And then he forgot about it. He went back to being a busy Army doctor, because an auto bomb killed several U.S. soldiers and wounded two dozen more. He hated auto bombs. They were a coward's weapons. You could be-and, if you had any brains, you were-miles away when your little toy went off. And you could laugh at what it did to the people you didn't like.

Digging jagged chunks of metal out of one soldier after another, O'Doull wasn't laughing. He didn't think the locals would be laughing very long, either, even though they probably were right now. "How many hostages will the authorities take after something like this?" he asked.

"Beats me," Goodson Lord answered. "But they'll shoot every damn one of 'em. You can bet your last nickel on that."

"I know. And that will make some diehard mad enough to build another bomb, and then it just starts up again. Ain't we got fun?" O'Doull said.

"Fun. Yeah," Lord said. "How's this guy doing?"

"We would have lost him in the last war-this kind of belly wound, peritonitis and septicemia would have got him for sure. But with the antibiotics, I think he'll pull through. His colon's more like a semicolon now, but you can live with that."

"Ouch!" Lord said. The pun seemed to distress him more than the bloody work he was assisting with. He'd done the work lots of times. The pun was a fresh displeasure. O'Doull had pulled it on Granny McDougald before, but not on him. I'm getting old, he thought. I'm using the same jokes over and over.

After he'd repaired as best he could the wounded who were brought to him, he took a big slug of medicinal brandy, and poured another for Goodson Lord. He wouldn't have done that during the fighting. No telling then when more casualties were coming in, and he'd wanted to keep his judgment as sharp as he could. Now he could hope he wouldn't have anything more complicated than another dose of clap to worry about for a while.

He lit a cigarette. It was a Niagara, a U.S. brand, and tasted lousy. But the C.S. tobacco firms were out of business-for the moment, anyway. Bad smokes beat no smokes at all.

Puffing on a Niagara made him think of heading north again, out of the USA and back to the country he'd adopted. Living in the Republic of Quebec meant returning to a backwater. Things happened more slowly there. Movies got to Riviиre-du-Loup months, sometimes years, after they were hits in the United States. Most of them were dubbed into French; a few had subtitles.

O'Doull's English would have got even rustier than it had if not for the need to read medical journals and try to keep up with the miracles happening in the USA-and the miracles the USA imported from Germany. Back before the United States fostered Quebecois independence, Canada tried ramming English down the locals' throats. Older people still remembered the language, but not fondly. Younger ones wanted nothing to do with it.

He could live with that if he had to. He had lived with it, for years. You took the bad with the good wherever you went. By now, his college French had picked up enough of the local accent to let people who didn't know him think he was born in La Belle Province himself. Of course, not many people in Riviиre-du-Loup didn't know him. As far as he was concerned, that was part of the good.

"Penny for 'em," Sergeant Lord said.

"Thinking about going home again," O'Doull answered.

"Figured you were," Lord said. "You're right here, but your eyes were a million miles away."

"Better than the thousand-yard stare the poor mudfoots get when they've been through the mill," O'Doull said. Lord nodded. They both knew that look too well.

O'Doull stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. He'd done something useful today, anyhow. If Colonel Tobin had sent him home, it would have been up to Goodson Lord. The guy with the shrapnel might have died then. Granny McDougald could have pulled him through, but O'Doull didn't think Lord was up to it.

But if the Confederates kept a rebellion smoldering for years, was that reason enough for him to stay down here till it finally got stamped out, if it ever did? He shook his head. He'd paid all the dues he felt like paying-more than he'd had to pay. He wasn't so goddamn young any more. He'd had that thought not long before, too. He wanted the rest of his life for himself.

Whether the U.S. Army or the authorities in the Republic wanted him to have it might be a different question. Well, he'd done what he could along those lines. Off in the distance, a train whistle blew. He smiled. If all else failed, he could hop a freight. What did the the soldiers say when you came out with something stupid? And then you wake up-that was it.

Doctor Deserts! Heads for Home in Spite of Orders! He saw the headlines in his mind's eye. Yes, it would be a scandal. It would if they caught him, anyhow. If they didn't, he was home free. The Republic wouldn't extradite him-he was sure of that.

Stop it, he told himself. You'll talk yourself into it, and then you'll really be up the creek.

Seventeen days after he wrote his letter, one with a Quebecois stamp came back. He opened the envelope with a strange mix of apprehension and anticipation. If they said no…But if they said yes…!

And they did! In stilted English, a bureaucrat in Quebec City proclaimed that he was a valuable medical resource, and vitally needed to serve the populace of Riviиre-du-Loup. He grinned from ear to ear. He'd been called a lot of things before, but never valuable, let alone a medical resource. He hurried off to show Colonel Tobin the letter.

J onathan Moss didn't like Houston. It was even hotter and muggier than Georgia and Alabama, and that was saying something. New Orleans was supposed to be just as bad, or maybe worse, but you could have a good time in New Orleans. If you could have a good time in Houston, Moss hadn't found out how.

Defending a man he loathed sure didn't help. Defending a man who might be the biggest murderer in the history of the world made things worse. And defending a man who might be the biggest murderer in the history of the world and didn't seem the least bit sorry about it, who seemed proud of what he'd done, made things much worse.

Defending Canadians who'd fallen afoul of occupation authorities was worth doing. This, on the other hand…Moss wished Major Isidore Goldstein hadn't smashed his stupid motorcar and himself. Then he would be going through the torments of the damned right now. Moss would rather have been flying turbo fighters, even though there was no one to fly them against any more. Would he rather have been sitting on the shelf? Sometimes he thought yes, sometimes no.

Pinkard's trial, and that of guard chief Vern Green, and those of several other guards from Camp Humble and its predecessor farther west, went on in what had been the Confederate District Courthouse in Houston. The exterior was modeled after the Parthenon: all elegant columns. But it was built from cheap concrete, not marble, and it was starting to crumble in Houston's savage weather.

Filling in for Confederate judges were U.S. Army officers. They'd shot down Moss' arguments for getting Jefferson Pinkard off the hook one after another. No, he couldn't claim Pinkard was only acting on orders from Richmond.

"The charge is crimes against humanity," said the chief judge, a craggy brigadier general named Lloyd Meusel. "The defendant is assumed to have been aware that, regardless of orders, it is illegal and criminal to have murdered innocent people in literally carload lots by various ingenious methods and then either burying them in mass graves or burning them so that their passing became a stench in the nostrils of mankind forever."

"Dammit, they weren't all that innocent," Pinkard said-he wouldn't keep his mouth shut, which was something any defendant needed to know how to do. "Plenty of rebels-and they all hated the CSA."