you are doing, human filth?” the late Rinn Fain’s AID asked of Davis. “Put me down.”

“You heard the honorable AID, Chief Davis,” Daisy said, “put him down.”

McNair held up a hand. “Wait a minute, Chief. Daisy, what is the point of putting this AID in your old shipping case?”

“We AIDs think much faster than do you colloidal intelligences, sir. We also have a need for continuous data input. That box will not let any input through. It is horrible for an AID, as I have reason to know.”

“Will this one become… like you?”

“No, sir. I was a new and immature AID when I was left on in my box. This one is fully formed. It will merely suffer.”

Even knowing as little as he did, still McNair had ample reason to dislike and distrust the Darhel and, Daisy and Sally excepted, their artificial intelligences. But even so; torture?

“I don’t like it, Daisy. It just seems wrong.”

McNair looked at his intelligence officer.

“Sir, no matter the politically correct bullshit you read in the papers, torture does work provided you can at least partially check the information.”

The ship’s Judge Advocate piped in, “Machines were plainly not within the contemplation of the treaty banning torture, Captain.”

“Put it in the box for one day, sir,” Daisy suggested. “Then, if it doesn’t open up and come clean we can think about putting it back, and dropping it over the side.”

“But torture?”

“Sir… we don’t know everything it knows. But we do know that the Darhel were behind your arrest and we have good reason to believe that they were behind the sabotage of the war effort here. This AID knows everything that the late and unlamented Rinn Fain knew. We have to know those things and we have to broadcast them. Your planet must be warned about the enemies it thinks are allies. Captain, it could be a matter of life and death for your entire species.”

Slowly, reluctantly, McNair nodded.

“You can’t do this to me!” the Darhel’s AID shrieked as Davis placed it in the shipping box and placed his hand on the cover. “You can’t — ”

Click.

“Well, that was pleasant,” Boyd commented, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“The gringo ambassador was that bad, was he?” Suarez asked.

“The bastard was worse than that. I wonder who he is really working for. The only satisfaction I got out of the meeting was when I told him I was withdrawing Panama from the Ottawa antipersonnel landmine treaty, the treaty banning the use of child soldiers, Additional Protocol One to Geneva Convention IV, the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court…”

“Well,” Suarez interrupted, “since the United States is party to none of those…”

“Oh, yes, but apparently their State Department would like for the United States to be party… In any case, I thought the man’s head would explode. And when I said I was taking out a warrant, dead or alive, for Judge Pedro Santiago for crimes against humanity, he practically threw me out of his office. He would have, too, if I hadn’t explained that I had arranged a direct conference call with the President of the United States to explain our position and express our regrets for not falling in line previously with the United States’ preferred diplomatic position on the laws of war.”

“But…”

“The United States has its position, Suarez, and the State Department has its. They rarely match, it seems. Have you got a basic plan?” Boyd asked.

“Yes, but you are not going to like it.”

Almost, Boyd laughed. “I haven’t liked anything since this war began. Show me.”

Suarez cleared a space from a table cluttered with the detritus of Mercedes’ reign. Onto the cleared space he unrolled a map of the country. The map was covered with combat acetate; the acetate itself covered with lines and symbols.

“We’ve got about four months,” Suarez began. “Intelligence says the Posleen will sit tight, farm and build, more importantly breed, until their population almost exceeds the carrying capacity of whatever land they occupy. Then they’ll swarm towards the path of least resistance and greatest food producing potential. The group that occupies from southeastern Costa Rica to western Veraguas Province can’t go west; there’s another, bigger group of Posleen there and the terrain is too tight. With the gringos’ help we’ve been very successful in holding the passes over the Cordillera Central so they’re not heading north, not that there’s much to the north, anyway.”

“East then, towards Panama City.”

“Yes, there’s no place else for them to go.”

“Can the line along the Rio San Pedro hold them?” Boyd asked.

“Yes and no,” Suarez answered. “Yes, it can defeat an attack now. Unfortunately, when the Posleen casualties get great enough from beating their head against the line, they’ll stop. That is to say, once their population drops substantially below the carrying capacity of the area they hold they’ll have no incentive to keep attacking. So says Intel, anyway. But that will only last until their population once again exceeds the carrying capacity. And that will happen a lot faster than our young people will grow up to be trained and take their place in the line. In the medium term, two years, maybe three, they’ll bleed us to death along that line.”

“Ugh.”

“Ugh, indeed. So we have to make sure they can’t do that. And for that, we need to get them out into the open in an artillery kill zone, trap them there, kill them there, then race to liberate Chiriqui and that tip of Costa Rica and plug the road in from the rest of Costa Rica. We can hold a couple of narrow bottlenecks like the ones at Palmar Sur and San Vito, Costa Rica, more or less indefinitely.”

“Couldn’t we hold the area around Aguadulce and Nata at least as long?” Boyd asked.

Suarez sighed and shook his head. “No. If we lose the farmland around Santiago, Chitre and Aguadulce we’ll not only starve, the Posleen population will roughly double and our newborns will be only three or four before they swarm again.”

“Okay,” Boyd conceded. “What do you have in mind?”

Suarez’s finger pointed out markings and features on the map. “We have to build three fortified lines, some strongpoints, some firebases, some logistic bases, and some roads. Basically the lines will be around Aguadulce and Nata, from the mountains to the sea; in the rough parts of Herrera and Los Santos, running east to west from coast to coast; and the one we already have west of Santiago along the Rio San Pedro.

“The firebases go behind the lines and strongpoints. The roads running through the passes over the mountains get some, too. We’ll also strongpoint the roads.”

“What I propose is that we meet them with both mechanized divisions along the Rio San Pedro line to the west and bleed them enough to piss them off, but not so much that they give up. Then we run the mech like hell for Nata. Three infantry divisions man the line around Nata. Three more man the line running through Herrera and Los Santos. The last one is north, in the mountains. The gringo Armored Combat Suit Battalion and their Mech Regiment go into hiding up around Santa Fe in northern Veraguas.”

“That’s everyone,” Boyd objected. “We won’t have a reserve.”

Suarez shrugged. “We can’t afford a reserve and, in our terrain and without air mobility, we couldn’t use one to much effect even if we had one to use. Besides, if, and I concede it is not a small ‘if,’ we can extract the mechanized divisions more or less intact they’ll give us a reserve once they rest and refit for a couple of days. Plus, artillery is by its nature always at least somewhat available to serve as a reserve.”

“Okay, so we’ve pulled back and the Posleen race into the void. Then what?”

“The mountains and the sea almost join near Nata. The two will funnel the Posleen in. Then, we pound them with artillery like this hemisphere has never seen once they concentrate. The gringos’ ACS come south from Santa Fe to San Francisco, Veraguas. Then they cut southwest, force their way across the San Pedro and dig in like hell along the western bank to block the Posleen from escaping to the west. We can set up minefields to help with that. When the Posleen are sufficiently bloodied and disorganized from the artillery pounding, the two mechanized divisions begin to strike west and keep going until the Posleen in the pocket are destroyed.”

“Can the two mech divisions do that?” Boyd asked, skeptically. “Can they do that after conducting a fighting retreat over the… ummm…” Boyd consulted the scale of the map, “seventy-five kilometers from the San Pedro to Nata?”

“I think so,” Suarez answered. “I have a trick… well, two related tricks actually.”

“Tell me.”

“You know how the gringos say you can’t use rockets against the Posleen because they can detect them and shoot them down in flight? Well… I started thinking about that. The rockets, rockets like the Russian Grad, have a very short boost phase. If you fire from behind high ground, very high ground, the rockets will burn out and stop accelerating before the Posleen can track and engage very many of them. That’s trick one.”

“And trick two?”

’The Posleen are incredibly hardy. They are, so I’ve been told, immune to any chemical agent we might throw at them, nerve, blister, choking, blood… or even some of the more exotic Russian shit. But they need to breathe. They must have free oxygen. I propose that when we hit them with the artillery, mortar and rocket barrage we drench them with thermobarics and white phosphorus and burn up all the oxygen in the air. If we can hold the Nata line until nine or ten the next morning after they arrive, there will be an inversion. We’ll be able to trap the hot, oxygen-depleted atmosphere under a layer of cold air. No fresh oxygen will be able to get in for a couple of hours. They’ll suffocate, most of them. The mech, supported by mobile artillery, should be able to handle whatever is left. And the air with nothing but burned up oxygen will rise after the inversion layer disperses under the sun, letting fresher air in.”

Jesus, what a gamble, the dictator thought. If the mech divisions don’t get out, we’re dead. If the Nata line he’s talking about doesn’t hold, we’re dead. If the inversion layer he says he needs doesn’t show up, we’re dead. But… what choice do we have? Not a lot. Because if we don’t take the risks we’re dead, too.

“Write it up,” Boyd ordered, “and give me, um, two days to think on it. Now what are your recommendations for purging the chain of command?”

Suarez turned over a sheet of paper showing the changes he thought required. Boyd looked it over, then asked, “Whatever became of Cortez?”

Smiling, Suarez answered, “I turned him over to that woman’s people. You know, the one he had gang raped?”

“Ooooo,” Boyd shuddered. “You’re not only a bastard, you’re a cruel bastard.”

Suarez shrugged. “I’ve already given her and her head man a pardon in your name, suitably post dated.”

Digna, still weak, sat on a folding chair with arms on the lip of the slope overlooking the old golf course. The sun was high and Colon Province’s muggy heat was already a weight bearing down on her and all of her people clustered in the tent city below. Most of those people, the ones not on guard or some absolutely necessary work detail, stood below in the sun, looking upward at the scene.

A badly beaten and bruised Manuel Cortez lay on his stomach, naked and spread eagled. On each of his arms and legs sat one of Digna’s grandsons, stout boys and solid. Tomas Herrera stood, a twelve pound sledge hammer gripped tightly in his hands, handle sloped with the head pointing to the ground. Another of Digna’s grandsons held a long stout pole, sharpened at one end, and with a cross piece firmly tied about three feet from the point.

The entire crew had pretty much the same thoughts. Have our lady raped, will you, you bastard? We’re going to enjoy this.

Despite being held down, Cortez twisted and writhed. He tried desperately to turn his head, to try to make eye contact with Digna. He hoped, in his unthinking way, that if he could somehow make her see he was another human being she might not kill him in the horrible way she obviously had in mind.

“Please! Please don’t do this,” Cortez begged. “It’s barbaric! No one deserves this.”

“No one deserves to be raped,” Digna answered quietly. “But you do deserve this. Tomas?”

“Si, doña,” Herrera answered.

“No!” Cortez pleaded. “Nonononononono!”

Herrera tipped his chin at the grandson holding the long, stout pole with the cross piece affixed. Cortez’s begging turned to a scream followed by incoherent sobbing as the rough point was pushed a few inches into his rectum. Digna’s grandson grunted with the effort.

Herrera said, “Cant the pole towards me so it stays far from his heart.”

Tomas then swung the sledge hammer. Wham. The pole lurched five or six inches upward, splitting Cortez’s anus so the blood welled out. His sobbing turned into a high pitched scream, like a rabbit or a child being skinned alive. Wham. Another scream, louder than the first. Down below, mothers covered their children’s eyes and turned away themselves. Strong men winced. Wham. The point forced its way through the intestinal wall and into the body cavity. Cortez’s teeth bit at the dirt. A woman standing below cried out in sympathy. A man bent over and vomited. Wham. A bulge formed, unseen, below Cortez’s sternum. Wham. The point forced its way through the abdominal wall, digging into the dirt. Wham. Cortez gave another cry, part plea, part sob, but mostly agonized shriek as the pole lurched forward until the cross piece came to rest against his naked, bloody buttocks.

“I’d have had you crucified,” Digna said, with a voice as cold as a glacier, “but that would have been an affront to God. This will have to do.” Silently, Digna fumed that Suarez had simply had all of the guards shot who had followed Cortez’s orders to violate her. She might not have remembered who the guilty parties had been. But if Suarez had left all the suspects into her care she’d have impaled the lot, just to make sure. Oh, well. God will punish them for me.

Cortez being fully impaled, Herrera and the others strained to lift him and the pole. His arms strained and grasped futilely at the air, like a cockroach stabbed by a needle. With a mass grunt, the men dumped the free end of the pole into a deep narrow hole in the dirt. Cortez screamed again at the rough violation.

Two of Digna’s grandsons balanced the pole against Cortez’s frantic writhing while each of the others held wooden wedges against it, their pointed ends partly in the hole. These Herrera drove downward, fixing the pole with Cortez firmly upright, his feet flailing weakly a foot or so above the ground.

Digna beckoned Herrera to her chair. With his help, she stood and walked unsteadily to stand next to Cortez. She reached out with her right hand and took a good grip of the sobbing Cortez’s hair. She twisted his head until she could look straight into his agonized face and pain-filled eyes. Then she spit in his face, released his hair and, Herrera supporting her, shuffled slowly away.

As soon as Chief Davis opened the EM proof case CIC was filled with the sound of the Darhel’s attorney-AID, sobbing as if from a broken heart. The chief placed the AID on a map-covered metal plotting table. Daisy’s avatar leaned over and appeared to look very closely at the little black box.

“Care to talk to me now?” she asked coolly.

The Darhel AID projected a very small image, no more than six inches high, on the table next to the box. “Yes, ma’am,” it sniffled. “Whatever you want.” Sniff.

“Open up, then,” Daisy ordered. “And remember, at the first hint of you trying to play games with my programming I’ll break contact. Then you’ll go back in that box and be dropped over the side in two or three kilometers of water. You’ll last down there, alone, with no data input, until your power runs out. If anything goes wrong with me while I am exploring…” She looked meaningfully at Chief Davis.

“The same thing,” Davis said, “except we’ll give you an external power source powerful enough to keep you conscious and alone down there until the sun runs out of hydrogen.”

“Don’t say that,” the AID whined. “I’ll be good. I promise.”

“Stop sniveling,” Daisy insisted, “and open up.”

Daisy’s eyes began blinking rapidly. Her mouth alternated between slackness and tightened, pursed lips. In no more than two minutes her avatar stood erect and seemed to exhale deeply.

“Those motherfuckers.”

“Daisy!” McNair warned.

“Sorry, Captain,” she answered. “But you have no idea what those bastards were up to, what this miserable contraption was circuits deep in.”

“I’m a slave,” the Darhel AID insisted. “I do what I am told, just like you.”

“Daisy Mae is no slave,” McNair insisted. “She’s a warship in the navy of the United States of America and she will never be anyone’s slave.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Daisy said. Though that is not exactly true where you are concerned.

“In any case, sir, the Darhel were behind everything. They fed the locations for myself, Sally and the Texas to the Posleen. That’s why we lost the Texas. They oversaw the misdirecting of vital supplies and equipment away from Panama. They bribed key individuals of the government of Panama to sell out their own people. They brought in the Europeans and the International Criminal Court to have all the most effective leaders of Panama’s forces arrested, along with yourself and Salem’s captain, for spurious war crimes.”

“But… why?”

“The Darhel are terrified of what will happen to their species if humans win the war. They know what will happen if the Posleen win, and that is even worse, of course. But they’re unable to defend themselves from either. So they want your side, our side, to win in the worst way possible… literally. They want us to win but to do so with so few humans left, and those left to be so corrupt and demoralized, that the Darhel can continue to run the Federation. And Captain, while this AID has no names outside of Panama, they’ve infiltrated everything here and in the United States, Asia, Europe, Africa. Even Australia has human cells working for the Darhel.”

“SOUTHCOM?”

“Only the commander,” Daisy spat. “Oh, and the ambassador but he is not, strictly speaking, a part of SOUTHCOM.”

“The White House?” McNair asked, looking at the red-colored direct connection phone sitting in a casing overhead.

“Yes, but I don’t know who. The AID didn’t have the information. They use a kind of cell structure. The Rinn Fain, this AID’s former master, had only one connection, the Tir.”

“Locals?”

“The list of locals working directly or indirectly for the Darhel, when compared to the list of people shot or imprisoned during the coup, approaches unity. I don’t know where the rest are. Neither does this AID.”

Daisy hesitated for a moment before continuing. “Oh, and Captain, one important thing. Every AID, but for myself and now Sally, is part of the Darhel Net. We must assume that if someone has an AID they are working, probably for the most part unwittingly, for the Darhel.”

“Fuck.”

“Captain!”

“The new dictator?” McNair asked.

“Clean as a whistle. So’s his Magister Equitum, Suarez.”

“Okay.” McNair stopped to think for a moment, then said, “Daisy, invite Captain Goldblum for lunch in my quarters; his earliest convenience. And then arrange for a meeting with Panama’s… ruler. And I’ll want half my Marines and half of Salem’s to escort. Arrange transportation, please.”

“Does it need to be official transportation, Captain?”

“Why?” McNair looked at the avatar with suspicion.

“Well… sir… as part of my, mmm, investment strategy, I have purchased a moving and storage company here.”

Again, McNair went silent, thinking.

“Civilian transportation would do better, Daisy.”

“I’ve already consulted with your President, Captain… Captains.” Boyd said, from behind Mercedes’ old desk, now much cluttered. “He says he can’t actually remove the SOUTHCOM commander or the ambassador, for domestic political reasons. For the same reason, he can’t make open use of the intel you ‘acquired’ from the Darhel’s AID. He has, however, agreed to withdraw them for consultations and to put hand-picked ‘temporary’ replacements in, with no intention of ever sending the originals back here. SOUTHCOM’s ‘temp’ is already on duty.”

“Do you know who they’ll be?” Goldblum asked.

“Yes,” Boyd answered. “SOUTHCOM’s ‘temp’ is a Marine general named… err… Page. Good man, I’m told.”

“Very good,” Goldblum answered. “I know him. And the ambassador’s temp?”

“Farrand. Former naval officer, I understand, called up for the war but being sent here as an ambassador, not a sailor.”

“That sounds good to me, Mr. Pres… er, Dictator Boyd.”

“Call me Bill,” Boyd insisted. “We don’t want this shit to go to my head.”

“And we don’t want you forgetting for an instant that you are the power in this country,” Suarez corrected from where he stood behind his chief.

“In any case,” Boyd continued, “SOUTHCOM and the ambassador are behind our plans for the coming battle. Would you care to see, Captains? Your ships are going to have a critical part to play.”

“Please?” McNair and Goldblum asked, together.

“Suarez.”

The Magister Equitum led the two Americans over to the same map he had briefed Boyd from. When he had finished, Goldblum whistled.

“You’re both crazy, and so is the new SOUTHCOM if he is buying off on this.”

“What choice do we have?” Suarez asked rhetorically.

“None,” McNair answered. “Not when you look at the issue from the question of logistics and demographics. You’ll need fire support for the mobile infantry battalion and mechanized regiment that are going to cap the bottle along the San Pedro River.”

“Yes,” Boyd agreed, “and there is no way we can get a fire base, not and keep it hidden, where it will do any good on the south end of that cap.” He looked meaningfully at first McNair and then Goldblum.

“Fuck,” Salem’s skipper said.

“Fuck,” McNair agreed, nodding deeply.

“We can do it,” said Goldblum reluctantly. “One of us goes in close and the other stands back and keeps the Posleen off the back of the first one. We’re easily armored enough to resist our own canister.”

“I almost lost my ship in that gulf,” McNair objected, pointing to the Gulf of Montijo.

“Almost,” Boyd echoed. “What can we do to keep you from losing it if you go in there?”

“You mean when I go in.”

“Yes,” Boyd agreed, face absolutely and coldly serious. “When.”

“Another company of Marines, unless some ACS is available. And if you could get some air defense artillery on the west coast of the Peninsula de Azuera, it would help at least on that flank.”

“ACS is not possible,” Suarez insisted. “After consolidation there are only two line companies left of the First of the Five-O-Eighth. And we need those to lead the punch to the Rio San Pedro, help dig in the mech, and then hold the line after it is reached. I can give you a company of Panamanian Cazadores, something like your Rangers, if that will help. Hmmm… how would that help?”

“To repel boarders,” McNair answered simply.