Again he paused. "This means a bluntly honest exposure of Peace Front fallacies and lies. It means promoting the validity of our defense activities, and establishing that they are necessary and efficacious. And these efforts need to be headed by someone whom the population as a whole trusts and respects."

With that the president sat down. From beneath arched brows, Foster Peixoto's eyes rested on him quizzically. "Indeed. And are you willing to take the job?-while seeing to your already existing responsibilities?"

"I am. Though you may very well come up with a better candidate. Meanwhile, I am the head of state, not the head of government. If I have difficulties handling it all, I will delegate my ceremonial and other less essential duties, and give priority to this more critical work. But we should not create a special office. It should be done within the existing structure of government."

Nabil Al-Kathad listened glumly. He recognized the factors the others had pointed out, but saw himself as ultimately responsible for enforcing the law and suppressing crime. I'm damned if I do, and damned if I don't, he thought. Meanwhile there remained the matter of appropriate and effective punishment.

This time he raised his hand, and the prime minister recognized him. "Yes, Nabil?"

"I still believe it is appropriate to execute criminals for high war crimes. It establishes their gravity in the public mind."

"Mr. Prime Minister," said Chang Lung-Chi, "if I may?"

"Go ahead, Mr. President."

"Nabil, my good friend, in cases sufficiently extreme, I would be willing to consider loading the guilty into a hyperspace courier and shipping them, without stasis, to a system in the path of the Wyzhnyny advance. There they would be shuttled to the surface of an enemy-occupied planet to negotiate peace. The minimum terms being Wyzhnyny withdrawal from the world they have taken, and from the general bounds of the Commonwealth sector."

With that the prime minister asked for further comments. As these were people with strong demands on their time, within five minutes the meeting was adjourned.

Camp Bosler Nafziger

The third oldest deep-space colony, Pastor Luneburger's World began as an agrarian religious settlement. Over the centuries, its original Mennonite doctrines had blurred and weakened, but low-tech agrarianism persisted. About fifty percent of its people still lived on farms, about thirty percent in rural hamlets, and twenty percent in market and industrial towns. The only colleges were seminaries. Trades and professions were learned by apprenticeship, with professional and trade associations providing optional certification.

Technological introductions were further hampered by disinterest in products. Nonetheless, over recent centuries, technology on Luneburger's had gradually, and more or less unintentionally, been upgraded. The slowness was largely a matter of cultural inertia, rather than Luddism. "Burgers" tended to like things as they were, and new things, to be successful, had to fit into the system. This was something the benign elected government considered very important in granting import licenses, especially the importation of technology.

On Luneburger's World, railroads were thought of as "new." Actually they'd been used there for centuries, but only during the past eighty years had they spread beyond the mining regions. While "trucks"-steam-driven rigs that burned coal or wood-were a phenomenon of recent decades, filling the newly felt need for hauling heavy freight to the expanding railroads.

Most Burgers with serious interest in technology migrated to the Sol, Epsilon Indi, or Epsilon Eridani systems. The Luneburgian government had established a small trust to help finance their offworld education. (A trust quietly supplemented by the Commonwealth.) On Luneburger's, this was considered Christian Kindness, not a means of developing a cadre of technicians and scientists. In fact, the expatriates were not encouraged to return.

Some did of course. Luneburger's had a number of engineers who'd trained offworld, or apprenticed under someone who had.

Given the circumstances, Luneburgian farmers and craftsmen, especially in frontier areas, tended to be innovatively practical with the materials at hand. They could drain a swamp, or build a house from scratch. A small crew of farm boys, using hand tools and a workhorse, could bridge a deeply-cut creek in an hour, and drive a loaded wagon over it. While those exposed to machinery quickly became decent jackleg mechanics. Thus given a handful of trained officers of whatever origin, Burgers were proving to make excellent engineering troops.

The threat of alien conquest had already brought changes. Most new military training camps, Camp Stenders for example, consisted of buildings whose prefabricated sections and modules were assembled on site by local entrepreneurs. Such practices would not have been accepted earlier. But in warmer climates, military camps were primarily tent camps. Administrative buildings and lecture sheds were prefab, but living accommodations consisted of acres of squad tents on raised wooden floors.

Camp Bosler Nafziger was sited in a region where winters were mild enough to live year-round in tents. The Luneburgian government had condemned nearly 40 square miles of rural land there for military use, including a village which was left intact. The Commonwealth had compensated the landowners liberally, and leased an additional 440 square miles of adjacent forest.

When the Jerries finished their advanced training, they were sent to Camp Nafziger for twelve weeks of unit training: combat exercises on battalion, regimental-even divisional-scale. These were to be carried out in conjunction with the Indi 3rd Armored Regiment, camped six miles down the Bachelor River. The Luneburgian 4th Infantry Division, camped ten miles upstream, would provide opposition forces in conjunction with its own unit training.

Major General Pyong Pak Singh had arrived by floater several days ahead of his division. He'd spent four days inspecting the camp and its facilities, getting acquainted with the Luneburgian staff in charge of maintenance and other services, being briefed on the military reservation itself, and finally reviewing the training plan with his general staff, and the Masadan commander and staff of the Indi 3rd Armored Regiment.

They were four gray, chilly days, with sporadic, wind-driven showers. His division arrived on the third, fourth, and fifth days, mostly by rail. On the fifth afternoon and evening, Pak inspected each regiment separately in a cold drenching rain.

The Indi 3rd Armored, with its Masadan cadre, had also traveled mostly by rail. He'd inspected them, too, at their own encampment.

The sixth morning had dawned gratefully clear, with a temperature of 45deg., and a predicted high of 63deg.-much warmer than the Jerries had been having at Stenders. At 0815, he started off in an open command car, gloved, jacketed, and capped, with a map book on his lap, and a driver behind the wheel beside him. Pak had developed his trip itinerary in consultation with a Captain Hippe, a Luneburgian engineering officer. Hippe had assigned the driver, and Pak had given the man his itinerary.

As they drove through the encampment, Pak gave his attention to the infantry companies standing in ranks on their mustering grounds. Shortly they'd march to lecture sheds for a two-hour orientation on the Camp Nafziger military reservation-a video lecture with large-scale topographic/vegetation maps and aerial photos. That would be followed by a two-hour talk on unit training, with an upfront caveat that the specifics might be changed.

Just now Nafziger's roads were puddled and muddy, but the car rode an AG cushion at the default height of four inches-enough to buffer it against irregularities in the surface. There was no splashing, and of course no rutting. And at the camp speed limit of 25 mph, even the puddles were little disturbed by the vehicle's air wake. Another main road crossed the one they'd been on, and the driver turned south, passing a cluster of prefab buildings-a regimental headquarters.