"Isaiah," she said, "can we talk? Privately somewhere?"

His eyes widened. "What about?" he asked cautiously.

"I don't want to stand out here and talk about it. Where can we go that's private?"

For a long moment he stood silently. What would Esau think? Jael was so pretty and so nice, more than once he'd caught himself drifting into a fantasy about her. A guilty fantasy. It was well, he'd told himself, that they trained so hard and had so little time to think. "The dayroom," he said at last. "That might be all right."

She knew where it was, though she'd never been inside it. She led off, Isaiah following. No one else was there, and they sat down opposite each other at a reading table.

"It's about agreeing to be turned into a warbot," she said. "If someone's badly wounded and going to die."

He stared at her, then realizing he needed to respond, he nodded.

"I'm thinking about signing," she said.

His mouth opened slightly, but nothing came out for several seconds. "That's something you need to talk to Esau about, not me."

"I will. Before I make any decision anyway. The reason I want to talk to you is, you were studying to be a speaker. So you must have read and reread all the books, and thought about them a lot. And the first thing I need to know is… "

She groped, clarifying her thoughts. "Like I told Sergeant Hawkins, I'm afraid of great pain. And I don't trust myself to be signing for the right reason: to help out in the war. I might just want to be rescued from great pain, or not spend the rest of my life all crippled up. You see. But God might want me to experience those things. To suffer in those ways."

Isaiah's expression changed, showing not worry now, but focus, and his answer, when it came, was expressed as a speaker might have phrased it. "Jael," he answered, "you've read that sometimes God tests people, as in the case of Job, and Abraham. But there's no sign that he'd have punished them if they'd failed."

"But what about suicide?"

"Suicide?"

"If I caused my crippled body to die, on purpose and ahead of its time, would that be suicide? And if my brain got cut out and bottled, then when God gathers the blessed to rise, and if I qualified, would I be resurrected as a warbot, or a person?"

Isaiah frowned not in disapproval but in thought, then shook his head. "First of all, all I can tell you is how it seems to me. The Testaments don't speak of that, nor does Elder Hofer's Contemplations. But it seems to me a warbot is a person. Because it has a soul. And as for resurrection- If a person gets eaten by a tiger, his flesh becomes tiger flesh, but he won't be resurrected as a tiger." Jael shook her head at that, rejecting. Isaiah continued. "And martyrs that were burned at the stake won't be resurrected as smoke and ashes. Nor cripples as cripples. God wouldn't resurrect them all humped over or twisted, or short an arm or leg."

He watched her thoughtful eyes. She was even prettier than he'd allowed himself to notice before. Finally she nodded. "Thank you, Isaiah," she said. "You've been a big help." Then she got up and left, leaving him sitting there.

Feeling guilty, because he hadn't been entirely honest with her. It seemed to him they wouldn't be resurrected in a body at all. He'd thought that when he was a child, and had gradually come to believe that when the time came, folks would have no interest in bodies. They'd just be souls.

Which of course brought up a lot of questions about the Testaments themselves. That was why he seldom let himself think about such things. The thing to do was trust in the Lord, and hope God would forgive his errors. Elder Hofer-and his own father-had always stressed that God was love.

Three more trainees of 2nd Platoon went to the orderly room that evening and signed warbot agreements. Jael Wesley was not one of them; she wasn't ready yet, if she'd ever be. The company as a whole signed 10 more; given those who'd signed earlier, that made 15. Now, Mulvaney thought, if we can get the other 145 signed up…

Status Review

The mahogany table and wall panels glowed with golden sunlight, the ten-foot-tall window fields adjusting both the intensity and the blend of wavelengths. The entire Commonwealth cabinet was there, along with several high-ranking officials of War House and the Office of War Mobilization. Elsewhere, selected others watched on live, closed-circuit video. Whether in person or electronically, attendance was by invitation only. For some, this cabinet meeting was their first.

Prime Minister Foster Peixoto presided, with Chang Lung-Chi beside him; since the invasion, the president invariably attended.

The prime minister began with a brief caveat. "First you must all remember-MUST ALL REMEMBER-that what you hear in this meeting is confidential. Repeating any of it without authorization can result in a charge of insubordination or even treason. The Ministry of Information decides what will be released and when, and clears those releases with myself, in consultation with the president."

He looked them over, allowing his injunction to sink in. "Most of you are well informed on one aspect or another of our plans and progress, but not on all of it. What I will do here is summarize major areas. Others may elaborate on them.

"Our central strategy is and must be to stop the alien advance. At some point we must defeat their armada in space, which requires a great fleet well crewed. Which of course we do not have. Meanwhile the aliens are not waiting for us to get ready, and the course of their advance will bring them here to Terra as surely as if they knew where we are."

High on each wall, a screen showed a diagram of the Commonwealth and the alien progress, the captive worlds glowing redly.

"So far we have not challenged them," Peixoto went on. "Until very recently we've had no force that could fight a meaningful action. Even to draw a small demonstration of their armaments, we depended on Morgan's refugee pirate squadron. It was like a mosquito annoying a man, and what we learned from it was very limited. But very important."

Amazing, Chang thought, that he can sound so worried when he and I talk privately, yet so calm and assured when speaking to others. It is a gift from the Tao.

"Now we do have a significant space force: the First Sol Provisional Battle Force, commanded by Admiral Alvaro Soong. It is far smaller than the enemy's, but powerful enough to draw a broad display of alien armaments and tactics, and inflict significant damage.

"Soong's ships are ready. What remains is to finish training their crews. The crews of battleships have all handled battleships in test runs. Those on cruisers have flown actual cruisers. Every officer and man has carried out his flight duties and manned his battle stations and damage stations, in a ship of the kind he's assigned to.

"But they have not flown them through battle evolutions; not in reality. What they have done is fight numerous actions in simulation drills-actions in virtual F-space and virtual warpspace. And every officer has manned his station in war games against every tactic and combination of tactics that generations of officers could think of. Against the weapons we know the enemy has, and others we think he might have, given what is known of physics."

He picked up a glass and sipped, then scanned his audience, the president watching beside him. Part of the impression he makes, Chang decided, is due to his height. And his eyebrows, like crows' wings! But mostly it is his intelligence and honesty. He speaks the truth, so far as he knows it.

"Within days," Peixoto said, "Soong's force-they call themselves the `Provos'-will generate warpspace and fly to the outer fringe of the Sol System. There its officers and men will carry out every sort of battle evolution in reality. And when Soong feels they are ready, but no later than four weeks after leaving the vicinity of Terra, they will journey outward to meet the enemy.