"Not long, a day or two at most. I just need an analyzer and the library software."

"And then what?"

"Then I need to talk to Jo Rugan about publishing a paper, real fast."

"What have you found, Caroline? What is all this?"

Soille was interested, picking up on the excitement she could feel reverberating in her friend.

"Let's just say that it might be one of the most important finds ever made in the Scopus cluster."

Soille's eyebrows rose. "In the whole cluster?"

Caroline had some wine. "Exactly."

"But it's not strictly old rocks and bones, then, not if you want a bioanalyzer?"

Caroline stiffened. "I can't tell you any more than I have. Now, be a good friend and stop asking questions and just tell me if you can sign a machine out and lend it to me."

Soille grinned. "Of course I can, darling."

"Good. Now tell me, what's been happening between you and Eric? How many times did you see him this week?"

Soille laughed. So Caroline was determined to be mysterious.

Soille knew there would come some other opportunity to find out what this exciting mystery was all about. She would keep her questions until then.

Their entrees arrived, and they chattered happily about men and their Mends and the latest political maneuvers in the life sciences department.

By the time they were done it was late; Caroline felt a sudden heavy fatigue. She'd had a long day, though she felt quietly elated and full and warm and sleepy.

She did not notice the hot-eyed, gaunt man in a dark raincoat who watched the two leave the restaurant and then followed them out. He observed Caroline tumble into a cab and head for her building, and then he followed Soille to her building, on the far side of the campus.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

ONCE THEY HAD BEEN THE SOUTH WEST ARENTE LIBERATION Army, or SWALA.

They had been a jaunty force, driving their customized ATVs down the back roads beneath blue-and-gold pennons. They were even headquartered for a while in an old mansion by the banks of the Arena, where they held the owner hostage along with his family.

But things had gone badly for them after a while, and a vigorous local landlord named Kaput had succeeded in rousing the rest of his class into settling their differences and hiring a strong force of Regulators to deal with such groups as the SWALA.

Soon they were driven out of the farm belt. They were no longer able to coerce support from the villages. They were reduced to preying on outlying farms and hijackings on the Kara State highway system. They became mere bandits, known as "doubters" in the Ruinart States, and existence became more precarious.

Hijacking on the highways was dangerous. The Kara State Highway Police had a reputation for being very tough. They ran dummy trucks all the time and used heavy surveillance. They also tended to kill hijackers the moment they had them in their sights. They tended to ignore hostages, killing them, too, quite often.

This possibility only drove the potential hostages who rode the big trucks into arming themselves to the teeth. It was easy to take casualties when trying to lift a truck on the Kara highways.

Their string ran out at last when they tried to lift a Jackson Me tractor trailer they thought was loaded with expensive carpets but turned out to be full of Regulators.

What was left of them-eight men, eleven women, and nine children-was holed up in a box canyon off the Climate River, on the fringe of the Ruinarts.

They were low on ammunition and virtually out of money. They had three vehicles left, two four-wheel Mogen ATVs and a big six-wheel Jahmsbok that needed a new clutch.

Regulators hired by Jackon Emee were still combing the hills for them, and occasionally a chopper flew along Peekaw Ridge, just fifteen kilometers north.

They were safe there, but they were reverting to savagery as their stuff broke down, fuel cells gave out, and ammo ran too low to hunt with.

Rhem Kerwillig was now corporal of A Squad. But since A Squad now consisted of just Rhem and Gugen Schuppet, he was really more the second-in-line corporal of A-and-B Squad, which had six men and four women survivors. The other women were not fighters. First corporal was Larshel Deveaux, a onetime radical firebrand at Cowdray University, who had drifted for years in the Frente States before joining SWALA. Since the loss of Manzaut and Commander Kafka, Larshel Deveaux was nominal chief of military operations.

On the political side Dendra Witte was now first leader, with Lambda Bo as assistant. Political enthusiasm was now as low as it could go. No one even bothered to call for meetings. They met anyway, every night around the fire in the main cave. There wasn't much else to do but sit there and drink homebrew and watch TV.

Rhem had lost his idealism a long time ago. For a while past that stage he had fooled himself into believing that his time in the dubtigers would pay off somehow. There was always the possibility of a big score and enough money to leave the hills and start a business in Frentana Beach.

Gradually that dream faded as it became apparent that it was getting too tough on the highways. A sour despair welled up in its place: he'd missed his chance for the good life.

Until Reena came. That had changed things drastically, and not entirely for the better. In fact, right now they were at their worst.

Reena was a dark-haired beauty, a self-admitted perpetual adolescent at twenty-eight who joined the SWALA with a burning desire to avenge the deaths of her parents at the hands of Regulators. Her lithe, slender body had since caused a lot of fights among both the male and female SWALA dubtigers.

Rhem had started out as the son of a well-off grocery-chain owner in Palken City in the Peach Bowl, the heart of Arente Province. Rhem had disagreed with his father about almost everything, from an early age. At eighteen he was so caught up in displays of rebellion that he began to run with the Bindini brothers, who were more or less criminals and who had connections to the SWALA, much in the media at the time following some dramatic raids on wealthy houses in the Peach Bowl.

Rhem discovered how really exciting life could be when he drove out with the SWALA for the first time. A night with both moons showing and the back roads were like dark corridors under the trees.

Their guns were loaded and ready, cool and heavy in their hands.

They hit a small factory on the edge of a sugar plantation. The place made custom phototronics and sold them through mail order all across North Trios.

They got the manager down on the floor with a shotgun pushed up against his testicles. He gave up the keycodes for the vault and they made off with two hundred thousand in ITAA cargo promissory notes.

All at once the SWALA bad been flush with money. Life out by the Arennee became a round of parties, orgies, and savage amusements. When they went to the villages they went armed, and they took anonymous petitions from peasants who paid well, and they dispensed the so-called justice of the SWALA. Other peasants paid well to overturn such justice and thus there was competition to buy off the SWALA and things were pretty wonderful.

Rhem Kerwillig abandoned school for the SWALA and never returned to his parents' home in Palken City.

And now?

Now he was reduced to a dirty cave and ragged clothing. For pleasure there was nothing but homebrew and panting after the sexy Reena, who was driving him crazy. Worst of all, he could foresee no way of getting out of there. He didn't have enough money to get a fuel cell, and all the cells in their ATVs were down to the nubbins.

Meanwhile he sat there staring hungrily at Reena whenever she was around and trying not to think about her the rest of the time.

At least Rosa Limcheg was still willing to share her bag with him nights. Rosa was in late extended middle age. She had been the girlfriend of one of the founders of the SWALA, a professor from Arente University by name of Drola. Drola had died long ago, ambushed by Regulators in a dusty Peach Bowl village. Since then Rosa had been the mother hen of the SWALA. She had borne three children and seen them grow and then die, lynched for thieving in Dowensville market. Her body was worn, her hair had grayed, and her beauty, such as it had been, had faded. Still, she was a woman and knew how to arouse a man.

But while Rosa was there for him at night, Rosa was not the woman uppermost in his thoughts. Instead he visualized the voluptuous charms of Reena Kirshtin and imagined her sharing them with Griff, and it drove him crazy.

All the women hated Reena, even the other fighters, who weren't normally interested in the men anyway.

Things weren't great between the men, either. Rhem wasn't the only one who wished he'd left for Frentana Beach a long time ago.

Reena's games were a real irritant. Griff and Larshel had just about come to blows again this morning.

Griff was still sporting bruises from the last one.

And Reena was out there now, with Griff, and Rhem knew all too well just what she would be up to.

There had been a time when she'd gone out there with Rhem, with just a single sleeping bag, to make love under the stars, all night long.

Reena was young and in love with herself and her magnificent body and the orgasms it could have.

These were nights to remember.

Rhem could recall the shape and feel of her breasts, her ass, he could virtually taste the damn woman, and she wouldn't even talk to him now.

Since the disaster on the highway she had turned away from him completely. For a while it had been all Larshel Deveaux, which Rhem thought had to be just for spite. Larshel was as ugly as sin, with his prematurely bald pate and his pop eyes and blubbery lips. She was doing it just to bust Rhem's balls.

Now she was out there, with Griff!

Griff was the latest. Griff was young enough to have fallen in love with Reena. In fact, Griff was just about insane over her.

The problem was that Larshel had blubbery lips and hands of stone. He had once boxed in the Frente Leagues, hands and feet, in the ancient kung fu forms.

Fighting him was something most men only ever wanted to do once. Griff, however, could not stay away from Reena, no matter what Larshel said.

Rhem had a sickening feeling that it was going to get down to gunplay soon, and then there would be a complex ripping up of the social fabric among the survivors.

Whose side was Rhem on? He had to decide and soon. Griff would either have to leave and take Reena with him or kill Larshel. And everyone would have to choose sides.

Larshel had seniority, by along shot, but he was not a popular choice. None of the other women wanted him as commander.

Neither Rhem nor Gugen cared for him, either. But they would come under pressure from a few of the older men.

It was going to be rough.

Someone was coming in; it was Reena. She strutted into the cave. She was wearing Griff's flage shirt. It was a good shirt, only good one Griff still had. Rhem wondered what she'd done for Griff to get him to give it up and then felt angry because he didn't want to imagine it between her and Griff, it still tore at his guts.

She circled beyond the fire and stopped by the keg and drew a jug of homebrew.

Larshel Deveaux was staring at her with pleading eyes.

She ignored Larshel, filled the jug, and turned on her heel and headed back out.

On her way she passed right by Rhem. She smiled at him, the first time in weeks. To his dismay his heart skipped a beat.

"Hi, Rhem," she said in that breathy way that turned men to jelly.

"Reena," he said. Their eyes met. He could scarcely believe it, she was being friendly.

"It's been a long time," he blurted, not meaning to.

Her eyebrows drew together. "Yes, Rhem, it has been," she purred. "I'm sorry about that, are you?"

"Yes, of course I am." She giggled. "Good."

Hopelessly he watched her leave the cave with the jug of beer.

He took another mug for himself and tried to dull the feelings enough to sit still and watch some TV.

It couldn't get much worse than this, could it?

The sleep of aeons was interrupted. Vaguely surprised to be called back to life, the Battlemaster awoke.

It had not expected to do so, ever again.

Slowly, painfully slowly, the oceans of dark oblivion parted and consciousness emerged. Sensory inputs were terribly dim on visual and audio wavelengths.

The olfactory sensorium was stimulated, however. Chemical receptors detected the presence of living animals.

Host!

Warm-blooded animals with oxygen-driven metabolic processes were close by. The sweet-salty exudates of the creatures hung in the air.

The Battlemaster struggled to awaken more completely, crawling up out of the well of nothingness as the tiny remnants of its nutrient base were converted to build sensory cells and pump the last reserves of blood into the brain. As the Battlemaster crawled out of that hole in the universe, that darkness of near-death, the lust for host grew to a wild, terrible passion.

Host! screamed every cell in its being.

As the brain came to life it began to equate the few facts that were known.

There was heat; ambient temperatures were relatively comfortable.

There was light, although the optical surfaces were seriously degraded and it was impossible to know even how intense the nearby light sources were.

But above all, there was host!

Many questions bubbled to the surface of thought.

How long had it been since the darkness had swallowed up the Battlemaster in the aftermath of the disaster?

And where was this, with this damp air so tantalizingly loaded with the odor of living host animals?

Then a second tremendous discovery was made. Nutrients were available. Indeed, the Battlemaster lay in a tank of them.

Water with easily metabolized sugars surrounded the Battlemaster on all sides.

Without a wasted moment the Battlemaster began to absorb nutrients. Dead tissues were sloughed away, fresh cells grew as quickly as they could be made.