A Separate War and Other Stories (two stories "A Separate War" and "For White Hill")

The male and female smiled and nodded in unison. "Now."

Thumbnail pictures of Karl and Cat appeared next to Morales. "Cat! Karl! Have the weapons units cease fire immediately!"

"What's going on?" Karl said. "Where's the stasis field?"

"They turned it off. Battle's over."

"That's right," Morales said. "Cease fire."

Cat started talking to the squads. Karl stared for a second and started to do the same.

Not fast enough. The left wall exploded in a hurricane of masonry and chunks of metal. The two Men were suddenly bloody rags of shredded flesh. Morales and I were knocked over by the storm of rubble. My armor was breached in one place; there was a ten-second beep while it repaired itself.

Then vacuum silence. The one light on the opposite wall dimmed and went out. Through the hole our ca

The three thumbnails were gone. I chi

Then I turned on a headlight and saw Morales was dead, his suit peeled open at the chest, lungs and heart in tatters under ribs black with dried blood.

I chi

So Cat was probably dead, and Karl, too. Or maybe their communications had been knocked out.

I thought about that possibility for a few moments, hoping and rejecting hope, listening to the babble. Then I realized that if I could hear all those privates, corporals, they could hear me.

"This is Potter," I said. "CaptainPotter," I yelled.

I stayed on the general freek and tried to explain the strange situation. Five did opt to stay outside. The others met me under the yellow light, which framed the top of a square black blast door that rose out of the ground at a forty-five-degree angle, like our tornado shelter at home, thousands of years ago, hundreds of light-years away. It slid open, and we went in, carrying four fighting suits whose occupants weren't responding but weren't obviously dead.

One of those was Cat, I saw as we came into the light when the airlock door closed. The back of the helmet had a blast burn, but I could make out VERDEUR.

She looked bad. A leg and an arm were missing at shoulder and thigh. But they had been snipped off by the suit itself, the way my arm had been at Tet-2.

There was no way to tell whether she was alive, since the telltale on the back of the helmet was destroyed. The suit had a biometric readout, but only a medic could access it directly, and the medic and his suit had been vaporized.

Man led us into a large room with a row of bunks and a row of chairs. There were three other Men there, but no Taurans, which was probably wise.

I popped out of my suit and didn't die, so the others did the same, one by one. The amputees we left sealed in their suits, and Man agreed that it was probably best. They were either dead or safely unconscious: if the former, they'd been dead for too long to bring back; if the latter, it would be better to wake them up in the Bolivar'ssurgery. The ship was only two hours away, but it was a long two hours for me.

As it turned out, she lived, but I lost her anyhow, to relativity. She and the other amputees were loaded, still asleep, onto the extra cruiser, and sent straight to Heaven.

They did it in one jump, no need for secrecy anymore, and we went to Stargate in one jump aboard Bolivar.

When I'd last been to Stargate it had been a huge space station; now it was easily a hundred times as large, a man-made planetoid. Tauran-made, and Man-made.

We learned to say it differently: Man,not man.

Inside, Stargate was a city that dwarfed any city on the Earth I remembered-though they said now there were cities on Earth with a billion Men, humans, and Taurans.

We spent weeks considering and deciding on which of many options we could choose to set the course of the rest of our lives. The first thing I did was check on William, and no miracle had happened; his Strike Force had not returned from Sade-138. But neither had the Tauran force sent to a

I didn't have the option of hanging around Stargate, waiting for him to show up; the shortest scenario had his outfit arriving in over three hundred years. I couldn't really wait for Cat, either; at best she would get to Stargate in thirty-five years. Still young, and me in my sixties. If, in fact, she chose to come to Stargate; she would have the option of staying on Heaven.

I could chase her to Heaven, but then shewould be thirty-five years older than me. If we didn't pass one another in transit.

But I did have one chance. One way to outwit relativity.

Among the options available to veterans was Middle Finger, a planet circling Mizar. It was a nominally heterosexual planet-het or home was now completely a matter of choice; Man could switch you one way or the other in an hour.

I toyed with the idea of "going home," becoming lesbian by inclination as well as definition. But men still appealed to me-men not Man-and Middle Finger offered me an outside chance at the one man I still truly loved.

Five veterans had just bought an old cruiser and were using it as a time machine-a "time shuttle," they called it, zipping back and forth between Mizar and Alcor at relativistic speed, more than two objective years passing every week. I could buy my way onto it by using my back pay to purchase antimatter fuel. I could get there in two collapsar jumps, having left word for William, and if he lived, could rejoin him in a matter of months or years.

The decision was so easy it was not a decision; it was as automatic as being born. I left him a note:

11 Oct 2878

William-

All this is in your perso