“How far back do your ancestral laws command? I have seen Nymphs working as nurses in the infirmary tent, and as drudges in the mess tent. They created your race.”

Soorm bristled uneasily. “It is better not to meddle with them.”

Menelaus said, “I would think that to one of your era, interred in 7466, they would be mythical?”

“They are not soldiers.”

“The Chimerae have a saying: Any warm body that pulls a heat-seeker away from a soldier dies with a soldier’s honor. There are five Nymph women, and four males. I don’t know their names as yet.”

“Yours is a sick and savage race, painting with gold what is basically the unromantic business of man-butchery. Speaking of which, how many Chimerae can you enlist?”

“There are two Chimerae in the camp.”

“Two Chimerae? You miscount. What of yourself?”

“Three.”

“And all the other ones?”

“Joet is a Gamma. The others include an Alpha Lady, two Beta Maidens of the Auxiliary class, and four Kine. Kine and women are noncombatants.”

“Wait. You wish to shield your woman and servants from combat, while you are sending in decorated Nymphs and their dancing boys?”

“Your count is also short. You listed Crile and Gload, but what about the five other Hormagaunts from your period?”

“I don’t know whom you mean.”

“Toil, Drudge, Drench, Prissy Pskov, and Zouave Zhigansk?”

“Ho! They are not Hormagaunts! They are Short-liveds. As their names suggest, two are Burghers. The Pskov Clade and Zhigansk Clade come from different walled cities, have different biochemical recognitions, and are therefore mutually allergic. It would be difficult to compel them into melee. Except against each other.”

“Overcome the difficulty.”

“And the other three are organ donors, who form our slave and livestock class, and therefore cannot be allowed to handle weapons.”

“In my sole capacity as Chief Intelligence Officer of the Academic Division of the Intelligence Command, of the Eugenic General Emergency Command of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the surrounding States, Settlements, and Territories, and acting under the battlefield regulations of the Code of Military Justice as Commander-in-Chief ad hoc and pro tempore, I hereby manumit any and all servile or underling classes, categories, slaves, or indentured servants whose members are willing to fight for our liberty. In the absence of any objection or veto from the Governor, and taking the Advice and Consent of the Senate and the House of Burgesses as granted, the motion passes by acclamation. There! Your slaves are now free men. Let us see if they will fight to stay free.”

“Milk and mush! You have no authority to mulct the Hormagaunts of our donation stock!”

“You may apply to the House of Burgesses for recompense at their next regular session. They have not been convoked for five thousand sixty-seven years, so you may have to find our Imperator-General to call them into session.”

“Bah! This is drollery and japery, not worth the spit required to spit on it. Fine! I will throw the three organ donors into the fray, if you will commit your Alpha and Beta ladies and your Gamma lad and the whole rest of the stupid alphabet of your Chimera-folk.”

“That would bring the tally up to twenty-seven.”

“Who is left?”

“Three very early and three very late.” Menelaus ticked them off on his fingers. “The early-comers include one Servant of the Machine named Glorified Ctesibius from A.D. 2525, from before the Ecpyrosis; a Giant from A.D. 3033; an albino Scholar named Rada Lwa—I don’t know his date, but he is very likely the earliest person here. The later-comers include the male and female gray-skinned blue-haired twins from some race I don’t recognize from A.D. 8866 and the strange-eyed creature from some race I really don’t recognize from A.D. 10100, the last year of the one hundred first century—unless that coffin was marked in binary, and she is from A.D. 20, the first century.”

“Everyone here is strange-eyed compared to me. Which one do you mean?”

“I mean the dark and silent lady who sits in the mess tent and never moves, and all the dogs are afraid of her. Her eyes are modified so that there is no white in them: every part of her eye is black. I think it is multifrequency absorption material. And what looks like a second pair of eyes, maybe infrared or microwave, above that. She has scars on her back. I don’t have her name. And there are two people the Blues are holding I haven’t seen yet. I am hoping one of them is our knight.”

“I can name the gray twins.”

“Really? Just how did you learn their names?”

“I just walked up in the exercise yard and pointed to myself and said Soorm; and they pointed to themselves and said Linder Keir and Linder Keirthlin. Linder Keir is the brother’s name. So either Linder Keirthlin is the sister’s name, or those are the words for I don’t know what you said and Why did your point at yourself? in their language. Just how do you learn their dates?”

“I sat out in the cold talking to a man not named Mickey the Witch of Williamsburg, and I memorized the dates on every coffin I could see.”

“Which one is he?”

“The rotund dark man in the straw hat.”

“The vegetarian.”

“Is he? He must eat a lot of lettuce to maintain that shape.”

“Rice and beans. I can smell it on his breath.”

“I think he and I between us can get the Witches to sign on.”

Soorm spread his webbed claws and looked at his palms meditatively. “Suppose you talk to the Savant, the Scholar, and the Giant. Say they join us. That brings the count up to thirty. Suppose also the Witches join. There are thirty-one of them, which would double our numbers. The men are not odd, but the women hardly look human!”

“I will skirt by the irony of that comment coming from you. The Witch-women look normal. Well, all except the one with freaky hair.”

“They would bring the count to sixty-one,” said Soorm, “Enough to rush the gate and have twenty-one survivor.”

“Our position unfortunately becomes untenable if we have to contend with enemy aerial support. We Chimerae have a standard formula for estimating air-support-induced casualties, depending on the ground cover, rate and precision of antiaircraft measures—”

“Spare me. I apprehend we are better off if they cannot shoot us from the air. And so we wait for a stormy day? This is the worst plan in the history of military endeavor.”

Menelaus said, “I hope to change the minds of my superiors to adopt a different plan. This place here you picked to kill me conveniently looks out upon a back entrance to the Tombs that the Blue Men cannot secure. They are not guarding it, and if we can get in—”

“What is inside? Weapons? Buried valuables? Buried allies? I remind you most people do not recover from thaw for hours or days, because most hibernation is for medical reasons.”

“I was thinking of using the communication equipment to send out an all-band distress signal. Then you open the main doors from the inside, using the words I give you, and we all rush in, close the doors behind us, laugh at the Blue Men outside, and wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For whoever or whatever passes for the local law enforcement of the current era. These Blue Men are pirates. Looters. Everything in the camp bespeaks haste and the need for stealth.”

Soorm shook his head ponderously, an oddly human-seeming gesture, given his monstrous frame. “Why would the Blue Men not simply kill us all the moment the distress call rang out? The fabric they gave out to those of you too foolish to grow proper fur is impregnated with binary chemicals in several phases. An electronic signal could flex the smartmolecules to any number of configurations, including lethal gas or flesh-eating fluid.”

“Strip nude. Or use detergent. Or set up a jamming signal. We have to act in coordination with the other prisoners. Will you help me?”