Ten-Thousand Pangas (IC CLOSED GRAPHIC)

[Songhia]

NOTE: This story is going to be DARK. It will contain scenes of mass and gruesome violence, and the records and evidence thereof. I have no interest in making this exploitative or pornographic, but I want to warn people anyway - even if it's not stated in as many words, this is the story of everything, EVERYTHING that gets these sorts of warnings put up. It is not for the squeamish.

OOC Thread

It didn't begin in 2013, obvious as it might be to start it there.

It didn't begin in 2003, when General Sundiata marched into the National Palace and put Prime Minister Diaré against a wall for 'treason against the nation.' It didn't begin in 2008, either, when Sundiata arrested tired, old President Sissoko and usurped his office.

It didn't begin in 1991, when the Kamaré dictatorship collapsed. It didn't begin in 1985, when the dictatorship started. It didn't begin in 1969, when the beloved president Dieng was thrown down from power. It didn't begin in 1963, when Johnathan Keita, hero of independence and father of the nation, died of stomach cancer.

It didn't begin in 1958, when the white people left. It didn't begin in 1853, when the white people arrived. It didn't begin with Wolo, or Songhai, or Semeré, or Djembelé, or Warou, or Mandahambé.

The orgy of violence and cruelty that exploded from the banks of the Sanaga began just after the first time a man lay eyes on his neighbor's bounty and said, that should be mine. It began when that same man, stricken through by envious thoughts, decided, I ought take it. It began then, and it continued to grow in pain and resentment a thousand times a day, as billions of tiny slights and indignities slowly began to build and fester and rot in the hearts of individuals, families, communities, and then an entire nation.

This profound national feeling flared up in 1868, when one of the errant sons of the last Wolo king took up the name of Takhar Sa, the Snake God of Justice and Revenge, and raised an army of vengeance to destroy the Norvenian invaders. A conflict between a prodigal son and a stubborn father, when given the onus of royalty, bloomed into the havoc of war, a war that claimed the lives of almost half a million people.

Today, the Takhar Sa is on the 10 Cauri note, his face the very picture of youthful patriotism and determination. When a new demagogue has roused up the anger of the people against everyone who denies then everything, who else could be their symbol?

Aramwaré, Songhia

God is Just, and the Land is Good.

That's the motto of Aramwaré province. It is one of the few provinces that keeps its motto strictly in English, to say nothing of its other printed materials. That alone ought to tell you what sort of place it is. It took a command from the capitol to make them change the name from 'Abernathy.'

But the motto is accurate, at least to the second part. The land is good. The Aramwaré river spawns out of Lake Koumbasa, 60 kilometers away to the northeast, and winds its lazy, brown course down to meet the Sanaga 80 kilometers yonder to the southwest. Some long-forgotten king had hewn the earth into canals, and the soil drank deep and gleefully of it. Every autumn, the earth would burst forth with anything you planted in it - cassava and peanuts for the hungry, sugar and cotton for the mercantile. The soil was better in the highlands, where coffee and tea and chocolate grew up in great shoots and leafy bushes and gnarled old trees, but that was neither here nor there.

Perhaps, up there, the land is better. But here in Aramwaré, the land is good.

The sky over Aramwaré is eternal, with the horizon always far, far away. Beyond the uniform rows of sugarcane, the trees are few and far between, and the grasses never higher than a man's waist, and then only sometimes. If you hold out your arms and look to your fingers, you will always see the shock of blue sky just above them. It is always hot, and the sky is always vast and pure and clean.

If you look across the river, perhaps you can see one of the famous Porcupine Temples. It is made of clay brick, and between the bricks are set wooden planks, jutting out like spines. Centuries ago, it was where the Saltigues gave their sacred lessons, and people came from far and wide to partake of their magic power, and to offer up sacrifices, and to hear the words of Roog the Immensity, Source of the World. The Saltigues are long gone, now; perhaps for a hundred years. They took their precious bronzes with them, and now the temple lies forgotten.

There is a town in Aramwaré. It is also called Aramwaré; it is the only town there that bothers with a name. It has 466 households, 8 restaurants and taverns, 3 churches, and a hospital with three doctors and three nurses and a white-washed wall that they use on Wednesday nights to show movies. The people there are Zawaré; they are a smiling people. They love to laugh, and to sing, and to call jokes at each other. Sometimes they love to curse and argue and shout at one another, too, but that's all for fun, ultimately. A Zawaré is never serious unless he's serious. They are the common clay people of Songhia.

If you follow the Aramwaré river long enough, you will reach the Sanaga. If, then, you continue downstream, you will soon enough reach Wosaweyo. Should you go upstream, you will reach Yandé. You are on the right bank of the river; the only good road that follows it is on the left bank. On this side, you make do with dirt roads if you want to leave, or take a river barge. There are lots of them; they come down from the lake bearing fish at least three times a week. You need a barge; the river is wide and fast, and only the best can swim across it.

It is good to know these things, because a crisis is coming to Aramwaré. 600 kilometers away, two men are getting in an argument. They are both important and powerful men, and the outcome of their hard words will effect the future of Songhia - and especially the future of Aramwaré. But that argument isn't finished yet. For the moment, at least, Aramwaré is at peace.

For the moment.

[The Cookish States]

Wittenhammer Farmstead, Songhia

The young man slammed his hammer into the fence post. The nails bent, contorted into a metal knot holding up long strands of barbed wire, which was wrapped around the post, digging into the wood. The fence went along for a few miles before curving west, then north, then east, and then south. The land the Wittenhammers owned was a perfect square, four square miles. A tributary with no name ran through it, teeming with fish of questionable contents. Doug loved the land, but wanted to travel. His world was so small, and his education so limited. He didn't feel he met his full mental potential.

His grandparents and aunt owned land adjacent to them, a much smaller plot. They gardened, but mostly used the vast amounts of money they saved up to buy most of their goods. They ate together every Sunday. His mother worked hard in the kitchen and fields, and spoke to relatives on the phone every day. They used to be missionaries, but the conversion was reverse. His father worked on a tractor in the barn, cursing and yelling at spewing oil and fluids. 31 cattle roamed the pasture, always looking for grass to eat and ponds to drink from. Doug was different from his family, he loved his rifle. He'd bought it off of the black market when he was 14 and completely overpaid, by almost five times the amount it was worth. But then, that was the only way a white boy would buy a gun in that neighborhood. His father had almost killed him.

"Why do you need a gun!? We're not savages, we don't fight, we work! The gun is only the tool of the man who cannot supply himself!"

But, he was able to keep the weapon. Now, Doug lined up his shot. A dog was roaming the pasture, harassing the livestock, at least that was what he'd tell his dad. He fired a shot. The dog gave no whimper, scream, or noise. It just fell, dead. He walked up to it, and admired his kill. After chopping the skinny, malnourished tail off of it with his hatchet, he left it by the fence to ward away coyotes.

He headed back home for some supper, happy with how his day had turned out.

[Lydenburg]

Aramwaré, Songhia

In the verdant hills which bordered this vibrant tributary of the Aramwaré River, a simple structure nestled cozily between two granite outcroppings overlooking some twenty hectacres of waving maize, penned sheep, and grazing cattle. Hewed from crude mortar and liver brick only three years ago to this day, it was commonly mistaken for one of the many shack-like tobacco barns common to choicer Kalumban or Lydenburgher country - thatched, crudely constructed, haphazardly situated. Only the imposing hedges, 14" razor security fence, and an ugly Mazda B1600 parked on an adjacent drive suggested anything less.

Kris Adriaanse Plaatjies called it home.

It was said that all the farmers in Aramwaré were rich. Typical snobbish Norvenian aristocracy with a rougher edge. It was assumed they held cocktail parties, played golf on the weekends, and managed their affairs from swimming pools or lavish, sprawling, estates with all the luxuries one could comprehensibly import.

Plaatjies had not inherited his farm. He had purchased the land at the very beginning, when there was only virgin bush and tangled kopjes as far as the eye could see. That first unbearable summer he had lived in his bakkie or slept on the ground, bathing from wood drums suspended over a smouldering campfire. He had cursed and hacked his way through clinging foliage denser than equatorial jungle, doggedly carving this little homestead from the vast Songhian wilderness. The fruits of painstaking labor weren't idyllic market croplands or a sprawling commercial estate drawing millions of cauris per week, but they were enough. Proof for any man that two worn, calloused, hands and unquenchable perseverance were always enough to defy the odds stacked against them - it was a lesson that Plaatjies had taken to heart.

Thirty-six months later, he was no longer poor white trash trying to survive. He was one of the provincial elite who provided for their country and reaped a harvest of profits, the big bosses who looked after Songhia and reasonably expected her to look after them.

He was also a stranger in a country he could not call his own.

Certainly, the other farmers saw him on occasion, haggling with a grocer in town or speeding along the rough tracks in that dreadful green pickup, but he was nowhere to be seen at races, country clubs, or union meetings. His monosyllable answers to the most casually posed questions were often underscored by habitual surliness and a clipped accent which betrayed his Afrikaner origins. Plaatjies looked the part, too; fair complexion, shock of dark hair, and heavy but well-conditioned physique that was enough for any Dutchman to supervise a roomful of munts. No surprise that he'd made his own contribution to alleviating unemployment by retaining a forty-member workforce on his property.

The blacks who came at first were scraped from the bottom of the barrel; Songhians who could not find employment elsewhere or those who simply lived closer to Plaatjies than any other source. Perhaps some came expecting to see a lazy vagabond who couldn't lift a finger without a native servant or two to do any real work. What they found was a hard man, a racist without apology who paid them very little and demanded much. But he was also a farmer, much like them, and instead of barking orders under a shaded veranda he labored alongside his boys to harvest the crop and till the soil. For many it was undoubtedly a refreshing change; at least they knew where he stood.

But to the eternal sorrow of others, Plaatjies also had little patience for incompetence. If one got cheeky around him they were liable to get swatted with a heavy sjambok for their trouble, though defiance wasn't always necessary to warrant such brutal consequences. Somebody would need to be blamed if the quota wasn't placated one day or another; an unfortunate due to get his head smashed into the door of a bakkie because their best simply hadn't been good enough. Giving the baas a wary eye or questioning a foreman in his presence was inviting a savage beating. If he was in a particularly bad mood the discipline could very well be fatal. One mistake might be tolerated. Another in recent memory meant the lash or the dog, a huge labrador retriever with massive paws and a vicious snarl.

It was a long eight hours before each day came to a merciful close and Plaatjies sent everybody home to retire behind his fence. His house was always shadowed and foreboding, even in the daylight, but although nothing remained burning after dark he never really slept - spending a busy interlude in the study with accounts or a Bible until the wee, wee, hours of the morning.

Tonight though, mister baas would be going straight to bed - new calves and those verdomde tobacco worms would still be waiting to confront him on the morrow, and he wished to get an early start.

Yesterday's paper - and its headlines about the new premier's boring rhetoric - would have to be put off for another restless night.

[The Steel Fraternity]

Note: For anyone unfortunate enough to have read my post in the Sign-up thread, just jump about two thirds of the way down this post to avoid re-reading. Or just CTRL+F and skip to "OutLook".

"Goddamn it, Verger!"

A sudden blow overturned the futon Anita Verger had passed out on, sending her tumbling to the hard tile floor of her living room. Her eyes flew open, and she had to immediately screw them shut against the sunlight streaming through her open windows. Don't puke, don't you dare puke, she thought furiously. Her head swam with nausea and pain, and her throat was burned and tight from the tequila the night before.

"What in the hell are you thinking? You know we've got a raid tonight!" The man shouting was Juan "Jack" Murrietta, her boss and former comrade. Verger did not reply and did not move. She simply remained sprawled there, her cheek pressed against the cool tile, as she took long, deep breaths and tried to get her nausea under control. "Huh? Do you even know what time it is? Answer me, dammit!"

Verger still couldn't answer. She was still to nauseous to risk it. The hell you can't, she thought furiously. Quit being a little bitch and talk. Taking one last deep breath, Verger managed to grunt out a barely-intelligible answer.

"No," she said, and immediately had to swallow a retch. You will not puke. Not in front of him.

"'No?' No, what? Were you thinking 'no'?" Murrietta wasn't yelling anymore, just speaking with soft contempt.

"No-" Another suppressed heave of her stomach. "No, I don't know what time it is."

"It's three in the afternoon. We head out in four hours." A brittle silence. "We can't take you in this condition." Another silence. "You're fired."

Verger heard Murrietta turn on his heel and begin to walk away. Gritting her teeth, Verger reached up to grab the edge of the futon and force herself into a kneeling position. She steadied herself as best she could on her knees and the stump of her missing right calf, her back as straight and erect as possible. She would have stood, should have stood, but she didn't have her prosthetic on and didn't know where it was.

Finally, she forced her eyes open, fought down her worst wave of nausea yet, and spoke with all the strength she could muster. "Stop right there."

The tall, rail-thin raider stopped. Looking at him for the first time, she saw he was already wearing his black fatigues and combat boots, though he didn't have his weapons or tactical harness on yet. She was wearing nothing but a pair of underwear and a t-shirt, covered in vomit. Beyond Murrietta, she could se the door to her little adobe house standing open, probably as she'd left it the night before.

Slowly, Murrietta turned. He looked at her for a few moments without speaking. She held his gaze evenly and expressionlessly, not letting her misery or weakness show. "I'm good."

"Good?" said Murrietta. "Look at yourself."

"I'm good," she repeated more forcefully. "I'll be at the Yard and ready to go before seven."

Murrietta looked at her a moment longer, then heaved a sigh. "You'd better. This is your last chance, Verger."

Murrietta turned and left. After he was out of sight, Verger waited until she heard the engine of his car start, then lunged for the garbage can by the futon.

She barely made it.

----

The raiders staged their convoy on the outskirts of the border town Santa Rio at seven in the evening, but did not cross the border until after dark. After that, it took them several more hours to reach their target. The trip to that nameless little village (or at least, if it had a name, she didn't know it) was one of absolute misery for Verger. Her hangover had not abated in the least as she had showered, dressed, and geared up. She tried drinking water, but threw it back up twice more before she left her house.

Afraid of forgetting something in her state, she had quadruple-checked her weapons and equipment before running out her front door. Her car had fishtailed its way into the Yard and screeched to a halt next to the empty holding pens at five till seven.

Now, sitting in the back of an open-topped Puma off-road vehicle as it bounced along a rough forest track, she checked her gear once again. She was wearing a bulky kevlar vest with shoulder pads over a set of black fatigues, with combat boots (or rather, a combat boot, with the recurved metal of her prosthetic protruding from her right pant leg), hard-knuckled tactical gloves, and a black steel helmet. Over this she wore a tactical harness bearing 240 rounds for her SA98 (a Skorzenian clone of the AK47); the four 30-round magazines on her right-hand side, all marked with blue tape, were loaded with rubber bullets, as was the magazine already in her weapon; the magazines on her left side, marked with red tape, were loaded with jacketed hollow-point rounds. Also hanging on her vest were four flash-bang grenades and two CS gas grenades. Finally, she wore a pistol belt with a holstered SA1911 and four spare magazines.

Having finished her check, she looked at the convoy around her. Her Puma, with two other passengers, a driver, and a gunner, was the second vehicle in the convoy. Ahead of them was another Puma, and behind them were three deuce-and-a-half trucks with caged beds. Finally, a hundred yards ahead and two hundred feet in the air was the light helicopter flown by Murrietta that would pinpoint any sentries around the target village with its IR unit.

When the convoy came within two miles of the village, the helicopter climbed to seven hundred feet to reduce the amount of noise audible below. At one mile out, the ground vehicles slowed to a crawl, likewise to minimize noise. At half a mile out, they stopped completely. Murrietta flew ahead to the village, located the two sentries posted against just such a raid, and radioed their position back to the ground units. Two raiders immediately leapt from the deuce-and-a-halfs and stalked out into the brush.

Half an hour later, once the sentries were confirmed neutralized, the convoy roared into the village, high beams on and weapons firing into the air. It was 2:47 AM.

The trucks roared right into the village square -- Such as it was. The target village was just a cluster of a dozen or so houses and shacks, with a well in front of a tiny church serving as the town center. The three trucks barely fit. The Pumas roared to the edges of the village, slowed just long enough for Verger and the other "door kickers" to leap out, and then began to circle the village in order to cut off any possible escape, all while firing sporadic bursts from their pintle-mounted machine guns to keep the villagers off-kilter.

Verger and her partner, Jenner disembarked on the far east side of town, Jenner limbering up the rotary-magazine grenade launcher from his harness as he hit the ground. They immediately began running from building to building, Jenner firing CS cannisters through windows while Verger covered him and "discouraged" any villagers from running outwards.

Verger's first customer of the night was a short, wiry teenage boy who tried to rush past into the jungle, dragging a younger child behind him. Blinded by tears from the gas, he couldn't see her, and made no move to dodge when she stepped in front of him and swung the synthetic butt of her rifle in a sharp, brutal arc into his nose. Running at full tilt into the blow, the boy was bowled over in a spectacular crash, knocking down the child he was trying to lead, as well.

As the boy struggled to rise, swinging wildly at his attacker, Verger stepped in and jabbed the muzzle of the rifle hard into his midsection. The air was knocked out of the teenager in a whuff!, and he flopped back to the ground, struggling to catch his breath. Verger bent down, grabbed his collar in her left hand, and jerked the boy to his feet.

"Vaya a la plaza! Ahora, o tomamos el niño también!" She shouted, and shoved the boy back toward the town center, sparing a light blow to start the smaller child in the same direction. The boy stumbled a few paces in the right direction, then fell to the ground. To encourage him on his way, Verger snapped up the SA98 and fired a rubber bullet into his buttocks, making the blinded, beaten boy cry out in pain and shock. "Vaya! Ahora!"

Finally, the boy struggled back to his feet, took the hand of the child, and ran to the town center and the waiting trucks.

Verger similarly intercepted several more runners, all blinded by CS gas and disoriented by the sudden shock of the raid, before she had her close call.

As the raiders drove the villagers inward, Murrietta provided overwatch from his helicopter, using the IR scanners to locate anyone trying to hide in their house. Most villagers tried to flee their houses when the raid began, panicked by the roaring engines and gunfire, and driven out by the tear gas. A few still tried to hunker down, but were easily dealt with. Murrietta would call them out over the radio, and Verger would toss a flash-bang into the house. Then she would shoulder-check the door open (she felt a pang of shame every time she did this; breaking down a door with a shoulder was inefficient and took multiple blows, the move of an amateur... or a cripple) rush in, and drag the disoriented villager out into the street.

At the last house before the town center, however, things went wrong. Murrietta called out one hunkered-down target, and Verger tossed in a flashbang, as usual. After her first couple blows to the door, however, it was suddenly yanked open from the inside. Verger just had time to register an old man with a wet bandanna tied over his mouth, goggles over his eyes, and an old double-barreled shotgun in his hands. Then came a sudden hammer-blow to her chest and a deafening blast, and she was knocked sprawling into the street. The old man then stepped out of his door, pivoted, and fired the other barrel of his shotgun at Jenner, who fell to the ground screaming and clutching his leg.

As the old man broke open
the shotgun and began to fumble in his pocket for more shells, Verger (lying at his feet) finally shook off her disorientation and surprise enough to level her rifle and fire a burst of rubber bullets into the man's torso. Now he was knocked to the ground, and Verger scrambled to her feet and hopped over to him. Leaning over, the pressed the muzzle of the rifle against his forehead, and fired again.

At that range, even firing a blank would have been fatal. The pure concussive force of the gunpowder exiting the muzzle would be enough to shatter his skull and kill him instantly. As it was, the rubber round actually penetrated his skull, though it didn't exit, instead bouncing around his cranium, shattering the skull and reducing his head to an amorphous blob of bruised skin.

Back in the street, Jenner was screaming shrilly and clutching at his upper leg as a massive pool of blood formed under him at an alarming rate. Verger limped over to him as fast as she could, but Jenner was a huge man and so hysterical that even the over-muscled female Paladin couldn't get his hands out of the way. The door-kickers from the west side of town, however, rushed across the square to help hold him down while the raiders who had ridden in the deuce-and-a-halfs kept the villagers under watch around the well.

Once Jenner's hands were pulled away from his wounds, Verger's stomach turned in a way that had nothing to do with her fading hangover. The blast of buckshot had reduced his left thigh to hamburger meat, and left several dime-sized holes in his groin. Scrambling at the first aid gear on Jenner's vest, Verger packed his wounds with gauze while one of the raiders holding him down got a hand free and began shouting into his radio for Murrietta to land the helicopter at the edge of town.

By the time Verger had finished dressing the wounds and the helicopter had landed, Jenner had passed out. The other raiders quickly brushed Verger aside, one of them taking Jenner's shoulders in his hands while the other snaked one arm under the small of the wounded man's back and the other beneath his knees. The two raiders then lifted Jenner and began running awkwardly toward the helicopter.

As Verger watched them go, she felt another stab of shame. She should have been runnig with them, helping to carry her wounded comrade, but a cripple couldn't keep up.

Soon, the helicopter lifted off and sped away to the east, bound for the Fraternity hospital in Stameyville.

Verger and the other two door-kickers returned to the square to help process the new acquisitions.

----

After the initial burst of violence, the raiders were as humane as they could be to their cargo. They separated the healthy teenagers and young adults from the group of villagers to herd into the trucks, only using force when they had to, which wasn't often. Many of the villagers had been through such raids before, and all of them had heard enough of them to know how it was going to go. Once the raiders had you, you were a Prole. Already dead, in every way that mattered.

Most people accepted that, but of course others couldn't. One teenage girl, hysterical at the prospect of being separated from her family and the newborn child that had been torn from her arms, broke away from the raiders and leapt down the town well. There was a moment of stunned silence from all present, and then the raiders calmly resumed their work.

Once the trucks were full (and the raiders didn't even pack them in too tightly, only putting as many as could fit the benches into the truck beds), the raiders ordered the rest out of the way, loaded back up in their vehicles, and roared back into the night.

It was 3:34 AM.

----

The next day, Verger was in the Cantina Madrid back in Santa Rio, and drunk again by four in the afternoon.

Sitting where she was, hunched over the bar, all Verger had to do was turn and look over her shoulder to see the Yard. So, she didn't turn around.

The new Proles they had captured the night before were still being treated well; they were in the pens, but they had shade and were given plenty of food and water. New Detroit, rural western protectorate of the Skorzenian Empire, made no use of Prole labor themselves, and saw no need to brutalize their miserable trade goods unnecessarily. Murrietta had put it succinctly when he first hired her after she was discharged from the Paladins: "New Detroit takes them, Skorzenia breaks them."

And Skorzenia was so good at breaking them, beating them down, and dehumanizing them through violence, chemical dependence, poisoned air, overwork, and --worst of all-- shear imposed ignorance, that whenever they needed Proles for any work other than mindlessly repetitive industrial tasks, they had to get fresh blood. Luckily, New Detroit was as good at taking them as Skorzenia was at breaking them.

She didn't know what time it was when Murrietta walked in for a drink. It had become dark outside at some point, and the world was already starting to blur if she turned her head too fast. She was able to keep up with their conversation though, barely.

"Verger," he said as he sat at the stool next to her. His voice was... empty. Six years ago, when Verger had first come to work for him, he had been cheerful and garrulous when they drank together. In fact, her very first week there, they had gotten blackout drunk together and woken up the next morning twenty miles on the wrong side of the border with some poor farmer's dead goat in the bed of their truck.

Then, he began to grow concerned when she started hitting the bar more and more often, and earlier and earlier. Then he got irate when she started getting drunk at home in the morning. Finally, he had grown contemptuous when she started going on raids drunk or hung over.

Now, concern, contempt, and admiration all seemed to be fighting in his voice, leaving it strangely neutral.

"You saved Jenner's life. He would have bled out for sure if you hadn't dressed his wounds like you did."

"Bullshit," Verger spat. "My crippled ass couldn't hold him down without help, or even help carry him."

"Oh, cut the miserable gimp act," said Murrietta. "Hodges and Allen said they could barely hold him down themselves. There had to be a third person there to stop the bleeding. Without you, he'd be dead. You saved his life, and even his leg."

"Yeah, right," said Verger. "He probably won't thank me. Will he keep his..."

Murrietta grimaced. "Too soon to tell. He might keep enough to stay... functional, or he might lose it all. But it's still better than being dead."

Verger grunted, took another drink, and blacked out again.

----

At some point, between passing out and actual sleep, Verger dreamed. She dreamed of her parents, both sets.

She saw her adoptive father, wearing those round spectacles with the taped bridge and cracked lens he'd had in the bunker during the 1984 War. Only he wasn't wearing his habitual jacket and khakis, but black fatigues and body armor. And he wasn't sitting at his desk or standing by a lectern, but writhing in a dusty street, sceaming and clutching at his bleeding crotch.

She saw her birth mother in Paladin armor, both legs terminating in spindly prosthesis, tumbling her way into a well.

She saw her birth father standing over her as she knelt in her own vomit, cursing her drunkenness.

She saw her adoptive mother praising her for her heroism, even as a bloodstain spread on her stomach -

from her womb it's from her womb

- and the Proles began to file silently into the barroom around them. They weren't the Proles from yesterday, though, they were the ones from 1987, the Skorzenians that hadn't been in the bunkers, who had been left to face the radiation and starvation and violence before the Fraternity had re-emerged. The ones she had seen when she was fifteen, the first around. When she had first struck children with her rifle, when she had first threatened to take a man's child if he didn't do as he was told. The ones who had spoken her language and not Spanish, who had babbled about rights and decency and common Christian kindness, back before everyone knew how it went. Before everyone knew that once they were Proles, they were dead.

Suddenly, her mother stopped congratulating her for saving her other mother's life. "New Detroit takes them, Skorzenia breaks them," She said. " You make them, Ani. Ani takes them, Ani breaks them."

She dreamed about leaping from a Thunderbird, of seeing a Lusitanian Imperialist's torso explode under a burst from her minigun, of the cheers from the Lusitanians flooding from the political prison.

She dreamed of fighting when she was a Paladin. Not taking, not breaking. Fighting. Feeling whole, throwing herself at Reconquistas, at Lusitanians, at whoever... and being better.

She dreamed more, but it was too strange for her to remember.

----

I need out. I need out. Ineedout. Ineedoutineedoutineedout. The crazy mantra was buzzing through Verger's mind when she regained consciousness in the wee hours of the morning, having gone to or been put in one of the booths at some point.

There were only a couple of other patrons still drinking, and the twenty-four hour news station on the TV over the bar was clearly audible.

“Tonight on OutLook, we have Professor Gerald Kingsley of Iron Bay University's Auroran Studies Center and Centurion Benito Alvarez, retired, of Legio Three's Afrosian Regional Command here to discuss recent developments in the South-Afrosian nation of Songhia. Songhia, which has been ruled by the military dictatorship of President David Sundiata since 2003, recently held its first free elections since he took power. Although Sundiata himself refused to run for election, this has been hailed by some international observers as an important step toward a restoration of democracy in Songhia. Others have derided this as a cynical effort to give a false cachet of democratic approval to what remains essentially a military junta. Thoughts, Professor?”

“Thank you, Donna. I'd say the two views of this situation are not mutually exclusive. Sundiata is undoubtedly working from self-interest here. Given the increasing unpopularity of his regime, he has to do something to muster public support, or he's vulnerable to the same sort of ouster he used to take power in the first place. So, he holds elections. It's surprising that he doesn't seem to have bothered stealing the parliamentary elections, but at the same time, that may be the smart move for him. Songhia, really all of Afrosia, is a powder keg of racial and ethnic tensions at the best of times, but has managed occasional periods of stable democracy in the past. If Sundiata plays his cards right, he may be able to parlay his military power into a legitimate political base of support, and eliminate the risk of being put up against a wall the next time a general gets ambitious.”

“We can only hope. Your read on the situation, Centurion?”

“To be honest, I think Dr. Kingsley might be being overly optimistic here. Yes, Songhia has managed some brief periods of democratic government in the past, but like most nations in the region, they have proven incapable of sustaining a truly free government. If Sundiata leaves power, it will be at gunpoint. However, that won't be a security concern for us. Aurora is a long way from us, and if anything from that part of the world should concern us, it's the socialist and interventionist policies of Norv--

The TV was switched off abruptly. “Last call,” announced the bartender.

Verger paid her tab, then began her weaving limp back home.

She was careful not to look at the Yard as she walked out onto the street. Not because she didn't want to see the poor villagers from across the border, but because she was afraid of seeing the starving Skorzenians from her childhood.

----

When she got back home, Verger carefully gathered up all the liquor bottles in her house. She got the tequila from her sideboard, the wine from her refrigerator, and the brandy from the cupboard, then poured them all down her sink. That still left one bottle, though. One she didn't want to get. Quit being a pansy and go grab it. It's just in... Just in a box.

Verger caught herself walking slowly on the way to the cellar door, and forced herself to speed up. Then she sped up again, and then again, until she was practically jogging around her small house. Still forcing herself to move quickly, she fumbled with the lock for a few seconds before getting it open, throwing the cellar door wide, and striding quickly down the steps.

Then she was there, looking at a bulky, featureless metal box that looked like nothing so much as a giant steel sarcophagus sitting on the dirt floor of the cellar. With hands that she didn't let shake, she quickly and efficiently punched the access code into the small keypad in the middle of the box's lid, then heaved it open to reveal the massive metal form within.

Six and a half feet tall and four feet across at the shoulders, it was an androgynous, blank-featured figure of pure, burnished steel. It was a completely unbroken, gleaming thing... except for the jagged, ugly hole in the right calf.

Verger had been telling herself that she'd get around to fixing it soon for the past six years, yet she had never touched it. Now she knew she never would.

Reaching behind the right shoulder of the behemoth, Verger pulled out the bottle of scotch nestled there and examined it. Thirty-five years old, presented to her by Centurion Reyes on her discharge. For the last six years she'd been telling her self she'd get around to it, and now she would.

Verger calmly tore the foil wrapping off the bottle neck, pulled the cork with her teeth, and poured the bottle out over her armor. Once it was empty, she simply opened her hand and let the bottle fall into the steel coffin. Then she closed the lid, turned around, and walked away.

----

“I quit,” said Verger.

Murrietta had always had a good poker face. Now he just leaned back in his office chair, blinked, and slowly set his pen down on the desktop. “Is this about Jenner?”

“Yes,” said Verger. “And about a thousand other things. I'm done.”

“What,” said Murrieta. “You just going to concentrate on drinking yourself to death now?”

“No, I'm done with that, too.”

Murrietta blinked again. “What are you going to do, then?”

“I'm going to Songhia.”

“That pit in Afrosia?” Murrietta's poker face was gone now, and he was looking at her in open befuddlement. “What the hell will you do there?”

“I don't know. They say they're trying to democratize, or some of them anyway. Maybe there'll be some way for me to help.”

“Are you already having Dts?” asked Murrietta. “What are you going to do, assassinate Generalissimo What's-his-name? Run around in the bush, scalping half-assed conscripts like you're back on the selection course? Preach the joys of the Steel Fraternity and the Scientific Church of Christ?”

“I don't know,” Verger said again. “Maybe. Maybe there'll be nothing for me to do there. I can always just go somewhere else. I'm not short on cash. I've got my Paladin pension, and we've been making money on Proles even faster than I can drink it away again.

“It doesn't matter, I'm done with this.”

“Now listen,” said Murrietta, rising. He leaned forward over his desk, bracing himself with both hands. “I don't know what you're going thr-”

Verger simply turned away from him and walked to the door.

“Dammit, Verger, wait!” Murrietta shouted. “Hold on!”

Verger threw the door open--

“An!”

--and stopped. Slowly, she turned back around to face him. Murrietta had opened his desk drawer, and produced out a long, straight-edged knife with a simple wooden hilt in a battered leather sheath. Walking over to where Verger stood in the doorway, he proffered the knife to her. Slowly, she took it, noting that both blade and hilt were even longer than they had first appeared, oversized to be carried in a powered gauntlet. “LEGIO III” was roughly carved into the pommel.

“Whenever you come back,” Murrietta said. “I'll still be here, Anita.” He offered his hand.

She shook it, and left.

----

“When's the next flight to Songhia?”

The young man behind the travel desk at the airport in Stameyville looked like he was barely shaving, and seemed vaguely flustered for no discernible reason. His air of general uncertainty irritated Verger.

“Well, there are no direct flights,” he said doubtfully after a few moments clacking at the computer.

“I wouldn't expect there to be,” replied Verger as patiently as she could. She felt nauseous, shaky, and desperately wanted a drink. “There wouldn't be much traffic for that, would there? Now, what about connecting flights?”

“Well,” he said slowly. “There's one flight for Sokassa boarding now, but it has an overnight layover in Wrenwa-”

“Fine. I'll take it.”

“But it's too late to check any bagg-”

“I'm only taking this,” Verger said, lifting her overnight bag. “Now ring it up.”

She brusquely paid for her ticket, tossed the young man her car keys, and walked away, leaving him even more confused than before.

[Norvenia]

Sokassa. One Week Ago.

Dannie Armstrong dropped his cigarette butt into the street below and puffed out a last lungful of thin grey smoke. He watched the faintly glowing coal circle down from the top of the embassy wall where he stood. When it hit the street, a gang of children descended upon it, trampling the butt into the mud. Armstrong shook his head wearily. What a fucking shithole.

And that, Dannie Armstrong knew, was why no one liked to look at it. The Norvenian embassy compound was the largest and oldest in the city, almost a half-mile square of lush gardens and old colonial buildings kept in sparkling repair. It was surrounded by a thirty-foot bomb resistant wall fifteen feet thick, atop which Dannie now stood. The whole thing was protected by two full rifle companies of the First National Infantry - the "Mountain Guard," Norvenia's heavy-infantry elite - who in this case had rather more firepower than embassy guards usually possessed. On top of all of that, Dannie knew that on the ambassador's desk sat a sat-phone with a direct link to the 7th Joint Task Force, a combined-arms unit with the capabilities of a small army that currently sat at anchor off the south Afrosian coast, watching for trouble in Norvenia's former colonies.

All of which just depressed Dannie even more. Fucking idiots. They seal themselves in where they can't smell the dirt, park a tank at the main entrance to blow up anyone who tries to remind them of exactly where they are, and if the people who actually lived here ever made their very real presence known, embassy staff would probably shit their pants and call in an airstrike from JTF 7. Instinctively, Dannie reached for another cigarette, then gave a frustrated sigh through yellowing teeth and let his hand drop. Meeting's in five minutes. And the embassy is a no-fucking-smoking compound. Idiots. Dannie scratched angrily at the unaccustomed constriction of his suit collar and necktie. Like hygiene and dress code are their biggest concerns right now.

"Oy!" The cry came from behind Dannie, inside the compound at the bottom of the wall. He turned, and almost ran straight into one of the Mountain Guard, patrolling the walltop in full New Model Armor. The man stopped, his expression inscrutable behind his helmet's mandibles and translucent visor. Then the soldier gave a half-amused, half-contemptuous snort, and walked on. "Yeah," Dannie muttered, "well fuck you too, buddy."

"Oy!" came the shout again. It was a tall man with classic Old Anglo coloring - fair and ash-blond and blue-eyed, sweating in a tropical suit. "Daniel Armstrong! Mr. Sinclair will see you now!"

"I'm coming," Dannie muttered. "I'm coming." He spared a last glance back over the wall. "For all the good it'll do." For as Daniel Armstrong descended into the embassy compound proper, the street outside vanished entirely from sight.

* * *

Lauren Russel was taking shelter from the blazing sun under an umbrella. She was fairly certain that she had already burned anyway - her Old Anglo skin made her the fairest of the fair - but there was no point in making things worse. It was on the same theory that she was sucking down a cold - well, at least a cool - local beer. It might not help anything, but it sure as hell couldn't make things any worse.

For Lauren Russel was in a fairly foul mood. She had been in Sokassa for four days. In that time, her every request for an interview had been turned down. Not even people on the street would talk to her. They saw Tim Han, sweating silently beneath the weight of his recording camera, and they clammed up. Everyone felt something; Lauren could feel it herself, in her bones - the something that lay beyond the silence, the sense of pressure building, like the clouds stacking up against the mountainside over the cornfields back home. But she couldn't put her finger on what - because nobody would talk to her.

"People are afraid," said Paul Cissé mildly. His pure black skin was beaded with sweat as well, but he seemed bizarrely comfortable. At the moment, that just annoyed Lauren even more. Her interpreter - and guide, and bodyguard - leaned forward. "This is Sokassa, Miss Russel. The capitol. You are asking questions about politics, about democracy. In Norvenia, politics is a spectator sport, and the capitol is its greatest stadium. But this is Songhia. Here, if you answer questions like that, and someone hears of it and does not like your answer - " Paul let the implications hand in the air a moment. "So people are afraid. They will not air their feelings on international television."

"We could pixellate their faces," Lauren protested, "distort their voices."

Paul simply laughed. "If I walk up to the man on the street here and offer to pixellate his face, he will just pixellate my face with his fist, Miss Russel. No one knows what that even means here." The Songhian-Norvenian sighed. "I'm sorry. But you are in the wrong place."

"I'm not," Lauren snapped. "There's a story here, Paul. I know it. I know it in my damned gut. And I'm going to run it down."

Paul Cissé sighed. "All right," he said quietly. "But you'll get nothing here. You have to find a place further from the centers of power, where people are not so afraid to speak."

Lauren nodded, pulling out her guidebook. "Right. Eh - here. Aramwaré. Looks like the back of beyond."

Her guide laughed again, softly. "Oh, yes. It doesn't get further from the centers of power than Aramwaré." Paul shrugged slowly. "Folk might not have anything to say. But if they do, they'll probably feel free to say it."

"Good," Lauren said firmly. She could feel new energy in her now, fighting off the lethargy of the midday heat. A story. I've got a lead again on my story. She stood. "Find us a boat, Paul. We leave tomorrow morning."

* * *

Dannie Armstrong's meeting could possibly be going better.

"Just listen to me, you pompous prick!" Dannie cried. "You think you can run an intelligence agency on the back of wiretaps and satellite imagery and UAV surveillance and drone strikes and special forces raids, and maybe in Bratoslovoukia or Altakstan you can, but this is fucking Songhia! You can't see jack shit from the air here! Nobody has enough money to use a phone, so you can't track communications. This isn't that fucking simple."

James Sinclair sat behind his polished mahogany desk, his hands folded, a pained expression on his face. The plaque on the desk read "Deputy Cultural Attaché", but everyone knew that that was a polite fiction and nothing more. Sinclair was National Intelligence Service to the bone - but he was part of the new NIS, the high-tech paramilitary counterterrorist NIS that had forgotten how to do old-fashioned HUMINT gathering. And that, if you asked Dannie Armstrong, was the whole problem.

"Please," said Sinclair now, "mind your language, Mr. Armstrong."

"Mind my language!" Dannie exploded. "Mind my fucking language, Sinclair? Buddy, you're sitting here looking at your sat feeds and UAV feeds on your nice holographic displays and flat-screen TVs, here in your comfy office where you can't even smell the shit in the street, while the storm of the century brews over your head, and you're telling me to mind my fucking language!"

Sinclair sighed, and looked up at Dannie, his eyes narrowed. "Mister Armstrong, you've been ranting and raving about this gathering storm of yours for weeks now. You have no solid evidence, no sources, no video, no recording - you can't tell me what's coming, or when, or why, only that it's bad." Sinclair leaned back and tapped a holographic control on his desktop, turning up the room's air conditioning. "You understand my reservations, I'm sure."

"Sinclair," Dannie cried, "I can feel it in my gut. Look, I know that nobody likes me. I know that I've been stuck here for close to twenty years because of it. I know that you guys don't think that I'm reliable. But I've been here for longer than any other Norvenian in this compound, Sinclair. I know the street. I can feel which way the wind is blowing. And I promise you, Sinclair, that there's bad shit coming down."

The slender man on the other side of the desk shook his head wearily, and stood. "Dannie, I've had just about as much of this as I can take. If you want me to take you seriously, bring me some hard evidence." Sinclair raised a document and handed it to Armstrong. "I'm reposting you to Aramwaré. You'll have no duties except to find me intelligence about this gathering storm of yours."

Dannie's jaw dropped. "Aramwaré? Fucking Aramwaré? How the fuck am I supposed to find anything out about anything when I'm consigned to the ass end of nowhere?"

Sinclair gave an unpleasant smile. "I ask myself that every morning that I wake up and realize that I'm still in Songhia, Dannie." He thrust the document into Armstrong's hands. "Your boat leaves tomorrow morning." Sinclair raised his eyebrows. "Enjoy the trip."

* * *

Aramwaré River. Today.

"It's big," murmured Tim Han, his voice faintly awed.

"The true mother of Songhia," replied Paul Cissé. "It gives life to everyone here. The country would not exist without this river."

Lauren Russel simply leaned on the rusty deck rail of the sixty-year-old repurposed river freighter that was carrying them - and a few hundred other passengers, and a few hundred head of livestock, and several tons of cargo - deep into the heart of Aramwaré. All around, the muddy brown waters of the river lapped away to the horizon, each bank faintly visible in the heat-haze of the far distance. Dozens of boats swarmed around them, mostly little fishing craft from the riverside villages all around. From below decks came the lowing of cattle. Lauren could feel the sun beating down on her scalp right through her tan ball cap, and she tossed her blonde ponytail from one shoulder to the other, savoring the brief touch of breeze on the back of her neck. It was awe-inspiring in its way, this river. But, Lauren thought with a small smile, it also smelled like shit.

A few dozen yards to starboard, a fisherman was pulling a heavy-laden net into his boat, muscles bunching beneath his black skin. Lauren watched, a faint smile on her face. "You know," she remarked, "my father was a fisherman."

Tim Han glanced at her. "You never told me that," he remarked.

"Yeah," Lauren said. "On the Trinities. A crabber. Cable-knit sweater, pipe, the whole deal."

Tim chuckled, and opened his mouth to say something, but a quiet voice cut him off. "Mine was too. Lived on Sanctus." The voice belonged to a tough-looking man in his early fifties: his head was shaved, but grizzled stubble covered on his jaw; his skin was the color and consistency of old leather, but his eyes were a striking pale blue. The man wore jungle boots, faded jeans, sunglasses, and a light jacket of khaki canvas over a t-shirt. Paul Cissé took one look at him and instinctively moved between the man and Lauren.

The other man chuckled humorlessly. "Oh, come off it. If I wanted to hurt you I wouldn't be fucking talking to you, buddy." Lauren's eyes initially narrowed at the profanity, and narrowed further as the man tapped a cigarette out of a pack in his jacket pocket. He noticed her expression and ironically offered the pack to her, eyebrows raised. Lauren shook her head. The man chuckled again as he lit up.

"I'm Dannie Armstrong," he said eventually, pocketing the pack. "I work at the Norvenian embassy. You're Lauren Russel." It was not a question. "I've seen your war correspondence. You've seen some bad shit."

"And met some great people," Lauren replied, a bit stridently. A category in which you most decidedly do not belong.

Dannie just chuckled a third time in response. He exhaled a cloud of smoke. "You're a long way from Norvenian troopers now, Miss Russel. Where are you going on this boat?"

"Aramwaré," replied Paul Cissé grimly.

"Aramwaré," mused Dannie. "The ass end of nowhere." He raised his eyebrows. "Me too, as it happens. What brings you there?"

Lauren cocked her head, her reporter's instinct buzzing. "I could ask the same of you, Mister Armstrong." She paused, one hand flipping on the tape recorder concealed in a pocket of her photographer's vest. "What exactly is it that you do at the embassy, anyway."

Dannie shook his head. "Ah ah ah. None of that. I'm not your story." He blew out some more smoke. "But there is a story here, Miss Russel. I've been in this country for long enough to know that. How about we make a deal." Dannie extended his hand; Lauren suddenly and uncomfortably noticed the knife scars on the backs of his forearms. "You stick with me," Dannie said, "you get hard evidence of what's going on here, and you shine the biggest fucking spotlight you can on it." He smiled. "And in return, I'll do whatever I can to hand you your story."

There was a long pause, as Lauren studied the man, trying to take his measure. And while she couldn't say quite why, she realized that - although she might not like him - she did trust Dannie Armstrong. In a strange way, I suppose, he reminds me of my father.

So Lauren nodded simply and said: "Deal." And amidst the endless muddy waters of the river, the two shook hands.

[Songhia]

Just like everywhere else, Aramwaré has its share of cracker-barrel philosophers. These are the sort of things that they have said, and - like all such folks - will continue to repeat, ad-nauseum, whenever someone gives them the chance.

The Abernathy Sporting Society was a grand, Art Nouveau building with a stone facade and gabled windows, surrounded by acres of perfectly-manicured garden that included Songhia's #12-rated golf course. Surrounding the garden, of course, was an electrified fence topped with barbed wire. The Society did triple-duty as a local country club for the white elite and a holiday getaway destination for their urban counterparts down in Burlington, a fine and beautiful city that had been regretfully re-named 'Kalimbata.' It was also the headquarters of the Aramwaré Province Growers' and Ranchers' Association, the regional body that allowed the country's white citizens to generally opt-out of the more onerous parts of Songhian life.

The GRA was both a legal fiction and a state-within-a-state. Its members were generally enrolled at birth by the sponsorship of 20 other members, and were never allowed to leave it. It levied its own taxes on its members, negligence from which could be punished by jail time under national law. Despite this burden, the GRA protected its members in uncountable ways - it exempted them from conscription, allowed them to attend any university they wanted, and kept them out of the regular justice system. They even received their own passports, allowing them to leave the country whenever they wanted without paying egress fees. Though the organization was at times tyrannical with its own members, the Sundiata regime vigorously protected it from larger society. In return, the white farmers used their formidable connections with foreign countries to ensure a constant flow of capital and market the country's exports.

The Society building itself was a spectacular home built in the 1920s by Mr. Thomas Abernathy, grandson of the Jacob Abernathy for whom the province was originally named. The Abernathy family mostly left Songhia during the independence struggle, leaving behind this grand house to be used as a hotel, golf club, and general club-house for the region's white residents. Its collection of spirits was narrow but extremely fine, its humidor the largest in all of Songhia, and its head chef an alumnus of one of the Cookish States' best restaurants.

The only black faces to be seen anywhere on the property were those in uniforms, either as servants or as guards. Oh yes - the GRA also had the power to hand out almost unlimited gun licenses to its members and member institutions, allowing the garishly-attired security force of 60 men to carry loaded assault rifles and pretend that they were honor guards at some 19th-century fairy castle. (It worked out for them, too - the bright red fin de siècle-inspired uniforms were pretty useful for impressing girls; some women appreciate a man in a pith helmet.)

On Thursdays, it was common enough to find Mr. Michael Cranford in the Society's lounge and saloon, having just finished his customary weekly golf-date, often with old school-friends or casual acquaintances but sometimes in solitude, as was his devotion to the game. He was generally regarded as being the province's highest authority on golf, and the reverence that others gave his opinions on sporting miscellany had confused him into believing that they revered all his other opinions. This was demonstrably not the case, though most were too polite to say so. After running through 18 holes, he would retire to the bar, take in his fill of single-malt whisky (with a tall glass of ice-water in the other hand, but never mixed), and give his opinions to anyone else sitting there.

"It'll never happen," he would say, "It'll never happen. At this very moment, we are sitting in the nest of the golden goose. Do you know what holds this building up? Yes, the proceeds from tobacco and cotton and sugar built it, of course, but today, this building is held aloft by tantalum and ytterbium and cobalt and casseritite. Rare earths, I tell you, rare earths. The mountains are riddled with them. You need rare earths in order to make superconductors and circuitboards. Modern trains, avionics, computers, lithium batteries, mobile phones, everything. There's big money up in those mountains, enormous, obscene amounts of money. And old David knows it. That's right, boss, we're talking about you."

He raises his whisky glass to a framed, formal photograph of the President, presented with honor next to a grandfather clock. It was from the 2003-2008 period, where he hadn't yet become President, and thus shows him still in his uniform. The photographer captured him in a moment of deep thought, doubtless considering weighty questions about the future of democracy and the welfare of the people. In recent years, he had phased out his uniformed appearances in favor of business suits, portraying himself as the apotheosis of democracy instead of the cautious guardian of it. The whites have no use for such pretenses; they prefer to imagine him the old way, as the winking Leporello of Songhia's rightful elite, taking stick to the upstart natives and reminding them how things are supposed to work in this country.

"And he knows it, and any little inkie who can read knows it. Without the minerals, Songhia dries up, just as sure as if you dried up the river. No minerals means no national mining company, and that means that half, maybe even two-thirds of the government's revenues disappear all at once. Petroleum has its place in the world, of course, and of course it makes money, but not on that scale. Ten times as much money comes in from minerals as from petroleum. So imagine no minerals. Kapow! No government welfare. No public universities, no public hospitals, no infrastructure, no utilities; any inkie who can read knows that everything in the country is subsidized by these damn minerals. It's like a remittance; one person in the household does all the work, and sends home money that the rest just spend on liquor and dope. Without the minerals, this country would disintegrate into subsistence farming, the GDP would go down 95% over five years, and half the country would starve to death."

"But you can't just disintegrate minerals, obviously. That's just science-fiction. But it's not as though the country's really using them for anything, obviously. There are no computers made in Songhia; I think one Norvenian company has a factory in Bakumba that turns out slip-shod work. The inkies just dig them up - using foreign machinery - they just dig them up, load them on barges, and send-them downriver to Bakumba, where they put them on ships and it becomes someone else's business. Then old David up there collects the money, and once he and his friends are through, a little bit trickles down - and, as we've established, that trickle is everything in Songhia. Losing the minerals and losing the ability to market the minerals would be one and the same."

"That's where we come in. In the 60s, you know, as soon as they discovered gold - it was gold first, don't forget that. We were too interested in agriculture to properly survey for gold back in the old days, because we had misguided humanitarian ideas. But as soon as they discovered gold, they nationalized it. They nationalized it, and they charged whatever they wanted for it, and they thought that they could re-invest the money into the country. At first, it worked very well, but then all the foreign experts went on strike and the system shut down. They had to import expertise; they didn't have the capability to train new, and this made the system almost broken."

"That's where we come in. The Songhians who have immigrated to foreign countries sincerely do not seem to care what happens here anymore; their kids assimilate and they forget about the place. But we, despite being Norvenians or Cookish or Bratoslovakians or what-have-you, we remember, and we maintain close contact. That's why they need us; we have the connections necessary to import both machinery and talent, and more importantly to keep talent here. Without the GRA, foreign experts would be at the mercy of ordinary Songhian law and institution, or they'd be stuck on treaties negotiated by each individual government. We are the spearhead, the wedge that gives all foreign markets an equal bargaining position. There's a national marketing board for the sales end, and then, of course, we are the national purchasing agency."

"And, of course, that makes us precious middle-men, and whenever a middle-man carries something, a little bit always sticks to his hands, eh?" He laughed a shrill giggle at his witticism. "We can ask for whatever we want."

"And that's why old Mr. David up there won't let Kouyaté do what he wants. There are masses of inkie Songhian boys who have it out for us, and I don't blame them. But the fact remains that Kouyaté rode into office promising opium to the farmers; something that would soothe them in the short-term but ruin the country in the long term. He's stirring up trouble because it makes him feel powerful, but the minute he steps out of line, old David will pick up his stick and beat him back into line."

He finished his drink, and retired for the afternoon.

[Kalumba]

Yahya sighed as he read the headlines from the old newspapers he was taking down from the racks, minister Amadou Suwoyoro had called for all the whites to leave Songhia. "Why?" he wondered aloud. Yes the whites were too rich and held far too much power, but most of the goods in his small shop came from white farms or factories, and better than most Yahya new their vital importance to the economy. But he understood why the SNF were calling for their expulsion. It was a vote winner, especially out here in Aramwaré where most of his countrymen toiled hard on farms for frequent beatings and minimal wages. He often saw them go hungry when they couldn't afford his goods and this broke his heart, but Yahya couldn't give them handouts. His buisness was run on the very edge of failure as he tried to keep prices down, only his savings kept him running.

Having finished clearing the outside racks Yahya went back inside his shop and pulled the rusted iron shutters down, it took him a great deal of effort with his one good arm. Sweat pouring from his brow he finally got the shutters down and bolted them in place, he though he would have to get them replaced when he had some money to hand. He rarely used the shutters but he had felt something in the men today as they came to spend their meagre wages. They were different, they were not angry or swearing about the harsh work of the previous day but just quiet and that had disturbed Yayha.

Yahya climbed the stairs in the storeroom to his small living space and lit the gas stove and prepared some rice for his evening meal. As he chopped some vegetables he hoped that he was wrong with his fears. His shop wouldnt survive without his customers and if they were in the mood for violence then his shop would be a prime target for looters. He would ask Jean to stay behind tomorrow if the mood did not change, Yahya smiled as he thought of his one employee. Jean had helped him build the shop twenty years ago when Yahya had left his village on the coast with the profits from the sale of his father's boat, and had since become his only friend. The only social life Yahya had was when Jean and his wife Chantal invited him to dinner.

He was slightly concerned about Jean, who had begun to vocally criticise the whites and started wearing a shirt embroidered with the image of the new Prime Minister. Yahya had asked Jean to stop wearing it in the shop to avoid upsetting the customers, and Jean was now wearing the colours of the SNF. Yahya could not understand his employee's desire to so openly display his political alleigance and wondered why? He had never bothered to vote believing, like many of his countrymen, all things were transistory and there was no need to try and force change. But perhaps times were changing Yahya thought as he tucked into his dinner and waited for the next day to come.

[The Steel Fraternity]

Anita Verger was relieved to have an excuse to spend the night in the airport, though she'd never admit it to herself. Skorzenian airports didn't bother putting Fraternity members through security, and she hadn't had to go through security upon landing in Norvenia, so Murrietta's knife was still in her carry-on. However, if she left the terminal, she would have to go through security to come back in, and she was sure she wouldn't be able to take the knife on the plane. So, she'd have to spend the night in the terminal.

And she was fine with that.

Intellectually, she knew that foreigners were just people who had been enculturated in a different society. She knew intellectually that she could get on fine if she just treated any Norvenians she had to deal with the same way she would a Fraternity member. If anyone had asked her, she could have given an educated, well-reasoned dissertation on why she had no rational reason to be uncomfortable spending a night in such a cosmopolitan, developed city as Wrenwatch.

But what she knew and how she felt were two entirely separate things. Aside from some vague memories of standing on an Iron Bay street corner and watching American tanks roll by when she was a small child, Anita Verger had only ever looked at foreigners over the sights of a weapon.

So, when she disembarked from the Skorzenian jet into the airport in Wrenwatch, she unexpectedly found herself paralyzed for a moment, her shoulders tense and her heart pounding as she looked for cover and fields of fire against the multitude confronting her.

She hadn't expected to be struck so suddenly or so strongly by the alienness of the people she would encounter here. But as the Fraternity businessmen and exchange students filed off the plane, all dressed in at least business casual (like her) and more than half in suits and ties, she couldn't help but be overwhelmed by how different, how subtly wrong all the other people around were. The Fraternity members stood straight and tall, striding confidently, but sticking together in small groups even as they went to their respective gates or baggage claim, pushing through the throng of foreigners in a way that often bordered on rude. By contrast, the relatively garishly-dressed and timid foreigners seemed so fundamentally different that it caught her flat-footed.

Between her desperate, jittery craving for a drink, and the fact that every single person she'd dealt with since she was eight years old was a Fraternity member, a prole, or trying to kill her, she was immediately put on the defensive when she entered the airport.

After a moment of fearful indecision, Verger shook her head sharply. Snap out of it. They're just people. Squaring her shoulders and fixing her eyes firmly ahead of her, Verger hefted her carry-on and made her way to a restroom.

There, Verger went into a stall and changed from her slacks, flats (or rather, flat), and blouse into a canvas-topped jungle boot, a set of khaki fatigues, and a Santa Rio High Desperadoes baseball cap.

Verger caught sight of her reflection in a mirror as she exited the stall. Just an inch shy of six feet tall, so heavily muscled that she might be (in fact, often had been) mistaken for a bodybuilder, with slate-gray eyes set in a sharp-featured face and golden-blonde hair scraped back into an austere ponytail, she had been a striking sight even among other Sisters-Military ever since she was a teenager. Now, at forty-one (with the lines in her face of a woman ten years older), with a thin white scar stretching from the left corner of her mouth to the hinge of her jaw, a dimple over her right eye where an anti-armor round had once nearly penetrated her helmet, and her right leg terminating in a spindly prosthesis...

Verger caught a Mediterranean-looking woman at one of the sinks gawking at her. Verger turned her head and stared at the smaller woman until she fled the room.

No, Verger didn't want go out into this city to find a hotel.

Instead, she bought a double handful of Norvenian periodicals that might have some coverage of the Songhian situation, found a relatively out-of-the-way seat out of sight of any bar, and settled in for a restless night.

----

Oddly, Verger was much more at ease in Sokassa.

Certainly, her physical discomfort had not decreased. Her head felt awful and she had pretended to be asleep every time the stewardess had passed her during the flight, just to avoid being asked if she wanted a drink. So when the plane had coasted to a halt on the tarmac at Sokassa, Verger had fairly jumped out of her seat, and was the first passenger waiting at the hatch when the exit stairs were rolled up.

The south Afrosian heat hit Verger in a welcome wave as soon as she stepped out of the plane. After the unaccustomed coolness of Norvenia, the return to such a sub-tropical climate came as a relief. And where Wrenwatch had been so unsettling to her in part because, as a modern, developed city, she could almost have mistaken it for a Skorzenian city, not even a blind man could mistake Sokassa for a Fraternity city. The smell alone saw to that.

Verger just stood by the base of the exit stairway for a moment as the other passengers filed off the plane and toward the terminal building. She looked around her, taking in as much as she could see of the city over the chain-link fence around the runway. To one side, she could see the modern, developed-looking downtown. In another, she could see an eclectic mix of various shacks, houses, and other buildings varying from badly dilapidated to sparklingly good repair. It was still alien to her, but in a way aggressively unique, rather than the subtle wrongness that Wrenwatch had exuded.

After a few moments spent savoring the heat and taking in the city, Verger turned and continued to the terminal herself, walking slowly to enjoy the open air (the... unique bouquet of the Afrosian city notwithstanding). Because of that, she arrived in the air-conditioned terminal to clear customs behind all the other passengers from her flight. But the line was moving fast and Verger didn't exactly have any urgent appointments, so she didn't mind.

Customs seemed to consist of a single khaki-uniformed soldier standing by a small lectern, glancing at documentation, and stamping passports after a couple of brief questions. Another soldier in fatigues with a rifle slung over his shoulder stood by the wall behind him. Verger was only in line a five or ten minutes before she reached the soldier –A lieutenant, if I'm reading the insignia right.– and handed him her passport.

“Good afternoon, Madame,” the young officer said in slightly accented English, a plastic smile on his face. “What is your nation of origin?”

“Skorzenia,” she replied.

“Where?”

“Skorzenia,” repeated Verger, sharply.

That was a mistake. The officer's smile froze, looking at her silently for a few moments. Then he gestured to an unassuming-looking door behind him. “Step this way, please.”

“Why?” Verger asked, wary now.

“For security purposes,” he said simply. His tone hardened as he repeated: “Step this way, please.” As he spoke, the soldier in fatigues looked at Verger. He made no move toward them, but simply took notice pointedly.

Cursing the officer's piquishness, Verger set her jaw and walked over to the door, the lieutenant following her. The fatigued soldier opened the door ahead of her, then fell in behind the officer as the three of them entered a dull utility corridor.

The officer directed Verger to a small, windowless room with a low table and a single wooden chair. The fatigued soldier took up a position in the corridor as the officer closed the door, took the a seat in the chair, and gestured for Verger to stand opposite him. His artificial smile never faltered.

“Please place your bag on the table. Empty your pockets as well.”

Looking sullenly at the officer, Verger slowly complied. Once her things were on the table, he opened her carry-on and began placing its contents on the table.

“Where did you say you were from?”

“Skorzenia,” said Verger. “It's in South America.”

“Yes. And what is the purpose of your visit to Songhia?”

“Vacation.”

“Really?” said the officer. “We do not get many tourists from outside Aurora. In fact, we get relatively few from within Aurora. Are you here for Sokassa's art museums?”

“No,” said Verger. “It's more of a...” Verger thought of a term she'd come across in a Norvenian magazine. “Nature vacation. Birdwatching.”

“Ah,” said the officer. “And which of our national parks were you plan–“ He broke off abruptly.

The officer had been emptying her bag onto the table as they spoke, and now he had reached the bottom of the carry-on, where Verger had packed Murrietta's knife. Now the Songhian slowly withdrew the weapon. Meant to be worn with powered armor, the knife was awkwardly oversized for carrying barehanded. The coffin-shaped wooden hilt was just long enough to be held in two hands, and the blade was almost as long as a short sword.

The officer slowly drew the knife from its leather sheath, revealing its dully-gleaming double-edged blade. Verger knew that it was razor-sharp, but sturdy enough to do duty as a machete. The lieutenant's smile disappeared for the first time. I have never looked upon a man, thought Verger with as much lust as he's looking at that knife.

“What is this?” He said slowly.

“A knife,” Verger stated the obvious, drawing a sharp look from the officer. She continued: “The kind they call an Arkansas toothpick.”

The lieutenant held her gaze for a moment more, then suddenly plastered his smile back on and placed the knife on the side of the table, away from Verger's other things.

For the next hour, he asked Verger increasingly repetitive questions about her plans in Songhia and any affiliation she might have with foreign governments or other organizations. Figuring the officer was ignorant of the nature of the Steel Fraternity and not wanting to try explaining it, she glossed over her membership.

There was no air conditioning in this part of the building, and the temperature in the tiny room soared a good twenty degrees higher than the air outside The officer kept asking the same questions over and over, sitting in his chair as Verger stood. She figured he was trying to get to her with physical discomfort. Although her head was feeling worse and worse, Verger refused to shift on her feet or show any other sign of unease.

Finally, the officer stopped questioning her, and stood. He picked up a pair of aviator sunglasses he'd removed from Verger's bag and placed them on the side of the table next to Murrietta's knife. Then, after glancing at her traveler's checks, he picked up Verger's wallet and began rifling through it. She had about five hundred Ingots in cash, and the lieutenant carefully sorted through the different denominations of bills to take half of it, and placed the money in his shirt pocket. Seeing Verger's jaw clench at this, his smile widened.

“Expediting fee,” he said. Picking up the knife and sunglasses, he stepped back from the table. “Thank you for your cooperation. You may re-pack your baggage.”

Verger stood silently for a moment, then said. “That knife... has great sentimental value to me.”

“My apologies,” the officer said smugly. “But this weapon violates our contraband code. I'm afraid I have no choice but to confiscate it.”

Verger made no reply but to stare at the man. After a few moments, he shifted uncomfortably on his feet. A few moments later, he made as if to reach for the walky-talkie on his belt. Verger raised an eyebrow. Calling for help in a staring contest?.

The officer snatched his hand back, his nostrils flaring as his smile disappeared once more. He petulantly threw the knife back on the table. Then he snatched up Verger's tablet computer and her traveler's checks and roughly tore half of them out of the book. He then dropped the remaining checks on the floor. Finally, with a single, sharp movement, he grabbed the edge of the table and jerked it up, sending Verger's belongings tumbling to the floor.

Then his smile re-appeared.

“Welcome to Songhia.”

----

From the airport, Verger walked to a bank to exchange her remaining Ingots for Cauri and wire in some more money from Skorzenia. After that, she walked the city looking for a hotel.

Verger certainly was more comfortable in Songhia, she decided. She still tensed up whenever she was confronted by a large crowd, but was only mildly disconcerted by smaller groups. The people were still alien, but the fact that they were so different in culture and language actually made it easier. There was none of the uncanny valley effect of Wrenwatch. Her gut wasn't telling her that every single person around her was an enemy any more.

But some of them are. It's just a matter of figuring out which ones. And then...

For the first time since leaving Santa Rio, Verger smiled, tightly and humorlessly.

----

Verger finally settled on a run-down but clean looking hotel called the Songhai Dynasty down near the river. It was well off the beaten path, surrounded by rough-looking slums. She chose it because the owner, a fifty-something half-white, half-Mandé man with graying hair and round spectacles, was willing to take cash and keep her off the registry. She'd already left more of a paper trail than she'd wanted to when she was forced to wire money to the bank, and if things in Songhia developed as she hoped, it would be best to have some undocumented accommodations.

Besides which, it was the only hotel she'd found without its own bar or one nearby.

After dropping off the overnight bag in her room, Verger went out to get a feel for the city. She wanted to learn her way around and perhaps get a better read on the political situation; all she knew about Songhia currently was what she'd gathered from a couple of guidebooks and the Norvenian magazines.

As she wandered around the shops, markets, and cafes of the city, she quickly gave up on asking direct questions. Whenever she tried bringing up the political situation to a local, they'd clam up immediately. Instead she tried to just listen in on the conversations around her, though that didn't really go too well either. Besides the obvious difficulty of looking inconspicuous, she didn't speak Mandé. She'd read a primer book during her flight, and she knew she'd start picking up the language soon enough, but for now most of what she heard was indecipherable to her.

So, she spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the tourist and downtown areas of Sokassa. Along the way, she bought a new pair of aviators and a more practically-sized belt knife.

She spotted the bar about an hour after sunset.

She had just decided it was time to start back for the hotel when she saw it. Situated in a slum near the river, it was very much not a tourist place. Little more than an open-sided shed with a rough wooden bar, a couple of televisions with tinny speakers, and a scattering of mismatched tables, it was packed with locals. As she stared at the bar, she saw a small group of soldiers enter.

There, she thought, too quickly. They might talk about something important. She knew it wasn't true, but Verger was already walking toward the entrance.

Verger felt dozens of pairs of eyes lock on her as she entered. Even the soldiers (five of them, she counted now) who had been crowding up to the bar turned to look at her as she walked up behind them. They were a mismatched group, Verger noted. She saw that they were wearing three different kinds of uniforms between them, and physically they ranged from one squat, pot-bellied man with oil stains on his fatigues –Some sort of mechanic.– to one giant, heavily muscled man with what appeared to be some sort of airborne insignia on his chest.

Most of the soldiers (as well as the other patrons of the bar) dismissed her after a moment of surprise. Four of them turned back to the business of ordering their drinks, but the fat one indicated her with a jerk of his head and made some sort of joke in Mandé. Then, when the other soldiers ignored him, he repeated himself more loudly, drawing some sort of derisive comment from the big soldier, which made the fat man close his mouth in a huff.

After the soldiers had gotten their drinks, Verger tried to order a soda in broken Mandé. The bartender interrupted her with a good-natured laugh, then told her in heavily accented English that she could order in that language.

Soda bottle in hand, Verger turned to see where the soldiers had gone. As luck would have it, they had taken a nearby table, and one of the few open seats in the bar was at the next table. So Verger walked over, sat down there, and tried to simultaneously eavesdrop on the soldiers and avoid looking at the liquor bottles behind the bar.

Of course, the men said nothing useful, even if she had known Mandé. From their tone as they replied to each other, she was pretty sure she knew what they were saying to each other, anyway. It sounded like the sort of war-story one-upmanship that pervaded every military unit she'd ever encountered. One of the soldiers would speak animatedly for a while, and then another would speak in a studiously dismissive tone before launching into his own tale.

Verger noticed that whenever the big soldier with the wings on his chest spoke, they others listened raptly. Well, most of them. The fat soldier tried to butt in a couple of times, but was pointedly ignored until he returned sullenly to his drink.

Otherwise, Verger didn't pay them much mind. She'd always been annoyed by the “I've-seen-worse-shit-than-you” game. It always seemed to come up when a group of soldiers went drinking, from prole conscripts to Steel Paladins. As far as she was concerned, anyone who'd lived and fought through the American Invasion, the Skorzenian Civil War, the 1984 War, or the Second Reconquista had seen plenty of battle and hardship. Verger saw bragging about who had the harshest experience as juvenile dick-measuring at best. She respected anyone who'd fought, and didn't begrudge anyone too young to have had to. As far as she was concerned, the current peace being enjoyed by young Fraternity members was what she'd fought for.

So, Verger spent the next couple hours nursing sodas, looking longingly at the liquor behind the bar, and half-heartedly listening in on an increasingly drunken conversation she didn't understand.

Then, around eleven, she killed a man.

Verger had almost rationalized getting a local beer (just to sample), when the soldiers began to put down their drinks and get ready to leave. Before the others could rise, however, the attention-starved fat man lurched to his feet. He was so drunk, he nearly fell over, grabbing the edge of the table for support, upsetting his companions' drinks. Seemingly oblivious to their cries of annoyance, he shouted something in Mandé, and whirled around to face Verger.

Oh, shit.

Grinning widely at some joke no one else cared for, the fat man staggered over to Verger's table, grabbed the edge, and leaned down close too her. As he moved, the other soldiers stood up, the nearest one starting forward to collect his friend.

“Hey, leg-woman,” he slurred in English, leaning close enough for Verger to smell the reek of alcohol coming off him. He swiveled his head back to shoot a leering grin at his friends, no doubt to receive the laughter he fondly imagined his antics would draw from them. Then, he turned back to Verger. “You look lonely. Maybe, you ask nicely, I take you out back, pretend you're a blonde Billie Piper, give you a pity fuck.”

At that point, three things happened at once, two of them two late.

First, the approaching soldier reached his fat friend and put a restraining hand on his shoulder, raising his other hand toward Verger as some sort of apology formed on his lips.

Second, the big soldier began to shout at the fat soldier in Mandé, probably telling him to shut up and stop making an ass of himself.

Third, Verger grabbed the fat soldier's collar in her left hand, and crushed his larynx with a single sharp blow from her right.

From there, things went downhill.

The fat man fell back into the arms of his restraining friend, struggling for a breath that wouldn't come. The big soldier leapt forward, charging around his table toward Verger, the other two following his lead.

The big soldier moved far faster than a man that size, with that many drinks in him, had any right to. Verger just had time to leap from her own chair before he reached her. As soon as he did, the man lashed out with a brutal punch. Verger tried to roll with it, but barely managed to get her nose out of the way before his fist laid open a bloody gash on her right cheek.

Her head ringing, Verger staggered back into her table, then fell heavily to one knee. In that instant, she knew she had to run.

Verger was strong and fast, but the big soldier was stronger and faster. She was trained and experienced in hand-to-hand fighting, but he had at least fifteen years on her and obviously knew how to handle himself, not to mention two friends running to surround her. They were hesitating momentarily, not as fast or decisive as the big soldier and distracted by the attempts of their other friend to haul away the suffocating fat man. But if they cut her off, it would be all over; at best, she'd be beaten and thrown in jail. More likely, she'd get kicked to death once their friend got around to asphyxiating.

So, when the big soldier drew back his leg to kick her down, Verger snapped out with both hands to grab his shin, then pivoted on her knees to yank him to the ground. He fell with a crash, and she scrambled quickly over him, drawing her new belt knife and stabbing blindly downward as she moved.

Verger felt the blade slide home and heard the big soldier scream, but didn't stop to see where she'd stabbed him, instead yanking the knife free, exploding to her feet, and sprinting out of the bar into the night.

----

Verger moved at a dead run for the first ten minutes, bloody knife held close to her side. She'd forgotten how well she could move on her prosthetic when she wasn't drinking. No one followed her, the soldiers likely too concerned with trying to help their hurt friends, and the rest still in shock at what had happened.

After she was well away from the bar, Verger stopped just long enough to yank an old newspaper from a trashcan and wipe off the blade of her knife. Sheathing it, she set off at a jog back toward her hotel.

----

Back at the Songhai Dynasty, the manager was sitting behind the desk when Verger walked through the door, looking haggard. As soon as he saw her, he leapt to his feet.

“Are you out of your mind, woman?” He shouted. “What are you thinking, coming back here?”

Verger blinked. “You know?”

“Of course I know! You think a white, foreign woman kills a man and the police don't check the hotels? Why in the hell did you come back?”

“They checked this place?”

“This place? This place was the first they checked! The police know that I put up SNF officials. If anything happens in this city, they try and connect us to it!”

“You're in the SNF?” Verger felt like an idiot. She'd been out searching the city for information, when one of the people she wanted to help was right under her nose. And you just killed a man –maybe two– for no damn reason at all. Don't forget that, Ani.

“Of course I am, but I'm not stupid enough to advertise it and get my self disappeared, much less start stabbing SAS troopers in the street!”

“Stabbing who?”

The hotel manager just stared at her in mute amazement for a moment, his jaw working. “Are you completely dense? Do you have any idea at all what's going on in this country? Or did you just jump of a plane and start looking for people to kill?”

Verger started to reply, but the man cut her off.

“I don't care. Just grab your bag and get out. You can't stay here. Even if the hotel isn't being watched by the police, people saw you checking in, and they'll be looking for you here again. I don't need this. And I doubt you want to be caught.”

With that, he turned his back to her, and walked back to his desk.

Without another word, Verger bounded over to the stairs, her mind racing. She couldn't stay in the city, and she couldn't go to the airport. She was a six foot tall, blonde, one-legged white woman in a foreign country. She couldn't hide long, and her friend the customs lieutenant would nab her if she tried to get on a plane.

Reaching her floor, she hurriedly unlocked her door, threw it open and ran over to her bag. She'd never bothered unpacking, so she threw the bag open. Moving quickly but surely, she withdrew Murrietta's knife and belted it on over her left hip, opposite the smaller knife she'd stabbed the soldier with. Then she slung the bag over her shoulder, and ran back out.

She didn't have a car or the time to buy one. She might steal something, but she'd still stick out like a sore thumb when she tried to leave the city.

The river, she thought as she bounded back down the stairs. It's my only way out. If she could get to the coast, she thought she'd have some breathing room. There she could either find some way to continue on in Songhia, or find a way to flee the country.

Not bothering to slow down, she threw her room key on the desk in front of the manager, then ran into the night again.

----

Verger, never having been a fugitive before, was surprised at the ease with which she was able to escape the city. After going through VANGUARD evasion training, where she'd been pursued with dogs and ATVs through the Skorzenian wilderness, simply sticking to back alleys and avoiding uniformed police was child's play.
Down at the docks, the various small shacks that served as offices were all deserted in the wee hours of the morning, but the destinations and schedules of the river boats had been put up on large chalkboards. After settling on a boat to Aramwaré, a backwater province where she should have some time to get her bearings, Verger hunkered down behind a net shed to spend another restless night.

The next morning, Verger watched from her vantage for several hours as the river boat began loading its cargo and passengers (both hoofed and bipedal). She saw police pass by a couple of times, but there didn't seem to be any real manhunt going on.

Odd. How many murders happen here on a given night?

A couple hours after dawn, most of the passengers seemed to have boarded the river boat, including a small number of whites. Verger had even seen another blonde woman climb up the gangplank, accompanied by another white man and a Songhian, all of them carrying some sort of heavy equipment in black bags.

When Verger judged that the boat was about to get underway, she picked up her bag and walked briskly from her hiding spot to the small office and bought her passage.

She was the last passenger up the gangplank before it was drawn up. As soon as she was aboard, she felt an odd malaise settle over her.

Well, Ani, you've accomplished a lot. Helped no one, killed a man, and run away. In Aramwaré she'd be too far from the center of power to affect anyone or anything.

She'd have nothing to do but wait for the heat to die down, then leave the country.

[Songhia]

The ferry to Aramwaré arrived at dock at 9:25 AM on Tuesday, April 23rd. The day was a clear and beautiful one; the Savannah stretched out for uncounted miles in every direction. It was beastly hot, though, and the omnipresent flies were made even worse by the mass of cattle on the ship.

The previous night, somebody had been listening to a radio. (The boat kept on going, even at night; no accommodations whatsoever were made for sleeping on the ship, other than letting you stretch out on your chair.) They must have been a Tekru or something; they were playing Radio Songhia English 1. In any case, it was filled with some seriously evil shit.

"We have had enough. We have had enough. We are calling for nothing, nothing except justice. In this country now, how many white people do you think there are? There are perhaps 70,000. But how much land do they own? I want you to guess, you at home. How much land do you think they own? They own over 12 million hectares of land. 12 million! It's not just their big houses in the South, no, certainly not. No, that's just the beginning. Let's talk coffee. Coffee makes a lot of money in Songhia, of course. And it's all grown in the north, up in the mountains. They would live up in the mountains, if we let them. But up in the mountains, that's where the coffee comes from. Who grows the coffee? Our farmers, our Songhian farmers, grow it. But who owns the land? Ahh, that's a much better question. Who owns the land, indeed?

I will tell you who owns the land. Half a million hectares of land, up in the mountains, up in Koulikoro. Perhaps a million yield coffee, and half of it belongs to one company, did you know this? Half of it belongs to one company, called Sanga-Jago. It sounds authentic, doesn't it? It sounds like Mr. Sanga saved up his money, issued certificates, that sort of thing. I would vote for a Mr. Sanga. He sounds very respectable! But it's not true at all. Mugan-Jago is one of the country's 46 companies incorporated under the special charter of the Kalimbato Provincial Growers' and Ranchers' Association. As we should all know by know, this is the arm by which the white people dodge their taxes and bleed our country and our people - you must pardon the pun, my friends - bleed us white.

Ask yourselves this. Every Songhian man has two experiences in common with every other Songhian man - he has attended public school and he has served in the army. If the twhite people are Songhians - if they are like us - then ask yourself this. Why do they not attend public school, and why do they not serve in the army? The Growers' and Ranchers' Association - the GRA - this is their excuse for everything. In a country that has wisely chosen to spread public universities across the country, the GRA lets them go to school wherever they want. In a country that has wisely chosen to control guns and protect people from murder and violence, they have almost unlimited access to them. In a country of workers and fighters, they are shopkeepers and landlords.

It is as simple as one word - why? Why are they here? Why, having spent the last 50 years seeing their ill-gotten privileges stripped away from them, one-by-one, do they continue to stay? They do not participate in our civil society; there are no white Songhian authors, or musicians, or politicians, or preachers, or teachers - if there are white Songhian teachers, then they don't teach at any school attended by a proper black Songhian. If there are white Songhian authors, they write in their own languages, in Norvish or in Cookish or in some other thing, and their books are published back in their home countries and we never hear about them. They are not a part of our nation. What's more, their home countries will take them back. Any white Songhian who goes to the airport and boards a plane to Norvenia, you know well that they can stay there. They'll have a new passport in two hours. Many of them still have their Norvenian passports, did you know that? They have never trusted us. Even in the 70s, when the first junta did everything to placate them, they never threw their lot in with us. They have chosen skin over soil. They have chosen it definitively.

I've had enough. I've had - look, look in your pocket right now, and if you have a ten in there, take it out. Do you see who's on it? That's Wolo X, the Takhar Sa, the last king of Songhia. He never had a crown, and he never had a castle. All he had - know your history, Songhia. He knew he would lose; he knew there was no way he could win. How could he win? He had no cannons, he had no - no musket lines, or anything like that. All he had was the bravery and loyalty of his men, of our men. He didn't fight to win, not on that day. He fought so that 150 years later, we would remember him. That was his mission. He wanted to light a candle that would never be put out.

I've had enough. My time with you is finished; it's time for music. Ali Molowé is here with music. He'll be playing the latest records by Simba, by Lolo Sekondé and the Swingers, and tearing up the charts all across the country, the Midnight Riders. Enjoy it, Songhia. This is George Giowa with Talk Tonight, on Radio Songhia English 1. It's a funny name for a radio station, really, there's no English 2 anymore. You can hear my show in Zawaré on Wosaweyo 96.3 every weekday at 6.

Ali Molowé barely has time to introduce the Midnight Riders before the radio turns off. Politics, it seems, sours one's taste for brass rock. That's the thing in Songhia, right now, is brass rock - it's guitar, bass, and drum mixed with assorted brass, especially trumpets, usually with jazz-style vocals.

Tuesday, April 23rd, 9:25 AM. The boat stops at Aramwaré. Unload the cattle, take on great heaps of tobacco, bunches of leaves already a rich brown, wrapped in thick, dusty cellophane. A handful of passengers get off, but more get on. An hour later, the ship turns around, cuts off its engines, and cruises downstream. Nobody's in a hurry.

[Lydenburg]

The dream came again, as Kris Plaatjies knew it would.

He wasn't comfortable here. Worse, he didn't belong.

Just keep moving, don't maintain eye contact -

It was only gooks here, black skin and white teeth flashing in the moonlight.

They were all either servants or the enemy. And if they weren't one, they were surely the other -

What he could see and hear fit together perfectly.

The drums were throbbing in the distance -

To the apes, perhaps, the drums sent friendly greetings. But to a white man, they telegraphed only unspoken threats.

He could see it in their eyes, even in their mirthless grins -

It was their way. Smile, get you to open up, read you like a book. Grinning little satans; gauge your enemy well.

He would teach them to bare their teeth at him -

Plant a fist right there in those wide grins, show them what happens when they get cheeky.

Hearing that satisfying crunch -

Watching the blood and spittle spray -

Feeling those insolent teeth give way beneath one's fist -

It is your way, and your response without variation. Take no nonsense, show a strong hand, keep them in their place.

But this is not his ground. They grow strong on the power of these endless forests and the harsh, empty, spaces. It is here that their magic works.

"Are you certain it's this way? I've seen just about enough."

"Of course I am. Who do you take me for, anyway, Kris?"

"A bounder and a cad, for starters."

"You just wait. You'll see."

Oh yes, you will, Plaatjies. You will see and learn much today. Look at their eyes. Glazed over by hunger and hate, screaming that they would surely kill you if they could.

Remember what you learned at the police school -

Never forgive.

Look at your hands. That is your birthright. It is what the communist terrorists want to take, what the swart gevaar is all about. It is why we guard our birthright jealously, why we must fight anybody who tries to take it away. We were in Lydenburg before the Cookish and Norvenians came to Afrosia, we'll be here long after they leave.

Never forget.

Lydenburg is a hard land with a hard history, and we are the men to tame it. We are the continent's most powerful tribe, because we had the ambition to crush those who stood in our way, hold them in check through the power of the lash and the gun. Afrosia scorns weakness. She respects strength. Only the strongest will survive long enough to call this soil their own.

You can trust Johannes, he is one of us. That black is the enemy. Don't let him inside your head.

"He lives here, Van?"

"Ja."

"Who are those women grinding maize?"

"His wives. I think he has eight."

See, look at that warlock. He lives in a circular pole-and-dagga, the biggest in the kraal. That roof looks like fresh thatch. And why aren't the other villagers following us past the verandah? Scared, scared.

"Ah, take a whiff of that."

"It's a dung floor, boetjie."

"Where is that fool? Does he not know we are here?"

"He knows, boetjie. The drums have told him."

The stench of marijuana is overpowering...

"Good evening, white man."

Insolent kaffir! That senile old idiot thinks he can address his master so. It will take much more than a bearded fool covered in warpaint to frighten a Boer. Somebody needs to make him eat those words.

"The spirits are talking."

Why is it so uncomfortable, so deathly cold? It's tiring, watching him toy with a giraffe tail as he munches on those disgusting roots. It looks as if he's been drinking blood.

"Oh, spirits, can you come and explain the problems this young man faces this evening? Can you help us solve them?"

A cheap trick. He's babbling incoherently in Sotho. What is up with those bones? They look like what's left of a rooipootjie - bloody disgusting -

At once, the memory came flooding back to Kris Plaatjies as he sat up on the little bed, sheets tangled around his legs and sweat soaking his pillow. A frustrated cry escaped his lips as he groped for reality. This was really too much. If a man couldn't be safe on his own farm any more, where could he seek refuge?

"Why can't that accursed witch doctor leave me alone? What does he want with me?"

It was the same dream, again and again every night this week.

A dream replaying that same overcast afternoon thirteen years ago, when he was young and stupid and fresh out of police training.

A fellow cadet, Johannes, had consulted a sangoma back when that was the trend for bored young people looking for a little excitement. The sorcerer immediately discerned that he was in the security forces and insisted that he would meet his future wife on the road forty kilometres east of Sandhoek. Within an unbelievable year, this prediction had come true, and Plaatjies allowed the other man to hoodwink him into going to see this faux shaman.

He had stalked out before the man could finish throwing his bones.

It was an irrational decision, one that derailed his relationship with Johannes, and furthermore - an action taken on impulse. Plaatjies would come to regret it, but at the time all he wanted to do was get away from that kraal. There was something genuinely unnerving about what happened to him that day; he could still see the witch doctor's haunting eyes as he leaned forward, jaw set in an impeccable scowl.

"Don't spit on your good fortune, my friend. An ant-eater will throw his eyes upon you not once, but twice. At first, the spirits will be merciful. But when he regards you the second time, then you shall know a terrible fate awaits you and all your kind."

"It is you and your kind I will see purged from this country, you black bastard."

"You will try, my friend, you will try."

It was an incident that had returned to haunt his slumbering moments ever since.

Plaatjies rolled over, finding his way into the kitchen to brew some rooibos tea. Far too early, but he had no intention of returning to the torment in his sleep.

Gryvlei Strip
Republic of Lydenburg
April, 2005

It wasn't equatorial jungle, but it was close. Dotted with a vast assortment of ancient trees and clinging bush, the Gryvlei Strip was also smothered by an underfoot padding - often two to three inches deep - of rotting leaves and branches. It was warm, though not impressively so, and equally as humid.

Gryvlei resembled a featureless green quilt; there were no clear landmarks which could be glimpsed from the air, and maps of the region were still approximate, making accurate navigation difficult. Off the few roads frequently patrolled by Lydenburgher security forces, there were only rough tracks linking kraals to their watering holes. Movement otherwise was achieved by following animal trails or painstakingly cutting one's own with a machete.

Here, the inferno of Lydenburg's brutal guerrilla war ignited in late 1999.

Typical Afrosian wet seasons turned Gryvlei into an exhausting place. Its oven heat stifled white troops, and the striking effect of increased humidity - which always seemed to be filling a man's lungs with damp cotton - was staggering for new arrivals. Assignments to these malarial river valleys between September and March, it was claimed, reduced even battle-hardened NCOs to tears.

A select few made for extreme exceptions.

The police stick picked its way through the dense foliage, moving with the utter lethargy of a spent force. They had come sixty kilometres in the past week, pausing to search kraal after kraal for any signs of an enemy that would not fight. Meanwhile, consistently damp fatigues had long chafed under web equipment and forty-kilogram bergen packs, while superficial cuts, sores, or stings ulcerated in the nearly tropical environment. Soles worn from the seven days' march swiftly became hideous masses of blood, blisters, and decaying skin sealed inside rotting footwear. A flatfooted constable had started to straggle.

There remained another twenty ks to follow when Sergeant Plaatjies took point. Grateful for the respite, radioman Koos Oberholzer fell willingly behind.

"Right, let's take a break."

Plaatjies snapped the canvas watch cover off his timepiece, gave it a cursory glance, and very deliberately took two brief swallows from his canteen. Then he moved on, walking around the forest trail in widening circles before pausing to fixatedly study the ground.

His men, collapsing in the shade of a nearby tree, observed these actions with a mixture of curiosity and concern.

"I think Gryvlei's finally gotten to the sergeant, hey?" It was Oberholzer, fumbling for a cigarette pack in his denim khakis.

Gerry Redelinghuis offered Koos one of his Belgas. "Give him his space, man. You don't know what it's like here in December. The place is swarming with gooks."

"He was here in December?"

"Man's been in and out of Gryvlei on five two-week patrols this since February alone. I tell you, I have no idea how he's still alive. Nobody's that lucky."

"And while we're all trying to get the hell out, there's one guy who actually likes it."

"He doesn't have much else to live for, does he? I've heard he's one of the best NCOs there is." Redelinghuis shrugged. "Who is there to say? Some men are just born soldiers. I think this work fits him well."

The others were silent, smoking their cigarettes or making a brew as they contemplated the twenty kilometre trek which waited ominously ahead.

Plaatjies walked back, holding his 1: 50,000 map. "Water hole - eighteen klicks. We get there at least, by twilight. Somebody's torched the ground."

"Shit." Oberholzer looked miserably down the trail. Several days prior, they had first spotted the telltale traces of smoke on the horizon, indicating one of the occasional bush fires which ravaged parts of rural Lydenburg. He didn't miss his stick leader's emphasis, though. "Who, sarge?"

"Terrs? The army? God? It matters not." Plaatjies crumpled the map, unslung his Galil. "Kom. We have much to cover before dark."

Just ahead, the air was permeated by the pungent stink of charred wood, expended petrol, and something sweeter. Plaatjies had neglected to tell his stick that he'd been able to detect where the blaze had first gotten out of control. There were three blackened human skulls there, and a fourth jawbone only ten metres away.

The patrol silently proceeded in single file, careful to avoid bunching up. Much as he hated clawing through jesse brush, Kris found walking across the fire-ravaged landscape infinitely more terrifying. His footfalls crackled noisily on the cinders beneath - producing a disembodied, unearthly, echo which filled both ears and repeatedly set him on edge.

Christ....hostiles were nearby, so close he could almost smell them; the gooks were obviously waiting for nightfall. If he didn't get his operators to safety by then, everybody would be hyena scraps come morning.

Plaatjies' boots were buckled twice at the trouser ankle to keep out insect life on jungle floors, but this punitive measure did little to stop an inevitable accumulation of fine, smouldering, ash which made taking every step like treading on live coals. He wanted desperately to stop, air out his tortured feet, or better yet - rip the heavy, cumbersome, fatigues from his body and flee naked from this place of mindless terror and attrition. Dammit! That was what the enemy counted on. But it wasn't his time. He had no intention of dying alone in a blery swamp.

Caught by the glare of the slanting sun, a large aardvark watched him from atop some scorched timbers. Strange, that. Too strange by half. Their eyes met, dogged defiance affronting tranquil ambiguity.

"Don't spit on your good fortune, my friend. An ant-eater will throw his eyes upon you not once, but twice. At first, the spirits will be merciful. But when he regards you the second time, then you shall know a terrible fate awaits you and all your kind."

Afrosia was a strange continent haunted by contradictions, paradox, and confusion. But - as Kris Plaatjies was to learn - she was also a land of candid prophecy.

[Kalumba]

Yahya was afraid, in the distance he could hear the drums. Throughout Afrosia the beating of the drums meant one thing, a wave of anger was filling the people. For countless years whenever things had grown too much for the people to bear they had returned to the ways of their ancestors and stared beating upon the drums which had traditionally called the warriors to the chief, and from there to war. Recentley whenever a political rally or protest was to occur the drums were used, but this time was different. As he looked out from his home his unease grew; the night should have been dark, but fires glowed fiercely in the distance and the more Yayha watched from his small window the bigger and brighter they became. This was not a political gathering, this was raw anger calling the men together. This was a call for blood.

He was torn from his thoughts by a frantic knocking on the shutters of the shop, trembling he grasped a short plank and descended the stairs. Fearing the worst he flung open the door and peered out from behind the shutters expecting strangers to try and burst into his shop, then sighed with relief. It was only Jean "What's going on?"

"Come quicky Yahya, the time has come. Sundiata and the whites are finished!"

"What are you talking Jean?" Yahya enquired, thouroughly confused and still slightly afraid.

"We are going to take back our land, our birthright. What the Takhar Sa started we are going to finish!" By know Yahya had opened the shutters and his employee had grabbed his arm and was dragging him out of the shop and starting off up the dirt road. Yahya protested that he needed to lock the shop and had no quarrel with the whites but Jean told him the people knew that he worked there and that would keep the shop safe. With his friend deaf to his entreaties Yahya reluctantly followed him up the hill towards the sound of the drums and the lights of the fires, still rasping the loose plank in his good hand.

[The Steel Fraternity]

Anita Verger was no stranger to nightmares. She never had chronic problems with them, but every so often one would strike her hard and out of the blue. As was her way with most problems, Verger just dealt with them when they happened and kept moving forward.

Hallucinations turned out to be somewhat harder to deal with.

The first day of Verger's voyage on the riverboat was her third since she'd stopped drinking. She hadn't slept the night before, and slept little the night before that. So, she tried to go to sleep in one of the chairs on the riverboat once it got underway, but she couldn't. There were too many people, too close. Too many watching eyes.

Verger constantly caught herself clenching her jaw, clenching her fists as her hand kept straying toward the huge knife on her hip. The other passengers started avoiding eye contact with Verger and staying as far away as they could, but it made no difference. She was still too exposed, surrounded by too many unknown quantities.

And all the while, her head felt worse and worse.

As the day crawled on, Verger did occasionally manage to nod off, but never for long, and her fatigue continued to worsen. Her head became increasingly fuzzy, her thoughts slower.

A few hours after noon

is it after noon? or before?

Verger dozed off again.

----

Verger woke with a start. Where the fuck am I? Verger sat bolt upright in her uncomfortable wooden bench, every muscle in her body tight as piano wire. She snapped her head from side to side, taking in a rusting old barge, a press of blacks who all started and stared warily at her sudden movement.

Who are these... Proles? Verger's hand fell to the hilt of an unfamiliar knife as she looked around, hyperventilating as her heart pounded. I've got to get out, get out of the country... They're coming. The big soldier is...

Verger finally remembered where she was. Songhia. She saw the fat soldier's face again for a moment, choking on the ruins of his own throat. Literally saw the fat man dying all over again, not five feet from her.

Verger screwed her eyes shut, concentrating on the feel of the knife hilt in her hand.

Suddenly she became aware of the uneasy muttering around her. Forcing her eyes open, she looked around to see dozens of fear-lined black faces staring back at her. Stiffly, she forced her hand away from the knife.

“What the fuck are all you putas looking at?” Verger growled hoarsely. The passengers nearest her averted their eyes and edged further away, while those who already had some distance simply continued to watch her warily.

Verger began to walk stiffly and unsteadily away from the crude seating area toward the side of the boat.

Seeing the other blonde woman she'd noticed that morning standing by the rail and looking out at the water, Verger pulled a wobbly about-face and made her way to the opposite side of the boat. She had no desire to explain herself to another foreigner. She was already attracting too much attention.

You just have to hold it together until we get to...

Where was she going, again?

Until the end of the boat ride. It should only be another...

What time was it, anyway? Reaching the rail at the side of the boat, Verger leaned on it with one hand while she studied her watch dumbly for a moment.

Why am I checking my watch?

Verger shook her head sharply, then turned and started walking aft, toward the livestock pens. There, she finally found an isolated corner where two shipping crates of uneven length were placed next to each other. Verger sat down heavily, her feet– You mean foot, cripple. –splayed out in front of her and her back against a crate.

Staring out over muddy water, Verger spent the rest of the– Day? Afternoon? –there, fading in and out of reality.

----

Sometime after nightfall, Verger finally slept.

----

She dreamed of the Reconquista.

She knew it was a dream because the burned-out hulk of a super-heavy tank was rocking slowly around her. Fifteen hundred tons of charred and twisted metal did not move around under you.

The pedant in Verger always found this maddening about dreams. The inconsistencies, to her, were worse than the terrors in nightmares.

For instance, Nick was beside her. That wasn't possible, since he'd died in 1987, their first day out of the bunker, his head split open by some warlord's crude machete. She and the other Sisters-Military of Third Squad had sheltered in a destroyed Hoplite tank during the defense of Iron Bay, eight years later and during a completely different war.

Nonetheless, in the dream, he was there.

And when the grenade sailed into the blasted-open fighting compartment of the tank, it was Nick instead of Rosa Jones who leaped on top of it.

----

The rest of the dream was like that, mostly true to her memories of that battle, but full of mistakes.

In her dream, it was Colombian soldiers, and sometimes proles or even Songhians attacking the Sisters-Military in the tank, instead of the Peruvians they'd actually fought. And when the Paladins arrived to relieve them, they were wearing power armor, three years before it had been introduced.

----

She continued to dream, and it grew stranger, but she was always in the hulk of that ruined tank, gently rocking its way down the Aramwaré.

----

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, Verger was shaken awake.

Opening her eyes, she saw the big soldier she'd stabbed in Sokassa kneeling over her.

Lunging forward, she grabbed his throat in one hand as she drew Murrietta's knife with the other. The soldier struggled weakly and ineffectually against her as she placed it to his throat.

Wait.

Verger froze and looked around her. They were on the river, moonlight gleaming off the inky blackness of the water, the shadowed land slowly sliding by.

But she was still in the tank.

She sat there, her hand clenched on the throat of the suffocating man as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing.

Suddenly, she remembered something Murrietta had said to her when they last spoke.

“Are you already having the DTs?”

“Oh shit,” she whispered, and released the man. He collapsed backwards, gasping and holding his throat as Verger sheathed her knife with shaking hands. “D- Don't sneak up on me like that.”

Saying nothing, the man quickly scrambled away.

The whole time, she only saw him as the big soldier.

----

Verger didn't know how much time passed after that. She sat there, her hands pressed hard against the deck plates, as she tried to tell reality from delirium tremens. She saw old fears, random people, and nameless, impossible horrors around her.

At some point, she slept again.

----

When Verger woke, it was a clear and beautiful day, and she seemed to be back in reality. She heard shouting and activity around her, and saw that the river and shore over the railing were sliding past even more slowly than before.

Glancing at her watch, Verger found she was able to read it again.

9:15.

Carefully, she rose, and walked back toward the area of the deck where the other passengers were.

Everyone she passed stared oddly at her, and Verger simply kept her eyes locked straight ahead.

She saw that the boat was approaching a dock. As she watched, the crew threw mooring lines down to the shore.

Holding herself as steady as she could, Verger waited for the boat to finish docking. As soon as the gangplank was set up, Verger was the first on it.

Okay. Just find somewhere to stay in town for a whi–

Verger was almost to the bottom of the gangplank when she was suddenly overwhelmed with vertigo and pitched forward.

Verger didn't see the ground rushing up to meet her; she had already blacked out.

[Norvenia]

As the ferry pulled into the rickety pier along the muddy riverbank, Lauren Russel braced herself to wade through the mass of people which she expected to be pressing at the gunwales. In fact, as it turned out, only a handful of their fellow passengers got off; the challenge was more finding a place on the pier to stand than finding a way to clamber off the boat. Lauren cast a curious glance at Paul Cissé, who snorted. "No one gets off here," he said bluntly. "Welcome to the end of the earth."

Dannie Armstrong chuckled at the overheard conversation, and vaulted off the gunwale of the boat, dropping neatly on his feet in the middle of a crowd of child beggars. The children fled after a few slaps to the back of the head and some aggressive cursing in Zawaré. Tim Han struggled down, carrying his cameras and microphones and recording equipment in a giant duffel bag, and almost fell face-first onto the pier before Lauren grabbed him and helped him regain his balance; Dannie didn't lift a finger to help, and Lauren glared daggers at his back.

This was because Dannie Armstrong was instead watching a tall blonde woman with the musculature of an ox, who was staggering down the gangplank. Something about her nagged at him. Dannie Armstrong had never seen active military combat, but he had been trained by the best. And though he had never been in battle, he was no stranger to violence; he had fought his share of men, and killed some, in the dark and fetid alleys of Songhia's cities. Dannie was, after all, a Mountain Anglo - a member of that violent and clannish people who still anointed their children's foreheads with the blood of the first deer that they killed. Murder was in his genes.

And something in him warned that this woman was not to be trifled with. That she would not blink before putting a knife through his eye. That she was a fellow member, with Dannie, of the terrible and indispensable tribe of Cain. That she was a killer.

Tim Han landed awkwardly on his feet behind Dannie. "Thanks a lot," he muttered, shouldering forward around him. Dannie did not bother to reply. Lauren Russel followed, gently assisted by Paul Cissé. "You're a dick," she told Dannie bluntly. The older man just grinned.

At which point the woman whom Dannie had been watching did a swift and inelegant face-plant onto the gangplank. The crash caught the attention of everyone nearby. Lauren's eyes widened, and she ran over, pushing the surrounding bystanders out of the way before they could rob the unconscious woman. The others followed, with Dannie at the rear, shaking his head and muttering: "Shit, shit, shit." Paul Cissé glared around at some of the more aggressive bystanders, and stood next to Lauren.

"So you're her bodyguard?" Dannie asked.

"Among other things," replied the other man stoically.

Dannie snorted. "Good fucking luck," he drawled laconically.

Lauren, for her part, felt for a pulse and found it. She peeled an eye open and got no response, slapped a cheek to no avail. She looked up. "We need to get this woman to a hospital."

"No fucking way," Dannie snapped.

Lauren stood sharply. "When last I looked, the deal we had didn't include you giving me orders."

Dannie stepped closer and dropped his voice. "Look, lady, something's brewing here, something big and bad. I've been feeling it growing in this country for months now, ever since the elections. There's a storm coming, and when the clouds break open, the last place we're going to want to be is stuck in some hospital shackled to an invalid whom we don't even know." Dannie shook his head. "We're here for a story. We both want that story, for different reasons. Let's get it, and get the fuck out."

"I'm not leaving this woman laying unconscious on the pier," Lauren insisted, "and that's final."

Dannie threw up his hands in frustration, but before he could say anything, Paul Cissé interrupted. "Look. There's a big compound up that hill. Walls, razor wire. Looks to me like a local or regional headquarters for the GRA - Growers' and Ranchers' Association," he explained, in response to Lauren's curious glance. "White racists, local elite, live in palaces while the country starves. They might not let me in -"

"Oh, they will," Lauren promised grimly.

"- but they'll have better doctors that the public hospitals anyway," Paul finished with a smile, "and they'll likely be glad to treat a white woman. That puts her someplace safe, and it might even get us a lead on our story. How about it?"

Dannie shrugged. "I can live with that."

"Fine," Lauren nodded. "Here, give me a hand." She looped an arm around Verger's back and tried to lift her, but ended up collapsing back. "Good grief," panted the journalist. "This woman is heavy."

"And she has only one leg," Dannie added grimly. "That's a prosthetic, see?"

"War wound," Paul said quietly. Dannie cast him a questioning glance. "I was in Sremski Okrug," the black man explained briefly. "Four years ago, with the 7th Calvin Light Horse. Peacekeeping ops. Watched while docs fitted a lot of folks for prosthetics - local civilians who'd had their legs chopped off by the Okrugian National Army, to encourage the others."

"You're full of surprises," Dannie muttered. Paul grimaced and said nothing more.

"Uh, guys?" Lauren called. "A little help."

"Right," Paul replied. With a grunt, he managed to lift Verger in a fireman's carry. "Shall we?" asked the big man rhetorically.

"Let's," agreed Lauren.

A half-hour's walk brought them to the gates of the Abernathy Country Club. Dannie leaned on the bell for an obnoxiously long time, and when the buzzer rang, he called: "White travelers here with a sick friend." His voice took on the nasal tones of the Songhian white aristocracy, an accent developed in isolation from wider Norvenian norms. "Open the fucking gate, if you'd be so jolly good, what?"

[Lydenburg]

As he bonked along in the dented green Mazda, Kris Plaatjies decided he liked this road. Not many potholes, well-maintained by Songhian standards - the white planters up and down the adjacent districts saw to that. It was lined with heavy bush, still soaked by early morning dew. Long green shoots and tendrils were already claiming the edge of the track, and given nine months with little traffic the road would become impassable. Ten months to a year later, and it would vanish without a trace.

One of Aramwaré's little oddities, encouraged by an ancient irrigation superstructure that made smilax and buffalo bean - the likes from which Plaatjies had fought to reclaim his farm three years ago - maddeningly dense. Kris cranked down his window, eager to fill his lungs with the dry, thin, continental air to which he was hopelessly inured. Hacking through a mouthful of grit, he immediately regretted it.

Thursday had not been kind to him.

"Allermachtig."

His eyes agog and mouth agape, Plaatjies had stared in flabbergasted disbelief at the little groups of distant cattle as they joined his gray karakul herd in wandering over another's scattered grazing lands. In better times, they would be in more enclosed settings, slowly eating their way to slaughter or a profitable shearing, but today they were sinking into the sunny horizon faster than Plaatjies' heart as it dropped to his shoetops.

"Christ. Bloody Christ."

Heads bowed, the Songhian foremen quietly shrank from his side. They knew how the baas could be when he was angry. In time, the shock would inevitably default to rage. Nevertheless, for the moment Kris remained utterly stupefied.

A lone sheep bleated mournfully before returning to the grass.

This was his first year experimenting with karakul pelts. Back in Lydenburg, the big farms made quite a run on that stuff. Plaatjies had tallied up the figures earlier that year. There were several healthy local outlets for marketing the hides and trundling excess sheep off to the slaughterhouse, courtesy of provincial demand. He anticipated netting enough profit for purchasing more tobacco land soon.

Didn't he have enough on his plate, without the coons trying to sabotage him at every turn?

The fencing was stolen, of course. It was betrayal, tantamount to mutiny. Somebody had ripped the wire, the stakes, the whole verdomde set-up from the ground - an entire section of it. For what? To resell? More than likely, just to antagonise a Boer. He didn't have any sort of alarm or sentries like the larger estate owners. He was just trying to survive. And this was how black Afrosia always repaid him.

Plaatjies closed his eyes, ran a finger slowly down the bridge of his nose. Crop yields this past season had been lousy, due to his inability to buy adequate seed or fertiliser. Spares were hard to get unless you knew where to go, and after three years he was still having difficulty finding his way around the farm, much less the province. Machinery broke down. Seed was simply not available. Nobody told him what the pre-planting prices were. There was no support order to give him access to agricultural data.

Ever since his arrival in rural Songhia, Plaatjies had fiercely rejected the Aramwaré Growers' and Ranchers' Association as being a lily-white cricket club for jaded colonials, an institution he wanted no part of. It represented a world he didn't understand, a world where he would never belong.

He supposed it was the theft of his fence, on his own farm, that finally did it. Guided by idiot docility, the sheep and cattle had rather predictably wandered off during the night. His crew would be tied up all day just trying to get them all back, and a new fence was beyond his pocket; the farm was already up against a knotty point.

"Sir, what should we do?" One of the elderly Songhians hurried to catch his red-faced employer as he stalked for the pickup.

"What the hell do you think, madala? You and the rest of the kaffir trash get out there and get my blery sheep back. Then the cows. I want them all here when I return, hey?"

"Baas, where are you going?"

"Don't get cheeky with me, boy."

Plaatjies had gone immediately back to his steading. What else could he do? He was liable to kill everybody down there if he stayed. Trying to take his mind off things by mending the tractor tyre had only wrenched his back and guaranteed he would be laid up for some time.

There was little else to do but head down to the Abernathy Sporting Society.

Kris knew that the whites at the Growers' and Ranchers' Association could take care of him - if they so wished. He had no idea how he intended to extend his begging bowl with dignity, but they offered supplies, fertiliser, prices, information, a preferential market, and financial security. Four years in Kalimbata had reminded him if nothing else that race here was an instrument of manipulation. There were under 100,000 people in the closed society that encompassed privileged white Songhia, and they took very good care of their own.

[Songhia]

There is no bell at the Abernathy, I'm afraid; they're a bit too good at this to rely on anonymous buzzy-buttons. Instead, there's three guards - one in charge and one on either side. They are dressed in simply fabulous uniforms, complete with, yes, pith helmets with crests on them. The entire effect was absurd, bringing to mind the idea that somebody wanted to create a very real and living sort of animatronic theme-park ride. Mr. Hartleray, the head of the provincial association, would sometimes get stinking drunk and order an inspection, making them stand stock-still while he marched past them and pretended he was a visiting president.

The guards were carrying live army-issue assault rifles. This either dimmed or enhanced the effect, depending on how you saw things. Look in their eyes, though, and you'd see that they were boys. Even their would-be commanding officer was no more than mid-20s, and whatever he'd learned in the service he'd probably forgotten. They probably thought they were getting a sweet deal, being guards at the Abernathy - you sit around all day, listen to the radio, and take it easy. But they didn't learn anything, didn't become anything, and the pay is so low that if they had to actually do anything, they'd never take the job.

When they saw Anita Verger, they were initially shocked, and then confused, but to their credit, they didn't try and push anyone around. They took one look at her, realized that she was appropriate for entry, and opened the gates. Two of the guards put down their guns - put them down right on the ground - to pick her up and carry her; the would-be leader follows helplessly after, torn between his specific orders not to let anyone in without permission and his generalized life experience that he was never to deny a white person something they seemed to need.

"I have to know your names, at least," he says apologetically. "Mr. Hartleray won't like this at all..."

Again, to their credit, once they get her inside, they get their on-hand doctor - more of a male nurse than anything, but sufficient for ordinary injuries and common colds - and set her down under his careful observation. They do all this immediately and without demand for explanation, though others - particularly Mr. Hartleray, who was interrupted from his daily stupor - are keen to extract one anyway.

Mr. George Hartleray suffered from what was apparently a common affliction among the whites of Songhia, namely the generalized belief that the correct way to spend one's life was to sort of simply wait around for death, that they'd each individually had some great opportunity as young people that they squandered or ignored and that they could never make up for it. He was approaching 60 and took five or six drinks a day, starting at 10 o'clock in the morning and ending last thing before bed. His face was beet-red, all the time, as were his bloated hands, adorned with rings that you'd have to saw off his fingers for if you wanted to remove them. He was, in every sense of the word, disgusting, a sort of vile human sausage stuffed into a tan suit. Lauren being a woman, he directed his inquiries toward Dannie Armstrong.

"Who's the woman, who are you, and what are you doing here?"

*****

"Welcome, Mr. Plaatjes," said that beleaguered officer as he opened the gates. By the time Kris Plaatjes arrived, the establishment had returned to some sort of order. The guards were back at the front, having been duly bawled out for letting in the previous uninvited guests, and greeted him with a salute. If nothing else, they got the salute right - it's one of the few things that they would have learned in the army. Salute, march in time, and stand still until we tell you not to; these are the basics, and for most it's all they retain.

The club offered its array of pleasures. One could visit for the day, spend the night, or even book the place as a hotel - many of the finer folks in Burlington did just that. There was a bar and grille that served decent steak sandwiches, and would give you all the ice you wanted in your drink. You could take your meal out onto a veranda if you wanted, and sit in a white wicker chair and watch the golfers. There was a main dining room, also, with a table that could seat 26 people, but that was mainly for important occasions and to serve as an impromptu boardroom. There was even a library, holding every single book ever written by a white Songhian - a sadly unimpressive feat, as most of it was airport trash, cheap ersatzes of Clavell and Michener novels.

By far, the most appealing thing about the Abernathy is that it offered all the hot and cold water you wanted. There was a tiny gymnasium with the only steam room for 300 miles.

Plaatjes was technically not welcome there; he hadn't paid his dues or joined the association. But they didn't have the heart to keep him out, and he hadn't yet really made a nuisance of himself. They just billed him as a guest and tried to not to think about it.

*****

Meanwhile, in the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday the 23rd, the Saltigué arrived. He took a room at a private house, and spent the evening mostly at leisure. A few young people, the more religiously-inspired among them, came to pay a visit, and he gave them a brief observance before calling it an early night. His work could begin in earnest the next day.

[Norvenia]

Dannie simply gave Hartleray a look of scathing, contemptuous disgust. I want to stick him with a kitchen knife just to see what comes out: blood, or grease? The tall Mountain Anglo shook his head firmly. "I'm Daniel George Armstrong," he said briefly. "I'm a Norvenian citizen with the embassy."

"That woman collapsed on the pier," Lauren Russel explained quickly, trying rather harder than Dannie to hide her disgust but succeeding only partially. "We don't know why. My guide - " Lauren nodded to Paul, who was standing very still beside the wall - "suggested that we bring her here. We don't know who she is."

Dannie's face was smooth, but his mind was troubled. Oh, but that's not quite true. Anglos, big, war veteran, technologically advanced prosthesis. Only two countries in the region fit that bill, and she doesn't look like a Norvenian to me.

Regardless, Lauren plowed on. "At any rate, we'd like to thank you for your hospitality, Mister...?" The journalist cocked her head and gave her most winning smile. "Actually, you seem like an important man. I'm here for Norvenian Central Broadcasting; I'm sure that you're busy, but do you think that you could find time in your schedule for an interview?"

[Songhia]

Dannie simply gave Hartleray a look of scathing, contemptuous disgust. I want to stick him with a kitchen knife just to see what comes out: blood, or grease? The tall Mountain Anglo shook his head firmly. "I'm Daniel George Armstrong," he said briefly. "I'm a Norvenian citizen with the embassy."

"That woman collapsed on the pier," Lauren Russel explained quickly, trying rather harder than Dannie to hide her disgust but succeeding only partially. "We don't know why. My guide - " Lauren nodded to Paul, who was standing very still beside the wall - "suggested that we bring her here. We don't know who she is."

Dannie's face was smooth, but his mind was troubled. Oh, but that's not quite true. Anglos, big, war veteran, technologically advanced prosthesis. Only two countries in the region fit that bill, and she doesn't look like a Norvenian to me.

Regardless, Lauren plowed on. "At any rate, we'd like to thank you for your hospitality, Mister...?" The journalist cocked her head and gave her most winning smile. "Actually, you seem like an important man. I'm here for Norvenian Central Broadcasting; I'm sure that you're busy, but do you think that you could find time in your schedule for an interview?"

"With the embassy?" Mr. Hartleray elects to play it cool. There are a number of ways that this could go down for him, depending on whose side he wants to be on and what these Norvenians probably want. The most obvious fork in the road is whether he has permission to be here. Relations between Songhia and Norvenia had occassionally been... servile, yes, but diplomatic staff certainly had to be accompanied by minders or at least get permission before they went anywhere. If he was a spy, then perhaps this was a way to curry favor with, well... who? The Norvenians or the government? Either one might make a good friend...

So Hartleray plays it cool. "I see. If you're going to stay, you should book a room. Ms. Clochaire can help you with that." Hey, just over yonder is a reception desk! Albeit one with nobody behind it. With regards to the interview request, however, he puffs up a bit.

"Such a thing could be arranged. What's the interview about?"

[Kalumba]

Yahya had not slept, and knew that it would show in his face when he looked into his shaving mirror. And he was right dark rings surrounded his eyes and his tired eyes had missed great patches stubble and mixed up another bowl of foam with his treasured badger hair shaving brush. It was oe of the few things he had left of his father, and the brush was a thing of beauty with an ebony handle inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl forming lions and elephants locked in combat. With the matching straight razor he began to carefully remove the previously missed patches, pausing every few strokes to strop the blade upon his belt. With this task done Yahya crossed his small room ad opened the old trunk which cotained his few items of clothing and took out his smartest shirt and trousers and wished he owned an iron. But there was no time to waste, Jean had been insistent, so Yahya donned his clothes and hurried down the stairs.

Jean was already outside and hopping from foot to foot in excitment. "Quickly Yahya, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity!" he spoke quickly and was already trotting of down the road, giving his employer barely enough time to close the shutters on the shop before hurrying after him with his curious shambling gait.

Yahya did not share his friends excitment ad was still gravely worried by the activities of the previous night. The men had all been quiet and just sat around listening to the drums until even these eventually petered out, normally there would been shouting and fighting and drinking and then the men would grow tired and return to their homes, anger expresed and gone. But this was different a murmur of discontent became a rumble and then a roar, and suddenly silence. That was when one of the men had risen and spoken in soft tones "The Saltigué has come." And that was it, the men had gone and the drums fell silent, but Yahya was deeply troubled by the events and had been unable to sleep and was now on his way to see the mysterious stranger and he trembled with anticipation and fear.

[Norvenia]

Lauren winked almost imperceptibly at Dannie, who stifled a groan. "I'll get a room," he muttered. For his own part, Dannie would not have chosen to stay in the Abernathy. Nobody here knows anything. It's a cocoon, a womb. Warm, and comfortable - if you're blind and deaf. But it was also safe, and Dannie Armstrong was growing increasingly sure that safety might count for a great deal soon enough.

Next, Lauren turned to Paul Cissé. "Paul, would you keep an eye on our friend from the quay?"

The Songhian-Norvenian frowned. "Miss Russel, you hired me to guide you and protect you. I'm not sure - "

Lauren laughed. "Paul, I'll be fine for a half hour in the middle of a country club." She raised her eyebrows. "Go."

Paul shook his head warily and turned away. Dannie took his arm for a moment. "Just remember," murmured the older man, "that if that woman is who we think she is, then she might be the most dangerous person in this town. One of the two of us should be near her at all times."

"Fine," Paul grunted. "I get the point. I just don't like it, that's all."

"Copy that," Dannie nodded. Paul sighed and headed off toward the doctor's office. Dannie, for his part, rapped his knuckles loudly on top of the reception desk and hollered: "Hello?" He glanced around at the reproachful gazes of the other patrons of the Abernathy. "What?"

* * *

Meanwhile, Lauren Russel grinned and nodded to Tim Han, who got his camera out and seated on his shoulder. "I hope you don't mind," Lauren told Hartleray. "I'm a TV journalist, you see, so my interviews have to be - well - televised." She cocked her head, smiling. God, how many interviews have I gotten by playing the admiring/coquettish reporter? Enough so that I hardly even notice when I start to play the role anymore. Lauren shook her hair a little. Well, it works. "I was wondering," she continued, "if we could talk a little about the political ramifications of the recent election." Tim Han's camera started rolling. "What do you think about the situation in Songhia?"

[Songhia]

When the world was young and there was virginity left to it, the Saltigués were already old.

Perhaps they stood by and watched its birth, and held the Earth aloft before the twinkling stars and called it Diñé, and gave names to the beasts of the forest and the fish of the sea. Perhaps they struck open the tree that created Man and Woman, and taught them to speak and to keep faith with the Law. Perhaps they brought the Magic Stylus to the First King of Yomoro, and called his people Sebennika, the People of the Word.

But perhaps they did none of those things, and they really did only come to this world as themselves, as the Saltigués, as the Keepers of the Road, some 1,200 years ago. Perhaps they were not so ancient as all that, and they were just a body of men like any other, another fellowship, another order, another comites, as it were, and didn't possess the sorcery they claimed. Perhaps, perhaps. But they still put on a show.

To be a Saltigué was to renounce all ties of home, hearth, and kinship, and to give yourself completely to them. Entering their ranks was simple, for an intelligent man - all you needed was a name, and the willingness to give it to them. They would take your name, and with it all your life, and put it in a box and burn it and thus destroy it. They would unmake you, and remake you, and with their revision give you a taste of their awesome powers. To those who believed, the Saltigué was the ultimate in human holiness, his every step a lotus flower, his every word burning gold, his every thought electricity from the Gods.

The Saltigué was born Woraso Siaré, but nobody knew that. Saltigués only had names amongst each other, and they called him 'Brother Sojola.' To ordinary people, he was simply 'The Wise Master, Marakasira, the Keeper of the Road.' Like his brotherhood, he was ancient, his eyes milky clouds, his skin wrinkled and folded, his fingers gnarled. He was impossibly thin, his body withered and bent under the weight of years and the burden of his impossible secrets, and not even his voluminous robes could add any girth or substance to him. Even in his blindness, his gaze could shrivel a man's heart. He was not to be trifled with.

The language he spoke was as laden with beauty and depth, to his own people, as is Chaucer to us - and perhaps as indecipherable.

"And so it was," he began, "in those most early days of man, that King Suwoyoro did, at one time, strike upon the Earth, and hew to it, that he might make of himself an icon, and his subjects be worshipful to it. His heart was black, and he coveted offerings coeval to Njoxona, Queen of the River, who took milk and blood alike in her sustenance, and yea, coeval to Rug, Lord of Heaven and Maker of All Things. And so it was that he hewed the stone, and so also did the most cunning stone-men hew upon it, to make it his perfect likeness, that any man who saw it might think himself to have looked upon the very King himself." The Wise Master's words were so soft that the ear strained to hear them. This was a Weeping Sermon; this is the Beginning of the Weeping Sermon.

"And so it was in time that it was fashioned in ample perfection, bearing a brow in the exactness of his brow, and a nose in the exactness of his nose, and arms in the exactness of his arms, and so alike in every other part of his person and such in the statue. And he looked upon his statue, and he said, it is not meet." His voice was the very apotheosis of solemnity and stern-heartedness, without a single hint of anger or of excitement.

"And it was not meet, for it had blemishes upon it. The king was sorely wroth, for though in his command he had bid this image be in his perfect-most likeness, he had not foreseen that in this command, he had also bid them capture his imperfections. In this way, the statue bore witness to all who cast their eyes upon it the King's own failures and infirmities, and he was sorely wroth and demanded it be done again."

"And so it was that the statue was begun anew, and was hence made and hewed that it would be of a perfect man, without any weakness of age or of ill-birth or of sickness or of any other thing, and it was made in the most perfect manner thereupon. Upon its completion, the King gazed on it, and he was enraged, and he wept with anger, and was ill with his heartbreak. For thought this was the likeness of a perfect man, it was still only a man, like others, lacking in failure but so too lacking in any greatness beyond the out-most greatness of man. And he destroyed this statue, and demanded be hewed a man more than man, not only free from man's frailty but made perfect beyond perfection, greater than the greatest of man. And so it was commanded, and so was it made done."

"And this statue was bid, and so it was made, and in this manner it was made perfect; it was like unto King Suwoyoro only in its least-most incidents, but was in all ways more and greater than him, and more and greater than any other man ever to have lived or ever shall live, and upon its completion was this statue placed before King Suwoyoro's palace, and he went to regard it, thinking that it would bring him glories beyond glories, and that all his subjects would be compelled to worship it.

"And so it was that he beheld his statue before his palace, and was well-satisfied with it, until he cast his gaze to the sky, and beheld them together, and he wept. For, he wept, how could man, man as he is, man as he might have been, and man beyond what man could be, how could these things ever compare before the majesty of Rug, who is beyond the great and small, beyond the strong and weak, beyond the brave and meek, and beyond all men alike?"

The Saltigué's assistants inform the assembled that he will now take questions and give personal guidance.

[The Steel Fraternity]

Anita Verger woke up slowly in an unfamiliar place. Not an uncommon experience for her over the past few years, but this was no ditch or park bench around Santa Rio.

When Verger opened her eyes, she was staring up at the white ceiling of a small room, with an antique-looking celing fan set in its center, dark wooden blades slowly stirring the air. It was purely for show, though, as Verger felt the draft of a central air-conditioning system coming from an ornate metal grate above her bed.

Verger took a few seconds staring at the ceiling and blinking the sleep from her eyes while she remembered what country she was in. Once she recalled the events of the past few days, Verger looked around to take stock of the situation. She was in what appeared to be a small bedroom in an ornate old building. The walls were white, but half-covered in rich wainscotting of some dark wood. There was an antique-looking chest of drawers by the far wall. Leaning against it, arms crossed over his chest, stood a vaguely familiar-seeming black man. He was watching her with an inscrutable expression, and she knew he had seen her wake up.

Giving him a quick once-over, Verger noted that he wasn't wearing any sort of uniform. He had an air of calm observance about him, however, so she wasn't entirely certain he wasn't some sort of cop. If she'd been caught, though, she didn't think she'd be in such pleasant surroundings.

And even if the man was from the Songhian government, there wasn't much Verger could do about it at the moment. She was lying on her back in a narrow bed, with fine linen sheets drawn up to her chest. Someone had removed her boot, the belt with her knives, her shirt, her pants, and her ball cap. She was left in he underwear and tank top she'd had on underneath her khakis. The Steel Paladin emblem tattooed on her left shoulder (a shield with an overlaid sword and compass) was clearly visible. There was an IV running from her left arm to a drip beside her bed.

Saline, probably, Verger thought, recalling how little water she'd had over the past couple days of running around. She'd probably passed out earlier because of a combination of dehydration and heatstroke. Her head still swam and ached, though it wasn't as bad as it had been before.

In any case, if the man across the room did have some ill intent toward her, she was in a vulnerable position: lying in bed, with an IV line in her arm, her boot, clothes, and weapons nowhere in sight. Trying to run past or through him would be a low-percentage proposition at the moment.

Besides, she had no way of being sure that he did harbor any hostility toward her. She didn't seem to be in a hospital, but it certainly wasn't a jail, either, and she wasn't restrained. Best to play it cool.

So, after several long moments of looking around in silence, Verger finally spoke to the man.

“Who are you, and where am I?”

[Norvenia]

Paul remained leaning against the bureau. "My name is Paul Cissé," he said calmly. "I'm a Norvenian citizen acting as a guide and interpreter for Ms. Lauren Russel, a journalist." The Norvenian kept his expression inscrutable, but his eyes kept glancing back at the Steel Paladin tattoo on Verger's shoulder. So we were right, he thought.

For more than twenty years, Norvenia had regarded Skorzenia as the primary military threat to regional stability. The Norvenian military was not overly worried about Skorzenian military might; in many ways, it regarded the Steel Fraternity as a paper tiger. The Fraternity had highly advanced military technology, but it was focused on building heavier armor and bigger guns and faster jets, rather than on the modern technology that really won wars: stealth tech, battlespace networks, long-range missile guidance, and electronic countermeasures. The result was that the Steel Fraternity was immensely powerful, but tactically and strategically inflexible - and against a highly-trained, superbly-equipped, and totally networked Norvenian force, that lack of flexibility would be fatal.

And that was why, all through Paul Cissé's training in the Norvenian Army, he had been thinking about the Steel Fraternity as the enemy just waiting to be fought: a dangerous foe, but one afflicted by fatal structural weaknesses. It didn't help that Skorzenia was everything that Norvenia opposed: laissez-faire rather than socialist, hierarchical rather than egalitarian, totalitarian rather than liberal. They were the bad guys, plain and simple, the bogeyman, the ultimate ideological and practical enemy. When Paul had been deployed outside Aurora to Sremski Okrug, he had been stunned that he was actually deploying as a peacekeeper, rather than to liberate Skorzenia.

And now a Steel Paladin was laying in bed in front of him. Paul didn't know what to think of that. But he couldn't help but feel - much as he would have liked to pass immediate judgment - that Verger was at the present moment just a sick woman who had been through hell. That was what she looked like, at any rate. And Paul had seen enough horrendous crimes committed by otherwise ordinary people to know that no one was as black or white as their allegiance might suggest.

With a sigh, the Norvenian stepped forward and circled around to the side of Verger's bed, staying about a foot beyond her reach. "You were on the ferry up-river with us," Paul said quietly. "Do you remember that? When we reached Aramwaré, you passed out on the dock." The big man gestured around. "This is the Abernathy Club, headquarters for the local GRA. We brought you here for treatment." Paul paused, considering. "Would you tell me who you are now?"

[The Steel Fraternity]

"A Norvenian," Verger said evenly. Briefly, she recalled what her mother had looked like after she was shot by a socialist fighter with a Norvenian assault rifle. Her face had looked almost normal, with just a small hole beside her nose, and a subtly misshapen cheek where the bones beneath had been shattered by the bullet. The back of her head, though...

But that was long ago, and far away. The man in front of her would have been a child himself when she was ten, if he'd even been born yet, and this was Songhia. At the moment, she was less concerned with international politics than whether he knew about the man she'd killed in Sokassa. He apparently didn't, since he and his journalist companions had brought her here instead of to the police.

Still, best to get out of here. Even if Cissé and his companions didn't know about the killing, attracting any sort of news attention wouldn't exactly be helpful in her situation. Best to get out of this country club, or whatever it was, and continue on her way out of the country. Except something was nagging at her.

He's too tense, Verger thought as she noted the man standing carefully out of reach. Something's up here, but what?

It did not occur to Verger that Cissé might be uncomfortable about being inside the Abernathy. She understood racism in an intellectual way, as an abstract concept, but her worldview did not really account for it. She'd spent most of her childhood living in a small, fortified Fraternity enclave. Most of the people there were white, but there were a couple of black families and one Asian one. They'd all been united by ideology rather than race, and under constant attack or threat of attack from corporate security forces, socialist militias, or bandits. There'd been no room for racism there, and even less when the 1984 War drove them into the bunkers.

Neither did it occur to Verger that Cissé might be particularly wary of her. Verger did not think of herself as a particularly dangerous person, as she'd lived her entire life surrounded by people who had fought in the same conflicts she had, many of them fellow Paladins or VANGUARD operatives.

“I remember,” Verger said. “More or less. I think I had a bout of heatstroke.” No need to tell a stranger about the DTs.

Suddenly irritated at her position, Verger sat up and swung her legs off the bed. She continued to talk as she withdrew the needle from her arm. “My name is Verger. Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.” She stood, starting her head spinning. Okay. I still need to catch up on hydration. At least they didn't take my prosthesis off. “Do you know where my things are?”

[Songhia]

Meanwhile, Lauren Russel grinned and nodded to Tim Han, who got his camera out and seated on his shoulder. "I hope you don't mind," Lauren told Hartleray. "I'm a TV journalist, you see, so my interviews have to be - well - televised." She cocked her head, smiling. God, how many interviews have I gotten by playing the admiring/coquettish reporter? Enough so that I hardly even notice when I start to play the role anymore. Lauren shook her hair a little. Well, it works. "I was wondering," she continued, "if we could talk a little about the political ramifications of the recent election." Tim Han's camera started rolling. "What do you think about the situation in Songhia?"

"The situation? It's simple. The black Songhian peasants are angry, and they're being stirred up by a bunch of demagogues for their own profit. These demagogues see an opportunity because the peasants are unhappy with their situation, and they're unhappy with their situation because there are too many of them and not enough to go around for them. Norvenian fertilizers and pesticides drastically increased the country's food productivity back in the 40s and 50s, but the rest of the country's services haven't caught up, so you have all these people who can afford to eat and breed but who have no opportunities. So they're unhappy. And there's this whole mindset of victimization here, so it's easy for someone to come out and say, 'all your problems are someone else's fault.' It just goes to show that they don't know what's good for them. If they actually step out of line, then the President will bring the hammer down on them; it's as simple as that."

[Lydenburg]

Kris Plaatjies had never felt intimidated by a building before. He reckoned there was a first time for everything.

Not merely a house, not merely a mansion, and not merely a club where too many obsessed Norvenian architects had been allowed to go to town for a staggering amount of brand new cauris, the Abernathy Sporting Society had once the stately residence of a single household. Now it stood, imposing and stolid, a reminder of much better days. No security men on the perimetre itself to keep out the unwary, but there was an electrified fence - as with everywhere else where one could hope to find a white Songhian.

"Welcome, Mr. Plaatjies."

Getting in had been surprisingly easy. At the gate, Plaatjies had offered his provincial driving licence, but the attendant's eyes had only just acknowledged it. Anybody who'd lived in Aramwaré town long enough probably recalled him vaguely by face, if not by name. It was a fairly small club.

Taking back his papers with a gruff "baie dankie", Kris had promptly stuffed them back into a bulging wallet as he brushed nonchalantly past the remaining help without another word. Norvenian colonialism may have been long dead, but in her former Afrosian colonies the story was always the same: blacks were required to show deference to the men who had once lorded over them and now kept them fed. Nothing in the rulebook suggested that such niceties had to be reciprocated.

Standing smartly to attention, gleaming rifles shouldered, they saluted in turn. What the hell?

Plaatjies had no idea how these people greeted their guests, but the gesture caught him off-guard. Several lifetimes of training instilled in a man who had once made his rank by shining boots and unquestioning obedience inevitably defaulted, and, blinking up at the Abernathy guards in surprise, he shuffled rigidly to attention.

They stood straight-backed, the gesture a minute off the parade ground. Gritting his teeth as his back threw out again, Plaatjies braced up to match their salute, holding it another punishing moment before returning to attention and effectively dismissing them. It was a gesture only former servicemen could appreciate.

---

Sandhoek
Republic of Lydenburg
March, 2006

"You look terrible."

Plaatjies knew he did. He hadn't eaten, hadn't shaved. His eyes were still bleary from sleep and his dark, unruly, hair matted underneath his combat cap. Jooste and de Villiers were in no better shape, but at least they had time to devour a pineapple between the two of them. Kris was too busy making phone calls.

"I believed I said you were dismissed, Leon."

"Yes, sir."

Having presented himself for the call-up, pudgy Leon Prinsloo went out, Owen gun in hand and webbing bouncing, to join the crowd of other reservists waiting outside the police station.

In theory, the 'Group D' Reserve of the Lydenburg National Police functioned much like the Kalumban Police Reserve after which it was partially modeled, a civilian counter-terrorist force which worked in the rural areas during an initial crisis until LNP regulars or military troops arrived in sufficient strength to take over. Plaatjies scowled. Having served as a regular for nearly his entire career, he had little respect for the reservists and was used to commanding fit young men properly trained to task, not fat fools who were expected to cut and run at the first sign of trouble.

"Frankly, Meneer Brandt, I am not interested in your excuses. Less than ten men have answered the dawn call-up. I need more coming, and given the fact that we don't have a single heavy weapon between us and only one mine-safe vehicle, I would say we've done remarkably well, eh?"

Plaatjies sighed into the rotary as he looked out the station's single window. Another truckload of reservists, still hastily shrugging into their gear, had just entered the parking lot. Most were grey-haired farmers well past middle age or their sons, some obviously as young as sixteen.

"Not to worry, Kris. Diergaart's on his way with some Auxiliary Unit fellows. I think they're -"

"Already here. I'll deal with them." Plaatjies had picked up the roar of a Rheebok behind the arriving bakkie. Dropping the phone with a muffled curse, he strode briskly outside to deal with the latest problem.

Like sheep, the men of Sandhoek's 'D' Group stood idly about, smoking or chatting it up in the early morning sun. Their voices quieted as the huge, open-topped, armoured personnel carrier lumbered into the dirt lot and ground to a sputtering halt.

"Sergeant Diergaart, reporting for duty, sir!"

Ignoring the cheery voice echoing from the Rheebok cab, Plaatjies coldly stood his ground as several black policemen assembled before his troops. Their immaculate camouflage and spotless Galils contrasted sharply with the casual browns and proliferation of ancient weapons carried by the comparatively shabby reservists.

"What are these kaffirs doing in front of my station, Diergaart?" Kris demanded of the white CO as the latter came trotting up. He hated this man and all of his kind.

"Coming to save your arses, sir!" Diergaart had responded with no less enthusiasm than before. Behind Plaatjies, de Villiers and Jooste made strangled coughing noises.

"We need....dependable chaps." Plaatjies found himself unable to retain a straight face. "The day I need your askari squad to help me run my op is the day I retire."

"At least have the decency to put down my men to their face, sir."

"Bapedis, are they?"

"Yes, sir. The best. Tracker platoon five oh -"

"And most of the terrs - they're Bapedi, hey?"

"Some of them are Coloured....sir."

Plaatjies took a step forward, until he was eye to eye with the younger man. His voice was barely audible.

"This is war, Diergaart."

"It's not a race war, Plaatjies - regardless of what ignorant buffoons like yourself wish to believe."

As it had on many occasions before, the argument was becoming heated, personal.

"All the blacks are communists, Diergaart. It's the first thing they teach you at COIN school. It's only a matter of time before they will all be exposed for what they are."

"You talking about race war, aren't you?"

"We can win. We can take all the savages in this bloody country and win, without some of them on our side. A man who turns his coat once - against his own people, no less, will turn it again."

"Look at them, sir. They've got nowhere else to go. Many of them are trying to feed their families but others want the prestige. They want to go home as proven warriors. This is the only trade they've got. It's why Afrosians join the regulars, not the reserves. It's why they spend hours polishing their boots and wearing their regulation uniforms, while your people try to be as casual as possible."

"We're standing here because two sods from the Auxiliary Unit deserted to the gooks, taking with them a MAG-58 and several magazines. That sort of firepower means some time in the future - today, tomorrow, a week from now, or a year, that's another convoy ambushed, another good man killed. We'll take this up another time, Diergaart - but don't forget my words."

---

Eight months later, Diergaart was dead, shot from behind by one of his own men. The deserters were never captured.

It had been a long time since Plaatjies had saluted a damned black. At least they got something right here. He'd managed to snag a critical NCO's glance at their FNs and weapon discipline. Some men looked spiffy in white shokas, but if they ever went up against any real threat those idiots were history.

Interior design had never interested your typical blockheaded Lydenburgher policeman, though Kris was astute enough to recognise the power decor in the Abernathy's ancient lobby; to his eyes it gave a soft texture and a light tinge to the walls. He kept an eye out for the same glassy-eyed heads he had so admired at the old colonial clubs down in Kalimbata, knowing full well that even down here Aramwaré's fleetest of foot were more than likely bought rather than earned by any skill as a hunter.

Odd, really. No wonder he was feeling so out of his niche. In Lydenburg, the guards weren't black and they didn't carry arms - but more than likely comprised a few ex-rugby giants with truncheons who were far better at what they did. There weren't fences to keep out the unwary, but if one had the wrong race stamp on his IC he would likely finish the evening with a few broken ribs for his trouble. Baaskap at its finest.

He looked out the sweeping plate window towards the golf course just as a passing aardvark emerged from the gardens. Their eyes met, dogged defiance affronting tranquil ambiguity.

Plaatjies shook his head, unwilling to believe what he'd seen. Impossible. Wild animals couldn't simply roaming the grounds of the province's most exclusive establishment.

When his gaze returned to the verdure outside, the mysterious creature had vanished.