Collected Driblets of Baen at Dahak's Orbit at the Fifth Imperium Snippet Feed

Burdens of the Dead - Wed May 22 20:17:10 EDT 2013

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:17:10 -0400

"Burdens of the Dead" by Mercedes Lackey, Erik Flint and Dave Freer, last updated Wed May 22 20:17:10 EDT 2013

“To destroy it for ever so that I can have a better world for my daughter,” said Benito, lightly. “That’s what I want, but it is not what I’ll get.”

Androcles was amused now. “And what do you hope to get?

“I need to take a fleet all the way to Constantinople. In the teeth of winter. That is neither wise nor easy. But I believe it must be done. So we will do it. But I could use some help with the weather.”

Juliette snorted delicately. “Try gods.”

Benito ignored the comment. “You are more weather wise than we humans are. And I have heard tell you can communicate over long distances.”

Androcles wagged his head a bit. “It would be hard to be less weather wise than humans. And sound travels well underwater. We can hear sounds ten or twelve leagues away.”

“There are ports along the way, or at least sheltered anchorages we can use — if we are not caught too far from them. What I want is some kind of advance warning.”

“It’s not wise to cheat the sea of its prey,” said Androcles, with the air of someone testing waters.

Benito shrugged. “Please. This is me you are talking to. I’m not wise.”

“He even cheated the Lord of the Dead of his bride,” Juliette reminded all of them. With cautious admiration.

Benito squeezed Maria’s shoulder. “As much as I was able.”

“More than most humans,” said Androcles, but he nodded. “Very well. Something can be arranged. But there is a price.”

“If we can afford it, it is yours,” said Benito, sounding as if he was one of the best bargainers on the canals. He probably was, thought Maria, with an inward smile to herself. He’d started hard and young, no matter where he’d risen to.

“Ah. Nothing you cannot afford. A drop of your blood on the water when you wish to call us, and a little something that Venice can afford. Besides the fact that we owe the healer, it seems wise to be on the right side of you,” said Androcles disarmingly.

“And he is my god-daughter’s father,” said Juliette, coming forward to touch Alessia.

“What is it that you want?” asked Benito.

“A piece of water to call our own. A place where no-one fouls and no one fishes. A couple of acres here, within the Lion’s shelter, that we can call our own. If ill times are coming, we’ll need it.” By the sudden sober look on the triton’s face, this had been something the mer-folk had long desired. Maria understood. Sanctuary, under the shadow of the Lion…valuable. Worth, to them, more than pearls. If they could not be safe with the Lion to guard, they could not be safe anywhere.

Benito nodded. Maria knew it would not be easy to police, although Doge Petro could make it legally so at the stroke of a pen. She was a canaler. You could hardly be that without knowing that the writ of the law as to fishing rights was often trespassed on, and the offenders were seldom caught. And she had a strong feeling these were not folk you could casually give your word to. So she said so.

“We’ll tell you who breaks the bargain. There are always some who will go too far for fish.” Juliette looked pointedly at the triton

He grinned, showing sharp teeth. “It will be up to you landfolk to punish them. We will know if you do not.”

Benito nodded. “I will talk to Petro about it, but I think I can safely promise it. He knows the value of sanctuary — and allies.”

Maria planned to take it a step further. She’d talk to the canalers about it. There’d be enough of them heading out with her Benito. It was not a deal to be turned down. The canal people were superstitious enough to keep each other out of the protected water, just in case.

Marco, who still practiced most of his medicine among the Venice’s poor and probably knew them as well as Maria did, obviously thought likewise. “I will talk to the canalers. Keeping their loved ones safe from the ravages of the sea while on this voyage is a bargain they’ll find hard to refuse, I think. And if they agree…well, their word is good. With all respect to Petro, it would be of more value than any piece of pap…”

They all felt it then. A cold that had nothing to do with temperature, the shiver down the spine, the touch at the back of the neck. And the power, oh yes, the power. The two merpeople vanished. Slipped away under the water like ghosts. Someone else had entered the water-chapel, although the door was still closed. They could all feel his cold presence behind them. Maria was chilled to the bone, and she held tightly onto Benito and her daughter.

They turned, slowly, to face Aidoneus, lord of the cold halls of the dead. Once again, Maria was struck by his beauty. How could a thing that ruled the dead be so handsome?

He inclined his head, unsmiling. “My bride,” he said.

She had known this was coming. She just had hoped for more time. But he would come when he would come, by his own calendar — and by his calendar, winter was about to begin.

Maria felt Benito tense. “For four months,” she said calmly, squeezing Benito’s shoulder. “That was our bargain. I honor my bargains. Benito will honor his.”

Aidoneus nodded. “I will keep her safe. And keep my bargain.”

Maria took a deep breath. “And him. Now…I need to bid them goodbye.” Her voice cracked slightly. She had meant to keep her self-control. But…four months. Four months of no Benito. No little ‘Lessi…Four months among the dead, four months being the sole living creature in those cold, silent halls…already she ached fiercely for them, and she had not said goodbye.

“If you don’t want…” Benito began.

Maria shook her head, fiercely. “A bargain is a bargain. I keep mine. And I’ll be back in the spring. I promise.”

Benito took a deep breath. “Or I’ll be there to fetch you. And this time…” He left the threat unspoken.

“I will keep my bargain too,” said Aidoneus to Benito, gravely, and with no sign of insult. “Not because that is my nature, but I would be foolish not to. She is not someone to anger, lightly. And I need her. She brings life to my lands. That is no small thing.”

Benito grimaced, and being Benito, could not forbear but try for a joke of some kind. She understood why. The cold…it froze a man’s soul. No wonder Aidoneus wanted Maria’s fire. “And she throws plates. And anything else she can get her hands on. And she has a temper and a voice that will probably blow those mists of yours away. Very well. I accept it. But I don’t have to like it.”

Benito turned to his wife and folded her in his arms, a stocky, short man, with muscles like rope, binding her. She could feel his anger and his sadness. And she could feel that he loved her, that if he could he would take her place, he would go again to the land of the dead to bring her out.

“I’ve done it once,” he said quietly to her, confirming what she felt. “If need be I’ll do it twice.”

She hugged him, unable to speak. She kissed and cried a little over her baby. And then she put her child in her father’s arms, and turned away and walked beside Aidoneus into the misty archway that had opened ahead of them. It was quite the hardest thing she’d ever done. If she’d turned back to see him and their daughter standing there beside the greenish water of the water-chapel…she knew she’d fail.

But she had a bargain to keep.

The Given Sacrifice - Sat May 11 11:09:55 EDT 2013

Sat, 11 May 2013 11:09:55 -0400

"The Given Sacrifice" by S. M. Stirling, last updated Sat May 11 11:09:55 EDT 2013

Castle Todenangst, Crown demesne
Portland Protective Association
Willamette Valley near Newburg
High Kingdom of Montival
(formerly western Oregon)
June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

“Mom!” the High Queen of Montival said.

Sandra Arminger looked up from where she had been kneeling at her prie-dieu. The padded prayer-stool—rather like a reversed legless chair—stood before a triptych of the Madonna and Child flanked by Saints Edgar and Olaf, the patrons of rulers. The gold leaf of the halos in the icons glowed in the beam of light from an ocular window set high up under the carved plaster of the coffered roof.

She smiled at her daughter, the dark-brown eyes dancing. “Honestly, Matti, you needn’t goggle as if you’d caught me doing something nasty with a pageboy. I was praying.”

Mathilda opened her mouth and closed it as Sandra crossed herself, returned her rosary to the embroidered purse at her belt and stood. That still left her six inches shorter than her daughter’s five-eight, a smoothly pretty and slightly plump woman in her fifties, in a cotte-hardie of dove-gray silk elaborately jaquarded with ribbons and swallows and a white silk wimple bound with silver and opals. A Persian cat yawned and padded out from beneath the prie-dieu, its gaze as blandly self-satisfied as its mistress’.

People who don’t know better underestimate Mother.

Though nowadays you had to go a long way to find someone so utterly uninformed. She’d seen very hard men start to sweat when Sandra Arminger smiled at them in her let’s-share-a-joke way. The joke might be very pointed, or give you indigestion.

Mathilda shook her head. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen her mother pray, of course; it was just the first time she’d seen her doing it strictly in private, where there wasn’t any political benefit to be gained by conventional piety. Previously she’d used this little room off the Regent’s suite for confidential interviews, though it was the sort of place a noblewoman would set up a private shrine. Now besides the prie-dieu and images it had a big carved rood on one wall and a small shelf of devotional books.

“What… were you asking?” she said at last.

“I was praying for your father,” her mother said.

“Oh, good!” Mathilda said with a rush. “I mean, for both of you.”

They looked at each other silently for a moment in the incense-scented gloom. She’d told her mother much of what she’d seen in the…

Visions, Mathilda thought. That’s as close as you can get to a word for things there aren’t words for. What did Father Ignatius say when I made my confession? That some realities make language itself buckle and break when we try to describe them instead of just living them.

… the visions she’d seen at Lost Lake, when she and Rudi had joined their blood on the blade of the Sword of the Lady and thrust it into the living rock of Montival.

Or perhaps where Artos and I did.

Rudi carried the Sword again now, but in another sense it was still there beside the infinitely blue waters with their hands clasped on the hilt… and always had been and always would be. She could still feel a little of the curious linking that had started then, the sensation that the whole of Montival was like her own body. Since then her dreams had been odd; not so much fantastic as… real.

Like vivid memories but of things she had never seen. Perhaps of ragged men stalking deer in a clearing fringed by redwoods, or wild horses running in a desert with dust smoking around their hooves and manes flying, or gulls on a cloudy beach beneath the enormous rusted hulk of a wrecked freighter, or the empty tinkling clatter of glass falling from the leaning tower of a skyscraper as wind-blown rain hooted through the wreck of a dead city…

Either it had faded a little or she’d grown accustomed to it; Rudi thought it was the latter, though he felt it much more as bearer of the Sword.

But for a while at Lost Lake she and he had walked outside the light of common day, their footsteps carrying them on separate paths across all boundaries of space and time. One thing she had seen was her own father, Norman Arminger, in a place where he did penance. And there she had met…

Her eyes went to the supernal peace on the Virgin’s face as she looked down upon the Christ Child.

“She said… She said that because he loved us, he could receive love now,” Mathilda said softly. “And choose to… to make amends. I think that works both ways.”

Her mother sighed. “Here I receive positive proof of an afterlife, and instead of being reassuring it’s frightening.”

“Well, of course,” Mathilda said. “That’s much worse than death. Potentially. Worse than oblivion, I mean. It raises the stakes of everything.”

They looked at each other with perfect mutual bafflement for a moment.

Sandra broke it with a laugh. “You know, darling, I have exactly the opposite problem with this than many people used to have with religion. When I was your age.”

Mathilda raised an eyebrow, and Sandra made a graceful gesture with one small well-manicured hand, tapping her own temple with a finger that just touched the white silk of her wimple.

“Now I know up here that it’s all true. Including the parts that are flat-out mutually contradictory, but leave that aside. Oh, well, a great many very intelligent people always did believe it, and I’m not going to reject the evidence of my own senses.”

She put the hand over her heart. “But the difficult part is making this part of me believe it… integrate it into my world-view, as we’d have said in the old days… My heart rebels against my mind. And here I thought I was a complete rationalist!”

“You are impossible, mother!” Mathilda laughed.

“Not impossible. Improbable, yes. Anyone who’s lived my life and done what I’ve done would have to be highly improbable at the very least, my darling. Now let’s go. It wouldn’t do to keep people waiting, even now that you’re Lady Protector.”

“Particularly now that I’m High Queen too,” Mathilda said, with a slight quirk in her smile. “I always knew that the higher your rank the more firmly you were bound by custom. I hadn’t quite realized…”

“Just how high a High Queen is,” Sandra finished for her. “But there are compensations, dear.”

They walked out through the semi-public part of the Regent’s suite arm-in-arm. Technically Mathilda was Lady Protector now; the peace after the Protector’s War had provided that she’d come of legal age at twenty-six. In practice…

In practice, being High Queen of Montival in the middle of a great big war doesn’t leave me the time to be Lady Protector of the PPA! And being a new mother, which cannot be completely delegated and I won’t anyway… Having Mother handling the administrative routine and a lot of the politics in the north-realm territories not only lets me do other things, it buffers me from Associates who’d presume too much. I don’t want to alienate the Protectorate’s nobility. But I’m High Queen of all Montival, not just the PPA, and I have to be seen to be so people will know I mean it. Ruling is as much about seeming as being. If there’s a difference at all.

So she’d firmly turned down her mother’s pro-forma offer to relinquish the suites that occupied the upper stories of the Silver Tower and shuffle off to some manor. Sandra Arminger had been the Spider of the Silver Tower for far too long. Even her virtues were a political problem; everyone knew how effectively she’d rebuilt the PPA after the shock of Norman Arminger’s death in the Protector’s War and the Jacquerie rebellion and the reforms and purges that followed it. If the Prophet hadn’t come along that might have caused real trouble with fearful neighbors.

Mathilda would have felt uneasy calling these her own chambers anyway, though of course her bedroom had been here before she turned twelve and got her Associate’s dagger and her own household and retinue. Like much of the great fortress-palace they’d been designed by Sandra, or at least she’d directed the terrified architects and interior decorators and artists she and Norman had swept up after their coup.

They were well over a hundred feet high here, and on the side looking out southward over the central keep, so the windows could be large—sets of triple pointed-arch portals at intervals, their upper fifth filled with stained glass and stone tracery in the Protectorate’s version of Venetian Gothic style. The sashes below were thrown open on the fresh early summer afternoon amid a scent of roses and Sambac jasmine from the planters. A torrent of light shimmered on walls and floors of pale stone, on tables of inlaid rare woods and mother-of-pearl, the carved surrounds of arched open doorways or tile above hearths, on spindly chairs and sofas upholstered in cream silk and on tapestries of war and the hunt and high ceremony.

The vivid colors of the hangings and those of the rugs on the floor were a deliberate contrast. Walls and niches held art commissioned new or scavenged from museums and galleries all across the west of the continent. Some were as familiar as her own face; Leighton’s Pavonia for instance, which had been there in the background so constantly she’d assumed for years it was a modern portrait of Delia de Stafford until she embarrassed herself by saying so at a reception here. But there was always something that surprised even her: this time it was a bronze statue of a youth, a slimly perfect athlete standing hipshot and about to crown himself with a wreath of laurel vanished twenty-four hundred years ago.

Classical but not Roman, Mathilda thought. Greek, and of the great years. And undamaged except for the feet. Oh, my…

“That’s new,” she said. “Well, you know what I mean.”

“Not so very,” Sandra said, stopping for a moment and seeming to caress the figure with her eyes. “This one is… probably… by Lysippos, Alexander the Great’s court sculptor. But it was in storage for a long time, since that last expedition I sent to southern California just before the war… my goodness, three years ago now! I’ve had some experts working it over and mounting it on that pedestal. It’s amazingly fragile, for something that’s lasted so very long.”

Mathilda looked at it and sighed, then sighed again rather differently as they walked on. She’d gone through a phase of guilt about her mother’s art-collecting activities when she’d been a teenager and in the first incandescent sureness of her faith. Some of the men in the teams sent to retrieve these treasures had died horribly in the desolate Eater-haunted ruins of the lost cities, in Seattle and Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles and places like San Simeon and the Getty Villa. And the revenues to finance it all came out of the incomes of peasants and craft-folk and traders, eventually.

When you were in a position to spend the fruits of other people’s sweat, not to mention their blood, prudent thrift became a cardinal virtue.

But should we be concerned only with food and shelter and the weapons to protect it? she thought. Mom saved so much that was beautiful. And she made it fashionable for the other nobles and the wealthy guildsmen to do the same thing; and to give patronage to our own makers. That kept knowledge and skills alive through the terrible years when everything might have been lost. How many generations will thank her for both? And if she did it so she could have this… stuff… does that matter? The realm gets it just the same, and all the people in times to come. That’s good lordship too.

Two separate holy men had pointed that out to her; Father Ignatius had used Sandra’s art collecting as an example of how God’s plan turned all things to good in the end. The Rinpoche Tsewang Dorje had phrased it a little differently, but it amounted to the same thing. Though her private confessor at the time had simply and sternly admonished her that her own sins were a heavy enough burden to carry up to Heaven’s gate without adding the spiritual pride of assuming someone else’s.

I’ve never quite understood why my confessors and tutors were all so sincere. Not since I realized… or let myself realize… that Mother wasn’t, that she was playing at it. Which I only really accepted when she stopped playing and started trying it for real. And now I’m High Queen—

She asked the question bluntly, and was a little astonished when her mother wiped at one eye until she caught a glint through the tear that was neither entirely false nor altogether genuine.

Absolutely Mother, in other words.

“My little girl is all grown up, and just as smart as I am!” she said.

Then, in utter seriousness: “Because I wanted you to fit in this world, darling. I can fake it… sometimes for days or weeks at a time, I don’t notice… but then everything, all this—“

She waved a hand.

“—is suddenly like a dream, and I expect to wake up and pop another tape in the VCR.”

Mathilda looked around and shook her head. Todenangst was about the most solidly real place she knew. Her mother went on:

“I survived by playing a game in deadly earnest I’d always liked to pretend to do for fun. I was in the Society but not the type who pulled their persona around them like a security blanket after the Change and never let go. Possibly I could play it so well because something deep down in me never entirely believed it, which meant I could be more objective. But it’s your life and you deserve to live it with a whole heart.”

Mother is troubling, but she’s rarely dull, Mathilda thought. Then with a rush of anguish: Oh, Rudi, I wish I was with you! Not safe here, but there where things are happening!

She couldn’t tell if it was normal worry, or her new sense of being linked to everything, but she could feel peril approaching, and that had to mean Rudi was in danger far from the strong walls that surrounded her.

Seven Devils Mountains
(Formerly western Idaho)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 A.D.

Cole Salander and his captors moved mostly in single file through mountainside meadow and forest, with the dogs weaving back and forth to keep an eye and nose on the surroundings. Occasionally he caught one cocking an eye at him in a considering manner, as if to remind him of something.

After a while Talyn pulled out sticks of jerky from his sporran and handed them around. Cole got one, which surprised him slightly, though Artan and Flan weren’t left out either. It was a not-too-odd variation on the usual fibrous salty not-much, better than nothing, and it made him thirsty.

They’d left him his canteen, and they all stopped to fill up at a spring-fed pool. He noted that they used water purification tablets like his, too; no matter how clear and cold and inviting it looked, any open water could have giardia in it, or for that matter a dead animal under a rock or dollops of dissolved deer-crap. You didn’t drink it untreated unless there was no choice, and the slight chemical tang was the taste of safety. The dogs didn’t drink at all until their master gave them a nod of permission.

The Mackenzie held out his hand before they started out again: “Talyn Strum Mackenzie, of Dun—village, you’d say—Tàirneanach; the totem of my sept is Lynx. And this fair but tight-lipped warrior maid is Caillech Carlson Mackenzie, a neighbor of mine and oath-sister. And a Raven like the Ard Rí himself, as you might be guessing from the paint.”

“Ard Rí?” he said.

“High King,” Alyssa said. “That’s what it means. Artos the First, High King of Montival. AKA Rudi Mackenzie, my cousin, sorta.”

Woah, wait a minute, a cousin, ‘sorta’? What’s that mean?

“And you talk too bloody much, Talyn, the which is beyond question or doubt,” Caillech said, but smiled.

Cole shook the offered hands; to his surprise Alyssa extended hers, too. Then he hesitated. You weren’t supposed to talk… but nobody had asked him any military secrets. Plus there were things he really wanted to know. And after all, they were all Americans. That was the official line too, which enabled him to feel a slight glow of virtue about not keeping his mouth completely shut. Talyn and Caillech might be the children of people who’d gone so batshit insane after the Change that they just barely managed to hang on to the side of the planet with suction cups, but they were also working countryfolk caught up in the gears of war even if they were on the other side. Very much like him.

“I’m Cole Salander—“

What the fuck is the equivalent of what he said?

“—and, uh, I’m from Cottonwood Ranch, about half a day’s walk from a town called Bruneau. Which is a little pimple of a place with thirty, forty people sixty-ish miles south and a bit east of Boise City. My folks run a few cattle and sheep and crop a little bit, they and my brothers… before the war… and sisters and a hand or two.”

They were probably having a hell of a time just getting by, with his elder brothers missing in action and him away in the Army, but he tried not to think about that too much. There wasn’t anything he could do about it, anyway, except try to keep foreign armies away from them.

“You might say the same of us, in reverse,” Talyn said cheerfully. “Adding in a bit of smithing and weaving and the like. Save that her ladyship here is by way of being a princess and above such low and mean pursuits.”

Alyssa snorted. “What he means is that my Dad is Eric Larsson. And we’re Bearkillers, not Associates, Talyn; I’ve done chores all my life and I made the A-list on merit, not birth.”

After a moment Cole missed half a step. Eric Larsson was the military commander of one of the Western outfits in the enemy alliance. They were from the Willamette valley near the Mackenzies and called themselves the Bearkillers. His sister Signe Havel—nee Larsson—was their civilian leader. Though from the briefings, they didn’t make much of a distinction that way, they’d been founded by a former Marine right after the Change. And Eric Larsson was related by blood or marriage to a whole clutch of other V.I.P’s including the enemy’s big bossman, the one calling himself High King Artos these days.

I am a toad, Cole thought mournfully. I am one dead toad. I didn’t just miss handing over an intelligence asset, this is high-up political stuff. I am a dead toad that got run under a road-roller and left in the hot sun. Oh, I am such a dead, flat toad.

“And my mom is Luanne Larsson,” the glider pilot went on gloomily. “Who is going to have an absolute cow when she hears I crashed and got banged up. She didn’t want me to be a pilot.”

“Instead of a lancer so shiny in armor and all?” Talyn asked innocently. “Your mother being Horsemistress of the Bearkillers.”

That got him a scowl from Alyssa and a laugh from Caillech; the Bearkiller woman was obviously much too slight for fighting in plate armor on horseback, though quick and very strong for her size. The briefings said the Bearkiller elite force were most of them cavalry, as good as the knights of the Portland Protective Association and more versatile and better disciplined. They called them the A-List.

“Mom thought I’d be more useful to the war effort helping with the remount program. But I took the Gunpowder Day barrel-riding cup,” Alyssa snapped. “And the mounted archery prize for the under-eighteens, one year. I could have made cavalry scout, easy. I just… like flying.”

Being a shrimp wasn’t a handicap for a glider pilot, of course; the opposite, if anything. Cole was a bit above medium-sized. He’d asked about pilot training himself when he turned eighteen back just before the war started, in the old General’s day, and had been told that the only way to make the weight limit would be to amputate both his legs above the knee. Or his head.

“And if I was stuck-up, would I hang out with lowlifes like you two?” Alyssa said.

“Ah, it’s the bonny long curling golden locks, the lassies can’t resist ‘em,” Talyn said.

He took off his Scots bonnet for a moment to run a hand over his shaven head and waggle the ordinary brown pigtail at the back.

“Beating them off with sticks I am three days in four, a trial and a troublement and a weariness.”

The women looked at each other and mock-kicked in unison towards the bowman’s backside. Cole stepped unobtrusively forward to let Alyssa steady herself against his shoulder. Having an arm in a sling interfered with your balance; he remembered that from his own experience with cracked bones.

“Wait ‘till we get back,” Caillech said. “I’ll punish you good and proper then.”

“Something to look forward to! Or I might be the one making you beg for mercy, eh?”

Caillech laughed and winked. Cole reflected gloomily that all he had to look forward to now was a POW camp. He supposed it was easier to be cheerful when your side was winning. Talyn might be a friendly sort, but he didn’t relax his vigilance one iota; neither did his companion, or their dogs, and Alyssa was keeping an eye peeled too. Cole hadn’t given any parole, so he kept his eyes open without being too conspicuous about it, and—

I am a skilled wilderness scout. It says so right there in my paybook that they took away from me after I fell asleep.

That meant he could expertly evaluate his chances of making a break, and the probability of getting anything but an arrow in the back and/or two sets of really large fangs ripping bleeding chunks out of his ass were somewhere between absolutely nothing and fucking zip right now.

And the fact that I’m feeling a little relieved at that analysis is neither here nor there. Or that I don’t want to be the last man to die in a lost war.

Surrendering on your own was risky—everyone knew that even if both sides were playing by the official rules you were as likely as not to be finished off if you just put up your hands up one-on-one at the point of the spear. When the other guy’s blood was up or he’d just lost a buddy rules were a thin way to avoid becoming another anonymous body.

But Cole had made it past that stage, and the grapevine, as opposed to official propaganda, said the enemy treated POW’s pretty well. Better than his own side did, these days.

He was prepared to risk his life for the mission. But there was a distinct difference between a hero’s honored grave and a hole in the dirt for a damned fool.

Mrs. Salander hadn’t raised any fools.

“Ah… OK if I ask a question?” he said.

The three looked at each other. “Ask away,” Talyn said. “I won’t promise to answer, mind.”

“That lady with the staff… she’s a witch, right?

Unexpectedly they all laughed. “They’re all witches, Cole,” Alyssa said.

“That we are,” Caillech said, striking a mock-spooky pose and making passes through the air for a moment with her free hand. “My other horse is a broomstick!”

He absently noted that Alyssa had used his first name instead of private or soldier or Salander or combinations thereof; evidently shaking hands made it all right. He shook his head.

“You know what I mean. That lady with the braids and the staff did something to me, didn’t she?”

“Meadhbh Beauregard Mackenzie is a priestess of the triple cords and the first degree, right enough,” Talyn said, more solemnly than his usual bantering tone. “But for the most part she’s our healer back in Dun Tàirneanach. That’s her trade.”

“Doctor at home, field medic with the levy,” Alyssa amplified.

“She said she felt the need to come along on this patrol,” Talyn said. “She’s a fiosaiche as well—“

“Seer,” Alyssa said, or translated. “Prophet, sorta. Irritating, all those odd words, aren’t they?”

“Says the sisu lady. And the kettle cried out awa’ with yer grimy arse to the pot,” Talyn said pointedly, then continued: “Meadhbh is a fiosache of note, and it’s bad luck to disregard the feelings that come to such. And she found you, right enough!”

“She didn’t just find me.”

Caillech nodded. “She cast a slumber on you,” she said. “I’ve heard of such things—Lady Juniper, the Mackenzie, the Chief herself herself, did it to a whole warband of your folk two years ago. There was a High Seeker of the CUT with them.”

Cole had heard rumors about that; he’d figured it was a cover-story for a defection. There had been a lot of those, especially recently.

But maybe not…

“But I’ve never seen such with my own eyes,” the Clanswoman said. “It was… just a wee bit alarming.”

“Yah think?” Cole said with feeling.

“And not in the usual run of things at all, at all,” Talyn said.

Caillech nodded again, her face absolutely serious for a moment.

“It would recoil on the doer, so, unless there was a… a provocation of the same sort,” she said. “So that it was in self-defense, you see? Even then it’s not something to be done lightly. When a fiosaiche… a seeress or a priestess… calls upon the Powers then They’re all too likely to answer… but you’re never quite sure how, for They are greater and other than we and Their minds are not as ours. Whether the glass bottle hits the iron cauldron, or the cauldron hits the bottle, it’s often bad news for the bottle. Hence not something to be done lightly.”

“Best not speak too much of it now,” Talyn said warningly, and made a sign in the air.

Yeah. It’s creepy.

The walk took most of the day and by the end of it they were treating him like an old friend—albeit one they were ready to shoot on the instant if he tried to run or make trouble, and one they never let into a position where he might seize a hostage. Which was flattering, if you looked at it right.

The sun was sinking behind the white peaks to the west before the first challenge came from behind a rock. Well-camouflaged sentries passed them through to a camp not far from a mountain lake. The heart of it was a long sloping flower-starred meadow of twenty or thirty acres that dropped off even more steeply southward.

A curved launching ramp of lodgepole trunks had been built down the center of the open space, with a counterweighted catapult system for throwing gliders into the air along it; it was a neat, solid piece of field engineering and differed only in detail from the ones the USAF used. As he watched a lever was tripped, the boxcar full of rocks slid down the short section of wooden rails below the ramp, gears and winches whined, and a glider swooped down and then soared into the air with a throw just short of the speed that would have ripped its wings off. It banked back in, came into the breeze and landed, probably testing the launcher after some repairs.

Alyssa followed the brief flight with her eyes and sighed. “No chance for me to break my neck again for a while,” she muttered.

Four of the slender-winged tadpole shapes of sailplanes were staked out with technicians working around them, and flags and a windsock marked the landing area. He even recognized the type; pre-Change Glaser-Dirk 100’s, one of the Air Force favorites, or modern copies so close to the original that a non-expert like him couldn’t tell the difference. A set of big tents flew a banner that showed a snarling bear’s-head, face-on in black and red and white on a brown background, and they contained a portable forge and workshops with treadle-powered lathes and presses.

The rest of the encampment included a corral for draught animals, mainly big mules, and a thick scattering of bell-tents grouped in threes around a somewhat larger one; the flag there was the moon and antlers of the Mackenzies. A taller pole in the center bore the Crowned Mountain and Sword—what the new “kingdom” of Montival used.

Folk gathered around, about half in pants and the rest in the Clan’s kilt. There must be more than two hundred here all up, but he’d gotten used to crowds since he started his military service. Though so many strange faces still seemed slightly unnatural, to someone who’d grown up on a little family ranch where you could go a month or more at a time without seeing a single outsider and a year without meeting someone from out of the neighborhood.

Alyssa exchanged salutes just like the one he’d learned in school with a hawk-faced woman in her thirties with brown hair in the same shortish bob cut.

He looked around. OK, Bearkiller women in the army wear it that way, like our high-and-tight.

She was dressed in a practical-looking brown uniform that included a basket-hilted single-edged sword. There was a small blue scar like Alyssa’s between her brows and what would have been a Captain’s bars in the US Army on her shoulders.

“Don’t tell me. A write-off, right?” the officer said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you see any sign of the enemy before you totaled it?”

“Nothing, ma’am. I didn’t get that far.”

“How did you manage to pile up your ship?”

“I relied on getting lift somewhere it wasn’t and then I was lower than the terrain all around me. Then I was lower than the terrain under me.”

The officer sighed. “If you had a sane approach to risk management you wouldn’t be a pilot, Larsson.”

“No excuses, Captain Sanders. Nothing salvageable in my estimation, the terrain’s not suitable even for mules, you’d have to back-pack the wreck out in pieces. Plus there’s a really big dead bear lying next to it.”

A shrug. “It might be worthwhile going after the instruments, later. You’re a good pilot, Larsson, and they’re harder to produce than gliders. Don’t make a habit of it, but combat-lossing these things occasionally is a cost of doing business. We’ll just show some sisu and suck it up. Written report including map data by 1400 hours tomorrow.”

“Yes, ma’am. Hakkaa päälle!”

“Hack ‘em down! The arm?”

“Hairline fracture of the ulna, according to the Mackenzie fiosaiche.”

“She’s a qualified field medic,” the officer said—a little reluctantly, Cole thought.

Alyssa nodded. “No need for a plaster cast, just time. I don’t think there was much of a concussion, none of the symptoms, except that I was woozy for a while. No recurrence of headaches, or blurred vision or loss of balance. Didn’t even lose any teeth.”

“Right, have our doc take a look when he’s got time but you’re on restricted duty until the arm heals anyway, four to six weeks if nothing goes wrong. I’ll unload some of my paperwork on you.”

Alyssa gave an almost imperceptible wince, and the officer returned a slightly disquieting grin. “I know, you can interrogate your cutie of a POW here. You are now in charge of that, seconded to Intelligence until you’re fit for unrestricted duty again.”

I’m a cutie? Cole thought, torn between feeling flattered and insulted.

“He’s technically the Mackenzies’ prisoner, ma’am.”

“I doubt they’ll be competing for the privilege of talking to him.”

“That we will not,” Caillech said. “No offense, Cole Salander.”

Alyssa chuckled. “He’s not going to talk much anyway. Not at first, at least.”

“SOP, we have to jump through the hoops.” She looked at Cole. “Interested in switching sides? We’ve got a lot of Boiseans on our side now, and Frederick Thurston leads them, your first ruler’s son.”

Cole shook his head, keeping private doubts off his face. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Captain Wellman’s always been straight with me, and as long as he says it’s the right side I’m on it.”

“Fair enough, private. A man’s obligations are his own to judge. You’re between a rock and a hard place and I don’t envy you that position one little bit. You may change your mind when you’re further back and get a chance to talk to more of your own folk who’ve come to different conclusions. Larsson, ask the usual questions, write ‘em down, and we’ll send the report on with him when we have time and personnel to spare to move him out. Carry on.”

A swatch of Mackenzies had gathered around, along with some of their enormous dogs. Apart from the haircuts and whether or not they’d painted their faces they looked more uniform than he’d expected, given their wild neobarb reputation… but then, according to the briefing they wore the kilt and plaid all the time anyway, so this was probably their ordinary clothes apart from the war-gear. Alter the clothes and such and keep their mouths shut and they’d pass for his neighbors easily. Nearly all of them were Changelings of around his age give or take a few years. There were some adolescents doing chores and standing in back, and a few slightly older ones were officers, most of whom wore a neck-torc of thin twisted gold.

Right, that’s the Mackenzie equivalent of a wedding ring, only they wear it around the neck. And there are so many women! he thought.

Then, after he did a deliberate count: No, not as many as all that. Well under half the total. It just looks like more to my eye, I guess. What the lecture called perception bias. Got to watch that if you want to make an accurate report.

Talyn and his comrade made their report to a big scarred man pushing thirty, with freckles on a ruddy pale face, rust-colored hair in a queue and one of the torcs around his bull neck. After drawing them aside out of earshot for a few sharp questions he gave Cole a long look, then turned to Alyssa.

“Is this one’s word good, lady?”

Alyssa looked at Cole herself. “Is it?” she said.

He scowled and nodded. A man whose word wasn’t good was a toad—no, a worm—and he instinctively resented the question. But to be fair she wasn’t a neighbor who’d grown up knowing him down to the bootlaces in the usual way. Dealing with strangers could be hard, without a known reputation to guide you. Nobody trusted people they didn’t know the way they did kin and the folks from over the next creek.

“I break any promises to you, ma’am?” he said.

“No.” She turned to the Mackenzie. “And our acquaintance was brief, but intense, Bow-captain Luag. I’d say he was honorable but I can’t take oath on it.”

Luag looked to Cole for a long green-eyed moment. “Give us your oath not to fight nor to try escaping while you’re in this war-camp, and we’ll let you walk free, though watched. Deny it, and we must keep you bound save when you’re on the latrine, the which would be uncomfortable and would do your cause no good at all or whatsoever. Suffer uselessly or not, as you please.”

A pause, and he went on flatly: “If you give your word and break it, then we’ll kill you sure. As an offering to Lugh Longspear.”

Cole thought carefully while the Clan warriors leaned on their great bows and watched him, moistening his lips a little as he did. On the one hand, standing orders said if you were captured you had to escape if possible. On the other, the New UCMJ said you had to escape if possible not get yourself killed trying when it wasn’t possible; his chances of that were much better when he was being moved and was far away from an enemy encampment.

OK, giving a general parole is out, but a temporary one… possible.

Especially if he stayed here a couple of days with liberty to walk around he could probably learn something valuable, and he was specifically tasked with getting information about bases like this, so it was aiding his mission to be able to ask questions and watch things. He could try for a break when they moved him—they couldn’t spare much effort to guard one prisoner, and in any army things got looser as you moved away from the sharp end. On the third hand—

“Unless US forces attack this camp,” he said. “If they do, all bets are off.”

There were grins and chuckles at that. Such a lot of merry light-hearted jokester bastards, he thought. Goddamn it. It was probably a lot easier to laugh when you were winning.

The redhead raised an eyebrow. “Or unless the sky fall and crush us, or the sea rise and drown us, or the world end,” he said sardonically.

“And my parole to last three days from sunset today and no more. After that I’m free to escape and to do anything necessary to carrying out my duties. And you’re free to shoot me if I try and if you can.”

A short, crisp but somehow respectful nod. “Good. A man careless of his oath would likely make fewer conditions, so. Swear then, in the sight of whatever Gods you follow and on a fighting-man’s honor.”

“I’m a Methodist, I guess…” He thought for a moment, then raised his right hand and swore so help me God.

Luag listed the specifics carefully, and drew a sign in the air before finishing:

“So witness all the Gods of my people, and the Mother-of-All in Her form as the Threefold Morrigú, who loves a warrior’s faithfulness, and the Lord Her consort as Lugh of the Oaths. You’re free of our camp, but don’t go beyond its bounds—those white wands you see planted about.”

He hadn’t noticed the peeled sticks, but they were obvious once the bowman’s thick finger pointed them out.

Luag went on: “What the Bearkillers do is their affair, but I wouldn’t go among them alone either, if I were you, for all that they’re blood-brothers of ours, so to speak. They’re a suspicious lot about outsiders and quickly fierce with their blades.”

Raising his voice slightly:

“To harm this man is geisa so long as he keeps his oath. Watch him close, but put no slight nor insolence on him while he’s bound helpless by his pledge. Or I will most assuredly kick your arse until your teeth march out of your mouth like little Bearkiller pikemen on parade, and you will be mocked by all and the bards will make a tale of it at the next festival and ill-luck will dog your tracks. This is a war, not a blood-feud. Treat him as you would wish on one of our own if they had the misfortune to fall captive. Understood?”

There was a murmur of assent.

“Then spread the word. About your work the now, Mackenzies.”

“Ah… that’s it?” Cole said.

“Is anything more needful?” Talyn said. “Ah, here’s our tent, the which you are welcome to share. Though we usually sleep under the stars unless it’s raining or much colder than this. Stow your gear.”

He and Caillech spent a few moments removing each other’s war-paint, with a mixture of flax-seed oil and goose grease that smelled of herbs—sage and rosemary, Cole thought—and then soap and water. Most of the Mackenzies just nodded at the prisoner and walked away, going back to working on their gear or shooting at wooden targets and flung disks with truly alarming dexterity or sparring or towards some cooking pits where an agonizingly good smell was drifting with wafts of blueish smoke to remind him that he’d been working hard on light rations. Others simply napped, played flutes or guitars, read or wrote letters, played games with dice or cards, or…

He blinked, and blushed a little. Soldiering tended to erode your sense of privacy, but he was used to it being all guys. His army had stopped recruiting women after the old General died a couple of years ago, and hadn’t had many even then. Cole averted his eyes.

Bearkillers seemed to do things more or less the way he was used to. The Mackenzies…

“They’re sort of informal, aren’t they? But it works for them,” Alyssa said. “God knows why.”

“Hup-one-two, and a lance up the arse to keep your back braced straight,” Caillech said. “The Bearkiller way.”

The two young women stuck out their tongues at each other, and Talyn rolled his eyes.

“I smell that a sounder of wild pig were guided our way by Cernnunos,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Rather than the over-stewed muck of infamous memory we get nine days in ten, when it isn’t jerky and trail-mix and dog-biscuit instead, ochone, the sorrow and black pity of it. Let us prepare for the sacred rite of eating ourselves full and drinking what’s to be had while we have the chance, for it won’t happen often.”

Cole smiled a little. The general awfulness of military food was something everyone seemed to have in common, weird or not.

Fire with Fire - Wed Apr 3 21:47:51 EDT 2013

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:47:51 -0400

"Fire with Fire" by Charles E. Gannon, last updated Wed Apr 3 21:47:51 EDT 2013

ODYSSEUS

The perfect blue of it, Caine thought, watching the flawless surface of the Mediterranean dapple beneath the approaching security delta. It banked hard right until it came about, then its jets burned bright cobalt. The delta powered back out over deeper water, its small weapons blister rotating away from the Doric columns, which partitioned Caine’s view into a succession of eight tall, sequential seascapes.

In the center of the fourth seascape, framed between two columns, was a silver-haired man facing away from him. He was still in good shape, but there was a telltale thickening of the body, loss of muscle mass in the shoulders and neck. His posture — straight-backed and vital — almost concealed the physical changes, inviting an observer’s eye to remain fixed upon the distinctive military bearing. In all probability, he was older than he looked.

Well, that cinches it, Caine decided as he passed through the shadow of the temple’s still-intact entablature. According to five weeks of research while he was confined to a stateroom on the attack sub Nevada, only one man over sixty could both be the head of IRIS and boast that trim a physique.

Caine emerged back into the beating glare of the Aegean sun, drew abreast of the man, and stole a sideways glance: patient blue eyes were tracking the delta’s speedy disappearance into the horizon.

“Admiral Corcoran?”

Nolan Corcoran, unmistakable from the many photographs and film clips Caine had seen — first as a teen and then over the past five weeks — turned and smiled. “Hello, Mr. Riordan. I’d thank you for joining me, but under the circumstances that wouldn’t be a courtesy: it would be an insult to your intelligence.”

“True enough.”

“I do wonder if you might call me Nolan, however — and if I might call you Caine.”

Riordan shrugged.

Nolan looked back out to sea. “I don’t blame you for being angry — not one damned bit. If I was in your shoes, I wouldn’t trust anyone right now. I’d hate a few, though. Above all, I’d hate the person who’d been responsible for playing god with my life. Which means, in your case, hating me.”

Well, at least Corcoran wasn’t a bullshitter — and he seemed far more direct than Downing. Of course, maybe that was just a polished act. “Hate might be too strong a word. But I’m not a happy guy.”

Nolan’s response was a wry bend at the right side of his mouth. “A sense of humor — bitter or otherwise — is the hallmark of a survivor.” He turned, looked at Caine frankly — a casual, head-to-toe inspection. Checking the condition of the merchandise? But as Caine thought it, he also noted an oddly paternal nuance in Corcoran’s demeanor. “I’m glad to see that you are no worse for the wear.”

“How could I be? Not much was going to happen to me once you stuck me down at the bottom of the sea. And without so much as briefing: straight from the vertibird to a ship to a sub.”

Nolan nodded, made a motion to start walking; Caine angled to trail alongside. “Sorry about that, but after the attack in Alexandria — well, we were in a bind. We couldn’t figure out how the opposing team found you there in the first place. So we had to get you off the playing field right away. No time for explanations which, truth be told, would only have undermined our efforts to compartmentalize information as much as possible.”

“Well, you could have at least provided me with more entertaining company. The SEAL team that brought me on board and babysat me — they were a pretty taciturn bunch.”

“They had to be. Orders. Not all of them are always so quiet.”

“Oh? Their dossiers indicate if they’re sparkling conversationalists?”

“No: their CO was my son. And he’s never been shy or retiring.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Why? Because you were a little snide? We’ve earned your spite — and more — and it’s bound to bubble up now and again.” They walked on a few steps. “You didn’t seem very surprised to see me, just now,” Nolan observed dryly.

“Well, Admiral –”

“Nolan.”

“Okay — Nolan. I simply built a timeline of who Downing was associated with when he showed up in the news. The pivotal clue was Senator Tarasenko’s Near Earth-approaching Asteroid Response subcommittee, which tasked you to intercept the Doomsday Rock in 2083.”

“And how was that so pivotal?”

Caine looked at Nolan out of the corner of his eye. “Sir, don’t be coy: it’s incongruous in an eighty-five-year-old man.”

Nolan exhaled a small laugh. “Touché.”

“The NEAR subcommittee was where all three of IRIS’s major players — and my prime suspects — overlapped. Tarasenko was an old crony from your midshipman days at Annapolis. Shortly after he sent you to deflect the Doomsday Rock with a nuke, he hired a strategic space analyst named Richard Downing — an Oxbridge import who was also, incongruously, ex-SAS. I couldn’t find any more details on that connection, but I’m betting it was actually you who did the reach-out to Downing.”

“Correct.”

“You and Downing were often ‘coincidentally’ on the same blue-ribbon committees and think tanks until you began cutting back in 2101. Rumors of fragile coronary health provided the context — or should I say pretext? — for your retirement. At the same time, Downing took a low-profile job running a fusty little think tank in Newport. Which was the embryo of IRIS.”

“For a couple of supposed spymasters, Richard and I sound a bit far from the center of things.”

“Well, sure. That’s what you’d want: perfect misdirection and plausible deniability, all in one. Nosy journalists or counterintelligence analysts would presume that Tarasenko would be giving orders, not taking them. So if they watch him, they find nothing. They might look at Downing, but they’ll conclude — rightly — that he’s too junior to be controlling a major intelligence operation.

“But you’ve got the perfect credentials and cover-story for the job. Having retired from all official posts, you’re now just a private citizen. You also happen to be a war hero who travels a lot, consulting for defense and aerospace contractors. But instead of becoming a typical spymaster, you have Downing construct a black-box organization: the Institute. Which you control from afar.”

Nolan raised one eyebrow. “To run the kind of operation you’re envisioning, you need plenty of contacts in the military, government, industry. Downing doesn’t have those contacts, Tarasenko does but is always being watched, and I’m still living too public a life.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Caine objected. “When you consider it with a properly jaded eye, your public life is not so public after all. You’ve always been a closed-door consultant, so I can’t help but wonder: during your visits, were you advising on policy — or were you dictating it? And if so, you’d also be able to use their secure channels to confer with Downing, Tarasenko, and the various section heads of IRIS’s widely distributed net of covert overseers.”

“‘Covert overseers’?”

“Of course. Practically speaking, IRIS is an invisible organization because it exists — in small, completely firewalled packages — within other organizations.”

“A very impressive hypothesis, but why all the charades, the false fronts, and — quite frankly — the subversion of public institutions?”

“Downing gave me that answer when he reanimated me last year. The raison d’être for IRIS is exosapient threats. Right after you intercepted the Doomsday Rock, we started creating the kind of space technology that would protect us from subsequent planet-killer asteroids. But what if the threat was so big that there was nothing we could do to stop it? We had to be able to get out of the way, maybe leave the Solar System — which was why you started Project Prometheus. And as you did, you thought: ‘If humans can learn to travel faster than light, other species can too.’ That’s why you created IRIS: to ensure that humanity can survive both inanimate and animate threats from space.”

Nolan reversed direction, chin raising into the direction of their stroll. “You don’t miss much.”

“I had two unfair advantages: knowing about IRIS and Downing, and then five weeks in which I had nothing to do but gather the facts and think. But I couldn’t get answers to the really important questions.”

“Which questions are those?”

“Nolan, if you had no memory of the most pivotal four days of your life, wouldn’t it be your top priority to ask questions about them, to get them back? Hell, Downing told me your agents grabbed me outside the door of your suite, and that I was behaving in a ‘suspicious manner.’ Accepting for the moment that this was true, what was I doing there? Why did I go to a place — a place I can’t even remember — that was so sensitive that it got me stuck into cold sleep for thirteen years?”

Nolan nodded. “Those are important questions, I agree. I just hope I’ll be able to provide the information you need. Our conversation a day and a half before you were cold-celled was the first, last, and only contact Richard or I had with you.”

“Then you shouldn’t have any problem sharing the records of that conversation. Or a list of my financial transactions while on the Moon. Or any of the several other dozen data trails that any visitor to Perry City can’t help leaving.”

Nolan stopped walking, faced him with a small smile that was unlike any of those Caine had seen in the media: it was gentle, maybe a bit sad. “I’m sorry, Caine, I really am — but I have to ask you to wait one more day. We can’t risk having you dig around for those records now: there’s no way of knowing where they might lead you, or how pursuing any given line of inquiry might somehow compromise all the work we’ve done to bring together the Parthenon Dialogs. But tomorrow, when the Dialogs are over — well, then it will be safe for you to seek your answers.”

“C’mon, Admiral: if I wait another day, am I really going to be that much safer?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“What? Why?”

“Because Parthenon has already started: we met in Athens for Day One this morning.” Corcoran started strolling back to where they had begun. “Tomorrow — Day Two — is the wrap-up, here at the Temple of Poseidon.”

Caine looked sideways. “I expected that I’d be at the first day’s proceedings, since the main item on the agenda was what I found on Delta Pavonis.”

“Most of which has already been presented. But the details you’ll share tomorrow are the capstones of the Dialogs. And will change everyone’s perspective yet again.”

“You know, that’s something I’ve never understood: after you had thoroughly debriefed me, what the hell did anyone have to gain by killing me? Would it have really have made such a difference?”

Corcoran shrugged. “You know how it is: it’s not just what is said; there’s the matter of how it’s said, and by whom. You are not just an eyewitness; you are an investigator whose writing makes the facts seem real. You breathe the life of human experience into lifeless data — and some people are scared of that.”

“So if I’m still at risk, why the hell did you bring me out here? Like the real Odysseus, I’m not a risk-taker if I don’t have to be.”

Nolan laughed. “Relax: all the Circes, sirens, and other monsters are far away from here. First, the tip of this headland is well beyond sniper range. Secondly, the slopes and crags around you are bristling with active intercept and denial systems: together, they can knock down anything from an incoming bullet to a missile salvo. But most importantly, no one could know that you’re in Greece — yet.” Nolan waved back toward the mainland. “So go use your freedom now, because you’ll be losing it again tomorrow. The world will want to know — and will find out quickly enough — who first brought them news of exosapients.”

Caine looked over at the serried ranks of low, white buildings that started four kilometers back from the base of the headland. His glance must have imparted his dubious opinion of an excursion there. Nolan urged, “Look, don’t waste this day: go do a little sightseeing. The view from the bluffs” — he waved in a vague northwesterly direction — “is spectacular.”

“And how am I supposed to get around?”

“The car you came in is still down at the bottom of the slope.”

“I think my driver’s license expired about fourteen years ago.”

“We’ve already taken care of that. Besides, cars are automated now — well, in most places. Should be here, although I think they may still be expanding the road sensor nets.”

“Guards?”

“Not needed — and they’d only draw attention.”

Caine looked up at the craggy, arid highlands Nolan had indicated. Well, maybe a quick drive would be fun –

“Oh, and on the way up, drop in on Richard and tell him his collarcom has apparently died.”

“Sure. Where is he?”

“At the Herakles Olympic training stadium, just a few kilometers out on the western coast road, near Legonia. The car will have it in memory.”

“The keys?”

“In the car. Tell Richard I’ll meet him at the villa, and will brief him at 1900. It’s where you’re staying also, so the car knows the way back home.”

Caine nodded, put up a hand in farewell.

Nolan returned the wave, smiled, and went back to inspecting the sea and the sky, framed between the same two columns.

Portal - Wed Mar 6 20:47:34 EST 2013

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:47:34 -0500

"Portal" by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor, last updated Wed Mar 6 20:47:34 EST 2013

“My God this is beautiful!”

It wasn’t the first time she’d expressed those sentiments in the last hour, but Helen couldn’t restrain herself, and the others didn’t seem bothered.

The walls of the huge, generally triangular tunnel reflected the lights of Zarathustra in a blaze of color, as though coated with layers upon layers of diamonds. Stripes of color – brown, black, greenish, red-orange – ran through the walls at different angles, but the walls themselves shimmered in hues of transparent glass, glacier-blue, sea-green, with irregular surfaces that seemed faceted on every side. Some were like cubes, others hexagonal plates layered upon each other, and in other spots the wall shone pure white like new-fallen snow at high noon, or cast tiny sharp-edged shadows that revealed feathery, curling structures.

“Looks almost like something dissolved away parts of this wall,” Maddie said quietly.

“Not dissolved,” Larry answered with a grin, taking picture after picture from the data stream. “A process much more sublime than that.”

Joe failed to restrain a snort, even as Helen winced, knowing what Larry had set in motion. “Enough of your vaporing, Larry. What’s your triple point?”

“Deposit yourself back in your chair and I’ll explain. It’ll be a gas.”

“ENOUGH.” Maddie’s voice held a tinge of amusement, but only a tinge, and there was more than enough authority with it. “I swear, every time I think you’re getting older, Joe… and Larry, stop encouraging him. So you’re saying that the … worn and eaten-away appearance here is from the ice subliming away in vacuum?”

“Partly, at least,” Larry answered.

“But don’t you usually end up with a dark, even blackish, surface that way?” Joe asked, more seriously. “I seem to remember something about that with comets. And Ceres had a lot of blackish ice.”

“Normally, yes. But… well, first, let’s face it, we’re still learning stuff about the solar system. Every time we’ve sent an unmanned probe somewhere, it’s sent back information we didn’t expect. Every place we’ve gone, something weird’s shown up. Why should we expect Europa to be any different?

“Anyway, we’re getting fairly deep inside Europa now. We’ve come, what, almost 20 kilometers, so we’re down well below where Athena holed-through. Pressure on the ice is getting significant, and – much more importantly – up until Athena came through and we dropped Zarathustra in, this was sealed up.”

“You think that makes a difference?” Helen asked.

“It might. You see, if this is a sealed chamber, or was, it’s more like a crystal chamber on Earth, or a geode, than something exposed in a larger chamber with an outlet. Remember that A.J. detected a wash of water vapor come up when Athena broke through? I think there was pressure in here. Not much, you’d call it vacuum on Earth, but a lot more pressure than anywhere else on Europa. The ice sublimes slowly over millions of years, and redeposits elsewhere. As we get farther down, remember, the temperature goes up. It’s already noticeably warmer where we are than on the surface – though humans like us wouldn’t notice. So that might mean we’ve got more water vapor coming up from below, filling this space.

“And we’ve got more pressure on the ice itself, except at the very surface, which means that there’s probably several phases of ice here. Hexagonal stuff is normal ice, Ice Ih, but some of those things there look more like octahedrons, which would be Ice Ic, and over there,” he pointed to a set of squarish-looking crystals stacking up like a deck of cards given a half-turn, “those look rhombohedral, which would indicate Ice II. No one’s really had much chance to study how a complex system with multiple ice phases like this could interact, and what we’re seeing here could be a combination of crystals left after one phase sublimed, and crystals deposited later on.”

“And, of course, there’s whatever impurities we’ve got in the walls.” He gazed at the rippled colors passing by. “I’m restraining myself from demanding we stop only because I want to see what’s at the end of this ride as much as the rest of you.” he added. “After that we come back and do some ordered and systematic sampling.”

“Of course, Dr. Conley. And whatever causes it, it’s lovely,” Madeline said. “A.J., I’m surprised you didn’t draw our attention to this.”

“Well,” A.J. answered after a pause, his voice sounding slightly tinny through the multiple relays they’d left in the tunnel to assure transmission, “I’d sort of noticed that there were some neat formations, but I was really more interested in scoping out the extent and accessibility of the tunnel. And looking at the pictures my Locusts brought back… well, they’re okay, but they don’t have the impact yours do. Remember, the Locusts were designed for close up work mostly, and don’t have the top-quality ranged imaging systems. The pics you’re sending back are gorgeous.”

“How are things topside?” Helen asked.

“Other than missing you?” he said, his sharp smile showing in the upper left corner of her VRD. “Pretty good. Athena’s performing perfectly, Munin docked successfully and they’re transferring the nozzle now. Everything’s stable up here, no emergencies, not even a hint of emergencies, actually, so you don’t need to worry. I just have to worry.”

She shook her head, but smiled. “Everything’s fine here too, A.J.”

“Found any fossils?”

“Nothing obvious yet,” Joe answered, turning the wheel of Zarathustra slightly to maneuver around a large chunk of ice sticking out into the passage. “We didn’t see anything when we passed the rough level of the deposit that Helen was looking at from Athena’s old bore, so either it didn’t extend that far out, or the layers were shifted.”

“I’d guess the latter,” put in Larry. “The patterns on the walls and floor that we can see through the – presumably – sublimed and redeposited material seem to at least tentatively confirm the theory that this passage is a void left by jumbled blocks of ice, which would mean that a lot of the surface might seem like a continuous thing, but it’s a scrambled mess under the surface, like breaking up ice on a pond and then letting it re-freeze. Whoa!”

Helen echoed him with an inarticulate cry as Zarathustra tipped forward and dropped into freefall for a heartstopping second, before bumping (surprisingly gently) back to a driving position.

“Don’t panic,” Joe said calmly, ignoring the consternation in A.J.’s sudden spate of inquiries. “Went over a shelf and dropped a few meters. I knew it was there and it’s not like rough riding on Earth.” Joe made sure Zarathustra’s two manipulator arms were still firmly locked in position, tucked under the forward part of the rover where they were least likely to get in the way or be damaged by anything projecting.

“So if it’s a matter of subliming, temperature, and pressure,” Madeline said, picking up the prior conversation, “we should expect more and larger formations as we get farther down?”

Larry looked suddenly cautious, with an expression Helen knew from her own mirror during the original Bemmius research: the look of a scientist trying to avoid making any direct statements on something that they haven’t enough data about. “Well… if I’m right on that, and it’s very wild speculation, and we haven’t gathered nearly enough data… well, yes, I’d expect we’ll see more as we go down. But like everything else in the solar system, I won’t be surprised to be surprised on that.”

Helen chuckled. “A perfectly scientific way of putting it, Dr. Conley,” she said, and then checked her time and map indicators. “At this rate, we can falsify or verify your prediction in a few hours. We’ve got, what, about fifteen kilometers to go?”

“Fourteen point two,” Joe said, “According to the sketchy map data A.J. put together. At that point the passageway appears to end. But it’s going to get a little rougher and a little slower than you think.”

“So tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Madeline said firmly. “I’m not going to let us drive on for more than another two hours, and we will not reach the end before then. We’ll stop and rest – and yes, go out and take a few samples, since we’ll already be stopped,” she said, seeming to be reading Helen’s mind, and perhaps Larry’s as well, given that the big astrophysicist’s frame had leaned forward and just as suddenly leaned back.

“Time enough to see the end of the journey tomorrow.”

Rationally, Helen agreed completely with Maddie; there was absolutely no reason to rush, and every reason to be cautious – and despite the startling drop and the casual byplay, Joe was being very cautious. And besides, pretty ice formations aside, the end of the tunnel was probably nothing more than that, the end of a tunnel in a lot of ice.

But I still really want to see what lies at the end!

Shadow of Freedom - Wed Mar 6 20:44:29 EST 2013

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:44:29 -0500

"Shadow of Freedom" by David Weber, last updated Wed Mar 6 20:44:29 EST 2013

The only good thing about the extended range was that it gave them plenty of time to track the incoming shipkillers. A missile’s impeller wedge was hard to miss and impossible to disguise, and that was good, because the Manty missiles’ sheer closing velocity was going to make them copper-plated bitches to stop. There wasn’t going to be time for more than a single counter missile launch against each shipkiller, and anything the CMs missed was going to streak clear across the defensive basket and actually pass its target in only eight seconds. That meant their counter missiles needed the best targeting and tracking data they could possibly provide, because each laser cluster was going to have a maximum of one shot before the shipkillers overflew the squadron…and each battlecruiser could bring only sixteen clusters to bear.

“At least they’re going to be generating a lower Delta Vee for evasions than a Javelin could, Ma’am,” Tucker Kiernan murmured just loud enough for Dubroskaya to hear him. “That should help a little.”

“Something better,” Dubroskaya replied harshly, never looking away from the plot.

“Coming up on initial EW activation…now,” Abigail announced.

Three hundred and forty-five seconds after launch, thirty-five million kilometers downrange from HMS Tristram, the electronic warfare platforms seeded throughout DesRon 301′s lead missile salvo came to sudden life. They were carefully sequenced, the Dazzlers blowing holes in the Solarians’ tracking systems, blinding them with furious strobes of interference, one thin sliver of an instant before the Dragon’s Teeth spawned sudden shoals of false targets.

It came at the worst possible moment — just as they crossed the perimeter of Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s counter missile envelope and half a heartbeat after the battlecruisers fired.

Fire control lost lock, throwing the CMs back onto their rudimentary seeking systems, but those onboard seekers had lost lock, as well. And when the Dazzlers faded, instead of a hundred and twenty incoming missiles, there were over five hundred. BatCruRon 491′s pathetic total of thirty-two counter missiles managed to reacquire and kill exactly one actual shipkiller…and its point defense clusters had barely seven seconds in which to try to find the one hundred real laser heads buried in that blinding confusion before they reached their standoff detonation range of thirty thousand kilometers.

The lasers failed. The computers and human beings behind them were still fighting desperately to find their targets when a tsunami of thermonuclear explosions sent a hurricane of bomb-pumped lasers into SLNS Inexorable.

Missile fire had always become progressively less accurate as the target got further away from the firing ship and lightspeed lag began degrading the quality of the fire control information feeding the missiles’ onboard computers. That creeping arthritis had thrown an ever greater load onto the missiles’ more limited sensors and less capable computers as the range was extended, and the question of exactly when to cut the telemetry links and let the missiles look after themselves had been more of an art than a science, in many ways. That was the very reason the Royal Manticoran Navy had created Apollo, and the ability to control missiles — and EW platforms — in real time even when they were literally light-minutes downrange explained the deadly lethality of Manticoran multidrive missiles.

Under normal circumstances, DesRon 301 could have anticipated that a significant percentage of its missiles would have lost lock, been lured aside by decoys, fooled by jamming. But the circumstances weren’t normal. First, the Ghost Rider platforms virtually on top of the Solarian battlecruisers did have FTL capability, which cut the effective communications lag between the squadron and its sensors in half. Second, Zavala had known his Dazzlers and Dragons Teeth were going to hammer Dubroskaya’s missile defenses into ineffectuality, so his missiles hadn’t been forced to engage in the last-minute evasion maneuvers normally required to squirm through the close-in fire of their targets’ laser clusters. They’d been able to steady down sooner, maintain lock without losing sensor contact at a critical moment, and deploy their lasing rods further out, with more time to align themselves and stabilize before detonation.

But perhaps even more importantly, the Royal Manticoran Navy had captured well over half of Sandra Crandall’s fleet intact at the Battle of Spindle. They’d examined the Solarian League Navy’s latest electronic warfare systems in detail. They’d analyzed their capabilities, noted their parameters and their weaknesses. Manticoran tactical officers like Abigail Hearns and Alice Gabrowski had pored over copies of the SLN’s technical and tactical manuals like misers gloating over the Philosopher’s Stone. They’d even been able to run captured Solarian simulations from inside the Sollies’ systems, doctrine, and hardware during the two-week voyage from Montana to Saltash.

BatCruRon 491 might as well not have had any ECM. In fact, it would have fared better if it hadn’t, because its EW systems didn’t fool a single incoming missile. Instead, the defenses which were supposed to protect those ships actually became homing beacons, helping their executioners find them, and the effectiveness of his squadron’s fire astounded even Jacob Zavala.

Shock bleached Oxana Dubroskaya’s face bone-white as hundreds of lasers ripped into Captain Borden McGillicuddy’s ship.

The number of missiles, alone, had already made a mockery of her pre-engagement calculations. Their blinding speed, and the incredible power and effectiveness of the electronic warfare systems the Mark 16′s onboard fusion plant made possible were even worse. She had no way of knowing her entire squadron’s total defensive fire had destroyed only one shipkiller, but she knew it hadn’t stopped many, and the survivors completely ignored the decoys of her deployed Halo platforms. They scorched in on Inexorable, and her stomach clenched in horrified disbelief as CIC’s estimate of the laser heads’ throughput appeared on her tactical plot’s sidebar.

The Mark 16′s original fifteen-megaton warhead had been more destructive than any destroyer or light cruiser missile ever previously deployed, although dealing with battlecruiser armor — as Abigail Hearns had learned aboard HMS Hexapuma in the Monica System — had pushed it to its limits. But Tristram and her sisters were equipped with the Mod G version, with a forty-megaton warhead and improved gravity generators. That increased its effectiveness by a factor of over five…which made it more powerful than the brand-new Trebuchet capital ship missile the Solarian League Navy had just begun to deploy.

Inexorable’s armor had never been designed to face that sort of holocaust, and each of the ninety-nine Mark 16s which reached attack range carried six lasing rods. Five hundred and ninety-four x-ray lasers, each more destructive than anything a Solarian ship-of-the-wall could have thrown, stabbed out at McGillicuddy’s ship. Perhaps a third of them wasted their fury on the impenetrable roof and floor of Inexorable’s impeller wedge, but the others didn’t. They punched through the battlecruiser’s sidewalls with contemptuous ease, and armor shattered as the transfer energy blew into the ship’s hull. The sidewalls and the radiation shielding inside them attenuated the lasers…slightly. Nothing could have stopped them, though, and eight hundred and fifty thousand tons of battlecruiser disintegrated in an incandescent flash like the heart of a star.

The entire attack, from the detonation of the first laser head to the last, took less than a second and a half. It was one terrible, blinding eruption of fury, crashing down upon its target like the fist of God. There was no time for life pods to launch. No time for small craft to escape the catastrophe. SLNS Vanquisher’s CIC couldn’t even differentiate between the individual lasers that ripped the life out of her consort and took Inexorable’s entire ship’s company with them.

“Tango One destroyed,” Abigail Hearns heard her own voice report as the FTL Ghost Rider platforms updated her plot. “Tracking on Tango Two. Second salvo EW activation in…twenty-one seconds.”

“Raise Zavala!” Oxana Dubroskaya barked. “Tell him we surrender!”

“Sir!” Lieutenant Wilson said suddenly. “They want to surrender!”

Jacob Zavala looked at Auerbach, and his nostrils flared.

“Put them on my display!” he snapped. An instant later, Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s face appeared before him. It was no longer the confident, angry face of a Solarian flag officer. It was ashen, the eyes huge.

“Captain –” she began over the Hermes buoy’s faster-than-light channel, but a wave of his hand chopped her off.

“You’re two light-minutes downrange, this link can’t interface with my telemetry channels, and my birds don’t have FTL links,” he said sharply. “My next salvo’s coming in less than ten seconds. It’s already committed, and there are two more right behind it that I can’t abort before they get there. Abandon immediately!”

Dubroskaya stared at him for one more moment, then wheeled from her own pickup.

“Abandon ship!” she shouted. “All units, abandon ship — now!”

SLNS Paladin was Tango Four, the last ship on DesRon 301′s targeting queue. She got three quarters of her personnel into life pods before she was destroyed, and SLNS Success managed to get almost half of her people out…but only one hundred and eleven of Vanquisher’s two thousand crewmen escaped.

Vice Admiral Oxana Dubroskaya and her staff were not among them.