The Butcher's Bill
by
David Drake


WHOOPS....

General Radescu straightened abruptly, glaring at the Slammers.  "But I
don't care what they say, gentlemen.  I didn't come here to preside
over an army sinking into a morass of lethargy and failure.  I will
remove any officer who seems likely to give only lip service to my
commands.

"And--" he paused, for effect but also because the next words proved
unexpectedly hard to get out his throat "--and if I give the signal,
gentlemen, I expect you to kill everyone else in the room without
question or hesitation.  I will give the signal--" he twirled the band
of his hat on his index finger "--by dropping my hat."

Glittering like a fairy crown in a shaft of sunlight, Radescu's hat
spun to the forest floor.  The only sound in the copse for the next ten
seconds was the shrieking of the animal in the foliage above them.

Hawker walked over to the gilded cap and picked it up with his left
hand, the hand which did not hold a submachine gun.

"Here, sir," he said as he handed the hat back to General Radescu. "You
may be needing it soon."

--from At Any Price

BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

Hammer's Slammers The Belisarian series:

The Tank Lords with Eric Flint> Caught in the Crossfire An Oblique
Approach The Butcher's Bill in the Heart of Darkness The Sharp End

Independent Novels The General series:

and Collections with s- M- Stirling> With the Lightnings The For8e

The Dragon Lord The Hammer

Redliners The Anvil

Startiner The Steel

Ranks of Bronze The Sword

Lacey and His Friends The Chosen Old Nathan

Mark II: The Military Dimension

All the Way to the Callows

The Undesired Princess and The Enchanted Bunny

(with L. Sprague de Camp)

Lest Darkness Fall and To Bring the Light

(with L. Sprague de Camp)

An Honorable Defense

(with Thomas T. Thomas)

Enemy of My Enemy (with Ben Ohlander)

the butcher's bill

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.

Copyright 1998 by David Drake

"But Loyal to His Own," "The Butcher's Bill," "Hangman," "Cultural
Conflict," and "Standing Down" copyright 1979 by David Drake.  "At Any
Price" copyright 1985 by David Drake.  "Liberty Port" copyright 1991 by
David Drake.  "The Irresistable Force" copyright 1998 by David Drake.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57773-5

Cover art by Charles Keegan First printing, November 1998

Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York,

NY 10020

Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH Printed in the United States of
America

Contents

Introduction .......................................................
1

But Loyal to His Own .....................................5

At Any Price....................................................32

The Butcher's Bill .........................................175

Hangman........................................................ 198

The Irresistible Force ....................................258

Cultural Conflict............................................ 306

Liberty Port.................................................... 324

Standing Down.............................................. 393

Becoming a Professional Writer by Way if Southeast Asia

Some years ago my son took an undergraduate history course in the
Vietnam Era.  He mentioned that his father had been drafted out of law
school in 1969.  The other students and their 27-year-old professor
were amazed; they "knew" that college students weren't drafted.

I was in the Duke Law School Class of 1970 when LBJ removed the
graduate student deferment in 1968 and I was drafted along with nine
more of its hundred and two guys.  There were only two women in our
class, a sign of the times that changed abruptly afterwards.

I'd been a history and Latin major as an undergraduate.  I'd been
against the war in a vague sort of way but I'd never protested or done
anything else political except vote once, since the voting age was 21.
There was never any real question about me refusing to serve, though
believe me I wasn't happy about it.

While a student I'd sold two fantasy short stories for a total of $85.
I used what I knew about: historical settings and monsters based on H.
P. Love craft's creepiecrawlies.  I was proud of the sales, but writing
was just a hobby.

Because I scored high on an army language aptitude test I was sent to
Vietnamese language school at Fort Bliss, then for interrogation
training at Fort Meade.  Finally to Nam, where I was assigned to the
Military Intelligence detachment

of a unit I'd never heard of: the 11th ACR, the Blackhorse Regiment.
My service wasn't in any fashion remarkable, and nothing particularly
bad happened to me.  I was in the field for a while with 2nd Squadron
just after the capture of Snuol; then with 1st squadron; and for the
last half of the tour I was back in Di An, probably the safest place in
Viet Nam, as unit armorer and mail clerk.  The Inspector General was
due, and apparently I was the only person in the 541st MID who knew how
to strip a .45 down to the frame.  (Military Intelligence doesn't seem
to get many people who shot in pistol competitions in civilian life.)

And then I went back to the World.  72 hours after I left Viet Nam I
was sitting in the lounge of Duke University Law School, preparing to
start my fourth semester.  Because nothing awful had happened to me, I
was honestly convinced that I hadn't changed from when I went over.

As I sat there, two guys I didn't know (my class had already graduated)
were talking how they were going to avoid Viet Nam.  One of them had
joined the National Guard, while the other was getting into the Six and
Six program that would give him six months army in the US, followed by
five and a half years in the active reserves.

These were perfectly rational plans; I knew better than they did how
much Nam was to be avoided.  But for a moment, listening to them, I
wanted to kill them both.

That gave me an inkling of the notion that maybe I wasn't quite as
normal as I'd told myself I was.

I finished law school and got a job lawyering.  I kept on writing,
which after the fact I think was therapy.  I didn't have anybody to
talk to who would understand, and I'm not the sort to go to a shrink. I
don't drink, either (which I think was a really good thing).

I had much more vivid horrors than Love craft's nameless ickinesses to
write about now.  I wrote stories about war in the future, assuming
that the important things wouldn't change.  The stories weren't like
earlier military S-F.  Instead of brilliant generals or bulletproof
heroes, I wrote about troopers doing their jobs the best way they could
with tanks

introduction 3

that broke down, guns that jammed--and no clue about the Big Picture,
whatever the hell that might be.  I kept the tone unemotional: I didn't
tell the reader that something was horrible, because nobody had had to
tell me.

It was very hard to sell those stories because they were different.
They didn't fit either of the available molds: "Soldiers are spotless
heroes," or the (then-more-popular) "Soldiers are evil monsters." Those
seemed to be the only images that civilians had.

But the funny thing is, when the stories were published they gained a
following.  Part of it was guys who'd been there, "there" being WW II,
Korea, and later the Gulf as well as Viet Nam.  Some of the fans,
though, were civilians who could nonetheless tell the difference
between the usual fictions and stories by somebody who was trying to
tell the truth he'd seen in the best way he could.

Some civilians really wanted to understand.  I guess that as much as
anything helped me get my own head straighter over the years.

After I got back to the World I'd just done what was in front of me.  I
didn't think about the future, because I suppose I'd gotten out of the
habit of believing there was one.  When I raised my head enough to look
around-almost to the day ten years after I rode a tank back from
Cambodia--I quit lawyering and got a part-time job driving a city bus
while continuing to write.  I didn't quit lawyering "to write" (though
I'd already had two books published) but because I realized the work
was making me sick.

At this point something unexpected happened.  Publishers were setting
up new S-F lines.  Editors already knew that I would write them a story
that people wanted to read; my first book, Hammer's Slammers, had
succeeded beyond the editor's wildest dreams.  (/ didn't realize that
for some years afterwards.) I got literally all the work I could do.
The only limitation on how many books I could sell was the number of
books I could write.

I've told you that Nam gave me a need to write and also gave me
something real to write about.  It gave me a third thing: service with
that unit I'd never heard of; the

11th ACR.  I'd been part of a professional outfit whose people did
their jobs with no excuses, no matter what the circumstances.

There are writers who spend more time making excuses for why they can't
write than they do writing.  I could've become one of them, but that
attitude wouldn't have cut any ice in the Blackhorse.  Instead I just
got on with my job, and since 1981 I've supported my family as a
full-time freelance writer.

I'm successful now because I learned professionalism in the Blackhorse
and carried that lesson over to the work I do in civilian life--which
happens to be writing S-F.  The lessons people learned in Nam probably
cost more than they were worth--even to the folks like me who got back
with nothing worse than a couple boil scars from the time I was in the
field.  They were valuable lessons nonetheless.

If any of the folks reading this were with Blackhorse, thank you for
what you taught me.  I'm proud to have been one of you.

Dave Drake Chatham County, NC

BUT LOYAL TO HIS OWN

"It just blew up.  Hammer and his men knew but they didn't say a
thing," blurted the young captain as he looked past Secretary Tromp,
his gaze compelled toward the milky noonday sky.  It was not the sky of
Friesland and that bothered Captain Stilchey almost as much as his near
death in the ambush an hour before.  "He's insane!  They all are."

"Others have said so," the councillor stated with the heavy ambiguity
of an oracle replying to an ill-phrased question.  Tramp's height was
short of two meters by less than a hand's breadth, and he was broad in
proportion.  That size and the generally dull look on his face caused
some visitors looking for Friesland's highest civil servant to believe
they had surprised a retired policeman of some sort sitting at the desk
of the Secretary to the Council of State.

Tromp did not always disabuse them.

Now his great left hand expanded over the grizzled fringe of hair
remaining at the base of his skull.  "Tell me about the ambush," he
directed.

"He didn't make any trouble about coming to you here at the port,"
Stilchey said, for a moment watching his ringers writhe together rather
than look at his superior.  He glanced up.  "Have you met Hammer?"

"No, I kept in the background when plans for the Auxiliary Regiment
were drafted.  I've seen his picture, of course."

"Not the same," the captain replied, beginning to talk very quickly.
"He's not big but he, he moves, he's alive and it's like every time he
speaks he's training a gun on you, waiting for you to slip.  But he
came along, no trouble-only he said we'd go with a platoon of combat
cars instead of flying back, he wanted to check road security between
Southport and the firebase where we were.  I said sure, a couple hours
wasn't crucial...."

Tromp nodded.  "Well done," he said.  "Hammer's cooperation is very
important if this .. . business is to be concluded smoothly. And"--here
the councillor's face hardened without any noticeable shift of
muscles--"the last thing we wanted was for the good colonel to become
concerned while he was still with his troops.  He is not a stupid
man."

Gratification played about the edges of Stilchey's mouth, but the
conversation had cycled the captain's mind back closer to the blast of
cyan fire.  His stomach began to spin.  "There were six vehicles in the
patrol, all but the second one open combat cars.  That was a command
car, same chassis and ground-effect curtain, but enclosed, you see?
Better commo gear and an air-conditioned passenger compartment, I
started toward it but Hammer said, no, I was to get in the next one
with him and Joachim."

Stilchey coughed, halted.  "That Joachim's here with him now; he calls
him his aide.  The bastard's queer, he tried to make me when I flew
out..  .."

Puzzlement.  "Colonel Hammer is homosexual, Captain?  Or his aide, or
.. . ?"

"No, Via!  Him, not the--I don't know.  Via, maybe him too.  The
bastard scares me, he really does."

To statesmen patience is a tool; it is a palpable thing that can grind
necessary information out of a young man whose aristocratic lineage and
sparkling uniform have suddenly ceased to armor him against the
universe.  "The ambush, Captain," Tromp pressed stolidly.

With a visible effort, Stilchey regained the thread of his narrative.

"Joachim drove.  Hammer and I were in the back along with a noncom from
Curwin--Worzel, his name was.  He

and Joachim threw dice for who had to drive.  The road was supposed to
be clear but Hammer made me put on body armor.  I thought it was cop,
you know--make the starter get hot and dusty.

"Via," he swore again, but softly this time.  "I was at the left side
power gun but I wasn't paying much attention; nothing really to pay
attention to.  Hammer was on the radio a lot, but my helmet only had
intercom so I didn't know what he was saying.  The road was stabilized
earth, just a gray line through hectares of those funny blue plants you
see all over here, the ones with the fat leaves."

"Bluebrights," the older man said dryly.  "Melpomene's only export; as
you would know from the briefing cubes you were issued in transit, I
should think."

"Would the Lord I'd never heard of this damned place!"  Stilchey blazed
back.  His family controlled Karob Trading; no civil servant--not even
Tromp, the Gray Eminence behind the Congress of the Republic--could cow
him.  But he was a soldier, too, and after a moment he continued,
"Bluebrights in rows, waist high and ugly, and beyond that nothing but
the soil blowing away as we passed.

"We were half an hour out from the firebase, maybe half the way to
here.  The ground was dimpled with frost heaves.  A little copse was in
sight ahead of us, trees ten, fifteen meters high.  Hammer had the
forward gun, and on the intercom he said "Want to double the bet,
Blackie?"  Then they armed their guns--I didn't know why--and Worzel
said, "I still think they'll be in the draw two kays south, but I won't
take any more of your money."  They were laughing and I thought they
were going to just .. . clear the guns, you know?"

The captain closed his eyes.  He remembered how they had stared at him,
two bulging circles and the hollow of his screaming mouth below them,
reflected on the polished floor plate of the combat car.  "The command
car blew up just as we entered the trees.  There was a flash like the
sun and it ate the back half of the car, armor and all.  The front
flipped over and over into the trees, and the air stank with metal.
Joachim laid us sideways to follow the part the

mine had left, cutting in right behind when it hit a tree and stopped.
The driver raised his head out of the hatch and maybe he could have got
clear himself .. . but Hammer jumped off our deck to his and jerked him
out, yanked him up in his armor as small as he is.  Then they were back
in our car.  They were firing, everybody was firing, and we turned
right, into the trees, into the guns."  "There were Mel troops in the
grove, then?"  Tromp asked.

"Must have been," Stilchey replied.  He looked straight at the older
man and said, very simply, "I was behind the bulkhead.  Maybe if I'd
known what to expect..  .. The other driver was at my gun, they didn't
need me."  Stilchey swallowed once, continued, "Some shots hit on my
side.  They didn't come through, but they made the whole car ring.  The
empties kept spattering me and the car was bouncing, jumping downed
trees.  Everything seemed to be on fire.  We cleared the grove into
another field of blue brights.  Shells from the firebase were already
landing in the trees; the place was targeted.  And Worzer pulled off
his helmet and he spat and said, "Cold meat, Colonel, you couldn't a
called it better."  Via!"

"Well, it does sound like they reacted well to the ambush," Tromp
admitted, puzzled because nothing Stilchey had told him explained the
captain's fear and hatred of Hammer and his men.

"Nice extempore response, hey?"  the aide suggested with bitter irony.
"Only Hammer, seeing I didn't know what Worzer meant, turned to me, and
said, "We let the Mels get word that me and Secretary Tromp would take
a convoy to Southport this morning.  They still had fifty or so
regulars here in Region 4 claiming to be an infantry battalion, and it
looked like a good time to flush them for good and all.""

Tromp said nothing.  He spread his hands carefully on the citron-yellow
of his desk top and seemed to be fixedly studying the contrast.
Stilchey waited for a response.  At last he said, "I don't like being
used for bait, Secretary.  And what if you'd decided to go out to the
firebase yourself?  I was all right for a stand-in, but do you think

Hammer would have cared if you were there in person?  He won't let
anything stand in his way."

"Colonel Hammer does seem to have some unconventional attitudes," Tromp
agreed.  A bleak smile edged his voice as he continued, "But at that,
it's rather fortunate that he brought a platoon in with him.  We can
begin the demobilization of his vaunted Slammers with them."

The dome of the Starport Lounge capped Southport's hundred-meter hotel
tower.  Its vitril panels were seamless and of the same refractive
index as the atmosphere.  As a tactician, Hammer was fascinated with
the view: it swept beyond the equipment-thronged spaceport and over the
shimmering billows of blue bright to the mountains of the Crescent
almost twenty kilometers away.  But tankers' blood has in it a turtle
component that is more comfortable on the ground than above it, and the
little officer felt claws on his intestines as he looked out.

No similar discomfort seemed to be disturbing the other men in the
room, all in the black and silver of the Guards of the Republic, though
in name they were armor officers.  "Had a bit of action today,
Colonel?" said a cheerful, fit looking major.  Hammer did not remember
him even though a year ago he had been Second in Command of the
Guards.

"Umm, a skirmish," Hammer said as he turned.  The Guardsman held out to
him one of the two thimble-sized crystals he carried.  In the heart of
each flickered an azure fire.  "Why, thank you--" the major's name was
patterned in the silver highlights below his left lapel "--Mestern."

"No doubt you have seen much worse with your mercenaries, eh, Colonel?"
a voice called mockingly from across the room.

Karl August Raeder lounged in imperial state in the midst of a dozen
admiring junior officers.  He had been the executive officer of the
Guards for the past year-ever since Hammer took command of the foreign
regiment raised to smash the scattered units of the Army of
Melpomone.

"Mercenaries, Karl?"  Hammer repeated.  A threat rasped

through the surface mildness of his tone.  "Yes, they cash their
paychecks.  There may be a few others in this room who do, hey?"

"Oh .. ."  someone murmured in the sudden quiet, but there was no way
to tell what he meant by it.  Raeder did not move.  The blood had drawn
back to yellow his smooth tan, and where the cushions had borne his
languid hands they now were dimpled cruelly.  Two men in the lounge had
reached officer status in the Guards without enormous family wealth
behind them.  Hammer was one, Raeder was the other.

He strained at a breath.  In build, he and Hammer were not dissimilar:
the latter brown-haired and somewhat shorter, a trifle more of the
hourglass in his shoulders and waist; Raeder blond and trim, slender in
a rapier sort of way and quite as deadly.  His uniform of natural silk
and leather was in odd contrast to Hammer's khaki battle dress but
there was nothing of fop or sloven in either man.

"Pardon," the Guardsman said, "I would not have thought this a company
in which one need explain patriotism; there are men who fight for their
homelands, and then there are the dregs, the gutter-sweepings of a
galaxy, who fight for the same reason they pimped and sold themselves
before our government--let me finish, please!"  (though only Hammer's
smile had moved) "--misguidedly, I submit, offered them more money to
do what Friesland citizens could have done better!"

"My boys are better citizens than some born on Friesland who stayed
there wiping their butts--"

"A soldier goes where he is ordered!"  Raeder was standing.

"A soldier--"

Dead silence.  Hammer's sentence broke like an axed cord.  He looked
about the lounge at the twenty-odd men, most of them his ex-comrades
and all, like Raeder, men who had thought him mad to post out of the
Guards for the sake of a combat command.  Hammer laughed.  He inverted
the stim cone on the inside of his wrist and said approvingly, "Quite a
view from up here.  If it weren't such

a good target, you could make it your operations center."  As if in
the midst of a normal conversation, he faced back toward the exterior
and added, "By the way, what sort of operations are you expecting?  I
would have said the fighting here was pretty well over, and I'd be
surprised at the government sending the Guards in for garrison duty."

The whispering that had begun when Hammer turned was stilled again.  It
was Raeder who cleared his throat and said in a tone between triumph
and embarrassment, "Colonel Rijsdal may know.  He ... he has remained
in his quarters since we landed."  Rijsdal had not had a sober day in
the past three years since he had acceded to an enormous estate on
Friesland.  "No doubt we are to provide proper, ah, background for such
official pronouncements as the Secretary will make to the populace."

Hammer nodded absently as if he believed the black and silver of a
parade regiment would over-awe the Mels more effectively than could his
own scarred killers, the men who had rammed Frisian suzerainty down Mel
throats after twelve regiments of regulars had tried and failed.  But
the Guards were impressively equipped .. . and all their gear had been
landed.

Five hundred worlds had imported blue bright leaves, with most of the
tonnage moving through Southport.  The handful of Frisian vessels
scattered on the field looked lost, but traffic would pick up now that
danger was over.  For the moment, hundreds of Guard vehicles gave it a
specious life.  In the broad wedge of his vision Hammer could see two
rocket batteries positioned as neatly as chess pieces on the huge
playing surface.  The center of each cluster was an ammunition hauler,
low and broad-chassied.  Within their thin armor sheetings were the
racks of 150mm shells; everything from armor-piercing rounds with a
second stage to accelerate them before impact, to antipersonnel cases
loaded with hundreds of separate bomblets.  The haulers rested on the
field; no attempt had been made to dig them in.

The six howitzers of each battery were sited about their munitions in a
regular hexagon, each joined to its hauler by the narrow strip of a
conveyor.  In action the hogs could

kick out shells at five-second intervals, so the basic load of twenty
rounds carried by the howitzer itself needed instant replenishment from
the hauler's store.  Their stubby gun-tubes gave them guidance and an
initial boost, but most of the acceleration came beyond the muzzle.
They looked grim and effective; still, it nagged Hammer to see that
nobody had bothered to defilade them.

"A pretty sight," said Mestern.  Conversation in the lounge was back to
a normal level.

Hammer squeezed the last of his stim cone into the veins of his wrist
and let the cool shudder pass through him before saying, "The Republic
buys the best, and that's the only way to go when a battle's hanging on
it.  Not that you don't need good crews to man the gear."

Mestern pointed beyond the howitzers, toward a wide spaced ring of gun
trucks.  "Latest thing in arty defense," he said.  "Each of those cars
mounts an eight-barrel power gun only 30mm but they're high-intensity.
They've got curst near the range of a tank's 200--thirty, forty
kilometers if you've that long a sight line.  With our radar hook-up
and the satellite, we can just about detonate a shell as soon as it
comes over the horizon."

"Nice theory," Hammer agreed.  "I doubt you can swing the rig fast
enough to catch the first salvo, but maybe placing them every ten
degrees like that .. . where you've got the terrain to allow it.  The
Mels never had arty worth cop anyway, of course."

He paused, not sure he wanted to comment further.  The grounded tanks
and combat cars of the regiment were in an even perimeter at the edge
of the circular field.  Their dull iridium armor was in evident
contrast to the ocher soil on which they rested.  "You really ought to
have dug in," Hammer said at last.

"Oh, the field's been stabilized to two meters down," the major
protested innocently, "and I don't think the Mels are much of a threat
now."

Hammer shook his head in irritation.  "Lord!"  he snorted, "the Mels
aren't any threat at all after this morning.  But just on general
principles, when you set up in a war zone any war zone--you set up as
if you were going to be hit.  Via, you may as well park your cars on
Friesland for all the good they'd do if it dropped in the pot."

"The good colonel has been away from soldiers too long," whipped Raeder
savagely.  "Major Mestern, would you care to enlighten him as to how
operations can be conducted by a real regiment--even though a gutter
militia would be incapable of doing so?"

"I don't .. . think .. . ," Mestern stuttered in embarrassment.  His
fingers twiddled an empty stim cone.  "Very well, then I will," the
blond XO snapped.  Hammer was facing him again.  This time the two men
were within arm's length.  "The Regiment of Guards is using satellite
reconnaissance, Colonel," Raeder announced sneeringly.  "The same
system in operation when you were in charge here, but we are using it,
you see."

"We used it.  We--"

"Pardon, Colonel, permit me to explain and there will be fewer needless
questions."

Hammer relaxed with a smile.  There was a tiger's certainty behind its
humor.  "No, your pardon.  Continue."

Hammer had killed two men in semi-legal duels fought on Friesland's
moon.  Raeder chuckled, unconcerned with his rival's sudden mildness.
"So," he continued, "no Mel force could approach without being
instantly sighted."

He stared at Hammer, who said nothing.  If the Guardsman wanted to
believe no produce truck could drop a Mel platoon into bunkers dug by a
harvesting crew--spotting the activity was no problem, interpreting it,
though--well, it didn't matter now.  But it proved again what Hammer
had known since before he was landed, that a lack of common sense was
what had so hamstrung the regular army that his Slammers had to be
formed.

Of course, "common sense" meant to Hammer doing what was necessary to
complete a task.  And that sometimes created problems of its own.

"Our howitzers can shatter them ninety kilometers distant," Raeder
lectured on, "and our tanks can pierce all but the heaviest armor at
line of sight, Colonel."  He

gestured arrogantly toward the skyline behind Hammer.  "Anything that
can be seen can be destroyed."

"Yeah, it's always a mistake to underrate technology," agreed the man
in khaki.

"So," Raeder said with a crisp nod.  "It is possible to be quite
efficient without being--" his eyes raked Hammers stained, worn
coveralls "--shoddy.  When we hold the review tomorrow, it will be
interesting to consider your .. . force .  beside the Guard."

"Via, only two of my boys are in," Hammer said "though for slickness
I'd bet Joachim against anybody you've got."  He looked disinterestedly
at the drink dispenser.  "We'll all be back in the field, as soon as I
see what Tromp wants.  We've got a clean-up operation mounted in the
Crescent."

"There is a platoon present now," the Guardsman snapped.  "It will
remain, as you will remain, until you receive other orders."

Hammer walked away without answering.  Bigger men silently moved aside,
clearing a path to the dispenser.  Raeder locked his lips,
murder-tense; but a bustle at the central drop shaft caused him to spin
around.  His own aide, a fifteen-year-old scion of his wife's house,
had emerged when the column dilated.  Rather than use the PA system
built into the lounge before it was commandeered as an officer's club,
messages were relayed through aides waiting on the floor below. 
Raeder's boy carried a small flag bearing the hollow rectangle of
Raeder's rank, his ticket to enter the lounge and to set him apart from
the officers.  The boy might well be noble, but as yet he did not have
a commission.  He was to be made to remember it.

He whispered with animation into Raeder's ear, his own eyes open and
fixed on the mercenary officer.  Hammer ignored them both, talking idly
as he blended another stim cone into his blood.  The blond man's face
slowly took on an expression of ruddy, mottled fury.

"Hammer!"

"The next time you determine where my boys will be, Colonel Raeder, I
recommend that you ask me about it."

"You traitorous scum!"  Raeder blazed, utterly beyond

curbing his anger.  "I closed the perimeter to everyone, everyone] And
you bull your way through my guards, get them to pass--"

"Pass my men, Lieutenant-Colonel!"  Hammer blasted as if he were
shouting orders through the howling fans of a tank.  All the tension of
the former confrontation shuddered in the air again.  Hammer was as set
and grim as one of his war cars.

Raeder raised a clenched fist.

"Touch me and I'll shoot you where you stand," the mercenary said, and
he had no need to raise his voice for emphasis.  As if only Raeder and
not the roomful of officers as well was listening, he said, "You give
what orders you please, but I've still got an independent command.  As
of this moment.  That platoon is blocking a pass in the Crescent,
because that's what I want it to do, not sit around trying to polish
away bullet scars because some cop-head thinks that's a better idea
than fighting."

His body still as a gravestone, Raeder spoke.  "Now you've got a
command," he said thickly.

The wing of violence lifted from the lounge.  Given time to consider,
every man there knew that the battle was in other hands than Raeder's
now--and that it would be fought very soon.

The drop shaft hissed again.

Joachim Steuben's dress was identical in design to his colonel's, but
was in every other particular far superior.  The khaki was unstained,
the waist-belt genuine leather, polished to a rich chestnut sheen, and
the coveralls themselves tapered to follow the lines of his boyish-sum
figure.  Perhaps it was the very beauty of the face smoothly framing
Joachim's liquid eyes that made the aide look not foppish, but softly
feminine.

There was a rich urbanity as well in his careful elegance.  Newland,
his homeworld, was an old colony with an emphasis on civilized
trappings worthy of Earth herself.  Just as Joachim's uniform was of a
synthetic sleeker and less rugged than Hammer's, his sidearm was
hunched high on his right hip in a holster cut away to display the

artistry of what it gripped.  No weapon in the lounge, even that of
Captain Ryssler--the Rysslers on whose land Friesland's second star
port had been built--matched that of the Newlander for gorgeous detail.
The receiver of the standard service pistol, a 1em power gun whose
magazine held ten charged-plastic disks, had been gilded and carven by
someone with a penchant for fleshy orchids.  The stems and leaves had
been filled with niello while the veins remained in a golden tracery. 
The petals themselves were formed from a breathtakingly purple alloy of
copper and gold.  It was hard for anyone who glanced at it to realize
that such a work of art was still, beneath its chasing, a lethal
weapon.

"Colonel," he reported, his clear tenor a jewel in the velvet silence,
"Secretary Tromp will see you now."  Neither he nor Hammer showed the
slightest concern as to whether the others in the lounge were
listening.  Hammer nodded, wiping his palms on his thighs.

Behind his back, Joachim winked at Colonel Raeder before turning.  The
Guardsman's jaw dropped and something mewled from deep in his chest.

It may have been imagination that made Joachim's hips seem to rotate a
final purple highlight from his pistol as the drop shaft sphinctered
shut.

When the Guards landed, all but the fifteenth story of the Southport
Tower was taken over for officers' billets.  That central floor was
empty save for Tromp, his staff, and the pair of scowling Guardsmen
confronting the drop shaft as it opened.

"I'll stay with you, sir," Joachim said.  The guards were in dress
blacks but they carried full-sized shoulder weapons, 2em power guns
inferior only in rate of fire to the tri barrels mounted on armored
vehicles.

"Go on back to our quarters," Hammer replied.  He stepped off the
platform.  His aide showed no signs of closing the shaft in obedience.
"Martyrs' bloodl" Hammer cursed.  "Do as I say!"  He wiped his palms
again and added, more mildly, "That's where I'll need you, I think."

"If you say so, sir."  The door sighed closed behind Hammer, leaving
him with the guards.

"Follow the left corridor to the end--sir," one of the big men directed
grudgingly.  The colonel nodded and walked off without comment.  The
two men were convinced their greatest worth lay in the fact that they
were Guardsmen.  To them it was an insult that another man would
deliberately leave the Regiment, especially to take service with a band
of foreign scum.  Hammer could have used his glass-edged tongue on the
pair as he had at the perimeter when he sent his platoon through, but
there was no need.  He was not the man to use any weapon for
entertainment's sake.

The unmarked wood-veneer door opened before he could knock.  "Why, good
afternoon, Captain," the mercenary said, smiling into Stilchey's
haggard ness  "Recovering all right from this morning?"

"Go on through," the captain said.  "He's expecting you."

Hammer closed the inner door behind him, making a soft echo to the
thump of the hall panel.  Tromp rose from behind his desk, a great gray
bear confronting a panther.

"Colonel, be seated," he rumbled.  Hammer nodded cautiously and
obeyed.

"We have a few problems which must be cleared up soon," the big man
said.  He looked the soldier full in the face.  "I'll be frank.  You
already know why I'm here."

"Our job's done," Hammer said without inflection.  "It costs money to
keep the Si--the auxiliary regiment mobilized when it isn't needed, so
it's time to bring my boys home according to contract, hey?"

The sky behind Tromp was a turgid mass, gray with harbingers of the
first storm of autumn.  It provided the only light in the room, but
neither man moved to turn on the wall illuminators.  "You were going to
say "Slammers," weren't you?"  Tromp mused.  "Interesting.  I had
wondered if the newscasters coined the nickname themselves or if they
really picked up a usage here..  .."

"The boys started it.... It seemed to catch on."

"But I'm less interested in that than another word,"

Tromp continued with the sudden weight of an anvil falling.  " "Home."
And that's the problem, Colonel.  As you know."

"The only thing I could tell you is what I tell recruits when they sign
on," Hammer said, his voice quiet but his forehead sweat-gem med in the
cool air.  "By their contract, they became citizens of Friesland with
all rights and privileges thereof..  .. Great Dying Lord, sir, that's
what brought most of my boys here!  Look, I don't have to tell you
what's been happening everywhere the past ten years, twenty--there are
thousands and thousands of soldiers, good soldiers, who wound up on one
losing side or another.  If everybody that fought alongside them had
been as good, and maybe if they'd had the equipment Friesland could buy
for them ... I tell you, sir, there's no one in the galaxy to match
them.  And what they fight for isn't me, I don't care what cop you've
heard, it's that chance at peace, at stability that their fathers had
and their father's fathers, but they lost somewhere when everything
started to go wrong.  They'd die for that chance!"

"But instead," Tromp stated, "they killed for it."

"Don't give me any cop about morals!"  the soldier snarled.  "Whose
idea was it that we needed control of blue bright shipments to be sure
of getting metals from Taunus?"

"Morals?"  replied Tromp with a snort.  "Morals be hanged, Colonel.
This isn't a galaxy for men with morals, you don't have to tell me
that.  Oh, they can moan about what went on here and they have--but
nobody, not even the reporters, has been looking very hard.  And they
wouldn't find many to listen if they had been.  You and I are paid to
get things done, Hammer, and there won't be any blame except for
failure."

The soldier hunched his shoulders back against the chair.  "Then it's
all right?"  he asked in wonder.  "After all I worried, all I planned,
my boys can go back to Friesland with me?"

Tromp smiled.  "Over my dead body," he said pleasantly.  The two men
stared at each other without expression on either side.

"I'm missing something," said Hammer flatly.  "Fill me in."

The civilian rotated a flat data visor toward Hammer and touched the
indexing tab with his thumb.  A montage of horror flickered across the
screen--smoke drifting sullenly from a dozen low-lying buildings; a
mass grave, reopened and being inspected by a trio of Frisian generals;
another village without evident damage but utterly empty of human
life'Chakma," Hammer said in sudden recognition.  "Via, you ought to
thank me for the way we handled that one.  I'd half thought of using a
nuke."

"Gassing the village was better?"  the councillor asked with mild
amusement.

"It was quiet.  No way you could have kept reporters from learning
about a nuke," Hammer explained.

"And the convoy runs you made with hostages on each car?"  Tromp asked
smilingly.

"The only hostages we used were people we knew--and they knew we knew"
--Hammers finger slashed emphasis-- "were related to Mel soldiers who
hadn't turned themselves in.  We cut ambushes by a factor of ten, and
we even had some busted when a Mel saw his wife or a kid riding the
lead car.  Look, I won't pretend it didn't happen, but I didn't make
any bones about what I planned when I put in for transfer.  This is
bloody late in the day to bring it up."

"Right, you did your duty," the big civilian agreed.  "And I'm going to
do mine by refusing to open Friesland to five thousand men with the
training you gave them.  Lord and Martyrs, Colonel, you tell me we're
going through a period when more governments are breaking up than
aren't--what would happen to our planet if we set your animals loose in
the middle of it?"

"There's twelve regiments of regulars here," Hammer argued.

"And if they were worth the cop in their trousers, we wouldn't have
needed your auxiliaries," retorted Tromp inflexibly.  "Face facts."

The colonel sagged.  "OK," he muttered, turning his face

toward the sidewall, "I won't pretend I didn't expect it, what you
just said.  I owed it to the boys they .. . they believe when they
ought to have better sense, and I owed them to try...."  The soldier's
fingers beat a silent tattoo on the yielding material of his chair.  He
stood before speaking further.  "There's a way out of it, Secretary,"
he said.

"I know there is."

"No!"  Hammer shouted, his voice denying the flat finality of Tromp's
as he spun to face the bigger man again.  "No, there's a better way, a
way that'll work.  You didn't want to hire one of the freelance
regiments you could have had because they didn't have the equipment to
do the job fast.  But it takes a government and a curst solvent one to
equip an armored regiment--none of the privateers had that sort of
capital."

He paused for breath.  "Partly true," Tromp agreed.  "Of course, we
preferred to have a commander--" he smiled "--whose first loyalty was
to Friesland."

Hammer spoke on, choking with his effort to convince the patient, gray
iceberg of a man across from him.  "Friesland s always made her money
by trade.  Let's go into another business--let's hire out the best
equipped, best trained--by the Lord, best--regiment in the galaxy!"

"And the reason that won't work, Colonel," Tromp rumbled coolly, "is
not that it would fail, but that it would succeed.  It takes a very
solvent government, as you noted, to afford the capital expense of
maintaining a first-rate armored regiment.  The Melpomonese, for
instance, could never have fielded a regiment of their own.  But if ...
the sort of unit you suggest was available, they could have hired it
for a time, could they not?"

"A few months, sure," Hammer admitted with an angry flick of his hands,
"But--"

"Nine months, perhaps a year, Colonel," the civilian went on
inexorably.  "It would have bankrupted them, but I think they would
have paid for the same reason they resisted what was clearly
overwhelming force.  And not even Friesland could have economically
taken Melpomone if the locals were stiffened by--by your Slammers, let
us say."

"Lord!"  Hammer shouted, snapping erect, "Of course we wouldn't take
contracts against Friesland."

"Men change, Colonel," Tromp replied, rising to his own feet.  "Men
die.  And even if they don't, the very existence of a successful
enterprise will free the capital for others to duplicate it.  It won't
be a wild gamble any more.  And Friesland will not be the cause of that
state of affairs while I am at her helm.  If you're the patriot we
assumed you were when we gave you this command, you will order your men
to come in by platoons and be disarmed."

The smaller man's face was sallow and his hands shook until he hooked
them in his pistol belt.  "But you can't even let them go then, can
you?"  he whispered.  "It might be all right on Friesland where there
wouldn't be any recruiting by outsiders.  But if you just turn my boys
loose, somebody else will snap them up, somebody else who reads balance
sheets.  Maybe trained personnel would be enough of an edge to pry
loose equipment on the cuff.  Life's rough, sure, and there are plenty
of people willing to gamble a lot to make a lot more.  Then we're where
you didn't want us, aren't we?  Except that the boys are going to have
some notions of their own about Friesland..  .. What do you plan,
Secretary?  Blowing up the freighter with everybody aboard?  Or will
you just have the Guards shoot them down when they've been disarmed?"

Tromp turned away for the first time.  Lightning was flashing from
cloud peak to cloud peak, and the mass that lowered over the Crescent
was already linked to the ground by a haze of rain.  "They put us in
charge of things because we see them as they are, Colonel," Tromp said.
The vitril sheet in front of him trembled to the distant thunder.
"Friesland got very good value from you, because you didn't avoid
unpleasant decisions; you saw the best way and took it--be damned to
appearances.

"I would not be where I am today if I were not the same sort of man.  I
don't ask you to like this course of action--I don't like it
myself--but you're a pragmatist too, Hammer, you see that it's the only
way clear for our own people."

"Secretary, anything short of having my boys killed, but--"

"Curse it, man!"  Tromp shouted.  "Haven't you taken a look around you
recently?  Lives are cheap, Colonel, lives are very cheap!  You've got
to have loyalty to something more than just men."

"No," said the man in khaki with quiet certainty.  Then, "May I be
excused, sir?"

"Get out of here."

Tromp was seated again, his own face a mirror of the storm, when
Captain Stilchey slipped in the door through which Hammer had just
exited.  "Your lapel mike picked it all up," the young officer said. He
gloated conspiratorially.  "The traitor."

Tromp's face forced itself into normal lines.  "You did as I explained
might be necessary?"

"Right.  As soon as I heard the word 'disarmed' I ordered men to wait
for Hammer in his quarters."  Stilchey's gleeful expression expanded to
a smile of real delight.  "I added a ... refinement, sir.  There was
the possibility that Hammer would--you know how he is, hard not to
obey-tell the guards be cursed and leave them standing.  So I took the
liberty of suggesting to Colonel Raeder that he lead four men himself
for the duty.  I used your name, sir, but I rather think the colonel
would have gone along with the idea anyway."

The captain's laughter hacked loudly through the suite before he
realized that Tromp still sat in iron gloom, cradling his chin in his
hands.

The room was a shifting bowl of reds and hot orange in which the khaki
uniforms of Worzer and Steuben seemed misplaced.  The only sound was a
faint buzzing, the leakage of the bone-conduction speakers implanted in
either man's right mastoid.  Hammer, like Tromp, had left his lapel
mike keyed to his aides.

"Get us a drink, Joe," Worzer asked.  With the Slammers, you either did
your job or you left, and nobody could fault Joachim's effectiveness.
Still, there was a good deal of

ambivalence about the Newlander in a unit made up in large measure of
ex-farmers whose religious training had been fundamental if not
scholarly.  Tense, black-bearded Worzer got along with him better than
most, perhaps because it had been a Newland ship which many years
before had lifted him from Curwin and the Security Police with their
questions about a bombed tax office.

Joachim stood and stretched, his eyes vacant.  The walls and floor gave
him a satanic cruelty that would have struck as incongruous those who
knew him slightly.  Yawning, he touched the lighting control, a slight
concavity in the wall.  The flames dulled, faded to a muted pattern of
grays.  The room was appreciably darker.

"Wanted you to do that all the time," Worzer grumbled.  He seated
himself on a bulging chair that faced the doorway.

"I liked it," Joachim said neutrally.  He started for the kitchen
alcove, then paused.  "You'd best take your pistol off, you know.
They'll be jumpy."

"You're the boss," Worzer grunts.  Alone now in the room, he unlatches
his bolstered weapon and tosses the rig to the floor in front of him.
It is a fixed blackness against the grays that shift beneath it.  Glass
tinkles in the kitchen.  Men on every world have set up stills,
generally as their first constructions.  Even in a luxury hotel,
Worzer's habits are those of a lifetime.  Hammer's microphone no longer
broadcasts voices.

The door valves open.

"Freeze!"  orders the first man through.  He is small and blond, his
eyes as cold as the silver frosting his uniform.  The glowing tab of a
master door key is in his left hand, a pistol in his right.  The
Guardsmen fanning to each side of him swing heavy power guns at waist
level, the muzzles black screams in a glitter of indium.  Two more men
stand beyond the door, facing either end of the hallway with their
weapons ready.  "Move and you're dead," the officer hisses to Worzer.
Then, to his tight-lipped subordinates, "Watch for the other one--the
deviate."

The kitchen door rotates to pass Joachim.  His left hand holds a
silver tray with a fruit-garnished drink on it.  Reflections shimmer
from the metal and the condensate on the glass.  He smiles.

"You foul beast!"  says the officer and his pistol turns toward the
aide of its own seeming will.  The enlisted men wait, uncertain.

"Me, Colonel Raeder?"  Joachim's voice lilts.  He is raising the tray
and it arcs away from his body in a gentle movement that catches
Raeders eyes for the instant that the Newlanders right hand dips and--a
cyan flash from Joachims pistol links the two men.  Raeder's mouth is
open but silent.  His eyeballs are bulging outward against the pressure
of exploding nerve tissue.  There is a hole between them and it winks
twice more in the flash of Joachim's shots.  Two spent cases hang in
the air to the Newlander's right; a third is jammed, smeared across his
pistol's ejection port.  None of the Guardsmen have begun to fall,
though a gout of blood pours from the neck of the right-hand man.

It is two-fifths of a second from the moment Joachim reached for his
pistol.

Worzer had been ready.  He leaped as Steuben's shots flickered across
the room, twisting the shoulder weapon from a Guardsman who did not
realize he was already dead.  The stocky Curwinite hit the floor on his
right side, searching the doorway with the power gun  In the hall, a
guard shouted as he spun himself to face the shooting.  Joachim's
jammed pistol had thudded on the floor but Worzer wasted no interest on
what the aide might do--you didn't worry about Joachim in a firefight,
he took care of himself.  The noncom had been squeezing even as he
fell, and only a feather of trigger pressure was left to take up when
the Guardsman's glittering uniform sprouted above the sights.

Heated air thumped the walls of the room.  The body ballooned under the
cyan impact.  The big-bore packed enough joules to vaporize much of a
man's abdomen at that range, and the Frisian hurtled back against the
far wall.  His tunic was afire and spilling coils of intestine.

The boots of the remaining Guardsman clattered on the

tile as he bolted for the drop shaft  Joachim snaked his head and the
pistol he had snatched from Raeder through the doorway.  Worzer and the
big gun plunged into the corridor low to cover the other end.  The
shaft entrance opened even before the Frisian's outflung arm touched
the summoning plate.  Hammer, standing on the platform, shot him twice
in the chest.  The Guardsman pitched into the wall.  As he did so,
Joachim shot him again at the base of the skull.  Joachim generally
doubted other men's kills, a practice that had saved his life in the
past.

Hammer glanced down at the jellied skull of the last Guardsman and
grimaced.  "Didn't anybody tell you about aiming at the body instead of
getting fancy?"  he asked Joachim.  Neither man commented that the
final shot had been aimed within a meter of Hammer.

The Newlander shrugged.  "They should've been wearing body armor," he
said offhandedly.  "Coppy fools."

The colonel scooped up both the power guns from the corridor and
gestured his men back into the room.  The air within stank of blood and
hot plastic.  Death had been too sudden to be prefaced with pain, but
the faces of the Guardsmen all held slack amazement.  Hammer shook his
head.  "With five thousand of you to choose from," he said to Joachim,
"didn't they think I could find a decent bodyguard?"

The Newlander smiled.  After his third quick shot, the expended disk
had been too hot to spin out whole and had instead flowed across the
mechanism when struck by the jet of ejection gas.  Joachim was
carefully chipping away at the cooled plastic with a stylus while the
pistol he had taken from his first victim lay on the table beside him.
Its muzzle had charred the veneer surface.  "There isn't enough gas in
a handgun ejector to cool the chamber properly," he said, pretending to
ignore his colonel's indirect praise.

"Via, you hurried 'cause you wanted all of them."  Worzer laughed.  He
thumbed a loaded round into the magazine of the shoulder gun he had
appropriated.  "What's the matter--don't you want the colonel to bother
bringing me

along the next time 'cause I scare away all your pretty friends?"

Hammer forced a smile at the interchange, but it was only a shimmer
across lines of fear and anger.  On one wall was a communicator, a
flat, meter-broad screen whose surface was an optical pickup as well as
a display.  Hammer stepped in front of it and drew the curtain to blank
the remainder of the room.  His fingers flicked the controls, bringing
Captain Stilchey into startled focus.  Tromp's aide blinked, but before
he could speak the colonel said, "We've got three minutes, Stilchey,
and there's no time to cop around.  Put me through."

Stilchey's mouth closed.  Without comment he reached out and pressed
his own control panel.  With liquid abruptness his figure was replaced
by the hulking power of Secretary Tromp, seated against the closing
sky.

"Tell the Guard to ground arms, Secretary," Hammer ordered in a voice
trembling with adrenaline.  "Tell them now and I'll get on the horn to
my boys--it'll be close."

"I'm sorry for the necessity of your arrest, Colonel," the big man
began, "but--"

"Idiot!"  Hammer shouted at the pickup, and his arm slashed aside the
drapes to bare the room.  "I heard your terms--now listen to mine. I've
arranged for a freighter to land tomorrow at 0700 and the whole
regiment's leaving on it.  I'll leave you an indenture for the fair
value of the gear, and it'll be paid off as soon as contracts start
coming in.  But the Lord help you, Tromp, if anybody tries to stop my
boys."

"Captain Stilchey," Tromp ordered coolly, "sound general quarters.  As
for you, Colonel," he continued without taking verbal notice of the
carnage behind the small officer, "I assure you that the possibility
you planned something like this was in my mind when I ordered the
Guards landed with me."

"Secretary, we planned what we'd do if we had to a month and a half
ago.  Don't be so curst a fool to doubt my boys can execute orders
without me to hold their hands.  If I don't radio in the next few
seconds, you won't have

the Guards to send back.  Lord and Martyrs, man, don't you understand
what you see back of me?  This isn't some coppy parade!"

"Sir," came Stilchey's thin voice from off-screen, "Fire Central
reports all satellite signals are being jammed.  The armored units in
the Crescent began assembling thirty-Lord!  Lord!  Sir!"

A huge scarlet dome swelled upward across the vitril behind Tromp.  The
window powdered harmlessly an instant later as the shock wave threw man
and desk toward Hammer's image.  The entire hotel shuddered to the
blast.  "They're blowing up the artillery," the captain bleated.  "The
ammunition--" His words were drowned in the twin detonations of the
remaining batteries.

Hammer switched the communicator off.  "Early," he muttered.  "Not that
it mattered!"  His face was set like that of a man who had told his
disbelieving mechanic that something was wrong with the brakes, and who
now feels the pedal sink to the firewall to prove him fatally correct.
"Don't go to sleep," he grunted to his companions.  "Tromp knows he's
lost, and I'm not sure how he'll react."  But only Worzer was in the
room with him.

Though Tromp was uninjured, he rose only to his knees.  He had seen
Captain Stilchey when the jagged sheet of indium buzz-sawed into the
suite and through him.  Scuttling like a stiff-legged bear, the
civilian made his way to the private drop shaft built into the room. 
He pretended to ignore the warm greasiness of the floor, but by the
time the platform began to sink his whole body was trembling.

Ground floor was a chaos of half-dressed officers who had been on the
way to their units when fire raked the encampment.  Tromp pushed
through a trio of chattering captains in the branch corridor; the main
lobby of bronze and off-planet stonework was packed and static, filled
with men afraid to go out and uncertain where to hide.  The councillor
cursed.  The door nearest him was ajar and he lacked it fully open. The
furniture within was in sleep mode, the self-cleaning sheets rumpled on
the bed, but

there was no one present.  The vitril outer wall had pulverized;
gouges in the interior suggested more than a shock wave had been
responsible for the damage.

Seen through it, the star port had become a raving hell.

Four hundred meters from the hotel, one of the anti artillery weapons
was rippling sequential flame skyward from its eight barrels.  High in
a boiling thunderhead at its radar chosen point of aim, man-made
lightning flared magenta: high explosive caught in flight.  Almost
simultaneously a dart of cyan more intense than the sun lanced into the
Guard vehicle.  Metal heated too swiftly to melt and sublimed in a
glowing ball that silhouetted the gun crew as it devoured them.
Hammer's tanks, bunkered in the Crescent, were using satellite-computed
deflections to rake the open Guard positions.  Twenty kilometers and
the thin armor of the lighter vehicles were no defense against the
200mm power guns

Tromp stepped over the low sill and began to run.  The field was wet
and a new slash of rain pocked its gleam.  Three shells popped high in
the air.  He ignored them, pounding across the field in a half-crouch.
For a moment the whistling beginning to fill the sky as if from a
thousand tiny mouths meant nothing to him either--then realization
rammed a scream from his throat and he threw himself prone.  The
bomblets showering down from the shells went off on impact all across
the field, orange flashes that each clipped the air with scores of
fragments.  Panic and Hammers tanks had silenced the Guard's defensive
weaponry.  Now the rocket howitzers were free to rain in wilful
death.

But the tanks, Tromp thought as he stumbled to his feet, they can't
knock out the tanks from twenty kilometers and they can't capture the
port while the Guard still has that punch.  The surprise was over now.
Lift fans keened from the perimeter as the great silvery forms of
armored vehicles shifted from their targeted positions.  The combatants
were equal and a standoff meant disaster for the mercenaries.

Much of the blood staining Tromp's clothing was his own, licked from
his veins by shrapnel.  Incoming shells were bursting at ten-second
intervals.  Munitions shortages would force a slowdown soon, but for
the moment anyone

who stood to run would be scythed down before his third step.  Even
flat on his belly Tromp was being stung by hot metal.  His goal, the
ten-place courier vessel that had brought him to Melpomone, was still
hopelessly far off.  The remains, however, of one of the Guard's
self-propelled howitzers lay like a cleat-kicked drink-can thirty
meters distant.  Painfully the councillor crawled into its shelter.
Hammer's punishing fire had not been directed at the guns themselves
but at the haulers in the midst of each battery.  After three shots,
the secondary explosions had stripped the Guard of all its ill-sited
artillery.

A line of rain rippled across the field, streaking dried blood from
Tromp's face and whipping the pooled water.  He was not running away.
There was one service yet that he could perform for Friesland, and he
had to be home to accomplish it.  After that--and he thought of it not
as revenge but as a final duty--he would not care that reaction would
assuredly make him the scapegoat for the catastrophe now exploding all
around him.  It was obvious that Hammer had ordered his men to disturb
the spaceport as little as possible so that the mercenaries would not
hinder their own embarkation.  The lightly rattling shrapnel crumpled
gun crews and the bewildered Guard infantry, but it would not harm the
port facilities themselves or the ships docked there.

For the past several minutes no power guns had lighted the field.  The
bunkered mercenaries had either completed their programs or ceased fire
when a lack of secondary explosions informed them that the remaining
Guard vehicles had left their targeted positions.  The defenders had at
first fired wild volleys at no better target than the mountain range
itself, but a few minutes' experience had taught them that the return
blasts aimed at their muzzles were far more effective than their own
could possibly be.  Now there was a lull in the shelling as well.

Tromp eased a careful glance beyond the rim of his shelter, the buckled
plenum chamber of the gun carriage.  His ship was a horizontal needle
three hundred meters distant.  The vessel was unlighted, limned as a
gray shadow

by cloud-hopping lightning.  The same flashes gleamed momentarily on
the wet turtle-backs of a dozen tanks and combat cars in a nearby
cluster, their fans idling.  All the surviving Guard units must be
clumped in similar hedgehogs across the port.

The big man tensed himself to run; then the night popped and crackled
as a Guard tank began firing out into the storm.  Tromp counted three
shots before a cyan dazzle struck the engaged vehicle amidships and its
own ammunition went off with an electric crash.  The clustered vehicles
were lit by a blue-green fire that expanded for three seconds,
dissolving everything within twenty meters of its center.  One of the
remaining combat cars spun on howling fans, but it collapsed around
another bolt before it could pull clear.  There were Guardsmen on the
ground now, running from their vehicles.  Tromp's eyes danced with
afterimages of the exploding tank, and for the first time he understood
why Stilchey had been so terrified by the destruction of the car he
might have ridden in.

Half a dozen shots ripped from beyond the perimeter and several struck
home together.  All the Guard blowers were burning now, throwing
capering shadows beyond the councillor's shelter.  Then, threading
their way around the pools of slag, the steam and the dying fires, came
a trio of tanks.  Even without the scarlet wand wavering from each
turret for identification, Tromp would have realized these were not the
polished beauties of the Guard.  The steel skirts of their plenum
chambers were rusty and brush worn  One's gouged turret still glowed
where a heavy power gun had hit it glancingly; the muzzle of its own
weapon glowed too, and the bubbling remains of the perimeter defense
left no doubt whose bolts had been more accurately directed.  The
fighting had been brief, Hammer's platoons meeting the disorganized
Guardsmen with pointblank volleys.  The victors' hatches were open and
as they swept in toward the central tower, Tromp could hear their
radios crackling triumphant instructions.  Other wands floated across
the immense field, red foxfire in the rain.

The shooting had stopped.  Now, before the combat cars and infantry
followed up the penetrations their tanks had made, Tromp stood and ran
to his ship.  His career was ruined, of that he had no doubt.  No
amount of deceit would cover his role in the creation of the Slammers
or his leadership in the attempted suppression.  All that was left to
Nicholas Tromp was the sapphire determination that the national power
which he had worked four decades to build should not fall with him.
They could still smash Hammer before he got started, using Friesland's
own fleet and the fleets of a dozen other worlds.  The cost would leave
even Friesland groaning, but they could blast the Slammers inexorably
from space wherever they were landed.  For the sake of his planet's
future, the excision had to be made, damn the cost.

And after Tromp fell in disgrace in the next week or two weeks at most,
there would be no man left with the power to force the action or the
foresight to see its necessity.  Panting, he staggered through his
vessel's open lock.  The interior, too, was unlighted.  That was not
surprising in view of the combat outside, but one of the three crewmen
should have been waiting at the lock.  "Where are you?"  Tromp called
angrily.

The lights went on.  There was a body at the big Frisian's feet.  From
the cockpit forward stretched another hairline of blood still fresh
enough to ooze.  "I'm here," said a cultured voice from behind.

Tromp froze.  Very slowly, he began to turn his head.

"People like you," the voice continued, "with dreams too big for men to
fit into, don't see the same sort of world that the rest of us do.  And
sometimes a fellow who does one job well can see where his job has to
be done, even though a better man has overlooked it.  Anyhow,
Secretary, there always was one thing you and I could agree on--lives
are cheap."

Surely Joachim's wrists were too slim, Tromp thought, to raise his
heavy pistol so swiftly.

AT ANY PRICE

Ferad's body scales were the greenish black of extreme old age, but his
brow horns--the right one twisted into a corkscrew from birth--were
still a rich gray like the indium barrel of the power gun he held.  The
fingertips of his left hand touched the metal, contact that would have
been distracting to most of his fellows during the preliminaries to
teleportation.

Molt warriors had no universal technique, however, and Ferad had grown
used to keeping physical contact with the metallic or crystalline
portion of whatever it was that he intended to carry with him.  He was
far too old to change a successful method now, especially as he
prepared for what might be the most difficult teleportation ever in the
history of his species--the intelligent autochthons of the planet named
Oltenia by its human settlers three centuries before.

The antechamber of the main nursery cave had a high ceiling and a
circular floor eighteen meters in diameter.  A dozen tunnel archways
led from it.  Many young Molt warriors were shimmering out of empty
air, using the antechamber as a bolt hole from the fighting forty
kilometers away.  The familiar surroundings and the mass of living rock
from which the chamber was carved made it an easy resort for relative
youths, when hostile fire ripped toward them in the press of battle.

The vaulted chamber was alive with warriors' cries, fear or triumph or
simply relief, as they returned to catch their

breath and load their weapons before popping back to attack from a new
position.  One adolescent cackled in splendid glee though his left arm
was in tatters from a close-range gunshot: in his right hand the youth
carried both an Oltenian shotgun and the mustached head of the human
who had owned it before him.  The ripe sweat of the warriors mingled
with propellant residues from projectile weapons and the dry,
arch-of-the-mouth taste of indium from power guns which still glowed
with the heat of rapid fire.

Sopasian, Ferad's junior by a day and his rival for a long lifetime,
sat eighteen meters away, across the width of the chamber.  Each of the
two theme elders planned in his way to change the face of the
three-year war with the humans.  Sopasian's face was as taut with
strain as that of any post adolescent preparing for the solo hunt which
would make him a warrior.

Sopasian always tried too hard, thought Ferad as he eyed the other
theme elder; but that was what worked, had always worked, for Sopasian.
In his right hand was not a gun bought from a human trader or looted
from an adversary but rather a traditional weapon: a hand-forged
dagger, hafted with bone in the days when Molt warriors fought one
another and their planet was their own.  While Ferad stroked his
gunbarrel to permit him to slide it more easily through the interstices
of intervening matter, Sopasian's left hand fiercely gripped a disk of
synthetic sapphire.

The two elders had discussed their plans with the cautious precision of
mutually-acknowledged experts who disliked one another.  Aloud, Ferad
had questioned the premise of Sopasian's plan.  Consciously but unsaid,
he doubted his rival or anyone could execute a plan calling for so
perfect a leap to a tiny object in motion.

Still deeper in his heart, Ferad knew that he was rotten with envy at
the very possibility that the other theme elder would succeed in a
teleportation that difficult.  Well, to be old and wise was not to be a
saint; and a success by Sopasian would certainly make it easier for
Ferad to gain his ends with the humans.

The humans, unfortunately, were only half the problem --and the result
Sopasian contemplated would make his fellow Molts even more
intransigent.  Concern for the repercussions of his plan and the shouts
of young warriors like those who had made the war inevitable merged
with the background as Ferad's mind tried to grip the electrical
ambience of his world.  The antechamber itself was a hollow of
energy--the crystalline structure of the surrounding rocks, constantly
deforming as part of the dynamic stasis in which every planetary crust
was held, generated an aura of piezoelectric al energy of high
amplitude.

Ferad used the shell of living rock as an anchor as his consciousness
slipped out in an expanding circle, searching to a distance his
fellows--even Sopasian--found inconceivable.  For the younger warriors,
such a solid base was almost a necessity unless their goal was very
well known to them and equally rich in energy flux.  As they aged, male
Molts not only gained conscious experience in teleportation but became
better attuned to their planet on a biological level, permitting jumps
of increasing distance and delicacy.

In circumstances such as these, the result was that Molts became
increasingly effective warriors in direct proportion to their growing
distaste for the glory which had animated them in their hot-blooded
youth.  By the time they had reached Ferads age .. .

The last object of which Ferad was aware within the antechamber was an
internally-scored five-centimeter disk, the condensing unit for a
sophisticated instrument display.  The disk came from a disabled combat
car, one of those used by the mercenaries whom the human colonists had
hired to support them in their war with the Molts.

Sopasian held the crystal in his left hand as his mind searched for a
particular duplicate of it: the location-plotter in the vehicle used by
Colonel Alois Hammer himself.

"Largo, vector three-thirty!"  called Lieutenant Enzo Hawker as Profile
Bourne, his sergeant-driver, disrupted

the air-condensed hologram display momentarily by firing his power gun
through the middle of it.

A bush with leaves like clawing fingers sprawled over a slab of rock a
few meters from the Slammers' jeep.  Stems which bolts from the
submachine gun touched popped loudly, and the Molt warrior just
condensing into local existence gave a strangled cry as he collapsed
over his own human-manufactured power gun

"Via!"  the little sergeant shouted as he backed the air cushion jeep
left-handed.  "Somebody get this rock over here.  Blood and martyrs,
that's right on top of us!"

An infantryman still aboard his grounded skimmer caught the shimmer of
a Molt tele porting in along the vector for which Hawker had warned. 
He fired, a trifle too early to hit the attacker whose imminent
appearance had ionized a pocket of air which the detection apparatus on
the jeep had located.  The cyan bolt blew a basin the size of a dinner
plate into the rock face on which the Molt was homing.  Then the
ten-kilo shaped charge which Oltenian engineers had previously placed
shattered the rock and the autochthon warrior himself into a sphere of
flying gravel and less recognizable constituents.

Ducking against the shower of light stones, a pair of Oltenians
gripping another shaped charge and the bracket that would hold it two
meters off the ground scuttled toward the slab on which Bourne's victim
quivered in death.  A trooper on the right flank of the company,
controlled by the other detection jeep, missed something wildly and
sent a bolt overhead with a hiss-thump!  which made even veteran
Slammers cringe.  The two locals flattened themselves, but they got to
their feet again and continued even though one of the pair was visibly
weeping.  They had balls, not like most of the poofs.  Not like the
battalion supposedly advancing to support this thrust by a company of
Hammers infantry reinforced by a platoon of Oltenian combat
engineers.

"Spike to Red One," said Hawkers commo helmet--and Bourne's, because
the tall heavy-set lieutenant had deliberately split the feed to his
driver through the intercom

circuits.  Profile was the team's legs; and here on Oltenia
especially, Hawker did not want to have to repeat an order to bug out.
"Fox Victor--" the Oltenian battalion "--is hung up.  Artillery broke
up an outcrop, but seems like the Molts are homing on the boulders
even.  There's some heavy help coming, but it'll be a while.  Think you
might be able to do some good?"

"Bloody buggerin' poofs," Sergeant Bourne muttered as he bent in
anticipation of the charge blasting the nearby slab, while the pipper
on the map display glowed on a broad gully a kilometer away as
"Spike"--the company commander, Henderson--pinpointed the problem.

The pair of detection jeeps were attached to the infantry for this
operation, but Hawker's chain of command was directly to
Central--Hammers headquarters--and the idea wasn't one that Henderson
was likely to phrase as an order even to someone unquestionably under
his control.  The Slammers had been on Oltenia for only a few days
before the practice of trusting their safety to local support had
proven to be the next thing to suicide.

But the present fact was that the company was safe enough only for the
moment, with the larger crystalline rocks within their perimeter broken
up.  The autochthons could-given time to approach the position instead
of tele porting directly from some distant location--home on very small
crystals indeed.  Unless somebody shook loose Fox Victor, the troopers
in this lead element were well and truly screwed.

Hawker rubbed his face with his big left hand, squeezing away the
prickling caused by Bourne's nearby shots and the nervous quiver
inevitable because of what he knew he had to say.  "All right," he
muttered, "all right, we'll be the fire brigade on this one too."

A hillock six hundred meters distant shattered into shell bursts turbid
with dirt and bits of tree.  Waves quivered across the ground beneath
the jeep for a moment before the blast reached the crew through the
air.  Bourne cursed again though the artillery was friendly, the guns
trying to forestall Molt snipers by pulverizing a site to which they
could easily teleport.  The attempt was a reminder that no

amount of shelling could interdict all outcrops within the
line-of-sight range of a power gun

"Want an escort, Red One?"  asked the company commander, flattened
somewhere beside his own jeep while his driver's gun wavered across
each nearby spray of vegetation, waiting for the warning that it was
about to hold a Molt warrior.

"Profile?"  asked Lieutenant Hawker, shouting over the fan whine rather
than using the intercom.

"What a bloody copping mess," grunted the sergeant as his left hand
spun the tiller and the fans spun the jeep beneath them.  "Hang on," he
added, late but needlessly: Hawker knew to brace himself before he said
anything that was going to spark his driver into action.  "No, we don't
want to bloody babysit pongos!"  and the jeep swung from its axial turn
into acceleration as smooth as the brightness curve of
rheostat-governed lights.

"Cover your own ass, Spike," Hawker reported as the jeep sailed past a
trio of grounded infantrymen facing out from a common center like the
spokes of a wheel.  "We'll do better alone."

The trouble with being a good all-rounder was that you were used when
people with narrower capacities got to hunker down and pray.  The other
detection team, Red Two, consisted of a driver possibly as good as
Bourne and a warrant officer who could handle the detection gear at
least as well as Hawker.  But while no one in the Slammers was an
innocent about guns, neither of the Red Two team was the man you really
wanted at your side in a firefight.  They would do fine, handling
detection chores for the entire company during this lull while the
autochthones regrouped and licked their wounds.

Red One, on the other hand, was headed for the stalled support force,
unaccompanied by slammer-mounted infantry who would complicate the mad
dash Profile intended to make.

Shells passed so high overhead that they left vapor trails and their
attenuated howl was lost in the sizzle of brush slapping the jeep's
plenum chamber.

"Gimme the push for Fox Victor," Hawker demanded of Central, as his
right hand gripped his submachine gun and his eyes scanned the route by
which Bourne took them to where the supports were bottlenecked.

The Slammers lieutenant was watching for Molts who, already in
position, would not give warning through the display of his detection
gear.  But if one of those bright uniformed, totally-incompetent
Oltenian general officers suddenly appeared in his gun sights .. .

Enzo Hawker might just decide a burst wouldn't be wasted.

The gorgeous clothing of the officers attending the Widows of the War
Ball in the Tribunal Palace differed in cut from the gowns of the
ladies, but not in quality or brilliance.  General Alexander Radescu,
whose sardonic whim had caused him to limit his outfit to that
prescribed for dress uniforms in the Handbook for Officers in the
Service of the Oltenian State, knew that he looked ascetic in
comparison to almost anyone else in the Grand Ballroom-his aide, Major
Nikki Tzigara, included.

"Well, the lily has a certain dignity that a bed of tulips can't equal,
don't you think?"  murmured the thirty-two-year old general as his oval
fingernails traced a pattern of lines down the pearly fabric of his
opposite sleeve.

Nikki, who had added yellow cuffs and collar to emphasize the scarlet
bodice of his uniform jacket, grinned at the reference which he alone
was meant to hear in the bustle of the gala.  From beyond Tzigara,
however, where he lounged against one of the pair of huge urns polished
from blue John--columnar fluorspar--by Molt craftsmen in the dim past,
Major Joachim Steuben asked, "And what does that leave me, General? The
dirt in the bottom of the pot?"

Colonel Hammer's chief of base operations in the Oltenian capital
flicked a hand as delicately manicured as Radescu's own across his own
khaki uniform.  Though all the materials were of the highest quality,
Steuben's ensemble had a restrained elegance--save for the
gaudily-floral inlays of the

pistol, which was apparently as much part of the Slammers dress
uniform as the gold-brimmed cap was for an Oltenian general officer. In
fact, Major Steuben looked very good indeed in his tailored khaki,
rather like a leaf-bladed dagger in an intarsia sheath.  Though
flawlessly personable, Steuben had an aura which Radescu himself found
at best disconcerting: Radescu's mind kept focusing on the fact that
there was a skull beneath that tanned, smiling face.

But Joachim Steuben got along well in dealing with his Oltenian
counterparts here in Belvedere.  The first officer whom Hammer had
given the task of liaison and organizing his line of supply from the
star port had loudly referred to the local forces as poofs.  That was
understandable, Radescu knew; but very impolitic.

Nikki, who either did not see or was not put off by the core of Joachim
which Radescu glimpsed, was saying, "Oh, Major Steuben, you dirt?" when
the string orchestra swung into a gavotte and covered the remainder of
the pair's Smalltalk.

Every man Radescu could see in the room was wearing a uniform of some
kind.  The regulars, like Nikki Tzigara, modified the stock design for
greater color; but the real palm went to the "generals" and "marshals"
of militia units which mustered only on paper.  These were the
aristocratic owners of mines, factories, and the great ranches which
were the third leg of human success on Oltenia.  They wore not only the
finest imported natural and synthetic fabrics, but furs, plumes,
and--in one case of strikingly poor taste, Radescu thought--a shoulder
cape flayed from the scaly hide of an adolescent Molt.  Officers of all
sorts spun and postured with their jeweled ladies, the whole seeming to
the young general the workings of an ill-made machine rather than a
fund-raiser for the shockingly large number of relicts created in three
years of war.

Radescu lifted his cap and combed his fingers through the pale, blond
hair which was plastered now to his scalp by perspiration.  The second
blue John vase felt cool to his back, but the memories it aroused
increased his depression.  The only large-scale celebrations of which
the autochthons,

the Molts, had not been a part were those during the present war.
While not everyone--yet--shared the generals opinion that the war was
an unmitigated disaster, the failure of this gathering to include
representatives of the fourteen Molt themes made it less colorful in a
way that no amount of feathers and cloth-of-gold could repair.

A gust of air, cool at any time and now balm in the steaming swamps,
played across the back of Radescu's neck and the exposed skin of his
wrists.  He turned to see a scarlet Honor Guard disappearing from view
as he closed a door into the interior of the Tribunal Palace.  The man
who had just entered the ballroom was the Chief Tribune and effective
ruler of Oltenia, Grigor Antonescu.

"Well met, my boy," said the Chief Tribune as he saw General Radescu
almost in front of him.  There was nothing in the tone to suggest that
Antonescu felt well about anything, nor was that simply a result of his
traditional reserve.  Radescu knew the Chief Tribune well enough to
realize that something was very badly wrong, and that beneath the wall
of stony facial control there was a mind roiling with anger.

"Good evening, Uncle Grigor," Radescu said, bowing with more formality
than he would normally have shown his mother's brother, deferring to
the older mans concealed agitation.  "I don't get as much chance to see
you as I'd like, with your present duties."

There were factory owners on the dance floor who could have bought
Alexander Radescu's considerable holdings twice over; but there was no
one with a closer path to real power if he chose to travel it.  "You
have good sense, Alexi," Antonescu said with an undertone of bitterness
that only an ear as experienced as Radescu's own would have heard.

The Chief Tribune wore his formal robes of office, spotlessly white and
of a severity unequaled by even the functional uniform of Joachim
Steuben .. . who seemed to have disappeared.  Another man in Grigor
Antonescu's position might have designed new regalia more in line with
present tastes or at least relieved the white vestments'

severity with jewels and metals and brightly-patterned fabrics rather
the way Niki had with his uniform (and where was Nikki?).  Chief
Tribune Antonescu knew, however, that through the starkness of a pure
neutral color he would draw eyes like an ax blade in a field of
poppies.

"It's time," Antonescu continued, with a glance toward the door and
away again, "that I talk to someone who has good sense."

On the dance floor, couples were parading through the steps of a
sprightly contredanse--country dance--to the bowing of the string
orchestra.  The figures moving in attempted synchrony reminded
Alexander Radescu now of a breeze through an arboretum rather than of a
machine.  "Shall we ... ?"  the general suggested mildly with a short,
full-hand gesture toward the door through which his uncle had so
recently appeared.

The man-high urns formed an effective alcove around the door, while the
music and the bustle of dancing provided a sponge of sound to absorb
conversations at any distance from the speakers.  Chief Tribune
Antonescu gave another quick look around him and said, gesturing his
nephew closer, "No, I suppose I need to show myself at these events to
avoid being called an unapproachable dictator."  He gave Radescu a
smile as crisp as the glitter of shears cutting sheet metal: both men
knew that the adjective and the noun alike were more true than not.

"Besides," Antonescu added with a rare grimace, "if we go back inside
we're likely to meet my esteemed colleagues --" Tribunes Wraslov and
Delhi "--and having just spent an hour with their inanity, I don't care
to repeat the dose for some while."

"There's trouble, then?"  the young general asked, too softly in all
likelihood to be heard even though he was stepping shoulder to shoulder
as the older man had directed.

There was really no need for the question anyway, since Antonescu was
already explaining, The great offensive that Marshal Erzul promised has
stalled.  Again, of course."

A resplendent colonel walked past, a young aide oil his

arm.  They both noticed the Chief Tribune and his nephew and looked
away at once with the terrified intensity of men who feared they would
be called to book.  Radescu waited until the pair had drifted on, then
said, "It was only to get under way this morning.  Initial problems
don't necessarily mean--"

"Stalled.  Failed.  Collapsed totally," Antonescu said in his smooth,
cool voice, smiling at his nephew as though they were discussing the
gay rout on the dance floor.  "According to Erzul, the only units which
haven't fallen back to their starting line decimated are those with
which he's lost contact entirely."

"Via, he can't lose contact!"  Radescu snapped as his mind retrieved
the Operation Order he had committed to memory.  His post, Military
Advisor to the Tribunes, was meant to be a sinecure.  That General
Radescu had used his access to really study the way the Oltenian State
fought the autochthones was a measure of the man, rather than of his
duties.  "Every man in the forward elements has a personal radio to
prevent just that!"

"Every man alive, yes," his uncle said.  "That was the conclusion I
drew, too."

"And--" Radescu began, then paused as he stepped out from the alcove to
make sure that he did not mistake the absence of Major Steuben before
he completed his sentence with, "and Hammer's Slammers, were they
unable to make headway also?  Because if they were .. ."  He did not go
on by saying, "... then the war is patently unwinnable, no matter what
level of effort we're willing to invest."  Uncle Grigor did not need a
relative half his age to state the obvious to him.

Antonescu gave a minute nod of approval for the way his nephew had this
time checked their surroundings before speaking.  "Yes, that's the
question that seems most frustrating," he replied as the contredanse
spun to a halt and the complex patterns dissolved.

"Erzul--he was on the screen in person--says the mercenaries failed to
advance, but he says it in a fashion that convinces me he's lying.  I
presume that there

has been another failure to follow up thrusts by Hammer's units."

The Chief Tribune barked out a laugh as humorless as the stuttering of
an automatic weapon.  "If Erzul were a better commander, he wouldn't
need to be a good liar," he said.

The younger man looked at the pair of urns.  At night functions they
were sometimes illuminated by spotlights beamed down on their
interiors, so that the violet tinge came through the huge, indigo
grains and the white calcite matrix glowed with power enchained.
Tonight the stone was unlighted, and only reflections from the smooth
surfaces belied its appearance of opacity.

"The trouble is," Radescu said, letting his thoughts blend into the
words his lips were speaking, "that Erzul and the rest keep thinking of
the Molts as humans who can teleport and therefore can never be caught.
That means every battle is on the Molts' terms.  But they don't think
the way we do, the way humans do, as a society.  They're too
individual."

The blue John urns were slightly asymmetric, proving that they had been
polished into shape purely by hand instead of being lathe-turned as any
human craftsman would have done.  That in itself was an amazing comment
on workmanship, given that the material had such pronounced lines of
cleavage and was so prone to splinter under stress.  Even the resin
with which the urns were impregnated was an addition by the settlers to
whom the gift was made, preserving for generations the micron-smooth
polish which a Molt had achieved with no tool but the palms of his
hands over a decade.

But there was more.  Though the urns were asymmetric, they were precise
mirror images of one another.

"If we don't understand the way the Molts relate to each other and to
the structure of their planet," said Alexander Radescu with a gesture
that followed the curve of the right hand urn without quite touching
the delicate surface, "then we don't get anywhere with the war.

"And until then, there's no chance to convince the Molts to make
peace."

The ambience over which Ferad's mind coursed was as real and as
mercurial as the wave-strewn surface of a sea.  He knew that at any
given time there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his fellows
hurling themselves from point to point in transfers which seemed
instantaneous only from the outside.  There was no sign of others in
this universe of stresses and energy, a universe which was that of the
Molts uniquely.

That was the key to the character of male Molts, Ferad had realized
over the more than a century that he observed his race and the human
settlers.  Molt females cooperated among themselves in nurturing the
young and in agriculture --they had even expanded that cooperation to
include animal husbandry, since the human settlement.  The prepubescent
males cooperated also, playing together even when the games involved
teleportation for the kilometer or so of which they and the females
were capable.

But with the hormonal changes of puberty, a male's world became a
boundless, vacant expanse that was probably a psychological construct
rather than a 'real' place-but which was no less real for all that.

In order to transport himself to a point in the material landscape, a
Molt had to identify his destination in the dream world of energy
patterns and crystal junctions that depended both on the size of the
object being used as a beacon and on its distance from the point of
departure.  Most of all, however, finding a location depended on the
experience of the Molt who picked his way across the interface of mind
and piezoelectric al flux.

That focus on self deeply affected the ability of males to consider
anything but individual performance.  Hunters, especially the young who
were at pains to prove their prowess, would raid the herds of human
ranchers without consideration of the effect that had on
settler-autochthon relations.  And, even to the voice of Ferad's
dispassionate experience, it was clear that there would be human herds
and human cities covering the planet like studded leather upholstery if
matters continued as they began three centuries before.

But while the war might be a necessary catalyst for change, no society
built on continued warfare would be beneficial to Man or Molt.

The greater questions of civilization which had been filling Ferad's
time in the material world were secondary now in this fluid moment.
Crystals which he knew--which he had seen or walked across or
handled--were solid foci within the drift.  They shrank as the theme
elder's mind circled outward, but they did not quickly lose definition
for him as they would have done decades or a century earlier.

The psychic mass of the power gun Ferad held created a drag, but his
efforts to bring the weapon into tune with his body by stroking the
metal now worked to his benefit.  He handled the gun in tele porting
more easily than he did its physical weight in the material world.  His
race had not needed the bulk and power of human hunters because their
pursuit was not through muscular effort and they struck their quarry
unaware, not aroused and violent.  Besides that, Ferad was very old,
and gravity's tug on the indium barrel was almost greater than his
shrunken arms could resist.

He would hold the weapon up for long enough.  Of that he was sure.

Ferad's goal was of unique difficulty, not only because of the distance
over which he was tele porting but also due to the nature of the
objects on which he was homing.  He had never seen, much less touched
them; but an ancestor of his had spent years polishing the great urns
from solid blocks of blue John.  That racial memory was a part of
Ferad, poised in momentary limbo between the central cave system of his
theme and the Tribunal Palace in Belvedere.

A part of him like the power gun in his hands.

"Shot," called the battery controller through the commo helmets, giving
Hawker and Bourne the warning they would have had a few seconds earlier
had the rush of their passage not shut off outside sounds as slight as
the first pop of the firecracker round.  The initial explosion was only
large enough to split the twenty-centimeter shell casing short of

the impact point and strew its cargo of five hundred bomblets like a
charge of high-explosive buckshot.

"Via!"  swore the sergeant angrily, because they were in a swale as
open as a whore's cunt and the hologram display which he could see from
the corner of his eye was giving a warning of its own.  The yellow
figures which changed only to reflect the position of the moving jeep
were now replaced by a nervous flickering from that yellow to the
violet which was its optical reciprocal, giving Lieutenant Hawker the
location at which a Molt warrior was about to appear in the near
vicinity.  It was a lousy time to have to duck from a firecracker
round.

But Via, they'd known the timing had to be close to clear the ridge
before the jeep took its position to keep the bottleneck open.  Bourne
knew that to kill forward motion by lifting the bow would make-the
slowing jeep a taller target for snipers, while making an axial 180
turn against the vehicle's forward motion might affect the precision
with which the Loot called a bearing on the tele porting autochthon. 
The drivers left hand released the tiller and threw the lever tilting
the fan nacelles to exhaust at full forward angle.

His right hand, its palm covered with a fluorescent tattoo which
literally snaked all the way up his arm, remained where it had been
throughout the run: on the grip of his submachine gun.

"Splash," said the battery controller five seconds after the warning,
and the jeep's inertia coasted it to a halt in the waving, head-high
grain.  A white glow played across the top of the next rise, mowing
undergrowth and stripping bark and foliage from the larger trees.  The
electrical crackle of the bomblets going off started a second later,
accompanied by the murderous hum of an object flung by the explosions,
a stone or piece of casing which had not disintegrated the way it
should have--deadly in either case, even at three hundred meters, had
it not missed Bournes helmet by a hand's breadth.

"Loot!"  the driver called desperately.  The burring fragment could be
ignored as so many dangers survived

had been ignored before.  But the Molt warrior who by now was in full
control of his body and whatever weapon he held, somewhere beyond the
waving curtain of grain .. . "Which way, Loot, which way!"

"Hold it," said Lieutenant Hawker, an order and not an answer as he
jumped to his full meter-ninety height on the seat of the jeep with his
gun pointing over the driver's head.  There was a feral hiss as
Hawker's weapon spewed plastic casings from the ejection port and cyan
fire from the muzzle.  Profile Bourne's cheeks prickled, and a line of
vegetation withered as the burst angled into the grain.

There was a scream from downrange.  The sergeant slammed his throttle
and the nacelle angle into maximum drive even as his teammate dropped
back into a sitting position, the muzzle of his power gun sizzling as
it cooled from white to lambent gray.  The scream had been high pitched
and double, so that the driver did not need to hear Hawker say, "Cop!
It was a female and a kid, but I thought she had a bloody satchel
charge!"

It wasn't the sort of problem that bothered Bourne a whole lot, but he
didn't like to see the Loot so distressed.

The reason Fox Victor was having problems--beyond the fact that they
were poofs who couldn't be trusted in a rainstorm, much less a
firefight--was obvious on this, the reverse slope of the gully which
formed the actual choke point for the support column.  Low retaining
walls curved back into the sloping hillside like arms outstretched by
the arched opening in their center: the entrance to what the Oltenians
called a Molt nursery cave.

In fact, the underground constructs of which this was a small example
were almost never true caves but rather tunnels carved into igneous and
metamorphic rocks of dense crystalline structure.  The sedimentary
rocks which could be cut or leached away into caves by groundwater were
of no use as beacons for tele porting autochthons--and thus of no use
in training young Molts to use their unique abilities.

By being surrounded from earliest infancy with living

rock whose crystals were in a constant state of piezoelectric al flux,
Molts--male and female alike--began to teleport for short distances
before they could crawl.  As they grew older, pre pubescents played in
the near vicinity of their nurseries and gained a familiarity with the
structure of those rocks which was deeper than anything else they would
meet in life.

And when called to do so by military need, Molt warriors could home on
even the smallest portions of the particular locality in which they had
been raised.  Shelling that broke up the gross structure of a slab did
not affect the ability of warriors to concentrate, though the damage
would ordinarily have at least delayed younger Molts trying to locate
it for teleportation.  The result, at least for poofs without the
instruments to detect warriors before the shooting started, would be
disastrous.

Now, while the pair of Slammers were.  flat out with nothing but a 15
slope to retard the jeep, the possibility of a Molt tele porting to
point-blank range beside them was the least of Profile Bourne's
worries.  The bolt that snapped into the hillside thirty meters away,
fluffing and dimming shell-set grass-fires in its momentary passage,
was a more real danger.  The micro fragments from the firecracker round
had cleared the crest and face of the ridge, but a Molt somewhere out
there, far from the immediate battle scene, continued to snipe at the
jeep undeterred.  The autochthons were not, in the main, good marksmen,
and the vehicle's speed made it a chance target anyway to a gunman a
kilometer distant.

But the chance that let the bolt blow a divot from the soil and
splinters from the rock close beneath might easily have turned the jeep
into a sizzling corona as electrical storage cells shorted through
driver and passenger.  It was nothing to feel complacent about, and
there was no way to respond while the jeep was at speed.

If only they were about to join one of the Slammers' tank companies
instead of a poof battalion!  Snipers would learn that they, like dogs,
got one bite--and that a second attempt meant the ground around them
glowed and

bubbled with the energy released by a tank's main gun or a long burst
from a tri barrel

That didn't, of course, always mean that the first bite had not drawn
blood..  ..

A less skilled driver would have let his jeep lift bow high at the
crest where the ridge rolled down its other slope.  Bourne angled his
fan nacelles left, throwing the vehicle into a sideslip which cut
upward velocity without stalling the jeep as a target silhouetted in
two directions.  The grass and low brush of the crest were scarred by
the bomblets, and a lump half-hidden by the rock which had sheltered it
might have been a warrior caught by the shrapnel.

While Bourne concentrated on his own job, Lieutenant Hawker had been on
the horn with the poof battalion commander, their Central-relayed
conversation audible to the driver but of no particular interest.  All
Sergeant Bourne cared was that the Oltenian troops not add their fire
to that of the Molts already sniping at the jeep.  Men so jumpy from
being ripped without recourse might well fire at any target they could
hit, even when the intellectual levels of their brains knew that it was
the wrong target.

"Profile, a hundred and fifty!"  the lieutenant ordered.  His left arm
reached out through the flashing hologram display in the air before
him, converting its digital information into a vector for his driver's
gun.

The sergeant grounded the jeep in a stony pocket far enough below the
crest to be clear of the Molt marksman who had fired as they climbed
the back slope.  Molts could teleport in within touching distance, but
this time that was the plan; and the rocks jumbled by a heavy shell
provided some cover from distant snipers.

Bourne did not fire.  He knew exactly where the Molt was going to
appear, but spraying the area a hundred and fifty meters down the wash
would have been suicidal.

Like most of Hammer's troopers, Sergeant Bourne had seen the wreckage
Molt warriors made of Oltenian assaults.  He hadn't really appreciated
the ease with which disaster happened until he saw what now took place
in the swale.

The water cut depression in a fold between crystalline ridges was now
studded with rubble cracked from both faces by armor-piercing shells
and the blazing remains of half a dozen Oltenian vehicles.  The human
bodies blended into the landscape better than did equipment marked out
by pillars of smoke and sometimes a lapping overlay of kerosene flames,
though the corpse halfway out of the driver's hatch of an armored car
was obvious with his lifted arms and upturned face--brittle as a
charcoal statue.

The single firecracker round had been intended only to clear the Molts
briefly from the area.  A poof armored car and armored personnel
carrier were trying to make a dash across the gully during the lull,
however, instead of waiting for the Slammers to get into position as
Hawker had directed.  Some might have said that showed exemplary
courage, but Profile Bourne couldn't care less about fools who died
well--which was all this crew was managing.

The automatic weapon in the car's turret traversed the slope toward
which the vehicle advanced, making a great deal of dust and racket
without affecting in the least the warrior who must have tele ported
directly between the car and the personnel carrier.  Bourne didn't fire
at the Molt, knowing that the armored vehicles shielded their attacker
and that the poofs across the swale would respond to the submachine
gun's 'attack' on their fellows, no matter how good their fire
discipline might be.

"Via!  Three more, Profile," Lieutenant Hawker said, his pointing arm
shifting 15 to the right as the swale rang with the sound of a magnetic
limpet mine gripping the steel side of the vehicle against which it had
been slapped.

Rock broken by heavy shells, brush smoldering where the bursting
charges of the antipersonnel bomblets had ignited it.  No target yet,
but Profile loosed a three-round burst to splash the boulders twenty
meters from the oncoming APC and warn the poofs.

The armored car dissolved in a sheet of flame so intense that the shock
wave a fraction of a second later seemed a separate event A trio of
Molts froze out of the air where

Hawker had pointed and Bourne's own shots had left glazed scars on the
stone a moment before.

He had a target now and he fired over open sights, two rounds into the
back of the first warrior and three at the second, who leaped up into
the last bolt when molten stone sprayed from the boulder sheltering
him.  A storm of fire from at least twenty Oltenian guns broke wildly
on the general area.  The Loot was shouting, "Close Profile!"  his big
arm pointing behind the jeep, but nothing this side of Hell was going
to keep Bourne from his third kill--the Molt crouched behind his
steaming power gun firing into the APC as fast as his finger could pull
the trigger.

Only when that Molt crumpled did the sergeant spin to shoot over the
racked electronics modules replacing the jeep's back seat.  Bourne
lifted the heat-shivering muzzle of his gun even as his finger took up
slack in the trigger.  If he had fired as he intended into the center
of mass of the warrior coalescing a meter away, the satchel charge the
Molt was clutching to his chest would have gone off and vaporized the
jeep.  Instead, the distorted face of the autochthon dissolved in a
burst so needlessly long that even Profile knew that he had panicked.

"Seventy-five," the Loot was saying, and Bourne rotated toward the new
target while the decapitated remains of his previous victim toppled
backwards.  In the swale below, the APC crackled with what sounded like
gunfire but was actually the explosion of ammunition within its burning
interior.  Seventy-five meters, a rough figure but there was a tangled
clump of ground cover at about that distance in the direction the Loot
was pointing, a flat-topped block jutting like a loggia garden into the
gully.  Bourne squeezed off what was intended to be a two-round burst
alerting the poofs deployed on the further side.

There was a single cyan flicker from the submachine gun--he'd emptied
the magazine on the previous Molt, leaving only one lonely disk in the
loading pan.

Cursing because the warrior homing on the block was going to get a shot
in for sure and the Loot was already pointing another vector, the
sergeant swapped magazines.

His eyes were open and searching the terrain for the new target, two
hundred meters to the front and closer to the Oltenian battalion than
to the jeep.  The right handgrip enclosed the magazine well, and a
veteran like Bourne had no need to look down for hand to find hand in
an operation as familiar as reloading.

He had no need to worry about the warrior his shot had marked, as it
turned out.

The standard poof shoulder weapon, a stubby shotgun, did not, with its
normal load of flechettes, have the range of the target.  The outside
surface of the gun tube could be used as the launching post for
ring-airfoil grenades, however, like the one that hurled a pair of
Molts in opposite directions from its yellow flash in the center of the
target.  Turret guns from armored vehicles were raking the blasted area
as well, even hitting the corpses as they tumbled.

Could be some a' the poofs had sand in their craws after all.

A power gun too distant to be a target for Bourne under these
circumstances was emptied in the direction of the jeep as fast as some
warrior could pull the trigger.  The bolts weren't really close--some
of them were high enough for their saturated blue-green color to be
lost in the sunlight.  The trio that spattered rock eighty meters from
the jeep-forty meters, twenty--were not less terrifying, however, for
the fact that the next three missed by more than the sergeant could
track.

Bourne's burst toward the Loot's latest warning was careless if not
exactly frightened.  He couldn't see anything and it was less of a
threat than the snipers now ranging on them anyway .. . and then, when
the Molt leaped into his vision while poof guns chopped furiously, the
sergeant realized that the warrior was hiding from him, from the jeep,
and fatally ignoring the Oltenians.

"Fox Victor," Lieutenant Hawker ordered, "roll 'em," and the bolt that
shattered a boulder into fist-sized chunks ringing on the jeep came
from the angle opposite the previous sniper.

"Loot, it's--" the driver said, reaching for the throttle left-handed.
A hilltop barely visible puffed white, shells

answering a satellite report of sniping, but that alone wouldn't be
enough to save their ass.  The trucks and armored vehicles of the poof
battalion were rumbling from cover; a couple autochthons fired at them,
missing badly.  Via!  If they could miss the broad, flat sides of an
APC, how did they get so bloody close to the sheltered jeep?

"Right," said Hawker as he glanced at his display, still and yellow as
it vainly awaited more tele porting autochthons, "let's ro--" and the
last word was swept away by his driver's fierce acceleration out of the
pocket of stone which had become an aiming point for the enemy far
off.

The Loot was on Central's push, now, calling for panzers and a salvo of
artillery, while Bourne jinked back up and away and the air winked with
ill-aimed sniper fire.  The bastards didn't need to be good, just
lucky, and the bolt that fried sod a millisecond before the jeep's
skirts whisked across it was almost lucky enough.  Central was
answering calmly, dryly--their butts weren't on the line!--but that
wasn't something the sergeant had time for anyway.  They'd done their
job, done it bleedin' perfectly, and now it looked like they'd be lucky
to get out with a whole skin.

Well, that was what happened when you tried to support the poofs.

As the jeep topped the ridge a second time but in the opposite
direction, a bolt snapped past it from the far side of the grain field
and coincidentally a truck blew up in the swale behind.  The detection
team could not prevent the support battalion from taking casualties
when it traversed open ground.  What the Loot's warnings--and Profile's
own submachine gun, its barrel reeking with sublimed indium and the
finish it burned from the breastplate to which the elastic sling held
it--had accomplished was to eliminate the warriors who knew the terrain
so well that they could place themselves within millimeters of an
opponent in the gully.  There were surely other Molts with a nursery
association with this area, but the autochthons--thank the Lord!-didn't
have the organization to make a massed response to a sudden threat.

They didn't need to, of course, since a handful of

warriors could stall a poof battalion, and weeks of long range sniping
eroded the Slammers' strength to no human purpose.

The shock wave from a six-tube salvo skewed the jeep even though the
shells impacted on the far side of the ridge and none closer than a
half kilometer to the course down which Bourne was speeding to escape.
The Loot was having the Slammers' hogs blast clear the flanks of the
Oltenian battalion, crumbling rocks that would otherwise stand as
beacons for Molts bouncing closer to shoot down the axis of the swale.
The poofs should've done that themselves, but their artillery control
wasn't up to civilized standards, and their gun crews minced around in
a funk fearing a Molt with a satchel charge would teleport aboard an
ammo transporter.  Which had happened often enough to give anybody the
willies, come to think.

The warrior who had snapped shots at them earlier now had at least a
pair of supporters--one of whom was too bloody good.  Bourne spun and
braked his vehicle, fearing the brief pause during which their original
downhill velocity was precisely balanced by thrust in the new
direction.  Lord help 'em if the Loot's request for heavy armor didn't
come through the way the artillery support had done.

Though Colonel Hammer didn't leave his people hanging if there was any
way around it.

The dark arch of the nursery tunnel into which Bourne headed the jeep
was a perfect aiming point--hitting the center of a large target is
easier than nailing a small one.  The sergeant expected the entrance to
be crisscrossed by the dazzling scatter of bolts squeezed off with all
the care of which Molt marksmen were capable.  He figured he had no
hope save the autochthons' bad aim or bad timing.  That there were no
shots at all was as pleasant a surprise as he'd had since the night a
whore tried to kill him with what turned out to be an empty gun..  ..

The tunnel was three meters wide and of simple design, an angled
gallery rather than a labyrinth of interconnected chambers.  The same
purpose was achieved either way: the

encouragement of the very young to teleport to points separated from
them by solid barriers.

The same stone angles were just what the doctor ordered to block sniper
fire--and as for anybody tele porting directly into the cave, they were
cold meat as soon as the Loots equipment picked them up.

"Safe!"  the driver cried happily as he yanked the tiller left at the
first 60 break, an edge of polished black granite that had not been
dulled by rubbing shoulders as it would have been in a structure
occupied by humans.

The warrior just around that corner pointed his Oltenian shotgun
squarely at Profiles face.

Molt cave systems were not unlighted--the autochthons actually saw less
well in dim conditions than humans did.  The roof of this particular
tunnel was painted with a strip of--imported--permanent fluorescent,
powered by the same piezoelectric al forces which made the rock a
beacon for tele porters  It gave off only a pale glow, however,
inadequate for irises contracted by the sun outside, so it was in the
jeep's front floods that the Molt's eyes gaped.  His shadow against the
gleaming stone was half again his real height, and the muzzle of the
gun seemed broad as the tunnel.

Bourne fluffed his front fans to full screaming lift with his right
hand.

He could have shot, have killed the warrior.  Man and Molt were equally
surprised, and Profile Bournes reflexes were a safe bet against just
about anybody's in those situations.

And then the charge of flechettes, triggered by the warrior's dying
convulsion, would have shredded both men from the waist upward.

Lieutenant Hawker shouted as he fired through the hologram display
which had failed to warn him.  The Molt was already within the tunnel
before the jeep entered, so there were no indicia of teleportation for
the apparatus to detect.  They should have thought of that, but the
lightning swift danger of the snipers outside had made the cave mouth a
vision of safety like none since Mother's bosom.

That was the sort of instinctive error that got your ass killed
thought Hawker as his energy bolts scarred long ovals across the
ceiling's fluorescence, ricocheting further down the tunnel in
diminishing deadliness, and the Molts shotgun blasted deafeningly into
the uplifted skirt and plenum chamber of the jeep.

The screech of the jeep striking and skidding along the tunnel wall at
a 45 angle was actively painful to Profile Bourne.  You didn't get to
be as good a driver as he was without empathy for your vehicle, and the
shriek of metal crumpling was to the sergeant comparable to skidding
along a hard surface himself.  But he'd done that too, thrown himself
down on gravel when shots slammed overhead.  You do what you gotta do;
and anyway, the Molt's body when the jeep hit it provided a pretty fair
lubricant.

Their forward velocity had been scrubbed off by the contact rather than
killed by the vectored fans in normal fashion.  Bourne chopped the
throttle so that the braking thrust would not slam them back against
the far wall.  The jeep slumped down onto its skirts again, its back
end ringing on the stone a moment before the whole vehicle came to
rest.

The sergeant knew that he ought to be watching the next angle in case
another warrior, prepared by the racketing death of the first, came
around it shooting.  Instead he closed his eyes for a moment and
squeezed his hands together hard enough to make the thin flesh start up
around the print of each fingertip.  Lord, he'd almost pissed
himself!

When he opened his eyes, he saw the tiny, glittering dimple in the
steel flooring just between his boots.  It was a flechette from the
shotgun charge which had come within a millimeter of doing the warriors
business--or half of it-despite the fact that the roof of the plenum
chamber was in the way.

Lord and martyrs!

"Lord and martyrs," muttered Lieutenant Hawker as he stepped out of the
vehicle, and curst if he didn't seem as shook as the driver felt.
"Don't worry, got it on aural," he

added with a nod toward the hologram display and a left handed tap on
the earpiece of his commo helmet.  The data relayed through the headset
was less instantly assimilable than what his eyes could intake through
the holograms-but there were only two directions from which an attack
could come in the tunnel.

Anyhow, Profile figured that he needed to walk out the wobbles he could
feel in his legs.  Maybe the Loot was the same.

Before the sergeant left the jeep, he switched off the headlights which
would otherwise be only a targeting aid to whatever Molts were around.
The rock quivered when he stepped onto it, an explosion somewhere, and
he cursed or prayed--who knew?--at the thought that another salvo of
penetrators on the back slope of the ridge might bring the bloody
ceiling down and accomplish what the autochthons had failed to do. What
the hell, nobody'd ever told him he'd die in bed.

Bourne skidded at his first step.  He glanced down, thinking that the
stone beneath his boots must have a glass smooth polish.  It wasn't
that--and the Molt with the shotgun deserved worse, it'd been too
cursed quick for him.

The two Slammers used hand signals at the next angle, five meters
further down the tunnel.  They could as easily have sub vocalized the
plan on the intercom, but Profile's quick tap on his own breastplate
and the Loot's grimace of acceptance was all that it took anyway.

Bourne put a single shot against the facing wall, the bolt crackling
like shattered brick as it bounced from the stone.  A fraction of a
second later, the sergeant himself went in low.

The shot might have drawn a reflexive return from anyone poised to meet
them around the angle--but there was no one, no adult at least: they
were in the nursery itself, a circular room no wider than the tunnel
from which it was offset to the left, just around the second angle.
There were eighteen reed and moss creches like the pips on an
instrument dial, and about half of them still squirmed with infant
Molts.

"S'all right, Loot!"  Bourne shouted as he rolled into a sitting
position; and for all the encouragement of his words, his ankles were
crossed in a firm shooter's rest beneath him.  "S'all clear, just the
babes."

The flash of the shot was still a retinal memory to Bourne as he
glanced around the chamber, blinking as if to wash the spreading orange
blot from the black surface of his eyeballs.  The scars of the ricochet
were marked by powdered stone at a constant chest height along the
circular wall.  No significant amount of energy would have sprayed the
infants, but they were mewing fearfully anyway.

The Loot came in behind the muzzle of his gun--you didn't leave
decisions of safety to somebody else, even Sergeant Bourne, not in a
place like this.

The Molt in the creche closest to Bourne tele ported neatly into his
lap, scaring the sergeant into a shout and a leap upward that ended
with the infant clamped hard against him and the muzzle of Lieutenant
Hawker's submachine gun pointed dead on.  The little Molt squealed even
more loudly.

"Let's get the cop outa here before the locals put a flame gun down the
tunnel and investigate later," Hawker said as he ported his weapon
again, making no apology for aiming it toward a tele porting
autochthon, even one in Bournes lap.  "Doesn't seem those Molts'll
snipe at us here, what with the little ones in the line of fire."

"Right," said his driver, kneeling to put the infant back in its--his?
her?--creche.  There were air shafts cut from the chamber's ceiling to
the surface twenty or thirty meters above.  Through them now sank,
competing with the power gun ozone prickliness, not only the ash and
blast residues of the shelling but the stomach-turning sweetness of
diesel fumes.  The vehicles of Fox Victor had gained the ridge and
should by now be advancing down the reverse slope, covered by shellfire
against likely sniper positions.

"No, here," said Lieutenant Hawker, reaching out with a left hand that
seemed large enough to encircle the infant Molt which he took from
Bourne.  "You need to drive.  We'll

clear these out and then get a squad a' engineers to blow the place
before it causes more trouble."

Little bastards looked less human than the adults, Bourne thought as he
strode quickly back to the jeep, calm again with the tension of battle
released by two sudden shocks within the runnel.  You could only be so
scared, and then it all had to let go--or you cracked, and Profile
Bourne didn't crack.  The limbs of the young Molt were very small, more
like those of a newt or lizard than of a human baby.  Even as adults,
the autochthons were shorter and more lightly built than most humans,
but after a few years of age there was no difference in proportions.

"I suppose it's because the ones that crawl least do the
other-teleport--better," said the Loot as he swung his big frame into
the seat behind the displays, still holding the infant Molt.  Via,
maybe he could read his driver's mind; they'd worked through some curst
tight places in the past few years.  But it was a natural thing to
wonder about if you saw the little ones up close like this, and the
Loot was smart, he figured out that sort of thing.

Right now, the only thing Bourne really wanted to figure out was how to
find a quiet spot where nobody would try to blow him away for a while.
He'd given enough gray hairs to this buggering planet and its buggered
poof army already!

There was a centimeter's clearance front and rear to turn the jeep in
the tunnel's width, but the sergeant did not even consider backing
after he tested his eyeball guestimate with a brief tap on the throttle
as he twisted the tiller to bring the vehicle just short of alignment.
Sure that it was going to make it, he goosed the fans again and brought
the detection vehicle quickly around, converting spin into forward
motion as the bow swung toward the first angle and the entrance.  If it
could be done with a ground effect vehicle, Profile would do it without
thinking.  Thinking wasn't his strong suit anyway.

The mercenaries' commo helmets brightened with message traffic as the
jeep slid back down the initial leg of the gallery.  Even a satellite
relay squarely overhead didn't

permit radio communication when one of the parties was deep beneath a
slab of rock.  Ground conduction signals were a way around that, but a
bloody poor one when all your troops were mounted on air cushion
vehicles.

Might be nice to have a portable tunnel to crawl into, now and again.
When some poof circus needed to have its butt saved again, for
instance.

The tunnel mouth gave them a wedge of vision onto the far slope,
expanding as the jeep slid smoothly toward the opening where the driver
grounded it.  Sparkling chains of fire laced the air above the valley,
bubbling and dancing at a dozen points from which snipers might have
fired earlier.

" "Bout bloody time!"  the driver chortled, though support from the
Slammers' big blowers had come amazingly quickly, given the care with
which the expensive vehicles had to travel on this hostile terrain.
"About bloody time!"

The tri barreled power guns raking Molt hiding places with counterfire
cycled so quickly that, like droplets of water in a fountain, the
individual cyan flashes seemed to hang in the air instead of snapping
light-quick across the valley.  Afterimages strobed within Bourne's
dark-adapted eyes: on a sunny day, the bursts of two-centimeter fire
imposed their own definition of brightness.  Snipers were still safe if
they fired and fled instantly; but if a warrior paused to take a breath
or better aim, heat sensors would lock on the glowing barrel of his
power gun and crisscrossing automatic fire would glaze the landscape
with his remains.

The support was combat cars, not the panzers--the tanks--that Bourne
had been hoping for.  This'd do, but it'd be nice to see a whole bloody
hillside go up in a blue flash!

Lieutenant Hawker, holding the Molt, stepped from the jeep and the
tunnel mouth, his gun hand raised as if he were hailing a cab in a
liberty port.  It wasn't the safest thing in the world, on this world,
to do, what with autochthons still firing at the oncoming poof
battalion and those locals themselves dangerously trigger-happy. Still,
the Molts had proven unwilling to shoot toward their infants, and the

poofs were more likely to pitch a bunker-buster into the tunnel mouth
than they were to shoot at a Slammer in battle dress three times the
size of any Molt who ever lived.  Shrugging, Bourne butted the jeep a
couple meters further forward to take a look himself.

The leading elements of Fox Victor had reformed on the ridge crest and
were advancing raggedly abreast in a mounted assault line.  There were
thirty or so vehicles in the first wave, armored cars and APCs with a
leavening of all-terrain trucks taking the place of armored vehicles
destroyed earlier in the operation.

The nearest vehicle was one of the light trucks, this one equipped with
a pintle-mounted machine gun instead of carrying a squad of engineers
with blasting charges the way the mercenaries had hoped.  The Loot
signalled it over peremptorily while his tongue searched the controller
of his commo helmet for the setting that would give him Fox Victors
inter vehicle push--Hawker's previous radio contact had been with the
battalion commander, pointless right now.

The truck, still fifty meters upslope, wavered in its course and did
not immediately slow; its driver and vehicle commander, as well as the
rest of the six Oltenians aboard, obviously had doubts about -the idea
of halting on open ground pocked with glassy evidence of Molt gunfire.
They did, however, turn squarely toward the entrance of the nursery
tunnel while the independent axles permitted the four wheels to bobble
in nervous disorder over the irregularities of the terrain.

Most important, nobody took a shot at the two Slammers.  Profiles
tattooed gun hand had swung his own weapon minutely to track the
Oltenians; now he relaxed it somewhat.  Allies, sure, but curse it,
they only had to look like they were planning to fire and they were
gone.. ..

The truck braked to a halt beside the notch in the slope which formed
the tunnel entrance.  Everybody aboard but the gunner leaped out with
the nervousness of dogs sniffing a stranger's territory.  Dust, thrown
up by treads that were woven in one piece with the wheel

sidewalls from ferri chrome mono crystal continued to drift downhill
at a decreasing velocity.

"Who'n blazes're you!"  demanded the close-coupled Oltenian captain who
presumably commanded more than the crew of this one truck.  Additional
vehicles were rolling over the ridge, some of them heavy trucks; and,
though the artillery was still crunching away at distant locations,
fire from the combat cars in the nearest positions had slackened for
lack of targets.

"We're the fairy godmothers who cleared the back slope for you," said
Lieutenant Hawker, pumping his submachine gun toward, and by
implication over, the ridge.  "Now, I want you guys to go in there and
bring out the rest of these, the babies."

He joggled the Molt infant that his left hand held to his breastplate;
the little creature made a sound that seemed more like a purr than a
complaint.  "We get them out--there's maybe a dozen of 'em--and we can
pack the tunnel with enough explosives to lift the top off the whole
bloody ridge.  Let's see 'em use it to snipe from then!"

"You're crazy," said one of the poofs in a tone of genuine disbelief.

"We aren't doing any such thing," agreed his captain.  "Just shove the
explosives in on top--there'll be plenty room still."

"They're babies," Lieutenant Hawker said with the kind of edge that
made Bourne smile, not a nice smile, as he checked the damage to the
jeep's front skirt.  "I didn't risk my hide to get a lot of lip from
you boys when I saved your bacon.  Now, hop!"

Lord knew what the chain of command was in a rat fuck like this
situation, but it was a fair bet that the Loot couldn't by protocol
give direct orders to a higher-ranking local.  Hawker didn't wear rank
tabs, nobody did when the Slammers were in a war zone; and no poof with
a lick of sense was going to argue with somebody the size and demeanor
of the mercenary officer.  The captain's short barrelled shotgun
twitched on his shoulder where he leaned it, finger within the trigger
guard; but it was to the locals

around him that he muttered, "Come on, then," as he strode within the
lighted tunnel.

The skirt wasn't damaged badly enough to need replacement, but Profile
hoped he'd have a chance soon to hose it down.  The slime which
glittered with Molt scales was already beginning to stink.

The Loot talked to Central, business that Bourne's mind tuned out as
effectively as a switch on his helmet could've done.  It was relaxing,
standing in the sunlight and about as safe as you could be on this
bloody planet: there were still the sounds of combat far away, but the
jeep was now lost in the welter of other military vehicles, a needle
among needles.  The Molts were reeling, anyway, and the few hundred
casualties this operation had cost them must be a very high proportion
of the fighting strength of the theme involved.

Lieutenant Hawker was absently stroking the back of the infant with the
muzzle of his submachine gun.  In the minutes since the gun was last
fired, the indium had cooled to the point that the little Molt found
its warmth pleasurable --or at least it seemed to: its eyes were
closed, its breathing placid.

Echoes merged the shots in the tunnel into a single hungry roar.

"Loot, the--" the sergeant began as he knelt beside the skirt, the jeep
between him and the gunfire, his own weapon pointed back down the
runnel.  He meant a tele porting warrior, of course, but the detector
holograms had been within the driver's field of vision and they were
calm with no yellow-violet flicker of warning.

Besides, the squad of Oltenians was coming back down the gallery
talking excitedly, two of them supporting a third who hopped on one leg
and gripped the calf of the other with both hands.  But that was only a
ricochet; you couldn't blaze away in a confined space and not expect to
eat some of your own metal.

Bourne stood up and let his sling clutch the submachine gun back
against his breastplate now that he knew there was no problem after
all.  Wisps of smoke eddied from the

barrels of the shotguns, residues of flash suppressant from the
propellant charges.  The air in the nursery chamber must be hazy with
it.... "What in the name of the Lord have you done?"  Lieutenant Hawker
asked the captain in a tone that made Profile Bourne realize that the
trouble wasn't over yet after all.

"It's not your planet, renter," the captain said.  His face was
spattered with what Bourne decided was not his own blood.  "You don't
capture Molts, you kill 'em.  Every cursed chance you get."

"C'mon, somebody get me a medic," the wounded man whined.  This hurts
like the very blazes!"  The fabric of his trousers was darkening around
his squeezing hands, but the damage didn't seem to Bourne anything to
lose sleep over.

"I told you .. . ," the Loot said in a breathless voice, as though he
had been punched hard in the pit of the stomach.  The big mercenary was
holding himself very straight, the infant against his breastplate in
the crook of one arm, towering over the captain and the rest of the
poofs, but he had the look of a man being impaled.

A four-vehicle platoon of the combat cars which had been firing in
support now kicked themselves sedately from the ridgeline and proceeded
down the slope.  Dust bloomed neatly around the margin of the plenum
chamber of each, trailing and spreading behind the big, dazzle-painted
indium forms.  A power gun bolt hissed so high overhead that it could
scarcely be said to be aimed at the cars.  Over a dozen tri barrels
replied in gorgeous fountains of light that merged kilometers away like
strands being spun into a single thread.

"When you've had as many of your buddies zapped as we have," said a
poof complacently to the Slammer who had earned his commission on
Emporion when he, as ranking sergeant, had consolidated his company's
position on the landing zone, "then you'll understand."

"Blood and martyrs, Loot!"  said Profile Bourne as he squinted upslope.
"That's Alpha Company--it's the White Mice and Colonel Hammer!".

"The only good Molt," said the captain, raising overhead

the shotgun he held at the balance and eyeing the infant in Lieutenant
Hawker's arms as if it were the nail he was about to hammer, "is a
dead--"

And the Loot shot him through the bridge of the nose.

Bloody hell, thought Bourne as he sprayed first a poof whose gun was
half-pointed, then the one who leaped toward the truck and the weapon
mounted there.  Had he reloaded after popping the round into the
nursery chamber?

Bourne's first target was falling forward, tangled with the man the
Loot had killed, and the second bounced from the side of the truck, the
back of his uniform ablaze and all his muscles gone flaccid in
mid-leap.  A bolt that had gotten away from Bourne punched a divot of
rock from the polished wall of the tunnel.

"Profile, that's enough!"  the Loot screamed, but of course it
wasn't.

The Oltenian with a bit of his own or a comrade's shot charge in his
calf was trying to unsling his shotgun.  Everything in the sergeant's
mind was as clear and perfect as gears meshing.  The emotion that he
felt, electric glee at the unity of the world centered on his gunsight,
had no more effect on his functioning than would his fury if the
submachine gun jammed.  In that case, he would finish the job with the
glowing indium barrel as he had done twice in the past..  ..

The submachine gun functioned flawlessly.  Bourne aimed low so that
stray shots would clear the Loot, lunging to try to stop his
subordinate; and as the trio of poofs doubled up, the second burst
hacked into their spines.

This close, a firefight ended when nobody on one side or the other
could pull a trigger anymore.  The Loot knew that.

Combat cars whining like a pair of restive banshees slid to a dynamic
halt to either side of the tunnel archway.  The central tri barrel
directly behind the driver's hatch, and one wing gun of each bore on
the detection team from close enough to piss if the wind were right.
Despite the slope, the cars were not grounded; their drivers held them
amazingly steady on thrust alone, their skirts hovering only

millimeters above the rocky soil.  The offside gunner from either car
jumped out and walked around his vehicle with pistol drawn.

Lieutenant Hawker turned very slowly, raising his gun hand into the
air. The infant Molt clutched in the crook of the other arm began to
greet angrily, disturbed perhaps by the screams and the smell of men's
bodies convulsing without conscious control.

A dead man's hand was thrashing at Profile's boot.  He stepped back,
noticing that the hair on the back of his left hand, clutching the
foregrip of his weapon, had crinkled from the heat of the barrel.

"I want you both to unsnap the shoulder loop of your slings," said a
voice, clear in Bourne's ears because it came through his commo helmet
and not over the rush of the big fans supporting tonnes of combat car
so close by.

There was no threat in the words, no emotion in the voice.  The quartet
of tri barrels was threat enough, and as for emotion--killing wasn't a
matter of emotion for men like Profile Bourne and the troopers of
Headquarters Company--the White Mice.

Lieutenant Hawker took a long look over his shoulder, past his sergeant
and on to the Oltenian vehicles already disappearing over the far
ridge--their path to Captain Henderson's infantry cleared by the risks
the detection team had taken.

"Aye, aye, Colonel Hammer," Hawker said to the wing gunner in the right
hand car, and he unsnapped his sling.

The hologram display began to flash between yellow and violet, warning
that a Molt was about to appear.

"Nikki, I've been looking for you the past half hour," said General
Radescu no louder than needful to be heard over the minuet that the
orchestra had just struck up.  His young aide nonetheless jumped as if
goosed with a hot poker, bumping the urn that he had been peering
around when Radescu came up behind him.  "Alexi, I--" Major Nikki
Tzigara said, his face flushed a darker red than the scarlet of his
jacket bodice.  There were white highlights

on Nikki's cheekbones and brow ridge, and the boy's collar looked too
tight.  "Well it's a .. ."  He gestured toward the whirling tapestry of
the dance.  "I thought I ought to circulate, you know, since you were
so busy with your uncle and important people."

The general blinked, taken aback by the unprovoked sharpness of his
aide's tone.  Nikki was counterattacking when there'd been no attack,
Radescu had only said ... "Ah, yes, there's no doubt something over a
hundred people here I really ought to talk to for one reason or
another," he said, filing Tzigara's tone in memory but ignoring it in
his response because he hadn't the faintest notion of its cause.  Nikki
really ought to wear full makeup the way Radescu himself had done ever
since he understood the effectiveness of Uncle Grigor's poker face.
Antonescu might not have become Chief Tribune, despite all his gifts,
had he not learned to rule his expression.  Heavy makeup was the edge
which concealed the tiny hints from blood and muscle that only the most
accomplished politician could wholly control.

And Man, as Aristotle had said, was the political animal.

"Rather like being on the edge of a rhododendron thicket," Radescu
continued, looking away from his aide to give Nikki room to compose
himself, for pity's sake.  Uncle Grigor had worked his way a few meters
along the margin of the circular hall so that he was almost hidden by a
trio of slender women whose beehive coiffures made them of a height
with the tall Chief Tribune.  "Very colorful, of course, but one can't
see very much through it, can one?

"Which reminds me," he added, rising onto the toes of his gilded boots
despite the indignity of it--and finding that he could see no farther
across the ballroom anyway, "do you know where the mercenary adjutant
is, Major Steuben?"

"Why would I know that?  He could be anywhere!"

Makeup wouldn't keep Nikki's voice from being shrill as a power saw
when the boy got excited, Alexander Radescu thought; and thought other
things, about the way Nikki's medals were now disarranged, row els and
wreathes and dangling chains caught and skewed among themselves.  The
back of Radescu's neck was prickling, and the hairs along

his arms.  He hoped it wasn't hormonal, hoped that he had better
control of his emotions than that.  But dear Lord!  He didn't care
about Nikki's sexual orientation, but surely he had better sense than
to get involved with a killer like Steuben .. . didn't he?

Ignoring the whispers in his mind, Radescu eyed the gorgeous show on
the ballroom floor and said, This is why She war's being fought, you
know, Nikki?  The--all the men having to wear uniforms, all the women
having to be seen with men in uniforms."  Except for Uncle Grigor, who
distanced himself and his fellow Tribunes from the war by starkly
traditional robes.  Everyone else--of the aristocracy-gained from the
war the chance to cavort in splendid uniforms, while Grigor Antonescu
settled for real control of the Oltenian State..  ..

"They don't fight the war--we don't fight the war, even the ones of us
with regular commissions," Radescu continued, turning to face Nikki
again and beginning to straighten the boy's medals, a task that kept
his eyes from Tzigara's face.  "But it couldn't be fought without our
support."

The whole surface of his skin was feeling cold as if the nerves
themselves had been chilled, though sweat from the hot, swirling
atmosphere still tingled at his joints and the small of his back.  The
two blue John urns stood tall and aloof just as they had done for
centuries, but between them'I think maybe the Molts would have
something to say about ending the war," said Nikki Tzigara.  "I mean,
you have your opinions, Alexi, but we can't make peace--"

"Nikki!"  Radescu shouted, for suddenly there was an ancient Molt
warrior directly behind the young aide.  The Molts hide was the color
of an algae-covered stone, soaked for decades in peat water, and his
right brow horn was twisted in a way unique in the general's
experience.  The power gun he held was a full-sized weapon, too heavy
for the Molt's stringy muscles to butt it against his shoulder the way
one of the Slammers would have done.

The warrior had no need for technique at this range, of course.

Nikki had begun to turn, his mouth still open and saying "--the Molts
don't--" when the warrior fired.  The first of his twenty-round
magazine.

The human nearest to Ferad flew apart in an explosive cavitation
effect, two-thirds of the mass of his thorax having been converted to
super-hot steam by the bolt it absorbed from the power gun almost in
contact with it.  The remainder of the corpse was flung backward by the
ball of vaporized matter which coated everything within a five-meter
radius, Ferad and the urns included.  The flailing yellow sleeves were
still attached to the rest of the body, but the scarlet bodice which
they had complemented was scooped away to the iridescent white of the
membrane covering the inner surface of the victim's spine and ribs.

The taller human in pearl and gold who had been standing behind the
first had locked eyes with Ferad.  He was an easy target, fallen in a
tangle of dancers and only partially covered by the corpse of the
companion which had knocked him down .. . but the theme elder's finger
paused and twitched only after the muzzle had swung to cover a paunchy
man in green and brown and the silvery cape of an immature Molt.  Ferad
did not need to be fussy about his targets and could not afford the
time it would take to pick and choose anyway; but in the case of the
human screaming something on the floor, he chose not to kill.  Perhaps
it was the eyes, or something behind them.

The thickly-packed humans were trying to surge away from the gun like
the waves of compression and rarefaction in a gas.  Only those closest
to Ferad knew what was happening --the bolts of energy hammered the air
and struck with the sound of bombs underwater, but the sounds were not
sharp enough to identify them to untrained ears in the noisy
ballroom.

The orchestra on the far side of the hall continued to play some
incomprehensible human melody, its members aware of the disturbance but
stolidly unwilling to emphasize it by falling silent.  Ferad shot into
fleeing backs, trapped by the press.

Sopasian had suggested a bomb in his calm voice that hid a cancer of
emotions beneath--envy and scorn, but mostly envy.  It was a reasonable
suggestion, since a bomb would have killed more than the power gun
could in targets as soft and frequent as these.  The surface-absorbed
two centimeter bolts had no penetration, though the amount of energy
they released could separate limbs from bodies-and the medals on the
first victim's chest were still raining down all across the hall.

But Sopasian missed the point of this attack.  They couldn't kill all
the humans, not even if every Molt on the planet had Ferad's skill or
Sopasian's.  What Ferad brought to the gala was a personal death, not a
sudden blast followed by dust and the screams of the injured.  This
attack went on and on in the safest place in the world, the victims
would have said a moment before.

Cyan light spurted from a gunbarrel so hot that the scales on Ferad's
left arm were lifting to trap a blanket of insulating air.  The
polished wood and stones inlaid into the groined ceiling reflected the
shots as they echoed with the screams.

Ferad's peripheral vision was better than that of a human, an
adaptation crucial to a Molt tele porting into the confusion of a
battle or hunt who had to receive a great deal of data about his
immediate surroundings in the first instant.  The flash of white drew
Ferad to the left, the power gun barrel shimmering its own arc through
the air before him.

None of them were armed.  The ballroom was like a nursery tunnel,
females and infants and all of them helpless as the veri est
newborn--but it had to be done.

One of the Tribunes stood in glistening white, facing Ferad though the
three shrieking females in between were scrabbling away.  The theme
elder fired, clearing a path for his next bolt by taking a female at
the point where her bare skin met the ruffles at the base of her spine.
Her corpse scissored backwards, its upper portion scarcely connected to
the splaying legs, and the other two females-now in gowns only half
pastel--were thrust from either side to close the gap.

The trio had been caught not by the general confusion but by the grip
of the Tribune's arms, protective coloration and, in the event, a
shield.

Ferad, wishing for the first time in decades that he had the muscles of
a young adult, squeezed off another bolt that parted the white-gowned
male from his females, only one of them screaming now and the gown
covered with the residues from the flash-heated steam.  Had Ferad been
younger, he could have leaped on the Tribune, thrusting the heavy power
gun against his target and finishing in an instant the business it had
taken two shots to prepare.  But a young, athletic warrior could never
have gotten here, and the Tribune was now sprawled on the floor, his
back against the wainscoting and only his palms and spread fingers
between his face and the white indium disk of the power gun muzzle.

The Molt's gun did not fire.  Ferad had already spent the last round in
his magazine.

The theme leader dropped his useless weapon on the floor, where wood
and wax crackled away from the barrel.  The hours he had spent in
locating the urns here in Belvedere, in gripping them with his mind,
were gone from memory.  The antechamber of the tunnel system which had
been the center of his existence for a hundred and forty years was a
dazzling beacon though a thousand kilometers separated it from the
theme elder.

For the instant only.

The ballroom and the carnage, almost as dreadful to Ferad as to the
humans surviving, trembled for a moment, superimposed on the stone and
lamps and shouting warriors of the nursery cave.

Two humans made a final impression on him: the male knocked down by the
first bolt, now trying to rise; and another in the khaki of the
mercenaries, so much more dangerous than the forces of the settlers
themselves.  This mercenary must have wedged his way through a
countercurrent of bodies in screaming panic.  His hand was raised, a
pistol in it, and there was a blue-green flash from the muzzle that
Ferad did not quite see.

In his millisecond of limbo, the theme elder wondered what success his
rival, Sopasian, was having.

There's a Molt--" said Lieutenant Hawker as the tone in his left
earpiece gave him a distance and vector, bloody close, but the target
designation was figured from the jeep and not where he himself stood a
couple paces away.

The trooper sent to collect Hawker's gun snatched the weapon away,
nervous to be reaching into the crossed cones of fire of the tri
barrels to either flank.  "Drop it, he said, cop head  the headquarters
trooper snarled, just as somebody shouted to Hammer from the other
combat car, "Sir, we've got'n incoming!"

For operations against the Molts, all the Stammers' line armor--the
tanks and combat cars--had been fitted with ionization detectors
similar to those on the team's jeep.  For reasons of space and the need
for training to operate more sophisticated gear, however, the detectors
which equipped the big blowers were relatively rudimentary.  The troops
of A Company, Hammers personal guard, were picked as much for technical
skills as they were for ruthlessness and lethality--qualities which
were not in short supply in the line companies either.  The man
calling, "Thirty-five left, eight meters--Colonel, he's coming right
beside your car!"  was getting more precision from his hardware than
Hawker would have thought possible.

The big lieutenant stepped over the body of the Oltenian officer,
setting the limbs a-twitch again when the sole of his boot brushed a
thigh.  The trooper with Hawker's gun bolstered his own pistol so that
he could level the automatic weapon as he turned toward Hammer and the
combat car.

"Loot!"  called Profile Bourne, familiar enough with Hawker to know
that the lieutenant's disquiet was not simply because a warrior was
about to attack.  The White Mice could handle that, the Lord knew, they
weren't poofs who needed a picture to figure which end to piss with.

The trooper who had advanced to take Bourne's gun as his companion did
Hawker's was now poised between the sergeant and Hammer, impaled on the
horns of a dilemma.

Bourne held his weapon muzzle-high, the barrel vertical and
threatening to no one who had not seen how quickly he moved.  The left
hand, however, was thrust out like a traffic warden's--a barrier in
defiance of the pistol which the man from A Company still pointed.

The fellow in the combat car had the vector right and the distance, but
there was something wrong with what he'd said.

Hawker dropped into his seat in the jeep and laid the infant Molt
beside him as Hammer's own combat car slid a few meters upslope,
swinging so that the two manned guns still covered the expected target
without threatening the dismounted troops besides.  The flashing
holograms of Hawker's display shifted simultaneously with a subtlety
that no tone signal could have conveyed.

"Drop it or you're dead, trooper!"  the man in front of Profile
shouted, but even as he spoke, his pistol and his eyes were shifting to
the danger behind him, the tri barrels that might be aligned with his
spine.

"Colonel, it's right under you!"  shouted the man on the combat car's
detector.

Hammer's great car spurted sideways like fluff blown from a seed pod
and the digits on Hawkers display shifted as quickly.

"Colonel!"  the lieutenant bellowed, trying to make himself heard over
the fans of the big blowers roaring in the machine equivalent of
muscles bunched for flight.  His unit link was to Hendersons infantry
company, and tonguing Central wouldn't have given him the direct line
to Hammer that he needed now.  "It's in your car!"  Hawker shouted as
he leaped out of the jeep, snatching for the submachine gun that had
been taken from him.

The Molt was so old that wrinkles showed like dark striping on his face
as the warrior appeared in the fighting compartment between Hammer and
the other gunner, both of them craning their necks to scan the rocky
ground beside the car.  If their body hairs felt the sudden shift in
electrostatic balance as the autochthon appeared behind them.  that
warning was buried in the subconscious of veterans faced with a known
threat.

"Contact!"  the A Company detection specialist shouted into the
instruments on which his attention was focused, and his companion at
the wing tri barrel triggered a shot into the empty soil by reflex. 
The Molt warrior's wiry arms held, raised, a blade of glittering blue
steel; the junction between Hammer's helmet and body armor was bared as
the Colonel stretched to find a target before him.

Hawker caught his gun, but the trooper holding it wouldn't have been in
the White Mice if he were soft.  He held the weapon with one hand and
rabbit-punched the lieutenant with the other, an instinctive, pointless
act since Hawker was wearing body armor; but the trooper held the gun
as the Molt's sword swung downward, unseen by anyone but Hawker--and
Sergeant Bourne.  The Molt sword blade was a sandwich of malleable iron
welded to either side of a core of high carbon steel, quick-quenched to
a rich blue after forging.  That razor sharp steel and the black iron
which gave the blade resilience glowed momentarily cyan in reflecting
the bolt flicking past them, brighter for that instant than the sun.

Hammer flattened behind the iridium bulkhead, his commo helmet howling
with static induced by the bolt which had bubbled the plastic
surface.

The trooper who should have disarmed Profile Bourne was one of those
whose eyes were drawn by the bolt to the warrior in the combat car. The
autochthon's sword sparked on the lip of the fighting compartment and
bounced out.  The Molt himself twisted.  His face had two eye sockets
but only one eye, and the wrinkles were bulged from his features when
his head absorbed the energy of the single shot.

The driver of Hammer's car had no view of the scene behind him.  He
drew a pistol and presented it awkwardly through his hatch, trying to
aim at Bourne while still holding the car steady with one hand.

"No!"  cried the trooper who had tried to disarm Bourne,

windmilling his arms as he made sure he was between the sergeant and
the guns threatening him.

Lieutenant Hawker and the trooper with whom he struggled now separated
cautiously, Hawker releasing the submachine gun and the man from A
Company licking the scraped knuckles of his left hand.  There was a pop
in the lieutenants helmet, static from a message he did not himself
receive, and the sound level dropped abruptly as both combat cars
grounded and cut their fans.

The Molt's sword had stuck point first in the soil.  It rang there, a
nervous keening that complemented the cries of the infant Molt, dumped
without ceremony on the drivers seat when Hawker had gotten into the
jeep.  The big lieutenant walked back toward his vehicle and lifted the
Molt with both hands to hide the fact that they were both trembling.

Colonel Alois Hammer reappeared, standing up with deliberation rather
than caution.  He held something in his left hand which he looked at,
then flipped like a coin to fall spinning onto the ground near the
sword.  It was the sapphire condensing plate from a combat car's
navigation display, a thick fifty-millimeter disk whose internal
cross-hatching made it a spot of fluid brilliance in the sunlight.

"He was holding that," said the Colonel, pointing to the disk with the
pistol in his right hand.  He fired, igniting grass and fusing a patch
of soil without quite hitting his target.  "I didn't know they could do
that," and the condensing plate shattered like a bomb, the scored lines
providing a myriad fracture sites.

Hammer fired twice more into the mass of glittering particles that
carpeted the ground.

"Now, kid, it could be a lot worse," muttered Enzo Hawker as he patted
the shivering infant's back and wondered if that were true for the
little Molt, for any of them.  The sounds of distant battle were like
hogs rooting among the mast, shellfire and diesels and the mighty
soughing of the Slammers' ground-effect vehicles.

"Hey!"  called Sergeant Bourne, holding his weapon

vertical again and aloft at the length of its sling.  "Still want
this, Colonel?"  His voice was high and hectoring, a reaction to having
made a shot that he would never have dared attempt had he paused to
think about what he was doing.  A millimeter, two millimeters to the
right, and the bolt would have expended itself on Hammer's face an
instant before the sword finished the business.

"Disarm the man," Hammer ordered in a voice as far away as the breeze
moving wispy clouds in the high stratosphere.

"Sure, all right," said Profile, and perhaps only Hawker realized that
the brittle edge in his voice was terror and not a threat.  The
sergeant's left hand fumbled with the sling catch while his right hand
held clear the submachine gun, though its barrel was by now cool enough
to touch.

"Only one thing--" the enlisted man added.

"Profile, don't--" said Hawker, aware that three tri barrels were again
aimed at his partner's chest.

"Only you better keep the Loot on his console," Bourne completed as he
flung his weapon to the ground.  "Until you hunt up somebody else who
knows how to use the bloody gear, at least."

Three pistol bolts struck within a palm's scope, the first shattering
the urn of blue John.  The other two sparkled among the shivered
fragments, reducing some of the flurospar to its ionized constituents.
Other chips now ranged in color from gray to brilliant amethyst,
depending on how close they had been to the momentary heat.  Larger
chunks, the upper third of the urn, cascaded over the gun the Molt had
dropped and, dropping it, disappeared.

Ozone and nascent fluorine battled for ascendancy between themselves,
but neither could prevail over the stench of death.

Someone had kicked Alexander Radescu in the temple as he flopped
backwards to the floor.  His memory of the past thirty seconds was a
kaleidoscope rather than a connected series, but he was not sure that
the blow had anything to do with his disorganization.  The gun muzzle
flickering like

a strobe light while the white glow of the indium remained as a steady
portent of further death .. .

Radescu's right hand lay across his gilded cap, so he could don it
again without looking down.  He stumbled on his first step toward Chief
Tribune Antonescu, but he knew what was binding his right foot and knew
also that he dared not actually view it.

Lifting his foot very carefully to clear what was no longer Nikki or
anything human, the young general murmured, "I'm going to be fine if I
don't think about it.  I just don't want to think about it, that's
all."  His tone would have been suitable had he been refusing a glass
of sherry or commenting on the hang of a uniform.  He couldn't keep
from remembering and imagining concrete realities, of course, but by
acting very carefully he could keep them from being realities of his
experience.

The screams had not stopped when the Molt warrior disappeared.  Most of
the crowd still did not know what had happened.  Would the Lord that
Alexander Radescu were as ignorant!

"I was afraid you'd been shot, my boy," said Grigor Antonescu, politic
even at such a juncture, "by that--" he nodded toward the spilled
crystals of blue John, cubic and octahedral, and the gun they lay
across like a stone counterpane "--or the other."

Staring over his shoulder, Radescu saw Major Steuben picking his way
toward them with a set expression and quick glances all around him,
ready now for any target which presented itself.  Hammer's bodyguard
had been marginally too late for revenge, and not even his reflexes
would have been quick enough to save Nikki.  None of the rest mattered
to Radescu, not the dead or the maimed, those catatonic with fear or
the ones still screaming their throats raw.

But that was over, and the past could not be allowed to impede what the
future required.

"This can't go on, Uncle Grigor," Radescu said with a twist of his
neck, a, dismissing gesture.

The Chief Tribune, whose face and robes were now as much red as white,
said, "Security, you mean, Alexi?  Yes,

we should have had real guards, shouldn't we?  Perhaps Hammer's
men...."  In his uncle's reasonable voice, Radescu heard himself-- a
mind that should have been in shock, but which had a core too tough to
permit that in a crisis.

Members of the Honor Guard were running about, brilliant in their
scarlet uniforms and almost as useless in a firefight as the unarmed
militia 'officers' attending the ball.  They were waving chrome and
rhodium plated pistols as they spilled in through the doors at which
they'd been posted to bar the uninvited.  If they weren't lucky,
there'd be more shots, more casualties..  ..

"Not security, not here at least," said General Radescu, gesturing
curtly at one of the Honor Guards gagging at a tangle of bodies.  "It's
the war itself that has to be changed."

"We can't do that," Antonescu replied bitterly, "without changing the
army,"

"Changing its command, Uncle Grigor," said Alexander Radescu as his
mind shuddered between Nikki's flailing body and the gunbarrel of the
aged Molt "Yes, that's exactly what we have to do first."

The young general flicked at spots on his jacket front, but he stopped
when he saw they were smearing further across the pearl fabric.

"I need two gunmen who won't argue about orders," said Radescu to
Colonel Hammer, standing where a granite pillar had been blasted to
glittering gravel to prevent Molt warriors from materializing on top of
them.  The Oltenian general spoke loudly to be heard over the pervasive
intake rush of the four command vehicles maneuvering themselves back to
back to form the Field Operations Center.  The verdigrised black head
and cape of an ancient Molt were mounted on a stake welded to the bow
of one of the cars.

The aide standing with Hammer smiled, but the mercenary colonel himself
looked at Radescu with an expression soured both by the overall
situation and specifically by the appearance of Alexander Radescu:
young, dressed in a uniform whose gold and pearl fabrics were showing

signs of blowing grit only minutes after the general disembarked from
his aircraft--and full facial makeup, including lip tint and a
butterfly-shaped beauty patch on his right cheekbone.

There's a whole Oltenian army out there," said Hammer bitterly, waving
in the direction of the local forces setting up in the near distance.
"Maybe you can find two who know which end of a gun the bang comes out
of.  Maybe you can even find a couple willing to get off their butts
and move.  Curst if I've been able to find 'em, though."

Radescu had worn his reviewing uniform for its effect on the Oltenian
command staff, but it was having the opposite result on the
mercenaries.  "The Tribunes are aware of that," he said with no outward
sign of his anger at this stocky, worn, deadly man.  Grime and battle
dress did not lower Hammer in the Oltenian's opinion, but the
mercenary's deliberate sneering coarseness marked him as incurably
common.  That's why they've sent me to the field: to take over and get
the army moving again.  My uncle--" he added, by no means in
consequently "--is Chief Tribune."

The Oltenian general reached into a breast pocket for his
identification--a message tube which would project a hologram of Chief
Tribune Antonescu with his arm around his nephew, announcing the
appointment 'to all members of the armed forces of Oltenia and allied
troops."  Hammer's aide forestalled him, however, by saying, "This is
General Radescu, sir."

"Sure, I haven't forgotten," Colonel Hammer remarked with an even
deeper scowl, "but he's not what / had in mind when I heard they were
going to send somebody out to take charge."

He looked from his aide to Radescu and continued, "Oh, don't look so
surprised, General.  That's part of what you hired us for, wasn't it?
Better communications and detection gear than you could supply
on-planet?"

Radescu's tongue touched his vermilion tips and he said, "Yes, of
course, Colonel," though it was not 'of course and he was quite certain
that Chief Tribune Antonescu would have been even more shocked at the
way these outsiders

had penetrated the inner councils of the State.  Radescu had flown to
the front without even an aide to accompany him because of the complete
secrecy needed for the success of his mission.  Though what the
mercenaries knew of his plan was not important ... so long as they had
not communicated what they knew to the Oltenian planetary forces.

Which brought the young general back to the real point at issue.  "This
time the help I need involves another part of the reason we hired you,
though."

"General," said Hammer coldly, "I've lost equipment and I've lost men
because local forces didn't support my troops when they advanced. We're
going to carry out basic contract commitments from here on ... but I
don't do any favors for Oltenian tarts.  No, I don't have two men to
spare."

"There's Hawker and Bourne," said the aide unexpectedly.  He gave
Radescu a sardonic smile as he continued.  "Might be a way out of more
problems than one."

A trio of Slammers were striding toward their leader from the assembled
Operations Center, two men and a woman who looked too frail for her
body armor and the equipment strapped over it.  Hammer ignored them for
the moment and said to his aide, "Look, Pritchard, we can't afford to
lose our bond over something like this."

"Look, I have full--" Radescu interjected.

"We're turning them over to the local authority for processing," said
Pritchard, as little impressed with the general in gold and pearl as
his colonel was.  "Via, Colonel, you don't want to call out a firing
party for our own men, not for something like that."

Hammer nodded to the three officers who had halted a respectful two
paces from him; then, to Radescu, he said as grimly as before,
"General, I'm turning over to you Lieutenant Hawker and
Sergeant-Commander Bourne, who have been sentenced to death for the
murder of six members of the allied local forces.  Whatever action you
take regarding them will be regarded as appropriate."

He turned his head from Radescu to the waiting trio.  "Captain?"  he
said on a note of query.

"Hammer to Radescu," the woman said with a nod.

"It's being transmitted to the Bonding Authority representative."

"AD right, General Radescu," Hammer continued, "you'll find the men in
the adjutant's charge, Car four-five niner I wish you well of them.
They were good men before they got involved with what passes for an
army here on Oltenia."

Hammer and his aide both faced toward the trio of other mercenaries as
if Radescu had already left them.

"But--" the Oltenian general asked, as unprepared for this development
as for the scorn with which the offer was made.  "Why did they, did
they commit these murders?"

Hammer was deep in conversation with one of the other officers, but
Pritchard glanced back over his shoulder at Radescu and said, "Why
don't you ask them, General?"  He smiled again without warmth as he
turned his head and his attention again.

General Alexander Radescu pursed his lips, but he sucked back the
comment he had started to make and quenched even the anger that had
spawned it.  He had made a request, and it had been granted.  He was in
no position to object that certain conventions had been ignored by the
mercenaries.

"Thank you for your cooperation, Colonel," he said to the commo helmets
bent away from him above backs clam shelled in porcelain armor.  The
woman, the communications officer, cocked an eye at the general only
briefly.  "I assure you that from here on you will have no call to
complain about the cooperation the Oltenian forces offer you."

He strode away briskly, looking for a vehicle with skirt number 459.
The set of his jaw was reflected alternately in the gilded toe-caps of
his shoes.

"One moment, sir," said a graying man who might have been the
adjutant--none of the Slammers seemed to wear rank insignia in the
field, and officers wore the same uniforms as enlisted men.

Another of the mercenaries had, without being asked, walked to a
room-sized goods container and rapped on the

bars closing the front of it "Profile!"  he called.  "Lieutenant
Hawker!  He's here to pick you guys up."

"We were informed, of course, sir," said the probable adjutant who
looked the Oltenian up and down with an inward smile that was obvious
despite its lack of physical manifestations.  "Did you get lost in the
encampment?"

"Something like that," said Radescu bitterly.  "Perhaps you could find
a vehicle to carry me and, and my new aides, to, ah, my
headquarters?"

"We'll see about that, of course, sir," said the graying man, and the
smile did tug a corner of his mouth.

The Slammers had sprayed the area of their intended base camp with
herbicide.  Whatever they used collapsed the cell walls of all
indigenous vegetation almost completely so that in the lower, wetter
areas, the sludge of dissolved plant residue was as much as knee deep.
That didn't seem to bother the mercenaries, all of whom rode if they
had more than twenty meters to traverse--but it had created a pattern
of swamps for Radescu which he finally crossed despite its effect on
his uniform.  He would look a buffoon when he called the command staff
together!

Then he relaxed.  He dared not hold the meeting without two gunmen
behind him, and if the mercenaries' public scorn was the price of those
gunmen--so be it.  Alexander Radescu had thought a long time before he
requested this duty from his uncle.  He was not going to second-guess
himself now.

"Got your gear over here, Profile," said the mercenary who had opened
the crude cell and stepped inside the similar--unbarred--unit beside
it.  He came out again, carrying a heavy suit of body armor on either
arm.

The men who had just been freed took their equipment, eying Radescu.
The young general stared back at them, expecting the sneering dismissal
he had received from other mercenaries.  What he got instead was an
appraisal that went beneath the muck and his uniform, went deeper into
Alexander Radescu than an outsider had ever gone before.

It was insufferable presumption on the part of these hirelings.

Lieutenant Hawker was a large, soft-looking man.  There were no sharp
angles to his face or frame, and his torso would have been egg-shaped
in garments which fit closer than the floppy Slammers battle dress  He
swung the porcelain clamshell armor around himself unaided, however, an
action that demonstrated exceptional strength and timing.

His eyes were blue, and the look in them made Radescu wonder how many
of the six Oltenians Hawker had killed himself.

Profile, presumably Sergeant Bourne, was no taller than Colonel Hammer
and was built along the lines of Radescu's own whippy thinness rather
than being stocky like the mercenary commander.  His bold smile
displayed his upper incisors with the bluish tinge characteristic of
tooth buds grown in vitro.

There was a scar on the sergeants head above his right temple, a bald
patch of kelo id that he had tried to train his remaining hair to
cover, and a streak of fluorescent orange wrapping his bare right
forearm. Radescu thought the last was a third scar until he saw that it
terminated in a dragons head laid into the skin of Bourne's palm, a
hideous and hideously obtrusive decoration .. . and a sign of scarring
as well, though not in the physical sense.

Bourne locked shut his body armor and said, "Well, this is the lot of
it, Major?"  to the graying adjutant.

That mercenary officer grimaced, but said, "Give them their guns,
Luckens."

The Slammer who had brought the armor had already ducked back from the
storage container with a submachine gun in either hand and ammunition
satchels in the crooks of both elbows, grinning almost as broadly as
Sergeant Bourne.

The lieutenant who had just been freed had no expression at all on his
face as he started to load his own weapon.  His left hand slid a fresh
magazine into the handgrip of his power gun a tube containing not only
the disks which would liberate bolts of energy but the liquid nitrogen
which worked the action and cooled the chamber between shots.  As his
hands moved, Hawker's eyes watched the Oltenian general I'll need to
brief you men in private," Radescu said, managing to override the
unexpected catch in his throat.  "I'm General Radescu, and the two of
you are assigned at my discretion."  How private the briefing could be
when Hammer listened to discussions in the Tribunal Palace was an open
question .. . but again, it didn't matter what the mercenary command
knew.

"Major Slanlas," said Hawker to the adjutant, only now rotating his
face from the Oltenian, "do you see any problem with me borrowing back
my jeep for the, ah, duration of the assignment?"

"General," said the adjutant, thumbing a switch in the oral notepad he
pointed toward Radescu, "do you accept on behalf of your government the
loan of a jeep with detection gear in it?"  That gave Hammer somebody
to bill if something went wrong .. . and they must already have a
record of the level to which the Tribunes had authorized Radescu's
authorization.

"Yes, yes, of course," the general snapped, noticing that Bourne had
anticipated the question and answer by striding toward a saucer-shaped
air cushion vehicle.  It had been designed to hold four people, but
this one had seats for only two because the back was filled with
electronics modules.

"You may not be real comfortable riding on the hardware that way,"
Hawker said, "but it beats having a Molt pop out of the air behind
you."  He turned his head slowly, taking in the arc of nondescript
landscape he could not have seen through the barred front of his cell.
"Not," he added, "that we'll see action around here."

Radescu gave the big mercenary a brief, tight smile.  "You don't think
so, Lieutenant?  I wouldn't have come to Colonel Hammer for someone to
drive me and--" he appraised Hawker in a different fashion, then made a
moue which flapped the wings of his beauty patch before he concluded
"--bring me tea at night"

Hawker spat on the ground.  He would probably have dropped the
conversation even without Sergeant Bourne spinning the jeep to an
abrupt halt between the two officers and calling cheerfully, "Hop in,
everybody."  His

submachine gun was now carried across his chest on an inertia-locked
sling which gave him access to the weapon the instant he took his right
hand from the tiller by which he now guided the jeep.

The general settled himself, finding that the modules had been arranged
as the back and sides of a rough armchair, with room enough for his
hips in the upper cavity.  The handles for carrying the modules made
excellent grips for Radescu; but there was no cushion, only slick, hard
composite, and he hoped Bourne would not play the sort of game with the
outsider which he in fact expected.

"Get us a short distance beyond this position and stop," the Oltenian
said, bracing himself for an ejection-seat start He thought of ordering
Hawker to trade places with him, but he was sure such a demand would
also turn into an embarrassment for him.  "I'll brief you there."

Instead of a jackrabbit start, the mercenary sergeant powered up the
jeep in an acceleration curve so smooth that only the airstream was a
problem to Radescu on his perch.  The Oltenian snatched off his
glistening, metalized cap and held it against his lap as he leaned
forward into the wind.

Bourne was driving fast, but with an economy of movement on the tiller
and such skill that the attitude of the jeep did not change even when
it shot up the sloping inner face of the berm around the firebase and
sailed above the steep outer contour in momentary free flight.  He
wasn't trying to dump Radescu off the back: Bourne took too much pride
in his skill to drive badly as a joke.

"Colonel won't like the way you're speeding in his firebase,"
Lieutenant Hawker said mildly to the sergeant.

"What's he going to do?"  Bourne demanded.  "Sentence me to death?" But
he slacked off the trigger throttle built into the grip of the
tiller.

Between the encampments, Oltenian and mercenary, was a wooded ridge
high enough to block shots fired from either position toward targets in
the no man's land between.  Radescu had understood the forces were
integrated, but

obviously the situation in the field had changed in a fashion which
had not yet been reported to the Tribunes in Belvedere.  Bourne
threaded his way into a copse of broad leafed trees on the ridge while
Radescu held his seat firmly, aware that even at their present reduced
speed he would be shot over the front of the vehicle if the driver
clipped one of the boles around which he maneuvered so blithely.

It was without incident, however, that Bourne set the jeep down out of
direct sight of either encampment.  He turned and looked up at Radescu
with a sardonic grin; and Hawker, still-faced, looked as well.

Radescu laughed harshly.  "I was wondering," he said to the surprised
expressions of the mercenaries, "whether I'm speaking to you from the
height of a throne--or of a cross."  He swung himself to the ground, a
trifle awkwardly because the padding in his uniform trousers to
exaggerate his buttocks had not been sufficient to prevent the hard
ride from cutting blood circulation to his legs.

"That's fitting, in a way," the Oltenian said to the Slammers watching
as his hands massaged his thighs, a thumb and forefinger still gripping
the gilded brim of his hat, "because the Tribunes have granted me power
of life and death over all members of the armed forces of the State-but
they haven't taught me how to bring the dead to life."

Without speaking Lieutenant Hawker slipped from his own seat and stood
with one heel back against the ground effect mantle of the jeep. Bourne
shifted only very slightly so that he faced Radescu directly; the head
of the dragon on his palm rested on the grip of his submachine gun.

"I have been given full authority to take command and get the offensive
against the Molts on track again," Radescu continued, "and I have the
responsibility as well as authority to deal with the situation.  But
the present command staff is going to resent me, gentlemen, and I do
not believe I can expect to do my job unless I go into my initial
meeting with you present."

"You think," said Hawker as something small and nervous shrilled down
at the men from a treetop, "that the present officers will arrest you
if we aren't there to protect you."

"There's two of us, General," added Profile Bourne, whose index finger
traced the trigger guard of his weapon, "and there's three divisions
over there."  He thumbed toward the encampment.  "We can't handle that,
friend.  No matter how much we might like to."

"The army command, and the commander and chief of staff of each
division will be present," said General Radescu, stretching his arms
out behind his back because when the muscles were under tension they
could not tremble visibly.  "And they won't do anything overt, no, it's
not what they'll say--"

The young Oltenian straightened abruptly, glaring at the Slammers. "But
I don't care what they say, gentlemen, I didn't come here to preside
over an army sinking into a morass of lethargy and failure.  I will
remove any officer who seems likely to give only lip service to my
commands.

"And--" he paused, for effect but also because the next words proved
unexpectedly hard to get out his throat "-and if I give the signal,
gentlemen, I expect you to kill everyone else in the room without
question or hesitation.  I will give the signal--" he twirled the band
of his hat on his index finger "--by dropping my hat."

Glittering like a fairy crown in a shaft of sunlight, Radescu's hat
spun to the forest floor.  The only sound in the copse for the next ten
seconds was the shrieking of the animal in the foliage above them.

"Via," said Sergeant Bourne, in a voice too soft for its precise
emotional loading to be certain.

"Sir," said Lieutenant Hawker, shifting his weight from the jeep so
that both feet rested firmly on the ground, "does Colonel Hammer know
what you intend?  For us?"

Radescu nodded crisply, feeling much lighter now that he had stated
what he had not, as it turned out, clearly articulated even in his own
mind.  He felt as though he were listening to the conversation from a
vantage point outside his own body.  "I have told no one of my specific
plans," his mouth said, "not even Chief Tribune Antonescu, my uncle.
But I believe Colonel Hammer did--would not be

surprised by anything that happened.  The point that caused him to
grant my request was your, your special status, gentlemen."

"Via," Sergeant Bourne repeated.

Hawker walked over to the gilded cap and picked it up with his left
hand, the hand which did not hold a submachine gun.

"Here, sir," he said as he handed the hat back to General Radescu. "You
may be needing it soon."

"Hoo, Lordy\" said Sergeant Bourne to the captain who nervously ushered
them into the staff room to wait.  "Where's the girls, good son?"  He
pinched the Oltenian's cheek, greatly to the mans embarrassment.  "Not
that you're not cute yourself, dearie."

"This the way you--gentlemen--normally operate in the field?"  Hawker
asked as his palm caressed the smooth surface of a nymph in a wall
fountain.

"Well, the water's recycled, of course," Rddescu said in mild surprise
as he considered the matter for the first time.

He looked around the big room, the tapestries--reproductions, of
course--and ornately carven furniture, the statues in the wall niches
set off by foliage and rivulets.  The Slammers lieutenant looked as
incongruous here, wearing his scarred armor and unadorned weapon, as a
bear would in a cathedral: but it was Hawker, not the fittings, which
struck Radescu as out of place.  "This does no harm, Lieutenant, beyond
adding a little to our transport requirements.  A modicum of comfort
during staff meetings doesn't prevent officers from performing in a
responsible and, and courageous manner in action."

He was wondering whether there would be enough time to requisition an
orderly to clean the muck from his boots.  On balance, that was
probably a bad idea since the pearl trousers were irredeemably ruined. 
Better to leave the ensemble as it was for the moment rather than to
increase its absurdity..  ..

"Just how do you expect to get bloody Oltenian officers to act
courageously, General-sir?"  Bourne asked in a tone

much more soberly questioning than the sarcasm of the words suggested.
The three men were alone in the room now that the poof captain had
banged the door nervously behind him, and Bourne watched Radescu over
the decorated palm of his right hand.

"I'm going to lead from the front, Sergeant Bourne," the young general
said quietly, noticing that the expression on the mercenary's face was
very similar to that on the dead Molt staked to the bow of Hammer's
command vehicle.

Radescu had seen no trophies of that sort in their drive through the
State encampment.  That could be a matter of taste--but equally it
might mean that Oltenian forces had failed to kill any of the aliens.

Of the autochthons.  Oltenia was, after all, the Molts' world alone
until the human settlement three centuries before.

"I ... ," said Radescu, choosing to speak aloud on a subject different
from that on which his mind would whisper to him if his mouth remained
silent.  "Ah..  .. Tell me, if you will, how the charges came to be
leveled against you, the two of you."

"Why we blew away those heroes of the Oltenian state, Lieutenant,"
restated Bourne with a bitter smile.

The big Slammers lieutenant sat down on the coping of the fountain. The
seat of his trousers must have been in the water, but he did not appear
to notice.  "Sure, General," he said in the accentless Oltenia Rumanian
which all the Slammers had been sleep-taught when their colonel took
the present contract.  "I'll tell you about what happened."

Hawker closed his eyes and nib bed his brow with the knuckles of his
right hand.  In a heart-stopping flash, Radescu realized that the
mercenary was removing his fingers from the grip of his weapon before
he called up memories of the past.

"We cleared a bottleneck for a battalion of locals," Hawker said.

"Your boys, General," Sergeant Bourne interjected.

"Killed a few ourselves, pointed some others out with

gunfire," the lieutenant continued.  "No point in knowing where a
Molt's going to appear a minute ahead of time if it took us ten to
relay the data.  These're a pretty good short-range data link."  He
patted the gray plastic receiver of his submachine gun.

"You were able to have that much effect yourselves?"  Radescu said,
seating himself at the head of the long conference table.  The
richly-grained wood hid the ruin of his boots and uniform; though when
the time came, he really ought to rise to greet the officers he had
summoned.  "To clear a corridor, I mean?"

"Got our bag limit that day," said Bourne, wiping his lips with the
dragon on his palm.  "By the Lord we did."

"We took the Molts by surprise," Hawker explained.  "There really
aren't that many of them, the warriors, and we cleared out the ones who
knew the territory before they figured things out."

Hawker's right thumb stripped something from a belt dispenser to give
his hands something to play with as he talked.  The gesture relaxed
Radescu somewhat until he realized that the mercenary was now juggling
an eyeball sized mini grenade

"We ducked into a nursery tunnel then, to get clear of the snipers,"
Hawker said.  "Figured that warriors could come at us there, but before
we were in danger Profile'd hand 'em one to keep."  "Where the chicken
got the ax," said Bourne, running an index finger--his left--across his
throat.  Radescu thought the gesture was figurative.  Then he noticed
the knife blade, the length of the finger along which it lay and so
sharp that light rippled on its edges as it did on the water dancing
down the nymph's stone arms.

Bourne smiled and flicked his left hand close to some of the decorative
foliage in the nearest wall niche.  A leaf gave a startled quiver; half
of it fluttered to the floor, severed cleanly.  Satisfied, Bourne
stropped both sides of the blade against his thigh to clean any trace
of sap from the weapon.

"Thing about the Molts," he went on, leaning closer to

Radescu, "is that how far they can pop through the air depends on how
old they are."  It was the sort of lecture the sergeant would have
given a man fresh to the field ... as Radescu was, but he and his
ancestors in unbroken line had been living with the Molts for three
hundred years.  The Oltenian general listened with an air of careful
interest, however; the disquisition indicated a level of positive
feeling toward him on the mercenary's part; and for more reasons than
his plan for the meeting, Radescu wanted Bourne to like him.

"The old males," the sergeant said, "there's no telling how far they
can hop if there's a big enough piece of hard rock for 'em to get a
grip of, like.  With their minds, you know?  But the females--not bad
looking some of 'em either, in the right light--"

"Profile .. . ?"

"Yes sir."  Bourne's right hand nodded a gobbling gesture in front of
his mouth as if the dragon's head were swallowing the words he had just
spoken.  "But the females can hop only maybe ten kays and it takes 'em
longer to psych into doing it, even the old ones.  And the little
babies, they can't jump the length of my prick when they're newborn. 
So the adults keep 'em in holes in the rock so their minds can get the
feel of the rock, like; touch the electrical charge when the rock
shifts.  And there they were when we got in, maybe a dozen a' the
babes."

"And that was about when it dropped in the pot, I s'pose, General,"
said Hawker as he stood up deliberately and faced the wall so that he
would not have to look at the cosmetic-covered Oltenian face as he
finished the story.  "A, a local officer ... I told him to get the
little ones out of the tunnel; figured they'd be put in a holding tank
somewhere.  And he killed them."

Hawker's back muscles strained against his clamshell armor, hunching
it.  "There was one more I was holding, a little Molt I'd brought out
myself."

He turned again, proceeding through stress to catharsis.  "I blew that
poof to Hell, General Radescu, before he could loll that baby too."

Alexander Radescu had seen the Slammers' power guns demonstrated.  The
snap of their blue-green energy was too sudden to be fully appreciated
by the senses, though the retinas danced for almost a minute thereafter
with afterimages of the discharge's red-orange complement.  A shot
would be dazzling in a cavern of dark rock lighted by Molt torches and
the lamps of the vehicles driven headlong within.  The blood and stench
of the sudden corpse, that too Radescu could visualize--had to be able
to visualize or he would not stay functionally sane if this meeting
this morning proceeded as he feared it might, planned that it might..
..

"And you, Bourne," Radescu said, "you were condemned simply for being
present?"  It was more or less what he had expected, though he had
presumed that the sergeant was the principal in the event and
Lieutenant Hawker was guilty of no more than failure to control his
murderous subordinate.  It was the sort of clean sweep Chief Tribune
Antonescu would have made..  ..

"Oh, one a' the poofs threw down on the Loot," Bourne said.  He was
smiling because he had returned to an awareness of the fact that he was
alive: when Radescu had first seen the sergeant, Bourne was dead in his
own mind; waiting as much for burial as the shot in the back of his
neck that would immediately precede interment.  "I took him out and,
Via, figured better safe'n sorry."

He looked at the mercenary officer, and the set of his jaw was as
fierce for the moment as any expression he had thrown Radescu.  "I
still think so, Loot.  There a couple of times, I figured I'd been
crazy to hand this over and let them put us in that box."  His index
finger tapped the submachine gun's receiver, then slipped within the
trigger guard as if of its own volition.  "And you know, we aren't out
of it yet, are we?"  Bourne shifted his torso to confront Hawker, and
the muzzle of the slung weapon pointed as well.

"Anybody ever swear you'd get out of the Slammers alive, Sergeant?"
Lieutenant Hawker asked in a voice as slick and cold as the indium
barrel of the gun thrusting toward him.

Radescu tensed, but there was no apparent fear in Hawker's grim
visage--and no more of challenge, either than that of a man facing a
storm cloud in the knowledge that the rain will come if it will.

"Ah, Via, Loot," Bourne said, the sling slapping the submachine gun
back against his chest when he let it go, I didn't want ta grease the
Colonel, cop.  After all, he gave this poor boy a job didn't he?"

Hawker laughed, and Bourne laughed; and the door beside the sergeant
opened as the first of the command staff entered the meeting room,
already three minutes after the deadline in Radescu's summons.

The Oltenian general looked from the newcomer to the wall clock and
back to the newcomer, lorga, the Second Division commander.  When
Radescu himself smiled, Sergeant Bourne was uneasily reminded of a
ferret he had once kept as a pet--and Hawker caught a glimpse, too,
beneath the beauty patch and lip tint, of a mind as ruthless as the
blade of a scythe.

It took the command staff thirty-six minutes to assemble in the large
trailer in the center of the Oltenian encampment, though none of the
officers were more than a kilometer away at the summons and Radescu had
clearly stated that anyone who did not arrive in fifteen minutes put
his command is jeopardy for -that fact alone.  It was not, he thought,
that they did not believe the threat: it was simply that the men
involved would be unable to act that promptly even if it were their
lives that, depended on it.

Which indeed was the case.

The quarters of the Army Commander, Marshal Erzul, adjoined the
conference trailer; but it was to no one's surprise that Erzul arrived
last of the officers summoned .. . and it did not surprise Alexander
Radescu that the marshal attempted to enter surrounded by his personal
aides.  The milling, disconsolate troop of underlings outside the
doorway of the conference room was warning enough that Radescu hewed
precisely to the language of the summons; but Erzul's action was not
motivated by ignorance.

Radescu had motioned the six earlier arrivals to chairs while he
himself sat on a corner of the conference table and chatted with
them--recruiting figures, the Season's colors in the capital, the gala
for the Widows of the War at which a Molt had appeared with a power gun
firing indiscriminately.  There were two stone urns, no more than that,
and the Molt focused on them across over a thousand kays--" he was
saying, when the door opened and the divisional officers leaped to
their feet to salute Marshal ErzuL

Radescu cocked his head toward the marshal and his entourage, then
turned away.  He did not rise for Erzul who was not, despite his rank,
-Radescu's superior officer, and he twisted the gold-brimmed cap
furiously in his hands.  Around and back, like the glittering spirals
of a fly jumped by a spider, both of them together buzzing on the end
of the spider's anchor line; around and back.

The young general took a deep breath.  By looking at the two officers
closest to where he sat at the head of the table, he was able to avoid
seeing either of the Slammers poised along the wall where they seemed
muddy shadows against the opulence and glitter of the room's
furnishings and other occupants.  He could not avoid his own
imagination, however, and the doubt as to whether there would be any
safe place in the room when the guns began to spray.  He closed his
eyes momentarily, not a blink but part of the momentary tensioning of
all his muscles .. . but he had to learn whose orders they would take,
these men around him.

"Generals Oprescu and lorga," Radescu said loudly, fixing the
commanders of the First and Second Divisions with eyes as pure as the
blue enamel on his shoulder boards, "will you kindly put out of the
conference room all those who seem to have entered with the marshal?
All save General Forsch, that is, since the Tribunes have ordered him
to attend as well."

There was a frozen pause.  lorga looked at Oprescu, Oprescu at his
manicure as a flush mounted from his throat to the cheeks which he had
not had time to prepare with a proper base of white gel.

Erzul was a stocky, jowly bulldog to Radescu's cat.  As his aides
twitched and twittered, the marshal himself crashed a step forward.
"This is my command," he thundered to the.  back of Radescu's head, his
eyes drawn unwillingly to the flickering highlights of the cap in the
general's hands, "and 7 decide where my aides will be!"

"The summons that brought you here, Marshal," Radescu announced in a
voice which became increasingly thin in his own ears, though no one
else in the room seemed to hear the difference, "informed you that the
Tribunes had placed me in charge of all personnel of the First Army,
yourself included."

"The Tribunes," sneered Erzul as everyone else in the room stayed
frozen and Sergeant Bourne's eyes focused on something a thousand
leagues away.  Tour uncle."

"Yes," said the young general as he rose to his muddy feet, fanning
himself gently with the cap in his hand, "my uncle."

General lorga made a little gesture with the backs of his hands and
fingers as if he were a house servant trying to frighten a wasp out of
the room with a napkin.  "Go on," he said to the captain closest to him
in a voice with a tinge of hysteria and desperation.  "Go on then, you
shouldn't be here!"

All of the divisional officers, not just the pair to whom Radescu had
directed his order, sprang forward as if to physically thrust their
juniors out of the conference room.  General Forsch, Erzul's lanky,
nervous chief of staff, slid behind the marshal as if for concealment
and in fear that the sudden onslaught would force him out the door with
subordinate aides.

Neither of the mercenaries changed the expression-lack of
expression--on his face.  Lieutenant Hawker stretched his left arm to
the side and began flexing the fingers of that hand like a man trying
to work out a muscle cramp.

"Marshal Erzul," said Radescu as he suppressed a hysterical urge to pat
the blood-suffused cheek of the former army commander, "your
resignation on grounds of health is regretfully accepted.  Your
services to the State

will be noted in my report to Chief Tribune Antonescu."  He paused.
"To my uncle."

Radescu expected the older man to hit him, but instead Erzul's anger
collapsed, leaving behind an expression that justified the accusation
of ill-health.  The marshal's flush drained away abruptly so that only
the grimy sallowness of pigment remained to color his skin.  "I--" he
said.  "General, don't--"

General lorga stepped between the two officers, the former army
commander and the man who had replaced him.  "Go on!"  he cried to the
marshal.  lorga's hands fluttered on the catches of his holster.

In a final burst of frustration, Marshal Erzul snatched off his cap,
formal with ropes of gold and silver, and hurled it blindly across the
room.  It thudded into the wall near Hawker, who neither smiled nor
moved as the hat spun end over end to the floor.  Erzul turned and
charged the door like a soccer player driving for the goal regardless
of who might be in his way.

In this case, Erzul's own chief of staff was the only man who could not
step clear in time.  General Forsch grunted as his superior elbowed him
in the pit of the stomach and then thrust past him through the outside
door.

Under other circumstances, Forsch might have followed.  Now, however,
he watched the marshal's back and the door banging hard against its
jamb--the automatic opening and closing mechanisms had been
disconnected to permit aides to perform those functions in due
deference to their superiors.  The divisional officers were scurrying
for their places around the table, and Radescu was finally preparing to
discuss the main order of business--the war with the Molts.

"It's easy to bully old men who've spent their lives in the service of
Man and the Tribunate, isn't it, Master Radescu?"  said Forsch in a
voice as clear and cutting as a well-played violin.  "Do you think the
Molts will be so obliging to your whim?"

Radescu slid into the chair at the head of the table, looking back over
his shoulder at Forsch.  The chief of staff stood with his chin thrust
out and slightly lifted, rather as

though he were baring his long, angular throat to a slaughterers
knife.  Radescu had not realized the man even had a personality of his
own: everything Antonescu's nephew had been told suggested that Forsch
was no more than Erzul's shadow--a gaunt, panicky avatar of the
marshal.

"No, General," said Radescu in a voice that did not tremble the way his
hands would have done save for the polished tabletop against which he
pressed them.  "I don't think the Molts are going to be obliging at
all.  Why don't you sit down and we'll discuss the problem like loyal
officers of Oltenia?"

He tapped with the brim of his cap on the chair to his immediate right.
Forsch held himself rigid for a moment, his body still awaiting death
or humiliation while his brain with difficulty processed the
information freeing him from that expected end.  Moving like a
marionette with a string or two broken, the chief of staff--now
Radescu's chief of staff, much to the surprise of both men--seated
himself as directed.

"Hawker," said General Radescu as if the mercenary were his batman,
"take this until we're ready to leave.  I won't need it inside here."
Lieutenant Hawker stepped obsequiously from his place at the wall and
took the gilded cap Radescu held out without looking away from his
fellow Oltenian generals.  The Slammer even bowed as he backed away
again .. . but when he reached the fountain in its niche, he flipped
the cap deliberately from his hand.  The Oltenians, focused on one
another, did not or did not seem to notice.

Profile Bourne relaxed and began rubbing his right arm with his left
forefinger, tracing the length of the glowing orange dragon.  Not that
it would have mattered, but Radescu's cap was not on the floor.

It lay atop the hat which Erzul had thrown in anger.

"This war can only be a war of attrition," said pudgy General Oprescu
with a care that came naturally to a man who needed to avoid
dislocating his makeup.  Radescu, watching the divisional commander,
understood very well '

how the preternatural calm of the other man's face could cloak
thoughts as violent as any which had danced through Marshal Erzul's
features moments before.  Radescu's face had been that calm, and he was
willing to go to lengths beyond anything the Marshal had suspected.
Perhaps Oprescu also had a core of rigid capability within .. . but it
was very well hidden if that were the case.

"We can only hurt the Molts when they attack us," Oprescu continued as
he examined his manicure.  "Naturally, they inflict more damage on such
occasions than we do ... but likewise, their population base is much
lower than ours."

"I believe the estimate," said the pale-eyed General Vuco, who had been
a reasonably effective intelligence officer before promotion to Second
Division chief of staff, "is seventy-three to one.  That is, we can
ultimately wipe the Molts from the face of Oltenia so long as we suffer
no more than seventy-three casualties for each of the scaly headed
demons that we bag."

"The problem is," Oprescu went on, "that the seventy three casualties
aren't limited to the bunion-heads in the lower ranks, not when a Molt
can pop out of the air in the middle of an officers' barracks that
chances to be too close to a lump of granite."

Radescu's heart stopped for an instant and his eyes, unbidden, flicked
sideways to Sergeant Bourne.  The mercenary noncom grinned back at him,
as relaxed as the trigger spring of his submachine gun.  It struck the
young Oltenian that there was a flaw in his plan of engaging gunmen to
do what he could not have accomplished with guns alone: you have
control over a gun as you do not over a man .. . not over men like
those, the soft-featured lieutenant who was willing to kill for a
matter of principle, and the scarred sergeant who needed far less
reason than that.  In Radescu's mind echoed the sergeant's gibe in the
jeep: "What's he going to do?  Sentence me to death?"

But Bourne smiled now and the moment passed with General Forsch saying
as he gripped his biceps with bony fingers, "Of course the Molts have
a--feeling for the casualty ratio, too; and while they're not as
formally organized as we--" he blinked around the conference table,
finally fixing Radescu with a look like that of a small animal caught
at night in the headlights.  "Ahem.  Not as structured as we are.
Nonetheless, when they feel that the fighting is to their disadvantage,
they stop fighting--save for random attacks far behind the 'lines,"
attacks in which they almost never suffer losses."

"Then," said Alexander Radescu, wishing that his voice were deep and
powerful--though surely it could not be as tinny as it sounded in his
own hypercritical ears--"we have to shift our strategy.  Instead of
advancing slowly--" "ponderously" was the word his mind suppressed a
moment before his tongue spoke it; the lavish interior of the
conference room had taken on a somewhat different aspect for Radescu
since the mercenary lieutenant sneered at it "--into areas which the
Molts infest, we shall make quick thrusts to capture the areas which
make them vulnerable: the nursery caves."

"We cannot advance quickly," said General Vuco, who was more able than
the others to treat Radescu as a young interloper rather than as the
man with demonstrated control over the career of everyone else in the
room, "so long as everyone in the assault must expect attack from
behind at every instant.  To--" he made a gesture with his left hand as
if flinging chaff to the wind "--charge forward regardless, well, that
was attempted in the early days of the conflict.  Panache did not
protect the units involved from total destruction, from massacre.

"Of course," Vuco added, directing his eyes toward a corner of the
ceiling, "I'm perfectly willing to die for the State, even by what
amounts to an order of suicide."

He dropped his gaze, intending to focus on the play of water in the
alcove across the table from him.  Instead, the Oltenian's eyes met
those of Lieutenant Hawker.  Vuco snapped upright, out of his pose of
bored indolence.  His mouth opened to speak, but no words came out.

"The mercenaries we hire, Hammer's troops," said Radescu, suppressing
an urge to nod toward Hawker in appreciation, "manage well enough--or
did" he added,

glaring at his elders and new subordinates "until our failure to
support them led to what I and the Tribunate agreed were needless and
excessive casualties, casualties not covered by the normal war risks of
their hiring contract."

Now for the first time, most of the senior officers looked up as though
Hawker and Bourne were specimens on display.  Vuco instead rubbed his
eyes fiercely as if he were trying to wipe an image from their surface.
Hawker accepted the attention stolidly, but the sergeant reacted with
an insouciance Radescu decided was typical, making a surprisingly
graceful genuflection--a form of courtesy unfamiliar on Oltenia and
shockingly inappropriate from a man as ruggedly lethal as Profile
Bourne.

"All very well," said General Forsch in the direction of the Slammers
but answering Radescu's implied question, "if we had the detection
capability that the mercenaries do.  They have time, a minute or more,
to prepare for an attack, even when they're moving."

Radescu's eyes traversed the arc of the divisional officers and General
Forsch.  His mind was too busy with his present words and the action
which would develop from those words in the immediate future, however,
for him really to be seeing the men around him.  "Nonetheless," he
heard his voice say, "General Forsch will determine a target suitable
for sudden assault by Oltenian forces."

It was the intention he had formed before he accepted his uncle's
charge, an intention vocalized here in the conference room for the
first time.

"Troops for the exercise will come from Second Division.  Generals
lorga, Vuco, your staff will coordinate with mine to determine the
precise number and composition of the units to be involved in the
exercise."

Radescu blinked.  It was almost as if he had just opened his eyes
because the staring officers sprang suddenly back into his awareness.
"Are there any questions, gentlemen?"

General Forsch leaned forward, almost close enough for his long neck to
snake out to Radescu's hand like a weasel snapping.  "Youth will be
served, I suppose," he said.  "But,

my leader, you have no idea of what it is like to battle the Molts on
their own ground."

"I will before long, though," said Alexander Radescu as he rose in
dismissal.  "I'll be accompanying the force in person."

The sound of his subordinates sucking in breath in surprise was lost in
the roar of blood through the young general's ears.

The most brilliant strategy, the most courageous intent, come alike to
naught if the troops are marshalled at one point and their transport at
another.  The command group had scuttled out of the conference room
with orders to plan an assault which none of them believed could be
carried through successfully.

Radescu waited until he heard the door bang shut behind the last of his
generals, Forsch; then, elbows on the table, he cradled his chin in his
palms while his fingers covered his eyes.  He did not like failure and,
as he came nearer to the problem, he did not see any other likely
result to his attempts.

It occurred to the young general that his subconscious might have
planned the whole operation as a means of achieving not victory but
solely an honorable excuse for him not to explain defeat to his uncle.
The chances were very slim indeed that Alexander Radescu would survive
a total disaster.

His pants legs were not only filthy, they stank.  How his generals must
be laughing at him!

"Sir .. . ?"  intruded a voice whose owner he had forgotten.

"Ah, Lieutenant Hawker," said the Oltenian general, his personality
donning its public when as he looked up at the big mercenary.  "Forgive
me for not dismissing you sooner.  I'll contact your colonel with
thanks and--"

"General," Sergeant Bourne interrupted as he strode to the nearest
chair and reversed it so that its back was toward the conference table,
"those birds're right so fan if you just bull straight in like you're
talking, your ass is grass and the

Molts'fl well and truly mow it.  You need support--and that's what you
hired us Slammers for, isn't it?"

Bourne sat down, the weight of his gear suddenly evident from the crash
it made when it bumped the chair.  The sergeant's legs splayed to
either side of the seat back which rose like an outer, ornately-carven,
breastplate in front of his porcelain armor.  The mercenary's method of
seating himself was not an affectation, Radescu realized: the man's
belt gear and the bulges of electronics built into the shoulders of his
backplate would prevent him from sitting in a chair in the normal
fashion.

"I thank you for your concern, Sergeant," Radescu said-had he ever
before known the name of an enlisted man?  He really couldn't be sure.
"Colonel Hammer is no longer willing to divide his own forces and trust
the Oltenian army to carry out its own portion of the operation.  When
I have proved my troops are capable of--active endeavor--on their own,
then I believe we can come to an accommodation, he and

I.

"For now," Radescu added brusquely as he rose, "I have business that
does not concern mercenaries.  If you'll be so good--"

"Sir, the Colonel has offered you troops," said Lieutenant Hawker as
loudly as necessary to silence Radescu's voice without shrillness. "Us.
All Profile means is you ought to use us, the best curst detection
team in the Slammers.  And he's right--you ought to use us, instead of
throwing yourself away."

Radescu sat down again, heavily.  The Slammers lieutenant was so much
larger than the general that only by tricking his mind could Radescu
keep from being cowed physically.  "He didn't send you to me for that,"
he said, "for detection.  You--you know that."

Bourne snorted and said, "Bloody cop we do."

At his side, with a hand now on the noncom's shoulder, Hawker replied,
The Colonel doesn't talk to me, sir.  But if you think he doesn't keep
up with what's happening with the people who hired him, hired us, there
you're curst well wrong.  Don't ever figure a man like Colonel Hammer
isn't

one step ahead of you--though he may not be ready to commit openly."

"Not," Bourne completed grimly, "when he's ready to call in the Bonding
Authority and void the contract for employer's nonperformance."

"My Lord," said Radescu.  He looked at the pair of mercenaries without
the personal emotion--hope or fear or even disgust--he had always felt
before.  The implications of what Hawker had just said stripped all
emotional loadings from the general's immediate surroundings.  Hawker
and Bourne could have been a pair of trees, gnarled and gray barked;
hard-used and very, very hard themselves..  ..

"My Lord," the Oltenian repeated, the words scarcely moving his lips.
Then his gaze sharpened and he demanded, "You mean it was, was a game?
You wouldn't have .. . ?"

"Try me, General," said Profile Bourne.  He did not look at Radescu but
at his open palm; and the dragon there bore an expression similar to
that of the mercenary.

"It's not a game, killing people," said the lieutenant.  "We got into
the box where you found us by doing just what we told you we did.  And
believe me, sir, nobody ever complained about the support Profile and
me gave when it came down to cases."  The fingers of his right hand
smoothed the receiver of the submachine gun where the greenish wear on
the plastic showed the owner's touch was familiar.

"It's just I guess we can figure one thing out, now," the sergeant
remarked, looking up with the loose, friendly look of a man lifting
himself out of a bath in drugs.  "We'd heard our sentence four days
ago, not that there was a whole lotta doubt.  I mean, we'd done it. The
colonel watched us."

He gave Radescu the grin of a little boy caught in a peccadillo, sure
of a spanking but winkingly hopeful that it might still be avoided. "We
don't stand much on ceremony in the Slammers," Bourne went on. "For
sure not on something like a shot in the neck.  So the Loot'n me
couldn't figure what the colonel was waiting for."

"I guess," the sergeant concluded with a very different sort of smile
again, "he was waiting for you."

Hawker pulled a chair well away from the table, lifting it off the
floor so that it did not scrape.  The mercenary handled the chair so
lightly that Radescu could scarcely believe that it was made of the
same dense, heavily-carven wood as the one in which the Oltenian sat.

"You see, sir," the lieutenant said as he lowered himself carefully
onto the seat, hunching forward a little to be able to do so, "we can't
cover more than a platoon, the two of us--but a platoon's enough, for
what you need."

"Any more'n that, they get screwed up," added Bourne.  "Even if we get
the range and bearing right, they don't.  Just gives the Molts more
targets to shoot at.  That's not what we're here for."

"What are you here for?"  Radescu asked, reaching out to touch Bourne's
right palm to the other's great surprise.  The skin was dry and
calloused, not at all unlike the scaly head of a reptile.  "What your
colonel may want, I can see.  But the danger to you personally--it
isn't as though you'd be protected by, by your own, the tanks and the
organization that strikes down Molts when they appear."

He withdrew his hand, looking at both the Slammers and marvelling at
how stolid they appeared.  Surely their like could have no emotion?
"I'm an Oltenian," Radescu continued.  "This is my planet, my State.
Even so, everybody in the room just now--" his fingers waggled toward
the door through which his fellow generals had exited "--thinks I'm mad
to put myself in such danger.  You two aren't lumps like our own
peasants.  You made it clear that I couldn't even order you without
your willingness to obey.  Would Hammer punish you if you returned to
him without having volunteered to accompany me?"

"Guess we're clear on that one, wouldn't you say, Loot?"  remarked
Sergeant Bourne as he glanced at Hawker.  Though the noncom was
physically even smaller than Radescu, he did not sink into the ambience
of the big lieutenant the way the Oltenian felt he did himself. Profile
Bourne was a knife, double-edged and wickedly sharp; size had nothing
to do with the aura he projected.

For the first time, Radescu considered the faces of his

divisional officers as they watched him in the light of the emotions
he tried to hide when he looked at the pair of mercenaries.  It could
be that the Oltenians saw in him a core of something which he knew in
his heart of hearts was not really there.

Hawker's body armor shrugged massively.  "Look, sir," he said without
fully meeting the Oltenian's eyes, "if we liked to lose, then we
wouldn't be in the Slammers.  I don't apologize for anything that
happened before--" now he did focus his gaze, glacial in a bovine face,
on Radescu "-but it wasn't what we were hired to do.  Help win a war
against the Molts."

Bourne tilted forward to grasp Radescu's hand briefly before the
sergeant levered himself back to his feet "And you know, General," the
mercenary said as he rose, "until I met you, I didn't think the poofs
had a prayer a' doin' that."

The encampment should in theory have been safe enough, with no chunk of
crystalline rock weighing more than a kilogram located within a meter
of the ground surface.  Nobody really believed that a three-divisional
area had been swept so perfectly, however, especially without the help
which Hammer had refused to give this time.

The center of the encampment, the combined Army and the Second Division
Headquarters, had been set up in a marsh and was probably quite secure.
The nervousness of the troops mustered both for the operation and For
immediate security was due less to intellectual fear of the Molts than
to the formless concern which any activity raised in troops used to
being sniped at from point-blank ambush with no time to respond.

Alexander Radescu felt sticky and uncomfortable in his new battle dress
though its fabric and cut should have been less stiff than the formal
uniforms he ordinarily wore.  He could not bring himself to don body
armor, knowing that it would cramp and distract him through the next
hours when his best hope of survival lay in keeping flexible and
totally alert.

Hawker and Bourne wore their own back-and-breast armor, heavier but
far more resistant than the Oltenian version which Radescu had refused.
They were used to the constriction, after all, and would probably have
been more subconsciously hindered by its absence than by the weight.

Radescu would have been even more comfortable without the automatic
shotgun he now cradled, a short-barrelled weapon which sprayed tiny
razor-edged airfoils that spread into a three-meter circle ten meters
from the muzzle.  The gun was perfectly effective within the ranges at
which Molt warriors were likely to appear; but it was the general's
dislike of personal involvement in something as ignoble as killing,
rather than his doubts about how accurately he could shoot, which put
him off the weapon.

Still, he had to carry the shotgun for protective coloration.  The
mercenaries' jeep would stand out from the Oltenian units anyway, and
the sole unarmed member of a combat patrol would be an even more
certain choice for a Molt with the leisure to pick his target.

"Cop!"  snarled Lieutenant Hawker from the side-seat of the jeep as he
surveyed the numbers his apparatus projected glowing into the air
before him.  The mercenary's commo helmet was linked to epaulette
speakers issued to the entire Oltenian contingent for this operation.
Radescu heard the words both on his own borrowed helmet and, marginally
later, directly from the lieutenant's mouth.  "Discard Beacon
Eighty-Seven.  Team Seven, that's three duds so far outa this lot, and
you've had all of 'em.  Are you sure you know how to switch the bloody
things on?"

"The numbers of the beacons being tested appear--on your screen, then?"
General Radescu asked the mercenary sergeant beside him, wiggling his
fingers toward the floating yellow numbers.  Obviously, there was no
screen; but he was uncertain how to describe in any other way what he
saw.

"Naw, that's the playback from Central," replied Profile Bourne.  He
nodded his head toward the distant ridge beyond which sheltered Colonel
Hammer and his armored regiment.  "Doesn't matter if we pick up the
signal or not,

but How Batt'ry can't bust up rocks for us if they don't get the
beacon."

"Yes, well .. . ," said General Radescu as he looked at the men and
equipment around him.  The Oltenian contingent was forty men mounted on
ten light trucks-each with a load of explosives and radio beacons, plus
a pintle-mounted automatic weapon which, at the flip of a switch, fired
either solid shot for long-range targets or beehives of airfoil
flechettes like the hand weapons.  The trucks were somewhat larger than
the Slammers' jeep on which Radescu himself would be mounted.  More
significantly, the Oltenian vehicles rode on wheels spun from
spring-wire rather than on air cushions.  Ground effect vehicles of
sufficient ruggedness and payload for scouting through brush required
drive-systems of a better power to-weight ratio than Oltenia could
supply.  The mercenaries' jeeps and one-man skimmers had the benefit of
cryogenic accumulators, recharged at need--every hundred kilometers or
so--from the fusion powerplants of the heavier combat cars and tanks.

The jeep which Sergeant Bourne drove and the energy weapon slung
against his chest were thus both of a higher technology level than
their Oltenian equivalents--but in neither case was the difference
significant to the present mission.  The range and quickness of the
electronics which detected Molts before they appeared physically, and
the needle-threading accuracy which terminal guidance gave the
Slammers' rocket howitzers, were absolute necessities if the present
operation were to succeed, however; and Colonel Hammer was supplying
both.

Despite his public dismissal of Radescu, Hammer was giving him and the
State of Oltenia one chance to seize back the initiative in this
accursed war with the planet's dominant autochthons.

"We're ready, sir," said Lieutenant Hawker with his helmet mike shut
off to make the report more personal than a radio message to the
general two meters away.  "The hardware is."

Radescu nodded.  Bourne had already slipped onto his

seat on the left side of the jeep.  Radescu had eaten a light,
perfectly bland, meal of protein supplement an hour earlier.  The food
now lay like an anvil in his belly while his digestive system writhed
in an attempt to crush it.

"Captain Elejash," the young general said, his signal broadcast to
every member of the assault party, "are your men ready?"  He lifted
himself carefully onto his electronic throne on the back of the jeep,
pleased to note that the motion decreased his nausea instead of causing
him to vomit in the sight of several thousand putative subordinates.

"Yes sir," replied the commander of the Oltenian platoon, a rancher
before the war as were most of his men.  They were a hardbitten crew,
many of them as old as the general himself, and very different in
appearance from the pasty faced young factory workers who made up the
ordinary rank and file of the army.  Forsch and lorga had gone at least
that far toward making the operation a success.

"General Radescu, the support battalion is ready," said an unbidden
voice over the wailing background which Radescu had learned to
associate with recompressed ultra low frequency transmissions from
Army

HQ.

Alexander Radescu looked imperiously around him at the faces and heavy
equipment and distant, wooded hills, all of which blurred in his
fear-frozen mind to gray shadows.

"All right," he said in his cool, aristocratic voice.  Then let's
go."

And before the last word had reached the general's throat mike, Profile
Bourne was easing the jeep forward at a rapidly accelerating pace.

How smoothly it rides, thought General Radescu as the ground effect
jeep sailed up a hillside pocked by the burrows of small grazing
animals and Lieutenant Hawker opened fire from the front seat with
shocking unexpectedness.  The ionization detectors had given no warning
because the Molt was already sited, a picket waiting near the Oltenian
base on a likely course of advance.  Hawker's face shield was locked in
place, and through its electronic

additions to the normal sensory spectrum--passive infrared or motion
enhancement--the mercenary had spotted his target as it rose to
attack.

Cyan flashes squirted from Hawker's gun at a cyclic rate so high that
their afterimage combined to form a solid orange bar on Radescu's
dazzled retinas.  The vehicles were in line abreast at ten-meter
intervals with the Slammers' jeep in the center.  A multi stemmed bush
to the jeep's right front hissed and shrivelled as it drank the energy
bolts; then it and recognizable portions of an adolescent Molt were
blasted apart by a violent secondary explosion.  The autochthon had
carried either a satchel charge or an unusually powerful
shoulder-launched missile.  The red flash of its detonation, though
harmless to the assault platoon, caused the driver of the nearest truck
to stall his engine.  He knew that if Hawker had been seconds slower,
the blast would have enveloped the Oltenian vehicle.

"Eight red thirty degrees," said Hawker as unemotionally as though his
gun's barrel was not pinging and discoloring the finish of the forward
transom on which he rested it to cool.  Numbers and symbols, not the
ones the mercenary was relaying to the assault force, hung as images of
yellow and violet in the air before him.  "Four yellow zero degrees."

Most of the pintle-mounted weapons snarled bursts toward the range and
bearing each gunner had computed from the Slammers rough direction.
First Hawker gave the number of the truck he chose as a base for that
deflection; then red, orange or yellow for fifty, seventy-five or
hundred meter arcs around that truck; and finally the bearing itself.
Molts beyond a hundred meters were rarely dangerous to a moving target,
even with the most modern weapons.  When possible, the mercenary would
point out such warriors with a burst from his own gun or even call in
artillery; but there was no need to complicate a system of directions
which had to work fast if it were to work at all.

"Cease fire," Hawker ordered as the jeep slid through a line of palmate
leaves springing from the hill crest and Radescu covered his face with
one hand.  "Cease fire, Six, they were going away!"

More pickets, Radescu thought as the echoes of gunfire died away and
the line of vehicles rocked down the next slope without immediate
incident.  The blips of plasma which the mercenaries' detection
equipment had caught this time were those resulting from Molts
disappearing, not coalescing to attack.  The pickets would be returning
to their council, their headquarters, with warning of the direction and
nature of the attack.

There was the sharp crash of an explosion nearby.  The crew of Truck
Six had tossed a charge overboard, onto a patch of crystalline rock
which their own sensors had identified.  Dirt showered the jeep and
Radescu, while dual blasts sounded from opposite ends of the patrol
line, deadened somewhat by distance.  The shaped-charge packets were
weighted to land cavity-down--most of the time.  Even so, they did not
have enough stand-off for the pencil of super-heated gas to reach
maximum velocity and effectiveness before it struck the rock it was to
shatter.

The bombs which the patrol set off could not break up even surface
outcrops so effectively that no Molt could home on them.  However, the
charges did, with luck; lessen and change the piezoelectric al
signature by relieving stresses on the crystalline structure.  The
oldest, most experienced, Molts could still pick their way to the
location, sorting through the sea of currents and electrical charges
for bits of previous reality which their brains could process like
those of paleontologists creating a species from bone fragments.

Even these older warriors were slowed and limited as to the range from
which they could project themselves to such damaged homing points,
however.  Younger Molts, equally deadly with their guns and buzz bombs
were effectively debarred from popping into ambush directly behind the
advancing patrol.

Powerguns--and the Molts carried them, though Oltenian regulars did
not--had an effective antipersonnel range, even in atmosphere, of line
of sight.  There was no practical way to prevent Molt snipers from
firing into distant human arrays, then skipping back to safety.  No way
at all, except by killing every male Molt on Oltenia.

Or by ending the war, which everyone high in the government thought
was also impossible.  Everyone but Alexander Radescu.

"Six red one-eighty!"  shouted Lieutenant Hawker, emotionless no longer
as his instruments warned him of the Molt blurring out of the air
through which Truck Six had just driven.  The attacker was in Hawker's
own blind spot, even if he had dared take his eyes from the read-outs
now that the attack had come in earnest.  "Ten yellow ninety!"

The jeep dropped a hand's breadth on irregular ground as the general
twisted to look over his shoulder.  The sinking feeling in his guts was
more pronounced than the actual drop when he realized that all the
pintle-mounted guns in the patrol had been swung forward at the first
contact.  The guns on even-numbered trucks were to have covered the
rear at all times, but nervousness and enthusiasm had combined to give
the autochthons a perfect opening.  Now gunners were tugging at the
grips of their long-barreled weapons, more handicapped by cramped
footing than by the guns' inertia.

Black smoke from the shaped charge dissipated above the scar in the sod
and flattened grass.  Squarely in the center of the blast circle--so
much for the effectiveness of the charges--a shadow thickened to solid
form.

The Molts gray scales had a blue tinge and what Radescu would have
called a metallic luster had not the iridium barrel of the creature's
power gun showed what luster truly was.  The general did not even
realize he had fired until the butt of the shotgun slammed him in the
ribs: he had loose-gripped the unfamiliar weapon, and its heavy recoil
punished the error brutally.

Radescu's shot twinkled like a soap bubble as the cloud of airfoils
caught the sunlight twenty meters above their target.  The Molt's
figure was perfectly clear for a moment as it hulked behind the
reflection of its gun; then the autochthon began to shrink and dissolve
in a manner that made Radescu think it had tele ported itself to
another location before firing.

No.

There was a scarlet cloud in the air beyond the Molt as the trucks and
jeep bounded away, blood and flesh and chips of yellow bone.  An
Oltenian soldier with a weapon like Radescu's and a skill the general
had never been expected to learn had fired three times.  The autochthon
crumpled before the machine guns could even be rotated back in its
direction.

Half a dozen shaped charges went off almost simultaneously, and there
was heavy firing from the right.  A power gun bolt sizzled across the
ragged line of vehicles, an event so sudden that Radescu, as he turned
back, could not be certain from which end it had been fired.  Hawker
was calling out vectors in the tight, high voice of a sportscaster. The
young general hoped his fellows could understand the mercenary's
directions; he was baffled by the unfamiliar data himself.

Sergeant Bourne banked the jeep around a copse of trees in a turn so
sharp that the left side of the skirt dragged, spilling air in its
brief hesitation.  "Five red zero!"  Hawker was calling, and the blur
that focused down into a Molt was directly in front of the Slammers'
vehicle.  Bourne spun the tiller with his left hand and crossed his
chest with his right, firing a burst of cyan bolts which the vehicle's
own motion slewed across the creatures torso.  The Molt fell onto its
missile launcher, dead before its psychic jump was complete enough for
the creature to be aware of its new surroundings.

Radescu's gun tracked the Molt as the jeep skidded past.  He did not
fire--it was obviously dead--but his bruised side throbbed as if the
butt were pounding him again.

There was a whistle from the sky behind, bird cries which expanded into
a roar so overpowering that earth fountained in apparent silence behind
nearby trucks as they dropped shaped charges at the same time.  The
sound was so intense that Radescu felt it as a pressure on the back of
his neck, then on his forehead and eyeballs.  He wanted very badly to
jump to the ground and cower there: the universe was so large and
hostile .. .

Instead, the young general gripped the handle of one

of the modules which formed his seat and stood up as straight as he
could without losing his hold.  He was bent like someone trying to ride
a bucking animal but the defiance was real.

A craggy, wooded hilltop three hundred meters ahead of the vehicles
dimpled, dirt and fragments of foliage lifting into the air.  There
were no explosions audible.  Radescu, slammed back into his seat when
the jeep rose to meet him, thought the shell blasts were lost in the
waterfall rush from overhead.  That blanket of sound cut off with the
suddenness of a thrown switch, its echoes a whisper to ears stunned by
the roar itself.

Only then did the sextet of shells explode, their blasts muffled by the
depth to which they had penetrated the rocky core of the hill.  The
slope bulged, then collapsed like cake dough falling.  Larger trees
sagged sideways, their roots crushed when the substrate was pulverized
beneath them.  No stones or fragments of shell casing were spewed out
by the deep explosions, but a pall of dust rose to hide the immediate
landscape--including a pair of Molts, killed by concussion just as they
started to aim at the oncoming vehicles.

"Via!"  swore Alexander Radescu.  He had arranged the fire order
himself two days earlier, six penetrator shells to land on a major
intrusion of volcanic rock identified by satellite on the patrol's
path.  The plan had worked perfectly in demolishing what would
otherwise have been a bastion for the autochthons.

But it had frightened him into a broil of fury and terror, because he
had no personal experience with the tools he was using.  Planning the
fire order had been much like a game of chess played on holographic
maps in the rich comfort of Army HQ.  It had never occurred to Radescu
that a salvo of twenty-centimeter shells would be louder than thunder
as they ripped overhead, or that the ground would ripple at the hammer
blows of impact even before the bursting charges went off.

Commanding soldiers is not the same as leading them.

"General, we--" Sergeant Bourne started to say, turning

in his seat though it was through Radescu's commo helmet that the
words came.

"Teams One through Five, break left," the general said, overriding his
drivers voice by keying his own throat mike.  "Six through Ten--and
Command--" the last an afterthought "--break right, avoid the shelled
area."

There was confusion in the patrol line as trucks turned and braked for
the unanticipated obstacle--which Radescu knew he should have
anticipated.  The churned soil and toppled vegetation would have bogged
the trucks inextricably; and, while the terrain itself might have been
passable for the air-cushion jeep, the dust shrouding it would have
concealed fallen trunks and boulders lifted from the shuddering
earth.

Bourne's head turned again as he cramped the tiller.  His face shield
had become an opaque mirror, reflecting Radescu in convex perfection.
The Oltenian had forgotten that the Slammers' array of night vision
devices included personal sonar which would, when necessary, map a
lightless area with the fidelity of eyesight--though without, of
course, color vision.  The sergeant had been perfectly willing to drive
into the spreading cloud, despite the fact that it would have blinded
the hologram display of Hawker's detectors.  That wasn't the sort of
problem Profile Bourne was paid to worry about.

"We're blowing Truck Two in place," said a voice which Radescu
recognized with difficulty as that of Captain Elejash.  Almost at once,
there was a very loud explosion from the left side of the line.

Looking over his shoulder, Radescu could see a black column of smoke
extending jaggedly skyward from a point hidden by the undergrowth and
the curve of the land.  The jeep slowed because the trucks which had
been to its right and now led it turned more awkwardly than the ground
effect vehicle, slowing and rocking on the uneven ground.  The smell of
their diesel exhaust mingled with the dry, cutting odor of the dust
shaken from the hillside.

Hawker was silent, though the yellow digits hanging in

the air before him proved that his instruments were still working.
They simply had no Molts to detect.

"Truck Two overturned," resumed Elejash breathlessly.  "We've split up
the crew and are proceeding."

After blowing up the disabled vehicle, thought Radescu approvingly, to
prevent the Molts from turning the gun and particularly the explosives
against their makers.  The trucks had better cross-country performance
than he had feared-wet weather might have been a different story--but
it was inevitable that at least one of the heavily-laden vehicles would
come to grief.  Truck Two had been lost without enemy action.  Its
driver had simply tried to change direction at what was already the
highest practical speed on broken ground.

"Sir," said Sergeant Bourne, keying his helmet mike with his tongue-tip
as he goosed the throttle to leap a shallow ravine that the Oltenian
vehicles had to wallow through, "how'd you convince 'em to pick up the
truck's crew?"

It was the first time Bourne had called him 'sir' rather than the
ironic 'general."  "I said I'd shoot--order shot--anyone who abandoned
his comrades," Radescu replied grimly, "and I hoped nobody thought I
was joking."

He paused.  "Speed is--important," he continued after a moment spent
scanning the tree-studded horizon.  The separated halves of the patrol
line were in sight of one another again, cutting toward the center.
Boulders shaken by shellfire from the reverse slope of the hill still
quivered at the end of trails that wormed through the vegetation.  They
would need follow-up salvos, but for the moment the Molts seemed unable
to use their opportunities..  .. "But we have a war to win, not just a
mission to accomplish.  And I won't win it with an army of men who know
they'll be abandoned any time there's trouble."

Numbers on Hawker's hologram display flashed back and forth from yellow
to the violet that was its complement, warning at last of a resumption
of Molt attacks.  The mercenary lieutenant said, "Purple One," on a
command

channel which Radescu heard in his left ear and the other Oltenians
did not hear at all.

"What?"  he demanded, thinking Hawker must have made a mistake that
would give a clear shot to the tele porting autochthon.  "Mark," said
Hawker^ in response to an answer even the general had not heard.

Bourne, fishtailing to avoid Truck Five--itself pressed by Truck Four,
the vehicles had lost their spacing as they reformed in line
abreast--said, "They're landing way behind us, sir.  Loot's just called
artillery on 'em while they're still confused."  Then he added, "We
told you this was the way.  Not a bloody battalion, not a division--one
platoon and catch 'em with their pants down."

They were in a belt of broad-leafed vegetation, soft trunked trees
sprouted in the rich, well-watered soil of a valley floor.  There was
relatively little undergrowth because the foliage ten meters overhead
met in a nearly solid mat.  The other vehicles of the patrol were
grunting impressions, patterns occasionally glimpsed through random
gaps in the trees.  Amazingly, Truck Two appeared to have been the only
vehicle lost in the operation thus far, though the flurry of intense
fighting had almost certainty caused human casualties.

But tele porting Molts were vulnerable before they were dangerous, and
Radescu had been impressed by the way bursts of airfoils had swept
patches of ground bare.  He had felt like a step-child, leading men
armed with indigenous weapons against an enemy with power guns bought
from traders whose view of the universe was structured by profit, not
fantasies of human destiny.  Though the energy weapons had advantages
in range and effectiveness against vehicles--plus the fact that the
lightly built autochthons could not easily have absorbed the heavy
recoil of Oltenian weapons--none of those factors handicapped the
members of the patrol in their present job.

As trees snapped by and Bourne lifted the jeep a centimeter to keep his
speed down but still have maximum maneuvering thrust available, the
right earpiece of Radescu's

helmet said in a machine voice, "Central to Party.  Halt your forces."
They were that close, then, thought the Oltenian general.  Without
bothering to acknowledge--the satellite net that was Hammer's basic
commo system on Oltenia would pick up the relayed order--Radescu said,
"All units halt at once.  All units halt."  If he had tried to key the
command channel alone to acknowledge, he might have had trouble with
the unfamiliar mercenary helmet.  Better to save time and do what was
necessary instead of slavishly trying to obey the forms.  If only he
could get his officers to realize that simple truth..  ..

Sergeant Bourne had the principle of lower-rank initiative well in
mind.  Without waiting for the general to relay the order from Central,
Bourne angled his fans forward and lifted the bow of the jeep to
increase its air resistance.  The tail skirt dragged through the loam
but only slightly, not enough to whip- the vehicle to a bone-jarring
halt the way a less expert driver might have done in his haste.

Hawker's display was alive with flashes of yellow and violet, but he
still did not call vectors to the Oltenian troops.  A branch high above
the jeep parted with an electric crackle as a bolt from a power gun
spent itself in converting pulpy wood into steam and charred
fragments.

The leaf canopy had become more ragged as the ground started to rise,
so that Radescu could now see the escarpment of the ridge whose further
face held their goal.  The tilted strata before them were marked with
bare patches from which the thin soil had slumped with its vegetation,
though the trucks could--General Forsch had assured his
commander--negotiate a route to the crest.

If it were undefended.

The world-shaking vibration of shells overhead was Radescu's attempt to
meet his chief of staffs proviso.

Somebody should have ordered the members of the patrol to get down, but
there was no opportunity now given the all-pervasive racket that would
have overwhelmed even the bone-conduction speakers set into the
Slammers' mastoids.  The biss-kump of power guns as overeager Molts
fired without proper targets also was lost, but the rare

flicker of bolts in the foliage was lightning to the sky's own
thunder.  The thick soil of the valley floor was a warranty that no
warrior was going to appear at arm's length of the deafened, cowering
patrol, and the Molts' disinclination to cover significant distances on
foot made it unlikely that any of them would race into the forest to
get at the humans they knew were lurking there.

The initial shell bursts were lost in the rush of later salvoes.  The
first fire order had been intended to destroy a beacon on which the
Molts would otherwise have focused.  The present shellfire was turning
the escarpment ahead into a killing ground.

Profile Bourne tapped the general's knee for attention, then gestured
with the open, savage cup of his tattooed right hand toward the images
which now hung over the jeep's bow.  The modules projected a
three-dimensional monochrome of the escarpment, including the heavy
forest at its foot and the more scattered vegetation of the gentle
reverse slope.

The Oltenian wondered fleetingly where the imaging sensor could be: all
of the patrol's vehicles hid behind the barrier of trees, which
concealed the escarpment as surely as it did the trucks.  The angle was
too flat for satellite coverage, and aircraft reconnaissance was a
waste of hardware--with the crews if the aircraft were manned-in a
military landscape dominated by light-swift power guns Perhaps it was a
computer model using current satellite photography enhanced from a data
base--of Hammer's, since the State of Oltenia had nothing of its own
comparable.

The image of the rock face shattered.  Instead of crumbling into a
slide of gravel and boulders the way the hillock had done earlier when
struck by penetrators, the escarpment held its new, fluid form as does
a constantly replenished waterfall.

The rain feeding this spray was of bomblets from the firecracker rounds
being hurled by all eighteen tubes of the Stammers' artillery.  It was
a prodigiously expensive undertaking--mechanized warfare is far more
sparing of

men than of material--but it was the blow from which Radescu prayed
the Molts in this region would be unable to recover.

Each shell split in the air into hundreds of bomblets which in turn
burst on the next thing they touched--rock, leaf, or the face of a Molt
sighting down the barrel of his power gun  The sea of miniature blasts
created a mist of glass-fiber shrapnel devouring life in all its forms
above the microscopic--but without significantly changing the
piezoelectric al constant of the rock on which the autochthons homed.

Hawker's detectors continued to flash notice of further Molts springing
into the cauldron from which none of them would return to warn the
warriors who followed them to doom.

Lieutenant Hawker was as still as the jeep, though that trembled with
the shell-spawned vibration of the earth on which it now rested.
Sergeant Bourne watched not the image of the fire-rippled escarpment
but the detector display.  His grin was alive with understanding, and
he tapped together the scarred knuckles of his hands.  Every violet
numeral was a Molt about to die.

Short bursts were an inevitable hazard, impinging on Radescu's senses
not by their sound--even the wash of the main bombardment was lost in
the ballistic roar of the shells themselves--but by the fact that
shafts of sunlight began to illuminate the forest floor.  Stray
bomblets stripped away the foliage they touched, but the low-mass
shrapnel was not dangerous more than a meter or two from the center of
each blast.

The Oltenian was nonetheless startled to see that the backs of his
hands glittered in the sudden sunlight with glass fibers scarcely
thicker than the hairs from among which they sprang.  He had been too
lost in the image of shellfire devouring the Molts to notice that it
had put its mark on him as well.

The ionization detectors had been quiescent for almost a minute when
the face of the escarpment slumped, no longer awash with firecracker
rounds.  Through the pulsing

silence as the shellfire ceased came the rumble of collapsing
rock--the final salvo had been of penetrator shells, now that the Molts
had either recognized the killing ground for what it was or had run out
of victims to send into the useless slaughter.

Like a bright light, the thunder of shellfire left its own afterimage
on the senses of the men who had been subjected to it.  Radescu's voice
was a shadow of itself in his own ears with all its high frequencies
stripped away as he said, "Platoon, forward.  Each crew find its own
path to the crest and await further orders."

Lord who aids the needy!  thought the general as the jeep rocked onto
its air cushion again.  He was alive, and he had apparently won this
first round of his campaign to end the war.

The second round: the command group of the army had been his opponent
in the first, and he had won that too.  Both victories due to the pair
of mercenaries before him; and to the harsh, unexpectedly complex,
colonel who commanded them.

With no need to match his speed to that of the trucks, Bourne sent his
jeep through the remaining half-kilometer of forest with a verve that
frightened Radescu--who had thought the initial salvo of shells passing
overhead had drained him of any such emotion for months.

A few trees had grown all the way up to the original face of harder
rock, but for the most part hard-stemmed scrub with less need for water
and nutrient had replaced the more substantial vegetation near the
escarpment.  Everything, including the thin soil, had been swept away
by the salvoes of antipersonnel bomblets.  The paths down which tons of
rock shattered by the penetrators slid were scarcely distinguishable
from the stretches to either side which were untouched by the heavy
shells.

The surface of an airless planetoid could not have been more barren;
and there, at least, Radescu's nostrils would not have wrinkled at the
smell of death.

Bourne took his right hand off his gun butt long enough

to pull rearward a dashboard lever while his left squeezed the hand
throttle on the tiller wide open.  The lever must have affected the
angle of the fans within the plenum chamber, because the vehicle began
to slide straight up the slope, stern lifted almost to a level with the
bow lihe that of a funicular car.

The original angle of the escarpment had been in the neighborhood of
one to one.  The salvo of penetrators had shaken portions of the
overhang down into a ramp at the foot of the slope, easing the ascent
at the same time it changed the electrical signature.  The sergeant's
bow-on assault was still a surprise, to the Oltenian and to the
Stammers' lieutenant, judging from Hawker's quick glance toward his
fellow.  The rear fans, those directly beneath Radescu and the
electronics modules, spun with the angry sound of bullets ricocheting
as they drove the vehicle upward.

Both mercenaries had locked their face shields down, less for
visibility than for protection against pebbles still skipping from the
hill's crumbled facade.  Dust and grit, though blanketed somewhat by
the overburden of topsoil from the further slope, boiled in the
vortices beneath the skirt of the jeep.

The trucks of the patrol's Oltenian element crawled rather than loped
in their ascent, but they were managing adequately.  Their tires were
spun from a single-crystal alloy of iron and chrome, and they gripped
projections almost as well as the fingers of a human climber.  Such
mono crystal filaments were, with beef, the main export props of the
economy of human Oltenia.

The Molts provided traders with the lustrous, jewel-scaled pelts of
indigenous herbivores and with opportunities to mine pockets of
high-purity ores.  The senses which permitted the autochthons to
teleport were far more sensitive and exact than were the best
mechanical geosurveying devices in the human universe.  Even so, Molt
trade off-planet was only a tiny fraction of that of members of the
Oltenian state.

The needs of the autochthons were very simple, however.  As the jeep
topped the rise, bounced fully a meter in the air by its momentum, a
bolt from a power gun burst

the trunk of one of the nearby trees mutilated in the hammering by
firecracker rounds.

Bourne swore savagely in a language Radescu did not know, then cried,
"Loot?"  as he whipped the jeep in a double-S that brought it to a
halt, partly behind another of the stripped boles which were the
closest approach to cover on the blasted landscape.

Take him," said the lieutenant as he rolled out of his seat before the
jeep had fully grounded.  As an afterthought, while he cleared his own
weapon in the vehicle's shelter, he added, "Via, General, get down!"

The shot had come from across a valley three kilometers wide and as
sere as the forest behind the patrol was lush.  When slabs of granite
tilted to form shallow wrinkles, layers of porous aquifer had been
dammed and rerouted with startling effects for the vegetation on
opposite sides of the impermeable divide.  This valley had nothing like
the dense canopy which had sheltered the vehicles while they waited for
the firecracker rounds to do their work.  Direct rainfall, the sole
source of water for the vegetation here, had paradoxically stripped
away much of the soil which might otherwise have been available because
there was no barrier of foliage and strong root systems to break the
rush of periodic torrents.

The native grass which fattened terran beefalo as efficiently as
imported fodder provided a straggly, russet background to the
occasional spike-leafed tree.  Hiding places in th e knobs and notches
of the valley's further slope offered interlocking fields of fire
across the entire area, and frequent outcrops among the grass below
warned that Molts had free access to the valley floor as well.

The present shot had come from the far escarpment, however: it chopped
shorter the trunk it hit at a flat angle.  As he tumbled off his seat,
obedient to the mercenary lieutenant, Radescu took with him a memory of
the terrain three thousand meters away--an undifferentiated blur of
gray and pale ochre--a background which could conceal a thousand gunmen
as easily as one.

"We can't possibly find him!"  the Oltenian whispered

to Hawker as Sergeant Bourne scanned for potential targets with only
his eyes and weapon above the jeep's front skirt.  "We'll have to wait
for the artillery to get him."

The shelling had resumed, but it was of a different scale and tenor.
Black splotches like oil-soaked cotton bloomed around momentary red
cores as Oltenian artillery pummeled the far side of the valley.
Hammer's three fully automated batteries of rocket howitzers were not
involved in this bombardment.  Their accuracy was needless --even
indigenous artillery couldn't miss by three kilometers.  The greater
effectiveness of the mercenaries' shells ' would not change the fact
that no practicable volume of fire could really affect the vast area
involved.  The shell bursts though violent, left no significant mark
once the puff of combustion products dispersed in the light breeze.

The State could not afford to use Hammer's hogs needlessly: the shells
were imported over long Transit distances.  Quite apart from their high
cost in money terms, the length of time for replenishment might be
disastrous in an emergency if stocks on Oltenia had been needlessly
squandered.

Even as he spoke, General Radescu realized the absurdity of waiting for
the shells speckling an area of twenty square kilometers to silence a
single marksman.  He grimaced, wishing he wore the makeup which would
ordinarily have covered his flush of embarrassment.

"We got pretty good at counter sniper work here on Oltenia," the
lieutenant said mildly.  The shellfire was not passing directly
overhead, and in any case the trajectories were much higher than when
the patrol cowered just short of the impact area of the heavy salvoes.
"If this one just tries once more, Profile'll spot the heat signature
and nail 'im."  Hawker scowled.  "Wish those bloody poofs'd get up here
before the bastard decides to blow our detection gear all to hell. That
first shot was too cursed close."

Alexander Radescu got to his feet, feeling like a puppet master guiding
the cunningly structured marionette of his body.  He walked away from
the jeep and the slender tree

trunk which was probably as much an aiming point as protection for the
crucial electronics.  He stumbled because his eyes were dilated with
fear and everything seemed to have merged into a blur of glaucous
yellow.

"Sir!"  someone cried.  Then, in his head phones, "Sir!  Get back
here!"

Poofs could only draw fire, could they?  Well, perhaps not even that.
Radescu's ribcage hurt where the gun had kicked him the only time he
fired a shot.  As he lifted the weapon again, his vision steadied to
throw boulders and hummocks across the valley into a clear relief that
Radescu thought was impossible for unaided vision at that distance. 
His muscles were still shuddering with adrenaline, though, and the
shotgun's muzzle wobbled in an arc between bare sky and the valley
floor.

That didn't matter.  The short-range projectiles could not reach the
far slope, much less hit a specific target there.  Radescu squeezed off
and the recoil rotated his torso twenty degrees.  A bitch of a weapon,
but it hadn't really hurt this time because he had nestled the stock
into him properly before he fired.  The Molts were not marksmen either;
there was no real danger in what he was doing, no reason for fear, only
physiological responses to instinct The muzzle blast of his second shot
surprised him; his trigger finger was operating without conscious
control.  Earth, ten meters downslope, gouted and glazed in the cyan
flash of the sniper's return bolt.  As grit flung by the release of
energy flicked across Radescu's cheeks and forehead, another power gun
bolt splashed a pit in the soil so close to Radescu's boots that the
leather of them turned white and crinkled.

The crackling snarl of the bolt reaching for his life almost deafened
the Oltenian to the snap of Bourne's submachine gun returning fire with
a single round.  Radescu was still braced against a finishing shot from
the heavy power gun across the valley so that he did not move even as
the sergeant scrambled back into the jeep and shouted, "Come on, let's
get this mother down a hole!"

The jeep shuddered off its skirts again before even Lieutenant Hawker
managed to jump aboard.  Radescu, awakening to find himself an
unexpected ten meters away, ran back to the vehicle.

"D'ye get him?"  Hawker was asking, neither Slammer using the radio.
There were things Central didn't have to know.

"Did I shoot at him?"  the sergeant boasted, pausing a moment for
Radescu to clamber onto his seat again.  "Cop, yeah, Loot--he's got a
third hole in line with his eyeballs."  As the jeep boosted downslope,
gravity adding to the thrust of the fans, Bourne added "Spoiled the
bloody trophy, didn't

I?"

Radescu knew that even a light -bolt could be lethal at line of sight,
and he accepted that magnification through the helmet faceplate could
have brought the warrior's image within the appearance of arm's length.
Nonetheless, a micron's unsteadiness at the gun muzzle and the bolt
would miss a man-sized target three kays away.  The general could not
believe that anyone, no matter how expert, could rightfully be as sure
of his accuracy as the Slammers' gunman was.

But there were no further shots from across the valley as the jeep slid
over earth harrowed by the barrage of firecracker rounds and tucked
itself into the mouth of the nursery tunnel which was the patrol's
objective.

The multiple channels of the commo helmets were filled with message
traffic, none of it intended for Radescu.  If he had been familiar with
the Slammers' code names, he could have followed the progress of the
support operation-an armored battalion reinforced by a company of
combat engineers--which should have gotten under way as soon as the
patrol first made contact with the enemy.  For now, it was enough to
know that Hammer would give direct warning if anything went badly
wrong: not because Radescu commanded the indigenous forces, but because
he accompanied Hawker and Bourne, two of Hammer's own.

"Duck," said the helmet with unexpected clarity, Bourne on the
intercom, and the general obeyed just as the vehicle

switched direction and the arms of the tunnel entrance embraced
them.

Though the nursery tunnels were carved through living rock--many of
them with hand tools by Molts millennia in the past--the entrances were
always onto gentle slopes so that no precocious infant projected
himself over a sharp drop.  That meant the approach was normally
through soil, stabilized traditionally by arches of small ashlars, or
(since humans landed) concrete or glazed earth portals.

Here the tunnel was stone-arched and, though the external portion of
the structure had been sandblasted by the firecracker rounds, blocks
only a meter within the opening bore the patina of great age.  Radescu
expected the jeep's headlights to flood the tunnel, supplementing the
illumination which seeped in past them.  Instead Profile Bourne halted
and flipped a toggle on the dashboard.

There was a thud!  within the plenum chamber, and opaque white smoke
began to boil out around the skirts.  It had the heavy odor of
night-blooming flowers, cloying but not choking to the men who had to
breathe it.  Driven by the fans, the smoke was rapidly filling the
tunnel in both directions by the time it rose so high that Radescu, his
head raised to the arched roof, was himself engulfed by it.

The last thing he saw were the flashing holograms of Hawker's display,
warning of Molt activity in the near distance.  Before or behind them
in the tunnel in this case, because the rock shielded evidence of
ionization in any other direction.

Something touched the side of Radescu's helmet.  He barely suppressed a
scream before his faceplate slid down like a knife carving a swath of
visibility through the palpable darkness.  He could see again, though
his surroundings were all in shades of saffron and the depth of rounded
objects was somewhat more vague than normally was the case.  Lieutenant
Hawker was lowering the hand with which he had just manipulated the
controls of the Oltenian's helmet for him.

"Molts can't see in the smoke," Hawker said.  "Want to come with me--"
the muzzle of his gun gestured down the tunnel-- "or stay here with the
sarge?"

"I ought--"Radescu began, intending to say "to join my men."  But the
Oltenian portion of the patrol under Captain Elejash had its
orders---set up on the crest, await support, and let the vehicles draw
fire if the Molts were foolish enough to provide data for the Slammers'
gunnery computers.  Each location from which a satellite registered a
bolt being fired went into the data base as a point to be hit not
now--the snipers would have tele ported away--but at a future date when
a Molt prepared to fire from the same known position.  In fact, the
casualties during the patrol's assault seemed to have left the
surviving Molts terrified of shellfire, even the desultory bombardment
by Oltenian guns.  "Yes, I'm with you," the general added instead.

The nursery tunnel would normally have been wide enough to pass the
jeep much deeper within it, but the shock of the penetrators detonating
had spoiled slabs of rock from the walls, nearly choking the tunnel a
few meters ahead.

"Dunno if it's safe," the mercenary said, feeling a facet of the new
surface between his left finger and thumb.

"It's bedrock," Radescu responded nonchalantly.  He had a fear of
heights but no touch of claustrophobia.  "It may be blocked, but
nothing further should fall."

Hawker shrugged and resumed his careful advance.

The tunnel was marked by several sharp changes of direction in its
first twenty meters, natural since its whole purpose was to train
immature Molts to sense and teleport to locations to which they had no
physical access.  There were glow strips and some light trickling
through the air shafts in the tunnel roof, but the angled walls
prevented the infants from seeing any distance down the gallery.

Radescu's gun wavered between being pointed straight ahead in the
instinctive fear that a Molt warrior would bolt around a corner at him,
and being slanted up at 45 in the intellectual awareness that to do
otherwise needlessly endangered Lieutenant Hawker, a step ahead and
only partially to the side.  Noticing that, the Oltenian pushed past
the Slammer so as not to have that particular problem on his mind.

When Radescu brushed closer to the wall, he noticed

I

128 Butchers Bill that its surface seemed to brighten.  That was the
only evidence that he was "seeing" by means of high-frequency sound,
projected stereoscopically from either side of the commo helmet and,
after it was reflected back, converted to visible light within
microns-thick layers of the face shield.

It was the apparent normalcy of his vision that made so amazing the
blindness of the pair of Molts which Radescu encountered in the large
chamber around the fourth sharp angle.  One of them was crawling toward
him on hands and knees, while the other waddled in a half crouch with
his arms spread as though playing blind man's bluff.

The shotgun rose--Radescu had instincts that amazed him in their
vulgarity--but the general instead of firing cried, "Wait!  Both of
you!  I want to talk about peace!"

The crawling Molt leaped upright, an arm going back to the hilt of a
slung weapon, while the other adult caught up an infant.  Both adults
were very aged males, wizened though the yellowish tinge which was an
artifact of the helmet's mechanism disconcerted eyes expecting the
greenish-black scales of great age.  The one who was crouching had a
brow horn twisted like that of the old warrior in Belvedere..  ..

Hawker was a presence to his left but the Oltenian general concentrated
wholly on the chamber before him, sweat springing out on his neck and
on the underside of his jaw.  There were not merely two Molts in the
chamber but over a score, the rest infants in their neat beds of woven
grass scattered across the floor of the room--where the adults, their
lamps useless, could find them now only by touch.

"Keir, stop!"  shouted the Molt who had not reached for a weapon.  He
was speaking in Rumanian, the only language common among the varied
autochthonal themes as well as between Molts and humans.  In this case,
however, the Molts almost certainly spoke the same dialect, so the
choice of language was almost certainly a plea for further forbearance
on the part of the guns which, though unseen, must be there.  "If they
shoot, the young--"

The other Molt lunged forward--but toward a sidewall, not toward the
humans.  He held a stabbing spear, a

traditional weapon with two blades joined by a short wooden handgrip
in the center.  One blade slashed upward in a wicked disemboweling
stroke that rang on the stone like a sack of coins falling.

"We won't hurt your infants--" Radescu said as the spear-carrier
rotated toward the sound with his weapon raised.  Hawker fired and the
Molt sagged in on himself, spitted on a trio of amber tracks: smoke
concealed the normal cyan flash of the power gun but shock waves from
the superheated air made their own mark on the brush of high-frequency
sound.

The adult with the twisted horn disappeared, holding the infant he had
snatched up as Radescu first spoke.

Alexander Radescu tried to lean his gun against the wall.  It fell to
the floor instead, but he ignored it to step to the nearest of the
infant Molts.  The little creature was surprisingly dense: it seemed to
weigh a good five kilos in Radescu's arms, twisting against the fabric
of his jacket to, find a nipple.  Its scales were warm and flexible;
only against pressure end-on did they have edges which Radescu could
feel.

"We'll carry them outside," said the Oltenian.  I'll carry them..  ..
We'll keep them in--" his face broke into a broad smile, hidden behind
his face shield "--in the conference room; maybe they'll like the
fountains."

"Hostages?"  asked Hawker evenly, as faceless as the general, turning
in a slow sweep of the chamber to ensure that no further Molts appeared
to resume the rescue mission.

The infant Radescu held began to mew.  He wondered how many of the
females and prepubescent males had been fleeing from the ridge in short
hops when the bomblets swept down across them.  "No, Lieutenant,"
Radescu said, noting the ripples of saffron gauze in his vision, heat
waves drifting from the indium barrel of Hawker's power gun  "As proof
of my good faith, I've proved other things today."

He strode back toward the exit from the tunnel, realizing that his
burden would prevent any hostile action by the Molts.

"Now I'll prove that," he added, as much to himself as to the
mercenary keeping watch behind him in the lightless chamber.

The image of Grigor Antonescu in the tank of the commo set was more
faithful than face-to-face reality would have been.  The colors of the
Chief Tribune's skin and the muted pattern of his formal robes glowed
with the purity of transmitted light instead of being overlaid by the
white glaze of surface reflection as they would have been had General
Radescu spoken to him across the desk in his office.

"Good evening, Uncle," Radescu said.  "I appreciate your--discussing
matters with me in this way."  Relays clicked elsewhere in the command
car, startling him because he had been told he would be alone in the
vehicle.  Not that Hammer would not be scowling over every word, every
nuance..  ..

"I'm not sure," replied the Tribune carefully, "that facilities
supplied by the mercenaries are a suitable avenue for a conversation
about State policy, however."

His hand reached forward and appeared to touch the inner surface of the
tank in which Radescu viewed him.  In fact, the older man's fingers
must have been running across the outside of the similar unit in which
he viewed his nephews image.  "Impressive, though.  I'll admit that,"
he added.

The Tribune had the slim good looks common to men on his side of
Radescu's family.  He no longer affected the full makeup his nephew
used regularly, because decades of imperious calm had given him an
expression almost as artful.  The general aped that stillness as he
went on.  "The key to our present small success has been the
mercenaries; similarly, they are the key to the great success I propose
for the near future."

"Wiping out an entire theme?"  asked Antonescu over fingers tented so
that the tips formed a V-notch like the rear sight of a gun.

"Peace with all the themes, Uncle," Radescu said, and

no amount of concentration could keep a cheek muscle from twitching
and making the wings of his butterfly beauty patch flutter.  "An end to
this war, a return to peaceful relations with the Molts--which
off-planet traders have easily retained.  There's no need for men and
Molts to fight like this.  Oltenia has three centuries of experience to
prove there's no need."

Cooling fans began to whirr in a ceiling duct.  Something similar must
have happened near the console which Antonescu had been loaned by
Hammer's supply contingent in Belvedere, because the Chief Tribune
looked up in momentary startlement--the first emotion he had shown
during the call.  "There are those, Alexi," he said to the tank again,
"who argue that with both populations expanding, there is no longer
enough room on Oltenia for both races.  The toll on human farm stock is
too high, now that most Molts live to warrior age--thanks to
improvements in health care misguidedly offered the autochthons by
humans in the past."

"Molt attacks on livestock during puberty rites are inevitable,"
Radescu agreed, "as more land is devoted to ranching and the number of
indigenous game animals is reduced."  He felt genuinely calm, the way
he had when he committed himself in the conference room with Marshal
Erzul.  There was only one route to real success, so he need have no
regrets at what he was doing.  "We can't stop the attacks.  So we'll
formalize them, treat them as a levy shared by the State and by the
Molts collectively."

"They don't have the organization to accomplish that," Antonescu said
with a contemptuous snap of his fingers.  "Even if you think our
citizens would stand for the cost themselves."

"What are the costs of having power guns emptied into crowded
ballrooms?"  the younger man shot back with the passionless precision
of a circuit breaker tripping.  "What is the cost of this army--in
money terms, never mind casualties?"

Antonescu shrugged.  Surely he could not really be that calm..  .. He
said, "Some things are easier in war, my boy.

Emotions can be directed more easily, centralized decision making
doesn't arouse the--negative comment that it might under other
circumstances."

"The Molts," said the young general in conscious return to an earlier
subject, "have been forced by the war to organize in much the same way
that we have rallied behind the Tribunate."

By an effort of will, he held his uncle's eyes as he spoke the words he
had rehearsed a dozen times to a mirror.  "There could be no
long-term--no middle-term--solution to Molt-human relations without
that, I agree.  But with firm control by the leaders of both races over
the actions of their more extreme members, there can be peace--and a
chance on this planet to accomplish things which aren't within the
capacity of any solely human settlement, even Earth herself."

The Chief Tribune smiled in the warm, genuinely affectionate, manner
which had made him the only relative--parents included--for whom
Alexander Radescu had cared in early childhood.  Radescu relived a dual
memory, himself in a crib looking at his Uncle Grigor-and the infant
Molt squirming against him for sustenance and affection.

Antonescu said, "Your enthusiasm, my boy, was certainly one of the
reasons we gave the army into your charge when traditional solutions
had failed.  And of course--" the smile lapsed into something with a
harder edge, but only for a moment "--because you're my favorite
nephew, yes.

"But primarily," the Chief Tribune continued, "because you are a very
intelligent young man, Alexi, and you have a record of doing what you
say you'll do ... which will bring you far, one day, yes."

He leaned forward, just as he had in Radescn's infancy, his long jaw
and flat features a stone caricature of a human face.  "But how can you
offer to end a war that the Molts began--however fortunate their act
may have been for some human ends?"

"I'm going to kick them," the general said with a cool smile of his
own, "until they ask me for terms.  And the

terms I'll offer them will be fair to both races."  He blinked,
shocked to realize that he had been speaking as if Chief Tribune
Antonescu were one of the coterie of officers he had brought to heel in
the conference room.  "With your permission, of course, sir.  And that
of your colleagues."

Antonescu laughed and stood up.  Radescu was surprised to see that the
Chief Tribune remained focused in the center of the tank as he walked
around the chair in which he had been sitting.  "Enthusiasm, Alexi,
yes, we expect that," he said.  "Well, you do your part and leave the
remainder to us.  You've done very well so far.

"But I think you realize," the older man went on with his hands clasped
on the back of a chair of off-planet pattern, "that I've stretched very
far already to give you this opportunity."  Antonescu's voice was calm,
but his face held just a hint of human concern which shrank his
nephew's soul down to infancy again.  "If matters don't--succeed,
according to your plans and the needs of the State, then there won't be
further options for you.  Not even for you, Alexi."

"I understand, Uncle," said Alexander Radescu, who understood very well
what failure at this level would require him, as an Oltenian
aristocrat, to do in expiation.  "I have no use for failures either."

As he reached for the power switch at the base of the vision tank, he
wondered who besides Hammer would be listening in on the
discussion--and what they thought of his chances of success.

The bolt was a flicker in the air, scarcely visible until it struck an
Oltenian armored car.  The steel plating burned with a clang and a
white fireball a moment before a fuel tank ruptured to add the sluggish
red flames of kerosene to the spectacle.  The vehicle had been hull
down and invisible from the ridge toward which the next assault would
be directed; but the shot had been fired from the rear, perhaps
kilometers distant.

Three men in Oltenian fatigues jumped from the body of the vehicle
while a fourth soldier screamed curses in a variety of languages and
squirmed from the driver's hatch,

cramped by the Slammer body armor which he wore.  The turrets on
several of the neighboring armored cars began to crank around hastily,
though the sniper was probably beyond range of the machine guns even
with solid shot.  There was no chance of hitting the Molt by randomly
spraying the landscape anyway; Radescu's tongue poised to pass an angry
order down when some subordinate forestalled him and the turrets
reversed again.

"Nothing to be done about that," Radescu said to the pair of men
closest to him.  He nodded in the direction of a few of the hundred or
so armored vehicles he could see from where he stood.  Had he wished
for it, satellite coverage through the hologram projector in the combat
car would have shown him thousands more.  "With a target the size of
this one, the odd sniper's going to hit something even if he's beyond
range of any possible counterfire."

A second bolt slashed along the side of an armored personnel carrier a
hundred meters from the first victim.  There was no secondary explosion
this time--in fact, because of the angle at which it struck, the power
gun might not have penetrated the vehicle's fighting compartment. Its
infantrymen boiled out anyway, many of them leaving behind the weapons
they had already stuck through gun ports in the APC's sides. Bright
sunlight glanced incongruously from their bulky infrared goggles,
passive night vision equipment which was the closest thing in the
Oltenian arsenal to the wide assortment of active and passive devices
built into the Slammers' helmets.

Thank the Lord for small favors: in the years before squabbling broke
out in open war between men and Molts, the autochthons had an
unrestricted choice of imports through off-planet traders.  They had
bought huge stocks of power guns and explosives, weapons which made an
individual warrior the bane of hundreds of his sluggish human
opponents.  Since theirs would be the decision of when and where to
engage, however, they had seen no need of equipment like the
mercenaries' helmets --equipment which expanded the conditions under
which one could fight.

"Don't bet your ass there's no chance a' counterfire," growled Profile
Bourne; and as he was speaking, the main gun of one of Hammer's tanks
blasted back in the direction from which the sniper's bolts had come.

The flash and the thump!  of air closing back along the trail blasted
through it by a twenty-centimeter power gun startled more Oltenians
than had the sniper fire itself.

General Forsch had started to walk toward Radescu from one of the
command trailers with a message he did not care to entrust either to
radio or to the lips of a subordinate.  When the tank fired, the
gangling chief of staff threw himself flat onto ground which the
barrage of two days previous had combed into dust as fine as baby
powder.  Forsch looked up with the anger of a torture victim at his
young commander.

Radescu, seeing the yellow-gray blotches on the uniform which had been
spotless until that moment, hurried over to Forsch and offered a hand
to help him rise.  Radescu had deliberately donned the same stained
battle dress he had worn during the previous assault, but he could
empathize nonetheless with how his subordinate was feeling.

"The meteorologists say there should be a period of still air' the
chief of staff muttered, snatching his hand back from Radescu's offer
of help when he saw how dirty his palms were.

"Our personnel say that it may last for only a few minutes," Forsch
continued, dusting his hands together with intense chopping motions on
which he focused his eyes.  "The--technician from the mercenaries--" he
glanced up at Hawker and Bourne, following Radescu to either side
"--says go with it."  His face twisted.  "Just "Go with it.""

The sky was the flawless ultramarine of summer twilight "Thank you,
General Forsch," Radescu said as he looked upward, his back to the
lowering sun.  Profile had been right: whether or not the tank blast
had killed the sniper, its suddenness had at least driven the Molt away
from the narrow circuit of rocks through which he had intended to
teleport and confuse counterfire.  A single twenty centimeter bolt
could shatter a boulder the size of a house, and the

consequent rain of molten glass and rock fragments would panic anyone
within a hundred meters of the impact area.

Radescu tongued the helmet's control wand up and to the left, the
priority channel that would carry his next words to every man in the
attacking force and log him into the fire control systems of the
Oltenian and mercenary gun batteries.  "Execute Phase One," he said,
three words which subsumed hundreds of computer hours and even
lengthier, though less efficient, calculations by battery commanders,
supply officers, and scores of additional human specialties.

True darkness would have been a nice bonus, but the hour or so around
twilight was the only real likelihood of still air--and that was more
important than the cloak Nature herself would draw over activities.

"All right," Alexander Radescu said, seeing General Forsch but
remembering his uncle.  The trailers of the Oltenian operations center
straggled behind Forsch because of the slope.  A trio of Stammers'
combat cars with detectors like those of the jeep guarded the trailers
against Molt infiltrators.  Hull down on the ridge one, the seventeen
tanks of Hammer's H Company waited to support the assault with direct
fire.  A company of combat cars, vulnerable (as the tanks were not) to
bolts from the autochthons' shoulder weapons, would move up as soon as
the attack was joined..

Apart from the combat car in which the commander himself would ride,
every vehicle in the actual assault would be Oltenian; but all the
drivers were Hammer's men.

Forsch saluted, turned, and walked back toward the trailers with his
spine as stiff as a ramrod.  There was an angry crackle nearby as a
three-barrelled power gun on one of the combat cars ripped a bubble of
ionization before it could become a functioning Molt.  There were more
shots audible and those only a fraction of the encounters which
distance muffled, Radescu knew.  A satchel charge detonated --with luck
when a bolt struck it, otherwise when a Molt hurled it into a vehicle
of humans whose luck had run oat.

The autochthons were stepping up their harassing

attacks, though their main effort was almost certainly reserved for
the moment that humans crowded into the killing ground of the open,
rock-floored valley.  Bolts fired from positions kilometers to either
side would enfilade the attacking vehicles, while satchel charges and
buzz bombs launched point-blank ripped even Hammer's panzers.  Human
counterfire itself would be devastating to the vehicles as confusion
and proximity caused members of the assault force to blast one another
in an attempt to hit the fleeing Molts.

It might still happen that way.

"Might best be mounting up," said Lieutenant Hawker, whose level of
concern was shown only by the pressure mottled knuckles of the hand
which gripped his submachine gun.  Bourne was snapping his head around
like a dog trying to catch flies.  He knew- the link from the combat
car to the lieutenant's helmet would beep a warning if a Molt were tele
porting to a point nearby, but he was too keyed up to accept the stress
of inaction.  "Three minutes isn't very long."

"Long enough to get your clock cleaned," the sergeant rejoined as he
turned gratefully to the heavy vehicle he would drive in this
assault.

The first shells were already screaming down on the barren valley and
the slope across it.  The salvo was time on-target: calculated so that
ideally every shell would burst simultaneously, despite being fired
from different ranges and at varying velocities.  It was a technique
generally used to increase the shock effect of the opening salvo of a
bombardment.  This time its purpose was to give the Molts as little
warning as possible between their realization of Radescu's plan and its
accomplishment.  The young general sprinted for the combat car,
remembering that its electronics would give him a view from one of the
tanks already overlooking the valley.

Colonel Hammer and his headquarters vehicles were twenty kilometers to
the rear, part of the security detachment guarding the three batteries
of rocket howitzers.  The mercenary units had been severely depleted by
providing

drivers for so many Oltenian vehicles, and a single Molt with a power
gun could wreak untold havoc among the belts of live ammunition being
fed to the hogs.

There was in any case no short-term reason that high officers should
risk themselves in what would be an enlisted man's fight.  Radescu had
positioned his own headquarters in a place of danger so that his
generals could rightfully claim a part in the victory he prayed he
would accomplish.  He was joining the assault himself because he
believed, as he had said to Hawker and Bourne when he met them, in the
value of leading from the front.

And also because he was Alexander Radescu.

There were foot pegs set into the flank of the combat car, but Hawker
used only the midmost one as a brace from which to vault into the open
fighting compartment.  The big mercenary then reached down, grasped
Radescu by the wrist rather than by the hand he had thought he was
offering, and snatched him aboard as well.  Hawker's athleticism, even
hampered by the weight and restriction of his body armor, was
phenomenal.

The detection gear which had been transferred to the combat car for
this operation took up the space in which the forward of the three
gunners would normally have stood.  The pintle-mounted tri barrels were
still in place, but they would not be used during the assault The
Slammers' submachine guns and the shotgun which the general again
carried would suffice for close-in defense without endangering other
vehicles.

The duck iridium sides of the mercenary vehicle made it usable in the
expected environment, which would have swept the jeep and any men
aboard it to instant destruction.  Radescu touched his helmet as he
settled himself in the corner of the fighting compartment opposite
Hawker firing from the combat car meant raising one's head above The
big vehicle quivered as Bourne, hidden forward in the driver's
compartment, fed more power to the idling fans.  Hawker brought up an
image of the valley over the crest, his hands brushing touch plates on
the package of additional

at any price 139

instruments even before Radescu requested it.  Very possibly the
lieutenant acted on his own hook, uninterested in Radescu's wishes pro
or con..  ..

The hologram was of necessity monochrome, in this case a deep
red-orange which fit well enough with what Radescu remembered of the
contours of rock covered by sere grass.  The shell-bursts hanging and
spreading over the terrain were the same sullen, fiery color as the
ground, however, and that was disconcerting.  It made Radescu's chest
tighten as he imagined plunging into a furnace to be consumed in his
entirety.

The tanks began to shoot across the valley with a less startling effect
than the single counter sniper blast.  These blasts were directed away
from the assault force, and they added only marginally to the ambient
sound.  The bombardment did not seem too loud to Radescu after the
baptism he had received from shells plunging down point-blank the
previous day.  The sky's constant Arum was fed by nearly a thousand gun
tubes some of them even heavier--though slower firing--than the
Slammers' howitzers, and the effect was all-pervasive even though it
had not called itself to the general's attention.

Dazzling reflections from the 200mm bohs played across even the
interior of the combat car, washing Hawker's grim smile with the
blue-green cast of death.  The bolts did not show up directly on the
display, but air heated by their passage roiled the upper reaches of
the smoke into horizontal vortices.  Across the valley the shots
hammered computer-memorized positions from which Molts had sniped in
the past.  Rock sprayed high in the release of enormous crystalline
stresses, and bubbles of heated air expanded the covering of smoke into
twisted images larger than the tanks which had caused them.

"Base to Command," said the helmet in the voice of General Forsch,
overlaid by a fifty-cycle hum which resulted from its transmission
through the mercenaries' commo system.  There were spits of static as
well, every time a tank main gun released its packet of energy across
the spectrum.  "Phase One coverage has reached planned levels."

"Terminate Phase One," said Radescu.  Across from him, Lieutenant
Hawker patted a switch and the image of the valley collapsed.  He did
not touch other controls, so presumably the detection apparatus had
been live all the time.  The smile he flashed at Radescu when he saw
the general's eyes on him was brief and preoccupied, but genuine
enough.

"Phase One terminated," Forsch crackled back almost at once.

There was no effect directly obvious to the assault force, but that was
to be expected: the flight time of shells from some of the guns
contributing to the barrage was upwards of thirty seconds.  "Prepare to
execute Phase Two," said Radescu on the command channel as clearly as
the hormones jumping in his bloodstream would permit.  Everything
around him was a fragment of a montage, each existing on a timeline
separate from the rest.

"Give 'em ten seconds more," Profile broke in on the intercom.  "Some
bastard always takes one last pull on the firing lanyard to keep from
having to unload the chamber."

"Execute Phase Two," ordered Radescu, his tongue continuing its set
course as surely as an avalanche staggers downhill, the driver's words
no more than a wisp of snow fencing overwhelmed in the rush of fixed
intent.

Whatever Bourne may have thought about the order, he executed it with a
precision smoother than any machine.  The combat car surged forward,
lagging momentarily behind the Oltenian APCs to either flank because
the traction of their tires gave them greater initial acceleration than
could the air cushion.  Seconds later, when the whole line crested the
ridge, the Slammers vehicle had pulled ahead by the half length that
Bourne thought was safest.

In the stillness that replaced the howl of shells, small arms sizzled
audibly among the grumble of diesels as soldiers responded to tele
porting Molts--or to their own nervousness.  A full charge of shot
clanged into the combat car's port side, although Hawker's instruments
showed that the gunman in the personnel carrier could not have had a
real target.

Radescu raised himself to look over the bulkhead, though the sensible
part of his mind realized that the added risk was considerable and
unnecessary.  To function in a world gone mad, a man goes mad himself:
to be ruled by a sensible appreciation of danger in a situation where
danger was both enormous and unavoidable would drive the victim into
cowering funk--counter survival in a combat zone where his own action
might be required to save him.  Bracing himself against the receiver of
the tri barrel locked in place beside him, Alexander Radescu caught a
brief glimpse of the results of his plan--before he plunged into
them.

The sweep of the broad valley the assault must cross boiled with the
contents of the thousands of smoke shells poured over it by the massed
batteries.  The brilliant white of rounds from Hammer's guns lay
flatter and could be seen still spreading, absorbing and underlying the
gray-blue chemical haze gushing from Oltenian shells.  The coverage was
not--could not be--complete, even within the two kilometer front of the
attack.  Nonetheless, its cumulative effect robbed snipers of their
targets at any distance from the vehicles.

Molts tele porting to positions readied to meet the attack found that
even on the flanking slopes where the warriors were not blanketed by
smoke, their gun sights showed featureless shades of gray instead of
Oltenian vehicles.  The wisest immediately flickered back to cover on
the reverse slope.  Younger, less perceptive autochthons began firing
into the haze--an exercise as vain as hunting birds while
blindfolded.

A pillar of crimson flame stabbed upward through the smoke as the
result of one such wild shot; but Hammer's tanks and the combat cars
joining them on the ridge combed out the frustrated Molts like burrs
from a dog's bide.  Had the snipers picked a target, fired once, and
shifted position as planned, they would have been almost invulnerable
to countermeasures.  Warriors who angrily tried to empty their guns
into an amorphous blur lasted five shots or fewer before a tank gun or
a burst of automatic fire

turned them into a surge of organic gases in' the midst of a fireball
of liquid rock.

All colors narrowed to shades of yellow as the combat car drove into
the thickening smoke and Radescu switched on the sonic vision apparatus
of his borrowed helmet.  What had been an opaque fog opened into a 60
wedge of the landscape, reaching back twenty or thirty meters.  It
would not have done for top speed running, but the visibility was more
than adequate for an assault fine rolling across open terrain at
forty

KPH.

A tree stump, ragged and waist high, coalesced from the fog as the
helmet's ultrasonic generators neared it.  Bourne edged left to avoid
it, the combat car swaying like a leaf in the breeze, while the Slammer
driving the Oltenian vehicle to the right swerved more awkwardly in the
other direction.

Alexander Radescu had been loaned a helmet from mercenary stores, but
there was no question of equipping enough local troops to drive all the
vehicles in the assault.  The alternative had been to scatter a large
proportion of the Slammers among packets of Oltenian regulars.  That
Hammer had found the alternative acceptable was praise for Radescu
which the Oltenian had only hoped to receive.

A Molt with a buzz bomb on his shoulder, ready to launch, appeared
beside the tree stump

The smoke did nothing to prevent warriors from tele porting into the
valley to attack.  The autochthons had expected a barrage of high
explosives and armor piercing rounds, which would have had some effect
but only a limited one.  This valley was the center of a theme's
territory; in a jump of a kilometer or two over ground so familiar, a
young adult could position himself on a chunk of granite no larger than
his head.

What the smoke shells did do was to prevent the autochthons from seeing
anything after they projected themselves into the fog.  Radescu cried
out, raising his shotgun.  The Molt was turned half away from them,
hunching forward, hearing the diesel engine of the nearest APC but
unable to see even that.

The combat car's acceleration and slight change of

attitude threw the Oltenian general back against the hard angles of
the gun mount beside him.  Bourne had brought up power and changed fan
aspect in a pair of perfectly matched curves which showed just how
relatively abruptly an air cushion vehicle could accelerate on a
downslope, when gravity was on its side and the rolling friction of
wheels slowed the conventional vehicles to either flank.

The Molt must have heard the rush of air at the last, because he
whirled like a dancer toward the combat car with a look of utter horror
as the bow slope rushed down on him.  Radescu fired past the car's
forward tri barrel his shot missing high and to the left, as the
autochthon loosed his shoulder-launched missile at the vehicle.

The buzz bomb struck the combat car beside the driver's hatch and
sprang skyward, its rocket motor a hot spot in the smoke to infrared
goggles and a ghostly pattern of vortices in the Slammers' ultrasound. 
The combat car, which weighed thirty-two tonnes, quivered only minutely
as it spread the Molt between the ground and the steel skirt of the
plenum chamber.

There was a violent outbreak of firing from the vehicles just behind
the combat car.  Passive infrared was useless for a driver because
terrain obstacles did not radiate enough heat to bring them out against
the ambient background.  For soldiers whose only duty was to cut down
Molts before the warriors could find targets of their own in the smoke,
passive infrared was perfect.

The gunners in the armored car turrets and the infantrymen huddled
behind vision blocks in the sides of their armored personnel carriers
could see nothing--until Molt warriors tele ported into the valley.

The autochthons' body temperature made them stand out like flares
blazing in a sea of neutral gray.  The automatic fire of the turret
guns was not very accurate; but the ranges were short, the shot-cones
deadly, and there were over fifteen thousand twitching trigger fingers
packed into a constricted area.  Warriors shimmered out of the smoke,
hesitated in their unexpected blindness, and were swept away in bloody
tatters by the rattling crossfire.

Charges of miniature airfoils sang from one vehicle to another,
scarring the light armor and chipping away paint like a desultory
sandblasting.  The projectiles could not seriously harm the vehicles,
however, and the armor was sufficient to preserve the crews and
infantry complements as well.

The Molt Profile had just driven over was a wide blotch to the goggles
of the Oltenians in the flanking APCs.  Their guns stormed from either
side, stirring the slick warmth and ricocheting from the rocky
ground.

Lieutenant Hawker touched Radescu with his left hand, the one which did
not hold the submachine gun.  The combat car yawed as Profile braked it
from the murderous rush he had just achieved, but the veteran
lieutenant held steady without need to cling to a support as the
Oltenian did.

"Arming distance," Hawker said over the intercom now that he had
Radescu's attention.  "The buzz bomb didn't go off because it was fired
too close in.  It's a safety so you don't blow yourself up that's all.
Profile wasn't taking any risks."

"Yee-Aa!"  shouted the driver, clearly audible over the wind rush

Alexander Radescu was later surprised at how little he remembered of
the assault--and that in flashes as brief and abrupt as the power gun
bolt that lanced past him from behind, close enough to heat the left
earpiece of his commo helmet before it sprayed dirt from the ground
rising in front of the combat car.  Bypassed sniper or mercenary gunner
forgetting his orders not to fire into the smoke?  No way to tell and
no matter: all fire is hostile fire when it snaps by your head.

The slope that was their objective on the other side of the valley had
been shrouded as thickly as the rest of the ground which the assault
needed to cross.  The hogs had kicked in final salvoes of firecracker
rounds to catch Molts who thought the fog protected them.  That
explosive whisking, added to the greater time that the curtain had been
in place, meant that the smoke had begun to part and thin here where
the ground rose.

A crag, faceted like the bow of a great sea vessel,

appeared so abruptly in Radescu's vision that the Oltenian
instinctively flipped up his face shield The wedge of granite bad a
definite purple cast noticeable through the smoke of sun-infused white
and gray streaming slowly down into the valley basin, heavier than the
air it displaced.

It had been inevitable that the assault lines would straggle.  Perhaps
it was inevitable also that Profile Bourne would use his experience
with his vehicle and its better power-to-weight ratio to race to the
objective alone--despite dear orders, from Hawker as well as Radescu,
to keep it reined in.  There was no other vehicle close to them as the
sergeant climbed to the left of the slab with his fans howling out
maximum thrust and the ionization detector began flashing its violet
and yellow warning, visible as the rock was through a thin neutral
mask.

Alexander Radescu looked up and to the right, guided by instinct in the
direction that the electronic tocsin was causing Hawker to turn with
his submachine gun.  The air solidified into a Molt with scales of as
rich a color as the rock he stood on--spitting distance from the car
laboring uphill, an easy cast for a satchel charge or a burst of fire
into the open-topped compartment.

The Molt did not carry a weapon, and his right horn was twisted.

"No\" Radescu shouted, forgetting his intercom link as he lunged across
the fighting compartment to grasp his companion's gun.  His fingers
locked at the juncture of the barrel and receiver, cold indium and
plastic which insulated too well to have any temperature apart from
that which the general's hand gave the outer layer of molecules.  "Not
tills one!"

"Steady," said Enzo Hawker, bracing the Oltenian with the free hand
which could have plucked the man away, just as Radescu's slight body
would have been no sufficient hindrance had the gunner wished to carry
through and fire at the Molt.  "Watch your side of the car."

The broad ravine into which Bourne plunged them was a water cut ramp to
the crest.  It held smoke dense enough to be instantly blinding.  The
autochthon had already

disappeared, tele porting away with a smile which was probably an
accident of physiognomy.

"I'm sorry, I--" Radescu said as he straightened, remembering this time
to use his intercom.  Hawker was as solid as the indium bulkheads
themselves, while the generals own mind leaped with fear and
embarrassment and a sense of victory which intellectually he knew he
had not yet won.  "Shouldn't have touched you, Lieutenant, I was--" He
raised his eyes to meet the other man's and saw nothing, even a hand's
length apart, because the mercenary's face shield was a perfect mirror
from the outside.  "I didn't think."

"Just steady," Hawker said quietly.  "You've been thinking fine."

Shells were hitting the ground, a considerable distance away but
heavily enough that pebbles slid in miniature avalanches as the ravine
walls quivered.  As soon as the vehicles rolled into the valley, the
artillery had shifted its points of aim to rocky areas within a few
kilometers of the target of the assault.

These would be staging points for the Molt refugees, the females and
the prepubescent males driven from what should have been the inviolable
core of the theme holdings.  They could stay ahead of human pursuit and
would in a matter of a few hops scatter beyond the area which shells
could saturate.  But since the starting point was known, there was a
finite number of initial landing areas available to the Molt
noncombatants.  Those were the targets for as many fragmentation and
high-explosive rounds as the army could pump out.

Alexander Radescu had his own reasons, eminently logical ones, to want
peace.  He had to give the autochthons a reason whose logic the most
high-spirited, glory-longing warrior would accept as overwhelming.

Dead comrades would not achieve that alone: a warrior could not accept
the chance of dying as a sufficient reason to modify his actions, any
more than could a mercenary soldier like Hawker, like Bourne in the
forward hatch.  Maimed females and children howling as they tried to
stuff

intestines back into their body cavities were necessary, as surely as
the Molt in the ballroom of the Tribunal Palace in Belvedere had been,
stooping behind the weight of his power gun--every shot turning a gay
costume into burning, bloody rags.

"It's not worth it," the young general said, sickened by the coolness
with which he had deliberated slaughter.

Only when Hawker said, "Hey?"  did the Oltenian realize he had spoken
not only aloud but loudly.  He shrugged to the mercenary and their
vehicle, sideslipping down the reverse slope, would have put an end to
the conversation even had Radescu wished to continue it.

The smoke blanket here was tattered into no more than a memory of what
the assault force had first driven into, though it--like a sheet of
glass viewed endwise--was still opaque to a sniper trying to draw a
bead any distance through it.  There was a body sprawled forty meters
from the combat car, an adult male killed by one of the shrapnel rounds
which interspersed the smoke shells covering the ridge.

"Red two-ninety!"  cried Lieutenant Hawker, "Radescul Red two seventy!"
and the general whirled to fire over the bulkhead at the Molt appearing
almost beside the combat car, too close for Hawker himself to shoot.

The muzzle blast of the shotgun was a surprise, but this time the
properly shouldered stock thrust and did not slam the young general.
Neither did the charge hit the autochthon, a male with a power gun
though a bush a meter from him was stripped in a sharp-edged scallop.

The Molt threw his arms up and ran as the car sailed past him.  Radescu
fired again, missing even worse because he had not figured the
vehicle's speed into his attempt to lead the runner; and as the Slammer
lieutenant aimed over the back deck, the autochthon dissolved away in a
further teleport.  Only then did Radescu realize that the Molt had not
only been too frightened to shoot, he had dropped his power gun as he
fled.

The cave entrance for which Bourne steered was much larger than the one
they had captured on the other side of

the ridge--larger, in fact, than anything of the sort which Radescu
had previously seen.  The size was accentuated by the hasty attempts
the Molts had made to build a physical barrier across the huge,
pillared archway.  There was a layer of stones ranging from head-sized
down to pebbles in the entrance, the foundation course of a crude wall.
Around the stones were more bodies, half a dozen of them--probably
adult males, but too close to the epicenter of the firecracker round
that burst overhead for the bomblets to have left enough of the corpses
for certain identification.

A puff of breeze opened a rent in the smoke through which the evening
sky streamed like a comet's violet hair.

"Hang on," said the sergeant on the intercom.  He had driven past the
archway and now, as he spoke, spun the combat car on its axis to
approach from the downhill side.

Radescu, clinging to the gun mount awkwardly because of the personal
weapon in his hand, cried, "There's a barrier there,
Sergeant--rocks!"

"Hang the cop on!"  Bourne replied gleefully, and the combat car,
brought to the end of the tether of its downhill inertia, accelerated
toward the entrance at a rate that sailed it over the pitiable stones
through which a less ebullient driver would have plowed.

There was light in the cavernous chamber beyond, a portable area lamp
of Oltenian manufacture, held up at arm's length by a Molt with a
twisted horn.

As cool as he had been when he prepared to execute his own command
group within minutes of meeting them, General Radescu said, "Neither of
you shoot," on the intercom.  Then, tonguing the command channel though
he was not sure of signal propagation from inside the crystalline rock,
he added, "Command to all units.  Phase Two is complete.  Terminate all
offensive activity, shoot only in self defense."

Bourne had not expected to halt immediately within the entrance, nor
had the general specifically ordered him to do so.  The sergeant would
not have been condemned for murder, however, if he had felt the need to
wait for orders before he took action he considered sensible.  Now

he used the steel skirts of the plenum chamber as physical brakes
against the floor of polished rock, screeching and sparking in an
orange-white storm instead of depending on the thrust of the fans to
halt the heavy vehicle.  The dazzling afterimages of saturated blue
seemed for a moment brighter than the lamp which the autochthon had
continued to hold steady while the car slewed around him in a
semicircle.

When the skirts rested solidly on the pavement, Radescu realized that
the ground itself was not firm.  Earth shocks from the distant impact
zones made dust motes dance around the globe of light, and the bulkhead
quivered as Radescu dismounted.

Lag time, General Radescu hoped as he stepped toward the wizened Molt,
shells fired before his order to desist.  Behind him, the combat car
pinged and sizzled as metal found a new stasis.  There was also the
clicking sound of Lieutenant Hawker releasing the transport lock of a
tri barrel freeing the weapon for immediate use.

"I hope you're here to talk of peace," said the Oltenian, reaching out
to take the lamp which seemed too heavy for the frail autochthon.

"No," said Ferad who relinquished the lamp willingly, though he would
have held it as long as need required-the way he had supported the
power gun until he had emptied the magazine.  "I am here this time to
make peace."

The placid landscape had a slightly gritty texture, but Alexander
Radescu was not sure whether that was a real residue from the smoke
shells or if it was just another result of his own tiredness.

Losing would have taken just as much effort as the triumph he had in
fact achieved.

Lieutenant Hawker murmured a reply to his commo helmet, then leaned
toward Radescu and whispered, "Seven minutes."

The Oltenian general nodded, then turned to Forsch and the divisional
generals assembled behind him, each with a small contingent of troops
in dress uniforms.  "The Tribunes

are expected to arrive in seven minutes," Radescu called, loudly
enough for even the enlisted men to hear him.

Radescu had gone to some lengths to give this event the look of a
review, not an occupation.  Weapons had been inspected for external
gloss.  Dress uniforms--blue with orange piping for the other ranks,
scarlet for officers through field grade, and pearl with gold for the
generals-would not remind the watching autochthons of the smoke
shrouded, shot-rippling assault by which the Oltenian Army had entered
a theme stronghold.

The Molts would not forget, the survivors watching from distant hills
with the representatives of the other themes.  There was no need to rub
their broad noses in it, that was all.

"General Radescu," said a voice.  "Sir?"

Radescu turned, surprised but so much a man living on his nerves that
no event seemed significantly more probable than did any other.  "Yes?"
he said.  "General Forsch?"

Profile Bourne watched the chief of staff with the expression of
disdain and despair which had summed up his attitude toward all the
local forces--until the Oltenian line had made the assault beside him.
Even those men were poofs again when they donned their carnival
uniforms.

The sergeant's hands were linked on his breastplate, but that put them
adequately near to his slung submachine gun.  The reason the two
Slammers had given for continuing to guard Radescu was a valid one: a
single disaffected Molt could destroy all chances of peace by publicly
assassinating Alexander Radescu.  The general had not been impelled to
ask whether or not that was the real reason.

Forsch was nervous, looking back at the divisional generals two paces
behind him for support.  lorga nodded to him with tight-lipped
enthusiasm.

"Sir," the lanky chief of staff continued, though he seemed to be
examining his expression in the mirrors of Radescu's gilded boots,
"I--we want to say that .. ."

The hills whispered with the rush of an oncoming aircraft.  That, and
perhaps the sculptured placidity of Radescu's face, brought Forsch back
to full functioning.

"You may have sensed," he said, meeting his commander's eyes, "a
certain hostility when you announced your appointment to us."

"I surprised you, of course," Radescu murmured to make Forsch easier
about whatever he intended to say.  The great cargo plane commandeered
to bring the Tribunes to sign the accords was visible a kilometer away,
its wing rotors already beginning to tilt into hover mode for the
set-down.  "All of you performed to the highest expectations of the
State."

"Yes," the chief of staff said, less agreement than an acceptance of
the gesture which Radescu had made.  "Well.  In any case, sir--and I
speak for all of us--" more nods from the officers behind him "--we
were wrong.  You were the man to lead us.  And we'll follow you, the
whole army will follow you, wherever you choose to lead us if the peace
talks break down."

Lord and his martyrs, thought Alexander Radescu, surveying the faces of
men up to twice his age, they really would.  They would follow him
because he had gotten something done, even though some of the generals
must have realized by now that he'd have shot them out of hand if they
stood in the way of his intent.  Lord and martyrs!

"I--" Radescu began; then he reached out and took Forsch's right hand
in his and laid the other on the tall officer's shoulder.
"General--men--the peace talks won't fail."  It was hard to view the
quick negotiations between Ferad and himself as anything so formal that
they could have been 'broken off," but it was the same implicit
dependence on bureaucratic niceties which had turned the war into a
morass on the human side.  "But I appreciate your words as, as much as
I appreciated the skill and courage, the great courage, the whole army
displayed in making this moment possible."

The Molts' problem had been the reverse of the self inflicted wound
from which the Oltenian Army had bled.  The autochthons were too
independent ever to deal the crushing blows that their ability to
concentrate suddenly would have permitted them.  Each side slashed at
one

another but struggled with itself, too ineffective either to win or to
cease.  And the same solution would extricate both from the bloody
swamp: leaders who could see a way clear and who were willing to drive
all before them.

"She's coming in," said Profile Bourne, not himself part of the
formalities but willing to remind those who were of their duties.
General Forsch wrung his superior's hand and slipped back to his place
a pace to the rear, while the aircraft settled with a whining roar that
echoed between the hills.

Debris and bodies had been cleared from the broad archway, and for the
occasion the flagstone pavement had even been polished by a crew which
ordinarily cared for the living quarters of general officers.  Radescu
had toyed only briefly with the thought of re sodding the shell-scars
and wheel tracks.  The valley's rocky barrenness was the reason it had
become a Molt center, and nothing the human attack had done changed its
appearance significantly.  It was perhaps well to remind the Tribunate
that this was not merely a human event, that the autochthons watching
from vantage points kilometers distant were a part of it and of the
system the treaty would put into effect for the remainder of the
planet's history.

The aircraft's turbines thrummed in a rapidly-descending rhythm when
the two struts flexed and rose again as the wheels accepted the load.
Dust billowed from among the russet grass blades bringing General
Radescu a flashback of a hillside descending in a welter of Molt bodies
as the penetrators lifted it from within.  He had been so frightened
during that bombardment..  ..

The rear hatchway of the big cargo plane was levering itself down into
an exit ramp.  "Attention!"  Radescu called, hearing his order repeated
down the brief ranks as he himself braced.  Most of the army was
encamped five kilometers away in a location through which the troops
had staged to the final assault.  There they nervously awaited the
outcome of this ceremony, reassured more by the sections of Hammer's
men with detection gear scattered among them than they were by
Radescu's promises as he rode off.

He'd done that much, at least, built trust between the indigenous and
mercenary portions of his army on the way to doing the same between the
intelligent species which shared the planet.  It occurred to Alexander
Radescu as he watched a pair of light trucks drive down the ramp, the
first one draped with bunting for the ceremony, that wars could not be
won: they could only be ended without having been lost.  The skirmishes
his troops had won were important for the way they conduced to the ends
of peace.

The chairs draped in cloth-of-gold made an imposing enough background
for the Tribunes, but no one seemed to have calculated what uneven
ground and the trucks high center of gravity would do to men attempting
to sit on such chairs formally.  Radescu suppressed a smile,
remembering the way he had jounced on the back of the jeep.

That experience and others of recent days did not prevent him from
being able to don a dress uniform and the makeup which had always been
part of the persona he showed the world; but a week of blood and terror
had won him certain pieces of self-knowledge which were, in their way,
as important to him a?  anything he had accomplished in a military
sense.

The driver of the lead truck tried to make a sweeping turn in order to
bring the rear of his vehicle level with the red carpet which had been
cut in sections from the flooring of the living trailers of high
officers.  An overly abrupt steering correction brought an audible
curse from one of the men in the back of the vehicle, men who looked
amazingly frail to Alexander Radescu after a week of troops in battle
dress

Hawker and Bourne had kept a settled silence thus far during the
makeshift procession until the six guards in scarlet--none of them were
below the rank of major-jumped from the second truck to help the
Tribunes down the steps welded to the back of the first.  At the Honor
Guards' appearance, Enzo Hawker snorted audibly and Radescu felt an
impulse to echo the Slammer's disdain.

And yet those men were very similar to Radescu himself in background;
not quite so well connected, but officers

of the Tribunal Honor Guard for the same reason that Alexander Radescu
was a general.  That he was a man who could lead an army while they,
with their rhodium-plated pistols, could not have guarded a school
crossing, was an individual matter.

Grigor Antonescu, First among Equals, wore a pure white robe of office,
while the collars of his two companions were black.  Radescu saluted.

Instead of returning the formality the Chief Tribune took his nephew's
hand in his own and raised it high in a gesture of triumph and
acclamation.  "Well done, my boy," the older man said loudly.  "Well
done."

More surprised by his uncle's open praise than he was by the brief
scowls with which the other members of the Tribunate, Wraslov and
Delhi, responded to it, the young general said, "Ah, Excellency, we all
had confidence in the abilities of our men."  Nodding to the side,
toward the still faced Bourne, he added in afterthought, "And in our
allies, of course, in Colonel Hammer."

The presence of the troops braced to attention behind him vibrated in
Radescu's mind like a taut bowstring.  "Excellencies," he said, guiding
down his uncle's hand and releasing it, "the actual meeting will be
within the, the cavern, actually a tunnel complex as extensive as any
Molt artifact on the planet, as it chances.  The antechamber seemed a
particularly suitable location for the signing since it--reminds the
representatives of other themes that our troops are here without Molt
sufferance."

Chief Tribune Antonescu patted at the front of his robe, frowning
minutely when he realized that the marks he left in the fine dust were
more disfiguring than the smooth layer which the ride from the plane
had deposited over him.  "The Molts are inside then, already?"  he
asked in a voice which, like his static face, gave away nothing save
the fact that something was hidden.

"No, Excellency," said Radescu, finding that his slight, ingenuous
smile had become a mask which he knew he must maintain, "they're--in
sight, I suppose, the representatives."

He gestured with his spread fingers toward a few of the crags where,
if he had squinted, he might have been able to see male autochthons
waiting as the Oltenian Army waited in camp.  "The young and females
whom we captured are still at the lower levels within, under parole so
to speak, those who might be able to teleport away now that we've
stopped shelling."

For a moment, the general lost control of the smile he had been keeping
neutral, and the Tribunes were shocked by the face of a man who
recalled tumbled bodies and who now grinned that he might not weep.
"But the theme elders who'll be signing--they'll arrive in the chamber
when we set off a smote grenade to summon them."  The grin flashed back
like a spring-knife.  "Red smoke, not gray."

The pair of mercenaries, near enough to overhear, smiled as well but
the reference escaped the newcomers who had not been part of the
assault.

"Then let's go within," said Antonescu, "and we won't have the Molts
present until you and I--until we all--" taking his nephew's hand
again, the Chief Tribune began to walk along the carefully-laid
carpet"--have had a chance to discuss this among ourselves."

Radescu raised an eyebrow as he stepped into line beside his uncle, but
the facial gesture was a restrained one, even slighter than necessary
to avoid cracking his makeup.  Antonescu, a master both of restraint
and interpretation of minute signals, said, "Only for a moment,
Alert."

"I was afraid for a moment," the general said in a carefully modulated
voice as he walked along, "a symptom of my youthful arrogance, I'm
afraid--" echoing in nervousness his uncle's words and his own "--that
you didn't realize that the agreement stands or falls as a piece--that
it can't be modified."

He thought as he spoke that he was being overly blunt with the man who
was both his protector and a necessary part of final success, but
Tribune Antonescu only replied, "Yes, we were in no doubt of that, my
boy.  Not from the first."

The six Honor Guards fell in behind the Tribunes in what Radescu found
himself thinking of as courtly, not military, precision.  The two
mercenaries drifted along to either side of the procession.  The
general risked a glance around to see that while Hawker walked to the
left and eyed the head of the valley with its smatterings of
autochthons, many of them picked out by iridium highlights, Profile
Bourne glowered at the gaily-caparisoned troops on review to the
right.

Radescu had heard the Slammers discussing whether or not they should
wear dress uniforms of their own.  He agreed with their final
assessment: tailored khakis would only accentuate the scarred
functionality of the helmets and body armor they would wear
regardless.

"The whole army," Radescu said, hoping to direct his uncle's attention
to the troops who had sweated as hard for this display as they had in
preparation for the assault, "performed in a way to honor the State."

Surely, as the plane circled to land, the Tribunes had seen the
burned-out vehicles Uttering the course of the assault-particularly
near the crest of this ridge, up whose gentle reverse slope the
entourage now walked.  Radescu's plan had made the attack possible and
a success: nothing could have made it easy.  The general's eyes
prickled with emotion as he thought of these men and their comrades
plunging into darkness to meet their terrifyingly agile opponents.

"As written," muttered the Tribune, Defiu, who walked behind Radescu,
"this treaty permits the Molts to import anything they want without
State control--specifically including weapons.  Hard to imagine anyone
but the most arrant traitor suggesting that the Molts should be allowed
power guns after the way they used one in Belvedere last month."

"Not the place for that, Mikhail," Antonescu said over his shoulder,
the very flatness of his remark more damning than an undertone of
anger.

Radescu did not miss a step as he paced along in front of men picked
not for their smartness on review but because of the way each had
distinguished himself in the assault which made this ceremony possible.
His mind, however,

checked into another mode at the paired statements which were neither
a question nor an answer--yet were both.

Aloud, drowning the other voices in his mind, the general said, "Quite
apart from the question of whether Ferad would have agreed to it,
Excellency, the prohibition would have been useless--and the past few
days have made me extremely intolerant of pointless behavior."

"I didn't care to discuss such matters here where the Molts may be
listening through directional microphones," said Antonescu in a louder
voice as he passed Captain Elejash and the platoon which had made the
preliminary assault.

"Since I've told the leader of the Molts precisely what I'm going to
tell you," Alexander Radescu continued with a cool hauteur which he was
too fiercely angry to disguise, "you need not be concerned on that
score.  Oltenia has no effective means of preventing off-planet
merchants from dealing directly with the Molts--even now, in the middle
of open warfare.  Since they, the theme elders as surely as the young
bucks, couldn't feel secure in peace without the sort of equipment
renewed fighting would require, then I saw no reason to make them even
more insecure by pretending to embargo it."

Now at midday the threshold of the autochthons' cave complex was bathed
in light, but that only emphasized the wall of darkness just within.
The high-vaulted antechamber was ancient enough to be set with sconces
for rush lights though the battery-powered floods now secured in them
to wash the ceiling were of an efficiency equal to anything On the
planet.  There was no need to match the brilliance outdoors, however,
so it was only as their eyes adapted that the men took in the rich,
vaguely-purple ambience which white light stroked from polished
granite.

The table in the center of the room was of thin, stamped metal which
the cloth drapery did little to disguise.  Ferad had offered a lustrous
pelt of an autochthonal herbivore, but on reflection it had seemed to
both that the feathery scales would prove an impossible surface on
which to sign the treaty.

"We couldn't be more pleased with the way you broke the Molts in so
short a time, my boy," said Grigor Antonescu as the rock enclosed the
party.  There were three semicircular doorways spaced about the inner
face of the antechamber, barricaded now--not in a misguided attempt to
keep the Molts hostage further within the cave system, but simply to
prevent Oltenian soldiers from wandering into places where they might
cause problems.  "But there are some matters of judgment in which you
are, in all deference to your abilities, too young to make the
decisions."

He spoke, thought Alexander Radescu, as if the sharp exchange in the
sunlight had not occurred.  Delhi's interference was not to be allowed
to affect the calm tenor of the tutorial the Chief Tribune had prepared
to give his nephew.

Avoiding the real meat of the opening statement, Radescu replied, "I
won a couple skirmishes against an unprepared enemy, Uncle.  Scarcely a
matter of breaking the Molts, or even the one theme primarily
involved."

"There were sizable contingents from all across Oltenia," put in the
eldest of the Tribunes, Constantin Wraslov, who even in Radescu's
earliest recollection had looked too skeletal to be long for the world.
His tone lacked the deliberate venom of Delhi's, but it had the
querulousness common to even the most neutral of Wraslov's
pronouncements.  "We've seen the report on the examination of the
corpses after the battle."

Radescu looked at the Tribune, surprised at the dispassion with which
his mind pictured the old man as one of the victims being examined by
the Intelligence Section: the body pulped by a sheet of rock giving way
on top of it ... flayed by micro shrapnel from a dozen nearby bomblets
.. . halved by a point-blank, chest-high burst from an armored car's
gun..  .. "Yes," the general said with the dynamic calm of a fine blade
flexing under the pressure of a thrust, "all the themes had
representatives here.  That made it possible for Ferad to inflate what
was really a minor occurrence into enough of an event to panic the
other themes into making peace.  Ferad himself knows better-as, of
course, do I."

"The infants are their weak point," said Tribune Delhi, adding with a
grudging approval, "and you fingered that well enough, boy, I grant
you."  There was no affection in the look he gave Radescu, however, and
when the gilt brim of the general 's hat threw a band of light across
Deliu's eyes, the Tribunes glare could have been that of a furious
boar.

"Yes, you've shown us how to exterminate the autochthons," Wraslov
agreed gleefully, rubbing his hands and looking around the big chamber
with the enthusiasm of an archeologist who had just penetrated a tomb.
"Before, we tried to clear areas so that they couldn't attack us, you
know, because it seemed they could always escape."

From where he stood, Radescu could not see the aged Tribune's face. The
Honor Guard had aligned itself as a short chord across the portion of
the carving wall toward which Wraslov was turned.  The worried looks
that flashed across the bland expressions of the six red-clad officers
were a suggestion of what those men thought they saw in the Tribune's
eyes.

"Excellencies, we can't .. ."  Radescu began, breaking off when he
realized that he didn't know where to take the words from there.  His
body felt so dissociated from his mind that his knees started to
tremble and he was not sure that he could continue to stand up.

He was not alone in feeling the tension in the chamber.  Chief Tribune
Antonescu, for all his outward calm, had an inner heat which might have
been no more than a well bred distaste for the scene which he saw
developing.

In fact, the only men in the antechamber who did seem relaxed were the
two Slammers, and theirs was the calm of soldiers carrying out a
familiar task.  Hawker and Bourne had their backs to the stone to one
side of the entranceway, too close together for a Molt to attempt to
teleport between them but still giving their gun hands adequate
clearance.  They scanned the room, their face shields transparent but
already locked in place in case the lights went out and vision aids
were required.

Hawker's hands were still.  Profile Bourne rubbed the

grip of his submachine gun, not with his fingers but with the palm of
his right hand.  The orange dragon caressed the plastic in a fashion
that gave Radescu a thrill of erotic horror before he snatched his eyes
away.

His uncle had not pressed when a sense of the futility of words had
choked the young general's first attempt at argument.  Antonescu still
waited with a placid exterior and a core of disdain for the emotional
diatribe which he expected to hear.  Wraslov was lost in his
contemplation of corpses, past and future; but Tribune Deliu was
watching the general with a grin of pleasant anticipation.

He would not, thought Alexander Radescu, embarrass Uncle Grigor and
give that stupid animal Deliu a moment of triumph.  For some reason,
that seemed more important than the fact that the plan he'd expected to
weld together the races of Oltenia had just disintegrated like a sand
castle in the surf.  Perhaps it was because he had control over
himself; and now, as he tumbled from his pinnacle of arrogant
certainty, he realized that he had no control over anything else after
all.

"The arguments against exterminating the Molts," Radescu said in the
tone of cool disinterest with which he would have enumerated to a
friend the failings of an ex lover, "the negative arguments that is--"
He paused and raised an eyebrow in question.  "Since I presume the
positive argument of Oltenia leading the galaxy through its combination
of human and autochthonal talents has already been discounted?  Yes?"

"We don't need to hear your arguments," rasped Deliu, "since we've
already decided on the basis of common sense."

"Thought is a beneficial process for human beings, Excellence," said
Radescu in a voice as clear and hard as diamond wind chimes  "You
should try it yourself on occasion."

One of the Honor Guards ten meters across the chamber gasped, but Chief
Tribune Antonescu waved the underling to panicked silence without even
bothering to look at the man.  "Deliu," said the Chief Tribune, "I
promised my

nephew a discussion, and that he shall have.  His merits to the State
alone have earned him that."

Antonescu's careful terminology and the edge in his voice were
extraordinarily blunt reminders of the difference in the current
government between Tribunes and the Chief Tribune.  He nodded toward
the general.  "Alexi," he prompted.

Which left the real situation exactly where Radescu had feared it was,
the dream of Man/ Molt partnership dissolved in a welter of blood, but
there is a pleasure to small triumphs in the midst of disaster.  Was
this happening to Ferad among his fellows as well .. . ?

Aloud, Radescu continued, "If we could destroy every nursery chamber,
and if every infant Mote were within such a chamber, neither of which
statements is true--" he did not bother to emphasize his disclaimer,
knowing that rhetorical tricks would lessen at least in his own mind
the icy purity of what he was saying "--then it would still be two,
more realistically, three decades, before the operation would by itself
deplete the ranks of effective Mote warriors.  Prepubescents, even
adolescents with a range of a few kays per hop, have been met on the
battlefield) only in cases like this one where we have gone to them."
"Yes, yes," said Tribune Wraslov, turning to nod at Radescu.  The young
general felt as if he stood at the shimmering interface between reality
and expectation.  On the side that was reality, the skeletal tribune
agreed with what Radescu had said and gave his thin equivalent of a
smile.  But surely his assumption that Wraslov was being sarcastic must
be correct?  It was obvious that everything Radescu had said was a
bitter attack on what the Tribunate seemed to have decided.

"And what conclusions do you draw from your analysis, Alexi?"  asked
Grigor Antonescu, very much the pleased uncle .. . though he beamed,
like a moon, coolly.

"That at best, Uncle, we're talking about another generation of war,"
Radescu replied, walking toward the chintz-covered table because his
legs worked normally again and he needed the opportunity to try them
out.  The

whole conversation had the feel of something he might have overheard
twenty years before--two aristocrats talking about a planned marriage
of peripheral interest to both their households.  It couldn't be a
discussion which would determine the future of Oltenia for the
foreseeable future!

And he, Alexander Radescu, wasn't really talking part in it.  He could
not have shut down his emotions so thoroughly and be proceeding
dispassionately in his mind to end game, not if it were Alexi and Uncle
Grigor talking here in a Molt cavern..  ..

"Another generation of ballrooms filled with bodies," Radescu continued
as his index finger traced the chintz into hills and valleys like those
outside, baptized already in blood.

"We've destroyed those urns, of course," snapped Tribune Delhi to the
generals back.

"Buildings collapsing because the foundations were on bedrock and a
Molt flitted in to set a bomb there," Radescu said calmly to the table.
"There We been a few of those already and there'll be more."

His copy of the treaty document, hand-lettered on parchment, crinkled
in his breast pocket when he straightened.  Ferad would bring the other
copy himself, on archival-quality paper imported from Earth--and how
long would the Molt leader wait for the red smoke before he realized
that there would be no peace after all, not in his lifetime or the
lifetime of anyone now on the planet..  . ?

"Yes, but we'll be killing many of them, very many " said Tribune
Wraslov, whose eyes had a glazed appearance that removed him as far
from the present as Radescu felt he himself had been removed.  The two
of them were only reflections, their lips moving without stirring
anything around them.  Only Chief Tribune Antonescu was real..  ..

"A generation of men walking the streets of Belvedere, of every city
and village on Oltenia," the general continued because he could not
stop without having made every possible effort to prevent what would
otherwise occur, "who have been trained to shoot infants--"

"Shoot Molts," Deliu interrupted.

"Shoot infants as harmless and helpless as anything human they're
going to find when they go home on leave," Radescu said, feeling his
voice tremble as his control began to break.  Something terrible would
happen if he ever lost control.  "That's what we'll have if the war
goes on!"

"We will have a Tribunate with complete control of the State," said
Chief Tribune Antonescu in a voice that penetrated the ears of every
listener like a sword blade being slammed home in its sheath.  "That's
what we'll continue to have for so long as the war goes on."

The six men of the Honor Guard were tense ciphers at the curving wall,
nervously watching State policy being made in a scene like an argument
over cards.  But men were men when personal emotions ran high, thought
Alexander Radescu, and nothing could have been more personal than what
he had just been told.

How naive of him to assume that Uncle Grigor would divorce personal
benefit from matters of State.  A political appointee like General
Radescu should have known better.

The Chief Tribune walked over to his nephew and put a hand on his
shoulder.  He no longer towered over little Alexi; they were eye to eye
with any difference in height to the younger man.... "Do you understand
what I'm telling you, my boy?"  he asked with the real warmth which
almost none of-his closest associates had heard in Antonescu's voice.
"Surely you understand?"

"I understand that it's wrong," said the general.  Loudly, almost
shouting as he pulled away from the Chief Tribune, he added, "I
understand that it's evil, Uncle Grigor!"

"Then understand this" roared Antonescu, who had not raised his voice
when informed of his son's suicide thirty years before.  "You have the
authority we choose to give you.  To carry out decisions of the
Tribunate--and no more!"

"Yes, yes," murmured Wraslov, and Deliu blinked avid, swine-bright eyes
beside him.

"You will summon the Molt leader, as planned," the Chief Tribune said
in frigid certainty.  "We will stand to the side, so that the Molts can
be killed as they appear.  These mercenaries are capable of that, I
presume?"

"Oh yes," General Radescu said with a nonchalance born of a question
with an easy answer in the midst of so much that had no answer at all
that he cared to accept.  It was only after he spoke that he even
bothered to look at Bourne and Hawker, gray figures who could so easily
be dismissed as age tattered statues... until the sergeant gave Radescu
a wink almost veiled beneath the highlights on his race shield.

1 think we'd best leave it to the professionals, then," the Chief
Tribune said, dismissing with a nod the motions the hands of the Honor
Guard were making toward their gleaming, black-finished pistol
holsters.

"Yes, of course" the general agreed, as his mind superimposed every
image of Ferad that it held in memory--and one image more, the wizened
Molt staggering backwards with his chest shot away and the treaty
ablaze in his hand.

Antonescu was walking toward the great archway with his nephew, though
of course he could not leave the antechamber without warning the Molts
of what was prepared.  The other Tribunes were drifting for safety
toward the young officers of the Honor Guard, out of the one of fire
through autochthons appearing beside the flimsy table.  "The trouble
with you, my boy," said tie Chief Tribune, laying his hand again on his
nephew's shoulder, "is that you're very clever, but you're young--and
you don't understand the use of power."

"Sir?"  said General Forsch, waiting just outside in the sunshine.
Beside him was Captain Elejash, looking uncomfortable in his scarlet
uniform and holding the smoke grenade in big, capable hands.

Radescu shook his head sharply, then turned to look at his uncle and
the plea in the older man's eyes that his protege^ accept reality
without an unpleasant scene.

"Don't 1 understand power, Uncle Grigor?"  the general said, raising
his right hand to his brow.  "Well, perhaps you're right" The only
thing his eyes could see as he looked back into the antechamber was the
gape of the dragon that Bourne's palm stroked across the grip of his
weapon.

Alexander Radescu tossed his cap toward the table in a scintillating
arc.

The Honor Guard was crumpling before the cyan flashes which killed
them were more than a stroboscopic effect to the men in the chamber.
One Guard managed to open his holster flap, but his chest was lit by
smoky flames which seemed to spring from the scarlet dye rather than
the black craters the power gun had punched in the uniform.

Radescu could forget that afterwards, could forget the way Delius
bladder and bowels stained his white robes as the bolts hit him and the
look of ecstasy on Wraslov's face as his eyeballs reflected the
blue-green glare from the muzzle of Hawker's submachine gun.

What he would never forget, however, was the wetness on his face, his
fingertips coming down from his cheek red with the splattered blood of
his Uncle Grigor.

When the weapons detector chimed, the man behind the console shouted,
"The little one's holding!"  and three shotguns pointed instinctively
at Hawker and Bourne in the anteroom of the Chief Executive's
Residence.

"Hey, it's Profile," said one of the quartet of guards, lifting the
muzzle of his weapon in embarrassment.  Down the hall, the bell
responder in the guard commander's office shut off when that worthy
bolted toward the anteroom.

"What's this cop?"  Bourne snapped in outrage, not so angry, however,
as to take a blustering step toward the leveled shotguns.  "We
offloaded our bloody hardware 'fore we came over!"

"Don't care if he's the Lord himself come to take me to heaven,"
rejoined a guard with his gun still centered.  He was dressed in issue
battle dress but the yellow bandana worn as a head covering and the
paired pistols in cross draw holsters gave him a piratical air.  "If
he's packin' he stays where he is."

"Excuse me, Sergeant Bourne," said the guard at the detector console as
the guard commander--Elejash, now Colonel Elejash--burst into the
anteroom with yet another shotgun, "but if you'd check your left
forearm, the underside r

"That's all right, Culcer," said Elejash, lifting his own

weapon and stepping across the line of fire from his men to their
targets "You did right, but we're to admit this pair as is."

"Via," said Profile Bourne, blushing for the first time in his
partner's memory.

He twitched his left hand, and the spring clip on his wrist flipped the
knife into his waiting grip.  "Lord and martyrs, man, you're right,"
the sergeant said to the shimmering blade in a voice of wonder.  "I
forgot it."

Enzo Hawker laughed, both in amusement and from a need to release the
rigid lock into which he had set his muscles at the unexpected
challenge.  The Oltenian guards, all of them men he and Bourne had
helped train, joined with various levels of heartiness.

That's all right, Sergeant," Elejash said as Bourne strode over to the
console and offered his knife pommel-first to the guard seated there.

"Like hell it is," Bourne muttered, laying the little weapon on the
console when the guard refused to take it.  "I couldn't even bitch if
they'd blown me away, could I?"

Elejash looked at Hawker and the big mercenary, shrugging, said, "Well,
we weren't expecting any special treatment, but I think I'd have been
disappointed in you fellows if you'd shot us now, yeah."

"Briefly disappointed," said the guard at the console.

"Well," muttered Profile Bourne, starting to regain his
composure--mistakes about weapons weren't the sort of thing the
sergeant accepted in anyone, least of all himself, "it wouldn't be the
first time I'd missed Embarkation Muster--but usually I was drunk'r in
jail."

"You can go on in," said the guard commander.  "The Chief Executive
told me to expect you."

"Or both," Bourne added to the nearer pair of guards.  AD the Oltenians
wore personal touches on their uniforms, and the fatigues of the man at
the console were patterned with a loose gray mesh in which he could
have passed at a distance for a Molt warrior.

"Hey, how in blazes did he know that?"  Bourne asked Colonel Elejash.
"We didn't--you know, want to intrude

when things were still settling out.  This was pretty much spur a' the
moment, with us gonna lift ship in a couple hours."

The guard commander shrugged, a gesture similar enough to that of the
mercenary lieutenant earlier to be an unconscious copy.  Others of the
Slammers had helped to train the new Executive Guard, but Hawker and
Bourne had had a particular impact because of their earlier
association.  "Why don't you ask him?"  the Oltenian said, making a
gesture that began as a wave toward the inner door and ended by opening
it.

"The Slammers are here, sir," Elejash called through the doorway.

"Two of us, anyhow," said Bourne as he squared his shoulders and,
swaggering to cover his nervousness--it wasn't the sort of thing he was
used to, but the Loot was right to say they had to do it--he led the
way into the circular Reception Chamber.

Across from the door, against the wall behind the desk and Chief
Executive Radescu rising from his seat, was an urn of large blue and
indigo crystals in a white matrix.

"Enzo, Profile," Radescu said, holding out his hands to either man.  He
was wearing trousers and a loose tunic, both of civilian cut and only
in their color--pearl gray, with gold piping on the pants
legs--suggestive of anything else.  "I'd-well, I didn't want to order
you in here, but I was really hoping to see you again before
liftoff."

"Well, you were busy," the lieutenant said uncomfortably as he shook
the hand offered him, "and we, we had training duties ourselves."
Funny; they'd made him what he was, but Radescu was fully a planetary
ruler now in Hawker's mind .. . while he and Profile were better'n fair
soldiers in the best outfit in the galaxy.

"What do you think of them?"  Radescu asked brightly, drawing the
mercenaries to the trio of chairs beside his desk--prepared for them,
apparently, for the Oltenian leader seated himself in the middle one
and guided the others down to either side.  "What do you think of them,
then?  The new Guards?"

"They'll do," said Profile Bourne, wriggling his back

against a chair he found uncomfortable because it was more deeply
upholstered than he was used to.

"We told a couple of them," Hawker amplified, "that the Slammers were
always hiring if they felt like getting off-planet."

"Via, though, they still don't look like soldiers," the sergeant said,
miming with his left hand the bandana of the guard with the evident
willingness to have blown him away.

"Conversely," said Alexander Radescu, "you know that there's a job here
for you if you decide to stay.  I'll clear it with Colonel Ham--"

"Sure, Profile," interrupted the big lieutenant, "and when's the last
time you wore a fatigue shirt with a right sleeve on it?  Talk to me
about issue uniforms!"

Sometimes the best way to give a negative answer to a question, an
offer, was to talk about something else instead.  Well, Radescu
thought, he could appreciate the courtesy, though he would much have
preferred the other response.

To the Slammers, the Chief Executive said, "There's been a tradition
here on Oltenia that officers could modify their outfits according to
personal taste--when they weren't on field service, that is.  I decided
that the same standards should apply to the Exec--to my personal guard.
A--" he spread and closed his fingers as his mind sorted words and
found some that were close enough "--mark of the honor in which I hold
them."

He laughed aloud, knowing as he heard the sound that there was very
little humor in it.  "After all," he said, "they keep me alive."

Sergeant Bourne had been eyeing the room, spacious and looking the more
so for its almost complete lack of furnishings: the trio of chairs
which seemed out of place; the large desk with an integral seat; and
the blue John urn toward which Profile now nodded and asked, "That
there what I think it is?"

"Yes, the surviving one of the pair," agreed the Chief Executive,
following the sergeant's eyes.  Neither mercenary

had ever been in this building when it was the Tribunal Palace, but
that story would have gotten around.  "I'd been told it was destroyed
also, but it appears that my uncle had instead removed it to storage in
a warehouse.  It permits Ferad to visit me at need."  He smiled.  "Or
at whim.  We've gotten to be friends, in a way, in the month since the
shooting stopped."

Radescu got up and stepped toward the circular wall, his arm describing
a 90 arc of the plain surface.  "That's going to be covered with a
twenty-centimeter sheet of black granite," the leader--the dictator--of
Oltenia said.  "It's been quarried by machinery, but the polish is
being put to it by Molts--by hand.  From every theme, and all of them
who want to help.  Ferad tells me that mothers are bringing infants as
small--"

He coughed, clearing away the constriction of memory from his throat
"--as small as the one I took out of the nursery chamber myself.
They're putting the little ones' hands on the stone and sliding them
along it, so that in the future, they'll be able to find this room as
they can anything on the planet."

Sergeant Bourne guffawed, but anything he might have intended to say
was swallowed when Radescu continued bitterly, "That means, I suppose,
that my human enemies will find a way to hire a Molt warrior to
assassinate me.  No doubt my spirit will lie more easily for having
helped achieve that degree of cooperation between the two intelligent
races on the planet."

"Problems, General?"  Bourne asked, levering himself out of the chair
with an expression which did not seem so much changed from what he had
worn a moment before but rather was a refinement of it.  As when a
fresh casting is struck to remove the sand clinging to its surface,
thus the lines of the sergeant's face sprang into full relief when the
thought of action rang in the little man's mind.

"I meant it about the job," replied the young Oltenian evenly, meeting
the mercenary's eyes.

"We've been moving around a lot," said Hawker, with the same calm and
the same underlying determination as

had been in Radescu's voice when he repeated the offer.  "Being with
the Regiment, it more or less keeps an edge on without it getting--you
know, outa control."

Profile Bourne looked quizzically at his lieutenant, not at all
unwilling himself, at this point, to have heard more about what Radescu
wanted--and needed.  Hawker, knowing that and determined to forestall
the discussion, went on, "If we left Hammer and tried to settle down
here, either we'd dump it all, all we'd been--doing, you know, you
aren't talking about a couple detection specialists now, are you?"

He took a deep breath, raising his hand to hold the floor for the
moment he had to pause before continuing, "We'd lose it, or we'd--" his
eyes flicked toward Sergeant Bourne in a gesture so minute that Radescu
could not be certain that it had been intentional "--go the other way,
turn into something you couldn't have around anyplace you'd--be wearing
civilian clothes, put it that way."

Alexander Radescu nodded brusquely and turned again to face the wall
that would be replaced by a surface of polished granite.  He did not
speak.

To his back, Lieutenant Hawker said in a tone that reminded Bourne of
the way the Loot had stroked the little Molt, "You're having trouble
with the Chief Tribune's relatives, then?  Sort of thought you might..
.."

Them?"  said Alexander Radescu with sardonic brightness as he turned
again to the Slammers.  "Oh, no, not at all.  For one thing, they're my
relatives too, you know.  They think they're sitting well--which they
are, since they're the only pool of people I can trust, besides the
army.  And anyway, nobody on either side of the family was close enough
to Uncle Grigor to think of, of avenging him.

"Nobody but me."

Radescu began to pace, his left hand swinging to touch the wall at
intervals as he circled it.  Bourne rotated to watch him, but
Lieutenant Hawker remained seated, his eyes apparently on the backs of
his hands.  "Things are settling in quite well, people forgetting the
war--and the Molts putting it behind them as well, from what Ferad says
and the other reports, the lack of incidents."

"There's been shooting," Sergeant Bourne interjected.

He talked to Oltenians, now, to members of the Guard and to the
soldiers they talked to.  It gave him more awareness of the planet on
which he served than he could ever before remember having.  Planets, to
one of Hammer's Stammers, were generally a circumscribed round of
fellows, "recreation establishments," and gunsight pictures.  For the
past month, Profile Bourne had found fellows among the local forces.

"There's always been incidents," Radescu snapped.  His cheeks were
puffier than they had been in the field, thought Lieutenant Hawker as
he glanced sidelong..  .. "There's going to be shootings in mining camp
bars and ranch dormitories as long as there's men, much less men and
Molts.  But it's no worse than, oh, ten years ago--I can get the exact
figures.  Having the Slammers around for an additional month to settle
what anybody started, that was useful; but basically, three years of
war haven't undone three centuries of peace, or as close to peace as
Nature seems ready to allow anyone."

"Well," said Bourne, still standing, figuring that they'd done what,
Via, courtesy demanded in making the call.  He didn't look real great,
the general didn't, but at least he wasn't a tar ted-up clown the way
he had been that first day, through the bars of the holding cell..  ..
"Glad things are workin' out, and you know that if you need the
Slammers again--"

"It's the Tzagara family," said Radescu, speaking through the
sergeant's leave-taking as if oblivious to it.  "Isn't that amusing?"

Lieutenant Hawker met the Chief Executive's painted smile with calm
eyes and no expression of his own, waiting to hear what would be
dragged out by the fact that when he and Bourne upped ship there would
be no one for Radescu to speak to.  That was what they had come for,
though Profile didn't know it.  That, and the one thing Hawker needed
to say to pay their debt to the man who, after all, had saved their
lives..  ..

"You never met Nikki, did you?"  Radescu continued in

a bantering tone.  "He was my aide, k-killed at the, in the ballroom
... that night."

He cleared his throat, forced unwillingly to pause, but neither of the
Slammers showed any sign of wanting to break in on the monologue.  "He
had a cousin, and I don't think I even knew that, in the, you know, in
the Honor Guard.  And it couldn't have made any difference, I don't
mean that, but the family blames me now for both deaths."

"He was one a' the ones we blew away in the cave, you mean?"  the
sergeant asked, not particularly concerned but hoping that if the
question were clarified he would be able to understand what in blazes
the general was driving at.

"You did what I ordered you to do, what had to be done!"  Alexander
Radescu replied in a tone more fitting for condemnation than approval.
But it was the world which he wanted to condemn, not the pair of
mercenaries .. . and not even himself, though that was increasingly
easy to do, when he lay awake at three in the morning.  "There's been
one attempt to kill me already, poison, and I've had word of others
planned..  .."

Radescu tented his fingers in front of him and seemed to carry out a
brief series of isometrics, pressing the hands together and letting
them spring back.  "Sometimes I think that I won't be safe so long as
there's a single one of the Tzigaras alive," he said.  Then, with his
eyes still determinedly focused on his fingertips, he added, "I'd
be--very pleased if you gentlemen changed your minds, you know."

Lieutenant Hawker rose from the chair without using his arms to lift
him, despite the depth and give of the upholstery.  The lack of body
armor made him feel lighter; and, though most of his waking hours were
spent as he was now, without the heavy porcelain clamshell latched to
him, being around Radescu made the Slammers lieutenant feel that he
ought to be in armor.  Habituated response, he supposed.

"I think we'd best be getting back to the regiment, sir," said Enzo
Hawker, stretching out his hand to shake Radescu's.

"Of course," agreed the Chief Executive, clasping the

mercenary's firmly.  "Colonel Hammer performed to the perfect
satisfaction of his contract.  What you two did was more."

"Don't worry 'bout missing us, general," said Profile as he took the
hand offered him in turn.  "You got boys out there--" he nodded to the
anteroom "--can handle anything we would."

He laughed, pleasantly in intention, though the harshness of the sound
made Radescu think of the fluorescent dragon on the palm wringing his.
"Didn't take a world a' smarts, didn't even take a lotta training. Just
to be willing, that's all."  He laughed again and stepped toward the
door.

Hawker touched the sergeant on the shoulder, halting and turning him.
"Sir," the big lieutenant said as his subordinate watched and waited
with a frown of confusion, "you're where you are now because you were
willing to do what had to be done.  Everybody else wanted an easy way
out.  Wanted to kill Molts instead of ending a war."

"Where I am now," Alexander Radescu repeated, quirking his lips into a
smile of sorts.

"If you didn't have the balls to handle a tough job," said Hawker
sharply, "you'd have seen the last of me 'n the sarge a long while
back, mister."

Hawker and Radescu locked eyes while Bourne looked from one man to the
other, puzzled but not worried; there was nothing here to worry
about.

"I appreciate the vote of confidence," said the Oltenian as he broke
into a grin and reached out to shake the lieutenants hand again.

"Oh, there's one thing more," Hawker added in a gentle voice as he
willingly accepted the handclasp.  "Profile, I'll bet the Chief
Executive thinks we were firing long bursts there when we cleared the
cave."

"What?"  said Radescu in amazement, pausing with the mercenary's hand
still in his.

"Oh, Via, no," Profile Bourne blurted, his surprise directed at the
suggestion rather than the fact that the Loot had voiced it.  "Blood 'n
martyrs, General, single shots only.  Lord, the polish that stone had,
the ricochets'd fry us all

like pork rinds if we'd just tried to hose things down."  He stared at
Radescu in the hopeful horror of a specialist who prays that he's been
able to prevent a friend from doing something lethally dangerous
through ignorance.

"That's right sir," said Enzo Hawker as he met the Chief Executive's
wondering eyes.  "You have to know exactly what you're doing before you
decide to use guns."

Radescu nodded very slowly as the two guns for hire walked out of his
office.

THE BUTCHER'S BILL

"You can go a thousand kays any direction there and there's nothing to
see but the wheat," said the brown man to the other tankers and the
woman.  His hair was deep chestnut, his face and hands burnt umber from
the sun of Emporion the month before and the suns of seven other worlds
in past years.  He was twenty-five but looked several years older.  The
sleeves of his khaki coveralls were slipped down over his wrists
against the chill of the breeze that had begun at twilight to feather
the hill crest "We fed four planets from Dunstan--Hagener, Weststar,
Mirage, and Jackson's Glade.  And out of it we made enough to replace
the tractors when they wore out, maybe something left over for a bit of
pretty.  A necklace of fireballs to set off a Lord's Day dress, till
the charge drained six, eight months later.  A static cleaner from
Hagener, it was one year, never quite worked off our powerplant however
much we tinkered with it.... "My mother, she wore out too.  Dad just
kept grinding on, guess he still does."

The girl asked a question from the shelter of the tank's scarred
curtain.  Her voice was too mild for the wind's tumbling, her accent
that of Thrush and strange to the tanker's ears.  But Danny answered,
"Hate them?  Oh, I know about the Combine, now, that the four of them
kept other merchants off Dunstan to freeze the price at what they
thought to pay.  But Via, wheat's a high bulk cargo,

there's no way at all we'd have gotten rich on what it could bring
over ninety minutes' transit.  And why shouldn't I thank Weststar?  If
ever a world did me well, it was that one."

He spat, turning his head with the wind and lofting the gobbet
invisibly into the darkness.  The lamp trembled on its base, an
overturned ration box.  The glare skipped across the rusted steel
skirts of the tank, the indium armor of hull and turret; the faces of
the men and the woman listening to the blower chief.  The main gun,
half shadowed by the curve of the hull, poked out into the night like a
ghost of itself.  Even with no human in the tank, at the whisper of a
relay in Command Central the fat weapon would light the world cyan and
smash to lava anything within line of sight of its muzzle.

"We sold our wheat to a Weststar agent, a Hindi named Sarim who'd
lived, Via, twenty years at least on Dunstan but he still smelled
funny.  Sweetish, sort of; you know?  But his people were all back in
Ongole on Weststar.  When the fighting started between the Scots and
the Hindi settlers, he raised a battalion of farm boys like me and
shipped us over in the hold of a freighter.  Hoo Lordy, that was a
transit!

"And I never looked back.  Colonel Hammer docked in on the same day
with the Regiment, and he took us all on spec.  Six years, now, that's
seven standard .. . and not all of us could stand the gaff, and not all
who could wanted to.  But I never looked back, and I never will."

From the mast of Command Central, a flag popped unseen in the wind.  It
bore a red lion rampant on a field of gold, the emblem of Hammer's
Slammers, the banner of the toughest regiment that ever killed for a
dollar.

"Hotel, Kitchen, Lariat, Michael, move to the front in company columns
and advance."

The tiny adamantine glitter winking on the hilltop ten kays distant was
the first break in the landscape since the Regiment had entered the
hypothetical war zone, the Star Plain of Thrush.  It warmed Pritchard
in the bubble at the

same time it tightened his muscles.  "Goose it, Kowie," he ordered his
driver in turn, "they want us panzers up front.  Bet it's about to drop
in the pot?"

Kowie said nothing, but the big blower responded with a howl and a
billow of friable soil that seethed from under the ground effect
curtain.  Two Star in the lead, H Company threaded its way in line
ahead through the grounded combat cars and a company from Infantry
Section.  The pongoes crouched on their one-man skimmers, watching the
tanks.  One blew an ironic kiss to Danny in Two Star's bubble.  Moving
parallel to Hotel, the other companies of Tank Section, K, L, and M,
advanced through the center and right of the skirmish line.

The four man crew of a combat car nodded unsmilingly from their
open-topped vehicle as Two Star boomed past.  A trio of swivel-mounted
power guns 2em hoses like the one on Danny's bubble, gave them
respectable firepower; and their armor, a sandwich of ceramics and
indium, was in fact adequate against most hand weapons.  Buzzbombs
aside, and tankers didn't like to think about those either.  But Danny
would have fought reassignment to combat cars if anybody had suggested
it--Lord, you may as well dance in your skin for all the good that hull
does you in a firefight!  And few car crewmen would be caught dead on a
panzer-or rather, were sure that was how they would be caught if they
crewed one of those sluggish, clumsy, blindsided behemoths.  Infantry
Section scorned both, knowing how the blowers drew fire but couldn't
flatten in the dirt when it dropped in on them.

One thing wouldn't get you an argument, though: when it was ready to
drop in the pot, you sent in the heavies.  And nothing on the Way would
stop the Tank Section of Hammers Slammers when it got cranked up to
move.

Even its 170 tonnes could not fully dampen the vibration of Two Star's
fans at max load.  The oval hull, all sit very smooth above but of
gouged and rusty steel below where the skirts fell sheer almost to the
ground, slid its way through the grass like a boat through yellow seas.
They were dropping into a swale before they reached the

upgrade.  From the increasing rankness of the vegetation that
flattened before and beside the tank, Pritchard suspected they would
find a meandering stream at the bottom.  The brow of the hill cut off
sight of the unnatural glitter visible from a distance.  In silhouette
against the pale bronze sky writhed instead a grove of gnarled trees.

"Incoming, fourteen seconds to impact," Command Central blatted.  A
siren in the near distance underscored the words.  "Three rounds
only."

The watercourse was there.  Two Star's fans blasted its surface into a
fine mist as the tank bellowed over it.  Danny cocked his power gun
throwing a cylinder of glossy black plastic into the lowest of the
three rotating barrels.  There was shrieking overhead.

WHAM

A poplar shape of dirt and black vapor spouted a kay to the rear, among
the grounded infantry.

WHAM WHAM

They were detonating underground.  Thrush didn't have much of an
industrial base, the rebel portions least of all.  Either they hadn't
the plant to build proximity fuses at all, or they were substituting
interference coils for miniature radar sets, and there was too little
metal in the infantry's gear to set off the charges.  With the main
director out, Central wasn't even bothering to explode the shells in
flight.

"Tank Section, hose down the ridge as you advance, they got an OP there
somewhere."

"Incoming, three more in fourteen."  The satellite net could pick up a
golf ball in flight, much less a two hundred kilo shell.

Pritchard grinned like a death's head, laying his 2em automatic on the
rim of the hill and squeezing off.  The motor whirred, spinning the
barrels as rock and vegetation burst in the blue-green sleet.  Spent
cases, gray and porous, spun out of the mechanism in a jet of coolant
gas.  They bounced on the turret slope, some clinging to the iridium to
cool there, ugly dark excrescences on the metal.

"Outgoing."

Simultaneously with Central's laconic warning, giants tore

a strip off the sky.  The rebel shells dropped but their bursts were
smothered in the roar of the Regiments own rocket howitzers boosting
charges to titanic velocity for the several seconds before their motors
burned out.  Ten meters from the muzzles the rockets went supersonic,
punctuating the ripping sound with thunderous slaps.  Danny swung his
hose toward the grove of trees, the only landmark visible on the
hilltop.  His burst laced it cyan.  Water, flash-heated within the
boles by the gunfire, blew the dense wood apart in blasts of steam and
splinters.  A dozen other guns joined Pritchards, clawing at rock, air,
and the remaining scraps of vegetation.

"Dead on," Central snapped to the artillery.  "Now give it battery five
and we'll show those freaks how they should've done it."

Kowie hadn't buttoned up.  His head stuck up from the driver's hatch,
trusting his eyes rather than the vision blocks built into his
compartment.  The tanks themselves were creations of the highest
technical competence, built on Terra itself; but the crews were
generally from frontier worlds, claustrophobic in an armored coffin no
matter how good its electronic receptors were.  Danny knew the feeling.
His hatch, too, was open, and his hand gripped the rounded metal of the
power gun itself rather than the selsyn unit inside.  They were
climbing sharply now, the back end hopping and skittering as the driver
fed more juice to the rear fans in trying to level the vehicle.  The
bow skirts grounded briefly, the blades spitting out a section of
hillside as pebbles.

For nearly a minute the sky slammed and raved.  Slender, clipped-off
vapor trails of counter-battery fire streamed from the defiladed
artillery.  Half a minute after they ceased fire, the drumbeat of
shells bursting on the rebels continued.  No further incoming rounds
fell.

Two Star lurched over the rim of the hill.  Seconds later the lead
blowers of K and M bucked in turn onto the flatter area.  Smoke and ash
from the gun-tit brushfire shoomped out in their downdrafts.  There was
no sign of the enemy, either Densonite rebels or Foster's crew--though
if the

mercenaries were involved, they would be bunkered beyond probable
notice until they popped the cork themselves.  Tank Section, ground!
Ground in place and prepare for director control."

Danny hunched, bracing his palms against the hatch coaming.  Inside the
turret the movement and firing controls of the main gun glowed red,
indicating that they had been locked out of Pritchard's command.  Kowie
lifted the bow to kill the tank's immense inertia.  There was always
something spooky about feeling the turret purr beneath you, watching
the big gun snuffle the air with deadly precision on its own.  Danny
gripped his tri barrel scanning the horizon nervously.  It was worst
when you didn't know what Central had on its mind .. . and you did know
that the primary fire control computer was on the fritz--they always
picked the damnedest times!

"Six aircraft approaching from two-eight-three degrees," Central
mumbled.  "Distance seven point ought four kays, closing at one one
ought ought."

Pritchard risked a quick look away from where the gun pointed toward a
ridgeline northwest of them, an undistinguished swelling half-obscured
by the heat-wavering pall of smoke.  Thirteen other tanks had crested
the hill before Central froze them, all aiming in the same direction.
Danny dropped below his hatch rim, counting seconds.

The sky roared cyan.  The tank's vision blocks blanked momentarily, but
the dazzle reflected through the open hatch was enough to make
Pritchard's skin tingle.  The smoke waved and rippled about the
superheated tracks of gunfire.  The horizon to the northwest was an
expanding orange dome that silently dominated the sky.

"Resume advance."  Then, "Spectroanalysis indicates five hostiles were
loaded with chemical explosives, one was carrying fissionables."

Danny was trembling worse than before the botched attack.  The briefing
cubes had said the Densonites were religious nuts, sure.  But to use
unsupported artillery against a force whose satellite spotters would
finger the guns before the first salvo landed; aircraft--probably
converted cargo

haulers--thrown against director-controlled power guns that shot light
swift and line straight; and then nukes, against a regiment more likely
to advance stark naked than without a nuclear damper up!  They weren't
just nuts--Thrush central government was that, unwilling to have any of
its own people join the fighting--they were as crazy as if they thought
they could breathe vacuum and live.  You didn't play that sort of game
with the Regiment.

They'd laager for the night on the hilltop, the rest of the outfit
rumbling in through the afternoon and early evening hours.  At daybreak
they'd leapfrog forward again, deeper into the Star Plain, closer to
whatever it was the Densonites wanted to hold.  Sooner or later, the
rebels and Foster's Infantry--a good outfit but not good enough for
this job--were going to have to make a stand.  And then the Regiment
would go out for contact again, because they'd have run out of work on
Thrush.

"She'll be in looking for you pretty soon, won't she, handsome?"

"Two bits to stay."

"Check.  Sure, Danny-boy, you Romeos from Dunstan, you can pick up a
slot anywhere, huh?"

A troop of combat cars whined past, headed for their position in the
laager.  Pritchard's hole card, a jack, flipped over.  He swore, pushed
in his hand.  "I was folding anyway.  And cut it out, will you?  I
didn't go looking for her.  I didn't tell her to come back.  And she
may as well be the colonel for all my chance of putting her flat."

Wanatamba, the lean, black Terran who drove Fourteen, laughed and
pointed.  A gold-spangled skimmer was dropping from the east, tracked
by the guns of two of the blowers on that side.  Everybody knew what it
was, though.  Pritchard grimaced and stood.  "Seems that's the game for
me," he said.

"Hey, Danny," one of the men behind him called as he walked away.  "Get
a little extra for us, hey?"

The skimmer had landed in front of Command Central, at rest an
earth-blended geodesic housing the staff and

much of the commo hardware.  Wearing a wrist-to-ankle sun suit yellow
where it had tone, she was leaning on the plex windscreen.  An officer
in fatigues with unlatched body armor stepped out of the dome and did a
double take.  He must have recollected, though, because he trotted off
toward a bunker before Danny reached the skimmer.

"Hey!"  the girl called brightly.  She looked about seventeen, her hair
an unreal cascade of beryl copper over one shoulder.  "We're going on a
trip."

"Uh?"

The dome section flipped open again.  Pritchard stiffened to attention
when he saw the short, mustached figure who exited.  "Peace, Colonel,"
the girl said.

"Peace, Sonna.  You're such an ornament to a firebase that I'm thinking
of putting you on requisition for our next contract."

Laughing cheerfully, the girl gestured toward the rigid sergeant.  "I'm
taking Danny to the Hamper Shrine this afternoon."

Pritchard reddened.  "Sir, Sergeant-Commander Daniel Pritchard--"

"I know you, trooper," the colonel said with a friendly smile.  "I've
watched Two Star in action often enough, you know."  His eyes were
blue.

"Sir, I didn't request--that is ..."

"And I also know there's small point in arguing with our gui here, hey,
Sonna?  Go see your shrine, soldier, and worse comes to worst, just
throw your hands up and yell "Exchange."  You can try Colonel Foster's
rations for a week or two until we get this little business
straightened out."  The colonel winked, bowed low to Sonna, and
reentered the dome.

"I don't figure it," Danny said as he settled into the passenger seat.
The skimmer was built low and sleek as if a racer, though its top speed
was probably under a hundred kays.  Any more would have put too rapid a
drain of the rechargables packed into the decimeter-thick floor--a
fusion unit would have doubled the flyer's bulk and added four hundred
kilos right off the bat.  At that, the speed and an

operating altitude of thirty meters were more than enough for the
tanker.  You judge things by what you're used to, and the blower chief
who found himself that far above the cold, hard ground--it could happen
on a narrow switchback-had seen his last action.

While the wind whipped noisily about the open cockpit, the girl tended
to her flying and ignored Danny's curiosity.  It was a hop rather than
a real flight, keeping over the same hill at all times and circling
down to land scarcely a minute after takeoff.  On a field of grass
untouched by the recent fire rose the multi-tinted crystalline
structure Pritchard had glimpsed during the assault.  With a neat spin
and a brief whine from the fans, the skimmer settled down.

Sonna grinned.  Her sun suit opaquing completely in the direct light,
blurred her outline in a dazzle of fluorescent saffron.  "What don't
you figure?"

"Well, ah .. ."  Danny stumbled, his curiosity drawn between the girl
and the building.  "Well, the colonel isn't that, ah, easy to deal with
usually.  I mean .. ."

Her laugh bubbled in the sunshine.  "Oh, it's because I'm an Advisor,
I'm sure."

"Excuse?"

"An Advisor.  You know, the .. . well, a representative.  Of the
government, if you want to put it that way."

"My Lord!"  the soldier gasped.  "But you're so young."

She frowned.  "You really don't know much about us, do you?"  she
reflected.

"Umm, well, the briefing cubes mostly didn't deal with the friendlies
this time because we'd be operating without support..  .. Anything was
going to look good after Emporion, that was for sure.  All desert
there--you should've heard the cheers when the colonel said that we'd
lift."

She combed a hand back absently through her hair.  It flowed like
molten bronze.  "You won on Emporion?"  she asked.

"We could've," Danny explained, "even though it was really a
Lord-stricken place, dust and fortified plateaus and lousy recce
besides because the government had two

operating spacers.  But the Monarchists ran out of money after six
months and that's one sure rule for Hammer's Slammers--no pay, no play.
Colonel yanked their bond so fast their ears rang.  And we hadn't
orbited before offers started coming in."

"And you took ours and came to a place you didn't know much about," the
girl mused.  "Well, we didn't know much about you either."

"What do you need to know except we can bust anybody else in this
business?"  the soldier said with amusement.  "Anybody, public or
planet-tied.  If you're worried about Foster, don't; he wouldn't back
the freaks today, but when he has to, we'll eat him for breakfast."

"Has to?"  the girl repeated in puzzlement.  "But he always has to--the
Densonites hired him, didn't they?"

Strategy was a long way from Dann's training, but the girl seemed not
to know that.  And besides, you couldn't spend seven years with the
Slammers and not pick up some basics.  "OK," he began, "Foster's
boys'll fight, but they're not crazy.  Trying to block our advance in
open land like this'd be pure suicide--as those coppy freaks--pardon,
didn't mean that-must've found out today.  Foster likely got orders to
support the civvies but refused.  I know for a fact that his arty's
better'n what we wiped up today, and those planes .. ."

"But his contract ...?*" Sonna queried.

"Sets out the objectives and says the outfit'll obey ciwie orders where
it won't screw things up too bad," Danny said.  "Standard form.  The
legal of it's different, but that's what it means."

The girl was nodding, eyes slitted, and to a low voice she quoted, "..
. 'except in circumstances where such directions would significantly
increase the risks to be undergone by the party of the second part
without corresponding military advantage."  She looked full at Danny.
"Very .. . interesting.  When we hired your colonel, I don't think any
of us understood that clause."

Danny blinked, out of his depth and aware of it.  "Well, it doesn't
matter really.  I mean, the colonel didn't get his

rep from ducking fights.  It's just, well .. . say we're supposed to
clear the Densonites off the, the Star Plain?  Right?"

The girl shrugged.

"So that's what we'll do."  Danny wiped his palms before gesturing with
both hands.  "But if your Advisors--"

"We Advisors," the girl corrected, smiling.

"Anyway;" the tanker concluded, his enthusiasm chilled, "if you tell
the colonel to fly the whole Regiment up to ten thousand and jump it
out, he'll tell you to go piss up a rope.  Sorry, he wouldn't say that.
But you know what I mean.  We know our job, don't worry."

"Yes, that's true," she said agreeably.  "And we don't, and we can't
understand it.  We thought that--one to one, you know?--perhaps if I
got to know you, one of you .. . They thought we might understand all
of you a little."

The soldier frowned uncertainly.

"What we don't see," she finally said, "is how you--"

She caught herself.  Touching her cold fingertips to the backs of the
tanker's wrists, the girl continued, "Danny, you're a nice .. . you're
not a, a sort of monster like we thought you all must be.  If you'd
been born of Thrush you'd have had a--different--education, you'd be
more, forgive me, I don't mean it as an insult, sophisticated in some
ways.  That's all.

"But how can a nice person like you go out and loll?"

He rubbed his eyes, then laced together his long, brown fingers.  "You
.. . well, it's not like that.  What I said the other night--look, the
Slammers're a good outfit, the best, and I'm damned lucky to be with
them.  I do my job the best way I know.  I'll keep on doing that And if
somebody gets killed, OK.  My brother Jig stayed home and he's two
years dead now.  Tractor rolled on a wet field but Via, coulda been a
tow-chain snapped or old age; doesn't matter.  He wasn't going to live
forever and neither is anybody else.  And I haven't got any friends on
the far end of the muzzle."

Her voice was very soft as she said, "Perhaps if I keep trying ..."

Danny smiled.  "Well, I don't mind," he said, looking at the
structure.  "What is this place, anyhow?"

Close up, it had unsuspected detail.  The sides were a hedge of glassy
rods curving together to a series of peaks ten meters high.  No
finger-slim member was quite the thickness or color of any other,
although the delicacy was subliminal in impact.  In ground plan it was
a complex oval thirty meters by ten, pierced by scores of doorways
which were not closed off but were foggy to look at

"What do you think of it?"  the girl asked.

"Well, it's .. ."  Danny temporized.  A fragment of the briefing cubes
returned to him.  "It's one of the alien, the Gedel, artifacts, isn't
it?"

"Of course," the girl agreed.  "Seven hundred thousand years old, as
far as we can judge.  Only a world in stasis, tike Thrush, would have
let it survive the way it has.  The walls are far tougher than they
look, but seven hundred millennia of earthquakes and volcanoes .. ."

Danny stepped out of the skimmer and let his hand run across the
building's cool surface.  "Yeah, if they'd picked some place with a
hotter core there wouldn't be much left but sand by now, would
there?"

"Pick it?  Thrush was their home," Sonna's voice rang smoothly behind
him.  "The Gedel chilled it themselves to make it suitable, to leave a
signpost for the next races following the Way.  We can't even imagine
how they did it, but there's no question but that Thrush was normally
tectonic up until the last million years or so."

"Via!"  Danny breathed, turning his shocked face toward the girl.  "No
wonder those coppy fanatics wanted to control this place.  Why, if they
could figure out just a few of the Gedel tricks they'd .. . Lord, they
wouldn't stop with Thrush, that's for sure."

"You still don't understand," the girl said.  She took Danny by the
hand and drew him toward the nearest of the misty doorways.  "The
Densonftes have well, quirks that make them hard for the rest of us on
Thrush to understand.  But they would no more pervert Gedel wisdom to
warfare than you would, oh, spit on your colonel.  Come here."

She stepped into the fuzziness and disappeared.  The tanker had no
choice but to follow or break her grip; though, oddly, she was no
longer clinging to him on the other side of the barrier.  She was not
even beside him in the large room.  He was alone at the first of a line
of tableaux, staring at a group of horribly inhuman creatures at play.
Their sharp-edged faces, scale-dusted but more avian than reptile,
stared enraptured at one of their number who hung in the air.  The
acrobat's bare, claw-tipped legs pointed 180 degrees apart, straight
toward ground and sky.

Pritchard blinked and moved on.  The next scene was only a dazzle of
sunlight in a glade whose foliage was redder than that of Thrush or
Dunstan.  There was something else, something wrong or strange about
the tableau.  Danny felt it, but his eyes could not explain.

Step by step, cautiously, Pritchard worked his way down the line of
exhibits.  Each was different, centered on a group of the alien bipeds
or a ruddy, seemingly empty landscape that hinted unintelligibly.  At
first, Danny had noticed the eerie silence inside the hall.  As he
approached the far end he realized he was conscious of music of some
sort, very crisp and distant.  He laid his bare palm on the floor and
found, as he had feared, that it did not vibrate in the least He ran
the last twenty steps to plunge out into the sunlight.  Sonna still
gripped his hand, and they stood outside the doorway they had
entered.

The girl released him.  "Isn't it incredible?"  she asked, her
expression bright.  "And every one of the doorways leads to a different
corridor--recreation there, agriculture in another,
history--everything.  A whole planet in that little building."

"That's what the Gedel looked like, huh?"  Danny said.  He shook his
head to clear the strangeness from it.

"The Gedel?  Oh, no," the girl replied, surprised again at his
ignorance.  "These were the folk we call the Hampers.  No way to
pronounce their own language, a man named Hamper found this site is
all.  But their homeworld was Kalinga IV, almost three days transit
from Thrush.  The shrine is here, we think, in the same relation to
Starhome as Kalinga was to Thrush.

"You still don't understand," she concluded aloud, watching Danny's
expression.  She sat on the edge of the flyer, crossing her hands on
the lap of her sun suit  In the glitter thrown by the structure the
fabric patterned oddly across her lithe torso.  "The Gedel
association--it wasn't an empire, couldn't have been.  But to merge, a
group ultimately needs a center, physical and intellectual.  And Thrush
and the Gedel were that for twenty races.

"And they achieved genuine unity, not just within one race but among
all of them, each as strange to the others as any one of them would
have been to man, to us.  The .  power that gave them, over themselves
as well as the universe, was incredible.  This--even Starhome itself-is
such a tiny part of what could be achieved by perfect peace and
empathy."

Danny looked at the crystal dome and shivered at what it had done to
him.  "Look," he said, "peace is just great if the universe cooperates.
I don't mean just my line of work, but it doesn't happen that way in
the real world.  There's no peace spending your life beating wheat out
of Dunstan, not like I'd call peace.  And what's happened to the Gedel
and their buddies for the last half million years or so if things were
so great?"

"We can't even imagine what happened to them," Sonna explained gently,
"but it wasn't the disaster you imagine.  When they reached what they
wanted, they set up this, Starhome, the other eighteen shrines as ...
monuments.  And then they went away, all together.  But they're not
wholly gone, even from here, you know.  Didn't you feel them in the
background inside, laughing with you?"

"I .. ."  Danny attempted.  He moved, less toward the skimmer than away
from the massive crystal behind him.  "Yeah, there was something.
That's what you're fighting for?"

You couldn't see the laager from where the skimmer rested, but Danny
could imagine the silvery glitter of tanks and combat cars between the
sky and the raw yellow grass.  Her eyes fixed on the same stretch of
horizon, the girl said, "Someday men will be able to walk through
Starhome and

understand.  You can't live on Thrush without feelin impact of the
Gedel.  That impact has .. . warped, _ the Densonites.  They have some
beliefs about the Gedel that most of us don't agree with.  And they're
actually willing to use force to prevent the artifacts from being
defiled by anyone who doesn't believe as they do."

"Well, you people do a better job of using force," Danny said.  His
mind braced itself on its memory of the Regiment's prickly hedgehog.

"Oh, not us!"  the girl gasped.

Suddenly angry, the tanker gestured toward the unseen firebase.  "Not
you?  The Densonites don't pay us.  And if force isn't what happened to
those silly bastards today when our counter-battery hit them, I'd like
to know what is."

She looked at him in a way that, despite her previous curiosity, was
new to him.  "There's much that I'll have to discuss with the other
Advisors," she said after a long pause.  "And I don't know that it will
stop with us, we'll have to put out the call to everyone, the
Densonites as well if they will come."  Her eyes caught Danny's
squarely again.  "We acted with little time for deliberation when the
Densonites hired Colonel Foster and turned all the other pilgrims out
of the Star Plain.  And we acted in an area beyond our practice--thank
the Lord!  The key to understanding the Gedel and joining them, Lord
willing and the Way being short, is Starhome.  And nothing that blocks
any man, all men, from Starhome can be ... tolerated.  But with what
we've learned since .. . well, we have other things to take into
account."

She broke off, tossed her stunning hair.  In the flat evening sunlight
her garment had paled to translucence.  The late rays licked her body
red and orange.  "But now I'd better get you back to your colonel." She
slipped into the skimmer.

Danny boarded without hesitation.  After the Gedel building, the
transparent skimmer felt almost comfortable.  "Back to my tank," he
corrected lightly.  "Colonel may not care where I am, but he damn well
cares if Two Star is combat ready."  The sudden rush of air cut off
thought of

further conversation, and though Sonna smiled as she landed Danny
beside his blower, there was a blankness in her expression that
indicated her thoughts were far away.  Hell with her, Danny thought.
His last night in the Rec Center on Emporion seemed a long time in the
past.

At three in the morning the Regiment was almost two hundred kilometers
from the camp they had abandoned at midnight.  There had been no
warning, only the low hoot of the siren followed by the colonel's voice
rasping from every mans lapel speaker, "Mount up and move, boys.  Order
seven, and your guides are set."  It might have loomed before another
outfit as a sudden catastrophe.  After docking one trip with the
Slammers, though, a greenie learned that everything not secured to his
blower had better be secured to him.  Colonel Hammer thought an
armoured regiments firepower was less of an asset than its mobility. 
He used the latter to the full with ten preset orders of march and
in-motion recharging for the infantry skimmers, juicing from the tanks
and combat cars.

Four pongoes were jumpered to Two Star when Foster's outpost sprang its
ambush.

The lead combat car, half a kay ahead, bloomed in a huge white ball
that flooded the photon amplifiers of Danny's goggles.  The buzz bomb
hollow detonation followed a moment later while the tanker, cursing,
simultaneously switched to infra-red and swung his turret left at max
advance.  He ignored the head of the column, where the heated-air thump
of power guns merged with the crackle of mines blasted to either side
by the combat cars; that was somebody else's responsibility.  He
ignored the two infantrymen wired to his tank's port side as well.  If
they knew their business, they'd drop the jumpers and flit for Two
Star's blind side as swiftly as Danny could spin his heavy turret.  If
not, well, you don't have time for niceness when somebody's firing
shaped charges at you.

"Damp that ground-sender!"  Central snapped to the lead elements.  Too
quickly to be a response to the command, the grass trembled under the
impact of a delay-fused rocket

punching down toward the computed location of the enemy's subsurface
signaling.  The Regiment must have rolled directly over an outpost,
either through horrendous^ bad luck or because Foster had sewn his
vedettes very thickly.

The firing stopped.  The column had never slowed and Michael, first of
the heavy companies behind the screen of combat cars, fanned the grass
fires set by the hoses.  Pritchard scanned the area of the firefight as
Two Star rumbled through it in turn.  The antipersonnel charges had
dimpled the ground with shrapnel, easily identifiable among the glassy
scars left by the power guns  In the center of a great vitrified blotch
lay a left arm and a few scraps of gray coverall.  Nearby was the
plastic hilt of a buzz bomb launcher.  The other vedette had presumably
stayed on the commo in his covered foxhole until the penetrator had
scattered it and him over the landscape.  If there had been a third
bunker, it escaped notice by Two Star's echo sounders.

"Move it out, up front," Central demanded.  "This cuts our margin."

The burned-out combat car swept back into obscurity as Kowie put on
speed.  The frontal surfaces had collapsed inward from the heat,
leaving the driver and blower chief as husks of carbon.  There was no
sign of the wing gunners.  Perhaps they had been far enough back and
clear of the spurt of directed radiance to escape.  The ammo canister
of the port tri barrel had flash-ignited, though, and it was more
likely that the men were wasted on the floor of the vehicle.

Another hundred and fifty kays to go, and now Foster and the Densonites
knew they were coming.

There were no further ambushes to break the lightless monotony of
gently rolling grassland.  Pritchard took occasional sips of water and
ate half a tube of protein ration.  He started to fling the tube aside,
then thought of the metal detectors on following units.  He dropped it
between his feet instead.

The metal-pale sun was thrusting the Regiment's shadow in long fingers
up the final hillside when Central spoke again.  You could tell it was
the colonel himself sending.  "Everybody freeze but Beta-First,
Beta-First proceed in column up the rise and in.  Keep your intervals,
boys, and don't try to bite off too much.  Last data we got was Foster
had his antiaircraft company with infantry support holding the target.
Maybe they pulled out when we knocked on the door tonight, maybe they
got reinforced.  So take it easy--and don't bust up anything you don't
have to."

Pritchard dropped his seat back inside the turret.  There was nothing
to be seen from the hatch but the monochrome sunrise and armored
vehicles grounded on the yellow background.  Inside, the three vision
blocks gave greater variety.  One was the constant 360 degrees display,
better than normal eyesight according to the designers because the
blower chief could see all around the tank without turning his head.
Danny didn't care for it.  Images were squeezed a good deal
horizontally.  Shapes weren't quite what you expected, so you didn't
react quite as fast; and that was a good recipe for a dead trooper. The
screen above the three-sixty was variable in light sensitivity and in
magnification, useful for special illumination and first-shot hits.

The bottom screen was the remote rig; Pritchard dialed it for the
forward receptors of Beta-First-Three.  It was strange to watch the
images of the two leading combat cars trembling as they crested the
hill, yet feel Two Star as stable as 170 tonnes can be when grounded.

"Nothing moving," the platoon leader reported unnecessarily.  Central
had remote circuits too, as well as the satellite net to depend on.

The screen lurched as the blower Danny was slaved to boosted its fans
to level the downgrade.  Dust plumed from the leading cars, weaving
across a sky that was almost fully light.  At an unheard command, the
platoon turned up the wick in unison and let the cars hurtle straight
toward the target's central corridor.  It must have helped, because
Foster's gunners caught only one car when they loosed the first blast
through their camouflage.

The second car blurred in a mist of vaporized armor plate. Incredibly,
the right wing gunner shot back.  The deadly flame-lash of his hose was
pale against the richer color of the hostile fire.  Foster had sited
his calliopes, massive 3em guns whose nine fixed barrels fired extra
length charges.  Danny had never seen a combat car turned into Swiss
cheese faster than the one now spiked on the muzzles of a pair of the
heavy guns.

Gray-suited figures were darting from cover as if the cars' automatics
were harmless for being outclassed.  The damaged blower nosed into the
ground.  Its driver leaped out, running for the lead car which had spun
on its axis and was hosing blue-green fire in three directions.  One of
Foster's troops raised upright, loosing a buzz bomb at the wreckage of
the grounded car.  The left side of the vehicle flapped like a batwing
as it sailed across Dannys field of view.  The concussion knocked down
the running man.  He rose to his knees, jumped for a handhold as the
lead car accelerated past him.  As he swung himself aboard, two buzz
bombs hit the blower simultaneously.  It bloomed with joined skullcaps
of pearl and bone.

Pritchard was swearing softly.  He had switched to a stern pickup
already, and the tumbled wreckage in it was bouncing, fading swiftly.
Shots twinkled briefly as the four escaping blowers dropped over the
ridge.

"In column ahead," said the colonel grimly, "Hotel, Kitchen, Michael.
Button up and hose 'em out, you know the drill."

And then something went wrong.  "Are you insane?"  the radio marveled,
and Danny recognized that voice too.  "I forbid you!"

"You can't.  Somebody get her out of here."

"Your contract is over, finished, do you hear?  Heavenly Way, we'll all
become Densonites if we must.  This horror must end!"

"Not yet.  You don't see--"

"I've seen too--" The shouted words cut off.

"So we let Foster give us a bloody nose and back off?  That's what you
want?  But it's bigger than what you want

now, sister, it's the whole Regiment.  It's never bidding another
contract without somebody saying, "Hey, they got sandbagged on Thrush,
didn't they?"  And nobody remembering that Foster figured the civvies
would chill us--and he was right.  Don't you see?  They killed my boys,
and now they're going to pay the bill.

"Tank Section, execute!  Dig 'em out, panzers!"

Danny palmed the panic bar, dropping the seat and locking the hatch
over it.  The rushing-air snarl of the fans was deadened by the armor,
but a hot bearing somewhere filled the compartment with its high
keening.  Two Star hurdled the ridge.  Its whole horizon flared with
crystal dancing and scattering in sunlight and the reflected glory of
automatic weapons firing from its shelter.  Starhome was immensely
larger than Danny had expected.

A boulevard twenty meters wide divided two ranks of glassy buildings,
any one of which, towers and pavillions, stood larger than the shrine
Danny had seen the previous day.  At a kilometer's distance it was a
coruscating unity of parts as similar as the strands of a silken rope.
Danny rapped up the magnification and saw the details spring out; rods
woven into columns that streaked skyward a hundred meters; translucent
sheets formed of myriads of pinhead beads, each one glowing a color as
different from the rest as one star is from the remainder of those seen
on a moonless night; a spiral column, free-standing and the thickness
of a woman's wrist, that pulsed slowly through the spectrum as it
climbed almost out of sight.  All the structures seemed to front on the
central corridor, with the buildings on either side welded together by
tracery mazes, porticoes, arcades--a thousand different plates and
poles of glass.

A dashed cyan line joined the base of an up swept web of color to the
tank.  Two Star's hull thudded to the shock of vaporizing metal.  The
stabilizer locked the blower's pitching out of Danny's sight picture.
He swung the glowing orange bead onto the source of fire and kicked the
pedal.  The air rang like a carillon as the whole glassy facade sagged,
then avalanched into the street.  There was a shock of heat in the
closed battle compartment as the breech

flicked open and belched out the spent case.  The plastic hissed on
the floor, outgassing horribly while the air conditioning strained to
clear the chamber.  Danny ignored the stench, nudged his sights onto
the onrushing splendor of the second structure on the right of the
corridor.  The breech of the big power gun slapped again and again,
recharging instantly as the tanker worked the foot trip.

Blue-green lightning scattered between the walls as if the full power
of each bolt was flashing the length of the corridor.  Two Star
bellowed in on the wake of its fire, and crystal flurried under the
fans.  Kowie leveled their stroke slightly, cutting speed by a fraction
but lifting the tank higher above the abrasive litter.  The draft
hurled glittering shards across the corridor, arcs of cold fire in the
light of Two Star's gun and those of the blowers following.  Men in
gray were running from their hiding places to avoid the sliding crystal
masses, the iridescent rain that pattered on the upper surfaces of the
tanks but smashed jaggedly through the infantry's body armor.

Danny set his left thumb to rotate the turret counterclockwise, held
the gun-switch down with his foot.  The remaining sixteen rounds of his
basic load blasted down the right half of Starhome, spread by the
blower's forward motion and the turret swing.  The compartment was gray
with fumes.  Danny slammed the hatch open and leaned out.  His hands
went to the 2em as naturally as a calf turns to milk.  The wind was
cold on his face.  Kowie slewed the blower left to avoid the glassy
wave that slashed into the corridor from one of the blasted structures.
The scintillance halted, then ground a little further as something gave
way inside the pile.

A soldier in gray stepped from an untouched archway to the left.  The
buzz bomb on his shoulder was the size of a landing vessel as it swung
directly at Danny.  The tri barrel seemed to traverse with glacial
slowness.  It was too slow.  Danny saw the brief flash as the rocket
leaped from the shoulder of the other mercenary.  It whirred over Two
Star and the sergeant, exploded cataclysmic ally against a spike of
Starhome still rising on the other side.

The infantryman tossed the launcher tube aside.  He froze, his arms
spread wide, and shouted, "Exchange!"

"Exchange yourself, mother!"  Danny screamed back white-faced He
triggered his hose.  The gray torso exploded.  The body fell backward
in a mist of blood, chest and body armor torn open by four hits that
shriveled bones and turned fluids to steam.

"Hard left and goose it, Kowie," the sergeant demanded.  He slapped the
panic bar again.  As the hatch clanged shut over his head, Danny caught
a momentary glimpse of the vision blocks, three soldiers with power
guns leaping out of the same towering structure from which the
rocketeer had come.  Their faces were blankly incredulous as they saw
the huge blower swinging toward them at full power.  The walls flexed
briefly under the impact of the tank's frontal slope, but the filigree
was eggshell thin. The structure disintegrated, lurching toward the
corridor while Two Star plowed forward within it.  A thousand images
kaleidoscoped in Danny's skull, sparkling within the wind chime
dissonance of the falling tower.

The fans screamed as part of the structure's mass collapsed onto Two
Star.  Kowie rocked the tank, raising it like a submarine through a sea
of ravaged glass.  The gentle, green-furred humanoids faded from
Danny's mind.  He threw the hatch open.  Kowie gunned (he fans,
reversing the blower in a poly chrome shower.  Several tanks had moved
ahead of Two Star, nearing the far end of the corridor.  Cray-uniformed
soldiers straggled from the remaining structures, hands empty, eyes
fixed on the ground.  There was very little firing.  Kowie edged into
the column and followed the third tank into the laager forming on the
other side of Starhome.  Pritchard was drained.  His throat was dry,
but he knew from past experience that he would vomit if he swallowed
even a mouthful of water before his muscles stopped trembling.  The
blower rested with its skirts on the ground, its fans purring gently as
they idled to a halt.

Kowie climbed out of the driver's hatch, moving stiffly.  He had a
power gun in his hand, a pistol he always carried for moral support.
Two Star's bow compartment was

frequently nearer the enemy than anything else in Hammer's Slammers.

Several towers still stood in the wreckage of Starhome.  The nearest
one wavered from orange to red and back in the full blaze of sunlight.
Danny watched it in the indium mirror of his tank's deck, the outline
muted by the hatch work of crystal etching on the metal.

Kowie shot off-hand.  Danny looked up in irritation.  The driver shot
again, his light charge having no discernible effect on the
structure.

"Shut it off," Danny croaked.  "These're shrines."

The ground where Starhome had stood blazed like the floor of Hell.

 Hangman

The light in the kitchen alcove glittered on Lieutenant Schillings
blond curls; glittered also on the frost-spangled window beside her and
from the armor of the tank parked outside.  All the highlights looked
cold to Captain Danny Pritchard as he stepped closer to the infantry
lieutenant.

"Sal--" Pritchard began.  From the orderly room behind them came the
babble of the radios ranked against one wall and, less muted, the
laughter of soldiers waiting for action.  "You can't think like a
Dutchman any more.  We're Hammer's Stammers, all of us.  We're meres.
Not Dutch, not Frisians--"

"You're not," Lieutenant Schilling snapped, looking up from the cup of
bitter chocolate she had just drawn from the urn.  She was a short
woman and lightly built, but she had the unerring instinct of a bully
who is willing to make a scene for a victim who is not willing to be
part of one.  "You're a farmer from Dunstan, what d'you care about
Dutch miners, whatever these bleeding French do to them.  But a lot of
us do care, Danny, and if you had a little compassion--"

"But Sal--" Pritchard repeated, only his right arm moving as he touched
the blond girl's shoulder.

"Get your hands off me, Captain!"  she shouted.  "That's over!"  She
shifted the mug of steaming chocolate in her hand.  The voices in the
orderly room stilled.  Then, simultaneously, someone turned up the
volume of the radio

and at least three people began to talk loudly on unconnected
subjects.

Pritchard studied the back of his hand, turned it over to examine the
calloused palm as well.  He smiled.  "Sorry, I'll remember that," he
said in a normal voice.  He turned and stepped back into the orderly
room, a brown-haired man of thirty-four with a good set of muscles to
cover his moderate frame and nothing at all to cover his heart.  Those
who knew Danny Pritchard slightly thought him a relaxed man, and he
looked relaxed even now.  But waiting around the electric grate were
three troopers who knew Danny very well indeed: the crew of the Plow,
Pritchard's command tank.

Kowie drove the beast: a rabbit-eyed man whose fingers now flipped
cards in another game of privy solitaire.  His deck was so dirty that
only familiarity allowed him to read the pips.  Kowie's hands and eyes
were just as quick at the controls of the tank, sliding its bulbous
hundred and fifty metric tons through spaces that were only big enough
to pass it.  When he had to, he drove nervelessly through objects
instead of going around.  Kowie would never be more than a tank driver;
but he was the best tank driver in the Regiment.

Rob Jenne was big and as blond as Lieutenant Schilling.  He grinned up
at Pritchard, his expression changing from embarrassment to relief as
he saw that his captain was able to smile also.  Jenne had transferred
from combat cars to tanks three years back, after the Slammers had
pulled out of Squire's World.  He was sharp-eyed and calm in a crisis.
Twice after his transfer Jenne had been offered a blower of his own to
command if he would return to combat cars.  He had refused both
promotions, saying he would stay with tanks or buy back his contract,
that there was no way he was going back to those open-topped coffins
again.  When a tank commander's slot came open, Jenne got it; and
Pritchard had made the blond sergeant his own blower chief when a
directional mine had retired the previous man.  Now Jenne straddled a
chair backwards, his hands flexing a collapsible torsion device that
kept his muscles as dense

and hard as they had been the day he was recruited from a quarry on
Burlage.

Line tanks carry only a driver and the blower chief who directs the
tank and its guns when they are not under the direct charge of the
Regiment's computer.  In addition to those two and a captain, command
tanks have a Communications Technician to handle the multiplex burden
of radio traffic focused on the vehicle.  Pritchard's commo tech was
Margritte DiManzo, a slender widow who cropped her lustrous hair short
so that it would not interfere with the radio helmet she wore most of
her waking hours.  She was off duty now, but she had not removed the
bulky headgear which linked her to the six radios in the tank parked
outside.  Their simultaneous sound would have been unintelligible
babbling to most listeners.  The black-haired woman's training, both
conscious and hypnotic, broke that babbling into a set of discrete
conversations.  When Pritchard reentered the room, Margritte was
speaking to Jenne.  She did not look up at her commander until Jenne's
brightening expression showed her it was safe to do so.

Two commo people and a sergeant with Intelligence tabs were at consoles
in the orderly room.  They were from the Regiment's HQ Battalion,
assigned to Sector Two here on Kobold but in no sense a part of the
sector's combat companies: Captain Riis' S Company--infantry--and
Pritchard's own tanks.

Riis was the senior captain and in charge of the sector, a matter which
neither he nor Pritchard ever forgot.  Sally Schilling led his first
platoon.  Her aide, a black-haired corporal, sat with his huge boots
up, humming as he polished the pieces of his field-stripped power gun
Its barrel gleamed orange in the light of the electric grate.
Electricity was more general on Kobold than on some wealthier worlds,
since mining and copper smelting made fusion units a practical
necessity.  But though the copper in the transmission cable might well
have been processed on Kobold, the wire had probably been drawn off
world and shipped back here.  Aurore and Friesland had refused to allow
even such simple manufactures here on their joint colony.  They

had kept Kobold a market and a supplier of raw materials but never a
rival.  ' "Going to snow tonight?"  Jenne asked.  "Umm, too cold,"
Pritchard said, walking over to the grate.  He pretended he did not
hear Lieutenant Schilling stepping out of the alcove.  "I figure--"

"Hold it," said Margritte, her index finger curling out for a volume
control before the duly man had time to react One of the wall radios
boomed loudly to the whole room Prodding another switch, Margritte
patched the signal separately through the link implanted in Pritchard's
right mastoid.  "--guns and looks like satchel charges.  There's only
one man in each truck, but they've been on the horn too and we can
figure on more Frenchies here any--"

"Red Alert," Pritchard ordered, facing his commo tech so that she could
read his lips.  "Where is this?"

The headquarters radiomen stood nervously, afraid to interfere but
unwilling to let an outsider run their equipment, however ably.  "Red
Alert," Margritte was repeating over all bands.  Then, through
Pritchard's implant, she said Its Patrol Sigma three-nine, near Haacin.
Dutch civilians've stopped three outbound provisions trucks from
Barthe's Company."

"Scramble First Platoon," Pritchard said, "but tell 'em to hold for us
to arrive."  As Margritte coolly passed on the order, Pritchard picked
up the commo helmet he had laid on his chair when he followed
Lieutenant Schilling into the kitchen.  The helmet gave him automatic
switching and greater range than the bioelectric unit behind his ear.

The wall radio was saying, "--need some big friendlies fast or it'll
drop in the pot for sure."

"Sigma three-niner," Pritchard said, "this is Michael One.

"Go ahead, Michael One," replied the distant squad leader.  Pritchard's
commo helmet added an airy boundless ness to his surroundings without
really deadening the ambient noise.

"Hang on," the tank captain said.  "I heres help on the way."

The door of the orderly room stood ajar the way Pritchard's crewmen
had left it.  The captain slammed it shut as he too ran for his tank.
Behind in the orderly room, Lieutenant Schilling was snapping out quick
directions to her own platoon and to her awakened commander.

The Plow was already floating when Danny reached it.  Ice crystals,
spewed from beneath the skirts by the hit fans, made a blue-white
dazzle in the vehicle's running lights.  Frost whitened the ladder up
the high side of the tank's plenum chamber and hull.  Pritchard paused
to pull on his gloves before mounting.  Sergeant Jenne, anchoring
himself with his left hand on the turret's storage rack, reached down
and kited his captain aboard without noticeable effort.  Side by side,
the two men slid through the hatches to their battle stations.

"Ready," Pritchard said over the intercom.

"Movin' on," replied Kowie, and with his words the tank slid forward
over the frozen ground like grease on a hot griddle.

The command post had been a district road-maintenance center before all
semblance of central government on Kobold had collapsed.  The orderly
room and officers' quarters were in the supervisor's house, a
comfortable structure with shutters and mottoes embroidered in French
on the walls.  Some of the hangings had been defaced by short-range
gunfire.  The crew barracks across the road now served the troopers on
headquarters duty.  Many of the Slammers could read the Dutch
periodicals abandoned there in the break-up.  The equipment shed beside
the barracks garaged the infantry skimmers because the battery powered
platforms could not shrug off the weather like the huge panzers of M
Company.  The shed doors were open, pluming the night with heated air
as the duty platoon ran for its mounts.  Some of the troopers had not
yet donned their helmets and body armor.  Jenne waved as the tank swept
on by; then the road curved and the infantry was lost in the night.
Kobold was a joint colony of Aurore and Friesland.  When eighty years
of French oppression had driven the

Dutch settlers to rebellion, their first act was to hire Hammer's
Slammers.  The break between Hammer and Friesland had been sharp, but
time has a way of blunting anger and letting old habits resume.  The
Regimental language was Dutch, and many of the Slammers' officers were
Frisians seconded from their own service.  Friesland gained from the
men's experience when they returned home; Hammer gained company
officers with excellent training from the GrSningen Academy.

To counter the Slammers, the settlers of Auroran descent had hired
three Francophone regiments.  If either group of colonists could have
afforded to pay its mercenaries unaided, the fighting would have been
immediate and brief.  Kobold had been kept deliberately poor by its
home worlds however; so in their necessities the settlers turned to
those home worlds for financial help.

And neither Aurore nor Friesland wanted a war on Kobold.

Friesland had let its settlers swing almost from the beginning,
sloughing their interests for a half share of the copper produced and
concessions elsewhere in its sphere of influence.  The arrangement was
still satisfactory to the Council of State, if Frisian public opinion
could be mollified by apparent activity.  Aurore was on the brink of
war in the Zemla System.  Her Parliament feared another proxy war which
could in a moment explode full-fledged, even though Friesland had been
weakened by a decade of severe internal troubles.  So Aurore and
Friesland reached a compromise.  Then, under threat of abandonment, the
warring parties were forced to transfer their mercenaries' contracts to
the home worlds.  Finally, Aurore and Friesland mutually hired the four
regiments: the Slammers; Compagnie de Barthe; the Alaudae; and Phenix
Moirots.  Meres from either side were mixed and divided among eight
sectors imposed on a map of inhabited Kobold.  There the contract
ordered them to keep peace between the factions; prevent the
importation of modern weapons to either side; and--wait.

But Colonel Barthe and the Auroran leaders had come to a further,
secret agreement; and although Hammer had

learned of it, he had informed only two men--Major Steuben, his aide
and bodyguard; and Captain Daniel Pritchard.

Pritchard scowled at the memory.  Even without the details a traitor
had sold Hammer, it would have been obvious that Barthe had his own
plans.  In the other sectors, Hammer's men and their French
counterparts ran joint patrols.  Both sides scattered their camps
throughout the sectors, just as the villages of either nationality were
scattered.  Barthe had split his sectors in halves, brusquely ordering
the Slammers to keep to the west of the River Aillet because his own
troops were mining the east of the basin heavily.  Barthe's Company was
noted for its minefields.  That skill was one of the reasons they had
been hired by the French.  Since most of Kobold was covered either by
forests or by rugged hills, armor was limited to roads where
well-placed mines could stack tanks like crushed boxes.

Hammer listened to Barthe's pronouncement and laughed, despite the
anger of most of his staff officers.  Beside him, Joachim Steuben had
grinned and traced the line of his cutaway holster.  When Danny
Pritchard was informed, he had only shivered a little and called a
vehicle inspection for the next morning.  That had been three months
ago..  ..

The night streamed by like smoke around the tank.  Pritchard lowered
his face shield, but he did not drop his seat into the belly of the
tank. Vision blocks within gave a 360 degree view of the tank's
surroundings, but the farmer in Danny could not avoid the feeling of
blindness within the impenetrable walls.  Jenne sat beside his captain
in a cupola fitted with a three-barrelled automatic weapon.  He too
rode with his head out of the hatch, but that was only for comradeship.
The sergeant much preferred to be inside.  He would button up at the
first sign of hostile action.  Jenne was in no sense a coward; it was
just that he had quirks.  Most combat veterans do.

Pritchard liked the whistle of the black wind past his helmet.  Warm
air from the tank's resistance heaters jetted up through the hatch and
kept his body quite comfortable.

The vehicles huge mass required the power of a fusion plant to drive
its lift motors, and the additional burden of climate control was
inconsequential.

The tankers' face shields automatically augmented the light of the
moon, dim and red because the sun it reflected was dim and red as well.
The boosted light level displayed the walls of forest, the boles
snaking densely to either side of the road.  At Kobold's perihelion,
the thin stems grew in days to their full six-meter height and spread a
ceiling of red-brown leaves the size of blankets.  Now, at aphelion,
the chilled, sapless trees burned with almost explosive intensity.  The
wood was too dangerous to use for heating, even if electricity had not
been common, but it fueled the gasogene engines of most vehicles on the
planet.

Jenne gestured ahead.  "Blowers," he muttered on the intercom.  His
head rested on the gun switch though he knew the vehicles must be
friendly.  The Plow slowed.

Pritchard nodded agreement.  "Michael First, this is Michael One," he
said.  "Flash your running lights so we can be sure it's you."

"Roger," replied the radio.  Blue light flickered from the shapes
hulking at the edge of the forest ahead.  Kowie throttled the fans up
to cruise, then chopped them and swung expertly into the midst of the
four tanks of the outlying platoon.

"Michael One, this is Sigma One," Captain Riis' angry voice demanded in
the helmet.

"Go ahead."

"Barthe's sent a battalion across the river.  I'm moving Lieutenant
Schilling into position to block 'em and called Central for artillery
support.  You hold your first platoon at Haacin for reserve and any
partisans up from Portela.  I'll take direct command of the rest
of--"

"Negative, negative, Sigma One!"  Pritchard snapped.  The Plow was
accelerating again, second in the line of five tanks.  They were beasts
of prey sliding across the landscape of snow and black trees at eighty
kph and climbing.  "Let the French through, Captain.  There won't be
fighting, repeat, negative fighting."

"There damned well will be fighting, Michael One, if Barthe tries to
shove a battalion into my sector!"  Riis thundered back.  "Remember,
this isn't your command or a joint command.  I'm in charge here."

"Margritte, patch me through to Battalion," Pritchard hissed on
intercom.  The Plow's turret was cocked thirty degrees to the right. It
covered the forest sweeping by to that side and anything which might be
hiding there.  Pritchard's mind was on Sally Schilling, riding a
skimmer through forest like that flanking the tanks, hurrying with her
fifty men to try to stop a battalion's hasty advance.

The commo helmet popped quietly to itself.  Pritchard tensed, groping
for the words he would need to convince Lieutenant Colonel Miezierk.
Miezierk, under whom command of Sectors One and Two was grouped, had
been a Frisian regular until five years ago.  He was supposed to think
like a mere, now, not like a Frisian; but .. .

The voice that suddenly rasped, "Override, override!"  was not
Miezierk's.  "Sigma One, Michael One, this is Regiment."

"Go ahead," Pritchard blurted.  Captain Riis, equally rattled, said,
"Yes, sir!"  on the three-way link.

"Sigma, your fire order is cancelled.  Keep your troops on alert, but
keep 'em the hell out of Barthe's way."

"But Colonel Hammer--"

"Riis, you're not going to start a war tonight.  Michael One, can your
panzers handle whatever's going on at Haacin without violating the
contract?"

"Yes, sir."  Pritchard flashed a map briefly on his face shield to
check his position.  "We're almost there now."

"If you can't handle it, Captain, you'd better hope you're killed in
action," Colonel Hammer said bluntly.  "I haven't nursed this regiment
for twenty-three years to lose it because somebody forgets what his job
is."  Then, more softly--Pritchard could imagine the colonel flicking
his eyes side to side to gauge bystanders' reactions--he added,
"There's support if you need it, Captain--if they're the ones who
breach the contract."

"Affirmative."

"Keep the lid on, boy.  Regiment out."

The trees had drunk the whine of the fans.  Now the road curved and the
tanks banked greasily to join the main highway from Dimo to Portela.
The tailings pile of the Haacin Mine loomed to the right and hurled the
drive noise back redoubled at the vehicles.  The steel skirts of the
lead tank touched the road metal momentarily, showering the night with
orange sparks.  Beyond the mine were the now empty wheat fields and
then the village itself.

Haacin, the largest Dutch settlement in Sector Two, sprawled to either
side of the highway.  Its houses were two- and three-story lumps of
cemented mine tailings.  They were roofed with tile or plastic rather
than shakes of native timber, because of the wood's lethal
flammability.  The highway was straight and broad.  It gave Pritchard a
good view of the three cargo vehicles pulled to one side.  Men in local
dress swarmed about them.  Across the road were ten of Hammers
khaki-clad infantry, patrol S-39, whose ported weapons half-threatened,
half-protected the trio of drivers in their midst.  Occasionally a
civilian turned to hurl a curse at Barthe's men, but mostly the Dutch
busied themselves with offloading cartons from the trucks.

Pritchard gave a brief series of commands.  The four line tanks
grounded in a hedgehog at the edge of the village.  Their main guns and
automatics faced outward in all directions.  Kowie swung the command
vehicle around the tank which had been leading it.  He cut the fans'
angle of attack, slowing the Plow without losing the ability to
accelerate quickly.  The command vehicle eased past the squad of
infantry, then grounded behind the rearmost truck.  Pritchard felt the
fans' hum through the metal of the hull.

"Who's in charge here?"  the captain demanded, his voice booming
through the command vehicle's public address system.

The Dutch unloading the trucks halted silently.  A squat man in a parka
of feathery native fur stepped forward.  Unlike many of the other
civilians, he was not armed.  He

did not flinch when Pritchard pinned him with the spotlight of the
tank.  "I am Paul van Oosten," the man announced in the heavy Dutch of
Kobold.  "I am Mayor of Haacin.  But if you mean who leads us in what
we are doing here, well .. . perhaps Justice herself does.  Klaus, show
them what these trucks were carrying to Portela."

Another civilian stepped forward, ripping the top off the box he
carried.  Flat plastic wafers spilled from it, glittering in the cold
light: power gun ammunition, intended for shoulder weapons like those
the infantry carried.

"They were taking power guns to the beasts of Portela to use against
us," van Oosten said.  He used the slang term, "skepsels" to name the
Francophone settlers.  The Mayors shaven jaw was jutting out in
anger.

"Captain!"  called one of Barthe's truck drivers, brushing forward
through the ring of Hammer's men.  "Let me explain."

One of the civilians growled and lifted his heavy musket.  Rob Jenne
rang his knuckles twice on the receiver of his tri barrel calling
attention to the muzzles as he swept them down across the crowd.  The
Dutchman froze.  Jenne smiled without speaking.

"We were sent to pick up wheat the regiment had purchased," Barthe's
man began.  Pritchard was not familiar with Barthe's insignia, but from
the mere's age and bearing he was a senior sergeant.  An unlikely
choice to be driving a provisions truck.  "One of the vehicles happened
to be partly loaded.  We didn't take the time to empty it because we
were in a hurry to finish the run and go off duty-there was enough room
and lift to handle that little bit of gear and the grain besides.

"In any case--" and here the sergeant began pressing, because the tank
captain had not cut him off at the first sentence as expected "--you do
not, and these fools surely do not, have the right to stop Colonel
Barthe's transport.  If you have questions about the way we pick up
wheat, that's between your CO and ours.  Sir."

Pritchard ran his gloved index finger back and forth below his right
eyesocket.  He was ice inside, bubbling

ice that tore and chilled him and had nothing to do with the weather.
He turned back to Mayor van Oosten.  "Reload the trucks," he said,
hoping that his voice did not break.

"You can't!"  van Oosten cried.  "These power guns are the only chance
my village, my people have to survive when you leave.  You know what'll
happen, don't you?  Friesland and Aurore, they'll come to an agreement,
a tradeoff, they'll call it, and all the troops will leave.  It's our
lives they're trading!  The beasts in Dimo, in Portela if you let these
go through, they'll have power guns that their mercenaries gave them.
And we--"

Pritchard whispered a prepared order into his helmet mike.  The
rearmost of the four tanks at the edge of the village fired a single
round from its main gun.  The night flared cyan as the 200mm bolt
struck the middle of the tailings pile a kilometer away.  Stone,
decomposed by the enormous energy of the shot, recombined in a huge
gout of Same.  Vapor, lava, and cinders spewed in every direction.
After a moment, bits of high-flung rock began pattering down on the
roofs of Haacin.

The bolt caused a double thunderclap, that of the heated air followed
by the explosive release of energy at the point of impact.  When the
reverberations died away there was utter silence in Haacin.  On the
distant jumble of rock, a dying red glow marked where the charge had
hit The shot had also ignited some saplings rooted among the stones.
They had blazed as white torches for a few moments but they were
already collapsing as cinders.

The Slammers are playing this by rules," Pritchard said.  Loudspeakers
flung his quiet words about the village like the echoes of the shot;
but he was really speaking for the recorder in the belly of the tank,
preserving his words for a later Bonding Authority hearing.  There'll
be no power guns in civilian hands.  Load every bit of this gear back
in the truck.  Remember, there's satellites up there--" Pritchard waved
generally at the sky "--that see everything that happens on Kobold.  If
one power gun is fired by a civilian in this sector, I'll come for him.
I promise you."

The mayor sagged within his furs.  Turning to the crowd behind him, he
said, "Put the guns back on the truck.  So that the Portelans can kill
us more easily."

"Are you mad, van Oosten?"  demanded the gunman who had earlier
threatened Barthe's sergeant.

"Are you mad, Kruse?"  the mayor shouted back without trying to hide
his fury.  "D'ye doubt what those tanks would do to Haacin?  And do you
doubt this butcher--" his back was to Pritchard but there was no doubt
as to whom the mayor meant "--would use them on us?  Perhaps tomorrow
we could have ..."

There was motion at the far edge of the crowd, near the corner of a
building.  Margritte, watching the vision blocks within, called a
warning.  Pritchard reached for his panic bar--Rob Jenne was traversing
the tri barrel  All three of them were too late.  The muzzle flash was
red and it expanded in Pritchard's eyes as a hammer blow smashed him in
the middle of the forehead.

The bullet's impact heaved the tanker up and backwards.  His shattered
helmet flew off into the night.  The unyielding hatch coaming caught
him in the small of the back, arching his torso over it as if he were
being broken on the wheel.  Pritchard's eyes flared with sheets of
light.  As reaction flung him forward again, he realized he was hearing
the reports of Jenne's power gun and that some of the hellish flashes
were real.

If the tri barrel discharges were less brilliant than that of the main
gun, then they were more than a hundred times as close to the
civilians.  The burst snapped within a meter of one bystander, an old
man who stumbled backward into a wall.  His mouth and staring eyes were
three circles of empty terror.  Jenne fired seven rounds.  Every charge
but one struck the sniper or the building he sheltered against.
Powdered concrete sprayed from the wall.  The sniper's body spun
backwards, chest gobbled away by the bolts.  His right arm still
gripped the musket he had fired at Pritchard.  The arm had been flung
alone onto the snowy pavement.  The electric bite of ozone hung in the
air with the ghostly afterimages of the shots.  The dead

man's clothes were burning, tiny orange flames that rippled into smoke
an inch from their bases.

Jenne's big left hand was wrapped in the fabric of Pritchard's jacket,
holding the dazed officer upright.  "There's another rule you play by,"
the sergeant roared to the crowd.  "You shoot at Hammer's Slammers and
you get your balls kicked between your ears.  Sure as god, boys; sure
as death."  Jenne's right hand swung the muzzles of his weapon across
the faces of the civilians.  "Now, load the bleeding trucks like the
captain said, heroes."

For a brief moment, nothing moved but the threatening power gun  Then a
civilian turned and hefted a heavy crate back aboard the truck from
which he had just taken it.  Empty-handed, the colonist began to sidle
away from the vehicle--and from the deadly tri barrel  One by one the
other villagers reloaded the hijacked cargo, the guns and ammunition
they had hoped would save them in the cataclysm they awaited.  One by
one they took the blower chiefs unspoken leave to return to their
houses.  One who did not leave was sobbing out her grief over the
mangled body of the sniper.  None of her neighbors had gone to her
side.  They could all appreciate--now--what it would have meant if that
first shot had led to a general firefight instead of Jenne's selective
response.

"Rob, help me get him inside," Pritchard heard Margritte say.

Pritchard braced himself with both hands and leaned away from his
sergeant's supporting arm.  "No, I'm all right," he croaked.  His
vision was clear enough, but the landscape was flashing bright and dim
with varicolored light.

The side hatch of the turret clanked.  Margritte was beside her
captain.  She had stripped off her cold weather gear in the belly of
the tank and wore only her khaki uniform.  "Get back inside there,"
Pritchard muttered.  "It's not safe."  He was afraid of falling if he
raised a hand to fend her away.  He felt an injector prick the swelling
flesh over his cheekbones.  The flashing colors died away though
Pritchard's ears began to ring..

"They carried some into the nearest building," the

noncom from Barthe's Company was saying.  He spoke in Dutch, having
sleep-trained in the language during the transit to Kobold just as
Hammer's men had in French.

"Get it," Jenne ordered the civilians still near the trucks.  Three of
them were already scurrying toward the house the mere had indicated.
They were back in moments, carrying the last of the arms chests.

Pritchard surveyed the scene.  The cargo had been reloaded, except for
the few spilled rounds winking from the pavement.  Van Oosten and the
furious Kruse were the only villagers still in sight.  "All right,"
Pritchard said to the truck drivers, "get aboard and get moving.  And
come back by way of Bitzen, not here.  I'll arrange an escort for
you."

The French noncom winked, grinned, and shouted a quick order to his
men.  The infantrymen stepped aside silently to pass the truckers.  The
French mercenaries mounted their vehicles and kicked them to life.
Their fans whined and the trucks lifted, sending snow crystals dancing.
With gathering speed, they slid westward along the forest rimmed
highway.

Jenne shook his head at the departing trucks, then stiffened as his
helmet spat a message.  "Captain," he said, "we got company coming."

Pritchard grunted.  His own radio helmet had been smashed by the
bullet, and his implant would only relay messages on the band to which
it had been verbally keyed most recently.  "Margritte, start switching
for me," he said.  His slender commo tech was already slipping back
inside through the side hatch.  Pritchard's blood raced with the
chemicals Margritte had shot into it.  His eyes and mind worked
perfectly, though all his thoughts seemed to have razor edges on
them.

"Use mine," Jenne said, trying to hand the captain his helmet.

"I've got the implant," Pritchard said.  He started to shake his head
and regretted the motion instantly.  "That and Margritte's worth a
helmet any day."

"It's a whole battalion," Jenne explained quietly, his eyes scanning
the Bever Road down which Command Central

had warned that Barthe's troops were coming.  "All but the
artillery--that's back in Dimo, but it'll range here easy enough.
Brought in the antitank battery and a couple calliopes, though."

"Slide us up ahead of Michael First," Pritchard ordered his driver.  As
the Plow shuddered, then spun on its axis, the captain dropped his seat
into the turret to use the vision blocks.  He heard Jenne's seat whirr
down beside him and the cupola hatch snick closed.  In front of
Pritchard's knees, pale in the instrument lights, Margritte DiManzo sat
still and open-eyed at her communications console.

"Little friendlies," Pritchard called through his loudspeakers to the
ten infantrymen, "find yourselves a quiet alley and hope nothing
happens.  The Lord help you if you fire a shot without me ordering it."
The Lord help us all, Pritchard added to himself.

Ahead of the command vehicle, the beetle shapes of First Platoon began
to shift position.  "Michael First," Pritchard ordered sharply, "get
back as you were.  We're not going to engage Barthe, we're going to
meet him."  Maybe.

Kowie slid them alongside, then a little forward of the point vehicle
of the defensive lozenge.  They set down.  All of the tanks were
buttoned up, save for the hatch over Pritchard's head.  The central
vision block was a meter by 30em panel.  It could be set for anything
from a 360 degree view of the tank's surroundings to a one-to-one image
of an object a kilometer away.  Pritchard focused and ran the gain to
ten magnifications, then thirty.  At the higher power, motion curling
along the snow-smoothed grain fields between Haacin and its mine
resolved into men.  Barthe's troops were clad in sooty-white coveralls
and battle armor.  The leading elements were hunched low on the meager
platforms of their skimmers.  Magnification and the augmented light
made the skittering images grainy, but the tanker's practiced eye
caught the tubes of rocket launchers clipped to every one of the
skimmers.  The skirmish line swelled at two points where self propelled
guns were strung like beads on the cord of men: antitank weapons, power
guns firing high-intensity

charges.  They were supposed to be able to burn through the heaviest
armor.  Barthe's boys had come loaded for bear; oh yes.  They thought
they knew just what they were going up against.  Well, the Slammers
weren't going to show them they were wrong.  Tonight.

"Running lights, everybody," Pritchard ordered.  Then, taking a deep
breath, he touched the lift on his seat and raised himself head and
shoulders back into the chill night air.  There was a hand light
clipped to Pritchard's jacket.  He snapped it on, aiming the beam down
onto the turret top so that the burnished metal splashed diffused
radiance up over him.  It bathed his torso and face plainly for the
oncoming infantry.  Through the open hatch, Pritchard could hear Rob
cursing.  Just possibly Margritte was mumbling a prayer.

"Batteries at Dimo and Harfleur in Sector One have received fire orders
and are waiting for a signal to execute," the implant grated.  "If
Barthe opens fire, Command Central will not, repeat, negative, use
Michael First or Michael One to knock down the shells.  Your guns will
be clear for action, Michael One."

Pritchard grinned starkly.  His face would not have been pleasant even
if livid bruises were not covering almost all of it.  The Slammers'
central fire direction computer used radar and satellite reconnaissance
to track shells in flight.  Then the computer took control of any of
the Regiment's vehicle-mounted power guns and swung them onto the
target. Central's message notified Pritchard that he would have full
control of his weapons at all times, while guns tens or hundreds of
kilometers away kept his force clear of artillery fire.

Margritte had blocked most of the commo traffic, Pritchard realized.
She had let through only this message that was crucial to what they
were about to do.  A good commo tech; a very good person indeed.

The skirmish line grounded.  The nearest infantrymen were within fifty
meters of the tanks and their fellows spread off into the night like
lethal wings.  Barthe's men rolled off their skimmers and lay prone.
Pritchard began

to relax when he noticed that their rocket launchers were still aboard
the skimmers.  The antitank weapons were in instant reach, but at least
they were not being leveled for an immediate salvo.  Barthe didn't want
to fight the Slammers.  His targets were the Dutch civilians, just as
Mayor van Oosten had suggested.

An air cushion jeep with a driver and two officers aboard drew close.
It hissed slowly through the line of infantry, then stopped nearly
touching the command vehicle's bow armor.  One of the officers
dismounted.  He was a tall man who was probably very thin when he was
not wearing insulated coveralls and battle armor.  He raised his face
to Pritchard atop the high curve of the blower, sweeping up his
reflective face shield as he did so.  He was Lieutenant Colonel Benoit,
commander of the French mercenaries in Sector Two, a clean-shaven man
with sharp features and a splash of gray hair displaced across his
forehead by his helmet.  Benoit grinned and waved at the muzzle of the
200mm power gun pointed at him.  Nobody had ever said Barthe's chief
subordinate was a coward.

Pritchard climbed out of the turret to the deck, then slid down the bow
slope to the ground.  Benoit was several inches taller than the tanker,
with a force of personality which was daunting in a way that height
alone could never be.  It didn't matter to Pritchard.  He worked with
tanks and with Colonel Hammer; nothing else was going to face down a
man who was accustomed to those.

"Sergeant Major Oberlie reported how well and .. . firmly you handled
their little affair, Captain," Benoit said, extending his hand to
Pritchard.  "I'll admit that I was a little concerned that I would have
to rescue my men myself."

"Hammers Slammers can be depended on to keep their contracts," the
tanker replied, smiling with false warmth.  "I told these square heads
that any civilian caught with a power gun was going to have to answer
to me for it.  Then we made sure nobody thinks we were kidding."

Benoit chuckled.  Little puffs of vapor spurted from his mouth with the
sounds.  "You've been sent to the GrSningen

Academy, have you not, Captain Pritchard?"  the older man asked.  "You
understand that I take an interest in my opposite numbers in this
sector."

Pritchard nodded.  "The Old Man picked me for the two year crash course
on Friesland, yeah.  Now and again he sends noncoms be wants to
promote."

"But you're not a Frisian, though you have Frisian military training,"
the other mercenary continued, nodding to himself.  "As you know,
Captain, promotion in some infantry regiments comes much faster than it
does in the .  Slammers.  If you feel a desire to speak to Colonel
Barthe some time in the future, I assure you this evening's business
will not be forgotten."

"Just doing my job, Colonel," Pritchard simpered.  Did Benoit think a
job offer would make a traitor of him?  Perhaps.  Hammer had bought
Barthe's plans for very little, considering their military worth.
"Enforcing the contract, just like you'd have done if things were the
other way around."

Benoit chuckled again and stepped back aboard his jeep.  "Until we meet
again, Captain Pritchard," he said.  "For the moment I think we'll just
proceed on into Portela.  That's permissible under the contract, of
course."

"Swing wide around Haacin, will you?"  Pritchard called back.  "The
folks there're pretty worked up.  Nobody wants more trouble, do we?"

Benoit nodded.  As his jeep lifted, he spoke into his helmet
communicator.  The skirmish company rose awkwardly and set off in a
counter-clockwise circuit of Haacin.  Behind them, in a column reformed
from their support positions at the base of the tailings heap, came the
truck-mounted men of the other three companies.  Pritchard stood and
watched until the last of them whined past.

Air stirred by the tank's idling fans leaked out under the skirts.  The
jets formed tiny deltas of the snow which winked as Pritchard's feet
caused eddy currents.  In their cold precision the tanker recalled
Colonel Benoit's grin.

"Command Central," Pritchard said as he climbed his blower, "Michael
One.  Everything's smooth here.  Over."  Then, "Sigma One, this is
Michael One.  I'll be back as

quick as fans'll move me, so if you have anything to say we can
discuss it then."  Pritchard knew that Captain Riis must have been
burning the net up, trying to raise him for a report or to make
demands.  It wasn't fair to make Margritte hold the bag now that
Pritchard himself was free to respond to the sector chief; but neither
did the Dunstan tanker have the energy to argue with Riis just at the
moment.  Already this night he'd faced death and Colonel Benoit.  Riis
could wait another ten minutes.

The Plow's armor was a tight fit for its crew, the radios, and the
central bulk of the main gun with its feed mechanism.  The command
vehicle rode glass-smooth over the frozen roadway, with none of the
jouncing that a rougher surface might bring even through the air
cushion.  Margritte faced Pritchard over her console, her seat a meter
lower than his so that she appeared a suppliant.  Her short hair was
the lustrous purple-black of a grackle's throat in sunlight.  Hidden
illumination from the instruments brought her face to life.

"Gee, Captain," Jenne was saying at Pritchard's side, "I wish you'd a
let me pick up that square head rifle.  I know those ground pounders
They're just as apt as not to claim the kill credit themselves, and if
I can't prove I stepped on the body they might get away with it.  I
remember on Paradise, me and Piet de Hagen--he was left wing gunner, I
was right--both shot at a partisan.  And then damned if Central didn't
decide the slope had blown herself up with a hand grenade after we'd
wounded her.  So neither of us got the credit.  You'd think--"

"Lord's blood, Sergeant," Pritchard snarled, "are you so damned proud
of killing one of the poor bastards who hired us to protect them?"

Jenne said nothing.  Pritchard shrank up inside, realizing what he had
said and unable to take the words back.  "Oh, Lord, Rob," he said
without looking up, "I'm sorry.  It .  I'm shook, that's all."

After a brief silence, the blond sergeant laughed.  "Never been shot in
the head myself, Captain, but I can see it might

shake a fellow, yeah."  Jenne let the whine of the fans stand for a
moment as the only further comment while he decided whether he would go
on.  Then he said, "Captain, for a week after I first saw action I
meant to get out of the Slammers, even if I had to sweep floors on
Curwin for the rest of my life.  Finally I decided I'd stick it.  I
didn't like the .. . rules of the game, but I could learn to play by
them.

"And I did.  And one rule is, that you get to be as good as you can at
killing the people Colonel Hammer wants killed.  Yeah, I'm proud about
that one just now.  It was a tough snap shot and I made it.  I don't
care why we're on Kobold or who brought us here.  But I know I'm
supposed to kill anybody who shoots at us, and I will."

"Well, I'm glad you did," Pritchard said evenly as he looked the
sergeant in the eyes.  "You pretty well saved things from getting out
of hand by the way you reacted."

As if he had not heard his captain, Jenne went on, "I was afraid if I
stayed in the Slammers I'd turn into an animal, like the dogs we
trained back home to kill rats in the quarries.  And I was right.  But
it's the way I am now, so I don't seem to mind."

"You do care about those villagers, don't you?"  Margritte asked
Pritchard unexpectedly.

The captain looked down and found her eyes on him.  They were the rich
powder-blue of chicory flowers.  "You're probably the only person in
the Regiment who thinks that," he said bitterly.  "Except for me.  And
maybe Colonel Hammer...."

Margritte smiled, a quick flash and as quickly gone.  "There're
rule-book soldiers in the Slammers," she said, "captains who'd never
believe Barthe was passing arms to the Auroran settlements since he'd
signed a contract that said he wouldn't.  You aren't that kind.  And
the Lord knows Colonel Hammer isn't, and he's backing you.  I've been
around you too long, Danny, to believe you like what you see the French
doing."

Pritchard shrugged.  His whole face was stiff with bruises and the
drugs Margritte had injected to control them.  If he'd locked the
helmet's chin strap, the bullet's impact

would have broken his neck even though the lead itself did not
penetrate.  "No, I don't like it," the brown-haired captain said, "It
reminds me too much of the way the Combine kept us so poor on Duiistan
that a thousand of us signed on for birdseed to fight off-planet.  Just
because it was off-planet.  And if Kobold only gets cop from the worlds
who settled her, then the French skim the best of that.  Sure, I'll
tell the Lord I feel sorry for the Dutch here."

Pritchard held the commo tech's eyes with his own as he continued, "But
it's just like Rob said, Margritte: I'll do my job, no matter who gets
hurt.  We can't do a thing to Barthe or the French until they step over
the line in a really obvious way.  That'll mean a lot of people get
hurt too.  But that's what I'm waiting for."

Margritte reached up and touched Pritchard's hand where it rested on
his knee.  "You'll do something when you can," she said quietly.

He turned his palm up so that he could grasp the woman's fingers.  What
if she knew he was planning an incident, not just waiting for one?
"I'll do something, yeah," he said.  "But it's going to be too late for
an awful lot of people."

Kowie kept the Plow at cruising speed until they were actually in the
yard of the command post.  Then he cocked the fan shafts forward,
lifting the bow and bringing the tank's mass around in a curve that
killed its velocity and blasted an arc of snow against the building.
Someone inside had started to unlatch the door as they heard the
vehicle approach.  The air spilling from the tank's skirts flung the
panel against the inner wall and skidded the man within on his back.

The man was Captain Riis, Pritchard noted without surprise.  Well, the
incident wouldn't make the infantry captain any angrier than the rest
of the evening had made him already.

Riis had regained his feet by the time Pritchard could jump from the
deck of his blower to the fan-cleared ground in front of the building.
The Frisian's normally pale face

was livid now with rage.  He was of the same somatotype as Lieutenant
Colonel Benoit, his French counterpart in the sector: tall, thin, and
proudly erect.  Despite the fact that Riis was only twenty-seven, he
was Pritchard's senior in grade by two years.  He had kept the rank he
held in Friesland's regular army when Colonel Hammer recruited him.
Many of the Slammers were like Riis, Frisian soldiers who had
transferred for the action and pay of a fighting regiment in which
their training would be appreciated.

"You cowardly filth!"  the infantryman hissed as Pritchard approached.
A squad in battle gear stood within the orderly room beyond Riis.  He
pursed his fine lips to spit.

"Hey, Captain!"  Rob Jenne called.  Riis looked up.  Pritchard turned,
surprised that the big tank commander was not right on his heels. Jenne
still smiled from the Plow's cupola.  He waved at the officers with his
left hand.  His right was on the butterfly trigger of the tri barrel

The threat, unspoken as it was, made a professional of Riis again.
"Come on into my office," he muttered to the tank captain, turning his
back on the armored vehicle as if it were only a part of the
landscape.

The infantrymen inside parted to pass the captains.  Sally Schilling
was there.  Her eyes were as hard as her porcelain armor as they raked
over Pritchard.  That didn't matter, he lied to himself tiredly.

Riis' office was at the top of the stairs, a narrow cubicle which had
once been a child's bedroom.  The sloping roof pressed in on the
occupants, though a dormer window brightened the room during daylight.
One wall was decorated with a regimental battle flag--not Hammer's
rampant lion but a pattern of seven stars on a white field.  It had
probably come from the unit in which Riis had served on Friesland. Over
the door hung another souvenir, a big-bore musket of local manufacture.
Riis threw himself into the padded chair behind his desk. "Those
bastards were carrying power guns to Portela!"  he snarled at
Pritchard.

The tanker nodded.  He was leaning with his right shoulder against the
door jamb.  "That's what the folks at

Haacin thought," he agreed.  "If they'll put in a complaint with the
Bonding Authority, I'll testify to what I saw."

"Testify, testify!"  Riis shouted.  "We're not lawyers, we're soldiers!
You should've seized the trucks right then and--"

"No, I should not have, Captain!"  Pritchard shouted back, holding up a
mirror to Riis' anger.  "Because if I had, Barthe would've complained
to the Authority himself, and we'd at least've been fined.  At least!
The contract says the Slammers'll cooperate with the other three units
in keeping peace on Kobold.  Just because we suspect Barthe is
violating the contract doesn't give us a right to violate it ourselves.
Especially in a way any simpleton can see is a violation."

"If Barthe can get away with it, we can," Riis insisted, but he settled
back in his chair.  He was physically bigger than Pritchard, but the
tanker had spent half his life with the Slammers.  Years like those
mark men; death is never very far behind their eyes.

"I don't think Barthe can get away with it," Pritchard lied quietly,
remembering Hammer's advice on how to handle Riis and calm the Frisian
without telling him the truth.  Barthe's officers had been in on his
plans; and one of them had talked.  Any regiment might have one
traitor.

The tanker lifted down the musket on the wall behind him and began
turning it in his fingers.  "If the Dutch settlers can prove to the
Authority that Barthe's been passing out power guns to the French," the
tanker mused aloud, "well, they're responsible for half Barthe's pay,
remember.  It's about as bad a violation as you'll find.  The
Authority'll forfeit his whole bond and pay it over to whoever they
decide the injured parties are.  That's about three years' gross
earnings for Barthe, I'd judge--he won't be able to replace it.  And
without a bond posted, well, he may get jobs, but they'll be the kind
nobody else'd touch for the risk and the pay.  His best troops'll sign
on with other people.  In a year or so, Barthe won't have a regiment
any more."

"He's willing to take the chance," said Riis.

"Colonel Hammer isn't!"  Pritchard blazed back.

"You don't know that.  It isn't the sort of thing the colonel could
say--"

"Say?"  Pritchard shouted.  He waved the musket at Riis.  Its breech
was triple-strapped to take the shock of the industrial explosive it
used for propellant.  Clumsy and large, it was the best that could be
produced on a mining colony whose home worlds had forbidden local
manufacturing.  "Say?  I bet my life against one of these tonight that
the colonel wanted us to obey the contract.  Do you have the guts to
ask him flat out if he wants us to run guns to the Dutch?"

"I don't think that would be proper, Captain," said Riis coldly as he
stood up again.

"Then try not to 'think it proper' to go do some bloody stupid stunt on
your own--sir," Pritchard retorted.  So much for good intentions.
Hammer--and Pritchard--had expected Riis' support of the Dutch
civilians.  They had even planned on it.  But the man seemed to have
lost all his common sense.  Pritchard laid the musket on the desk
because his hands were trembling too badly to hang it back on the
hooks.

"If it weren't for you, Captain," Riis said, "there's not a Slammer in
this sector who'd object to our helping the only decent people on this
planet the way we ought to.  You've made your decision, and it sickens
me.  But I've made decisions too."

Pritchard went out without being dismissed.  He blundered into the
jamb, but he did not try to slam the door.  That would have been petty,
and there was nothing petty in the tanker's rage.

Blank-faced, he clumped down the stairs.  His bunk was in a parlor
which had its own door to the outside.  Pritchard's crew was still in
the Plow.  There they had listened intently to his half of the argument
with Riis, transmitted by the implant.  If Pritchard had called for
help, Kowie would have sent the command vehicle through the front wall
buttoned up, with Jenne ready to shoot if he had to, to rescue his CO.
A tank looks huge when seen close up.  It is all howling steel and
iridium, with black muzzles ready to spew death across a planet.  On a
battlefield, when the sky is a thousand shrieking colors no god

ever made and the earth beneath trembles and gouts in sudden
mountains, a tank is a small world indeed for its crew.  Their
loyalties are to nearer things than an abstraction like "The
Regiment."

Besides, tankers and infantrymen have never gotten along well
together.

No one was in the orderly room except two radiomen.  They kept their
backs to the stairs.  Pritchard glanced at them, then unlatched his
door.  The room was dark, as he had left it, but there was a presence.
Pritchard said, "Sal--" as he stepped within and the club knocked him
forward into the arms of the man waiting to catch his body.

The first thing Pritchard thought as his mind slipped toward oblivion
was that the cloth rubbing his face was homespun, not the hard
synthetic from which uniforms were made.  The last thing Pritchard
thought was that there could have been no civilians within the
headquarters perimeter unless the guards had allowed them; and that
Lieutenant Schilling was officer of the guard tonight.

Pritchard could not be quite certain when he regained consciousness.  A
heavy felt rug covered and hid his trussed body on the floor of a
clattering surface vehicle.  He had no memory of being carried to the
truck, though presumably it had been parked some distance from the
command post.  Riis and his confederates would not have been so open as
to have civilians drive to the door to take a kidnapped officer, even
if Pritchard's crew could have been expected to ignore the breach of
security.

Kidnapped.  Not for later murder, or he would already be dead instead
of smothering under the musty rug.  Thick as it was, the rug was still
inadequate to keep the cold from his shivering body.  The only lights
Pritchard could see were the washings of icy color from the night's
doubled shock to his skull.

That bone-deep ache reminded Pritchard of the transceiver implanted in
his mastoid.  He said in a husky whisper which he hoped would not
penetrate the rug, "Michael One to any unit, any unit at all.  Come in
please, any Slammer."

Nothing.  Well, no surprise.  The implant had an effective range of
less than twenty meters, enough for relaying to and from a base unit,
but unlikely to be useful in Kobold's empty darkness.  Of course, if
the truck happened to be passing one of M Company's night defensive
positions.... "Michael One to any unit' the tanker repeated more
urgently.

A boot slammed him in the ribs.  A voice in guttural Dutch snarled,
"Shut up, you, or you get what you gave Henrik."

So he'd been shopped to the Dutch, not that there had been much
question about it.  And not that he might not have been safer in French
hands, the way everybody on this cursed planet thought he was a traitor
to his real employers.  Well, it wasn't fair; but Danny Pritchard had
grown up a farmer, and no farmer is ever tricked into believing that
life is fair.

The track finally jolted to a stop.  Gloved hands jerked the cover from
Pritchard's eyes.  He was not surprised to recognize the concrete
angles of Haacin as men passed him hand to hand into a cellar.  The
attempt to hijack Barthes power guns had been an accident, an
opportunity seized; but the crew which had kidnapped Pritchard must
have been in position before the call from S-39 had intervened.

"Is this wise?"  Pritchard heard someone demand from the background.
"If they begin searching, surely they'll begin in Haacin."

The two men at the bottom of the cellar stairs took Pritchard's
shoulders and ankles to carry him to a spring cot.  It had no mattress.
The man at his feet called, "There won't be a search, they don't have
enough men.  Besides, the beasts'll be blamed--as they should be for so
many things.  If Pauli won't let us kill the turncoat, then we'll all
have to stand the extra risk of him living."

"You talk too much," Mayor van Oosten muttered as he dropped
Pritchard's shoulders on the bunk.  Many civilians had followed the
captive into the cellar.  The last of them swung the door closed.  It
lay almost horizontal to the ground.  When it slammed, dust sprang from
the ceiling.  Someone switched on a dim incandescent light.  The
scores

of men and women in the storage room were as hard and fell as the bare
walls.  There were three windows at street level, high on the wall.
Slotted shutters blocked most of their dusty glass.

"Get some heat in this hole or you may as well cut my throat,"
Pritchard grumbled.

A woman with a musket cursed and spat in his face.  The man behind her
took her arm before the gun butt could smear the spittle.  Almost in
apology, the man said to Pritchard, "It was her husband you killed."

"You're being kept out of the way," said a husky man-- Kruse, the
hothead from the hijack scene.  His facial hair was pale and long,
merging in distinguishably with the silky fringe of his parka.  Like
most of the others in the cellar, he carried a musket.  "Without your
meddling, there'll be a chance for us to ... get ready to protect
ourselves, after the tanks leave and the beasts come to finish us with
their power guns

"Does Riis think I won't talk when this is over?"  Pritchard asked.

"I told you--" one of the men shouted at van Oosten.  The heavy-set
mayor silenced him with a tap on the chest and a bellowed, "Quiet!" The
rising babble hushed long enough for van Oosten to say, "Captain, you
will be released in a very few days.  If you--cause trouble, then, it
will only be an embarrassment to yourself.  Even if your colonel
believes you were doing right, he won't be the one to bring to light a
violation which was committed with--so you will claim--the connivance
of his own officers."

The mayor paused to clear his throat and glower around the room.
"Though in fact we had no help from any of your fellows, either in
seizing you or in arming ourselves for our own protection."

"Are you all blind?"  Pritchard demanded.  He struggled with his elbows
and back to raise himself against the wall "Do you think a few lies
will cover it all up?  The only ships that've touched on Kobold in
three months are the ones supplying us and the other meres.  Barthe
maybe's smuggled in enough guns in cans of lube oil and the Wee

to arm some civilians.  He won't be able to keep that a secret, but
maybe he can keep the Authority from proving who's responsible.

"That's with three months and preplanning.  If Riis tries to do
anything on his own, that many of his own men are going to be short
sidearms--they're all issued by serial number, Lord take it!--and a
blind Mongoloid could get enough proof to sink the Regiment."

"You think we don't understand," said Kruse in a quiet voice.  He
transferred his musket to his left hand, then slapped Pritchard across
the side of the head.  "We understand very well," the civilian said.
"All the mercenaries will leave in a few days or weeks.  If the French
have power guns and we do not, they will kill us, our wives, our
children.... There's a hundred and fifty villages on Kobold like this
one, Dutch, and as many French ones scattered between.  It was bad
before, with no one but the beasts allowed any real say in the
government; but now if they win, there'll be French villages and French
mines--and slave pens.  Forever."

"You think a few guns'll save you?"  Pritchard asked.  Kruse's blow
left no visible mark in the tanker's livid flesh, though a better judge
than Kruse might have noted that Pritchard's eyes were as hard as his
voice was mild.

"They'll help us save ourselves when the time comes," Kruse retorted.

"If you'd gotten power guns from French civilians instead of the meres
directly, you might have been all right," the captain said.  He was
coldly aware that the lie he was telling was more likely to be believed
in this situation than it would have been in any setting he might
deliberately have contrived.  There had to be an incident, the French
civilians had to think they were safe in using their illegal weapons..
.. "The Portelans, say, couldn't admit to having guns to lose.  But
anything you take from meres--us or Barthe, it doesn't matter--we'll
take back the hard way.  You don't know what you're buying into."

a few of us, it's every family in the village behind .. . our holding
him."  Van Oosten nodded around the room.  "More of us than your
colonel could dream of trying to punish," he added naively to
Pritchard.  Then he flashed back at Kruse, "If you act like a fool,
he'll want revenge anyway."

"You may never believe this," Pritchard interjected wearily, "but I
just want to do my job.  If you let me go now, it--may be easier in the
long run."

"Fool," Kruse spat and turned his back on the tanker.

A trap door opened in the ceiling, spilling more light into the cellar.
"Pauli!"  a woman shouted down the opening, "Hals is on the radio.
There's tanks coming down the road, just like before!"

"The Lord's wounds!"  van Oosten gasped.  "We must--"

"They can't know!"  Kruse insisted.  "But we've got to get everybody
out of here and back to their own houses.  Everybody but me and him--"
a nod at Pritchard "--and this."  The musket lowered so that its round
black eye pointed straight into the bound man's face.

"No, by the side door!"  van Oosten called to the press of conspirators
clumping up toward the street.  "Don't run right out in front of them."
Cursing and jostling, the villagers climbed the ladder to the ground
floor, there presumably to exit on an alley.

Able only to twist his head and legs, Pritchard watched Kruse and the
trembling muzzle of his weapon.  The village must have watchmen with
radios at either approach through the forests.  If Hals was atop the
heap of mine tailings-where Pritchard would have placed his outpost if
he were in charge, certainly--then he'd gotten a nasty surprise when
the main gun splashed the rocks with Hell.  The captain grinned at the
thought.  Kruse misunderstood and snarled, "If they are coming for you,
you're dead, you treacherous bastard!"  To the backs of his departing
fellows, the young Dutchman called, "Turn out the light here, but leave
the trap door open.  That won't show on the street, but it'llwho's
responsible.

"That's with three months and preplanning.  If Riis tries to do
anything on his own, that many of his own men are going to be short
sidearms--they're all issued by serial number, Lord take it!--and a
blind Mongoloid could get enough proof to sink the Regiment."

"You think we don't understand," said Kruse in a quiet voice.  He
transferred his musket to his left hand, then slapped Pritchard across
the side of the head.  "We understand very well," the civilian said.
"All the mercenaries will leave in a few days or weeks.  If the French
have power guns and we do not, they will kill us, our wives, our
children.... There's a hundred and fifty villages on Kobold like this
one, Dutch, and as many French ones scattered between.  It was bad
before, with no one but the beasts allowed any real say in the
government; but now if they win, there'll be French villages and French
mines--and slave pens.  Forever."

"You think a few guns'll save you?"  Pritchard asked.  Kruse's blow
left no visible mark in the tanker's livid flesh, though a better judge
than Kruse might have noted that Pritchard's eyes were as hard as his
voice was mild.

"They'll help us save ourselves when the time comes," Kruse retorted.

"If you'd gotten power guns from French civilians instead of the meres
directly, you might have been all right," the captain said.  He was
coldly aware that the lie he was telling was more likely to be believed
in this situation than it would have been in any setting he might
deliberately have contrived.  There had to be an incident, the French
civilians had to think they were safe in using their illegal weapons..
.. "The Portelans, say, couldn't admit to having guns to lose.  But
anything you take from meres--us or Barthe, it doesn't matter--we'll
take back the hard way.  You don't know what you're buying into."

of us than your colonel could dream of trying to punish," he added
naively to Pritchard.  Then he flashed back at Kruse, "If you act like
a fool, he'll want revenge anyway."

"You may never believe this," Pritchard interjected wearily, "but I
just want to do my job.  If you let me go now, it--may be easier in the
long run."

"Fool," Kruse spat and turned his back on the tanker.

A trap door opened in the ceiling, spilling more light into the cellar.
"Pauli!"  a woman shouted down the opening, "Hals is on the radio.
There's tanks coming down the road, just like before!"

"The Lord's wounds!"  van Oosten gasped.  "We must--"

They can't know!"  Kruse insisted.  "But we've got to get everybody out
of here and back to their own houses.  Everybody but me and him--" a
nod at Pritchard "--and this."  The musket lowered so that its round
black eye pointed straight into the bound man's face.

"No, by the side door!"  van Oosten called to the press of conspirators
clumping up toward the street.  "Don't run right out in front of them."
Cursing and jostling, the villagers climbed the ladder to the ground
floor, there presumably to exit on an alley.

Able only to twist his head and legs, Pritchard watched Kruse and the
trembling muzzle of his weapon.  The village must have watchmen with
radios at either approach through the forests.  If Hals was atop the
heap of mine tailings-where Pritchard would have placed his outpost if
he were in charge, certainly--then he'd gotten a nasty surprise when
the main gun splashed the rocks with Hell.  The captain grinned at the
thought.  Kruse misunderstood and snarled, "If they are coming for you,
you're dead, you treacherous bastard!"  To the backs of his departing
fellows, the young Dutchman called, "Turn out the light here, but leave
the trap door open.  That won't show on the street, but it'llhis
disappearance had stirred up some patrolling, for want of more directed
action; perhaps a platoon was just changing ground because of its
commander's whim.  Pritchard had encouraged random motion.  Tanks that
freeze in one place are sitting targets, albeit hard ones.  But
whatever the reason tanks were approaching Haacin, if they whined by in
the street outside they would be well within range of his implanted
transmitter.

The big blowers were audible now, nearing with an arrogant lack of
haste as if bears headed for a beehive.  They were moving at about
thirty kph, more slowly than Pritchard would have expected even for a
contact patrol.  From the sound there were four or more of them, smooth
and gray and deadly.

"Kruse, I'm serious," the Slammer captain said.  Light from the trap
door back-lit the civilian into a hulking beast with a musket.  "If
you--"

"Shut up!"  Kruse snarled, prodding his prisoner's bruised forehead
with the gun muzzle.  "One more word, any word, and--"

Kruse's right hand was so tense and white that the musket might fire
even without his deliberate intent.

The first of the tanks slid by outside.  Its cushion of air was so
dense that the ground trembled even though none of the blower's 170
tonnes was in direct contact with it.  Squeezed between the pavement
and the steel curtain of the plenum chamber, the air spurted sideways
and rattled the cellar windows.  The rattling was inaudible against the
howling of the fans themselves, but the trembling shutters chopped
facets in the play of the tank's running lights.  Kruse's face and the
far wall flickered in blotched abstraction.

The tank moved on without pausing.  Pritchard had not tried to summon
it.

"That power," Kruse was mumbling to himself, "that should be for us to
use to sweep the beasts--" The rest of his words were lost in the
growing wail of the second tank in the column.

Pritchard tensed within.  Even if a passing tank picked up his
implant's transmission, its crew would probably ignore

the message.  Unless Pritchard identified himself, the tankers would
assume it was babbling thrown by the ionosphere.  And if he did
identify himself, KruseKruse thrust his musket against Pritchard's
skull again, banging the tanker's head back against the cellar wall. 
The Dutchman's voice was lost in the blower's howling, but his blue-lit
lips clearly were repeating, "One word .. ."

The tank moved on down the highway toward Portela.

"..  . and maybe I'll shoot you anyway," Kruse was saying.  "That's the
way to serve traitors, isn't it?  Mercenary!"

The third blower was approaching.  Its note seemed slightly different,
though that might be the after-effect of the preceding vehicles'
echoing din.  Pritchard was cold all the way to his heart, because in a
moment he was going to call for help.  He knew that Kruse would shoot
him, knew also that he would rather the now than live after hope had
come so near but passed on, passed on..  ..

The third tank smashed through the wall of the house.

The Plow's skirts were not a bulldozer blade, but they were thick steel
and backed with the mass of a 150 tonne command tank.  The slag wall
repowdered at the impact.  Ceiling joists buckled into pretzel shape
and ripped the cellar open to the floor above.  Kruse flung his musket
up and fired through the cascading rubble.  The boom and red flash were
lost in the chaos, but the blue-green fire stabbing back across the
cellar laid the Dutchman on his back with his parka aflame.  Pritchard
rolled to the floor at the first shock.  He thrust himself with corded
legs and arms back under the feeble protection of the bunk.  When the
sound of falling objects had died away, the captain slitted his eyelids
against the rock dust and risked a look upward.

The collision had torn a gap ten feet long in the house wall, crushing
it from street level to the beams supporting the second story.  The
tank blocked the hole with its gray bulk.  Fresh scars brightened the
patina of corrosion etched onto its skirts by the atmospheres of a
dozen planets.  Through the buckled flooring and the dust whipped into
arabesques by the idling fans, Pritchard glimpsed a slight figure
clinging left-handed to the turret.  Her right hand still threatened
the

wreckage with a submachine gun.  Carpeting burned on the floor above,
ignited by the burst that killed Kruse.  Somewhere a woman was
screaming in Dutch.

"Margritte!"  Pritchard shouted.  "Margritte!  Down here!"

The helmeted woman swung up her face shield and tried to pierce the
cellar gloom with her unaided eyes.  The tank battered opening had
sufficed for the exchange of shots, but the tangle of structural
members and splintered flooring was too tight to pass a man--or even a
small woman.  Sooty flames were beginning to shroud the gap.  Margritte
jumped to the ground and struggled for a moment before she was able to
heave open the door.  The Plow's turret swung to cover her, though
neither the main gun nor the tri barrel in the cupola could depress
enough to rake the cellar.  Margritte ran down the steps to Pritchard.
Coughing in the rock dust, he rolled out over the rubble to meet her.
Much of the smashed sidewall had collapsed onto the street when the
tank backed after the initial impact.  Still, the crumpled beams of the
ground floor sagged further with the additional weight of the slag on
them.  Head-sized pieces had splanged on the cot above Pritchard.

Margritte switched the submachine gun to her left hand and began using
a clasp knife on her captain's bonds.  The cord with which he was tied
bit momentarily deeper at the blade's pressure.

Pritchard winced, then began flexing his freed hands.  "You know,
Margi," he said, "I don't think I've ever seen you with a gun
before."

The commo tech's face hardened as if the polarized helmet shield had
slipped down over it again.  "You hadn't," she said.  The ankle
bindings parted and she stood, the dust graying her helmet and her
foam-filled coveralls.  "Captain, Kowie had to drive and we needed Rob
in the cupola at the gun.  That left me to--do anything else that had
to be done.  I did what had to be done."

Pritchard tried to stand, using the technician as a post on which to
draw himself upright.  Margritte looked frail, but with her legs braced
she stood like a rock.  Her arm around Pritchard's back was as firm as
a man's.

"You didn't ask Captain Riis for help, I guess," Pritchard said, pain
making his breath catch.  The line tanks had two man crews with no one
to spare for outrider, of course.

"We didn't report you missing," Margritte said, "even to First Platoon.
They just went along like before, thinking you were in the Plow giving
orders."  Together, captain and technician shuffled across the floor to
the stairs.  As they passed Kruse's body, Margritte muttered
cryptically, "That's four."

Pritchard assumed the tremors beginning to shake the woman's body were
from physical strain.  He took as much weight off her as he could and
found his numbed feet were beginning to function reasonably well.  He
would never have been able to board the Plow without Sergeant Jenne's
grip on his arm, however.

The bartered officer settled in the turret with a groan of comfort. The
seat cradled his body with gentle firmness, and the warm air blown
across him was just the near side of heaven.

"Captain," Jenne said, "what d'we do about the slopes who grabbed you?
Shall we call in an interrogation team and--"

"We don't do anything," Pritchard interrupted.  "We just pretend none
of this happened and head back to .. ."  He paused.  His flesh wavered
both hot and cold as Margritte sprayed his ankles with some of the
apparatus from the medical kit.  "Say, how did you find me, anyway?"

"We shut off coverage when you--went into your room," Jenne said,
seeing that the commo tech herself did not intend to speak.  He meant,
Pritchard knew, they had shut off the sound when their captain had
said, "Sal."  None of the three of them were looking either of the
other two in the eyes.  "After a bit, though, Margi noticed the carrier
line from your implant had dropped off her oscilloscope.  I checked
your room, didn't find you.  Didn't see much point talking it over with
the remfs on duty, either.

"So we got satellite recce and found two trucks'd left the area since
we got back.  One was Riis', and the other was a ciwie junker before
that.  It'd been parked in the

woods out of sight, half a kay up the road from the buildings.  Both
trucks unloaded in Haacin.  We couldn't tell which load was you, but
Margi said if we got close, she'd home on your carrier even though you
weren't calling us on the implant.  Some girl we got here, hey?"

Pritchard bent forward and squeezed the commo tech's shoulder.  She did
not look up, but she smiled.  "Yeah, always knew she was something," he
agreed, "but I don't think I realized quite what a person she was until
just now."

Margritte lifted her smile.  "Rob ordered First Platoon to fall in with
us," she said.  "He set up the whole rescue."  Her fine-fingered hands
caressed Pritchard's calves.

But there was other business in Haacin, now.  Riis had been quicker to
act than Pritchard had hoped.  He asked, "You say one of the infantry's
trucks took a load here a little bit ago?"

"Yeah, you want the off-print?"  Jenne agreed, searching for the flimsy
copy of the satellite picture.  "What the Hell would they be doing,
anyhow?"

"I got a suspicion," his captain said grimly, "and I suppose it's one
we've got to check out."

"Michael First-Three to Michael One," the radio broke in.  "Vehicles
approaching from the east on the hardball."

"Michael One to Michael First," Pritchard said, letting the search for
contraband arms wait for this new development.  "Reverse and form a
line abreast beyond the village.  Twenty meter intervals.  The Plow'll
take the road."  More weapons from Riis?  More of Barthe's troops when
half his sector command was already in Portela?  Pritchard touched
switches beneath the vision blocks as Kowie slid the tank into
position.  He split the screen between satellite coverage and a
ground-level view at top magnification.  Six vehicles, combat cars,
coming fast.  Pritchard swore.  Friendly, because only the Slammers had
armored vehicles on Kobold, not that cars were a threat to tanks
anyway.  But no combat cars were assigned to this sector; and the
unexpected is always bad news to a company commander juggling too many
variables already.

"Platoon nearing Tango Sigma four-two, three-two, please

identify to Michael One," Pritchard requested, giving Haacins map
coordinates.

Margritte turned up the volume of the main radio while she continued to
bandage the captain's rope cuts.  The set crackled, "Michael One, this
is Alpha One and Alpha First.  Stand by."

"God's bleeding cunt!"  Rob Jenne swore under his breath.  Pritchard
was nodding in equal agitation.  Alpha was the Regiment's special duty
company.  Its four combat car platoons were Colonel Hammer's bodyguards
and police.  The troopers of A Company were nicknamed the White Mice,
and they were viewed askance even by the Slammers of other
companies--men who prided themselves on being harder than any other
combat force in the galaxy.  The White Mice in turn feared their
commander, Major Joachim Steuben; and if that slightly-built killer
feared anyone, it was the man who was probably travelling with him this
night.  Pritchard sighed and asked the question.  "Alpha One, this is
Michael One.  Are you flying a pennant, sir?"

"Affirmative, Michael One."

Well, he'd figured Colonel Hammer was along as soon as he heard what
the unit was.  What the Old Man was doing here was another question,
and one whose answer Pritchard did not look forward to learning.

The combat cars glided to a halt under the guns of then bigger
brethren.  The tremble of their fans gave the appearance of heat
ripples despite the snow.  From his higher vantage point, Pritchard
watched the second car slide out of line and fall alongside the Plow.
The men at the nose and right wing guns were both short, garbed in
nondescript battle gear.  They differed from the other troopers only in
that their helmet shields were raised and that the faces visible
beneath were older than those of most Slammers: Colonel Alois Hammer
and his hatchet man

"No need for radio, Captain," Hammer called in a husky voice.  "What
are you doing here?"

Pritchard's tongue quivered between the truth and a lie.  His crew had
been covering for him, and he wasn't about to leave them holding the
bag.  All the breaches of regulations

they had committed were for their captain's sake.  "Sir, I brought
First Platoon back to Haacin to check whether any of the power guns
they'd hijacked from Barthe were still in ciwie hands."  Pritchard
could feel eyes behind the cracked shutters of every east-facing window
in the village.

"And have you completed your check?"  the colonel pressed, his voice
mild but his eyes as hard as those of Major Steuben beside him; as hard
as the iridium plates of the gun shields.

Pritchard swallowed.  He owed nothing to Captain Riis, but the young
fool was his superior--and at least he hadn't wanted the Dutch to kill
Pritchard.  He wouldn't put Riis' ass in the bucket if there were
neutral ways to explain the contraband.  Besides, they were going to
need Riis and his Dutch contacts for the rest of the plan.  "Sir, when
you approached I was about to search a building where I suspect some
illegal weapons are stored."

"And instead you'll provide backup for the major here," said Hammer,
the false humor gone from his face.  His words rattled like shrapnel.
"He'll retrieve the twenty-four power guns which Captain Riis saw fit
to turn over to civilians tonight.  If Joachim hadn't chanced, chanced
onto that requisition .. ."  Hammer's left glove shuddered with the
strength of his grip on the forward tri barrel  Then the colonel
lowered his eyes and voice, adding, "The quartermaster who filled a
requisition for twenty-four pistols from Central Supply is in the
infantry again tonight.  And Captain Riis is no longer with the
Regiment."

Steuben tittered, loose despite the tension of everyone around him. The
cold was bitter, but Joachim's right hand was bare.  With it he traced
the baroque intaglios of his bolstered pistol.  "Mr.  Riis is lucky to
be alive," the slight Newlander said pleasantly.  "Luckier than some
would have wished.  But, Colonel, I think we'd best go pick up the
merchandise before anybody nerves themself to use it on us."

Hammer nodded, calm again.  "Interfile your blowers with ours,
Captain," he ordered.  "Tour panzers watch street level while the cars
take care of upper floors and roofs."

Pritchard saluted and slid down into the tank, relaying the order to
the rest of his platoon.  Kowie blipped the Plow's throttles, swinging
the turreted mass in its own length and sending it back into the
village behind the lead combat car.  The tank felt light as a dancer,
despite the constricting sidestreet Kowie followed the car into.
Pritchard scanned the full circuit of the vision blocks.  Nothing save
the wind and armored vehicles moved in Haacin.  When Steuben had
learned a line company was requisitioning two dozen extra sidearms, the
major had made the same deductions as Pritchard had and had inspected
the same satellite tape of a truck unloading.  Either Riis was insane
or he really thought Colonel Hammer was willing to throw away his
life's work to arm a village--inadequately.  Lord and Martyrs!  Riis
would have had to be insane to believe that!

Their objective was a nondescript two-story building, separated from
its neighbors by narrow alleys.  Hammer directed the four rearmost
blowers down a parallel street to block the rear.  The searchlights of
the vehicles chilled the flat concrete and glared back from the windows
of the building.  A battered surface truck was parked in the street
outside.  It was empty.  Nothing stirred in the house.

Hammer and Steuben dismounted without haste.  The major's helmet was
slaved to a loudspeaker in the car.  The speaker boomed, "Everyone out
of the building.  You have thirty seconds.  Anyone found inside after
that'll be shot.  Thirty seconds!"

Though the residents had not shown themselves earlier, the way they
boiled out of the doors proved they had expected the summons.  All told
there were eleven of them.  From the front door came a well-dressed man
and woman with their three children: a sexless infant carried by its
mother in a zippered cocoon; a girl of eight with her hood down and her
hair coiled in braids about her forehead; and a twelve-year-old boy who
looked nearly as husky as his father.  Outside staircases disgorged an
aged couple on the one hand and four tough-looking men on the other.

Pritchard looked at his blower chief.  The sergeant's right

hand was near the gun switch and he mumbled an old ballad under his
breath.  Chest tightening, Pritchard climbed out of his hatch.  He
jumped to the ground and paced quietly over to Hammer and his aide.

"There's twenty-four pistols in this building," Joachim's amplified
voice roared, "or at least you people know where they are.  I want
somebody to save trouble and tell me."

The civilians tensed.  The mother half-turned to swing her body between
her baby and the officers.

Joachim's pistol was in his hand, though Pritchard had not seen him
draw it.  "Nobody to speak?"  Joachim queried.  He shot the
eight-year-old in the right knee.  The spray of blood was momentary as
the flesh exploded.  The girl's mouth pursed as her buckling leg
dropped her facedown in the street.  The pain would come later.  Her
parents screamed, the father falling to his knees to snatch up the
child as the mother pressed her forehead against the door jamb in blind
panic.

Pritchard shouted, "You son of a bitch!"  and clawed for his own
sidearm.  Steuben turned with the precision of a turret lathe.  His
pistol's muzzle was a white-hot ring from its previous discharge.
Pritchard knew only that and the fact that his own weapon was not clear
of its holster.  Then he realized that Colonel Hammer was shouting,
"No!"  and that his open hand had rocked Joachim's head back.

Joachim's face went pale except for the handprint burning on his cheek.
His eyes were empty.  After a moment, he bolstered his weapon and
turned back to the civilians.  "Now, who'll tell us where the guns
are?"  he asked in a voice like breaking glassware.

The tear-blind woman, still holding her infant, gurgled, "Here!  In the
basement!"  as she threw open the door.  Two troopers followed her
within at a nod from Hammer.  The father was trying to close the girl's
wounded leg with his hands, but his palms were not broad enough.

Pritchard vomited on the snowy street.

Margritte was out of the tank with a medikit in her hand.  She flicked
the civilian's hands aside and began freezing the wound with a spray.
The front door banged

open again.  The two White Mice were back with their submachine guns
slung under their arms and a heavy steel weapons chest between them.
Hammer nodded and walked to them.

"You could have brought in an interrogation team!"  Pritchard shouted
at the backs of his superiors.  "You don't shoot children!"

"Machine interrogation takes time, Captain," Steuben said mildly.  He
did not turn to acknowledge the tanker.  "This was just as
effective."

"That's a little girl!"  Pritchard insisted with his hands clenched.
The child was beginning to cry, though the local anesthetic in the
skin-sealer had probably blocked the physical pain.  The psychic shock
of a body that would soon end at the right knee would be worse, though.
The child was old enough to know that no local doctor could save the
limb.  "This isn't something that human beings do\"

"Captain," Steuben said, "they're lucky I haven't shot all of them."

Hammer closed the arms chest.  "We've got what we came for," he said.
"Let's go."

"Stealing guns from my colonel," the Newlander continued as if Hammer
had not spoken.  The handprint had faded to a dull blotch.  "I really
ought to--" "Joachim, shut it off!"  Hammer shouted.  "We're going to
talk about what happened tonight, you and I. I'd rather do it when we
were alone but I'll tell you now if I have to.  Or in front of a
court-martial."

Steuben squeezed his forehead with the fingers of his left hand.  He
said nothing.

"Let's go," the colonel repeated.

Pritchard caught Hammer's arm.  "Take the kid back to Central's
medics," he demanded.

Hammer blinked.  "I should have thought of that," he said simply. "Some
times I lose track of ... things that aren't going to shoot at me.  But
we don't need this sort of reputation."

"I don't care cop for public relations," Pritchard snapped.  "Just save
that little girl's leg."

Steuben reached for the child, now lying limp.  Margritte had used a
shot of general anesthetic.  The girls father went wild-eyed and swung
at Joachim from his crouch.  Margritte jabbed with the injector from
behind the civilian.  He gasped as the drug took hold, then sagged as
if his bones had dissolved.  Steuben picked up the girl.

Hammer vaulted aboard the combat car and took the child from his
subordinates arms.  Cutting himself into the loudspeaker system, the
stocky colonel thundered to the street, "Listen you people.  If you
take guns from meres-either Barthe's men or my own--we'll grind you to
dust.  Take 'em from civilians if you think you can.  You may have a
chance, then.  If you rob meres, you just get a chance to die."

Hammer nodded to the civilians, nodded again to the brooding buildings
to either side.  He gave an unheard command to his driver.  The combat
cars began to rev their fans.

Pritchard gave Margritte a hand up and followed her.  "Michael One to
Michael First," he said.  "Head back with Alpha First."

Pritchard rode inside the turret after they left Haacin, glad for once
of the armor and the cabin lights.  In the writhing tree limbs he had
seen the Dutch mother's face as the shot maimed her daughter.

Margritte passed only one call to her commander.  It came shortly after
the combat cars had separated to return to their base camp near Midi,
the planetary capital.  The colonel's voice was as smooth as it ever
got.  It held no hint of the rage which had blazed out in Haacin.
"Captain Pritchard," Hammer said, "I've transferred command of Sigma
Company to the leader of its First Platoon.  The sector, of course, is
in your hands now.  I expect you to carry out your duties with the
ability you've already shown."

"Michael One to Regiment," Pritchard replied curtly.  "Acknowledged."

Kowie drew up in front of the command post without the furious caracole
which had marked their most recent approach.  Pritchard slid his hatch
open.  His crewmen did

not move.  "I've got to worry about being sector chief for a while,"
he said, "but you three can sack out in the barracks now.  You've put
in a full tour in my book."

"Think I'll sleep here," Rob said.  He touched a stud, rotating his
seat into a couch alongside the receiver and loading tube of the main
gun.

Pritchard frowned.  "Margritte?"  he asked.

She shrugged.  "No, I'll stay by my set for a while."  Her eyes were
blue and calm.

On the intercom, Kowie chimed in with, "Yeah, you worry about the
sector, we'll worry about ourselves.  Say, don't you think a tank
platoon'd be better for base security than these pongoes?"

"Shut up, Kowie," Jenne snapped.  The blond Burlager glanced at his
captain.  "Everything'll be fine, so long as we're here," he said from
one elbow.  He patted the breech of the 200mm gun.

Pritchard shrugged and climbed out into the cold night.  He heard the
hatch grind shut behind him.

Until Pritchard walked in the door of the building, it had not occurred
to him that Riis' replacement was Sally Schilling.  The words "First
Platoon leader" had not been a name to the tanker, not in the midst of
the furor of his mind.  The little blonde glanced up at Pritchard from
the map display she was studying.  She spat cracklingly on the electric
stove and faced around again.  Her aide, the big corporal, blinked in
some embarrassment.  None of the headquarters staff spoke.

"I need the display console from my room," Pritchard said to the
corporal.

The infantryman nodded and got up.  Before he had taken three steps,
Lieutenant Schilling's voice cracked like pressure-heaved ice,
"Corporal Webber!"

"Sir?"  The big man's face went tight as he found himself a pawn in a
game whose stakes went beyond his interest.

"Go get the display console for our new commander.  It's in his
room."

Licking his lips with relief, the corporal obeyed.  He carried the
heavy four-legged console back without effort.

Sally was making it easier for him, Pritchard thought.  But how he
wished that Riis hadn't made so complete a fool of himself that he had
to be removed.  Using Riis to set up a double massacre would have been
a lot easier to justify when Danny awoke in the middle of the night and
found himself remembering..  ..

Pritchard positioned the console so that he sat with his back to the
heater.  It separated him from Schilling.  The top of the instrument
was a slanted, 40 em screen which glowed when Pritchard switched it on.
"Sector Two display," he directed.  In response to his words the screen
sharpened into a relief map.  "Population centers," he said. They
flashed on as well, several dozen of them ranging from a few hundred
souls to the several thousand of Haacin and Dimo.  Portela, the largest
Francophone settlement west of the Aillet, was about twenty kilometers
west of Haacin.

And there were now French mercenaries on both sides of that division
line.  Sally had turned from her own console and stood up to see what
Pritchard was doing.  The tanker said, "All mercenary positions,
confirmed and calculated."

The board spangled itself with red and green symbols, each of them
marked in small letters with a unit designation.  The reconnaissance
satellites gave unit strengths very accurately and computer analysis of
radio traffic could generally name the forces.  In the eastern half of
the sector, Lieutenant Colonel Benoit had spread out one battalion in
platoon-strength billets.  The guard posts were close enough to most
points to put down trouble immediately.  A full company near Dimo
guarded the headquarters and two batteries of rocket howitzers.

The remaining battalion in the sector, Benoit's own, was concentrated
in positions blasted into the rocky highlands ten kays west of Portela.
It was not a deployment that would allow the meres to effectively
police the west half of the sector, but it was a very good defensive
arrangement.  The forest that covered the center of the sector was
ideal for hit-and-run sniping by small units of infantry.  The tree
boles were too densely woven for tanks to plow

through them.  Because the forest was so flammable at this season,
however, it would be equally dangerous to ambushers.  Benoit was wise
to concentrate in the barren high ground.

Besides the highlands, the fields cleared around every settlement were
the only safe locations for a modern firelight.  The fields, and the
broad swathes cleared for roads through the forest..  ..

"Incoming traffic for Sector Chief," announced a radioman.  "Its from
the skepsel colonel, sir."  He threw his words into the air, afraid to
direct them at either of the officers in the orderly room.

"Voice only, or is there visual?"  Pritchard asked Schilling held her
silence.

"Visual component, sir."

"Patch him through to my console," the tanker decided.  "And son--watch
your language.  Otherwise, you say 'beast' when you shouldn't."

The map blurred from the display screen and was replaced by the hawk
features of Lieutenant Colonel Benoit.  A pick-up on the screen's
surface threw Pritchard's own image onto Benoit's similar console.

The Frenchman blinked.  "Captain Pritchard?  I'm very pleased to see
you, but my words must be with Captain Riis directly.  Could you wake
him?"

The reVe been some changes," the tanker said.  In the back of his mind,
he wondered what had happened to Riis.  Pulled back under arrest,
probably.  "I'm in charge of Sector Two, now.  Co-charge with you, that
is."

Benoit's face steadied as he absorbed the information without betraying
an opinion about it.  Then he beamed tike a feasting wolf and said,
"Congratulations, Captain.  Some day you and I will have to discuss the
.. . events of the past few days.  But what I was calling about is far
less pleasant, I'm afraid."

Benoit's image wavered on the screen as he paused.  Pritchard touched
his tongue to the corner of his mouth.  "Go ahead, Colonel," he said.
"I've gotten enough bad news today that a little more won't signify."

Benoit quirked his brow in what might or might not have been humor.
"When we were proceeding to Portela," he said, "some of my troops
mistook the situation and set up passive tank interdiction points.
Mines, all over the sector.  They're booby-trapped, of course.  The
only safe way to remove them is for the troops responsible to do it. 
They will of course be punished later."

Pritchard chuckled.  "How long do you estimate it'll take to clear the
roads, Colonel?"  he asked.

The Frenchman spread his hands, palms up.  "Weeks, perhaps.  It's much
harder to clear mines safely than to lay them, of course."

"But there wouldn't be anything between here and Haacin, would there?"
the tanker prodded.  It was all happening just as Hammer's informant
had said Barthe planned it.  First, hem the tanks in with nets of
forest and minefields; then, break the most important Dutch stronghold
while your meres were still around to back you up.  . "The spur road to
our HQ here wasn't on your route; and besides, we just drove tanks over
it a few minutes ago."

Behind Pritchard, Sally Schilling was cursing in a sharp, carrying
voice.  Benoit could probably hear her, but the colonel kept his voice
as smooth as milk as he said, "Actually, I'm afraid there is a
field--gas, shaped charges, and glass-shard antipersonnel
mines--somewhere on that road, yes.  Fortunately, the field was signal
activated.  It wasn't primed until after you had passed through.  I
assure you, Captain Pritchard, that all the roads west of the Aillet
may be too dangerous to traverse until I have cleared them.  I warn you
both as a friend and so that we will not be charged with damage to any
of your vehicles--and men.  You have been fully warned of the danger;
anything that happens now is your responsibility."

Pritchard leaned back in the console's integral seat, chuckling again.
"You know, Colonel," the tank captain said, "I'm not sure that the
Bonding Authority wouldn't find those mines were a hostile act
justifying our retaliation."  Benoit stiffened, more an internal
hardness than anything that showed in his muscles.  Pritchard continued
to speak

through a smile.  "We won't, of course.  Mistakes happen.  But one
thing, Colonel Benoit--"

The Frenchman nodded, waiting for the edge to bite.  He knew as well as
Pritchard did that, at best, if there were an Authority investigation,
Barthe would have to throw a scapegoat out.  A high-ranking
scapegoat.

"Mistakes happen," Pritchard repeated, "but they can't be allowed to
happen twice.  You've got my permission to send out a ten-man team by
daylight--only by daylight-to clear the road from Portela to Bever.
That'll give you a route back to your side of the sector.  If any other
troops leave their present position, for any reason, I'll treat it as
an attack."

"Captain, this demarcation within the sector was not a part of the
contract--"

"It was at the demand of Colonel Barthe," Pritchard snapped, "and
agreed to by the demonstrable practice of both regiments over the past
three months."  Hammer had briefed Pritchard very carefully on the
words to use here, to be recorded for the benefit of the Bonding
Authority.  "You've heard the terms, Colonel.  You can either take them
or we'll put the whole thing--the minefields and some other matters
that've come up recently--before the Authority right now.  Your
choice."

Benoit stared at Pritchard, apparently calm but tugging at his upper
lip with thumb and forefinger.  "I think you are unwise, Captain, in
taking full responsibility for an area in which your tanks cannot move;
but that is your affair, of course.  I will obey your mandate.  We
should have the Portela-Haacin segment cleared by evening; tomorrow
we'll proceed to Bever.  Good day."

The screen segued back to the map display.  Pritchard stood up.  A
spare helmet rested beside one of the radiomen.  The tank captain
donned it--he had forgotten to requisition a replacement from
stores--and said, "Michael One to all Michael units."  He paused for
the acknowledgment lights from his four platoons and the command
vehicle. Then, "Hold your present positions.  Don't attempt to move by
road, any road, until further notice.  The roads

have been mined.  There are probably safe areas, and we'll get you a
map of them as soon as Command Central works it up.  For the time
being, just stay where you are.  Michael One, out."

"Are you really going to take that?"  Lieutenant Schilling demanded in
a low, harsh voice.

"Pass the same orders to your troops, Sally," Pritchard said.  "I know
they can move through the woods where my tanks can't, but I don't want
any friendlies in the forest right now either."  To the intelligence
sergeant on watch, Pritchard added, "Samuels, get Central to run a plot
of all activity by any of Benoit's men.  That won't tell us where
they've laid mines, but it'll let us know where they can't have."

"What happens if the bleeding skepsels ignore you?"  Sally blazed.
"You've bloody taught them to ignore you, haven't you?  Knuckling under
every time somebody whispers 'contract'?  You can't move a tank to stop
them if they do leave their base, and I've got 198 effectives.  A
battalion'd laugh at me, laugh!"

Schillings arms were akimbo, her face as pale with rage as the snow
outside.  Speaking with deliberate calm, Pritchard said, "I'll call in
artillery if I need to.  Benoit only brought two calliopes with him,
and they can't stop all the shells from three firebases at the same
time.  The road between his position and Portela's just a snake-track
cut between rocks.  A couple firecracker rounds going off above
infantry strung out there--Via, it'll be a butcher shop."

Schilling's eyes brightened.  Then for tonight, the sector's just like
it was before we came," she thought out loud.  "Well, I suppose you
know best," she added in false agreement, with false nonchalance.  "I'm
going back to the barracks.  I'll brief First Platoon in person and
radio the others from there.  Come along, Webbert."

The corporal slammed the door behind himself and his lieutenant.  The
gust of air that licked about the walls was cold, but Pritchard was
already shivering at what he had just done to a woman he loved.

It was daylight by now, and the frosted windows turned to flame in the
ruddy sun.  Speaking to no one but his

consoles memory, Pritchard began to plot tracks from each tank
platoon.  He used a topographic display, ignoring the existence of the
impenetrable forest which covered the ground.

Margritte's resonant voice twanged in the implant, "Captain, would you
come to the blower for half a sec?"

"On the way," Pritchard said, shrugging into his coat.  The orderly
room staff glanced up at him.

Margritte poked her head out of the side hatch.  Pritchard climbed onto
the deck to avoid some of the generator whine.  The skirts sang even
when the fans were cut off completely.  Rob Jenne, curious but at ease,
was visible at his battle station beyond the commo tech.  "Sir,"
Margritte said, "we've been picking up signals from--there."  The
blue-eyed woman thumbed briefly at the infantry barracks without
letting her pupils follow the gesture.

Pritchard nodded.  "Lieutenant Schilling's passing on my orders to her
company."

"Danny, the transmission's in code, and it's not a code of ours."
Margritte hesitated, then touched the back of the officer's gloved left
hand.  There's answering signals, too.  I can't triangulate without
moving the blower, of course, but the source is in line with the
tailings pile at Haacin."

It was what he had planned, after all.  Someone the villagers could
trust had to get word of the situation to them.  Otherwise they
wouldn't draw the Portelans and their mercenary backers into a fatal
mistake.  Hard luck for the villagers who were acting as bait, but very
good luck for every other Dutchman on Kobold..  .. Pritchard had no
reason to feel anything but relief that it had happened.  He tried to
relax the muscles which were crushing all the breath out of his lungs.
Margritte's fingers closed over his hand and squeezed it.

"Ignore the signals," the captain said at last.  "We've known all along
they were talking to the civilians, haven't we?"  Neither of his
crewmen spoke.  Pritchard's eyes closed tightly.  He said, "We've known
for months, Hammer and I, every damned thing that Barthe's been
plotting with the skepsels.  They want a chance to break Haacin now,
while

they're around to cover for the Portelans.  We'll give them their
chance and ram it up their ass crosswise.  The Old Man hasn't spread
the word for fear the story'd get out, the same way Barthe's plans did.
We're all mercenaries, after all.  But I want you three to know.  And
I'll be glad when the only thing I have to worry about is the direction
the shots are coming from."

Abruptly, the captain dropped back to the ground.  "Get some sleep," he
called.  "I'll be needing you sharp tonight."

Back at his console, Pritchard resumed plotting courses and distances.
After he figured each line, he called in a series of map coordinates to
Command Central.  He knew his radio traffic was being monitored and
probably unscrambled by Barthe's intelligence staff; knew also that
even if he had read the coordinates out in clear, the French would have
assumed it was a code.  The locations made no sense unless one knew
they were ground zero for incendiary shells.

As Pritchard worked, he kept close watch on the French battalions.
Benoit's own troops held their position, as Pritchard had ordered. They
used the time to dig in.  At first they had blasted slit trenches in
the rock.  Now they dug covered bunkers with the help of mining
machinery trucked from Portela by civilians.  Five of the six antitank
guns were sited atop the eastern ridge of the position.  They could
rake the highway as it snaked and switched back among the foothills
west of Portela.

Pritchard chuckled grimly again when Sergeant Samuels handed him
high-magnification off-prints from the satellites.  Benoit's two squat,
bulky calliopes were sited in defilade behind the humps of the eastern
ridge line.  There the eight-barreled power guns were safe from the
smashing fire of M Company's tanks, but their ability to sweep
artillery shells from the sky was degraded by the closer horizon.  The
Slammers did not bother with calliopes themselves.  Their central fire
director did a far better job by working through the hundreds of
vehicle-mounted weapons.  How much better, Benoit might learn very
shortly.

The mine-sweeping team cleared the PortelaHaacin road, as directed.
The men returned to Benoit's encampment an hour before dusk.  The
French did not come within five kilometers of the Dutch village.
Pritchard watched the retiring minesweepers, then snapped off the
console.  He stood.  "I'm going out to my blower," he said.

His crew had been watching for him.  A hatch shot open, spouting
condensate, as soon as Pritchard came out the door.  The smooth bulk of
the tank blew like a restive whale.  On the horizon, the sun was so low
that the treetops stood out in silhouette like a line of bayonets.

Wearily, the captain dropped through the hatch into his seat.  Jenne
and Margritte murmured greeting and waited, noticeably tense.  "I'm
going to get a couple hours' sleep," Pritchard said.  He swung his seat
out and up, so that he lay horizontal in the turret.  His legs hid
Margritte's oval face from him.  "Punch up coverage of the road west of
Haacin would you?"  he asked.  "I'm going to take a tab of Glirine.
Slap me with the antidote when something moves there."

"If something moves," Jenne amended.

"When."  Pritchard sucked down the pill.  "The square heads think
they've got one last chance to smack Portela and hijack the power guns
again.  Thing is, the Portelans'll have already distributed the guns
and be waiting for the Dutch to come through.  It'll be a damn short
fight, that one..  .."  The drug took hold and Pritchard's
consciousness began to flow away like a sugar cube in water.  "Damn
short..  .."

At first Pritchard felt only the sting on the inside of his wrist. Then
the narcotic haze ripped away and he was fully conscious again.

"There's a line of trucks, looks Wee twenty, moving west out of Haacin,
sir.  They're blacked out, but the satellite has 'em on infrared."

"Red Alert," Pritchard ordered.  He locked his seat upright into its
combat position.  Margritte's soft voice

sounded the general alarm.  Pritchard slipped on his radio helmet
"Michael One to all Michael units.  Check off."  Five green lights
flashed their silent acknowledgments across the top of the captain's
face-shield display.  "Michael One to Sigma One," Pritchard
continued.

"Go ahead, Michael One."  Sallys voice held a note of triumph.

"Sigma One, pull all your troops into large, clear areas-the fields
around the towns are fine, but stay the hell away from Portela and
Haacin.  Get ready to slow down anybody coming this way from across the
Aillet.  Over."

"Affirmative, Danny, affirmative!"  Sally replied.  Couldn't she use
the satellite reconnaissance herself and see the five blurred dots
halfway between the villages?  They were clearly the trucks which had
brought the Portelans into their ambush positions.  What would she say
when she realized how she had set up the villagers she was trying to
protect?  Lambs to the slaughter..  ..

The vision block showed the Dutch trucks more clearly than the
camouflaged Portelans.  The crushed stone of the roadway was dark on
the screen, cooler than the surrounding trees and the vehicles upon it.
Pritchard patted the breech of the main gun and looked across it to his
blower chief.  "We got a basic load for this aboard?"  he asked.

"Do bears cop in the woods?"  Jenne grinned.  "We gonna get a chance to
bust caps tonight, Captain?"

Pritchard nodded.  "For three months we've been here, doing nothing but
selling rope to the French.  Tonight they've bought enough that we can
hang 'em with it."  He looked at the vision block again.  "You alive,
Kowie?"  he asked on intercom.

"Ready to slide any time you give me a course," said the driver from
his closed cockpit.

The vision block sizzled with bright streaks that seemed to hang on the
screen though they had passed in microseconds.  The leading blobs
expanded and brightened as trucks blew up.

"Michael One to Fire Central," Pritchard said.

"Go ahead, Michael One," replied the machine voice.

"Prepare Fire Order Alpha.

"Roger, Michael One."

"Margritte, get me Benoit."

"Go ahead, Captain."

"Slammers to Benoit.  Pritchard to Benoit.  Come in please, Colonel."

"Captain Pritchard, Michel Benoit here."  The colonel's voice was
smooth but too hurried to disguise the concern underlying it.  "I
assure you that none of my men are involved in the present fighting.  I
have a company ready to go out and control the disturbance immediately,
however."

The tanker ignored him.  The shooting had "already stopped for lack of
targets.  "Colonel, I've got some artillery aimed to drop various
places in the forest.  It's coming nowhere near your troops or any
other human beings.  If you interfere with this necessary shelling, the
Slammers'll treat it as an act of war.  I speak with my colonel's
authority."

"Captain, I don't--"

Pritchard switched manually.  "Michael One to Fire Central.  Execute
Fire Order Alpha."

"On the way, Michael One."

"Michael One to Michael First, Second, Fourth.  Command Central has fed
movement orders into your map displays.  Incendiary clusters are going
to burst over marked locations to ignite the forest.  Use your own main
guns to set the trees burning in front of your immediate positions. One
round ought to do it.  Button up and you can move through the fire--the
trees just fall to pieces when they've burned."

The turret whined as it slid under Rob's control.  "Michael Third, I'm
attaching you to the infantry.  More Frenchmen're apt to be coming this
way from the east.  It's up to you to see they don't slam a door on
us."

The main gun fired, its discharge so sudden that the air rang like a
solid thing.  Seepage from the ejection system filled the hull with the
reek of superheated polyurethane.  The side vision blocks flashed cyan,
then began to flood with the mounting white hell-light of the blazing
trees.  In the central block, still set on remote, all the Dutch
trucks

were burning as were patches of forest which the ambush had ignited.
The Portelans had left the concealment of the trees and swept across
the road, mopping up the Dutch.

"Kowie, let's move," Jenne was saying on intercom, syncopated by the
mild echo of his voice in the turret.  Margritte's face was calm, her
lips moving subtly as she handled some traffic that she did not pass on
to her captain.  The tank slid forward like oil on a lake.  From the
far distance came the thumps of incendiary rounds scattering their
hundreds of separate fireballs high over the trees.

Pritchard slapped the central vision block back on direct; the tank's
interior shone white with transmitted fire.  The Plow's bow slope
sheared into a thicket of blazing trees.  The wood tangled and sagged,
then gave in a splash of fiery splinters whipped aloft by the blower's
fans.  The tank was in Hell on all sides, Kowie steering by instinct
and his inertia!  compass.  Even with his screens filtered all the way
down, the driver would not be able to use his eyes effectively until
more of the labyrinth had burned away.

Benoit's calliopes had not tried to stop the shelling.  Well, there
were other ways to get the French meres to take the first step over the
line.  For instance' Punch up Benoit again," Pritchard ordered.  Even
through the dense iridium plating, the roar of the fire was a sub aural
presence in the tank.

"Go ahead," Margritte said, flipping a switch on her console.  She had
somehow been holding the French officer in conversation all the time
Pritchard was on other frequencies.

"Colonel," Pritchard said, "we've got clear running through this fire.
We're going to chase down everybody who used a power gun tonight; then
we'll shoot them.  We'll shoot everybody in their families, everybody
with them in this ambush, and we'll blow up every house that anybody
involved lived in.  That's likely to be every house in Portela, isn't
it?"

More than the heat and long of the blazing forest distorted Benoit's
face.  He shouted, "Are you mad?  You can't think of such a thing,
Pritchard!"

The tanker's lips parted like a wolf's.  He could think of mass
murder, and there were plenty of men in the Slammers who would really
be willing to carry out the threat.  But Pritchard wouldn't have to,
because Benoit was like Riis and Schilling: too much of a nationalist
to remember his first duty as a mere..  .. "Colonel Benoit, the
contract demands we keep the peace and stay impartial.  The record
shows how we treated people in Haacin for having power guns  For what
the Portelans did tonight--don't worry, we'll be impartial.  And
they'll never break the peace again."

"Captain, I will not allow you to massacre French civilians," Benoit
stated flatly.

"Move a man out of your present positions and I'll shoot him dead,"
Pritchard said.  "It's your choice, Colonel.  Michael One out."

The Plow bucked and rolled as it pulverized fire shattered trunks, but
the vehicle was meeting nothing solid enough to slam it to a halt
Pritchard used a side block on remote to examine Benoit's encampment.
The satellite's enhanced infrared showed a stream of sparks flowing
from the defensive positions toward the Portela road: infantry on
skimmers.  The pair of larger, more diffuse blobs were probably
antitank guns.  Benoit wasn't moving his whole battalion, only a
reinforced company in a show of force to make Pritchard back off.

The fool.  Nobody was going to back off now.

"Michael One to all Michael and Sigma units," Pritchard said in a voice
as clear as the white flames around his tank.  "We're now in a state of
war with Barthe's Company and its civilian auxiliaries.  Michael First,
Second and Fourth, we'll rendezvous at the ambush site as plotted on
your displays.  Anybody between there and Portela is fair game.  If we
take any fire from Portela, we go down the main drag in line and blow
the cop out of it.  If any of Barthe's people are in the way, we keep
on sliding west.  Sigma One, mount a fluid defense, don't push, and
wait for help.  It's coming.  If this works, it's Barthe against
Hammer--and that's wheat against the scythe.  Acknowledged?"

As Pritchard's call board lit green, a raspy new voice

broke into the sector frequency.  "Wish I was with you, panzers. We'll
cover your butts and the other sectors--if anybody's dumb enough to
move.  Good hunting!"

"I wish you were here and not me, Colonel," Pritchard whispered, but
that was to himself .. . and perhaps it was not true even in his heart.
Danny's guts were very cold, and his face was as cold as death.

To Pritchard's left, a lighted display segregated the area of
operations.  It was a computer analog, not direct satellite coverage.
Doubtful images were brightened and labeled--green for the Slammers,
red for Barthe; blue for civilians unless they were fighting on one
side or the other.  The green dot of the Plow converged on the ambush
site at the same time as the columns of First and Fourth Platoons.
Second was a minute or two farther off.  Pritchard's breath caught.  A
sheaf of narrow red lines was streaking across the display toward his
tanks.  Barthe had ordered his Company's artillery to support Benoit's
threatened battalion.

The salvo frayed and vanished more suddenly than it had appeared. Other
Slammers' vehicles had ripped the threat from the sky.  Green lines
darted from Hammers own three firebases, off-screen at the analog's
present scale.  The fighting was no longer limited to Sector Two.  If
Pritchard and Hammer had played their hand right, though, it would stay
limited to only the Slammers and Compagnie de Barthe.  The other
Francophone regiments would fear to join an unexpected battle which
certainly resulted from someone's contract violation.  If the breach
were Hammer's, the Dutch would not be allowed to profit by the
fighting.  If the breach were Barthe's, anybody who joined him would be
punished as sternly by the Bonding Authority.

So violent was the forest's combustion that the flames were already
dying down into sparks and black ashes.  The command tank growled out
into the broad avenue of the road west of Haacin.  Dutch trucks were
still burning-fabric, lubricants, and the very paint of their frames
had been ignited by the power guns  Many of the bodies sprawled beside
the vehicles were smoldering also.  Some

corpses still clutched their useless muskets.  The dead were victims
of six centuries of progress which had come to Kobold prepackaged, just
in time to kill them.  Barthe had given the Portelans only shoulder
weapons, but even that meant the world here.  The power guns were
repeaters with awesome destruction in every bolt.  Without answering
fire to rattle them, even untrained gunmen could be effective with
weapons which shot line-straight and had no recoil.  Certainly the
Portelans had been effective.

Throwing ash and fire like sharks in the surf, the four behemoths of
First Platoon slewed onto the road from the south.  Almost
simultaneously, Fourth joined through the dying hell storm to the other
side.  The right of way was fifty meters wide and there was no reason
to keep to the center of it.  The forest, ablaze or glowing embers,
held no ambushes any more.  The Plow lurched as Kowie guided it through
the bodies.  Some of them were still moving.  Pritchard wondered if any
of the Dutch had lived through the night, but that was with the back of
his mind.  The Slammers were at war, and nothing else really mattered.
Triple line ahead," he ordered.  "First to the left, Fourth to the
right; the Plow'll take the center alone till Second joins.  Second,
wick up when you hit the hardball and fall in behind us.  If it moves,
shoot it."

At one hundred kph, the leading tanks caught the Portelans three
kilometers east of their village.  The settlers were in the trucks that
had been hidden in the forest fringe until the fires had been started.
The ambushers may not have known they were being pursued until the
rearmost truck exploded.  Rob Jenne had shredded it with his tri barrel
at five kilometers' distance.  The cyan flicker and its answering
orange blast signaled the flanking tanks to fire.  They had just enough
parallax to be able to rake the four remaining trucks without being
blocked by the one which had blown up.  A few snapping discharges
proved that some Portelans survived to use their new power guns on
tougher meat than before.  Hits streaked ashes on the tanks' armor.  No
one inside noticed.

From Portela's eastern windows, children watched their parents burn.

A hose of cyan light played from a distant roof top.  It touched the
command tank as Kowie slewed to avoid a Portelan truck.  The burst was
perfectly aimed, an automatic weapon served by professionals.
Professionals should have known how useless it would be against heavy
armor.  A vision block dulled as a few receptors fused.  Jenne cursed
and trod the foot-switch of the main gun.  A building leaped into
dazzling prominence in the microsecond flash.  Then it and most of the
block behind collapsed into internal fires, burying the machine gun and
everything else in the neighborhood.  A moment later, a salvo of
Hammer's high explosive got through the calliopes' inadequate screen.
The village began to spew skyward in white flashes.

The Portelans had wanted to play soldier, Pritchard thought.  He had
dammed up all pity for the villagers of Haacin; he would not spend it
now on these folk.

"Lane ahead--First, Fourth, and Second," Pritchard ordered.  The triple
column slowed and reformed with the Plow the second vehicle in the new
line.  The shelling lifted from Portela as the tanks plunged into the
village.  Green trails on the analog terminated over the road crowded
with Benoit's men and over the main French position, despite anything
the calliopes could do.  The sky over Benoit's bunkers rippled and
flared as firecracker rounds sleeted down their thousands of individual
bomblets.  The defensive fire cut off entirely.  Pritchard could
imagine the carnage among the unprotected calliope crews when the
shrapnel whirred through them.

The tanks were firing into the houses on either side, using tri barrels
and occasional wallops from their main guns.  The blue-green flashes
were so intense they colored even the flames they lit among the
wreckage.  At fifty kph the thirteen tanks swept through the center of
town, hindered only by the rubble of houses spilled across the street.
Barthe's men were skittering white shadows who burst when power guns
hit them point blank.

The copper mine was just west of the village and three

hundred meters north of the highway.  As the lead tank bellowed out
around the last houses, a dozen infantrymen rose from where they had
sheltered in the pit head and loosed a salvo of buzz bombs  The tank's
automatic defense system was live.  White fire rippled from just above
the skirts as the charges there flailed pellets outward to intersect
the rockets.  Most of the buzz bombs exploded ten meters distant
against the steel hail.  One missile soared harmlessly over its target,
its motor a tiny flare against the flickering sky.  Only one of the
shaped charges burst alongside the turret, forming a bell of light
momentarily bigger than the tank.  Even that was only a near miss.  It
gouged the iridium armor like a mis thrust rapier which tears skin but
does not pierce the skull.

Main guns and tri barrels answered the rockets instantly.  Men dropped,
some dead, some reloading.  "Second Platoon, go put some HE down the
shaft and rejoin," Pritchard ordered.  The lead tank now had expended
half its defensive charges.  "Michael First-Three, fall in behind
First-One.  Michael One leads," he went on.

Kowie grunted acknowledgment.  The Plow revved up to full honk.
Benoit's men were on the road, those who had not reached Portela when
the shooting started or who had fled when the artillery churned the
houses to froth.  The infantry skimmers were trapped between sheer
rocks and sheer drop-offs, between their own slow speed and the
onrushing frontal slope of the Plow.  There were trees where the rocks
had given them purchase.  Scattered incendiaries had made them blazing
cres sets lighting a charnel procession.

Jenne's tri barrel scythed through body armor and dismembered men in
short bursts.  One of the antitank guns--was the other buried in
Portela?--lay skewed against a rock wall, its driver killed by a shell
fragment.  Rob put a round from the main gun into it.  So did each of
the next two tanks.  At the third shot, the ammunition ignited in a
blinding secondary explosion.

The antitank guns still em placed on the ridge line bad not fired,
though they swept several stretches of the road.  Perhaps the crews had
been rattled by the shelling, perhaps

Benoit had held his fire for fear of hitting his own men.  A narrow
defile notched the final ridge.  The Plow heaved itself up the rise,
and at the top three bolts slapped it from different angles.

Because the bow was lifted, two of the shots vaporized portions of the
skirt and the front fans.  The tank nosed down and sprayed sparks with
half its length.  The third bolt grazed the left top of the turret,
making the indium ring as it expanded.  The interior of the armor
streaked white though it was not pierced.  The temperature inside the
tank rose thirty degrees.  Even as the Plow skidded, Sergeant Jenne was
laying his main gun on the hot spot that was the barrel of the leftmost
antitank weapon.  The Plow's shot did what heavy top cover had
prevented Hammer's rocket howitzers from accomplishing with shrapnel.
The antitank gun blew up in a distance-muffled flash.  One of its
crewmen was silhouetted high in the air by the vaporizing metal of his
gun.

Then the two remaining weapons ripped the night and the command blower
with their charges.

The bolt that touched the right side of the turret spewed droplets of
iridium across the interior of the hull.  Air pistoned Pritchard's
eardrums.  Rob Jenne lurched in his harness, right arm burned away by
the shot.  His left hand blackened where it touched bare metal that
sparked and sang as circuits shorted.  Margritte's radios were
exploding one by one under the overloads.  The vision blocks worked and
the turret hummed placidly as Pritchard rotated it to the right with
his duplicate controls.

"Cut the power!  Rob's burning!"  Margritte was shrieking.  She had
torn off her helmet.  Her thick hair stood out like tendrils of bread
mold in the gathering charge.  Then Pritchard had the main gun bearing
and it lit the ridge line with another secondary explosion.

"Danny, our ammunition!  It'll--"

Benoit's remaining gun blew the tri barrel and the cupola away
deafeningly.  The automatic's loading tube began to gang-fire down into
the bowels of the tank.  It reached a bright column up into the sky,
but the turret still rolled.

Electricity crackled around Pritchard's boot and the foot trip as he
fired again.  The bolt stabbed the night.  There was no answering
blast.  Pritchard held down the switch, his nostrils thick with ozone
and superheated plastic and the sizzling flesh of his friend.  There
was still no explosion from the target bunker.  The rock turned white
between the cyan flashes.  It cracked and flowed away like sun-melted
snow, and the antitank gun never fired again.

The loading tube emptied.  Pritchard slapped the main switch and cut
off the current.  The interior light and the dancing arcs died, leaving
only the dying glow of the bolt heated indium.  Tank after tank edged
by the silent command vehicle and roared on toward the ridge.  Benoit's
demoralized men were already beginning to throw down their weapons and
surrender.

Pritchard manually unlatched Jenne's harness and swung it horizontal.
The blower chief was breathing but unconscious.  Pritchard switched on
a battery-powered hand light He held it steady as Margritte began to
spray sealant on the burns.  Occasionally she paused to separate
clothing from flesh with a stylus.

"It had to be done," Pritchard whispered.  By sacrificing Haacin, he
had mousetrapped Benoit into starting a war the infantry could not win.
Hammer was now crushing Barthes Company one on one, in an indium vise.
Frieslands Council of State would not have let Hammer act had they
known his intentions, but in the face of a stunning victory they simply
could not avoid dictating terms to the French.

"It had to be done.  But I look at what I did--" Pritchard swung his
right hand in a gesture that would have included both the fuming wreck
of Portela and the raiders from Haacin, dead on the road beyond.  He
struck the breech of the main gun instead.  Clenching his fist, he
slammed it again into the metal in self-punishment.  Margritte cried
out and blocked his arm with her own.

"Margi," Pritchard repeated in anguish, "it isn't something that human
beings do to each other."

But soldiers do.

And hangmen.

Lamartiere sat in the driver's compartment of the super tank Hoodoo,
which he'd stolen from Hammer's Slammers as the mercenaries left
Ambiorix for Beresford and another contract.  The tank's 20em main gun
could smash mountains; the fully automatic 2em tri barrel in the cupola
defended her against incoming artillery as well as packing a sizable
punch in its own right.  She was the most powerful weapon within twenty
light years

In theory, at least.  Hoodoo's practical value to the sputtering
remnants of the Mosite Rebellion would have to wait until Lamartiere
and Dr.  Clargue figured out how to transfer ammunition from the tank's
storage magazines in the hull to the ready magazines in the turret.

"The reconnaissance drone has turned east," Clargue said over the
intercom.  The AI predicts it's completed its search pattern, but I
suppose we should wait a short time to be sure."

"Right," Lamartiere said, wondering if he'd fall asleep if he closed
his eyes for a moment.  "We'll wait."

Even with Hoodoo at rest in a narrow gorge, her internal systems and
the hum of the idling drive fans made her noisy.  It would have been
difficult to shout directly through the narrow passage between the
fighting compartment and the driver's position in the bow.  The
Slammers would have used commo helmets to cut off the ambient noise,
but Lamartiere hadn't bothered with frills the night he drove Hoodoo
out of the spaceport at Brione.

The Government of Ambiorix had decided the Mosite Rebellion was
broken, so they'd terminated the mercenaries' contract to save the cost
of paying for such sophisticated troops and equipment.  Hoodoo was the
last piece of Slammers' hardware on the planet.  An electrical fault
had held it and its two-man crew back when the rest of the regiment
lifted for Beresford, 300 light-years away.

Those planning the operation on behalf of the Mosite Council in
Goncourt had claimed that Hoodoo would win the war.  With a single
super tank the Council could force the Carcassone government to grant
autonomy to the Western District where the Mosite faith predominated.

Lamartiere had been at the sharp end, infiltrating Brione as one of the
mercenaries' Local Service Personnel--cheap local labor who did fetch
and carry for the Slammers' skilled service technicians.  He hadn't
thought beyond completion of the operation, and even that only in the
moments when he had enough leisure to think more than half a second
ahead.  If asked, though, he'd have said that Hoodoo's enormous power
would restore military parity between Mosite forces and the
government.

Maybe, just maybe, that would have been true--if he and Clargue could
use Hoodoo's armament properly.  As it was, with luck and fewer than a
hundred rounds of 2em ammunition gleaned from the local militia, they'd
been able to smash a government mechanized battalion at the Lystra
River.

It wouldn't work that way again, though.  By now the government would
have analyzed the wreckage of the previous battle and realized that
Hoodoo's main gun wasn't working, though they might not guess why.  A
powerful force would attack Hoodoo again as soon as Carcassone learned
where she had fled.  This time Lamartiere's trickery wouldn't be enough
to win.

In addition to the government, the tank's mercenary crew, Sergeant Heth
and Trooper Stegner, had stayed on Ambiorix instead of rejoining the
regiment.  They might or might not be actively helping the government
forces, but in any case they contributed to the aura of overhanging

doom Lamartiere had felt ever since his triumph at stealing Hoodoo had
worn off.

"The drone hasn't returned," Clargue said in his usual mild tone.  The
doctor was as tired and frustrated as Lamartiere, but you never heard
that in his voice.

"Sorry," Lamartiere said.  "I was daydreaming."

Daydreaming in the middle of the night, with the stars above jewels in
the desert air.  It was thirty-six hours since Lamartiere had last
slept.

He raised the drive fans from idle speed to full power, then broadened
the angle of the blades so that they pushed the atmosphere instead of
simply cutting it.  Hoodoo rose on the bubble of air trapped within her
steel-skirted plenum chamber, then slid out of the gully in which
Lamartiere had hidden her when the government drone came over the
horizon.  With the nacelles tilted forward to retard the tank's rush
down the slope, Hoodoo entered the Boukasset.

Most of Ambiorix' single large continent was organized in districts
under administrators appointed by Carcassone.  The sparsely settled
Boukasset, the rocky wasteland in the rain shadow of the mountains
forming the Western District, had always been ignored as a poor
relation.  Since the West em District had rebelled when the Synod of
the Established Church attempted to put down what it described as the
Mosite Heresy, the Boukasset's connection to Carcassone had become even
more tenuous.

Hoodoo squirmed out of the mountains and into a broad river basing dry
now but a gushing, foaming torrent once every decade or so when
cloudbursts drenched the Boukasset.  The bottom was carpeted with
vegetation that survived on groundwater dribbling beneath the sand. The
coarse brush flattened beneath a 170-tonne tank with the power of a
fusion bottle to drive it, then sprang up again to conceal all traces
of Hoodoo's passage.

Lamartiere pulled his control yoke back, increasing speed gradually.
The AI overlaid a recommended course on the terrain display and steered
the tank along it as long as Lamartiere permitted it to do so.

Their intended destination was the Shrine of the Blessed Catherine. If
Lamartiere fell asleep now, Hoodoo would roar past the site in three
hours and forty-nine minutes according to the countdown clock at the
top of the display.

Giggling and aware that he wasn't safe to drive, Lamartiere pulled the
yoke back a hair farther.  The Estimated Time of Arrival dropped to
three hours and twenty-four minutes.

Nowhere on Ambiorix was safe for Lamartiere until he and Clargue got
Hoodoo's guns working.  He wouldn't be safe then either, but at least
he could fight back.

Maury, the rebel commander in the Boukasset, dealt with off-planet
smugglers who slipped down in small vessels.  Hoodoo's tri barrel used
the same ammunition as the 2em shoulder weapons of the Slammers'
infantry and others who could afford those smashingly effective
weapons.  Maury had some of the guns, so he could supply the tank if he
chose to.

If ... "What do you know about Maury, doctor?"  Lamartiere asked,
partly to keep himself awake.  "He seems to have held the government
out of his region, which we couldn't do in the mountains."

Great trees overhung the riverbed.  The pin like leaves of their
branches shivered as the tank slid past.  The trees' taproots
penetrated the buried aquifer, but their trunks were clear of the flash
floods that periodically scoured the channel.

"There's nothing in the Boukasset that the government wanted badly
enough to commit Hammer's mercenaries to get it," Clargue said.
"Nomadic herdsmen and small-scale farmers using terraces and deep
wells.  Our mines in the Western District were Ambiorix' main source of
foreign exchange before the rebellion."

Clargue was a small, precise man in his sixties; a doctor who'd left
the most advanced hospital in Carcassone to serve the sick of his home
village of Pamiers in the mountains.  Because of his experience with
medical computers as complex as the systems of this tank, the Council
had chosen him to help Lamartiere make Hoodoo operational.  He'd
tried

despite his distaste for the war that had wrecked his home and
Ambiorix as a whole, but he hadn't been able to find a way to access
the ammunition Lamartiere knew was stored in Hoodoo's hull.

"As for what I know of Maury," Clargue continued, "nothing to his
credit.  At the best of times leaders in the Boukasset have been one
step removed from posturing thugs.  "Posturing thug' would be a kind
description of Maury if half the rumors one hears are true."

"Beggars can't be choosers, I suppose," Lamartiere muttered.  The yoke
twitched in his hands as the AI guided Hoodoo.

He had a bad feeling about this, but he'd had a bad feeling about the
operation almost from the beginning.  He'd bloodied the government
badly both when he escaped from Brione with the tank and at the Lystra
River. But Pamiers had received a hammering by artillery and perhaps
worse because Hoodoo had hidden there, and at Brione Lamartiere's
sister Celine had died while driving a truckload of explosive into the
main gate of the city.

So long as the war went on, everybody lost.  If Hoodoo became fully
operational, she could extend the war for years and maybe decades.

"Beggars have no power," Clargue said.  He sniffed.  "A man like Maury
understands no language but that of power.  The Council must be fools
to send us into the Boukasset with that message."

Lamartiere sighed.  "Yeah," he said.  "But we already knew that, and
we're here anyway.  We'll see what we can work out."

The dry riverbed lost itself among the plains.  The skirts began to
ring on rocks, the heavy debris dumped here at the last spate and not
yet covered by sand.  Lamartiere edged Hoodoo northward to where the
ground was smoother.  The AI reconfigured the course slightly; thETA
changed again.

Hoodoo roared through the star filled night, heading at speed toward
the next way-station on a road to nowhere.

^

It was an hour past dawn.  The low sun deepened the color of the red
cliffs and the red sand into which those cliffs decayed.  By midday the
sun would turn the sky brassy and bleach every hue to a ghost of
itself.

The shrine was in the Boukasset where four generations ago Catherine
had given birth to the child who became Bishop Moses, to whom God
revealed the foundations of the Mosite faith.  The site had been a
pilgrimage center during peacetime, but Lamartiere hadn't been
religious in that fashion.

Since Lamartiere learned what had happened to his sister Celine, he
hadn't been religious in any way at all; but now there was no way out
of the course he'd chosen in the days when he could believe in a
future.

The first sign of habitation was the line of conical shelters, two or
three abreast, which wound across the plain.  Low hills lay in the
distance to east and west, and a jagged sandstone slope rose
immediately north of the site.

The shrine itself was a fortress walled in the russet stone of the
overlooking cliff.  It was built on a lower slope where the rise could
be accommodated by a single terrace, but the gullied rock behind it
rose at 1:2 or even 1:1.

The spire of a church showed above the enclosure's ten meter sidewalls.
A bell there rang when Hoodoo appeared out of the east, trailing a
great plume of dust.

Lamartiere disengaged the AI and began slowing the tank by turning the
fan nacelles vertical instead of tilting them to the rear.  Hoodoo's
enormous inertia meant control inputs had to be added well in
advance.

"They grow lemon trees in those shelters," Dr.  Clargue said.  He
sounded puzzled at something.  "The plantings are laid out over an
underground aquifer, but without protection the wind would scour the
leaves and even bark off the trees."

He paused, then added, "There weren't nearly as many trees when I came
here twelve years ago.  Only a handful of Brothers tended to the shrine
then."

Lamartiere guided the tank past the cones straggling as

they followed a seam in the bedrock.  Overlying sand kept the water
from evaporating.  He knew that lemons from the Boukasset had a
reputation for flavor, but because he'd never visited the region he
hadn't wondered how terrain so barren could grow citrus fruit.

Hoodoo had slowed to a crawl when she was still a hundred meters from
the high walls of the shrine.  Lamartiere cut his fan speed but angled
the nacelles sternward again.  The tank slid the remainder of the way
forward under perfect control.

Lamartiere ruefully congratulated himself on his skill He was probably
the only person in the Boukasset who knew how difficult it was to drive
a 170-tonne air-cushion vehicle.

He slid open his hatch.  What looked from a distance like the shrine's
entrance had been closed by sandstone blocks many years in the past.  A
woman leaned over the battlements.  Beside her, a basket hung on a
crane extending from the wall.  A great geared wheel within raised and
lowered it.  The basket was apparently the only way in and out of the
shrine.

"Tell your leader that we need help to spread the camouflage cover over
this tank," Lamartiere called to the woman.  "Otherwise we'll be
spotted if the government overflies us."

Men and women were approaching from the lemon orchard, though the
sprawled extent of the plantings meant it would be half an hour before
the more distant folk reached the shrine.  There were hundreds of
people, far more than Lamartiere had expected.

"The Brothers have been sheltering refugees," Clargue realized aloud.
He sat on the edge of his hatch, his legs dangling down the turret's
smooth iridium armor.

Lamartiere looked up at his companion and hid a frown.  The doctor had
always seemed frail.  Now he was skeletal, worn to the bone by strain
and the frustration of not being able to find the command that would
transfer ammunition and permit Hoodoo to use her devastating
weaponry.

"Go away!"  the woman shouted.  Her left hand was

bandaged.  "Go back to the hell you came from and leave us alone!"

An old man in black robes and a pillbox hat appeared on the battlements
beside her.  He and the woman held a brief discussion while Lamartiere
kept silent.

The woman unpinned the gearwheel, letting the basket wobble down.  The
man held his hat on with one hand as he bent forward.  "Please," he
said.  "If you gentlemen will come up, it will be easier for us to
discuss your presence."

Lamartiere looked at Clargue.  "One of us should stay with .. he
said.

The doctor smiled.  "Yes, of course," he said, "but you should carry
out the negotiations.  I wouldn't know what to say to them."

"And you think I do?"  Lamartiere said; but he knew Clargue was right.
The doctor was smarter and older and better educated; but this was war,
and Clargue was utterly a man of peace.

Denis Lamartiere was .. . not a man of peace.  He and Clargue were
operating in a world at war, now, however much both of them might hate
it.

Lamartiere got into the basket.  He let the sway of it ratcheting
upward soothe his tension.

The basket was still several feet below the stone coping when the
pulley touched the fiber cage connecting the rim to the draw rope.  The
old man helped Lamartiere onto the battlements.  Normally Lamartiere
would have scrambled over easily by himself, but his head was swaying
with fatigue even though the basket was steady again.

The old man wore a clean white tunic with a red sash under the black
robe.  Though his beard was gray, not white, his face bore the lines of
someone much older than Lamartiere would have guessed from a
distance.

"Sorry, ah, father?"  Lamartiere said.  "You're in charge of the
shrine?"

"I'm Father Blenis," the old man said.  "We try to work cooperatively
here in the presence of the Blessed

Catherine, but because of my age the others let me speak for us
all."

"It's not your age!"  the woman said.  She'd pinned the ratchet,
locking the wheel so that a breeze didn't send the basket hurtling down
uncontrolled.  She looked at Lamartiere and continued, "Father Blenis
is a saint.  He's taken us in after your kind would have let us all
die--once you'd stolen everything we had."

"Marie," Father Blenis said.  "This gentleman--"

He looked at Lamartiere and raised an eyebrow.

"Lamartiere, Denis Lamartiere," Lamartiere said.  "Dr.  Clargue and I
won't stay any longer than we need to, ah, do some work on Hoodoo.  On
our tank."

Three of the people coming in from the field were nearing the base of
the walls.  A thin younger man was pushing ahead of a woman while a
much larger fellow clumped along close behind.

"It's the job of whoever last comes up the walls to lift the next
person," Marie said with a challenging glare at Lamartiere.  He first
guessed she was well into middle age, but she might be considerably
younger.  Hunger and hard use could have carved the lines in her
face.

And anger.  Anger was as damaging to a woman's appearance as a spray of
acid.

"Yes, all right," Lamartiere said.  He was a little steadier now.  Just
getting out of the tank and its omnipresent vibration had helped,
though he knew he was both weak and desperately tired.

He removed the pin and lifted the ratchet pawl, controlling the basket
with his other hand on the crank.  "Don't you have any power equipment
here?"

"You should ask!"  Marie spat.  Pus had seeped through the bandage on
her left hand; it needed to be changed again.  "When it's your kind who
stole it!"

"Marie," Father Blenis murmured.  He put his own frail hands on the
crank beside Lamartiere's, silently rebuking the woman for her lack of
charity.

"We'd ordered a winch and solar power unit for it, Mr.  Lamartiere," he
explained, "but it didn't arrive.  In general

the parties who rule the region allow us to trade unhindered so long
as we pay taxes to them--"

"I'll handle it, father," Marie said contritely.  She patted both
Blenis and Lamartiere away from the winch.  The process of moving
hundreds of people in and out of the fortress must be a very
time-consuming one, though having each person lift the next one kept it
from being an unbearable physical burden.

Blenis stepped aside, gesturing Lamartiere with him.  Lamartiere would
have protested, but he was suddenly so dizzy that he sat down in order
not to fall

"When we order something that looks particularly enticing, though,"
Blenis went on, "it may not arrive.  By living simply here we avoid
such problems for the most part."

He grinned.  "Another example of how those who follow God's tenets
avoid temporal concerns," he said.  It took Lamartiere a moment to
realize that he was joking.

There was angry shouting at the base of the walls.  Concern wiped the
smile from the Father's face.  He leaned over to see what was
happening.

"It's not taxes," Marie muttered to Lamartiere.  "It's pure theft, and
by both sides.  But what can we do since you have the guns, eh?"

"Rasile, Louise," Father Blenis called.  His voice had penetrating
volume when he chose to use it Living in this windswept wasteland would
teach a man to speak with authority.  "Let Pietro come up first, then
he can lift both of you together.  Let us leave struggle outside our
community."

"I haven't robbed anybody," Lamartiere said.  He'd killed.  Some of
those he'd killed had probably been civilians as innocent as the
refugees here at the shrine, but even in his present exhausted state it
made him angry to be accused of things he hadn't done.

He shook his head, trying to clear it of the hot white fuzz that
clogged his thoughts.  "You pay taxes to the government, then?"  he
said.  "I didn't know Carcassone had officials in the Boukasset
nowadays."

Marie grunted with the effort of hauling up the first of the civilians
below.  Before she could catch her breath to speak, Father Blenis said,
"There aren't regular officials, or regular troops either.  The
government sent a group of former rebels, Ralliers, into the Boukasset
under a Captain de Laburat."

He smiled again.  The Fathers consistent good-humor was a shock to
Lamartiere.  For years most of the people he'd been around were soured
by war and fury.

"I'm not sure whether the government was trying to impose its will or
merely hoping to prevent Maury from having things all his own way."
Blenis continued.  "In any case, Maury's band and the Ralliers under de
Laburat decided to cooperate rather than fight.  A model for the whole
planet, wouldn't you say?"

The heavyset man got out of the basket.  Lamartiere had seen more
obvious signs of intelligence on the faces of sheep.  Marie stepped
away from the crank.

"Pietro," Father Blenis said, "bring up Rasile and your sister,
please."

To Lamartiere he went on, "Pietro's strength has been a great help to
our community since he and Louise arrived last month."

Marie turned and sniffed.  Her good hand played with the stained
dressings of the other.

"Look, father," Lamartiere said.  He spoke toward his hands in his lap
because he was too tired to raise his eyes as he knew he should.  The
rhythmic squeals of the winch were starting to put him to sleep.  "I
don't mean to disturb your peace, but we have to stay here until we get
in touch with Maury."

He shook his head again.  It didn't help him think.  "Or with the
Council in Goncourt if they've got a better idea," he said.  "We're
going to need food and water, and if you don't help us get Hoodoo under
cover you're going to learn how much the government cares for your
neutrality as soon as the first drone comes over."

With Pietro's strength on the crank, the basket had already reached the
battlements.  The slim man and the

woman, Louise, got out on opposite sides with the tense hostility of
rival dogs.  They looked remarkably fit in contrast to Marie, but
neither was a person Lamartiere would have chosen to know in peacetime.
He supposed that pimps and hard-faced whores sometimes became refugees
also.

"Carcassone doesn't fly anything over the Boukasset," Rasile said.
Lamartiere blinked in surprise to hear so throaty and pleasant a voice
coming from the rat-faced civilian.  "If they do, Maury shoots them
down.  Or de Laburat does it himself."

Marie stepped forward "Look, you don't belong here!"  she said harshly
to Lamartiere.  "We'll give you water, and you can have food too.  I
suppose you'll like the taste even better because you're snatching it
out of the mouths of widows and orphans, won't you?  But take your tank
and your war away from us--or die, that would be fine.  That would be
even better!"

"Marie," Father Blenis said.  His tone was sharper than Lamartiere had
heard from him previously, though it was still mild after the rasping
anger of the others who'd been speaking.  "Mr.  Lamartiere has come as
a distressed traveller.  You can see how tired he is.  The Blessed
Catherine has never turned such folk away in the past, as you well
know."

"He's a soldier!"  she said.  "He came in a tank!"

"We won't let him bring weapons within the walls," Blenis replied. With
the gentle humor Lamartiere was learning to recognize he added,
"Especially his tank.  But he and his companion are welcome to the
hospitality we offer to anyone passing by."

Houses two and three stories high were built around the interior of the
shrine.  The rooms had external staircases and windows opening onto the
central courtyard where an herb garden grew.  Lamartiere could see two
well copings and, at the upper end of the courtyard, a stone trough
into which water trickled from an ancient bronze pipe.

Several younger women holding infants stood in the doorways, watching
the group around the winch.  Ah* of them had the same worn look that
Lamartiere had noticed in Marie.  A woman alone--and worse, a woman
with small

children--would have had a tough time crossing a wasteland ruled by
rival gangs.  There were, quite literally, fates worse than death,
because the dead didn't wake from a screaming nightmare before every
dawn.

The basket was tight against the pulley.  Retro still held the crank,
possibly because nobody'd told him to do otherwise.  Someone shouted
from below.  Pietro looked at Louise, who snapped, "Yes, yes, bring the
next one up.  For God's sake!"

"Louise?"  Blenis said.

The woman grimaced.  She might have been attractive once, but the glint
of her eyes was a worse disfigurement than the old scar on her right
cheek.  "Sorry, father," she said.  "I'll watch my language."

Lamartiere tried to stand.  He didn't belong in a place where people
worried about taking the name of God in vain.

"Look, the hell with you," he said.  He was furious because of
frustration at his inability to accomplish anything he could feel good
about.  "We'll go, just get us water."

The world went white.  Lamartiere was lying on the stone battlements.
He didn't remember how he got there.  "We'll leave you alone," he tried
to whisper.

"Marie, make a bed for Mr.  Lamartiere here," Father Blenis murmured
through the buzzing white blur.  "Later on we can consider the
future."

Lamartiere awoke to see Father Blenis rearranging a slatted screen so
that the lowering sun didn't fall on the sleeper's face.  The rattle
and flickering light had brought Lamartiere up from the depths to which
exhaustion had plunged him.  Near the winch a young woman nursed her
infant while an older child played at her feet.

"Oh God, help me," Lamartiere groaned.  There was nothing blasphemous
in the words.  His every muscle ached and his head throbbed in tune
with his heartbeat, though the haloes of light framing objects settled
back to normal vision after a few moments.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," Blenis said.  "Can you drink
something, or ... ?"

"Please," Lamartiere said.  He sat up, ignoring the pain because he
had to get moving.  He had no traumatic injury, just the cumulative
effects of a day and a half spent as a component of a tank.

Hoodoo's metal, seals and insulation became worn in the course of
service.  A bearing in Number 7 drive fan would be repacked if the
vehicle were in Brione for depot maintenance, and the lip of the skirts
needed re contouring if not replacement.

The crew needed down-time also, but they wouldn't have gotten it in the
field any more than the tank itself would.  Heth and Stegner would have
gone on until the mission was accomplished or something irretrievably
broke.

Lamartiere was in the same situation, except that by now he was quite
certain his mission--defeat of the Carcassone government--could never
be accomplished.  The only question was whether he or Hoodoo fell to
ruin first.

Father Blenis held out a gourd cup.  Lamartiere took it from the old
man and drank unaided.  The contents were milk, not water; goat's milk,
he supposed, since he'd seen goats scrambling about the hillsides
nearby.  It was hard to imagine that the Boukasset had enough
vegetation even for goats.  No doubt they, like the shrines human
residents, had simple tastes.

Lamartiere looked over the wall coping.  The camouflage tarp was
stretched between poles and hooks hammered into wall crevices, so from
this angle only Hoodoo's bow was visible.  The fabric provided a radar
barrier and a sophisticated matrix which mimicked the thermal signature
of the materials to either side.  Aerial reconnaissance would show only
a blotch of rock against the wall of the shrine.

Most of the residents were at work again in the orchard, either picking
ripe lemons or building additional dry stone shelters.  The latter work
was performed by gangs of refugees, but a black-robed Brother oversaw
each group.

A few civilians sat or stood near Hoodoo's bow.  Dr.  Clargue was in
the driver's hatch, draining the sore on a child's shin while the
mother looked on.  A slightly older girl stood on a headlight bracket
and, with a self-important

expression, held the exiguous medical kit Clargue had brought with him
from Pamiers.  The equipment would have slipped down the bow slope if
the doctor had laid it directly on the armor.

"I've got to go down and spell Clargue," Lamartiere said.  "Has he been
awake all the time?"

"In a moment," Father Blenis said.  He smiled.  "Your companion has
been a godsend.  We've never had a doctor in residence here, and some
of the distressed folk coming for shelter recently have needed help
beyond what I and the other Brothers are trained to provide.
Regrettably, medical supplies don't reach us here."

Lamartiere scowled.  He got carefully to his feet by bracing himself on
the stone.  As he slept the residents had slid a blanket-wrapped
mattress of springy brush beneath him.  It was the best bed than
Lamartiere had had since he thundered out of Brione in the stolen
tank.

Lamartiere's discomfort came from being shaken for over a day in the
strait confines of Hoodoo's driving compartment.  Dr.  Clargue
understood the tank's software better than Lamartiere could ever hope
to do, but driving a tank was a specialized skill that Clargue had
never learned.  They couldn't switch positions during the high-speed
run into the Boukasset.

Lamartiere paused; he'd intended to climb into the basket, but his body
wasn't quite ready.  "You're in regular touch with the rest of
Ambiorix, then?"  he asked.

"A truck comes every week to pick up our lemons and bring us the things
we've ordered with the proceeds," Blenis explained.  "An aircraft would
be better but as Rasile said, no one flies in the Boukasset.  Maury and
de Laburat both import very sophisticated weaponry, much of it by
starship.  Not medical supplies, though; at least not to share with
us."

He shook his head.  "I'm not complaining," he said.  "God has poured
her bounty over us with great generosity.  We give thanks daily that
She allows us to help so many of Her afflicted."

"I'll go down now and send the doctor up," Lamartiere said.  "He needs
sleep at least as much as I did."

He stepped into the basket.  The woman moved the slung infant to her
right hip so that she could grip the crank.

"You know, all people really need is peace," Father Blenis said.  "I
regret that this isn't understood more widely.  Ambiorix would be a
better place."

Lamartiere walked to Hoodoo's bow, feeling stronger with each step.  He
wasn't looking forward to getting inside again, but perhaps he wouldn't
have to if he stayed close to the hatch.

Dr.  Clargue was re bandaging Marie 's hand "The dry air is an
advantage," he said, pitching his voice to greet Lamartiere as well as
speaking to his patient "Germs don't find it any more attractive than I
do.  Though I'd prefer to have a greater supply of antibiotic cream as
well."

Rasile, Louise, and the woman's dimwitted brother--if Pietro really was
her brother--loitered near the tank Unlike Marie, none of them had any
obvious medical problems.

"You three," Lamartiere ordered harshly.  Whatever they were doing, it
wasn't together Louise and Rasile liked each other as little as
Lamartiere liked either one of them.  "Get out of here.  Either out in
the orchard or inside the shrine, I don't care which."

Pietro was in a different category.  You couldn't dislike him any more
than you could dislike a rock, though a rock could be dangerous enough
in the wrong circumstances.

"Who do you think you are, giving me orders?"  Rasile said.

The guy who's going to be testing Hoodoo's drive fans in a moment,"
Lamartiere said as he hopped onto the bow slope.  "If you're within a
hundred meters when I crank up, there won't be anything left of you but
a smear by the time I shut down again.  Just a friendly warning."

If trouble started, Lamartiere needed to be in the driver's seat.  He
wished Clargue weren't there now, but the doctor wouldn't have been
able to work on his patients from the cupola.

The refugees drifted toward the orchard instead of pushing matters.
Louise and Pietro walked together, while Rasile stayed twenty meters
distant in space and a lot farther away in spirit.

Lamartiere supposed they'd been hoping to steal equipment.  Tanks in
the field were generally festooned with gear, but Heth and Stegner had
stripped Hoodoo to be loaded on a starship before Lamartiere drove her
out of the base.  He and Clargue had only the clothes they stood in,
but Lamartiere still didn't want the likes of those three rummaging
around inside the tank.

Clargue got out of the compartment very stiffly.  "I'm sorry, Denis,"
he said.  "I should have been working on the software, but I found I
was a doctor before I was a tank crewman."

"Go get a bath and some sleep, doctor," Lamartiere said.  "There's
plenty of water here, for our purposes anyway."

He gripped Clargue's hand to permit him to negotiate the indium slope
under control.  "You did just what you should've done.  I wish I could
say the same."

Clargue trudged toward the basket, carrying his medical kit.  Marie
still stood close to the tank.  "I'll leave in a moment," she said.  "I
wanted to apologize for what I said when you arrived.  Dr.  Clargue is
a good man, and he tells me that you are too."

Lamartiere snorted.  "Then he knows something I don't," he said.  He
squatted on the edge of the hatch instead of lowering his body inside.
The driver's seat had almost infinite possible adjustments, but at the
end of the long run there was no part of Lamartiere's body that hadn't
been rubbed or pounded.

"Look," he said, "I'm sorry we're here.  I'm sorry about a lot of
things, though I know that doesn't make them any better.  If Maury can
get us ammo, then we'll go back across the mountains to where we can
maybe do something about the war.  Or whatever the Council decides it
wants."

"Maury won't give you anything unless there's advantage in it for him,"
the woman said.  "The last thing he wants is for the war to end.  He
and de Laburat are making too good a thing about being the only
authorities in the Boukasset."

Despite Marie's initial comment, she didn't show any sign of wanting
to leave.  Lamartiere was glad of her company.

"They manufacture drugs, you know," Marie said.  She glared at
Lamartiere as though he was responsible for the situation.  "Most of
the output goes off-planet, but I suppose there's enough left over for
Ambiorix as well."

"I wasn't aware of that, no," Lamartiere said evenly.  It made sense,
though.  He should have wondered what Maury traded to the smugglers in
exchange for his gang's weaponry.  Goat-hair textiles or even the
subtly flavored lemons of the Boukasset didn't buy many power guns and
antiaircraft missiles.

"I was at one of the factories for three months," Marie said.  Her tone
was harsh, but Lamartiere now saw the misery in her eyes.  "Not as
staff--they have off-planet technicians for that.  As entertainment.
Until they raided some other family of refugees and replaced me with
someone who was in better shape.  I came to the shrine instead of dying
in the desert."

"I'm responsible for the things I've done," Lamartiere said.  He
deliberately met the woman's fierce glare.  "I won't apologize for
things other people have done.  However much I may regret them."

Marie nodded.  Her expression relaxed slightly.  "I just wanted you to
know the sort of people you'll be dealing with," she said.  "And don't
misunderstand me: de Laburat's gang ran the factory where I was held.
But they're both the same.  They and all their men are demons."

The sun was almost on the rim of the western hills.  The shrine's
residents were coming back from the lemon orchard, carrying their
tools.  Some of them were even singing.

Over the southern horizon roared a score of vehicles, both wheeled and
air-cushion.  They bristled with weapons.  Dust mounted in a pall that
turned blood red in the light of the lowering sun.

The rulers of the Boukasset were paying a call on Hoodoo.

* * ^

Lamartiere slid into the driver's hatch.  His body no longer ached.  He
switched on the fans and checked the readouts.  All were within
parameters except Number 7, and that bearing wasn't of immediate
concern.  He blipped the throttle once, then let the blades drop to a
humming idle.

A blast of fine grit sprayed beneath the skirt at the pressure spike in
the plenum chamber.  It staggered Marie as she backed away from the
vehicle.  Lamartiere was sorry, but he didn't have a lot of time. Worse
things were likely to happen soon anyway.

The vehicles approaching in line abreast were already within a Mick of
the shrine.  Even without magnification Lamartiere could tell that they
were overloaded, wallowing over irregularities in the desert's
surface.

He brought up the gunnery controls on the lower of the compartment's
two displays.  It was impossible for one person to drive and handle
Hoodoo's armament simultaneously, but though he was prepared to move
the tank Lamartiere didn't expect to need to.

He hoped he wouldn't be shooting either, not when he had only seven 2em
rounds in the tri barrel ready magazine and no ammunition at all for
the main gun.

In the middle of the oncoming vehicles was a three axle truck which
flew a pennant of some sort.  The windshield was covered with metal
plates; the driver could only see through a slit in his armor.  That
was just barely better than driving blindfolded.  If Lamartiere had
been in either of the adjacent vehicles, he'd have given the truck at
least fifty meters clearance to avoid a collision.

The truck's bed was armored with flat slabs of concrete, a makeshift
that would stop small arms but not much more.  Three launching tubes
were bracketed to either side; Lamartiere couldn't tell whether they
held antitank missiles or unguided bombardment rockets.  On top was a
turret that must have come from a light military vehicle: it mounted an
automatic cannon and a coaxial machine gun, both of them electromotive
weapons.

The remainder of the vehicles were similar though

smaller: four- and six-wheeled trucks, massively overloaded with men,
weapons, and armor, as well as half a dozen air cushion vehicles of
moderate capacity.  The latter weren't armored or they wouldn't have
been able to move.  The wheeled vehicles' panoply of mild steel and
concrete was next to valueless anyway.

Lamartiere had fought among the guerrillas of the Western District
before the Council picked him to steal a tank for the rebellion.  The
rebels had tried to convert civilian trucks into armored fighting
vehicles, but they'd immediately given up the practice as a suicidal
waste.  In combat against purpose-built military equipment, makeshifts
were merely tombs for their crews.  They were good for nothing but to
threaten civilians and rival groups of undisciplined thugs.

Which was obviously what these were being used for.

Well, Denis Lamartiere was neither of those things.  He rested his
hands on the control yoke.  His index finger was a centimeter away from
the firing control on the screen in front of him.  To his surprise, he
was smiling.

The vehicles halted near the base of the shrine, disgorging men and a
few women.  Their clothing was a mixture of military uniforms, the
loose robes of the Boukasset, and tawdry accents of Carcassone finery.
A band of pirates, Lamartiere thought; about two hundred of them all
told.

The residents still at a distance either stopped where they were or
returned to the orchard which provided concealment if not shelter.
Civilians who'd already reached the shrine squeezed against the walls,
their eyes on the armed gang.

The basket was descending; Dr.  Clargue was in it, doing what he saw as
his duty.  Lamartiere wished the doctor had stayed safe in the
fortress, but there was no help for it now.

The big truck pulled up twenty meters from Hoodoo.  Grit sprayed up
from the tires, but the breeze carried it back away from the tank.

A man nearly two meters tall and broad in proportion got

out of the door set in the concrete armor of the bed.  He wore a blue
and gold uniform--a military uniform, Lamartiere supposed, though he
couldn't imagine what military force wore something so absurdly ornate.
There was even a saber in a gilded sheath dangling from a shoulder
belt.

"My name's Maury!"  he called to Lamartiere.  He put his hands on his
hips.  "I own everything in the Boukasset, so I guess I own you too."

"No," said Lamartiere.  He spoke through the conformal speakers in
Hoodoo's hull.  His voice boomed across the desert, echoing from the
cliffs and tall stone walls of the shrine.  "You don't own us."

Maury laughed cheerfully.  Lamartiere's amplified voice had made some
members of the gang flinch or even hit the ground, but their leader
seemed unafraid.  "I like a boy with spirit," he said.  "Come down out
of that thing and we'll talk about how we can all win this one."

"We can discuss anything we need just like we are," Lamartiere replied.
"You might say I've gotten used to being in the driver's seat."

The big man chuckled again.  He sauntered toward Hoodoo.

"I said we're fine like we are!"  Lamartiere repeated.  "I can hear
anything you've got to say from where you're standing."

Maury had fair hair and the pale complexion that goes with it.  His
expression didn't change, but a flush climbed his cheeks like fluid in
a thermometer on a hot day.

"I got a message from the Council that they'd like me to give you a
hand, boy," he said.  "I don't take orders from Goncourt but I'm
willing to be neighborly.  Thing is, the way you're acting don't put me
in a very neighborly frame of mind."

The rest of the gang didn't know how to take what was going on.  The
thugs seemed more nervous than angry.  A hundred-and-seventy-tonne tank
was impressive even if it were shut down.  When purring and under the
control of someone who sounded unfriendly, it was enough to frighten
most people.

"I was told you might help me with supplies," Lamartiere said.  He
kept the emotion out of his voice, but the tank's speakers threw his
words like the judgment of God.  "Now that I'm here, I get the
impression that any help you gave me would come at a price I wouldn't
be willing to pay.  Why don't you go back where you came from before
there's an accident?"

Maury laughed again.  His heart wasn't in it, but even as bravado it
took courage.  Most of his gang was festooned with weapons--there were
at least a dozen 2em power guns whose ammo would have filled Hoodoo's
ready magazine if Lamartiere had dared ask for it--but Maury himself
wore only the saber.

"We haven't even talked price," the big man said, almost cajoling.
"Believe me, you'll do fine with your share.  The Boukasset may not
look like much--"

He gestured broadly.  The gold braid on his cuff glowed in the sun's
last ruddy light.

"--but my friends don't lack for anything.  Anything at all!"

There was a commotion near the wall of the shrine.  Lamartiere risked a
quick glance sideward.  He could drop his seat into the driver's
compartment and button the hatch up over himself, but that would give
Maury the psychological edge.

One of Maury's men had backed a woman against the stone.  She shouted
and tried to move sideways.  The man caught her arm and lifted it,
drawing her closer to him.

"Let go of her!"  Dr.  Clargue said as he stepped toward the pair.  The
gangster shoved the woman violently toward Clargue, then stepped back
and unslung a submachine gun.

"Freeze!"  Lamartiere said.  His shout made dust in the air quiver.

"Let her go, Schwirzer," Maury said.  His bellow was dwarfed by the
echoes of Lamartiere's amplified voice.  "For now at least.  This is
just a neighborly visit."

He turned to Lamartiere again and continued, "But let's say for the
sake of discussion that you did want to make something out of this,
kid--just how did you plan to do

that?  Because I know from Goncourt that you don't have any ammo for
those pretty guns of yours."

Cursing under his breath the idiots on the Council who'd given this man
a hold over him, Lamartiere slid the targeting pipper onto Maury's face
in the gunnery display.  The turret whined, bringing the 20em main gun
squarely in line with the self-styled chief of the Boukasset.

"I can't swear on my sister's grave," Lamartiere said, "because she
doesn't have one.  But by her soul in the arms of God, I swear to you
that Hoodoo carries ten thousand rounds for the tri barrel and two
hundred for the main gun.  Shall I demonstrate for the rest of your
men?"  The main gun's barrel was a polished indium tunnel.  Maury was
no coward, but what he saw staring at him was not merely death but
annihilation.  After a frozen moment's indecision he turned his back.
He took off his stiff cap and slammed it into the ground.

"Mount up!"  Maury snarled.  "We're moving out!"

He stalked to the armored truck.  His men obeyed with the disorganized
certainty of pebbles rolling downhill.  One of them scuttled over to
retrieve the cap, then dropped it again and ran off when he made the
mistake of looking up at the 20em bore.

Maury halted at the door.  Drivers were starting their engines:
turbines, diesels, and even a pair of whining electrics.  Maury pointed
an arm the size of a bridge truss at Lamartiere and said, "Maybe you'll
come to talk to me when you've thought about things.  And maybe we'll
come to you again first!"

He got in and his motley squadron started to pull away from the shrine.
The air-cushion vehicles merely swapped ends, but those with wheels
turned awkwardly or even backed and filled.  The bolted-on armor
interfered both with visibility and their turning circles.

Dr.  Clargue walked over to the tank's bow.  He looked wobbly.
Lamartiere himself felt as though he'd been bathed in ice water.  He
was shivering with reaction and had to take his hands away from the
controls to keep from accidentally doing something he'd regret.

The gang vehicles headed south in a ragged line, looking like
survivors from a rout.  The leaders continued to draw farther ahead of
the others.  Maury's own overloaded truck wobbled in the rear of the
procession.

"Doctor," Lamartiere said.  He'd switched off the speakers, so he had
to raise his voice to be heard over Hoodoo's idling fans.  "There's
self-defense strips just above the skirts.  They're supposed to blast
pellets into incoming missiles, but I don't know if they're live.  Can
you check that for me?"

"Yes," Clargue said.  "I'll do that now."

Lamartiere reached out a hand to help the doctor clamber up the bow
slope.  Before he got into the turret Clargue paused and said, "I
worried when I stood watch alone, Denis, because I wasn't sure I'd be
able to use a weapon.  I was trained to save lives, as you know.  But I
think I can do that too, if I must."

"I know what you mean," Lamartiere said.  "Look, keep looking for the
transfer command so we can use the ammo in the storage magazines if we
have to.  When we have to.  Maury'll decide to call my bluff before
long."

"Yes, I'll keep looking," the doctor said in a weary tone.

"I wish to God I was in a different place," Lamartiere whispered.  "I
wish to God I was in a different life."

The stars shone through the dry air in brilliant profusion.  Hoodoo's
displays care ted movement, but Lamartiere had already heard the winch
squeal.  He focused the upper screen on the descending basket, using
light enhancement at 40:1 magnification.

"It's Marie," he said to Clargue.  "She's carrying a couple buckets on
a pole across her shoulders."

"Ah," said the doctor without noticeable interest.  The turret's
yellow, low-intensity lighting was on as Clargue searched the database
for the command that would turn Hoodoo from a vehicle into a fighting
vehicle.

Lamartiere was letting the screens' own dim ambiance provide the only
illumination for the driver's station.  He could have slept beside the
tank if he'd wanted to, setting

an audible alarm to warn him of motion; but so long as Clargue was
working, Lamartiere preferred to be alert also.

He got out of the hatch and slid to the ground.  The smooth iridium
hull reflected starlight well enough to show him in silhouette.  Marie
stepped from the basket and said, "I brought you some food and water.
Bread and vegetable stew--we're vegetarians here.  But it's fresh and
hot."

Lamartiere took the pole from her.  He'd eaten as much as he wanted
earlier in the evening.  The pounding drive had left him too run down
to be really hungry, and it was even an effort to drink though he knew
his body needed the fluids.

"Hot food, doctor," he called.  "Want to come out, or shall I bring it
in to you?"

"Perhaps in a while, Denis," replied Clargue's voice with a hint of
irritation.  "I will run this sequence before I stop, if God and the
world permit me."

Lamartiere set the buckets on the ground and squatted beside them; the
tank's armor slanted too sharply to use it as a ledge.  Thanks," he
said to Marie as he took one of the pair of bottles from the left-hand
basket.  The loaf in the other one smelled surprisingly good.

"Government radio says they're launching an attack on Goncourt," Marie
said as she sat across from him.  "I don't know whether that's true or
not."

The bottle contained water with just enough lemon juice to give it
flavor.  Lamartiere drank, let his stomach settle, and drank more.

The other is goat's milk," Marie said.  "I've come to like the
taste."

"I didn't know about Goncourt," Lamartiere said as he lowered the
bottle.  "I didn't think to listen to the commercial bands.  That would
explain why nobody's contacted us the way they were supposed to.  To
tell us what the fuck we're supposed to do!"

"What are you going to do?"  the woman asked quietly.

Lamartiere shrugged.  He broke off a piece of bread and dipped it into
the stew.  "We won't stay here much longer,"

he said.  He wished he had a real answer to the question, but he
wished a lot of things.

"We have our own garden inside the walls," Marie said.  "We buy the
grain for the bread, though.  It's the main thing we do buy."

"We're just making things worse," Lamartiere said.  He was glad for
someone to talk to, to talk at.  "The government was wrong and stupid
to say that unless you did what the Synod said you weren't a citizen,
you were only a taxpayer.  But this war has made things so much worse.
Me stealing Hoodoo has .. . got a lot of people killed that didn't have
to be.  Including my sister."

Marie shrugged.  "I don't know who's right," she said.  "I never did.
It's easier to see who's wrong, and in the Boukasset that's pretty much
everybody with a gun.  Pretty much."

She stood.  "I'll take back the containers in the morning," she said.
"People like you and me can't change anything."

To her back Lamartiere said, "I changed things when I stole this tank,
Marie.  I changed things when I drove it here and put you all in
danger.  I want to start changing things for the better!"

Hoodoo's warning chime sounded.  Lamartiere was climbing the bow slope
before he was really aware of his movement.  Consciously he viewed the
tank more as Purgatory than as shelter, but he'd dived into the
driver's compartment so often recently that reflex sent him there at
the first hint of danger.

He brought up the fans before he checked to see what movement the
sensors had found; he brought up the gunnery screen also, even though
the weapons were more easily controlled from the fighting compartment
where Dr.  Clargue was.  Clargue was the rebellion's best hope to
decipher Hoodoo's coded systems, but Denis Lamartiere was far the
better choice to use the tank's weaponry.  An air-cushion jeep carrying
a single person was coming out of the hills three kilometers west of
the shrine.  Its headlights were on.

So far as Lamartiere could tell, neither the vehicle nor the driver
carried a weapon.  He was using 100:1

magnification, as much as he trusted when coupled with light
enhancement.  Anything higher was a guess by the AI, and Lamartiere
preferred his own instincts to machine intelligence when his life
depended on it.

"What do you want me to do?"  Clargue asked over the intercom.

"Close your hatch and warn me if anything happens," Lamartiere said.
"This guy is too harmless to be out at night if he didn't have a hell
of a lot lined up behind him."

There's no one else in the direction he came from," Clargue reported.
"I'll continue to monitor the sensors, but otherwise I'll not interfere
with your business."

After a brief mental debate, Lamartiere raised his seat to await the
visitor with his head out of the hatch.  Clargue would warn him if
Hoodoo's electronics showed a danger that unaided eyes would miss.

After hesitating again, he cut the drive fans back to their minimum
speed.  A normal idle sent ringing harmonics through the surrounding
air.  To talk over that level of background noise, the parties would
have had to shout.  Shouting triggered anger and hostility deep in
people's sub brains, even if consciously they would have preferred to
avoid it.

If there'd been two figures in the jeep, Lamartiere would have guessed
they were Heth and Stegner, Hoodoo's original crew.  He'd seen the
mercenaries at the Lystra River, observing the battle from a similar
vehicle.  He supposed they were hoping to steal back their tank.

At this point he'd have rather that they'd driven Hoodoo aboard a
starship and lifted for Beresford, 300 light years distant, the way
they'd planned to do.  Then Lamartiere wouldn't have had to make
decisions when all the alternatives seemed equally bad.  It was too
late to go back, though.

The jeep halted ten meters from Hoodoo's bow.  The driver shut off his
turbine and stood.  "May I approach you, Mr.  Lamartiere?"  he asked.
His voice was cultured but a little too high-pitched.  "Or is it Dr.
Clargue?"

"I'm Lamartiere," Lamartiere said.  "And you can come closer, yeah."

The man walked to the tank, moving with an easy grace.  Lamartiere
heard the winch squeal once more, then stop.  Marie must have reached
the battlements, but he didn't look up to be sure.

"My name is Alexis de Laburat," the man said.  He was a slim, panther
like fellow with a strikingly handsome face.  His left cheek bore a
serpentine scar and there was a patch over that eye.  "I've come alone
and unarmed to offer you a business proposition."

"I've heard about your business," Lamartiere said, more harshly than
he'd intended.  He was remembering what Marie had told him.  "No
thanks.  And I think you'd better go now."

"I was born a Mosite and fought in the rebellion," de Laburat said.  "I
rallied to the government and fought for it when I saw the rebellion
was doomed to fail; so did the other men under my command.  But what
I'm offering now, Mr.  Lamartiere, is peace."

De Laburat's fingers toyed with the tip of his neat moustache.  "As
well as enough money to keep you and the doctor comfortably on any
world to which you choose to emigrate.  Obviously you can't stay on
Ambiorix unless you join me, which I don't suppose you'd care to do."

"I told you, we have no business with you!"  Lamartiere said.

The Rallier shook his head.  "Think clearly," he said.  "I know you're
a clever man or you'd never have gotten this far.  The Council wouldn't
be able to use this tank, even if you were able to get ammunition for
it.  The rebellion is over.  Goncourt will fall within the week. Though
the Council will probably relocate to some cave in the hills, they'll
control nothing at all."

De Laburat smiled "You're the cause of that, you know," he said.  He
was trying to be pleasant, but his voice scraped Lamartiere's nerves to
hear.  "The attack on Goncourt has been very expensive.  The government
probably wouldn't have had the courage to attempt it except that they
were afraid to let the embers of the rebellion smolder on when the
Mosites had this super weapon  As they thought"

"You're not part of this war," Lamartiere said.  "You've made that
clear, you and Maury both.  I am.  You came unarmed so I won't hurt
you--but you'd better leave now or you'll have to walk back, because
I'll have driven Hoodoo over your jeep."

"Listen to me!"  de Laburat said.  He had to look up because Lamartiere
was in the vehicle.  He still gave the impression of a panther, but a
caged one.

"I'll protect the Boukasset," de Laburat said.  "The government knows
I'm no threat to it.  They won't come here to chase me, and the Synod
won't try to impose its definition of heresy here while I have this
tank!"

"Protect the Boukasset under yourself," Lamartiere said.

De Laburat chuckled.  "You've met Maury," he said.  "He has a strong
back and about enough intellect to pull on his boots in the morning.
Would you entrust the Shrine of the Blessed Catherine to him?  And even
if you did, one of his own men will shoot him in the back in a few
weeks or months, as surely as the sun rises tomorrow."

"Go away," Lamartiere said.  In sudden fury he repeated, "Go away, or
by God I'll kill you now so that I can say there's one good deed to
balance against all the harm I've done in this life!"

De Laburat nodded with stiff propriety.  "Good day, Mr.  Lamartiere,"
he said.  "I hope you'll reconsider while there's still time."

Lamartiere watched the Rallier drive back across the desert the way
he'd come.  The jeep's headlights cut a wedge across the rocks and
scrub, disappearing at last through a cleft in the low hills.

"What do we do now?"  Dr.  Clargue asked quietly.

"I wish I knew," Lamartiere said.  "I wish to God I knew."

He slept curled up on the floor of the driver's compartment.  He
continued to hear the purr of Hoodoo's computers late into the night as
Clargue worked on a problem that neither he nor Lamartiere now believed
they would ever solve.

4- 4- *

The warning chime awakened Lamartiere.  After a moment of blurred
confusion--he was too tired and uncomfortable for panic--he realized
what the problem was.

"It's all right, doctor," he said.  "I left the audible alarm on, and
it's registering the locals leaving to go to the orchard."

It wasn't dawn yet, but the sky over the eastern mountains was
noticeably lighter than in the west.  Two hundred kilometers into those
mountains was Goncourt, where Lamartiere supposed shell bursts had been
glaring all night

"Ah," said Clargue.  They'd seen very little of one another despite
having been no more that a meter or two apart during most of the past
week.  Crewing Hoodoo was like being imprisoned in adjacent cells.

"Co get a bath and some breakfast," Lamartiere said He cleared his
throat and added, "I think we may as well move out today, even if we
don't hear anything from the Council.  Otherwise we're going to bring
something down on these people that they don't deserve."

"Yes," said Clargue.  "I'm afraid you're right."  He didn't ask
Lamartiere where he intended to go.  The only possible answer was away.
They needed to go some place where there wasn't anybody else around to
be harmed by what Hoodoo attracted.

Residents were coming down by pairs in the basket.  Even so the process
would take at least an hour.  The Shrine of the Blessed Catherine
hadn't been intended for its present population, at least not in the
years since the ground-level gate had been blocked.  The walls were
little defense against heavy weapons, but they protected the handful of
Brothers from the small arms and banditry of the Boukasset during
normal times.

Hoodoo could turn the shrine into a pile of rubble in a matter of
seconds.  Not that anyone would bother to do so ... except, perhaps, as
a whim along the lines of pulling the wings off flies.

Clargue slid clumsily down the bow and walked toward the basket.
Civilians coming in the other direction murmured greetings to the
doctor.  Everyone here was glad of his presence.

Indeed, most of them probably thought of Hoodoo herself as protection
for the shrine and themselves.  They were wrong.  Even if Lamartiere
could have used the ammunition he knew was in the storage magazines,
the tank was sure to summon increasing levels of violence until
everything in its vicinity was shattered to dust and vapor.

Lamartiere supposed he was dozing in the hatch, though his eyes were
open.  He wasn't consciously aware of his surroundings until Dr.
Clargue said, "I will watch now, Denis," and Lamartiere realized direct
sunlight stabbed across the plain through the notch in the hills by
which Hoodoo had entered.

"Right," Lamartiere said, trying to clear his brain.  He crawled out of
the hatch, bitterly aware that he was in terrible shape.  He supposed
it didn't matter.  The best option he could see now was to drive Hoodoo
fifty kilometers out into the desert, and the AI could handle that once
he got her under way.

De Laburat had been right about one thing.  Dr.  Clargue might be able
to return to helping the sick in a village lost in the mountains, but
there was no longer any place on Ambiorix for Denis Lamartiere.  Like
Hoodoo herself, he was a valuable resource: a tank crewman, to be
captured if possible but otherwise killed to prevent another faction
from gaining his expertise.

He stepped into the basket as a mother and her twins got out.  The
woman nodded while the children whispered excitedly to one another.
They'd been close enough to the soldier to touch him!

The basket jogged its way up the wall of the shrine.  His shadow
sprawled across the hard sandstone blocks.

Below Lamartiere, most of the residents were trudging toward the
orchard.  Parties of the healthiest refugees were loading two-man
cradles with blocks crumbled from the cliff face.  Ordinary
wheelbarrows would be useless on this terrain of sand and irregular
stone.  Human beings were more adaptable than even the simplest of
machines.

Rasile was on the winch, somewhat to Lamartiere's surprise, but Marie
sat nearby.  She was embellishing a piece

of canvas with a Maltese cross in needlepoint, holding the frame
against her thighs with her left wrist and using her good right hand to
direct the needle.  The pattern of tight, small stitches was flawless
so far as Lamartiere could tell.

"Will you lower Mr.  Rasile to the ground?"  Marie said to Lamartiere.
"Or are you still--"

"I'm healthy enough," Lamartiere said.  "Tired, is all."

And so frustrated that he felt like kicking a hole in the battlements,
but neither fact would prevent him from turning a crank.

Children played within the courtyard, their voices shrilly cheerful.
Lamartiere saw a pair of them momentarily, chasing one another among
the rows of pole beans.  The shrine wasn't really the Garden of Eden;
but it was closer to that, and to Paradise, than most of the refugees
could have hoped to find.

"I'm not going down," Rasile said.  "I have permission from Father
Blenis to read my scriptures here today."

He reached into the knapsack at his feet and brought out a fabric-bound
volume.  It was probably the Revelations of Moses, though Lamartiere
couldn't see the title.  Despite the book in his hand, Rasile looked
even more like a pimp--or a rat--than usual.

"What?"  Marie said, both angry and amazed.

"I have permission!"  Rasile said.  "I'm not shirking.  It's hard work
to bring people up in the basket!"

"I wouldn't know that?"  said the woman.  "Father Blenis's so gentle
he'd give you permission to carry off all the communion dishes, but
we're not all of us such innocent saints here, Rasile!"

Lamartiere turned his head away as he would have done if he'd stumbled
into someone else's family quarrel.  Only then did he see the
six-wheeled truck driving up from the south.  It had an open cab and
cargo of some sort in the bed under a reflective tarp, but there were
no signs of weapons.  The driver was alone.

"What's that?"  Lamartiere said sharply.  Marie and Rasile instantly
stopped bickering to stare over the battlements.  Fear made the woman
look drawn and a decade older than

she'd been a moment before; Rasile's expression was harder to judge,
but fear was a large part of it also.

"It's just the provisions truck," Marie said.  She sighed in relief.
"It's a day early, but it seems .. ."

The driver parked near the wall and pulled the tarp back to uncover his
cargo.  He was carrying several hundred-kilo burlap grain sacks and a
number of less-definable bags and boxes.  It all looked perfectly
innocent.

The residents who were still close to the shrine gathered around the
truck.  Others, including a pair of black-robed Brothers, were on their
way back from the orchard.

Lamartiere noticed with approval that Dr.  Clargue had closed the
tank's hatches and was even aiming his tri barrel at the truck.  Some
of the shrines' residents sprawled away in panic when the weapon moved,
but the driver didn't seem to care.  If the fellow made this trip
across the Boukasset regularly, he must be used to having guns pointed
at him.

Rasile said, "Ah!"  with a shudder.  He'd dropped the book in his
haste, but he'd grabbed the knapsack itself and was holding it in front
of him.  It was a sturdy piece of equipment and apparently quite new.

"I was hoping to wash up before we go," Lamartiere said quietly to the
woman.  "We'll be leaving soon.  And I'd like to thank Father Blenis
for his hospitality."

"He's usually in the chapel till midday," Marie said with a nod.  "I'll
get you some breakfast.  You can draw the water yourself now, can't
you?"  "Yes, I--" Lamartiere said.

Hoodoo's siren began to wind.  Lamartiere looked down.  The tank's
turret gimbal led southward, pointing the guns at the line of vehicles
racing toward the shrine.

Maury was returning.

"Let me down!"  Lamartiere said.  He stepped toward the basket,
wondering if he could reach the tank before the armed band arrived.

Rasile backed away, fumbling inside his knapsack.  His right hand came
out holding a bell-mouthed mob gun.  The weapon fired sheafs of aero
foils that spread enough to hit everyone in a normal-sized room with a
single shot As dose

as Lamartiere was to the muzzle, the charge would cut him in half.

"Don't either of you try to move!"  Rasile screamed.

An oncoming vehicle fired its automatic cannon.  Lamartiere suspected
that the gunner had intended to shoot over the heads of the people
streaming back from the orchard, but it was hard to aim accurately from
a bouncing vehicle.  Several shells exploded near the civilians.  A
woman remained standing after those around her had flung themselves to
the ground.  She finally toppled, her blood soaking the sand around her
black.

The truck firing had dual rear wheels and an enclosure of steel plates
welded onto the bed.  The gun projected through a slot in the armor
over the cab.  Hoodoo's tri barrel hit the vehicle dead center.  The
bolts of cyan plasma turned the steel into white fire an instant before
the trucks fuel tank boomed upward in an orange geyser.

One round would have been enough for the job.  Dr.  Clargue fired all
seven, emptying the loading tube.  Lamartiere supposed that was a
waste, but he saw where the woman sprawled on a flag of her own blood
and he couldn't feel too unhappy.  At least the short-term result was
good.

Maury's surviving vehicles bounced and wallowed toward the shrine. None
of them shot at Hoodoo, demonstrating a level of discipline Lamartiere
wouldn't have expected of the gang.  Several of the band were firing in
the air, though.  Their muzzle flashes flickered in the sunlight.

"Don't move or I'll loll you!"  Rasile said, squeaking two octaves up
from his normal voice.  He waggled the mob gun.

Maury's agent in the shrine was as high as a kite either from drugs
he'd taken to nerve himself up, or from simple adrenaline.  Lamartiere
guessed there was a radio in Rasile's knapsack.  He'd signaled his
master when Lamartiere was out of the tank.  Dr.  Clargue was the
better of the two men in Hoodoo's crew, but he wasn't a danger to
Maury's plans.

Maury's vehicles pulled up in a ragged semicircle around the shrine's
southern wall.  Hoodoo and the provisions truck were within the arc,
but the gang had cut most of the residents off from the structure.

If Lamartiere had been in Hoodoo, he'd have driven straight through
one or more of the gang's vehicles: not even the heavy truck was a real
barrier to a tank's weight and power.  Clargue didn't think in those
terms; and anyway, he couldn't drive the tank.

Most of the gangsters got out of their vehicles.  Today Maury wore
expensive battle dress of chameleon fabric which took on the hues of
its surroundings.  He carried a submachine gun, but that was no more
his real weapon than the saber of the previous day had been.  Maury may
have been a thug to begin with, but now he'd risen to a level that he
ordered people killed instead of having to kill them himself.

"I'll be his chief man after this," Rasile said.  A line of drool hung
from the corner of his mouth.  "I'll have all the women I want.  Any
woman at all."

Maury glanced up to make sure Lamartiere was out of the way.  He waved
the submachine gun cheerfully, then spoke to two henchmen.  They
grabbed an old man who'd been standing nearby.  One gangster twisted
the victim's hands behind his back while the other put a pistol to his
temple.

The driver of the provisions truck got up from where he'd lain beside
his vehicle while the shooting was going on.  He also looked toward
Lamartiere, lifting his cap in a casual salute.

The driver was Sergeant Heth, Hoodoo's commander until Lamartiere stole
the tank from Brione.

"Come on out, doctor!"  Maury said in a voice loud enough for those on
the battlements to hear.  "We're going to start killing these people.
We'll kill every one of them unless you give us the tank!"

Lamartiere opened his mouth but remained silent because he didn't know
what advice to give Clargue.  He didn't doubt that Maury would carry
out his threat, and since the doctor couldn't drive Hoodoo The gangster
fired.  Ionized plasma from the projectile's driving skirt ignited a
lock of the hair it blew from the victim's scalp.  Hydrostatic shock
fractured the cranial vault, deforming the skull into softer lines.

The shooter laughed.  His partner flung the body down with a curse and
wiped spattered blood from his face.

Hoodoo's hatches opened.  Dr.  Clargue climbed out of the cupola, bent
and dejected.  He might have been planning to surrender the tank
anyway.  Maury's men had acted before he'd really had a chance to make
up his mind.

Rasile cackled in triumph.  "Any woman--" he said.

Lamartiere caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye.  An
antitank missile hit the side of Maury's big armored truck.  The
warhead blew the slab of concrete into pebbles and a worm of
reinforcing mesh twisted away.

The blast threw everyone within twenty meters to the ground.  Dr.
Clargue lost his grip and bounced down Hoodoo's flank.  He lay still on
the ground.  Ammunition inside the stricken vehicle went off in a
series of red secondary explosions like a string of firecrackers,
reducing to blazing junk whatever the warhead had left.

Rasile stared disbelievingly at the destruction.  Lamartiere twisted
the mob gun's broad muzzle skyward, then punched the smaller man at the
corner of the jaw.

Rasile toppled over the battlements.  For a moment he kept his grip on
the butt of the pistol whose barrel Lamartiere held.  Marie leaned
forward and jabbed her needle into the back of Rasile's hand.  His
screams as he fell were lost in the sudden ripping destruction below.

Two more missiles hit, each destroying its target with a blast intended
to gut purpose-built armored vehicles.  A shock-wave flipped the
provisions truck onto its back; Lamartiere didn't see what had happened
to Sergeant Heth.

Even before the third warhead exploded, automatic cannons firing from
the hills west of the shrine began to rake Maury's other vehicles.
Three kilometers was well within their accurate range.

Maury's air-cushion vehicles disintegrated like tissue paper in a
storm.  The steel armor of some wheeled trucks wasn't thick enough to
stop the shells, and the concrete slabs protecting the others fractured
at the first impact.  Following shells passed through unhindered,
igniting cataclysms of fuel and stored ammunition.

"Let me down!"  Lamartiere said as he jumped into the basket.  He
should have waited.  Marie had to struggle with the locking pin because
Lamartiere's weight was already on the winch, but she jerked it loose
before he realized the problem.  The basket wobbled downward.

Still shooting, the attacking vehicles drove out of the hills where
they'd waited in ambush.  There were three of them, air-cushion armored
personnel carriers of the type used by government forces.

Each thirty-tonne APC could carry a platoon of troops behind armor
thick enough to stop small arms projectiles.  The small turret near the
bow carried a light electromotive cannon as well as a launching rail on
the left side for an antitank missile.  The hatches on the APCs' back
decks opened.  Troops leaned out, aiming rifles and submachine guns.

The men in the APCs wore government uniforms, though with cut-off
sleeves and flourishes of metal and bright fabrics.  Maury had played
his card; now de Laburafs Ralliers were trumping the hand.

The gangs' alliance of convenience had broken down under the weight of
loot that couldn't be shared and which gave the party owning it an
overwhelming advantage over the other.  In this at least, Hoodoo's
presence had benefitted the other inhabitants of the Boukasset.

Most of Maury's men had thrown themselves to the ground or were running
toward the rocks behind the shrine, the only available cover.  Their
leader stood and emptied his submachine gun at the oncoming vehicles.

The APCs' turrets were stabilized to fire accurately on the move.  Two
of the automatic cannon shot back simultaneously.  Maury's head and
torso disintegrated in white flashes.  An arm flew skyward; the legs
below the knees remained upright for an instant before toppling onto
the sand.

Lamartiere was halfway to the ground when a Rallier noticed the mob gun
and took him for one of Maury's gang.  Chips of sandstone flew from the
wall close enough to cut Lamartieres arm: the shooter was either lucky
or better

than any man had a right to be when firing from a moving platform.

Lamartiere saw a cannon tracking toward him.  The ground was still five
meters below but there was no choice.  Cradling the mob gun to his
belly and hoping it wouldn't go off when he hit, he jumped.  A burst of
shells devoured the basket as he left it, stinging his back with
fragments of casing and stone.

He knew to flex his knees as he hit, but his feet flew backward and he
slapped the ground hard enough to knock his breath out and bloody his
chin.  He'd dropped the mob gun.  He snatched it up again, then
staggered toward Hoodoo with knifeblade pains jetting from two lower
ribs.

The APCs closed to within thirty meters of the burning vehicles and
flared broadside to a halt.  The Ralliers wanted to stay beyond range
of a hand-thrown bomb as they finished off the survivors of Maury's
band.  Bullets sparkled on the APCs' sides; a Rallier sprawled,
bleeding down the sloping armor.  Gunfire from the vehicles was twenty
to one compared to what they received.

Lamartiere grabbed a headlight bracket with his left hand.  Behind him
a woman's voice shrilled, "Stop him, Pietro!"  through the roar of
gunfire.

Lamartiere swung his right leg up.  Pietro closed a hand like a bear
trap on his ankle and jerked him back.  With the muzzle of the mob gun
tight against the giant's body, Lamartiere pulled the trigger.

Recoil bashed the gun butt hard against Lamartiere's ribs.  He doubled
up.  Pietro stepped back with a look of blank incomprehension on his
face.  There was a hole two centimeters in diameter just above his
navel.  His tunic was smoldering.

Pietro pivoted and fell on his face.  The cavity in his back was bigger
than a man's head.  Sections of purple-veined intestine squirmed out of
the general red mass.

Louise stood behind her brother's body.  "You bastard!"  she cried and
drew a small pistol from the bosom of her blouse.

Lamartiere hesitated a heartbeat, but there was no

choice.  Louise and her brother were combatants, agents working for de
Laburat just as Rasile had worked for Maury--and she was about to kill
him.

He pulled the trigger.  Nothing happened.  Excessive chamber pressure
when he'd fired with the muzzle against Pietro's chest had ruptured the
cartridge case.  The mob gun was jammed.

Sergeant Heth grabbed the woman's wrist from behind, spun her, and
broke her elbow neatly over his knee.  The mercenary had lost the loose
robe he'd worn for a disguise, and his left arm and shoulder were black
with oil or soot.

"You drive, kid!"  he shouted.  He used Hoodoo's toolbox as a handhold
and a patch welded on the side skirt for a step to hit himself up the
tank's side.  "I'll take care of the rest!"

Lamartiere climbed the bow slope and dropped into the driver's
compartment.  He switched the fans on and closed the hatch above him.

De Laburat must have ordered his troops not to fire at the tank since
its capture undamaged was the whole purpose of the attack, but now a
dozen shells exploded against the side of the turret.  They were as
harmless as so many raindrops.

Fan speed built smoothly; only the ragged line of Number 7's readout
reminded Lamartiere that there was a problem.  Hoodoo's systems were
coming alive all around him.  There were hums and purrs and the
demanding whine of a hydraulic accumulator building pressure.

Some of the sounds were unfamiliar.  With a sudden leap of his heart,
Lamartiere realized that the rhythmic shoopshoopshoop from deep in the
hull must be ammunition rising from the storage magazines.

Out of nervousness he coarsened blade pitch too fast.  The fans
threatened to bog, but Lamartiere rolled back on the adjustment in
time.  Adding power with his right handgrip and pitch with the left, he
brought Hoodoo to hover in place.

The driver's compartment felt more comfortable to him

without a gunnery display in the center of the lower screen.  He'd
regularly driven tanks during the months he'd worked as one of the
Slammers' Local Service Personnel, but he'd never seen a gunnery
display until Dr.  Clargue went over Hoodoo's systems in Pamiers.

Dozens of Ralliers were blazing away at Hoodoo with rifles and
submachine guns, a dangerous waste of ammunition.  Somebody with a
better notion of utility jumped down from his APC and ran forward,
swinging a satchel charge for a side-armed throw.  A bullet ricocheting
from the tank tore his face away as he released the satchel.

The bomb flew toward Hoodoo in a high arc.  A section of self-defense
strip fired, making the tank ring.  Tungsten pellets shredded the
satchel into tatters of cloth and explosive, flinging it back the way
it had come.  It didn't detonate.

Lamartiere eased his control yoke forward and twisted left to move the
tank away from the shrine.  There were too many civilians nearby. Shots
that couldn't damage Hoodoo would kill and maim people who'd only
looked for peace.

The APCs were driving away.  Ralliers who'd gotten out to finish off
Maury's men on foot ran along behind the vehicles, shouting and waving
their arms.  One of the gunners depressed his cannon as his APC turned,
intending to rake Hoodoo's skirts.  If the plenum chamber was holed
badly enough, the tank's fans couldn't build enough pressure > to lift
her off the ground.

Blue-green light sparkled on the APC's turret as a dozen bolts from
Hoodoo's 2em weapon hit it.  The tri barrel rotation was an additional
whirr in the symphony of the tank at work.  In the driver's
compartment, the plasma discharges were scarcely louder than peanuts
cracking.

The turret flew apart like steam puffed into a stiff breeze.  The APC's
armor was a sandwich of ceramic within high-maraging steel: the steel
burned white while glassy knives of the core ripped in all directions.
The torso of a Rallier trying to climb back aboard the vehicle vanished
in bloody spray.

Lamartiere crawled through the chaos.  The ground in front of the
shrine was littered with bodies and debris.  Residents who'd been
caught in the fighting lay intermixed with Maury's gang.  Some of them
might still be alive.

Above Lamartiere the tri barrel spat short bursts.  Sergeant Heth was
picking off dismounted Ralliers instead of firing at the fleeing
vehicles.  Some of de Laburat's men turned to run for shelter in the
rocks when they saw the APCs weren't going to stop for them.  None of
them made it, and the ones who threw themselves down to feign death
didn't survive either.

It was easy to tell dead Ralliers from those shamming.  At short range
a 2em bolt tore a human body apart.  When several hit the same target,
the result was indistinguishable from a bomb blast.

Lamartiere drove over the wreckage of a truck that had been hit by an
antitank missile.  Lubricant and the synthetic rubber tires burned with
low, smokey flames.  Hoodoo's skirt plowed a path through the skeletal
frame, whipping the blaze higher with the downdraft from the plenum
chamber.

The main gun fired.

The tri barrel had so little effect inside the tank that Lamartiere was
merely aware that Heth was shooting.  The 20em weapon's discharge
rocked Hoodoo backward despite the inertia of her 170 tonnes.  Air
clapped to fill the vacuum which the jolt of plasma had burned through
its heart.  Lamartiere shouted in surprise.

The leading APC, by now nearly a kilometer distant, burst as though a
volcano had erupted beneath it.  The bolt transferred its mega joules
of energy to the vehicle, vaporizing even the ceramic armor.  A
fireball forty meters in diameter bloomed where the APC had been; bits
of solid matter sprayed out of it, none of them bigger than a man's
thumbnail.

The gun cycled, ejecting the spent round into the fighting compartment.
Heat and stinking fumes flooded Hoodoo's interior even though the
ventilation fans switched to high speed.  Lamartieres eyes were
watering and the back of his throat burned.

"Thought I'd wait till we were clear of the civilians," Sergeant Heth
explained over the intercom in a conversational voice.  "Sidescatter
from the big gun can blister bare skin if you're anywhere nearby."

He fired the 20em weapon again.  This time the clang and the way the
tank bucked weren't a surprise to Lamartiere, though his head wobbled
back and forth in response to the hull's motion.

The second APC was making a skidding turn to avoid running through the
flaming ruin that had exploded before it.  The cyan bolt hit the
vehicle at a slant, perfectly centered, and devoured it as completely
as its fellow.  The fireball dimmed to a ghost of its initial fury, but
brush ignited by debris ignited hundreds of meters away.

The last Rallier vehicle fled at over 100 kph despite the broken
terrain.  It was drawing away because Hoodoo's mass took so long to
accelerate despite the tank's higher top speed.  Lamartiere
concentrated on driving, avoiding knobs of rock too heavy to smash
through and crevices that would spill air from the plenum chamber and
ground Hoodoo shriekingly.

He heard the turret gimbal onto its target.  A Rallier stood on the
deck of the APC and jumped.  The man hit the ground and bounced high,
limbs flailing in rubbery curves.  He'd broken every bone in his body
and was obviously dead.

But then, so were his fellows.

The main gun slammed.  The third APC vanished in a smear of fire across
the desert floor.  The sun was high enough to pale the flames, but the
pall of black smoke drifted west with the breeze.

"Go back to the fort, kid," Heth ordered.  "Stegner's heading there in
our jeep."

The mercenary chuckled, then started coughing.  The ozone and matrix
residue from the main gun burned his throat also.  "We planned that
Steg'd set off some fireworks on the hills.  While everybody was
looking that way I'd hop into Hoodoo.  The locals made a better job of
fireworks than we ever thought of, didn't they?  Bloody near did for
me, I'll tell the world!"

Lamartiere braked the tank with the caution its mass

demanded.  Unlike the driver of a wheeled vehicle, he didn't have the
friction of tires against the ground to slow him unless he dumped air
from the plenum chamber and deliberately skidded the skirt.

There was no need now for haste.  Lamartiere wasn't in a hurry to face
what came next.

He opened his hatch, thinking the draft would clear fumes from the
tank's interior faster than the filtered ventilation system.  The hatch
rolled shut again an instant later; Sergeant Heth had used the
commander's override.

"Not just yet, kid," he said.  "The guy in charge of this lot, de
Laburat .. . Did you ever meet him?"

"Yes," Lamartiere said.  "I'd sooner trust a weasel."

"Yeah, that's the guy," the mercenary said.  "But he's a smart
sonuvabitch.  He saw the way things were going before any of his people
did.  He bailed out and ran into the rocks right away.  I didn't have
the ready magazines charged yet, so I couldn't do anything about it."

"You mean de Laburat got away?"  Lamartiere said in horror.

The main gun fired.  The unexpected CLANG/Jerk\ whipsawed Lamartiere's
head again.  Fumes seeped through the narrow passage from the fighting
compartment, but both hatches opened before he had time to sneeze.  The
wind of Hoodoo's forward motion scoured Lamartiere's station.

This time the bolt had struck at the base of the cliff a hundred meters
west of the shrine.  Rock shattered in a blue-green flash.

The slope bulged, then slid downward with a roar.  A plume of
pulverized rock settled slowly, displaying an enormous cavity in the
cliff.  Below the crater was a pile of irregular blocks which in some
cases were larger than a man.  The mass was still shifting internally,
giving it the look of organic life.

Civilians who'd been returning from the orchard, some of them running
to check on loved ones, flattened again to the ground.  They had no way
of telling what had just happened.

"He got away for a while," Heth said with satisfaction.

"But then he stuck his head up outa the crevice where he was hiding to
see what was going on.  He didn't get a very long view, did he?"

Heth's laughter changed again to coughing, though with a cheerful
undercurrent.  Because the fumes escaped via the cupola, the turret
took longer to clear than the drivers compartment.

Father Blenis was on the battlements, standing as straight in his robes
as age would permit him.  He was alone.  He hadn't flinched when the
20em gun fired, even though he was closer to the bolt's crashing impact
than any of the other civilians.

A jeep was racing across the desert from the foothills to the east,
trailing a pennant of ruddy dust.  Lamartiere wondered if Heth was
armed.  Probably not.  The gangs searched the provisions truck, so one
or the other of them would have confiscated any weapon the mercenary
had tried to bring with him.

It didn't matter.  Lamartiere had run as far as he was going to.  The
tank he'd stolen with such high hopes had brought disaster to everyone
around him.

Hoodoo was nearing Maury's vehicles.  Black smoke still poured out of
the carcasses.  Lamartiere swung his fan nacelles vertical, lifting the
tank for an instant to spill air from the plenum chamber.  Hoodoo
pogoed, touching several times as she slowed.  The impacts were too
gentle to damage the skirts.

They nosed through the gap they'd plowed in pursuit of the Ralliers.
Lamartiere drove carefully; there were civilians moving behind the
smoke.  He didn't see anyone holding a weapon, though there were plenty
of guns strewn across the ground.  Dr.  Clargue squatted near the
walls, bandaging a child's leg.

"Sir?"  Lamartiere asked.

"I'm no fucking officer, kid," Heth said, at least half serious.
"Anyway, 'sarge' was good enough when you were an LSP at the base,
wasn't it?"

"That was a long time ago, sarge," Lamartiere said.  Five calendar
days, and a lifetime.  "Anyway, I was wondering

what the command was to transfer ammo to the ready magazines.  Dr.
Clargues searched the data banks up, down and crosswise and he can't
find it.  Couldn't find it."

Heth laughed himself into another fit of coughing.  "Oh, blood and
martyrs, was that the problem?  Steg and me knew there must be
something going on why you didn't use the main gun, but we couldn't on
our lives figure out what it was!"

Lamartiere nestled the tank against the shrine.  He shut down the fans.
The jeep with Trooper Stegner was still a minute or two distant. "Well,
what was it then?"  he said sharply.  There were worse things happening
than Heth laughing at him, but it was still irritating.

The sergeant had cocked the turret to the side; the 20em barrel was no
longer glowing, but heat waves still distorted the air above the
indium.  He climbed out of the cupola and slid down beside the driver's
hatch.  Lamartiere raised his seat, but for the moment he was too
exhausted to get out of the vehicle.

"Hey, simmer down," Heth said.  "I'm just laughing because of how lucky
we were.  Not that I'm not going to have some explaining to do about
why Hoodoo's late joining the regiment on Beresford, but at least you
didn't turn Carcassone inside out with the main gun."

The jeep wound between a pair of truck chassis.  The open flames had
died down, though the wreckage still smoldered.  Stegner, a tall man
with wispy hair and a face Like a rabbit's, waved to them.

Transfer isn't a software process," Heth went on.  "It's hardwired.
There's a thumb switch on the firing lever.  To recharge the ready
magazines you roll it up for the tri barrel and down for the main
gun."

"Oh," Lamartiere said.  "Yeah, that explains why the doctor couldn't
find the command."

He put a boot on the seat and lifted himself out of the compartment.
Heth steadied him till he'd settled on the open hatch.

"Kid," the sergeant said.  "There's maybe three million parts in one of
these suckers.  How were you supposed to

know what every one of them is, and you not even through proper
training?"

He patted Hoodoo with an affectionate hand.  "You did plenty good
enough with what you had.  I watched you chew up that mechanized
battalion at the Lystra, remember?  I'll tell the world!"

The sergeants torso was badly scraped besides being half covered in
oil, but apart from occasionally rubbing his elbow he showed no signs
of discomfort.  Lamartiere's chest hurt badly, particularly where the
mob gun had recoiled into his ribs when he fired, but he thought the
damage was probably limited to bruising.

"Did you see the holes in the skirt, sarge?"  Stegner called as he
stood scowling at Hoodoo's flank.  "Must be about a hundred of 'em.
Nothing very big but I don't want to drive back to Brione with her
mushing like a pig."

"She sagged left," Lamartiere said.  "I had to tilt the nacelles to
keep her straight, but it wasn't as bad as the damage we took at the
Lystra."

"Probably the warhead that flipped my truck over on me," Heth said
judiciously.  "Well, we can use the truck's bed for patching.  Do they
have a welder here, kid?"

Half the residents had returned to the shrine.  They were crying in
amazement and horror at the carnage.  Many others still hid among the
stone shelters of the orchard, waiting to be sure that it was safe to
show themselves.  Lamartiere couldn't blame them for their fear.

"I doubt it," he said.  He thought for a moment.  "There's mastic,
though.  I saw some where they're tiling the chapel entryway.  It'll
work for a patch on the inside of the skirts, since air pressure
tightens the seal."

"Yeah, that'll work," said Stegner approvingly.  He walked to the
overturned truck and kicked it, judging the thickness of the body metal
by the sound.

"Sergeant Heth," Lamartiere said, looking at the stone wall of the
shrine.  "Are you going to hand me over to the government, or ... ?"

He turned and gestured toward the body of the old man Maury's thugs had
shot as a warning to Dr.

Clargue--a few moments before they and all their fellows died also.

"Hey, we don't work for the government of Ambiorix any more, kid," Heth
said.  "The only reason Steg and me are still on the planet is we
really didn't want to explain to Colonel Hammer how we managed to lose
one of his tanks.  Do you have any idea what one of these costs?"

He patted Hoodoo again.

Marie's body lay at the foot of the wall.  Her upturned face was
peaceful and unmarked, but there was a splotch of blood on her upper
chest.  Lamartiere supposed a stray bullet had hit her.  There'd been
enough of them flying around.

"I know what it costs," he said.  "I know what it cost these people."

"Yeah, that's so," Heth agreed.  "And I'm not arguing with you.  But
you might remind yourself that things may be a little better for the
folks here now that the gangs are out of the way.  I don't say it will,
mind you; but it may be."

He spat accurately onto the corpse of one of Maury's men; the one who'd
held the hostage for his partner to shoot, Lamartiere thought.

"I don't work for the government, like I told you," Heth said quietly.
"But sometimes I do things on my own personal account.  War isn't a
business where there's a lot of obvious good guys, but sometimes the
bad guys are pretty easy to spot."

Lamartiere put a hand on Heth's shoulder so that the mercenary would
look him straight in the eye.  "Sergeant," Lamartiere said, "am I free
to go?  Is that what you're telling me?"

Heth shrugged.  "Sure, if you want to," he said.  "But Steg and me was
hoping you might like to join the Slammers.  The Colonel's always
looking for recruits."

Stegner morosely rubbed a dimple in the hull surrounded by a halo of
bright radial scratches.  A high explosive shell had burst there
against the armor.  "If we bring you along," he said, "maybe we can get
a few of these extra dings passed off as training accidents, you
know?"

"And you might like to be someplace there wasn't a price on your
head," Heth said, rubbing the armor with his thumb.  "Nobody at the
port's going to think twice if there's three of us boarding a ship for
Beresford along with Hoodoo, here."

Lamartiere looked toward the battlements.  Father Blenis knelt in
prayer.  A pair of young women, one of them holding an infant, were
with him.  At the base of the wall three laymen and a Brother worked
with focused desperation to jury-rig a platform in place of the
shattered basket.

"I guess I don't have a choice," Lamartiere said.

Trooper Stegner looked up from the side of the tank.  "Sure you got a
choice," he said in a hard, angry voice.  Lamartiere had thought of the
trooper as a little slow, but invariably good-humored.  "There's always
a choice.  I coulda stayed on Spruill sniping at Macauleys till one of
the Macauleys nailed me!"

"For me," said Sergeant Heth, "the problem was her father and brothers.
I decided that joining the Slammers was better that the rest of my life
married to Anna Carausio."

He smiled faintly in reminiscence.  "I still think I was right, but who
knows, hey?"

Lamartiere nodded.  "Yeah, who knows?"  he said.

He looked at Marie's silent body.  Maybe she was in the arms of God;
maybe Celine was there too, and all the others who'd died since Denis
Lamartiere stole a tank.  It would be nice to believe that.  Lamartiere
didn't believe in much of anything nowadays; certainly not in the
Mosite Rebellion as a cause to get other people killed in.  But one
thing he did believe.

"Ambiorix'll be a better place if I'm off-planet," he said to the
mercenaries.  "And just maybe I'll be better off too.  I'll join if
you'll have me."

Heth stuck out his hand for Lamartiere to shake.  "Welcome aboard,
kid," he said.

Stegner kicked Hoodoo's skirt.  "Now let's get this poor bitch patched
up so we get the hell out of here, shall we?"

CULTURAL CONFLICT

Platoon sergeant Horthy stood with his right arm--his only arm--akimbo,
surveying the rippling treetops beneath him and wishing they really
were the waves of a cool, gray ocean.  The trees lapped high up the
sides of the basalt knob that had become Firebase Bolo three weeks
before when a landing boat dropped them secretly onto it.  Now, under a
black plastic ceiling that mimicked the basalt to the eye of the
Federation spy satellite, nestled a command car, a rocket howitzer with
an air cushion truck to carry its load of ammunition, and Horthy's
three combat cars.

Horthy's cars--except on paper.  There Lieutenant Simmons-Brown was
listed as platoon leader.

One of the long-limbed native reptiles suddenly began to gesture and
screech up at the sergeant.  The beasts occasionally appeared on the
treetops, scurrying and bounding like fleas in a dog's fur.  Recently
their bursts of rage had become more common--and more irritating.
Horthy was a short, wasp-wasted man who wore a spiky goatee and a
drum-magazined power gun slung beneath his shoulder.  His hand now
moved to its grip .. . but shooting meant giving in to frustration, and
instead Horthy only muttered a curse.

"You say something, Top?"  asked a voice behind him.  He turned without
speaking and saw Jenne and Scratchard, his two gunners, with a lanky
howitzer crewman whose name escaped him.

"Nothing that matters," Horthy said.

Scratchard's nickname was Ripper Jack because he carried a long knife
in preference to a pistol.  He fumbled a little nervously with its hilt
as he said, "Look, Top, ah .  we been talking and Bonmarcher here--" he
nodded at the artilleryman "--he says we're not supporting the rest of
the Regiment, we're stuck out here in the middle of nowhere to shoot up
Federation ships when the war starts."

The sergeant looked sharply at Bonmarcher, then said, "If the war
starts.  Yeah, that's pretty much true.  We're about the only humans on
South Continent, but if the government decides it still wants to be
independent and the Federation decides it's gotta have Squire's World
as a colony--well, Fed supply routes pass through two straits within
hog shot of this rock."  Simmons-Brown would cop a screaming worm if he
heard Horthy tell the men a truth supposed to be secret, but one way or
another it wasn't going to matter very long.

"But Lord and Martyrs, Top," Bonmarcher burst out, "how long after we
start shooting is it gonna be before the Feds figure out where the
shells're coming from?  Sure, this cap--" he thumbed toward the plastic
supported four meters over the rock by thin pillars "--hides us now.
But sure as death, we'll loose one off while the satellite's still over
us, or the Feds'll triangulate radar tracks as the shells come over the
horizon at them.  Then what'll happen?"

"That's what our combat cars are for," Horthy said wearily, knowing
that the Federation would send not troops but a salvo of their own
shells to deal with the thorn in their side.  "We'll worry about that
when it happens.  Right now--" He broke off.  Another of those damned,
fluffy reptiles was shrieking like a cheated whore not twenty meters
from him.

"Bonmarcher," the sergeant said in sudden inspiration, "you want to go
down there and do something about that noisemaker for me?"  Two
noisemakers, actually--the beast and the artilleryman himself for as
long as the hunt kept him out of the way.

"Gee, Top, I'd sure love to get outa this oven, but I heard the
lieutenant order .. ."  Bonmarcher began, looking sidelong at the
command car fifty meters away in the center of the knob.  Its air
conditioner whined, cooling Simmons Brown and the radioman on watch
within its closed compartment.

"Look, you just climb down below the leaf cover and don't loose off
unless you've really got a target," said Horthy.  "I'll handle the
lieutenant."

Beaming with pleasure, Bonmarcher patted his sidearm to make sure it
was snapped securely in its holster.  "Thanks, Top," he said and began
to descend by the cracks and shelvings that eternity had forged even
into basalt.

Horthy ignored him, turning instead to the pair of his own men who had
waited in silent concern during the exchange.  '"Look, boys," the
one-armed sergeant said quietly, "I won't give you a load of cop about
this being a great vacation for us.  But you keep your mouths shut and
do your jobs, and I'll do my damnedest to get us all out of here in one
piece."  He looked away from his listeners for a moment, up at the dull
indium vehicles and the stripped or khaki crewmen lounging over them.
"Anyhow, neither the Feds or the twats that hired us have any guts.
I'll give you even money that one side or the other backs down before
anything drops in the pot."

Scratchard, as lean and dark as Horthy, looked at the huge, blond
Jenne.  There was no belief on either face.  Then the rear hatch of the
command car flung open and the communications sergeant stepped out
whooping with joy.  "They've signed a new treaty!"  he shouted.  "We're
being recalled!"

Horthy grinned, punched each of his gunners lightly in the stomach.
"See?"  he said.  "You listen to Top and he'll bring you home."

All three began to laugh with released tension.

Hilf, Caller of the Moon Sept, followed his sept-brother Seida along
the wire-thin filaments of the canopy.  Their

black footpads flashed a rare primary color as they leaped.  The world
was slate-gray bark and huge pearly leaves sprouting on flexible
tendrils, raised to a sky in which the sun was a sizzling platinum
bead.  Both runners were lightly dusted with the pollen they had shaken
from fruiting bodies in their course.  The Tree, though an entity,
required cross fertilization among its segments for healthy growth. The
mottled gray-tones of Seida's feathery scales blended perfectly with
his surroundings, and his strength was as smooth as the Tree's. Hilf
knew the young male hoped to become Caller himself in a few years, knew
also that Seida lacked the necessary empathy with the Tree and the sept
to hold the position.  Besides, his recklessness was no substitute for
intelligence.

But Seida was forcing Hilf to act against his better judgment.  The
creatures on the bald, basalt knob were clearly within the sept's
territory; but what proper business had any of the Folk with
rock-dwellers?  Still, knowing that token activity would help calm his
brothers, Hilf had let Seida lead him to personally view the situation.
At the back of the Caller's mind was the further realization that the
Mothers were sometimes swayed by the "maleness" of action as opposed to
intelligent lethargy.

Poised for another leap, Hilf noticed the black line of a worm track on
the bark beside him.  He halted, instinctively damping the springiness
of his perch by flexing his hind legs.  Seida shrieked but fell into
lowering silence when he saw what his Caller was about.  Food was an
immediate need.  As Hilf had known, Seida's unfitness for leadership
included his inability to see beyond the immediate.

The branch was a twenty-centimeter latticework of inter grown tendrils,
leapfrogging kilometers across the forest.  In its career it touched
and fused with a dozen trunks, deep rooted pillars whose tendrils were
of massive cross section.  Hilf blocked the worm track with a spike
clawed, multi-jointed thumb twice the length of the three fingers on
each hand.  His other thumb thrust into the end of the track and
wriggled.  The bark split, baring the

hollowed pith and the worm writhing and stretching away from the
impaling claw.  Hilfs esophagus spasmed once to crush the soft
creature.  He looked up.  Seida stuttered an impolite ness verging on
command: he had not forgotten his self-proclaimed mission.  The Caller
sighed and followed him.

The ancient volcanic intrusion was a hundred-meter thumb raised from
the forest floor.  The Tree crawled partway up the basalt, but the
upper faces of the rock were steep and dense enough to resist
attachments by major branches.  Three weeks previously a huge ball had
howled out of the sky and poised over the rock, discharging other
silvery beasts shaped like great sow bugs and guided by creatures not
too dissimilar to the Folk.  These had quickly raised the black cover
which now hung like an optical illusion to the eyes of watchers in the
highest nearby branches.  The unprecedented event had sparked the
hottest debate of the Callers memory.  Despite opposition from Seida
and a few other hotheads, Hilf had finally convinced his sept that the
rock was not their affair.

Now, on the claim that one of the brown-coated invaders had climbed out
onto a limb, Seida was insisting that he should be charged at once with
leading a war party.  Unfortunately, at least the claim was true.

Seida halted, beginning to hoot and point.  Even without such notice
the interloper would have been obvious to Hilf.  The creature was some
fifty meters away--three healthy leaps, the Caller's mind
abstracted--and below the observers.  It was huddled on a branch which
acted as a flying buttress for the high towers of the Tree.  At near
view it was singularly unattractive: appreciably larger than one of the
sept-brothers, it bore stubby arms and a head less regular than the
smooth bullets of the Folk.

As he pondered, the Caller absently gouged a feather of edible orange
fungus out of the branch.  The rest of the aliens remained under their
roof, equally oblivious to the Folk and their own sept-brother.  The
latter was crawling a little closer on his branch, manipulating the
object he carried while turning his lumpy face toward Seida.

Hilf, blending silently into the foliage behind his brother, let his
subconscious float and merge while his surface mind grappled with the
unpalatable alternatives.  The creature below was technically an
invader, but it did not seem the point of a thrust against the Moon
Sept.  Tradition did not really speak to the matter.  Hilf could send
out a war party, losing a little prestige to Seida since the younger
brother had cried for that course from the beginning.  Far worse than
the loss of prestige was the risk to the sept which war involved.  If
the interlopers were as strong as they were big, the Folk would face a
grim battle.  In addition, the huge silver beasts which had whined and
snarled as they crawled onto the rock were a dangerous uncertainty,
though they had been motionless since their appearance.

But the only way to avoid war seemed to be for Hilf to kill his
sept-brother.  Easy enough to do--a sudden leap and both thumbs rammed
into the bra inbox  The fact Seida was not prepared for an attack was
further proof of his unfitness to lead.  No one would dispute the
Caller's tale of a missed leap and a long fall..  .. Hilf poised as
Seida leaned out to thunder more abuse at the creature below.

The object in the interloper's hand flashed.  The foliage winked cyan
and Seida's head blew apart.  Spasming muscles threw his body forward,
following its fountaining blood in an arc to the branch below.  The
killer's high cackles of triumph pursued Hilf as he raced back to the
Heart.

He had been wrong: the aliens did mean war.

Simmons-Brown broke radio contact with a curse.  His khakis were sweat
stained and one of the shoulder-board chevrons announcing his
lieutenancy was missing.  "Top," he whined to Sergeant Horthy who stood
by the open hatch of the command car, "Command Central won't send a
space boat to pick us up, they want us to drive all the way to the
north coast for surface pick-up to Johnstown.  That's twelve hundred
kilometers and anyhow, we can't even get the cars down off this
Lord-stricken rock!"

"Sure we can," Horthy said, planning aloud rather than deigning to
contradict the wispy lieutenant.  Simmons Brown was a well-connected
incompetent whose approach to problem solving was to throw a tantrum
while other people tried to work around him.  "We'll link tow cables
and .. . no, a winch won't hold but we can blast-set an eyebolt, then
rappel the cars down one at a time.  How long they give us till
pickup?"

"Fifteen days, but--"

A shot bumped the air behind the men.  Both whipped around.  Horthy's
hand brushed his submachine gun's grip momentarily before he relaxed.
He said, "It's all plus, just Bonmarcher.  I told him he could shut up
a couple of the local noisemakers if he stayed below the curve of the
rock and didn't put a hole in our camouflage.  The fed satellite isn't
good enough to pick up small arms fire in this jungle."

"I distinctly ordered that no shots be fired while we're on detached
duty!"  snapped Simmons-Brown, his full mustache trembling like an
enraged caterpillar.  "Distinctly!"

Sergeant Horthy looked around the six blowers and twenty-three men that
made up Firebase Bolo.  He sighed.  Waiting under oommo security,
between bare rock and hot plastic, would have been rough at the best of
times.  With Simmons-Brown added .. . "Sorry, sir," the sergeant lied
straight-faced, "I must have forgotten."

"Well, get the men moving," Simmons-Brown ordered, already closing the
hatch on his air-conditioning.  "Those bastards at Central might just
leave us if we missed pickup.  They'd like that."

"Oh, we'll make it fine," Horthy said to himself, his eyes already
searching for a good place to sink the eyebolt.  "Once we get off the
rock there won't be any problem.  The ground's flat, and with all the
leaves up here, cutting off light we won't have undergrowth to bother
about.  Just set the compasses on north and follow our noses."

"Hey, Top," someone called.  "Look what I got!"  Bonmarcher had
clambered back onto the rock.  Behind him, dragged by its lashed
ankles, was a deep-chested reptile that had weighed about forty kilos
before being decapitated.  "Blew this monkey away my first shot," the
artillery-man bragged.

"Nice work," Horthy replied absently.  His mind was on more important
things.

The world of the Moon Sept was not a sphere but a triangular section of
forest.  That wedge, like those of each of the twenty-eight other
septs, was dominated by the main root of a Tree.  The ground at the
center was thin loam over not subsoil but almost a hectare of ancient
root.  The trunks sprouting from the edge of this mass were old, too,
but not appreciably thicker than the other pillars supporting the Tree
for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.  Interwoven stems and
branches joined eighty meters in the air, roofing the Heart in a
quivering blanket of leaves indistinguishable from that of the rest of
the forest.  The hollow dome within was an awesome thing even without
its implications, and few of the Folk cared to enter it.

Hilf himself feared the vast emptiness and the power it focused, but he
had made his decision three years before when the Mothers summoned the
previous Caller to the Nest and a breeder's diet.  Hilf had thrust
forward and used the flowing consciousness of the whole sept to face
down his rivals for the Callership.  Now he thumped to the hard floor
without hesitation and walked quickly on feet and knuckles to the pit
worn in the center of the root by millennia of Callers.  His body prone
below the lips of the blond root wood HilPs right claw gashed sap from
the Tree and then nicked his own left wrist.  Sap and pale blood oozed
together, fusing Caller and Tree physically in a fashion dictated by
urgency.  The intense wood grain rippled from in front of Hilfs eyes
and his mind began to fill with shattered, spreading images of the
forest.  Each heartbeat sent Hilf out in a further surge and blending
until every trunk and branch-bundle had become the Tree, each member of
the Moon Sept had blurred into the Folk.  A black warmth beneath the
threshold of awareness indicated that even the Mothers had joined.

The incident trembled through the sept, a kaleidoscope more of emotion
than pictures.  Seida capered again, gouted and died in the invaders
raucous laughter.  Reflex stropped claws on the bark of a thousand
branches.  Response was the Caller's to suggest and guide, not to
determine.  The first blood-maddened reply by the sept almost
overwhelmed Hilf.  But his response had been planned, stamped out on
the template of experience older than that of any living
sept-brother--as old, perhaps, as the joinder of Folk and Tree.  The
alien nature of the invaders would not be allowed to pervert the
traditional response: the remainder of Seida's hatching would go out to
punish the death of their brother.

The pattern of the root began to reimpose itself on Hilf's eyes.  He
continued to lie in the hollow, logy with reaction.  Most of the sept
were returning to their foraging or play, but there were always eyes
trained on the knob and the activity there.  And scattered throughout
the wedge of the Tree were thirty-seven of the Folk, young and fierce
in then strength, who drifted purposefully together.

At the forest floor the raindrops, scattered by the triple canopy, were
a saturated fog that clung and made breath a struggle.  Horthy ignored
it, letting his feet and sine wed hand mechanically balance him against
the queasy ride of the air-cushion vehicle.  His eyes swept the ground
habitually.  When reminded by his conscious mind, they took in the
canopies above also.

The rain had slowed the column.  The strangely-woven tree boles were
never spaced too closely to pass the armored vehicles between them, but
frequent clumps of spire-pointed fungus thrust several meters in the
air and confused the aisles.  Experience had shown that when struck by
a car the saprophytes would collapse in a cloud of harmless spores, but
in the fog-blurred dimness they sometimes hid an unyielding trunk
behind them.  The lead car had its driving lights on though the water
dazzle made them almost useless, and all six vehicles had closed up
more tightly than Horthy cared to see.  There was little chance

of a Federation ambush, but even a sudden halt would bring on a
multiple collision.

The brassy trilling that had grown familiar in the past several hours
sounded again from somewhere in the forest.  Just an animal, though.
The war on Squire's World was over for the time, and whether the
Regiment's employers had won or lost there was no reason for Horthy to
remain as tense as he was.  Simmons-Brown certainly was unconcerned,
riding in the dry cabin of his command car.  That was the second
vehicle, just ahead of Horthy's.  The sergeant's wing gunners huddled
in the fighting compartment to either side of him.  They were miserable
and bored, their minds as empty as their slack, dripping faces.

Irritated but without any real reason to slash the men to vigilance,
Horthy glared back along his course.  The stubby 150mm howitzer, the
cause of the whole Lord accursed operation, was the fourth vehicle.
Only its driver, his head a mirroring ball behind its face shield, was
visible.  The other five men of the crew were within the open backed
turret whose sheathing was poor protection against hostile fire but
enough to keep the rain out.

The ammo transporter was next, sandwiched between the hog and the
combat car which brought up the rear of the column.  Eighty-kilo shells
were stacked ten high on its flat bed, their noses color coded with
incongruous gaiety.  The nearby mass of explosive drew a wince from
Horthy, who knew that if it went off together it could pulverize the
basalt they had been em placed on.  On top of the front row of shells
where its black fuse winked like a Cyclops' eye was the gas round, a
thin walled cylinder of K3 which could loll as surely by touch as by
inhalation.  Everyone in the Regiment respected K3, but Horthy was one
of the few who understood it well enough to prefer the gas to
conventional weapons in some situations.

In part, that was a comment on his personality as well.

To Horthy's right, Rob Jenne began to shrug out of his body armor.
"Keep it on, trooper," the sergeant said.

"But Top," Jenne complained, "it rubs in this wet."  His

fingers lifted the segmented porcelain to display the weal chafed over
his floating ribs.

"Leave it on," Horthy repeated, gesturing about the fighting
compartment crowded with ammunition and personal gear.  "There's not
enough room here for us, even without three suits of armor standing
around empty.  Besides--"

The gray creature's leap carried it skimming over Horthy to crash full
into Jenne's chest.  Man and alien pitched over the bulkhead.  Horthy
leaned forward and shot by instinct, using his sidearm instead of the
powerful, less handy, tri barrel mounted on the car.  His light finger
pressure clawed three holes in the creature's back as it somersaulted
into the ground with Jenne.

The forest rang as the transporter plowed into the stern of the
grounded howitzer.  The gun vehicle seemed to crawl with scores of the
scale-dusted aliens, including the one whose spear-sharp thumbs had
just decapitated the driver.  Horthy twisted his body to spray the mass
with blue-green fire.  The hog's bow fulcrum med in the soil as the
transporter's impact lifted its stern.  The howitzer upended, its gun
tube flopping freely in an arc while inertia vomited men from the
turret.

"Watch the bloody ammo!"  Horthy shouted into his intercom as a tri
barrel hosed one of the aliens off the transporter in a cloud of gore
and vaporized metal.  Ahead, the command car driver had hit his panic
bar in time to save himself, but one of the long-armed creatures was
hacking at the vision blocks as though they were the vehicle's eyes. 
The rear hatch opened and Simmons-Brown flung himself out screaming
with fear.  Horthy hesitated.  The alien gave up its assault on the
optical fibers and sprang on the lieutenant's back.

Horthy's burst chopped both of them to death in a welter of blood.

Only body armor saved the sergeant from the attack that sledged his
chest forward into the iridium bulkhead.  He tried to rise but could
not against the weight and the shocks battering both sides of his
thorax like paired trip-hammers.

The blows stopped and the weight slid from Horthy's

back and down his ankles.  He levered himself upright, gasping with
pain as intense as that of the night a bullet-firing machine gun had
smashed across his armor.  Scratchard, the left gunner, grinned at him.
The man's pale skin was spattered with the same saffron blood that
covered his knife.

They've gone off, Top," Scratchard said.  "Didn't like the tri
barrels--even though we didn't hit much but trees.  Didn't like this,
neither."  He stropped his blade clean on the thighs of the beast he
had killed with it.

"Bleeding martyrs," Horthy swore under his breath as he surveyed the
damage.  The platoon's own four blowers were operable, but the
overturned hog was a total loss and the transporters front fan had
disintegrated when the steel ground-effect curtain had crumpled into
its arc.  If there was any equipment yard on Squires World that could
do the repairs, it sure as cop was too far away from this stretch of
jungle to matter.  Five men were dead and another, his arm ripped from
shoulder to wrist, was comatose under the effects of sedatives,
clotting agents, antibiotics, and shock.

"All plus," Horthy began briskly.  "We leave the bodies, leave the two
arty blowers too; and I just hope our scaly friends get real curious
about them soon.  Before we pull out, I want ten of the high explosive
warheads unscrewed and loaded into the command car--yeah, and the gas
shell too."

"Via, Top," one of the surviving artillerymen muttered, "why we got to
haul that stuff around?"

" "Cause I said so," Horthy snarled, "and ain't I in charge?"  His hand
jerked the safety pin from one of the delay-fused shells, then spun the
dial to one hour.  "Now get moving, because we want to be a long way
away in an hour."

The platoon was ten kilometers distant when the shock wave rippled the
jungle floor like the head of a drum.  The jungle had blown skyward in
a gray puree, forming a momentary bubble over a five-hectare crater.
$<$

The Moon Sept waited for twilight in a ring about the shattered
clearing in which the invaders were halted.  The pain that had slashed
through every member of the sept at the initial explosion was literally
beyond comparison: when agony gouged at the Tree, the brothers had
collapsed wherever they stood, spewing waste and the contents of their
stomach uncontrollably.  Hours later the second blast tore away ten
separate trunks and brought down a hectare of canopy.  The huge silver
beasts had shoved the debris to the side before they settled down in
the new clearing.  That explosion was bearable on top of the first only
because of the black rage of the Mothers now insulating the Moon Sept
from full empathy with their Tree; but not even the Mothers could
accept further punishment at that level.  Hilf moaned in the
root-alcove, only dimly aware that he had befouled it in reaction.  He
was a conduit now, not the Caller in fact, for the eyeless ones had
assumed control.  The Mothers had made a two-dimensional observation
which the males, to whom up and down were more important than
horizontal direction, had missed: the invaders were proceeding toward
the Nest.  They must be stopped.

The full thousand of the Moon Sept blended into the leaves with a
perfection achieved in the days in which there had been carnivores in
the forest.  When one of the Folk moved it was to ease cramps out of a
muscle or to catch the sun-pearl on the delicate edge of a claw.  They
did not forage; tie wracking horror of the explosions had left them
beyond desire for food.  The effect on the Tree had been even worse. 
In multi kilometer circles from both blast sites the wood sagged
sapless and foliage curled around its stems.  The power guns alone had
been devastating to the Tree's careful stasis, bolts that shattered the
trunks they clipped and left the splinters ablaze in the rain.  Only
the lightning could compare in destructiveness, and the charges
building in the uppermost branches gave warning enough for the Tree to
minimize lightning damage.

There would be a further rain of cyan charges, but that

could not be helped.  The Mothers were willing to sacrifice to
necessity, even a Tree or a sept.

The four silvery beasts lay nose to tail among the craters, only fifty
meters from the standing trunks in which the Folk waited.  Hilf watched
from a thousand angles.  Only the rotating cones on the foreheads of
each of the beasts seemed to be moving.  Their riders were restive,
however, calling to one another in low voices whose alien nature could
not disguise their tension.  The sun that had moments before been a
spreading blob on the western horizon was now gone; invisible through
the clouds but a presence felt by the Folk, the fixed Moon now ruled
the sky alone.  It was the hour of the Moon Sept, and the command of
the Mothers was the loosing of a blood-mad dog to kill.

"Death!"  screamed the sept-brothers as they sprang into the
clearing.

There was death in plenty awaiting them.

The antipersonnel strips of the cars were live.  Hilf was with the
first body when it hurtled to within twenty meters of a car and the
strips began to fire on radar command.  Each of the white flashes that
slammed and glared from just above the ground-effect curtains was
fanning out a handful of tetrahedral pellets.  Where the energy
released by the power guns blasted flesh into mist and jelly, the
projectiles ripped like scythes over a wide area.  Then the forest
blazed as flickering cyan hosed across it.

The last antipersonnel charge went off, leaving screams and the thump
of power guns that were almost silence after the rattling crescendo of
explosions.

The sept, the surprising hundreds whom the shock had paralyzed but not
slain, surged forward again.  The three limbed Caller of the invaders
shouted orders while he fired The huge silver beasts howled and spun
end for end even as Hilf's brothers began to leap aboard--then the port
antipersonnel strips cut loose in a point-blank broadside.  For those
above the plane of the discharges there was a brief flurry of claws
aimed at neck joints and gun muzzles tight against flesh as they fired.
Then a grenade, dropped or jarred from a container, went off in the
blood-slick

compartment of number one car.  Mingled limbs erupted.  The sides blew
out and the bins of ready ammunition gang fired in a fury of light and
gobbets of molten iridium.

The attack was over.  The Mothers had made the instant assumption that
the third explosion would be on the order of the two previous--and
blocked their minds off from a Tree-empathy that might have been
lethal.  Without their inexorable thrusting, the scatter of
sept-brothers fled like grubs from the sun.  They had fought with the
savagery of their remote ancestors eliminating the great Folk-devouring
serpents from the forest.

And it had not been enough.

"Cursed right we're staying here," Horthy said in irritation.  "This is
the only high ground in five hundred kilometers.  If we're going to
last out another attack like yesterday's, it'll be by letting our K3
roll downhill into those apes.  And the Lord help us if a wind comes
up."

"Well, I still don't like it, Top," Jenne complained.  "It doesn't look
natural."

Horthy fully agreed with that, though he did so in silence.  Command
Central had used satellite coverage to direct them to the hill, warning
again that even in their emergency it might be a day before a landing
boat could be cleared to pick them up.  From above, the half-kilometer
dome of laterite must have been as obvious as a baby in the wedding
party, a gritty red pustule on the gray hide of the continent.  From
the forest edge it was even stranger, and strange meant deadly to men
in Horthy's position.  But only the antipersonnel strips had saved the
platoon the night before, and they were fully discharged.  They were
left with the gas or nothing.

The hill was as smooth as the porous stone allowed it to be and rose at
a gentle 1:3 ratio.  The curve of its edge was broken by the great
humped roots that lurched and knotted out of the surrounding forest,
plunging into the hill at angles that must lead them to its center.  As
Jenne had said, it wasn't natural.  Nothing about this cursed forest
was.

"Let's go," Horthy ordered.  His driver boosted the angle

and power of his drive fans and they began to slide up the hill,
followed by the other two cars.  Strange that the trees hadn't covered
the hill with a network of branches, even if their trunks for some
reason couldn't seat in the rock.  Enough ground was clear for the
power guns alone to mince an attack, despite the awesome quickness of
the gray creatures.  Except that the power guns were low on ammo too.

Maybe there wouldn't be a third attack.

An alien appeared at the hill crest fifty meters ahead.  Horthy killed
it by reflex, using a single shot from his tri barrel  There was an
opening there, a cave or tunnel mouth, and a dozen more of the figures
spewed from it.  "Watch the sides!"  Horthy roared at Jenne and
Scratchard, but all three power guns were ripping the new targets.
Bolts that missed darted off into the dull sky like brief, blue green
suns.

Jenne's grenade spun into the meter-broad hole as the car overran it.
If anything more had planned to come out, that settled it.  Scratchard
jiggled the controls of the echo sounder, checked the read-out again,
and swore, "Via!  I don't see any more surface openings, Top, but this
whole mound's like a fencepost in termite country!"

The three blowers were pulled up close around the opening, the crews
awaiting orders.  Horthy toothed his lower lip but there was no
hesitation in his voice after he decided.  "Wixom and Chung," he said,
"get that gas shell out and bring it over here.  The rest of you cover
the forest--I'll keep this hole clear."

The two troopers wrestled the cylinder out of the command car and
gingerly carried it to the lip of the opening.  The hill was reasonably
Sat on top and the laterite gave good footing, but the recent shooting
had left patches glazed by the power guns and a film of blood over the
whole area.  The container should not have ruptured if dropped, but no
one familiar with K3 wanted to take the chance.

"All plus," Horthy said.  "Fuse it for ten seconds and drop it in.  As
soon as that goes down, we're going to hover over the hole with our
fans on max, just to make sure all the

gas goes in the right direction.  If we can do them enough damage,
maybe they'll leave us alone."

The heavy shell clinked against something as it disappeared into the
darkness but kept falling in the passage cleared by the grenade.  It
was well below the surface when the bursting charge tore the casing
open.  That muted whoomp was lost in the shriek of Horthy's fans as his
car wobbled on a column of air a meter above the hilltop.  K3 sank even
in still air, pooling in invisible deathtraps in the low spots of a
battlefield.  Rammed by the drive fans, it had permeated the deepest
tunnels of the mound in less than a minute.

The rioting air blew the bodies and body parts of the latest victims
into a windrow beside the opening.  Horthy glanced over them with a
professional concern for the dead as he marked time.  These creatures
had the same long limbs and smooth-faced features as the ones which had
attacked in the forest, but there was a difference as well.  The
genitals of the earlier-seen aliens had been tiny, vestigial or
immature, but each of the present corpses carried a dong the length and
thickness of a forearm.  Bet their girlfriends walk bow-legged, Horthy
chuckled to himself.

The hill shook with an impact noticeable even through the insulating
air.  "Top, they're tunneling out!"  cried the command car's driver
over the intercom.

"Hold your distance!"  Horthy commanded as five meters of laterite
crumbled away from the base of the hill.  The thing that had torn the
gap almost filled it.  Horthy and every other gunman in the platoon
blasted at it in a reaction that went deeper than fear.  Even as it
gouted fluids under the multiple impacts the thing managed to squirm
completely out.  The tiny head and the limbs that waved like broom
straws thrust into a watermelon were the only ornamentation on the
slug-white torso.  The face was blind, but it was the face of the
reptiloids of the forest until a burst of cyan pulped its obscenity. 
Horthy's tri barrel whipsawed down the twenty meter belly.  A sphincter
convulsed in front of the line of shots and spewed a mass of eggs in
jelly against the

unyielding laterite.  The blackening that K3 brought to its victims
was already beginning to set in before the platoon stopped firing.

Nothing further attempted to leave the mound.  "Wh-what do we do now,
Top?"  Jenne asked.

"Wait for the landing boat," answered Horthy.  He shook the cramp out
of his hand and pretended that it was not caused by his panicky death
grip on the tri barrel moments before.  "And we pray that it comes
before too bleeding long."

The cold that made Hilf's body shudder was the residue of the Mothers'
death throes deep in the corridors of the Nest.  No warmth remained in
a universe which had seen the last generation of the Folk.  The yellow
leaf-tinge of his blast-damaged Tree no longer concerned Hilf.  About
him, a psychic pressure rather than a message, he could feel the
gathering of the other twenty-eight septs--just too late to protect the
Mothers who had summoned them.  Except for the Moon Sept's, the Trees
were still healthy and would continue to be so for years until there
were too few of the Folk scampering among the branches to spread their
pollen.  Then, with only the infrequent wind to stimulate new growth,
the Trees as well would begin to die.

Hilf began to walk forward on all fours, his knuckles gripping firmly
the rough exterior of the Nest.  Top!"  cried one of the invaders, and
Hilf knew that their eyes or the quick-darting antennae of their silver
beasts had discovered his approach.  He looked up.  The three-limbed
Caller was staring at him, his stick extended to kill.  His eyes were
as empty as Hilfs own.

The bolt hammered through Hilfs lungs and he pitched backwards. Through
the blood roar in his ears he could hear the far-distant howl that had
preceded the invader's appearance in the forest.

As if the landing boat were their signal, the thirty thousand living
males of the Folk surged forward from Trees.

Commandant Horace Jobber had just lowered the saddle of his mobile
chair, putting himself at the height of the Facilities Inspection
Committee seated across the table, when the alarm hooted and Vicki
cried from the window in the next room, "Tanks!  In the street!"

The three Placidan bureaucrats flashed Jobber looks of anger and fear,
but he had no time for them now even though they were his superiors.
The stump of his left leg keyed the throttle of his chair.  As the fans
spun up, Jobber leaned and guided his miniature air-cushion vehicle out
of the room faster than another man could have walked.

Faster than a man with legs could walk.

Vicki opened the door from the bedroom as Jobber swept past her toward
the inside stairs.  Her face was as calm as that of the statue which it
resembled in its perfection, but Jobber knew that only the strongest
emotion would have made her disobey his orders to stay in his private
apartments while the inspection team was here.  She was afraid that he
was about to be killed.

A burst of gunfire in the street suggested she just might be correct.

"Chief called Jobber's mastoid implant in what he thought was the voice
of Kames, his executive officer.  "I'm at the gate and the new
arrivals, they're Hammer's, just came right through the wire!  There's
half a dozen tanks and they're shooting in the air!"

Could've been worse.  Might yet be.

He slid onto the staircase, his stump boosting fan speed with reflexive
skill.  The stair treads were too narrow for Jolober's mobile chair to
form an air cushion between the surface and the lip of its plenum
chamber.  Instead he balanced on thrust alone while the fans beneath
him squealed, ramming the air hard enough to let him slope down above
the staircase with the grace of a stooping hawk.

The hardware was built to handle the stress, but only flawless control
kept the port commandant from upending and crashing down the treads in
a fashion as dangerous as it would be humiliating.

Jolober was a powerful man who'd been tall besides until a tri barrel
blew off both his legs above the knee.  In his uniform of white cloth
and lavish gold, he was dazzlingly obvious in any light.  As he gunned
his vehicle out into the street, the most intense light source was the
rope of cyan bolts ripping skyward from the cupola of the leading
tank.

The buildings on either side of the street enticed customers with
displays to rival the sun, but the operators-each of them a gambler,
brothel keeper, and saloon owner all in one--had their own warning
systems.  The lights were going out, leaving the plastic facades
cold.

Lightless, the buildings faded to the appearance of the high concrete
fortresses they were in fact.  Repeated arches made the entrance of the
China Doll, directly across the street from the commandant's offices,
look spacious.  The door itself was so narrow that only two men could
pass it at a time, and no one could slip unnoticed past the array of
sensors and guards that made sure none of those entering were armed.

Normally the faculties here at Paradise Port were open all day.  Now an
armored panel clanged down across the narrow door of the China Doll,
its echoes merging with similar tocsins from the other buildings.

Much good that would do if the tanks opened up with their 20em main
guns.  Even a tri barrel could blast holes in thumb-thick steel as
easily as one had vaporized knees and calves..  .

He slid into the street, directly into the path of the lead tank.  He
would have liked to glance up toward the bedroom window for what he
knew might be his last glimpse of Vicki, but he was afraid that he
couldn't do that and still have the guts to do his duty.

For a long time after he lost his legs, the only thing which had kept
Horace Jolober from suicide was the certainty that he had always done
his duty.  Not even Vicki could be allowed to take that from him.

The tanks were advancing at no more than a slow walk though their huge
size gave them the appearance of speed.  They were buttoned up--hatches
down, crews hidden behind the curved surfaces of indium armor that
might just possibly turn a bolt from a gun as big as the one each tank
carried in its turret.

Lesser weapons had left scars on the indium.  Where light power guns
had licked the armor--and even a tri barrelled automatic was light in
comparison to a tank-the metal cooled again in a slope around the point
where a little had been vaporized.  High-velocity bullets made smaller,
deeper craters plated with material from the projectile itself.

The turret of the leading tank bore a long gouge that began in a
pattern of deep, radial scars.  A shoulder-fired rocket had hit at a
slight angle.  The jet of white-hot gas spurting from the shaped-charge
warhead had burned deep enough into even the refractory indium that it
would have penetrated the turret had it struck squarely.

If either the driver or the blower captain were riding with their heads
out of the hatch when the missile detonated, shrapnel from the casing
had decapitated them.

Jolober wondered if the present driver even saw him, a lone man in a
street that should have been cleared by the threat of one hundred and
seventy tonnes of armor howling down the middle of it.

An air-cushion jeep carrying a pintle-mounted needle stunner and two
men in Port Patrol uniforms was driving alongside the lead tank,
bucking and pitching in the current roaring from beneath the steel
skirts of the tank's plenum

chamber.  While the driver fought to hold the light vehicle steady,
the other patrolman bellowed through the jeep's loudspeakers.  He might
have been on the other side of the planet for all his chance of being
heard over the sound of air sucked through intakes atop the tank's hull
and then pumped beneath the skirts forcefully enough to balance the
huge weight of steel and indium.

Jolober grounded his mobile chair.  He crooked his left ring finger so
that the surgically redirected nerve impulse keyed the microphone
implanted at the base of his jaw.  "Gentlemen," he said, knowing that
the base unit in the Port Office was relaying his words on the
Slammers' general frequency.  "You are violating the regulations which
govern Paradise Port.  Stop before somebody gets hurt."

The bow of the lead tank was ten meters away--and one meter less every
second.

To the very end he thought they were going to hit him-by inadvertence,
now, because the tank's steel skirt lifted in a desperate attempt to
stop but the vehicle's mass overwhelmed the braking effect of its fans.
Jolober knew that if he raised his chair from the pavement, the blast
of air from the tank would knock him over and roll him along the
concrete like a trashcan in a windstorm--bruised but safe.

He would rather the than lose his dignity that way in front of Vicki.

The tank's bow slewed to the left, toward the China DoD.  The skirt on
that side touched the pavement with the sound of steel screaming and a
fountain of sparks that sprayed across and over the building's high
plastic facade.

The tank did not hit the China Doll, and it stopped short of Horace
Jolober by less than the radius of its bow's curve.

The driver grounded his huge vehicle properly and cut the power to his
fans.  Dust scraped from the pavement, choking and chalky, swirled
around Jolober and threw him into a paroxysm of coughing.  He hadn't
realized that he'd been holding his breath--until the danger passed and
instinct filled his lungs.

The jeep pulled up beside Jolober, its fans kicking up still more dust,
and the two patrolmen shouted words of

concern and congratulation to their commandant.  More men were
appearing, patrolmen and others who had ducked into the narrow alleys
between buildings when the tanks filled the street.

"Stecher," said Jolober to the sergeant in the patrol vehicle, "go back
there--" he gestured toward the remainder of the column, hidden behind
the armored bulk of the lead tank "--and help 'em get turned around.
Get 'em back to the Refit Area where they belong,"

"Sir, should I get the names?"  Stecher asked.

The port commandant shook his head with certainty.  "None of this
happened," he told his subordinates.  "Ill take care of it."

The jeep spun nimbly while Stecher spoke into his commo helmet,
relaying Jolober's orders to the rest of the squad on street duty.

Metal rang again as the tank's two hatch covers slid open.  Jolober was
too close to the hull to see the crewmen so he kicked his fans to life
and backed a few meters.

The mobile chair had been built to his design.  Its only control was
the throttle with a linkage which at high-thrust settings automatically
transformed the plenum chamber to a nozzle.  Steering and balance were
matters of how the rider shifted his body weight.  Jolober prided
himself that he was just as nimble as he had been before.

--Before he fell back into the trench on Primavera, half wrapped in the
white flag he'd waved to the oncoming tanks.  The only conscious memory
he retained of that moment was the sight of his right leg still
balanced on the trench Up above him, silhouetted against the
crisscrossing cyan bolts from the power guns

But Horace Jolober was just as much a man as he'd ever been.  The way
he got around proved it.  And Vicki.

The driver staring out the bow hatch at him was a woman with thin
features and just enough hair to show beneath her helmet.  She looked
scared, aware of what had just happened and aware also of just how bad
it could've been.

Jolober could appreciate how she felt.

The man who lifted himself from the turret hatch was

under thirty, angry, and--though Jolober couldn't remember the
Slammers' collar pips precisely--a junior officer of some sort rather
than a sergeant.

The dust had mostly settled by now, but vortices still spun above the
muzzles of the tri barrel which the fellow had been firing skyward.
"What're you doing, you bloody fool?"  he shouted.  "D'ye want to
die?"

Not any more, thought Horace Jolober as he stared upward at the tanker.
One of the port patrolmen had responded to the anger in the Slammer's
voice by raising his needle stunner, but there was no need for that.

Jolober keyed his mike so that he didn't have to shout with the
inevitable emotional loading.  In a flat, certain voice, he said, "If
you'll step down here, Lieutenant, we can discuss the situation like
officers--which I am, and you will continue to be unless you insist on
pushing things."

The tanker grimaced, then nodded his head and lifted himself the rest
of the way out of the turret.  "Right," he said.  "Right.  I ..."  His
voice trailed off, but he wasn't going to say anything the port
commandant hadn't heard before.

When you screw up real bad, you can either be afraid or you can flare
out in anger and blame somebody else.  Not because you don't know
better, but because it's the only way to control your fear.  It isn't
pretty, but there's no pretty way to screw up bad.

The tanker dropped to the ground in front of Jolober and gave a sloppy
salute.  That was lack of practice, not deliberate insult, and his
voice and eyes were firm as he said, "Sir.  Acting Captain Tad Hoffritz
reporting."  "Horace Jolober," the port commandant said.  He raised his
saddle to put his head at what used to be normal || standing height, a
few centimeters taller than Hoffritz.  The Slammer's rank made it
pretty clear why the disturbance had occurred.  "Your boys?"  Jolober
asked, thumbing toward the tanks sheepishly reversing down the street
under the guidance of white-uniformed patrolmen.  "Past three days they
have been," Hoffritz agreed.  His mouth scrunched again in an angry
grimace and he said, "Look, I'm real sorry.  I know how dumb that was.
I just..."  Again, there wasn't anything new to say.

The tank's driver vaulted from her hatch with a suddenness which drew
both men's attention.  "Corp'ral Days," she said with a salute even
more perfunctory than Hoffritz's had been.  "Look, sir, / was drivin'
and if there's a problem, it's my problem."

"Daisy--" began Captain Hoffritz.

"There's no problem, Corporal," Jolober said firmly.  "Go back to your
vehicle.  We'll need to move it in a minute or two."

Another helmeted man had popped his head from the turret--surprisingly,
because this was a line tank, not a command vehicle with room for
several soldiers in the fighting compartment.  The driver looked at her
captain, then met the worried eyes of the trooper still in the turret.
She backed a pace but stayed within earshot.

"Six tanks out of seventeen," Jolober said calmly.  Things were calm
enough now that he was able to follow the crosstalk of his patrolmen,
their voices stuttering at low level through the miniature speaker on
his epaulet.  "You've been seeing some action, then."

"Too bloody right," muttered Corporal Days.

Hoffritz rubbed the back of his neck, lowering his eyes, and said,
"Well, running .. . There's four back at Refit deadlined we brought in
on transporters, but--"

He looked squarely at Jolober.  "But sure we had a tough time.  That's
why I'm CO and Chester's up there--" he nodded toward the man in the
turret "--trying to work company commo without a proper command tank.
And I guess I figured--"

Hoffritz might have stopped there, but the port commandant nodded him
on.

"--I figured maybe it wouldn't hurt to wake up a few rear echelon types
when we came back here for refit.  Sorry, sir."

"There's three other units, including a regiment of the Division
Legere, on stand-down here at Paradise Port already, Captain," Jolober
said.  He nodded toward the soldiers in mottled fatigues who were
beginning to reappear on the street.  "Not rear-echelon troops, from
what I've

heard.  And they need some relaxation just as badly as your men do."

"Yes, sir," Hoffritz agreed, blank-faced.  "It was real dumb.  I'll
sign the report as soon as you make it out."

Jolober shrugged.  "There won't be a report, Captain.  Repairs to the
gate'll go on your regiment's damage account and be deducted from
Placida's payment next month."  He smiled.  "Along with any chairs or
glasses you break in the casinos.  Now, get your vehicle into the Refit
Area where it belongs.  And come back and have a good time in Paradise
Port.  That's what we're here for."

"Thank you, sir," said Hoffritz, and relief dropped his age by at least
five years.  He clasped Jolober's hand and, still holding it, asked,
"You've seen service, too, haven't you, sir?"

"Fourteen years with Hamptons Legion," Jolober agreed, pleased that
Hoffritz had managed not to stare at the stumps before asking the
question.

"Hey, good outfit," the younger man said with enthusiasm.  "We were
with Hampton on Primavera, back, oh, three years ago?"

"Yes, I know," Jolober said.  His face was still smiling, and the
subject wasn't an emotional one any more.  He felt no emotion at all
... "One of your tanks shot--" his left hand gestured delicately at
where his thighs ended "--these off on Primavera."

"Lord," Sergeant Days said distinctly.

Captain Hoffritz looked as if he had been hit with a brick.  Then his
face regained its animation.  "No, sir," he said.  "You're mistaken. On
Primavera, we were both working for the Federalists.  Hampton was our
infantry support."

Not the way General Hampton would have described the chain of command,
thought Jolober.  His smile became real again.  He still felt pride in
his old unit--and he could laugh at those outdated feelings in
himself.

"Yes, that's right," he said aloud.  "There'd been an error in
transmitting map coordinates.  When a company of these--" he nodded
toward the great indium monster,

feeling sweat break out on his forehead and arms as he did so
"--attacked my battalion, I jumped up to stop the shooting."

Jolober's smile paled to a frosty shadow of itself.  "I was
successful," he went on softly, "but not quite as soon as I would've
liked."

"Oh, Lord and Martyrs," whispered Hoffritz.  His face looked like that
of a battle casualty.

"Tad, that was--" Sergeant Days began.

"Shut it off, Daisy!"  shouted the Stammers' commo man from the turret.
Days' face blanked and she nodded.

"Sir, I--" Hoffritz said.

Jolober shook his head to silence the younger man.  "In a war," he
said, "a lot of people get in the way of rounds.  I'm luckier than
some. I'm still around to tell about it."

He spoke in the calm, pleasant voice he always used in explaining
the--matter--to others.  For the length of time he was speaking, he
could generally convince even himself.

Clapping Hoffritz on the shoulder--the physical contact brought Jolober
back to present reality, reminding him that the tanker was a young man
and not a demon hidden behind armor and a tri barrel--the commandant
said, "Go on, move your hardware and then see what Paradise Port can
show you in the way of a good time."

"Oh, that I know already," said Hoffritz with a wicked, man-to-man
smile of his own.  "When we stood down here three months back, I met a
girl named Beth.  I'll bet she still remembers me, and the Lord knows I
remember her."

"Girl?"  Jolober repeated.  The whole situation had so disoriented him
that he let his surprise show.

"Well, you know," said the tanker.  "A Doll, I guess.  But believe me,
Beth's woman enough for me."

"Or for anyone," the commandant agreed.  "I know just what you mean."

Stecher had returned with the jeep.  The street was emptied of all
armor except Hoffritz's tank, and that was an object of curiosity
rather than concern for the men spilling out the doors of the reopened
brothels.  Jolober

waved toward the patrol vehicle and said, "My men'll guide you out of
here, Captain Hoffritz.  Enjoy your stay."

The tank driver was already scrambling back into her hatch.  She had
lowered her helmet shield, so the glimpse Jobber got of her face was an
unexpected, light-reflecting bubble.

Maybe Corporal Days had a problem with where the conversation had gone
when the two officers started talking like two men.  That was a pity,
for her and probably for Captain Hoffritz as well.  A tank was too
small a container to hold emotional trouble among its crew.

But Horace Jolober had his own problems to occupy him as he slid toward
his office at a walking pace.  He had his meeting with the Facilities
Inspection Committee, which wasn't going to go more smoothly because of
the interruption.

A plump figure sauntering in the other direction tipped his beret to
Jolober as they passed.  "Ike," acknowledged the port commandant in a
voice as neutral as a gun barrel that doesn't care in the least at whom
it's pointed.

Red Ike could pass for human, until the rosy cast of his skin drew
attention to the fact that his hands had only three fingers and a
thumb.  Jolober was surprised to see that Ike was walking across the
street toward his own brothel, the China Doll, instead of being inside
the building already.  That could have meant anything, but the
probability was that Red Ike had a runnel to one of the buildings
across the street to serve as a bohhole.

And since all the real problems at Paradise Port were a result of the
alien who called himself Red Ike, Jolober could easily imagine why the
fellow would want to have a bolt hole

Jolober had gone down the steps in a smooth undulation.  He mounted
them in a series of hops, covering two treads between pauses like a
weary cricket climbing out of a well.

The chair's power pack had more than enough charge left to swoop him up
to the conference room.  It was the

man himself who lacked the mental energy now to balance himself on the
column of driven air.  He felt drained--the tri barrel the tank .. .
the memories of Primavera.  If he'd decided to, sure, but .. .

But maybe he was getting old.

The Facilities Inspection Committee--staff members, actually, for three
of the most powerful senators in the Placidan legislature--waited for
Jolober with doubtful looks.  Higgey and Wayne leaned against the
conference room window, watching Hoffritz's tank reverse sedately in
the street.  The woman, Rodall, stood by the st airhead watching the
port commandant's return.

"Why don't you have an elevator put in?"  she asked.  "Chat least a
ramp?"  Between phrases, RodalTs full features relaxed to the pout that
was her normal expression.

Jolober paused beside her, noticing the whisper of air from beneath his
plenum chamber was causing her to twist her feet away as if she had
stepped into slime.  "There aren't elevators everywhere, Mistress," he
said.  "Most places, there isn't even enough smooth surface to depend
on ground effect alone to get you more than forty meters."

He smiled and gestured toward the conference room's window.  Visible
beyond the China Doll and the other buildings across the street was the
reddish-brown expanse of the surrounding landscape: ropes of lava on
which only lichen could grow, where a man had to hop and scramble from
one ridge to another.

The Placidan government had located Paradise Port in a volcanic
wasteland in order to isolate the mercenaries letting off steam between
battles with Armstrong, the other power on the planet's sole continent.
To a cripple in a chair which depended on wheels or unaided ground
effect, the twisting lava would be as sure a barrier as sheer walls.

Jolober didn't say that so long as he could go anywhere other men went,
he could pretend he was still a man.  If the Placidan civilian could
have understood that, she wouldn't have asked why he didn't have ramps
put in.

"Well, what was that?"  demanded Higgey--thin, intense,

and already half bald in his early thirties.  "Was anyone killed?"

"Nothing serious, Master Higgey," Jolober said as he slid back to the
table and lowered himself to his "seated" height "And no, no one was
killed or even injured."

Thank the Lord for his mercy.

"It looked serious, Commandant," said the third committee
member--Wayne, half again Jolober's age and a retired colonel of the
Placidan regular army.  "I'm surprised you permit things like that to
happen."

Higgey and Rodall were seating themselves.  Jolober gestured toward the
third chair on the curve of the round table opposite him and said,
"Colonel, your, ah--opposite numbers in Armstrong tried to stop those
tanks last week with a battalion of armored infantry.  They got their
butts kicked until they didn't have butts any more."

Wayne wasn't sitting down.  His face flushed and his short white
mustache bristled sharply against his upper lip.

Jolober shrugged and went on in a more conciliatory tone, "Look, sir,
units aren't rotated back here unless they've had a hell of a rough
time in the line.  I've got fifty-six patrolmen with stunners to keep
order .. . which we do, well enough for the people using Paradise Port.
We aren't here to start a major battle of our own.  Placida needs these
mercenaries and needs them in fighting trim."

"That's a matter of opinion," said the retired officer with his lips
pressed together, but at last he sat down.

The direction of sunrise is also a matter of opinion, Jolober thought.
It's about as likely to change as Placida is to survive without the
mercenaries who had undertaken the war her regular army was losing.

"I requested this meeting--" requested it with the senators themselves,
but he hadn't expected them to agree "--in order to discuss just that,
the fighting trim of the troops who undergo rest and refit here.  So
that Placida gets the most value for her, ah, payment."

The committee staff would do, if Jolober could get them to understand.
Paradise Port was, after all, a wasteland with a village populated by
soldiers who had spent all the recent

past killing and watching their friends die.  It wasn't the sort of
place you'd pick for a senatorial junket.

Higgey leaned forward, clasping his hands on the table top, and said,
"Commandant, I'm sure that those--" he waggled a finger disdainfully
toward the window "--men out there would be in better physical
condition after a week of milk and religious lectures than they will
after the regime they choose for themselves.  There are elements--"

Wayne nodded in stern agreement, his eyes on Mistress Rodall, whose set
face refused to acknowledge either of her fellows while the subject was
being discussed.

"--in the electorate and government who would like to try that method,
but fortunately reality has kept the idea from being attempted."

Higgey paused, pleased with his forceful delivery and the way his eyes
dominated those of the much bigger man across the table.  "If you've
suddenly got religion, Commandant Jolober," he concluded, "I suggest
you resign your current position and join the ministry."

Jobber suppressed his smile.  Higgey reminded him of a lap dog, too
nervous to remain either still or silent, and too small to be other
than ridiculous in its posturing.  "My initial message was unclear,
madam, gentlemen," he explained, looking around the table.  "I'm not
suggesting that Placida close the brothels that are part of the
recreational facilities here."

His pause was not for effect, but because his mouth had suddenly gone
very dry.  But it was his duty to'I'm recommending that the Dolls be
withdrawn from Paradise Port and that the faculties be staffed with
human, ah, females."

Colonel Wayne stiffened and paled.

Wayne's anger was now mirrored in the expression on Rodall's face.
"Whores," she said.  "So that those---soldiers-can disgrace and
dehumanize real women for their fun."

"And kill them, one assumes," added Higgey with a touch of amusement.
"I checked the records, Commandant.  There've been seventeen Dolls
killed during the months

Paradise Port's been in operation.  As it is, that's a simple damage
assessment, but if they'd been human prostitutes-each one would have
meant a manslaughter charge or even murder.  People don't cease to have
rights when they choose to sell their bodies, you know."

"When they're forced to sell their bodies, you mean," snapped Rodall.
She glared at Higgey, who didn't mean anything of the sort.

"Scarcely to the benefit of your precious mercenaries," said Wayne in a
distant voice.  "Quite apart from the political difficulties it would
cause for any senator who recommended the change."

"As a matter of fact," said Higgey, whose natural caution had tightened
his visage again, "I thought you were going to use the record of
violence here at Paradise Port as a reason for closing the facility.
Though I'll admit that I couldn't imagine anybody selfless enough to do
away with his own job."

No, you couldn't, you little weasel, thought Horace Jolober.  But
politicians have different responsibilities than soldiers, and
politicians' flunkies have yet another set of needs and duties.

And none of them are saints.  Surely no soldier who does his job is a
saint.

"Master Higgey, you've precisely located the problem," Jolober said
with a nod of approval.  "The violence isn't a result of the soldiers,
it's because of the Dolls.  It isn't accidental, it's planned.  And
it's time to stop it."

"It's time for us to leave, you mean," said Higgey as he shoved his
chair back.  "Resigning still appears to be your best course,
Commandant.  Though I don't suppose the ministry is the right choice
for a new career, after all."

"Master Higgey," Jolober said in the voice he would have used in an
argument with a fellow officer, "I know very well that no one is
irreplaceable--but you know that I am doing as good a job here as
anybody you could hire to run Paradise Port.  I'm asking you to listen
for a few minutes to a proposal that will make the troops you pay
incrementally better able to fight for you."

"We've come this far," said Rodall.

"There are no listening devices in my quarters," Jolober explained,
unasked.  "I doubt that any real-time commo link out of Paradise Port
is free of interception."

He didn't add that time he spent away from his duties was more of a
risk to Placida than pulling these three out of their offices and
expensive lunches could be.  The tanks roaring down the street should
have proved that even to the committee staffers.

Jolober paused, pressing his fingertips to his eyebrows in a habitual
trick to help him marshal his thoughts while the others stared at him.
"Mistress, masters," he said calmly after a moment, "the intention was
that Paradise Port and similar faculties be staffed by independent
contractors from off-planet."

"Which is where they'll return as soon as the war's over," agreed
Colonel Wayne with satisfaction.  "Or as soon as they put a toe wrong,
any one of them."

"The war's bad enough as it is," said Rodall.  "Building up Placida's
stock of that sort of person would make peace hideous as well."

"Yes, ma'am, I understand," said the port commandant.  There were a lot
of "that sort of person" in Placida just now, including all the
mercenaries in the line--and Horace Jolober back here.  "But what you
have in Paradise Port isn't a group of entrepreneurs, it's a
corporation--a monarchy, almost--subservient to an alien called Red
Ike."

"Nonsense," said Wayne.

"We don't permit that," said Rodall.

"Red Ike owns a single unit here," said Higgey.  "The China Doll. Which
is all he can own by law, to prevent just the sort of situation you're
describing."

"Red Ike provides all the Dolls," Jolober stated flatly.  "Whoever owns
them on paper, they're his.  And everything here is his because he
controls the Dolls."

"Well .. ."  said Rodall.  She was beginning to blush.

"There's no actual proof," Colonel Wayne said, shifting his eyes toward
a corner of walls and ceiling.  "Though I suppose the physical traits
are indicative .. ."

"The government has decided it isn't in the best interests of Placida
to pierce the corporate veil in this instance," said Higgey in a thin
voice.  "The androids in question are shipped here from a variety of
off-planet suppliers."

The balding Placidan paused and added, with a tone of absolute
finality, "If the question were mine to decide-which it isn't--I would
recommend searching for a new port commandant rather than trying to
prove the falsity of a state of affairs beneficial to us, to
Placida."

"I think that really must be the final word on the subject, Commandant
Jolober," Rodall agreed.

Jolober thought she sounded regretful, but the emotion was too faint
for him to be sure.  The three Placidans were getting up, and he had
failed.

He'd failed even before the staff members arrived, because it was now
quite obvious that they'd decided their course of action before the
meeting.  They--and their elected superiors--would rather have
dismissed Jolober's arguments.

But if the arguments proved to be well founded, they would dismiss the
port commandant, if necessary to end the discussion.

"I suppose I should be flattered," Jolober said as hydraulics lifted
him in the saddle and pressure of his stump on the throttle let him
rotate his chair away from the table.  "That you came all this way to
silence me instead of refusing me a meeting."

"You might recall," said Higgey, pausing at the doorway.  His look was
meant to be threatening, but the port commandant's bulk and dour anger
cooled the Placidan's face as soon as their eyes met.  "That is, we're
in the middle of a war, and the definition of treason can be a little
loose in such times.  While you're not technically a Placidan citizen,
Commandant, you--would be well advised to avoid activities which oppose
the conduct of war as the government has determined to conduct it."

He stepped out of the conference room.  Rodall had left ahead of him.

"Don't take it too hard, young man," said Colonel Wayne when he and
Jolober were alone.  "You mercenaries, you

can do a lot of things the quick and easy way.  It's different when
you represent a government and need to consider political
implications."

"I'd never understood there were negative implications, Colonel,"
Jolober said with the slow, careful enunciation which proved he was
controlling himself rigidly, "in treating your employees fairly.  Even
the mercenary soldiers whom you employ."

Wayne's jaw lifted.  "I beg your pardon, Commandant," he snapped.  "I
don't see anyone holding guns to the heads of poor innocents, forcing
them to whore and gamble."

He strode to the door, his back parade-ground straight.  At the door he
turned precisely and delivered the broadside he had held to that point.
"Besides, Commandant--if the Dolls are as dangerous to health and
welfare as you say, why are you living with one yourself?"

Wayne didn't expect an answer, but what he saw in Horace Jolober's eyes
suggested that his words might bring a physical reaction that he hadn't
counted on.  He skipped into the hall with a startled sound, banging
the door behind him.

The door connecting the conference room to the port commandant's
personal suite opened softly.  Jolober did not look around.

Yield put her long, sum arms around him from behind.  Jolober spun,
then cut power to his fans and settled his chair firmly onto the floor.
He and Vicki clung to one another, legless man and Doll whose ruddy
skin and beauty marked her as inhuman.

They were both crying.

Someone from Jolober's staff would poke his head into the conference
room shortly to ask if the meeting was over and if the commandant
wanted non emergency calls routed through again.

The meeting was certainly over .. . but Horace Jolober had an emergency
of his own.  He swallowed, keyed his implant, and said brusquely, "I'm
out of action till I tell you different.  Unless it's another Class A
flap."

The kid at the commo desk stuttered a "Yes sir" that was a syllable
longer than Jolober wanted to hear.  Vicki straightened, wearing a
bright smile beneath the tear streaks, but the big human gathered her
to his chest again and brought up the power of his fans.

Together, like a man carrying a moderate-sized woman, the couple slid
around the conference table to the door of the private suite.  The
chair's drive units were over built because men are over built capable
of putting out huge bursts of hysterical strength.

Drive fans and power packs don't have hormones, so Jolober had
specified--and paid for--components that would handle double the
hundred kilos of his own mass, the hundred kilos left after the tri
barrel had chewed him.  The only problem with carrying Vicki to bed was
one of balance, and the Doll remained still in his arms.

Perfectly still, as she was perfect in all the things she did.

"I'm not trying to get rid of you, darling," Jolober said as he
grounded his chair.

"It's all right," Vicki whispered.  "I'll go now if you like.  It's all
right."

She placed her fingertips on Jolober's shoulders and lifted herself by
those fulcrums off his lap and onto the bed, her toes curled beneath
her buttocks.  A human gymnast could have done as well--but no
better.

"What I want" Jolober said forcefully as he lifted himself out of the
saddle, using the chair's handgrips, "is to do my job.  And when I've
done it, I'll buy you from Red Ike for whatever price he chooses to
ask."

He swung himself to the bed.  His arms had always been long--and
strong.  Now he knew that he must look like a gorilla when he got on or
off his chair .. . and when the third woman he was with after the
amputation giggled at him, he began to consider suicide as an
alternative to sex.

Then he took the job on Placida and met Vicki.

Her tears had dried, so both of them could pretend they hadn't poured
out moments before.  She smiled shyly and

touched the high collar of her dress, drawing her fingertip down a
centimeter and opening the garment by that amount.

Vicki wasn't Jolober's ideal of beauty--wasn't what he'd thought his
ideal was, at any rate.  Big blondes, he would have said.  A woman as
tall as he was, with hair the color of bleached straw hanging to the
middle of her back.

Vicki scarcely came up to the top of Jobber's breastbone when he was
standing--at standing height in his chair-and her hair was a black
fluff that was as short as a soldier would cut it to fit comfortably
under a helmet.  She looked buxom, but her breasts were fairly flat
against her broad, powerfully muscled chest.

Jolober put his index finger against kers on the collar and slid down
the touch-sensitive strip that opened the fabric.  Yields body was
without blemish or pubic hair.  She was so firm that nothing sagged or
flattened when her dress and the supports of memory plastic woven into
it dropped away.

She shrugged her arms out of the straps and let the garment spill as a
pool of sparkling shadow on the counterpane as she reached toward her
lover.

Jolober, lying on his side, touched the collar of his uniform jacket.

"No need," Vicki said blocking his hand with one of hers and opening
his trouser fly with the other.  "Come," she added, rolling onto her
back and drawing him toward her.

"But the--" Jolober murmured in surprise, leaning forward in obedience
to her touch and demand.  The metallic braid and medals on his
stiff-fronted tunic had sharp corners to prod the Doll beneath him
whether he wished or not.

"Come," she repeated.  "This time."

Horace Jolober wasn't introspective enough to understand why his
mistress wanted the rough punishment of his uniform.  He simply
obeyed.

Vicki toyed with his garments after they had finished and lay on the
bed, their arms crossing.  She had a trick

of folding back her lower legs so that they vanished whenever she sat
or reclined in the port commandant's presence.  Her fingers tweaked the
back of Jolober's waistband and emerged with the hidden knife, the only
weapon he carried.

"I'm at your mercy," he said, smiling.  He mimed as much of a hands-up
posture as he could with his right elbow supporting his torso on the
mattress.  "Have your way with me."

In Vicki's hand, the knife was a harmless cylinder of plastic--a weapon
only to the extent that the butt of the short tube could harden a
punch.  The knife was of memory plastic whose normal state was a
harmless block.  No one who took it away from Jolober in a struggle
would find it of any use as a weapon.

Only when squeezed after being cued by the pore pattern of Horace
Jolober's right hand would it The plastic cylinder shrank in Vicki's
hand, sprouting a double-edged 15em blade.

"Via!"  swore Jolober.  Reflex betrayed him into thinking that he had
legs.  He jerked upright and started to topple off the bed because the
weight of his calves and feet wasn't there to balance the motion.

Vicki caught him with both arms and drew him to her.  The blade
collapsed into the handle when she dropped it, so that it bounced as a
harmless cylinder on the counterpane between them.

"My love, I'm sorry" the Doll blurted fearfully.  "I didn't mean--"

"No, no," Jolober said, settled now on his thighs and buttocks so that
he could hug Vicki fiercely.  His eyes peered secretively over her
shoulders, searching for the knife that had startled him so badly.  "I
was surprised that it... How did you get the blade to open, dearest?
It's fine, it's nothing you did wrong, but I didn't expect that, is
all."

They swung apart.  The mattress was a firm one, but still a bad surface
for this kind of conversation.  The bedclothes rumpled beneath
Jolober's heavy body and almost concealed the knife in a fold of cloth.
He found it, raised it with his

fingertips, and handed it to Vicki.  "Please do that again," he said
calmly.  "Extend the blade."

Sweat was evaporating from the base of Jolober's spine, where the
impermeable knife usually covered the skin.

Vicki took the weapon.  She was so doubtful that her face showed no
expression at all.  Her fingers, short but perfectly formed, gripped
the baton as if it were a knife hilt--and it became one.  The blade
formed with avalanche swiftness, darkly translucent and patterned with
veins of stress.  The plastic would not take a wire edge, but it could
carve a roast or, with Jolober's strength behind it, ram twenty
millimeters deep into hardwood.

"Like this?"  Vicki said softly.  "Just squeeze it and..  . ?"

Jobber put his hand over the Doll's and lifted the knife away between
thumb and forefinger.  When she loosed the hilt, the knife collapsed
again into a short baton.

He squeezed--extended the blade--released it again-and slipped the
knife back into its concealed sheath.

"You see, darling," Jolober said, "the plastic's been keyed to my body.
Nobody else should be able to get the blade to form."

"I'd never use it against you," Vicki said.  Her face was calm, and
there was no defensiveness in her simple response.

Jolober smiled.  "Of course, dearest; but there was a manufacturing
flaw or you wouldn't be able to do that."

Vicki leaned over and kissed the port commandant's lips, then bent
liquidly and kissed him again.  "I told you," she said as she
straightened with a grin.  "I'm a part of you."

"And believe me," said Jolober, rolling onto his back to cinch up his
short-legged trousers.  "You're not a part of me I intend to lose."

He rocked upright and gripped the handles of his chair.

Vicki slipped off the bed and braced the little vehicle with a hand on
the saddle and the edge of one foot on the skirt.  The help wasn't
necessary--the chair's weight anchored it satisfactorily, so long as
Jolober mounted swiftly and smoothly.  But it was helpful, and it was
the sort of personal attention that was as important as sex in
convincing Horace Jolober that someone really cared--could care--for
him.

"You'll do your duty, though," Vicki said.  "And I wouldn't want you
not to."

Jolober laughed as he settled himself and switched on his fans.  He
felt enormous relief now that he had proved beyond doubt--he was sure
of that--how much he loved Vicki.  He'd calmed her down, and that meant
he was calm again, too.

"Sure I'll do my job," he said as he smiled at the Doll.  "That doesn't
mean you and we'll have a problem.  Wait and see."

Vicki smiled also, but she shook her head in what Jolober thought was
amused resignation.  Her hairless body was too perfect to be flesh, and
the skin's red pigment gave the Doll the look of a statue in blushing
marble.

"Via, but you're lovely," Jolober murmured as the realization struck
him anew.

"Come back soon," she said easily.

"Soon as I can," the commandant agreed as he lifted his chair and
turned toward the door.  "But like you say, I've got a job to do."

If the government of Placida wouldn't give him the support he needed,
by the Lord!  he'd work through the mercenaries themselves.

Though his belly went cold and his stumps tingled as he realized he
would again be approaching the tanks which had crippled him.

The street had the sharp edge which invariably marked it immediately
after a unit rotated to Paradise Port out of combat.  The troops
weren't looking for sex or intoxicants --though most of them would have
claimed they were.

They were looking for life.  Paradise Port offered them things they
thought equaled life, and the contrast between reality and hope led to
anger and black despair.  Only after a few days of stunning themselves
with the offered pleasures did the soldiers on leave recognize another
contrast: Paradise Port might not be all they'd hoped, but it was a lot
better than the muck and ravening hell of combat.

Jolober slid down the street at a walking pace.  Some of the soldiers
on the pavement with him offered ragged salutes to the commandant's
glittering uniform.  He returned them sharply, a habit he had ingrained
in himself after he took charge here.

Mercenary units didn't put much emphasis on saluting and similar
rear-echelon forms of discipline.  An officer with the reputation of
being a tight-assed martinet in bivouac was likely to get hit from
behind the next time he led his troops into combat.

There were regular armies on most planets--Colonel Wayne was an
example--to whom actual fighting was an aberration.  Economics or a
simple desire for action led many planetary soldiers into mercenary
units .. . where the old habits of saluting and snapping to attention
surfaced when the men were drunk and depressed.

Hampton's Legion hadn't been any more interested in saluting than the
Slammers were.  Jolober had sharpened his technique here because it
helped a few of the men he served feel more at home--when they were
very far from home.

A patrol jeep passed, idling slowly through the pedestrians.  Sergeant
Stecher waved, somewhat uncertainly.

Jolober waved back, smiling toward his subordinate but angry at
himself.  He keyed his implant and said "Central, I'm back in business
now, but I'm headed for the Refit Area to see Captain van Zuyle.  Let
anything wait that can till I'm back."

He should have cleared with his switchboard as soon as he'd .. . calmed
Vicki down.  Here there'd been a crisis, and as soon as it was over
he'd disappeared.  Must've made his patrolmen very cursed nervous, and
it was sheer sloppiness that he'd let the situation go on beyond what
it had to.  It was his job to make things simple for the people in
Paradise Port, both his staff and the port's clientele.

Maybe even for the owners of the brothel: but it was going to have to
be simple on Horace Jolober's terms.

At the gate, a tank was helping the crew repairing

damage.  The men wore khaki coveralls--Slammers rushed from the Refit
Area as soon as van Zuyle, the officer in charge there, heard what had
happened.  The faster you hid the evidence of a problem, the easier it
was to claim the problem had never existed.

And it was to everybody's advantage that problems never exist.

Paradise Port was surrounded with a high barrier of woven plastic to
keep soldiers who were drunk out of their minds from crawling into the
volcanic wasteland and hurting themselves.  The fence was tougher than
it looked--it looked as insubstantial as moonbeams--but it had never
been intended to stop vehicles.

The gate to the bivouac areas outside Paradise Port had a sturdy
framework and hung between posts of solid steel.  The lead tank had
been wide enough to snap both gate posts off at the ground.  The gate,
framework and webbing, was strewn in fragments for a hundred meters
along the course it had been dragged between the pavement and the
tank's skirt.

As Jolober approached, he felt his self-image shrink by comparison to
surroundings which included a hundred-and seventy-tonne fighting
vehicle.  The tank was backed against one edge of the gateway.

With a huge clang!  the vehicle set another steel post, blasting it
home with the apparatus used in combat to punch explosive charges into
deep bunkers.  The ram vaporized osmium wire with a jolt of high
voltage, transmitting the shock waves to the piston head through a
column of fluid.  It banged home the replacement post without
difficulty, even though the "ground" was a sheet of volcanic rock.

The pavement rippled beneath Jolober, and the undamped harmonics of the
quivering post were a scream that could be heard for kilometers.
Jolober pretended it didn't affect him as he moved past the tank.  He
was praying that the driver was watching his side screens--or listening
to a ground guide--as the tank trembled away from the task it had
completed.

One of the Slammers' noncoms gestured reassuringly

toward Jolober.  His lips moved as he talked into his commo helmet.
The port commandant could hear nothing over the howl of the drive fans
and prolonged grace notes from the vibrating post, but the tank halted
where it was until he had moved past it.

A glance over his shoulder showed Jolober the-tank backing into
position to set the other post.  It looked like a great tortoise,
ancient and implacable, maneuvering to lay a clutch of eggs.

Paradise Port was for pleasure only.  The barracks housing the soldiers
and the sheds to store and repair their equipment were located outside
the fenced perimeter.  The buildings were prefabs extruded from a dun
plastic less colorful than the ruddy lava fields on which they were
set.

The bivouac site occupied by Hammer's line companies in rotation was
unusual in that the large leveled area contained only four barracks
buildings and a pair of broad repair sheds.  Parked vehicles filled the
remainder of the space.

At the entrance to the bivouac area waited a guard shack.  The soldier
who stepped from it wore body armor over her khakis.  Her submachine
gun was slung, but her tone was businesslike as she said, "Commandant
Jolober?  Captain van Zuyle's on his way to meet you right now."

Hold right here till you're invited in, Jolober translated mentally
with a frown.  But he couldn't blame the Slammers' officer for wanting
to assert his authority here over that of Horace Jolober, whose writ
ran only to the perimeter of Paradise Port.  Van Zuyle just wanted to
prove that his troopers would be punished only with his assent--or by
agreement reached with authorities higher than the port commandant.

There was a flagpole attached to a gable of one of the barracks.  A
tall officer strode from the door at that end and hopped into the
driver's seat of the jeep parked there.  Another khaki-clad soldier
stuck her head out the door and called something, but the officer
pretended not to hear.  He spun his vehicle in an angry circle, rubbing
its low side skirts, and gunned it toward the entrance.

Jolober had met van Zuyle only once.  The most memorable thing about
the Slammers' officer was his anger-caused by fete, but directed at
whatever was nearest to hand He'd been heading a company of combat cars
when the blower ahead of his took a direct hit.

If van Zuyle'd had his face shield down--but he hadn't, because the
shield made him, made most troopers, feel as though they'd stuck their
head in a bucket.  That dissociation, mental rather than sensory, could
get you killed in combat.

The shield would have darkened instantly to block the sleet of actinics
from the exploding combat car.  Without its protection .. . well, the
surgeons could rebuild his face, with only a slight stiffness to betray
the injuries.  Van Zuyle could even see--by daylight or under strong
illumination.

There just wasn't any way he'd ever be fit to lead a line unit
again--and he was very angry about it.

Commandant Horace Jolober could understand how van Zuyle felt--better,
perhaps, than anyone else on the planet could.  It didn't make his own
job easier, though.

"A pleasure to see you again, Commandant," van Zuyle lied brusquely as
he skidded the jeep to a halt, passenger seat beside Jolober.  "If
you--"

Jolober smiled grimly as the Slammers' officer saw-and remembered--that
the port commandant was legless and couldn't seat himself in a jeep on
his air-cushion chair.

"No problem," said Jolober, gripping the jeep's side and the seat back.
He lifted himself aboard the larger vehicle with an athletic twist that
settled him facing front.

Of course, the maneuver was easier than it would have been if his legs
were there to get in the way.

"Ah, your--" van Zuyle said, pointing toward the chair.  Close up,
Jolober could see a line of demarcation in his scalp.  The implanted
hair at the front had aged less than the gray-speckled portion which
hadn't been replaced.

"No problem, Captain," Jolober repeated.  He anchored his left arm
around the driver's seat, gripped one of his

chair's handles with the right hand, and jerked the chair into the
bench seat in the rear of the open vehicle.

The jeep lurched: the air-cushion chair weighed almost as much as
Jolober did without it, and he was a big man.  "You learn tricks when
you have to," he said evenly as he met the eyes of the Slammers'
officer.

And your arms get very strong when they do a lot of the work your legs
used to--but he didn't say that.

"My office?"  van Zuyle asked sharply.

"Is that as busy as it looks?"  Jolober replied, nodding toward the
door where a soldier still waited impatiently for van Zuyle to
return.

"Commandant, I've had a tank company come in shot to hell" van Zuyle
said in a voice that built toward fury.  "Three vehicles are combat
lossed and have to be stripped --and the other vehicles need more than
routine maintenance--and half the personnel are on medic's release.  Or
dead.  I'm trying to run a refit area with what's left, my staff of
twenty-three, and the trainee replacements Central sent over who
haven't ridden in a panzer, much less pulled maintenance on one.  And
you ask if I've got time to waste on you?"

"No, Captain, I didn't ask that," Jolober said with the threatening
lack of emotion which came naturally to a man who had all his life been
bigger and stronger than most of those around him.  "Find a spot where
we won't be disturbed, and we'll park there."

When the Slammers' officer frowned, Jolober added, "I'm not here about
Captain Hoffritz, Captain."

"Yeah," sighed van Zuyle as he lifted the jeep and steered it sedately
toward a niche formed between the indium carcasses of a pair of tanks.
"We're repairing things right now--" he thumbed in the direction of the
gate "-and any other costs'll go on the damage chit; but I guess I owe
you an apology besides."

"Life's a dangerous place," Jolober said easily.  Van Zuyle wasn't
stupid.  He'd modified his behavior as soon as he was reminded of the
incident an hour before--and the leverage it gave the port commandant
if he wanted to push it.

Van Zuyle halted them in the gray shade that brought sweat to Jobber's
forehead.  The tanks smelled of hot metal because some of their
vaporized armor had settled back onto the hulls as fine dust.  Slight
breezes shifted it to the nostrils of the men nearby, a memory of the
blasts in which it had formed.

Plastics had burned also, leaving varied pungencies which could not
conceal the odor of cooked human flesh.

The other smells of destruction were unpleasant.  That last brought
Jolober memories of his legs exploding in brilliant coruscance.  His
body tingled and sweated, and his mouth said to the Slammers' officer,
"Your men are being cheated and misused every time they come to
Paradise Port, Captain.  For political reasons, my superiors won't let
me make the necessary changes.  If the mercenary units serviced by
Paradise Port unite and demand the changes, the government will be
forced into the proper decision."

"Seems to me," said van Zuyle with his perfectly curved eyebrows
narrowing, "that somebody could claim you were acting against your
employers just now."

"Placida hired me to run a liberty port," said Jolober evenly.  He was
being accused of the worst crime a mercenary could commit: conduct that
would allow his employers to forfeit his unit's bond and brand them
forever as unemployable contract-breakers.

Jolober no longer was a mercenary in that sense; but he understood van
Zuyle's idiom, and it was in that idiom that he continued, "Placida
wants and needs the troops she hires to be sent back into action in the
best shape possible.  Her survival depends on it.  If I let Red Ike run
this place to his benefit and not to Placida's, then I'm not doing my
job."

"All right," said van Zuyle.  "What's Ike got on?"

A truck, swaying with its load of cheering troopers, pulled past on its
way to the gate of Paradise Port.  The man in the passenger's seat of
the cab was Tad Hoffritz, his face a knife-edge of expectation.

"Sure, they need refit as bad as the hardware does," muttered van Zuyle
as he watched the soldiers on leave

with longing eyes.  "Three days straight leave, half days after that
when they've pulled their duty.  But Via!  I could use 'em here,
especially with the tanks that're such a bitch if you're not used to
crawling around in "em."

His face hardened again.  "Go on," he said, angry that Jolober knew how
much he wanted to be one of the men on that truck instead of having to
run a rear-echelon installation.

"Red Ike owns the Dolls like so many shots of liquor," Jolober said. He
never wanted a combat job again--the thought terrified him, the noise
and flash and the smell of his body burning.  "He's using them to strip
your men, everybody's men, in the shortest possible time," he continued
in a voice out of a universe distant from his mind.  "The games are
honest--that's my job--but the men play when they're stoned, and they
play with a Doll on their arm begging them to go on until they've got
nothing left.  How many of those boys--" he gestured to where the
truck, now long past, had been "--are going to last three days?"

"We give 'em advances when they're tapped out," said van Zuyle with a
different kind of frown.  "Enough to last their half days--if they're
getting their jobs done here.  Works out pretty good.

"As a matter of fact," he went on, "the whole business works out pretty
good.  I never saw a soldiers dive without shills and B-girls.  Don't
guess you ever did either, Commandant.  Maybe they're better at it, the
Dolls, but all that means is that I get my labor force back
quicker--and Hammer gets his tanks back in line with, that much fewer
problems."

"The Dolls--" Jolober began.

"The Dolls are clean," shouted van Zuyle in a voice like edged steel.
"They give full value for what you pay 'em.  And I've never had a Doll
knife one of my guys--which is a curst sight better'n anyplace I been
staffed with human whores!"

"No," said Jolober, his strength a bulwark against the Slammer's anger.
"But you've had your men knife or Strangle Dolls, haven't you?  All the
units here've had incidents of that sort.  Do you think it's chance?"

Van Zuyle blinked.  "I think it's a cost of doing business," he said,
speaking mildly because the question had surprised him.

"No," Jolober retorted.  "It's a major profit center for Red Ike.  The
Dolls don't just drop soldiers when they've stripped them.  They
humiliate the men, taunt them .. . and when one of these kids breaks
and chokes the life out of the bitch who's goading him, Red Ike pockets
the damage assessment.  And it comes out of money Placida would
otherwise have paid Hammer's Slammers."

The Slammers' officer began to laugh.  It was Jolober's turn to blink
in surprise.

"Sure," van Zuyle said, "androids like that cost a lot more'n gate
posts or a few meters of fencing, you bet."

"He's the only source," said Jolober tautly.  "Nobody knows where the
Dolls come from--or where Ike does."

"Then nobody can argue the price isn't fair, can they?"  van Zuyle
gibed.  "And you know what, Commandant?  Take a look at this tank right
here."

He pointed to one of the vehicles beside them.  It was a command tank,
probably the one in which Hoffritz's predecessor had ridden before it
was hit by power guns heavy enough to pierce its armor.

The first round, centered on the hull's broadside, had put the unit out
of action and killed everyone aboard.  The jet of energy had ignited
everything flammable within the fighting compartment in an explosion
which blew the hatches open.  The enemy had hit the indium carcass at
least three times more, cratering the turret and holing the engine
compartment.

"We couldn't replace this for the cost of twenty Dolls," van Zuyle
continued.  "And we're going to have to, you know, because she's a
total loss.  All I can do is strip her for salvage .. . and clean up as
best I can for the crew, so we can say we had something to bury."

His too-pale, too-angry eyes glared at Jolober.  "Don't talk to me
about the cost of Dolls, Commandant.  They're cheap at the price.  I'll
drive you back to the gate."

"You may not care about the dollar cost," said Jolober

in a voice that thundered over the jeep's drive fans.  "But what about
the men you're sending back into the line thinking they've killed
somebody they loved--or that they should've killed her?"

"Commandant, that's one I can't quantify," the Slammers' officer said.
The fans' keeping lowered as the blades bit the air at a steeper angle
and began to thrust the vehicle out of the bivouac area.  "First time a
trooper lolls a human here, that I can quantify: we lose him.  If
there's a bigger problem and the Bonding Authority decides to call it
mutiny, then we lost a lot more than that.

"And I tell you, buddy," van Zuyle added with a one-armed gesture
toward the wrecked vehicles now behind them.  "We've lost too fucking
much already on this contract."

The jeep howled past the guard at the bivouac entrance.  Wind noise
formed a deliberate damper on Jolober's attempts to continue the
discussion.  "Will you forward my request to speak to Colonel Hammer?"
he shouted.  "I can't get through to him myself."

The tank had left the gate area.  Men in khaki, watched by Jolober's
staff in white uniforms, had almost completed their task of restringing
the perimeter fence.  Van Zuyle throttled back, permitting the jeep to
glide to a graceful halt three meters short of the workmen.

The Colonel's busy, Commandant," he said flatly.  "And from now on, I
hope you'll remember that / am, too."

Jolober lifted his chair from the back seat.  "I'm going to win this,
Captain," he said.  "I'm going to do my job whether or not I get any
support."

The smile he gave van Zuyle rekindled the respect in the tanker's pale
eyes.

There were elements of four other mercenary units bivouacked outside
Paradise Port at the moment.  Jolober could have visited them in
turn--to be received with more or less civility, and certainly no more
support than the Slammers' officer had offered.

A demand for change by the mercenaries in Placidan service had to be
just that: a demand by all the

mercenaries.  Hammer's Slammers were the highest-paid troops here, and
by that standard--any other criterion would start a brawl--the premier
unit.  If the Slammers refused Jolober, none of the others would back
him.

The trouble with reform is that in the short run, it causes more
problems than continuing along the bad old ways.  Troops in a combat
zone, who know that each next instant may be their last, are more to be
forgiven for short term thinking than, say, politicians; but the
pattern is part of the human condition.

Besides, nobody but Horace Jolober seemed to think there was anything
to reform.

Jolober moved in a walking dream while his mind shuttled through causes
and options.  His data were interspersed with memories of Vicki smiling
up at him from the bed and of his own severed leg toppling in
blue-green silhouette.  He shook his head gently to clear the images
and found himself on the street outside the Port offices.

His stump throttled back the fans reflexively; but when Jolober's
conscious mind made its decision, he turned away from the office
building and headed for the garish facade of the China Doll across the
way.

Rainbow pastels lifted slowly over the front of the building, the
gradation so subtle that close up it was impossible to tell where one
band ended and the next began.  At random intervals of from thirty
seconds to a minute, the gentle hues were replaced by glaring,
supersaturated colors separated by dazzling blue-white lines.

None of the brothels in Paradise Port were sedately decorated, but the
China Doll stood out against the competition.

As Jolober approached, a soldier was leaving and three more--one a
woman--were in the queue to enter.  A conveyor carried those wishing to
exit, separated from one another by solid panels.  The panels withdrew
sideways into the wall as each client reached the street--but there was
always another panel in place behind to prevent anyone from bolting
into the building without being searched at the proper entrance.

All of the buildings in Paradise Port were designed the same way, with
security as unobtrusive as it could be while remaining uncompromised.
The entry ways were three-meter funnels narrowing in a series of gaudy
corbel led arches.  Attendants--humans everywhere but in the China
Doll-waited at the narrow end.  They smiled as the customers
passed--but anyone whom the detection devices in the archway said was
armed was stopped right there.

The first two soldiers ahead of Jolober went through without incident.
The third was a short man wearing lieutenants pips and the uniform of
Division Legere.  His broad shoulders and chest narrowed to his waist
as abruptly as those of a bulldog, and it was with a bulldogs fierce
intransigence that he braced himself against the two attendants who had
confronted him.

"I am Lieutenant Alexis Condorcet!"  he announced as though he were
saying "major general."  "What do you mean by hindering me?"

The attendants in the China Doll were Droids, figures with smoothly
masculine features and the same blushing complexion which set Red Ike
and the Dolls apart from the humans with whom they mingled.

They were not male--Jolober had seen the total sexlessness of an
android whose tights had ripped as he quelled a brawl.  Their bodies
and voices were indistinguishable from one to another, and there could
be no doubt that they were androids, artificial constructions whose
existence proved that the Dolls could be artificial, too.

Though in his heart, Horace Jolober had never been willing to believe
the Dolls were not truly alive.  Not since Red Ike had introduced him
to Vicki.

"Could you check the right-hand pocket of your blouse, Lieutenant
Condorcet?"  one of the Droids said.

"I'm not carrying a weapon!"  Condorcet snapped.  His hand hesitated,
but it dived into the indicated pocket when an attendant started to
reach toward it.

Jolober was ready to react, either by grabbing Condorcet's wrist from
behind or by knocking him down with the chair.  He didn't have time for
any emotion, not even fear.

It was the same set of instincts that had thrown him to his feet for
the last time, to wave off the attacking tanks.

Condorcet's hand came out with a roll of coins between two fingers.  In
a voice that slipped between injured and minatory he said, "Can't a man
bring money into the Doll, then ?  Will you have me take my business
elsewhere, then?"

"Your money's very welcome, sir," said the attendant who was reaching
forward.  His thumb and three fingers shifted in a sleight of hand;
they reappeared holding a gold-striped China Doll chip worth easily
twice the value of the rolled coins.  "But let us hold these till you
return.  We'll be glad to give them back then without exchange."

The motion which left Condorcet holding the chip and transferred the
roll to the attendant was also magically smooth.

The close-coupled soldier tensed for a moment as if he'd make an issue
of it; but the Droids were as strong as they were polished, and there
was no percentage in being humiliated.

"We'll see about that," said Condorcet loudly.  He strutted past the
attendants who parted for him like water before the blunt prow of a
barge.

"Good afternoon, Port Commandant Jolober," said one of the Droids as
they both bowed.  "A pleasure to serve you again."

"A pleasure to feel wanted," said Jolober with an ironic nod of his
own.  He glided into the main hall of the China Doll.

The room's high ceiling was suffused with clear light which mimicked
daytime outside.  The hall buzzed with excited sounds even when the
floor carried only a handful of customers.  Jolober hadn't decided
whether the space was designed to give multiple echo effects or if
instead Red Ike augmented the hum with concealed sonic transponders.

Whatever it was, the technique made the blood of even the port
commandant quicken when he stepped into the China Doll.

There were a score of gaming stations in the main hall,

but they provided an almost infinite variety of ways to lose money.  A
roulette station could be collapsed into a skat table in less than a
minute if a squad of drunken Frieslanders demanded it.  The displaced
roulette players could be accommodated at the next station over, where
until then a Droid had been dealing desultory hands of fan-tan.

Whatever the game was, it was fair.  Every hand, every throw, every pot
was recorded and processed in the office of the port commandant.  None
of the facility owners doubted that a skewed result would be noticed at
once by the computers, or that a result skewed in favor of the house
would mean that Horace Jolober would weld their doors shut and ship all
their staff off-planet.

Besides, they knew as Jolober did that honest games would get them most
of the available money anyhow, so long as the Dolls were there to
caress the winners to greater risks.

At the end of Paradise Port farthest from the gate were two
establishments which specialized in the leftovers.  They were staffed
by human males, and their atmosphere was as brightly efficient as men
could make it.

But no one whose psyche allowed a choice picked a human companion over
a Doll.

The main hall was busy with drab uniforms, Droids neatly garbed in blue
and white, and the stunningly gorgeous outfits of the Dolls.  There was
a regular movement of Dolls and uniforms toward the door on a
room-width landing three steps up at the back of the hall.  Generally
the rooms beyond were occupied by couples, but much larger gatherings
were possible if a soldier had money and the perceived need.

The curved doors of the elevator beside the front entrance opened even
as Jolober turned to look at them.  Red Ike stepped out with a smile
and a Doll on either arm.

"Always a pleasure to see you, Commandant," Red Ike said in a tone as
sincere as the Dolls were human.  "Shana," he added to the red-haired
Doll.  "Susan--" he nodded toward the blond.  "Meet Commandant Jolober,
the man who keeps us all safe."

The redhead giggled and slipped from Ike's arm to Jolober's.  The slim
blond gave him a smile that would have been demure except for the
fabric of her tank-top.  It acted as a polarizing filter, so that when
she swayed her bare torso flashed toward the port commandant.

"But come on upstairs, Commandant," Red Ike continued, stepping
backwards into the elevator and motioning Jolober to follow him.
"Unless your business is here--or in back?"  He cocked an almost-human
eyebrow toward the door in the rear while his face waited with a look
of amused tolerance.

"We can go upstairs," said Jolober grimly.  "It won't take long."  His
air cushion slid him forward.  Spilling air tickled Shana's feet as she
pranced along beside him; she giggled again.

There must be men who found that sort of girlish idiocy erotic or Red
Ike wouldn't keep the Doll in his stock.

The elevator shaft was opaque and looked it from outside the car.  The
car's interior was a visi-screen fed by receptors on the shaft's
exterior.  On one side of the slowly rising car, Jolober could watch
the games in the main hall as clearly as if he were hanging in the air.
On the other, they lifted above the street with a perfect view of its
traffic and the port offices even though a concrete wall and the
shaft's indium armor blocked the view in fact.

The elevator switch was a small plate which hung in the "air" that was
really the side of the car.  Red Ike had toggled it up.  Down would
have taken the car--probably much faster--to the tunnel beneath the
street, the escape route which Jolober had suspected even before the
smiling alien had used it this afternoon.

But there was a second unobtrusive control beside the first.  The blond
Doll leaned past Jolober with a smile and touched it.

The view of the street disappeared.  Those in the car had a crystalline
view of the activities in back of the China Doll as if no walls or
ceilings separated the bedrooms.  Jolober met--or thought he met--the
eyes of Tad Hoffritz, straining upward beneath a black-haired Doll.

"Via!"  Jolober swore and slapped the toggle hard enough to feel the
solidity of the elevator car.

"Susan, Susan," Red Ike chided with a grin.  "She will have her little
joke, you see, Commandant."

The blond made a moue, then winked at Jolober.

Above the main hall was Red Ike's office, furnished in minimalist
luxury.  Jolober found nothing attractive in the sight of chair seats
and a broad onyx desktop hanging in the air, but the decor did show off
the view.  Like the elevator, the office walls and ceiling were covered
by pass through visi-screens.

The russet wasteland, blotched but not relieved by patterns of lichen,
looked even more dismal from twenty meters up than it did from
Jolober's living quarters.

Though the view appeared to be panorama, there was no sign of where the
owner himself lived.  The back of the office was an interior wall, and
the vista over the worms and pillows of lava was transmitted through
not only the wall but the complex of rooms that was Red Ike's home.

On the roof beside the elevator tower was an air car sheltered behind
the concrete coping.  Lake the owners of all the other facilities
comprising Paradise Port, Red Ike wanted the option of getting out
fast, even if the elevator to his tunnel bolt hole was blocked.

Horace Jolober had fantasies in which he watched the stocky humanoid
scramble into his vehicle and accelerate away, vanishing forever as a
fleck against the milky sky.

"I've been meaning to call on you for some time, Commandant," Red Ike
said as he walked with quick little steps to his desk.  "I thought
perhaps you might like a replacement for Vicki.  As you know, any
little way in which I can make your task easier .. . ?"

Shana giggled.  Susan smiled slowly and, turning at a precisely
calculated angle, bared breasts that were much fuller than they
appeared beneath her loose garment.

Jolober felt momentary desire, then fierce anger in reaction.  His
hands clenched on the chair handles, restraining his violent urge to
hurl both Dolls into the invisible walls.

Red Ike sat behind the desktop.  The thin shell of his

chair rocked on invisible gimbals, tilting him to a comfortable angle
that was not quite disrespectful of his visitor.

"Commandant," he said with none of the earlier hinted mockery, "you and
I really ought to cooperate, you know.  We need each other, and Placida
needs us both."

"And the soldiers we're here for?"  Jolober asked softly.  "Do they
need you, Ike?"

The Dolls had become as still as painted statues.

"You're an honorable man, Commandant," said the alien.  "It disturbs
you that the men don't find what they need in Paradise Port."

The chair eased more nearly upright.  The intensity of Red Ike's stare
reminded Jolober that he'd never seen the alien blink.

"But men like that--all of them now, and most of them for as long as
they live ... all they really need, Commandant, is a chance to die.  I
don't offer them that, it isn't my place.  But I sell them everything
they pay for, because I too am honorable."

"You don't know what honor is!"  Jolober shouted, horrified at the
thought--the nagging possibility--that what Red Ike said was true.

"I know what it is to keep my word, Commandant Jolober," the alien said
as he rose from behind his desk with quiet dignity.  "I promise you
that if you cooperate with me, Paradise Port will continue to run to
the full satisfaction of your employers.

"And I also promise," Red Ike went on unblinkingly, "that if you
continue your mad vendetta, it will be the worse for you."

"Leave here," Jolober said.  His mind achieved not calm, but a dynamic
balance in which he understood everything-so long as he focused only on
the result, not the reasons.  "Leave Placida, leave human space, Ike.
You push too hard.  So far you've been lucky--it's only me pushing
back, and I play by the official rules."

He leaned forward in his saddle, no longer angry.  The desktop between
them was a flawless black mirror.  "But the meres out there, they play
by their own rules, and

they're not going to like it when they figure out the game you're
running on them.  Get out while you can."

"Ladies," Red Ike said.  "Please escort the commandant to the main
hall.  He no longer has any business here."

Jolober spent the next six hours on the street, visiting each of the
establishments of Paradise Port.  He drank little and spoke less,
exchanging salutes when soldiers offered them and, with the same
formality, the greetings of owners.

He didn't say much to Vicki later that night, when he returned by the
alley staircase which led directly to his living quarters.

But he held her very close.

The sky was dark when Jolober snapped awake, though his bedroom window
was painted by all the enticing colors of the fagades across the
street.  He was fully alert and already into the short-legged trousers
laid on the mobile chair beside the bed when Vicki stirred and asked,
"Horace?  What's the matter?"

"I don't--" Jolober began, and then the alarms sounded: the radio
implanted in his mastoid, and the siren on the roof of the China
Doll.

"Go ahead," he said to Central, thrusting his arms into the uniform
tunic.

Vicki thumbed up the room lights but Jolober didn't need that, not to
find the sleeves of a white garment with this much sky-glow.  He'd
stripped a jammed tri barrel once in pitch darkness, knowing that he
and a dozen of his men were dead if he screwed up--and absolutely
confident of the stream of cyan fire that ripped moments later from his
gun muzzles.

"Somebody shot his way into the China Doll," said the voice.  "He's
holed up in the back."

The bone-conduction speaker hid the identity of the man on the other
end of the radio link, but it wasn't the switchboard's artificial
intelligence.  Somebody on the street was cutting through directly,
probably Steeher.

"Droids?"  Jolober asked as he mounted his chair and powered up,
breaking the charging circuit in which the vehicle rested overnight.

"Chief," said the mastoid, "we got a man down.  Looks bad, and we can't
get medics to him because the gun's covering the hallway.  D'ye want me
to--"

"Wait!"  Jolober said as he bulled through the side door under power.
Unlocking the main entrance--the entrance to the office of the port
commandant--would take seconds that he knew he didn't have.  "Hold what
you got, I'm on the way."

The voice speaking through Jolober's jawbone was clearly audible
despite wind noise and the scream of his chair as he leaped down the
alley staircase in a single curving arc.  "Ah, Chief?  We're likely to
have a, a crowd control problem if this don't get handled real
quick."

"I'm on the way," Jolober repeated.  He shot onto the street, still on
direct thrust because ground effect wouldn't move him as fast as he
needed to go.

The entrance of the China Doll was cordoned off, if four port patrolmen
could be called a cordon.  There were over a hundred soldiers in the
street and more every moment that the siren--couldn't somebody cut it?
Jolober didn't have time--continued to blare.

That wasn't what Stecher had meant by a "crowd control problem."  The
difficulty was in the way soldiers in the Division Legere's mottled
uniforms were shouting--not so much as onlookers as a lynch mob.

Jolober dropped his chair onto its skirts--he needed the greater
stability of ground effect.  "Lemme through!"  he snarled to the mass
of uniformed backs which parted in a chorus of yelps when Jolober
goosed his throttle.  The skirt of his plenum chamber caught the
soldiers just above the bootheels and toppled them to either side as
the chair powered through.

One trooper spun with a raised fist and a curse in French.  Jolober
caught the man's wrist and flung him down almost absently.  The men at
the door relaxed visibly when their commandant appeared at their
side.

Behind him, Jolober could hear off-duty patrolmen scrambling into the
street from their barracks under the port offices.  That would help,
but' You Major!"  Jolober shouted, pointing at a Division Legere
officer in the front of the crowd.  The man was almost of a size with
the commandant; fury had darkened his face several shades beyond
swarthiness.  "I'm deputizing you to keep order here until I've taken
care of the problem inside."

He spun his chair again and drove through the doorway.  The major was
shouting to his back, "But the bastards shot my--"

Two Droids were more or less where Jolober had expected them, one
crumpled in the doorway and the other stretched full length a meter
inside.  The Droids were tough as well as strong.  The second one had
managed to grasp the man who shot him and be pulled a pace or two
before another burst into the back of the Droid's skull had ended
matters.

Stecher hadn't said the shooter had a submachine gun.  That made the
situation a little worse than it might have been, but it was so bad
already that the increment was negligible.

Droids waited impassively at all the gaming stations, ready to do their
jobs as soon as customers returned.  They hadn't fled the way human
croupiers would have--but neither did their programming say anything
about dealing with armed intruders.

The Dolls had disappeared.  It was the first time Jolober had been in
the main hall when it was empty of their charming, enticing babble.

Stecher and two troopers in Slammers' khaki, and a pair of technicians
with a portable medico mp stood on opposite sides of the archway
leading into the back of the China Doll.  A second patrolman was
huddled behind the three room-wide steps leading up from the main
hall.

Man down, Jolober thought, his guts ice.

The patrolman heard the chair and glanced back.  "Duck!"  he screamed
as Sergeant Stecher cried, "Watch--"

Jolober throttled up, bouncing to the left as a three-shot burst
snapped from the archway.  It missed him by-little enough that his hair
rose in response to the ionized track.

There was a man down, in the corridor leading back from the archway.
There was another man firing from a room at the corridors opposite end,
and he'd just proved his willingness to add the port commandant to the
night's bag.

Jobber's chair leaped the steps to the broad landing where Stecher
crouched, but it was his massive arms that braked his momentum against
the wall.  His tunic flapped and he noticed for the first time that he
hadn't sealed it before he left his quarters.  "Report," he said
bluntly to his sergeant while running his thumb up the uniform's seam
to close it.

Their officer's in there," Stecher said, bobbing his chin to indicate
the two Slammers kneeling beside him.  The male trooper was holding the
female and trying to comfort her as she blubbered.

To Jolober's surprise, he recognized both of them--the commo tech and
the driver of the tank which'd nearly run him down that afternoon.

"He nut ted shot his way in to find a Doll," Stecher said quickly.  His
eyes flicked from the commandant to the archway, but he didn't shift
far enough to look down the corridor.  Congealed notches in the arch's
plastic sheath indicated that he'd been lucky once already.

"Found her, found the guy she was with and put a burst into him as he
tried to get away."  Stecher thumbed toward the body invisible behind
the shielding wall.  "Guy from the Legere, an El-Tee named
Condorcet."

"The bitch made him do it!"  said the tank driver in a scream strangled
by her own laced fingers.

"She's sedated," said the commo tech who held her.

In the perfect tones of Central's artificial intelligence, Jolober's
implant said, "Major de Vigny of the Division Legere requests to see
you.  He is offering threats."

Letting de Vigny through would either take the pressure off the team
outside or be the crack that made the dam fail.  From the way Central
put it, the dam wasn't going to hold much longer anyhow.

"Tell the cordon to pass him.  But tell him keep his head down or he's
that much more t'clean up t'morrow," Jolober replied with his mike
keyed, making the best decision he could when none of 'em looked
good.

"Tried knock-out gas but he's got filters," said Stecher.  "Fast, too."
He tapped the scarred jamb.  "All the skin absorbtives're lethal, and I
don't guess we'd get cleared t'use 'em anyhow?"

"Not while I'm in the chain of command," Jolober agreed grimly.

"She was with this pongo from the Legere," the driver was saying
through her laced fingers.  "Tad, he wanted her so much, so fucking
much, like she was human or something"

"The, ah, you know.  Beth, the one he was planning to see," said the
commo tech rapidly as he stroked the back of the driver--Corporal
Days--Daisy..  .. "He tried to, you know, buyer from the Frog, but he
wouldn't play.  She got 'em, Beth did, to put all their leave allowance
on a coin flip.  She'd take all the money and go with the winner."

"The bitch," Daisy wailed.  "The bitch the bitch the bitch .. ."

The Legere didn't promote amateurs to battalion command.  The powerful
major Jolober had seen outside rolled through the doorway, sized up the
situation, and sprinted to the landing out of the shooter's line of
sight.

Line of fire.  "Hoffritz, can you hear me?"  Jolober called.  "I'm the
port commandant, remember?"

A single bolt from the submachine gun spattered plastic from the jamb
and filled the air with fresher stenches.

The man sprawling in the corridor moaned.

"I've ordered up an assault team," said Major de Vigny with flat
assurance as he stood up beside Jolober.  "It was unexpected, but they
should be here in a few minutes."

Everyone else in the room was crouching.  There wasn't any need so long
as you weren't in front of the corridor, but it was the instinctive
response to knowing somebody was trying to shoot you.

"Cancel the order," said Jolober, locking eyes with the other
officer.

"You aren't in charge when one of my men--" began the major, his face
flushing almost black.

"The gate closes when the alarm goes off!"  Jolober said in a voice
that could have been heard over a tank's fans.  "And I've ordered the
air defense batteries," he lied, "to fire on anybody trying to crash
through now.  If you want to lead a mutiny against your employers,
Major, now's the time to do it."

The two big men glared at one another without blinking.  Then de Vigny
said, "Blue Six to Blue Three," keying his epaulet mike with the code
words.  "Hold Team Alpha until further orders.  Repeat, hold Alpha.
Out."

"Hold Alpha," repeated the speaker woven into the epaulet's fabric.

"If Condorcet dies," de Vigny added calmly to the port commandant, "I
will kill you myself, sir."

"Do you have cratering charges warehoused here?"  Jolober asked with no
emotion save the slight lilt of interrogation.

"What?"  said de Vigny.  "Yes, yes."

Jolober crooked his left ring finger so that Central would hear and
relay his next words.  "Tell the gate to pass two men from the Legere
with a jeep and a cratering charge.  Give them a patrol guide, and
download the prints of the China Doll into his commo link so they can
place the charge on the wall outside the room at the T of the back
corridor."

De Vigny nodded crisply to indicate that he too understood the order.
He began relaying it into his epaulet while Stecher drew and
reholstered his needle stunner and Corporal Days mumbled.

"Has she tried?"  Jolober asked, waving to the driver and praying that
he wouldn't have to ... "He shot at "er," the commo tech said, nodding
sadly.  "That's when she really lost it and medics had to calm her
down."

No surprises there.  Certainly no good ones.

"Captain Hoffritz, it's the port commandant again," Jolober called.

A bolt spat down the axis of the corridor.

"That's right, you bastard, shoot!"  Jolober roared.  "You blew my legs
off on Primavera.  Now finish the job and prove you're a fuck-up who's
only good for killing his friends.  Come on, I'll make it easy.  I'll
come out and let you take your time!"

"Chief--" said Stecher.

Jolober slid away from the shelter of the wall.

The corridor was the stern of a T, ten meters long.  Halfway between
Jolober and the cross corridor at the other end, capping the T, lay the
wounded man.  Lieutenant Condorcet was a tough little man to still be
alive with the back of his tunic smoldering around the holes punched in
him by three power gun bolts.  The roll of coins he'd carried to add
weight to his fist wouldn't have helped; but then, nothing much helped
when the other guy had the only gun in the equation.

Like now.

The door of the room facing the corridor and Horace Jolober was ajar.
Beyond the opening was darkness and a bubble of dull red: the iridium
muzzle of Hoffritz's submachine gun, glowing with the heat of the
destruction it had spit at others.

De Vigny cursed; Stecher was pleading or even calling an order.  All
Jolober could hear was the roar of the tank bearing down on him, so
loud that the slapping bolts streaming toward him from its cupola were
inaudible.

Jolober's chair slid him down the hall.  His arms were twitching in
physical memory of the time they'd waved a scrap of white cloth to halt
the oncoming armor.

The door facing him opened.  Tad Hoffritz's face was as hard and yellow
as fresh bone.  He leaned over the sight of his submachine gun. Jolober
slowed, because if he kept on at a walking pace he would collide with
Condorcet, and if he curved around the wounded man it might look as if
he were dodging what couldn't be dodged.

He didn't want to look like a fool and a coward when he died.

Hoffritz threw down the weapon.

Jolober bounced to him, wrapping the Slammers' officer in both arms
like a son.  Stecher was shouting, "Medics!"  but the team with the
medico mp had been in motion as soon as the power gun hit the floor.
Behind all the battle was Major de Vigny's voice, remembering to stop
the crew with the charge that might otherwise be set--and fired even
though the need was over.

"I loved her," Hoffritz said to Jolobers big shoulder, begging someone
to understand what he didn't understand himself.  "I, I'd been drinking
and I came back .. ."

With a submachine gun that shouldn't have made it into Paradise Port ..
. but the detection loops hadn't been replaced in the hours since the
tanks ripped them away; and anyhow, Hoffritz was an officer, a company
commander.

He was also a young man having a bad time with what he thought was a
woman.  Older, calmer fellows than Hoffritz had killed because of
that.

Jolober carried Hoffritz with him into the room where he'd been holed
up.  "Lights," the commandant ordered, and the room brightened.

Condorcet wasn't dead, not yet; but Beth, the Doll behind the trouble,
surely was.

The couch was large and round.  Though drumhead-thin, its structure
could be varied to any degree of firmness the paying half of the couple
desired.  Beth lay in the center of it in a tangle of long black hair.
Her tongue protruded from a blood-darkened face, and the prints of the
grip that had strangled her were livid on her throat.

"She told me she loved him," Hoffritz mumbled.  The commandant's
embrace supported him, but it also kept Hoffritz from doing something
silly, like trying to run.

"After what I'd done," the boy was saying, "she tells me she doesn't
love me after all.  She says I'm no good to her in bed, that I never
gave her any pleasure at all..  .."

"Just trying to maximize the claim for damages, son," Jolober said
grimly.  "It didn't mean anything real, just more dollars in Red Ike's
pocket."

But Red Ike hadn't counted on Hoffritz shooting another mere.  Too bad
for Condorcet, too bad for the kid who shot him And just what Jolober
needed to finish Red Ike on Placida.

"Let's go," Jolober said, guiding Hoffritz out of the room stinking of
death and the emotions that led to death.  "We'll get you to a
medic."

And a cell.

Condorcet had been removed from the corridor, leaving behind only a
slime of vomit.  Thank the Lord he'd fallen face down.

Stecher and his partner took the unresisting Hoffritz and wrapped him
in motion restraints.  The prisoner could walk and move normally, so
long as he did it slowly.  At a sudden movement, the gossamer webs
would clamp him as rightly as a fly in a spiderweb.

The main hall was crowded, but the incipient violence facing the cordon
outside had melted away.  Judging from Major de Vigny's brusque,
bellowed orders, the victim was in the hands of his medics and being
shifted to the medico mp in Division Legere's bivouac area.  That was
probably the best choice.  Paradise Port had excellent medical
facilities, but medics in combat units got to know their jobs and their
diagnostic healing computers better than anybody in the rear
echelons.

"Commandant Jolober," said van Zuyle, the Slammers' bivouac commander,
Tm worried about my man here.  Can I--"

"He's not your man any more, Captain," Jolober said with the weary
chill of an avalanche starting to topple.  "He's mine and the Placidan
courts'--until I tell you different.  We'll get him sedated and keep
him from hurting himself, no problem."

Van Zuyle's face wore the expression of a man whipping himself to find
a deity who doesn't respond.  "Sir," he said, "I'm sorry if I--"

"You did the job they paid you t'do," Jolober said, shrugging away from
the other man.  He hadn't felt so weary since he'd awakened in the
Legion's main hospital on

Primavera: alive and utterly unwilling to believe that he could be
after what happened.

"Outa the man's way," snarled one of the patrolmen, trying to wave a
path through the crowd with her white sleeved arms.  "Let the
commandant by!"

She yelped a curse at the big man who brushed through her gestures.  "A
moment, little one," he said--de Vigny, the Legere major.

"You kept the lid on good," Jolober said while part of his dazed mind
wondered whose voice he was hearing.  "Tomorrow I'll want to talk to
you about what happened and how to keep from a repeat."

Anger darkened de Vigny's face.  "I heard what happened," he said.
"Condorcet was not the only human victim, it would seem."

"We'll talk," Jolober said.  His chair was driving him toward the door,
pushing aside anyone who didn't get out of the way.  He didn't see them
any more than he saw the air.

The street was a carnival of uniformed soldiers who suddenly had
something to focus on that wasn't a memory of death--or a way to
forget.  There were dark undercurrents to the chatter, but the crowd
was no longer a mob.

Jolober's uniform drew eyes, but the port commandant was too aloof and
forbidding to be asked for details of what had really happened in the
China Doll.  In the center of the street, though' Good evening,
Commandant," said Red Ike, strolling back toward the establishment he
owned.  "Without your courage, tonight's incident would have been even
more unfortunate."

Human faces changed in the play of light washing them from the brothel
fronts.  Red Ike's did not.  Colors overlay his features, but the lines
did not modify as one shadow or highlight replaced another.

"It couldn't be more unfortunate for you, Ike," Jolober said to the
bland alien while uniforms milled around them.  "They'll pay you money,
the meres will.  But they won't have you killing their men."

"I understand that the injured party is expected to pull

through," Red Ike said emotionlessly.  Jolober had the feeling that
the alien's eyes were focused on his soul.

"I'm glad Condorcet'll live," Jolober said, too tired for triumph or
subtlety.  "But you're dead on Placida, Ike.  It's just a matter of how
long it takes me to wrap it up."

He broke past Red Ike, gliding toward the port offices and the light
glowing from his room on the upper floor.

Red Ike didn't turn around, but Jolober thought he could feel the alien
watching him nonetheless.

Even so, all Jolober cared about now was bed and a chance to reassure
Vicki that everything was all right.

The alley between the office building and the Blue Parrot next door
wasn't directly illuminated, but enough light spilled from the street
to show Jolober the stairs.

He didn't see the two men waiting there until a third had closed the
mouth of the alley behind him.  Indonesian music began to blare from
the China Doll.

Music on the exterior's a violation, thought the part of Jolober's mind
that ran Paradise Port, but reflexes from his years as a combat officer
noted the man behind him held a metal bar and that knives gleamed in
the hands of the two by the stairs.

It made a hell of a fast trip back from the nightmare memories that had
ruled Jolober's brain since he wakened.

Jolober's left stump urged the throttle as his torso shifted toward the
alley mouth.  The electronics reacted instantly but the mechanical
links took a moment.  Fans spun up, plenum chamber collapsed into a
nozzle The attackers moved in on Jolober like the three wedges of a
drill chuck.  His chair launched him into the one with the club, a
meter off the ground and rising with a hundred and eighty kilos of mass
behind the impact.

At the last instant the attacker tried to duck away instead of swinging
at Jolober, but he misjudged the speed of his intended victim.  The
center of the chair's frame, between the skirt and the saddle, batted
the attacker's head toward the wall, dragging the fellows body with
it.

Jolober had a clear path to the street.  The pair of knife men thought
he was headed that way and sprinted in a desperate attempt to catch a
victim who moved faster than unaided humans could run.

They were in midstride, thinking of failure rather than defense, when
Jolober pogoed at the alley mouth and came back at them like a
cannonball.

But bigger and heavier.

One attacker stabbed at Jobber's chest and skidded the point off the
battery compartment instead when the chair hopped.  The frame slammed
knife and man into the concrete wall from which they ricochetted to the
ground, separate and equally motionless.  The third man ran away.

"Get 'em, boys!"  Jolober bellowed as if he were launching his
battalion instead of just himself in pursuit.  The running man glanced
over his shoulder and collided with the metal staircase.  The noise was
loud and unpleasant, even in comparison to the oriental music blaring
from the China Doll.

Jolober bounced, cut his fan speed, and flared his output nozzle into a
plenum chamber again.  The chair twitched, then settled into ground
effect.

Jolober's mind told him that he was seeing with a clarity and richness
of color he couldn't have equalled by daylight, but he knew that if he
really focused on an object it would blur into shadow.  It was just his
brain's way of letting him know that he was still alive.

Alive like he hadn't been in years.

Crooking his ring finger Jolober said, "I need a pickup on three men in
the alley between us and the Blue Parrot."

"Three men in the alley between HQ and the Blue Parrot," the artificial
intelligence paraphrased.

"They'll need a medic."  One might need burial.  "And I want them
sweated under a psycomp--who sent 'em after me, the works."

Light flooded the alley as a team of patrolmen arrived.  The point man
extended a surface-luminescent area light

powered from a backpack.  The shadows thrown by the meter-diameter
convexity were soft, but the illumination was the blaze of noon
compared to that of moments before.

"Chief!"  bellowed Stecher.  "You all right?  Chief!"  He wasn't part
of the team Central vectored to the alley, but word of mouth had
brought him to the scene of the incident.

Jolober throttled up, clamped his skirts, and boosted himself to the
fourth step where everyone could see him.  The man who'd run into the
stairs moaned as the side draft spat grit from the treads into his
face.

"No problem," Jolober said.  No problem they wouldn't be able to cure
in a week or two.  "I doubt these three know any more than that they
got a call from outside Port to, ah, handle me .. . but get what they
have, maybe we can cross-reference with some outgoing traffic."

From the China Doll; or just maybe from the Blue Parrot, where Ike fled
when the shooting started.  But probably not.  Three thugs,
nondescripts from off-planet who could've been working for any
establishment in Paradise Port except the China Doll.

"Sir--" came Stecher's voice.

"It'll keep, Sergeant," Jolober interrupted.  "Just now I've got a
heavy date with a bed."

Vicki greeted him with a smile so bright that both of them could
pretend there were no tears beneath it.  The air was steamy with the
bath she'd drawn for him.

He used to prefer showers, back when he'd had feet on which to stand.
He could remember dancing on Quitly's Planet as the afternoon monsoon
battered the gun carriages his platoon was guarding and washed the soap
from his body.

But he didn't have Vicki then, either.

"Yeah," he said, hugging the Doll.  "Good idea, a bath."

Instead of heading for the bathroom, he slid his chair to the cabinet
within arm's reach of the bed and cut his fans.  Bending over, he
unlatched the battery compartment--the knife point hadn't even
penetrated the casing--and removed the power pack

"I can--" Vicki offered hesitantly.

"S'okay, dearest," Jolober replied as he slid a fresh pack from the
cabinet into place.  His stump touched the throttle, spinning the fans
to prove that he had good contact, then lifted the original pack into
the cabinet and its charging harness.

"Just gave 'em a workout tonight and don't want to be down on power
tomorrow," he explained as he straightened; Vicki could have handled
the weight of the batteries, he realized, though his mind kept telling
him it was ludicrous to imagine the little woman shifting thirty-kilo
packages with ease.

But she wasn't a woman.

"I worry when it's so dangerous," she said as she walked with him to
the bathroom, their arms around one another's waist.

"Look, for Paradise Port, it was dangerous," Jolober said in a light
appearance of candor as he handed Vicki his garments.  "Compared to
downtown in any capital city I've seen, it was pretty mild."

He lowered himself into the water, using the bars laid over the tub
like a horizontal ladder.  Vicki began to knead the great muscles of
his shoulders, and Lord!  but it felt good to relax after so long..
..

"I'd miss you," she said.

"Not unless I went away," Jolober answered, leaning forward so that her
fingers could work down his spine while the water lapped at them.
"Which isn't going to happen any time soon."

He paused.  The water's warmth unlocked more than his body.  "Look," he
said quietly, his chin touching the surface of the bath and his eyes
still closed.  "Red Ike's had it.  He knows it, I know it.  But I'm in
a position to make things either easy or hard, and he knows that, too.
We'll come to terms, he and I. And you're the--"

"Urgent from the gate," said Jolober's mastoid implant.

He crooked his finger, raising his head.  "Put him through," he said.

Her through.  "Sir," said Feldman's attenuated voice, "a

courier's just landed with two men.  They say they've got an oral
message from Colonel Hammer, and they want me to alert you that they're
coming.  Over."

"I'll open the front door," Jolober said, lifting himself abruptly from
the water, careful not to mis key the implant while his hands performed
other tasks.

He wouldn't rouse the human staff.  No need and if the message came by
courier, it wasn't intended for other ears.

"Ah, sir," Feldman added unexpectedly.  "One of them insists on keeping
his sidearms.  Over."

"Then he can insist on staying outside my perimeter!"  Jolober snarled.
Vicki had laid a towel on the saddle before he mounted and was now
using another to silently dry his body.  "You can detach two guards to
escort 'em if they need their hands held, but nobody brings power guns
into Paradise Port."

"Roger, I'll tell them," Feldman agreed doubtfully.  "Over and out."

"I have a fresh uniform out," said Vicki, stepping back so that Jolober
could follow her into the bedroom, where the air was drier.

"That's three, today," Jolober said, grinning.  "Well, I've done a lot
more than I've managed any three other days.

"Via," he added more seriously.  "It's more headway than I've made
since they appointed me commandant."

Vicki smiled, but her eyes were so tired that Jolober's body trembled
in response.  His flesh remembered how much he had already been through
today and yearned for the sleep to which the hot bath had disposed
it.

Jolober lifted himself on his hands so that Vicki could raise and cinch
his trousers.  He could do it himself, but he was in a hurry, and .. .
besides, just as she'd said, Vicki was a part of him in a real way.

"Cheer up, love," he said as he closed his tunic.  "It isn't done yet,
but it's sure getting that way."

"Good-bye, Horace," the Doll said as she kissed him.

"Keep the bed warm," Jolober called as he slid toward the door and the
inner staircase.  His head was tumbling

with memories and images.  For a change, they were all pleasant
ones.

The port offices were easily identified at night because they weren't
garishly illuminated like every other building in Paradise Port.
Jolober had a small staff, and he didn't choose to waste it at desks.
Outside of ordinary business hours, Central's artificial intelligence
handled everything-by putting non emergency requests on hold till
morning, and by vectoring a uniformed patrol to the real business.

Anybody who insisted on personal service could get it by hammering at
the Patrol entrance on the west side, opposite Jolober's private
staircase.  A patrolman would find the noisemaker a personal holding
cell for the remainder of the night.

The front entrance was built like a vault door, not so much to prevent
intrusion as to keep drunks from destroying the panel for reasons
they'd be unable to remember sober.  Jolober palmed the release for the
separate bolting systems and had just begun to swing the door open in
invitation when the two men in khaki uniforms, neither of them tall,
strode up to the building.

"Blood and Martyrs!"  Jolober said as he continued to back, not
entirely because the door required it.

"You run a tight base here, Commandant," said Colonel Alois Hammer as
he stepped into the waiting room.  "Do you know my aide, Major
Steuben?"

"By reputation only," said Jolober, nodding to Joachim Steuben with the
formal correctness which that reputation enjoined.  "Ah--with a little
more information, I might have relaxed the prohibition on weapons."

Steuben closed the door behind them, moving the heavy panel with a
control which belied the boyish delicacy of his face and frame.  "If
the colonel's satisfied with his security," Joachim said mildly, "then
of course I am, too."

The eyes above his smile would willingly have watched Jolober drawn and
quartered.

"You've had some problems with troops of mine today," said Hammer,
seating himself on one of the chairs and

rising again, almost as quickly as if he had continued to walk.  His
eyes touched Jolober and moved on in short hops that covered everything
in the room like an animal checking a new environment.

"Only reported problems occurred," said Jolober, keeping the promise
he'd made earlier in the day.  He lighted the hologram projection tank
on the counter to let it warm up.  "There was an incident a few hours
ago, yes."

The promise didn't matter to Tad Hoffritz, not after the shootings; but
it mattered more than life to Horace Jolober that he keep the bargains
he'd made.

"According to Captain van Zuyle's report," Hammer said as his eyes
flickered over furniture and recesses dim under the partial lighting,
"you're of the opinion the boy was set up."

"What you do with a gun," said Joachim Steuben softly from the door
against which he leaned, "is your own responsibility."

"As Joachim says," Hammer went on with a nod and no facial expression,
"that doesn't affect how we'll deal with Captain Hoffritz when he's
released from local custody.  But it does affect how we act to prevent
recurrences, doesn't it?"

"Load file Ike One into the downstairs holo," said Jolober to
Central.

He looked at Hammer, paused till their eyes met.  "Sure, he was set up,
just like half a dozen others in the past three months--only they were
money assessments, no real problem.

"And the data prove," Jolober continued coolly, claiming what his data
suggested but could not prove, "that it's going to get a lot worse than
what happened tonight if Red Ike and his Dolls aren't shipped out
fast."

The holotank sprang to life in a three-dimensional crosshatching of
orange lines.  As abruptly, the lines shrank into words and columns of
figures.  "Red Ike and his Dolls-they were all his openly, then--first
show up on Sparrow home a little over five years standard ago,
according to Bonding Authority records.  Then--"

Jobber pointed toward the figures.  Colonel Hammer put

his smaller, equally firm, hand over the commandants and said, "Wait.
Just give me your assessment."

"Dolls have been imported as recreational support in seven conflicts,"
said Jolober as calmly as if his mind had not just shifted gears.  He'd
been a good combat commander for the same reason, for dealing with the
situation that occurred rather than the one he'd planned for.  "There's
been rear-echelon trouble each time, and the riot on Ketelby caused the
Bonding Authority to order the disbandment of a battalion of Guardforce
O'Higgins."

"There was trouble over a woman," said Steuben unemotionally, reeling
out the data he gathered because he was Hammer's adjutant as well as
his bodyguard.  "A fight between a ranger and an artilleryman led to a
riot in which half the nearest town was burned."

"Not a woman," corrected Jolober.  "A Doll."

He tapped the surface of the holotank.  "It's all here, downloaded from
Bonding Authority archives.  You just have to see what's happening so
you know the questions to ask."

"You can get me a line to the capital?"  Hammer asked as if he were
discussing the weather.  "I was in a hurry, and I didn't bring along my
usual commo."

Jolober lifted the visiplate folded into the surface of the counter
beside the tank and rotated it toward Hammer.

"I've always preferred nonhumans for recreation areas," Hammer said
idly as his finger played over the plate's keypad.  "Oh, the troops
complain, but I've never seen that hurt combat efficiency.  Whereas
real women gave all sorts of problems."

"And real men," said Joachim Steuben, with a deadpan expression that
could have meant anything.

The visiplate beeped.  "Main Switch," said a voice, tart but not
sleepy.  "Go ahead."

"You have my authorization code," Hammer said to the human operator on
the other end of the connection.  From Jolober's flat angle to the
plate, he couldn't make out the operators features--only that he sat in
a brightly illuminated white cubicle.  "Patch me through to the
chairman of the Facilities Inspection Committee."

'"Senator Dieter?"  said the operator, professionally able to keep the
question short of being amazement.

"If he's the chairman," Hammer said.  The words had the angry undertone
of a dynamite fuse burning.

"Yes sir, she is," replied the operator with studied neutrality.  "One
moment please.

"I've been dealing with her chief aide," said Jolober in a hasty
whisper.  "Guy named Higgey.  His pager's loaded--"

"Got you a long ways, didn't it, Commandant?"  Hammer said with a
gun-turret click of his head toward Jolober.

"Your pardon, sir," said Jolober, bracing reflexively to attention.  He
wasn't Hammer's subordinate, but they both served the same
ideal--getting the job done.  The ball was in Hammer's court just now,
and he'd ask for support if he thought he needed it.

From across the waiting room, Joachim Steuben smiled at Jolober.  That
one had the same ideal, perhaps; but his terms of reference were
something else again.

"The senator isn't at any of her registered work stations," the
operator reported coolly.

"Son," said Hammer, leaning toward the visiplate, "you have a unique
opportunity to lose the war for Placida.  All you have to do is not get
me through to the chairman."

"Yes, Colonel Hammer," the operator replied with an aplomb that made it
clear why he held the job he did.  "I've processed your authorization,
and I'm running it through again on War Emergency Ord--"

The last syllable was clipped.  The bright rectangle of screen dimmed
gray.  Jolober slid his chair in a short arc so that he could see the
visiplate clearly past Hammer's shoulder.

"What is it?"  demanded the woman in the dim light beyond.  She was
stocky, middle-aged, and rather attractive because of the force of
personality she radiated even sleepless in a dressing gown.  "This is
Colonel Alois Hammer," Hammer said.  "Are you recording?"

"On this circuit?"  the senator replied with a frosty smile.  "Of
course I am.  So are at least three other agencies, whether I will or
no."

Hammer blinked, startled to find himself on the wrong end of a silly
question for a change.

"Senator," he went on without the hectoring edge that had been present
since his arrival.  "A contractor engaged by your government to provide
services at Paradise Port has been causing problems.  One of the
Legere's down, in critical, and I'm short a company commander over the
same incident."

"You've reported to the port commandant?"  Senator Dieter said, her
eyes unblinking as they passed over Jolober.

"The commandant reported to me because your staff stonewalled him,"
Hammer said flatly while Jolober felt his skin grow cold, even the tips
of the toes he no longer had.  "I want the contractor, a nonhuman
called Red Ike, off planet in seventy-two hours with all his chattels. 
That specifically includes his Dolls.  We'll work--"

"That's too soon," said Dieter, her fingers tugging a lock of hair over
one ear while her mind worked.  "Even if--"

"Forty-eight hours, Senator," Hammer interrupted.  "This is a violation
of your bond.  And I promise you^ I'll have the support of all the
other commanders of units contracted to Placidan service.  Forty-eight
hours, or we'll withdraw from combat and you won't have a front
line."

"You can't--" Dieter began.  Then all muscles froze, tongue and fingers
among them, as her mind considered the implications of what the colonel
had just told her.

"I have no concern over being able to win my case at the Bonding
Authority hearing on Earth," Hammer continued softly.  "But I'm quite
certain that the present Placidan government won't be there to contest
it."

Dieter smiled without humor.  "Seventy-two hours," she said as if
repeating the figure.

"I've shifted the Regiment across continents in less time, Senator,"
Hammer said.

"Yes," said Dieter calmly.  "Well, there are political consequences to
any action, and I'd rather explain myself

to my constituents than to an army of occupation.  I'll take care of
it."

She broke the circuit.

"I wouldn't mind getting to know that lady," said Hammer, mostly to
himself, as he folded the visiplate back into the counter.

"That takes care of your concerns, then?"  he added sharply, looking up
at Jolober.

"Yes, sir, it does," said Jolober, who had the feeling be had drifted
into a plane where dreams could be happy.

"Ah, about Captain Hoffritz .. ."  Hammer said.  His eyes slipped, but
he snapped them back to meet Jolober's despite the embarrassment of
being about to ask a favor.

"He's not combat-fit right now, Colonel," Jolober said, warming as
authority flooded back to fill his mind.  "He'll do as well in our care
for the next few days as he would in yours.  After that, and assuming
that no one wants to press charges--"

"Understood," said Hammer, nodding.  "I'll deal with the victim and
General Claire."

"--then some accommodation can probably be arranged with the courts."

"It's been a pleasure dealing with a professional of your caliber,
Commandant," Hammer said as he shook Jolober's hand.  He spoke without
emphasis, but nobody meeting his cool blue eyes could have imagined
that Hammer would have bothered to lie about it.

"It's started to rain," observed Major Steuben as he muscled the door
open.

"It's permitted to," Hammer said.  "We've been wet be--"

"A jeep to the front of the building," Jolober ordered with his ring
finger crooked.  He straightened and said, "Ah, Colonel?  Unless you'd
like to be picked up by one of your own vehicles?"

"Nobody knows I'm here," said Hammer from the doorway.  "I don't want
van Zuyle to think I'm second guessing him--I'm not, I'm just handling
the part that's mine to handle."

He paused before adding with an ironic smile, "In any case, we're four
hours from exploiting the salient Hoffritz's company formed when they
took the junction at Kettering."

A jeep with two patrolmen, stunners ready, scraped to a halt outside.
The team was primed for a situation like the one in the alley less than
an hour before.

"Taxi service only, boys," Jolober called to the patrolmen.  "Carry
these gentlemen to their courier ship, please."

The jeep was spinning away in the drizzle before Jolober had closed and
locked the door again.  It didn't occur to him that it mattered whether
or not the troops bivouacked around Paradise Port knew immediately what
Hammer had just arranged.

And it didn't occur to him, as he bounced his chair up the stairs
calling, "Vicki!  We've won!"  that he should feel any emotion except
joy.

"Vicki!"  he repeated as he opened the bedroom door.  They'd have to
leave Placida unless he could get Vicki released from the blanket order
on Dolls--but he hadn't expected to keep his job anyway, not after he
went over the head of the whole Placidan government.

"Vi--"

She'd left a light on, one of the point sources in the ceiling.  It was
a shock, but not nearly as bad a shock as Jolober would have gotten if
he'd slid onto the bed in the dark.

"Who?"  his tongue asked while his mind couldn't think of anything to
say, could only move his chair to the bedside and palm the hydraulics
to lower him into a sitting position.

Her right hand and forearm were undamaged.  She flexed her fingers and
the keen plastic blade shot from her fist, then collapsed again into a
baton.  She let it roll onto the bedclothes.

"He couldn't force me to kill you," Vicki said.  "He was very
surprised, very...."

Jolober thought she might be smiling, but he couldn't be sure since she
no longer had lips.  The plastic edges of the knife Vicki took as she
dressed him were not sharp

enough for finesse, but she had not attempted surgical delicacy.

Yield had destroyed herself from toes to her once-perfect face.  All
she had left was one eye with which to watch Jolober, and the parts of
her body which she couldn't reach unaided.  She had six ribs to a side,
broader and flatter than those of a human's skeleton.  After she laid
open the ribs, she had dissected the skin and flesh of the left side
farther.

Jolober had always assumed--when he let himself think about it--that
her breasts were sponge implants.  He'd been wrong.  On the bedspread
lay a wad of yellowish fat streaked with blood vessels.  He didn't have
a background that would tell him whether or not it was human normal,
but it certainly was biological.

It was a tribute to Vicki's toughness that she had remained alive as
long as she had.

Instinct turned Jolober's head to the side so that he vomited away from
the bed.  He clasped Vicki's right hand with both of his, keeping his
eyes closed so that he could imagine that everything was as it had been
minutes before when he was triumphantly happy.  His left wrist brushed
the knife that should have remained an inert baton in any hands but
his.  He snatched up the weapon, feeling the blade flow out As it had
when Vicki held it, turned it on herself.

"We are one, my Horace," she whispered, her hand squeezing his.

It was the last time she spoke, but Jolober couldn't be sure of that
because his mind had shifted out of the present into a cosmos limited
to the sense of touch: body-warm plastic in his left hand, and flesh
cooling slowly in his right.

He sat in his separate cosmos for almost an hour, until the emergency
call on his mastoid implant threw him back into an existence where his
life had purpose.

"All units!"  cried a voice on the panic push.  "The--"

The blast of static which drowned the voice lasted only a fraction of a
second before the implant's logic circuits shut the unit down to keep
the white noise from driving Jolober mad.  The implant would be
disabled as long as the

jamming continued--but jamming of this intensity would block even the
most sophisticated equipment in the Slammers' tanks.

Which were probably carrying out the jamming.

Jolober's hand slipped the knife away without thinking-with fiery
determination not to think--as his stump kicked the chair into life and
he glided toward the alley stairs.  He was still dressed, still mounted
in his saddle, and that was as much as he was willing to know about his
immediate surroundings.

The stairs rang.  The thrust of his fans was a fitful gust on the metal
treads each time he bounced on his way to the ground.

The voice could have been Feldman at the gate; she was the most likely
source anyway.  At the moment, Jolober had an emergency.

In a matter of minutes, it could be a disaster instead.

It was raining, a nasty drizzle which distorted the invitations
capering on the building fronts.  The street was empty except for a
pair of patrol jeeps, bubbles in the night beneath canopies that would
stop most of the droplets.

Even this weather shouldn't have kept soldiers from scurrying from one
establishment to another, hoping to change their luck when they changed
location.  Overhanging facades ought to have been crowded with morose
troopers, waiting for a lull--or someone drunk or angry enough to lead
an exodus toward another empty destination.

The emptiness would have worried Jolober if he didn't have much better
reasons for concern.  The vehicles sliding down the street from the
gate were unlighted, but there was no mistaking the roar of a tank.

Someone in the China Doll heard and understood the sound also, because
the armored door squealed down across the archway even as Jolober's
chair lifted him in that direction at high thrust.

He braked in a spray.  The water-slicked pavement didn't affect his
control, since the chair depended on thrust rather than friction--but
being able to stop didn't give him any ideas about how he should
proceed.

One of the patrol jeeps swung in front of the tank with a courage and
panache which made Jolober proud of his men.  The patrolman on the
passenger side had ripped the canopy away to stand waving a yellow
light-wand with furious determination.

The tank did not slow.  It shifted direction just enough to strike the
jeep a glancing blow instead of center-punching it.  That didn't spare
the vehicle; its light frame crumpled like tissue before it resisted
enough to spin across the pavement at twice the velocity of the slowly
advancing tank.  The slight adjustment in angle did save the patrolmen,
who were thrown clear instead of being ground between concrete and the
steel skirts.

The tank's scarred turret made it identifiable in the light of the
building fronts.  Jolober crooked his finger and shouted, "Commandant
to Corporal Days.  For the Lord's sake, trooper, don't get your unit
disbanded for mutiny!  Colonel Hammer's already gotten Red Ike ordered
off-planet!"

There was no burp from his mastoid as Central retransmitted the message
a microsecond behind the original.  Only then did Jolober recall that
the Slammers had jammed his communications.

Not the Slammers alone.  The two vehicles behind the tank were squat
armored personnel carriers, each capable of hauling an infantry section
with all its equipment.  Nobody had bothered to paint out the fender
markings of the Division Legere.

Rain stung Jolober's eyes as he hopped the last five meters to the
sealed facade of the China Doll.  Anything could be covered, could be
settled, except murder--and killing Red Ike would be a murder of which
the Bonding Authority would have to take cognizance.

"Let me in!"  Jolober shouted to the door.  The armor was so thick that
it didn't ring when he pounded it.  "Let me--"

Normally the sound of a mortar firing was audible for a kilometer, a
hollow shoo mp  like a firecracker going off in an oil drum.  Jolober
hadn't heard the launch from beyond the perimeter because of the nearby
roar of drive fans.

When the round went off on the roof of the China Doll,

the charge streamed tendrils of white fire down as far as the
pavement, where they pocked the concrete.  The snake pit coruscance of
blue sparks lighting the roof a moment later was the battery pack of
Red Ike's air car shorting through the new paths the mortar shell had
burned in the car's circuitry.

The meres were playing for keeps.  They hadn't come to destroy the
China Doll and leave its owner to rebuild somewhere else.

The lead tank swung in the street with the cautious delicacy of an
elephant wearing a hoop skirt  Its driving lights blazed on,
silhouetting the port commandant against the steel door.  Jolober held
out his palm in prohibition, knowing that if he could delay events even
a minute, Red Ike would escape through his tunnel.

Everything else within the China Doll was a chattel which could be
compensated with money.

There was a red flash and a roar from the stern of the tank, then an
explosion muffled by a meter of concrete and volcanic rock.  Buildings
shuddered like sails in a squall; the front of the port offices cracked
as its fabric was placed under a flexing strain that concrete was never
meant to resist.

The rocket-assisted penetrators carried by the Slammers' tanks were
intended to shatter bunkers of any thickness imaginable in the field.
Red Ike's bolt-hole was now a long cavity filled with chunks and dust
of the material intended to protect it.

The tanks had very good detection equipment, and combat troops live to
become veterans by observing their surroundings.  Quite clearly, the
tunnel had not escaped notice when Tad Hoffritz led his company down
the street to hoo-rah Paradise Port.

"Wait!"  Jolober shouted, because there's always a chance until there's
no chance at all.

"Get out of the way, Commandant!"  boomed the tank's public address
system, loudly enough to seem an echo of the penetrators earth shock

"Colonel Hammer has--" Jolober shouted.

"We'd as soon not hurt you," the speakers roared as the

turret squealed ten degrees on its gimbals.  The main gun's bore was a
20em tube aligned perfectly with Jolober's eyes.

They couldn't hear him; they wouldn't listen if they could; and anyway,
the troopers involved in this weren't interested in contract law.  They
wanted justice, and to them that didn't mean a ticket off-planet for
Red Ike.

The tri barrel in the tank's cupola fired a single shot.  The bolt of
directed energy struck the descending arch just in front of Jolober and
gouged the plastic away in fire and black smoke.  Bits of the covering
continued to burn, and the underlying concrete added an odor of hot
lime to the plastic and the ozone of the bolt's track through the
air.

Jolober's miniature vehicle thrust him away in a flat arc, out of the
door alcove and sideways in the street as a power gun fired from a port
concealed in the China Doll's facade.  The tank's main gun demolished
the front wall with a single round.

The street echoed with the thunderclap of cold air ruling the track
seared through it by the energy bolt.  The pistol shot an instant
earlier could almost have been a proleptic reflection, confused in
memory with the sun-bright cyan glare of the tank cannon--and, by being
confused, forgotten.

Horace Jolober understood the situation too well to mistake its events.
The shot meant Red Ike was still in the China Doll, trapped there and
desperate enough to issue his Droids lethal weapons that must have been
difficult even for him to smuggle into Paradise Port.

Desperate and foolish, because the pistol bolt had only flicked dust
from the tank's indium turret.  Jolober had warned Red Ike that combat
troops played by a different rule book  The message just hadn't been
received until it was too late..  ..

Jolober swung into the three-meter alley beside the China Doll.  There
was neither an opening here nor ornamentation, just the blank concrete
wall of a fortress.

Which wouldn't hold for thirty seconds if the combat team out front
chose to assault it.

The tank had fired at the building front, not the door.  The main gun
could have blasted a hole in the armor, but that wouldn't have been a
large enough entrance for the infantry now deploying behind the armored
flanks of the APCs.

The concrete wall shattered like a bomb when it tried to absorb the
point-blank energy of the 20em gun.  The cavity the shot left was big
enough to pass a jeep with a careful driver.  Infantrymen in battle
armor, hunched over their weapons, dived into the China Doll.  The
interior lit with cyan flashes as they shot everything that moved.

The exterior lighting had gone out, but flames clawed their way up the
thermoplastic facade.  The fire threw a red light onto the street in
which shadows of smoke capered like demons.  Drips traced blazing lines
through the air as they fell to spatter troops waiting their turn for a
chance to kill.

The assault didn't require a full infantry platoon, but few operations
have failed because the attackers had too many troops.

Jolober had seen the equivalent too often to doubt how it was going to
go this time.  He didn't have long; very possibly he didn't have long
enough.

Standing parallel to the sheer sidewall, Jolober ran his fans up full
power, then clamped the plenum chamber into a tight nozzle and lifted.
His left hand paddled against the wall three times.  That gave him
balance and the suggestion of added thrust to help his screaming fans
carry out a task for which they hadn't been designed.

When his palm touched the coping, Jolober used the contact to center
him, and rotated onto the flat roof of the China Doll.

Sparks spat peevishly from the corpse of the air car  The vehicle's
frame was a twisted wire sculpture from which most of the sheathing
material had burned away, but occasionally the breeze brought oxygen to
a scrap that was still combustible.

The penthouse that held Ike's office and living quarters was a squat
box beyond the air car  The mortar shell had detonated just as the
alien started to run for his vehicle.

He'd gotten back inside as the incendiary compound sprayed the roof,
but bouncing fragments left black trails across the plush blue floor of
the office.

The door was a section of wall broad enough to have passed the air car
Red Ike hadn't bothered to close it when he fled to his elevator and
the tunnel exit.  Jolober, skimming again on ground effect, slid into
the office shouting, "Ike!  This--"

Red Ike burst from the elevator cage as the door rotated open.  He had
a pistol and eyes as wide as a madman's as he swung the weapon toward
the hulking figure in his office.

Jolober reacted as the adrenaline pumping through his body had primed
him to do.  The arm with which he swatted at the pistol was long enough
that his fingers touched the barrel, strong enough that the touch
hurled the gun across the room despite Red Ike's death grip on the
butt.

Red Ike screamed.

An explosion in the elevator shaft wedged the elevator doors as they
began to close and burped orange flame against the far wall.

Jolober didn't know how the assault team proposed to get to the roof,
but neither did he intend to wait around to learn.  He wrapped both
arms around the stocky alien and shouted, "Shut up and hold still if
you want to get out of here alive!"

Red Ike froze, either because he understood the warning --or because at
last he recognized Horace Jolober and panicked to realize that the port
commandant had already disarmed him.

Jolober lifted the alien and turned his chair.  It glided toward the
door at gathering speed, logy with the double burden.

There was another blast from the office.  The assault team had cleared
the elevator shaft with a cratering charge whose directed blast sprayed
the room with the bits and vapors that remained of the cage.  Grenades
would be next, then grappling hooks and more grenades just
beforeJolober kicked his throttle as he rounded the air car  The fans
snarled and the ride, still on ground effect, became greasy as the
skirts lifted un desirably

The office rocked in a series of dense white flashes.  The room lights
went out and a large piece of shrapnel, the fuze housing of a grenade,
powdered a fist-sized mass of the concrete coping beside Jolober.

His chair's throttle had a gate.  With the fans already at normal
maximum, he sphinctered his skirts into a nozzle and kicked again at
the throttle.  He could smell the chair's circuits frying under the
overload as it lifted Jolober and Red Ike to the coping But it did lift
them, and after a meter's run along the narrow track to build speed, it
launched them across the black, empty air of the alley.

Red Ike wailed.  The only sound Horace Jolober made was in his mind. He
saw not a roof but the looming bow of a tank, and his fears shouted the
word they hadn't been able to get out on Primavera either: "Not"

They cleared the coping of the other roof with a click, not a crash,
and bounced as Jolober spilled air and cut thrust back to normal
levels.

An explosion behind them lit the night red and blew chunks of Red Ike's
office a hundred meters in the air.

Instead of trying to winkle out their quarry with gunfire, the assault
team had lobbed a bunker-buster up the elevator shaft.  The blast
walloped Jolober even though distance and the pair of meter-high
concrete copings protected his hunching form from dangerous
fragments.

Nothing in the penthouse of the China Doll could have survived.  It
wasn't neat, but it saved lives where they counted--in the attacking
force--and veteran soldiers have never put a high premium on finesse.

"You saved me," Red Ike said.

Jolober's ears were numb from the final explosion, but he could watch
Red Ike's lips move in the flames lifting even higher from the front of
the China Doll.

"I had to," Jolober said, marvelling at how fully human the alien
seemed.  "Those men, they're line soldiers.  They think that because
there were so many of them involved, nobody can be punished."

Hatches rang shut on the armored personnel carriers.

A noncom snarled an order to stragglers that could be heard even over
the drive fans.

Red Ike started toward the undamaged air car parked beside them on this
roof.  Jobber's left hand still held the alien's wrist.  Ike paused as
if to pretend his movement had never taken place.  His face was
emotionless.

"Numbers made it a mutiny," Jolober continued.  Part of him wondered
whether Red Ike could hear the words he was speaking in a soft voice,
but he was unwilling to shout.

It would have been disrespectful.

Fierce wind rocked the flames as the armored vehicles, tank in the lead
as before, lifted and began to howl their way out of Paradise Port.

"I'll take care of you," Red Ike said.  "You'll have Vicki back in
three weeks, I promise.  Tailored to you, just like the other.  You
won't be able to tell the difference."

"There's no me to take care of any more," said Horace Jolober with no
more emotion than a man tossing his uniform into a laundry hamper.

"You see," he added as he reached behind him, "if they'd killed you
tonight, the Bonding Authority would have disbanded both units whatever
the Placidans wanted.  But me?  Anything I do is my responsibility."

Red Ike began to scream in a voice that became progressively less human
as the sound continued.

Horace Jolober was strong enough that he wouldn't have needed the knife
despite the way his victim struggled.

But it seemed like a fitting monument for Vicki.

STANDING DOWN

"Look, I'm not about to wear a goon suit like that, even to my
wedding," Colonel Hammer said, loudly enough to be heard through the
chatter.  There were a dozen officers making last-minute uniform
adjustments in the crowded office and several civilians besides.
"Joachim, where's Major Pritchard?  I want him in the car with us, and
it's curst near jump-off now."

Joachim Steuben was settled nonchalantly on the corner of a desk,
unconcerned about the state of his dress because he knew it was
perfect--as always.  He shrugged.  "Pritchard hasn't called in," the
Newlander said.  His fine features brightened in a smile.  "But go
ahead, Alois, put the armor on."

"Yes indeed, sir," said the young civilian.  He was holding the set of
back-and-breast armor carefully by the edges so as not to smear its
bright chrome.  Rococo whorls and figures decorated the plastron, but
despite its ornateness, the metal ceramic sandwich beneath the
brightwork was quite functional.  "Really, the image you'll project to
the spectators will be ideal, quite ideal.  And there couldn't be a
better time for it, either."

lieutenant Colonel Miezierk frowned, wrinkling his forehead to the
middle of his bald skull.  He said, "Yes Colonel.  After all, Mr.  van
Meter's firm studied the matter very carefully and I think--" Joachim
snickered; Miezierk's scalp reddened but he went on "--that you ought
to follow his advice here."

"Lord!"  Hammer said, but he thrust his hands through the armholes and
let Miezierk lock the clamshell back.

Someone tapped on the door.  A lieutenant was leaning over the front
desk, combing his hair in the screen of the display console.  He cursed
and straightened so that the door could open to admit Captain Fallman.
The Intelligence captain was duty officer for the afternoon, harried by
the inevitable series of last-minute emergencies.  "Colonel," he said,
"there's a Mr.  Wang here to see you."

"Lord curse it, Fallman, he can wait till tomorrow!"  Hammer blazed.
"He can wait till Hell freezes over.  Miezierk, get this bloody can off
me, it's driving the stylus in my pocket clear through my rib cage."

""Sir, we can take the stylus--" Miezierk began.

"Sir, he's from the Bonding Authority," Fallman was saying.  "It's
about President Theismann's--death."

Hammer swore, brushing the startled Miezierk's hands away.  The room
grew very silent.  "Joachim what's in the office next door?"  Hammer
asked.

"Dust, three walls, and some stains from the Iron Guards who decided to
make a stand there," the Newlander replied.

"Bring him next door, Captain, I'll talk to him there," Hammer said. He
met his bodyguard's eyes.  "Come along too, Joachim."

At the door the colonel paused, looking back at his still faced
officers.  "Don't worry," he said.  "Everything's going to work out
fine."

The closing door cut off the babble of nervous speculation from
within.

A moment after Hammer and his aide had entered the side office, Captain
Fallman ushered in a heavy Oriental.  Joachim bowed to the civilian and
closed the door, leaving the duty officer alone in the hallway.

An automatic weapon had punched through the outer wall of the office,
starting fires which the grenade thrown in a moment later had snuffed.
There was still a scorched plastic after-stench mingling with that of
month-dead meat.  Joachim had been serious about the Iron Guards.

"I'm Hammer," the colonel said, smiling but not offering the Authority
representative his hand for fear it might be refused.

"Wang An-wei," said the Oriental, nodding curtly.  He held a flat
briefcase.  It seemed to be more an article of dress than a tool he
intended to use this morning.  "I was sent here as Site Officer when
Councillor Theismann--"

"President Theismann, he preferred," interjected Hammer.  He seated
himself in feigned relaxation on a blast warped chair.

Wang's answering smile was brief and as sharp as the lightning.  "He
was never awarded the title by a quorum of the Council," the Terran
said.  "As you no doubt are aware, Site Officers are expected to be
precise.  If I may continue?"

Hammer nodded.  Steuben snickered.  His left thumb was hooked in the
belt which tucked his tailored blouse in at the waist, but his right
hand dangled loose at his side.

"When Councillor Theismann hired you to make him dictator," Wang
continued coolly.  "Naturally I have been investigating the death of
your late employer.  There have been--and I'm sure you're aware of
this--accusations that you murdered Councillor Theismann yourself in
order to replace him as head of the successful coup."

The Site Officer looked at the men in turn.  The two Slammers looked
back.

"I started with the autopsy data.  In addition, I have interrogated the
Councillor's guards, both his personal contingent and the platoon
of--White Mice--on security detail here at Government House."  Wang
stared at Hammer.  "I assume you were informed of this?"

Hammer nodded curtly.  "I signed off before they'd let you mind-probe
my men."

"I used mechanical interrogation on all troops below officer rank
involved," Wang agreed, "as your bond agreement specifies the Site
Officer may require."  When Hammer made no reply, he continued, "The
evidence is un controverted that Councillor Theismann, accompanied by
you, Colonel--" Hammer nodded again "--stepped out

onto his balcony and was struck in the forehead by a pistol bolt."

Wang paused again.  The room was very tense.  "The pistol must have
been fired from at least a kilometer away.  Because of the distance and
the fact that fighting was going on at several points within the city,
I have reported to my superiors that it was a stray shot, and that the
Councillor's death was accidental."

Joachim's fingers ceased toying with the butt of the power gun
holstered high on his right hip.  "We were clearing some of van Vorn's
people out of the Hotel Zant," he said.  "Pistol and submachine gun
work.  There might have been a stray shot from that.  It'd be very
difficult to brain a man that far away with a pistol, wouldn't it?"

"Impossible, of course," Wang said.  His gaze flicked to Steuben's
ornate pistol, flicked up to the bodyguard's eyes.  For the first time
the Oriental looked startled.  He looked away from Steuben very quickly
and said, "Since the investigation has cleared you, and your employment
has ended for the time, I'll be returning to Earth now.  I wish you
good fortune, and I hope we may do business again in the near
future."

Hammer laughed, clapping the civilian on the shoulder with his left
hand while their right hands shook.  "That's all over, Mr.  Wang.  The
Slammers're out of the mere business for good, now.  But I appreciate
your wishes."

Wang turned to the door, smiling by reflex.  He looked at Joachim's
face again: the Cupid grin and unlined cheeks; the hair which, though
naturally graying, still fell across the Newlander's forehead in an
attractive page-boy; and the eyes.  Wang was shivering as he stepped
into the hall.

Danny Pritchard stood outside the door watching the Site Officer leave.
He was dressed in civilian clothing.

Spaceport buses did not serve the cargo ships for the man or two they
might bring, so Rob Jenne hiked toward the barrier on foot.  At first
he noticed only that the short man marching toward the terminal from
the other recently landed freighter was also missing an arm.  Then the
other's

crisp stride rang a bell in Jenne's mind.  He shouted, Top!  Sergeant
Horthy!  What the hell're you doing here?"

Horthy turned with the wary quickness of a man uncertain as to any
caller's interest.  At Jenne's grin he broke into a smile himself.  The
two men dropped their bags and shook hands awkwardly, Jenne's left in
Horthy's right.  "Same thing you're doing, trooper," Horthy said.  The
Magyar's goatee was white against his swarthy skin, but his grip was as
firm as it had been when Rob Jenne was Horthy's right wing gunner.
"Comin' here to help the colonel put some backbone in this place.  You
don't know how glad I was when the call came, snake."

"Don't I though?"  Jenne murmured.  Side by side, talking
simultaneously, the two veterans walked toward the spaceport barrier.
There was already a line waiting at the customs kiosk.  Jenne knew very
well what his old sergeant meant.  Seven years of retirement had been
hard on the younger man, too.  He hadn't lacked money--his pension put
him well above the norm for the Burlage quarry men to whom he had
returned--but he was useless.  To himself, to Burlage, to the entire
human galaxy.  Jenne had shouted for joy when Colonel Hammer summoned
all pensioned Slammers who wanted to come.  The Old Man needed
supervisors and administrators, now.  It didn't matter any more that
gaseous indium had burned off Jenne's right arm, right eye, and his
gonads; it was enough that Hammer knew where his loyalties lay.

A gray bus with wire-mesh windows and SECURITY stencilled on its side
pulled up to the barrier.  The faces and clothing of the prisoners
within were as drab as the air cushion vehicle's exterior.  A guard
wearing the blue of the civil police stepped out and walked to the
barrier.  His submachine gun was slung carelessly under his right
arm.

Horthy nudged his companion.  "It's a load a' politicals for the Borgo
Mines," he muttered.  "Bet they're being' hauled out on the ship that
brought me in.  And I'll bet that bus'll be heading back to wherever
the colonel is, just as quick as it unloads.  Let's see if that cop'll
offer us a ride, snake."

As he spoke, the Magyar veteran stepped to the waist high barrier. The
customs official bustled over from his kiosk and shouted in Horthy's
face.  Horthy ignored him.  The official unsnapped the flap of his
pistol holster.  Other travellers waiting for entry scattered, more
afraid of losing their lives than their places in line.  Jenne, his
good eye flashing across the tension, knowing as well as any man alive
that his muscles were nothing to the blast of a power gun cursed and
closed the Magyar's rear.

A second bus, civilian in stripes of white and bright orange, pulled up
behind the prison vehicle.  The policeman turned and waved angrily. The
bus hissed and settled to the pavement despite him.  The policeman
fumbled with his submachine gun.

A shot from the bus cut him down.

A man with a pistol swung to the loading step of the striped vehicle.
He roared, "Just hold it, everybody.  We got a load of hostages here.
Either we get out of here with our friends or nobody gets out!"

The customs official had paused, staring with his mouth open and his
fingers brushing the butt of the gun whose existence he had forgotten.
Horthy, behind him, drew the pistol and fired.  The rebel doubled over,
his jacket afire over his sternum.  Someone aboard the civilian bus
screamed.  Another gun fired.  Horthy was prone, his pistol punching
out windows in answer to the burst that had sawed the customs official
in half.

Rob rolled over the barrier, coming up with the guard's automatic
weapon.

The striped bus was moving, dragging the fallen gunman's torso on the
concrete.  The ex-tanker's mind raced in the old channels.  The fans of
the bus were not armored like those of a military vehicle.  Rob aimed
low.  A power gun bolt sprayed lime dust over his head and shoulders.
His own burst ripped across the plenum chamber.  The driving fans
disintegrated, flaying the air with steel like a bursting shell.  The
bus rolled over on its left side.  Metal and humans screamed together.
A gray-suited prisoner jumped from the door of the government bus.
Horthy shot her in the face.

The ruptured fuel cell of the overturned vehicle ignited.  The
explosion slapped the area with a pillow of warm air.  The screaming
took a minute to die.  Then there was just the rush of wind feeding the
fire, and the nearing wail of sirens.

Jenne's cheek and shoulder-stub were oozing where the concrete had
ground against them.  He rose to his knees, keeping his eye and the
submachine gun trailed on the gray bus.  No one else was trying to get
out of it.  The police could sort through whatever had happened inside
in their own good time.

Horthy stood, heat rippling from the barrel of the weapon he had
appropriated.  He glanced at the mangled customs official as if he
would rather have spit on the body.  "Oh, yes," the veteran said. 
"They need us here, trooper.  They need people to teach 'em the facts
of life."

"Pritchard, where the Hell have you been?"  Hammer demanded, pretending
that he did not understand the implications of his subordinate's
business suit.

"I need to talk to you, Colonel," the brown-haired major said.

Hammer stood aside.  Then come on in.  Joachim, we'll join the group
next door in a moment.  Wait for us there, if you will."

Pritchard took a step forward.  He hesitated when he realized that
Joachim was not moving.  The Newlander had been as relaxed as a sunning
adder during the interview with Wang An-wei.  Now he was white and
tense.  "Colonel, he's a traitor to you," Joachim said.  "He's going to
walk out."  His voice was quiet but not soft.

"Joachim, I told you--"

"You don't talk to traitors, Colonel.  What you do to traitors--" The
Newlander's hand was dipping to his gun butt.  Hammer grappled with
him.  He was not as fast as his aide, but he knew Joachim's mind even
better than the gunman did himself.  The extra fraction of a second
saved Pritchard's life.

The two men stood, locked like wrestlers or lovers.  Pritchard did not
move, knowing that emphasizing his

presence would be the worst possible course under the circumstances.
Hammer said, "Joachim, are you willing to shoot me?"

The bodyguard winced, a tic that momentarily disfigured his face.
"Alois!  You know I wouldn't..  .."

"Then do as I say.  Or you'll have to shoot me.  To keep me from
shooting you."

Hammer stepped away from his aide.  Joachim lurched through the
doorway, bumping Pritchard as he passed because his eyes had filled
with tears.

Pritchard swung the door shut behind him.  "I told you last week I was
going to resign from the Slammers, sir."

Hammer nodded.  "And I told you you weren't."

Pritchard looked around at the dust and rubble of the room, the
bloodstains.  "I've decided there's been enough killing, Colonel.  For
me.  We're going somewhere else."

"Danny, the killing's over!"

The taller man gave a short snap of his head.  He said, "No, it'll
never be over--not any place you are."  He spread his hands, then
clenched them.  He was staring at his knuckles because he would not
look at his commander.  "Right now we're chasing van Vorn's guards like
rabbits, shooting 'em down or sticking 'em behind wire where they're
not a curse a' good to you or themselves or this planet."

He faced Hammer, the outrage bubbling out at a human being, not the
colonel he had served for all his adult life.  "And the ones we
kill--doesn't every one a' them have a wife or a brother or a nephew?
And they'll put a knife in a Slammer some night and be shot the same
way because of it!"

"All right," said Hammer calmly.  "What else?"

"How about the Social Unity Party, then?"  Pritchard blazed.  "Maybe
the one chance to get this place a work force that works instead of the
robots the Great Houses've been trying to make them.  And does anybody
listen?  Hell, no!  The Council tinkers with the franchise to make sure
they don't get a majority of the Estates-General; van Vorn outlaws the
party and makes their leaders terrorists instead of politicians.  And
you, you ship them off-planet to rot in state-owned mines on Kobold!"

"All right," Hammer repeated.  He sat down again, his stillness as
compelling as that of the shattered room around him.  "What would you
do?"

Pritchard's eyes narrowed.  He stretched his left hand out to the wall,
not leaning on it but touching its firmness, its chill.  "What do you
care?"  he asked quietly.  "I didn't say the Slammers couldn't keep you
in power here the rest of your life.  I just don't want to be a part of
it, is all."

Without warning, Hammer stood and slammed his fist into the wall.  He
turned back to his aide.  His bleeding knuckles had flecked the panel
more brightly than the remains of the Iron Guards.  "Is that what you
think?"  he demanded.  "That I'm a bandit who's found himself a bolt
hole?  That for the past thirty years I've fought wars because that's
the best way to make bodies?"

"Sir, I ..."  But Pritchard had nothing more to say or need to say
it.

Hammer rubbed his knuckles.  He grinned wryly at his subordinate, but
the grin slipped away.  "It's my own fault," he said.  "I don't tell
people much.  That's how it's got to be when you're running a tank
regiment, but .. . that's not where we are now.

"Danny, this is my home."  Hammer began to reach out to the taller man
but stopped.  He said, "You've been out there.  You've seen how every
world claws at every other one, claws its own guts too.  The whole
system's about to slag down, and there's nothing to stop it if we
don't."

"You don't create order by ramming it down peoples' throats on a
bayonet!  It doesn't work that way."

"Then show me a way that does work!"  Hammer cried, gripping his
subordinates right hand with his own.  "Are things going to get better
because you're sitting on your butt in some farmhouse, living off the
money you made killing?  Danny I need you.  My son will need you."

Pritchard touched his tongue to his lips.  "What is it you're asking me
to do?"  he said.

"Do you have a way to handle the Unionists?"  Hammer shot back at him.
"And the Iron Guards?"

"Maybe," Pritchard said with a frown.  "Amnesty won't be enough--they
won't believe it's real, for one thing.  But a promise of authority ..
. administrative posts in education, labor, maybe even security--that'd
bring out a few of the Unionists because they couldn't afford not to
take the chance.  Most of the rest of them might follow when they saw
you really were paying off."

The brown-haired man's enthusiasm was building without the hostility
that had marked it before.  "The Guards, that'll be harder because
they're rigid, most of them.  But if you can find some way to convince
them there's nothing to gain by staying out, and--Hell, there'll be
counter-protests, but work the ones who turn over their guns into the
civil police.  Not in big dollops, but scattered all over the planet.
They'll feel more secure that way, and you can keep an eye on them
easier anyhow."

Hammer nodded.  "All right, bring me a preliminary assessment of both
proposals by, say, 0800 Tuesday.  No, make that noon, you're going to
waste the rest of today watching a wedding from the front row.  You'll
have the backing you'll need, but these are your projects--I've got too
much blood on my hands to run them."  His eyes held Pritchard's.  "Or
don't you have the guts to try?"

The taller man hesitated, then squeezed Hammer's hand in return.  "I
rode your lead tank," he said.  "I ran your lead company.  If you need
me now, you've got me."  His face clouded.  "Only, Colonel--"

Hammer tightened.  "Spit it out."  "I'm not ashamed of anything.  But I
swore to Margritte I'd never wear another uniform or carry another gun.
And I won't."

Hammer cleared his throat.  "Right now I don't need a major as much as
I do a conscience," he said.  He cleared his throat again.  "Now let's
go.  We've got a wedding to get to."

Cosimo Barracks was a fortress in the midst of estates which had
belonged for three hundred years to the family of the late President
van Vorn.  The Slammers had bypassed

Cosimo in the blitzkrieg which replaced van Vorn with Theismann, their
employer.  But now, a month after van Vorn had poisoned himself in
Government House and three weeks after someone else had burst
Theismanns skull with a power gun the fortress still refused to
surrender.  Sally Schilling, leading a "battalion" made up of S Company
and six hundred local recruits, was on hand to do something about the
situation.

A burst of automatic fire combed the rim of the dugout, splashing
Captain Schilling with molten granite.  "Via!"  she snapped to the
frightened recruit.  "Keep your coppy head down and don't draw fire."

The sergeant who shared the dugout with Schilling and the recruit shook
his own head in disgust.  In her mind, Schilling seconded the opinion.
To police a planet, Hammer needed more men than the five thousand he
had brought with him.  He wanted to give the new troops at least a
taste of combat in the mopping-up operations.  Schilling could
understand that desire, but it was a pain in the ass trying to do her
own job and act as baby-sitter besides.

She looked again through the eyepiece of her periscope.  The machine
gun had ceased firing, though cyan flickers across the perimeter showed
someone else was catching it.  The Iron Guards were political bullies
rather than combat soldiers, but their fortress here was as tough as
anything the Slammers had faced in their history.  The fiber optics
periscope showed Cosimo Barracks only as a rolling knob.  The grass
covering the rock was streaked yellow in fans pointing back to hidden
gun ports.  The ports themselves were easy enough targets, but the
weapons within were on disappearing carriages and popped up only long
enough to fire.  The rest of the fortress, with an estimated five
hundred Iron Guards plus enough food, water and ammunition to last a
century, was deep underground.

Schilling glanced down at her console.  On it Cosimo Barracks showed as
a red knot of tunnels drawn from plans found in Government House.
"Sigma Battalion," she said, "check off."  Points of green light winked
on the screen, an emerald necklace ringing the fortress.  Each point
was

a squad guarding nearly one hundred meters of front.  That was
adequate; the infantry was on hand primarily to prevent a breakout.

"Fire Central," Schilling said, "prepare Fire Order Tango-Niner."

"Ready," squawked the helmet.

"Ma'am," said the recruit, "w-why don't the tanks attack instead of
us?"

"Shut it off, boy!"  the sergeant snapped.

"No, Webbert, we're supposed to be teaching them," Schilling said.  She
gestured toward the knob.  The recruit automatically raised his head.
Webbert shoved him back down before another burst could decapitate him.
The captain sighed.  "Mines're as thick up there as flies on a fresh
turd," she said, "and they've got more guns in that hill than the light
stuff they've been using on us.  Besides, we aren't going to attack."

The recruit nodded with his mouth and eyes both wide open.  He began to
rub the stock of his unfamiliar power gun "Fire Central, execute
Tango-Niner," Schilling ordered.

"On the way."  Nothing happened.  After a long half minute, the recruit
burst out, "What went wrong?  Dear Lord, will they make us charge--"

"Boy!"  the sergeant shouted, his own knuckles tight on his weapon.

"Webbert!"

The sergeant cursed and turned away.

Schilling said, "The hogs're a long way away.  It takes time, that's
all.  Everything takes time."

"Shot," said the helmet.  Five seconds to impact.  The sky overhead
began to howl.  The recruit was trembling, his own throat working as if
to scream along with the shells.

The explosions were almost anticlimactic.  They were only a rumbling
through the bedrock, more noticed by one's feet than one's ears.
Schilling, at the periscope, caught the spurts of earth as the first
penetrator rounds struck.  The detonations seconds later were lost in
the shriek of further shells

landing on the same points.  Each tube's first shell ripped sod to the
granite.  The second salvo struck gravel; the third, sand.  By the
tenth salvo, the charges were bursting in the guts of Cosimo Barracks,
thirty meters down.  A magazine went off there, piercing earth and sky
in a cyan blast that made the sun pale.

"Not an oyster born yet but a starfish can drill a hole through it,"
muttered Webbert.  He had been a fisherman long years before when he
saw one of Hammers recruiting brochures.

"Sigma One, this is Sigma Eight-Six," said the helmet.  "Our sensors
indicate all three fortress elevators are rising."

With the words, circuits of meadow gaped.  "Sigma Battalion," Schilling
said as she rose and aimed over the lip of the dugout, "time to earn
our pay.  And remember-no prisoners!"

Because of the way the ground pitched, it was hard for the captain to
keep her submachine gun trained on the rising elevator car.  But there
were eight hundred guns firing simultaneously at the three elevator
heads.  The bolts converged like suns burning into the heart of the
hillside.

"They were sending up their families!"  the recruit suddenly screamed.
"The children!"

Sally Schilling slid a fresh gas cylinder in place in the butt of her
weapon, then reached for another magazine as well.  "They had three
months to turn in their guns," she said.  "Half the ones down there
were troops we beat at Maritschoon and paroled.  So this was the second
time, and I'm not going to have my ass blown away because I gave
somebody three chances to do it.  As for the families, well .. .
there's a couple thousand more of van Vorn's folks mooching around in
the Kronburg, and they won't know it was an accident: when word of this
gets around, the ones that're still out are going to think again."

The fortress guns had fallen silent as the elevator cars rose.  Now a
few weapons opened up again, but in long, suicidal bursts which flailed
the world until the Slammers' fire silenced them forever.

<- ^ <$

President van Vorn's Iron Guards had planned to use the garage beneath
Government House for a last stand; which in a manner of speaking was
what they did.  The political soldiers had naively failed to consider
gas.  The Slammers introduced KD7 into the forced ventilation system,
then spent three days neutralizing the toxin before they could safely
enter the garage and remove the bloated corpses.  Now the concrete
walls, unmarred by shots or grenade fragments, echoed to the fans of
two dozen combat cars readying for the parade.

"There's three layers a' gold foil," the bald maintenance chief was
saying as he rapped the limousine's myrmillon bubble.  "That'll diffuse
most of a two see emma bolt, but the folks, they'll still be able to
see you, you see?"

"What I don't see is my wife," Hammer snapped to the stiff-faced noble
acting as the Council's liaison with their new overlord.  "She's
agreed, I've agreed.  If you think that the Great Houses can back out
of this now--"

"Colonel," interrupted Pritchard, pointing at the closed car which was
just entering the garage.  The armored doors to the mews slammed shut
behind the vehicle, cutting off the wash of sunlight which had paled
the glow strips by comparison.  The car hissed slowly between armored
vehicles and support pillars, coming to a halt beside Hammer and his
aides.  Two men got out, dressed in the height of conservative fashion.
The colors of Great Houses slashed their collar flares.  A moment
later, a pair of women stepped out between them.

One of them was sixty, as tall and heavy as either of the men.  Her
black garments were as harsh as the glare she turned on Hammer when he
nodded to her.

The other woman was short enough to be petite.  It was hard to tell,
however, because she wore a dress of misty, layered fabric which gave
the impression of spiderweb but hid even the outline of her body.  The
celagauze veil hanging from her cap-brim blurred her face similarly.
Before any of those around her could interfere, she had reached up and
removed the cap.

"Anneke!"  cried the woman in black.  One of the escorting nobles
shifted.  Danny Pritchard motioned him back, using his left hand by
reflex.

Anneke sailed the cap into the intake of a revving combat car.  Shreds
of white fabric softened the floor of the garage.  "What, Aunt Ruth?"
she asked.  Her voice was clearly audible over the fans and the
engines.  "That's the idea, isn't it?  Prove to the citizens that the
Great Houses are still in charge because the colonel is marrying one of
us?  But then they've got to see who I am, don't they?"

Hammer stepped forward.  "Lady Brederode," he said, repeating his nod.
The older woman looked away as if Hammer were a spot of offal on the
pavement.  "Lady Tromp."

Anneke Tromp extended her right hand.  She had fine bones and skin as
soft as the lining of a jewelry box.  The fingernails looked
metallic.

The colonel knelt to kiss her hand, the gesture stiffened by his armor.
"Well, Lady Tromp," he said, "are you ready?"

The woman smiled.  Hammer became the commander again.  He waved
dismissingly toward his bride's aunt and escort.  "I've made provisions
for your seating at the church," he said, "but you'll not be needed for
the procession.  Lady Tromp will ride in my vehicle.  We'll be
accompanied by majors--that is, by Major Steuben and Mr.  Pritchard."

Anneke nodded graciously to the aides flanking Hammer.  Unexpectedly,
Joachim giggled.  His eyes were red.  "Your family and I go back a long
way, Lady," he said.  "Did you know that I shot your father on
Melpomene?  Between the eyes, so that he could see it coming."

The colonel's face changed, but he grinned as he turned.  He threw an
arm around his bodyguard's shoulders.  "Joachim," he said, "let's talk
in the car for a moment."  Steuben looked away, blazing hatred at
everyone else in the room, but he followed his commander into the
soundproofed compartment.

As the car door thudded shut, Anneke Tromp stepped idly to Pritchard's
side.  She was still smiling.  Without looking at the limousine's
bubble, she said, "That's a very

jealous man, Mr.  Pritchard.  And jealous not only of me, I should
think."

Danny shrugged.  "Joachim's been with the colonel a long time," he
said.  "He's not an ... evil .. . man.  Just loyal."

"A razor blade in a melon isn't evil, Mr.  Pritchard," the woman said,
gesturing as though they were discussing the markings of the nearest
combat car.  "It's just too dangerous to be permitted to exist."

Pritchard swallowed.  Part of his duties involved checking the roster
of veterans returning to the colors.  He was remembering a big man with
an engaging grin--as good a tank commander as had ever served under
Pritchard, and the lightest touch he knew on the trigger of an
automatic weapon.  "We'll see," Danny said without looking at the
woman.

"When I was a little girl," she murmured, "my father ruled Friesland. I
want to live to see my son rule."

The car door opened and both men got out.  "Joachim has decided to ride
up front with the driver instead of with us in back," Hammer said with
a false smile.  He held the door.  "Shall we?"

Pritchard sat on a jump seat across from Hammer and Lady Tromp.  The
armored bubble was cloudy, like the sky on the morning of a snowstorm.
Hammer touched a plate on the console.  "Six-two," he said.  "Move 'em
out."

Fans revved.  The garage door lifted and began passing combat cars out
into the mews.  Hammer's driver slid the limousine into the line of
cars waiting to exit.  More armored vehicles edged in behind them. They
accelerated up the ramp and into the Frisian sunlight.  The whole west
quarter of Government House had burned in the fighting, darkening the
vitril panels there.

Pritchard leaned forward.  "You don't really think that you can turn
Friesland around, much less the galaxy?"  he asked.

Hammer shrugged.  "If I don't, they'll at least say that I died
trying."

The limousine glided through the archway into Independence Boulevard.
Tank companies were already closing

either end of the block, eight tanks abreast.  The panzers had been
painted dazzlingly silver for the celebration.  The combat cars aligned
themselves in four ranks between the double caps of bigger vehicles,
leaving the limousine to tremble alone in the midst of the waves of
heavy armor.  Hammer's breastplate was a sun blazed eye in the center
of all.

On the front bench beside the driver, Joachim was trying nervously to
scan the thousands of civilians.  He knew that despite the armored
bubble, the right man could kill Hammer as easily as he himself had
murdered Councillor Theismann.  He wished he could kill every soul in
the crowd.

Pritchard checked the time, then radioed a command.  The procession
began to slip forward toward the throngs lining the remaining three
kilometers of the boulevard, all the way to the Church of the First
Landfall.

"I've been a long time coming back to Friesland," said Hammer softly.
He was not really speaking to his companions.  "But now I'm back.  And
I'm going to put this place in order."

Anneke Tromp touched him.  Her glittering fingernails lay like knife
blades across the back of his hand.  "We're going to put it in order,"
she said.

"We'll see," said Danny Pritchard.

"Hammer!"  shouted the crowd.

"Hammer!"

"Hammer!"

"Hammer!"