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  "Generale Shimon Bar-El? Very good, Excellency. My orders," Chiabrera said, producing a sheaf of flimsies. "We can have your men at camp in about an hour. Generale DiCorpo d'Armata Colletta sends word that he would like the pleasure of your company at table tonight—as soon as your men are settled in, of course. We dine at the twentieth hour, local time."

  "I'll be there," Bar-El said. Some of the Metzadans had started to drift over toward the bus. "Mordecai," he said.

  "Tel Aviv Ten. As you were, people," Peled snapped out. "Let's pretend we're all soldiers, shall we?"

  Shimon jerked his chin toward Galil. "Check it out."

  Galil picked out Benyamin and two other fireteam leaders by eye. Ari followed his brother up the ramp and into the darkness of the second bus. It wasn't anything special, he decided; just a converted civvy vehicle, turned into military transportation by the addition of mesh grenade screens to the windows.

  Benyamin rapped a ring against the nearest window. "Glass. Shit."

  "Kelev One One Two Two," Laskov said. He was all the way in the back. "Somebody's idea of cleaning out this thing was to shove a bunch of old bottles and tools under the back benches."

  "We'll clean it out, then move out," Shimon Bar-El's distant voice said.

  "My apologies, of course, Generale, but I'm afraid I don't understand the problem."

  "No big deal, Colonel," Peled said. "But you have to keep gear stowed away. If the bus hits a mine, the bang turns every loose bottle or piece of metal into shrapnel. Pretty mean shrapnel," he said, idly rubbing the edge of his thumb against an old scar on the bridge of his nose. "Never knew no nice shrapnel, and that's a fact."

  "But we are 200 kilometers from the front, and the front is quiet."

  "His fucking point pre-fucking-cisely." For a moment, Ari thought that it was one of the soldiers near the colonel who had said that, then he realized it was Meir Ben David, the sapper captain, on All Hands One.

  "Shut up, Meir," Shimon Bar-El said quietly. He turned to Peled. "Mordecai, send a detail to police the buses."

  "Tel Aviv Ten. Yes, Shimon."

  "We have to—" A helo roared by loudly overhead, sending some hands to the grips of their weapons, everybody desisting when Shimon came back on All Hands One. "Easy, people, easy. Few of us are operational, and none of us are engaged."

  "Not at the moment we aren't," Benyamin said as they walked out into the daylight. "Not fucking yet."

  CHAPTER 2

  Dov Ginsberg: A Simple Man

  Avram's chatter irritated Dov. Avram always chattered. This time it was something about maps and overlays and coordinate systems.

  Who cared? Avram always had to make things complicated, Dov Ginsberg decided, not for the first time.

  For Dov, it was simple. He would handle his own job and leave the rest to Uncle Shimon. That was the way it had always been. That was the way it was supposed to be. That was enough; he was content.

  Dov Ginsberg smiled. One hand wrapped around the anodized barrel of his shotgun, he leaned back, not quite letting his head rest against the seatback as he looked across Avram, out the window.

  The road to Camp Ramorino cut gingerly across the rolling hills above the valley, as though it were too weak to cut deep and hard. Perhaps one klick below and ten to the south, a river twisted slowly through the greens and reds of the valley. Kind of pretty, really.

  "The river is the Dora della Maestra," Avram said, tapping a map. He had taken off his field jacket and rolled it up so it could prop the clipboard on his lap. "Ag report says that they've got the salmon cycle going all by itself, now, or had it going before the war, at least." He pointed to a spot on the map. "There's a hydropower dam just beyond that bend, with a salmon ladder and all."

  Officially, Captain Avram Stein was Shimon's aide-decamp while Dov was his bodyguard and driver; the TO called for a captain to watch over the general's needs.

  In practice, Avram was more of a junior chief of staff than simply an aide, and what with the demands on his time, Dov and he had always split the dogrobber duties. They never had a problem deciding who ought to do what; it was always obvious, which seemed to bother Avram. Dov liked it that way. Keeping track of maps, having the right map instantly available, was obviously Avram's responsibility, not Dov's.

  "But only on the western arm of the Dora; eastern arm's the Dora di Goro," Avram went on. He sounded excited, as though it mattered. "We had it in Geography, remember? Way back when?"

  "No." Dov didn't like remembering. Not that part, not that far back.

  "At the orphanage?"

  "No." Dov didn't remember much about the more important things that had happened in the orphanage, and he didn't want to. This might matter to Avram, but not to him; Dov wouldn't have cared if the river was called the Big Creek.

  But things like this were important to Avram, and Shimon liked it that way, and Shimon wanted the two of them to get along, so Dov forced a smile for a moment, just as if he cared.

  You had to decide what to care about, and what to let go. If it weren't that Shimon said otherwise, Avram and all his piddling little details wouldn't matter at all.

  Salmon and fishing and rivers didn't matter. The details that mattered involved guns and knives. Dov hadn't liked the way the others, all of whom had guns and knives, had milled around Shimon as they boarded the bus.

  It was good that they were all Metzadans, and better that they were all in Shimon's regiment, but that didn't mean Dov could relax.

  Shimon wouldn't tell him to relax. Kick that aside, Dov; move this vehicle; just get me in there; do your exercises; start my bath, Dov; eat this food; fire this weapon; make my bed; kill them all, Dov; open that door; get my lunch; ignore the pain, Dov; gut this bastard like a trout for me, Dov; be very strong for me; Dov.

  Dov had done all that, and all that was fine. All that was the way it was supposed to be.

  Relax—no.

  Turning like a turret, he looked around the crowded compartment.

  In the seats behind him and Avram, Shimon and Yacov Sher were engaged in a discussion about some flimsies, punctuated by an occasional peremptory tap of Shimon's finger against the sheets. The aisles were crammed with buttpacks and backpacks, weapons of the operationals, either held or lashed in place. The rest of the gear, along with the administratives' weapons, was stowed below, in the ring of baggage carriers above the buses' rubberized skirts.

  And, as usual, the virgins watched the scenery wide-eyed, while most of the veterans slept. It was a conditioned reflex: a seasoned soldier sleeps when and where he can. It didn't matter that this was a cadre job. A reflex isn't a reasoned judgment.

  At the thought of sleep, Dov almost yawned. But he decided that he wasn't tired and didn't need to yawn, so he didn't. He had gotten enough sleep on the way down, and he never needed much. There wouldn't be much he'd have to do here, but at least there was some point in staying alert.

  Reflexively, he licked his knuckles to be sure they weren't gritty—they weren't—and then rubbed at his eyes.

  He looked past Avram, through the mesh, out the window again. Not a military road, or at least not a good one. The brush wasn't cleared more than two meters on each side of the ditch running along the bare dirt road.

  Not bad, though, for a civvy wheel road, although it was hard to see a lot of it, what with the fans kicking up dust.

  A military road should have been more direct, carving its way more urgently through the countryside. Ditch-edged roads were okay for fans, although you'd have to be careful riding a tracked vehicle down one if you wanted some speed.

  Not bad for buses or merkavas, but it would be dangerous for the tracked vehicles: they could get themselves stuck too easily. If the bus slipped over into the ditch, it would just slide to the bottom, perhaps riding a bit higher on its air cushion as it rattled from side to side. No problem, there, but a wheeled vehicle would likely break an axle, and a tank would surely throw a track. A tank with a bad track was like an infantryman w
ith a broken leg: too often you had to leave it behind.

  It wasn't a bad road, but it wasn't really a fan road: the curves were unbanked; the bus had to slow at each turn for fear of going over the high side.

  Again, the bus slowed and swung gently through another bend.

  "Mountains there are the Rosso Magginines; most of the fighting's on the Piano Amiata, just beyond." Avram bit his lip for a moment. "If I was Generalleutnant Müller, I'd be thinking a lot about how the Casas have to get a hundred kilos per man up and through the Rosso Magginine passes every day."

  "Eh?"

  "I was just saying that I don't like those numbers," Avram said, pursing his lips judiciously. "Two of their fat divisions are about forty thousand men, total. Figure four thousand tons per day. Local trucks can haul about, what? Twenty tons, maybe? That's two hundred trucks up, each day. Three hundred, once they bring the new division online."

  Dov grunted, as though he followed. Or cared. Numbers weren't his responsibility. They were too complicated. Leave it for logisticians like Avram. Worrying wasn't his department, not about this. It was good to worry about the right things, but a waste of energy to worry about the wrong things. So Dov would leave all the worrying to Uncle Shimon.

  All Dov had to do was take care of what Shimon told him to. It had worked that way for twenty-five years, and not a day had passed in that time that Dov hadn't marveled at how perfectly it worked.

  Just do what Uncle Shimon said and the rest of the universe fell neatly, quietly, elegantly into place, like a body slumping into the grave.

  He was still angry about Peled. Peled should have known better than to let his rifle get too near Shimon. It didn't matter that the safety had been on, it didn't matter that his trigger finger wasn't even on the trigger housing. It was simple: people didn't point guns at Uncle Shimon.

  Keep things simple, that was the trick. Don't worry about who is the friend, who is the enemy. That can get too complicated when you stand next to Uncle Shimon because sometimes friends wear funny foreign uniforms and sometimes enemies wore good Metzadan khaki.

  Protect Uncle Shimon, and do what Uncle Shimon says.

  Nothing else mattered.

  Avram shifted nervously in the seat next to him, his attention split between his clipboard and the view outside. Avram was the organizer. He had been, ever since Shimon Bar-El's magic had touched him and the little boy who wasn't yet Dov. Shimon had touched all of them; and of the six who survived Shimon's Children's Crusade, all were different.

  Poor Avram, always made things complicated. He liked it complicated, now. It hadn't always been that way. Things had been very complicated once, for the both of them, back when their names hadn't been either Dov or Avram, neither Ginsberg nor Stein, back when they were children in Bienfaisant, half this world away.

  Dov didn't remember much about that; he'd lost most of those memories over the years.

  It was only the end that he remembered at all clearly, and that only in flashes, because that was complicated. Little Annette running into the boy's dormitory, clutching scraps of her dress to herself, blood trickling down her skinny thighs; the men in the black uniforms kicking in the door and laughing at her, then pinning her down while they took turns with her; two of the men in black uniforms hacking Ton-ton to bits, and not because the poor spaniel had tried to attack them—it had just cowered under the porch. They had just done it for fun.

  The men had used up the girls too quickly; they started in on the boys.

  Two of them had grabbed Etienne and bent him over a table; a third pulled his pants down.

  He didn't let himself remember much about that, only the end, with all the bodies scattered over the rough wood of the dormitory floor, some of them in the gray shirts and trousers of the orphanage, some of them in the black uniforms of the soldiers, and the thick man in torn khaki with the funny slanted eyes kneeling over him, gripping little Etienne's shoulder with surprising gentleness and saying, "You're the biggest one still living—well, still ambulatory, anyway—and I need you. Can you hear me?"

  He remembered nodding, the movement sending pain shooting through his broken teeth. "What's your name?" the man asked.

  Little Etienne, the complicated little fool, he couldn't say anything, not through the pain and the tears. It hurt so much.

  And the man with the funny slanted eyes said, "Well, then, I will call you Dov, because that means 'bear' in my language, and you're a big boy—you remind me of a bear. Hmm, you don't know what a bear is? That's fine, don't worry about it. I'll do the knowing for both of us. You're Dov—and you can call me Uncle Shimon. Can you remember that? Uncle Shimon."

  Then he said the words that Dov would never forget, could never forget, the words that changed Dov's life, right then and there.

  They were beautiful words:

  "You must be very strong for me, Dov."

  It was so simple. You must be very strong for me, Dov.

  It was the most natural thing in the world, the easiest thing anybody had ever done, even through the pain and the tears and shattered teeth and the blood, for Dov to say, "Oh, yes, Uncle Shimon. I will be very strong."

  He would be very strong, and he was very strong. Uncle Shimon wanted it that way.

  Dov gripped the seatback in front of him and squeezed, hard, exercising his hands, not quite tearing the upholstery. It was important to Uncle Shimon that he be strong, and to be strong you had to get enough rest, you had to eat enough of the right kinds of things, and you had to train your body and your will at being strong and staying strong.

  But that was all there was to it. Everything was always so simple.

  And when the bus slowed to negotiate another sharp turn on the road, and the men in the brush beyond the ditch opened fire, two rising to their feet, each with a launching tube on his shoulder, it didn't matter that they were all wearing the mottled Casa fatigues, it didn't matter that there wasn't supposed to be any trouble, not on this job.

  No. That would have been complicated. That would have called for decisions and caring and thought. None of it mattered.

  It didn't matter when the stream of bullets stitching across the windows caught Avram in the head, spraying Dov's face with his oldest friend's blood and brains, the air filled with flying glass and gore and shouts.

  It was utterly unimportant, because the bullets missed Uncle Shimon, and while splinters of glass dug deep into Dov's cheek and forehead, they missed his eyes.

  The spray of blood and brains only filled and blinded and pained his left eye, and that didn't matter because one eye was all Dov needed. It was simple, it was so easy for Dov to spit out the warm salty gobbets and then snap his faceplate down with one hand while his other hand brought up his shotgun, thumb brushing away the safety.

  Dov snatched up Avram's field jacket and used it to shield his hand as he punched out the remaining splinters of glass, then tried to push out the mesh over the window.

  It didn't give, and, encumbered by his seat straps, he couldn't quite reach far enough to put enough pressure on it. He punched the release and the straps fell away.

  You must be very strong for me, Dov, Uncle Shimon had said. And Dov was strong.

  Oh, yes, Uncle Shimon. I am very strong.

  Dov wound Avram's jacket tight around his left fist. Rising to kneel on Avram's corpse, Dov leaned forward and punched hard, metal squealing, feeling the distinct snap as small finger bones broke.

  But they were just bones, they didn't matter, and the pain didn't matter as he threw the field jacket aside. He shoved the muzzle of his shotgun out through the mesh while he turned sideways to grab Shimon.

  He didn't need to see where Uncle Shimon was in order to grip his shoulder; Dov always knew were Shimon was.

  It was simple: Uncle Shimon had to be pushed out of danger and the man trying to kill Uncle Shimon had to die. The rest of the universe could fuck itself up the ass.

  Dov squeezed the trigger gently with one hand while his other hand, his br
oken hand, gripped Shimon Bar-El's shoulder and forced him down, hard enough to move him but not to hurt him. Nothing was allowed to hurt Uncle Shimon; that was the rule.

  The shotgun kicked gently against Dov's right hand while Shimon went limp against his left, letting Dov push him down, and the world was simple and beautiful.

  Dov released Shimon and nudged Avram's body out of the way. He pumped, fired, pumped and fired again, ignoring the shouts and the sounds of explosions and gunfire.

  The shotgun kicked against his good hand with gratifying firmness; the first rocketeer dropped his launcher and grabbed at his belly.

  Pump, fire, pump, fire.

  This time Dov's first shot missed, but his second blast smashed the other rocketeer's face to bloody pulp and the rocket launched straight up, riding a pillar of smoke and fire into the sky.

  Pump, fire, pump.

  Another of the enemy leaped for a rocket launcher but Dov led him just enough, firing instinctively, sending the bastard screaming off into a neatly timed stutter from a Barak.

  Dov's shotgun locked open, empty. The first two fingers of his left hand were bent at impossible angles. Clumsy, broken fingers refusing to obey properly, Dov awkwardly reloaded as the crack of Baraks echoed through the cabin, and more shots from outside starred the window to his right.

  But he finally was reloaded, and there were shapes in the bushes, and they were targets, and that was enough.

  Fire, pump, fire, pump, fire.

  It took a strong man to keep the barrel so level, so steady, but Dov was a very strong man.

  The only sad part was that Shimon, too busy barking out orders, didn't have time to give Dov a quick "Good boy."

  But the rest of it was pure simplicity.

  It was beautiful.

  CHAPTER 3

  Warrior's Reflex

  It was one of the reasons that they were valuable, that other worlds paid them, and it was something a Metzadan was supposed to carry with him, inside him. Ari had always known he didn't have it.