CHAPTER 14


   Even with the corporal's rank, even with a commendation, he was still picking on her! Finny was stomping through the dusty camp from the water hole that was far on the other side. This Army had won its battle and was on the move once again with what could only be described as a single-minded determination. Casualties in the last battle had been high. The Imperials had made a very good fight of it. They were just too outnumbered to win since the UP Army had caught them before they could link up with their main force.  

Finny got her rank because of the battle mainly. Not because the unit's former commander had said to promote her alter male ego ZeKe, not because she won a medal saving that same mans life. No, Joey only gave it to her because he had no other choice. Their unit had lost a good deal of men in that battle. It seemed like everyone got promoted, if in responsibilities, if not actual rank. As for Finny the opposite was true. She was now a junior non commissioned officer and doing private's work! More to the point, woman's work! Joey never missed her for these kinds of details. Finny was starting to get mad about this.

As she stomped along between row after row of tents, the combination of the big hat she wore and the fact that she was not paying attention made it take longer for Finny to notice someone. There was a man following her. Finny ducked into another row of tents and waited but, he showed up again. He was always getting closer and now that it was obvious Finny had noticed him they guy started walking right at her. Finny gasped, she began weaving in and out of tents until she looked behind her and thought that, just maybe, she had lost him.

Finny kept looking back over her shoulder, for over a minute this time. When it was a safe bet he had vanished she turned around to get going back to her own area. He was standing in front of her when she did! Finny dropped the water bucket when he grabbed her by both arms and tossed her into an empty tent. He slid a knife to her throat. "You scream, and I'll cut your pipes so fast you won't have time."

Finny just nodded and the man pulled his hand cautiously away from her mouth. The knife remained at her throat. The guy looked behind him to make sure that everything was clear outside. He obviously didn't want any unexpected guests. The man ran his hand up under Finny’s jacket and down into her shirt. He felt up her abdomen until he got to her breast. He rubbed it for a minute and then pulled his hand back. The knife lowered. "I thought as much."

"What... " Finny was terrified, "What are going to do me?"

The man slipped his knife down in his belt. He had an evil sounding laugh. He reached down and pulled his own shirt up past his belly, almost to his neck. It was a woman!  He... she had breasts! She said as she dropped her shirt, "won't see any hairs on this chest ether little one."

Finny relaxed, but only a little, "What do you want?"

The woman chuckled, "Just to talk little one. What? You didn't honestly think you were the only woman in this army did you. Tell me a few things now. Are you a runaway? Does your master know you're here?"

"No," Finny was shocked. This woman looked more like a man than she thought was even possible. She had a wide brimmed hat just like Finny.  Probably for the same purpose that Finny wore hers, to make the face less visible. Whereas Finny had a young boyish quality to her, this woman could have easily passed as a man almost anytime except fully nude.

Finny flung the question back in her face, "Where's your master?"

"We got tired of each other years ago. He couldn't sell me cause I put too many whoop marks on him. Never had no kids either. So we was both stuck. I just left. He never told nobody I runs away."

That was not a real believable story, "Oh yeah, and how did you survive without a master?"

"Same way as I do here," said the woman, "I just pretended to be a man. Now I comes here to ask you the questions. See if we's can trust ya."

This grew more bizarre, "We?"



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"Courier coming in sir," said Sergeant Lee after he spotted the rapidly approaching horseman.  

Joey tossed the stick he had been stoking the fire with, into the blaze. He stood up and looked the supposed courier over and then Joey reached down and tapped Pam on the shoulder, "It's your hubby."

The horse came to a stop by the nearby row of tents. After Pete dismounted he went flying in and out of each tent in a frantic search until Joey called to him. Pete practically sprinted over to the fire with the paper in his hand. He showed it to them. Pete pointed to the picture, pointed to the lines about Mary being from another world, about how they called her the Virgin Mary. "Now only somebody from Earth would have thought of something like that. It's too much of a coincidence."

Joey grabbed the paper and studied the picture closely. Pam rolled her eyes at her husband, "That's not her Pete. That woman is way too fat. The rest of it is just a bunch of hooey. You know how the papers are on this planet."

Lee took a look over his commander’s shoulder, "that's her."

"No," said Joey. He still had not made his mind up yet.  "Lee you don't even know who we're talking about here."

"Her and my precious Chreelana were girl friends. They had the same master at one time. I was going to buy them both back after old man Whide died. I told you this Leader Joey. You remember how I told you that I thought you would make a good master for my red haired angel if I can ever get her back."

Joey didn't remember. The man rattled on about his daughter all of the time. Joey had for the most part ignored it. "I don't know Pete. I want it to be her but, this Mary doesn't sound like Mom. I mean… her ears are too big, you know? Besides this chick kicks ass.”

Lee kept on, "They only called this woman Mary. I think they actually called her Mary Can. She had another name... Jew... Jew Lee Ah... Julia. That's her I know. I heard tell that the rebellion started in the town I was from, Slolista. The town she was in."

Pete, Pam, and Joey were all staring at this man with their mouths hanging wide open. Pete reached over and tapped Joey on the shoulder, "I... I need you to run the radio for me. I'll get Joe to transfer you to his headquarters. You'll be safer there anyway."

It was not that Joey didn't want to go find his mother, or that the thought of actual real shelter over his head, up at headquarters, did not appeal to him. He had something else that was keeping him in this unit though. Even Pam and Pete, for that matter, didn't know anything about why he wanted to stay. Who was going to watch after Finny if he was up at Army? "Pete, how?"

"Yeah honey," said Pam, "how are we going find her out there?"

"We?" replied Pete. "You're staying here. Better yet, you're going back to Luftmot."

"Oh no Pete. You've run off enough without me. Julia was my best friend..."

"She was my mother," said Joey.

In unison the husband and wife looked at him, "shut up Joey."

Pam got back to her point, "We were both responsible for that mess. It's we, or you’re not going."

"How are you going to stop me," Pete was bluffing. He had no way to stop her either.

"I'll call Jack on our little radio, and tell him what you're planning on doing."

Joey raised his hand, "guys, I think it would be a good idea to tell Jack."

"Shut up Joey," they both said.

"All right then," said Pete. "We'll leave tomorrow on the first train out. We'll hop the Ithanian border since theirs not much going on there. Catch the first train East and we'll be at the Raed Frontier in a few days."

"Forgot one thing oh loving man of mine," said Pam. "How are we going to find her when we get there? Newspapers didn't say anything about where she was."

Pete smiled, "That's easy. We get some sat recon before we go. Right now, Julia's got to be the only person on this planet with thirty thousand screaming women around her. With guns even."

Pam put her arms around his neck and they rubbed noses, "I get so horny when you're smart. Better take advantage of me now. That's not too often you know."



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Vitosk had known since supper exactly which direction they should be moving in. They had been working into the night on it. No one wanted to stop now. Every second was telling them more and more. Even Gina was here now. Pam's two children, and Gina's girl, were all in bed asleep. Gina came to the tent mostly because she wanted to spend time with some adults for a change. Now she was missing sleep because of what they were doing.  

Jack had arrived ten minutes prior and had gone straight to his cottage first. Instead of finding Dee asleep, all he found was her clothes piled on the bed with her duty belt and pistol on top. Jack figured she was playing another one of her games. She had been doing that a lot right before he left. Every night she got wilder. That was right up to the night he left to go north and had walked into the cottage and found her naked in bed. Her arms and legs were tied to the bed by some slipknots. There was some paper stuck up on the wall with the word "movies" written on it.    

Dee had said to him as he shut the door that night, "If the show gets boring we can always do something else."

Jack had been a little too stunned, embarrassed, and outright shocked. He quickly brought the situation back to something a little more normal at which time he found that it just wouldn't stand up. Shock does things like that to a man. That and laughing which Jack couldn't stop doing for some time thereafter.  

Looking all around the cottage, Jack saw no signs of Dee. He actually looked around outside the cottage next. For all he knew, Dee probably wanted them to go streaking next but, she wasn't there. Back inside, Jack got a little worried. Her Zeat clothes were not hanging up on the line in the corner. Her leg holster was gone but, that wouldn’t do her a lot of good because that holster was useless without the gun laying over on the bed. Jack went right to the tent where he heard all the voices. She was probably there with everyone else.

After the very brief welcome home they all seemed to forget that Jack was even standing there. All four of them, Harry, Vitosk, Gina and Saiid, were watching the computer screen mesmerized by its glow. Jack leaned up against the satcom workstation. He noticed that no one had tended to it in a while. Jack ruffled through the papers in the received bin. Nothing of all that much interest was sitting in it. Jack didn't see the paper on the floor under the table. No one had.

"You know guys, we do have other things to do around here," said Jack.

Vitosk raised up, lifted his glasses off his nose, "unlike you Jack. Some of us have been doing important work."

Jack sat down in Dee's chair.  "Has anybody seen the operator to this little station here?"

Harry took his eyes off the computer screen for just a second, "She came running through the Inn earlier, looking for Gary."

"That's nice," said Jack, "so where is she now?" Everybody shrugged at that one. The next obvious question, "Well what about Gary?"

Saiid waved Jack off, "Went into town this morning. Hasn't been back."

Not exactly news to Jack.  He always did that.  "Would it interest everybody to know, that Dee isn't even at the Inn?"

That got everyone’s attention, Gina in particular. There was great concern in her voice. "Where is she?"

Jack stood up mad, "Why would I be asking all of you if I knew? Hell! I just got here."

"Are you sure Jack," asked Vitosk. He too seemed concerned.  "Maybe she just walked down to the lake or something. She has been keeping to herself as of late."

"Her gun is sitting back in the cottage, on our bed, in the holster."

Gina gasped, "Oh my god!" and ran out of the tent to look for Dee and then check on the children.

"This is serious," said Saiid. Everybody knew that Dee was religious about keeping that gun with her at all times. All of the girls had been. "Oh god Jack, I'm sorry man. We've been just too busy here. I mean, up till now, Dee was sitting in that chair working without sleep. She even had me run this crazy stuff for her off the ships computer."

Vitosk got a twinkle in his eye, "What things? She never said a word to me."

Saiid rumbled around till he found the papers lying next to the other computer. He figured she must have already looked at the files so he did too. Everybody watched as Saiid called up the exact same files that Dee had looked at earlier. Jack moaned. Vitosk stood there chewing on the end of his glasses, his arms crossed, "I'm afraid that this might be more serious than we had anticipated Jack."

Harry scratched his head, "So what, we know all of this stuff. We know this planet has cities and people."

"We didn't then," said Vitosk, "but obviously there were others far less ignorant. Look at that as well. Dee obviously figured out that the bomb was attached to the hull when the module itself was launched. She also had to know that if these hidden satellite pictures were in the ships computer, it was for a reason. So someone could access them if need be. I would say, above all, definitive proof that we indeed had or still have a saboteur."

Saiid looked around at everybody, "One of us? Look guys that stuff with Pete was bad enough."

Jack paced, "me and Pete kissed and made up. He's a security specialist, he understood."

"It was the logical choice Saiid," said Vitosk. "Pete was the only one with high level connections. Whoever the person is associated with this bomb, would have been a part of a very small group of men. They would have picked one of their own. To bring in too many would have risked exposure."

Harry thought about it. When Dee flew through the Inn like a bat out of hell she had been looking for, "Gary, Dee was looking for him. You know I remember when I first met him. We were at the White House meeting with the Presidents Chief of Staff that day. He was coming out of the oval office."

"Shit!" said Jack.

Saiid had a blank expression, "You don't think that Dee found out, and he killed her or something do you?"

"Or kidnapped her," commented Harry. "Remember, Gary was the one out in the desert with Julia the night she disappeared. Vitosk, you said you saw him at the train station the day Gina got attacked. I bet you that bastard sold both of them out."

Saiid came to his feet with a look of rage but Vitosk laid a hand on his shoulder to calm him down.

Jack started feeling a fire building within him as well. He looked at Vitosk who was now looking back down at the computer screen. He seemed to be in deep thought. Jack called him, "Yurgani?"

Vitosk shook his head, "Jack, I would suggest that you better go to town and find Dee at once. All of you for that matter."

"What about you?" asked Jack.

"There's something here that doesn't make sense. Quite a bit of it actually. Jack, I need to look at this some more. I'm afraid all of our lives could be riding on it."

A long time ago, Jack had learned to have faith when Vitosk got a hunch. If anyone else had told him that they were not coming, Jack would have thought the guy a coward or something. "All right, have me a report when I get back. Harry, Saiid, its time to kick the tires and light the fires." Jack then fumbled for the keys to the storage room that were in his pocket. He jingled them at the end of his finger, “let’s break out the real shit.”



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The army was parting. It was a basic violation of sound military principle as ZePure liked to point out. Julia simply let him know that he had better hope she was right because half of her army was with him. That included all of the artillery they had, and cavalry. ZePure was going to need the big stuff if he was going to occupy the attention of all of Shlendon’s army. They were presently concentrated in a series of fortifications, forty miles south the capital.

Shlendon had the only real way to Tallos blocked with his massive force. The west was to far to swing around and would also let him shadow every move Julia made. To the East was the great lake that the city sat nestled on. The North was to far around and covered by all of those rocky hills that Julia had seen on that train ride ages ago. It made Shlendon’s position look very strong if not just plain impregnable.  

The city of Tallos itself had a large wall around the outskirts. It was thick enough to stop the small cannon that Julia had. Only big guns, like those mounted on the very wall itself, too big for even Elephant to haul quickly, could break the thick layers of mortar and brick. That wall, however, stretched only from the tip of the lake in the southeast, around the southern and western suburbs and up to the hills at the northwest corner of the city. The lakefront itself was not only undefended, but unguarded as well.

Julia thought of D-Day which was the invasion of Hitler’s Germany. They came from the sea, stormed the beaches and won the war. No one on this planet even knew that much about their own oceans. There were ships, mostly fishing boats like Ouilat’s, but no one had ever thought to arm one. There had never been a reason too. There certainly were no organized navies on this world that Julia was aware of. Considering that, it was no wonder that anyone in Tallos ever dreamed of the possibility of an attack from their lake. It was simply not in their experience and too far fetched.

The further east Julia's infantry marched the more gentile the land became. This was not just in topography but in every way else. Unlike the land she had just left this area had not been fought over repeatedly. There were no enemy cavalry patrols in the area. The marching women ran into no impaled corpses along the roadside. The civilians were not friendly but, they were far from hostile. The ones that Julia had seen standing along the road watching them march by seemed more curious than anything else.

Julia stopped her horse beside a farmhouse. There was a well in the front yard. Chree got down off her horse and went to refill canteens. The weather had turned hot all of the sudden. While that made marching endless miles miserable it was good for what they were about to do. Julia took it as a sign. At least she was trying too. She really didn’t believe in all that voodoo crap.

Julia waited for her water and considered that this was the fastest that they had ever marched. Without the big guns and long Elephant trains to slow them down they had made good time and she really should have expected it. As the canteens came back Julia took hers. Before she took a drink there was a hand holding out a flask. Fescan had rode up on his own horse. Julia lowered her canteen and took the flask offered her. She turned it up for a swig. When she finished, "I never saw you ride a horse before. Didn't even know you could."

Fescan took his flask back, "Ah yes my fair Mary, I just simply never had need until now. My equestrian skills are, how do you say, like that of a Texan."

Tish sneered and wondered where he had gotten that horse, "Now what would you need a horse for, Fescan?"

"Well I had to visit the fair Mary here, to bid my farewells, share a final drink of course, and ride off into the sunset as she would say."

Julia giggled and shook her head, "What am I going to do with you Fescan. I guess all I can say now is, good luck. Will we ever meet again?"

He tipped his hat, "It is almost certain, however, should that not come to pass, I will hold you in the highest esteem for the rest of my days."


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The giant doors opened and a single man came walking out. The doors to the General Staffs main planning room were at least fifty feet high. It made anything short of an old fashioned, elephant powered, siege machine departing from the room seem less than significant. To Shlendon, the sight of the emerging officer, nothing more than an errand boy for the high staff, was put into his proper proportions by the door. Shlendon said nothing to him as he was called. Instead, Shlendon simply nodded for Rizen to stay put on the bench, and wait.

The giant round room, with it's high domed ceilings, nearly seventy five feet up, stained glass windows set in the top, and colored marble floors now filled with desks, was a very dark place to Shlendon. This was not just because of the bad lighting. As he walked up and presented himself to the long semi circle table where the high generals sat, he felt a certain loathing for these men, this room, and this entire institution itself. The men were old and former Imperial Officers. The room had once served as a court for the Emperor’s Eastern Palace just as the men in it had once served that same Emperor. It all stood to adequately demonstrate how little had really changed since the successful conclusion to the revolution.  

All were old, the room, the men, their bodies, and their ideas. None of them had a clue as to what the Independence War was about. They had done nothing more than change the names. The middle republic functioned as if it were still an Imperial province. The money was the same, the people who had it were the same, and the people who made important choices for all the other miserable wretches had not changed. No man still held any real measure of power in the anarchy that they called their government. If the Emperor were to come back tomorrow, he would find himself right at home.

Even the social institutions had remained in tact. The current war was proof of that. One of the causes of the war had been the Imperial crack down on the education of women to fill the vacuum of skilled labor in the east. Yet, now with the ability to freely do so the republics began enforcing the emperor’s own dictates that had driven them from his rule. It was all coming around again. There was a slave revolt in the south and a freeman revolt in the north. The western most lands of the northern Republic of Raed were now preparing to sever ties with the very government that they had bled to place in power.

All of this going on, and the old men with the long gray mustaches and fancy helmets, bellies lapping over the table they sat at, had the nerve to demand of Shlendon, "How goes it say you? Your casualties have been high. The Virgin Mary still marches the countryside at will, killing, and destroying all in her path. Can you account for your inability to bring her to the pike Shlendon."

Arrogant ass, "Well High General, there is the small matter of the twenty or so thousand fanatical women with guns that surround her day and night. You see, just to kill Mary will not be enough. If any of them escape they will flee into the under populated regions of our lands and fight from there for years. To root out such small bands is no easy matter. I prefer to trap her army and destroy it en masse."  

Shlendon almost smiled at the irony being that every word he just said was completely true.

"All I have seen," said another, "Is you commit your forces piece meal, and repeatedly get entire units annihilated to no purpose. I would say that this gross incompetence on your part and is now the reason that we are hearing many rumors that the Virgin Mary is now leading her army at this very city we now sit in. What say you of that?"

"It is true that she is coming this way High General. Time to spring the trap," this day was filled with irony. Shlendon had not told this many truths in quite some time. Politics were not a place where the truth was always helpful, nor safe for that matter. Today it served Shlendon well.


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That damn beeping noise again! Vitosk was sitting back with his gene research at the moment. He had already exhausted himself by going over the records that Dee had found, in detail. There was some reason why it bothered him, something about that module, something about all of it. Vitosk was getting to tired to remember at the moment.

He had to set up the next step of calculations for the sequencer so he got to work on that for now. Only the satellite radio kept going off with useless reports from Joey. Mostly just tests since he was trying to learn how to use the thing on the job. Vitosk ignored it and went about his work.

He watched the sequencer grow proteins then react with other DNA doing the same thing. Unlike Harry, who had been trying to do this work like he was back in his lab in Pasadena, Vitosk’s was a little more specific. Harry had been trying everything and at the moment that was not needed. They were not out to a write a paper here, Vitosk only wanted to know a few specific things. Those things did not have to be that concrete either.

The results began to roll off the screen an hour or so later. Vitosk had fed samples of DNA for entire humans of the Jewish persuasion. He started getting results. Not at first, for some reason, because all that happened was what had occurred before. The strand did nothing at all. Vitosk was about to give up and then in several million sequences, of recombination, something happened. The gene and its byproducts began reacting with other substances in the body. It started when the mathematical subject was still a fetus. Vitosk stopped the program and pulled up the menu. He selected one particular model.

The computer model of the human developed normally until about age twelve. Vitosk moved the mouse and highlighted the brain area. The graphic of the human swung around to a topside view. The head enlarged and the outer sections began flying away until only the brain was left in view. Vitosk selected the menu once again. He took several sample models from other population groups and compared them to his test subject. The differences in the models began to display.

"Good god," the neuron activity was higher in the individual with the cave gene and almost by a factor of a thousand. The areas of activities were even different. Some parts of the brain that were not even normally used, to any great extent, by an average human looked to be on fire. The lobes that were generally accepted to be the conscious thinking part of the brain were actually buffered from this by a chemical that the computer could not even identify.  

Vitosk had seen enough of this for the moment. He saved his model and started running a separate sequence. He wanted to know how many generations there were between each activation of this gene. When he started the computer to running it's calculations he got a very quick response. The small window simply read,  "0.0"

That should have been impossible. How was it going to activate in the first place if it was not passed on? Vitosk went back to his first model and looked for the cause. He pulled up the entire human body this time. He ran another comparison and the computer spit back a category of difference. "Reproduction System? The person would be sterile. Where is Pam when I need her! I'll have to look this up my bloody self."

Vitosk got up and went back to other computer which had copied medical reference files from the satellite. Vitosk had made sure that Dee got every file from the late Doctor Mikes libraries.

Vitosk turned on the computer. He thought about how much faster things worked with the human mind. If it could only remember details as well a computer. To just be able to ask, to reason, to have the ability to instantly access information and combine it with creative thought, things that these machines could not do. If he could just get Pam's brain in his body it would all be... "Oh my god. It's a bloody computer. A biological computer."