A Desert Called Peace

PART V
Chapter Twenty-Five

"The enemy gets a vote." -Common wisdom, understood by all decent armies, and completely lost on the press.

Ninewa, 24/3/461 AC

People were beginning to return to the town now, indeed to return to all the villages of the roughly forty thousand square kilometers of the Balboan Zone of Responsibility or BZOR. The people numbered anywhere from a million to two million; no one really knew and aerial surveys were of little help.

The populace of Ninewa returned to what was mostly a ruin. There were no functioning utilities, no governmental administration, no schools, no jobs. Whatever local money the people had was worthless except perhaps as toilet paper. Then again, since the Sumeris did not, by and large, use toilet paper it didn't really have even this small value.

On the plus side, there was food-plenty of it, as a matter of fact- in the granaries and silos of the former government. These were under guard by the legion, which had taken control by right of conquest. There was water no worse than what they had been used to drinking. As this same water might well have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands in the years leading up to the invasion, this was small recommendation.

There was also plenty of work to be done. With work, with money, with food for the money to buy, there was some hope. Electricity was nice, but it could wait. Clean water was more important, but it could wait, too, albeit at cost in lives. For now, what the people needed were jobs, money, and food to buy with the money.

And therein lay a problem, for although plenty of the food had been captured, enough to last until the next harvest came in, following right on the heels of the invading armies had come the cosmopolitan progressives.

The progressives came in one of four or, rather, five categories. Some had assets or skills and were willing and eager to help the Sumeri people by helping the invaders. Others had assets and skills, money at least, but were totally unwilling to cooperate with the invading armies even though that was the only way to help the Sumeri people. Some had neither assets nor skills and only enough money to ensure that their representatives in Sumer could live rather well while by being gadflies. Some came with nothing but a willingness to work and were willing to live pretty poorly while they did so. And then, for the fifth group, there was the press, which was unwilling to do anything useful and, indeed, was most eager to see the entire enterprise fail, preferably miserably.

The cosmopolitans, most of them, did not want the food sold. They did not want the people forced to work to earn the money to buy it. Food was a "human right" and it was morally wrong to withhold it.

Carrera said, "Fuck off." The cosmopolitans lived to be appreciated, that and for their perks, and rough language was not something they were used to. This cavalier treatment sent many of them packing but, in both Carrera's opinion and Sada's, too many of them stayed.

The legion called a meeting of the Kosmos, sending patrols out throughout its ZOR to so advise them. About half showed up. These were given their marching orders and rules of engagement. They were also promised that security would be provided by the legion as long as they followed the legion's program.

The rest? Those without the obvious security of uniformed legionaries? Sada's watchers came to the fore here, showing up in the middle of the night to threaten, to beat, in a few cases to kill. The only limit on their conduct was, "no rapes." This rule was not always followed and Sada had to have a few of his men, with regret, hanged in public squares.

Some more of the Kosmos packed up, true, but even more came to Carrera's next meeting.

The press waxed lyrical about "the growing lawlessness and terror in Sumer."

That, Carrera admitted, was a problem but not one admitting of an easy solution. That he had hired Sada's brigade, and even expanded it, helped. Still, that was only about three thousand young men employed. There were anywhere from a third to three-quarters of a million men without jobs, though many of these were farmers and could be said to be constantly employed. For the nonfarmers, he could decorate every non-functioning lamppost in the BZOR with hanged bodies and still men would rob to feed their families. And who could blame them?

Again, Sada's watchers provided a partial solution. Sent out to all the larger towns and in all the neighborhoods of the city of Ninewa, they reported on the crime status in their areas, naming names. Carrera's helicopters would then fly in, surrounding the town concerned with Sada's troops. Hangings, sometimes mass hangings, quickly followed. That was the province of the mullahs Sada had found, the chief mullah charging a price of one gold drachma per death sentence.

The press added, "Travesty of Justice" and "Death Squads" to their existing repertoire of "growing lawlessness and terror."

"In the long run, though," Sada told Carrera, "however necessary they seem now, the hangings might do us more harm than good on their own."

"Why's that?" Carrera asked, puzzled.

The two men sat conversing in one of the university buildings, the entire complex still being under occupation by the legion. Fortunately, the furniture had not been looted precisely because of that occupation. The rest of the town had been somewhat looted, what little there was to take, by the returning people. It was only "somewhat" because of a dozen or so street lynchings that had taken place supervised by the men of Sada's brigade.

"We're not individuals the way you people are," Sada explained. "Everyone we hang is a member of a family and a tribe. It doesn't really matter if the bastards we string up are guilty because right and wrong here do not mean objective right and wrong, they mean, "What is good for my tribe is right; what is bad for my tribe is wrong." Executing young men who could bring in money and eventually father families is therefore inherently wrong."

"How many have your boys hanged so far?" Carrera asked.

"Eighty-seven," Sada answered, instantly. "As of yesterday. Fortunately, they're mostly from two of the smaller tribes. Also, fortunately, they were mostly here in Ninewa where tribal affections are slightly looser."

"How did the dictator maintain control if killing a tribe member makes enemies of the entire tribe?" Carrera asked, even more puzzled than he had been before.

"Well… see," Sada explained. "He changed the equation. Resistance meant something between tribal culling and tribal extermination and not a man or woman in the country but believed he meant it. Therefore that became the ultimate wrong, risking the complete death of the tribe."

"I can't exterminate entire tribes," Carrera said. Jesus, I've got some decency left. "You have a solution?"

"Work? We have to provide work for the young men. We might also slip some money, under the table, to the leaders of the tribes we've affected."

Carrera answered, "No… I won't reward people for failure to control their young men. I'm willing to provide work, though."

"It'll help," Sada answered with a shrug. And I can take care of bribing the tribal leaders, even if Patricio will not.

"Let's look at the map," Carrera suggested.

The map, marked up with grease pencils, showed the borders of the BZOR, which was a near square of about two hundred kilometers on a side. Ninewa was approximately in the center of the eastern side along the River Buranun.

"We need to build a base here," Carrera pointed to a spot just northeast of Ninewa. "I'll also need one more smaller base for each infantry cohort, though those will need to be big enough to house three times that many, eventually, and assuming the war goes the way I expect it to. Can your people handle that kind of construction?"

Sada snorted. "Back on Old Earth my people were building magnificent palaces and cities when yours were still painting themselves blue." He did some quick calculations in his head. Let's see. An average cohort base will need to house about fifteen hundred men when it grows. At sixty square meters per man that would be ninety thousand. A square of three hundred meters on a side…

"How are you planning on building your bases?" Sada asked.

"Basically square. Ditch. Earthen wall," Carrera answered. "Maybe adobe housing. Small airstrip inside for the Crickets. A full-length strip, maybe twelve-hundred meters, at the main base."

"Okay… that would be about one square kilometer you'll need to rent or lease-trust me, Patricio, you'll want to lease it rather than just take it-for each cohort base. A fair price, depending on the quality of the land, would be somewhere in the range of twenty to fifty thousand FSD per year for each."

"That's all?"

"Yes, somewhere in there. Probably on the low end provided you make it clear that the housing will stay when you leave. Then, for the walls… ummm… call it two or three thousand men employed with shovels for a month, for each base. Housing would be… honestly I don't know anything about housing."

"I know someone who does," Carrera answered. "Get me Tribunes Cheatham and Clean," he shouted out the office door.

"Two to three thousand each would work for the outlying bases," Carrera said. "Here in Ninewa it would have to be quite a bit larger."

"Yes," Sada agreed. "Including my brigade it would have about four times the area and twice the perimeter. Call it four to six thousand men for a month."

"That would make a big dent in the unemployment situation here in Ninewa," Carrera said. Unenthusiastically, he added, "But only for a month or so. Speaking of your men and families, has yours arrived here safely?"

"Yes, just this morning. I've taken over a couple of rooms here in the compound for them."

"We'll need to secure the families of your men as well, you know," Carrera observed.

"Just so. But the university hasn't enough space. For now, the families are safer where they are. When we build the base, we can make room for them as well and move them there."

Cheatham knocked on the door, accompanied by the Anglian, Clean. "You called us, sir?"

"Yeah… how much would we need in housing, presumably adobe housing, for the troops?"

"Adobe?" Clean asked, visibly interested. "As it so happens, I've always had a great interest in adobe construction. Did you know that it can be as strong as concrete and, if labor is cheap, also much, much cheaper? It's a wonderful building material for the very rich and the very poor."

It took Clean and Cheatham some days to work out the plans and the requirements. Still more time was spent in negotiations with local leaders for the leasing of land. After that it took more time for PSYOP and word of mouth advertising to assemble work crews. Within a month or so, however, about fifteen thousand of the otherwise unemployed Sumeris had found work in base construction. This was less of a drop in the bucket than it seemed as each Sumeri with money to spend created jobs for the otherwise jobless.

It helped, but not enough.

Zabol, Pashtia

Fadeel al Nizal was a man with a problem.

Actually, I have more problems than I can count. Starting with this one.

"This one" meant Mustafa ibn Mohamed ibn Salah, min Sa'ana. And Mustafa was not a happy camper, nor even a happy troglodyte.

"You shame me for being a member of the same race," Mustafa stormed. "I gave you money, hundreds of thousand of FS drachma, and what do you show for it? Nothing!" he raged. "I've given you access to our data base to recruit your own group and what have those you have recruited done to resist the infidel? Lain around buggering each other for all that anyone can see!"

Abdul Aziz ibn Kalb, standing well off to one side, flinched even though he was not the target of the tongue lashing.

"Sheik Mustafa," Fadeel began, "I admit, we were taken by surprise by the speed of the infidel conquest. But then," and Fadeel looked around at the walls of the cave as if to say, Aren't you a little surprised to find that your impregnable Pashtia, the Pashtia that did to death the might of the Volgan Empire, is reduced to this little hole in the ground?

"Don't try me, little man," Mustafa glared. "If we are here it is due to the will of Allah. He is the great strategist. Ours is but to fight in His cause."

"Indeed," Fadeel agreed. "And all will turn out well, even in Sumer. But we do have problems there."

"Like what?" Mustafa demanded.

"Number One is a turncoat Sumeri general named Sada. For reasons I dearly pray the Almighty will reveal to me someday, this man fought the infidel gloriously… and then surrendered and joined him. Worse, this Sada, the dog, took his brigade over with him."

"He is in the infidel's pay," Mustafa said, with a glare of hate. "His family must pay."

"Easier said than done, Great Prince. The turncoat's family is already beyond our reach. Those of his men will be… harder to identify and find. We are working on this."

"Ah, so you actually have done something."

"We have done what we could. I have just over one hundred future martyrs operating in Sumer. About twenty of them are in the area of the traitor, Sada. It would be more except that about half, or a bit more, of what I sent simply disappeared. I suspect he has a network of informers. And I can't eliminate the informers without knowing who they are. I can't find out who they are without getting more of my people in place. And I can't get my people in place, as long as the area crawls with informers. Only in the city of Ninewa, mostly because it is of a size that makes it impossible to identify strangers, have I been successful in infiltrating. That; and that there been a major displacement of people and disruption of society wherever there was serious fighting."

"And you have a plan for the use of what you do have?" Mustafa asked, growing visibly calmer.

"I do. Noting that everything is in the hands of the Beneficent, the Merciful, still I am prepared to begin attacks against these crusaders very soon."

"With what?"

"I have too few men to conduct a proper suicide campaign at this time," Fadeel admitted. "But I can do kidnappings, I can plant bombs, I can do some assassinations. Watch and see. There are munitions scattered unsecured all over Sumer. My people are buying these up. Very soon the invader will feel our sting."

Ninewa, 1/4/461 AC

Tariq Mohsem was one of the town's few Christians. A bit shorter than most of the Sumeri norm, and also a bit stouter as befit a normally prosperous shopkeeper, he was also one of the first merchants to reopen for business. Tariq's shop, one of Ninewa's largest before the invasion, was a general store that sold food along with some dry goods, household appliances, tools, and such.

He'd returned to find the shop looted and heavily damaged. He had some funds, not the worthless Sumeri pounds but hard currency from the FS and TU. It had been his escape money. Instead of using it to escape with his family, however, he'd decided to stay and rebuild. Factoring large in that decision had been the very forthright way the occupying forces-or liberating, for those who insisted on more aesthetic terms-had shown early on that they were intent on maintaining order. Perhaps the clearest indicator of this was the young man Tariq had found dead in the shop, though visible from the street, hanging by the neck from a cross beam- Who would have thought a neck could stretch that far?- and with a sign on his chest proclaiming, "Looter."

"If the invading forces provide safety and order," Tariq had told his wife, "why not stay? This is home, after all."

So, instead of using the money to flee, Tariq had hired a couple of carpenters to put his shop back in order. The rest he had used to buy food from the invaders. He had to admit, they'd charged a fair price.

"Thank God," he'd also said to his wife, "that they are, too. If we were further north, in the Anglian or FSC sector, they'd be giving the food away and no one would shop from us."

Things were going well enough, so far, too. He'd bought the food at about forty percent of what the invaders told him he could sell it for. And don't the bastards stop by from time to time to make sure I'm not gouging, too? Of course, that doesn't stop me from taking some of the grain and trading it for other foodstuffs, which I can mark up rather more than that.

With the profits, and given that he was one of the first stores to reopen, Tariq not only hired two assistants, he also took on an armed guard for the evenings when he closed shop.

Of course, not everyone had a job yet. The six thousand or so men employed by the legion, locally, were only a fraction of those needing work. On the other hand, those six thousand with money created a certain amount of work on their own, as did the men of Sada's brigade and even the damned foreigners. In any case, Tariq was finding business picking up almost to preinvasion levels. As to whether it would drop off again, as more competition reentered the market; who could say? Tariq hadn't gotten where he was by inability to compete or to work hard. Indeed, in a freer market he expected to do rather better.

No one noticed when the tall, slender man with the oddly and unevenly shaped eyes pulled the beat up, dented and dirty white van to the front of the store. Even the lack of a license plate excited no interest; many, perhaps even most, of the automobiles operating in the town were unlicensed. Perhaps they had once had licenses; who knew?

The slender fellow had a friendly face, although anyone who saw him probably thought it seemed a bit distant. He fiddled with something in the van, something below door level. No matter, everyone in the country was still in a state of shock, even those for whom the shock was not unpleasant. Nor was there anything particularly suspicious in the driver's reaching below the dash.

Opening the van's door and stepping out, the driver simply walked into the store. No one thought it odd that he consulted his watch and left after approximately four minutes. And no one walking by the storefront connected the man departing with the parked van.

Standard military time fuse burns at a rate of forty seconds per foot. The fuse had been cut to a length of fifteen feet. Thus, between the time he reached below the dash, and subtracting a few seconds to enter Tariq's store and five minutes inside, the slender man had just over four minutes to walk away at a fairly leisurely pace. He was almost three hundred meters away when…

"What the fuck was the point?" Carrera asked Sada.

"I'm not sure," the Sumeri answered. "Does it have to have a point?"

The two men, surrounded by legionaries with a few of Sada's men as well, stood in front of what had once been a store. The street was mostly still there, barring only a four foot deep crater, but the front of the store itself was gone. Indeed, much of the back was gone as well. Bodies and parts of bodies remained. Some of those parts were very small.

"Do we know how many people?"

Sada asked one of his men before answering, "At least fifty-seven. That many are more or less intact. As to the parts…"-he spread his arms, shrugging- "… hard to say."

Carrera's eyes focused on one very small part. It was a leg, small, slightly olive in tone, with a shoe on the foot. A baby girl's leg, he thought. A baby girl… like my Milagro. So fucking what if she was a Moslem, she was still just a baby girl. Bastards!

Sada looked at the legate, looked away quickly, and offered, "It is no shame to cry, my friend. The shame would be in doing nothing about this atrocity."

Wiping a hand across his face, which did little more than streak the dust that had gathered there, Carrera forced the sorrowful tone away and asked, bitterly, "What can we do? It's in the nature of these things that they leave little evidence."

Sada laughed grimly. "Remember what I said about us being the sort of people who become exceedingly resentful about losing family members? Well… I think we have here the recruiting brochures"his hand swept the scene, taking in the bodies and parts of bodies"to acquire some numbers of people who will do anything to get even for what's just been done to their family. Watch and see if I'm not right."

He bellowed something to one of his officers supervising the soldiers at the bombing site. The officer came over and Sada spoke to him briefly. Then he turned back to Carrera and said, "I've just ordered Lieutenant Faroush to round up as many relatives as he can find and bring them to the university. I don't suppose your people are up to teaching a course in counter-terror? No? Well, we'll think of something. After all, it isn't as if we Sumeris have never had experience in crushing dissidents."

Village of Qadir Karam,

Ninewa Province, 10/4/461 AC

Sada's adjutant had narrowed the number of applicants down to thirty-six.

Since this was Sada 's adjutant, the officer didn't do the normal thing for Sumer and select based on who could offer the highest bribe. Instead, he screened out those too old, or too young, those who didn't look strong enough and those with wives and children still living. Not that the others were turned away completely. Instead, they were redirected to neighborhood militias. Some joined; some did not.

After that, the adjutant selected for intelligence and desire for revenge. This required personal interviews, literacy being far from universal in Sumer and vindictiveness something that could never be objectively tested for. This process took time but narrowed the number of suitable candidates considerably.

Those few dozen were gathered now in a plain and somewhat rundown adobe mosque in this plain and ramshackle Sumeri town. Indeed, the only brightness to the assembly came from the flickering lamps along the walls and the shining, hating, vengeful eyes of the men assembled. Along with the few dozen was another, smaller group of specialists Sada had recruited from the dictator, Saleh's, secret police.

"So," Sada began, in addressing them, "you have agreed to give up your old lives, to become instruments of justice and vengeance? Excellent. Let me tell you what you are going to do. In a few minutes I am going to turn you over to one of my officers and a couple of special people he has selected to teach you how to become the instruments you wish to be. Before that happens, I am going to take your oaths, in the name of Allah, that you will obey every order you are given without question. You will be trained, over the next few months, in how to kill. More than that, you'll be trained in how to kill in the most terrifying manner. After that, you will return to your homes. In time, orders will come. You will gather in small groups to prepare and then you will hunt down and kill-or otherwise punish-those whom you are told to, wherever they may be and who or what ever they may be.

"Let me explain something to you, two things, actually. One is that once you have taken the oath, you may not release yourself from it. Your families are hostages, wherever they may be, for your continued obedience. The second is in the nature of what you are to do.

"You see, there are three kinds of terrorism. The first is what you have suffered, random acts of senseless violence. This kind almost never works," Sada sneered. "Witness the Federated States of Columbia. When their people were randomly killed, they merely went to war to exact vengeance and destroy the terrorists. Two regimes, here and in Pashtia, which formerly were great supporters of terrorism around the world, have fallen. More than that, as boys in school you all read-at least those of you who had the chance to attend school did-of the great terror bombings of the Great Global War. That was all random terror; it targeted nobody in particular. Note that no one ever knuckled under to them until nuclear weapons were used. So much for random terror.

"The other kind of terror is specific. With this kind, punishment is inflicted on particular persons, either on themselves or on those whom they love. To be the target of specific terror is a fearsome and terrible thing. Specific terror works. If it didn't, would the dictator have lasted a week?"

The eyes of the men assembled seemed to glow. Yes, yes, they thought. This is what we want: specific terror.

"The third kind of terror is genocidal. With this an entire people and even civilization is threatened with destruction. Thus, it includes specific terror because, if all are killed, then all whom you love are killed as well. Anyone who does not believe that this kind of terror works is a fool. Genocidal terror was all that kept the Federated States and the Volgan Empire from destroying each other and, incidentally, probably us as well. Genocidal terror is probably all that keeps the United Earth Peace Fleet and the Federated States from using nuclear weapons on each other now.

"So there are your three types. The kind that was used on you and brought you here and the other two, which are the kinds you will use to retaliate. Are there any questions?"

Seeing there were none, Sada said, "Very well. Stand and raise your right hands…"

University Compound,

Ninewa, 12/4/461 AC

Ricardo Cruz was just leaving the gymnastics building where he had showered when it happened

The first warning was a flash in the distance, behind some houses in the town. Next came the muffled sound of a small explosion. Then came the first blast, much nearer. Only after that could anyone make out the freight train rattle of incoming mortar rounds.

Cruz screamed, "INCOMING!" as he threw himself into partial shelter at the angle where steps met building wall.

The rounds came in at even intervals, a dozen of them, about two seconds apart. Whoever was on the other end apparently knew what he or they were doing. They landed with about thirty meters between shells, moving in a slightly arcing line from near the broad front steps to the main office of the campus and across an open field. Between the even spacing and the even timing it was the obvious work of a well-trained mortar crew, using the traversing wheel on the bipod to quickly and expertly lay the rounds. Before the last round had landed someone caught on the field was screaming out in pain.

"I knew this shit was too good to last," Cruz muttered as he picked himself up from his temporary shelter and then ran to offer aid, toward the still incoming blasts.

I swear I will kick my own ass if I ever go to the showers without my body armor again.

The mortar attack was over almost as soon as it began. Automatically, the legionary Command Post's duty officer ordered a reaction century of mechanized troops and a mixed flight by a Turbo-Finch and a Cricket.

The Cricket was airborne in minutes, the Finch following almost immediately thereafter. The mechanized troops were bursting through the university gate to race into the town scant moments later.

Mistake. Big mistake. Big, bad, fucking mistake.

Khalid al Marri kept in the shadows atop the half wrecked apartment building. It was the same building that had been taken by the now departed FSA 731st Airborne Brigade. People lived in it, still, but not in anything like what had been its pre-war capacity. That was a shame, because al Marri's mission was to get the crusader dogs to overreact, to kill some number of the civilians now living inside. Ah, well; between his own surface to air missile and the other one located a kilometer away and overlooking the same area, one was sure to take down a crusader aircraft and cause a reaction.

From his vantage point, al Marri saw the flashes of the mortar firing and the impact of the shells inside the university compound. Not much time now.

Despite his prediction, al Marri was still somewhat surprised at how quickly the enemy got aircraft into the air. Just like the dogs, to have airplanes standing by to kill the people, he thought, his heart overflowing with hatred for the infidel invader.

To the outsider, privileged to look into al Marri's mind, that would have seemed incongruous. There he stood, ready to do his best to bring violence and destruction down onto the innocents of the apartment building beneath him, and hating those he intended to provoke into that violence because of their willingness to engage in it.

There was no real contradiction, though. To al Marri, and he shared this much, at least, with much, perhaps even most, of the cosmopolitan progressive community, things were neither good nor bad in themselves, but only in relation to the end being sought. To some extent, they shared that viewpoint with Carrera, at least as he had come to be, the major difference being only the end in view.

In any case, one of the infidel airplanes was coming his way. Still keeping to the shadows, al Marri picked up the tube he had carried to the top of the apartment building and placed it on his shoulder, fitting his eye to the sight. He aimed the sight and tube at the noise he heard coming from the craft's engine. Then he flicked a switch and was rewarded with a low hum as the seeker head went active and coolant circulated to drop its temperature so it could make out the heat of the airplane's engine.

The engine stood out in fuzzy view in the sight's eyepiece. Al Marri squeezed the first trigger and was rewarded with a beep which told that the sight saw the target. Elevating the tube until the target was near the bottom of his field of view, he then squeezed the second trigger. The sealed back of the tube blew off as the missile went airborne, al Marri feeling a slight push from his front as the missile's exhaust pushed him backwards.

Though he was too busy to note it, the other missile, launched from a kilometer away, likewise took off within a couple of seconds of his own.

Tribune Miguel Lanza of the legion's air ala wasn't really a scout pilot, despite the Cricket he strapped himself into. Instead, he'd flown transports most of his adult life; "hauling the trash," as he liked to say, especially when the trash consisted of human beings who could hear him say it. Nobody minded; Lanza had been a fixture in the old Guardia Nacional, then in the Defense Corps, the Civic Force and now, finally, in the legion.

At nearly fifty, Lanza was a bit long in the tooth for the TurboFinches. Those birds went through gyrations that pulled the blood from the brain and made an old man faint. Even so, he had checked out on them. One never knew, after all, when a pilot would be needed. Likewise, he'd gotten himself qualified on the NA-21s and – 23s-which were similar to his normal bird-and the Crickets. The helicopters were still beyond him but he intended to fix that if he ever got a chance to get back to Balboa.

Lanza loved to fly. Moreover, he believed in leading from in front. For a pilot, leading from in front meant flying, even flying the dangerous missions. That was why, despite command responsibilities as the senior officer of the ala, he'd been standing by on alert when the word had come of the mortar attack. First to the Cricket despite his years, Lanza had told the younger pilot just behind him in the sprint to, "Fuck off, sonny. This one's mine. You can observe."

An amazing aircraft, the Cricket; one hundred feet of take-off run and the thing had gone up like an elevator, pulling Lanza's stomach down to his butt despite the low speed. Lanza's observer was already fiddling with the radio before the thing was off the ground, getting the latest intel update from the command post. There wasn't much intel; that was, after all, why the command post had ordered the Cricket launched in the first place. Aviation was mostly about reconnaissance and always had been.

The command post did have a presumed firing position for the mortar or mortars-no one knew for certain if there had been more than one-that had fired at the university. This Lanza set his heading towards. It led over a set of five modern and ugly looking apartment buildings.

Once airborne, Lanza pulled one of the two sets of night vision goggles the Cricket carried over his head and onto his eyes. The observer did the same. Lanza looked back and over his left shoulder, catching sight of the Turbo-Finch that followed at a discreet distance. Confident of support, Lanza turned his eyes back to the flight path. Then, with both pilot and observer looking forward, both sets of goggles suddenly flashed brightly and went blank.

"Shit!" Lanza shouted as he pushed the Cricket's nose down with one hand, tearing off the goggles with the other. "Shitshitshitshitshit!"

The missile wasn't what one could call "bright." As a matter of fact, where the FSC had poured money into "brilliant" munitions, the Volgans-and they had made the thing some years prior-concentrated instead on "competent" ones. Competent was another way of saying, "good enough for the purpose, especially if used in mass."

It saw the target, a glowing greenish blur, and sped towards it. The target attempted to duck by dropping and the missile duly corrected itself, following the target down. The missile's dim but "competent" mind went something like, "Oh, boy, I'm going to hit… Oh, boy, I'm going to hit… Oh, boy, I'm going to hit," as it got closer. Still, the target went erratic. "Oh, boy, I'm going to hit," changed to, "Oh, shit, I missed."

The missile promptly blew itself up, scattering numerous small rods of hot metal through the air, some of which connected with Lanza's Cricket.

Lanza felt the plane shudder, first from the blast and then, slightly and unevenly, from the metal rods scattered by the warhead. The observer felt rather more, and let it be known with a piercing scream, as one of the rods passed through the upper portion of the cockpit's Plexiglas rear canopy, through his seat, through his harness and into his back. He slumped forward.

The important thing is not to panic, Lanza reminded himself as he played with the controls to assure himself that his plane would still respond to command and fly. His heart was pounding, and it showed in his voice, as he called the CP and said, "This is Lanza… We've got SAMs! Shitpots of 'em. My Cricket is hit and my observer wounded… I think they got the Finch that was following me

… I'm heading back and I suggest that no more planes be launched for now, not until we can reduce the SAM threat."

Al Marri felt a great joy overflowing. True, and it was a shame, his own missile had failed to bring down its target. Yet he had seen the other crusader aircraft go up in a fiery ball of light. His partner in this enterprise had clearly scored against the enemy. Of course, the towering apartment building was still standing. Perhaps that would change. For now, al Marri decided to follow orders and leave. There would be other days. Besides, the enemy armored column that had left the university a few minutes prior was just now reaching the part of the town from which the mortar attack had come. The next few minutes would be interesting.

The mechanized century had taken some pretty fierce losses in the fight for the town. These hadn't been made good yet. Instead of having four tanks, five Ocelots, and fifty-eight men, the century had two, four and forty-six. Worse, maybe, the leadership was low. Both the century's key men, the signifer and centurion, had been killed, with command devolving onto a sergeant.

Not that Sergeant Paredes was a bad sergeant, not at all. The kid had actually been tapped for centurion track before the legion had even left Balboa. He was slated to be replaced by a newly graduated signifer, due in on the next transport. You really couldn't bitch; the whole legion was straining for leadership, what with the losses in the invasion and the scramble to form replacement units back home.

The problem was that the sergeant hadn't really been trained for the job he had. Smart? Check. Good attitude? Check. Aggressive? Check. Brave? Double check. Wise?

Kaboom!

Three of al Marri's comrades in Fadeel's organization were waiting for the armored column as it approached. There were only so many roads into the area, a small open spot surrounded by buildings. Along each of the major ones a very large explosive device had been improvised from an automobile or, in one case, van. These were primed to be set off remotely, by radio. The radio control devices and solenoids were, after all, cheap and readily available for purchase from any good hobby store in the TU or FS.

True to form, the arrogant invaders took the easiest, quickest and broadest route to the mortar site. One of the men standing by with a handheld remote control device watched as the lead vehicle in the column passed the van he had parked earlier. The first three vehicles were tanks, followed by the four that carried infantry. The bomber had thought that getting an expensive tank would be the greater prize but his team leader, who was also Fadeel's brother-in-law, had assured him that killing more men was better in the long run.

Thus he waited as the clumsy tanks passed. When the first infantry carrier reached a spot next to the van he pushed the button.

Kaboom!

The explosion physically threw the Ocelot's front around by ninety degrees, knocking Paredes' helmet off. He was slammed to one side, splitting the skin over his scalp and breaking one arm with a sickening crunch. The driver, who had had his head stuck up out of the hatch, was knocked unconscious. From what Paredes could see, only half of the track commander made it into the track. Where his upper torso had gone? Who could say?

With blood seeping into his eyes and his arm shrieking in protest Paredes crawled to the back of the track and twisted the door latch open. The door still didn't move-perhaps the hull was slightly deformed-until the sergeant kicked it open. When he emerged, weaponless, helmetless and using one arm to try to keep the other in place, the building walls to either side were lit by fire, despite the smoke.

In shock, Paredes looked to one side and saw a tipped over Ocelot, with flames pouring out of it. No survivors, he thought, grimly.

His assistant, a corporal, ran up asking, "What the fuck, Paredes? I mean, what the fucking fuck?"

"Bomb," the sergeant answered, simply and a bit distantly. He was swaying on his feet as he continued, "I'm… a little hurt. Stop the tanks and get them back here. Set up a perimeter. Report to higher. And take over because…"

The sergeant pitched face first onto the asphalt.

University of Ninewa, legionary Command Post, 17/4/461 AC

Sada was there, representing and in command of his Sumeri Brigade. So were all the cohort commanders as well as the primary staff and McNamara.

"Let's be honest," Carrera was saying. "We got overconfident and we got sloppy. Some of that's understandable; post invasion let down and all. We had the boys on an adrenaline high for weeks. When the adrenaline went, they just went on a natural downer. It was to be expected and we should have expected it… I should have expected it.

"That's in the past. We can only affect the future. For the future I have some other news, most of it good. There have been attacks all through the country over the last several days. For the most part, we got off lightly. The Anglians and the FS troops were hit a lot harder. I think we can thank Amid Sada's watchers for the fact we weren't hit as badly. They've identified and helped round up about half of the insurgents, so we think, who infiltrated our ZOR…"

Carrera waited for a few moments for a translator to pass what he had said on to Sada who answered, "They did, Pat, and thank you. But they're only part of it. If there had been no work here, then the attacks would have been a lot worse."

"I know," Carrera agreed. "In any case, there is some good news. The FSC's War Department is finally waking up to the fact that we have an insurgency here and it's not going to go away on its own. We've been offered a long-term contract to keep a legion here and to expand that legion to roughly divisional strength. The details don't matter much except that the rate of reimbursement we get is going to be based on our strength in country. Even so, we're not going to hurry that expansion. For one thing, the Area of Responsibility we get assigned, the size of it, goes up as our strength does. For another, if we break ourselves in trying to get big faster than our school system and recruiting standards would currently permit, we'll soon find ourselves unemployed." And I'll find myself without the means of finding and destroying those who murdered my wife and children.

"It isn't just the insurgents, Patricio," Fernandez said. "We've got to go after those who feed them, those who support them, those who supply them and those who'll spread their propaganda, too. Everybody."

Interlude

5 January, 2095, Terra Nova

The unloading proceeded in accordance with a schedule designed to get one national or ascriptive group completely off the transport before another was unfrozen. The Panamanians came first, roughly ten thousand of them, as their colony, named Balboa, was the westernmost of the six colonies the Amerigo Vespucci had come to settle. Even among the Panamanians, there was a split as Chocoes Indians were to be dropped before the European- and Mestizo-descended people. The Vespucci would merely accelerate slightly in its orbit to assume the best position for unloading each of the others.

Ngobe Mzilikaze, Captain of the Vespucci, thought this was needless and excessive care. True, there had been problems with the colonies from Europe, from farther south in Latin America, and from Africa. And what happened with the colonists from the Balkans, the one time they had been awakened without regard to ethnicity, ought not even be talked about. But the Central Americans, despite having had a few wars amongst themselves over the centuries, had no real or deeply engrained hatred of each other. They much preferred civil to foreign war. Nonetheless, since the Cheng Ho disaster, standard procedure was to unload ascriptive, national, religious and ethnic groups as separately as humanly possible.

Ngobe hoped the settlement went smoothly. He carried important dispatches for the UN enclave on the island they called Atlantis, dispatches he was bound to deliver personally. Yet he could not, consistent with his duty, abandon his post aboard the Vespucci until all of his cargo was unloaded.

Belisario Carrera had never even believed it was possible to be so cold. Shivering worse than a leaf in hurricane, worse even than a high living leader of a Kosmo charity faced with an audit, he sat up in his deep freeze cubicle like a corpse arising at a funeral.

That was not the only Finnegan's Wake aspect to the resurrection, either. As soon as he sat up a white-coated technician handed him a plastic cup containing several ounces of nearly pure ethanol mixed with what passed for orange juice.

"Drink this," the technician ordered. "Primitive, I know, but we've found it's the best thing to get the blood moving and to warm you up."

The tech didn't mention that, after many dozens of voyages now, it had also been found to calm colonists who sometimes tended to panic when they realized they were suddenly, from their point of view suddenly, an uncrossable distance from a home and family they would never see again in this life.

Gratefully, too cold even to enquire as to the young wife who had accompanied him, Belisario took the proffered ethanol and drank quickly and deeply. He barely choked on the liquid as it burned its way down his throat and began to light small fires in his veins and arteries.

Beginning to warm now, and finally able to think more or less clearly, Belisario asked about his wife, still lying frozen in the next compartment.

The tech checked the meters on the compartment and answered, "She's fine. Would you like to be here when she awakens? It sometimes helps."

5 January, 2101, UNOG (UN Offices, Geneva)

High Admiral Kotek Annan looked out over a skyline gone dark. It was far too much to say that Earth had become "a world lit only by fire"-though fire all too often lit it-but there had been a steady drop in all the activities that might have brought light. At least here in Europe there had, though Europe had started off on so high a plain it still exceeded most of the world. China was doing well enough, as were India, Brazil, and a few other places. The United States, along with those portions of what had once been known as western Canada and which now made up six of America's sixty-three states, was still a powerhouse though there were indicators that that was changing. The U.S. still tried to act as if the UN didn't exist, too.

"The secretary general will see you now, High Admiral," a flunky announced.

Nodding slightly, Annan turned from the window and the darkness it showed and walked briskly into the well-appointed, even luxuriously appointed, offices of the secretary general, Edouard Simoua.

"Kotek, my fine boy," said Simoua, rising and taking the younger man's arm warmly. "So good to see you. And how is your most excellent great-great-grandfather?"

"He is well, Your Excellency, in rigorous good health. I saw him in Kumasi just a few days ago. He told me to pass along his thanks, both for my appointment and for the antiaging treatments you ordered for him."

"Well," began Simoua, "it is sad but we are just in the infancy of antiagathic therapy. If your esteemed ancestor can hang on, even greater things may be possible. Besides, we people of the right views have to watch out for each other, do we not? And no one else is going to if we don't, eh?"

"Indeed, Your Excellency," Annan readily agreed. How could he not? His family-and he, personally-benefited immensely from the "I'll scratch your back; you scratch mine" philosophy of nearly all of those elites who worked for the great supra- and transnational organs of the Earth.

"Please, sit, my boy. Can I have anything brought to you? Coffee? Tea? Something stronger, perhaps?"

Annan shook his head as he sat in the proffered chair. "No, thank you, Your Excellency."

"As you wish," said Simoua, taking a chair himself opposite Annan. "I wanted to discuss your new command, the Amistad, and the others that will follow."

"Ah, yes," Annan agreed. "I have been up to see my new ship. It's a wonder."

"Indeed. It is the finest that America could build." Simoua laughed. "We took it in lieu of a UN dues payment that they would never have given us anyway."

"A wonderful ship it is, Excellency, but I confess I am a bit confused about my mission."

"Govern the island on the new world that is our enclave. Atlantis, they call it. Observe… for now," answered the secretary general. "Spread our influence. Organize the fleet we will send you. It's going to be thirty-three ships, eventually, you know."

Chapter Twenty-Six In the Cain-and-Abel conflicts of the 21st century, ruthlessness trumps technology. -Ralph Peters

Hospital Ancon, Cerro Gorgia, Ciudad Balboa, 15/7/461 AC

Mango trees and chirping birds surrounded the long, five-story hospital atop Cerro Gorgia, or Gorgia Hill. They stood, and smelled, in pleasant contract to the unadorned brick walls, antiseptic odor, and continuous business bustle of the "body shop."

The hospital had once had a different name. This was when it had been the major medical facility for the FSC forces in Balboa. It was not so major now; not every ward had been reopened. At the very least, though, it was fully staffed and equipped for Jorge Mendoza's needs. Now that they were not so pressed for medical care, and the question had become merely one of money, Campos and the War Department had come through on their promise of equivalent care, restoration and prosthesis for the legion's wounded. In some cases, this meant anything up to millions of drachma for the very latest.

His new "legs" were a marvel. Flexible, strong and computer controlled; they'd cost half a million drachma each from the Sachsen company that made them. Jorge would rather have his old ones back. Marvelous these new legs may have been, but they couldn't feel. Worse, he was still not really able to use them naturally and spent most of his time not in bed in a wheelchair.

He took the loss of the legs well enough, if not precisely cheerily; he was that kind of young man. But his eyes…

"Jorge, there is nothing wrong with your eyes that I can find," the doctor had said. "Here, let me show you." The doctor flicked a finger at Jorge's eye. The eye blinked.

"Did you feel that?"

"Feel what?" Jorge asked.

"The blink. I just poked my finger at your eye and you blinked. Your eye blinked because it saw my finger. But your brain won't let vision through."

"I saw nothing," Mendoza insisted. "I just blinked because… well… people blink."

The doctor poked at the eye again and, again, it dutifully blinked. "Twice in a row is not coincidence, Jorge," the medico said.

The orderly at the desk just melted when the tiny… well, tiny, yes, that… but perfectly symmetrical, charmingly symmetrical, vision of a young girl fluttered her eyelashes and asked if she could please visit Private Jorge Mendoza. She'd said her name was "Marqueli Cordoba."

"Jorge, a Miss Cordoba to see you."

Private Mendoza turned his wheelchair toward the voice, bumping his bed as he did so. Blind, with both legs off below the knee, his reconstructive surgery had only been able to heal the more visible scars. Mendoza's green hospital robe hung down below the point at which his legs ended. The young soldier looked his age, about eighteen years old.

Cousin Lourdes didn't tell me he was so gorgeous, Marqueli thought, no eyes for the legs but only for the face.

It was characteristic of Balboan society that the government didn't do much. Nor had the legion had time and opportunity to set up a large and complex bureaucracy to deal with personal problems. Instead, the extended family took care of things. Thus, naturally, when Lourdes had seen a problem to be dealt with she hadn't thought of anything too very formal as a solution. Instead she'd called a family member, in this case Marqueli, and said, "There's a really nice soldier who was hurt in Sumer. Could you go make sure he's all right?" Lourdes being family, Marqueli had, also naturally, agreed.

As a system it wasn't much. Where it worked it tended to work well. Where it didn't it failed completely. Looking over Jorge Mendoza, Marqueli decided instantly that here, at least, it was going to work.

"Private Mendoza, I'm Marqueli Cordoba. My cousin, Lourdes, suggested I look you up. It's wonderful to meet a hero who's fought in the war."

Mendoza scratched behind his ear. He caught the slightest whiff of perfume. He sensed someone small and somehow soft sitting in the chair next to his bed. "I don't know if I fought. It's more like they fought me."

"It's fine," Marqueli answered. "You're fine." She turned and asked a nurse on the ward, "How is his recovery going?"

"Jorge is doing very well. He has some minor reconstruction still to go. Then we have to get him used to his new legs. That's going to take longer. And then, of course, there's physical therapy, and-"

"But he will be getting mostly better, then," the girl announced, in a voice like a love song. "I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get here, Jorge. Do you mind if I call you 'Jorge'? I was in school. And it took me a while to find out where you were since you started out in the hospital near Hamilton."

She has a nice voice, thought Mendoza. "No, Miss Cordoba, I don't mind."

"Wonderful!" she bubbled and the sweet sound cheered up the entire ward. She reached out to touch a hand. "And, please, I'm Marqueli."

"Marqueli," he said, uncertainly, "… yes, I was in Warren Branch Hospital in the FSC for a while. They did a lot of the work on me there. Hmmm… Lourdes," he puzzled. "I don't know any… Ohhh, the Legate's… wife."

"They're not married," Marqueli laughed, bouncing lightly on her chair. "Wicked, naughty Lourdes. Bad, bad, bad Lourdes. I hope they will be sometime but my cousin told me she was willing to wait."

"She seemed like a nice woman," Mendoza observed neutrally.

"She's wonderful," Marqueli enthused. "Smart and clever and tall and… well, she's just slinky. And those eyes! I'd like to be just like her except that she's almost a foot taller than I am and I don't think I'm going to grow."

Mendoza made an estimate of Marqueli's height based on where the voice seemed to be coming from. True, she was sitting in a chair but, even so, just under five feet was his best guess.

God, though, she smells and sounds wonderful. Height? Well, I'm a shorty myself. Otherwise I'd never have ended up in one of those cramped Volgan tanks. Moreover, I am especially short now, he thought. Shorter by a couple of feet… and two legs.

Camp Balboa, Ninewa, 20/7/461 AC

Whatever she lacked in height, Irene Temujin of Amnesty, Interplanetary (a subsidiary of the Marquisate of Amnesty, Earth) made up for in determination. She barged furiously past the guards on the headquarters gate to force her way in and directly to Carrera's office. How she got onto the compound, how she got into the freaking BZOR, had to wait. She was here and, Carrera supposed, she had to be dealt with.

Just shooting the bitch is right out, I suppose, since she hasn't technically violated any rules. I might have the fucking guards shot, though; that, or make them wish that I had.

"Legate Carrera, I am-"

"I know who you are, Ms. Temujin." Carrera interrupted, sliding onto his desk the report he had been reading. "I read the papers when I can. What I don't know is why you are here."

"I'm here to investigate credible reports that you and your… mercenaries," Temujin spat out the word, "are torturing prisoners in your camp."

Carrera's face assumed a highly amused look. "Mercenaries is such a loaded term. Inaccurate, too, since, under Additional Protocol One we are no such thing. My men make about the same pay as in the Civil Force of Balboa, you see, and there's nothing in the rules to suggest one is a mercenary unless one meets every condition. As for torturing people here… no… no, I'm afraid we're not. Sorry, but your reports are ill-founded."

Temujin sneered, "Then you wouldn't mind if I looked around?"

"Considering your affection for and affiliation with the enemy," Carrera answered, calmly, "I would. But, if you are willing to be confused a bit, so that I know you are not pacing off corrections for the mortar attacks we seem to receive about twice a week, then yes, I'll let you… look around. To your heart's content, as a matter of fact. I'll even escort you myself."

Fernandez burst into Carrera's office. "Patricio, I just hea-"

"Ms. Temujin, may I introduce Tribune Omar Fernandez, my intelligence officer? Tribune, this is Ms. Irene Temujin of Amnesty, Interplanetary. I've just told her she could look around the camp… 'to her heart's content.' Ms. Temujin seems to think we are torturing people here. And," Carrera sighed deeply, "she doesn't seem to want to take my word for it that we are not."

His face assuming a very somber expression, Fernandez answered, "That is most sad, Legate."

"I'm going to escort her myself. Ms. Temujin, did you bring a camera team with you? Ah, you did not. Fernandez, would you call the PSYOP people to provide a camcorder and operator for Ms. Temujin?"

"I'll see to it, sir," Fernandez answered, as he hurried out of the office.

"Ms. Temujin? Some coffee while we wait for the camcorder team?"

The camp was still under construction. Indeed, it would remain under construction for years if things worked out as Carrera planned. While some things were complete, work continued in part to provide better living arrangements for his troops but equally to provide continued work and-at least as important-job training for the Sumeris who worked there. The legion had become the largest single employer in the province, and that wasn't even counting the several hundred Sumeri whores-widows, many of them, with no other recourse-who had been given a small quadrant of the main and each outlying camp.

Well… they're going to work at what they do, anyway, had been Carrera's thought. It only makes sense to protect and regularize them. Keep down the incidence of clap among the troops, too.

The perimeter was roughly rectangular, but only roughly. A thick berm of earth zigzagged to provide lines along which any attacking enemy would have to bunch up for easy harvesting by the machine guns at the angles and corners. The berm had been formed from a deep ditch excavated out of the soil. It stopped at the river edge, where one corner of the camp continued on the other side. The water purification equipment, four Secordian-built reverse osmosis water purifiers, or ROWPUs, were dug in at the friendly side of the river by that corner. A few small motor launches stood bobbing in the murky water, tied to a short pier. Another, longer pier was being built as it was intended, eventually, to bring in parts of the classis to patrol the river.

Topping the berm were dozens of towers, each standing about fifteen meters high. They were effectively indistinguishable. No one not a long-time denizen of the camp could hope to find their way about by reference to the towers.

On each side there was a complex gate. Like the walls, these were formed of earth. Moveable barbed wire barriers helped to control vehicular access and block off any dismounted enemy that might try to force one of the gates.

From the gates four dirt and gravel roads ran inward to a central parade field fronting the headquarters building. On either side of the roads, and all around the parade field, mixed crews of legionaries and locals worked at putting up adobe buildings. Not every legionary was in adobe, however. Many tents, pink Misrani-manufactured ones, still stood. These were beginning to grow a little ragged.

For the purposes and under the circumstances, adobe was a nearly ideal material. Once the legion had received its long-term contract from the FSC's War Department, it had let a further contract to a machinery company in Hindu-speaking Bharat for a fairly large number of earth-block forming machines. Some of these were automated; still others used muscle power. The blocks, a uniform ten inches by fourteen inches by three and a half, were emplaced by hand without mortar, indentations on each side and at the edges serving to hold them together.

Irene Temujin thought them interesting.

"The block houses are reasonably cool, once we add a double roof," Carrera explained. "Moreover, they're also fairly bullet and shrapnel proof. At the current rate of progress, we should have the camp completed, at least for the number of troops on hand, within a month or so. It's taken longer than we thought it would. For after that, we've formed a building company from the Sumeri workers here who will take possession of the machines and build housing for the locals… for profit."

Despite her initial fascination with the machines, the word "profit" drew a sneer from Irene.

"Ahhh," Carrera said, understanding instantly. He smiled broadly. "You're one of those Kosmos who used to be a Marxist, aren't you? Tell you what: I'm putting Sumeris to building decent housing for money. In all the other ZORs every bleeding heart organization in the world is trying to put up housing for free. Let's make a bet… any sum you care to name and put in escrow," Carrera smiled wickedly, " any sum, that in six months I'll have a larger portion of the population housed, more decently, than anywhere else in Sumer outside of the capital at Babel."

Temujin merely scowled.

"Up to you," Carrera said, grinning. "But if you decide to take me up on it just let me know. I'll be happy to take your money."

Two uniformed men trotted up, one of them bearing a camcorder. They stopped and the senior saluted, reporting, "Sir, Corporal Santiago and Private Velez, PSYOP, reporting as ordered."

Carrera returned the salute, saying, "Gentlemen, this is Irene Temujin of Amnesty, Interplanetary. She wishes to tour the camp, which request I have approved. You are going to film whatever it is she wants filmed. You will then, when the tour is done, turn the film over to her without altering it in the slightest. Understood?"

"Yessir. Only it's a disc, sir, not film."

"Whatever. Ms. Temujin, will a disc do? Good. As I said earlier, you are the enemy and I can't have you pacing off correction for insurgent mortars. I'm going to blindfold you now, spin you like a top, and drive you someplace where you will not recognize exactly where you are. Then I'm going to spin you like a top, again. After that, and from there, you can remove the blindfold and go wherever you would like."

"I am neutral, " Temujin insisted.

"Yes. As I said, you're the enemy. Now, do we blindfold you or do I have you tossed out of the camp? Your choice."

Gritting her teeth, Irene answered, "Blindfold me then."

"Corporal," Carrera ordered.

One of the escorts from Fernandez's section took a black blindfold from his pocket and placed it over the woman's eyes. Then he spun her around several times, in both directions. At Carrera's summons a four wheel drive vehicle pulled up, into which the woman was helped. The vehicle sped off, doing several otherwise unnecessary turns, before stopping at one wall.

Temujin was helped out of the vehicle, spun more, and her blindfold removed.

"From here, go where you like," Carrera said. "We're just along for the ride."

After almost two hours of aimless wandering during which Temujin saw nothing, Carrera's attention was caught by Siegel, standing at a camp street corner. Siegel gave the thumbs up.

"Ms. Temujin, you really want to see our POW compound, don't you?" Carrera asked. His finger pointed down one street. "It's just down that way, about a quarter of a mile."

"You mean now that you've had to chance to hide the evidence," she growled.

"We've hidden absolutely nothing," Carrera assured her.

Gathering her soiled dignity about her-representatives of major cosmopolitan progressive organizations like Amnesty were used to more respect!-she walked in the direction indicated.

Irene Temujin first heard the screams when she reached a point about one hundred meters from the separately walled compound. She began to hurry. The guards at the gate attempted to bar her way until Carrera signaled that it was all right for her to enter. Once past that inside gate, the screaming grew oppressively loud.

A row of five gallows, wire nooses hanging empty, stood just inside the gate. They were low structures, each with a stool underneath, obviously intended to let their victims strangle rather than to mercifully break their necks. Temujin almost retched at seeing them.

Worse was the stink. As soon as Temujin entered the adobe building nearest the gate her nostrils were assailed with the mixed smell of feces, piss, blood, and burnt pork. Once again, a guard made as if to bar her way until Carrera signaled that she was to be allowed in.

Once inside, she saw four men, their arms bound behind them, hanging by those arms from meat hooks attached to the wooden beams of the ceiling. The men's heads hung low, the very picture of abject misery, while their toes barely touched the floor.

"Would you like to record their faces?" Carrera asked genially. When she didn't answer immediately he walked up to the nearest of the hanging men and, grabbing him by the hair, lifted his face for the camera.

Temujin was so shocked she didn't even wonder at Carrera's arrogance in showing her all this horror. Doesn't realize I'm from Amnesty? Or that I have pull around the globe?

"Be sure to get this, gentlemen," he told the camera team. "Ms. Temujin will want it all recorded." He did the same with each of the others.

"Irene, would you like to see the rest?"

Normally tawny face gone white with horror, the woman gulped and answered, "Yes."

In the next cell, a small room showed a half naked man bound to a metal chair. Wires led from a field telephone to the floor where they were lost in a mass of wires. Wires also were attached directly to the prisoner's genitals. A Sumeri, in the uniform of Sada's brigade, asked questions of the bound prisoner. When answers were not forthcoming, another Sumeri sitting at the table began to turn the crank on the field phone. The bound prisoner screamed and writhed piteously. There was a puddle of urine on the floor. A smell of overripe shit escaped the cell's small window.

The next cell showed a man on a wooden table. Another interrogator asked questions while an assistant played a blowtorch over the far side of the prisoner's leg, farthest away from the door. The screaming was absolutely hideous and nauseating. There was an overwhelming smell of burnt pork.

Temujin turned and began to storm out. Before she made it she bent over suddenly, adding the smell of her own vomit to the sickening stench that pervaded the facility.

Babel, Hotel Ishtar, 21/7/461 AC

Carrera had provided an escort for Irene all the way to Babel. "It would never do," he explained, "for you to be killed in my ZOR." At least once we've accepted you in and assumed a sort of tacit responsibility. The escort had consisted of two light wheel vehicles and a heavier truck with a tarp pulled over it. Fernandez had volunteered to serve as escort officer.

Once back at her hotel, Temujin had wasted no time in calling for a press conference. At that, she had made her statement and shown her video of the horrors being perpetrated near Ninewa. She called, forcefully and sincerely, for, "This illegal occupation to end."

At about that time, Fernandez walked into the back of the large press room containing hundreds of reporters. He had a fairly large armed escort with him. Temujin, closing her prepared statement, wondered for a moment if they were here to arrest her. She pointed and started to say, "There's one of the torturers-" when she recognized the face of one of the armed men standing by Fernandez's side.

Oh, shit, she thought. The bastards.

She didn't need to say it. As one the assembled media types turned around and saw for themselves.

The man to whom Irene had pointed had appeared on the film she had just shown. He appeared on the film not as one of the guards or interrogators, but as one of the "victims," the very first one hanging with his arms behind him, as a matter of fact. (For, unnoticed by Irene, another rope had run from the bound hands to encircle his waist under his clothing.) Despite the current highly amused smile, the face was completely recognizable. So were the faces of every other man in Fernandez's escort, every man who had ridden to Babel in the back of a tarp-covered truck, every man who had been seen under "torture."

Yet here he was, here they were, free and armed. That meant…

The reporters turned their questioning faces back toward Temujin who sat there, dumbly.

"If she'd seen nothing," Fernandez shouted over the hubbub, "she'd still have reported the same thing. It's her business to find torture in the world. It's so much her business that she didn't even think to question the show we put on for her. I've got to ask you people, how stupid are you that you would assume accurate reporting from a woman as gullible as that?

"Now, if any of you would like to talk to the 'victims,' they're at your disposal."

Camp Balboa, Ninewa, 22/7/461 AC

"Patricio, that was just mean! " Lourdes chided as they watched the television in the three-bedroom adobe bungalow the troops had put up for them. The party, Carrera and Lourdes plus Sada and his wife, sat on the floor on cushions. Ruqaya, Sada's wife, had shown Lourdes how to make a first class kibsa, which sat mostly eaten (with fingers) on a tray in the middle.

Carrera couldn't answer at first; he was laughing too hard.

"He was perfectly correct to do this, Miss Lourdes," Sada insisted. "Prestige drives these people, that and their perks. Humiliation is what they fear the most. That woman is personally crushed, probably forever. Her entire organization is humiliated. Patricio has pulled the incisors of a major enemy."

"It was really Fernandez's idea," Carrera submitted humbly, though it was a hard statement to get out through his laughter. "Frankly, I couldn't believe that she'd be stupid enough to fall for it, that anyone would be stupid enough to fall for it. The tricky part was collecting the special effects, the blood and shit and such, to make it seem real. Fortunately, one of the mess halls had some pork we could burn up with a blowtorch. And the 'victims' and 'interrogators' had already been rehearsed."

"Those were important, Legate Patricio, but she saw what she expected to see," Sada explained. "She made herself fall for it."

"It was still mean," Lourdes insisted.

"But it was clever," Sada's wife, Ruqaya, answered, sipping at her tea.

Hospital Cerro Ancon, 23/7/461 AC

If I were truly clever, thought the doctor, I'd have thought of this myself. It's just amazing what a young girl looking on or helping can do to move progress along. The doctor smiled indulgently as young Private Mendoza walked-with difficulty, true, but he walked- with one arm over the shoulder of the lovely young girl who came to see him every day. Her arm was about his waist.

"This is so hard, 'Queli," the boy said, "and I'm too heavy for you."

"Nonsense, Jorge. Did you forget I'm a farm girl, not some soft, city-bred wilting flower?"

Mendoza had wondered what she looked like. At some level he knew it could not matter to him so long as he couldn't see. On the other hand, looks or not she was shaped right. That, he could tell from the press of her tiny body against him and the times they walked with only his arm around her waist for support. God, is she shaped right!

The pair reached as far as they could in the physical therapy and prosthetics area. Marqueli guided Jorge in a half-stumbling turn and they began the return promenade.

"I heard Legate Carrera and Duce Parilla have decreed a beca "-an educational scholarship-"for all seriously wounded or decorated veterans," Marqueli said.

"Something to think on," Mendoza agreed. "But I've only got a high school education. And then there's the farm to think about."

"Well, as to the farm," the girl answered, "you really don't need to worry about it. Your mother told me over the phone that she's found someone to work it for her."

"I know… but that land's been in our family for over four hundred years. It doesn't feel right having someone else work it."

Marqueli understood that call of the land. Her family, too, had been ranching the same patch for as long as Mendoza's. Indeed, she'd checked the local histories and birth records and discovered that they'd both had ancestors who'd ridden with the semilegendary Belisario Carrera in his war against Earth. The reason she'd checked, though, had been to find out degree of consanguinity. They were, it seemed, roughly seventh cousins… though it was more complicated than that as there was more than one link. The reason she'd checked that… well… that was for later.

In the interim, there was the torture of Jorge learning to walk to see to.

SS Hildegard Mises, Yithrabi Coast, 23/7/461 AC

Relatively few people were actually tortured on the ship. For most, a tour of what was available was generally sufficient. While Jorge and Marqueli worked out his new legs, and Irene Temujin wallowed alone in the abject misery of worldwide embarrassment, other people arrived at a ship registered to Balboa and currently coasting off of Yithrab. The ship was unremarkable, a freighter with nothing much to distinguish it on the outside except for what appeared to be a helicopter platform. An IM-71 helicopter sat on the pad, but only for so long as it took to disgorge five tightly bound men and a woman.

They were prisoners. They'd had all the due process anyone might expect, however, and been found guilty of numerous war crimes to include failure to meet the requirements for legal combatancy. They were illegal combatants, in other words.

Identified as outsiders by the men of his brigade that Sada had spread out as "watchers," four of the men had been grabbed from a safe house set up by Sumer's dictator in the days before the invasion for just such a purpose. The other two were the homeowner and his wife. All six had been captured in a raid by the Cazador Cohort, aided by some Sumeri guides from Sada's brigade.

The prisoners had been taken, in secret, to another safe house, this one controlled by Sada's men. There all six had been court-martialed, separately, in camera and sentenced to hang. A mullah-Carrera had asked Sada for, "An honest mullah, one who will stay bought."-and two of his associates had approved the penalty as fitting under Islamic law. Fernandez had given the mullah six gold drachmae as a reward, to be divided as the mullah, Hassim, thought fit.

The executions had been duly announced, along with the notice that the bodies had been cremated and the ashes scattered against the Day of Judgment when Allah could rejoin their atoms or not, as he saw fit. Instead of having been executed, however, the six were taken at night in a sealed vehicle to the airfield inside the camp and loaded aboard the helicopter. This had then flown them, also in secret, to the ship, the helicopter skimming the waves and even venturing into Farsian airspace to confuse radar.

Gagged with duct tape, none had been given a chance to talk with each other since their capture.

On the ship they were separated and carried individually to separate containers that had been soundproofed. There they were chained to the walls while the program for each was worked out by the Sumeri interrogators on Fernandez's Black Budget.

Looking over the files on each, the chief interrogator, Warrant Officer Achmed al Mahamda, tapped his fingers on first one picture, then another. These are either brothers or close cousins, Mahamda thought. What one knows the other will know as well. He placed the files together on his desk and wrote on a slip of paper, "Interrogation Course M."

This meant that the cousins, or brothers, would be used as a check on each other. If their stories failed to match in any particular, pain would be first threatened and, if that failed, applied until they did match.

It's funny, thought Mahamda, well, funny for certain values of funny, that for all that relatives and comrades try to concoct a story beforehand, they can never get all the details right. They might agree on, "We were just minding our own business going to the goat auction," but they never think of "What's Khalid's mother's maiden name?" They never remember to work out and commit to memory a purely spurious route or set of connections and events. Even if they did, they wouldn't remember to update it daily and couldn't commit it to memory even if they tried. And once we get them screaming and talking, once they lose confidence in each other and the story, there's no stopping point and they'll spill everything.

The others were more problematic. At this stage, the insurgency wasn't really well developed enough-even the bi-weekly mortaring of Camp Balboa had grown somewhat listless-for there to have been much intelligence to gather. Sada's watchers watched, of course, even so.

The first course of the treatment, for each of the prisoners, was to give them a guided tour of the ship. This was usually enough to loosen even very fixed tongues.

Muhammad al Kahlayleh was the first of the newcomers to be given the tour. His interrogator introduced himself genially. "I'm Warrant Officer Achmed al Mahamda, and you are going to tell me everything I want to know."

Al Kahlayleh told Mahamda, a very genial seeming and somewhat overweight former member of the dictator's Mukhabarat, or secret police, "I'll tell you nothing."

Al Mahamda just kept the genial smile and answered, very confidently, "Yes, you will. Trust me on this. I've been at this business a long time. It's just a job to me but it's a job I do very well."

With al Kahlayleh's hands cuffed to a chain about his waist, and accompanied by two stout escorts, al Mahamda led the prisoner to the first chamber. This contained a dental chair, with all the usual appurtenances and some extra features for holding the "patient" firmly in place.

"We usually begin here, my friend," al Mahamda began. "The teeth are not strictly necessary for life, can be repaired almost indefinitely, and are extremely painful to have drilled without anesthesia."

A smiling Sumeri in a white coat bobbed his head, also genially, agreeing, "Oh, yes, it is truly awful what we can do here, more or less indefinitely." Al Kahlayleh's tawny face blanched, as much at the present geniality as at the future prospect.

"Of course, there are other methods," al Mahamda continued, still smiling. "This way, please."

The next chamber held another chair, not unlike the dental chair in the first, but without any of the instruments.

"This is worse," the warrant officer said. "Here, we do more or less permanent damage. The chair is to hold you still for it."

"Permanent damage?" the prisoner asked.

"Oh, yes. Here fingernails are removed. Gonads are crushed. Also we can attach an electrode to your penis and stick one up your ass." Al Mahamda shook his head. "If you think a dental drill is painful, well…" Mahamda shuddered delicately. "Come on, only fair to show you the rest."

The next chamber held a similar chair. Along one wall was a bench on which were neatly laid out a series of obscure instruments.

"This one is particularly fascinating," al Mahamda said, picking up a complex metal assembly with places for neck, knees and wrists, plus a rack and pinion method for closing the entire apparatus. "It's called the 'Scavenger'-I haven't a clue why-and it does everything the old rack used to do, but in a fraction of the space. It will break your bones, deform your spine, dislocate your joints. It's pretty awful, but very little effort for us which, as you may imagine, we appreciate."

The prisoner gulped.

"And then there's this," the warrant continued, holding up what looked like an outsized wooden shoe with handles and screws. "We put this on one of your feet and simply crush that foot a millimeter at a time. You know," he said, with a trace of wonder in his voice, "as I said, I've been at this business a long time and I've never seen anyone resist this for long. I think it must be the idea that they'll be crippled for life that gets to them. What do you think?"

"I think I'll tell you whatever you want to know," answered al Kahlayleh, shivering. "Just keep that shit away from me."

So much for "I'll tell you nothing," thought al Mahamda.

"You sure you wouldn't like just one little demonstration?" al Mahamda asked. "Just so you know we're sincere."

"No, no," the would-be insurgent answered. "That won't be necessary. No, not at all necessary. I'll cooperate."

"You're sure you wouldn't like a demonstration?" al Mahamda asked again, pleasantly. "Just as a show of our good faith."

"Please, no," the prisoner whimpered.

"Very well, then." Al Mahamda put the boot down, as if reluctantly. "You do realize, don't you, that if we catch you in a lie, now or later, you will get the treatment before I deign to talk to you again."

"I said I'll talk," al Kahlayleh shouted. "Just get me out of here."

"Very well. In light of your cooperative attitude, I think we can dispense with the rest of the tour. Come with me."

The four men began walking toward the bow of the ship when they passed an area marked, in Arabic, "Surgical Ward."

"Is that for if someone has a heart attack while being questioned?" the prisoner asked.

"Oh, no," the interrogator answered. "Well, that, too. But mostly this is for the really hard cases. See, we give them sex change operations before we strangle them so that they go to Allah as women."

Kahlayleh's eyes rolled up in his head as he moaned and crumpled to the deck.

Mahamda couldn't help but laugh. "You know, boys, it's amazing how often we get that reaction. That infidel, Fernandez, was a pure genius for thinking of this trick."

Not that it was actually a trick, of course.

First Landing, Hudson, 33/7/461 AC

Matthias Esterhazy, representing the firm of Chatham, Hennessey, and Schmied had no trouble securing an appointment with Irene Temujin. Indeed, since it seemed as if the entire world had turned their backs on her, unwilling to be contaminated by her apparent gullibility, she was positively eager to see anyone who might contribute to the organization and so help her expiate her shame. She had been thinking of resigning her post and going to work for the World League, where even idiocy could be, and generally was, rewarded. But before she took that cut in pay and prestige, perhaps Esterhazy would offer her the means to regain her lost status.

Esterhazy ignored the woman's voluble gratitude. He wasn't here to dispense money, but rather to show the power and influence money could buy. Taking his seat he opened an expensive looking leather briefcase and took from it a folder, which he opened. He slid a picture onto Temujin's desk.

"A photo of my son at school? I don't understand."

Matthias didn't answer. Instead, he slid another across, this one of her family in Kashmir, which was her home. This was followed by another of her daughter in finishing school in Helvetia. The last was of her husband, taken apparently as he left his place of employment with the World League in First Landing.

"Let me be blunt," Esterhazy said, Sachsen accent coming through strongly. "You are now shown to ze verld, fittingly or not, as an hysteric und a fool. Very little you say is likely to be believed by anyvun who matters. Ever. Again."

Irene began to blanch.

"Zus, ze rest of vat I haff to say, you could repeat to no good effect. Zat is, if you were shtupid enough to repeat it. If, even zo, you do repeat it, everyone you care for in zis verld vill disappear." His hand pointed toward the photos now littering Irene's desk. "Moreover, if you do not call your organization's dogs away from the Legio del Cid, eferyvun you care about in life vill disappear. Let me add to zat, zat zey are all being vatched and ze disappearance of any vun of zem vill cause all ze rest to disappear. Phones, too, are being monitored as is zeir mail.

"My principal in zis matter is someone you don't want to fuck viz, Ms. Temujin. He has no scruples, not anymore. If you get in his vay you vill be crushed. Going after him or his organization, or trying to, is even more silly zan it vould have been for you to go after ze olt Volgan Empire in zeir days of power. Ze Volgans, at least, vere slightly sensitive to public opinion vile my principle is not in ze least."

Esterhazy further explained, "Ze problem, you see, Ms. Temujin, is zat you and zose like you are aesthetically razer zan morally focused. You object to what you can see razer zan to vat is true. Zus, you can see what you like to zink of as torture because the civilized East lets you see it. You cannot see ze harm that ze torture seeks to prevent und zo you ignore it. Frankly, since it does not fit your verld view, you ignore ze harm even ven you can see it. In ze old days, you made a show of being "neutral" with regard to the Volgan Empire. Never mind zat, morally speaking, ze Volgan Empire vas as evil a political construct as man has efer known and should have been ze focus of all of your efforts. Ze Volgans did not let you see ze evil zey did and so, zey vere not truly evil to you. Ze democratic world did let you see zeir much lesser degree of evil and so zey were ultimate evil to you.

"You are like ze drunk who lost ze keys to his vehicle on vun side of ze road, but insists on looking for zem on ze ozer where zere is more light.

"Zat will be all, zank you, madam."

Without another word Esterhazy stood, took the photos, returned them to his briefcase, and left.

Interlude

Earth Date 27 March, 2102, Island of Atlantis,

UNENT (United Nations Enclave, New Terra)

"Ungovernable, untaxable, unsupervisable, and uncivil, High Admiral," the outgoing governor, a short and slight, sandy-haired bureaucrat named Lubbing informed Annan. "Our staff here is too small to really supervise or govern. Nor is the population density high enough for them to pay enough in tax to justify a larger staff. The land mass is extensive and the people just move around as they see fit. It's hopeless, at least until their population grows."

It was a feature of UN policy with regard to the new world that, while countries and groups on Earth were awarded settlement rights, most of those countries didn't really care about, or have the clout to interfere with, the UN's attempt at governing those colonies. Most especially did the UN's heavy hand fall, as it did on Earth, upon the poor and weak.

"Govern through the Terra Novans?" Kotek asked.

"They won't cooperate. The people who came here wanted to escape taxation and supervision. That, or they're just dirt-scrabble subsistence farmers forced to leave. And those have nothing to give."

Annan shrugged his shoulders eloquently. "It doesn't matter. The point of this exercise is to get them off Earth, both the useless and inefficient and the extremely efficient but unenlightened and ungovernable. I had just hoped to make this trip worth the time away from Earth. As a practical matter, when my tour here is done I'm allowed to return with as much as I can carry."

"I know," the bureaucrat agreed. " And that, High Admiral, you can do. There are some nice things available here, including some things you can't find on Earth at any price."

"Like what?"

The outgoing governor's eyes lit up. He already had a rather large haul that would accompany him back to Earth at UN expense. "Gold, jewels, rare woods, other precious metals can be obtained quite cheaply. I am taking back two dozen Smilodon rugs and several score bales of other furs. Mastodon tusks sell well back home, too, especially since the great herds here are already disappearing. You did bring trading materials with you from home, yes?"

"Yes," Annan confirmed. "Mostly medical and electronic. Some primitive firearms."

"I made that mistake too," admitted Lubbing. "Forget the flintlocks; they're making their own now. If you had something modern perhaps…"

"No. That particular ban I thought it wise to keep. Tell me, what are the chances of picking up slaves for concubinage at a fair price?" Annan asked. "Female slaves, of course. Oh, yes, I know I couldn't keep them in Europe; appearances and all. But in Kumasi? No problem."

"Very small," Ludding said. "Oh, there are some, particularly among the Salafis of Yithrab. But the prices are high and the quality comparatively low. And don't try raiding. The locals will fight. In any event, you can get better deals in the Balkans, Africa, or the Arabian Peninsula back home. If you are willing to pay well, then you could find a girl or two among the Salafis, something you could make do with, at least, here. But I really don't see the point. The entire female staff of the mission here on Atlantis-to say nothing of the fleet as it grows-would, I am sure, be happy to be at your disposal."

Chapter Twenty-Seven Ancient gods used to "kill us for their sport," but modern Olympians are content to regulate and preach at us. -John O'Sullivan, Gulliver's Travails

UEPF Spirit of Peace, Earth Date 20 August, 2515

" Oh, Hammerskjold," Robinson laughed in the privacy of his quarters, "That's just priceless. "

Robinson sat on an overstuffed brown chair he'd had purchased from below and brought up. The matching sofa held Captain Wallenstein, who leaned on one arm of the piece, her breasts poking through a thin negligee and her long legs folded under her.

"She was almost one of ours," the captain pointed out, with residual anger in her voice, "hand picked by our own Amnesty to do our work below among the savages."

"Oh, I know," Robinson agreed, sobering. "And surely we can't just let this pass. But on the other hand, what can we do about it?"

"Not much," Wallenstein admitted. "She's asked for asylum for herself and her family. It seems that, not content with just publicly humiliating her, the locals have made threats which, based on their record to date, they'd carry out in a heartbeat."

"Have you spoken with the woman?" Robinson asked.

"Not personally," Wallenstein answered. "I sent one of my people to see her though. She has some very… quaint notions of life on Atlantis, aboard ship and on Earth. Her idea of her place in the big scheme of things is even farther off base."

Robinson made a tent of his fingers, tapping them together under his nose. "Is she attractive? Could we get enough for her as a slave on Earth to justify the expense of shipping her and hers back?"

"Not a chance; she's not much to look at. There are some prole positions on Atlantis, cooks and maids and gardeners and such. Shall we send her and her family there?"

"Whatever you think best," Robinson answered, now grown very serious. "Just so long as she has no chance of ever escaping. Wouldn't do for her to tell the local progressives just where progress is going to lead them now, would it?"

Wallenstein laughed in agreement before changing the subject. "Speaking of progress, how is the war down below going?"

"Mixed bag," Robinson said, putting out his hand and wiggling his fingers. "The invasion by the FSC and the coalition went a little better for them than I had hoped. On the other hand, they haven't found any of the weapons that provided some of the excuse for the invasion. I've passed the word to our people below who deal with the press to play that up and play down any of the other reasons for the invasion. It's been hard, though, to get the anarchist bastards to pay much attention what with all the atrocities they've fixated on that are taking place in the Balboan sector."

"Well… won't that hurt the FSC?"

"Yes and no," Robinson said, further explaining, "there are two ways to look at it. In the first place, the Balboans are doing a much better job of controlling the insurgency than the FSC or the Anglians are. If the press would play that up they might have more of an impact on undermining support for the war effort in the FSC simply by making them appear inefficient. But, on the other hand, by playing up the Balboans' war crimes, the press is helping build an unbreachable wall to further participation by the states of the Tauran Union. It's a hard call and I don't know which way to nudge it," the high admiral admitted.

"What is the deal with the Balboans anyway?" Wallenstein asked. "I looked them up. They've got no really modern military tradition though they were a serious pain in the ass to us four centuries ago. Tied to trade as they are, you would think they'd be more globally minded, more like the Taurans. Yet they've got a larger percentage of their population over there fighting than anyone else, about three times larger."

"I wondered about that, too," Robinson admitted. "Computer?"

"Working, High Admiral," a speaker answered.

"Bring up the file on Patrick Hennessey."

The Kurosawa view screen, previously taken up with a soothing show of geometric patterns, changed almost instantly to show a somewhat grainy picture of Carrera.

"He caused it," Robinson explained. "You can look his file over later at your leisure."

Unconsciously, Wallenstein ran her tongue over her lips. "Can't we control him, then?"

"I'm not sure how," the high admiral admitted, shaking his head with frustration. "He's got no family to threaten, or none that he cares enough about anyway. He appears to have no civilized moral constraints; he's a pure barbarian, in other words. Nor is he hurting for money. Actually, he appears to have more money than he really knows what to do with."

"A direct attack?" Wallenstein suggested.

Robinson exhaled, forcefully. "I wish, but no. He's an important enough ally of the Federated States that they might consider taking him out to be an act of war by us on them. And that we can't afford."

"I suppose not," Wallenstein conceded. "They're touchy swine. How about having one of the Novan states take him out for us?"

"It's highly questionable whether they even could," Robinson laughed. "Outside of a very few of them the rest are unlikely to be able to field a force of a competence or size capable of getting through his security. On the other hand, that does give me an idea… but it will take some time to set that up.

"In any case, the insurgency is going reasonably well," the high admiral continued. "They're terribly short of money, though. So Mustafa told me last month on Atlantis." Yes, he'd had to bring Wallenstein in even on that.

"Is there any way to funnel them funds?" Wallenstein asked.

"Probably, but the FSC has gotten almost incredibly good at ferreting out their accounts. Anything we did would have to be very discreet."

"Or not," the captain answered, cryptically. "I think I know a way."

Ciudad Balboa, 26/8/461 AC

Jorge Mendoza handed a roll of bills to the girl who sat next to him in the taxi. She counted out the fare, rounded it up for a tip, and paid the driver. The driver attempted to return the money but a look from Marqueli and a vigorous shake of her head told him that Jorge would be insulted if the driver refused his fare. The driver nodded his understanding and took the money with a sincere " Muchas gracias, senor." Then Marqueli gave the change to Mendoza and opened the door on her side of the taxi.

Mendoza slid across the seat towards the open door. His metal and carbon fiber legs caught briefly on the transmission hump in the middle of the taxi floor. He unhooked the flexible metal feet at the end of the tubes that ran up to join the remnants of his own legs, then swung them out onto the street. Marqueli took his arm to help him stand. Passersby stopped momentarily to look over the smartly uniformed soldier being led by a tiny girl. An off-duty policeman saluted Mendoza's wound badge and the ribbon-all he was allowed to wear-of his " CC en Acero " and continued on his way. Marqueli nodded to the policeman in recognition of the salute. As the taxi pulled away, Mendoza took a moment to secure his balance. Then he followed Marqueli to the door of the restaurant, lifting his artificial legs especially high to avoid the rise of the sidewalk.

This was Mendoza's first time in public since being equipped with his prosthetics. Understandably he was nervous about it. But, at his doctor's prompting, Marqueli had taken him out. Some of the other troops of his ward had gone over his dress uniform with a fine tooth comb. Everyone there was just pleased as punch to see one of their own with a beautiful girl.

"'Queli, I feel like people are staring at me."

"It's only your imagination, Jorge. However, they are staring at me; I'm sooo pretty." She laughed at herself. The sound was like the bubbling of a newly discovered jungle stream, infinitely joyful and refreshing. "Now relax. I won't let you fall. Okay, you can start lifting your legs now. There is a staircase in front of us. Here, put your hand on the rail, right here." With one hand on the rail, the other held by the girl, Mendoza was just able to make his way up the stairs without making it look too difficult.

At the top of the steps, Marqueli opened the door and held it for Mendoza to enter the restaurant. A waiter appeared to escort the two to their table. The table was next to the long windows that looked out over the Bahia de Balboa and towards the Isla Real.

"The view is so lovely here," said Marqueli. Then she realized that Jorge couldn't see any of it. "Oh, I'm sorry, Jorge. I forgot." She reached over to hold his hand lightly. The touch surged through Mendoza like an electric jolt.

He said, "That's all right. Tell me what you see and I'll try to imagine it."

"If you like. We are sitting in a restaurant, at a table with a white table cloth. To your right is a clean window. Below the window children are playing on a slanted rock wall that runs from street level down to the water. The water doesn't look too clean this close, I'm afraid.

"But just a ways out there are boats. Let me see… I count… ah, seventeen of them. All waiting to go through the Transitway or to leave. There are a few small boats moving among the ships. And I see crewmen working on the ships too."

Mendoza wrinkled his brow in concentration, willing his mind to see what his eyes no longer would. "I think I can hear the children playing. And maybe the engines of the small boats."

Marqueli smiled and gripped Mendoza's hand tighter. "There is a boat you can't hear. A big sailing ship with… three, no four masts. It's painted white and has none of its sails set. There is no one on that ship that I can see. It just rocks there, with the waves. It's a beautiful ship."

"I can almost see that."

The waiter came and placed menus down for the couple. Marqueli just took them and asked "Why don't you let me order for both of us, Jorge?" The soldier agreed without comment. Marqueli looked over the menu, decided lobster was impossible, and settled on something that didn't require sight to eat neatly.

While they waited for their meals to be prepared, Marqueli continued to chatter on, describing the bay to Mendoza. "Far away, on the other side of the bay, Jorge, there is a row of white buildings. I can't make out much but there seems to be movement around the buildings."

"That's probably the police cavalry squadron. I remember that they keep a base there."

"Yes, you must be right. I don't remember that the legion has one there, anyway. But the base really looks lovely from here." Marqueli was silent for a while, looking out over the tranquil scene.

Mendoza too was quiet. If things had been different, if I hadn't been hurt, I might have been able to find a girl like this someday. But if I hadn't been hurt, it would not have been this girl. And, when she is with me, it feels like it must be this girl, not some other. But it can't ever be this one. I wouldn't saddle her with a cripple.

Marqueli looked over at the boy. Can he tell when I stare at him, I wonder? If she were still alive, my mother would say I was crazy, if she thought I was beginning to fall in love with a cripple. Am I falling in love? I don't know, I've never been in love before. But it hurts, inside, when we're not together. And Jorge isn't crippled in any way that matters. We could have children. He could be a good husband and father. And he needs me. I like being needed… by him. But he's not going to ask me. I'd better tell him myself.

The waiter brought out two steaming trays and set them on the table. Marqueli assisted Jorge by cutting his meat first and then switching plates.

"You said you were a soldier's daughter, 'Queli?" he asked, while she cut.

"Yes." She sighed, sadly. "My father was killed by the gringos when I was very little. I don't remember much but broad shoulders and a big smile for me. A couple of years ago my mother died, too. I don't think she ever got over losing him."

"How did you…?"

"Oh, we went to live with my uncle and my mother worked to support us until she died. If Legate Carrera had not begun supporting those of us who lost family in the invasion I don't know what I'd have done."

"He's a gringo, you know," Mendoza said. "He was even in on the invasion. It may have been him, or his men, who killed your father… or my brother."

"I know… but… if he did, he's gone a long way to make up for it."

"That's true," Mendoza admitted. "And he's done all right by me." Better than all right.

"In more ways than one, Jorge," she amended.

Now the only question is tell him or trap him. Marqueli turned to her dinner with a grin unseen by Mendoza.

Babel, Sumer, 28/8/461 AC

Her given name meant "assistant." It was fitting.

Senta Westplatz waited impatiently at the corner of two busy streets. Though Sachsen-born, Senta was a Muslim. Like virtually all of those around her, Westplatz wore the hijab. Since it was important that she also be recognizable, her outer covering was olive on the outside, with enough of a sky blue lining showing to mark her as distinctive. Between that, her light eyes and her Sachsen features, she hoped the freedom fighter coming to claim her would have no problem.

Though Sachsen-born, Senta had lived long in Sumer. She had friends there, many of them. Many of those friends were involved, deeply involved, in the resistance. It was a case of like attracting like.

She'd done odd work for the resistance from time to time, her cover as an aid worker giving her free access throughout most of the country, though the BZOR remained problematic. The mercenaries seemed to neither have, nor permit, any illusions about the humanitarian Kosmos.

Senta was a committed pacifist. Though willing to help, she had drawn the line at transporting weapons or explosives, instead acting as a courier, transporting fighters under cover of her humanitarian organization, providing medical supplies and occasionally spying. Then, too, some of the FSA's civil-military affairs personnel were more civil than military and gave away more information than they should have.

When some of her Sumeri friends suggested to Senta that she might help the resistance by voluntarily becoming a hostage for ransom, she'd jumped at the chance. She could think of no better way to help the cause.

Simply taking her off the street would have been easy, especially given her intention of helping in her own kidnapping. On the other hand, such a kidnapping might be inherently suspicious. To allay that suspicion, Westplatz had reported to the occupation authorities that she had received nonspecific threats. That way, her side and her country-nominally, very nominally, allied to the FSC-could also blame the FSC for failing to provide security for her when she was taken.

The automobile, when it pulled up, proved to be a nondescript dirty white four door sedan made in Yamato. There were three men inside. Each pulled his keffiyah, the traditional checked Arab headdress, across his face and tucked it into the opposite side as the car slowed to a stop.

Once the car stopped, two of the men emerged waving pistols. They simply grabbed Senta as she stood there and bundled her into the car.

Potsdam, Sachsen, 31/8/461 AC

The old, gray, stone building rang with the sounds of workmen engaged in restoration. It was slow work but much had been accomplished already. The key officers of the cabinet of the Sachsen Republic, for example, all had habitable offices.

"They want five million Tauros and the release of Ali Mahmoudi," the chancellor's greasy-looking assistant, Herr Hoyer, said, in the secure confines of his chief's centrally located suite of offices. Even to the chancellor, Hoyer seemed to be something of a Schmierfink .

"Ali Mahmoudi…?" The Chancellor groped for a memory. "Oh… him. "

"Yes, him. The FSC seems to know some of the details of the offer," the assistant advised. "Well… after forty years of occupation and keeping us from liberation by the Volgan Empire, while preserving our own fascists, it's no surprise they have their friends in Sachsen, too. In any case, they're already pressuring us to turn Mahmoudi over to them before we can release him. Of course, we would have turned him over years ago except that two of our own people are being held hostage in Mahmoudi's old stomping ground in Bekaa. We were promised that they would be killed if we let the FS have him. This was obviously a political impossibility."

The chancellor was no friend of the Federated States, less still a supporter of the war in Sumer. Deep down he wasn't even a supporter of the war in Pashtia, though he had had to send some forces. Even there, he'd made sure their rules of engagement were such as to make them as useless as possible, all under the guise of preserving Sachsen life.

Notwithstanding any of this, however, he had his domestic opponents who were sure to take advantage of his discomfiture whichever way he rolled. And roll he would; there was no doubt about that. The only question was the direction of the roll and the degree of spin that would be needed. And there really wasn't much question about the direction, either.

Majrit, Castilla, Terra Nova, 21/9/461 AC

Of course, the Sachsen chancellor did release Mahmoudi. There really had never been much question about that. Whatever physical harm the terrorist might do in the future was unimportant compared to the damage that would be done to the chancellor's domestic political power in the present were Westplatz to be killed. This release of the terrorist had to be made public though every effort was made, largely unsuccessfully, not to link the two as having been the subjects of a trade.

The trade couldn't be hidden, really. What could be, and was, hidden was the amount of ransom money paid over. This was the full five million Tauros that had been demanded. Even with the obvious linkage between Westplatz and Mahmoudi, the chancellor was a believer in Abraham Lincoln's truth: you can fool all of the people some of the time.

Of course, thought the Chancellor, it's much easier when all of the people desperately want to be fooled.

The money went to a number of useful places. Some purchased influence in Sumer and elsewhere. Some went to arms inside the country and out. A fair amount went to explosives, detonators, the odd book bag and backpack, and living expenses for certain persons inhabiting various parts of the continent of Taurus.

It was amazing how far a few million Tauros could go when overhead was low, arms and explosives cheap, and with most of Salafis within Taurus already being supported by the generous doles provided by the Tauran Union's member states and some lesser amounts from Yithrabi-funded madrassas and mosques.

Some small percentage went to fund a critically important operation in Castilla.

The operation had cost less, far less, than holding a Kosmo conference at a five star hotel on the picturesque island of Melosia concerning the dreadful problem of forced assimilation of migrant widget pickers in Eastern Westfuckistan. (Or perhaps it was Western Eastfuckistan. No matter; the point was never really to solve the problem, so much as it was to have a lovely conference by a lovely beach at someone else's expense. Why, if the problems were actually to be solved the free luxury conferences might end. That would never do.)

In any case, Fadeel's organization was able to plant fewer than a dozen bombs, kill under two hundred Castillanos, and drive that country completely out of the coalition in Sumer. Rarely in history had such a significant strategic objective been achieved at so little cost, though the Salafis would remember when it had, if anyone would. Westplatz agreed that the lives lost, while regrettable, had been well spent. Even so, she slept poorly for three entire nights over it, she felt so badly, and felt very virtuous at her own suffering thereafter.

UEPF Spirit of Peace,

Earth Date 19 September, 2515

"I've got to confess, my dear Captain, that your plan was brilliant, brilliant, I say!"

"Why thank you, Martin," Wallenstein answered, preening. "It gets better, too. Our collaborators down below have rounded up dozens of people willing to be 'kidnapped.' We've got news reporters, humanitarian aid workers, international lawyers, priests and ministers. There are even two rabbis and as many homosexuals as one could imagine. I never thought that would happen. I really don't see us ever running out of people, actually. And every one taken means five or ten million transferred to the resistance in Sumer and even in Pashtia. Of course, some of it will go to Taurus, too, and while I don't expect anyone to fold as readily as Castilla did, governments will fall, alliances will be weakened."

"I've been thinking a bit myself," the high admiral said. "I think the best way to handle the success the Balboans have been having is to split the effort in the media, with half comparing them to the FSC to the latter's detriment and half insisting that the FSC boot them out of the country and arrest their leaders for war crimes."

Wallenstein sipped at her drink. "Not sure I follow."

"The people down below who support us engage in a very interesting form of double think," Robinson answered. "They seem to have these little mental compartments in which they store their hatreds. The compartments let in or reject evidence, but seem never to objectively analyze it. They accept anything they hear that fits their world view or supports the ends they believe in, and reject what does not, logical consistency be damned. Thus, they're perfectly capable of believing both things as true at the same time, provided they hear them from different sources.

"It's like those homosexuals you mentioned who are willing to be kidnapped as hostages. They're going to help people who would string them up by their necks in a heartbeat. Why? It can only be mental compartmentalization amounting to insanity."

Wallenstein thought that very witty. She added to the high admiral's thought, "Well, our ancestors, the ones who took over Old Earth, didn't compartmentalize. Like us, however, they were very capable of using those who did."

"Quite," Robinson agreed. "In any case, I do intend to push their Cosmopolitan Criminal Court into having the Balboan leaders arrested, if possible, but it has to be at the right time. That time is not quite yet. I am, however, working on the Balboan government. Apparently the agreement under which they agreed to sponsor the forces in Sumer allowed them a total of one thousand FSD per man per month from the profits. This is about twice what an individual private in that force is paid, by the way. It's also become a substantial portion of the government's revenues, about seven percent and rising. The government, however, sees no reason anymore that they shouldn't be receiving all of it, which would increase their total funding several times over."

"So what stops them from simply issuing a decree and taking over?" Wallenstein asked, confused.

"Fear, I think. They've only got a few thousand under-equipped police in country. The mercenaries match that fully with their secondary formations of soldiers, damned well-armed soldiers, too, being raised under the government's nose. Still, let's let the ambassador see what he can do. No need to tell him in advance how unlikely success is."

Embassy of United Earth, Ciudad Balboa, 1/10/461 AC

"What you ask is, sadly, impossible," President Rocaberti insisted. "Yes, Mr. Ambassador, I would very much like to see those two bastards out of the way. I lack the power even to get at the one that's in this country. If I tried, I'd soon find myself decorating a lamppost."

The ambassador of United Earth to the Republic of Balboa was nonplussed. A small man, very dapper and precise, he found it hard to imagine a semi-private military force able to ignore a genuine government, though he understood that nonmilitary nongovernmental organizations did so with impunity all the time. That was different though.

"I really don't understand," the ambassador admitted.

"It's like this," the president explained. "I have about eleven thousand police, most of them civil rather than military. Of the military police there are about four thousand, a quarter of which are brand new. They lack heavy weapons and training for combat. Moreover, those most suitable for combat were let go to join this "legion" Parilla and Carrera-that's not his real name, did you know that?-set up. We've since made up the numbers, but not the… oh, I suppose 'quality' is the best word. Worse, there are strong ties of affection between the Civil Force and the Legio del Cid. My police are, frankly, unreliable to me.

"In Balboa now, there is a second legion forming. My people tell me this legion is about half strength in the units-call it twenty-five hundred soldiers-and has about as many still in training. They are led by what are now rather experienced and rather good combat commanders; so I'm told. They're frighteningly well armed, too. They'd go through my skeleton of a military police force in days… maybe hours. If the police didn't just go ahead and join them.

"So you see, I can neither arrest them, not even the ones in country, nor do a damned thing to force them to pay a fair share of their revenues."

The ambassador almost asked whether it might not be possible to have the FSC, the ultimate guarantor of Balboan democracy, or what passed for it, force the change in receipts and likewise reinforce the police to make the arrests. He started, and then realized that there was no chance-zero, zip, zilch, nada-that the FSC would do a blessed thing to undermine their real allies in the conflict that currently mattered. Still, there was something, something just at the edge of conscious thought.

Rocaberti saw and understood the fleeting look that crossed the ambassador's face. "Yes, that's exactly right. Under the circumstances of this war, with the Balboan legion being the third, soon to be second, largest contingent, there is no chance of any support from the gringos. My best hope is to keep the legion for the most part out of the country."

The ambassador half closed one eye, cocking his head and twisting it on his neck as he struggled for that something which seemed to be eluding him. Aha.

"Mr. President," he asked, "what if Tauran Union troops came to secure your government?"

UEPF Spirit of Peace, Earth Date 13 October, 2515

"Now isn't that an interesting idea?" muttered Robinson as he considered the ambassador's proposal. "It would never work on its own, of course. But if there were to be another attack on Balboa, then the legion they have overseas would have to be sent home or other security forces would have to be brought in."

"Which security forces, Martin?" the captain asked. "The FSC can't, they're already overstretched in the first place but in the second place, after a century of occupation and an invasion, the people there would not welcome their troops."

"After I looked over the file on this Hennessey or Carrera person, I also looked into the country he's recruiting from. I doubt their president could politically stand the uproar if he invited the FSC back."

"I know," Robinson agreed genially. "That's why the ambassador suggested that Tauran Union or other coalition troops be used."

"You would have to be careful," she cautioned. "The Yamatans are notable for being dicks when overseas. The Sachsen Army, whatever its government might feel, is still at heart a staunch ally of the FS. The Anglians? I'm not sure why but the Balboans seem to not much like the Anglians. What's that leave? Gauls and Castilians?"

"Yes," Robinson agreed happily. "And some few others. Precisely those who are no friends of the FSC and those who are most friendly to us and our aspirations. But there will need to be an incident to justify calling for help. And if it kills some civilians down below, it's still better than people of our classes being killed, eventually, back home."

Ciudad Balboa, 25/10/461 AC

Not every asset available to Mustafa had been used in the attacks of two years prior. He still had his command and control team which had never been used and was perfectly capable of easing the arrival of other, operational, teams.

Those teams, two of them of three men each, came in on a single large yacht that anchored at one of the country's many yacht clubs, debarking their hidden passengers at night.

Moreover, the passengers fit right in once they were ashore. It was elegant, really. There were a dozen good Salafis from Castilla who spoke Spanish and needed to get out of the country. There was a job for half that many men skilled with explosives in a country where one needed to speak Spanish. Sometimes problems had a way of solving each other.

The men had escaped from Castilla barely ahead of the police and hidden out in Bilad al Sham for some weeks. From there they'd flown via that nation's national airline service to Farsia. Once in Farsia they'd languished for a bit, their informal leader, Mohammad Ouled Nail, doing his best to keep their spirits up after the ecstatic excitement of the attacks.

While they'd languished, however, the Farsian intelligence service had been very busy, preparing identification and passports. Properly documented, the six chosen reboarded an airplane, the first of a series that ultimately saw them arrive in San Vicente, not far from Balboa. There they were met by a representative of some local import-export business known locally as M-31. This business imported money and exported illegal drugs. They imported a bit more money, some small portion of what was paid for Senta Westplatz, for seeing the six by sea to Balboa and providing them with certain useful materials and implements. Business was business, after all.

Kaboom! Kakakakakaboomoomoomoomoom!

Camp Balboa, Sumer, 26/10/461 AC

Carrera found Fernandez weeping quietly and staring at the photo of his daughter. A faxed message sat, crumpled on the desk, alongside a color newspaper page from home showing the carnage.

Beautiful girl, Carrera thought. She must have resembled her mother. What a goddamned fucking waste.

He placed one hand on his intel chief's shoulder, in sympathy. "I just heard, Omar. There are no words…"

Fernandez looked up, not trying to hide his tears. "She was all I had after her mother died. And then these…"

"… bastards," Carrera supplied. "We'll get them, if we can, Omar. I wish I could promise you-"

"It's for me to promise you, Legate. We'll get them, all of them, no matter what it takes."

Of all men, Patricio Carrera probably best understood Fernandez's suffering. And one had to be impressed with the conviction behind his promise.

Aeropuerto Internacional Herrera,

Ciudad Balboa, 3/1/462 AC

You had to be impressed. The fund-starved and despised armed forces of the various states of the Tauran Union had never managed to deploy much of anywhere without the FSC not only footing the bill but providing the taxis… and the lunch counters… and the fuel… and the bulk of the ammunition… the administration… the medical support, the… ah, but why be petty? Nonetheless, in what was lightning speed by TU standards, the first troops of the Kingdom of Castilla and the Republique de la Gaule arrived in country within a fortnight of the second series of attacks.

These had been directed away from infrastructure and towards people. This focus was not exactly unusual, for the terrorists, but it was critical here. Had they actually succeeded in destroying the Balboa Transitway, the above-sea-level canal that connected Terra Nova's two major oceans, there might not have been a reason to deploy. Moreover, killing people (and they killed many in attacks on churches, especially) was much more likely to garner sympathy.

Best of all, from the Tauros' point of view, was that no one at home could object to sending soldiers to protect Balboa. This was as plainly a nonaggressive move as one could conceive of. Even the pacifists approved.

The FSC had very mixed feelings, of course. The Transitway was theirs. They'd paid for it, built it, defended it, and even once invaded to make sure the Balboans didn't soon forget who really owned it. On the other hand, the FS really didn't have available the troops required to defend it, what with running two campaigns in Sumer and Pashtia. Even worse, with the growing insurgency in Sumer, the legion couldn't be released to defend their home turf.

There wasn't much to do but acquiesce.

Las Mesas, Balboa, 3/1/462 AC

Jorge would never surrender to being a mere cripple.

But your problem, old son, is that there is only so much you can do that's fun. Mendoza laughed at himself. Okay, there's only so much you can do… period. The fun part could wait. Seriously though, I can't take her swimming outside of a pool. And I'm not comfortable in a pool. Movies are less than ideal for me and so she doesn't enjoy them as she should. The worst are the ones in English with Spanish subtitles. Long walks are out for the next few years. But this horse has advantages over walking anyway.

Actually, thought Mendoza, my body-what there is of it-isn't so big a problem as the fact that I am scared to death of Marqueli… or rather of losing her. I'd love to tell her how I feel, but what if she just ran away from me? A cripple for a friend is one thing. But for something more than a friend…?

It was Marqueli who hit upon the idea of horseback riding. She had gone to her uncle who raised horses and asked him if he could provide a couple of gentle ones. The uncle, being told of Carrera's interest in Mendoza and eager to stay on Carrera's and the legion's good side, had agreed immediately.

So Marqueli asked the doctor in charge of Jorge's recovery if a car and driver could be provided, telling him why they needed them. "Piece-o-cake," the doctor had answered, snapping his fingers.

A few days later Mendoza and Marqueli found themselves staying in separate rooms on her uncle's ranch. Every day began with a ride. Marqueli took along a picnic lunch. As she and Jorge rode she described the scenes they passed and warned him of any undulations in the ground that would affect his horse. Sometimes they just rode in silence.

He's remarkable, thought Marqueli. He never complains, he never whines. How many men would take such a beating from life and still be trying?

She asked, "Jorge, what are you going to do now?"

Mendoza didn't answer immediately. When he did, his answer came slowly, as if he were still thinking. "There's the beca the legion is offering to badly wounded troops. It's generous, much more so than the one being offered to regularly discharged legionaires. I've been thinking along the lines of taking them up on that offer… going back to school, to the university."

The girl clapped her hands together, startling the horses slightly. "That's wonderful. To study what, do you think?"

"History, maybe. The legate and Dux have said they'd need teachers at the schools they're starting. It would carry a warrant- officership when I finish. I'll keep drawing my regular pay until then. Only problem is… how do I write a paper when I can't see the typewriter?"

"Oh, Jorge don't be silly. I'll type your papers for you, once we're married." The girl said it so matter of factly that Mendoza didn't at first realize what she had said. He answered "Well, of course you could… did you say married?" He reined his horse in tightly.

"Yes, silly. Do you think I spend all my available time with you because I hate you? 'Married.' Why not?"

"Pity?" Mendoza asked.

"When you start feeling sorry for yourself, maybe I'll feel sorry for you, too. In the interim, since I do plan on children, and since I plan on them being yours, and especially since my family would disown me if they were illegitimate, then 'married.' To you. Or don't you want me?" She leaned over Mendoza's horse and kissed his cheek.

Speechless for the moment, Jorge just inclined his head at an odd angle. "Married. Senora Marqueli Mendoza. Children. Oh, wow… I love you 'Queli."

"I know. I've known for months. Though why you never said so… well! "

"Married." He whooped and gave a nudge to his horse's midriff. The horse picked up to a trot, heading down the road.

Marqueli followed, reaching to grab Jorge's horse's leads. "You damned fool. A broken neck might be a little bit too much, don't you think?"

Marqueli, being not much past sixteen, needed her family's permission to marry. This was forthcoming once Jorge explained to her uncle that, despite his injuries, he would be able to maintain a wife and family. Following that step, the next had been to introduce Marqueli and his mother.

His mother had wept, of course, at first. She'd wept, too, when she'd first heard the news of his loss and then again when she'd seen him at the hospital. The image of her fine strong son, bedridden and crippled, had been just too much. However, where before she had wept in despair, now it was with relief and even happiness. And married? To such a fine girl?

While the driver had taken Marqueli to her family's house, not too far away, Jorge and his mother were left alone to talk.

"Oh, she's a wonderful girl," Mama Mendoza said. "A beautiful little thing. How in the world did you ever find her?"

"She found me… sort of, Madre. It seems she's the cousin of the… to be honest, the mistress of Legate Carrera."

"Really? Well… she's not only beautiful but she has a very nice singing voice," the mother said innocently.

" What?"

"You're the girl?" Jorge asked, as his horse sauntered besides 'Queli's mare.

"The girl?"

"You sang in the choir, didn't you? You wore a white hat and a yellow print dress."

"Sometimes. How did you know?"

"I didn't, I had no idea until my mother mentioned it. I always stayed in the back and I used to watch you, you were so beautiful."

Marqueli's heart leapt. He remembered.

Interlude

Earth Date 16 May, 2104 (Terra Novan year 45 AC), Continent of Southern Columbia, Balboa Colony, Isthmian Region, Terra Nova

The raiders had come before, though not to Belisario Carrera's newly founded settlement of Cochea. Still, even with word of mouth and jungle telegraph, he was not surprised when one of the village boys ran to the center of the spread out, ramshackle town to breathlessly report that a helicopter was disgorging armed men.

Taxes? Belisario wondered. No, not that. We have nothing much to take. These are looking for something else.

At that moment Belisario's beautiful wife-she would one day have a multi-great-granddaughter named Linda who would be her very image-emerged from their hut. He knew then what the armed men were coming for.

"What is it, husband?" she asked.

"Trouble," he answered. "Raiders. Gather up all the women and children, except for the boys over twelve. Take them to the caves downstream from here to the east. Send the men and the older boys to me. Tell them to bring their guns and bows."

Trade is all well and good, Kotek thought, but why trade for what you can take?

The base was already well established. Command of the Amistad took little of his time; after all, he had "people" to do that sort of thing for him. So Kotek spent much of his time hunting. He'd already bagged half a dozen saber-tooths, well over a score of impressively tusked mammoth, and sundry other bits of wildlife useful for their pelts and feathers (the antifur fetish on Earth-as with all such fadshaving long since passed into mere quaintness).

Indeed, he'd grown rather tired of the game. There really wasn't much challenge in shooting stupid animals and the rewards, while reasonable, were far off in time. What Kotek wanted was more immediate satisfaction.

Besides, while he had purchased a couple of female slaves from a reputable Yithrabi dealer, they were poor, drab and miserable things. Anything beyond bending over or kneeling down and quietly accepting was beyond them. No, Kotek wanted some females with a bit of life in them. And for those, he had to go hunting himself, as his ancestors in distant Ghana had hunted to feed the slave markets of Virginia, Panama, Cuba and Brazil.

Then, too, it was reputed that there was a great deal of gold found in these parts and that would be even more negotiable upon his return to Earth than matched pairs of mastodon or mammoth tusks.

The helicopter had landed Kotek and two squads of UN Marines, nineteen men in total, not far from a small village set in this mountain-fringed part of Balboa colony. One squad of Marines Kotek sent sweeping south of the village to set up a cordon while he and the other prepared to drive the inhabitants out of their village and into the net. The Marines were armored and armed with both lethal and nonlethal weapons, the better to take worthwhile females and young boys alive.

I might get a decent price on some of the boys, too, Kotek thought, or at least be able to trade them to the Yithrabi for a better class of female.

Kotek Annan stood up when he and the Marines had reached a line within two hundred meters of the village. They began firing immediately, but only over the heads of the villagers. They assumed the sound would panic the people into running into the cordon. It was a great surprise for Kotek when, instead of panicking, the people disappeared and began returning fire with their primitive rifled muskets. His accompanying Marines looked, if anything, more surprised. But the next surprise, a few minutes later, was better, as two dozen or more clouds of smoke suddenly bloomed to Kotek's right flank.

Even so, the best surprise was the. 57 caliber ball that smashed into Kotek's right thigh, rending the flesh and smashing the bone. It also nicked the femoral artery but not so badly that Kotek didn't have the chance to see a hard, hate-filled face, lighter than his own but still quite dark, that came up to glare down at him. The face spoke some words in a language Kotek didn't understand.

Belisario was no soldier. Still, he had three great assets, common sense, knowledge of the lay of the land, and the sure knowledge that he had to kill these raiders or see-or rather more likely not live to see-his wife and daughters dragged off to serve foreign masters. This much he had learned on Old Earth; the progressives who said they came to do good only came to do well.

It also didn't hurt that his enemies were clumsy, being unused to genuine field work. He heard their twin columns, even as small as they were, before he ever saw them.

"One coming from the north, one from the south. They won't attack from two directions at once; that might cause them to shoot each other. So… one's a driving force, the other's a net. We hunt that way, sometimes, after all. But which is the net? South, I think, on the other side of the river."

South of the town there was a river that ran east to west. It was down this Belisario had sent his wife and the other women, girls and very small boys. His wife had carried her own escopeta, or shotgun, as had some of the others. The town itself was a mere twenty-three huts holding perhaps one hundred and fifty people of all ages.

Belisario counted heads at the people assembled around him, their faces looking frightened but determined. Sixty-one men and older boys with rifles, another dozen with homemade bows and arrows. All right. The raiders are… not many, based on little Pablo's report, but they'll be better armed.

Dividing his men into three groups, Belisario explained his plan quickly. No one interposed a better one. Leaving one group-about a quarter of the total-behind at the village, he sent another quarter downstream to cross the river at a ford he knew and which the raiders were unlikely to. The others he, himself, led to a tree line to the northeast.

"Keep low, dammit," he whispered. "For your lives, your wives and your children, for God's sake keep low."

The men following Belisario through the woods lay down along the edge and waited. Surely enough, ten men, nine of them armored and all of them armed, emerged into the open and began firing generally at the village. The group that had been left there went low and returned fire, generally ineffectively.

That doesn't matter, Belisario thought. I don't want you to be effective. I want you to be enticing.

The skirmish line advanced toward the village, their own rifles firing low now to suppress the defenders. Belisario waited… waited… waited… "READY… Fire!"

Over the sound of their own fusillades, the raiders didn't hear him. Thus, it was with considerable shock that the heavy bullets slammed into them, knocking half down immediately. Some of the villagers had climbed into trees to fire down on their enemies. Soon enough, there was not a single man left unhurt among the UN Marines.

"Reload," Belisario ordered before leading the men with him out. "Kill them all, then we'll go after the other group." Desultory firing to the south told him that the cordon, too, was being engaged.

One man, differently clothed from the Marines and less well armored, lay on his back trying to staunch the flow of blood that poured from a shattered thigh. Belisario walked up to him, kicking the man's expensive looking rifle away from his reach. The man put one arm up, either begging for mercy or trying to fend off the machete Belisario drew from a scabbard at his waist.

"I should burn you alive," Belisario said. "I should burn you alive, you bastard, but there isn't time. Still, you won't live to gain revenge for this." He raised his machete high.

Four hundred and fourteen local years later all that remained of a very beautiful woman, one of Belisario's many multi-great grandchildren, would be interred very close to the spot where High Admiral Kotek Annan's hand and head rolled free of his body.

(And that, boys and girls, was how the office of High Admiral of the UN Space Fleet and its successor, the UEPF, was rendered nonhereditary.)

Chapter Twenty-Eight My troops are just poor… boys in rude shirts, but they're good soldiers, and they'll soon have better shirts. -Charles XII, of Sweden

The new year saw some material things change while many remained the same. Desert uniforms changed to a new tiger-striped and pixilated pattern Carrera had ordered from a company in the FSC. Another pattern was created for the radically different jungles of Balboa, Carrera believing that any pattern which tried to do both would do each only half as well, if that. The loricae, the silk and glassy metal vests the legion used for body armor remained the same. The basic design of their Helvetian helmets didn't change, but they grew lighter as a new model, likewise manufactured from glassy metal, made its appearance.

Two new rifles were in development. Both were in 6.5mm. The nearer to perfection was a Volgan design, the Bakanova, superficially similar to the Samsonov already in use. The Bakanova inside was radically different, however, having a rammer to half feed a fresh cartridge during the extraction process and thus increase the rate of fire to eighteen hundred rounds per minute, for two rounds anyway. This made burst fire a practical and useful capability for the first time in a general issue rifle on Terra Nova. To take full advantage of the burst fire capability, the Bakanovas were to be modified to fire a Montgomery Arsenal 6.5mm Jotun cartridge. The barrels were also modified-increased by four inches-to take full advantage of the more powerful round. The Bakanovas, however, had not yet been perfected.

Even there, an improved rifle was only considered to be a stopgap. Carrera wanted something new and had formed a group under Terry Johnson to investigate possibilities. Among the possibilities being looked at were combustible casings, semicombustible casings, electronic priming with the rate of fire controlled by a computer chip in the rifle, near simultaneous feeding and extraction to bring the rate of fire up to two thousand rounds per minute, and carbon fiber wrapped thin steel barrels to reduce weight and improve cooling.

There were some new rifles issued, but only for the snipers. These came in three calibers,. 34,. 41 and a reduced charge. 510 that, with a silencer attached, was extremely quiet. For these rifles, frightfully expensive in themselves but with money no longer being so much of a limiting factor, thermals sights were obtained.

Two new machine guns, a heavy in. 41 and a general purpose MG in . 34 were likewise under slow development.

Mortars and MRLs remained unchanged: 60mm, 120mm and 160mm mortars, and 300mm rocket launchers. Artillery was being switched from 122mm to a 155mm lightweight gun pirated by the Volgans from an Anglian design. The numbers grew, too, from the seventy-eight systems the legion had first gone to war with, inching upward to the one hundred and fifty-two it would need to field when it reached the equivalent field strength of a full division.

Helicopters and fixed wing aircraft had, so far, proven mostly satisfactory. The Turbo-Finches were retained, but modified for additional armor protection for the pilots and with a semiactive defense system against shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles added. This came at a small cost in ordnance carried but, in the circumstances of a guerilla war against small, scattered, and for the most part poorly armed irregulars, Carrera considered it a fair trade off. The IM helicopters and NA cargo aircraft likewise had done good work and were retained. Some of the NA-23 Dodos were converted to aerial gunships firing a mix of ordnance,. 50 caliber, 23mm and 40mm. Like the artillery, the numbers of aircraft increased towards the final goal of one hundred and thirty-two deployed systems, exclusive of aerial medical evacuation.

Heavy armor had proven mostly good enough during the invasion and the subsequent occupation. Contracts were let, therefore, for an additional six hundred and ninety combat systems, mixed tanks and Ocelots, exclusive of simple armored personnel carriers, to be delivered over four years. This was enough, if barely, to keep Khudenko's factory in Kirov employed. Some of his workers were invited to Balboa to set up a depot for heavy maintenance on the armor.

One of the legion's larger purchases, in every sense, was in the form of an old light aircraft carrier, once called Her Anglic Majesty's Ship Revenge, and more recently known as the Amazonia. This had been offered for a price not much above its value as scrap metal or about the cost of three Jaguar tanks. It needed work, of course, before it would be fit to fight, but its engines were good and it could already sail. It also needed a trained crew, for which purpose Abogado's FMTGRB added another subdivision. Other ships for the naval classis of the legion were manned and, approximately, ready sooner.

The legion was growing. It had to; the insurgency around it was growing even faster. Worse, it had spread.

Pashtia, which had fallen very quickly to the FSC led coalition, was already showing some signs of future problems as the Ikhwan reconsolidated in neighboring Kashmir and sent teams forward to contest the land. Carrera expected it to become a major theater of war again, though it would be, he thought, some years.

Within the oil states of the Yithrabi Peninsula there were terrorist strikes wherever the local government chose to accommodate the wishes of the FSC. From Mustafa's point of view the results of these strikes were a very mixed bag. In some cases, true, the government had ceased such support to the infidel. In others, disastrously, it had instead struck back at the Ikhwan, arresting and imprisoning holy men, sometimes even as they preached the jihad from their pulpits. Worse, the government security and intelligence forces had taken to searching out and destroying Ikhwan cells, seizing weapons caches and, most damnably, interfering with the flow of money to the cause.

Along the northern border of the Volgan Republic there had been some remarkably effective strikes, proof to the Ikhwan of the holiness of the cause. No longer could Volgan mothers pack their children off to school without fear. No longer could Volgan soldiers march with impunity, even within their own country.

Uhuru was beginning to see flare ups, some trivial but many quite bloody, between Christian and Moslem factions. Overall, the Moslems had the edge there, however. Long lines of black Christians and Christian-Animists now marched as coffled slaves towards the markets of Yithrab. Meanwhile highly civilized Taurans and progressives in the FSC wrung their hands and wept at the plight of the Uhurans. That, however, was all they did. After all, weeping and hand wringing made them feel virtuous while forceful action would have been a rebuke to their worldview.

It was actually quite easy to trace the troubles. All one had to do was run one's finger over a map of the planet. Wherever Salafis or Salafi inspired or controlled Moslems shared a border with anyone else-Christians, Christian-Animists, Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus… anyone- that border was awash in blood. Even at sea blood was beginning to flow as Salafi pirates in the Nicobar Straits and along the coast of Xamar attacked shipping for loot, ransoms, and slaves.

Santissima Trinidad, Bahia de Balboa, 3/1/462 AC

The surplus special operations and patrol boat was capable of mounting up to ten. 50 caliber machine guns or some combination of those and either 30mm or 40mm grenade launchers. It could have been fitted for missiles or torpedoes as well, but in this case was not. Indeed, only four of the possible ten weapons stations were filled.

She was low and lean and predatory. Made of aramid and carbon fiber composites, the boat was eighty-four feet from stem to stern and seventeen and a half feet in beam. Capable of better than fifty knots, it was one of, if not the, fastest things smoking on the water.

That his crew was only half trained, the boat's skipper, Warrant Officer Pedraz, knew. Then again, I'm only about half trained, too. How much training do you need to run down a yacht moving at fifteen knots? Not much, I think. It's an easy target to practice intercepts on. Hopefully they won't mind too much.

The target yacht was named The Temptation. This seemed fitting to Pedraz, since his patrol boat had Santissima Trinidad painted across her stern.

It was just a routine run, a training run. They approached from astern to within one hundred meters of the Temptation. Pedraz had no idea that there was anything amiss with the yacht until he heard frightening cracking sounds splitting the air overhead.

"Holy shit, Chief, that fucking boat is firing at us!"

The speaker was Able Bodied Seaman Miguel Quijana, a young recruit to the legion's classis. At barely seventeen, Quijana had never before been shot at.

Well, dammit, neither have I, thought Pedraz as he ducked low behind the boat's superstructure, his finger pressing the klaxon for "battle stations."

When you've got the range advantage, use it, the chief remembered one of his FMTG instructors telling him. Gunning the engine, Pedraz twisted the wheel hard left and swung his boat past the Temptation. The Trinidad 's wake caused the Temptation to rock, upsetting the aim of the men aboard. The chief kept a nervous watch behind him until he had determined his ship was out of small arms range.

He put his head up. Each of the. 50 caliber machine guns was manned by two anxious looking crewmen. He nodded to them and turned to face the yacht. Moving at only twenty knots or so, the Trinidad closed the distance, aiming for an intercept point about two hundred meters ahead of the yacht.

"One hundred rounds per gun," Pedraz ordered, when he judged the position right, "FIRE!" Immediately the air was rent by hundreds of powerful muzzle blasts a minute. The recoil wasn't enough to rock the boat or upset the gunners' aim. Downrange, however, the superstructure of the yacht began to come apart under the hammering of high velocity fifty caliber slugs. Even with a half-trained crew, the fire was fierce enough that several of the gun-wielding men aboard the yacht went down, ripped apart by the heavy bullets. The others soon dropped their weapons in abject terror.

Slowly, the Trinidad approached, her crewmen rocking with the boat and keeping their machine guns trained on the yacht. One two- man gun crew could not see the yacht as the Trinidad's own cockpit blocked their line of sight. These Pedraz selected to board with him, along with the boat's cook and one of the radar crew.

"Spoon!" Pedraz shouted to the cook. "Draw five submachine guns out of the armory. Francais," he said to his second in command, "take the con. I'm boarding."

"I've got it, Chief," Francais answered.

Thus armed, all five men of the boarding party loaded a small rubber boat with a motor. This sped, cook manning the outboard, to cross the short distance between the two boats, leaving a white wake V-ing out behind it.

Blood dripped out the runnels in the yacht's side, Pedraz noted, as the rubber boat touched the target's side. He went first, keeping the yacht's passengers covered until a second sailor, ABS Dextro Guptillo, could board. Then he tied the rubber boat to the yacht. The rest of the sailors followed.

None of the yacht's crew resisted. Most were down anyway, dead, wounded, or having shat themselves silly. After making sure the remaining few were disarmed, Pedraz ordered the Trinidad over. The crew conducted a thorough search of the yacht, stem to stern.

Pedraz expected drugs. There weren't any. Failing that, money? Not much. Arms? Only what had been used to shoot at his boat.

He was puzzled, really puzzled. Why the hell did they shoot at me? Makes no sense. It was a serious overreaction to our playing games. He asked one of the unwounded men on the yacht and got a sullen answer. That also made no sense. And then it hit him, Castilian accent… bombings in Castilla… similar bombings here. Bingo.

Balboa Base, Ninewa, 3/1/462 AC

Fernandez's daughter's murder remained a festering hate within him. He nursed that hate, guiding and developing it from a small planting into a full-blooming tree. He didn't let it distract him from his work.

"Where-where the fuck- are the explosives coming from!?" Carrera asked Fernandez as he looked over the latest casualty figures from roadside bombings in the BZOR. His anger was not at his chief of intel, but at the enemy.

Fernandez rubbed a finger over his upper lip. He answered, "The… ummm… ship reports that they're coming in from Farsia right across the border and from Bekaa by way of Bilad al Sham. They're being bought from either the Volgans-the criminal organizations there, not the government-or the Zhong. Some, too, may have been bought in other places. A fair amount was bought right here. The money appears to have come from Sachsen."

"Sachsen? That Westplatz twat?" Carrera asked.

"So I would surmise, her and some of the others."

"Evidence?"

Without a word Fernandez turned in his wooden swivel chair and, opening a cabinet, extracted a thin red file. This he handed over.

Taking the file and opening it, Carrera began to read. When he was finished, he said, "Get Sada and bring him here. I have a mission or three for some of his special workers."

"Wilco, Patricio. By the way, next week I need to go visit the Hildegard Mises. We have some special prisoners I want to see to… personally."

Carrera thought on that and suspected it meant Fernandez was going to oversee something that a man ought not oversee, not if he wanted to keep his soul. He didn't want to see it, either. Nonetheless, he said, "I think that, this time, I should join you there."

SS Hildegard Mises, 9/1/462 AC

Mohammad Ouled Nail spat at Warrant Officer Mahamda as the latter set about giving the customary tour and demonstration. Mahamda looked questioningly at the short, wiry, dark man standing nearby.

"I think the tour will be unnecessary," Fernandez said. "Let's go right to interrogation."

Nail lifted his nose and clamped his mouth shut, almost theatrically. I won't say a word to you pigs.

Fernandez just smiled as two stout guards picked up the bomber of Castilla and Balboa and carried him, struggling, to a dental chair. They expertly strapped him in to the point he was almost completely unable to move.

Silly man, Fernandez thought. You should have thought a bit more carefully on what it meant when you were tried, sentenced to death, reported hanged, and yet found yourself here.

A sort of articulated cage was fitted onto Nail's head, with metal projections to fit between gums and lips and blunt-tipped screwbolts to hold the head to the frame. The guards set the helmet on Nail's head and began turning cranks on each side of the helmet. When it was firmly affixed, a far from painless process in itself, they rotated the jaw separator down. Nail refused to open his mouth, of course. One of the guards picked up a small hammer and deftly whacked Nail between the legs. That opened his jaws for a scream. They then forced the device into his mouth and turned another crank, which spread the device, separating the invading bits of metal and forcing the terrorist's lips and jaws apart.

"He's ready, Doctor," one of the guards called out. In walked a white-jacketed dentist who looked over the arrangement and nodded satisfaction. The dentist put in earplugs and covered his ears with muffs. Then he picked up one of his drills and stepped on a pedal. The drill began to whine.

Nail's fear-filled eyes followed the drill bit as it inched closer to his mouth, ultimately crossing just before the bit touched enamel.

In a few moments he was screaming, pleading, begging to be permitted to talk, but over the whine of the drill no one seemed to be able to hear him.

Ar-Ramadi, Ninewa Province, 14/1/462 AC

Giulia Masera didn't have Westplatz's local connections. Still, she wanted to help the cause. Indeed, she'd been fighting for the cause all her life. For the better part of the last year she'd been fighting in the role of a journalist, uncovering the misdeeds of the FSC and its running dogs. When a Sumeri, apparently having noted her sympathies, approached her with the offer of a kidnapping to both raise funds for the resistance and discredit her own fascist government, she jumped at the chance. She'd have made the offer herself if she'd only known where to find members of the resistance.

If one had asked a Roman Catholic why he or she believed in the Bible and the teachings of the Church, the nearest to an honest answer might have been something like, "That's how I was raised." Masera was not different. She'd grown up at the knee of the hero of her life, her grandfather, who had been an antifascist partisan in her native Etruria during the Great Global War. Both her mother and father had been Marxist activists and had made the easy transition to cosmopolitan progressives.

She didn't like the Salafis or even the more secular terrorists she supported. But when she considered the evil she saw in the FSC, in capitalism, and in the travesty that passed for democracy, she saw something that justified even support for murderers, oppressors of women, and theocratic fascists. Sometimes you have to choose the lesser of two evils.

Giulia was picked up off the street without incident and taken to a residential basement somewhere in the city. The men who took her were as polite as she'd expected they would be, being allies and all.

In the basement, a small TV studio had been set up. Her co-fighters spent a few hours coaching Giulia before she made a teary-eyed plea for her government to come to her rescue by withdrawing their troops from this imperialist war and paying the just ransom demanded.

Imagine her surprise then when, taping apparently completed, her newfound comrades tossed a rope over a hook in the ceiling, tied her hands to the rope and hauled her up to her tippy toes. Imagine her greater surprise when she was stripped to the waist and, out of deference to Islamic modesty, turned around to face away from the cameras, her legs being likewise tied by the ankles to bolts in the floor to prevent her from twisting and shamelessly showing her breasts to the camera.

Neither of those surprises, however, compared to the surprise she felt when the whip first bit a bright red, oozing strip out of her back.

"Now howl like a dog, bitch," her captors instructed as one of them lay on the whip for another stroke. Still in shock from the first stroke, Giulia shook her head in shocked misunderstanding. No matter, the second lash evoked a piercing scream that was every bit as good as a howl.

When the flogging was done, another twenty-three strokes later, and Masera sobbing and hanging by her wrists from the rope, the leader and the other captors pulled balaclavas over their faces and lined up three to either side of her shuddering, bleeding body. Into the camera the leader said, "Twenty-five million Tauros," he said, "or this twat gets fed feet first into a wood chipper for the nightly news."

At that, all the captors raised their weapons above their heads, shouting, " Allahu akbar! "

SS Hildegard Mises, 16/1/462 AC

They'd let Nail talk, but only after drilling away most of the enamel on his two front upper teeth. This had been replaced with a temporary filling material. There was no sense, after all, in wasting the good stuff on a walking corpse.

Talk he did, intending to lie. Sadly for Mohammad, lies required concentration and pain destroyed it. They'd caught him in a lie, a trivial thing, really, from his own badly abused mouth.

He'd thought he'd get the drill again and shat himself at the thought of it. He'd probably have been happier if they had gone the dental route. Instead, though, they'd moved him to a different chair after stripping off his trousers. Even over the pain, he'd been deeply embarrassed when his captor had stuck something cold and hard up his ass, then put his penis in what looked like a light socket.

There were things, he discovered, that hurt worse than dental work without anesthesia.

23 Al Rasul Street, Doha, 17/1/462 AC

Although weapons were easier to obtain on the Yithrab peninsula even than slaves, the four Sumeris had brought in their own. These were silenced pistols, in 9mm. Other weapons, though it was to be hoped they would not be needed, were secured in the rental car's trunk.

The team waited near the guarded gate for the chauffeured limousine that always came at this time every day but Friday. Not that they intended to attack the limo, far from it. But the limousine carried four children, two boys and two girls, to and from their school every day. Its arrival thus signaled that all the targets were present at home.

Seeing the limousine pull through the guarded gate at the front of the mansion, the rental car's driver waited five minutes before following the same course. The gate opened and an ethnic Bengali emerged, wearing a uniform far, far too hot for the climate.

"May I be of assistance, sayidi?" the Bengali asked of the driver. In answer, the man sitting beside the driver shot the gate guard with his silenced pistol. One man got out to drag the Bengali's body behind some well-tended bushes. The car proceeded through the gate, and into the mansion complex.

Al Iskandaria Studios, Doha, Terra Nova, 17/1/462 AC

"I won't show this perversion," Sheik Hamad insisted to the vicious looking man seated opposite him in his plush blue and green themed office.

Hamad was a study in contrast to his visitor. The sheik was tall and lean, with the sharp features of a desert nomad accentuated by his pure white keffiyah. His visitor was short and a bit overweight, perhaps the scion of some peasant family.

Probably a Sumeri peasant family, the sheik thought, based on the accent.

"Yes, you will," the visitor answered amiably. "By the way, have you spoken to your wife today? Why don't you give her a call? They live at Twenty-three al Rasul Street, do they not? Here, use my cell phone. The number is already dialed."

SS Hildegard Mises, 19/1/462 AC

Nail knew they were working over his captured comrades, just as they had worked over him. He knew it because they often played his comrades' screams over the speakers in his cell when he was not, himself, under the torture.

They'd gotten pretty direct in their approach. They were being direct now.

"What is the address for the safe house you used in Ciudad Balboa?" Mahamda asked.

The captive spat out an address. Mahamda consulted an earpiece stuck into his right ear and shook his head, sadly. "Your answers don't match, Mohammad. You know the price of that."

"Please… no… I am telling the truth," Ouled Nail begged.

"Perhaps you are and perhaps you are not. Listen to this." Mahamda turned on a speaker so that Ouled Nail could hear the pleading screams of his comrade. Nail couldn't know it, but the transmission was on a time delay controlled by the interrogation team to ensure that no one undergoing questioning could, between screams, coach anyone else on a story.

"He's just lost a fingernail," Mahamda said calmly. "Now it's your turn." He flicked off the speaker and turned on a microphone. He nodded at an assistant.

Mahamda's assistant grabbed Ouled Nail's middle finger on his left hand firmly, then took a pair of needle-nosed pliers and jammed one end under the nail. The terrorist shrieked into the microphone then, sobbing, begged, "For the love… of Allah… please… please tell them… the truth."

It took three nails each before the addresses given matched perfectly. There were seventeen more nails to go, along with much skin, many teeth, and a virtual infinity of nerve endings. Indeed, there were more than enough nerve endings to learn everything Ouled Nail had ever known or even suspected.

Neue Ulm, Sachsen, 21/1/461 AC

Senta Westplatz was busy packing for her return trip to Sumer. An agent of the freedom fighters was supposed to give her the tickets at the airport. In the background Fernsehen Sachsen droned. Senta paid no attention to the television until she heard the name of a friend and comrade, Giulia Masera, mentioned. Even that really didn't catch her attention-Giulia was often in the news-until she heard the words, "kidnapped" and "torture."

She ran to the TV barely in time to catch the last four strokes of the whip that set her comrade to howling, much like a dog. Hand clenched over her mouth as she watched the spectacle, Senta was simply horrified, so much so that the knock at the door barely registered until it had been repeated several times.

Finally, Westplatz did go to the door, pulling her hijab over her hair automatically as she walked.

"Yes? How may I…?" she asked the deliveryman standing there, impatiently, holding a wrapped package.

The blow to her solar plexus came as a shock to Senta. She went down like a sack of rice, loosely and almost without a sound. The deliveryman entered the apartment, closing the door carefully behind him. He hit the woman once again, hard, in the chest. She wouldn't be screaming for help any time soon. From his pocket he drew a very small digital camera with which he took a short video of Senta moving feebly and gasping for air.

Returning the camera to his pocket, he then squatted down by the shocked almost-corpse and picked it up. He looked around quickly and identified the bathroom. Then he carried Senta to it, stripping her body and placing it in the tub. Another few seconds were spent recording that scene as well. After putting on some rubber gloves, he flicked the switch to close the drain and turned the tap to let the water fill.

Taking a towel with him, the deliveryman then went to the kitchen and carefully opened the drawers until he found a sharp knife. He had one with him, of course, but it would be better in the short term if the implement came from the house. Returning to the bathroom he found that Senta, still gasping desperately, had sat up. He pushed her back and grabbed her left wrist, which he twisted toward the far wall. Senta struggled but feebly.

With the knife he made a long slash lengthwise up the radial artery. The cut went deep and blood spurted out, staining the tiled far wall and turning the water filling the tub red. The deliveryman released the arm and took another short video of the blood flowing. Then he took that hand and wrapped it around the handle of the knife, holding it firmly. With this he made a not very deep and deliberately ragged cut up the right wrist. Then he let both knife and hand go free. He watched for a minute as blood loss took away consciousness. When the water had mostly filled the tub he shut off the flow and waited for ten minutes. A quick check of the carotid confirmed the woman was quite dead. He took some more video of the corpse.

The deliveryman then retrieved the package and removed from it a change of clothing, another pair of rubber gloves, a false moustache, a digital camera and a plastic bag. He exchanged clothing, putting his old, blood-spotted clothes in the bag and the bag back in the package, which he rewrapped loosely. He put on the gloves and began to search the apartment. Since no suicide was very likely to be packing a bag for a trip, he returned the articles of clothing to what seemed logical places. In the course of his search, he found a folder at the bottom of the bag. He did not find any air or train tickets. The folder he set aside for the moment.

Continued searching of the apartment turned up nothing further, not even a computer. Walking to the door, folder and package in hand, the man stopped to listen for a few moments. Nothing. Then he opened the door, exited, and closed the door behind him.

By the time the police began to suspect that Senta had been murdered, the assassin would be long gone, leaving no personal trace. The video would be posted on the Globalnet as a warning to other Kosmos who might be inclined to help the Salafi Ikhwan.

SS Hildegard Mises, 24/1/462 AC

The walls of the cell were covered with color photographs of the victims of the bombs he'd helped set off in Balboa. He couldn't escape them; his eyelids had been sewn open. When he looked at the pictures, in his mind's eye he saw his own family laid out butchered as he was sure they would soon be.

Mohammad Ouled Nail wept as the cell door opened in front of him. Mahamda entered with that small dark man-Fernandez, he was called-who seemed to be in charge. Another man, taller and lighter skinned than Fernandez, stood there as well.

Nail's hands were bandaged but blood oozing from the fingertips had stained the white gauze red.

It wasn't just pain that made Nail weep; it was also the shame.

He'd thought he was tough and brave. He'd thought he had faith in his God. He'd been sure they could never break him. He'd been sure, too, that he could lie.

He knew, now, in his innermost being, that there was no God. He knew he couldn't keep a story straight when in agony. And he knew he couldn't take the pain.

His joints were, half of them, dislocated from the little metal framework-the "Scavenger," they'd called it-they'd placed him in and tightened. They hurt almost as much from the decompression chamber he'd endured. His face-they'd made him look in a mirror-was blotched with burst blood vessels.

The evil looking infidel, Fernandez, made his pronouncement. "Murdering bastard! Turn him into a woman, then hang him… her… it." Then, horror of horrors, the evil infidel had bent down and whispered, "I'm sending a team to exterminate your family in Castilla, you son of a bitch."

Topside, far from the screams, Carrera and Fernandez sat on a large pipe, staring across the dark vastness of the ocean toward the lights of the Yithrabi coast. In these confined waters the ship rocked gently, slowly. It didn't matter; Carrera was sick to his stomach anyway.

"Do you ever have nightmares, Omar?" Carrera asked of Fernandez.

The Balboan shrugged. "Everyone has nightmares, Patricio."

"Do they?" He shook his head. "Not like mine, I don't think. Not like mine.

"Did you know," Carrera continued, "that I was raised to be a civilized man? I don't advertise it but my mother and father were progressives, cosmopolitans, in fact. I sometimes wonder if that's why I was able to transfer my loyalty from the Federated States to the legion; because I wasn't raised to be loyal to the Federated States, even though for many years I was and, to some degree, still am. An interesting thought, is it not; that maybe the end result of the destruction of ties to nations is not loyalty to mankind, but loyalty to even smaller and more exclusive groups than nations? To family most of all."

Fernandez's mind was not the sort to worry about such things. He kept silent. Besides, what was wrong with having an ultimate loyalty to one's family? As far as he could see that was the default state of mankind.

Carrera flicked a cigarette butt over the side, then reached for a tumbler of whiskey resting on the deck by his feet. From this he drank deeply.

"Ever read any Shakespeare from Old Earth, Omar? Henry the Fifth, maybe?"

Fernandez shook his head in negation. "I've heard of it; that's all."

"No surprise, I suppose. It's a play; never underestimate the benefits of a classical education. There's a scene there… where the king insists that he is not to blame for the condition of his soldiers' souls should they be killed in battle for him."

Carrera laughed, bitterly. "Damn old Will. He answers the questions he wants to but not the one you want him to. Tell me, Omar, what do you think? If Henry's soldiers had sacked Harfleur, would he have been responsible for the sack? For the rape of the 'shrill shrieking maidens'? For the dashing of old men's heads to walls? For the 'naked infants spitted upon pikes?' Where would the blame lie then?"

"Patricio," Fernandez began, "I don't thi-"

Carrera cut him off. Nodding his head toward the hatch that led into the bowels of the ship, he asked, "And where does the blame lie here? Who is to blame for that obscenity taking place below? If it's you, does that relieve me of anything? I don't think so."

Sighing, Fernandez asked, "Do you want me to shut the program down?"

Taking another hefty slug of the whiskey, Carrera coughed and then answered, "That's the worst part: no."

Ic (Intelligence Office), Camp Balboa, Ninewa, 29/1/462 AC

Thank God Patricio didn't succumb to the weaker part of his nature, thought Fernandez while sitting at his desk in Sumer. Bad enough he shows too light a hand with some of our adversaries. But we must have the information that comes out of that ship, whatever it costs.

The desk sat deep inside the Intel Office, which was the most secure building in the camp. It was built of a double wall of pressure formed adobe bricks with the interior space filled with earth as well. The office was surrounded by another wall, this one topped with barbed wire and with a tower at each corner of the compound. Guards manned the tower, the narrow gate, and the inside of the building continuously.

There was no air conditioning; Carrera simply forbade it on the theory that troops given air conditioning would never grow acclimated to the heat, which was, while drier, even worse than Balboa's. The four exceptions to this rule were the religious facilities, the field hospital, the troop messes and the small brothel quadrant full of Sumeri whores, most of them widows or orphans.

So instead of air conditioning, Fernandez sat under an overhead fan. Paperweights-generally of steel, glass, or fired clay-held the papers on the desk in place against the breeze of the fan.

It was better to be seated. After days on the Hildegard Mises Fernandez found himself still swaying when he walked on dry land. He hoped it would go away soon.

It had been worth it, though. Normally Fernandez was, while willing enough, not a man who enjoyed inflicting pain. This time had, obviously, been different.

They were still on the ship, the one named Ouled Nail and the other three who had survived. They'd be hanged when they'd healed from their surgery; be hanged, incinerated and their ashes dumped out with the garbage.

Big mistake to survive, Fernandez thought. Worse mistake to survive after killing my blood and then being captured. Bastards. Well, let's see what today brings.

What today brought were dispatches from Sada, received from Sachsen. These included a folder taken from the not-quite-packed bag of a woman. Most of the names in the folder were of no interest. Rather, they were of no obvious interest as they had no markings against them in the folder to indicate any importance beyond the merely personal. They would, of course, be investigated anyway.

Two names were interesting. One of them was a woman, this one living in the City of Akka in Bekaa. She appeared in the folder as Westplatz's main contact with the insurgency.

"Odd," Fernandez said to himself, "very odd that a Spanish name should appear among our adversaries, yet be living in Bekaa." He decided to pass the name on to the research section.

When the name came back, a few days later, with a healthy file including pictures both before and after the plastic surgery, all Fernandez could say was, "Ohhh," before passing the file back to Sada's office.

Akka, Bekaa, 2/2/462 AC

Standing on a second floor, iron railed balcony overlooking the Tauranian Lakes, Layla Arguello shivered despite the warm night air. There was something going on that was monstrous in its implications. People, her people, good and trusted comrades of many years of struggle, were disappearing right and left. She was pretty sure they were disappearing right.

She'd been something of an icon in her youth, had Layla. Borderline pretty, with a simple, sincere face masking a devious mind, a photographer had once taken her picture with her hair covered by a man's keffiyah and a man's rifle slung over her shoulder with the muzzle projecting above her back. This photograph had rocketed around Terra Nova, propelling Layla into an unwanted, even unfortunate, stardom. Songs had been written about her in several tongues. The stardom, in turn, had made it nearly impossible for her to continue her mission, which was, by and large, the hijacking of aircraft.

Nothing deterred, Layla had undergone a series of plastic surgeries to hide her true face and make it possible for her to continue boarding aircraft in order to hijack them. The significant part of that was that she had endured the surgery without anesthesia, this being by way of a gesture of solidarity with the suffering People of the world.

Later in life, after many hijackings and many terms in prison, Layla had married a comrade from the struggles in Colombia Latina. Later still, she'd entered politics, winning office repeatedly based largely on her revolutionary past and her potential for continuing the revolution into the future. As a politician, her new face became even better known than had been her old. Likewise well known were her residence, office, domestic arrangements and family situation.

Is it time to go undercover again? she wondered, staring at the stars winking in the waves below. No… I can't. The cause needs me here, easy to find and with all my connections intact. But I think I ought to improve my security.

Camp Balboa Base, Ninewa,

Sumer, 3/2/462 AC

Sada, Fernandez and Carrera met in a conference room in the intelligence offices. The conference room was small; the idea of a large conference in the shadowy, dirty world of intelligence, counterintelligence and direct action was something of a contradiction in terms. A few flies buzzed-Fernandez had reason to believe they were the only bugs in the room-and the rotating fan whined despairingly overhead.

"There are a few people, very few," Fernandez admitted, "who won't break under torture. She's going to be one of them."

"She has two sons," Sada had pointed out. "She might not talk over threats to a husband, or even her father and mother, but she's an Arab, an Arab mother; she'll talk to save her sons."

"What do you think she's going to know to justify torturing and killing her sons?" Carrera had asked. "Remember, we do not torture anybody we have not announced that we have killed and are not planning to kill. If you tell me she's part of a plot to set off a nuke in a major city, maybe that would justify it. Maybe. Or if you tell me that you know, not suspect but know, that her sons are in on the whole thing. Can you do that?"

Sada shook his head. "No, we can't say that. Both of them are still in school. One's in college; the other in high school. They're likely to join the enemy at some point in time, yes, but for now? No, as far as we can tell they're innocent enough."

Fernandez grew heated. "If the sons will grow up to become terrorists, and they will, we should kill them now while we can. If we're willing to kill them then why not do the rest?"

"It just seems wrong."

"Patricio," Sada said, "you heard me when we first began working together but I don't think you listened. We Arabs are not like you people, and it isn't just a matter of religion. After religion, and not far behind… maybe even ahead, family is what really matters to most of us. We stopped, or at least cut down on, the hangings because it was making enemies of entire clans. The same logic applies here. At least the clans and tribes here could be bought off. But unless you are willing to kill the sons who will avenge this woman-and the right or wrong of it matters not at all-you are better off not touching her. What's the sense of killing or taking one terrorist if, in the process, you create two? On the other hand, if you're reluctant to take and use the sons to loosen their mother's tongue, at least let us kill the lot of them."

Fernandez inclined his head toward Sada. "Adnan is quite right, Patricio. Moreover, what's the difference between that and an air strike that takes out a whole family to get one terrorist? There isn't any and you know there isn't." Fernandez's voice and face grew desperate. "Patricio, for God's sake they created you by killing your family and leaving you alive. They have brought out the very worst in me. This is not different."

Carrera thought about that. He'd done some terrible things, let innocent people be killed to get at the guilty. But this was just… wrong somehow. He couldn't deliberately order the deaths of the two boys on the mere chance that they might someday become a threat.

"No. Kill the woman, fine. Leave her family alone."

"Well," Sada said, acquiescing, "if it's to be a simple assassination then there's no sense in using my own boys for it. Can we afford to hire a hit team?"

Fernandez, still shaking his head in disgust at Carrera's squeamishness, asked, "Of course we can afford it. A hit team from whom?"

"Possibly the Anti-Zionist People's Liberation Front; they're strong in Bekaa and never liked the fact that Arguello, a woman, garnered so many headlines. Or maybe the ZII, the Zion Intelligence Institute, could suggest someone. Maybe they'd be willing to do it themselves. Give me a week to work it out."

"You have contacts with the ZII?" Fernandez asked incredulously.

"Just one good one," Sada answered and then refused to say more.

Akka, Bekaa, 9/2/462 AC

As it turned out, ZII wouldn't touch it. The head of the organization, Mickey Zvi Maor, who knew Sada from school in Anglia, was firm on that. Oh, they wished the woman dead, one thousand times over dead. But they were such an obvious candidate for the hit that Maor begged off. He did suggest contacting one of the religiously affiliated parties in Bekaa, all of whom distrusted women in positions of power.

Sada sent one of his more trusted lieutenants, Major Qabaash, to Bekaa to do the negotiations.

" Qef halak, ya sheik, " Qabaash began at the audience he had secured with the leader of the Monotheism Party in a suburb of Akka. The sheik lived simply enough, in a rambling adobe house with a fountained central courtyard. The fountain was not ostentation. In the fierce heat of the Bekaa desert the fountain served to cool the courtyard without the pollution of the infidel's electricity.

Serene and dignified, the sheik-his given name was Ghalebreturned the greetings and swept his hand down, inviting Qabaash to sit near him on some cushions placed where they would receive the most benefit of the fountain's cooling effect.

Serving women, some the sheik's wives and concubines, others his daughters, brought in trays ostentatiously laden with more food than two men could hope to eat. Besides the usual lamb, there were bowls of red maize paste, flavored with native "holy shit peppers."

Holy shit peppers were at the low end of piquancy compared to some of Terra Nova's natural spices. Above them were Joan of Arc peppers, only for the very daring or masochistic. At the very high end were the plants known as "Satan Triumphant." No one had ever managed to eat these, whole, though they had found a use during the Great Global War when distilled into a potent chemical agent similar in its power and effects to phosgene oxime. Highly diluted, they could have been used for food preservation. Unfortunately, STs were so vile that the slightest underdilution would have preserved the food indefinitely as no human being could have hoped to eat it. Mixed in minute proportion in shoug, a fiery popular paste, was about as useful as "Satan Triumphant" peppers ever got.

Besides the red maize paste were pitas made from the flour of the chorley. There were half a dozen Terra Novan "olives" on the trays, as well. These had little resemblance to Old Earth olives, being roughly the size of plums and gray in color. They grew in clumps of three on a plant that looked like a stunted, anemic palm, except that unlike the palms of Old Earth this one's trunk was green while its fronds were gray. The taste was said to be similar to normal olives, though slightly more astringent.

One did not get right down to business when dealing with the sheik or, indeed, with nearly any Arab; there were the niceties to observe first. A full two hours of mostly meaningless pleasantries followed. Mostly, however, does not mean entirely. By the end of the two hours, from hints and suggestions, Ghaleb had learned that the heretic woman, Layla Arguello, needed to die and Qabaash had learned that the price of her death, her husband's and her sons would be fifty thousand FSD, half payable up front and half on confirmation that she was truly dead. Two of Terra Nova's three moons, Eris and Bellona, had risen by the time the two reached this point.

"It would be better," observed the sheik, getting down to business, "if her sons did not grow up to avenge her."

"I could not agree more, O Wise One," Qabaash answered. "Yet those are our limitations. The people I represent will not countenance the killing of the sons."

Ghaleb's smiled slightly as his fingers pulled at one ear. "Easterners, eh? It never ceases to amaze me how little they understand us and how completely they insist on trying to fit us into their own mold. For the woman and the sons I would charge fifty thousand. For the woman alone, the price is one hundred thousand, for I will have to recompense families when the sons grow up to exact their revenge."

"It is fair, O Sheik, and the amount in within my discretion."

To himself Qabaash mused, If this were the FSC, they would, at a cost many times greater, drop a large and expensive guided bomb from an aircraft costing more than this country earns every year. The bomb would kill Arguello, and the FSC would congratulate itself for its discretion and humanity. The bomb would also kill fifty genuine innocents and probably miss her sons. For a mere fifty thousand I could get rid of the lot and kill no true innocents if only I were permitted. Life is strange and the Almighty's sense of humor unfathomable.

Akka, 17/2/462 AC

Ordinarily, the sheik would have merely given a sermon in the mosque on the subject of female iniquity and mentioned Layla's name as an example. Several of his followers would have read between the lines, hunted her down to her home and killed her and her family. Word would have leaked so that the sheikh could reward his diligent followers properly, but only within the close confines of the clan, so that the police could pretend bafflement. Because of the absurd requirement that her family not be hurt, more direct and less subtle methods were required.

A team of Ghaleb's followers was thus handpicked and given its marching orders. They were experienced and bright men; they had no real difficulty finding Layla's residence and office. They did find it suspicious that she changed her routes between the two more than daily. This meant that the killing would have to take place either in or in front of either her office or her home. Given that they were, unaccountably, forbidden from killing her family it would have to be the office.

Purchasing weapons and explosives in the market in Akka was like buying dates and figs. Finding Layla's residence and office was equally easy, reconning them not much more difficult.

Unfortunately, what the hit team did not count on was the woman herself. Layla Arguello was not some untrained, innocent Kosmo journalist or humanitarian aid worker. She was, herself, a trained and experienced terrorist. Moreover, her long career should have told the team she was a smart trained terrorist. Smart and trained terrorists, in the circumstances of Akka, Bekaa, did not go about unarmed.

What should have been an easy hit turned into a somewhat lengthy firefight. With six men with rifles engaging one woman with a pistol the result would normally been foreordained. Not so with Layla.

Near her office, her car was suddenly cut off by another that swerved in front and forced her driver to crash into a parked car by the curb. The car following Layla's smashed into the rear of her own to further shock the occupants. Her driver and the guard sitting in the front seat were thrown forward-the use of seatbelts indicating a certain lack of piety among their people-and stunned.

Layla, however, was not shocked. She had the door open and was crouching outside, digging in her purse for a pistol and her trademark hand grenade, even before the men in the assaulting cars had their feet to the pavement. Her hand closed on the grenade first. This she donated to the following car. It went off on the asphalt, laying out two just emerging assassins with multiple shrapnel wounds. Red pools began to spread across the pavement.

The remaining four assassins were momentarily shocked. This gave Layla enough time to dig out her pistol, a 9mm job made in Sachsen. With the pistol in hand, she stuck her head over the trunk of her own immobilized automobile and fired at the passengers of the car that had rammed hers from behind. She hit one, she thought.

A long burst of fire from the car that had swerved in front of hers smashed the windows of her own, sending the glass shards tinkling to the asphalt and killing the driver. None of the barely aimed bullets hit her, but spraying glass scored her forehead and face, causing blood to run into her right eye. Desperately Layla used her left hand to try to wipe the blood away and clear her eye for shooting. Even through the haze she managed to jack a couple of rounds in the direction of the first auto.

Achmed, nephew of Ghalib, was shocked by the return fire. The explosion of what he assumed was a hand grenade had been bad enough. But for the woman to have the effrontery to actually shoot back? This was too much.

Unfortunately, the return fire was also too much. Achmed, feeling ashamed, closed his eyes and kept low to the ground to escape the bullets this damned heretic woman seemed to have in great supply.

The rough pavement dug into his face. Achmed forced his eyes open and saw a woman's foot and a knee exposed under the floor of the target vehicle. He pointed his rifle in the general direction of the foot and pulled the trigger.

Layla was reloading her pistol from one of the four spare magazines she kept in her purse when she felt the blow just above her knee. Partly from the physical force of the blow and partly in automatic response to the instant and intense pain, her leg spun out from under her, causing her to drop the loaded magazine she had been struggling to insert. She fell to one side even as her hand groped the asphalt for the magazine.

Unable to stand or kneel any longer Layla forced her back to the rear wheel of her car while her hand continued to feel around, searching for the lost magazine. She found and grabbed it with a joyful cry.

Before she could reload, she stopped. Two angry looking men were standing above her, each with a rifle pointed towards her head and torso. A third sprayed her guard, still sitting in the front seat, knocking his bloodied corpse over onto the lap of the dead driver.

No chance now, Layla thought, dropping the magazine but retaining the pistol.

Layla's last acts in this life were to smile as if her own death were a triumph and to spit at her assailants.

The rifles opened fire. At this range even very bad marksmanship could not miss. Over forty bullets entered Layla's body. When they were done she lay dead against the rear tire, her head lolling to one side and the pistol still held tightly in her hand.

Camp Balboa, Sumer, 19/2/462 AC

Layla's bullet-riddled body was barely in the ground in Bekaa when the first replacement units began to arrive in Sumer. This was the Second Cohort of the now renamed 1st Tercio (principio Eugenio). Whereas the 1st Cohort had never had a strength above four hundred and sixty, the replacement was closer to a real battalion's strength of nearly seven hundred. It was still organized in six subunits though these, in deference to the increase in strength, were called now "maniples" rather than centuries and were subdivided into platoons rather than sections. The platoons were still rather small, as platoons went.

Sporting new sergeant's stripes on his collar, Cruz didn't care about that. In truth, he didn't care much about anything except that this combat tour was over and he was going home for a while, home to his Cara and, hopefully, home to marriage and the beginning of a family. He had a good job with the legion, work he liked and work he had proven good at. He intended to stay even though this would mean frequent separation from his loved ones.

Waiting with his gear for the trucks that would take himself and the rest of the cohort to the Ninewa airport, Cruz mused upon the meeting he and his cohort's tribune had had with Carrera and the legion's sergeant major, that crusty old bastard, McNamara.

He'd been shocked, more than a little, when Carrera had announced that he'd been selected for Cazador School and, if he passed that, further selected for the Centurion Candidate Course.

"They'll be harder than combat, Sergeant Cruz," McNamara had informed him. "I know you don't believe that now but, before you accept the appointment, just trust me on this."

He'd sat silent for a while at that, thinking hard. Finally, he'd decided, "I think I can take it, Sergeant Major… Legate. After all, I have good reasons to."

Interlude

Earth Date 27 May,

2104 (Terra Novan year 45 AC),

Atlantis Base

The shuttle came down from the Amistad carrying a full platoon of thirty UN Marines, all the ship had available. It screeched in to Atlantis base furiously. The Marine commander directed his troops to wait at the small terminal while he went to collect his orders from the Base's deputy, acting in High Admiral Annan's stead.

"The helicopter went off the air several days ago," the deputy advised the major commanding the Marines. "I don't know if they crashed or what."

"Where were they heading?" the major asked.

The deputy's finger played over his computer's keyboard, bringing up a somewhat undetailed map of Balboa colony. "The high admiral said he was going here. "Hunting," he said." Since the deputy had some idea of just what it was that Annan had intended to hunt, and since that was technically illegal, even for a high admiral, he kept his mouth shut as to what Annan's objective had been.

"I've been in contact with our office in Ciudad "-the Deputy laughed; to call such a miserable collection of shacks a city was absurd-"Balboa. They say the high admiral stopped there on his way."

The major could have surmised the hunt's objective but long years in UN service had conditioned him not to dig into, not to even think upon, the foibles of his superiors. He had his own life to worry about and another four years would see him retired to his Botswanan village on a very comfortable, Noblemaire-Rule-driven, pension.

Following Annan's flight path, the shuttle stopped off at the local UN supervisory office in Ciudad Balboa. The bureaucrats there had nothing to add. It struck the Marine major that the guards on the office seemed even more slovenly and undisciplined than was the UN norm. Still, it was close enough to that norm to excite no real interest. After refueling the shuttle from local stocks, and seeing that his men were given a decent meal and some rest, the ship took off heading east.

The shuttle was not equipped to scan the jungle below. Even if it had been, it might well not have noticed the several dozen armed men on horseback over whom it flew, riding hell for leather, westward, beneath the thick triple canopy.

The helicopter was easy enough to find; it had landed in the open and there it still was. When the shuttle descended to a leaf- and grass- churning landing, the major and his men debarked. They found the helicopter, along with twenty-two insect-eaten heads on stakes in a circle around it. Of the high admiral's body, or those of the eighteen Marines who had accompanied him, there was not a trace. The bodies of the three-man crew, or what was left of them after ants, antaniae, and buzzards had taken their share, were found right by the helicopter.

The nearby village was abandoned. No footprints told where the villagers had gone. Prints of horse hooves, some dozens of them, led off to the east but disappeared in the sodden jungle. The major was about to organize and send off search parties when he received a distress call from the UN supervisory office, now some hundreds of kilometers away.

The call for help ended almost as soon as it began. By the time the shuttle arrived back at the office it was nothing more than a corpse- draped, smoking ruin.

The shuttle landed nearby. This was a mistake.