The Caryatids

It was well after noon when they arrived at the nomad camp of the grass people, a place much as she had first imagined it. There was nothing to mark this camp as a menacing terrorist base, although this was what it was. To the naked eye, the terror camp was a few shabby felt tents and a modest group of livestock.

From the desert silence came a steady babble of happy voices, for the people gathered within this camp rarely met one another.

The largest tent in the camp was full of rambunctious children. The children were shrieking with glee. They were supposed to be attending a school of some kind, but the excitement of their clan reunion was proving too much for them. Their teachers-young women-were unable to get the children to concentrate on the classroom work at hand, which was building toy airplanes. Many toy airplanes. The kind of toy airplanes that could be glued together by a ten-year-old child.

Sonja's pack robot excited alarm in the camp. People rushed to see it, guns in hand. The locals looked like any group of central Asian refugees, except that they had many more children and they looked much better fed. Their parents had probably been urbanites a generation ago: people who went to Ulaanbaatar to see the beauty contests and drink the Coca-Cola.

The marauders stared at her, for camp people always stared at the Angel of Harbin. Some touched her white robes with wondering fingers.

In the hubbub, the Badaulet vanished.

John Montgomery Montalban appeared from the patchworked flap of a tent. Much like his brother, John also had a masked escort…his bodyguard, interpreter, tour guide-or the armed spy who was holding him hostage. Another of the clones.

So far, she had seen two clones among thirty-five. Sonja had vague hopes of killing all of the clones, but thirty-five? Thirty-five highly trained zealots, walking the Earth, scattered far across a desert? That was enough to found a civilization.

"I'm glad to see you, Sonja. Welcome."

Sonja climbed out of the robot and ignored his offered hand.

John Montalban pursued her, his dignified face the picture of loving concern. He still loved her. Sonja knew that he still loved her. He really did love her: that was the darkest weapon in his arsenal, and it brought on her a bondage like no other. "Sonja, I have some bad news for you. Please brace yourself for this."

"What now?"

"Your mother is dead."

Sonja looked him in the eye. John Montalban was telling her the truth. He never lied to her.

"She died in orbit two days ago," Montalban told her. "Everyone in the Shanghai Cooperative Orbiting Platform was killed by a solar flare. In my family's space station, my own grandmother was killed. It was a natural disaster."

"I am sorry about your grandmother," Sonja told him, and then her voice rose to a shriek. "This is the happiest day of my life ! What luck ! God loves me! She's dead, John? She's truly dead? She's dead, dead, dead?"

"Yes. Your mother is dead."

"You're sure she's dead? You saw her body? It's not another trick?"

"I saw a video of the body. A few systems on that space station are still operational. Most of it was stripped by that solar blast. That was a world disaster, Sonja. Communications are scrambled across the Earth…power outages, blackouts on every continent-that was the worst solar storm in recorded history. It was bad and it came out of nowhere. So this is not your happy day, Sonja. This has been a very grim and ominous couple of days for the human race."

"The human race? Ha ha ha, that counts me out!" said Sonja, and she was unable to restrain the bubble of pure, euphoric joy that rose within her. Happiness lit the core of her being. She began to dance in place. She wanted to scream the glorious news until the sky rang.

Realizing that nobody would stop her, Sonja tilted her head back, threw out both her arms, and howled. She howled with a heartfelt passion.

When Sonja opened her eyes, wetly streaming tears of joy, she could see from the looks on the grimy faces of the nomads that she still had her old magic. They were awestruck. Ten minutes alone with her as an inspired healer, and they would have done anything that she said.

"You don't really feel that way," John told her mildly. That was the worst thing about knowing John Montalban: that he was always telling her about her own true feelings. Worse yet, he was generally right.

"Djordje told the others about your mother's death," he said. "They're all in shock."

"I'm not shocked! I feel fantastic! I'm so happy. I want to dance!"

"Stop convulsing, Sonja. That first emotional reaction doesn't last," he told her. He put his arm on her protectively, and ushered her inside the tent.

The inside of the woolly ger tent was brisk and garish: there were scattered carpets, plastic ammunition crates, gleaming aluminum stewpots, and grass-chopping equipment. The place reeked of new-mown hay.

"I felt that I was just getting to know your mother," said John. "Her twisted motivations were the key to the whole Mihajlovic enterprise, but…no extent of her paranoia could protect her from a fate like that. There wasn't a cop, spy, general, or lawyer on Earth who could dig Yelisaveta out of her flying bolt-hole-and yet she was dead in ten minutes. Killed by space weather. I'd call that cosmic retribution, if not for the forty other international crewmen up there. Those poor bastards had maybe six minutes' warning of that catastrophe, and not one damn thing they could do to save themselves. Not one damn thing except to watch the wave roll in and fry them. I hate to think about a death scene like that."

Sonja remembered her taikonaut training. "Everyone is dead in the space station? All of them? They had a radiation shelter."

John shook his head. "For a blast of that size ? That flare was ten times bigger than planet Earth!"

"The sun blew up? Truly?" That was a difficult matter to grasp.

"The sun is a star, Sonja. Stars are unstable by nature. Some stars are violently unstable."

Lionel entered the tent and noticed his brother's mournful look. His face fell in instant sympathy. "My grandmother was a very fine lady," Lionel offered, voice low. "She was the kind of great lady that a woman can become, when she's been poor, and hungry, and homeless, and a nobody."

John beamed at his younger brother. He was proud to see his fellow aristocrat commiserating with the little people.

Now the fuller extent of the strategic situation dawned on Sonja. The event that had happened changed everything. "You say that the Chinese space station is empty ? Nothing in it but corpses?"

"Corpses," John agreed. "The Chinese station is one more large, failed, overextended technical megaproject. Although I had nothing to do with stopping this one myself."

Lionel smirked. "I think you're selling yourself a little short there, John."

Montalban shot his brother a warning glance.

"What?" Sonja shouted. "What is it this time, what have you done? What are you doing, John? What, what?"

"Not so loudly, please," said Montalban.

A busy nomad council of war was convening inside the ger. Outriders from a distant cell had arrived. The terrorists were briefing each other, issuing orders and making contingency plans. They were doing it all with paper. Little slips of grass parchment. Charcoal ink brushes.

"They never use electricity," said Montalban, "because it makes them too easy to track. That fact is making me, and my big correlation engine here, into the largest electronic-warfare target in a hundred kilometers. There are Chinese hunter-killer teams wandering out there, with who knows what kinds of weaponry. They use the local civilian populations for target practice."

For the first time, Montalban's bodyguard spoke. He spoke in a stiffly proper Beijing Chinese, and he spoke to Sonja. "This man said, in English, 'hunter-killer teams. "