The Caryatids

It had never been Sonja's intention to provoke revenge attacks. Sonja had never wanted to kill anyone. Her first jaunt into China had been as a teenage camp follower in a medical relief column. Its poorly armored trucks were piled to bulging with rations, water barrels, tents, cots, bandages, antibiotics...Not thirty kilometers from port they'd been ambushed with rockets and small arms, their convoy shot to pieces and everything of value stolen by feral, screeching, dust-caked, rag-clad bandits who had scrambled back into the barricaded rubble that had once been their town.

That was Sonja's introduction to the true situation on the ground, and what followed had been unspeakably worse. As Sonja's first husband had put it: "It is necessary to incinerate the towns in order to save the cities," and he had incinerated many such before he met the death he'd always courted.

Ernesto had been a brave man from a distant corner of the Earth who had come to offer his hands and his heart and his medical knowledge and his strong, shapely, noble back to a stricken people-and, as many did, Ernesto had swiftly found it necessary to shoot many of them. Specifically, Ernesto had to shoot the gangs of malcontents who interfered with his redemption of the masses.

Nobody called Ernesto the "Angel" of anything, because when he sent his convoys tearing through the Chinese landscape he moved like a bloody hacksaw through a broken leg.

Sonja had been his wife, a caress and a whisper of comfort to Ernesto in his darkest hours, yet China didn't lack for bitter people who remembered things they had done. Along with many similar things Red Sonja herself had done since, in the same cause.

So: This latest episode of attempted revenge was part of her older story. It was simply a smaller and more personal story, because the scale of the havoc had dwindled. Bandits had once skulked in screaming thousands in the ruins of China's major cities. Bandits were now skulking in crazy dozens in the dusty wilderness far outside the state's armed boundaries. They were still bandits.

Bandit warlords came in a thousand factions, but they were all the same. Most were already gone, and the rest had to go.

AN UNMANNED POLICE VEHICLE deposited Sonja and her new husband at the ancient slopes of the Great Wall. Then it turned and fled with an unseemly haste back toward Jiuquan, leaving the two of them abandoned under the dazzling blue tent of central Asian sky.

If they were lucky in their lethal venture, they would never be seen by anyone. Sonja and the Badaulet were now a two-person "Scorpion team." Their task was to venture across the wilderness, spy out the camp of their enemies, call in a covert strike, and have the bandits annihilated.

They had both done such work before, so the chance to do it in tandem was a blessing to them as a couple.

The Great Wall of China was a sullenly eroded, ridge-backed dragon on the Earth. The color of dirt-for it was mostly handmade of dirt-it wriggled over an astounding expanse of central Asia. In the state's recent hours of need, technicians had brusquely drilled fresh holes and topped the Wall with the state's surveillance wands, transforming an ancient barrier into a modern surveillance network.

The new Wall consisted of the old Wall, plus tall, thin, gently swaying observation towers. Each needlelike tower was blankly topped with a mystical black head, a sphere devouring every trace of light that touched its opaque surface.

No merely human being could outguess what the state watched with these towering wands, for, potentially, the state surveilled everything within the Wall's huge line of sight. Not just passively absorbing light from the landscape, but sorting that light as data, sifting through it, searching it, collimating and triangulating and extrapolating from it...comparing each new nanosecond, pixel by pixel, to the ever-growing records of its previous observations.

The state's impassive visual ubiquity rambled on for thousands and thousands of closely linked kilometers, rooted in the ancient bricks and dirt of the longest, heaviest human structure ever created, its black towers like a fruiting bread mold in the immemorial substance of the planet's greatest fortress. There was not a single human guard along the new Wall. Like astronauts on the Martian surface, people were politically glorious yet practically unnecessary.

Hand in hand, Sonja and the Badaulet skulked past the monster ruins of a once-thriving tourist town. A life spent on horseback had made the Badaulet bowlegged, yet now he had an odd, spry, hop-along shuffle, for the Jiuquan clinic had done extraordinary things to the broken bones of his feet.

The medical operatives had also tactfully replaced Lucky's bomb-blown ears, so that the two of them no longer needed any earplug translation units. Their new language translators were sophisticated onboard devices the size of flecks of steel, and they ran on blood sugar.