He looked at Mark. “Guess even you aces started feelin’ it come down hard. You’re the first ace I ever met didn’t look at me like I was dirt. That or the freak poster-child for the Cause of the Week.”

He put his head close to Mark. “Lot of the boys been giving you some pretty hard looks because you ain’t just a nat, you’re an ace,” he said in a low voice. “Reckon that ain’t news. But you’re right, man. You’re here now, with your ass in the grass. You ain’t even a joker, but you’re layin’ it on the line right along with the rest of us. Guess that makes you okay – in my book, anyway.”

He stood with an audible creaking of joints. “Even if you wouldn’ta lasted five minutes back in the old Brigade. But then, neither would anybody else in this chicken-shit outfit, my sorry ass included. All right, everybody, naptime’s over. Time to saddle up and go.”

As Mark was struggling to raise his pack – he’d just gotten used to the lighter gravity on Takis, that was it – Spoiler sidled up next to him.

“Sucking up to the brass,” he said sotto voce. “Don’t think we don’t notice… nat.”

Mark looked after him as he joined the file tramping off along the paddy dike. It’s so nice to be appreciated, he thought.

The night’s sticky-hot embrace had healed the blisters on her feet. As she moved through her kata her limbs warmed, and the aches of the day’s trudging vanished. Deep in the core of her she could feel Mark’s guilt at taking the easy path, copping out from the pain the day’s exertions had earned.

The weariness stayed with her; her wound-healing ability couldn’t lave the fatigue poisons from her tissues any faster than normal. But she knew how to use the tiredness, softening the hard and angular tae kwon do movements until they were almost t’ai chi-like in their fluidity.

“I thought it was the rightwing types who always said, ’If you want peace, prepare for war,’ babe,” Croyd said. He was lying on the sandbags piled atop his bunker. The storm lanterns he’d set out to draw bugs flanked him, so that he looked like a guardian on a library’s steps in some town whose civic taste ran more to lizards than lions.

“You doubt these people are committed to peaceful means?” Moonchild asked. Her breathing was regular. “When we – when Mark went on patrol today, his squad did not carry weapons.”

Croyd tipped his head up and blew smoke at the low clouds. “Does that mean the New Joker Brigade stands for Peace and Love, or does that mean Sobel doesn’t trust the new boots with guns yet? Some of these boys seem a touch on the psychopathic side, to tell you the truth.”

“They have the passion of the young,” Moonchild declared.

“Yeah. So’d the Khmer Rouge. And speaking of the passionate young, babe, you’re about to acquire an audience.”

A crowd was drifting their way like sand blown across the parade ground. There was no television in Fort Venceremos, the food was fish heads and rice, and beer was strictly rationed – though Croyd always managed to have plenty in his cooler. Game Boys were outlawed, as were foreign magazines other than the Daily Worker, which Mark had never been able to read, and also of course marijuana and other illicit highs. With no Bill of Rights or even Uniform Code of Military justice to inhibit authority, plus a widespread network of informers doing business as good little kiem thao self-criticism group elves, the mini-prohibitions seemed generally successful – so far. The marked lack of downtime diversion beyond kiem thao and study resulted in a whole lot of fights, it seemed to Mark. Maybe he was just unused to military life.

Even the government radio was down, more or less. For some reason it had played nothing but off-key martial music all day. Not even Luce could muster much enthusiasm for it. The boys were attracted to activity like fat juicy bugs to Croyd’s lanterns.

“Hey! Look at that. It’s a babe!’

Catcalls and whistles followed. “Hey, guys, that’s sexist!” Eraserhead’s voice cried, followed a second later by a meaty thump and a “Hey! You hit me!”

“Yeah,” another voice said. “Now pipe down or I’ll tie you in knots, you little narc.”

“How ’bout a date?” somebody else yelled.

“She’s not for the likes of you low-lives,” Croyd said.

“Yeah? What, she goes in for big lizards?”

Moonchild ignored them. She was serene. “What’s she doing?” the joker called Ent asked in his piping voice. “Dancing?”

“Doing kata,” said Studebaker Hawk. He was the kid with fins on his head. “Karate practice.”

“It’s dancing,” scoffed Spoiler, “unless you just want to call it bullshit.”

“No, look at her, Spoiler,” the Hawk urged. “She’s real good.”

“She looks good,” Spoiler said, “but it doesn’t have anything to do with that crap. Hey, honey – I’m talkin’ to you, nat bitch.”

Moonchild ignored him. “Looks like you think you’re too good for us scummy jokers,” Spoiler said. “Maybe you oughta show us if that stuff’s for real.”

She finished her form and stopped. She smoothed back heavy black hair from a face half-obscured by her yin-yang mask. “I do not fight for sport or pleasure.”

Spoiler pulled a long face beneath his air-scoop nose and nodded. “Well, how about self-defense, then?”

The crowd parted. The young German joker the others called Rhino charged Moonchild. He was heavy, but he wasn’t slow, and he had his name for a good reason.

She danced aside, out of his path. A savage hooking blow with the foot-long horn that grew from his face grazed her hip. Instead of lumbering on into the side of Croyd’s bunker, the joker dropped his weight, turned, skidded, stopped facing Moonchild with one fist on the muddy ground, propped like a lineman on one massive arm.

Jesus! Cosmic Traveler shrilled. He’s serious!

The Krauts don’t do joker kid gangs the way we do back in New York, J. J. Flash responded: They got no Killer Geeks or Twisted Sisters. Last German joker to get any sound bite was that twisted little freak who got waxed at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta back in ’86. This boy figures he’s got to show some real fiendish class to keep up.

Moonchild was not used to the sort of kibitzing Mark increasingly had to put up with. She tried to put it from her mind and concentrate on summing up her opponent. He looked as if he massed two hundred kilograms, heavy gray folds of hide hanging on a squat frame. He clearly had meta-human strength, to move that bulk so quickly, and he had to be agile to come so close to tagging Moonchild on his charge. On the other hand, the tiny eyes glaring at her from the blunt-muzzled face seemed to be having trouble focusing on her six meters away, and the joker’s sides were heaving as if he were winded.

Yes. I can run from him, and I can hide from him. A sidestep, a sprint, and I become one with shadow. It was what her strict code called for, flight over fight if at all possible.

Even as Cosmic Traveler weighed in with enthusiastic approval, she knew she couldn’t do it. She had a responsibility to Mark and the others. The new recruits seemed to take her existence as a challenge. Unless she proved herself formidable, they’d just keep trying their luck with her – or with mark, who in his own persona had no ace powers and was far from robust, even for a nat.

I must best him without hurting him, she thought. Beat without humiliating him. No one ever said being an ace would be easy.

“Leave off,” she said. “Are we not comrades?”

The pig eyes flicked right and left, assessing the crowd. No mistake: it wanted blood. “You’re a nat,” he said. “I’m a joker. We fight.”

“Is not that the attitude we are supposed to fight against?”

This time Rhino looked square at Spoiler, who stood at the front of the crowd with his hands on his hips. Glancing that way herself, Moonchild saw that Brew and Luce had arrived as well and were hanging out at the rear. As was the badly disfigured young joker, Eric the dreamer.