She fingered the new insignia on my collar tab, grinning. “Not even close to time-in-grade!” I was about three years senior to her in service, both of us going up at about the same pace.

  She looked away for a second, then back, seeking out my eyes with her own, suddenly serious, measuring me. “You’ll, ah, be needing a dog robber now.”

  “Um.” Right. And expecting something like this. Jemadar-major is the first rank high enough to need a personal staff—I’d be needing, at the very least, a good regimental adjutant. Did I really not have anyone in mind? Poor planning. Still, I’d known Solange Corday for twenty years, liked her, had seen a competent, well-trained soldier, then officer at work. Quite possibly, she’d made fewer mistakes than me.

  Well. They weren’t paying us to dither. I held out my hand. “You’ll like Karsvaao. It’s a fucking desert.”

  She clapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, Athy. Let’s get those beers while we have the chance.”

  OK. And if I was going to go on furlough, go home, if home were still there, for the first time in twenty years, I’d need someone to go on ahead to Karsvaao and set things up properly. In the bar, the beers were cold, if a little sweet. That was one thing the natives were learning how to do, at least.

  o0o

  Later, at home, I ate dinner while I sat on the balcony of my crib and watched the sun set out of Boromilith’s lovely indigo evening sky. I’d invited Hani to have dinner with me, the way I usually signaled which pillow-geisha would be sharing my bed tonight, and we were served by the other burdars, Fyodor acting like a perfect little waiter, white linen over one arm, directing the placement of the dishes as each course was brought out, pouring the drinks himself, with a flourish.

  The meal was built around a spicy lamb casserole, Margie’s doing, I think. She grew up in Virginia, maybe shared some of my childhood tastes. Meat well trimmed, irradiated, injected with nutrients and antitoxins, everything cooked in that radical-free ersatz fat that’s all we’re allowed to have. She made it taste good though.

  The sky was starting to flame orange-red now, swatches of deep, deep blue being displaced, even streamers of black coming over the far horizon, stars just about ready to pop out, the way they always did on Boromilith, sudden-like. I’m never sure I remember how it was on Earth. I was only nineteen when I left for good, the appearance of the starry sky, the order of events at dusk far from the most important thing in my universe.

  Passing the entrance exams was all that counted, back then. Memory still painful. This tough-looking bastard in what I still thought of as sergeants’ chevrons laughing when he saw me, too skinny maybe. Still looking like a kid. Then he pointed to the top of a snow-capped mountain. “Up there, kid.” Then he pointed to a man lying on the ground. “Take him with you.” It took me a minute to figure out the guy was dead. Another minute to figure out he’d been dead for a while.

  Maybe being so stiff made him a little easier to carry. Six thousand boys and girls made it into the examination center that day. Sixty passed the test-battery. Eighteen made it through basic training. And I’m sitting here with a jemadar-major’s pips on my collar, eating lamb casserole under a lovely alien sky, while a beautiful young Indonesian woman tries to make me laugh, and waits to see what I’ll want to do.

  Hani, I think, was born on the island of Bali. I keep forgetting.

  The sky was at its loveliest, most garish now, colors shading over into purest red, blanketing the heavens in dust-layer shapes, like fiery mother-of-pearl. I’ve enjoyed living here. Enjoyed the sunsets. Not like the sunsets I’d just seen, though. Not nearly so grand.

  Imagine me standing on the great plain of Shônetk, sky black with night, stars shimmering overhead, while my soldiers sifted through a million alien corpses, separating the living from the dead, so very many more of the latter, of course. Quickly, quickly now. Get it done and we can go home. Home to Boromilith and our burdars. Earned our wages today, boys and girls.

  But the sky...

  My god it was a sky! The Mountains Without Clouds towering up and up and up, out of night, out of dusk, right into full daylight, looking for all the world like great towers of gold, like a city of the gods floating above us on the void, the gods themselves looking down on our deeds, judging them.

  And, all around, the alien dead lay drifted like so much dim, clotted snow. Wind-rows of the dead. Heaps of them. No longer able to appreciate that sky. Maybe, watching it form one last time, as they lay bleeding into the night, the sight made dying a touch easier. Or maybe not. Maybe it made it all the harder.

  With luck, I’ll never know.

  On Boromilith, on a tall hill, looking down over fortress and town, we were finished eating now, lazing in the afterglow, Hani pulling her chair closer to mine, one small hand on my arm, stroking gently. She’d been with me for a couple of years, knew my routines. Knew she wouldn’t remain my favorite forever.

  Every day on-station is a point on their contracts, a mark toward a better life when they go home. I’ve heard people call the burdar-system slavery. But a job is a job.

  Flash of light down by the horizon, flickering, building up, steady and silent for a long moment, then the roll of distant thunder. I never get tired of watching them, no matter how many I see.

  The lighter lifted off from the spaceport, brilliant fire splashing across the black stone landing stage, ship rolling around its long axis, sound growing louder, so I could hear the individual crackles and pops. It was taking off on full afterburner, subjecting its cargo to nine or ten standard gees, climbing fast out of the local troposphere. Fire, fire, climbing...

  The long jet of hydrogen flame winked out as it got past the altitude where the atmosphere would support combustion, supplanted by a brilliant yellow-white glow, hydrogen plasma coming out of its jets, pushed by a fusion-powered electric turbine. Inefficient, but practical. And, somewhere up there, its starship waited.

  We’d called our ships starships, once upon a time. What a laugh. We should’ve called them dugout canoes.

  Hani had her hand on my thigh now, still stroking gently. She knew, sooner or later, I’d be finished with the sunset.

  o0o

  Then it was dark night and we were done for the evening, Hani and I lying together in my big, comfortable bed, her smooth, damp back pressed against my chest, my arms curled around her, my legs tucked up under her thighs. I could feel her heart beating, slowly, gently, a faint drumbeat from somewhere inside. She wouldn’t be asleep, of course, not so long as she could tell I was still awake. Waiting for my hands to move again, perhaps, touch her here and there. Waiting for me to grind against her gently, signaling.

  Maybe I would. Maybe not. Hani’s lithe muscularity, her small, smooth brown torso, had a way of drawing me out, making me do more than I intended. Image of her face in the almost-darkness of night, looking up at me, moving slowly to the rhythms of our lovemaking, eyes big and dark, so very serious. Am I doing this right? she seemed to be asking. Am I making you happy?

  Yes, to both questions.

  Yes, if there is such a thing as happiness.

  And sometimes wondering what she thought of it all. That little smile that sometimes emerged, a squint of seeming pleasure, sheen of moisture on her brow and upper lip. That small hand on one of my buttocks as she held still, engulfing my orgasm.

  Maybe just thinking about a time, down the road, when all this would be over. Of a time when she would be back home on some tropical isle, wealthy by any reasonable standard, would never again need to lie still under a hulking white man while he gasped softly and pulsed inside her.

  Not much to compare her with. Pillow-geisha burdars from the past and present. Janice and Mira, sleeping now in some other room, probably glad I took Hani to my bed far more often than they. A free ride. Maybe they argued about it, maybe Hani was just a little bitter, knowing they’d go home just as wealthy as she, though they lay, more often than not, dry and comfortable in their own little beds, while she endured my s
eemingly endless attention.

  Years and years and years ago. Alix... Alexandra Moreno was her name. Tall, thin teenage girl, one of us in the ruins of the world. Angular, with that mass of curly black hair, dark brown eyes, serious, questioning.

  What were we going to be, when we all grew up?

  No way of knowing. The world was destroyed before we got old enough to make those plans.

  Alix and I walking hand in hand, looking up at a full moon. Looking at the big, shadowy scar on its surface, not too far from Tycho, where something had once flared, brilliant blue-white. Looking up at the full moon, hardly noticing the twinkling interplay of orbiting debris, the shattered remains of human spacecraft, a reminder of all who’d died.

  Alix and I at a party, sitting in a corner, full of smoke and liquor, holding each other, touching each other, putting our tongues in each other’s mouths, tentatively groping around, trying to understanding the complementarity of each other’s bodies.

  That spring night in the weedy, overgrown playing field not far from the ruins of the old high school, when we took off all our clothes, lay down on a scratchy old blanket, and put ourselves to the test.

  At the time, it had seemed a big thing, terribly frightening, but wonderful. Alix’s eyes wide as I crawled on top of her, letting me know she was afraid, but not wanting to stop.

  A few more times that summer, then, in the fall, the examination-battery. And me passing, she failing. A decision to make. She cried when I told her I was leaving for boot camp, told me she understood. Even came to see me off at the train.

  We wondered if it would be possible to write, but it turned out not to be. And then, as far as I was concerned, the Earth was dead and gone and everyone with it. Everyone but my brothers and sisters of the Spahi mercenaries.

  Sweating, striving, in the hard rock deserts of Australia. In vacuum suits under the impossible red and black skies of Mars. In the soppy teal jungles of Alpha Centauri A-4. And then everywhere. Everywhere.

  I wonder where Alix is now. Married? Children? Most likely. I wondered what her husband would be like, if I’d meet him, would like him, when I went home.

  It all seemed so pale and distant now. My exertions with Alix merely that, adolescent fumblings, amusing in retrospect, no matter how important they seemed then. Different, though. How Alix felt seemed important to me then. Hani...

  I could just reach around and palpate her breasts and she’d stretch against me, cocking her pelvis back in case that’s what I wanted, would try to be ready for me, whenever I was ready, no matter how she felt, if she were sore, tired. She would not let me know how she felt. Success here was too important to her future. If she made me wonder how she felt, I might want to let her go.

  And then she’d just be another burdar, serving my meals, washing my feet, cleaning my crib, shining my dress boots. They sterilize burdars as part of the contract. Sterilize them forever. Hani would go home a rich woman. A rich woman who’d never have children of her own. My understanding is they adopt the children of their relatives, their brothers and sisters and cousins. Extended families are probably making a big comeback these days, one man or woman in burdarage pulling a whole family out of the grinding poverty and servitude in which most of humanity must live.

  I slid my hand around Hani’s waist, resting my palm on one narrow hipbone, and pulled her around to face me. She tipped her head back, ready for my kiss, arms around my back, pulling me close, tilting her hips, rubbing against me, experienced in my wants, knowing full well what to do.

  After a while, we slept, I without dreams. Hani? She would never let me know.

  Two. The Next Day, Brilliant and Hot

  The next day dawned brilliant and hot, the blue-green sky hazy but cloudless. I was up before the sun, an hour in the exercise machines, a few dozen turns around the track, talk to Solange about forwarding my household to Karsvaao, then off to the cosmodrome and the beginning of my voyage home.

  Home. Nothing real to go with that word. A memory from the transport floating in orbit, me and a hundred other frightened young recruits just out of basic training, riding the transport to Mars. I’d stood there, looking out through the index field at a bright little circle in the deep black sky, the familiar image of a blue and white world, getting smaller and smaller until it was gone.

  Now, I stood on the black stone of the launching table, waiting in the shadow of the lighter for my turn to board. She was Orbital Transport Six, attached to Masters’ Starship CX110, a lovely tall metal cylinder, sixty meters across its base, slightly tapering up to a rounded nosecap, a little more than two hundred meters high, her tanks brimming with cold hydrogen slurry, fusion reactor ticking over at hot idle.

  Looking between the landing jacks, I could see a techie crew, a mixed bag of human engineering-burdars and native Boromilithi, servicing something on one of the engines’ gimbal mounts, pulling it this way and that, seeming to argue among themselves, waving their arms and pointing. Four engines here, big, translucent blue crystalline bells, afterburner inlets already gaping open.

  The piloting software seems to like that quick takeoff, an oversight maybe, since the Masters wouldn’t even be aware of the acceleration unless it got so high the ship’s structure started to fail. Software not too bright, maybe just bright enough. They seemed to be careful about that—maybe not wanting to breed their own successors by mistake.

  Once, on a dare, I’d tried to take a launch standing up. I wound up on my knees anyway. At ten gees I weighed a full metric ton.

  A larger shadow, a shape like something from an old nightmare, fell on the ground beside me, gigantic, familiar, making me turn. She was tall in a sense, head carried three meters off the ground, and long, six meters from that head to the tip of her thick, blunt tail. Muzzle full of complex omnivore teeth, teeth that looked like they were made out of fine white china. Pupilless yellow eyes like foggy marbles set close together on the front of that head, just under twin tufts of feathery blue stuff, the rest of her body covered with pebbly gray scales.

  The overall effect was a little like a therapod carnivore, an allosaur maybe. A little bit, but the differences were important. Black claws on big, three-toed feet, yes, but silver-painted chelae like sheet-metal shears on the ends of long, dangling, muscular arms, thin tentacles clustered at the wrists serving in lieu of fingers.

  “Hello, Shrêhht.”

  She did something to a little box hanging on a leather strap around her throat, whispered to it, a sound like faraway thunder, and the box said, “Hello, Athy. I thought I might find you down here, watching the techies.”

  I smiled and shook my head. “Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work.” There was a time, when I was maybe seven or eight years old, when I’d had these dreams of one day becoming a fighter pilot. A child’s dreams, fed on the warlike fantasies of that age.

  She said, “I don’t think so.” The vocal encoder managed to convey a slight touch of amusement.

  They call themselves the Kkhruhhuft, at least that’s how it comes out of the translation device. If you want to imagine how people felt on that day in 2104, when the Master’s lighter touched down in the water a few hundred meters off Merritt Island Cosmodrome, how they felt when these... things came toddling out, I understand the historical documents are still available. Monsters. Just like the monsters in every SF horror movie ever made. Fangy, slavering monsters who told us they came in peace.

  Until that one, lone roving Master, orbiting the Earth in a starship the size of a small asteroid, decided it could take this planet all by itself and sic’d its Kkhruhhuft bodyguard on us. All right. We killed them all and sent the Master packing. It was fifty years before they came back to finish the job.

  I said, “I’d heard you were going to Earth, this trip. I’ll be glad to have some real company.”

  Her big head dipped slightly, something like a nod. Somehow, they seem a little too much like us, despite the enormous differences. Birds of a feather, perhaps.

 
Across the way, a horde of poppits spilled out of a delivery-GEM, like living blue water, all mashed together, scurrying over each other so it was hard to tell one animal from the next. Making their little piping cries, tootling back and forth, carrying the sense of their mission in aggregate.

  “Which one is this?”

  Shrêhht whispered to her encoder. “Freshly duplicated off the software lineage of 3m8, I think. That’s the rumor, anyway.”

  “Headed for Earth?”

  “For the next phase of the ground expansion program, perhaps.”

  The back of the truck was open now, dark inside, the poppits swarming up the sides, crawling in. If you looked closely, you could see eight bright red eyes on each flat little head, the flicker of little white teeth in those fangy little mouths. They say a couple of hundred poppits can reduce a man to bones in less than a second. Never seen it happen, though, or heard a reliable story.

  Shrêhht said, “My mother’s memory is to be honored in the next Gosudar’s Ceremony, Athy. I’d be pleased if you’d stand with me.”

  There was a scrape of plastic on plastic and the Master’s black and gray cartridge slid out onto the liftgate, which whined, lowering the heavy mass. Cold vapor spilled down from the sides of the cartridge, fluttered in the breeze and disappeared. There are two rumors about that. One says the Masters’ hardware is based on a quite archaic technology, metal superconductors cooled with liquid helium. The other says its a very advanced technology indeed, circuit energy flux so high the hardware has to be cooled with liquid helium to keep from melting.

  I’m inclined to believe the latter.

  “I’d be honored, comrade,” I said. Shrêhht’s mother had been killed during the conquest of Earth.

  The poppits had the Master’s cartridge on a dolly now and were sliding it over to the ship’s cargo loader. Shrêhht brushed her tendrils against my shoulder, and said, “Might as well board now.”