The Caryatids

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.'"

"Yes, he did say that, sir," Sonja told him.

"Red Sonja, you should tell your friends in Jiuquan not to send any more 'hunter-killer teams' into these steppes. Because we hunt them and we kill them."

"May I ask your name, sir?"

"I am Major General Cao Xilong, director of the army's General Political Department."

"You were a very able ideologist and military political thinker. You were a legend in your field."

"That," said Cao Xilong, "is why they have assigned me to oversee these fat Californian subversives in their ridiculous hats."

Montalban looked on, smiling benignly. Foreign languages had never been an American strong suit.

Sonja smiled politely at Cao Xilong. "May I inquire why your colleagues found it necessary to attempt to liquidate me with a flying bomb?"