An elderly woman in a hairy robe entered the tent. She carefully tied two knots into a dangling cord of chemglow, and left without a word. The General picked up the thread. "You see, son-and Dr. Pen-ninger"-he nodded at Greta in courtly fashion-"we're all the he-roes of our own story. You tell me you've got a big problem-hell, we've all got big problems."

"Let's discuss them," Oscar said.

"I got some excellent career advice for you overachievers. Why don't you clowns just give up? Just quit! Knock it off, hit the road! Are you enjoyin'

life? Do you have a community? Do you even know what a real community is? Is there any human soul that you poor haunted wretches can really trust?

Don't answer that! 'Cause I already know. You're a sorry pair of washouts, you two. You look like coyotes ate you and crapped you off a cliff. Now you got some crisis you want me to help you with. . . . Hell, people like you are always gonna have a crisis. You are the crisis. When are you gonna wake up? Your system don't work. Your economy don't work. Your politicians don't work. Nothing you ever do works. You're over."

"For the time being," Oscar said.

"Mister, you're never gonna get ahead of the game. You've had a serious wake-up call here. You're disappeared, you're dispossessed. You've been blown right off the edge of the earth. Well, you know something? There's a soft landing down here. Just go ahead and leave! Burn your clothes! Set fire to your damn diploma! Junk all your ID cards! You're a sickening, pitiful sight, you know that? A nice, charming, talented couple. . .. Listen, it's not too late for you two to get a life! You're derelicts right now, but you could be bon vivants, if you knew what life was for."

Greta spoke up. "But I really need to get back to my lab."

"I tried," said Burningboy, flinging up both hands. "See, if you just had the good sense to listen to me, that fine advice of mine would have solved your problems right away. You could be eatin' mulliga-tawny stew with us tonight, and probably getting laid. But no, don't mind old Burningboy. I'm much, much older than you, and I've seen a lot more of life than you ever have, but what do I know? I'm just some dirt-ignorant fool in funny clothes, who's gonna get arrested. Because some rich Yankee from outta town needs him to commit some terrible criminal act."

"General, let me give you the briefing," said Oscar. He pro-ceeded to do this. Burningboy listened with surprising patience.

"Okay," Burningboy said at last. "Let's say that we go in and strong-arm this giant glass dome full of scientists. I gotta admit, that's a very attractive idea. We're extremely nice, peaceful people in the Moderators, we're all love and sunshine. So we might do a thing like that, just to please you. But what's in it for us?"

"There's money," Oscar said.

Burningboy yawned. "Sure, like that'll help us."

"The lab is a self-sufficient structure. There's food and shelter inside," Greta offered.

"Yeah, sure-as long as it suits you to give it to us. Once that's done, then it's the run-along as usual."

"Let's be realistic," Oscar said. "You're a mob. We need to hire some mob muscle to back up our labor strike. That's a very traditional gambit, isn't it? How hard can that be?"

"They're very small, timid cops," Greta offered. "They hardly even have guns."

"Folks, we carry our own food and shelter. What we don't have is bullet holes in us. Or a bunch of angry feds on our ass."

Oscar considered his next move. He was dealing with people who had profoundly alien priorities. The Moderators were radical, dissident dropouts-but they were nevertheless people, so of course they could be reached somehow. "I can make you famous," he said. Burningboy tipped his hat back. "Oh yeah? How?"

"I can get you major net coverage. I'm a professional and I can spin it. The Collaboratory a very famous place. Dr. Penninger here is a Nobel Prize winner. This is a major political scandal. It's very dra-matic. It's part of a major developing story, it ties in with the Bambakias hunger strike, and the Regulator assault on a U.S. Air Force base. You Moderators could get excellent press by restoring order at a troubled federal facility. It would be the very opposite of the dreadful thing that the Regulators did." Burningboy reached thoughtfully into his jacket. He removed three small bars of substances resembling colored chalk. He set them onto a small slab of polished Arkansas whetstone, drew a pocketknife, and began chopping the bars into a fine powder.

Then he sighed heavily. "I really hate having my chain pulled just because a hustler like you happens to know that we Mods have it in for the Regulators."

"Of course I know that, General. It's a fact of life, isn't it?"

"We love those Regulators like brothers and sisters. We got nothingin common with you. Except that . . . well, we're Modera-tors because we use a Moderator network. And the Regulators use a Regulator interface, with Regulator software and Regulator proto-cols. I don't think that a newbie creep like you understands just how political a problem that is."

"I understand it," Kevin said, speaking up for the first time.

"We used to get along with the Regulators. They're a civilized tribe. But those Cajun goofballs got all puffed up about their genetic skills, and their state support from Green Huey. . . . Started bossin' other people around, doing talent raids on our top people, and if you ask me, them gumbo yaya voodoo-krewes are way too fond of gas and poison . . . ." Sensing weakness, Oscar pounced. "General, I'm not asking you to attack the Regulators. I'm only asking you to do what the Regula-tors themselves have done, except for much better motives, and under much better circumstances."

General Burningboy arranged his chopped powder into straight lines, and dumped them, one by one, into a small jar of yellow grease, He stirred the grease with his forefinger, and rubbed it carefully be-hind his ears. Then he waited, blinking. "Okay," he said at last. "I'm putting my personal honor on the line here, on the say-so of total strangers, but what the hell. They call me 'General' because of my many hard won years of cumulative trust ratings, but the cares of office hang kinda heavy on my hands right now, quite frankly. I might as well destroy everything I've built in one fell swoop. So, I'm gonna do you three rich creep palookas a very, very big favor. I'm going to loan you five platoons."

"Fifty Moderator toughs?" Kevin said eagerly.

"Yep. Five platoons, fifty people. Of course, I'm not sayin' our troops can hold that lab against a federal counterassault, but there's no question they can take it."

"Do these men have the discipline that it takes to maintain civil order in that facility?" Oscar said.

"They're not men, pal. They're teenage girls. We used to send in our young men when we wanted to get tough, but hey, young men are extremely tough guys. Young men kill people. We're a well-established alternative society, we can't afford to be perceived as murdering marauders. These girls keep a cooler head about urban sabotage. Plus, underage women tend to get a much lighter criminal sentencing when they get caught."

"I don't mean to seem ungrateful, General, but I'm not sure you grasp the seriousness of our situation."

"No," Greta said. "Teenage girls are perfect."

"Then I reckon I'll be introducing you to some of our chaperone field commanders. And you can talk about tactics and armament."

Oscar rode back to Buna in a phony church bus, crammed with three platoons of Moderator nomad soldiers. He might have ridden with Kevin, but he was anxious to study the troops.

It was almost impossible to look at girls between fourteen and seventeen and envision them as a paramilitary task force that could physically defeat police. But in a society infested with surveillance, militias had to take strange forms. These girls were almost invisible because they were so improbable.

The girls were very fit and quiet, with the posture of gymnasts, and they traveled in packs. Their platoons were split into operational groups of five, coordinated by elderly women. These little-old-lady platoon sergeants looked about as harmless and inoffensive as it was possible for human beings to look.

They all looked harmless because they dressed the part, deliber-ately. The nomad crones had given up their usual eldritch leather-and-plastic road gear. They now wore little hats, orthopedic shoes, and badly fitting floral prints. The young soldiers painstakingly ob-scured their tattoos with skin-colored sticks of wax. They had styled and combed their hair. They wore bright, up-tempo jackets and pat-terned leggings, presumably shoplifted from malls in some gated com-munity. The Moderator army resembled a girl's hockey team on a hunt for chocolate milk shakes.

Once the buses and their soldiery had successfully made it through the eastern airlock gate, the assault on the Collaboratory was a foregone conclusion. Oscar watched in numb astonishment as the first platoon ambushed and destroyed a police car.

Two cops in a car were guarding one of the airlocks into the Hot Zone, where Greta's Strike Committee was sullenly awaiting eviction. Without warning, the youngest of the five girls clapped her hands to the sides of her head, and emitted an ear-shattering scream. The po-lice, galvanized with surprise, left their car at once and rushed over to give the girl aid. They fell into an invisible rat's nest of tripwires, which lashed their booted legs together with a stink of plastic. The moment they hit the ground, two other girls coolly shot them with sprayguns, pasting them firmly to the earth. A second platoon of girls united and turned the tiny police truck onto its roof, and web-shot its video monitors and instrument panels. At his own insistence, Kevin personally led the assault on the police station. Kevin's contribution consisted of fast-talking with the female desk sergeant as thirty young women walked into the building, chatting and giggling. Smiling cops who trustingly emerged to find out what was going on were webbed at point-blank range. Gagged, blinded, and unable to breathe, they were easy prey for trained squads who seized their wrists, kicked their ankles, and knocked them to the floor with stunning force. They were then swiftly cuffed.

The Moderators had seized a federal facility in forty minutes flat. A force of fifty girls was overkill. By six-thirty the coup was a fait accompli.

Still, there had been one tactical misstep. The lab's security di-rector was not at his work, and not at his home, where a platoon had been sent to arrest him. There was no one at home but his greatly surprised wife and two children.

It turned out that the security chief was in a beer bar with his mistress, drunk. Teenage girls couldn't enter a bar without attracting attention. They tried luring him out; but, confused by bad lighting, they attacked and tackled the wrong man. The chief escaped appre-hension.

Two hours later the chief was rediscovered, sealed into an im-promptu riot vehicle in the basement of the Occupational Safety building. He was frantically brandishing a cellphone and a combat shotgun.

Oscar went in to negotiate with him.

Oscar stood before the rubber bumper of the squat decontamina-tion vehicle. He waved cheerfully through the armored window, showing his empty hands, and called the police chief on one of the Collaboratory's standard phones.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" the chief demanded. His name, Oscar recalled flawlessly, was Mitchell S. Karnes.

"Sorry, Chief Karnes, it was an emergency. The situation's un-der control now. No one is going to be hurt."

''I'm the one who handles emergencies," said the chief "You and your men were the emergency. Since Director Pen-ninger was abducted yesterday, I'm afraid you and your team have forfeited her trust. However, the lab is now back in the hands of its properly constituted authorities. So you and your staff will be relieved of duty and placed under detention until we can restore the situation to normalcy."

"What on earth are you talking about? You can't fire me. You don't have the authority."

"Well, Chief, I'm very aware of that. But that doesn't change the facts of our situation. Just look at us. I'm standing out here, trying to be reasonable, while you're holed up in an armored vehicle with a shotgun, all by yourself. We're both adults, let's be sensible men here. The crisis is over. Put the gun down and come on out."

Karnes blinked. He'd been drinking heavily earlier in the day, and the full gravity of his situation hadn't entirely registered on him. "Look, what you're saying is completely crazy. A labor strike is one thing. Computer viruses are one thing. Netwar is one thing, even. But this is an armed coup. You can't get away with attacking police of-ficers. You'll be arrested. Everybody you know will get arrested."

"Mitch, I'm with you on this issue. In fact, I'm way ahead of you. I stand ready to surrender myself to the properly constituted authorities, just as soon as we can figure out who they are. They'll show up sooner or later; this will all shake out in the long run. But in the meantime, Mitch, act normal, okay? All your colleagues are down in detention. We've got the crisis handled now. This is doable. We're having the place catered tonight, there's doughnuts, coffee, and free beer. We're playing pinochle together and swapping war stories. We're planning to set up conjugal visits."

"Oscar, you can't arrest me. It's against the law."

"Mitch, just relax. You play ball with Dr. Penninger, probably we can work something out! Sure, I guess you can stand on principle, if you want to get all stiff-necked about it. But if you sit in that truck with a loaded shotgun all night, what on earth will that get you? It's not going to change a thing. It's over. Come on out."

Karnes left the truck. Oscar produced a pair of handcuffs, looked at the plastic straps, shrugged, put them back in his pocket. "We really don't need this, do we? We're grown-ups. Let's just go."

Karnes fell into step with him. They left the basement, and walked out together beneath the dome. There were winter stars be-yond the glass. "I never liked you," Karnes said. "I never trusted you. But somehow, you always seem like such a reasonable guy."

"I am a reasonable guy." Oscar clapped the policeman on the back of his flak jacket. "I know things seem a little disordered now, Chief: but I still believe in the law. I just have to find out where the order is."

After seeing the former police chief safely incarcerated, Oscar con-ferred with Kevin and Greta in the commandeered police station. The nomad girls had changed from their dainty infiltration gear into cloth-ing much more their style: webbing belts, batons, and cut-down com-bat fatigues. "So, did you get our internal publicity statemnt released?"

"Of course," Kevin said. "I called up every phone in the lab at once, and Greta went on live. Your statement was a good pitch, Oscar. It sounded really . . ." He paused. "Soothing."

"Soothing is good. We'll have new posters up by morning, de-claring the Strike over. People need these symbolic breathers. 'The Strike Is Over.' A declaration like that takes a lot of the heat off" All enthusiasm, Kevin pitched from the chief's leather chair and crawled on his hands and knees to a floor-level cabinet. It was crammed with telecom equipment, a dust-clotted forest of colored fiber optics. "Really neat old phone system here! It's riddled with taps, but it's one of a kind; it has a zillion cool old-fashioned features that nobody ever used."

"Why is it so dirty and neglected?" Oscar said.

"Oh, I had to turn these boards backward to get at the wiring. I've never had such total control over a switching station. A couple of weeks down here, and I'll have this place ticking like a clock." Kevin stood up, wiping clotted grime from his fingers. "I think I'd better put on one of these local cop uniforms now. Does anybody mind if I wear a cop uniform from now on?"

"Why do you want to do that?" Oscar said.

"Well, those nomad girls have uniforms. I'm now your chief of security, right? How am I supposed to control our troops, if I don't have my own uniform? With some kind of really cool cop hat."

Oscar shook his head. "That's a moot point, Kevin. Now that they've conquered the lab for us, we really need to usher those little witches out of here just as soon as possible."

Kevin and Greta exchanged glances. "We were just discussing that issue."

"They're really good, these girls," Greta said. "We won the lab back, but nobody got killed. It's always very good when there's a coup d' etat and nobody gets killed."

Kevin nodded eagerly. "We still need our troops, Oscar. We have a gang of dangerous Huey contras who are holed up in the Spinoffs building. We have to break them right where they stand! So we'll have to use heavy nonlethals-spongey whips, peppergas, ultrasonic bull-horns . . . . Man, it's gonna be juicy." Kevin rubbed his hands to-gether.

"Greta, don't listen to him. We can't risk serious injury to those people. We're in full command of the lab now, so we need to behave responsibly. If we have trouble from Huey's loyalists, we'll behave like normal authorities do. We'll just glue their doors shut, cut their phone and computer lines, and starve them out. Overreaction would be a serious mistake. From now on, we have to worry about how this plays in Washington."

Greta's long face went bleak. "Oh, to hell with Washington! They never do anything useful. They can't protect us here. I'm sick of them and their double-talk."

"Wait a minute!" Oscar said, wounded. "I'm from Washington. I've been useful."

"Well, you're the one exception." She rubbed her skinned wrists angrily.

"After what happened to me today, I know what I'm up against. I don't have any more illusions. We can't trust anyone but ourselves. Kevin and I are going to seize the airlocks and seal this entire facility. Oscar, I want you to resign. You'd better resign before the people in Washington fire you." She began jabbing her spidery fingers at him. "No, before they arrest you. Or indict you. Or im-peach you. Or kidnap you. Or just plain kill you." He gazed at her in alarm. She was losing it. The skin of her cheeks and forehead had the taut look of a freshly peeled onion. "Greta, let's go for a little walk in the fresh air, shall we? You're overwrought. We need to discuss our situation sensibly."

"No more talking. I'm through being played for a sucker. I won't be gassed and handcuffed again, unless they come in here with tanks."

"Darling, nobody uses 'tanks.' Tanks are very twentieth century. The authorities don't have to use violent armed force. The world is past that phase as a civilization. If they want to pry us out of here, they'll just .. .'

Oscar fell silent suddenly. He hadn't really considered the op-tions from the point of view of the authorities. The options for the authorities didn't seem very promising. Greta Penninger-and her allies-had just seized an armored biological laboratory. The place was blast-resistant and riddled with underground catacombs. There were hundreds of highly photogenic rare species inside, forming a combination mobile food source and corps of potential hostages. The facility had its own water supply, its own power supply, even its own atmosphere. Financial threats and embargoes were meaning-less, because the financial systems had already been ruined by netwar viruses.

The place was sewn up tight. Greta's pocket revolutionaries had seized the means of information. They had commandeered the means of production. They had a loyal and aroused populace in a state of profound distrust for the outside world. They had conquered a mighty fortress. Greta returned her attention to Kevin. "When can we junk these lousy prole phones and get our regular system back?"

Kevin was all helpfulness. "Well, I'll have to make sure it's fully secure first. . . . How many programmers can you give me?"

''I'll run a personnel search for telecom talent. Can you find me my own office here in the police station? I may be spending a lot of time in here." Kevin grinned gamely. "Hey, you're the boss, Dr. Penninger!"

"I need some time off," Oscar realized. "Maybe a nice long nap. It's really been a trying day." They cordially ignored him. They were busy with their own agenda. He left the police station.

As he tottered through the darkened gardens toward the looming bulk of the Hot Zone, weariness overcame him with an evil metabolic rush. His day's experiences suddenly struck him as being totally in-sane. He'd been abducted, gassed, bombed; he'd traveled hundreds of miles in cheerless, battered vehicles; he'd concluded an unsavory alliance with a powerful gang of social outcasts; he'd been libeled, accused of embezzlement and criminal flight across state bound-aries . . . . He'd arrested a group of police; he'd talked an armed fugitive into surrendering. . . . And now his sometime lover and his dangerously unbalanced security director were uniting to plot behind his back.

It was bad. Impossibly bad. But it still wasn't the worst. Because tomorrow was yet another day. Tomorrow, he would have to launch into a massive public-relations offensive that would somehow justify his actions. He realized suddenly that he wasn't going to make it. It was overwhelming. It was just too much. He'd reached a condition of psychic overload. He was black, blue, and green with wounds and bruises; he was hungry, tired, overstressed, and traumatized; his ner-vous system was singing with stale adrenaline. Yet in his heart of hearts, he felt good about the day's events.

He'd outdone himself.

True, he'd suffered the elemental blunder of being kidnapped. But after that, he had handled every situation, every developing crisis, with astonishing aplomb and unbroken success. Every move had been the proper move at the proper moment, every option had been an inspired choice. It was just that there were too many of them. He was like an ice-skater performing an endless series of triple axels. Some-thing was going to snap. He felt a sudden need for shelter. Physical shelter. Locked doors, and a long silence.

Returning to the hotel was out of the question. There would be people there, questions, trouble. The Hot Zone, then.

He trudged to a Hot Zone airlock, now manned by a pair of elderly nomad sergeants, up on the night shift. The camou-clad gran-nies were amusing themselves, doing cat's-cradle string-games with homemade yoyos of chemically soaked sponge. Oscar walked by the women with a ragged salute, and entered the empty halls of the Hot Zone.

He searched for a place to hide. An obscure equipment closet would be ideal. There was just one more little matter, before he re-laxed and came fully apart at the seams. He needed to have his laptop. That was a deeply comforting thought to Oscar: retreating into a locked closet with a laptop to hold. It was an instinctive reaction to unbearable crisis; it was something he had been doing since the age of six.

He had left a spare laptop in Greta's lab. He crept into the place. The former Strike headquarters, once sterile and pristine, bore the scars of political backroom maneuvers-it was filthy now, full of scat-tered papers, half-eaten food, memos, bottles, junk. The whole room stank of panic. Oscar found his laptop, half buried below a stack of tapes and catalogs. He pulled it out, tucked it under his arm. Thank God.

His phone rang. He answered it by reflex. "Yes?"

"Am I lucky! Got the Soap Salesman first try! How's it goin', Soapy?

Everything under control?"

It was Green Huey. Oscar's heart skipped a beat as he snapped to full attention. "Yes, thank you, Governor."

How on earth was Huey inside the lab's phones? Kevin had as-sured him that their encryption was uncrackable.

"I hope you don't mind a late cold-call, mon ami." Oscar sat slowly on the laboratory floor, bracing his back on a metal cabinet. "By no means, Your Excellency. We live to serve."

"That's mighty good of you, Soapy! Lemme tell you where I am right now. I'm riding in a goddamn helicopter above the Sabine River, and I'm lookin' at a goddamn air strike."

"You don't say, sir."

"I DO SAY!" Huey screamed. "Those sons of bitches blew my people away! Black helicopters with missiles and automatic weapons, murdering American civilians on the ground! It was a goddamn mas-sacre!"

"Were there many casualties, Governor? I mean, besides that un-fortunate French submarine?"