The Caryatids

Sonja was in Jiuquan, so of course microbes sounded familiar to her. "George, no one wants any ancient, wild microbes. Those microbes are backward and feudal. Those microbes are of academic interest only. You want Jiuquan's fully advanced internal gut microbes, created in the state's genetic-recombinatorial labs. Those microbes are state secrets, and very valuable."

"Oh no, I want those good old-fashioned all-natural microbes," George said firmly. "Just-don't scrape any nasty goo out of some Asian corpse. I want the genetic sequences of the microbes. Just the pure data. Could you supply that microbe data to me? Could you do that, Sonja?"

"Probably. I am a public health officer here. Yes, I could do that."

"Excellent!"

"If I get you those Scythian microbes-will you ship me what I need for my military operations, with no more trifling?"

"Yes."

SONJA METHODICALLY READIED HERSELF for vengeance: to find out who to kill, why, and how. Vengeance was a rather more thorough, thoughtful, and comprehensive effort than it had once been for Sonja.

When Sonja had first arrived in China-fresh off the boat at the age of nineteen-she had known that she was heading for a cataclysm. She had desired that fate, she had sought that out: the bold desperado, without a homeland, joining a foreign legion.

She'd instantly fallen in with much bolder desperadoes. All the men Sonja had loved were keen-eyed, domineering, headstrong, fearless men. They were men at home in hell. However, their courage, while always necessary and always in short supply, was not what was needed to make a cataclysm stop.

On the contrary: Raw courage was superb at provoking cataclysms. Any gutsy teenager, boldly careless of his life, could empty his gun into some archduke and create colossal chaos. Stopping cataclysms required imposing order.

Sonja had come to understand the order as the hard part of the work. To end a war meant either restoring an old order, or invoking a new order. Neither work was easy. Order, unlike war, required unglamorous skills such as political savvy, business sense, and rugged logistics.

Restoring order required a crisp, succinct articulation of the big picture and why one's efforts mattered in that regard. It required a tremendous knowledge of details. It needed the patience to build a long-lasting, big-scale enterprise that would not collapse instantly from guerrilla attacks. And it needed a cold-blooded ability to make firm choices among disgusting alternatives.

George was a merchant and a fixer, never the kind of man she liked. Yet George, for all his countless demerits, had a definite rapport for ubiquitous systems. George had a positive genius for handling border delays, security compliances, fuel costs, detours on the planet's weather-shattered roads and bridges, documentation hurdles, no-fly zones and confiscatory carbon-footprint taxes, port congestion, cargo security, regulations both in-state and offshore, liaisons with manufacturers, out-sized and overweight shipping modules...Boring things, dull things. Yet George could ship things to her, and that mattered.

Bravery mattered much less. A brave woman could be "very brave" in a field hospital. She might hold the hand of a dying child while it coughed up blood. That moral act required a courage that left dents all over one's soul, while, in the meantime, any tedious holdup in the flow of medical supplies could kill off entire populations, not tender children killed tragically in their ones and twos, but masses killed statistically in their hundreds and thousands.

Privates and sergeants bragged about courage: digging foxholes and kicking in doors. Colonels and generals talked soberly about supply trains and indirect fire. Barbarism, disorder, chaos, and murder were the ground state of mankind, so foxholes and ambushes were in infinite supply. Public order was about leveraging the things that were in short supply: with sturdy supply trains and superior firepower.

It had taken Sonja quite some time to comprehend all this, because, as a nineteen-year-old adventuress, she had been far too busy learning Chinese, sopping up a patchy medical training, and establishing her personality cult. But she had finally learned such things, well enough. She'd had teachers.

The fortunes of war favored the bold, if the bold survived. Sonja was nothing if not bold. Eventually, an important apparatchik had descended from the murky heavens of Beijing's inner circles to manifest a personal interest in her glorious career.

This gentleman was Mr. Zeng, a thoughtful, open-eyed chief of the "Scientific Research Bureau." Which was to say, Mr. Zeng was a Chinese secret policeman.