The Caryatids

Plague and Starvation would be history. Their apocalyptic depredations would be forgotten as if such things had never occurred. In the future, they would have to be explained to people.

That still left Sonja's two other Apocalyptic enemies, War and Death, still very much in the planetary saddle, but nevertheless, in Jiuquan-in Jiuquan! — she'd just been scorched by an antiperso

Developments of this scale, the most grandiose scale possible: These were the schemes that kept Sonja standing firm at her duties. Forged in the heat of combat, she was an iron pillar of the state.

Except on Mr. Zeng's analytical screens, where the Angel of Harbin was not an iron pillar but a vulnerable fluffy blue cloud.

With her bioplastic notebook uneasily poised on her exfected knees in her watery hospital bed, Sonja saw, with a sinking, seasick sensation, that her blue cloud looked distinctly stormy. In Zeng's world, this was the hexagram sigil and omen signifying that one was (in a colloquial translation) "getting too big for one's boots," that "the heat was on," that "tomorrow's prospects were dim."

As she studied these cryptic hints, Sonja realized for the first time that Mr. Zeng's service had a name in English: it was a "correlation engine." She had been using a correlation engine all this time, in another language and another context. Apparently these radical techniques had escaped Chinese state secrecy, and become so common lately that even Western businesspeople like George saw fit to use them.

Sonja certainly was not in "business." Sonja was a state heroine. Profits were not her concern-but purges were. As a state operative, if you didn't already know for sure who the chosen victim was and why, then that victim was probably you.

This established, Sonja had to discover who had tried to kill her. There were three basic varieties of killers in China: the people supporting the state, the traitors against the state, and, worse yet, the people like herself and Mr. Zeng, the people definitely with the state yet not eminently of the state, people who were plausibly deniable and eminently disposable.

After some deft string pulling, the local police saw fit to share the results of their investigations with Sonja.

The attack plane had been vaporized by its payload of explosive. However, one of its wings and parts of its landing gear had cracked and fallen off. Those fragments were rich with criminal evidence.

For the Jiuquan police, any grain of stray pollen was a clue that blazed like an asteroid. The police knew the range of the plane, from its wing shape and its fuel capacity. They knew, roughly, what landscapes it must have overflown, because of the pollen lodged in its crude seams. They further knew that the plane had been hand-built, recently, in the desert, from snap-together panels of straw plywood.

It was a toy airplane made in a secret bandit camp-made from pressed Mongolian hay. The plane's lightweight panels were so carelessly glued that they might have been assembled by a ten-year-old child.

As a further deliberate insult, the plane had somehow been salted with DNA from several high-ranking officials who had once been major figures of the Chinese state. Fake DNA evidence was no surprise to the local police, of course-even the cheapest street gangs knew how to muddy a DNA trail, these days. Still, given that the police in Jiuquan were absolutely sure to study DNA evidence, this was a nose-thumbing taunt, a knowing terrorist provocation. It showed a mean-spirited cu

So, Sonja had the profile of her enemies: they were not of the Chinese state. They were ragtag political diehards, pretending to state co

It had never been Sonja's intention to provoke revenge attacks. Sonja had never wanted to kill anyone. Her first jaunt into China had been as a teenage camp follower in a medical relief column. Its poorly armored trucks were piled to bulging with rations, water barrels, tents, cots, bandages, antibiotics…Not thirty kilometers from port they'd been ambushed with rockets and small arms, their convoy shot to pieces and everything of value stolen by feral, screeching, dust-caked, rag-clad bandits who had scrambled back into the barricaded rubble that had once been their town.

That was Sonja's introduction to the true situation on the ground, and what followed had been unspeakably worse. As Sonja's first husband had put it: "It is necessary to incinerate the towns in order to save the cities," and he had incinerated many such before he met the death he'd always courted.

Ernesto had been a brave man from a distant corner of the Earth who had come to offer his hands and his heart and his medical knowledge and his strong, shapely, noble back to a stricken people-and, as many did, Ernesto had swiftly found it necessary to shoot many of them. Specifically, Ernesto had to shoot the gangs of malcontents who interfered with his redemption of the masses.

Nobody called Ernesto the «Angel» of anything, because when he sent his convoys tearing through the Chinese landscape he moved like a bloody hacksaw through a broken leg.

Sonja had been his wife, a caress and a whisper of comfort to Ernesto in his darkest hours, yet China didn't lack for bitter people who remembered things they had done. Along with many similar things Red Sonja herself had done since, in the same cause.

So: This latest episode of attempted revenge was part of her older story. It was simply a smaller and more personal story, because the scale of the havoc had dwindled. Bandits had once skulked in screaming thousands in the ruins of China's major cities. Bandits were now skulking in crazy dozens in the dusty wilderness far outside the state's armed boundaries. They were still bandits.

Bandit warlords came in a thousand factions, but they were all the same. Most were already gone, and the rest had to go.

AN UNMANNED POLICE VEHICLE deposited Sonja and her new husband at the ancient slopes of the Great Wall. Then it turned and fled with an unseemly haste back toward Jiuquan, leaving the two of them abandoned under the dazzling blue tent of central Asian sky.

If they were lucky in their lethal venture, they would never be seen by anyone. Sonja and the Badaulet were now a two-person "Scorpion team." Their task was to venture across the wilderness, spy out the camp of their enemies, call in a covert strike, and have the bandits a

They had both done such work before, so the chance to do it in tandem was a blessing to them as a couple.

The Great Wall of China was a sullenly eroded, ridge-backed dragon on the Earth. The color of dirt-for it was mostly handmade of dirt-it wriggled over an astounding expanse of central Asia. In the state's recent hours of need, technicians had brusquely drilled fresh holes and topped the Wall with the state's surveillance wands, transforming an ancient barrier into a modern surveillance network.

The new Wall consisted of the old Wall, plus tall, thin, gently swaying observation towers. Each needlelike tower was blankly topped with a mystical black head, a sphere devouring every trace of light that touched its opaque surface.

No merely human being could outguess what the state watched with these towering wands, for, potentially, the state surveilled everything within the Wall's huge line of sight. Not just passively absorbing light from the landscape, but sorting that light as data, sifting through it, searching it, collimating and triangulating and extrapolating from it…comparing each new nanosecond, pixel by pixel, to the ever-growing records of its previous observations.