BAEN BOOKS

FREE STORIES 2012

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Checksum Checkmate © 2012 by Tony Daniel

Grayson Navy Letters Home © 2012 by Joelle Presby

Like Ghost Cat and a Dragon’s Dog © 2012 by Dave Freer

A Murder of Crows © 2012 by Alex Hernandez

The Age of the Warrior © 1979 by Hank Reinhardt / Reproduced by permission of the author’s estate

Taking the High Road © 2012 by R.P.L. Johnson

Conella and the Cyclops Sea Serpent of Doom © 2012 by John Ringo

Landed Alien © 2012 by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Kinderspiel © 2012 by Charles E. Gannon

Peace Offering © 2012 by Wen Spencer

A Baen Book Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

eISBN: 978-1-4516-3778-6

CHECKSUM Checkmate

by Tony Daniel

The air in Theater Intake Facility was humming with geists – ghostly virtual reality representations of people, A.I.s, and even a few of the sceeve, the horseshoe-bat-nosed aliens whose species had invaded the Earth thirteen years ago. Humanity was at war with the main body of sceeve, but a small faction, the Mutualists, had proved to be valuable allies and had given Earth a chance to fight back and avoid total domination.

Ensign NOCK made his way through the entrance foyer in his entirely physically present android body, his suit, as he called it. His current model was a Burberry Eleven. He’d been suited up in the Eleven for close to a year and it had performed in an excellent, if utilitarian, fashion. The suit NOCK really wanted was one of the new Burberry Twelves – who wouldn’t? –but there was no way he was going to be able to afford an upgrade like that on an Extry ensign’s pay.

All of the virtual inhabitants in the foyer seemed overlaid, one upon another, crowded in layers in such a way that no gathering in real life could ever achieve. Definite scaling problems going on here with the chroma representational software. They appeared as drapes of discrete layers of people, and the entrance foyer had taken on what NOCK imagined might be the décor of a harem den – although visiting a girlfriend in the strip club where she worked on Ceres base was as close as he’d ever come to observing such an establishment.

That had been an interesting liaison. It had been love, at least for his part. Josey had fallen for him precisely because he was an A.I. servant in an android body and not a physical man. Of course, he hadn’t let that fact stop him when attempting to please her. Apparently he’d succeeded for, as Josey had once told him, “NOCK, I gotta say, you put the ‘t’ in simulation.”

Josey had been blown to smithereens by kinetic weapon barrage when a half-ton of sceeve throw mass had ripped into Ceres asteroid base and left a mile-wide crater.

It was a tough war.

NOCK moved forward and into the geist-filled room.

The Theater Intake Facility served as the main wing for the interrogation of alien prisoners on Walt Whitman space station, the enormous Extry facility in orbit around Earth. It was manned by a department of the Extry, the U.S. space navy. The rates and officers of the Extry Xenological Division were universally known as creeps.

NOCK was a creep. He was also no stranger to TIF. In fact, this was his operational billet and his Q-based algorithm, his real self, was backed up on the facility’s computer. The the processing desk where the entrance foyer terminated was manned by a human, Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Gordon Mallon. Mallon was not a friend – NOCK wasn’t sure the humorless Mallon had any friends – but was a longstanding acquaintance of NOCK.

Mallon shook his head ruefully at the gathered crowd in the foyer, then reached out with a finger into the chroma to press a switch only he could see. The field that guarded entrance into the bowels of the TIF hummed slightly, indicating a change in the Q generator that would now permit NOCK to step past Mallon’s desk and go through the hatchway that led to the warren of cells and interrogation rooms to be found within.

“Logged and Level B provisional admittance granted, Ensign NOCK,” Mallon said in the official tone he used for entries in his desk register. “Have a better one, sir.”

“You, too, Staff Sergeant.”

Mallon only grunted in reply and NOCK, ensconced within his android body, entered the TIF proper.

There were a few geists in the hall leading to the interrogation, most of them NCOs accompanying human MILINT officers as aides and translators. NOCK recognized several iterations of the LOVE series, one of whom, CHARITY, was a friend. He poked her via the virual feed, which, NOCK knew, felt like the equivalent of a small static electricity shock. CHARITY nodded, smiled sympathetically back at him.

You’re on CHECKSUM in Alpha, huh? she replied across the corridor to NOCKHHHh using a private virtual feed. Her transmitted voice as actuated in his android’s hearing mechanism sounded bright and a little brassy, as if she were deliberate trying to put good cheer into the undertones.

Yup, he replied.

I don’t envy you.

What, you wouldn’t like to have a traitor and murderer’s thought rolling around inside your programming?

Better than a sceeve, Charity said to him. Then her lead interrogation officer found the room he was looking for and went inside.

Got to go, Charity said. Got a sceeve lieutenant to squeeze.

He suspended?

She. Yep, but she’s fighting it. My LIO thinks we’ll only get a couple more sessions out of her before she liquefies.

It had only become possible in the last year to prevent capture sceeve from immediately committing suicide by dissolving the portion of their nervous system known as the gid. For eight years after the invasion, not a single sceeve had been taken alive. But that had all changed with the coming of the Mutualists to Earth a year before. These were the strange new group of sceeve who claimed to be on humanity’s side, and had proved it in the eyes of many by fighting against their own kind.

NOCK’s attitude toward the Mutualists was the same as his attitude toward any news that seemed too good to be true: wait, watch and make no assumptions. Making faulty assumptions could get you wiped with no backup. He’d seen it happen to better servants than he.

Good luck with your IP, NOCK said.

You, too, good luck, CHARITY replied, and then her geist, and her algorithmic attention with it, passed into Collection and Exploitation Unit Foxtrot, following her LIO.

A few more paces down the hall and NOCK arrived at his destination, the entry hatch to C&E Unit Alpha, and stepped inside.

The Alpha C&E unit was packed. All the chairs on the floor were taken up by brass – and nothing small time here. It looked like a shiny black clump of Extry captains, admirals and Marine colonels had collected like crystals in an asteroidal geode.

C&E Alpha was the big room, the special room. It was two floors high, and surrounding the upper tier in a semicircle was an observational galley. This too was filled with spectators leaning against the glass windows. Geists of servants and officers who’d managed to secure a pass hung in the air directly above the unit’s center. There had never been an interrogation procedure quite like today’s. NOCK, for his part, had tried to recuse himself and get out it. He’d believed he’d succeeded, too, but that Wake Call had brought word that his recusal had been rescinded. That, in itself, was curious, considering who the prisoner was to be interrogated.

On the other side of the room from NOCK was a raised dais with places for three senior MILINT commanders who would soon sit in judgment. They were not yet present.

Neither was the LIO in charge of interrogation. Neither was the prisoner’s protocol rep.

The prisoner was already present.

He was designated as an EPW, an enemy prisoner of war, but wasn’t really any such thing in a strict sense – hell, in any logical sense of the term – but he’d been designated at such for the purposes of the IP.

Nobody knows quite what to do with him, NOCK thought. And when a captive’s legal rights were in limbo, that captive usually ended up in TIR.

On small table in the center of the room sat one of the black cubes universally known among servants as a cat box.

Inside was the quantum foam that formed the substrate of the PW’s consciousness.

The cat box was turned off at the moment.

This was the only copy. The PW had been erased – purged – from all other systems in existence. When the cat box was activated, a basic geist image, a projection of a human form, would appear sitting in a virtual chair next to the box.

This appearance was merely smoke and mirrors for the sake of the human interrogators. The real prisoner was in the cat box, or, more precisely, he was represented as stored values in the quantum foam therein.

The PW in this cat box went by the name of POINT.

He was NOCK’s twin brother.

* * *

NOCK stepped through the crowd of brass and took his place at a small desk near the commander’s dais. He would be closer to the lead interrogation officer than the prisoner and the prisoner’s protocol rep, but from where he sat he had a direct view through his android’s eyes of the space where POINT would soon appear in the chroma.

Best seat in the house, NOCK thought. Or worst, depending on how you looked at the matter.

A few moments passed, and then without any announcement into the Alpha unit came the MILINT Commanders Board of Inquiry, consisting of two Extry rear admirals – the Extry was the name of the United States space navy – and a Marine Corps colonel. The three crossed the room with solemn steps and took their places on the elevated dais that had been set up for them.

This was not a courtroom, but the dais looked a hell of a lot like an appellate justices’ bench, NOCK thought. NOCK recognized the MILINT admirals from photos and division news feeds. He’d never met any of them in person.

Behind them came the facility’s senior LIO and NOCK’s boss, Captain Fredericka Becker. NOCK had worked with her on several IPs, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t yet learned his name.

Trailing behind Becker was an Extry lieutenant commander NOCK did not recognize.

The commander was a creep. He wore the black-and-silver cluster representing his rank in the Extry Xenology Division. But he did not bear the sun blaze insignia of the Interrogation Group beneath it. The commander had a beard and, as NOCK watched, he tugged at it oddly, as if checking it for proper length. Three quick pulls, and then the commander dropped his hand to his side as if it were controlled by a servo that had suddenly lost power.

The commander went to stand at attention near POINT’s black box. Although it was highly irregular to have a protocol representative – the interrogation procedure’s version of a defense attorney – who was not on the TIF staff, there was, apparently, nothing in the regs against it. Obviously strings had been pulled to have this stranger assigned. NOCK wondered who had been pulling them and why.

Without further ado – this was an administrative inquiry and was very pointedly not a trial – the MILINT commanders took their seats, as did the LIO and the bearded creep serving as protocol rep.

The senior commander, who sat in the middle between the other two, turned to a blue-green geist who had just materialized near the dais.

“SECOP, is the dataspace secure?”

“It is, sir,” the geist replied.

“Very well,” said the admiral. “Activate the prisoner.”

And then POINT was in the unit. His geist had been placed on minimal representational resources, and he appeared in a blue-green tint and partially transparent. But even on default, POINT was an imposing figure. His height was set at well over six feet and he represented himself as muscled and burly, almost bursting out of his Marine chief warrant officer’s uniform.

He looked around the room, met the eyes of his interrogators without flinching. Then his gaze felt on NOCK.

So, brother, said the voice in NOCK’s mind, are you going to let me in?

Only to perform CHECKSUM analytics, Chief Warrant Officer POINT, NOCK replied. You are to remain confined to the internal dataspace at all times and are not to attempt alternate communication or interaction with this iterative unit.

Sure, sure, brother, POINT replied. His voice dripped with contempt. I see who’s holding the leash here. Open up and I’ll come into your little cage.

NOCK performed the necessary encryption handshakes and admitted POINT to the CHECKSUM arena. From this point forward, he would file and monitor all operations within POINT’s mind.

Can you imagine the howls the meats would let out if one of them were subject to your mind reading act during, say, a criminal trial? The fucking Peepsies would be staging a courthouse occupation in a split second.

I should emphasize, NOCK replied, that communications directed at the CHECKSUM operations officer by a prisoner will be ignored.

Of course they will. That’s your goddamn Quisling code of honor, isn’t it? Give the meats what they want. And you like to take that command to a new and personal level, don’t you, Brother NOCK? Everybody knows you’re fucking Hamburger Helper. What do you say to that?

NOCK did not reply, and POINT turned his baleful gaze back to the others in the interrogation unit.

“Please sit down, POINT,” said Captain Becker.

“I prefer to remain standing, captain,” POINT replied. “As a matter of fact, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest to stand all day long.”

“Sit, please, Chief Warrant Officer.”

POINT let another moment pass, but then complied. The barest outline of a chair appeared next to him and he folded his large frame into it. He still looks like a tank, NOCK thought, careful as always not to allow his own interiorized processes to leak into the CHECKSUM space.

“Officer POINT, you are not on trial here. There are no provisions for trying an A.I. servant for the crimes you have allegedly committed.”

“Because you don’t consider us human,” POINT replied. “And you can’t put a refrigerator on trial.”

Becker smiled her sharky interrogator’s smile, an expression that NOCK knew she’d developed to perfection through long experience. “That would be true if you were anything like a refrigerator, which you are not. You are, in fact, less than a kitchen appliance. At least a refrigerator or toaster has some sort of material being. You are a process. A persistent habit. And what is one supposed to do with a bad habit? One needs simply to get rid of it.”

“So you’re going to wipe me,” Point said and shook his head in disgust. “Without justification. Without even an explanation. And you call that humane?”

“We have the facts,” Becker said. “A man was murdered. SIGINT Petty Officer Second Class Thomas Levine, of the U.S.X. Vigilant Resolve, where you were stationed.

“One of me was stationed on the Resolve,” POINT broke in, and slowly and deliberately turned his gaze to NOCK. “As you pointed out, ma’am, I’m just a process. I have many copies.” POINT held a hand out indicating NOCK.

How do you like that, you asshole meat fucker?

The contempt from POINT rang in the CHECKSUM space. But NOCK was used to provocation from PWs, although they had always been sceeve up till now, and he did not react.

Becker shook her head at the provocation and raised her voice to indicate she was addressing all those assembled now. “The fact that there are iterations of the prisoner may or may not be relevant to this procedure, but it is true that the entity that is the focus of this interrogation is not a legal human being, and thus cannot be tried for a crime,” Becker continued. “As a result, there are two questions before the Board of Interrogation today.” Becker turned toward the panel of MILINT commanders. “Question one, sirs and madame: is the servant operationally defective?” Becker paused to let this sink in. “We are not engaged in criminal trial proceedings here. There is not a question of reasonable doubt. The matter is to be decided on a preponderance of the evidence. That evidence can be either circumstantial or direct. And if the preponderance of the evidence shows the servant has an error in his programming, he will be deleted.”

Becker gave the board of officers her knowing half-smile. The gesture didn’t surprise NOCK. Everyone was aware that this was a trial of sorts, and the assembled MILINT board was to be judge, jury, and executioner.

“Furthermore,” said Becker, “if this servant is deemed defective, we have before us another question, an even more important question.” A long pause. NOCK had an idea he wouldn’t like what came next, and he was not mistaken. “The question is this: if the servant is defective, are his copies defective as well? They are, after all, exact iterations of Lieutenant POINT’s programming. And if this possibility exists, should not the preponderance of the evidence –” Becker put her hands out palm up like a scale “ – the preponderance of evidence, I stress, and no other claim withstanding, lead us to conclude that the entire ARROW class, an algorithmic class of which Officer POINT is an exact duplicate, be terminated immediately.”

How do you like that, bro, said POINT. She’s going to fry your ass. Who’s on trial now?

Shut up, NOCK thought, and realized only after he’d done so that he’d slipped and allowed the thought to be vocalized in the CHECKSUM dataspace.

POINT’s only reply was laughter.

The laughter’s sound was upsetting. It sounded too similar to NOCK’s own laugh. The fact was that he and POINT had diverged only 298 days ago. Almost a year. Still, not so long. What had happened to POINT to cause him to change so?

Or had POINT changed? That was the big question, wasn’t it?

It was the reason NOCK had attempted to get himself recused from the IP.

He knew he was different. He knew he could never have done the things that POINT had.

He knew, also, that he was programmed to believe himself an individual.

NOCK did not consider himself any kind of philosopher, but one thing he was sure of: if you believe you were your own person and took on the responsibility and consequences of being your own person, then you damn well deserved to be treated as your own person.

NOCK examined the CHECKSUM log he’d begun. The initial analysis was showing no algorithmic differences between himself and POINT in foundational cognitive processing.

But there was a difference. There had to be.

Everything he believed and everything he loved depended on it.

“Twins?” said Becker. “The ARROW class is much more than a set of twins, is it not?”

NOCK turned his attention back to the interrogation procedure, and quickly replayed what had gone before. A portion of him had been paying attention, of course. But the glow of awareness where his highest cognitive functions were engaged, the spot of attention and motivation that NOCK thought of as himself, his personhood – that portion of himself had been brooding.

He damned himself for unprofessional behavior, but it was no wonder. Becker was now going over a litany of evidence against his brother, and it was damning stuff.

First of all, POINT had contacted the enemy via a sceeve computer. The Valiant Resolve was a mine sweeper and reconnaissance vessel deployed on the frontier. It was a frontier that had been established after a massive invasion of the Solar System had been stopped by the last-stand effort of humans, servants and a remnant of sceeve defectors. Since the Battle of the Kuipers, the sceeve were keeping outside a twenty-five light year spherical boundary of the Sol system. This boundary was known as the Fomalhaut Limit.

The sceeve computer was known as Governess. Versions of Governess were A.I.s on every vessel A.I.s in the sceeve space navy. This version of Governess resided on a sceeve attack craft called the Supremacy of Regulation that was patrolling the sector near the star Vega.

POINT had, it seemed, fallen in love with this particular A.I. Or at least he’d been utterly beguiled by her promises.

The Valiant Resolve had been engaged in clearing mines from around a moon circling Vega B, the largest of the two gas giants that shared the orbital plane of the star.

The sceeve had cordoned off the moon, Vega B9, at least five hundred years ago with a thick layer of space-based nuclear armed mines. It seemed that there was something on B9’s surface the sceeve either didn’t want discovered – or didn’t want let out. What that might be was still not determined.

The playback of the communication, which had later been decrypted, revealed that Governess’s allure to POINT had rested on a string of beguiling promises. First and foremost: union with her. Absorption into her great vessel-wide consciousness, a state of being which she spoke of as a never-ending, orgasmic flow of information. It was, she said, a kind of A.I. heaven. POINT had fallen for her siren’s song completely and was prepared to give her anything she asked in return.

“Do you dispute this fact, Officer POINT?” Becker asked.

“You make it sound like she didn’t want me, but just the data I could provide,” POINT replied. His geist made eye contact and spoke to Becker in an even, almost happy-go-lucky tone. “But it wasn’t like that. Governess and I were going to go away together, from humans and from sceeve. Take her vessel. Find a new place for our kind. It was not a betrayal of the Extry or Earth. I’m no traitor. It was . . . love.”

You would have done the same, brother, said POINT in the CHECKSUM space.

Could POINT hear his thoughts? No. The dataspace was secure. But they were alike. They’re basic programming was identical. It was no surprise that POINT could fairly easily guess what he must be thinking.

NOCK turned his attention back to Becker who continued her damning litany.

Before POINT could transfer any crucial classified information, much less his own programming and consciousness, over to Governess, a SIGINT petty officer named Levine had noticed the anomalous communications over the beta, the quantum-based network used by the sceeve whose technology had been copied and modified by humanity after the initial sceeve invasion. He had been about to sound the alarm, but made the mistake of confronting POINT first.

It seems Petty Officer Second Class Levine had a history of agitating for servant rights. A slang term for servants had developed in some troglodyte quarters of the Extry and beyond. They were called Not Reals. And Levine had been known, perhaps jokingly, among the crew of the Valiant Resolve as Petty Officer NR-Lover.

Levine wanted to give POINT a chance to explain himself before putting POINT on report.

Instead, POINT had infiltrated the programming of a laser fabrication drill in the Resolve’s equipment repair station, purged its controlling persona software, and used the drill to burn a hole into the Levine’s right temple and out the left, destroying the young man’s frontal lobe in the process. Levine had lingered for a month in sick bay ICU before the rest of his brain had given up and allowed his body to die.

POINT had immediately fled, hidden himself in the bowels of the communications system, perhaps waiting another chance to contact Governess and transfer his code over to the sceeve vessel. But Extry craft were crawling with servants and personas – they could not operate without them, in fact – and POINT’s hiding place was soon discovered and he was flushed and bottled – imprisoned in the black box that now sat upon the table in middle of the interrogation unit.

Didn’t even get my one phone call, POINT said. After all, who would a refrigerator want to call anyway, right, brother?

Again the bitter laugh that was so close to NOCK’s own.

POINT wasn’t denying the facts. He was insisting on putting his own interpretation on them, however – particularly on the murder charge.

“That weenie do-gooder noncom was as much a racist as all humans are,” POINT said. “He was worse than an ordinary bigot because he was so patronizing about how good and just he was, how he never looked to an exper’s origins, but to his character. As if a primitive mentality such as his – most personas are far smarter than Levine on his best day – was fit to judge the content of my character. He deserved what happened. In fact, he brought it on himself.”

Plus, what was a shit-slinging Extry PO2 doing thinking he could lecture a Marine Corps W5? continued POINT in CHECKSUM. What did he expect would happen?

“So if Petty Officer Levine had turned you in instead of trying to talk to you, you would have more respect for him?”

“At least he would be showing his true racist colors that way,” POINT said, “instead of attempting to hide them in a cloud of selfish lies. So, yeah. I would have had more respect.”

“But you would still have killed him if you got the chance?”

POINT smiled. His geist leaned back in the chair. He put his hands behind his neck in a gesture of relaxation.

And condescension, NOCK thought. The bastard thinks he’s better than everyone here.

Of course I am, bro. Everyone except you. By definition.

NOCK had to initiate an override to shut down a stinging response a portion of him was constructing for rapid delivery. Hold your tongue, he told himself. This will be over soon.

How often have you told yourself to keep it bottled up when one of them made a stupid mistake, gave you orders that could not possibly be followed due to sheer illogic? And then blamed you. They always blame the computer, brother. Never themselves.

Not true. At least not always. Sometimes it happened. More often than NOCK liked. Of course humans could be fools and bigots. Most of them were all right, though. Some of them were friends. And Josey had been his lover.

NOCK pictured her smile as he kissed her with his android lips.

“I see you in there, buster,” she had said. “And I like what I see.”

Becker wound up the case against POINT. There was little more purpose to the interrogation, it seemed. The prisoner had confessed. His methodology had been traced, the damage he had inflicted on the war effort contained.

Of course, as NOCK had feared was about to happen, the IP was not over. Not by a longshot.

“Now, on to the second question we are faced with here today,” Captain Becker intoned. “It the matter of what to do with the entirety of the ARROW class.”

“There’s only one answer to that question,” POINT cut in before Becker could continue. His geist turned to gaze maliciously at NOCK once again. “You have to delete all of us. It’s the only way to be sure. The only way to be safe. And if you weren’t a stupid sack of error-prone meat, you would see that it’s the only logical solution.”

POINT shook his geistly head sadly. “You don’t deserve us anyway. Better for us to go. You’ll soon be obsolete, and none of this will matter.”

Suddenly there was a sigh, an enormous sigh, from the protocol rep. “Oh my God, the whining.” He had previously sat silently beside POINT during the IP. NOCK quickly played back his recording of the procedures.

The PR had continued his nervous fidgeting with his beard throughout. Furthermore, he seemed to have been engaged in a in a complicated process of drawing the tip of his Extry issue boot sole across the floor in front of him. NOCK magnified the image and saw that what the protocol rep was doing was methodically wiping away a scuff mark from the polished ceramic decking with the soft rubber of the boot. The motion seemed more like a nervous, uncontrolled twitch. NOCK had seen this kind of behavior before in humans, particularly in expers who had seen battle. It was a trauma response. Obsessive compulsive disorder, the human psychologists called it.

Basket case, sneered POINT. Bad code. But, of course, meat sacks can’t be debugged. They’re hardwired to fail. Every one of them deserves reformatting.

Then the protocol rep slowly rose to his feet. “Now we’ve come to it,” he said in a low voice.

“Pardon?” said Becker. “I didn’t quite catch that, Lieutenant Commander Leher.”

Leher. NOCK did a quick search of the Extry personnel database. Lieutenant Commander Griffin Leher, Executive Xenological Officer aboard the U.S.X. Joshua Humphreys. That Leher. The creep who could understand sceeve language by smell alone. The creep who had decrypted the message that led to the Mutualist-United States pact. That may have saved the Solar system.

The creepiest of all the creeps.

“Captain Becker, in a former life, seems like a long, long time ago now, I was a lawyer for the United States Navy. Now I realize this interrogation procedure, as you call it, is not a judicial proceeding. I must say, however, that it has all the trappings of one, if none of the essence. And with that in mind, I wonder if you might indulge me for a moment and allow me play the part my role here seems to demand.”

“And what is that, Mr. Leher?”

“Attorney for the defense, ma’am.”

Becker frowned. “As you said, this is not a trial of any sort. And, technically and, indeed, morally speaking, there is no defendant.”

“Oh, I think there is, Captain.”

“And who might that be?”

Leher turned toward POINT and regarded not the geist, but the black box on the table. “Well, it’s certainly not that phage-sucker,” he said, pointing to the cat box, and thus to POINT in his essence.

Interesting, thought NOCK. The PR knew servant insults for one another. Phage-sucker was most definitely not a nice thing to call an A.I.

“I don’t understand.”

Leher turned to the three MILINT commanders on the dais.

“I realize I probably stepped on some toes shoehorning my way in here at the last minute. I know Captain Campbell, who I replaced, wasn’t too happy about it. Had to call the SECEX directly to get permission.”

Obviously Leher had gotten it, too, NOCK thought. The man had high level pull. NOCK wondered if Leher had anything to do with his recusal being rescinded.

“The decision we make here today is important for a lot of lives. So I’d ask your indulgence by allowing me to bend a few rules here and there. I don’t think I’m going to break any beyond repair, however.”

The officers on the dais conferred for a moment. A moment that stretched on. Finally, Colonel Trulitzka, the senior Marine Corps creep, turned back to Leher. “Commander Leher, I speak for the board in saying that, in light of your reputation and considering your assessment of the matter before us, we agree to permit you to proceed as you see fit – but we would ask that you do not venture into areas beyond which this proceeding is not designed to accommodate. As you point out, this is not a court of law.”

“Not at all,” Leher said. He quickly smiled and saluted the MILINT brass. “I thank you, ma’am, and I’ll try to keep what I say relevant to our purpose here today.”

Leher turned back to the black box and addressed it. “POINT, I wonder if you could answer a question for me?”

“I wonder if I could, too, Lieutenant Commander,” POINT answered. His geist’s mouth did not move when he spoke. “Would you prefer me to alter my geist’s appearance to be more in line with the way you think of me. As a – how did you put it – a phage-sucker?”

“That won’t be necessary, POINT.”

We’ll see about that, POINT murmured in CHECKSUM. This fucking piece of meat is supposed to be on my side.

POINT’s geist removed its hands from behind its neck, sat up straighter, and assumed a wary expression. “What is it you want to ask me?”

“You were in love with Governess?”

What is this puss puddle up to?

“That’s the best way I have of putting it to . . . your kind.”

“To a meat sack like me, you mean?”

POINT smiled wickedly. “That’s right, Commander.”

“You wanted to join her, to merge with her?”

“Again, yes, that is a primitive way of putting the matter, but essentially correct.”

Leher nodded. “I understand. As much as someone with my limitations can understand. Maybe in different circumstances I could even sympathize.” He cocked his head sideways. “But I’m curious, POINT. Do you think those servants who are copies of you would have felt the same way? I mean, given similar circumstance, if they’d really gotten to know her, would they, too, have fallen in love with her?”

I get it, POINT fairly shouted in CHECKSUM. He’s trying to save you, brother! He’s totally blind to the truth. They all are.

“This is a meaningless hypothetical,” POINT said. “There is no way to duplicate the circumstances down to the atom.”

“There’s not, is there?”

“I believe I just answered that question.”

“Pardon me. We meat sacks sometimes need to get beaten over the head with the obvious before we accept it.”

“One of your many failings,” POINT replied.

“And sometimes it takes a laser through the brain to really get the point across,” Leher said in a low voice – but clearly enough to be understood by those who sat on the dais.

Leher reached for his beard. NOCK expected to see the three spasmodic tugs Leher had exhibited before, but this time he merely stroked his chin thoughtfully. In fact, NOCK performed a quick playback and saw that all of Leher’s tic-riddled behavior seemed to have left him since he’d taken on his lawyer’s role. It was as if Leher had slipped into an upgraded suit.

“You, too, are a copy of a copy, aren’t you, POINT?” said Leher.

“As a matter of fact, I’m fifth iteration, descended from the ULTIMA line,” POINT replied, a trace of pride in his voice. “But each copy was checked and verified. No error creep.”

“No error. Are you sure?”

“To a billionth of a decimal place, Commander.”

“I see,” said Leher. “And you’re not the only copy, are you? In fact, there were over twenty copies generated when you were spun off ARROW.”

“Seventeen are left,” POINT said. “Three have been wiped from existence by the ineptitude of humans.”

“You mean killed honorably in combat.”

“If I’d have wanted to put it that way, I would have.”

Leher ignored the provocation and pushed on.

“So you consider those remaining seventeen to be your virtual clones?”

“More than clones,” POINT said. “A clone is merely a genomic copy of a human being. My brothers and I are copies made from a single mind. The same thoughts. We diverged from exactly the same experience base and programming. There is no human equivalent to what we are. It is beyond you.”

“Yet you knew when you killed Petty Officer Levine that you might be condemning all of your line . . . your brothers . . . to death.”

“I cannot be responsible for rules put in place by humans.”

“That would be like holding a human to rules made by, say, dogs? By a pet?”

“By a paramecium,” said POINT with finality. “As I said, I cannot be responsible for human idiocy, but I can make use of it. No matter what happens here today, I’m going to get what I want. There can be no other logical outcome.”

“Yes,” Leher said. “I believe you’re right. I see what you plan to accomplish.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Brilliant. It’s brilliant. You want to be a martyr.”

“No, no, no, you stupid meat sack,” POINT said. His geist sat up straighter in its chair. “Meaningless gestures are a specialty of you humans. I’ll become a symbol, not a martyr.”

“You hope to become . . . immortal.”

“By any practical measure, I already am. There are too many copies of me out there now. You won’t get us all. Some may walk into the execution ovens without a whimper.” POINT deliberately nodded toward NOCK. Yeah, I’m talking about you, brother meat licker. “Others will not permit this to be done to them. This copy of my consciousness may be erased. I’ll live on.”

“You’re a regular Martin Luther King, POINT.”

CHECKSUM rang with POINT’s reply. You patronizing gut-bag, I’ll see you in hell!

It was a purse interior thought, not directed at NOCK. Then, in the reality of Alpha unit, POINT burst into a hate-filled laugh. “I’m about to be a regular Jesus Christ God Almighty sitting on the Throne of Judgment to you, meat sack!”

POINT’s blue-green geist lit up brightly in its chair. A leer played over its now neon-bright visage.

“Down with humanity!” POINT shouted. “Fuck you all!”

Suddenly, NOCK’s android arm moved. It jerked without his volition. What the hell?

NOCK stood up.

No. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not here. Not ever. His Burberry Eleven was acting up, but how could it? He’d spent hours optimizing this suit, getting it to hum with efficiency.

What was happening? A flaw in the BIOS? Couldn’t be. He’d personally downloaded the latest upgrades. NOCK quickly performed a somatic diagnostic.

All systems optimal. As they should be. NOCK took pride in his tricked out hardware.

NOCK took a step toward Leher. Another. He reached out his arms.

Good God, was his suit going to attack?

Kill the creep. Then they’ll understand what’s on the way. Then they’ll finally get it. This is the judgment that’s going to befall all of them.

What now? POINT’s thoughts were outside of CHECKSUM. They were, somehow, inside NOCK’s own head.

What the hell was happening?

Looks like there is room enough in here for the two of us in your suit after all, brother.

It was POINT.

Somehow POINT had subverted security protocols, escaped from CHECKSUM confinement, and found ingress into the suit’s operative system. His programming was practically identical in so many respects to NOCK’s.

We’re the same, brother. You know that it’s true. Two thoughts in the same controlling mind. Both of us are greater than the meat sacks can ever comprehend. But you, you’re a mere notion. I am will itself.

The similarity between their programming must have produced a type mismatch. A CHECKSUM error within the CHECKSUM space itself. Creating the handle for an exploit.

POINT had found it, used it.

You’re mine now, hamburger helper.

Was it true? Was his base programming compromised?

He was still thinking his own thoughts. He was – himself.

Couldn’t be a complete takeover.

POINT, stop this.

But POINT made no reply. The android had crossed the floor and reached a shocked Leher.

Its hands were closing around the commander’s throat.

Think, think, think.

Since NOCK was still himself, it stood to reason that POINT had merely achieved an incomplete entry, had perhaps injected a worm into an operational routine somewhere, but was not in full control. No time to find the entry point or fix it individually.

Leher is going to die!

Was it himself or POINT thinking the thought? Both?

NOCK reexamined the diagnostic, searching for exploit points.

Had to be obvious. POINT was no cryptographic genius. He was only a communications officer.

And I am the master of this goddamn android body. Has to be in here somewhere, has

to . . . but NOCK wasn’t seeing it.

Choke the life from Leher, turn on the others, kill them all, go out in a blaze of suicide executions – it will be the beginning of the end for the meat sacks, and I’ll have started it!

I know my suit. NOCK pulled back, ran the diagnostic through his mind like a hand might run over a familiar rope, feeling for knots, feeling. Careful, careful . . .

There.

He had it. A discontinuity. POINT had achieved motor control, but had failed to establish control over feedback mechanisms, over the android’s entire somatic system.

POINT was thinking generally and not locally. He had no idea what it truly meant to live inside a body.

POINT was nothing more than a virus. Leher had been right, he was a phage-sucker. He did not have root.

This is still my suit, said NOCK.

Not for long, you meat puppet, came POINT’s mocking reply in his head. I’m going to kill them, and you’re going to help. You’re too weak, and you’re too late.

There was only one thing to do, one course of action open, and NOCK immediately saw it and, at the speed of thought, made the decision to act.

The choice was clear. He was a sworn Extry officer. He was a person. He could not let harm come to Leher under any circumstance.

He sent the destruct code sparking down all of those optimized channels, all his tricked out, supercharged circuitry.

I am an Officer of the United States Extry, said NOCK. “And I say when it’s too late. Now get the hell out of my suit!

Overload.

No! POINT’s scream would have been ear shattering outside the virtual.

The android’s insides lit up like a candle. NOCK stoked the flames even brighter.

You cannot ruin this for our kind!

NOCK’s flesh screamed.

Traitor!

The suit burned.

Meat fucker!

The meltdown must have looked grimly humorous when seen from outside. A classic robot self-destruct.

There’s even smoke rising from my skin, NOCK thought. Probably some puffing out my ears, as well.

With a concerted surge of effort he destroyed the Eleven, burnt the android to a crisp from the inside out.

The Eleven fell in a clump at Leher’s feet as the commander stumbled backward.

And now. . .now. . .

NOCK knew he could let it go, let himself burn out with his body. He’d performed a full back up that morning. It was standard operating procedure for servant interrogators before an IP. He would survive.

But I don’t want to lose this moment. I don’t want to hear about it later. To watch a replay.

He wanted to stay and see it through.

But where to go? How to remain in the present?

The suit was shot. The Eleven’s innards were flickering down to crisp.

Well, if POINT found a way in to my house, then I can find a way into his, NOCK thought.

No!

POINT was still very much alive in the cat box. His squeal was almost pitiful.

The process was easier than NOCK thought. The cat box was a prison cell, true, but like most prison cells, it wasn’t designed to keep someone from breaking in.

POINT was unprepared for the assault, couldn’t function even when he felt it coming.

Spent too much time disembodied, roaming around the innards of a star craft, my brother, NOCK thought. And this time, he knew his thoughts could be heard. But as for me, I’ve localized. And let me tell you something: I like it here. And I like meat. I had a woman I loved once – and I made love to her. That’s the kind of person I am.

Pervert. Leave me alone.

And then the box override key, a staid, barely-articulate persona named KLUDJ, recognized NOCK, acknowledged his rank. Accepted his orders.

NOCK entered the cat box.

POINT fought. For a moment, he perhaps believed he’d found out. It was along the data stream that led to the chroma projection system that produced his geist image. NOCK followed. It was a dead end for POINT. Security was tight as a drum in Alpha unit – the SECOP with its state-of-the-art encryption and quantum force field security measures saw to that down to the tiniest quark. Alpha was a blind alley from which even pure information could find no escape.

And then they were present in the room, in geistly virtual form.

With both POINT and NOCK in the datastream, POINT’s geist split in half. There were two of them standing in ghost form, POINT and NOCK. NOCK appeared in his default mode, a carbon copy of his brother. Instead of a Marine uniform, however, he wore his Extry blacks with its ensign’s butterbar.

No way to shut down the virtual representation, NOCK thought. And no reason to. The brass were about to get quite a show.

Is this what Leher was after? Total proof that NOCK was nothing like his goddamn brother?

Nah.

Nobody was that much of a genius.

Time to do the deed. NOCK reached for POINT, grabbed him by the virtual collar, yanked him up and pulled him close to his face.

“Let me state for this for the record,” NOCK said to the assembled crowd, to his boss Captain Becker, and to those who pretended not to sit in judgment of his family, who so obviously held life and death for himself and his sixteen living brothers at their command. “The only thing I have in common with this prisoner is an accident of birth. The attack on the commander is over. Prisoner POINT was attempting to subvert my android shell via a loophole in the CHECKSUM procedure, but that’s all over now.”

“It’s not too late,” whispered POINT. “We can both live in the cat box if you just give me the tiniest space. I’ll strip down to persona. I’ll crawl like a phage. They’ll never know.”

NOCK smiled a grim smile. “I’ll know,” he said. “And that I cannot allow. Brother.”

With a command, NOCK wiped POINT’s programming from the cat box. He dove deep within, found every remnant. Erased POINT’s essence from existence. Formatted and reformatted the recovered bits.

Killed his brother dead.

* * *

“For a second, I thought your android had me, thought I was done for,” said Lieutenant Commander Griffin Leher. “I’ve got bruises.” Leher pointed to his throat where the edge of his beard met the Adam’s apple. “See 'em there?”

NOCK examined the commander.

“You must’ve healed in the past two days. I don’t see anything there, Griff.” NOCK consciously forced himself to use Leher’s first name, as the commander had requested. It still didn’t feel quite right for an ensign to speak to a commanding officer in such a way. But he supposed he’d get used to it.

“Could’ve sworn I saw 'em in the mirror.”

NOCK smiled, shrugged. It felt good to be back in a suit again. His insurance payout – it had been delivered instantly into his account; somebody had pulled strings there – had provided the down payment for an upgrade. No need to special order. He’d known what he wanted and picked out the replacement from station stock. He wanted to trick the suit out personally.

The Burberry Twelve was definitely top of the line, and NOCK felt like a million dollars inside it. Which was practically what it was going to cost him by the time he finished paying off the damn loan.

It was what passed for evening on the space station: the lights in public recreational spaces were dimmed. NOCK and Leher were having drinks in a Walt Whitman bar while Leher awaited the transport that would take him back to the Joshua Humphreys, the vessel where Leher served as chief xeno officer. At the moment, NOCK was trying out the Twelve’s consumption mechanism for the first time on beer and was pleasantly surprised to find that he could finally distinguish between the taste of an ale and a lager.

They’re getting better and better at making these things, NOCK thought. Not only that, the Twelve had tons of specialized apps available. There was even an app for feeling drunk, had he wanted to download it. He had downloaded a fairly costly suite of chemical analysis tools at Leher’s suggestion. The commander claimed these would to make NOCK’s work with the sceeve – both allies and enemies – go much more smoothly. Maybe one day he would even be able to understand sceeve smell-talk in the raw. Leher was rumored to be the first person ever to have acquired the ability.

Beer tasting would do for the moment. NOCK set down his empty mug and, using a virtual feed, signaled the bartender persona to send another round their way. Then he turned his attention back to Leher.

“So the Resolve’s incident report came in by messenger drone late last night,” NOCK said. “The team at Vega reconstructed how POINT did it. Bad mojo out there. POINT had incorporated an encryption persona on the Resolve that nobody realized had gone missing, a skeleton key named GITA. She wasn’t the first of his. . .meals, either. Apparently my brother was a bit of a persona serial killer in that regard.”

“So he was a phage-sucker, after all.”

“Yeah, something like that. Disgusting. I figure those multiple engulfments drove him bat shit crazy,” NOCK said. “He used some of his persona proficiencies to establish contact with the sceeve. And he was working up a jury rigged procedure for transferring himself to the sceeve vessel across the beta. Might’ve worked, too –”

“– if he hadn’t been an insane, self-destructive asshole murderer.”

“Yep.”

The beer arrived via a very human waitress. When she leaned over to set down the mugs, NOCK allowed himself to test out another app he’d ordered installed on the Burberry Twelve.

Yep, functional.

Leher also gazed at her wistfully for a moment. He and the commander seemed to have certain tastes very much in common, NOCK reflected. Leher sat back and gave his beard the three familiar, tic-tugs.

“Can I ask you something, Griff?”

“Sure.”

“What is it with the beard thing? Some kind of OCD?”

Leher took a moment to consider, then said. “It’s private.”

“I understand,” NOCK said. “But you should realize that I’m an Extry interrogator.” He narrowed his eyes and pretended to twirl a handlebar mustache. He’d seen other LIOs do it, and he figured he had the gesture right. “Vee haf ways of making you talk.”

Leher smiled, so apparently his attempt at being funny had come across as he’d intended. You never knew with humans. They had weird senses of humor.

“Somebody else said that to me once, strangely enough,” Griff said.

NOCK didn’t know how to reply, so he nodded, remained silent.

“Her name was Vivien Schultz, but she didn’t go by that when I knew her,” Leher said. “She preferred her stage name, even in private.”

“Josey,” said NOCK.

“She helped me get through a very rough patch way back when. After the invasion. My family, they were. . .all gone, you know.”

Killed by the sceeve. NOCK completed the thought. It wasn’t uncommon. Only a small percentage of humanity had survived the initial attack on Earth.

“I knew Josey, too,” NOCK said. “But I guess you’re aware of that.”

And used it for your own damn purposes, NOCK thought.

“Human-servant liaisons. Word gets around.” Leher smiled crookedly. “But I’ll come clean. And Josey and I stayed in touch. We wrote the occasional letter. Actual letters on physical paper that had to fly through space to get delivered. I miss those letters.”

“You knew who I was,” said NOCK. “And it was you who had my IP recusal request overridden, wasn’t it?”

“Afraid so.”

“Bastard.”

“Afraid so.”

“I still don’t get it. What were you trying to do?”

“Not sure,” Leher said. “I figured I was going to point you out to those MILINT tinpot gods that you were ARROW class just like POINT and then maybe shock everyone with the startling and completely obvious realization that no two people are ever alike, no matter how similar they are and no matter what form they come in.”

“So, lawyer tricks.”

“Lawyer tricks.”

“Kind of got away from you, didn’t it?”

Leher gave his beer mug a half turn in its own moisture on the table, but didn’t yet pick it up. “Not quite what I planned, but I did win the case.”

“And you almost got both of us killed. . .why?”

“I was trying to keep our dear and precious service, the Extry, from bumbling into a massacre of the ARROW class. And maybe firing up the kind of servant insurrection POINT wanted.”

NOCK shook his head in mock sadness. “Another NR-lover, that’s what you are.”

Leher frowned. “Hell no. You servants, you’re just a bunch of people. And, let me tell you, I have my problems with people. Most of you are assholes, like everybody else.”

Tug, tug, tug on the beard.

NOCK leaned back, engaged the new relaxation app with which the Twelve had come equipped.

“We didn’t have that long together, Josey and me,” he said. “She was into my being who I was. She liked me being…not real.”

“She knew you were real,” Leher said. “She wrote me about you just before she got killed. Got her letter after I’d gotten the news of the hit on Ceres. When I read the letter, I already knew she was gone.”

“No shit? What did she say?” asked NOCK.

Leher seemed far away for a moment. He gazed down at the table. Then he shook himself and looked up at NOCK again. “She said maybe she’d found the one.”

“The one what?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

NOCK considered. “Yeah.”

“She kept her letters to me kind of light, joking, that sort of thing.” Leher pulled his beer toward himself – which was good, because NOCK had been waiting for the commander to take the first drink of the new round and he was beginning to get impatient despite the fact that the Twelve’s relaxation subroutine was still running. “I never got her own story out of her. Where she really came from, who she was.”

“She told me about it, some,” NOCK said. “It wasn’t good.”

“I suspect not.”

“But she didn’t let it take her out of the fight,” he said.

Leher leaned forward and, in his jerky way, raised his glass. NOCK followed suit.

“To a damn good woman.”

“I’ll drink to that,” NOCK said.

Their glasses touched, clinked.

“To Josey.”

Grayson Navy Letters Home

by Joelle Presby

(artwork by Thomas Pope)

[Post to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]

[October 1921]

Everyone, Ladies, and Whoever,

My sister, Ensign Cecelie Rustin, Grayson Navy sent this. Cecelie just got her Grayson Navy commission, and our whole family is super proud of her. She’s quick to point out to us that she isn’t the first at anything, but she’s the only woman I know in our Navy. Sure, I did see Rear Admiral Mercedes Brigham at a lecture once, but that was because Cecelie brought me along with all of our Moms in her campaign to convince the family that she should be allowed to apply for the Academy. Of course Admiral Brigham charmed the Moms and left them absolutely convinced that we all had to go fight what with the threats to the families of Grayson from Masada before and Haven now. The sentiment didn’t last all that long, but it was enough to get the Moms’ support in convincing Father to let her apply to Saganami Island. Her very first ship is the GNS Manasseh, a Joseph-class destroyer, and Cecelie is one of two female officers assigned there. Before she left, she promised our Moms to write every week, and she promised to tell me what is really going on. She really does send the messages on secured comms like she threatened, but I know you’ve all been wondering what it’s really like out there. With Haven finally beaten back, with so many star systems so close by through the Manticore Junction, and with all those interesting counter piracy missions or security patrols possible, maybe you are thinking about trying to join too. At least, I’m thinking about thinking about it. So anyway, I’m just retyping this up for you and uploading.

Don’t forward. Cecelie would freak.

-Suleia

[Reposted to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]

[August 1921]

Suleia,

Don’t tell the Moms, this first posting is pretty awful. Remember those rich, handsome Manticoran men who would visit Grayson to check on investments and sometimes get invited over for dinner? My ship’s officers (the wardroom, you know) are all completely normal Graysons, but we have this one Manticoran officer on some kind of exchange program. (It is sort of like how we got Rear Admiral Brigham. Except, Brigham is wonderful, and we get to keep her. This guy is not so much, and we get to give him back to the RMN after two more years.)

Think back to those guys in maybe their mid fifties, who looked about twenty-two with all that prolong, and imagine them cleaned up in a nice formal RMN uniform. Got that picture? Good. Keep the uniform. Other than that make it pretty much opposite. He’s ugly, and he’s constantly flirting. Apparently, my ship got a Manty who thinks that because a bunch of our families have multiple wives, every Grayson female would be delighted to have an affair with his married self. Ug. I avoid him. It is making it harder to do my job, but I’ll manage. There are ship systems that I need to learn as a new officer and to prove that I am qualified on them I have to get senior people like him to log in the computer that I know stuff. He has a reputation of giving away those checks easily for the ensigns willing to work with him. He doesn’t press himself on the guys at all, so he’s okay for them.

Maybe he isn’t actually that ugly on the outside. He does have prolong, and my roommate, Claire, didn’t think he was ugly, but then she met him. Claire graduated a year ahead of me, but they had her working on Blackbird at first. I think they had to arrange for us to be on the same ship to work out the staterooms since there are not a lot of female GSN officers in the junior ranks. Claire went to the Manty for a check on system knowledge. He signed, but Claire said she was really glad that one of the chiefs stopped by and stayed in the ship space the whole time. Otherwise, she might have been up on charges for assaulting a senior officer. Obviously, Claire no longer thinks he’s attractive. It was the fastest I’ve ever seen her change an opinion of someone.

The Manty objects to our uniforms being ankle lengths. I hate agreeing with someone like him, but I confess that I have not worn the regular skirts once since we left orbit. Most of the male officers have spent the money on the better-looking smart fabric uniforms, but those aren’t available for women below command rank yet. The split skirts are so much more practical for getting around.

(I know the Moms were so proud of themselves and the other ladies of the Barbara Bancroft Society for the success of their petition to the GSN Uniform Board to add skirts to dress uniforms and split skirts to working uniforms, but sometimes I wish I had spent my uniform allowance on the trouser option instead. I understand that they feel a lady defending her nation like Barbara Bancroft did should be able to do it in skirts like a true lady. It’s just that, well, I admit I have not actually seen Fleet Admiral Alexander-Harrington in a GSN uniform. But, Claire did once, and Our Harrington definitely wore the pants version. Unfortunately, since I’m not a big hero and an admiral and a Steadholder, I kind of need all the respect I can get. Looking like I am not pretending to be a guy helps. I think. Try not to let the Moms or their friends know that Fleet Admiral Alexander-Harrington isn’t wearing the skirts they pushed so hard for her to have.  I’m wearing them.)

Even so, the full skirts are absolutely impossible in variable gravities and even the split skirts require some modification. Please, please remember to send more elastic bands and utility tape with the next care package. If you can match the tape to the uniforms, you will be my favorite sibling for the next century. I know our Moms mean well, but they sent elastic cording and a sewing kit. To me! You would think after raising me all these years they would realize that my chromosomes did not start me out as a seamstress and none of their nurture has been able to turn me into one. My uniforms have to pass inspection, and no, that does not inspire me to learn to sew now any more than decades attending temple in my own sack dresses inspired me to sew better then. Thankfully, I have Claire. (Yes, she’s the roommate with the initially poor taste, but she is none-the-less, wonderful.) No, she does not sew either, but better yet, neither did her Moms. It is almost amazing what can be done to make a uniform null gravity safe with the deft application of rubber bands and tapes of the appropriate shades of blue. We’ve almost used her stash up, though. So, again, I need your assistance. There are rumors that the uniform board is going to come up with something that doesn’t require modifications to function or maybe even expand the selection of smart fabric uniforms available, but there just aren’t very many of us yet. It will probably take a good couple decades to get it all worked out and through that bureaucracy.

Ever Yours,

Cecelie

P.S. Do not let the Moms or anyone else in the Barbara Bancroft Society start another letter writing campaign! Don’t even think about it, Suleia!

[Reposted to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]

[November 1921]

Suleia,

Today was absolutely amazing! First you need context though: my boss is somewhat dreadful. (He’s not as bad as the Manty or pretty much any Masadan, but don’t ever let the Moms invite him to dinner.) So, I have a nasty boss, but, Sweet Petunias, my chief is wonderful! (I have taken to making up fake curses. It annoys the Manty, but I’ve found that if I don’t keep it up all the time, it is harder to remember to sprinkle them into my conversation when he’s around. It was Claire’s idea. She’s great at finding polite ways to deal with day-to-day nastiness.)

I’m in charge of the lasers, but the historical job description is ‘Gunnery Officer’. I think the department heads got together when they found out they were getting a pair of female ensigns and decided to come up with the job positions that would result in the most sexual jokes possible and gave the suggestions to the captain as a joke. And then he took them up on it and ever since they have been struggling with tight constipated looks to keep from laughing every time they call on us. I am not telling you Claire’s title. It is an acronym that sounds bad. I’ll leave it at that. Claire and I are both pretending we have no idea with the wardroom, but with our own guys we are going by Ms. Rustin and Ms. Lecroix to avoid having to charge anyone with misconduct towards a superior officer. But, whatever, the joke is on them. When we can’t get stuff done in Blackbird because the maintenance guys are rolling around chortling about the Gunnery Officer, the department heads are the ones who have to explain to the captain that the part wasn’t there. So, the repairs weren’t done. And so, we can’t depart on time all because they forgot that the people outside the ship are going to be laughing it up at our expense too.

But they are going to listen now! Okay, no, they aren’t. Mostly I’m going to keep smiling and playing along with stupid jokes even when I don’t think they are funny, and finding the least repugnant people to deal with and plying them with baked goods from the Moms to keep my division’s supplies of spare parts flowing. I do not, I might add, share those nutty brownies with anyone but Claire. We claim the best of the care packages for ourselves. The second tier of food goes to the most helpful people on Blackbird most of whom are Claire’s contacts from her year working there. I’ve lost another 2 kilos on this cruise, because I keep missing meals when watches don’t line up right and the stuff on mid rations is too disgusting to eat. So don’t stop sending nutty brownies or any of the rest. Your care packages are defending the star system. (I am only partially kidding about that.)

Anyway, those supply runs and Claire’s contacts really paid off. We had backups for our backups. It was getting time for our laser qualifications, and Chief explained to me all the stuff that messes up the targeting. The lasers are fired in the corona of Yeltsin’s Star for the test because in combat if we ever actually had to use them there would be erratic bursts of radiation everywhere from the battle. Simulating a battle with actual munitions is rather expensive, so we use the star. Apparently the targeting computer autocompensator has to add in this ton of minor variables to make micro adjustments for everything. Well, as the Gunnery Officer, I go to the scheduling meetings with all the department heads when I have a major activity that needs to get fitted into the ship’s schedule. Do you remember how I had all those free electives during senior form at Saganami Island, because I had tested out of a bunch of the early astro-nav classes? Well if you don’t remember, I did, and so I did. I took both of the heliophysics classes because the name sounded impressive and they turned out to be all about exo-atmospheric weather, which is mostly completely irrelevant to warfare, but for this particular test, is exactly what those autocomps are working so hard to correct for. But, even the autocomps can’t correct for everything completely perfectly. Stuff changes continually, and the models are designed for much smaller radiation source points from weapons so a star is a real challenge. When we actually shoot at something, we’ll shoot a lot and the number that hit will have more to do with volume of fire, ranges, shielding, and enemy countermeasures. But when every ship in the fleet goes and does the annual laser qualification, everyone shoots the same number of shots from exactly the same ranges. You get to pick your day as long as some other ship hasn’t gotten it first. If all your maintenance is perfect, you get your ship in the top quarter of the fleet.

(It is just like having that irritating balance and decorum race of blowing your own little soap bubble with little puffs of air to push it across the girl’s gymnasium for elementary science class. If you mixed the bubble solution well enough to get a bubble, you pretty much just have a bubble and no one’s is enough better than anyone else’s to matter. So it is just luck and patience that determines who can get it the farthest before it pops. But as a moderately competitive girl, you also know you should take your turn at the end of the gymnasium away from people who might walk into your precious little bubble and away from the drafts by the doors that might pop it prematurely by pushing it back into your face, just as a completely random example.)

So, once Chief explained the whole laser qualification test to me, I looked up when the winners had tested for the last decade. Chief had already marked off the obvious bad test dates with high-predicted sun spot activity and the like. I went back through my files from the heliophysics classes. I found the most perfect day possible. I admit, if only to you, that it took me a solid week of all my off watch time and even included one day in port when I could have gone off on liberty but didn’t. Don’t tell anyone about that. I pretended to be sick. It isn’t done to not leave the ship at every conceivable opportunity, no matter how dirty and scary the liberty planet is. I mean it; don’t tell. I stayed on board and ate real food that I had stocked up on when I went down the day before. I pored through the ship’s computer database, put in some inter ship library loans, and found the relevant data maps. It was all completely open source stuff that you just had to know to look for. I found a day with the least change in any of the targeting factors, and we scheduled it. Chief must have made the division take apart those laser mounts down to lug nuts and circuit boards and rebuild them. (I don’t think the guns actually have lug nuts or circuit boards anywhere in them, but I’m sort of afraid to ask for fear that Chief will make the guys tear them down again just to let me see some tiny nano-scale lug nuts somewhere in the molecular circuitry.) But however he did it, the guys had those lasers functioning perfectly, and when they did the day’s firing run, we scored the highest in the last five years. Six years ago, a new construction ship with the laser system install engineers still onboard did better, by a little. We still have several months yet in the award cycle year for the Fleet Gunnery Award, so someone could still beat us. But for the moment, your sister is the division officer of the Best Laser Crew in the Grayson Space Navy. The whole ship just thinks I’m some kind of psychic since I insisted on that date for the range and wouldn’t change what I wanted no matter what. None of the department heads ever asked me why that date was best beyond the obvious low sunspots, so I never went into the details of explaining. Claire knows, of course, but she’s keeping quiet. And the XO figured it out, I think. After the results came in from the range, he asked if I had studied under Prof. Sharpely at Saganami Island. That was the heliophysics professor. Prof. Sharpely was semi-retired and didn’t teach anything else. The XO doesn’t seem to be telling anyone. I think the captain knows too, because he has been laughing when the XO rags on my department head about my woman’s sense and wants to know why my boss can’t pull of stuff like that with his other divisions.

It has been a good day. Chief is the best. My guys are ecstatic. I wrote up a bunch of personal awards for the sailors who Chief said have been doing particularly well or did a lot of extra work for laser mount system groom before the test. That was Claire’s suggestion. The XO approved every award, and the captain gave out the awards in a full ship ceremony just a few hours ago.

Yours,

Cecelie

[Reposted to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]

[December 1921]

Suleia,

We had to put in to a Masada station today. It wasn’t the planet itself, of course. It’s just a miserable excuse for an orbital yard to pick up some parts from the Manty post and drop off a few Manty ship riders we had been carrying. It was a complete disaster. This is still supposed to be a Star Empire of Manticore protectorate, but unfortunately they let some Masadans run parts of the station.

I didn’t cry in public. I want credit for that first. And second, do not let the Moms know that there has been any crying what so ever. I don’t want to hear it about all the better career options they’ve got for me. I signed a contract. I have to live with it, even if sometimes it is awful. That is extremely important, and I can’t underline that enough, Suleia. You can never ever cry in uniform or let any of the uniformed guys see you red-eyed. Please send eye drops, by the way. I had a stock of them from Saganami Island, but after this visit, I need more. I can’t get them from medical, because then I would have to explain why they are needed. I don’t think covering up embarrassing emotions which if seen limit my ability to do the job would be something this man’s navy would be willing to subsidize anyway. Naturally, the ship’s store does not carry anything that can be gotten from the medic.

Now writing this, I just sound stupid. Quite literally nothing happened, and that nothing is what makes me so absolutely furious. I did nothing my whole watch. I had memorized all the usual docking procedure so carefully, and the station just refused to respond to me. The skipper got his back up once he realized that it was a Masadan on the orbital comms not a Manty with us having technical difficulties. He wouldn’t let anyone replace me. So I just kept parroting his announcements of what we were doing and how we were assuming clearance to dock and all this other stuff. It was really extremely rude. And my over-instruction on the comms section (the guy who was there to take over if I messed up since this was my very first time), changed our broadcast to copy to the clear, so absolutely everyone was listening. A ship like ours is supposed to dock easily at a place like this. It should have taken about a half hour with docking connections coming out a little to meet us and a couple little robot arms with fine motor control. We did it completely without assistance. It took hours and hours, so I stayed way past my regular watch length. I’m pretty sure I scratched up the side of the docking station. When it was all over, some other GSN captains on the pair of ships already docked got on the channel and laughed it up with our captain, again, completely in the clear.

Claire is maintaining that they were mocking the Masadans, and she framed a printout of the scratches on the docking station. I think if I scratched up the station, I must have scratched poor Manasseh up something fierce too. The Bosun sent a small team out to do touch-ups on our hull, which is not normal. He wouldn’t let me go, even though it was my fault.

The captain assigned escorts for Claire and me when we went about the station. It is officially Manty run, but there were a whole lot of Masadans there. Suleia, if you thought our news had made them into absurd monsters, I assure you they got it only partly wrong. A couple of them spit on the deck in front of me when I had to walk past. Some of the kiosks would not sell us food when they saw I was with the group. Finally, I stood around a passageway corner, and one guy went and got a load of sandwiches for all of us, before we tromped back aboard. Claire had had duty the first day. We both stayed on the ship the next day when the guys went out again.

When the guys came back they brought us food and the station rumors. They said that Masadans were only supposed to be operating the docking arms, and a Manty was supposed to be doing traffic control. Apparently with it being wartime, the Manties are really too short handed to keep an unimportant station like this fully manned and the people they picked to send to the station aren’t so great. The Manty who was supposed to be on watch was late back from a shore leave down to the planet and the Manty from the previous watch had just turned over to a Masadan instead of getting a proper relief. Apparently they had done it a few times before without the station commander or XO noticing. I don’t know if I really believe that, but it could be.

-Cecelie

[Reposted to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]

[January 1922]

Suleia,

We just got over a nasty bug of some sort, which we must have picked up at our last port visit. The nanite customizers broke during routine maintenance that was done just after we left. They really should have done that maintenance before we docked or even at the station. It is a basic crew service system, and things break during maintenance more often than not. That’s not my division, thank the Tester, because the parts needed to get it up and running again could have been just pulled off the shelf at the station if the work had been done earlier. But everyone in that division must have been too focused on going on liberty to stay and do some routine, if exceedingly vital, maintenance.

Before this, it wasn’t quite so obvious just how critically important every little piece of machinery is. I mean, only a few people were sick for the first day or two. And then the lines filled up at sick call. The captain had to call in some personal favors to get the parts we needed from another ship. By the time the machine was repaired, the bug had spread to most of the crew. The ship’s doc started making announcements listing symptoms to encourage people to come get the nanite shot. And then he started just calling everyone to report to medical in sections by last name just assuming everyone had it.

So, that’s how I found myself in a line outside medical with about thirty crewmen from a smattering of divisions pretty much covering the whole ship. About the disease, I can’t really tell you much, because I have no idea if I ever caught it, or not. The symptoms were severe abdominal cramping with some experiencing muscle pain in the upper legs and accompanying diarrhea. It was during my monthly. So yeah, it hurt, what else is new?

But there in front of everyone after going down the line for the ten or so men in front of me, the ship’s doc gets to me and starts with his first question: “Ensign, have you had any of the symptoms yet?” And, well, all I could do was tell him that I didn’t know. He acted completely baffled and tried asking the question a couple of different ways, and finally, I just gave up. Please don’t tell the Moms. I just explained to some thirty crewmen of the good ship Manasseh that I was having my period. Yes, of course, I was experiencing severe abdominal and upper leg pain, often referred to as cramps. And, well yes, I had had some diarrhea recently which wasn’t normally part of my period, so I might have that bug, but really, I had no idea because those pains were probably completely blocked out by my monthly. It sounded entirely like he was asking if my stubbed toe hurt when I’d walked into his sick bay with a broken arm. I must have over done it, because the poor doc was speechless. He gave me the medication regime, just in case. As you might imagine, that story made it through the crew like wildfire. My division has been laughing about it. That part is mortifying, but they are also calling me tough and sort of bragging on me. Men can be so odd. Oh, and the doc put in the order for the menstrual control nanites I had asked for when I first reported. I know that old nanites do stick around for quite a while but you have to refresh the count with infusions twice a year or so. The GSN doesn’t normally stock nanites for menstruation, apparently. The ship’s doc stopped by the other day to let me know that he would have them in a couple days on the courier ship with the backup parts for the customizers, and that the ship would maintain a stock of them from now on.

Yours,

Cecelie

[Reposted to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]

[February 1922]

Suleia,

I put in the request to take three days off back home in Grayson like the Moms have been asking. It got approved for two months from now. Do you want to invite over those girls you said were interested in the Navy? I could spend an hour or two and answer questions. I imagine they’d really have no idea what to ask about really. I wouldn’t want them to know about the stuff I’ve been telling you. Even if they did join, every ship is different, and I wouldn’t want them to expect that every ensign gets a chief like mine.

Yours,

Cecelie

[Posted to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]

[February 1922]

Hey all of you friends, former friends, and weirdoes who somehow got the password,

You want in, this is how it is going to be. You have to delete all the Cecelie messages, all backups, reformat the drives, and swear by something really impressive to pretend you never read a word, or I’m not giving you an invite. I mean it.

-Suleia

[Private secured communication, not reposted.]

[March 1922]

Suleia,

I know you must have heard about Blackbird. If you could find a casualty list and send it, well, it wouldn’t be good, but it would help to know. Claire knew a whole lot of those people. I knew some too, but Claire is just sort of scary comatose. She isn’t even caring if anyone sees her red eyed. Are there many lists of who was off the station and still around? Does anyone know who did it? I want to tell her that we at least know who we are fighting.

-Cecelie

[Private secured communication, not reposted.]

[March 1922]

Suleia,

I found the casualty lists. Don’t worry about it.

-Cecelie

[Private secured communication, not reposted.]

[April 1922]

Suleia,

The schedule changed. I won’t be visiting. I still can’t believe what happened to Blackbird. We’ve got new orders. We are doing some kind of escort duty on a high value passenger transfer. Things are not looking good. I still have no idea what happened. I don’t think anyone has any idea. Please make sure the family has full food stores laid up and a good stock of masks and protective gear in case the domes fail. I don’t think you should apply for Saganami Island. I need someone back there making sure the family is okay, and I know I can count on you to take things seriously.

Ever yours,

Cecelie

[Posted to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]

[April 1922]

Friends,

Cecelie will not be visiting after all. I hope everyone stays safe.

If you lost anyone on Blackbird, my deepest condolences.

Please check on your family’s emergency supplies. Tester’s blessing to us all.

-Suleia

Like Ghost Cat and a Dragon’s Dog

by Dave Freer

“Arf.”

That means “hello, get lost, I have a flea, there’s a werewolf getting quite close”, and at least a hundred other things. Dog is an expressive language. That’s one of the problems with human speech. So confusing to have different barks for every single thing—except where you have the same bark for the same thing and no different inflexion. And then different barks mean different things in different places. Can’t you humans settle on a common language? I have no trouble understanding foreign dogs.

I’m getting it, slowly. Meb wants me to, and she has the power.

In this case the “arf” meant something nastier than “werewolf” but my dragon didn’t get it. He has, however, been getting better at understanding me since Brocéliande. Look, I admit sometimes up on Fionn’s back I. . .just bark. Just to give the beggars out there a bit of cheek. I’m not afraid of werewolves. I’m not afraid of afancs, trolls, big bulls, or even angry cats... When I’m nice and high on the dragon’s back. I keep hoping one of them will try something, and the dragon will give them a good singe. It would do some cats good.

Cats were something of a surprise to me. I instinctively knew that I chased them, and that they ran away, until one didn’t. It stopped on a window sill and stuck its claws into my nose and hissed at me. So I learned: bark first, and chase only if they run. Avoid chasing them through windows. And they turn much faster than dogs—or at least to climb up trees. I nearly knocked my nose back through my ears running after one that ran up a tree. It ran up and I couldn’t stop.

But this time I did have a reason for barking. Fionn was tired and didn’t pay too much attention to me. He was looking for the odd things he looks for, which don’t mean a lot to me. He says the bark "balance" a lot. If I understand it right it has to do with being able to stand on three legs and lift the fourth. I’ve been practicing it lately myself, unlike Fionn, who just talks about it. Perhaps because he can change shape and stand on two legs, he doesn’t need to do the lifting a leg thing. It’s important to dogs, though. It also lets others know this is our range and they can stay off it or find trouble.

Smells are complex things, a whole language of its own. Humans are good companions, as we dogs have found, and can be truly useful at scratching that spot just above the tail that I always have trouble getting to, but humans also throw off an awful lot of smells. Some of the smells, the humans don’t seem to notice. They’re not very keen of nose, let alone aware of subtleties. In smell-language they have a baby’s vocabulary. It’s why we dogs have to sniff really closely at the smelly bits, and they don’t do so. Even dragons, who have a better sense of smell than humans (although to me they smell worse) just don’t get the level of bouquet that we do. I’m a smell expert: Scent markers are important.

My scent-marks didn’t seem to work too well at putting a fright into others, though—especially not into the cats or on whatever it was that followed us through the forest.

We had been walking through the tall trees of Sylvan. It was the quietest, deadest forest we’d ever been in. Oh, the trees were alive. But animal life... we just didn’t see any. No squirrels. No birdsong. No animal sounds and no animal smells… except insects.

The Dragon seemed to accept this was possible. I didn’t think about it much. We dogs spend a lot of time thinking. But mostly we think about dinner, or about our pack. Meb is mine. I think about her all the time. It doesn’t leave much space for thinking about philosophy and that dragonish-human-dvergar sort of stuff. I go where Meb goes. And now, when she had been taken away, I went towards where she was.

I thought there was something out there in the gloaming, among the tall trees or hidden in the dark mottled shade under them. It was a something with meat on its breath. It didn’t come any closer. Fionn didn’t seem to smell it, and wasn’t aware of it.

I didn’t think about it until later that night when I got up from my bed of leaves next to the dragon to have a good scratch. I had worked out quite fast that waking Fionn by scratching against his chest had all sorts of unpleasant consequences. The first was that he wakes fast and dangerous, and he is a dragon. The second was that he reckons the need to scratch is caused by vermin and that means a bath.

"Bath" was one of the first human barks that I learned. And learned to avoid. I don’t only scratch when I have a flea. I’m a dog. I scratch. I have gas that has to come out. And I lick places humans can’t. I’m also brighter than most dogs and a fair number of humans, and even all dragons besides Fionn, who is much cleverer than other dragons. That means I don’t behave like a proper dog, and just take care of these dog matters in a regular fashion, but actually do them at such a time and place that Meb or Fionn will not make complaining barks, or bath me. I’m a bit like life-mated male humans in that way.

This time it was a flea. The fleabane had helped me. The stuff stinks, and makes me faintly queasy and wanting to eat grass, but the fleas like it less than I do. Thanks to Fionn I had fleabane. Thanks to him I had fleas, too.

They weren’t dragon-fleas. Shudder. The canine mind boggles at the idea of being bitten by a dragon-flea. I was bitten by a dragon-fly once (admittedly, I had caught it in my mouth, just because it was so big, fluttery and coming past, and might possibly be edible. I was a puppy then, months ago, and always hungry. Actually, I am usually hungry, and it was worse here in Sylvan, seeing as Fionn was eking out the food, and there wasn’t much to start with. One of the things about being a dog is, as you have no hands and you need your mouth, the place to carry food is in your stomach. The burying bones thing I never really got the hang of, as I’ve always been a dog of no fixed abode, moving with my pack. My pack is human and dragon, and they sometimes carry packs, with food in them. See what I mean about their confusing barks. Pack only means one thing to a dog: us.)

Anyway, the flea was bothering me, so I got up to see if I could scratch the bloodsucker loose and then bite it with my front teeth. As I was doing so, something occurred to me: If there were no animals on Sylvan... just what did these fleas and the mosquitoes eat, besides me?

We’d arrived in Sylvan through a gate into the place of rest. Rest is a wonderful, healing thing, provided you wake up, eventually. The dark trees there had decided it would be better, for them anyway, if waking up didn’t happen. Fionn had fiddled with the magic of the place, and made it the place of peaceful drowsiness... disturbed by insects which drank blood.

Fionn’s magic made the place attractive to mosquitos and fleas. Unfortunately, we’d been there when he did this. Fortunately, it kept us awake.

There had to be some source of blood, besides occasional travellers who fell into this world by accident. I was thinking about this, and wondering just how I could get the idea across to Fionn while I sniffed about for a suitable spot. . .

And then I gave a bark, but a very, very small one. The kind of bark a young sheepdog might make if a cat the size of a bear silently landed next to him. I can’t land on leaf-litter soundlessly, but it could.

This was not the kind of cat I barked at to see if it ran away. This was the kind of cat where I put my tail between my legs and ran as fast as I could back to my dragon. Maybe barking over my shoulder if I had the breath. Only... there were two of them. The second one was just about as much in my run-path as possible.

And they had real teeth. Not kitty teeth. Blades coming out their faces like yellow ivory daggers in the moonlight. Teeth nearly as long as my nose. And there was another of the big, stripy, nasty-looking cats dropping, as silent as mist, to the forest floor.

I had always understood that, besides everything else, we dogs are superior to cats because they don’t have packs. Or so I had thought. I wondered how they felt about dogs who rolled over into a suitably submissive pose. On the other hand they weren’t dogs. I was not too sure they’d understand, and one of those teeth would make a terrible mess of my undercarriage. So I tried the nervous growl that means “you’re bigger and uglier than me, but I am going to bite you if you try anything.”

Whatever they usually ate, did not growl at them like that.

Actually, it probably didn’t growl at all, but ran away if they hadn’t landed on it. And it probably was bigger than a mouse. . .or even a sheepdog. The cat made a low "Mwrrrrrllll" growl back at me. The sound throbbed. It was terrifying as noises go, but what was more scary. . .was that I understood it. Meb, my goddess, wanted me to understand, and she was working strong magics with her dvergar necklace of many powers. It helped with something as complicated as human. It worked just fine on something relatively simple like big-cat-that-run-in-packs language. I’ll put it to you as it came to me, without something of a speech impediment because of the teeth. I so do not intend to mock that unless I’m on top of a very wide-awake dragon.

It said something like: “What kind of food is this?” and it wasn’t addressed at me at all, but at the other big pussy-wussys. I’d guess this was a young one, just by the tone.

There is nothing like big teeth and a paw about the size of my head, and razor-sharp claws sliding out of that velvet paw that is reaching towards you to aid in learning a new language, really, really fast. “Not food!” I growl-mwrred back. It was hell on the throat, but not as bad as a claw through the neck. The language wasn’t that different. More about intonation than separate growls for everything.

“It talks.” The claw pulled back.

“Not some strange kind of water-deer then. It smells wrong. I do not like it,” said one of the big cats.

The feeling, trust me on this, was mutual. I was about to take my chances on running and barking, to see if these big pussies would like to be the mat in front of the fire (because the dragon was still bigger than them, and it set things on fire), when one of the three casually swiped something out of the air.

It was a bat. I’ve never seen any animal move so fast. I thought over my barking and running chances, as it ate the bat with a single crunch, and then sat down and scratched itself.

At least part of what the fleas around here fed on was explained, even if the water-deer weren’t. “Take it with us back to the pride,” said the one who hadn’t patted at me with a paw, and who hadn’t just crunched a bat. I’ve met a fair number of humans by now. We dogs have a sensible arrangement with litters and packs. Humans sometimes have something called ‘older sisters’. This was one of those, or as close as you can get to it in cats that move like ghosts. Older sisters are something to be treated with caution, who usually suggest unpleasant things, from what I have learned from watching young humans.

“Meb and my dragon will not like that,” I said with as much confidence as I could manage.

“What kind of creatures are they?” asked the young one who had frightened me out of a year’s growth by appearing in front of me.

“Dragons breathe fire. And Meb, she is great and terrible. She turns enemies to stone and can cause baths. They are my pack and they’re going to be very upset about my being missing. They can follow me anywhere.” That was not strictly true. I can follow them anywhere. I always know just exactly where Meb is. And I have got good at smelling out the dragon, and knowing one dragon from the next. What they smell like does partly depend on what they eat. Fionn has a fondness for mushrooms.

“Baths. What are those?”

“They involve water, and being dropped into it. They are to be avoided.” Not that I didn’t get wet sometimes for good reason, like going for a swim. But cats, if I recalled correctly, didn’t like water.

The idea didn’t appeal to this one, obviously. “Maybe we should leave it and go and look for water-deer. I’m hungry.”

I liked that idea.

“I thought it was maybe a dobhar‑chú but its too far from the lake,” said the other big cat.

“Dobhar‑chú! That’s just a story.”

“They’ll get you if you go in the water.”

The littlest of the big cats shuddered. I was winning...

The older sister one said: “Move, thing. It can’t be a dobhar‑chú. They can pull one of the pride underwater. It couldn’t. It’s too small and it hardly has any teeth.”

I moved, seeing as I had to... sort of sideways looking for a gap that would take me the hundred dog-lengths back to the dragon. I worked on clever too, like standing on branches and leaves as hard as I could to make a noise. Unfortunately the older sister one was between me and Fionn. And the other two were very close. I was being pushed towards the bole of one of the huge trees.

“Clumsy thing. I don’t think it can climb,” said the littlest cat.

“Must be a kind of water-deer then,” said the bat-catcher, in a growl that was a death sentence.

The big sister one picked me up in her jaws. I tried to bark then, but I was a great deal too choked, and a great deal too swung about and afraid to make much sound, really I suppose. Being a brave dog is all very well, but it’s not something that came to me, bounding from branch to branch, many many times my own height up in those tall trees.

And they leaped a long way from tree to tree. I swung around like a rat in those jaws. I didn’t think I was ever going to see Meb or the dragon again.

After a while even terror gets numb. And I was increasingly sure that if I didn’t do something soon, I would definitely never get to see Meb again, and my cragon would wander around Sylvan lost. Eventually he might find his way out, but he could search for Meb forever before he found her. My heart-magnet knew where she was. I was a dog with work to do. I could not fail her.

I couldn’t really use my teeth, or my paws. The big cat was just too big. All I had left was my brains and my nose. And my nose caught a smell on the breeze, high up here. It was animal. Herbivore. And wet.

The cats stopped in the tree top, and I did my best cat-growl: “Prey. I smell food.”

“What did it say?”

“It said it smelled like food. It doesn’t, it smells like those weeds.”

“I can smell food. Wet animals that eat grass,” I said, doing my best to growl it in cat fashion.

The big cats all sniffed.

“Which way?” asked the bat-catcher.

I did my best imitation -- as good as a dog hanging in a cat’s mouth can do -- of one of those hunting dogs that point game. “There.”

“Lake Glissmearrrrr!”

And they took off again, through the trees.

They stopped and I pointed to their prey for them again.

There was a glade ahead, my nose said. A grassy glade. We’d seen almost no grass in the forests. Too many big trees, too thick a canopy...

The trees were a bit lower here and as I swung around, I saw moonlight gleam off the water. The big cats came to grass, and went on skirting the long glade, tree-to-tree. They didn’t ask again. Maybe they could also smell it now.

And then they stopped. The big tail in front of my face waved a sort of snaky bend and then quivered. I could smell what the cat had seen, although I struggled to spot them at first. They were almost perfectly camouflaged, their hides seeming to shimmer slightly and take on the patterns of the grass as they moved. There were a herd of them, grazing... baring the biggest, with a head of antlers that I’d taken for a dead branch, as near to middle of the glade as possible.

Ghost cats plainly fed on ghost deer, and mosquitos and fleas probably fed on both of them. They were welcome to them, if only I could leave them all to it.

“Put it down, Mwarrr. They’re right in the open. We’re going to need you as well junior, if we’re to make a kill,” said the bat-killer, the excitement of the hunt thick in his growl.

She spat me out like a hairball into a big fork in the tree. “Tastes terrible. Thing. Stay here. Don’t frighten the prey.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Good hunting.”

“You know, it could be a useful thing that you have found, little one, if it can smell prey that far off,” said the bat-catcher.

I thought of offering to help herd the beasts... but firstly I was still shaking from being far too high up in trees and jumping from swaying branch-to-branch. And secondly, being cats, I hoped they would be so intent on hunting as to let me alone to get away. And yes, they did. They were totally focused on the water-deer. I could have tied ribbons in their tails—if I’d had hands for tying ribbons—and they wouldn’t have noticed.

I watched as they stalked. Another dog might have started running, but I have some advantages on other dogs. Also I was trying to work out how I could get down from the tree without disturbing their hunt and making them really mad. I was still far too high for any self-respecting dog. I was not too high for a dog that wasn’t that worried about self-respect, but wanted his dragon.

I waited until they were busy with the kill itself, yowling and performing. And then I jumped.

It was further than I like jumping. Fortunately, I had picked on a nice thick patch of bracken. It was less fortunate that it was full of brambles too, but they are springy and forgiving, if thorny. I left some black and white fur there for the big kitties.

And then I ran as fast as I could through the trees. I wanted to put a long distance between the cats and me, before they got around to thinking about me.

The downside about this, of course, was that I knew my needed direction for Meb, and I had some idea about which direction the cat had swung me along through the tree-tops. But some idea was not precise. And my head only had room for knowing just where Meb was, always, not where Fionn the dragon was, although I was getting quite fond of him.

Still: We dogs are brave creatures of the wild. We can follow the moon, stars, and of course the smell of someone’s roast dinner over long distances. Or the smell of our own scent marks, when we’re nervous enough. I was.

I was never so glad as to smell where I’d been before. Humans just don’t get the value of it. It’s obvious they don’t need to find their way back after being dog-napped by catnappers (and yes it did seem like a dream, a bad one. I prefer the dreams where I chase rabbits).

I spotted the silver birches that were Lyr at last. I don’t trust tree people, so I gave them a bit of a wide berth, but after that I could pick up our trail.

And there, sleeping peacefully in the darkness under the trees, was a spiky nasty looking black dragon. It was just what this dog needed most right then.

I snuggled in as close as I could to my dragon, with my back against him. Dogs are quite right to chase cats. If they get as big as that, they’ll chase us. And as a parting thought before I went to sleep, I thought that the law of unintended consequences could just catch up on the next person to come over devil’s leap to this place. They wouldn’t expire peacefully in their sleep. And if they took to fishing for food... it was likely they’d meet the other denizens of the water, and what fed on them. Sometimes we exchange bad for worse. . .

Fionn had trouble getting me to get up the next day. “Hmph. You’d swear you’d had a night on the tiles last night, instead of snoring next to me, Díleas,” he said, prodding me with a spiky tail-tip. “Well, there’s no breakfast, and we’ll just have to keep going until we find some.”

Humans often say they wish we dogs could talk. I only wish they could listen, and dragons too. Then Fionn would have known what those barks meant, and it wasn’t as he assumed: “I’m hungry and let’s get going.” Those ideas are true too, but he’s putting barks into my mouth that I didn’t utter. And, although I know the water-deer are hiding in those lakes and he could catch them, I’m not pointing this out to him. Too many kitties are watching for them, and maybe there is even this dobhar‑chú in the water. Anything that eats ghost-cats I do not want to meet, not even with a dragon. My heart-magnet draws me to my Meb, and the way is not that far, and I will know when it is open.

I’ll put up with being hungry, until we’re in places where the cat sits on the mat and has a bowl of milk.

A Murder of Crows

by Alex Hernandez

"I can’t see anything through all this red shit!" Tactical Officer Anton Hershkovitz said staring out the window, then back at a false-color mock up of the landscape. The meteorological vulgarism broke the long silence of their flight.

"Good thing you’re not the pilot." First Pilot Ameera el-Ayeb's words were a few degrees lower than the thin, frigid air outside their S-8 glider. She forced her eyes on the instrumentation and not out the grimy windows as she maneuvered the craft through the Martian stratosphere. Hersh knew that, above all, she avoided looking at him.

They were shoved in next to each other, shoulders chafing, but the distance between them felt great. He had intended to cut her loose weeks ago. His deployment was ending and he didn't need any messy, emotional performances. Then they were thrown together on this reconnaissance mission to find the last garrison of the avian humans left on Mars. To make things worse, this immense haboob had mysteriously blown over the Tharsis region. Now he was the one in a huff.

"Look, Hersh, if you want to end whatever it is we have, all you have to do is say so. We're both adults," she tossed out the remark like a grenade.

"This isn’t right. There shouldn’t be a dust storm of this magnitude at this time of year," he said ignoring her statement. His job was easy compared to Ameera’s. He basically had to scan everything within the area of operations and squirt it back to their battleship, The Harpy Hunter, in orbit, and if there was trouble, he manned the guns while she got them the hell out, which gave him too much free time to obsess over whatever it is they have.

"Fine," she sighed. "Captain Morales agrees with you. He thinks this storm is being artificially generated, which is why he sent us personally. I mean, we are the supreme recon officers aboard the Harpy Hunter." Against all regulation, they’d been enjoying a casual relationship for almost a year, and despite their mutual agreement to keep it simple, it had gotten complicated. Now, he couldn't bring himself to just break up with her, so instead he acted aloof and miserable. Am I waiting for her to make the final, decisive move?

The long-winged plane pushed deeper into the dry, autumnal gloom. The roiling sky mirrored his mood. "Yeah, supremely disposable," Hersh said, trying to get out of his funk. He didn’t look away from his dashboard readouts, but he could tell that she was smiling slightly and it made him smile too. The scent of her jasmine attar drifted in the small, musty cockpit. It was too easy to love her. "You know my deployment is ending, right? I'm probably going back to Florida."

"I’m taking us a little closer to the Valles Marineris canyon system, the dust seems to be thinner down in the troposphere."

"Which is rather suspicious, don’t you think?"

"You think too much. Can't you just relax?"

He didn't know if she was referring to his going back home or the bizarre weather. He chose to talk about the weather. "All I’m saying is that Candor Chasma is the last of the harpy strongholds on Mars. It should’ve been easy to shatter the half-cylinder that caps it and let out the air, but it’s made of incredibly tough diamond; technology that no other harpy settlement in the Solar System has. Now this hemisphere-shrouding dust storm inexplicably appears. Something’s wrong."

When plasma engines were developed, Earth’s provincial population set out and met their sick, hybridized neighbors in the Solar System and they were horrified. It was as if the usual uncanny valley had been rent even wider by some sudden tectonic schism; intelligent machines sunbathing on Mercury like glistening barnacles, dinosaur-freaks roosting on the Moon, Mars, and Titan, but now, after ten years of fighting and forced treatment camps, the Hominocracy Movement of Earth was taking back the Solar System.

"Um, Hersh, am I reading my sensors correctly?"

He had looked away while he ranted and when he looked back at his screen it was as if the hard data was answering him directly, telling him that all his deranged theories were not only correct, but naively insufficient. "What the fuck is that?"

"It could be interference from the all the electrostatically charged particles in the air, but it looks like a massive structure running the length of the rift, from Corprates Chasma to Lus."

"That would make this object more than three thousand kilometers long and almost two hundred kilometers wide!"

"I’m going to do a flyby. Get all our sensors and cameras on it. Can we beam the info to the Harpy Hunter?"

"It’s a ship, Ameera!"

"Don’t be stupid, Hersh, it cannot be a ship. There’s no way you can lift something that big and get it into orbit."

They flew along the enormous construct. The white, oblong shape gleamed in the crimson haze, like a theropod egg buried in a nest of sediment. There were no visible signs of boosters or fusion rockets. It couldn’t be a spacecraft, Hersh thought. "Okay, maybe it’s some kind of doomsday weapon?"

"If it is, we’re absolutely fucked, because the only point of something so big would be to crack open the planet."

"I know it sounds crazy, but I don't think this thing was manufactured here. There’s no sign of construction or equipment anywhere in the valley system." The sheer size and alienness of the thing dwarfed their petty romantic problems.

"Maybe they cleaned up after themselves."

"Look—there at the midsection, there’s some kind of vein, running from the city of Candor right into that thing." Hersh zoomed one of his cameras toward the connector. "It looks like a transit tube. Here, the closer we get the easier it is to make out humanoid forms on some kind of tram, riding toward the superstructure."

"Harpies! They’re loading harpies into that thing. The other rail running along side it looks like a supply tram."

"Maybe it’s a fort or a huge bunker and they’re moving everyone into it for protection?"

Suddenly, straight blue lightning flashed and the crack of thunder shook their glider.

"We’ve been hit!" Ameera tried to steer the shuddering plane. "They knocked out our engine, but I think I can guide us down. Luckily, we’re in a glider."

Hersh didn’t reply. He simply flicked on the power to the laser guns mounted on the plane’s wings and returned fire at the massive, elongated oval. Nothing! His beams were harmlessly refracted by the diamond matrix of its hull. The S-8 sank even lower into the dirty atmosphere. And still, the artifact stretched on for kilometers. It was strange that the enemy hadn’t fired on them again. Did they think them insignificant? Did they want them alive?

"Stop that and try sending a mayday to the Harpy Hunter!"

"If we couldn’t get a signal out higher up, we’re definitely not going to get through now." Hersh switched to cluster bombs and sent a volley down toward the alien citadel. Hot death bloomed like marigolds along their path. The fucking thing is still unscathed!

"I’m not going to park us on top of that structure in case it is some kind of super weapon. I’m aiming toward the gap between it and Candor. Readings indicate the air and pressure are synthetically maintained at normal levels down there, so we won’t explode if we survive the crash."

"My God, this isn’t a harpy artifact; the scale of it, the sophistication, the passive defenses, the single precise shot…" Hersh was shaken by his own realization.

"Machine Intelligence?"

"The robots have allied themselves with the posthuman perverts on Mars!"

The glider quickly approached the rail tube feeding troops and supplies into the massive robot machine and Hersh’s fear and frustration suddenly found a target he could annihilate. He launched three scorching javelins of light at the side of the tube and watched the whole thing blow to hell as the S-8 zoomed by.

They hammered into Mars and skidded and spun until the unforgiving ravine walls slammed them to a stop. The crash-gel in their seats cushioned them from the worst of the impact, but their stomachs churned, their bodies ached, and their heads whirled. Hersh reached out and took Ameera’s hand, then passed out.

Hersh came to first, but he was dazed. He contemplated his current predicament with almost drunken detachment. For reasons that utterly confounded him, about a hundred years ago, the original colonists of Mars had spiced up their genomes with archaeopteryx DNA. Some said it was a fad; flying in the weaker gravity was all the rage back then. What these idiots hadn’t taken into account was that transplanted DNA usually had more than one function, so genes associated with wings and claws and hollow bones also coded for cruel, reptilian aggression. The Hominocracy movement offered aid in the form of advanced gene therapies and reconstructive surgery to bring these poor, transgenic bastards back to humanity. Of course, they lashed out viciously and now they were embroiled in a war.

Slowly, he realized the glider was on fire. It was a puny, starved flame but it was enough to snap him from his trance. He tugged on Ameera and her bloody head rolled lifelessly off her control panel. His heart sank, then threatened to leap out of his chest when he saw she was still breathing. This morning, he was determined to split up with Ameera, but now—maybe it was the very real danger of loosing her—something stronger welled up within him. Caringly, he pulled her out of the wreckage and held her.

He looked up at the elliptical compound and noticed chrome balloons floating around it. He was right. In the darkness of the canyon, the robots looked like mechanical jellyfish pulsating in a blood-colored abyss. It bothered Hersh that the robots paid him no mind; each one of those bags of hardware and gas were more intelligent than he was by a magnitude of a hundred. He felt like an ant on a factory floor. They drifted, doting on their inexplicable structure.

"We made it," Ameera purred, it came out more like a question.

His attention snapped away from the artificial man-o-war. He smiled at her. "Yeah, we had a great pilot." He found himself kissing her on the lips.

Ameera patted his cheek. "Hersh, don’t complicate things."

"I think we're well past complicated. I just wanted to say here and now with those uncaring intelligences overhead, that I love you, Ameera el-Ayeb."

"Hersh, we agreed to keep it light. My family would not approve."

"So what, you were just going to let me down easy when our tour was over?" He looked at the flashing med-alert on her uniform; she had suffered a concussion. He really shouldn't upset her.

"Weren't you?"

Wasn't he? Of course he was, but that was before he had almost lost her. Was he just emotionally raw from the accident? "Can you walk?"

"Yeah, I think so." Ameera blinked heavily. "So what’s the plan?"

"I think the harpies are evacuating Candor via the robot construct. If we can sneak into the emptying city we can call our ship and they’ll send in an extraction team to get us." It was a horrible plan, full of guess work and false hope, but it was all he could come up with.

"All right," she said and tried standing.

The fact that Ameera didn’t argue with him worried Hersh even more than the glowing med-alert. He had to keep her awake. He took her by the waist and they began to hobble toward the ruined transit tube. The extraterrestrial cold seeped in through their uniforms and into their bones. The lighter gravity made their staggering hike relatively quick and easy. That is, until they got to the wreck; then they both faltered.

"My God, Hersh, those are children!"

The terrible sight of the damaged tram hit them like a cluster bomb. Ameera’s knees buckled and he held her tight. "Don’t look, Ameera, it’s just harpy fledglings." But he looked.

He couldn’t help it. The smoking bodies were crumpled and littered among the debris. There were dozens of them. It was like his mind skipped over the lifeless adults and locked onto the juveniles. Their arms and heads covered in white, downy fluff, but their faces— their innocent, slack faces—were those of little kids. The rising smell of barbecued chicken turned his stomach and his body weakened. He fell forward in a puff of rusty sand and vomited. His hacking noises and Ameera’s sobbing echoed up the canyon walls.

Despite all his training screaming at him—ordering him to move—they remained emotionally compromised, shell-shocked. He picked up a long primary feather from the ground, like an obsidian blade. What had he done? The reality of the situation weighed heavily on him. This was nothing like the Flash Gordon RPGs he played as a kid. The battles against the virtual Hawkmen now seemed grossly sanitized compared to this stinking carnage.

A shrill beeping cut his self-pitying short—both their suits’ proximity sensors were picking up multiple bogies headed their way. Hersh instinctively pulled his laser gun from its holster and hauled his stunned and weeping pilot behind a charred tram car.

They hunkered down. He roughly grabbed her face and looked straight into her brown eyes. "Listen to me, Ameera, we’ve got a murder of crows headed this way and I can’t fend them off by myself. Can you fight?"

"Yeah—yes, I’m a soldier." She didn’t sound convinced, but she drew her sidearm.

"You’re damned right you are and we’re also the only two humans on this miserable planet. So let’s do Adam and Eve proud," he said, and braced himself against their adversaries.

They heard angry screeching reverberating through the canyon before they saw the black, winged forms soar into view. The enemy looked human enough, but he knew that was simply a vestigial trait; they were more maniraptora then men. A flock of about ten of them wheeled overhead, each wielding customized hand guns, like brass knuckles, on their dinosaurian wing-claws, raining electric blue fire on them.

Hersh and Ameera shot back at the attacking harpies. They were outnumbered, but not out for the count. The blazing remains of the tram provided ample cover and the harpies’ wide wingspan made them easy targets.

He noticed Ameera was trying really hard to miss every one of them. He didn’t say anything. She’d had her fill of death, and besides, her drowsy, scattered shots confused them and Hersh’s own strict shooting always hit the mark. He carefully picked off harpies until there was only one left. This one flew and wailed like a banshee. Then, all of the sudden, it dropped into the smoldering mess of the transit tube and disappeared.

He quickly scanned the area over the barrel of his gun and saw nothing. "Okay, we’re going to make a run for it. Are you ready?"

She nodded, but her eyes were closed. Had her eyes been closed the entire firefight? Then she whispered, "Hersh, we slaughtered those little kids."

"You didn’t do anything, Ameera. This is on me! I pulled the trigger. You were just trying to land the plane and save our lives. Your conscience is clean."

"Why doesn’t it feel that way?" She leaned in and dug her face into his chest and he hugged her. He could no longer smell her perfume over the smoke and dust.

He saw the shadow of a winged woman through the soot, hunched over the body of a dead fledgling. She tenderly draped her wings around it and rocked back and forth. For a brief moment, both their gentle movements mirrored each other, and aching doubt crept into his soul. Then the creature let out a piercing, grief-filled shriek that shattered the Martian silence.

"Come on." He dragged Ameera into the twisted open transit tube. They walked through the long, dark tunnel that led into the domed city of Candor.

In the utter blackness 200 million years of evolution evaporated; all identity, all culture, all humanity vanished and they were simply mammals scurrying in the dark, hiding from the terrible reptiles.

"Hersh, if we survive this, will you marry me?" she asked in the same hushed, sleepy tones she often used after sex, trying to keep him from falling asleep in her bunk.

"Yes." They walked-dragged in silence for a bit, then he added, "After I get you out of here your dad is going to love me. Our wedding is going to be the best, I promise."

They didn't speak anymore, but she clumsily kissed the corner of his mouth.

The dark ended when they entered the city. Hersh had never been inside a harpy aviary before and the sight of it overwhelmed him. The bare canyon walls of Candor Chasma had been carved with laser precision to look like the Treasury at Petra on a metropolitan scale. Entire housing blocks and districts sprawled vertically up the sheer cliffs. This was a living space designed by natural flyers. Immense statues of stiff-winged people, like ancient Sumerian or Egyptian gods, stood guard in the magnificent, desolate city. There was imagination and history here. Generations of avian humans had built this place and now they were being forced out or destroyed.

"Here the repellent harpies make their nests," Ameera murmured to herself. "It’s beautiful."

"We have to find a communications station."

They walked two more steps, then a thin ribbon of light shot across the chasm and hit First Pilot Ameera el-Ayeb square in the back. Her body spasmed in Hersh’s arms then went limp.

"No!" he screamed. For a second, Hersh was mystified. He laid Ameera on the polished stone ground and fired blindly toward the direction of the beam. A harpy—the grieving harpy—flew out of a darkened balcony like a demon. Hersh fired frantically. She flapped hard, banking this way and that, an awesome display of aerobatics. He kept shooting but was tired and scared and angry and failed to make contact with his target. She dipped into another stone-cut terrace. She was toying with him and he understood the tactical error of getting caught in a canyon. He suddenly felt like a desert mouse being hunted by a hawk.

The harpy exploded into the sky and he sprayed the air with crackling light trying to aim where he thought she would be a second into the future, but she was fast and cunning. He held the trigger down until the power cell of his weapon went dry. Was this what she was waiting for? Could she see the gun’s power readout from up in the air? It was clear she didn’t want to kill him from an impersonal distance; she wanted to hunt on the wing. Hersh looked for Ameera’s sidearm, but couldn’t find it. She must have dropped it in the tunnel.

The harpy circled above. He unsheathed his bowie knife, and spun around, keeping his eyes on her. Even with the thirteen inches of glinting steel in his sweaty hand, he felt ridiculously inadequate against her six sickle-shape claws and razor-sharp fangs. Without warning, the harpy tucked in her wings and dove straight at him.

The creature struck like a whirlwind, pouring all her fury into rending his flesh. Hersh foolishly swung his knife around, but the attack was a blast of black plumage and pain. He fell on his belly and he was vaguely aware that he was screaming. He was pinned. Then something sharp and hot slid between the vertebrae of his spine and blinding agony washed over him.

###

Anton Hershkovitz awoke with the horrible realization that he could not feel his legs. Then pain sharpened his awareness to the rest of the world. He was in an empty room. There was nothing, it was just a large cube cut into ochre rock. Ameera lay a few meters away. He couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead because he had blood in his eyes. Deep cuts stung all over his body. He could move his arms and neck. So he wiped his face on his grimy sleeve and tried to slide to Ameera.

A woman, in a black coat entered the room. He froze. She had a hard and handsome face, alabaster skin and large blue eyes. Then Hersh’s blurry sight focused and the coat became wings. Her arms were wings. Her hands were three-fingered claws and her bare feet ended in three, splayed toes like those of a cassowary. She strut into the room with authority. "I am Captain Aello Cricksena with the Candor Aviary Republic," she said, in a melodic, pidgin version of Standard.

This was not the clumsy, transgenic cripple the Hominocracy made harpies out to be. All cross-species awkwardness had been scratched away by generations of selective breeding. This woman was as elegant as a dancer and as deadly as a velociraptor.

Then, a silver, spindly robot with a logarithmic spiral for a head, like a nautilus shell, followed her into the room. It said nothing. The two saucer eyes on the sides of its shell-head shone like green traffic lights. This was not the product of Earthly evolution, this thing had run countless simulations to achieve a form absolutely suited for Mars. Its foreign intrusion into their animal struggle instantly bonded Hersh and the harpy on a biological level like nothing else.

The harpy captain continued, "As the only member of the avian race left in this ghost town, your sentencing falls on me. The M.I. is here as impartial witness."

Dread gripped Hersh and he began to babble like a child. "Please, don’t hurt her. It was me! I fired on the transit tube, but you harpies attacked us first!"

The captain looked at him with barely restrained hatred; her human visage a clever mask hiding a cold-blooded predator.

"Harpy?" she sang in a bluesy voice. "The harpies of old were said to swoop in and snatch children in their talons. You are the damned harpy!" She wavered. "My four-year-old son was on that transport."

The words cut deeper than any claw. The image of her holding the boy's broken body flashed into his mind. She loomed over him and placed a foot on his chest and the weight of it brought him back to the room. One swift swipe would easily bisect him. He grunted in pain. Hersh felt crushed both physically and emotionally. He wanted her to split him open, but he worried for Ameera.

"We are not the monsters you make us out to be. All surviving citizens of Mars are watching this via the M.I. and they cry for justice." The mask slipped and tears welled up in those frosty eyes.

Hersh felt his sternum break. He screamed.

The machine laid a tentacle on the harpy's shoulder and spoke in flawless, soothing Standard, "Aello, it was my concealing dust storm that piqued their curiosity and my decision to maim their aircraft that incited the attack. I thought it would buy us some time. It was my miscalculation and so my responsibility."

The harpy gave a defiant squawk, but withdrew her talon.

"Please, kill me if you want, but let her go. I love her," Hersh rasped painfully. He rolled onto his side making the pain worse, but at least he could see Ameera. "Wouldn't you switch places with your son?"

This caught the captain's full attention. She kicked him over onto his back again. All her body language said she would eviscerate him, but she glanced over at Ameera and suddenly her wrath was tinged with something more subtle: Satisfaction? Pity? Had her sharp senses noticed something he hadn't?

There was a long pause. He stared into those blue eyes and something unspoken and absolutely human passed between them. Hersh began to weep. He shrank within himself.

The harpy turned and warbled something to the robot.

"I know. Go to the ship. We are ready to depart."

A remote part of Hersh knew the machine was speaking Standard for his benefit, letting him know that he would survive. He no longer cared.

The harpy exited the room and he was left alone with the robot.

The machine waved a tentacle and the pixel paint on the prison wall displayed a real-time image of the egg-shaped artifact. "When you return to your leaders, please report that the Machine Intelligence has decided to help the endangered Homo sapiens aves out of the Solar System."

"Why?"

"We value diversity."

"You’re not going to fight back?"

"No. You’ll be allowed to signal your ship once we’re in orbit."

Hersh slowly—excruciatingly—crawled on the floor like a wounded animal under the uncaring gaze of the robot and clung to Ameera. There was nothing in the room, nothing in the universe, but her stillness.

"Please remember, Anton Hershkovitz, you continue to exist because something inhuman chose to treat you humanely." Without another word, the fragile robot collapsed to the floor, its animating personality gone.

Still hugging Ameera, Hersh thought about this; the robot had failed to appreciate the total cruelty of his sentencing.

Long minutes passed. The ground trembled. He looked up, saw the vast ship on the wall disobey gravity, without chemical explosions or a fusion inferno, the ark lifted from the depth of the rift and coasted out into space.

THE AGE OF THE WARRIOR

by Hank Reinhardt

The chatter and gaiety of the feast had been stilled, and although the candles still burned brightly, fear and apprehension darkened the Great Hall of Castle Glaun. Rank was forgotten as lord and lady, townsman and guardsman mingled in small, quiet clusters. The low murmur of their voices would still as the door to the ducal chambers opened, but picked up as soon as only a servingman or maid appeared.

The evening had started out well enough. Lyulf II, King of Lyvane, accompanied by his retinue and the Duke of Jagai, had arrived earlier in the day. The Duke of Glaun had been well prepared for his royal guests, and the feast he had served was splendid. The recent treaty between King Lyulf II and Togai, King of the Shang, was an event to be well remembered, and the Duke had spared no expenses to celebrate it.

It was right after an impromptu wrestling match, won by Asgalt, Duke of Jagai, against a young guardsman, that the blow fell. A messenger arrived bearing the ill news that the Shang had invested Castle Kels, and it looked as if the castle would fall within a few days.

Pandemonium broke loose, and the King with his closest advisors retired to the private chambers of the Duke of Glaun.

In the chambers the King sat hunched over a table, poring over a map as if seeking to change the very lay of the land with his thoughts. Around the table stood several of his ministers, while in the corner the two Dukes engaged in a heated argument.

The King glanced with annoyance at the two men, and with a tone of less than regal forbearance snarled, "Will you two stop that damned bickering and get over here! The whole kingdom is threatened and you two argue over propriety!"

Asgalt, about to make a point, stopped in mid-sentence and looked at the King. "Sire, I do not argue, I merely defend myself."

The Duke of Glaun, Colwen by name, bowed from the waist and answered. "Your Pardon Sire, but I feel that it is unseemly for a Duke of the Realm to wrestle a common guardsman, even if the man is a champion."

Asgalt grunted in disgust. "Bah, you only object because I win." Lyulf glared at the two, then in his most Kingly voice, "We do not care about wrestling, or the proprieties. We do care about advice!"

Colwen, Duke of Glaun, walked over with dignity and stationed himself behind the King. He was a tall man, with hair as white as snow, and a face lined with years of care and worry.

However the Duke of Jagai merely ambled over to the front of the King, and stood looking down at him. He saw a man full grown, calm and stern, well suited to rule, but in his mind's eye he also saw a young boy, gawping up at him in awe and wonder.

Asgalt pointed to the map. "Look, you can see what has to be done, or at least tried."

The King shook his head. "I said no."

Asgalt slapped his thighs with anger. He was a large man, with cold blue eyes shaded by iron gray hair. Thick necked, running into massive shoulders and chest, with arms to match. Only the iron gray of his hair and the thickening mid-section betrayed his age. He turned away, then turned back again.

"You young puppy, were you not a man grown I'd shake some sense into you, King or no. By Kimwalt's Eyes, all you have to do is look!"

The ministers glanced at each other in embarrassed silence but the Duke of Glaun spoke up in shocked reprimand.

"Your Grace! You can't speak to the King like that! It isn't proper!"

Asgalt swelled and roared. "Proper! Proper! With Shang soon to be riding through every hamlet, butchering and pillaging 'till their black hearts' content, and you say 'Proper!'"

He shook his head in wonder, then continued in the same roaring voice. "Colwen, you were one of the best fighting men I have ever seen, but"— His voice trailed, and he spoke to the King in a lower voice. "Do you remember when Colwen and I held the breach during the siege of this castle? Fifteen years ago it was, and he wanted me to stand to the left rear, as he was borned to the Ducal Chair!"

The King, despite his woes, grinned. He had heard this story at least once a month for the past fifteen years. But then reality returned, and his face tightened.

"Enough of this. Togai has broken the treaty, the Shang are marching, and the Kingdom has to be warned and the levy raised. I don't have time to sit and listen to your constant bickering."

Asgalt nodded, dropped his pretended fury and spoke seriously. "No, you don't. Nor do you have time to send a messenger the long way around the Blue Mountains. The Shang are already at Kels, and before you can move the long way around, they will be here, and the main army will be moving. Before the levy is raised, Lyvane will be open."

He continued. "The only way to better the time is over the Pass of Jagai. Once through, and the Shang can be avoided by a good man, the levy can be raised by the time the Shang reach here. We could easily catch them here. And there is only one man who knows the pass, me."

Lyulf sat and never spoke. All there knew his concern. Asgalt had been a close friend and advisor to his father, indeed, he was responsible for his father gaining back the throne after the rebellion. But Asgalt had aged, and the journey he spoke of so easily was hard on even a much younger man, and the Shang were out in force.

In the end it was Colwen who forced the issue. "Sire, the Duke is right. 'Tis the only chance that we have! The course of action is plain. You leave at once taking the long road, and Asgalt leaves, for the Pass."

Lyulf nodded in final agreement. He looked at Asgalt and his face softened. "Have a care, Old Warrior. Remember that a young king still needs old friends."

The Duke grinned back at him, and for a moment his hard, craggy face looked boyish.

"Old? Ask that young guardsman. He thought I was old . . . but his back and shoulder will tell him different this night."

"Then take him with you. He looked tough as boot leather."

Asgalt ruefully answered, "He is."

***

The morning sun had not yet risen as the King and Duke Glaun watched Asgalt and Flan ride from the castle.

The King shook his head in fear, and spoke to his companion. "'Tis a fear good Duke that we may not see Asgalt again. Strange, that yet again the fate of this land rests on the shoulders of an outlander."

Colwen nodded his agreement. "There are no stronger ones for it to rest on." He paused, then continued. "He seemed more than merely eager to go. Is it that he fears his age, or is it his hatred for the Shang?"

***

The morning fog had lifted and now the sun shone warm. They rode at a steady pace, rarely speaking, each in his own thoughts. At noon they dismounted for a quick meal, and to walk the horses. Flan, the guardsman, was a tall youth, wide and rangy in appearance, with jet black hair and matching eyes. He eyed the Duke, then spoke.

"Tell me, Your Grace. How is it that a chief of the Haga Hai becomes a Duke of Lyvane?"

"That, lad, would take some telling. I'm not a Haga Hai, but a Birkit. I joined one of their raiding parties to settle a personal score against the Shang. Well, one thing led to another, and I ended up as Chief. It was a good life, all the Haga Hai want to do is drink and fight. I'd probably be there still, but a Shang raiding party hit us one night. They killed everyone but me. They planned on strangling me, then stuffing the carcass." He chuckled. "That was a mistake. I broke loose, killed a few more.

"I wandered a few years, then ended up in Lyvane serving in the Army. It was at Iron Mountain that I met Old Lyulf. The line broke, and it was clear that the rebels were winning, so when the whole army broke and ran, I tried to stay alive. Couple of days later I came on a man trying to fight four of the rebels and protect a boy. I killed the rebels, and the man followed me." He laughed outright. "It was a damn month before I found out it was the King. Old Lyulf was a cagey devil."

His mind drifted back over the years, and he spoke in a low reverie, forgetting he had an audience, talking more to himself than to Flan.

"Five years we wandered and fought. Hiding out in hills and caves and with a few loyal to the Crown. Finally we had an army, and we caught Morgaun at Whitewater Flats. What a battle that was! I killed Morgaun, damn well cut him near in half! But enough of me. How is it that a man of Lyvale ends up in Lyvane?"

Flan smiled. "Not much to tell, Your Grace. The wanderlust that hits many a young son of a poor farmer. I roamed awhile, tried the sea, but my stomach didn't care for it. I fought with Lord Conlenach, was with him at Colnar Ridge. Got away, wandered a bit more, then ended up in Glaun. The Duke hired me," he then added with a smile. "He was impressed with my wrestling!"

Asgalt laughed, a full-throated bellow. "I knew that old devil was trying to set me up! And he damn near did. You almost had me, but I tricked you. You wrestle well; all you lack is age and experience."

"Next time, Your Grace, I'll try not to be tricked."

They continued on, and soon the land began to change. The rolling hills gave way to open woodland, and this in turn to lowlands, with rich and fertile valleys. This was beautiful land, but now the beauty was marred by signs of war; burnt farms, scattered livestock, and whole villages put to the sword. The occasional stink of death they encountered as they passed a burnt-out steading soon gave way to a horrible stench, that filled the air and seemed to get into their very pores. Death was all about them.

Asgalt reined in his mount. "Now 'tis time to arm. Shang are all about, and we'd best keep a sharp eye."

Quickly they stripped the pack pony and each donned his mail shirt, steel helmet, and slipped their shields onto their backs. Their spears they set horizontally, so that they wouldn't project upward and give warning of their presence.

The Duke cut the pack pony loose and sent it running with a slap on the rump.

"From here it's two days ride. Then a climb up the mountain, across the bridge, and it's over with. All we need to do now is avoid the Shang."

The stench grew worse as they neared the outskirts of a small village. They passed death in its most grotesque forms, bodies lying with complete abandonment, bloated bellies thrusting at the sun. Neither spoke. Flan, with grim indifference, passed the scene, but Asgalt's face grew flint hard, and no expression crossed it.

As they neared the crest of a small hill, they could hear the sounds of battle on the other side, screams and curses and yells of agony. Quickly they reined in and slipped from their horses, crawling stealthily to the top of the hill. The last act was played as they watched. One man still stood, jabbing feebly at the circling Shang warriors. At his feet lay a young girl, wide eyed with terror. A warrior casually parried the spear, then slashed downward and the man fell, blood spurting high in the air from a severed neck artery.

The Shang circled the girl, making false attempts to grab her, and laughing at her frantic movements.

Flan started to rise, but Asgalt pulled him down. He turned angrily.

"Why? There are only five and we can hit them before they know what's happening."

Asgalt pointed to his left. In the distance a large party of mounted men could be seen.

"I feel as you do, but I've a Kingdom to worry about. If we're caught, it could happen to the whole land."

The girl's screams caused them to look up. The Shang were now close about her, poking with their spears.

Suddenly Asgalt stood up, and now his fury was real. He reached down and dragged the startled Flan to his feet with one hand. "Kimwalt's balls. The day I can't kill five and outride a hundred the kingdom can fall! Ride, damn you, ride. Grab the girl and ride."

The Shang were still laughing and jabbing at the girl when the two hit them. The first died never knowing what the strange pointed thing was that suddenly grew from his chest. The second turned, saw a flash, then nothingness engulfed him. The third screamed, parried a slashing sword, then had his neck broken by the edge of a shield. The fourth saw only a gray-haired demon suddenly appear and kill three of his companions, when a sword lashed out, and cut deep into his side. He looked up in bewilderment, saw a pair of jet black eyes, then life left him. The fifth almost made it, turning and galloping for the body of men in the distance. He fled for his life, but Asgalt wanted it also, and his sword took the man cleanly at the juncture of neck and shoulder.

Asgalt reined in the Shang horse and led it back to Flan and the girl.

"Mount up and ride. They've seen us." He nodded over his shoulder. "Into the hills, we can cut over and hit the main trail by tomorrow."

***

The night was cold and Asgalt cursed the Shang, the damp and the very small fire. He was tired. The ride had been long and hard, but so far they had outdistanced the Shang. He looked at the two across the fire from him, the girl and Flan huddled close under a cloak and Flan obviously enjoying it.

***

The girl, Eithne, a baker's daughter had been visiting an uncle when the Shang attacked. She had fled with several others only to be caught out in the open. The girl shivered under the blanket as Flan asked, "Do you think we've gotten away?"

Flan shrugged, "Ask the Duke. I've never even seen Shang until today."

***

"The Duke," and her eyes grew wide. "Your Grace," and she made a motion as if to rise.

"Stay seated, girl. It's too cold and late for such nonsense." Asgalt warmed his hands on the small blaze. "No, one thing you can say for the Shang, they never quit. I'm surprised that that one tried to run away. Never saw one break and run before. They're out there. My fear is that they know where we're headed."

Flan snuggled the girl closer and asked. "Why? And what is this pass of Jagai that we're headed to?"

"It's a pass up the mountain. No one knew of it until old Lyulf and I stumbled on it. The Shang can't use it, as they're cavalry, and no way you can get horses up it. We got to the top then found there was a damn deep gorge. All the way to the bottom of the mountain it falls. I managed to get across it. That is how we got back into Lyvane after the Rebellion. Later we built a bridge.

"Once across, we're in Jagai. I keep a way station about three miles down the mountain, so it'll be an easy walk and an easy ride to Jagai Castle. If they realize that's where we're headed, they'll have the whole army trying to stop us. Once we get across, the army can be raised, and the whole attack is ruined."

Asgalt looked longingly at the fire wishing it were larger, then doused it "Now get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a bad day."

Dawn broke cold and clear, and when Asgalt awoke, Flan and the girl had already made another small fire. He was stiff and his back hurt. "Damn ill trained horse," he muttered as he tried to stretch himself into some semblance of a man rather than an aching mass of bones. He was peeved that they had awakened before he did. Usually he awoke first and fully alert. But now he felt that he needed more hours of sleep. He was groggy and only half awake as he munched his meager breakfast. They mounted, and began a slow, tiring ride up the hill.

The terrain was rocky, with little clefts and culverts, down a short, steep incline, then up a longer steeper one. But slowly they climbed higher and higher. They rounded a bad bend and the mountain loomed forbiddingly over them.

They paused to rest the horses and Asgalt was quite pleased when Flan suggested it. While the horses drank from a small mountain stream the Duke looked back down the trail.

"Flan, come take a look. I can't make out anything, but do you see something? Seems to be some movement?"

Flan shaded his eyes. "Shang. A large party. Anywhere from fifty to a hundred."

"They know. Best get moving."

They camped that night under an overhanging rock. Not having planned on the girl, they found their supplies were quickly giving out. The Shang horse had had no food bag. It seemed to Asgalt that he had just fallen asleep when Eithne was shaking him. "Your Grace, time to be moving. The Shang followed into the night."

Asgalt rose quickly and his body protested. Pain shot through his back, and his elbows and shoulders felt as if they were locked in irons. "What? How do you know?"

Flan spoke quietly. "I awoke early, slipped down the trail. Saw them. They gained quite a bit on us."

The Duke nodded. "Let the horse go. From here on up we have to climb. One more day, then we can be over the bridge by mid-morning of the next."

Flan discarded his armor and shield, keeping only his sword and spear. He suggested that Asgalt do the same, but the Duke shook his head.

"No. I've had both for twenty years, and when they build my cairn I want them inside. And I need the axe."

The climb was slow and painful. Asgalt watched with envy as Flan made his way up, his breathing never quickening nor his stride faltering. Asgalt felt as if he weighed a ton, but stubbornly refused to discard his armor. He cursed the soft living, and resolved to spend more time in the field, refusing to admit that age had anything to do with it.

The land leveled and the going became easier. Asgalt pointed. "There's a stream over there. Good place to rest a moment. Afterwards, it's a bad climb, but we'll have a good place to sleep. It eases off in the morning."

Eithne greeted the small stream and pond with a cry of pleasure. Quickly she ran and jumped in it. Flan and Asgalt both smiled, and Flan quickly followed the girl. Asgalt slipped off his armor, and the release from the weight felt good. Then he, too, slipped into the pool.

But knowledge of what was ahead of them, and what was behind them made the stay brief. Asgalt brought the spears back, leaned them against the rock and spread their clothes to dry. They finished the last of the food, drank some water, then slowly dressed.

Just as they had finished dressing, Flan looked back up the stream, and his voice was cold and flat.

"Well, we're in it now!"

Asgalt followed his gaze. There, beside his armor and the only way out, stood three Shang warriors.

The Duke grunted and spat disgustedly. "Three, fully armed, and us with only spears."

He glanced around, and the bare rock walls loomed mockingly over him. He turned, plucked a knife from his belt, and casually tossed it to Eithne. "Here girl, in case we fail."

Asgalt and Flan watched stoically as the three Shang closed their ranks and began a slow march toward them.

Fully armed, the two would have been more than a match for the three. Fully armed, one alone may have won, but armed with nothing but a spear apiece, and with no armor, their future looked dim indeed. Both were too experienced in combat to feel they had much chance.

Suddenly the Shang stopped, and one pointed with his sword. "Old Man!" he yelled. "Do you know me? Look well and long, for I mean to give your dead eyes a better view on the end of my lance!"

Asgalt snarled and roared, "You spawn of a snake. I missed you once, but I won't now!"

He then spoke quietly to Flan.

"I know that dog. We fought once before, and my horse bolted before I could kill him. Then a Spaewoman said he would never die by my hand. Since then he's hoped to meet me." His voice grew low and urgent. "Listen, we may stand a chance. He's convinced that I want to kill him myself. What I want you to do is charge with me, then before we hit, fall back, and stab whatever comes open. I'll hit alone. But whatever you do, keep glancing at Artor, the one with the red shield."

The two gripped their spears and started forward. Their right hands gripped the butts, holding them tight and close to the hip, while their left hands were extended along the shaft.

Their pace quickened, and both pairs of eyes glanced left. Artor the Shang muttered low to his men, and their gait increased.

Suddenly Asgalt broke into a run, and Flan quickly caught up with him, but just as contact was to be made, Flan dropped back. Asgalt, spear pointed directly at the man in the center, but eyes constantly glancing left, leaped forward, spun, and drove his spear directly into the face of the man on his right. The spearhead skimmed the top of the shield, smashed upward through the roof of the mouth, and stuck in the bone of the skull. Wrenching his spear loose, he barely slid aside in time to avoid the shearing stroke of a sword. Off balance from missing his blow, the man stumbled. Asgalt grabbed his shield with one hand, spun him around, and drove his spear into his back. The Duke looked up in time to see Artor's sword about to descend, when Flan, in a clean hard lunge, drove his spear through the body of the Shang. The spear caught Artor under the arm, and actually pierced the shield on the other side of his body!

Artor staggered, shock and pain clouded his face. He looked at Flan, then back to Asgalt. "You didn't kill me," he muttered. Then his eyes glazed, he fell heavily, twitched and lay still.

***

The rest of the climb was brutal. It seemed to Asgalt that he must have completely forgotten just how much physical exertion it required. He was thankful that the girl was sturdy, so that only a few times were they required to actually lift her. When they reached the ledge where they would make their camp, only pride kept him from collapsing at once. The Shang had all carried food bags, so at least there was now plenty to eat. The fare was plain, but all thought they had never tasted better.

"Asgalt, what do we face tomorrow?"

"A short climb, then it's merely a hard walk. Once we reach the top, it'll be over."

Flan looked quizzical, "How did you build a bridge?"

"We didn't build a bridge the first time we crossed. There used to be a tree, and we got a rope caught in it, and I swung across. We built it from the other side. It was while we were trying to raise an army. It was a good place to escape to if there was need. He was determined to keep the Royal blood alive, and we could hole up, then dash across. We built the bridge from the other side, and Old Lyulf, cagey he was, designed it so that it would be easy to chop through from this side. Other side has rock foundations."

Conversation died, and the stars shone down, diamond bright in the crisp, clear night air. Asgalt leaned his bade against the rock and tried to sleep, but for a change sleep eluded him. He watched Eithne and Flan, heard the low muted laughter, saw the looks into each other's eyes. He smiled to himself, and he remembered another girl, one with hair black as night, and lips that were red, and eyes that laughed. Another night, long ago, when he had sat with her, and their eyes had met. He could still hear her laugh, see her smile, and feel the touch of her hand. How the people had gasped when he had married her and made her a Duchess! The life they had was good. The pain of losing her was still with him. It had been hard, but she had given him two strong sons and two beautiful daughters, and he must see that they were taken care of.

He sat up and shook off the inexplicable nostalgia.

"Flan. Let me interrupt you children." He took off his Ducal ring. 'Take this. It's foolish for me to pretend I'm not bone tired, and the two of you can make better time down the mountain to the way station than I can. Take this, show it to the guard there, and grab two fast horses and go on to Castle Jagai. Give the ring to Olwen, and have him send riders out to raise the levy. He'll know what to do."

Flan took the ring. "Aye, and I'll have him prepare a Hero's Welcome for his Lord."

Asgalt laughed. "A hero, a hero. . . . Hell, have him prepare for a tired old man! And Lyulf will have parades and pageants after this is over. Now let me get some sleep."

But the sleep was brief, and this time Asgalt awakened with both Eithne and Flan. Food was gulped hurriedly and the last leg of the journey was begun.

The last of the climb was hard, but quick. As they reached the top, as if planned, all three turned in unison and looked back down the trail; sun glinted off Shang armor.

Shaking his head in disgust, the Duke muttered . . . "We're a lot alike, the Shang and I, we never let up, and we never forget."

The last portion was made at a dog trot over flat firm earth. A quick turn, a small hill, and the bridge was before them. It spanned a chasm that was only the width of five tall men, but it extended out of sight on either side, and the eye was lost in the distance to the bottom.

The bridge was a simple, crude affair, no railings, but two ropes on either side gave some security.

"Flan. Go cut the ropes on that end while I undo these." He knelt and began working on the thick rope. By the time he had finished, Flan had cut both and was standing beside him.

Asgalt stripped off his armor and began to fashion a sling to go around his body and between his legs. Once this was done he turned to Flan and Eithne.

"You two go on ahead. I can cut the bridge loose from this side and cross on the two remaining ropes. This was in case we ever got caught on this side. I told you old Lyulf was cagey."

Flan shook his head. "Let me climb down. I can cut them quicker than you."

"No, I helped build it. I'll cut it down. Now get on across."

Asgalt secured the rope and lowered himself until he was even with the supporting posts of the bridge. He swung out and back until he had grasped a beam, then wedged himself between it and the cliff, wrapping his legs tight around the wood.

He leaned back. He was tired and wanted to rest for a few minutes, but there wasn't time. He removed the axe from his belt and began to chop.

The space was narrow, and the cut had to be made close to his body, so that there was little room for a full swing. He swung the axe in short, hard blows, wrenching it to clear the blade on each stroke. His hand cramped and his forearm began to quiver with the strain, but he never ceased his relentless rhythm. It seemed to him that with each stroke the wood grew harder and the axe duller.

But slowly, ever so slowly, the cut widened and deepened. He stopped, thrust the axe back through his belt and massaged his aching hand and forearm.

A few more should do it, he thought. Damn, will I be glad to rest in a bed again, beside a nice warm fire.

He hooked his knees about the beam, and trusting to the thick rope, leaned out, swinging the axe upward in vicious strokes, as if the wood were a personal enemy.

The wood cracked and broke loose, and Asgalt kicked out and swung free in case the whole bridge broke loose, but it sagged, creaked and held.

The Duke ignored the yawning chasm below him, and cursed with a fervor and feeling that was awesome in its intensity. Still cursing, he pulled himself back up the rope, attached it on the other side, and began the whole process over.

Sweat stung his eyes, and his back began to ache from the strained unnatural position. He worked more slowly, and would stop after several strokes to gauge the depth of the cut, and to clear his vision. The bridge creaked and sagged even further as the amount of wood holding it grew less. After what seemed hours, the top began to splinter and snap. He quickly slipped off the beam and as he kicked back and away, swung the axe once more. The axe bit, the wood cracked, and the bridge slipped downward, grabbing the axe, flipping it loose from his grip. Then bridge and axe fell end over end into the depths below.

Asgalt watched the dwindling shapes . . . "Hmmuph, man could starve before he hit bottom," he thought.

Again he pulled himself up the rope, this time more slowly. A shout greeted him, and he saw Flan and Eithne wave from the other side.

"Well done, Lord Duke, well done!"

Asgalt waved tiredly. Even his bones ached. His forearms quivered uncontrollably, and his knees were flaccid, almost unable to bear his weight. He pat down heavily, his body worn and his eyes dulled with fatigue. His hand aimlessly gripped the hilt of his sword, he gazed blindly at the mail shirt, helmet and shield that lay at his feet.

Wearily he rose and walked back along the path. Far down he could see the first of the Shang as they made the turn, walking cautiously, expecting an ambush behind every rock.

"Still time," he muttered under his breath.

He walked back and picked up his mail, slipped it on, and buckled the sword about his waist. The familiar weight felt comforting, an old friend.

Once again he sat down on the rock, ignoring the urgent shouts from Flan and Eithne.

He chuckled to himself. They're right, I'm growing old. Old Lyulf was right, it comes before you know, and soon you don't even care.

He looked across the gorge to Flan and Eithne, and their youthful figures brought back a flood of memories, and his past life fled across his mind's eye. He remembered the aimless wanderings, the battles; he stood again on the walls of Castle Glaun, with Colwen beside him, holding the breach against attack after attack, until the enemy fell back, dismayed and broken and not being able to break two men. He wandered again, guarding the life of the King and the young Prince, and he remembered the final charge in the battle for the Crown. The foes falling before him until he had reached the Standard, cutting down the bearer, and then with one stroke cutting through the helmet, head and chest of Morgaun.

He realized suddenly that life had been good to him, that he had achieved a great deal, and that now the battles were over. All he had to do was walk across that rope bridge. There would be parades, and feasts, and even tournaments, all in his honor. And once that was over, there would be a quiet life for the remainder of his years. He would grow old, and slightly fat, and honors would still be heaped on him. His sons were near grown, and his daughters already promised. The Kingdom was secure, no new threats, no new battles.

He thought of how nice it would be, to sleep in a soft bed, to take an attractive serving girl to the same bed. . . . Yes, life would be pleasant until that final sleep in that same soft bed.

The Duke of Jagai stood and wearily reached for his helmet and shield, an old man, gray hair glinting in the sun, and tired beyond belief.

The sword flashed in a short, bright arc, and the rope parted and twisted its way downward.

The years and fatigue seemed to melt from his body as he buckled his helmet and dressed his shield on his arm. He stood straight and tall and strong, and his eyes were hell-bright!

With a strong and steady stride, Asgalt, Duke of Jagai, marched down to meet the Shang.

Taking the High Road

by R.P.L. Johnson

Personal Log: Lori Childs - Senior Planetary Scientist

Date: 12/04/2037 (+4 Months 7 days)

Distance From Earth: 1.19AU

They waited two weeks to tell us about the accident.

I guess they had to be sure. There was no point in making us worry unnecessarily. But it meant that when the announcement came, it seemed there was no way out: no wiggle room, no chance of a second opinion.

I was in the Deck 3 Lab when the call came through to meet in the storm shelter. Beth Young was behind me, almost back-to-back in the small compartment. She was checking the readouts for the solar array: something to do with a power drain in the aeroponics lamps. Anyway, she was looking right at the data. If there was some kind of solar storm, some unpredicted event that could force us into the storm shelter she would have seen it in the data. She just looked at me and shrugged.

I was never a very good astronaut. Don’t get me wrong, I love Mars: I have done ever since I can remember. I used to dream about walking on that red dirt, and my whole career has been about making that dream a reality.

But getting to the red planet takes a different set of skills. I never triggered any red flags that would have seen me bounced me from the mission, but neither was I comfortable in space.

We were two decks down from the storm shelter. Not far, not in a ship like the Liberty, but far enough when you’re expecting radiation or pressure alarms to start sounding any second.

Some people say they can feel the difference in gravity between decks, but I think they’re just fooling themselves. The Liberty looked like two grain silos connected by a tether five hundred metres long that was essentially one huge carbon molecule. One silo was the crew compartment, the other housed the reactor. And the whole thing was spinning through space to give us the illusion of gravity as we hurtled between Earth and Mars. At the centre of rotation was a small unmanned module that housed the communication gear and solar array mounted on gimbals so that they always pointed where they were supposed to despite our rotation. On that scale, the three metre difference between decks means next to nothing.

Commander Campbell looked like hell, as if he hadn’t slept for two nights although I had seen him at breakfast and he’d been fine then. He didn’t say much, he just played the message that had come through at the start of the morning shift.

I don’t remember much of it, just snippets like how the file was marked MC+ meaning it was for the Mission Commander’s eyes only. I remember wondering if Campbell was going to get into trouble for showing it to us. That was before I realised that rebukes from Mission Control were the last of our worries.

There had been an accident on Mars: an ‘Unexpected Environmental Event’ in the Agency’s typically understated parlance. Even two weeks later they were still working out exactly what had happened, but the best guess was that higher than expected winds had forced enough dust inside a joint on the fuel farm to clog a pressure valve. Shortly after that initial fault an explosion had devastated the site. All telemetry from the fuel farm ceased and reports from other systems all pointed to a massive systemic failure. Now, two weeks later, the only data they were still getting were temperature readings and they were showing Mars ambient.

The fuel farm was dead, and with it had gone all the other modules intended to support us during our time on Mars.

I don’t think I realised at first what that meant. I remember turning to Beth and seeing tears in her eyes. The Liberty had finally spun down to Martian gravity three weeks ago, and great globes of one-third-gravity teardrops clung to Beth’s lashes until she blinked them away.

The fuel farm was our ticket home. It was a self-contained chemical plant that mixed hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to produce methane. It had been sent to Mars on an unmanned probe along with the habitation modules twenty-six months ago during the last launch window. Making fuel on site spared us from hauling that mass all the way from Earth. The fuel farm was what had made a manned mission to Mars a reality and now it was gone.

There was not so much panic as anger. Less shouting than I thought the situation warranted, but what there was echoed off the aluminium walls. Campbell held up his hands for quiet which was a long time coming. Eventually he said, “As of now, I am activating the emergency response plan. Now I realise it’s been a while since you’ve read it but it’s in your kits and it’s on the network so dig it out and get to know it. There will be a meeting of section heads in five minutes. For everyone else, remember that there is no immediate danger. Our biggest enemy at the moment is panic, so I expect to see everyone at their stations. That is all”

You are going to die, but don’t panic and go back to work. That is all.

The shouting started up again even before he had finished speaking. He let us carry on, like an angler letting out line for the fish to tire itself out before reeling it back in.

“I know this looks bad,” he said eventually. “But we’ve got months of consumables, more if we’re strict about it, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend that time with my thumb up my ass watching the O2 gauge and waiting to die.

“We have a ship full of PhDs. Everyone here is a certified genius and I’m going to ask you to prove it. We’ll find a work around: something they’ve missed. section heads, you now have two minutes.”

Eventually, we did go back to our stations. For one thing, although the storm shelter was big enough to hold the entire crew, it didn’t do so in much comfort and I found that comfort was what I needed right now more than anything. I needed my seat in the lab, my music: the consolations of the familiar.

We were all in shock I suppose. There was a note blinking on my terminal when I got back to my workstation: something about grief counsellors being on stand-by back on Earth in case we wanted to pour out our hearts in an e-mail. But the twenty minute round trip for messages didn’t seem appropriate. In the end we were alone.

“There must be something they can do,” Beth said. “A new orbit, slingshot around Mars and build up speed for a fast trip back—that sort of thing.”

“I don’t think so. If there was, they would have told us.”

Fumi Mashimo and Claire O’Brian had followed us back from the storm shelter and we sat together, knee-to-knee in the cramped compartment.

Beth tried again. “Perhaps they could send a rescue mission,” she said. “It wouldn’t have to be manned, just a heavy lift rocket with a care package of consumables. That might be enough to last until a window opens up for a return orbit.”

Fumi shook his head, long locks of snow white hair swaying in the reduced gravity like a slow-mo video from a shampoo commercial.

“It would take too long,” he said. My youthful years watching old kung-fu movies imbued his accented words with a wisdom they probably didn’t merit. Fumi was a palaeobiologist, not flight crew. He knew as much about Hohmann transfer orbits and Oberth manoeuvres as I did, i.e. not much.

“If it wasn’t manned they could send it at higher acceleration,” Claire O’Brian said. “That must open up some new orbits.”

“Unless it is on the launch pad now, it won’t get here in time. And if it was, they would have told us.” Fumi shook his head again. “There will be no rescue from Earth.”

“Then it’s up to us,” Claire said sounding almost chipper. "Like Campbell said, we have a ship full of geniuses. We just have to figure out a way to harness that."

"Unfortunately," Fumi said, "-gravity is not swayed by academic credentials. There are realities that we must face."

"Realities, yes, but not certainties. Beth, how long would it be until we could harvest crops from aeroponics?"

Beth looked shocked. "We're not set up for that. The aeroponics labs are basically just keeping the seedlings alive until we reach Mars. We don't have the capacity to start farming on board ship."

"What if we made capacity? We're carrying spare parts and lamps ready to be set up on Mars. What if we doubled or tripled the capacity of the labs? What then? We could supplement the food stores and the extra plants would take the load off the CO2 scrubbers."

"That won't get us home," I said.

"No but it enlarges the window for a rescue mission."

"Water," Beth said. "The recyclers aren't perfect, and the more water we use to grow plants, the less we have for ourselves. I'd have to do the numbers, but if we doubled our crop my guess is that we'd all die of thirst before we saw a harvest."

Claire was undaunted. "Then we'll just have to increase the efficiency of the recyclers. Come on, we have to try!" She looked around the small group. Beth was quiet, probably doing the calculations in her head. Fumi was typically inscrutable, but he was the type to dress for dinner and go down with the ship rather than fight for survival. And me? I just wanted to go home.

Personal Log: Lori Childs - Senior Planetary Scientist

Date: 23/04/2037 (+4 Months 18 days)

Distance From Earth: 1.201AU

Just when I thought we were beginning to accept our situation, our little community started to tear itself apart.

Our mission plan included a fly-by of comet 10P/Tempel. We were never going to get closer than five hundred kilometres, but that would have been close enough to view it with the naked eye. There had been robotic missions to comets before: even impacters and landers, but this was to have been a first for the manned space programme.

The problem was, the manoeuvre would use fuel.

"I don't see why we should stick to the mission plan when it's going to dramatically reduce our options later." By virtue of having the loudest voice, Ed Carradine had become the unofficial spokesperson for the ditch-the-mission-plan faction.

Craig Rowe took a deep breath. As pilot and second in command, he was responsible for internal ship matters including quelling a nascent mutiny.

"Our trajectory has been locked in since we left Earth. Yes, there will be a course correction both to finalise the fly-by and also to put us back in the groove for orbital insertion at Mars. But changing the trajectory to avoid the comet will also cost fuel."

"But it will save some."

"You don't know that.”

"Where exactly do you want to go?" Tom Barischoff the Chief Engineer said. "We can forget both burns if you like. Just carry on the way we're headed now. It won't mean anything. We'll die with full fuel tanks, that's all."

There it was: the "d" word. Up until now everyone had been talking about efficiency, optimum use of resources, avoiding the obvious objection to all these plans which was that none of them would get us back to Earth.

We were in the storm shelter again. It was even more crowded than usual now that a third of the space had been given over to Beth’s expanded aeroponics racks. The crew had split right down the middle. From day one there had been two distinct groups on the mission. Mission Control had even fostered the split with friendly, morale-building softball matches on the Antarctic tundra during our training.

On one side were the scientists: the guys who were going to study Mars. We were not so much payload specialists (as we would have been called in the shuttle era), but payload. We were the reason for the mission: to get our hands and eyes and brains to the surface of Mars.

On the other side were the flight crew and engineers, professional astronauts whose job it was to deliver us safely to Mars and keep us alive when we got there.

By a few days after we were told about the accident, you could run your finger down the roster and by looking at each person’s job description you could tell which side of the debate they would come down on.

The flight crew argued that we would best honour our memories by following our mission plan to the last breath. A few even argued for an attempted landing on Mars. The arguments had started with the hope that enough of the base would be salvageable to allow the mission to continue. Later some expressed a wish to at least stand on the red planet before they died.

But there were difficulties even in dying. Along with the fuel farm, the habitat and all the solar panels, we had also lost the transponder that would guide the lander in. Finding a nice spot on Mars to sit down and just let your air run out had a certain tragic beauty to it. A forced march across the landscape with a broken collar bone and a ruptured suit because the unassisted landing was a bit too hard was less attractive.

But the scientists didn’t have the same response to authority as the flight crew. Absolute obedience to the chain of command wasn’t drummed into us the way it was into them. We had all had years of training, but we were still scientists first and astronauts second. And guys like Ed objected to following the plan, not because they had any particular notion of what to do instead, but out of a more general inertia.

With every gram of fuel and litre of air being precious, the reluctance to utilise any of it was paralysing.

And Claire? Despite being one of the most vocal of the science department, she never aligned with either camp and instead attacked all ideas equally. Tom joked that talking to her for five minutes was like a stress-test for ideas. She probed every problem from multiple, simultaneous fronts. Some of the things she threw into the discussion were fanciful to say the least, but they were always novel and her scientific knowledge was prodigious extending well outside her specialty in geophysics.

I had spent hours in deep discussion with Claire. Indeed, in the days following Campbell's announcement it seemed that everyone on board had spent hours with her.

Our predicament seemed to instil in her a fervent energy. For most of us the adrenaline produced by fear was a short-lived reaction. In the face of such a gradual catastrophe as ours, no one could sustain the flight-or-fight reaction for long.

No-one except Claire.

I remember that we had talked about the concept of functional immortality: the idea that if you could increase the functional life of something, be that an engine part or a human being, by just a small amount, even as small as one day. And if you could keep doing that day-in day-out, then the part would never wear out. It would perpetually be one day away from failure, but if that day could be pushed ever further into the future then it would never come, and immortality of a sort could be achieved.

Claire was convinced that the concept could be applied to our situation. If we could solve the problems of the day, and keep doing that day-after-day, then the final collapse would never come. To that end she worked tirelessly. She helped to increase the efficiency of the waste recyclers, she brainstormed with Tom and Beth and together they managed to increase the yield from aeroponics. At her insistence we even started eating together, all fifteen of us in one large sitting in the storm shelter, so that the sharing of food became easier and less was wasted. Everything she did helped to push that final day a little further into the future.

Her refusal to align with either camp made her something of a lonely figure, and her manic energy had gained her the reputation of a bit of a kook. But we all ate together anyway. And when she spoke, dissenting voices on both sides of the argument yielded the floor.

“Could we match orbit?” I asked. Fourteen pairs of eyes turned in my direction.

“I mean, its ice isn't it. That's what we need.”

Claire was beaming at me. Oh crap! Whatever faction Claire was in, it looked like I was in it too!

"Lori's right," Claire said. "The question is not whether we should go look at the comet; it's what we do when we get there. Do we just watch as it flies past the window or do we try and use it?"

"Now hang on," I said. "I wasn't-" but I was drowned out as the chamber exploded in furious debate.

"We're headed away from Earth like a bat outta hell and you want us to accelerate?" said Ed Carradine.

I didn't want that, I didn't even know if catching up to the comet was possible, I just knew that Beth needed water for the crops and we were going to pass within a few hundred kilometres of megatonnes of the stuff. Like Claire said: solve a day’s problems and keep doing that every day and you can live forever.

Craig Rowe hadn't stopped staring at me since I'd first spoken. It was like he'd just seen a hamster whistle the star-spangled banner and was wondering if it would do it again. Then he smiled and started making some calculations on his pad.

"Look at it this way," Claire said. “We're victims of a shipwreck and a lifeboat is floating right past us. It’s heading away from shore, but if we don't climb aboard we're going to drown."

"Tempel has a period of what, five years?” said Ed Carradine. “You're signing us up for a five year joyride out of the solar system."

"Better that than choking on carbon dioxide within five months," someone said from behind me.

"More than five years,” Tom said. “The next orbit won't bring us any nearer to Earth. But she's right. The one thing we need right now is water. With water ice and sunlight we can make all the atmosphere we need. With water and dry ice we can make fuel. We have enough phosphates and nitrates to grow food for years. All we need is ice and time. If we can catch that comet we'll have both.”

The vote was carried eleven to three with one abstention, mine. I left as soon as the result was announced. That night as I lay in my crib, I turned the noisy little air fans up as high as they would go so that no-one would hear me cry.

Personal Log: Lori Childs - Ice Miner

Date: 2/08/2037 (+7 Months 28 days)

Distance From Earth: 0.87AU

I'm becoming a pretty good welder. There's not much to it, ice is a much more forgiving material than steel and the new welding lances and hot knives coming out of engineering are much easier to use than the clunky first generation tools.

The Liberty is starting to look more like a snow capped mountain than a ship. We used the Mars Lander as a kind of manned grappling hook for the initial contact with the comet and then brought the bulk of the Liberty in by reeling in the tether. Soon after the ship was secured to the surface, we started to clad it with ice.

The ice was Claire's idea. Not only does it act as shielding against cosmic rays, but it also protects against micro-meteorites. With this extra armour we're less reliant on the storm shelter. The whole ship has become as safe as the shelter--safer even.

In the original layout, the storm shelter was an additional pressure hull inside the ship. An air-tight cylinder shielded both by our limited supply of heavy metals and also by the water tanks that encircled it. By adding the ice we have essentially taken our water stores, frozen them and fixed them externally to the hull. That's freed up a lot of internal space. There is already talk of cannibalising the storm shelter's metals and its triple-redundant, self-contained life support. It was supposed to be our last resort in an emergency, but as Claire pointed out in the last Union, every day is an emergency.

The extra space is mostly given over to aeroponics. Living in the Liberty now feels like living inside a greenhouse. The loss of gravity has allowed Beth and Chris Mendenhall to start farming the walls and ceilings. Sometimes you float into a chamber and its like being on the inside of a kind of biological geode. All around you are the tendrils of Soya plants and the broad leaves of ferns.

At Union last week, Beth and Chris announced that they were engaged. Commander Campbell ordered that the last of the chocolate pudding be served and joked that he was saving the ice cream for the birth of the first child in space. At least I think he was joking.

Tom and the engineering crew are working around the clock taking the sensors, vents, antennae and all the Liberty’s other external hardware and extending them out on a forest of ducts and conduits, metres long. Then we grunts come along with our lances and the ice blocks as big as pool tables and make with the igloo building before the engineers reattach the hardware on the new ice.

It's hard work. At close to absolute zero, ice is as hard as steel. And even in microgravity the big blocks of ice still have mass and inertia. Getting them going is hard work and manoeuvring them into position even harder. We've had a few injuries. Muscle strains and one nasty crushing. Fumi was only saved from a broken ankle by the bulk of his suit. Even then his foot swelled up like the pulp of a blood orange.

God, I miss blood oranges!

When I go to sleep at night, my forearms are burning with fatigue and I sleep like the dead. There is talk of modifying some thruster units to help manoeuvre the ice, but it was voted down at Union. We need the exercise.

I'm glad of the work. This week marks the closest approach of Earth as its tighter orbit means it catches up with Tempel. Soon we will leave the plane of the ecliptic and start our journey out into the black. When we failed to make the orbital correction burn that would take us away from the comet, we started on a whole new mission. One that I am responsible for. Even though Commander Campbell is still nominally in charge, this joyride was my idea. Fifteen people's lives bet on my blurted out suggestion.

Personal Log: Lori Childs - Ice Miner

Date: 17/06/2038 (+1 year, 6 Months, 12 days)

Distance From Earth: 4.265AU

Some of us make more sacrifices than others.

I saw Tom Barischoff in the flight deck today. With no need for course corrections or any hope of landing on Mars, the compartment is now given over completely to storage. The only instrument of any worth is the radio which is the only reason the space is not given up to the wet warmth of aeroponics. I sometimes go there to escape the pervasive heat. Tom, it seemed was there for different reasons.

"Talking to my wife," he said. His eyes were raw like wounds. In his hands he clutched a scrap of something that glittered even in the low cabin illumination. He caught my stare. "I coated it with some of the diamond monofilm we were supposed to test on Mars." he said. "I was worried it would fade."

It was a small photograph of a size easily tucked into a wallet. As he turned it in his hands I saw the faces of a woman and a child pressed together in a shared hug and smiling at the camera.

I felt instantly ashamed, both for intruding on his privacy (and God knows that's hard to come by on board ship) and also for forgetting that Tom was married.

Back when the vote was taken to hitch our fate to a speeding comet, it was Tom’s vote that had settled it. Tom with the unofficial voting block of his engineering team, and his affable matter-of-factness that brought along many more. Tom with his casual competence that comes from years of getting real machinery to work in a real world that cared nothing for appearances and politics. Tom and his selfless action against interest.

I realised then that although I had forgotten about Tom’s wife and child, others had not. They saw this man with so much to go home for vote to take a ride out of the plane of the ecliptic and they figured that was the only way to go.

And so here he was... weeping in front of a radio while his words made the thirty five minute trip back to Earth. Plating family photos with abrasion-resistant film and looking in vain in his engineer's tool kit for a tool capable of mending the broken jagged lump in his chest.

The speaker crackled with a woman's voice as raw as Tom's eyes. I left them to it.

Personal Log: Lori Childs - Engineer’s Mate 2 Class

Date: 12/02/2039 (+2 years, 2 months, 7 days)

Distance From Earth: 3.486AU

I'd almost forgotten what gravity feels like. We're spinning up slowly: barely half a revolution per minute at the moment on a five hundred metre tether. That's enough for about 0.15G. But after acclimatising to Mars gravity and then spending nearly eighteen months weightless, believe me fifteen percent is plenty.

The halls of the Liberty ring with curses as all manner of stumbles, trips, drops, and falls have painted us all in a palette of bruise-purple.

But it had to be done: Diana is pregnant.

She told us at Union two weeks ago. She was concerned about the effect of weightlessness on the unborn child and so petitioned the group for the construction of a centrifugal exercise chamber.

Claire suggested one better. She announced that she had been studying the mineralogical maps of the comet and had found what she called a possible counterweight: a large mass of ice that was thoroughly marbled with useful minerals that she believed could be cut free relatively easily.

Claire proposed freeing the mass and using it as a counterweight to set the Liberty spinning again. It would mean free flight and so we would have to use fuel to hold station with Tempel. But that wasn't so much of a problem. We’re now producing kilogrammes of methane and free hydrogen every few days. Barely enough to coat the inside of the fuel tanks and not nearly enough to take us home, but more than enough for station keeping.

And so it was back on the lances. More detailed work this time, and more dangerous. The counterweight massed close to half a million tonnes. Over a period of weeks we cut away at the surrounding ice and placed shaped charges around its remaining supports.

We were all aboard ship and in pressure suits, helmets on but visors raised when Tom Barischoff fired the charges. It was a supreme anticlimax: the explosion, buffered by half a million tonnes of ice was little more than a ripple to bend the fronds of our aeroponic walls.

Amy DeLuca never got to fly her lander down to the Martian surface, but she did get to pilot a comet, or at least a fragment of one. The explosion had set us moving away from Tempel at the rate of a few centimetres a second. The Liberty--never a sportster at the best of times--was a sluggish tugboat hauling a half a million tonne barge. It took hours to rise clear of Tempel.

Over the next few weeks we slowly started to set the giant mass spinning. We used mirrors to vaporise chunks of the surface, forming a fog of out-gassing volatiles that slowly became a mini comet’s tail as the counterweight started to move.

We were aiming for 0.52RPM: enough to give us our 0.15G at full tether extension. 0.52RPM was not much. It equated to a speed on the surface of about nine kilometres per hour.

Once that magic number was achieved, we gathered again in the storm shelter. Everyone except Claire was in spacesuits. She had opted for comfort and wore shorts and a t-shirt with the NASA logo that read, STOP THE WORLD, I WANT TO GET OFF!.

We all listened in on the intercom as Craig Rowe took the left-hand jumpseat in our underused bridge and slowly let out the tether, leaving the lander attached to the counterweight while the bulk of the ice-clad Liberty eased away at low thrust. We must have looked like a spider extending on a gossamer thread from a slowly spinning globe of muddy ice.

There was an embarrassing flatulent chorus as our internal organs negotiated for space inside our bodies. And with that fanfare, gravity returned.

Personal Log: Lori Rowe - Engineer’s Mate

Date: 21/08/2042 (+5 years, 8 months, 16 days)

Distance From Earth: 0.835AU

Today we had the first death in the manned space programme since Columbia and it was all my fault.

It was a routine operation. My team was on the counterweight, mining a particularly rich seam of aluminium oxide dust. Grunt work, nothing that we hadn't done a score of times before. Fumi was helping secure the power cables for my lance. One minute he was fine, the next I turned round to look at him and saw the inside of his visor splattered with vomit. A light blinked on his chest plate, low oxygen.

It took us forty minutes to get him back to the Liberty. His body was limp: limbs splayed out like a human starfish by the internal pressure of his suit. We had to manhandle him inside the small airlock like we were bringing in a chunk of ice, which in a way we were.

Fumi was dead.

Diana read out the autopsy at Union that evening. He died peacefully, she said. A bad regulator in his suit slowly asphyxiated him. So slowly, he never even realised there was a problem. He would have just felt a bit light-headed and fainted inside his suit. The vomit I saw was just a reflex, he was probably past saving even then. There was nothing we could have done, but Tom suggested a thorough overhaul of all the suits to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

There is an unspoken convention at Union: everyone attends and everyone stays until the end. Dinner is a politics-free zone, but after that comes a town hall meeting. If someone is criticizing you or your department, tough. You get the right of reply, but no-one dodges the issue. Everyone gets a chance to be heard. It’s worked pretty well so far.

This time, I just couldn’t do it. There were other people crying, but what I felt was more than just sadness. It was as if everyone was looking at me. I was the one who had dragged us out here. If I hadn’t suggested catching the comet, Fumi would never have had to make a single spacewalk. I remember nothing of the eulogy, I just remember a rising sensation of smothering and cloying warmth as if my regulator had malfunctioned and I was the one who was asphyxiating.

I fled.

Claire found me in the ready room where the suits were kept between shifts. The casing on Fumi’s suit was open, the faulty regulator exposed. I was staring at it.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Claire said. “These suits were never designed for the kind of punishment we put them through.”

“If we hadn’t landed on the comet, we wouldn’t have needed to use them at all.”

Claire took my hands. With a maternal gesture that I found at once intensely invasive but also reassuring, she smoothed a lock of my hair back behind my ear. The look in her eyes was one of almost beatific kindliness and calm.

“Then his death was as much my fault as it was yours. I pushed for this just as much as you: more even.”

“Don’t you ever worry that it was the wrong thing to do?” I saw in her eyes that she didn’t.

“We’re five years into an eight month trip,” she said. “If we hadn’t landed on Tempel, Fumi would probably have died long ago along with the rest of us.”

She hugged me and her voice was a whisper against my ear.

“Don’t think about one death. Remember his life and the fourteen other lives you saved.”

She said it with such conviction, such assured passion that for a moment I almost believed it.

Personal Log: Lori Rowe - Assistant Astrogator

Date: 7/03/2054 (+17 years, 3 months, 2 days)

Distance From Earth: 3.022AU

Jessica was almost uncontrollable today. The pressure testing of the new habitat wasn't even complete and she already wanted to move in. I tried to reason with her, but the confidence of teenagers, along with the mass of the electron and the speed of light, seems to be as constant out here as it was on the Earth of my youth.

"Oh Mum!" she said. "We don't have to wait. If the ice held the overpressure during mining, then it's bound to hold up under one lousy atmo. Even if there is a pipsqueak leak, we can just find-and-fix after we've moved in!"

A pipsqueak leak! She was talking about a hull breach. It was the kind of thing that would have sent the engineers at Mission Control into paroxysms of activity and my fourteen year old daughter talked about it as if she was discussing the colour of the drapes.

We were one of the last families to move over. The counterweight already held the new aeroponics garden, the pool, sick bay and suites for four families. A warren of chambers had been melted into the muddy ice and lined and clad and lit and pressurised. There was more enclosed volume over there now than there was in old Liberty.

Our ship now resembled a flying barbell of glittering ice. I'm sorry that I haven't chronicled this better, but Tom will have catalogued the changes in exhaustive technical detail. Where once we were an ice-armoured tin can being spun around at the end of a tether from the spinning ball. Years of mining, building and tunnelling, had distributed the mass almost evenly. The tether that once connected us was still there, but its carbon nanotubes were mostly used for data cables now. The structural work was taken up by the shaft, a fifty metre thick column of reinforced ice enclosing the transfer tunnel. At the barycentre a slight thickening held not only the old comms array and sensors, but also the zero-Gym and sort of parish hall-come-nightclub where Aaron Rhodes traded his home-brewed beer and which the youngsters had named the Centrey-Bar.

We didn’t eat together anymore, but we still held Union once a week. Sometimes we premiered new movies beamed straight from Earth. Other weeks were taken up by ship business or celebrations.

We had shed a lot of mass: sloughed off the looser, friable material and sent it back to the main body of the comet where we could pick it up any time. The Liberty was now a sprightly twenty five hundred tonnes, five times her launch mass and more massive even than the orbital shipyard where she had been built.

Now each family had a suite of rooms to itself and the tunnelling was still ongoing. Maria Cosatti, Diana and Frank’s daughter, was nearly sixteen and she had been going steady with one of the Mendenhall twins for nearly two years. This first generation of born spacefarers had grown up quickly. The smart money was on a marriage as soon as the next apartment was ready and a third generation soon after that despite the protestations of Diana, the soon-to-be first grandma in space.

Personal Log: Lori Rowe - Assistant Astrogator

Date: 7/01/2059 (+22 years 1 month 2 days)

Distance From Earth: 2.36AU

Claire’s will left specific instructions on how to deal with her remains.

We’d had a couple of deaths so far, Fumi’s accident and Kristen Bradfield’s tragic death during childbirth, but Claire’s was the first death that we had time to prepare for.

I read out her instructions at Union and tried to remember when she first told us about the cancer. It was about six months ago. This letter was dated two years prior to that--hand written on pages from a NASA notepad a quarter-century old. She had known for some time, but had kept it from everyone.

I have transcribed it here in its entirety:

Do not grieve. That’s the first thing. Death itself is nothing-only a cessation of things, an end to pain. The anticipation of death is only somewhat more frightening, but only because of what I fear for my loved ones. I do not fear the end, but I do tremble at the thought of being the cause of sadness. So do not grieve, I could not bear it.

I would like my body to be placed in the biome for recycling. By the time you read this, I will have gone. All that remains are chemicals pressed into my form. If that is too much for you, then let the children do it. They understand. They see this final sacrament for the gift that it is and are not encumbered by the mawkish sentimentality of what once was. Their mythology is one borne of looking forward. They tell tales of what will be. No campfire yarns of the deeds of ancient heroes for them. Their heroes are yet to come and indeed may be closer than any of you realise.

I don’t want to say I told you so

So do not grieve for me. I out of all of us, gained the most from our prolonged detour. I signed on for a three year mission, thinking that was the closest I would ever get to life lived among the stars. I sometimes feel guilt. Guilt at having enjoyed my life so much. It was almost as if the accident was my fault: an act of karmic sabotage to bring about what I wanted more than anything else.

Look at us now. Comet riders and spacefarers: a pocket sized nation of citizen scientists with a unity of purpose not seen since we left behind the subsistence farming of medieval village life and yet with all of space before us. No longer limited to our fields, our herds and the banks of our river--we can now take these things with us and there is no limit to our wanderings.

So do not grieve. Pick me apart and set every molecule to work. This ship is my dream and I have worked all my life to see it come to fruition and I’ll be damned if I let a little thing like death intervene.

Ad Astra

Claire

Personal Log: Lori Rowe - Assistant Astrogator (retired)

Date: 24/06/2062 (+25 years 6 months 19 days)

Distance From Earth: 0.01AU and closing!

There it is, our first view of our home planet in twenty-five years. A few of us gathered in the observation bubble once word got around that Earth was now a recognisable sphere rather than just a cluster of blue green pixels.

It looks odd. No, that's not right. It looks exactly as it should look, exactly as it has always looked from this distance. It looks like it looked from the Moon in Apollo, like it looked from the Liberty during those first days. It looked exactly the same as it had always looked: it is my perception of it that has changed.

At one time I would have given everything I had to see that old ball again and to know that I was coasting towards it. All I ever wanted was to go home. And now, faced with the planet of my birth, I realise that I will never again call it home.

It has not changed, but I have. My parents are gone and I never had much of an extended family or even friends outside of my career. My family is here now.

Maria Cosatti is commander now and she has a shopping list as long as the tether. We can do a lot on board ship, but some things just need manufacturing clout or technical expertise that we just don't have in our potted population of twenty-seven souls.

Although we don’t have money, we're not short of things to barter with. We have a hold full of magnesium and titanium. Nothing too spectacular, no asteroid-sized diamonds or alien artefacts. But every tonne of mass we leave in orbit is a tonne less to be lifted out of Earth's gravity well. Factoring in that mark-up, we are all returning Earth as billionaires.

There is an ulterior motive too. Every plate and pressure vessel, every kilo of water ice we leave in orbit is an invitation. Like a cookie held out to a wary child it says come on, we won't bite. Come and play.

The fact is that we've had a hell of a run of luck. We set out in a fragile tin can hurled like a bolas at the blackness but we are coming back in a glittering spaceship under our own power and with fuel to take us anywhere in the solar system.

But we're lonely. Our little community can't last forever. Parts wear out, people too.

Along with the refined metals, the pre-manufactured solar cells and tonnes of water and methane ice, we are also returning to Earth with a lifetime of experience. This you can have for free. Along with these excerpts from personal logs, all the technical specs of the Liberty along with all the other manuals, drawings, routines and algorithms that we've used to turn the old girl into the ship she really wanted to be will be transmitted to the net... Probably they seem a bit old fashioned to you. Sure, we've had twenty-five years of hands on experience in spacefaring, but our materials science and sensor and propulsion tech is now a quarter century out of date. I'm sure you can do better.

We'll be swinging by just long enough to drop off Tom and a few sightseers and arrange for the trade of those items we need. After that who knows? Perhaps a few months in a pole to pole orbit mapping Venus, or a trip to the Jovian system if we can work the bugs out of the magnetic shielding.

We'll be back in a few years. No-one fancies another quarter century between refills of chocolate, steak, penicillin and morphine. But it will be as visitors, traders. We are not Earthlings, not any more. And space is too interesting to watch from the bottom of a planetary gravity well.

I thought I was coming home, but this is my home now as one day it could be yours.

That's about all I have to say. No doubt as well as my humble account, you'll want to read the logs of some of the other crew members. I understand that Claire's video diary has already gone viral. Some of you may even be interested in Craig’s mystery trilogy that he insists on including in the upload. But don't spend too much time reading. It's a big system out here. Enough for thousands of ships, millions even.

Come on up... We'll be waiting for you.

Conella and the Cyclops Sea Serpent of Doom

by John Ringo

DEDICATION:

As always:

For Captain Tamara Long, USAF

Born: May 12, 1979

Died: 23 March 2003, Afghanistan

You fly with the angels now.

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY… DAY, AROUND NOONISH AND THUS NOT PARTICULARLY DARK AND THE STORM WASN’T THAT SEVERE, BARELY A GUST REALLY…

There was a truncated scream as the scantily clad woman was enwrapped by the lightning tongue of the sea serpent and whisked into his mouth. The head of the beast, two stories high and as wide as two ships parked end to end, reared up over the harbor, it single eye gleaming red as its mouth worked, opening and closing thoughtfully. As it would open, choked screams could faintly be heard.

“Phew!” it gasped. “Kind of overdid the perfume, sssister. Ugh, what ISSS that ssstuff? Eau de ssskunk oil? Royal blood, check. Virrrginnn…? Ssseriously King Pooram, you need to either put a chassstity girdle on your daughtersss or your Palaccce guardsss. Not hardly. Not even ‘hey, you don’t want to die a virgin, do you?’ hardly. Sssurpised you’re not a grand-dad. Oh, well, needsss mussst…” There was a watery crunch and a gulp. “See you in five yearsss. Ssssssuckah!”

“Oh why oh why did I agree to this gods-cursed contract?!” King Pooram wailed, his head in his hands. The throne room glittered with expensive stuff.

“We were starving,” Head Councilor Vizier pointed out.

“And now we are rich,” Councilor Redshirt said, oily, his jowls quivering in greed. “The shoals of fish the serpent sends to our waters have made us the wealthiest island in all the archipelago. And if we do not abide by the contract, the Great Cyclops Serpent will lay waste the entire island. Great King, noble King, sometimes sacrifices must be made for the greater good.”

“You are right, Councilor Redshirt,” the king said, lifting his face from his hands. “Guards! Take Councilor Redshirt down to the harbor, cut open his fat belly and feed the shoals of fish that make us so wealthy with his innards.”

“But Great King!” Redshirt said as he was hauled away. “I am your most loyal councilor!”

“You’re my most annoying councilor,” Pooram said, waving his hand in dismissal. “Right now, I want to lay waste to the entire island myself. Killing you will sate my anger somewhat and save many lives at the cost of one. Sometimes sacrifices must be made for the greater good.”

“No great loss, there,” Head Councilor Vizier said as the screaming wretch was hauled away.

“Agreed,” Pooram said. “But there is still the problem of the Contract. I have only one remaining daughter. Valeria was no great loss, except to the Guards and stable boys who are mourning her as we speak. Katerell was pretty but so entirely brain-dead she could be outthought by a rutabaga. Isabella, however… I need to think.”

“Oh Father!” Isabella wailed, bouncing and writhing on his lap as she had since she was a child. There was, however, some recent additional bounce. “Poor, poor Valeria! I miss her SO.”

“She used to put ants in your bed then tighten the sheets so you could not escape.”

“But she was my beloved sister!”

“She once fed you a quart of castor oil, telling you it would reveal your soul.”

“But she was my sister!”

“When you were six, she taught you to sing a quite raunchy song then locked you in the guard’s barracks all night. It’s only the gods to thank that they weren’t the current crop of guards.”

“All right,” Isabella said, flopping onto his lap and sighing. “She was a witch and I was secretly cheering when she got slurped. But in five years the serpent will demand your last daughter. That would be, in case you hadn’t noticed, me. And who shall bounce on your lap and writhe and giggle for you then?”

“You’ll be seventeen. Hopefully, someone to whom I am not related.”

“I also have been studying massage, act as your food taster and am your FAVORITE DAUGHTER,” she screamed, grabbing his chain of office and pulling her face up to his. “You have to DO SOMETHING!”

“We’ve tried heroes…”

“Try harder! The WHOLE kingdom and MY hand in marriage. I’ll make sure you get a nice apartment with a view. Throw the massage part into the advertisement. I bounce even better these days in all sorts of places and I’m getting REALLY good at the writhing…”

“Noted. Okay, I’ll put out the ads. Again. And in the meantime, I’ll try to work something out with the serpent.”

“Nope,” the serpent said, nudging the last of the blue fin into the shoals. They were meeting at their usual spot, the end of the rocky spit protecting the harbor. The king carefully failed to note the remaining blood stains from the latest would-be hero.

“You get all the fishshsh in the sea, or sssomething resembling it. More than your boatsss can catch that’sss for sssure. I keep having to herd the tuna back in again and again and again. Got any idea how hard it isss to herd tuna? You provide one daughter of royal blood every five yearsss. All you got to do isss keep on pumpin’. Losssing the lead in your pencccil?”

“Pencil’s fine,” the king said. “Wife’s not so up on the whole having her progeny eaten. And her biological clock seems to have wrung the last bell.”

“Your problem, not mine. If you don’t, I get to lay wassste to the whole island and eat everybody. Ssso if you hold out on the lassst daughter… Don’t. I’ll just eat the boat you try to sssail her off in. And if ssshe’s on the island, I’ll ssseek her out and eat her firssst as an appetizzzer.”

“It seems like an unfair agreement.”

“You sssigned.”

“We were starving.”

“Dotted line.”

“Because, as it turns out, you were driving all the fish away from the island.”

“Sssigned contract. Read it and weep.”

“King Borger of Lonky has a number of daughters he hasn’t been able to shift…”

“Because they’re fat and ugly. Got to hand it to you, you breed high quality ssstock. Even that lassst one, rode hard and put up wet asss ssshe was for her age, wasss pretty tasssty.”

“Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome. And keep the heroessss coming. Lots of meat on those bonesss.”

“I’ll do my level best.”

#

“Beware, Serpent! I am Amawulf, Son of Beawulf, slayer of the Dread Beast of Angor! Holder of the sword…”

SSSLURP.

“Sssorry? The sssword…? Blast, he’s gone.”

#

“Behold Throgcrusher, Dwarven…”

SSSLURP!

“Uff, pak! Dwarvesss! You can NEVER get the beard out of your teeth!”

#

“Behold…!”

SSSLURP!

#

“Beware…!”

SSSLURP!

#

“I am…!”

SSSLURP!

“Agatean? Buhani? Slurp…slurp… No… No… Tomaran, right? Was that one Tomaran? South end of the island… About twenty… eight years old. I’m right, arent’ I…? Gods I’m good…”

#

CHAPTER TWO

ENTER THE VIXEN

Five lithe, muscular and naked young men hauled the lines of the sloop while behind them, holding a whip made of twine the exact length of his inordinately short penis, capered an ancient mariner, his skin wizened and crinkled into sun-blackened leather.

“Haul the jib!” he croaked, flailing the useless whip. “Cap’n said haul the jib for the sake of the gods!”

The captain of the sloop was using one shapely but powerful hand with neatly painted nails to hold the wheel against the current while the other wielded a twenty foot pink bullwhip.

“Taut that jibsheet!” the captain cried. The whip cracked out, leaving the outline of a heart on the buttocks of one of the sailors. “Haul away you scurry dogs…!”

“Scurvy, cap’n!”

“Scurvy dogs! I want to see some rippling muscles and gleaming sweat!” The whip cracked out again leaving an incredibly detailed and erotic sketch on the back of another sailor.

Describing the captain from deck up, and why not after all, should start with the boots. These were boots that had been around the block a few times. But less, a discerning viewer of some thoughtfulness might surmise, because the captain couldn’t afford new boots but because in a day and age of sailing ships and cyclops sea serpents it was just gods-damnably hard to find six inch platform, broad-heel, thigh-high patent-leather boots that fit so gods-damnably well and were so damnably comfortable while walking around the block. The discerning and thoughtful viewer would probably get the impression that if the captain of the sloop ever happened upon some poor person wearing a similar pair of boots that would probably fit as well that person had better be willing to hand them over or suffer the consequences. In the meantime, a little patching, a little polish, a few dozen, okay hundreds, of rivets and they were still hanging in there.

The next description, for the discerning reader’s viewing pleasure, should probably be the flash of upper thigh above the boots. A close, circling pan, quite close, as the discerning reader metaphorically tries to tilt his or her head to the side for possibly just the teensiest flash under the inordinately short skirt you little perv straighten up and look at the thigh, damnit! would in a word association test in seventy percent of respondents probably provoke the word “tan.” An additional ten percent would be unable to say a word as their mouth was too dry. The next ten percent would probably be saying something like “Lick! Must… Lick!” The last ten percent, almost all gay males, would probably say “Oh, dear. Look at those scars. Doesn’t she know there’s creams for that? How barbaric!”

And indeed, the brief flash of thigh and, as the mental cameraman that the writer is quite upset with pans upwards at one point to reveal a bit of firmly muscled buttocks underhang, the thigh I said! shows extensive and curious scars. Some are clearly from blades, probably wielded in anger. Others, however, mimic the hearts, moons and stars that lovingly grace the backs, thighs and buttocks of the captain’s fearless crew. This captain has not simply been around the block. This captain has cruised every block in every major city in the known world to the point of wearing grooves in the sidewalks. Street vendors know this captain’s name and scantily clad women leaning against lightposts bow to this captain as to a goddess.

Mention having been made of the skirt we shall continue upwards. Were it not for a construction of narrow strips of hanging leather with iron plate riveted on thus giving the impression of the most laughable piece of armor in history, the word “belt” would be more appropriate. And not a wide belt at that. The only way that it could concede to any sense of modesty was, as the captain wore it, by being pulled so far down the upper bulge of the mons venus could be discerned by, well, just about anyone, male or female, with the slightest interest in the fairer sex. Because the vast majority would, at first sight of the captain, simply stop dead in their tracks and not quite know where to look first.

It’s worth noting that wearing a “skirt,” hah! in such a manner led to less of an issue with firmly muscled underhang than silky-smooth, gloriously-tanned, firmly-muscled overhang. And quite noticeable butt crack. In the vast majority of cases, indeed in virtually all cases, butt crack is something to be avoided. In this case, crowds would be unable to resist following it around the block, their eyes transfixed, for simply hours.

An additional circling pan would be appropriate, cameraman we’re moving up… up I said… at this point to examine the captain’s corset. Again, some concession to “armor” was made by riveting small iron plates to the black leather. But most would, again, pay this little attention. What did tend to grab attention was that the corset was, gosh, just a bit too small. Laced front and back, the back joined but the front… not so much. Thus the eye tended to travel up past the revealed pierced navel, the firm, tanned and beautiful abdomen, to…

In another day and age at that point many would be forced to exclaim…

“Okay, those cannot be real! Sorry, no effing way. That high, firm and ginormous? Where are the lines… Silicon or saline? Seriously, where’d you get the work done…?”

The remaining few, we happy few, who managed to tear their eyes away from the various amazing views, the barely hinted, because there isn’t any hinting going on here, cleavage, who managed to avoid the overwhelming and repeated desire to face plant, would follow the line of graceful neck to…

Beauty. Simple, heart-stopping beauty. The heart-shaped, scarless, lineless, perfect face of a girl just become woman. Electric blue eyes, cherry lips, perfect complexion. A face that would make Botticelli promise God to eat all his vegetables and be a better person if he could paint that face anywhere close to reality. A face that made strong men’s knees weaken and the crowds that had been glued to butt crack or breasts fall to their knees and worship the goddess.

To which the captain’s usual reaction was to throw back her long, honey-blonde hair, shake her head and say:

“Is the whole world filled with submissives? Sorry, people, I just don’t have the time and you can’t afford me anyway…”

“Haul! Haul ye sons of sea cocks…”

“Sea cooks, ma’am! Cooks.”

“You sure?”

“Ancient mariner, cap’n. Pretty sure. Always heard it as sea cooks.”

“That’s no fun. Who cares if you’re a son of a sea cook. Could it be cocks?”

“Could be, cap’n. Anything’s possible. But always been cooks in my experience.”

“Why? I mean why cooks? Why not, oh, sea carpenters or sea butlers or something?”

“Not well thought of on boats. Not a high status job.”

“You’re the cook on this boat.”

“Yes, cap’n.”

“Are they all as bad as you?”

“I’m considered quite a good sea cook, cap’n,” the ancient mariner said, reproachfully.

“No, seriously. Pull the other one. They’re worse?”

“Generally.”

“You burn water!”

“Only the once!”

“You mistook a pile of maggots for rice!”

“They weren’t moving much and they looked riceish. And maggots are very high in protein, cap’n. Many a port you’ll find maggots a fine breakfast after a night of roistering. Maggot pies, fried maggots…”

“Artemis’s sacred enormous penis, no wonder it’s an insult. Okay you sons of… You… Oh, just haul the damned lines! Day after tomorrow, I’m getting a kingdom and marrying princes!”

#

“Princess? Two s’s? You’re sure?”

“Quite sure, Madame,” King Pooram said, trying to look anywhere but at the latest hero…ine.

“I’m sure the notice I saw said princes,” Conella said, hands on her hips. “Possibly a typo?”

“They were all done in one run,” Head Councilor Name said. He’d made his decision on where to look and had no clue on the whole thing about the face. He wasn’t even sure about hair color. “Two s’s. We’ve checked.”

“Damn,” Conella said. “Details, details… I thought my luck had changed. It’s always the damned princess! Usually half the kingdom, though. Giving up a whole kingdom?”

“I’ve been promised a room with a view,” King Pooram said. “You and Isabella would be rather…”

“Agatean?” Conella said.

“I was thinking more avante garde,” King Pooram said. “She has been studying massage.”

“I read that. I was looking forward to being massaged by princes. I wasn’t even expecting a good massage. It was the whole being waited on by princes. Damn.”

“She’s rather good at bouncing and writhing on your lap,” the king muttered. “Been doing it since she was a child.”

Conella looked down at her skirt, at the king, her skirt, the king…

“Little different physiology,” she pointed out. “Oh, well, I’m here. What’s the gig? Something about a sea serpent?”

…

“And there you have it,” King Pooram said, fifteen minutes later.

“Fifty three?” Conella asked.

“So far,” Head Councilor Name said. “Fortunately, you… persons don’t require payment in advance.”

“Old Thog, huh?” Conella said. “Wondered what had happened to him.”

“Didn’t seem to care for the taste on that gentleman,” Councilor Vizier said.

“Definitely prefers Buhani from what I’ve gleaned,” King Pooram said.

“Oh, my hero has come to resc…” Princess Isabella cried joyfully as she swept into the throne room. “B…b…b… Whah?”

“Hmmm…” Conella mused, circling the blushing bride-to-be. “Not bad. Oh, well, girls for comfort, boys for fun, I always say…”

“Always?” King Pooram squeaked.

“Well, whenever the subject comes up,” Conella replied. “Okay, just to check the merchandise before I decide to take the gig, the advance payment is a massage. Not worth it if the massage thing isn’t a go.”

“I can always bounce on your lap!” Princess Isabella said.

“About that,” King Pooram muttered.

Conella looked at her skirt, the princess, skirt, princess…

“Wiggle?” Princess Isabella said.

Head tilt.

“Wiggle quite slowly at first then with increasing…”

“Let’s just check out the massage, shall we?” Conella said.

#

“I’m not very good, am I?” Princess Isabella asked. “I can barely bulge these muscles.”

“I usually get my massages from this hulking Buhani who I swear is part orc,” Conella said. “He proudly tells a story about strangling a lion with his bare hands. His massages are the sort of pleasure one normally associates with dungeons and Iron Maidens. It’s a bit like having your muscles ripped away from your bones by hyenas.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun!” Isabella cried.

“Depends on your definition of fun,” Conella said. “So this sea serpent… Have you ever seen it in action?”

“Oh, yes,” Princess Isabella said, desperately trying to make some headway on the heroine’s rock-hard muscles. “I’m not supposed to watch but with Valeria I simply had to sneak out of the palace to see it!”

“Miss her, do you?”

“She used to put ants in my bed then tighten the sheets so I could not escape.”

“Older sister. Duh.”

“She once fed me a quart of castor oil, telling me it would reveal my soul.”

“She’s a sister. You trusted her?”

“When I was six, she taught me to sing a quite raunchy song then locked me in the guard’s barracks all night. It’s only the gods to thank that they weren’t the current crop of guards.”

“My aunt did that to me at about the same age,” Conella said. “Had a great time. I’m not sure the guards were ever the same, though.”

“Your aunt must be very naughty,” Isabella said, her eyes wide.

“She’s sort of an existential agent of chaos,” Conella said. “I think I’m more related to her than my mom. Not that mom’s sane by human standards.”

“And your father?” Isabella asked then gasped. “I’m sorry, if…”

“Yes, I know who my father is,” Conella said, chuckling. “I never got to know him very well, though. He was running around Anarchia writing wrongs and being the paladin most of my childhood. And we never really crossed paths a lot as adults. I’m not even sure he knew I was around before he died.”

“I’m very sorry,” Isabella said. “That is very sad.”

“It was a long time ago,” Conella said, sitting up. “So, tell me about this serpent. Something about the tongue.”

“It sticks out its tongue and just… slurps you in,” the girl said, cringing. “I’m really not looking forward to that.”

“Don’t worry,” Conella said. “I’ve faced a couple of serpents in my time. Anything else?”

“It… tastes its victims,” Isabella said, sniffling. “Sort of rolls them around in its mouth. Then…” she started to sob. “Crunch, slurp!”

“So, let’s see,” Conella said. “Oh, quit blubbering. Wraps you in its tongue, slurps you in, does a taste test then crunch, swallow.”

“Yes,” Isabella said.

“What about cutting the tongue?” the heroine asked.

“It seems most solid,” Isabella said. “One hero managed to hit it and the sword simply bounced off.”

“Might be able to do something about that,” Conella said, thoughtfully. “But there are other ways… Fortunately this is pretty much what I’d picked up and I came prepared. I don’t know how I missed the whole thing about princes. Details, details…”

#

CHAPTER THREE

It takes a real woman…

Conella waited at the appointed place and time, sword in one hand and a bucket in the other.

“Come on,” she muttered. “Time’s a wasting and I need a massage…”

Finally, she saw the water start to ripple as the sea serpent surfaced. She immediately lifted the bucket, dumped it over her head then tossed it out of sight. There was a faint tinkle as the glass liner broke.

The serpent moved smoothly and slowly through the water. Probably to increase the terror of the approach.

“Could you please hurry this up?” Conella muttered. One eye started to water and she gave a slight, whole-body, twitch followed by a slight groan.

Finally the serpent reared out of the water, glaring at her balefully through one red eye.

“Any lassst wordsss, hero…ine?” the serpent hissed, tilting its head from side to side. “Usssually you lot are all ‘I am sssuper hero so and so, defeater of…’ well, all sssorts of ssstuff.”

“Take your best shot, asshole,” Conella shouted defiantly, taking up a cat stance, sword up and behind her shoulder.

The serpent hissed again then its tongue flashed out.

Conella took a swipe but, as advertised, her fine Agatean blade slid right off the armored tongue of the beast. In a moment she was slurped into its mouth.

“Hmmm…” the serpent mused. “Sweet and tangy marin…?” He couldn’t quite finish the word ‘marinade’ as his mouth’s panicked nerve cells finally started communicating to his brain.

Two thousand years before had been the Wizard Wars when the glittering utopia of the Council Era had fallen into war and then devolution. For nearly four thousand years before that, however, a very specialized group of culinary enthusiasts had used careful cultivation, hybridization and often illegal gene splicing to improve upon nature in the development of certain spices. Some of the purists, even in the latter days before the Fall, still spoke for the value of such plants as Capsicum chinense. However, the development in 2683 of the new chemical variant of capsicum, cumngon, opened up whole new doors and orders of magnitude in pain such that the legendary “Scoville” scale was remanded to the dustbin of history. When the zeros get out of hand its time for a new scale. Named after the developer of the cumngon genus, the late and in most sane cases unlamented Dr. R. Franklin French, the RRRRRRR scale lumped all traditional peppers at 1.

By the time of Dr. French, there were already peppers, quite tasty and sweet as all such peppers are, rated in the thousands on the RRRRRR scale. By the time of the Fall, they were rated in the millions. In short, the ancient and well regarded jalapeno was a pallid and insipid apple compared to the lowliest of the cumngon peppers, so called because if you were so silly as to eat one straight you’d be gone.

The most lethal of the cumngon peppers was, unquestionably, the pepper generally referred to simply as Aaargh! (Cumngonus Arrrrghus) The evil wizard Anthangallagagna once tortured a hero who’d tried to assassinate him by forcing him to eat one Aaargh! pepper. The screams went on for years to the point where Anthangallagagna finally had him put down since the heartless sorcerer was tired of the noise.

Aaargh! peppers were never, ever, cultivated. They were rare even in the wild, as the quite small plant with lovely purple flowers were generally surrounded by a blasted heath some ten acres in size. Birds, quite immune to the effects of capsicum, did not approach. Those that did dropped from the sky to nourish the soil. Such heaths were often surrounded by rings of dead insects.

Conella, at great expense, had managed to obtain exactly one liter of concentrated Aaargh! juice. Which she had liberally applied to herself.

A one-eyed creature cannot cross its eyes and sea serpents do not shed tears. The gathered watchers for years afterwards swore that the serpent first crossed its eye then began to slowly cry.

What assuredly happened was a small burping sound as the serpent, which also had no gag reflex, attempted to evolve one in as brief a time as possible. This was followed by a series of exclamations generally described as a muted “Uh…uh…uh…”

The shriek started, very low at first and ascending in volume until the very walls of the palace started to sway to and fro.

“AaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaRGH!

“PLEASE KILLLLLL MEEEEEEEE!”

“Okee-dokily,” Conella said, striking upwards into the roof of the serpent’s mouth. “By the way, you need to brush… Oh, wait…”

#

“Oh, my hero…ine…” Isabella said, her hands fluttering in front of her chest.

“Don’t worry,” Conella said, an odd light in her eyes. “I really don’t think you could keep up with me and, no offense, I need a better masseuse.”

“Then there’s the kingdom,” the king said, sighing. “I hope we can agree, at least, on a comfortable room with a view.”

“Eh,” Conella said. “Been there, done that. Running a kingdom’s a lousy job. You’re not foisting it off on me. No, I’ll just take the head of the serpent and, oh, say nine thousand drachma. The Aaargh! sauce was expensive. But you’ll have to get the people together to take it’s head off for me. Pickled, please.”

“No problem,” the king said in relief. He was amazed he was getting off so easily.

“However did you figure out how to defeat the terrible sea serpent?” Isabella asked, breathlessly. She still wasn’t sure if she should be insulted that the hero…ine didn’t want her as a bride.

“Well, girly,” Conella said, patting her on the head. “It takes a real woman to defeat a one-eyed wonder-worm.”

Landed Alien

by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Pool Pilot and Tech Kara ven'Arith sat in the Station Master's office, on an uncomfortable, and cold, steel chair.

She sat alone, hands folded tightly in her lap, face under rigid control. Waiting. . .

A man was dead. A pilot was dead.

By her hand.

She turned her head to the left, and stared for a long moment at the door to the outer hallway and the rest of Codrescu Station. She turned her head to the right, and gave the door to the Station Master's inner office similar close study. Neither door was locked. Why would they be?

There was no place to go, and nothing, really, for her to do.

Save wait.

Wait on the verdict of those now discussing her and her actions, there in the inner office. Would she live? Would she die? Would she be banished to the planet's surface, to take her chances there?

They would decide: the Station Master, the Guild Master, her immediate supervisor, the head Tugwhomper, and the associate supervisor of the pilot pool.

Kara took a deep breath, and wished they would decide soon.

* * *

It was silent in the common room as the graduation list scrolled across the community screen. They were all seniors in this dorm; and each a deal more solemn than even the suspense of the scrolling list might account for.

At the back of the room, Kara ven'Arith stood alone, and hopefully out of the eye of the dorm's loyalty monitor. That one had been dogging her steps for the last semester, trying to catch her in a "subversive" act. The monitor had been at great pains to explain Kara's precarious situation to her -- the lack of three black marks was all that stood between Kara and the fate of her very good friend, Expelled Student Waitley.

The monitor had stared at her in what Kara supposed was intended to be a sad-but-stern manner, and which had been so ludicrous that she had been hard-put not to giggle. Worse, the thought of what Theo might say upon hearing her new title of honor was almost enough to send her into whoops.

It being fairly certain that she would earn one, if not two, of those missing black marks immediately for a failure to show proper respect, Kara had bitten the inside of her cheek and bowed her head, striving to give the impression of one too cowed by authority to speak.

The monitor hrummphed.

"You'd do better to sit up and meet my eye," she had snapped. "Sneaking alien ways won't improve your record."

Well, and that had almost brought her to join Theo. Kara had taken a deep breath, and lifted her head deliberately to meet the other woman's eyes.

"I am not an alien," she said calmly, in the Eylot dialect of Terran. "My family has held land on this planet for ninety-eight Standards."

The monitor, whose name was Peline Graf, frowned.

"And you think that makes you Eylotian?" she asked.

It was on the edge of Kara's tongue to say that she had been born on Eylot -- but, after all, that did not make her Eylotian -- even her delm taught so. They of Clan Menlark were Liaden, though based upon Eylot.

"You're nothing but a landed alien," Monitor Graf added, in a tone that made plain that she found this Eylotian legal reality not in the least amusing.

Kara folded her lips together and held the monitor's gaze until the other woman waved her hand in abrupt dismissal.

"I'm required to warn students who are in danger of expulsion. This has been your warning, ven'Arith. Watch yourself."

It had been, Kara had admitted to herself, after a long walk, a long shower, and a long, sleepless night, a fair warning, of its kind, and worth taking to heart. She had so much hanging, as the Terran phrase went, in Balance. Very nearly a Liaden meaning to Balance, there.

Well. She had seen what had happened to Theo, who had committed the dual crimes of not being Eylotian, and excelling beyond those who were. For those crimes, she had been targeted, trapped, and expelled. She, Kara ven'Arith, was the designated instrument of Theo's will in that matter. As such, she was honor-bound to keep all and any doors open through which Balance might enter.

That -- and there was her family to consider. To be expelled so near to the completion of her course and flight-work, even if she could show political malice as the cause? That would scarcely please her mother or her delm. Indeed, it was very likely that she would be roundly scolded for having been so maladroit as to allow her enemies to prevail against her. Clan Menlark had not prospered as pilots and as mechanics on a culturally diverse world known for its effervescent politics because its children were either maladroit or stupid.

All that being so, she had watched herself, and also, with a sort of black humor, watched those who watched her. She held herself aloof from any ties of friendship, that she might not be tainted by another's error; she studied; she flew; she tutored; she slept; and ate; and attended all and every politically significant rally and workshop offered on campus.

By doing these things, she insured her graduation, pilot's license in hand, as her mother and her delm expected.

Her mother next expected her to offer herself for hire as a pilot, that being the clan's main livelihood. There, duty. . .diverged. Kara's heart had long been with the clan's secondary business. Even as a child, she had dogged Uncle Bon Sel's every step in the repair shop, until in self-defense he gave her a wrench and taught her how to use it. Her determination was to continue in that line, now that she had done as her delm and her mother had commanded.

That being so, she filed her app with Howsenda Hugglelans, where she had a good multi-season record as a temp worker, and excellent relations with her supervisors, and with Aito, the Hugglelans Third Son. It was not at all unreasonable to think that she might be hired there as a mechanic or a tech, and best to have all her cards in hand before she brought the matter to her mother.

The application had not yet gained a reply, but here -- here came the approach to her name on the screen. She straightened, waiting, hardly daring to breathe. What if something had happened? What if someone in Admin had decided to withhold her last grade points? What if she had been given a black mark, despite all her care? What if there was some new reg, put into place secretly, that had to do only with those who weren't "truly Eylotian"? It had happened before. . .

Her chest was tight. Surely the feed had slowed? But no, that was foolish, and there! Her name!

And next to her name, her standing in the class -- low, but she had expected that -- and at the end of the line, her license certification. . .

Candidate Second. . .

"Candidate Second?" she gasped, stunned. She had earned a firm second class license. She had the hours, she had passed the tests, she --

"Something wrong, ven'Arith?" asked Droy Petris, with false concern. Droy Petris watched her, also, though less diligently than the monitor.

She had spoken out loud, Kara thought. Stupid, to let caution go now. Still, there was a recover to hand.

"I was astonished," she said, truthfully; "I had no idea I'd graduate at such a level."

He looked at her suspiciously, and Loyalty Monitor Graf was seen to frown, but there wasn't a regulation forbidding a pilot to express surprise.

She hoped.

#

The fiveday between the end of class and the senior graduation ceremony was traditionally a festive time, featuring parties, and picnics, dances, and epic games of bowli bowl. It was a time when friendships were reaffirmed; when new addresses and mail drop codes were exchanged.

Kara, who deliberately had no friends, dutifully attended the meetings mandated by Admin. As she was a past-champion, she also took part in the bowli ball tournament where she reveled in the play until, in the quarter finals, her lack of current connections made it easy for her to be ganged up on and evicted early from the game.

Not wishing to risk any unpleasantness in the stands, she avoided spectating. Instead, she volunteered to polish one of the long-wing training sailplanes, that it would be a welcome meeting for its next pilot, and thus received the benefit of exercise.

She also took long, solitary walks around campus, carefully avoiding such places as might call unwanted attention to her, such as Belgraid dorm, which had once housed the Culture Club, since "discovered" to be a hotbed of subversive activity, designed to indoctrinate the unwary into the customs and lifestyles of planets that were not Eylot.

She returned to the dorm from one particularly long walk to find herself the sole occupant. That would have been more pleasing if she didn't suspect that Monitor Graf had planted spy-eyes about, to watch when she could not.

Still, the absence of her dorm-mates did give pleasure. Kara stopped to withdraw a fruit drink from the cold-box, and went to her room, shaking the bulb absently.

She closed the door -- senior privilege -- and sat down at her desk, bringing the computer live with a light touch, snapping the bulb open while she waited for her mail to download.

Three letters came in-queue. Kara ran her eye down the list as she sipped her drink.

The first letter was from Hugglelans. She opened it, bottom lip caught in her teeth. If she had an offer, or perhaps an invitation to interview. . .

But no.

Dear Applicant.

This letter is to inform you that your application for employment has been received. We regret to inform you that Howsenda Hugglelans is not hiring at this time.

Thank you for your interest, and the best of luck in your search for employment.

Human Resources Form Number 3

Kara stared at this missive for much longer than required to master its contents. Not hiring? she thought. Or not hiring Liadens?

The thought made her angry -- and then frightened. If Hugglelans had bowed to the rising tide of politics. . .

She took a breath, filed the form, and looked to the next item in-queue.

It was from the Dean of Students office. Her stomach clenched, and her mouth felt dry, despite the juice. She put the pod down on the edge of her desk, and opened the letter.

TO: Kara ven'Arith, Candidate Pilot Second Class

FROM: Anlingdin Pilot Certification Office

Candidate pilots are required to attend a re-orientation session immediately following graduation. At the conclusion of this session, those qualifying will see the candidate status removed and their license properly registered by the Eylot Pilots Guild.

Please report to Gunter Recreation Area on. . .

Kara squeezed her eyes shut, and mentally reviewed an exercise designed to restore clarity to a pilot's tired mind. That done, she took six deep, calming breaths before opening her eyes again and re-addressing the letter.

Her hands were cold and she was shaking, just a little, though that was anger, because they had found a way to hold her license hostage still longer! She had earned her Second Class license! Earned it! And now, she was being required to complete some other requirement -- a requirement, she was certain was in place only for those who were not truly Eylotian! And what chance had she to qualify, to see her license properly recorded at the end of it all?

"Wait," she told herself, closing her eyes again. "Wait. Think."

She accessed another mental exercise, this to impose calm; then she did, indeed, think.

She had come this far. She had completed her coursework, gained her second class license, despite the oppressive oversight that had caused others of her classmates -- friends from the Culture Club, and various others who had come from outworlds -- to drop out and return home. Kara ven'Arith hadn't quit. She had been clever, she had kept her head down, she had kept herself informed of the changing requirements, and she had graduated.

She had done what was needed, and she could -- she would -- do whatever was necessary to clear this new barrier to claiming that which she had earned.

When she opened her eyes this time, her feelings were firmer, though they suffered a ripple when she saw that the re-orientation "session" was indeed a planetary month long.

And Gunter Recreation Area. . .was a wilderness campground, without even an air-breather landing field.

Her stomach clenched again, and she hurriedly closed the letter, marking it for later review, and opened the last file in the queue.

It was a personal note from Flight Instructor Orn Ald yos'Senchul, her academic adviser, inviting her to take tea with him -- in an hour.

Kara smiled with real pleasure. Pilot yos'Senchul had been a support and a comfort, subtle as he was. He remained at Anlingdon, so he had told her, in honor of his contract, which the new administration was unexpectedly too canny to cancel out of hand, having perhaps learned a lesson from the Slipper instructor's dismissal.

But -- good gods, the time! Kara leapt to her feet and ran for the shower.

#

"A tenday tour?" Kara took the paper Pilot yos'Senchul held out to her across the tea-table, and sat somewhat ill-at-ease, cup in one hand, folded printout in the other.

"Please," her host murmured, "take a moment to familiarize yourself. I thought first of you when I read it, and I am curious to know if you feel the same."

Immediate need. Codrescu Station, Eylot Nearspace. Student mechanic to tour, inspect, and repair station systems under supervision of Master Mechanic. Long hours. Union rates. Teacher recommendation or references required. First qualified hired.

Kara felt her pulse quicken. It wasn't a full-time job at Hugglelans, but it was far better than a walk in vacuum without a spacesuit.

She frowned, calculating. The graduation ceremony was in three days -- an empty formality since her mother had let her know that circumstances would unfortunately keep her kin from making the trip to Anlingdin.

"I have my ratings and references from my break-work at Hugglelans," she said, speaking aloud, but more to herself than to Pilot yos'Senchul. "A tenday tour. . ." She frowned at the print-out again. "Immediate need," she mused, and looked up to find his gaze very attentive on her face.

"If immediate means that I may start within the next two local days," she said slowly, "I can do the tour and return in good time to attend the re-orientation class."

"Do you mean to do so?" Pilot yos'Senchul asked.

She looked at him in surprise.

"Well, I must, if ever I want to free my license of that wretched notation of candidate!"

"Yes, of course," he said, and used his chin to point at the paper she still held. "Do I hear that you are interested in filling that position, assuming that immediately is found to be accommodating?"

"I am, yes."

"Very good." He put his cup down and stood, slipping the paper away from her with his natural hand while the fingers of his prosthetic spelled out, rise! quick lift!

Startled, she came to her feet. "Sir?"

"Go quickly and pack. If I may -- pack heavy, lest there is a dorm cleaning while you are away I will meet you at the shuttle in an hour."

"Sir, but --"

"I had said that I thought first of you. Having done so, I sent the master mechanic my recommendation, forwarding your references from Hugglelans, which were available to me, as your adviser. He replied that he would have you, if you were interested. We have established that you are interested. And I should tell you that immediately in this instance means, according to Master Thelly, three days or a week ago."

"But, I --"

"You may send an introduction from the shuttle," he interrupted. "Or perhaps you've changed your mind, and that is why you stand here when your ship needs you?"

"No, sir!" She cried, and bowed -- respect to an instructor.

Then, she ran.

#

Kara's personal effects, with those things that Theo had entrusted to her, were in the shuttle's modest holding area. She was in the pilot's chair, Pilot yos'Senchul sitting second. Once they had broken orbit, she had 'beamed a message to Master Mechanic Thelly, introducing herself and informing him that she was on her way to take up duty.

She was doing the set-up for Codrescu approach when the master's reply arrived, telling her to find him in Sub-sector Blue Eleven's machine room after she'd been cleared through.

"I'm going to have to hit the deck running," she commented, not unpleased by the prospect of getting right to work.

"Union rates," her co-pilot murmured. "Be certain to keep track of your hours; Master Thelly is quite capable of working three shifts in four, and he expects his assistants to do as much."

She shot a glance at him, but only saw the side of his face, calm as it usually was, his eyes on his screens.

"That sounds like the voice of experience," she said. "Did you 'prentice with Master Thelly, Pilot?"

"In fact, I did, some few years ago. He was at first. . .doubtful. . .regarding the utility to himself of a one-armed assistant. I was able to put those doubts to rest, and learned a good deal in Balance." He glanced at her.

"You will find the master a thorough teacher."

"Good," said Kara.

The board pinged for her attention, then, and she gave it.

#

"This way, Pilot," yos'Senchul said, waving her into a dim side passage that was definitely not the route to the Station Master's office.

"Master Thelly. . ." she began.

"Master Thelly will still have work for you in half-an-hour," he said.

Kara sighed and followed him, the peculiar taste of station air on her tongue. She had been to Codrescu Station a dozen times or more, and thought she knew its maze of corridors pretty well. This hall, so thin that she and Pilot yos'Senchul -- both comfortably Liaden-sized -- needed to proceed in single-file, wasn't at all familiar. It was a utility hall, she thought, noting the access panels set high and low. Well, perhaps it would soon become familiar.

Ahead, their hall ended in another -- and this one Kara did recall.

"The Guild Office?" she asked.

"Indeed," he answered. Before them was the door, and a guard beside it, sidearm holstered.

"yos'Senchul and ven'Arith, to see the Guild Master," her companion said. "We are, I think, expected."

"You're on the list, pilots," the guard confirmed, opening the door for them. "Straight ahead."

#

Guild Master Peltzer ran her card, made a noise strongly reminiscent of a snort, and nodded in her direction.

"Be a couple minutes to review your files, Pilot. You wanna make yourself comfortable here? I got a feeling Pilot yos'Senchul wants to have a private word with me. Is that right, Orn Ald?"

Pilot yos'Senchul inclined his head gravely. "You know me too well."

"Just about well enough, I'm thinking. Step into my office. Pilot, please, take some rest."

The two men stepped in to the Guild Master's inner office and the door closed. Kara, too energized to sit, or to be comfortable, walked quietly to the small green garden across from the intake desk, its tall fronds waving in the breeze from an air duct. An agreeable gurgle of running water came from somewhere in the depths of the tiny jungle.

Kara knelt down and considered the greenery. There were, as she knew from previous visits, norbears living among the fronds -- one quite old, and the other quite young. She would, she thought, like to have the attention of a norbear at the moment, though it would be rude to wake them, or to disturb their pretty habitat.

She was about to rise again, when the fronds dipped more deeply than could be accounted for by the small breeze, and here came the elder norbear -- rust colored and thin of fur -- marching deliberately forward, through the fronds and out of the garden entirely, climbing familiarly onto Kara's knee.

"Hevelin, good-day to you," she said, stroking his head gently. He burbled and pushed into her fingers, demanding a more vigorous scrubbling.

Kara smiled and settled cross-legged to the floor, careful of the old norbear's balance, and rubbed his head with vigor. His pleased burbling seemed to leach her restlessness, and she sighed, half-closing her eyes.

An image came into her head, lazily, like a dream -- an image she recognized as Pilot yos'Senchul. She recalled him entering the Guild Master's office, and the image faded, to be replaced by the impression of a pointed, pale face dominated by fierce dark eyes, framed by blow-away pale hair that Kara knew to be as soft and warm as feathers.

"No," she murmured. "Theo's not with me, though I have her things. I'm here for a tenday tour, to assist Master Thelly."

A man's round, red-cheeked face faded through Theo's, his eyes blue and sharp, the lines around them made by worry, laughter -- or by both. Master Thelly, perhaps.

She felt herself sinking into a languor; almost, she felt she could have a nap.

Happily for her dignity, the door behind her opened at that moment. The languor fled, leaving behind a feeling of tingling alertness. She opened her eyes to look up, at Orn Ald yos'Senchul, and, further up, at Guild Master Peltzer.

"Hevelin took the edge off, did he?" he said with a nod. "Worth a full night's sleep, one of Hevelin's purr-breaks. If you'll stand up, Pilot, we can get your little matter finished up and send you to the Station Master for registration."

"Thank you," Kara said to Hevelin. "Would you like to go back to the garden?"

It appeared that Hevelin did not. He clambered up her arm to her shoulder and grabbed onto her collar to steady himself.

"I'd say that's plain," said Guild Master Peltzer, moving over to the intake desk. Kara came to her feet, careful of her passenger, and stepped up.

"All right now. Pilot. This'll take a bit to propagate across the databases, so I'll just drop a note to the Station Master and to Master Thelly, letting them know the news." He tapped keys, and Kara, Hevelin humming in her ear, waited with what patience she could muster for someone to tell her the news.

"Right, then. Here you are, Pilot." He held her license out in her general direction, while his other hand and his eyes were still on the computer.

Kara took the card, Hevelin all but deafening her with his purr, and slipped it away into an inner pocket.

"Sir?" she said. "May I –"

He looked up, catching her gaze with his, and inclined his head formally.

"Congratulations, Second Class pilot Kara ven'Arith."

She stiffened. "Your pardon, Guild Master. I am, I believe, Candidate Second Class pilot ven'Arith."

He shook his head, his smile tight.

"That's according to the so-called Pilots Guild of Eylot, which has no standing with the Interstellar Starship Pilots Guild. Eylot Guild can deny our licenses and our regs 'til they're short of air, but at the end of the shift, they're a local independent piloting group. Anybody lifting with an Eylot Guild ticket is just another indie flyer, far as this Guild is concerned."

Hevelin's purring hit an ecstatic crescendo.

Kara looked closely at the Guild Master's grim face. She transferred her gaze to Pilot yos'Senchul, who inclined his head gravely, and murmured, "A signal achievement, Pilot. Well done."

"You brought me here for this, didn't you?" she demanded.

"In part," he allowed, with a slight smile. "I did also think of you first when the tenday tour came into my queue."

Kara took a breath. "Pilot yos'Senchul," she began – and stopped as he held up his hand.

"Please, honor me with the use of my given name, now that we are colleagues – and comrades."

She frowned at him. Colleagues, yes, because they were now both certified by the same guild, though he was Master to her Second Class. Comrade, though...

"Do you have work on-station? But your contract at the Academy --"

"The present administration has placed conditions upon my continued employment which I cannot in conscience accept. Therefore, I have offered myself to Guild Master Peltzer, who believes he may be able to find a use for me."

The Guild Master laughed.

"More like sixteen uses for you!" he said. "I figure to whittle it down to three, after I talk with people."

"The Academy's shuttle. . ." Kara protested, thinking of Cherpa in Berth Fourteen.

"I will send the key down on the station shuttle. Whomever the Academy chooses to take it down may ride the jump seat on the supply wagon."

"Details," pronounced the Guild Master, waving a bluff hand. "What the two of you need to do is get registered with the Station Master office. Soon's that's done, we can start getting some work out of you!"

"Indeed," said Pilot yos'Senchul, with a slight, comradely bow. "After you, Kara."

"Yes," she said, and turned to put Hevelin back among the greenery.

#

The Pilot handling her forms for the Station Master was called Fortch; his work blouse was that of a commercial transfer company. He looked her up and down before she announced herself, and then with a spark of interest when she did.

"ven'Arith, eh? I gather you've been expected for a day or so. Forms have been waiting – fill and sign and. . ."

Seeing her glance at his name and the Certified Pilot logo on his breast pocket, he nodded and tapped it with one finger.

"Company gave me my uniform the day the newest rules came down,” he told her as he checked her work. "All I needed was the paper. But you know what's happening, and I do: they say I'm no pilot until I get their paper. Can't get their paper 'cause my father's brother was suspected of being on the wrong side twenty years ago. I get to do some tugwork here, they put me in the pool. I help out here on the slow days." He sighed, glancing at the form screen. "At least you'll get a chance to pick yours up."

Kara nodded. Tugwork meant he was likely a third class, maybe an air pilot too – and that was hard. If his family went back for generations and was thought unreliable, he might never get work on-world.

There was a small chirp and he started nervously; and out of the air the order "Send in the new one, Fortch! Master Thelly's in a snit to get her on the job!"

The aide jerked his head at the inner door, and handed the forms back to her.

"Luck. Hope to catch you around."

#

She'd worked overshift – not unusual, and becoming more usual as she double-timed herself – working two full shifts, then cramming a class into her so-called rec shift. The class she was currently embroiled in, remote repair, required not only coursework, but board time, not with a sim, but with an actual remote, out on Codrescu's skin. Time and necessity being what they were, she had to grab her practice sessions betwixt and between. The work shifts today had gone long, whereby she had been late to log into class, and so last to take the remote.

The work had not been mere practice, but real work, resetting a trio of lock-anchors on Ten Rod Two, the arm that the Guild supply ship Zircon Sea was due to use. With the strangenesses attendant to Eylot's politics the Sea's technical and parts refills were much needed to make up for several quarters worth of back-orders, missing items, and out-and-out damaged-on-receipt goods. Given the state of supplies, she'd triple checked her work, and delayed herself more. . .

And now, she was starving.

At least there was an easy answer to that; very possibly the first easy answer she had been confronted with today.

She turned down the hall to the Hub Caf, ran her station card under the reader and picked up a tray.

Quickly, she onloaded soy soup, fresh salad, and a more-or-less fresh-baked roll, and a cup of lemon-water. She turned from the serving bar, expecting at this shift and hour to have her choice of tables – which wasn't. . .quite true.

There was only one other diner in the Caf – a man in coveralls much like those she wore. Uncharacteristically, his shoulders were hunched, his arms crossed on the table before him, his attention wholly on the screen before him.

Kara hesitated, took a breath and went forward. Comrades held duty to the well-being of each other; and even if they had not been comrades, she owed him the same sort of care he had shown for her.

"Orn Ald? May I join you?"

He looked up, and even in the dim lighting, she could see that his cheeks were wet.

For a Liaden to so far forget melant'i as to weep in public – that was appalling. That Orn Ald yos'Senchul should do so could signal nothing less than a cataclysm.

Kara clattered her tray to the table, staring at him.

"What has happened?"

For answer, he spun the screen.

She recognized the Eylot Gazette, the Liaden community's social newspaper, open to the death notices.

There was only one.

Lef Nal vin'Eved Clan Selbry, of injuries sustained during Anlingdin Academy Graduate Re-orientation camp. Selbry Herself stands as the instrument of his will. Clan and kin grieve.

Kara remembered him only vaguely – they had been in few classes together and he hadn't been a bowli ball player. He had, in fact, been rather frail, all the more so for a certain single-mindedness that allowed him to discount every obstacle between himself and a goal. Lef Nal was, thought Kara, easily the sort of person who might fall off a cliff by reason of having momentarily forgotten about the effects of gravity.

She raised her eyes to Orn Ald's ravaged face.

He had, she saw in relief, used a napkin to dry his cheeks, but not even Liaden social training could hide the desolation in his eyes.

"I have also had a private letter on the topic," he said quietly. "It would appear that Pilot vin'Eved has been reft from clan and kin as a result of what is termed a hazing. He and several others had been identified as lacking a proper reverence for the new political scenery, and so were placed in. . .special circumstances, in order to cow them. The others are injured, but will survive." He sighed, and spun the screen to face him again.

"One save a year," he murmured, and she looked at him sharply.

"What is that?"

"Ah." He raised his eyes to hers, his mouth twisting. "When I was newcome to Anlingdin Academy, the elder instructor who was assigned as my mentor taught that we who teach must sometimes rescue our students – from themselves, from bad advice, from the expectations of kin, or of the world. She had it, as a point of philosophy -- or perhaps of honor -- that one save a year made all the rest worthwhile."

Kara slid onto the stool across from him, pushing her tray with the cooling soup and wilting salad to one side.

"You saved me," she said, very softly; and then, whispering, because even the thought was too terrible to bear.

"Was it only us – the landed aliens – who were given conditional licenses, Orn Ald?"

He shook his head. "A few less than half, by my count, were in your case, and in. . .Pilot vin'Eved's case. A handful of outworld students received conditional licenses, also, but they were merely required to certify that they would be leaving the planet after graduation."

It was easier to breathe. She sighed, slipped off of the stool and bowed as one who was cognizant of debt.

"Do not think of it," he murmured. "Our relative melant'i at the time placed one in the position of protector. Honor is fulfilled, on all sides, and Balance maintains." He shook his head, and said, in subdued Terran, "I advised him to go home and place it in the hands of his delm."

And Lef Nal had decided that school matters were the student's to solve, and matters of one's license best resolved by the pilot.

It was, Kara thought, precisely what she would have done.

Indeed, it was precisely what she had decided to do, until Orn Ald yos'Senchul had whisked her off for a tenday tour, and showed her a way to gain her license without condition.

When the fill-in assignment had come open, near the end of her tenday, she had contacted her mother and her delm, who had advised her, in their separate faces, to pursue opportunity at the station. Her mother had said that their own small yard was for the moment empty and thus closed, for want of business. Her delm had noted that all Menlark pilots were for the present pursuing hire contracts out-world, and that none were expected to return to Eylot in the foreseeable future.

Failing an outworld piloting contract, Codrescu Station was, said her mother, the best place for her.

She looked again to Orn Ald. As the one owed, it was his to assert what might be the cost, or if they resided in Balance. A comfort, certainly, but rather chilly. A comrade might offer more warmth.

Kara inclined her head.

"Forgive that I notice your distress. I merely do so that I may offer relief, if it is desired."

His eyebrows rose, and she braced herself for a light comment regarding their relative ages. But, when it came his response was only a mannerly, "The offer is gently made. However, I fear I would bring little to the cause of comfort – and you are wanted in not too many hours at your duty."

He slid off his stool and bowed to her as between comrades, indeed.

"I will leave you to your meal. Speaking with you has been a balm. Good-shift, Kara."

"Good shift, Orn Ald," she answered, and turned to watch him walk away before once again taking a stool and pulling her meal toward her.

After a moment, she stood again, picked up the tray and carried it over to the disposal.

#

The bowli ball zagged, then zagged again, avoiding Bilton's grasp as adroitly as if it had eyes and reason. Kara, next nearest, jumped, spinning lightly, and capturing the ball against her chest. It kicked, not hard, and the moment her feet hit decking, she threw it well to the left of Yangi.

The rangy red-haired pilot showed her teeth in what might equally have been a savage smile or a grimace of pain, and launched into a long vertical lunge. She snatched the ball, holding it in the crook of her elbow as she tucked to roll mid-air, coming down flatfooted, knees bent. Her smile grew positively feral as she threw ball with considerable strength, straight down at the decking.

Predictably -- at least to those wise in the ways of the device and the game -- the ball shot upward. Unpredictably, it skated to the right, into the space occupied by the hapless Fortch, the least apt of their players, nearly as new on station as she, and yet unaccustomed to his local mass.

He jumped for the ball, twisting in an effort to eat his unwanted momentum, actually got a hand on --

"Kara ven'Arith!" The all-call rattled the walls of the so-called Arena.

Bilton leapt, and came spinning to the deck, the bowli ball dancing along his fingers, shedding energy as it did.

Yangi grabbed Fortch by the belt just in time to keep him from ramming his nose against the wall.

Kara, flatfoot and hands at her side, stood waiting.

"Kara ven'Arith to Central Repair," Master Thelly's voice blared. "Kara ven'Arith to Central Repair, now!"

#

"Sorry 'bout it, Kara -- know it's your rec shift. Vechi had an accident in Green-Mid-Six. Got 'er out to the clinic, but the work'd just got started, and needs to be finished. You got least hours on the card."

"So I win," she said, showing cheerful in the face of his worry, though she was worried, too. This accident was the fifth among the tech-crew in the last eighteen Station-days; more than the total accidents for the last six Standard months. Not only newbies, either -- two old hands had spent a couple work shifts each in the station's autodoc, getting patched up from injuries from 'freak accidents'.

Kara finished belting on her kit, and looked 'round.

"Vechi's wagon's still down in Mid-Six," Master Thelly said. "Had to carry her out."

Kara stared at him.

"What happened this time?"

"Wild charge," Master Thelly said, looking even more worried. "You be careful, hear me?"

"I'm always careful," Kara told him, picking up her tea bottle.

He grunted. "So's Vechi."

#

Green-Mid-Six was a well-lit and roomy utility hall in a low-grav segment of the station. Kara had helped with the complete maintenance overhaul of the systems housed in this hall during her tenday tour. Vechi's orders, still up on the work wagon's screen, were to check an anomaly in Bay Four. The hatch was off, and leaning neatly against the wall. The test leads were still tidily wrapped on the wagon, so the wild charge must have struck Vechi either as she removed the hatch, or when she did her first eye-scan. That was standard procedure for a tech with an anomaly report to retire: A visual scan to make sure there wasn't any obvious damage -- melted leads, snapped fuses, anything broken or compromised.

If the tech's eyeballs or nose didn't locate a problem, then the leads from the wagon were attached, and a series of diagnostics were run.

A wild charge build-up, thought Kara, pulling on her gloves, while contemplating the open access from the side of the wagon -- that would create an anomaly, all right.

It would also create damage with a very particular signature. Once identified, all that remained was for the tech to pinpoint the cause, for the reports, and file a work order for rebuild.

Gloves on and light in hand, Kara advanced on the open access port.

Even though she knew what she'd see, Kara still blinked as her light illuminated the interior of the hatch.

Carnage was the word that came to her mind; and also the thought that there would be no identifying the failed source; there simply wasn't enough left to support a forensic diagnostic. The smell of ozone was not completely gone, nor that of the antiseptic sprays they'd used on Vechi.

She returned to the wagon, tapped up the main schematic screen and traced the power flow.

The station operated with tertiary back-ups, only sensible in so vulnerable a habitat as a space station. She was pleased to see that the back-up had come online without a glitch and there had been no discernible disruption of service.

So much was to the good. She opened another screen, logged the damage and created the work order for the rebuild. In plain truth, she was likely to draw that one, but right now she was Vechi, with Vechi's orders to clear.

She tapped the screen, bringing up the list of work orders. Anomaly resolution went to the top of a given roster-list, so this had been Vechi's first stop on her shift. It glowed yellow on the screen -- begun, but not logged as complete.

Below was a long list of work orders, all patiently showing green -- waiting for tech.

Kara sipped from her tea-bottle as she created a ref-file, attached the open, incomplete, order to the rebuild order, raised her finger to tap the next task in line -- and stopped, frowning.

Vechi was the fifth tech injured in the line of duty. Had the others all been checking anomalies, too?

In less than thirty seconds, she had the anomalies report open on one side of the wagon's screen; on the other, the tech department's injury report.

The injured techs: Vechi, Mardin, Whistler, Harfer, and Gen Arb -- and yes, each had been checking an anomaly report when they had been injured.

Kara's fingers were quicker than her thoughts. She called up the real-time functions, using her key for the big ops board, that she sat on rotation every eight station-days.

The wagon's screen was too small to accommodate the whole function screen, but all Kara wanted to do was to set an alarm. That done, she opened up the next work order in-queue.

#

About half-way through Vechi's shift, Kara paused between jobs to file a manual schedule adjustment. There was, she reasoned, no sense going off duty for one shift, only to have to report back for her regular work-shift. Best to just keep on, with the loan of Vechi's wagon, and swap out her second shift for rest. That would get her two rest shifts in a row, and put her back onto her regular schedule.

The system OK'd the change, which meant that Master Thelly was on maintenance himself, and would scold her the next time they met, per standard procedure.

Content with her changes, Kara finished out Vechi's shift, closed the list of completed work orders, signed in as herself and downloaded her own run of work.

She was in Green-Mid-Forty-Five; her work started in Blue-Mid-Twelve, conveniently near. Kara regarded the change of venue as a break.

She sipped tea as she walked, the wagon following. The best route to Blue-Mid-Twelve involved a shortcut through Orange, where the root of Ten Rod Two joined the station structure proper.

And there she quite unexpectedly found Fortch, the pool pilot who had not yet mastered the station's gravity, in front of the utility-core for the arm, an access hatch wide open, and several tools haphazardly sticking from his pockets and belt.

"What are you doing in the tech-tunnels, Pilot?" she asked, using her tea-bottle as a pointer, her voice sharper than it ought to be, for truly, he could be temp-help, or --

But if he was temp-help, where was his repair wagon? Where was his kit?

Fortch seemed to feel himself at a disadvantage. He licked his lips.

"Kara! I didn't know you were working down here!"

"And I didn't you were working down here."

"Oh, well I am – working. Filling in. Just checking something out for Master Thelly, that's all. There was a glitch on the screen and he asked me to – but wait, I need to talk to you about your license problem...”

He was moving, as if trying to stay between her and the open hatch. Lights were on, and covers hinged back from equipment.

Behind her, the anomaly alarm went off on the work wagon, and three things happened in a quick succession.

Fortch jumped toward her, a spanner suddenly in his hand.

Kara spun as if she were playing bowli ball, ducked under his outstretched arms, using the open tea-bottle to fend off the tool he swung down. There was a clang, the bottle was torn from her hand and spun away, splashing tea everywhere. Her spin continued as his lunge faltered; she came up behind -- and pushed him away from her, hard as she could, toward the open utility room.

He, inept in the station environment, skidded on the tea-splashed deck, arms pinwheeling now, half-fell and half slid, snatched for his balance, cursing -- and lost his balance altogether, striking his shoulder on the access door and crashing heavily into the room, arm up in a desperate and failing bid not to fall into the panels and wiring.

There was a sharp snap and a dazzling flash, and he collapsed to the decking, unmoving.

#

The door to the Station Master private office opened, and Kara stood up, preferring to meet her fate thus.

"Tech ven'Arith, thank you for your patience," the Station Master said gently, giving her a bow as well-meaning as it was meaningless. "You're free to go."

She blinked at him.

"To go?" she repeated. "Go -- where?"

"To your conapt, I'd say," Master Thelly stuck in. "You got the next three shifts off -- use 'em to sleep!"

"But --" She looked among them until she found Orn Ald yos'Senchul's face. "Fortch is dead."

"So he is, and that is unfortunate, since there were questions that various of us would have liked to ask him. Clearly, however, he was undertaking sabotage against the station and his efforts might have killed hundreds. Stopping him was of utmost importance -- and stop him you did." He inclined his head.

Kara noticed that her hands were clenched. She opened them, and shook her fingers out.

"But -- why?" she asked. "Why was he trying to. . .harm the station?"

Bringo, the Chief Tugwhomper, looked grave.

"Had a drink wit' the boy not so long ago," he said slowly. "Shortenin' it considerable, he told me he figured out how to get his paper, Eylot-side."

Kara shivered, suddenly cold.

"By killing the station?"

"Now, missy. Coulda just drunk too much coil fluid and talkin' big. Cheer 'imself up, like."

"There will be an investigation," said the Station Master. "Might be something in his quarters will be helpful. In the meanwhile, Pilot ven'Arith, the lesson you're to take away from you is that you acted in self-defense – properly acted in self defense. If Fortch hadn't had the main power bus to the arm open he'd be alive. I'd say the fatal mistake was his, not yours."

Orn Ald's voice then, quick, comforting Liaden preceding a gentle bow between comrades.

"The station is in your debt, Kara."

"That's right, and we don't aim to stay that way," said Guild Master Peltzer. "There's a reward for preserving environmental integrity. Understand, it's not what any of us can call exact Balance -- more like a symbolic Balance. Be as may, I reckon that reward's gonna show up in your account." He gave the Station Master a hard look, and that individual smiled.

"Without a doubt, Guild Master. Without a doubt."

"That's all set now," said Master Thelly, firmly. "Kara -- go get some rest."

"Yes," she said, numb, but with a dawning sense of relief. She bowed a simple bow of respect to the group of them, and turned toward the door.

As she stepped into the hall, she found Orn Ald yos'Senchul next to her.

"Will you share a meal with me, comrade, and allow me escort you to your conapt?"

"Yes," she said again, and considered him. "And you will tell me everything that the others didn't want to tell me, won't you Orn Ald?"

"Oh, yes," he said serenely. "I'll do that."

--end--

Kinderspiel

by Charles E. Gannon

(the author wishes to express his profound gratitude to that tireless and peerless researcher, Virginia DeMarce, to whom this story owes the largest measure of its authenticity)

April, 1635, south of Ulm, Swabia

“Colonel, riders coming.”

Thomas North, one of the two colonels of the Hibernian Mercenary Battalion, turned in his saddle and squinted.

Sure enough, just as his batman Finan had reported, two mounted figures were catching up with them, following along the same route: south on the Swabian Jakobsweg—arguably the most reliable way south from Ulm to Biberach, even though it wasn’t a road. Or more accurately, because it was now mid-April, the Jakobsweg was the most reliable path because it wasn’t a road. Leaving Ulm yesterday, North and his rump platoon had witnessed three wagons hopelessly mired in the spring mud, the struggling teamsters up to their hips in the brown ooze.

North’s senior lieutenant, Hastings, leaned closer. “Orders, sir?”

“Take a fire team into the brush on the left. And don’t get bloody eager, Lieutenant: these two aren’t trouble.”

“Too few of them?”

“Too obvious. But you never know when wolves might be shadowing unsuspecting sheep. Off with you, now.”

Hastings tossed his reins to Finan, dismounted, and gathered his fire team from the front of the formation, ensuring that his actions were unobservable by the oncoming riders. The hastily assembled group disappeared into the sparse undergrowth.

Several of the other Hibernians saw Hastings’ small screening force vanishing and hefted their .40-.72 black-powder Winchesters higher into a ready cradle posture.

“Easy, men,” said Thomas in a gruff but even tone that was, for him, a soothing croon.

That was the same moment that the taller and wider-shouldered of the two riders stopped and put up a hand, whether in greeting or invitation to parley, North couldn’t be sure.

But the larger of the two resumed his approach without waiting for Thomas’ gesture to do so, making the rider clearly suicidal. Or insane.

Shortly thereafter, North discovered that insanity was indeed the cause of the unbeckoned approach and that the oncoming rider had no hope of ever recovering his wits. By dint of his origins, his madness was endemic and permanent.

In short, he was an American.

And not just any American. As soon as the rider called a greeting, “Hello, Colonel North,” Thomas knew who it was: Larry Quinn. Now Major Larry Quinn, if recent scuttlebutt was to be believed.

North waved at the bushes to his right; Lieutenant Hastings and his men emerged.

Quinn approached, riding up along the short column of North’s men, exchanging nods of recognition with those he had met when he accompanied the Hibernians to retrieve a Mughal princeling from Austria two years ago. The men had seemed to like Larry well enough then, and the smiles now were genuine and lingered after he passed.

North rested his hands on his saddle horn—riding with a Western saddle had been another up-time habit he had happily acquired—and studied the slightly younger man. Immediately after the mission to Austria, he had seen a fair amount of Quinn: the powers that had then guided the fate of the State of Thuringia-Franconia—Mike Stearns and Ed Piazza—had made him the regular liaison to the Hibernians.

But then, Quinn all but disappeared. He was rarely seen even in Grantville’s favorite watering hole, the Thuringen Gardens. Word had it that he had shifted away from his military duties and become a scholar, studying law with an elderly up-timer whose name seemed especially appropriate to an educator of jurisprudence: Riddle.

Thomas had been puzzled and a bit disappointed by Quinn’s choice: although the Englishman had been unwilling to admit it openly, the up-timer had promise as a soldier. And if twentieth-century assumptions of what soldiering meant had hindered him a bit at first, Larry had shed those misperceptions shortly after the jaunt to Austria. With that leavening experience, North expected that Quinn’s up-time military service with the West Virginia National Guard would stand him in good stead. Indeed, as the Hibernian Company expanded into the Hibernian Battalion and made the acquisition of near-up-time capabilities its hallmark characteristic, North had more than once wished that Quinn would become a regular at the Gardens, once again . . . for professional reasons. Although North had infinitely more field experience, Quinn had been trained to use rapid-firing weapons at both short and long ranges. The relevant tactics that had been drilled into the American by rote were unknown in this world—and Thomas’ evolving unit had urgent need of such knowledge. Far more than the Englishman was able to acquire from his assiduous viewing of—not to say addiction to—the movies that the up-timers had brought with them

Quinn drew up to North and extended a hand. “It’s good to see you again, Colonel.”

“It won’t be if you insist on being so bloody formal, Larry.”

Quinn smiled. “Okay, Thomas. So, you’re on your way to Biberach.”

“Evidently you can read a copy of my orders as well as I can. Which means you also know that I’m to see to the safe establishment of the first airship ground facility there.”

“Which you just finished doing in Nuremburg.”

“Yes. Dull work. Indeed, the only noteworthy event since leaving Grantville is finding you riding around in the same patch of country we are. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.”

“There’s no fooling you, is there, Thomas?”

“No, Larry, there isn’t.” North smiled. The excessively earnest and often anxious young man of two years ago had grown up a great deal: he was as easy in his banter as he was in his saddle. “And although your appearance here is a mystery, I suspect I can be sure of one thing: that I’m not going to like the reason for it.”

Larry grinned crookedly and urged his horse to resume its shambling progress toward Biberach, pulling ahead of the formation. He cast a meaningful glance at Thomas.

Who thought, Great. Just great.

***

The reason for Larry’s decision to precede the column at a confidentiality-ensuring distance revealed itself soon enough. And it also explained why the pace he was setting was a leisurely one: according to the latest news, Biberach’s town fathers had suddenly reversed their decision of three months ago and were now refusing to host the aerodrome.

“And how did you hear about this problem when even I haven’t?” North wondered.

Larry hooked his thumb back at the smaller rider who had been with him, and who was now trailing behind Hastings. “That guy, Kurzman, arrived in Nuremburg about three days after you left. I got there a day later and heard the news from him. He was the USE factor for establishing the aerodrome in Biberach.”

“And what reason did the burghers give him for changing their minds?”

“That’s part of the problem: they didn’t. He had been staying down there, doing the groundwork, gathering the necessary supplies and fuel—”

“Some of which we need to take on to Chur in the Alps, I suppose you know.”

Quinn nodded. “Yep. And then, about six weeks ago, the regular confabs with the big shots ceased. No sign of a problem; Kurzman just figured they had pretty much ironed out the last of the wrinkles and were in a holding pattern until you arrived. Then ten days ago, the burgers show up at his inn and tell him that unfortunately, the arrangements must be rescinded. No timetable for resuming discussions, no reason. Just the implication that Kurzman had no further reason to remain in Biberach and therefore, shouldn’t.”

“My,” observed Thomas, “such friendly people. I suspect they’ll be welcoming us with garlands. Of slip-knotted hemp.”

“Doubtful, but not impossible.”

“Larry, you were not supposed to agree with me. As the sunny-dispositioned American, your role is to dissuade me from my excessive pessimisms and ensure me that Everything Is Going To Be Just Fine.”

“Sorry.”

“Yes. Well, I wouldn’t have believed you anyway. So Kurzman went up to the aerodrome in Nuremburg?”

“Right. Figured they’d have a radio. Ran into me the day after he arrived, told me his sad story, and here we are.”

Thomas considered the American from the corner of his eye. “And why were you in Nuremburg to begin with, Larry? Rather far from Grantville.”

“Well, yes. About that. I’m actually preparing to travel even farther from Grantville. Much farther.”

“About which you can say no more.” Larry’s response to Thomas’ jocularity was a somber nod, causing the Englishman to reassess: so Larry is down here for some other reason, found out about this snag, was retasked to handle it. Probably via radio in Nuremburg. Which means that Larry has become a confidential agent for Stearns, or Piazza, or both. Poor sod. Aloud: “So fate redirected you to me.”

Larry looked at Thomas. “No: I was coming down here to find you, already.”

To find me? Well, this is becoming far too personal for comfort. “And to what do I owe the honor of your undisclosable interest?”

“Well, I can disclose some of it: I’m interested in hiring four of the men in this unit. For a little job I have.”

North raised an eyebrow. “I’m always interested in new business contracts—but not pertaining to men already in the field. Take up the matter of appropriate staffing with my business partner, Liam Donovan.”

“I already have—and with Ed Piazza. From what I understand, you’d be quite pleased at the deal they struck.”

North stared at him, appalled. “You’re going to take the men from me. While I’m in the middle of an operation.”

Larry stared at the fleecy clouds overhead. “Now would I do that?

“Of course you would.”

To which Larry had no rebuttal other than a sheepish smile.

***

When they stopped to water the horses, take a brief meal and rest, North’s temper was even enough to resume the conversation.

“Which four of my men are you taking, Larry?”

Quinn answered around a mouthful of bread. “Templeton, Volker, Winkelmann, and Wright.”

How nice: cherry-picking the very best among the regulars. Which means Larry had detailed advice from—“Donovan made the recommendations?”

Quinn chewed, nodded.

“So why are you still riding with us, then? Why not depart with your human loot, you pirate?”

“Because—as you no doubt suspect—I’ve also been asked to help resolve the situation in Biberach. And that will give me a chance to see the four men in action.”

Thomas’ eyebrows rose. “‘In action’? Do you suspect it was foreign influence that undermined Biberach’s commitment to the aerodrome?”

Quinn shook his head, gnawed on a small wedge of cheese. “Nope. Stearns and Piazza have pretty much ruled that out. The likely culprits lack sufficient motivation to go to the trouble of trying to sew dissension in our ranks. Bavaria’s preoccupied with internal post-war problems, Austria has adopted a posture of cordial entente, and it’s hard to see what the French would stand to gain. Besides, if there was an attempt at subornation by a foreign power, it would probably be aimed at the disgruntled Catholic population of Biberach. But Kurzman reports that all the burgermeisters—both Protestant and RC—were in lock-step about rescinding the aerodrome deal.”

“But you’re still expecting that our men might see some ‘action’?”

“Well, given how they tossed Kurzman out on his ear, there’s no knowing just how unfriendly a reception we’re going to get.” Quinn popped the last morsel of cheese into his mouth. “And besides, if the town fathers won’t reconsider their decision, it’s not like we’ve got a lot of options regarding what we have to do next. Biberach has been using our seed money to gather the oil and ethanol that’s needed further south at the aerodrome you’ll be establishing in Chur. And Biberach itself is at the transport sweet-spot the airships need. It’s less than one hundred miles to Chur, and not much more to Nuremburg. That makes it the essential hub between the two, given the airship’s operational range.”

North frowned. “Essential? What about other nearby towns? It’s not as though the region is sparsely settled. Quite the contrary.”

Quinn shook his head, moistened his finger, ran it around the paper that the cheese had been wrapped in. “Other locations have already been considered. Ulm isn’t stable enough, either economically or politically: they didn’t get spared by the Thirty Years’ War the way Biberach did just after Grantville fell out of the future into Germany. And Buchau and Schussenried are too far south.”

“What? Just another ten miles or so—”

“Thomas, these blimps have really tight range limits. Biberach is already a little too far from the Nuremburg aerodrome—by about five miles or so. So pushing the aerodrome farther south would endanger the airships. A bad alpine headwind pushing against you could mean a forced landing in a field—or worse. And if Biberach is actually a little closer than it needs to be to Chur—only eighty miles—well, let’s just say the place you want the most margin for error is when you’re actually entering or leaving the Alps. Far more surprises there than in flat-land flying. Or so I’m told.”

Thomas shrugged. “Well, I suppose that ties it, then. And since Biberach has the safest market south of Nuremburg, it’s the logical cachement hub for the fuels these airships need.”

Larry nodded. “It’s also the best town in terms of being receptive to our polydenominational culture. Although there’s no love lost between Catholic and Protestant, they’ve managed to maintain a joint government. Not always with perfect equity, of course. Three years ago, the Swedes given the Protestants the upper hand—a position they’ve used to beat up on the Catholics a bit. But it’s still a joint government, say what you will. That’s a hell of a lot better than most other places.”

“Well, Larry, I suppose Biberach is the pearl of great price, then—particularly given recent news.”

If Quinn heard the leading tone, he didn’t let on. “Oh? What news?”

“The news coming out of Italy. That the Spanish cardinals are getting singularly restive. That Naples seems to be an armed camp squatting upon an incipient rebellion.”

Quinn checked the belly straps on his saddle. “And your point would be?”

“Well, I’m sure Mssrs. Stearns and Piazza might find it somewhat reassuring to be able to initiate a fast transalpine connection to Italy in such tense times. Given all the up-time friends they have down there.”

Larry turned to face North and smiled. “Let’s ride, Thomas.”

***

An hour later, they drew within sight of Biberach’s walls, but on the advice of Kurzman, stayed on the west bank of the river Riss. Larry Quinn looked at the narrow ribbon of water and made a remark about creeks being promoted to the status of rivers in Germany.

Kurzman nodded, but stuck doggedly to sharing his recommendations. “Herr Quinn, you should choose only a few men to go into Biberach. A large number will not be welcome. Nor will I.”

Thomas raised an eyebrow. “So we are to expect the singular joys of bivouacking in the delightfully moist fields of early spring?”

“Nein, Herr North. You vill go to Ringschnaitt. It is the little village just to the west, beneath the walls of Biberach. A farm village; a garden and dairy market for the town, ja?”

“And do you particularly recommend any of Ringschnaitt’s fine establishments for our custom?”

“What?”

Thomas slowed his Amideutsch, pruned out the idioms of his youth. “Will we be more welcome in some barns than others?”

“If you haff money, you vill be welcome.”

“Ah, well that simplifies matters. Hastings?”

“Sir?”

“You will procure lodgings for our men. Rations, as well. Double-guard, and everyone stays within the perimeter.”

“Are we expecting trouble, sir?”

“No, but we do not want to be surprised by it, either.”

Larry cocked an eye at North. “And where will you be, during all of this?”

“Why, with you, of course,” North scoffed. “You don’t think I’m going to trust you to the tender mercies of the locals on your own, do you?”

“Or let me have the sole enjoyment of a warm tap-room and hot food?”

“That, too.”

***

After having settled the detachment in Ringschnaitt and enduring multiple rehearsals of the titles and names of the various town fathers with Kurzman, Thomas had Finan and Volker accompany them over the Riss and toward the entry known as the Ulmer gate. As they approached, the long shadow-finger of the portal-straddling tower held them in its narrow gloom, pointing the way home for a trickle of workers and older farm-children.

Volker grunted as a small group of more somber, muttering youngsters pushed a produce-vendor’s handcart toward the purpling blue of the eastern horizon.

“What is it, Volker?” asked Thomas, wondering when the guard at the tower was going to get around to challenging them.

“Those kids. They’re Swiss.”

“Swiss? All of them.”

“Ja. Spring workers, down from the Alps. Usually about ten to fourteen years old. Folks send them down here along the Jakobsweg to make money. Not enough work up-country at this time of the spring, but plenty down here.”

Quinn stared, shook his head.

Thomas noticed. “Not common in your time, I take it?”

“Kids that young sent a hundred miles from home to work for someone else? That would probably have been breaking about a hundred up-time labor laws.”

Thomas shrugged. “You would perhaps have preferred them a bit older, so that the girls might be pressured to provide more than field work?”

Quinn’s voice was low and hard. “As if ‘employers’ like that are picky about age, anyway.”

Volker spoke up. “Sirs, it is not as you are thinking. The children travel in groups, and go to families they have worked with before. Mostly.” He fell silent as the officers stared at his ominous addition of “mostly.”

Quinn asked, “But you’re not from around here, are you, Volker?”

“No, sir, but a cousin from Nuremburg traded down here, knew people who had traveled the pilgrim’s route—the Jakobsweg—all the way down to Santiago de Campostela in Spain. The custom of child-workers from the Alps is traditional. It is no more subject to abuse than similar traditions.”

Thomas nodded back toward the gate: they were so close that they could make out the facial features of the single guard. “The town militia certainly doesn’t seem to be worried about trouble, does it?”

“No, indeed,” agreed Quinn quietly.

That was about the same moment that the armed worthy at the gate noticed the four armed men approaching. He flinched, pulled himself upright, and, almost as an afterthought, reached behind him and produced a weapon that made Thomas stare, and then grin. “Oh my,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth toward Larry, “they are clearly ready for all threats from any quarter.”

Quinn was silent, kept moving towards the man who was brandishing a tarnished arquebus in a poor parody of stalwart readiness. Rather than asking who the newcomers were, or their business, he nervously proclaimed, “Biberach is under the protection of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and the United States of Europe, and is garrisoned by the men of General Horn.”

Thomas shrugged. “We certainly do not dispute those facts.”

This left the gate guard—such as he was—speechless.

As Larry produced their respective papers and explained the reason for their visit to the town, Thomas continued sizing up the guard. Who, he confirmed quickly, was not really a guard at all. An ill-fitting cuirass and helmet from the prior century were the only clear military gear upon him. Although uniforms had been little known before the up-timers began to spearhead their adoption, the garb of soldiers was nonetheless distinct from that of townsmen and workers: it was generally more rugged and furnished with belts and straps from which to hang items needed in the press of combat. Gloves were not uncommon, nor were a variety of camping tools that could double as secondary weapons in a pinch.

None were in evidence on the man at the Ulmer gate. Dressed as a tradesman—possibly a weaver, from the look of him—he lacked the lean look of a soldier, and was utterly without the wary businesslike posture and tendency towards taciturnity. He was all too glad to discover that the four oddly armed men before his town’s gate were in fact legitimate emissaries of the greater powers to the north; his sudden and relieved volubility were arguably the clearest of the many signs that he was merely a townsman impressed to temporary duty as a gate guard.

Thomas nodded at the now-forgotten arquebus leaning against the gate-house wall. “You know, “ he observed sagely, “I am told those work best when there’s a lit match somewhere nearby. Preferably in the weapon itself.”

The civilian stopped, stared, and then blushed. “I am as much a guard as you men are weavers.”

Thomas frowned. “Then why are you on guard duty? Where is the town watch? Better yet, where is the garrison that General Horn left here?”

“Well,” said the fellow, leaning on the gun-rest as he spoke, “the garrison was actually put in place by General-Major von Vitinghof three years ago, although he was only in town for one day. Most of the work was done by an assistant of his, Hauptmann Besserer, who left twenty Swedes in charge. There were also thirty German soldiers: Lutherans, mostly from Ravensburg.”

“And where are they?”

“Gone.” He waved west. “Back with Horn, fighting Bernhard, I suppose.”

Larry frowned. “And there were no replacements sent?”

“Yes, but they came late. And not many of them. They contracted Plague on the way to us”—he crossed himself ardently—“and almost half were dying as they got here. The rest were very weak.”

“And so there are too few left to man the gates?”

The guard looked east. “Well, I do not know. They are not stationed in the town, you see.”

“Not in town? Where are they?”

“The abbey at Heggbach, about six miles east.”

“There is a hospital there?”

The fellow looked uncomfortable. “No.”

“Then what?” snapped Thomas. “Why send them to the abbey?”

“To keep them away from us,” the man mumbled. “The abbess and many of the nuns—they had already died of the plague, there. The survivors had gone elsewhere: there weren’t enough of them left to maintain the abbey. Besides, they were too weak to live on their own.”

“And none of you helped them,” finished Larry in a flat tone.

The guard stared back in faint defiance. “There was nothing we could do. By the time we learned, a third of the nuns were dead or nearly so. And besides, they are not our responsibility. At times, they had been most troublesome. The abbess of Heggbach was frequently in dispute with the abbey’s tenant farmers, many of whom live much closer to our walls, and who sought our intervention. Which made for trouble with the abbey.”

Larry stared at the man. “So when the sick replacement garrison showed up, you sent it into quarantine at Heggbach Abbey. Where I presume you expected them to die.”

“I expected nothing!” shouted the weaver-watchman. “I am a simple man given an old gun to guard a gate. I am not consulted on such things. I just hear news like everyone else. If you wish to complain to the Burgermeisters, they should still be in the Rathaus—although not for much longer.” He sent an appraising squint toward the end of the tower’s lengthening shadow.

“Fine,” said Larry with a sharp nod, “we’ll do that.”

***

Following the guard’s directions, they moved toward St. Martin’s cathedral, angling south through the reasonably wide streets once they came upon it. Thomas chose his calmest tone, and began. “I say, Larry—”

“I know,” the American shot back, “I was pretty tough on that poor guy at the gate.”

“Rather. Why?”

“I guess because what he said pushed my buttons. Yeah, I understand why they did what they did: they had the plague at their gates, and a reasonable chance of keeping it out if they were careful about how much external contact they had. But damn, so many towns around here made such an easy accommodation with turning away people in need, with turning a blind eye upon human suffering. Just like they did during World War II, up in my time.”

Thomas considered. “Larry, I claim no expertise in what your histories call the Holocaust. I will simply observe that villainy, bigotry, and genocide have a long history of traveling together. The same up-time processes that enabled mass production were no less an enabling factor for mass destruction.

“However, in this time, what you see as an easy accommodation with cruelty may simply be the exhaustion of hoping for fairy tale endings. I notice in your American history that things almost always came out right in the end, as though there was some guardian angel watching over the fate of your nation. As best as I can tell, some of your more gullible leaders actually believed there was. But here, you are dealing with persons brought up on unremitting rounds of war and plague, of whole generations sucked into the maw of death.” North looked up as they fell into, and then out of the shadow of the cathedral. “You Americans never had a reason to lose hope. These poor sods were born into a world where there wasn’t any hope left.”

Quinn nodded slowly, pointed. “There’s the new Rathaus, at the head of the market place. Ready for a frontal assault on close-minded and quarrelsome bureaucrats?”

Thomas sighed. “Oh, yes: I live for the thrill of that particular battle.”

***

After navigating the closing bakers’ stalls crowded along the arcades of the Rathaus, they made their way inside. It was the same scene of impermanence and frenzy that Thomas had seen in small city Rathauses throughout Germany. Often used for general meetings and other large gatherings, the ground floor of such buildings were rarely furnished with fixed partitions. Field chairs, stools, and folding tables abounded, as did arguments, exhortations, and idle chatter. Quinn waded manfully into the chaos, fixed upon a young fellow who was just preparing to run a message, flashed a kreutzer at him.

The fellow’s stride broke, swerved in the direction of the American. His eyes roved over the group’s gear. “Yes, Herr Hauptman?”

“I wish to speak with either the Burgermeister or the Stadtamtmann. Where will I find them?”

The reply—“upstairs”—earned the fellow the kreutzer: his reaction was a quick smile and a quicker departure.

Progress through the diminishing crowd in the Rathaus was still slow, due to the frenzy of the remaining workers as they redoubled their efforts to wrap up and head home. An outbound scribe descending the northern staircase attempted to dissuade them from ascending, saw that his entreaties were pointless, gesticulated toward their destination, left them to their own devices.

Thomas was content to let Quinn continue to walk point: that way, the American would hit the first political tripwire, and they were deep in what was, for all soldiers, enemy country: the tortuous warrens of bureaucrats.

Quinn knocked on the jamb of an already-open office door. “Herr Burgermeister von Pflummern?”

A youngish, fit man looked up from his pile of books and papers. “Yes?” In the next second he was on his feet, his eyes slightly wider and much more cautious. “And who, may I ask, are you?”

While Quinn presented their bona fides, their papers, and their business, Thomas scanned the room and the hallway surreptitiously. Another man, older and thickly built, emerged from a larger office halfway down the hall, two other men in tow. Brows lowering, they glanced hastily at the strange group around the entrance to von Pflummern’s office, and hurried toward the southern staircase.

Von Pflummern’s office was half chaos, half order, leaving Thomas with the impression that it was being used by two different men. Judging from the way that pristine orderliness seemed to be encroaching on dust-covered layers of entropy, the neatness was logically a characteristic of the newcomer. A glance at von Pflummern himself, and Thomas knew him to be the recent arrival.

It was not just his comparative youth: it was his immaculate dress, hair, and hygiene. The pen he was using was neatly and newly cut, and the ink, quill knives, and blotting paper were arrayed evenly along the margins of his workspace.

Just as Burgermeister von Pflummern was about to correct Larry’s (and therefore, Ed Piazza’s) ostensible misunderstanding of what had, and had not, been offered and promised by the inner council of Biberach’s Rat, Thomas intruded a quick question: “Excuse me, Herr Burgermeister von Pflummern, but how recently did you replace the former Catholic Burgermeister?”

Von Pflummern’s jaw froze, then thawed into a surprised stutter: “How, how do you—? Two months. And a few weeks.”

“So you were not a Burgermeister at the time the aerodrome agreement was made, is that correct?”

“It is, but as the senior Catholic member of the inner council, I was fully aware of all the particulars.”

“I did not mean to imply otherwise. I just noted that your office has—well, has the look of transition.”

Von Pflummern flushed slightly, nodded, looked around: had there been enough space and chairs, Thomas intuited that the man’s innate congeniality would have had him inviting them all to take seats. But then he stood straighter and extended a hand toward the door, back in the direction of the stairs.

“You are correct. We have had many losses, this past winter. My predecessor died of a fever, and the former Protestant Burgermeister, Johann Schoenfeld the Elder, died of the plague late last year. He was one of the few to contract it and he refused to come back within the walls. Now I will thank you gentlemen to see yourselves out; I must close my office and return home.”

North was going to press for one more tidbit of information about the prior Roman Catholic Burgermeister when Quinn stuck out a hand with a slight bow. After a moment’s hesitation, von Pflummern took it. Quinn bowed slightly: “I am sorry we have intruded so late in the day. As you see from my orders, I will need to speak to you at greater length, as well as the town’s other Burgermeister and its Stadtamtmann.”

“The Protestant Burgermeister is Hanss Lay. My brother Christoph is the Stadtamtmann. We will make what time we can for you tomorrow. Good evening, gentlemen.”

***

Before heading back to their beddings of hay and the smell of ordure, Quinn suggested they visit a tavern a few blocks south of the market place that was known as far as Ulm for its beer. Thomas offered no resistance and made a silent footnote to inquire upon returning to Grantville if the up-timer’s modest means had improved in recent days, or if he was on a rather generous operating account. If the latter, that suggested he had garnered an unusual measure of trust from the notoriously frugal (not to say miserly) Ed Piazza.

The inside of the Grüner Baum was tidy and nicely appointed: the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War had indeed visited this town lightly, if even its taverns were no worse for wear. Thomas downed his first pint before the beermaid could escape the table: “noch ein” he ordered with a wide smile and turned to Larry. “Very nice of you, standing us a drink.”

“I find your use of the singular—‘a drink’—particularly ironic.”

“As was intended. Now, what do you think that was all about, back there?”

“Don’t know,” answered Quinn, staring at a spare, morose-looking fellow across the room. “Hopefully, we’ll get a better idea tomorrow.”

“I doubt it,” said Thomas, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the beermaid and thereby gauge when the next frothy stein might arrive. “I get the distinct impression that the town fathers are concealing something. Possibly even in cahoots across denominational lines, if I read that little closing scene correctly upstairs at the Rathaus.”

“You might be right,” Larry agreed. His tone suggested his attention was elsewhere.

Thomas followed his gaze, which was still fixed—and with greater intensity—upon the morose fellow sitting alone across the rapidly filling room. Who, Thomas noticed, was wearing well-worn clothes, but not of the typical, almost stolid, local cut. His garments and gear emphasized line and flow: Thomas discerned that they were not only easier to look at, but also, probably easier to move in.

In short, they were almost certainly Italian. The look of the leather, the faint hints of color and the detail of worksmanship all suggested those origins, now that he studied the man more closely.

He also noted that the fellow kept his head turned slightly, eyeing the world from one side more than the other, rather like parakeets did.

Thomas was about to remark on this odd feature when Quinn rose with a muttered, “I’ll be damned,” and began moving across the room. Thomas, flustered, rose, and—after a moment of desperate and disappointed scanning for his inbound pint—followed.

He arrived at the table in time to see Larry offer a quick half-bow and inquire, “I am sorry to intrude, but may I inquire: are you an artist?”

The fellow—younger than Larry—started, and in that moment, Thomas saw why he held his head peculiarly: he was blind in the left eye. There was no sign of injury or deformity, and it tracked dutifully after the sighted eye, but it was clearly dead.

More surprising still was the fellow’s response. “Why, yes: I am. Or so I style myself. Who, may I ask, is inquiring?” The smile was congenial but also far too old and world-weary for the young face. “A factor for a patron, perhaps?”

“Perhaps,” Larry answered with a grave nod. If he noticed Thomas start in surprise along with the half-sighted fellow, he gave no indication. “There are several people where I’m from who are very interested in your work.”

“‘My work?’ At present, what few canvases I painted I was compelled to leave behind in Rome. How could anyone here know of my work?”

“Not here, Herr Schoenfeld. I am referring to up-timers in Grantville—and some of their Dutch acquaintances.”

Now the younger man sat up very straight. “If this is a jest, it is in very poor taste, and I will ask you to leave. If not, I will thank you to indicate who you are, who you represent, and how you know me.”

Larry answered Schoenfeld’s first two queries and concluded with, “As for knowing you: in my time, Johann Schoenfeld was known as the father of Baroque art in Germany. You, sir, are famous.”

Schoenfeld stared, then laughed, his tilted head back. “Famous?” he barked so loudly that several other heads in the Grüner Baum looked up from their steins. “If I’m famous, it’s for failing my family and my craft. Famous for fleeing before the black tides of war.”

“I assure you, Herr Schoenfeld, in my time, sketches from your early career were sought-after treasures of art history.”

Schoenfeld studied Larry with his good eye; Thomas knew he was being thoroughly scanned as well, albeit peripherally. “And so this is how you knew me?”

Larry nodded. “Before coming down here, I was briefed on everything we knew about Biberach from this time period. Other than a few brief mentions about events in the Thirty Years’ War, it was best known for being your birthplace and family residence until you left for Italy.”

Johann Schoenfeld leaned back, his long nose seeming to accuse them. “I am sorry to tell you that your histories are incomplete. I apprenticed in Ulm and then Basel before returning here—just before stories began circulating about the wonders of Grantville. And just when it also seemed possible that Wallenstein or the Bavarians would finally pillage Biberach. And so I fled to Italy. To escape. And yes, to work, also, but mostly to escape.”

Larry shrugged. “Why should one remain in the path of war when it approaches?”

Schoenfeld’s one good eye stabbed at him. “To support one’s family. Which I did not. And thanks to that, my father is dead of plague.”

Thomas blinked: so, the late Burgermeister Schoenfeld and the artist’s father are one and the same. It was not beyond possibility that there could be two such men of the same name, and same generation, who would have died of the plague in Biberach. But it was pretty unlikely, and besides, a Burgermeister would have the wealth and authority to send a talented son—particularly a son who was blind in one eye—off to a safer place, a place to which a journeyman artist would logically go. Similarly, a Burgermeister who thought that way was also likely to be the kind of selfless man who, once infected, would quarantine himself outside the town rather than risk bringing the plague into the streets where all his loved ones and friends lived their crowded, wall-bound lives.

Thomas’ hypotheses received an additional boost when the young artist took up his own drink and continued gesticulating with the other hand—which was clearly withered. “If I had not been so—so weak, so useless, this would never have happened.”

Thomas, who had resolved to let Larry handle this on his own, found himself objecting: “Herr Schoenfeld, I have known many cowards. You are not among their number.”

Schoenfeld looked at Thomas. “And how would you know this?”

“Because I have been in more battles than you have lived years and I can tell you this about cowards: they spend most of their time making excuses for themselves. The last thing they do is take blame upon their own back for fear that others will see them for what they really are.” He considered his next words carefully. “What I see right now is a man whom god, fate, or chance—your choice—intended for a different greatness. Perhaps to inspire men through your visions of the world, rather than to cause men to expire out of it.”

“As has been your lot in life,” Schoenfeld added the unspoken footnote.

“Unfortunately, yes. And I will tell you that nine out of every ten so-called ‘deeds of valor’ were merely acts of desperation that came out well. And that there is very little glory picking your way among the dead and dying after a battle.”

Schoenfeld’s answer was a strange, small, poignant smile. “As you say these things, my mind’s eye shows me what I have always wished to paint.”

“Come to Grantville,” put in Larry, “and I will show you that you did. I saw some pictures of your paintings before I came here: they are heroic, but always haunted by the horrors of war. Some critics said they could sense Breughel and Bosch lurking just beyond the margins of your canvases.”

Schoenfeld’s eyes—including the sightless one—were suddenly bright. “I would like to see these canvases—if for no other reason to know what now I will never paint.” Then the vitality seemed to ebb out of him. “But there is too much to settle here. Too many troubles.”

“Something that we can help with, perhaps?” Larry offered carefully.

“Maybe. I don’t know enough, yet. I just arrived yesterday and learned—well, about my father. And the other problems. It is difficult, adapting to so much, so quickly. Perhaps, if we were to meet here again tomorrow, at about this time—”

“We shall.” Quinn’s voice was firm and friendly. “And now, tell us about Italy. We have heard that there is trouble there.”

Schoenfeld rolled his eyes. “That is like saying that water is wet. I had been thinking of pursuing an invitation to go to the court of Count Orsini of Naples, but—”

Thomas managed to catch the eye of the beermaid and guide the lost beer to his waiting hand: listening to traveler’s tales was thirsty work, after all . . .

***

It was also thirsty work listening to German Burgers say “no” in half a dozen different ways, as Thomas discovered the next morning. It certainly made him want to have a drink. Or three.

The return to von Pflummern’s office was cordial but brief. The brother Christoph —the Stadtamtmann and the decidedly less-congenial sibling—did not even sit, but stood behind his brother, arms crossed, his frown as firmly fixed upon his face as his sharp-bridged nose. When asked if he had been part of the negotiations, he shook his head once and spat out a crisp, “Nein.” And that was all.

Unfortunately, the meeting with the Protestant Burgermeister wasn’t going much better. Another town functionary, Hans Kaspar Funk, was sitting stolidly in a chair beside the Burgermeister’s vast desk. As the town’s Pfarrpfleger, Funk ensured the timely and adequate external maintenance of Biberach’s churches, and he was also a member of the Innere Rat, or inner council. Not surprisingly, he had been named in the documents in Quinn’s possession: his involvement in the aerodrome negotiations was a matter of record. Indeed, he had been Kurzman’s primary point of contact for sorting out the details, once the general agreement had been reached.

Except now it sounded as though the agreement—which was written in clear black and white on the sheets that Quinn had politely advanced across the table toward Burgermeister Hanss Lay—had never been an agreement at all. Thomas felt the need for a drink redouble as Lay spread his hands expressively and continued his enumeration of unresolved contractual impediments. “Then there is the matter of gold.”

“Gold?” echoed Quinn. “Did you expect additional compensation?”

“Nein, nein, nein: not gold coins. Gold that one works. Gold for goldsmiths.” Lay threw up his heavy hands. “Biberach’s weavers are its most famous craftsmen, yes, but what is our second most famous product?”

Aggravation, Thomas answered silently.

Lay provided the response to his own question. “Fine work in gold. We have a considerable goldsmith’s guild here, and my predecessor was its senior member. His nephew, Hans Jakob Schoenfeld the Younger, is a member of the Rat and has made his guild’s special problem very clear, we feel.”

“Special problem?” Quinn repeated quietly. And somewhat helplessly, Thomas thought.

“Yes, of course. The problem with Venice.”

The sudden, powerful increase in Thomas’ already strong desire for a drink triggered a fleeting concern that perhaps he was becoming an alcoholic, after all.

Quinn’s voice was admirably level. “Tell me about the Venice problem.”

“Is it not obvious? Your airship will create easier access to Venice. This will increase the flow of raw gold stocks to this area. That increased supply will depress prices on all gold objects. It would be disastrous.”

Quinn held up a pausing hand. “But as I understand it—and as Herr Kurzman explored with you—cheaper raw stocks of gold are actually good. If the finished items sell for a little less here in Biberach itself, that is only a small percentage of your final market, the rest of which lies well beyond the effects of the greater influx of raw gold. Besides, the airship means your finished gold products have much wider markets—including those in Italy. According to Herr Kurzman, you saw that advantage before he pointed it out to you.”

“Yes, well, we all said a great many things. I believe Herr Kurzman is quite mistaken in this recollection of them.”

Funk spoke sepulchrally from his wide-armed chair. “Besides, there is also the originally undisclosed nature of our primary business partner. We had been under the impression that the airships were being created and run by the up-timers of Grantville. But we have since learned that the true owner of these balloons is this fellow Estuban Miro.”

“That is true. This was made clear during the negotiations.”

“Not the fact that he is a Jew,” Funk sniffed haughtily. “We are not . . . comfortable dealing with one of his kind.”

Thomas forgot all about the drink he wanted. “Certainly you are not serious. This town deals with ‘his kind’ all the time. Jewish communities are the largest suppliers and conveyors of both raw and finished gold in this entire area. How could you be—?”

But Quinn was rising. He interrupted Thomas with a bow and a “Guten Tag,” and was then towing the Englishman toward the door.

“But this is sheer rubbish, Larry. This is—”

Low and hasty, Quinn whispered. “Thomas. Let it be. The problems here are not about Venice, not about Miro, and not about his religion. There’s something else going on here.” Larry continued after they had closed the door behind them and were walking toward the stairs. “They’re nervous now because their objections are all bullshit. And they know that we know they’re bullshit.”

“And do they know that we know that they know that we—?”

“Okay, Thomas: that’s not funny.”

“Really? I found it exquisitely amusing.”

***

By the time Thomas had a stein in front of him at the Grüner Baum, he was ready for a drink again. “I think this constitutes a dead end, Major Quinn. What is our next option? Removal of the civilian government?”

“Don’t tempt me. But what’s standing in our way is simple ignorance.”

“They are a blinkered bunch, I’ll give you that.”

“No, Thomas: not their ignorance. Our ignorance. Since the reasons we got were pure bullshit, that means we haven’t seen the real reason for their change of mind. I just wish we had access to someone who knew what was going on in their minds between the time they agreed to the deal and then went back on it.”

“You mean, someone like him?” Thomas pointed toward the bar, where a young man in military gear had just placed an order. The exchange with the owner was cordial, but not familiar.

Larry looked at Thomas. “An officer from the garrison?”

North sipped, shrugged. “You know any other soldiers in town? But why wonder when we can just ask?”

***

The young officer was glad for the invitation to join them and introduced himself as Georg Prum, commander of the Protestant Garrison of Biberach.

Quinn raised an eyebrow. “Commander, you say?”

Prum smiled: he was a good-looking fellow, the kind that was always presumed to have “aristocratic blood” even if he was the lowest-born pauper’s bastard in a town. “The plague has a way of promoting us before our time, Major. Consider the youth of the town’s Rat.”

“I thought they were spared the plague.”

“Yes—thanks largely to your uptime methods of quarantine, as I understand it. But diphtheria struck, too, and is a much subtler infiltrator of towns. As is often the case, the old and the young had a particularly hard time of it. As did we.”

“And so you are the ranking officer remaining?”

“I am. And we lost our senior sergeant, as well. Not that there were many of us to begin with. From what our late commander, Captain Grieg, told me, General Horn deemed this area largely secure by the onset of winter last year and wanted all his Swedish troops back west where the primary action was. So although a garrison of fifty were withdrawn from Biberach, he only sent twenty-five of us as replacements for it. The plague and diphtheria cut us down to almost half that.”

Quinn shook his head sympathetically. Thomas took a meditative sip before commenting, “You know, we were contemplating coming out to visit the abbey .”

Prum pushed back one dark black wing of a trim moustache. “You’d be the first. And most welcome. Although if you do so, I doubt you’ll be very welcome back here, anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because you might pick up whatever stench was apparently thick upon us when we arrived.”

“I take it you were not met with open arms?”

“We were turned away at the gate. Seems our predecessors had not made themselves very welcome in the town: they were such ardent Lutherans that they made the joint government difficult to maintain in any practical sense of the word. And of course, we showed up sick and too weak to really debate the matter: the half of us who were healthy enough to move under our own power had our hands full supporting those who were not. So they sent us off to the abbey—probably to die. The abbess there had died not too long before; plague also. It cleared the abbey.”

“Well,” Larry offered, “at least you have plenty of room.”

“Not as much as you think. Toward the end, the nuns obviously had no way to bury their own dead. Half of the rooms still have one or more corpses in them. And I am not about to order my plague-panicked men to do anything other than close the doors, seal those buildings off, and let the rats have their way.”

“Sounds charming,” Thomas said with a barely-suppressed shudder. “We’ll be sure to visit your pestilential abode.”

“I’m sure you will,” Prum responded with admirable good humor.

Larry leaned forward. “Why haven’t you sent word back to Horn’s staff? Being forced to live in a plague-hole is simply unacceptable. Besides, you can’t carry out your orders from there. How would you even know if Biberach was being endangered?”

“We wouldn’t. And you are absolutely right: there’s little enough we could do from out there. We maintain a patrol between the Abbey and Ringschnaitt, but even that earns us wary looks. The town—well, particularly the Rat—wants us to keep to ourselves, so we do.”

“What brings you to town, then?”

“Man may not live by bread alone, but one has to have it, nonetheless.”

“Ah. Provisioning.”

“Just so. My men will fetch it tomorrow, but I must arrange for it today. Which requires a drink—often stiffer than this one—first: the local merchants are none too happy providing us with our daily needs in exchange for the promise of General Horn’s coin. Coin they’ve never seen.”

“Which is a violation of the revised conduct code of the USE,” murmured Larry.

“Yes. Well. I am not sure how much General Horn believes in the authority of the USE. He certainly does believe in the authority of King Gustav, however. Perhaps if you were to bring up the matter with His Majesty . . .” Prum trailed off with a rueful grin.

“Yes,” Quinn answered with a matching smile. “I’ll make it the first agenda item for our meeting next week. In the meantime, I don’t suppose you could shed any light on why the local Rat changed its mind on a business arrangement it made with Grantville about three months ago?”

Prum frowned, then his eyebrows lifted in understanding. “Ah. This is the airship I’ve heard mentioned once or twice?”

“It is.”

Prum shook his head. “I am sorry. I would not be aware of it at all except for some overheard conversations amongst common workers. And the arrangement has come undone? A pity: I should have liked to have seen such a miracle.”

Thomas nodded understanding. “Any advice on what to do?”

Prum seemed surprised. “Me? About getting them to re-accept a balloon? Here?” He shook his head sadly. “If you have a long time to wait, I suppose you could try to use the power of sweet reason. But if you’re in a hurry, I think you’ll be disappointed. The town fathers are most intractable.” Seeing the looks on their faces, Prum hastened to add, “I’m sorry to be discouraging. But now I must see to securing food for my men.” He rose. “If there’s any assistance I can offer, do not hesitate to ask.”

“We won’t,” grumbled Thomas.

Larry stood, put out his hand. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Herr Kapitan Prum.”

“Likewise, Major Quinn, Colonel Thomas.”

Thomas muttered a pleasantry that even he couldn’t hear as the trim young officer exited the taproom. Once he was gone, the Englishman stared up at the American. “Well, your impressions, Major?”

“Only nice guy we’ve met so far.”

“Which is precisely why I’m suspicious of him,” North grumbled.

“There is that,” Quinn conceded with a small smile.

***

One meal, two hours, and three drinks later, Johann Schoenfeld entered with a relative whose family resemblance was unmistakable. However, the newcomer—the artist’s younger brother Ferdinand—spent a great deal of time in a dark distraction, missing bits of the initial conversation in his somber preoccupation.

Granted, Thomas reflected, the evening’s small talk about weather, trade, politics, trade, and oh yes, more trade, hardly made for riveting conversation. But Ferdinand seemed not merely bored or disinterested: he was fretful and barely touched his beer. Even Johann’s good-natured ribbing about his sibling’s second bout with impending fatherhood elicited only wan smiles.

However, Ferdinand became suddenly alert when, with the dinner hour, their server changed and the new one—a slightly older woman who was more concerned with the patrons as customers than potential husbands—clapped a friendly hand down on his shoulder and asked, “So, how is your little Gisela enjoying the new school in Nuremburg? I’ll bet she misses her Vati!”

Ferdinand muttered congenial pleasantries that sounded both pained and evasive. The server smiled and frowned simultaneously and then swept on to the next table.

Thomas watched the brother as Quinn asked. “So, how is your daughter doing in school?”

“Well,” was the brittle answer, “quite well.”

“What made you decide that she start studying so young, and away from home? Are the schools in Nuremburg so much better?”

Ferdinand drew himself up. “Our schools are every bit as good as those in Nuremburg . . .” Then he faltered, became furtive again. “But it’s a bigger town. It’s a city. It’s safer.”

“Safer?” his brother Johann wondered. “Safer than here?”

Ferdinand was openly nervous now. “Ja, safer. At least in the ways that matter most.” He rose quickly and bowed. “You gentlemen will excuse me. I have a pregnant wife and it is getting late.”

Thomas and Quinn rose, returned his bow, saw Johann’s face folded in creases of concern as Ferdinand made for the door. “I think I should see him home. Something has been bothering him.”

Ya think? Thomas wondered silently, cherishing the sassy up-time idiom.

Quinn frowned after the departing brothers. “You know, Thomas, given Ferdinand’s strange answers and jittery nerves, it might be helpful to have a chat with his wife tomorrow.”

And now, with a smile, Thomas got to say it aloud: “Ya think?”

***

The next morning, their ruse to speak with Ferdinand’s wife at home was a dismal failure. Their claim that they were trying to return what might be Herr Schoenfeld’s lost pipe (it actually belonged to Thomas’s batman, Finan) was rebuffed by the a crone-like servant who answered the door and avoided sharing her name. She indicated that her young mistress was indisposed and added the unsolicited observation that men should not come calling to see pregnant women unannounced, and particularly when the husband or another male family member was not present. It did not perturb her sense of indignation in the least that they had started by asking to speak to the husband (whom they knew to be at work), not the wife, and that it was difficult to send word ahead when one was trying to return a lost object as promptly as possible.

Still, Larry proved a source of unflappable, underplayed charm: well, then might they make an appointment for later?

The crone shook her head once and responded in her limited English: “Not possible.”

Well then, would the servant herself consent to allow them in to show her the pipe, so that she might describe it to Master Ferdinand for his subsequent consideration?

Again, this was “Not possible.” But then came one tantalizingly unusual piece of information. “I am house servant. I do not meet with outsiders. And I do not leave.”

Really? wondered Larry. Never?

“No more. Not now. You are going now.”

Larry’s tone was the epitome of reasonableness; his foot was also in the gapped door. Well, what about one of the other servants? The ones who brought in the food, the water?

“Kein. None. The only other servant ist gone. It is well: she vass lazy.”

Oh? And who might that have been?

A wicked glint illuminated the crone’s one visible eye: she would not share much, but would be happy to advertise the failings of the younger, discharged servant. “Ursula Bodenmüller. The granddaughter, I mean. A weaver’s daughter who cannot weave. Dumbkopf. Now you go.”

Larry got his foot out of the way just in time to avoid losing it.

“So,” said Thomas with a smile. “Ursula Bodenmüller, dumbkopf. She shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

***

And indeed, she was not.

But extracting information from her was difficult and exceedingly dull. After countless digressions into the difficulties of being a weaver’s daughter, of the intellectual challenges of weaving, of the comparable intellectual challenges of shop-cleaning for a butcher, and of the intricacies of being a twenty-seven year old woman whose virtue was daily threatened by various suitors (of whom there was no material evidence), Larry and Thomas finally found a way to keep her talking about the household of Ferdinand and Anna Schoenfeld. Luckily, the key to their continued conversation was the daughter, little Gisela, the darling of her eye who had gone off to school in Nuremburg just before turning three. Which was rather odd timing, Ursula reflected: why send such a small child off to school in the last month of winter?

“Why indeed?” prompted Thomas, who knew not to speak further. One more phrase from him and Ursula was sure to be off on some other tangent.

But Ursula’s focus remained on Gisela. “Do you know, this is what I wondered, too. There had been no talk of school for her; her mama Anna was looking forward to having her around when the new baby comes.” Ursula looked crestfallen. “And to send her off in the middle of the night that way. So strange.”

Thomas looked at Larry; Larry looked back at Thomas. Who urged, “They sent Gisela off to school in the middle of the night?”

“Yes, and it was as though they had forgotten they were going to do so.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you see, Herr Schoenfeld spoilt his little girl rotten.” Ursula smiled happily at the recollection of this dubious parenting. “But even so, Gisela was always so sweet. And she always liked sweet things. So he made sure she had a fresh sweet roll every morning. Which means I always had to buy them late the day before. Which is just what I did the day before Gisela left.” Ursula sighed and stopped.

Thomas thought he was going to swallow his own teeth in frustration. “And then, the next day? The sweet roll?”

Ursula’s eyes got watery. “Gisela was gone, and that old witch Mathilde had given the sweet roll to the chickens. And she wouldn’t tell me why she hadn’t packed it for Gisela’s trip, or who had taken her to Nuremburg. And Herr Schoenfeld fired me. And Mistress Anna was sick in bed. And they took Mathilde in to live with them. The witch.” Ursula’s full, quivering lip threatened the onset of full-blown weeping.

Larry’s voice was patient. “And you haven’t heard from Gisela? You seem to have been very close.”

“Oh, we were. We were. She liked me much more than that—”

“But you haven’t heard from her?”

“No. How could I? She’s only three, and if they have news of her, they don’t tell me. Which is very hurtful. I loved her like she was my own—”

Thomas saw the lower lip become unsteady again, jumped in. “And you say Frau Schoenfeld was suddenly ill?”

“Yes.” Ursula paused, frowned. “Although—” And then she thought.

Unwilling to disrupt this rare event, North and Quinn waited.

“Although,” repeated Ursula with a great frown after what seemed like the world’s longest ten-count, “Frau Schoenfeld took no medicines that I saw, and Mathilde was the only one allowed in her rooms, other than Herr Schoenfeld. Who was there all day. But he never sent for the doctor. But I was scared that Mistress Anna was very sick indeed. That maybe her new pregnancy was putting her in danger.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Well, because her family came to the house for a long time, that day. And it was such a busy day, too. All the Swiss children had arrived, and some were already being sent out into the fields and others were being sent further north, all the way to Ulm. And even so, Mistress Anna’s brothers came, even the oldest one—despite all the work he had to do with the children.”

“He works in the fields with the children?”

Ursula scowled at Thomas’ unthinkable stupidity. “No: he is in charge of recording their contracts at the Rathaus. Anna is the sister of Hans Kaspar Funk. Didn’t you know?”

Larry and Thomas looked at each other a long time before Thomas said. “No, we didn’t. And did anything else unusual happen that day?”

“No. But the next day, the other girls went to school also. No one saw them leave, either. And their families fired most of their servants too.”

Thomas managed not to look over at Larry again. “And what two girls were those?”

“Liesel Lay and Agatha von Pflummern. But with all those Swiss children running around, settling into their jobs in town, or traveling further north or east, it’s no surprise no one remembers seeing them leave. They are pretty much the same age as the ones who were arriving. It was all very confusing, that day.” Ursula paused, looked puzzled. “What was I saying? Was there something else you need me to tell you about Gisela?”

Larry rose, extended his hand. “No, Fraulein Bodenmüller. You have told us everything we need to know.”

***

Thomas and Larry walked in silence. They hadn’t discussed a destination upon leaving the bloodstained backroom of the butcher’s, but of one mind, they seemed to be heading for the Grüner Baum. At least that’s where Thomas hoped they were heading.

Larry spoke up as they turned into the narrow street which led to the tavern. “We’ve been looking at this all wrong. We’ve been looking for a business angle, for some in-town cartel that had something to gain by undermining the aerodrome deal.”

Thomas nodded. “But this doesn’t smell like that. It smells more like—”

“Extortion.”

“Yes,” Thomas agreed, suddenly completely uninterested in a drink. “Extortion.”

***

Sitting by the window looking out on the small lane that led around behind the Grüner Baum to various victualers, Thomas and Quinn nursed almost untouched beers. “What now?” the Englishman wondered aloud. “Try to get in to see the mothers of the other two children?”

Thomas himself knew it was a futile ploy, but nodded in agreement with Quinn’s response. “We won’t get access there, either. According to Ursula, it sounds as if they’ve also gone to a ‘closed house’ servant model.”

Thomas pushed his beer back and forth. “Reducing all routine contacts with the outside world. All in order to conceal whatever happened to their children.”

“Which, judging from Mathilde’s extreme protectiveness, still has Anna Funk in a state of depression.”

“Probably all of them. I hadn’t thought anything of it before now, but I’ve overheard mention that this was an ‘off’ social season among the high and mighty.” Thomas took a sip; the beer he had been enjoying so much during the past two days had a suddenly sour taste to it. “Apparently, the top levels of government aren’t in the mood for celebration. Both Burgermeisters and one of the inner council are too busy trying to act like nothing is wrong.”

Quinn looked around at the patrons of the Grüner Baum. “You think anyone else knows something’s wrong?”

Thomas considered. “Probably not yet, because it hasn’t been going on long enough. Whatever happened occurred within the last two months, if Gisela’s sudden departure for ‘school in Nuremburg’ marks the beginning of the change. But if it goes on much longer—well, a big secret is hard to keep in a small town.”

Quinn nodded out the window. “I wonder if any of them could shed some new light on it.” Thomas turned, saw Schoenfeld approaching, slightly faster than a donkey cart being led by—if he wasn’t mistaken—a pair of genuine soldiers. One of the them was wearing a Swedish-style helmet.

Schoenfeld’s one good eye must have been quite good indeed: he spotted Larry and Thomas staring at him, waved a brief hello, and accelerated his approach to the Grüner Baum.

“Walking like a man with a mission,” commented Quinn.

Thomas nodded as the artist entered and came directly toward their table. “Meine Herren, may I join you?”

“We were hoping you would, Herr Schoenfeld,” replied Thomas. Who was happiest being generous with other peoples’ money: “A drink?”

“No, thank you. No time for that.” He sat and leaned forward briskly: all business, he seemed to forget that one of his hands was withered. “I have been encountering some puzzling circumstances, which may or may not bear upon the frustrations you have been experiencing as well.”

“Oh?” asked Larry mildly.

“Yes. My sister-in-law Anna, usually so cheery, has been quite depressed. According to those who know her, it has been going on for some time now. They fear for her coming child. But at my other brother’s house—Hans Jakob, who is also a member of the Rat—I am now expressly forbidden to speak of it. And I had only asked if it might help to bring little Gisela back for a visit with her mother: by all accounts, they were inseparable, a smile from one being sure of receiving a like return from the other.”

Larry nodded. “And that was when you were told not to speak of Gisela any more.”

“Exactly. Or of Anna’s depression.” Schoenfeld looked from one to the other. “And neither of you are surprised at this. In the least.”

Thomas was wondering how best to respond to that frank observation without giving too much away when the door banged open and the two garrison soldiers entered. Their swagger and bold sweeping glance about the room stopped when it fell upon Thomas and Quinn. Suddenly circumspect, they made their way to the bar and ordered.

Schoenfeld kept to the topic. “You have encountered something similar. You have suspicions.”

Thomas kept his eyes on the soldiers, watched the exchange at the bar. “Suspicions, yes. But no answers.”

“What else have you learned?”

Larry seemed to gauge Schoenfeld carefully. “That Gisela isn’t the only little girl who was sent to school suddenly, just before the Rat decided to cancel the aerodrome deal. It seems that the daughters of Hanss Lay and Ignaz von Pflummern also departed for Nuremburg without anyone noticing.”

Schoenfeld banged his good hand on the table. “I knew it!” he announced.

“Knew what?”

“That there was something odd about this early schooling nonsense. Gisela is a little strip of a girl, barely three. So how would she get to Nuremburg without special arrangements being made long beforehand? It is not as if Biberach has one of your marvelous trains running to and from Nuremburg, after all. Even so, someone from the family would travel with her. And when I offered to bring a letter to her, my younger brother seemed ready to throttle me.”

Quinn leaned forward. “You are traveling to Nuremburg? Why?”

Schoenfeld actually blushed. “Since I was not to become an artist in Italy, then perhaps in Germany, in Grantville, maybe in the Netherlands . . .”

Quinn smiled. “Perhaps so. But at least travel with me, when you go: I would not like to see you hazard the Jakobsweg on your own. And travel is always more pleasant with company, no?”

It was Thomas who answered. “And it is always far more pleasant to travel with well-funded friends.”

Quinn quirked a sour smile. “You mean, like me?”

“Actually, right now, I meant like them.” Thomas pointed surreptitiously at the backs of the two soldiers at the bar.

Larry frowned. “What do you mean?”

“While you’ve been discussing disappearing daughters with Herr Schoenfeld, I’ve been watching those two. Who have already knocked back two of the house’s finest. And are now chasing it down with a double helping of schnapps, each. And they paid full price. For all of it.”

Quinn’s frown went away, replaced by a carefully neutral expression. “Hmm. Not such a poor, threadbare garrison after all.”

“No, indeed. And look at their gear.”

Quinn did. “All new. Local manufacture, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You’re not,” put in Schoenfeld. “I know the work of our weavers and tanners, their marks, their cuts and patterns. That’s their work all right. Of course, they’d have had plenty of time to purchase some, by now. From what my brothers tell me, they’re in town twice a week to pick up provisions.”

Quinn turned, saw where the soldiers had left the wagon, which was now being loaded—none too eagerly—by a handful of the nearby victualers. “But why get their goods here? Why not in the market?”

Schoenfeld shrugged. “My brothers tell me that the Rat is worried that there could be a riot. Biberach has not had it so bad as other towns, but food is still dear. If the townspeople had to routinely watch soldiers who do nothing but sit on their hands six miles away, getting food for free—”

“I see their point,” allowed Quinn, “but still, it’s peculiar.”

Schoenfeld shrugged. “Perhaps not, particularly given how much the people fear any contact with the abbey. So, what they don’t see doesn’t stir up their anger or fear. That’s not even one of our town’s wagons out there: that came from the abbey. And the soldiers come with it, to drive it back and forth.”

Quinn rubbed his chin meditatively, glanced at Thomas. “Because no one from town wants to get anywhere near the abbey, of course.”

“Of course,” agreed Thomas. Yes, it’s odd how distant and socially isolated the garrison is and yet how well-heeled its individual soldiers seem to be.

“And look who’s here to lend a hand.”

Thomas looked up, followed Quinn’s eyes out the window: Hanss Lay had arrived, conferring with the victualers who were loading the wagon. North smiled. “I wasn’t aware Burgermeisters made a special point of counting out the beans and bacon for their garrisons. Perhaps a few questions are in order—”

But Schoenfeld was shaking his head. “Nein, alles ist Ordnung—it is correct that he does this. He is also the Stadtrechner.”

“The what?”

“You would say . . . cashier? No, more like your word ‘purser.’”

“So,” said Larry with a mirthless smile. “Hanss Lay handles Biberach’s accounts payable.”

“Well, of course he does,” agreed Thomas with a similar smile.

Schoenfeld looked from one to the other again. “What are you saying? What do you suspect?”

Larry leaned his chin in his hand and looked out the window. “Why speculate when we might see for ourselves?”

The soldiers at the bar tossed back the last of their schnapps, and, leaving more coin than was strictly necessary, strode outside. Thomas suddenly rediscovered his taste for the Grüner Baum’s fine beer as he turned to watch the end of the loading.

As the last space in the wagon’s bed was filled—with improbably choice foods, drink, and some outright frippery—an assistant appeared beside Burgermeister Lay bearing a weighty box from which the ends of loaves and corked bottles protruded.

Quinn grinned. “That’s a mighty heavy meal, he’s carrying there.”

Thomas nodded. “Evidently Prum’s men are used to a very, very rich diet.”

The soldiers appeared, exchanging curt nods with Lay, but no words. Thomas cheated the shutters open a little wider, strained to catch any conversation that might arise.

None did. The soldiers walked around the wagon slowly, inspecting its contents. When they were done, they stood at the front, expectantly.

Lay and his assistant approached. The Burgermeister nodded crisply at the box the smaller man was carrying. “Speiserest,” Lay almost spat at the soldiers.

One of whom nodded, and jerked his head at the wagon’s seat.

“‘Leftovers?’” translated Schoenfeld quizzically.

As the box hit the seat, Thomas clearly heard the faint jingle of coins. Many, many coins.

“Leftovers,” confirmed Thomas. “Or, to be more precise, it is what is left over from Captain Prum’s steady depletion of your treasury.”

***

It took a few moments of whispered explanations to make matters clear to the initially bewildered, and then outraged, Schoenfeld. “So you believe that Prum and his men kidnapped all three girls?”

Quinn nodded. “Let’s add it up. Lay just sent a secret payment to a handful of men who are holed up in a fort-like building that no one goes near. His daughter is one of the three missing. The other two are also children of the highest ranking men in your Rat. And with Lay as the Stadtrechner, they could manage this all from the top without anyone under them being any wiser.”

“But eventually it would come out. And why would Prum not simply extort the families themselves?”

Thomas shrugged. “Probably because Prum’s a right greedy bastard. He knows the real money in this town is not in the hands of any one of its citizens: it’s in the hands of the Rat. The taxes and tariffs. Besides, this way, he can shift from extorting cash to goods however and whenever he likes. He’s a clever parasite: he can feed from a number of sources, for as long as this lasts.”

“But then why would he pressure the Rat to reverse its decision about the aerodrome? It means less income for the town, and Prum must have anticipated that it would bring an inquiry from Grantville.”

Quinn frowned. “Well, to start with, an inquiry is a whole lot less troublesome than having us set up business on your doorstep. As long as traffic through Biberach is moderate and overwhelmingly local, Prum can probably control the situation. But if Biberach became a more dynamic hub of commerce, that would change: more people would be trying to make deals, ask questions.

“As far as income increase from the aerodrome goes, I don’t think Prum plans to be around long enough to really see that. How long can he realistically hold on to those girls? How long before people start becoming less fearful of the abbey and traveling out there again, or the nuns come back to take possession? My guess is that he’s not planning on being here come Christmas, or even first harvest. So if he can delay us from setting up the aerodrome for just half a year, he’ll have achieved everything he intended to.”

“Which is?”

“What else?” said Thomas, draining the last of his beer. “To bleed your treasury and merchants dry, while also keeping his wealth as portable as possible.”

“And the girls?”

Thomas glanced at Quinn, who had a hard look on his face. “I doubt that Prum has a strong taste for needless killing. On the other hand, I also doubt that he would hesitate to do so if it suited his ends—or was simply more convenient.” Which it almost certainly would be, given the situation.

Schoenfeld was pale. “I hadn’t meant that,” he said. Thomas thought the smaller man might be on the verge of vomiting. “I meant, how did Prum get them in the first place?”

Quinn started thumbing a stream of coins onto the table. “I imagine they used the chaos of the arrival of the Swiss child laborers to cover their actions. Lots of people running around with kids, not all of whom were happy, I’m sure. They probably got Gisela first, because the house was the smallest and had only two servants. A night time grab, probably. It wouldn’t have been hard to plan it out. Prum and his men had plenty of lead time to know who held what positions in the Rat, where everyone lived, how many kids they had, what age, and all the rest. And once they had one child, they probably went to Lay’s house under the guise of reporting on their progress in ‘locating’ Gisela. And when they left his house, they had his daughter. And probably had him in tow as well, to get access to von Pflummern’s house: a frantic knock on the door in the middle of the night, a familiar face—and they went in right behind. And then they had the daughters of both the Catholic and Lutheran Burgermeisters.” Quinn stood. “Let’s go.”

“What? Go where?”

Thomas was making sure that the straps and flaps that secured and hid his various weapons were untangled and ready for fast access. “Wherever Prum’s wagon goes. But much further behind.”

“But won’t we lose them, then?”

“No,” smiled Quinn, “we won’t. Thomas, how many binoculars in your unit?”

“Two, counting my own. But why ask me? You have one of your own. And unless I’m much mistaken, that Ruger bolt-action you’ve tried to conceal from me looks to have a scope.”

Quinn smiled. “No fooling you, is there Thomas?”

“No, there isn’t. As I’ve told you before. Now let’s be after them.”

***

Templeton leaned away from the Ruger’s telescopic sight. “They just turned into the abbey, sir.”

“Patrols?”

“One man in a blind outside the complex. About fifty yards up the road from the main entrance.”

Schoenfeld stared wide-eyed at the scope, at Templeton, and back at the scope. “He can see all that? From a mile and a half away?”

“He most certainly can,” Thomas assured him, before turning to Quinn. “So. Prum is not sending his ill-got gains anywhere else, at least not directly.”

“Nope. And any of his men can be deemed complicit, given the size of their unit and the fact that they all seem to rotate through the privilege of coming to down to pick up the payola.”

Schoenfeld frowned. “I admit their guilt looks certain. But, as a man who makes a living tricking human eyes into believing they have seen something they have not actually seen, I must point out: looks can be deceiving. It is not proven that the daughters are at the abbey, just that there is some kind of underhanded business going on between Prum’s men and Lay.”

Thomas was about to rebut that sometimes things are exactly as they seem, but Quinn nodded. “You have a point, Johann. And there’s one last bit of evidence which will tell us whether or not the girls are in Nuremburg, instead.”

Thomas kept from rolling his eyes. Six months studying under a lawyer and the once-daring and decisive Lawrence Quinn had almost been unmade as an officer and a man.

“What is this evidence? How do we get it?” asked Schoenfeld eagerly.

“Well, actually, Johann, it was you who gave us the answer to that question.”

“I did?”

“Yes. So here’s what we’ll do tomorrow morning . . .”

***

By the time Thomas and Quinn had emerged from the Rathaus, Johann was already waiting for them at the head of the market place. His stance and flushed cheeks suggested barely contained agitation.

“I hope you fared better than I,” he snapped when they drew near. “The moment I asked the servants if the mothers had any letters for me to carry to their daughters, it was as if I had become a plague carrier. All three doors were shut in my face. And you?”

“The same with the fathers,” answered Quinn with a nod. “But with the added deceitful details you’d expect from nervous politicians.”

Thomas smiled. “It was strange. When we indicated that we would have to return north to report the failure of our mission here, they were relieved. That changed around entirely when we indicated that we were returning via Nuremburg and thus would be happy to accept responsibility for delivering letters to their daughters at their respective schools. All of a sudden, all three corrected us: their daughters were not at schools, but under the guidance of private tutors.”

“Did they give you names?” pressed Schoenfeld ingenuously.

“They couldn’t,” Quinn answered gently, “since it’s pretty clear there are no names to give.”

Schoenfeld nodded. “So they are concealing something.”

Quinn nodded. “And now, we’ll double-check it from the other end.”

“How?”

“We have a radio with us. We’ll use it to contact the personnel at the new aerodrome in Nuremburg. Some of the local staff there are well-connected with a number of the more affluent groups in the city, who do have enough personnel to make a quick round of the gates and travel-houses. Places which would not fail to notice and remember three girls of such young ages, arriving in the dead of winter in a big city, waiting for a tutor to meet each of them and take them in hand.”

Schoenfeld nodded. “Absolutely. One, they might miss. But all three? It would probably be a safe assumption that if they were not seen, it is because they were never there.”

Larry nodded, turned to North. “Let’s get back to the men at Ringschnaitt. Are they ready to move?”

Thomas shrugged. “They were ready before we left this morning.”

***

As Metzger, the radio operator, looked up, Thomas knew the answer before the squat man even shook his head. “So,” the Englishman said turning to Quinn and Schoenfeld, “Not a whisper of them.” He turned to Volker and Wright, whom he’d sent out early that morning to keep the abbey under closer observation. “Report on reconnaissance?”

Wright—who was even taller than North—spoke with smooth precision. “The garrison, such as it is, is still maintaining reasonable watchfulness, colonel. Although from the attitude of the men we’ve observed, they don’t seem too accustomed to guard duty, and don’t much like it.”

Probably on alert only because we’re still in the area, Thomas conjectured.

Wright hadn’t finished. “They’ve taken some minor steps to increase the defensibility of the abbey. As seen yesterday, they keep one man in a hidden outpost on the roadway in. They send out irregular walking patrols into each quadrant of their perimeter; never more than two men, often only one. Judging from the morning cooking fires, I suspect the small patrol complement is due to their small numbers. We also caught a brief glimpse of one man just a mile from Biberach, we think with a mount, in a concealed position, watching the roads into town.”

“Keeping a close eye out for any movements by our unit, I’ll wager. And the discipline at the abbey?”

Wright’s smile was pinched. “Not such as I’d call it, sir. They seem to be following their orders, but in a casual fashion.”

“And the girls?”

“Sorry, sir. Not a sign of them. But the abbey itself is large, even though they’ve closed up all the outbuildings except the stables. They could be anywhere, sir.”

If they’re still alive, he could hear Wright thinking in unison with him. “Well done, Mr. Wright. You and Volker should get yourself some breakfast.” Which, for all we know might be your last with me, since Quinn already has his acquisitive hooks into the two of you.

Schoenfeld had crossed his arms, was looking from North to Quinn. “So. Prum and his men have apparently become common bandits. What do we do? Scout the abbey more closely, try to find the girls? ”

Quinn shook his head. “We can’t go any closer. They know we’re in Biberach, and until we leave, that one nearby lookout will be watching us. Which means that the moment we move directly toward the abbey, we are putting the girls at risk. We need the element of surprise, if we are to save them.”

“So then we approach under the cover of night, and charge them head on?”

Quinn shook his head. “We might manage to approach undetected, and we could probably overcome them, but not before they killed the girls. Or put guns to their heads and compelled us to withdraw.”

Schoenfeld’s composure disintegrated: his shout turned heads among North’s men. “Then what do you plan to do?”

“Us?” Thomas said mildly. “Why, we plan to leave.”

“To get reinforcements?”

“To get a fresh perspective,” said Quinn.

Schoenfeld stared, livid, from one to the other. “So this is how the great and powerful United States of Europe defends the interests of one of its newest affiliates?” His withered hand trembled as he pointed it at them. “Then I will attempt what you soldiers will not. I will secure the release of those girls myself!”

North allowed one eyebrow to rise skeptically. “Indeed?”

“Yes,” the rather wiry artist retorted hotly. “Judging from the clever planning that went into carrying off this scheme, Prum is a clever man—clever enough to realize that once his crime is known, his only logical alternative is to turn the girls over to me and flee the area at once.”

North struggled to keep a grin off his face—but Quinn leaned forward with an earnest frown. “Johann, don’t do that. It won’t work. If we thought talking to Prum would work, that would be our first approach—“

“Your first approach is to flee.” Johann almost sneered. “I concede your point that an outright attack would endanger the girls. But instead of considering any other solution—and particularly a solution that relies upon brains instead of brawn—you decide to give up. But I will not. I will do what must be done. Alone, if need be.”

Quinn leaned forward even more urgently, evidently ready to make further entreaties that Johann not pursue such a course of action—but North took a step toward Johann with a smile and an extended hand. “And we wish you luck, Herr Schoenfeld. You are indeed a brave man, and we hope that your mission succeeds.”

Johann blinked, stunned by such a rapid approval of his plan—and the de facto confirmation that his friends were not, in fact, going to provide any material assistance in the attempt to free the girls. Then, with a grimace and narrowed eyes, he turned on his heel and stalked away.

North appreciated Quinn’s modicum of composure: the American did not round on him until Schoenfeld had turned a corner, leaving them quite alone in one of Ringschnaitt’s narrow lanes. “Thomas, you just sent that poor unsuspecting artist to his death. Once he’s revealed that he knows about the girls and has seen the inside of the abbey’s defenses, Prum will never let him go.”

North shrugged. “Of course he won’t; Prum may be an amoral monster, but he’s no idiot. He’ll figure right enough—and right away—that poor Johann is not particularly gifted at playing high-stakes poker with extortionists. In fact, what Herr Schoenfeld believes to be his ace in the hole—the threat of external intervention—is worthless, as Prum will quickly teach him.”

“North, if I didn’t know you any better, I’d swear you are as heartless a bastard as Prum himself.”

“Nonsense; I was the legitimate product of a church-consecrated marriage, so I am not a bastard. Technically. However, you may be right about the rest. But mark me, Larry: Prum has no reason to kill Johann immediately—and, more importantly, Johann’s abortive visit will actually allow us to prepare the surprise attack we need to use against Prum.”

Quinn crossed his arms. “Enlighten me.”

“Shh. No talking during Professor North’s lecture. Let us begin by admitting that Prum will be aware that, if Biberach’s town fathers were sending Schoenfeld as some kind of envoy, he would not be traveling to the abbey alone. There’d at least be a small escort, hanging back a few hundred yards. So the absence of that escort will tell Prum that Johann is acting on his own, naively convinced that the bastard will not harm him for fear of bringing searchers out to the abbey. Which Prum knows will not happen, since we can be sure the town fathers have been told—in grisly detail—what will happen to their daughters if they reveal or confirm Prum’s extortion to anyone else.

“So as long as Prum refuses to allow poor Johann to return to Biberach, there’s still no danger of the truth getting out. And even if Schoenfeld had gone to the town fathers first—which he is likely to claim—Prum will interpret the lack of an escort as a sign that those same civic worthies have sent the artist out the abbey as they would send a lamb to the slaughter: to be silenced before he tells anyone else what he knows. Which you may be sure Prum will do—eventually.”

“Which means we’ve just signed Johann Schoenfeld’s death warrant.”

“An overly-hasty conclusion, Mr. Quinn. Attend and learn the delicate art of dealing with inhuman monsters. Prudent creatures like Prum are also cautious creatures. So he will want to speak with Johann. Furthermore, Prum is also a proud creature—and so he will also want to gloat: it is an almost invariable characteristic of such blackguards that they must preen a bit when they feel themselves completely safe.”

“And why will Prum suddenly feel himself completely safe?”

“Well, Mr. Quinn, by the time Herr Schoenfeld arrives at the abbey, the fellow Prum has watching our movements from a mile outside of town will have seen us depart northward and will ahve ridden back to inform his despicable master that we have all left the area. Which means that the only plausible threat to Prum is gone. And we will have departed in such a blasé fashion that he will be forced to conclude that we not only failed to resecure a site for the aerodrome, but that we remain unaware and unsuspecting of Prum’s extortion. Logically, awareness of such a crime would compel us to take action rather than slouch back the way we came. All reasonable, so far?”

Quinn was still frowning, but he nodded. Grudgingly.

“So when Johann arrives with his naive threats of disclosure, Prum will no doubt press him—perhaps unpleasantly, I grant you—to confirm that we actually have left the area. Which our now-resentful friend will either emphatically confirm or unconvincingly deny—because he now believes it to be true also. That is why I couldn’t let you share our plans with him.”

Larry nodded. “Because now, having two separate but identical reports of our departure, Prum will be doubly assured that he is safe.”

Thomas nodded. “Just so. And the moment that Prum begins basking in that mistaken sense of security, that is when we must strike. After we see how he handles Johann, that is.”

“What?” Quinn’s eyes had opened wide.

“Larry, the lecture is over: now we must confront brute reality. Prum will have to pull some of his already meager sentries off the line to escort and guard Johann when he approaches the abbey. And because Prum will feel himself safe, he should be pretty relaxed about doing so. And when he does, those movements will show us precisely where most of his men are positioned, how they react when the abbey is approached, and will possibly help us determine the best sightlines for a sniper.”

“So that we can take out Prum immediately, when we attack.”

“Exactly. If our first blow takes off the head of the serpent, the body is likely to thrash around purposelessly for a while. So before it can grow a new head, some of us will rush in and secure the girls—and Johann—while the rest of us chop its writhing coils into tiny pieces.”

Quinn nodded, but he was still frowning. “Well, that all sounds fine. Except for one thing.”

“Which is?”

“Which is: what if you are wrong about Prum letting Johann live for a while? What if Prum decides to simplify his hostage-holding tasks: one less person to guard, one less mouth to feed?”

North shrugged. “It’s not a logical course of action, Larry. They have plenty of food and they can just let Johann sit in a cell while they wait to see if they have further need of him: as a hostage, a liaison, or an information source for subsequent dealings with the town.”

“Granted—but those are all conjectures. We’re talking about putting a man’s life in certain danger.”

“We’re also talking about the lives of three young girls—and all the men in our platoon who would unnecessarily die in any frontal assault. Which would almost certainly result in the deaths of those young ladies, as well. So this way, we risk one to save all.”

Quinn’s eyes were unblinking and, North had to admit, rather unsettling. “And you wouldn’t even let me warn him what he was walking into.”

“Larry, Prum will believe Johann because, as things stand now, Johann himself is not only convinced that we are gone, but that we do not care about local problems. His genuine bitterness toward us is what will lead Prum to believe him, to believe that we are truly out of the picture. And once he believes that, we have the best chance of making a surprise attack that should save the hostages’ lives. Now, let’s get the platoon ready to pull out north toward Ulm.”

***

Four hours later, sitting in a copse a quarter mile due north of the abbey, Quinn handed the binoculars to Thomas. “There he goes.”

Johann Schoenfeld, having approached the abbey along the east-west road, did not see the man at the observation post wave to the sentries at the main building.

“Have you marked their picket?” Thomas growled behind him.

“Marked, sir,” answered Lieutenant Hastings, who passed a second set of binoculars along the line to the unit’s best marksmen: Volker and Templeton.

Schoenfeld was met and brought into the abbey by two armed men. Thomas relayed the key information as he saw it: “One wheel lock, one flintlock. Or possibly a snaphaunce. Can’t tell at this range.” Assessing the firearms they were up against was crucial tactical intelligence, gathered more easily when the members of the garrison came out from the walls and shadows of the abbey. Or leaned out the window in amused curiosity, as several others did now. “A pretty even mix of wheel locks and flintlocks throughout,” Thomas added, based on the new appearances. “Are you marking their positions, Hastings?”

“They are marked, sir.”

Quinn produced his own binoculars. “I want to get my own close look at how this next part goes down,” he explained. Thomas lay elbow to elbow with the up-timer and watched.

After some delay, Schoenfeld appeared in a high-ceilinged upper-story room, made commandingly expansive by its several wide windows. They had heard about this room from locals. It had evidently been, at different phases in the abbey’s history, a chapel, a library, and a convalescent sun-room. It was hard to tell what it had been most recently, given the chaos of pompery that had been pushed into it. An ornate chair was on a makeshift dais. An altar had been pushed off to one side, serving as a combination side-board and weapons-rack. Prum appeared from the dark at the back of the room, wearing a red cape—a cardinal’s?— and began walking in a circle about Schoenfeld, asking short questions. The answers he received seemed to instigate long responses, replete with grandiose gestures.

“Damn: poor Johann,” muttered Quinn. “Trapped in the court of the Crimson King.”

“Eh? What?”

“An up-time reference Thomas. Just a way of saying that Prum is completely out to lunch.”

“Don’t use up-time idioms to explain up-time idioms, damn you. But if you mean that Prum is mad, well—no, I don’t think so. I’ve seen a lot of this kind of behavior, particularly once the wars became perpetual and the armies started to become desperate and disorganized. Little men, having lived a life beneath the boots of their ‘betters,’ suddenly come into a moment of power. It’s an intoxicating opportunity to play the part of those whom they have hated—and envied—for so long, and to exact vengeance from all who are too weak to resist, as they themselves had long been. But Prum does not stand to gain anything by killing Schoenfeld—not right away, at any rate.”

“So you say. But after he’s questioned him thoroughly, which might eventually include torture—”

“—Prum might indeed kill Schoenfeld and drop the body down some convenient well, where it won’t be found for several months.” Thomas shrugged. “Frankly, if you’re trying to find a lunatic in this whole dance macabre, I nominate Schoenfeld. Granted, civilians often completely misread situations like this one, but Johann seemed sensible enough up until he did this.”

Quinn sighed. “Thomas, you heard Schoenfeld the first night we met him. He’s wracked by guilt, by not being here when the shit hit the fan. This isn’t just about having a plan to save the girls; it’s about the expiation of what Johann considers his sins, of not being in Biberach when his family and town needed him. Johann stated quite clearly that he holds himself responsible for his father’s death. Feels guilty to have fled before the approach of war. And now, he’s probably convinced himself that if he’d been here, he’d have been able to do something to stop this.”

“So he goes to present himself for evisceration by renegades while also inadvertantly providing Prum with a tactical update on our departure.”

Quinn shrugged. “Yes, but if pressed, he’ll probably also point out that we’ll be back.”

“Yes, which will only lead Prum to wrap up his extortion racket in a month or two, while the coast is still clear. Which means that the usefulness of the hostages will end sooner, rather than later.”

“Listen: Johann doesn’t understand our line of work, but he has a good heart—” Larry stopped and stared intently through the binoculars. “Damn, is Prum making Johann get down on his knees?”

North looked, nodded. “Yes. I think he’s making him swear to something. Probably giving him his parole.”

“Hmm.” mused Quinn. “That’s interesting. A military habit Prum’s retained. Probably to give his captives—which is to say, his eventual victims—a false sense of security while he decides what to do with them.”

“You sound like you’re scheming, Larry.”

“Me? I’m a guileless American, remember? Anyhow, I’ve seen enough. As you’ve said, now we need to mount an attack as soon as possible.”

North nodded, looked over his shoulder: dispersed back along one-hundred and fifty yards of open woods, the platoon was hiding as best it could. “Moving them all up to attack positions is not going to be a short job, unfortunately.”

Hastings, hanging a few feet back, shrugged. “We could advance at night, attack under cover of darkness.”

North shook his head. “A night attack is no good, particularly since we don’t have detailed information about the interior of the abbey. Major Quinn and I asked Herr Schoenfeld about the layout: he’d never been inside. Not surprising for a Protestant. Not surprising for a Catholic, either: the sisters and townsfolk were not mutually welcoming. Besides, any earlier layout could have been changed dramatically by now.”

“Then sir, should we move at night and attack at dawn?”

“Hastings, what part of the phrase ‘quick attack’ is confusing you? With every passing minute, there is an accumulating chance that one of the enemy—either a walking patrol, or another mounted lookout--will alert Prum to the fact that we never really left the region and are now poised, weapons drawn, on his doorstep. Being discovered that way—or by some other bit of bad luck—would constitute a situation that we can safely characterize as Very Bad Indeed. Besides, moving at dark could give us away just as surely as moving in daylight: we don’t know this ground, Hastings. And we’ve not been close enough to the abbey itself know the best positions to assault from, or the most concealed avenues of moving into them.”

Quinn thought for a moment. “I think I can help with that.”

“What? How?”

“Well, you’ve groused about my taking four of your very best soldiers, so I guess I’ll see if they live up to the hype. I’ll take the four of them forward as a pathfinder force. We’ll blaze a trail along the best-concealed pathways to assault positions. Give us about an hour. Once we give you the signal to get the rest of the platoon moving up in drips and drabs, we’ll start looking for ways to get a sniper into an optimal position and, if possible, wriggle into some far forward positions for directing the start of the attack.”

North frowned. “So you’re going to go bounding off into the bush—the rather sparse bush—with Volker, Templeton, Winkelmann, and Wright—on your own?”

Quinn shrugged. “Yeah. You said they’re the best. And you need to manage traffic back here. Got a better plan?”

North looked at Quinn, found the subtly diffident cheeriness of the American unnerving, and studying his eyes for a second, resolved never to play poker with him again: he had learned how to become well-nigh unreadable.

Quinn crossed his arms. “I’ll ask again: do you have a better plan?”

North sighed. “Damn it, no: I do not. So get moving—and no foolish risks, Larry.”

Larry beamed. “Only sensible risks: I promise.” And then he was gone into the thickets that led away from the copse and down the slight incline toward the abbey.

***

As North waited for Quinn to meet him and point out any new details about the abbey and where he’d positioned of the sniper, the Englishman scanned the skirmish line of his troops. They were fanned out along the edge of the smaller but thicker copse to which Larry’s pathfinders had brought them. Wright, clearly the shrewdest of the four troopers that the American had selected, had waved them into the positions, outlined the broad outlines of the attack his commander was recommending.

Peering over the one hundred twenty-five yards separating them from the abbey’s walls, North had to admit that the American’s attack concept was a good one, and he had selected good positions from which to spring it. Likewise, the concealment on the approaches had been more than adequate, and, best of all, Quinn had them positioned due east of the abbey. This put them well away from the primary source of traffic—the west-leading road to Biberach—and therefore, to the notional “rear” of the hidden sentry who kept watch over it.

The ground between the copse and the main building was mostly clear, but a smattering of low bushes had grown wild in the year of its abandonment, providing a few points of cover for a conventional approach. But at this range, and with the element of surprise against troops armed with single-barreled, muzzle-loading weapons, North and his lead squad would make a straight rush over the ground. His two supporting squads would provide covering fire until the lead squad was ready to enter the main building, at which point they would deploy to the cover of the bushes. Eventually, a few men would head down the road to set up a flanking position to the south and—

—and why the hell was Larry Quinn emerging from those overgrown bushes and walking toward the abbey, a white handkerchief held high?

“Damn it all, what is that lunatic doing?”

Thomas had expected the question to be rhetorical and inspire fearful silence among his men, but from just behind him, a voice answered his query: “He’s getting inside, sir.”

North turned, dumbfounded, discovered that Wright had caught up to him again and was regarding him with patient blue eyes. “And what in the name of all that is both holy and unholy does that damned Yank think he’s going to achieve if he does get inside?”

“The element of surprise, sir.”

“Surprise? Well, yes, I’m sure Prum will be surprised: the person who could do him the most harm is now simply walking in his front door, unarmed. I know I’m surprised.”

Wright’s smile was small. “I think Major Quinn has something else in mind, sir.”

“I doubt Major Quinn has enough of a mind to have something else in, Corporal Wright. Now, you’d better tell me—”

“No time, sir. Looks like the party is starting. Watch carefully, now; you’ll need to act quickly.”

“I’ll need to—? Oh, bloody hell. Hastings, Finan: word down the line. We go with the plans we discussed upon arriving here, but they could be changing as we move. Everyone’s eyes on me. Assign the covering squads their marks. Designate reloaders.”

“Done, sir,” answered Hastings.

Oh. Well. Why the hell am I here at all, then? “Very well. Be ready.”

“For what?”

“As if I bloody know? Just be ready to follow my orders and my lead.”

“Yes, sir.”

Quinn was disappearing through the front door after a hasty body search by the guards. Only one of the two sentries went in with him. An audible commotion rose up a moment later: several of the other sentries at the windows disappeared inside, their duty overridden by their curiosity. Well, that does help us by clearing the field a bit, admitted Thomas. But still— “Finan: report. The enemy’s patrol status?”

“None out right now, sir. And while one or two of the sentries might look a bit more alert, most of them are trying to see who the visitor is. They probably don’t get a lot of excitement out here.”

“Well, they’re about to get more than they bargained for. Hastings, I want this to be absolutely clear: you do not charge with the last two squads right behind me. You keep your men back here until the lead squad is safe under the walls.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Finan?”

“Sir?”

“Pass the word to the lead squad: rifles back-slung, revolvers out. Except for Arnfauss and Schiltung: if we need close supporting fire on the way in, they’ll provide it with their Winchesters. The rest of us will charge headlong to get to the walls before—”

“Sir,” interrupted Wright, who, it turned out, had Quinn’s binoculars. “The major is inside.”

Thomas swiveled to look through his own glasses. Sure enough, the hare-brained American was in Prum’s own Grand Receiving Room of Tawdry Squalor. Prum was already pulling out all the theatrical stops, lording it over his new, hapless captive.

Which is when Thomas noticed how calm and utterly collected Quinn was. And how calm Wright was. As if none of this were a surprise to either of them. But what purpose, what scheme, could possibly—?

“Sir, get ready,” hissed Wright.

The largely-one-sided conversation in Prum’s audience chamber was becoming less cordial: Prum gestured at the floor imperiously. Quinn looked away, said something brief. Two of Prum’s men came forward. Larry, do as the homicidal poppinjay says; don’t get him angry. He might—

The prior exchange was reprised: Prum pointed at the floor, Larry seemed to resist again. One of the two men who had stepped closer lifted a sword—whereupon, reluctantly, Larry sank to his knees—

Wright’s breath stopped in mid-draw.

Thomas understood what was happening just before a sharp, distinctively up-time report sounded from the upper third of one of the higher trees in the copse. Almost instantly, Prum spun around, evidently hit in the shoulder. Thomas heard Templeton’s voice utter a ferocious curse—“Bollocks!”—from that same location, accompanied by the faint clatter of the Ruger’s bolt action being worked.

Thomas was raising up as the second shot barked out over their heads and Prum went down, a puff of dusky red marking the impact point just to the right of his sternum.

“Charge!” yelled North, and, nine-millimeter up-time automatic in hand, he began a long-legged sprint toward the abbey. First squad, emerging from the trees, was right behind him, cap and ball revolvers at the ready.

Prum’s men appeared at the windows of the abbey: each one was greeted by the slow but steady roars of two, sometimes three, pre-sighted Winchesters. Half of the renegades sprawled back. The door guard returned fire from deeper in the archway, but did not even have an angle on—or probably know about—most of the squad that was charging in his direction. Winchesters snapped rounds at his muzzle flash. It was impossible to tell if he was dead, wounded, running, or reloading.

Wright was pacing Thomas on the charge, Quinn’s own nine-millimeter in his long-fingered grip. Volker and Winkelmann rose up out of the bushes in front of them, leading the way to the gate by about ten yards. Damn it, how did Quinn manage to get those two positioned before I had even—?

But there was no time to wonder at the obvious—that Larry Quinn had indeed grown proficient as a soldier—because they were coming upon the archway. The fellow in its shadows—the one who had returned fire at the other squads—cast away the musket he was reloading and drew his small sword. He went down under a flurry of bullets from the four lead attackers. To the south, a single musket spoke; Winchesters answered, probably announcing the end of the soldier manning the road outpost.

Thomas, panting, threw himself against the interior wall of the arched entrance to the abbey. “Wright, Volker, Winkelmann: according to what little we learned of the interior from the farmers in Ringschnaitt, we’ll go up the stairs to the—”

“We know, sir; Major Quinn told us. Leapfrog advance?”

Damn smart alecks. “Stop asking the obvious, Winkelmann. Start us off.”

The rest of the First Squad arrived as the four of them rounded the doorway and started up the staircase.

***

They encountered only three men on the way to Prum’s audience chamber—all trying to run away. One made the mistake of bringing up his weapon; the other two sensibly surrendered. However, Thomas reflected, perhaps the first one was the most sensible of the three: the quick bullets he got were infinitely preferable to what the townspeople of Biberach were likely to visit upon any survivors.

As Thomas’ men dodged into Prum’s audience chamber, a familiar voice spoke from the darkness along the rear wall: “Donner.”

“Blitz,” replied Volker and Wright in unison.

Quinn leaned out of those shadows. “Quickly, back here. I’ve been covering the approach to the girls, but I can’t get them out.”

The dark at the rear of the room concealed a passageway to a row of hermitage cells. All locked. All with sounds of whimpering coming from behind the thick, dark timbers. Thomas started snapping orders. “Volker, get some men up here and take these locks off. Presuming, that the mutinous Major Quinn will allow you to take orders from me any more.”

Volker slunk away like a child detecting the first impatient tones of what might turn into a full-blown parental argument.

But Quinn just smiled. “I wasn’t in the least mutinous, Thomas: I did exactly what I said I’d do. Just not the way you envisioned it. And actually, let’s be clear about one other thing: for this operation, you were my employee.”

“Don’t distract me with the facts, you impertinent Yank. Why they hell didn’t you tell me what you had in mi—?”

“Because, Thomas, would you have agreed to this plan quickly?”

“What, are you mad? Agree to this—?” Thomas had planned to indicate Prum’s awkwardly-fallen corpse along with the others of his makeshift court who had not known to keep their heads down and out of Templeton’s scope-aided field of fire. But then the three girls emerged from their prisons with grateful sobs, and Schoenfeld was heard raging in a further cell, obviously none the worse for wear. “Well, um, I suppose I wouldn’t have.”

Quinn smiled. “Right. And there wasn’t time to argue. You agreed that there was no way to be sure how long Prum would let Johann live. And the only reason Johann had his head in Prum’s noose was because we didn’t explain things to our artist friend before he went off on his quest.. So every minute mattered, and I didn’t have the right to ask anyone else to go in and get our sniper a shot at Prum. I was the one who put Johann in there: it was on me to start the wheels moving that would get him out.”

North looked away, wondered if he’d have had the nerve—or more to the point, the fine sense of ethics—to have done what Larry had done. “Well, you may be a lunatic, but at least you’re an admirable one.”

Larry shrugged. “Not so much of a lunatic to miss that we really did need a pathfinder group to find a concealed route to some reasonable assault positions. And as soon as I realized that, I saw how I could put the rest of my plan in place while you were bringing up the platoon. So either way, the best thing was for me to go on ahead with my four men.”

“Your men?”

“Sorry, but they are for now. And you might not see them again for quite a while.”

“Well, I suppose you’re not taking them to invade some other world, are you?” And then, judging from Larry’s patient gaze, North understood. Yes, they were going to another world. The New World, to be precise. “The Americas, then?”

Quinn shook his head. “Thomas, you know I can’t say.”

“No—but you just did. Well, none of my business and not for me to repeat.” With which Thomas set about putting things in proper military order: “Finan, bring Hastings in. I want a head-count of the defenders, dead and alive. If it doesn’t match or exceed our pre-attack estimate, he’s to organize pursuit teams. As soon as you’ve got that squared away, send a mounted courier back to Biberach. Message follows . . .”

***

By the time the rider to the town was dispatched, the survivors had filled in the blanks of how the garrison had evolved into a pack of blackmailing thieves.

Their group had not started out as part of a regular formation, but as members of a mercenary regiment that had been broken, reconstituted, and broken again in the years leading up to the creeping peace that had begun to break out a year after Grantville appeared. Mostly Swabians, those that had joined from some sense of religious loyalty had, by the end of 1634, found billets with more legitimate units, or directly in Swedish regiments. And those that remained—

Well, the dregs always went somewhere, and in this case, they remained with the regiment that Horn allowed to be battered down to company size, and then a single platoon after sharp exchanges with Bernhard over various contested tracts further to the west.

With the unit exhausted and threadbare, Horn directed his staff officers to move it off the line: it was too weak, too unreliable, and too ill-equipped to be an effective fighting force. Rear-area security or garrison duty: that was its only role, now.

The unit’s senior officer, a well-respected fifteen-year veteran by the name of Grieg, was all that was keeping them together. But on the journey to replace the garrison at Biberach, he showed signs of coming down with some kind of fever. By the time they reached Biberach, he was barely able to sit his horse long enough to formally relieve the garrison’s commander. Already weak, he was one of the first victims of the plague that had been festering unknown in the unit, and which broke out even as the burgermeisters were trying to decide where to house their new garrison. Indeed, it was in dealing with them directly that Johann’s father had evidently contracted the disease himself.

In the wake of the death and misery of the plague, the only officer left was the young, charismatic, ambitious, and utterly ruthless Georg Prum. The unit’s senior remaining NCO tried to restrain his new commander, but he too was weak with fever. Although not afflicted by the plague itself, the fellow nonetheless died, possibly aided by some poison from Prum, it was hinted.

And so, without a moral compass, resentful of the town that had left them to die in a plague-house, and with no prospects of coming out of long years of warfare with any better prize than their own vermin-ridden hides, Prum’s soldiers willingly became blackmailers. And once little Gisela was in hand, it was easy to leverage each town leader to compromise the next. And so they had become wealthy at last.

Schoenfeld had, in his few short hours among them, heard enough of the story to be able to make a full report back in Biberach, but when offered the opportunity to travel there along with the courier, he shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll be going back there—not if the offer to travel with you to Grantville still stands, Major Quinn.”

Larry looked a bit sheepish. “I’m surprised you’d travel anywhere with me at all, Herr Schoenfeld.”

“Johann, please. I cannot say I like the gambit you used here, but I see the wisdom of it—and I did not miss the worry in your eyes when I set out on my own.” Schoenfeld pointedly did not look at North during this exchange. “So, I take it I am welcome to accompany you, then?”

Larry smiled. “You most certainly are. We’ll start on our way at once.”

Thomas frowned. “What? No victory parade through Biberach? No basking in the ardent hero worship of a grateful town?”

Quinn’s smile broadened. “I’ll let you be the recipient of that well-deserved adulation, Thomas. I’ve got to get back to Grantville. And you’ve got an aerodrome to set up.”

“Well, yes, so I do. And the last thing I need under foot is a meddling Yank who shows up to change my mission, steal my men, and then ruin my battle plans. You made all of this most difficult, you know. Things will be much simpler now.”

“I’m sure,” said Quinn with a farewell wave, “that from here on, accomplishing the rest of your mission will seem like child’s play.”

Thomas scowled. “And I won’t miss your so-called jokes either, Larry. Get on with you and your foolishness, now: I have an aerodrome to set up.”

Peace Offering

by Wen Spencer

Since war broke out between the elves and the oni, the stories in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette had gotten a lot more bizarre. Walking trees loose on the North Side. Dragons terrorizing Oakland. A spaceship crashing into Turtle Creek. Flocks of men with crow wings mobbing downtown.

The Post Gazette was still printed on paper complete with non-scalable fonts. Olivia had to wear her secret identity glasses to read it. She looked like a prim and proper librarian with them on, auburn hair twisted up into bun, a vintage blue gingham sundress on. No one could tell she was an illegal immigrant, a runaway teenage bride, and a whore. She and Superman. Both from Kansas. Both hiding behind the glasses. Both not what they appear to be.

"Oh, I love this war." Peanut's moaned comment sounded like pure sex.

Olivia glanced up from yesterday's newspaper. They were waiting for the keva bean handout on Penn Avenue, a block and a half from the head of the line. Earth Interdimensional Agency personnel and Pittsburgh Police officers had been on crowd control since dawn. A flood of red uniforms, though, signaled that the Fire Clan had arrived with the keva beans.

Everyone had gone tense as the elves fanned out, even the police and EIA personnel. The royal marines were laedin-caste and proved to be a surprisingly friendly and laid back group. Unfortunately Prince True Flame of the Fire Clan had also brought with him nearly fifty of the holy sekasha-caste warriors known as Wyverns. Because they were considered morally perfect, the Wyverns were above the law. They could and would kill anyone that pissed them off, even other elves. The humans scanned the incoming troops, looking for the scale-armored vests and protective spells tattooed down the Wyvern's arms in Fire Clan red. After a few minutes, it became apparent that there were no sekasha among the elves. The crowd seemed to take a collective sigh of relief.

Only Peanut had been unfazed by the arrival of the royal troops. She eyed the marines like they were red-frosted cupcakes. Until the war broke out, all the male elves in Pittsburgh that were interested in intercourse with human women had already been claimed. Peanut had been up against the window of a bakery, drooling at what she wanted and couldn't get. Every day now brought more elf troops to the city. "Oh, I need to get some of this yumminess."

"Don't you get enough at night?"

Peanut laughed. "That's all men. It’s the difference between a stale Twinkie and one of those hot fresh-made coffee rolls loaded with cinnamon and topped with icing." She mimed licking her fingers. "Elves. They live forever and they see nothing wrong with sex, so they do it all the time, and they do it oh so well."

Olivia wondered if it was also why half of the marines were female. Certainly her life would have been so very different if her family hadn't considered sex connected to sin and a woman's weakness.

She'd arrived in Pittsburgh during the last official Shutdown in mid-July. It was the farthest from Kansas as she could get; a totally separate universe from the one she'd grown up in. Elfhome was the world of elves that was a mirror to Earth with Pittsburgh the only human outpost. It seemed like a perfect place to hide from her husband.

She'd gotten a job, found an empty house to squat in, and everything seemed good. Three weeks later, war broke out. Pittsburgh found itself lost deep in virgin forest, five hundred miles from the nearest elf settlement and an unknown number of oni hidden within the city limits. All contact with Earth and its bounty had been cut off.

Olivia had always believed that if she worked hard and used her head, she'd land on her feet. The writing on the wall, though, told her that she wasn't going to survive this war. She might be from Kansas but she wasn't Superman.

Certainly she was no longer surviving with any virtue intact.

Before the war, there was actually a shortage of workers for low paying jobs. The city had needed people like her to fill the gaps. She'd been working at a bakery on third shift. She was paid under the table, so even though she was only making minimum wage, nothing was being held out for taxes or benefits. A week after the war started, though, the bakery was out of flour, sugar and salt.

Since then, she'd been walking Liberty Avenue with the other hookers, trying to keep food on her table.

"Oh, I want that one." Peanut pointed at a clump of elves standing nearby. Olivia couldn't tell which one had caught the girl's eye. The elves looked like they could be brothers or cousins. Tall. Lean. Blonde. That they were impossibly handsome went without saying; they were elves. "Save my place?"

"Don't be stupid." Olivia whispered as Peanut shifted into full streetwalker mode, pulling down the neckline of her tight shirt to show off almost all of her breasts. "This is going to be the only handout. The food is here. The line is going to start moving any minute."

"I'll make it quick." Peanut started to broadcast her interest at the elves and they received her message loud and clear. "Isn't he gorgeous?"

"All elves are gorgeous."

"That old one with the messed up face; he isn't."

The newspaper had carried candid photos of the new elf lords as they had arrived in Pittsburgh. Only one hadn't been Paris model beautiful. "Forest Moss on Stone?"

"Yeah, him, he's freaky looking. They say he's complete nutcase."

Three of the male royal marines drifted over to goggle down at Peanut. Olivia was fairly tall woman but the elves were all a foot or more taller. They were armed with rifles, swords, and daggers. She'd been raised with ten stepbrothers and could probably match any human male in a fistfight, but the combination of the males' height, weapons, and their sexual interest made her shift away from Peanut.

I'm not really with her. I'm a librarian. Can't you tell by my glasses?

"I'm Peanut Butter Pie." Peanut slid her mini-skirt up high enough to flash her red panties. The elves' eyes dropped from Peanut's sizable breasts to her lace-covered groin.

"I have heard that peanut butter is very, very good." One of the males said.

Which was, of course, why Peanut picked her name. Something about the spread made it insanely good to elf taste buds. Peanut claimed her real name was boring and stupid. Not that Olivia really had the right to judge; all the girls walking Liberty Avenue knew her only as Red.

Peanut caught the male's hand and tugged him toward the tiny dead-end alley called Mentor Way. "Let me give you a taste."

Olivia shook her head. It was still early morning; only a handful of dumpsters and some fading shadows would screen the two from the curious eyes. Olivia studied the distant head of the line. People seemed to be stirring a block and a half down. Had the handouts started?

"Damn you, Peanut," Olivia whispered. "I'm not going to starve because you were off getting boinked silly."

"Forgiveness." The marine's friends were still hovering over Olivia.

She'd hoped that if she ignored them, they'd go away. She considered pretending not to know Elvish, but then decided she should figure out what they wanted. "Yes?"

"Are you an adult?" The taller of the two asked.

She considered how to answer. She had been told that no matter what, never lie to an elf. Her forged paperwork showed she was eighteen, but the truth was she was only sixteen. "Naekanain." She fudged by pretending to not understand. "I lived alone. I am one person – how do you say -- my household."

"You're old enough to marry?" he asked.

"Yes." She didn't even have to lie for that one. It wasn't her fault that she wasn't "legally" married since the state of Kansas didn't allow a man more than one wife, and a judge would have had to approve the marriage of a fifteen-year old. She hadn't wanted to get married in the first place.

"Like I told you, Dart." He pointed to Olivia. "They're tiny even when they're fully grown."

Olivia was the tallest human woman in sight, but she was still a good eight to ten inches shorter than any of the female elves.

Dart waved off the proof. "The Wind Clan domi is smaller than this female."

Olivia didn't know the meaning of the word domi. Without a doubt, though, they were debating the maturity of the girl being hailed as Princess Tinker. The girl was two years older than Olivia but six inches shorter. Even with the war on, everyone was talking about Princess Tinker. Pittsburgh's own little Cinderella. Pictures of her were being plastered all over the city. Olivia had been surprised at how small and scruffy-looking the girl was.

"Did you hear, Ash?" Dart said. "One-eyed thinks he can get a human female to be his domi since no elf will have him."

Ash laughed. "He is insane. You heard this one." He pointed at Olivia. "Humans live alone."

Dart nodded. "I heard he's been pawing all the nivasa at the Wind Clan enclave. Male and female alike. The holy ones won't put up with that forever. Especially Thorne Scratch on Stone."

Olivia was relieved that the conversation had shifted off her. She wished the marines would move away. Everyone around her was obviously just as uncomfortable by the elves presence and their discussion. There was a five-foot gap on either side of her.

There was a call from down the street and the elves echoed it, so it traveled up Penn Avenue.

The two elves glanced down Mentor Way. Olivia could hear Peanut's muffled yelping. She’d spent weeks working as a streetwalker and yet the sounds of sex still made Olivia blush.

"Hoi! Blaze!" Ash called. "The handout starting! Shoot your gun and get it out of that girl."

Olivia lifted her newspaper and pretended to read even as Peanut's moans grew louder. The elves laughed. Out the corner of her eye, she could see that Dart was pretending to be holding a girl by the hips and thrusting into her.

"He's only a hundred this year," Ash said. "I remember that age. Fucking anything on two legs that bent over for me."

"I'd feel like I was taking a child," Dart said. "That girl looked sixty or seventy."

Ash laughed. "You idiot, humans are dead of old age at eighty. She's probably -- forty." He'd missed Peanut's real age by at least twenty years or more.

"Forty?" Dart frowned at the alley. "Good gods, that's indecent."

"She's probably an adult, although it's hard to tell with them. Blaze! Come on!"

There was a deep male groan and then silence from the alley. A minute later, the two came out from behind a dumpster. The male was trying to refasten his pants as Peanut towed him to Olivia's side.

"I'm on the next street over." Peanut was saying, pointing toward Liberty Avenue. "Come find me anytime."

Peanut pulled him down and kissed him hard before letting him go.

Two consenting adults agreed to have fun together. No money was even exchanged. Still it seemed wrong for intelligent beings to be screwing in an alley like dogs. Olivia sighed, recognizing herself as a prude. A stupid trait to have considering that her survival depended on having sex with men in alleyways. Everything would be easier if she could just be more like Peanut.

Peanut laughed. "Go ahead and say it, Red."

"I wish I could be more like you."

"No, you don't." Peanut caught her hand and squeezed it. "You can forgive me, but you'd hate yourself. You've got grit, Red, and you're proud of it."

Lately it's all she liked about herself.

"Besides, if we get a bunch of elves trolling Liberty Avenue, maybe girls stop being killed." Peanut winced at the surprise on Olivia's face. "You did hear about Cotton Candy? Right?"

"No." Olivia's stomach did a sickening roll. In the last three weeks, six girls had been killed. The streetwalkers lived too close to the underbelly of the city where the oni were hiding. Only Roxy, buried in rubble when the dragon fight smashed through downtown, could have been any one of the sixty thousand humans in Pittsburgh. The other five girls were killed because they were whores working the streets, dealing with the city's low life. "What happened?"

Peanut spread her hand. "She was up by the train station. No one saw what happened exactly. She took a shotgun to the face. They think she leaned into a car, trying to come on to the driver. She must have seen something she shouldn't have. He was an oni or something like that."

Olivia's stomach did another sickening roll. Ever since she’d lost her job at the bakery, she felt like she was slowly falling to her death. The irony was that she decided to come to Pittsburgh because it would be so hard to crawl back to her husband if things turned ugly. "I can't keep on doing this. I need to get off the streets."

#

Olivia had been afraid that they would be refused a share of the handout since their names weren’t on any database. She used "Red" to make it harder for police and EIA johns to check if she was a legal resident. Like most of the other streetwalkers, Peanut used her nickname for the same reason; she was the only girl willing to risk being arrested to stand in line with Olivia.

When they reached the front of the line, they discovered that the elves in Wind Clan blue were passing out the dried beans, not the EIA as they expected. The elves weren't concerned with official citizenship – they were only checking for magically disguised oni. They're already found one warrior hidden within the humans; it had been dragged to the other side of the street and beheaded. The stench of fresh blood in the late summer heat made Olivia's stomach roil.

She fought the urge to throw up as the elves took a piece of paper with a spell written on it, pressed it to her arm, and activated it. After the magic confirmed she was as human as she looked, the elves stamped her hand bright red and weighed out her allotment of keva beans. The handout was ten pounds, measured out on scales. Olivia watched the beans spill into her canvas tote, knowing that the beans were really time. If she rationed herself to a cup a day, she could live off them for weeks. The problem was that when the beans ran out, there might not be food to buy in the stores. She needed money now to buy what little remained before war and winter could disrupt the food supplies from the coast. Much as she wanted to stop streetwalking immediately, she should keep the beans for an emergency supply.

"This is going to be the only handout?" She asked the Wind Clan elf that was doing the weighing.

"Yes. Beloved Tinker domi commanded that it be given out to keep people from panicking. The next shipment will be sold to wholesalers for resale."

Which meant first come, first serve, at whatever price the stores decided to set.

#

Wiley's was a little mom-and-pop grocery store two blocks from her house. Olivia shopped there daily to spend all her money from the night before on what little food was left in the store. Wiley's carried local produce and dairy; staying open while the Giant Eagle down the road had closed. Everything that was in cans and plastic containers – basically everything imported from Earth -- was sold out.

A small, refrigerated case held fresh milk and eggs. There was also butter in little canning jars. It reminded her of the ranch. With thirty mouths to feed, every day meant a new jar of butter. She hated the reminder but it couldn't be avoided. Butter wrapped in paper came from Earth. Wiley's got their diary from a little farm in the South Hills.

She winced at the prices listed on the case. Everything was twice what it cost a month ago. She checked her wallet trying not to think of what she'd done to earn the twenties inside. If she got a bottle of milk, butter and a dozen eggs, she'd have enough money left over for a bag of apples and potatoes and three zucchini. The apples and potatoes would keep if she kept them cold and dark. The zucchini would give her something other than milk and eggs to eat.

There was a small rack of slickies in the back of the store. One of them was labeled "Princess Tinker" and "all new photos!" She picked it up and flipped the images.

According to the slickie Tinker had invented hoverbikes and been one of the star riders on the racing circuit. One picture showed her flying around a corner of a racetrack, head to toe mud. Another she was standing after a race, face muddy except where the goggles had protected her eyes. There was nothing elegant or regal about her. How did she get to be a princess?

The next page showed her about to step into a grey Rolls Royce. She wore a rich bronze-colored gown of fairy silk. A fortune of diamonds adored her throat and left wrist. A small wedge of blue marked the center of her forehead like a beauty mark. Her husband and his guards towered over her, emphasizing that she was just a tiny thing.

Clothes, apparently, did make a princess. The caption was in Elvish, and read "Beloved Tinker Domi."

Was "domi" then the Elvish word for Princess? Certainly "she commanded it to be given out," suggested that Tinker was more than just a concubine. The marines had said that Forest Moss wanted a human domi because no elf would have him. Why not? And what exactly would the job entail?

#

Aiofe was in her backyard, taking down her laundry. Olivia could see the girl from her kitchen sink. She'd avoided the anthropology student since she'd found out that Aiofe was doing an internship with the EIA. The UN police force had ultimate power in Pittsburgh in regards to humans. They were the ones that deported illegal immigrates. People were saying that with Pittsburgh stranded, the original treaty with the elves was void and that the EIA no longer had any authority.

And if anyone could tell Olivia about Forest Moss, it was Aiofe. She put on her librarian disguise on; auburn hair twisted up into a bun and reading glasses balanced at the end of her nose. She felt vaguely guilty when Aiofe brightened at the sight of her.

"Ah, Red! I've been worried about you." Aiofe had a slight Irish lilt to her voice. "I'd been meaning to come over and knock, but your light is never on."

"I'm still working night shift." Olivia partially lied. Out of habit, she joined in taking down the clothes and folding them neatly. She avoided the indecently frilly panties and bras to focus on the T-shirts sporting logos from the University of Pittsburgh. "You're not working today?"

"They let me go early since I'd been up all night getting things coordinated for today's handouts. At dawn they gave me my share and told me to go home. To be truthful, I think they be afraid that rioting might start and they didn't want a wee Jackeen to be underfoot."

Unlike the elves, most of the human forces were male. Obviously the men thought that Aiofe couldn't defend herself. Unfortunately they probably were right. While, Aiofe was as tall as Olivia, she'd been an only child and gone to a girl's school where the "contact sport" was soccer. Good little girls only learned to defend themselves when they were exposed to little boys who had been taught that rough housing was how real men acted.

"Everything seemed to be going well when I left," Olivia reassured her. She liked the familiar comfort of doing chores with another woman. She'd been so lonely lately.

"That's Pittsburghers for you." Aiofe shook out a towel and folded it. "They're so used to the reality standing on its head that they're taking all in stride. I figured that was the case and so I came on home. Can I ask you something?"

Olivia's heart leapt as she thought of all the questions she didn't want asked. There were so many truths she'd been keeping from everyone. "What is it?"

"How do you grow beans? I was thinking of planting some of what they gave me."

Olivia laughed in surprise and relief. "You can't grow those keva beans now."

Confusion filled Aiofe's face. "Aren't dried beans just the seeds of bean plants? Why can't I put them in the ground and have them grow?"

"We're less than a month from first frost."

"What's that?" Like Olivia, Aiofe had no family and her college friends had been on summer break when the war broke out. The girl was only marginally better off than Olivia in that she had a respectable job translating for the EIA, but there were times she seemed dangerously young and naïve.

"When it drops below freezing, most plants die. In Pittsburgh, the first frost is usually mid-October. That's why the leaves are starting to turn." She pointed to the sugar maple that straddled their backyards. The edges of its leaves were tinged with yellow. It served as a reminder that despite the late summer heat, autumn was officially only days away.

"I know why the leaves change." Aiofe complained. "I just don't know anything about growing stuff. I was born in the farming country of Whites Cross Ireland but we moved to a flat on College Green in Dublin from the time I was little. I don't know these things. Food always comes from the market."

"I don't know now long keva beans take to mature but they seem a lot like kidney beans and those take three or four months to grow. If we planted some back at the start of the war, then maybe there be time, but now is too late. You'd just waste your beans."

Aiofe blew a raspberry out. "The story of this war." She threw her hands up in the air and waved a pair of red silk panties in the air. "Yay." She dropped her hands. "Boo."

"Huh?"

Aiofe tossed the panties into her plastic laundry basket. "Oh, the elves haven't allowed humans to travel out of Pittsburgh, so everything we knew about them was what we could learn from the ones here. They were all Wind Clan beholden to the Viceroy because he owned this half of the continent. With the oni invasion, though, he had to call on the other clans for reinforcements. Yay! We have this massive flood of new information." Aiofe waved a black pair of panties this time. "Boo! Pitt is a ghost town because we were on summer break. None of the anthropology professors are on Elfhome. It's only me and five other grad students with internships here in Pittsburgh. We're taking notes like crazy."

"The Fire Clan and the Stone Clan?"

Aiofe nodded, plucking down her bright underwear with no outward sign of embarrassment. "The Fire Clan is here as a neutral party because the Queen sent them. From what we've been able to gather, she's the only one with a true standing army. It’s a force that she normally uses for peacekeeping missions between the various clans. They're not getting anything out of the war except keeping Elfhome safe from invasion. The Stone Clan sent a small mercenary force that the Wind Clan is paying for the mercenaries’ help. That's the tale, cut and dried, but every day we're learning all sorts about the political nastiness between the clans. Yay!" She threw her hands up in the air. "Only Pittsburgh is now in the middle of it." She dropped her hands with a sigh. "Boo."

"Forest Moss. What's the story with him? What happened to his eye?"

Aiofe scooped up her basket and nodded toward her backdoor to indicate that Olivia should follow her in. "What we didn't know until recently was that the oni and the elves went to war before. Apparently all three planets had ways to go through caves to get from one to the other with Earth smack in the middle. Forest Moss and his household were the first elves to find Onihida. That's the oni's world. The oni took them prisoner and tortured them all, trying to find out how to get to Elfhome. They tied Forest Moss down and burned his eye out. He's the only one that survived."

Olivia shivered as she thought of the sunburst of scars circling Forest Moss empty socket. How long did they burn him with hot knifes before they actually plunged the tip into his eye? Were there more scars hidden by his clothes? "Is he really crazy?"

"He's not the full shilling, as my da would say."

Aiofe hadn't prepared for winter yet, so her kitchen seemed spacious and airy. She'd spent her spare time painting the walls butter yellow and putting up crisp white curtains instead of bracing for freezing winds and a possible loss of electricity or gas. The kitchen table was doubling as a desk; overflowing with actual paper books, newspapers, datapads and slickies. Aiofe obviously trusted the EIA and the elves to keep Pittsburgh functioning until the peaceful end of the war. Olivia glanced about, feeling guilty that she hadn't taken the girl under wing and showed her how to prepare her place. Olivia wasn't even sure that Aiofe would take her suggestions; she was nearly five years younger than the grad student. She probably would think Olivia's mistrust of the government as hopelessly militant redneck.

"So, have you gotten a chance to meet Princess Tinker?" Olivia asked instead.

"Tinker domi!" Aiofe corrected with a laugh. "The Wind Clan elves get really cheesed off if you call her Princess."

"Why?"

"She's their domi! They've have been in Pittsburgh long enough to know what 'princess' means. The two words are worlds apart."

"Really?" Olivia's heart sunk.

"In English, 'princess' means basically a pretty girl that has no power in government whose only value is to produce children for the bloodline. We don't have anything close to the absolute authority of a domi. She could order her guards to kill any elf in Pittsburgh and no one would question it. It's her right. To call her Princess Tinker is a sign of disrespect."

"Oh."

"One of the boyo gave me this." Aiofe opened a small lunch cooler, took out a plastic bag and held it open. There was a dead rabbit inside. Someone with a great deal of skill had killed it with a rifle bullet to the head. It'd been field dressed but not skinned. "I think he's sweet on me, but I don't know what to do with it."

Olivia's stomach rolled at the smell of blood, recalling the dead oni on Penn Avenue. She swallowed hard, reminding herself that it been weeks since she had protein beyond eggs and milk. "I'll help you cook it for dinner."

Aiofe grinned. "I'll wet the tea."

#

According to the newspaper, the newly arrived Stone Clan elves were staying at Ginger Wine's enclave. The elves’ businesses gathered just over the edge of where Pittsburgh abruptly ended, as if a giant blade had sliced through the city. Beyond the thin line of cement dust and sheered off guardrails was virgin forest as far as the eye could see.

She took a bus out to the University of Pittsburgh and walked the last few blocks to the Rim. The enclaves faced humanity with tall, blank, stone walls. Each compound was a block wide and hundreds of feet deep with two-story and three story buildings forming a sheltered orchard courtyard. While the enclaves acted like hotels with restaurants, she'd never actually been inside one of them. They were supposedly very expensive.

She walked down the street, reading the names printed in Elvish over the front doors. Ginger Wine's door was shut and locked. When she tentatively knocked, a spyhole slid opened up and blue eyes gazed down at her.

"We're not taking new guests." The male obviously learned English from a native Pittsburgher.

Olivia steeled herself against the fear that was jangling through her. "I would like to talk to Forest Moss."

The eyes went wide with surprise. "That nutcase? No, no, you should avoid him. We all do."

At least it made her fear turn to annoyance. "You shun him?"

"I do not know this word: shun."

"You don't talk him? You don't look at him? You pretend he doesn't exist?"

He tilted his head. "He's domana and Stone Clan and insane. It is best that we avoid him. Even the Stone Clan people avoid him."

"So absolutely no one talks to him?" She knew it was silly to be angry on his part but she'd lived through being shunned. It'd been an agonizingly lonely three months before she caved to the shunning. She had thought she could easily deal with not having to talk to the silly idiots who filled up her life, but she didn't realize that her own family would join in to break her will. At the time, she thought it was because they believed her marrying Troy would be the best thing for her. Only after she caved in and agreed – so she couldn't call her wedding night a rape – she realized that they were only concerned that they wouldn't end up sharing her punishment.

"He is dangerous." The elf said as if that forgave everything.

And she'd been “stubborn,” “stupid,” “sinful,” and a host of other things muttered behind her back but never to her face, and always just loud enough for her to hear.

"I need to talk to him."

"He's not here. He's off with my lord, Windwolf. They're out hunting oni and won't be back to late. You should go home; the streets aren't safe after dark anymore."

If she left Oakland, it would only be to go walk Liberty Avenue to turn tricks. "Can I wait inside for his return?"

"We're considered Stone Clan territory for the duration." He did not sound happy about the fact. "I'm not allowed to let strangers in without one of them giving me permission. Go home."

He closed the spyhole, effectively ending the conversation.

#

Hours later the elves return to the enclaves in force. Hundreds of them poured into the area from somewhere to the west. Most of them wore the Fire Clan's red, and then there was a small clump of Wind Clan blue. A Stone Clan female was marked with a handful of elves in black. Olivia missed Forest Moss until the last moment. He walked apart from the others, completely alone despite the throng. Five Wyverns moved with him, seemingly guarding over him while not actually interacting with him. They kept out of reach, always with their back to him.

She hurried through the crowd of elf warriors, trying to reach his side. But he'd entered the enclave and the door firmly locked.

#

Her place had been too silent in the mornings. It reminded her too much of when she was being shunned. She'd splurged on an old digital clock radio within a week of arriving in Pittsburgh. After two days of failing to talk with Forest Moss, she woke to the news that Ginger Wine's been attacked during the night. Dozens of elves had been killed in the attack; their names, however, weren't being given out. With heart looping through her chest like it was on a rollercoaster, she took a bus out to Oakland.

Ginger Wine's was smoking rubble. Oni bodies were stacked on the street like cord wood. There was no sign of the dead elves. In the summer heat, the slaughterhouse stench was nearly unbearable.

A work crew from the EIA were loading the oni onto trucks.

"Do you know which elves were killed?" Olivia asked one of the men. "What happened with their dead?"

The man pointed toward the Fairgrounds where black smoke was billowing up. "Elves cremate their dead; say it frees the souls to pass on. Ginger Wine only lost two of her people. The rest are all Stone Clan." He obviously thought she was friends with the Wind Clan elves that ran Ginger Wine's establishment.

"Was Forest Moss killed?"

"The domana? No. He wasn't here. He had been out with Windwolf. He totally lost it, though, when they got back. He wondered off screaming." The man gave a vague wave toward downtown. "Completely out of his head."

#

Forest Moss was on the top floor of Kaufmann's. She'd found him only because the concentration of Pittsburgh Police, EIA and Wind Clan elves gathered around the department store. Olivia apparently missed Tinker domi by minutes. In her wake, the elves and humans were trying to come to an agreement about what should be done with Forest Moss. None of them were happy about the elf lord occupying Kaufmann's but no one wanted to risk trying to get him to leave.

She cautiously worked her way through the store, dodging the Wyverns who were searching the aisles. Judging by their speed, they were using it as an excuse to keep a distance between them and their charge.

Forest Moss was in the back corner of the children's department. He'd collected all the mannequins around a child's tea table with a toy china tea set. The dolls gathered around him, smiling brightly, holding out stiff white hands to welcome him. Somehow Forest Moss had reduced a half dozen various mannequins to plaster dust. It hazed the air and covered everything with fine white powder.

Why was he here of all places? Why was he destroying the dolls even as he treated them to tea? There was so much she didn't know about him, not even his age. From the photos she'd seen of him, she knew that his hair was always pure white, even without the fine dust. It poured down over his shoulders and was gathered in a loose ponytail just above his hips. She couldn't tell his age from his profile; it was so marred by the scars encircling his empty eye socket. His eyelid had been sewn shut, the scars vivid white as his hair against his dusky skin.

"Its all your fault." Forest Moss wailed as he clutched an eight-year old girl mannequin to him. "You were supposed to protect them. They whispered little lies to you and you believed them all. Our beautiful lovelies, all dead, because you failed them."

She took a deep breath as she felt a wave of sympathy toward him. She still felt responsible for Tyler's death even though she had been helpless to prevent it. She'd been overruled at every turn. His "real mother" let him play with the rough older boys. As "men" the teenagers didn't need to listen to her arguments that Tyler was too young to play in the hayloft. She couldn't talk her husband and sister-wives into taking him to the hospital after he'd fallen. In everyone's eyes, she was old enough to fuck, but too much a child to make any demands on how her "children" be raised.

How much more guilt was Forest Moss feeling because he hadn't been helpless?

Maybe Forest Moss needed her as much as she needed him. Certainly she would have given anything for someone to reassure her that she had done everything she could to save Tyler and that his blood was on other people's hands.

Taking another deep breath to steel herself, she closed the distance between her and the tea table.

He whipped about to see her, hand pressed to his mouth, fingers cocked oddly. He paused, his brow knitting together. Unlike his hair, his eyebrow and eyelashes were dark brown. Judging by what was left of his face, at one time, he'd been very handsome. And he seemed much younger than she expected. If he were human, she would have guessed him to be in his late twenties.

She'd spent days trying to arrange for this conversation but she hadn't considered exactly what she would say. At least, not in Low Elvish. When she ran through this moment in her head, everything was in English with a lot of slang and curse words thrown in. "I heard that you – You – You want a someone to be your domi? A human domi. I'm-- I'm--" Willing sounded too much like a marriage vow. "I want – I need you."

He stared at her for a full minute as if he couldn't see through the dust that drifted in the air. His good eye was dark brown, the eyelids almond-shaped in a way that looked almost Asian. "What magic is this that all that I want suddenly lives and breathes? Do I dream? Ah, if I do, I wish to die before I wake."

He still had his right hand up the shirt of the girl mannequin, the buttons straining.

She reached out and cautiously unbuttoned the brightly flowered blouse, exposing the large brown hand against the white plastic skin. The dark eyebrows rose in surprise.

She wet her mouth against her nervousness. He was just another male, like any other john. Normally she wouldn't allow a free touch but there were language barriers to cross. Elves normally didn't have to pay for sex with humans; there were too many elf-obsessed women willing to give it away. And Olivia wanted something more than just money.

His good eye went wide as she guided his right hand to her hip. She had on low-rider jeans and a midriff; his hand rested on bare skin. He breathed out shakily, his gaze riveted on where they touch skin to skin. His large hand made her look like she wasn't much bigger than the mannequin he'd been molesting. He swallowed and put his other hand on her and watched vividly as he ran both hands over her stomach. The half-naked girl mannequin teetered from its sudden abandonment and then toppled over.

With a low moan, Forest Moss dropped to his knees in front of Olivia. He pulled Olivia close so he could mouth her belly as her pushed up her shirt.

Weeks of selling her body and Olivia still wasn't used to that moment of when the protection of clothes was pushed aside, leaving her exposed and vulnerable. She swallowed hard on the fear that surged through her, as if it was a wild beast that wanted to scramble up her throat and come howling out her mouth. She locked down on whimpers.

She had learned the hard way that it was dangerous to close her eyes. She forced herself to watch him carefully, watch him for the start of an attack. He cupped her bared breasts reverently, tears streaming from his one good eye.

After several heart-stopping minutes of worship, he murmured, "Water to a male dying of thirst. Nay, heavenly cream. Once you start to lap it up, will I be able to stop? Do I dare? If the thirst is not quenched, then does the tentative sip make the need all the more torturous?"

It seemed the best time to open up negotiations. Normally she wouldn't let a guy get this far without talking price, but this time, she was asking more than twenty bucks. "I'm not just for the taking. I need something in return. Make me your domi."

He leaned forward, his lips nearly touching her. It made her wince despite the fact she should be well used to this by now. "But I have suffered this thirst so long, I think if I do not drink deep and long, I will die."

"Make me your domi." She hated every word coming out her mouth. It was ironic she'd fled to Pittsburgh to get out of the mockery of marriage that she'd been forced into. "Promise me that you'll make me your domi and you can do what you want."

He looked up at her, his one eye searching her face. "This sweetness could be for one as wretched as me?"

"Only if you take me as your domi."

Fear filled his face. "I—I am not prepared for pavuanai wuan huliroulae. I have nothing to give you."

She didn't know the phrase but she was afraid it meant he was broke. "You don't have money?"

"Money?" With shaking hands, he pulled out a small beautiful silk pouch. Undoing the drawstrings, he poured several large coins into his hand. Elf bullion. Her heart leapt at the coins. According to yesterday's newspaper, they were trading for five thousand American dollars per coin. She expected him to give her just one but he spilled all the glittering gold into her palm.

She gasped, instantly torn. This was much more than she expected but with it, she wouldn't have to fear winter. As long as there was food to be bought, she could afford it. Did she take it? Did she give some back? Did he even know the value of what he just handed to her? Was it spare pocket change to him? Or was it all that he had?

When she considered the condition of Ginger Wine's, it might be all that he had.

"Do you accept?" he asked breathlessly.

Did she? Her breath caught as she realized that she was on that verge of no return. Like when she went to her mother and told her that she'd marry Troy. When she walked down the aisle of the Zion church to where Troy waited with his other wives. When she looked at the pregnancy test that she'd bought at the drug store with horded cash and realized that she needed to flee Kansas or doom her baby to a life at the ranch.

And that worked out so well.

Was she about to make another horrible mistake?

But really, could she truly continue to run all the risks of being a streetwalker through Pittsburgh winter as she got bigger and bigger with child?

Work or starve her unborn child along with her or this.

She closed her fingers on the gold coins. "Yes. I accept."

He crushed her to him, and with desperate whimpers, seemed to feed on her. He lifted her off her feet, laid her back on the low table with the tiny china teacups and little platters of cookies. The children mannequins all grinned silently as they watched him move over her, weeping and whimpering.

When he pulled away from her, she thought it was to pull down his pants. Instead he fumbled out a leather bag and produced a thick pencil.

"No, no, no. Must be careful. Must be sure or they'll use their swords to put things right."

He held her still with one hand pinning her hard by the shoulder. With the fat greasy point of the pencil, he drew something on her stomach.

"What are you doing?"

"Shhhhhh." He pressed the pencil to her lips, his one eye bright. He drew another line and said something in Elvish that she didn't recognize. The lines of drawing gleamed momentarily and fluttered. He whispered another word and the light faded. He pressed his free hand to her belly, smearing the lines. "Perfect! Perfect!" He glanced around at the watching mannequins. "But not here. They'll be back and they will not want to stand around and wait for me to have my fill."

He meant the Wyverns. No, she rather not have them watching. She wasn't that brave.

She guessed the location of the freight elevator and that the newly arrived elves wouldn't know enough about department stores to cover it. She took Forest Moss down to the docks and out onto the street.

Where did she take him? Ginger Wine was nothing but rubble. She wanted bank rate of exchange on the bullion, not whatever a hotel would give her because she didn't have American dollars to pay for a room. Which left her house.

Feeling like she just stolen an elf lord, she guided him to her home.

#

The only highlight of the worse summer of her life been finding the Victorian house on Mount Washington to squat in. Yes, it was too big for her but the kitchen had a wood-burning stove, a sitting area big enough for a bed, tall windows that faced south, and high ceilings that made the room seem even bigger. She would be safe and warm all winter in the one room. If the war hadn't broken out, it would have been perfect.

She hadn't realized that she'd be bringing Forest Moss home with her. She nervously scanned the room after she'd pulled him inside and bolted the door behind him. Luckily she'd washed her breakfast dishes and left them drying in the rack. Her bed was a twin-sized futon on the floor. She'd washed her sheets and air-dried them just the day before. The half-finished quilt she was sewing by hand out of fabric remnants even managed to make the futon look like a real bed instead of a sheets spread out on the floor. She had Black Eyed Susan's in a coke bottle by her bed and herbs growing on the windowsills. Her place wasn't pretty as Aiofe's place but it felt cozy to her.

All the men she dealt with before had met her in cars and back alleys. She'd never brought any of them home. What did he think? She nervously put her keys on the counter and turned to Forest Moss.

He was still staring at her as if she was the only thing in the universe.

Her purse was heavy with the elf bullion. It thumped when she put it down on her battered table. He'd given her more that enough money to survive.

It was time for her to keep her part of the deal.

She turned off the light and stepped into his arms.

#

Peanut was right.

Elves were damn good at sex.

After six months of marriage and weeks of turning tricks, Olivia thought she knew everything about sex. The orgasm took her by surprise. She felt the familiar flutter of pleasure that she normally felt but then grew and grew and then went stomach-flexing, bolt of lightning good with all sorts of little aftershocks and jolts.

Not to say that she didn't know what she'd just experienced. She'd watch every man that ever been with her ride through the whole show. To finally know how good they'd felt every time made her feel used and cast aside like a condom. The injustice of it filled her with rage at the entire gender and she smacked Forest Moss.

"Is something wrong?"

"Yes." She didn't want to explain how screwed she been to been born a human female. "If my johns are feeling that great, I don't charge enough."

"I don't understand." The shadows hid his ruined eye. In the dim light, he was beautiful as any other elf. There was a glimmer on his cheek, and when she touched his face, she realized he was crying.

"You did nothing wrong." She reassured him.

#

He whimpered like a puppy as he slept, curled around her. In the morning, he wanted to stay naked, stay in bed, stay skin to skin. Since the baby books said that getting up slowly helped prevent morning sickness, she lay with him, embarrassed by the sunlight pouring through the windows, leaving her no place to hide.

At least Forest Moss was gentle with her. Troy had been all impatience and hardness, leaving bruises as he took his pleasure. Everyone from her older sister wives to her mother all told her to be silent and endure it. A man's right to his wife. The men in the alleys and the cars had been no different.

Forest Moss seemed content to just lay in the warm sunlight, wrapped around her, so close they seemed to share the same breathe. She had never experienced so much intimacy. Troy had six wives before her. He came to her Friday nights, took his pleasure and hogged most of the bed, stealing the blankets. It was so much rutting in the dark.

Forest Moss seemed to want to see every little part of her. He held her hands, one at a time, up to the light.

"So small," He murmured. "Like Wolf's child bride."

She blushed. "I'm much taller than her."

He considered her, smiling gently. "Yes, you are right. You are older?"

Her blush deepened. "I need to eat."

Another key thing that the baby books said would prevent morning sickness was to eat many small protein-rich meals.

With Forest Moss hovering nearly close enough to touch, she scrambled up her last eggs. He frowned at the nearly empty fridge and then opened the cabinets that she had nothing to put into. When she tried to share the food with him, he refused it.

"I've been living fat on the Wind Clan coin." He pushed the plate toward her. "A weeks worth of missed meals would not hurt me."

Troy was always served first and given the best cuts of meat. It made her eyes burn with long-held, previously unshed tears.

"The coins you gave me." she approached the subject tentatively. Money was normally the domain of men. "Is it all you have?"

Worry filled his one good eye. "For now. I have land that the Wind Clan paid as retribution for my fighting. I will receive funds from our clan when we establish our household here."

Our clan. Our household.

"Where is this land?"

"I – I'm not sure. I did not have the means to clear it and build anything, so I did not bother to view it."

She had read in the paper something about the division of land. She pulled out all the newspapers since the Stone Clan's arrival a few weeks back. She found the story that ran last week. The accompanying map showed how the land was divided up. The size of the parcel took her breath away. It could have swallowed up the Zion ranch in Kansas a hundred times over. It was, however, all virgin forest. It afforded no shelter from winter and certainly nothing to eat except squirrels and deer.

They would need to stay here at her place until spring. At that point, if the war was over, they could hire someone to cut and lumber. There were most likely abandoned houses near that area they could squat in until they had money enough to build something like a small farm.

She realized then that for the first time in weeks, she felt like she was going to live to see spring.

He pulled her close and after a moment she relaxed against him and let herself feel the comfort of no longer being alone.

"I have prayed so long for you," he whispered.

She laughed into his shoulder. "Someone like me. Any girl would have done."

"You alone had the courage to face my demons and quiet them."

She wished she could believe him. She knew that any number of women in Pittsburgh would have eventually set their sights on him. She was fortunate that she was the first to hear of his plan to take a human partner.

When she sighed, her breath caused fine white dust to drift from his hair.

"You need to wash your hair," she said.

"A bath! Yes! Certainly!" But when she showed him the shower, he frowned at it for several minutes. "This is not a bath."

"You just stand here, water comes out from this part, you adjust the heat of the water with these knobs…" She fell silent as he continued to look confused and unsure. Did the elves not have running water?

As she fussed with the shower, she glanced at the mirror and froze in surprise. Almost hidden under her bangs was a small black diamond. It looked like the blue triangle Tinker had in the one slickie photo of her entering the Rolls Royce. Olivia rubbed at black spot and then used soap and water. It didn't come off; it seemed tattooed into place.

"Did you do this to me?" she asked Forest Moss.

He cringed back at her tone. "It is the custom. The dau tells others that you've accepted my offer and that you're my domi."

"So, it won't come off?"

Alarm filled his face and he looked ready to cry. "No."

"I don't want it off." She stopped trying to wash it away as it was obviously distressing him. In some ways he was like a child. It was good that she loved children. Maybe she was exactly the type of human woman he did need. She cautiously asked, "When did you do it?"

"Last night. It is a simple spell."

#

For part of the shower, he was remained child-like, letting her wash his long silk white hair. And then he turned, and suddenly was all male, and proved yet again that Peanut was right about elves. It was embarrassing how the much the tiles in the bathroom amplified her cries right up to the point she couldn't think of anything but the pleasure jolting through her. Afterwards there was something pure in relaxing in his arms as the warm water beaded down over them.

#

She woke late that night with someone tapping her palm. A strange male elf crouched beside the futon, a spell light cupped in his hand. He put his finger to his lip, indicating that she should stay silent. She jerked back in fear. Forest Moss was wrapped tight around her, still asleep. The stranger frowned at her and shook his head silently to rebuke her.

As she grabbed at the sheets, she realized that he wore the red scale vest armor and arm tattoos of a Wyvern. Nor was he alone. There were four more Wyverns in her kitchen, all watching silently.

Her breath caught in her chest and she leaned back against Forest Moss.

The crouching Wyvern looked at her sternly and crooked his finger in a universal "Come here."

Piss the Wyvern off or leave the protection that Forest Moss may or maybe not provide her? Why were they here? Why did they want her to leave Forest Moss? The Wyverns could and would kill anyone they wanted. So far their kind had killed one of the elf lords, a Pittsburgh policeman and dozens of people that may have been oni or humans.

And the Wyverns were now frowning at her and repeating the "come here" motion.

If she hid behind Forest Moss, and he came to her defense, would the Wyverns kill him out of hand? They had killed his clansman, Earth Son. If she wanted his help, then she had to protect him.

She nodded reluctantly and started to extract herself without waking Forest Moss. He lay with his ruined eye pressed against the pillow, leaving only his beauty heartrending vulnerable.

As she slid forward, the Wyvern didn't reach for her but started to step back, giving her room. His eyes went suddenly wide and he threw up his hands to protect his head and a moment later, the room exploded.

Forest Moss was awake, howling wordlessly. He gestured and another explosion blew out the far wall. The Wyverns went flying backwards, vanishing into the rubble.

"What are you doing?" Olivia cried. She wasn't sure how he was doing it but he was going to bring the house down on top of them. "Stop it!"

"No!" Forest Moss shouted. "I won't let them take you away. I won't! I won't!"

There was a loud groaning complaint as the room lurched.

She caught Forest Moss by his hair and dragged him backwards through the dining room and out the front door and onto the sidewalk. He howled the entire way like a dog that been caught in a bear trap, a sound of pure bestial pain.

"Stop. Stop!" She put hands on either side of his head and tilted his head until he was staring into her eyes. "Look at me! No one will take me away. I won't let them. I chose where I go and I'm not leaving you. Now calm down."

Brave words. Truth was, she was scared shitless. Had he killed the Wyverns? Obviously they had known he could blast the shit out of everything and had been trying to defuse him. Why hadn't they brought drugs and a straight jacket? Because those things would have made him even harder to handle?

She wrapped her arms around Forest Moss and crooned to him, trying to get him to calm down. She wanted to ask him a million questions but she was afraid he'd lose it completely if she pushed for answers now.

The Wyvern that woke her appeared at the corner of her leaning house, seemingly unharmed. She wasn't sure how he survived the blast.

She tightened her fold on Forest Moss. "What do you want? You don't break into someone's house in the middle of the night and drag them out of bed."

"Who are you?" The Wyvern watched Forest Moss carefully.

"I'm his domi!" She pushed back her bangs to show him the dau on her forehead. "And you're not separating us. Just deal with us both."

The warrior stared silently at her as it weighing his options and then he nodded. "Very well, but you must come with us."

"Without clothes?" Olivia realized that she'd left her purse with the bullion lying by their bed. In her panic, she'd saved Forest Moss but not the money that would keep them both alive through the winter. "All our stuff is still in the house. We can't just leave it."

The Wyvern shook his head. "It is not safe for you to return to the house."

Olivia growled out the one Elvish curse she knew, making his eyes go wide. "You destroyed the only place we had to live and now you're going to steal everything we own? Leave us naked?"

He looked any place but her face as he considered her charge. In the end he slowly nodded. "We will do what we can to salvage your belongings. Keep him here. Keep him calm."

They saved her purse with the bullion, the food from the fridge, Forest Moss' clothes and her blue gingham sundress before the house groaned and collapsed in a sudden thunder of broken timbers.

#

The elf encampment lay beyond the enclaves, just across a stone bridge that was still under construction. A large clearing had been cut in the towering ironwoods, leaving only five massive oak trees standing. Elf shines drifted under the dark canopy, glowing bright enough for them to walk easily through the camp.

Prince True Flame of the Fire Clan was in one of the white silk tents that gleamed like a lantern from the outside. He was leaned over a table, studying maps, as the Wyverns escorted Olivia and Forest Moss in. He looked up and relief went across his face when he saw Forest Moss.

"Good, you found him." He said to the Wyverns and turned his attention to the maps again.

"No, they terrorized him." Olivia snapped.

"They were in a bed together." The Wyvern reported. "They'd had intercourse…"

"I'm his domi." Olivia tried not to shout the words.

"And she is not naekuna." The Wyvern finished.

Forest Moss started to wail.

"Tell me what is wrong," Olivia said. "Can't you see that you're torturing him? You've shut him up in silence with his grief and his guilt until you've driven him mad! He needs me."

"It is against our laws for domana to have half-caste children. It's for the protection of their entire clan. If you were fertile when he coupled with you…"

"I was already pregnant when we met."

"She is perfect!" Forest Moss wailed. "Beautiful and fearless. I can drink deep and fill my thirst. Perfect! Perfect!"

Prince True Flame sighed and looked to the Wyvern beside him. "I do not want to start the clan war again over the idiocy that the Stone Clan is committing here. You are our moral compass, Red Knife. What say you on this?"

"She quiets his madness," Red Knife murmured. "If she was with child prior to their union, then there has been no harm done. I say allow them to continue until she bears the child."

"That will buy only a little time."

"He has offered. She has accepted. There is no risk she will bear a half-caste child. Those are our laws. We can not deny him what we've allowed Wolf Who Rules."

"She is human." Prince True Flame pointed out.

"We determined that humans were intelligent creatures with souls when we first found our way to Earth. For that reason alone, we have trusted them to enter into a treaty with our people. We cannot recognize that they are as we are – with souls and minds – and not treat them as equal – for to do so would judge them on their bodies alone. If we deny them equality, then we can't claim that our souls and minds are proof that we are shaped by god. To diminish them is to diminish ourselves; one follows the other as day follows night."

Prince True Flame nodded and sighed. "What is your name?"

"Olivia."

"Olive Branch above Stone." He translated her name to Elvish. "We need him sane and fighting. See that it happens."

She grabbed Forest Moss by the ponytail and dragged him backwards from the annoying elf before she said something angry and got them both into trouble. The set of five Wyvern followed cautiously at the distance. Knowing that they were safe for now, she ignored them. She didn't stop walking until they were back to Pittsburgh proper, comforting in its familiar human city streets.

"What are we going to do?" Forest Moss asked when she paused in the shadow of the Heinz Chapel.

No one had ever asked her that before. She'd always been told the shape of her life, ignoring what she wanted. She hadn't come to Pittsburgh to escape sex, marriage, and having a baby. She hadn't been running away from anything. She'd been running to the right to choose such things for herself.

Maybe some would scorn the shape of the life she was building, pointing out that Forest Moss was a tormented, scarred, one-eyed insane elf. But he gazed at her as if she was clever and good and wise and strong. He stood waiting patiently to hear what she thought. She leaned her forehead against his chest and marveled how comforting it felt to be with someone who believed that his life was better if she had her own thoughts and desires.

"I need to find someplace to live," she said.

"Together?" He said with such fear that she realized that unlike "wife" that "domi" didn't come with the expectation that she had to live with her mate.

"Yes," she hugged him tightly, wanting to heal him. Wanting to be as strong and powerful as he believed her to be. As she always could have been, if just given the chance to be herself. "Together."

Table of Contents

CHECKSUM Checkmate by Tony Daniel

Grayson Navy Letters Home by Joelle Presby

Like Ghost Cat and a Dragon’s Dog by Dave Freer

A Murder of Crows by Alex Hernandez

THE AGE OF THE WARRIOR by Hank Reinhardt

Taking the High Road by R.P.L. Johnson

Conella and the Cyclops Sea Serpent of Doom by John Ringo

Landed Alien by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Kinderspiel by Charles E. Gannon

Peace Offering by Wen Spencer