His computer started making small purring noises. He suspected he knew what that was: Sorviss’ coding at war against the measures the government had set up to keep unwelcome visitors out of the archive. If humans had learned more about computers than Sorviss thought, Sam might be in live steam, not just hot water.

For a second, the screen started to go dark. He cursed-softly, so Barbara wouldn’t notice. But then it cleared. ENTRY AUTHORIZED, it read. PROCEED. Proceed he did. As he read, his eyes got wider and wider. He finished, then left the archive at once. For good measure, he turned off the computer, too.

“Jesus!” he said, shaken as he hadn’t been since watching a teammate get beaned. “What the hell do I do now?”

The first thing Nesseref did when she got up in the morning was check her computer monitor. That was the first thing she did any morning, of course, to see what the news was and what electronic messages had come in during the night. But she had a more urgent reason for checking it today: she wanted to find out what the fallout level was, to see if she could safely leave her block of flats.

She let out an unhappy hiss. It was very radioactive out there this morning. Were it not for the filters and scrubbers newly installed in the heating and air purification systems, it would have been very radioactive inside the apartment, too. The Deutsche were taking quite a pounding. In the abstract, Nesseref didn’t mind that at all. But the prevailing winds on Tosev 3 blew from west to east. They brought the radioactive ashes from the Reich ’s funeral pyre straight into Poland.

And the Deutsche had also managed to detonate several explosive-metal bombs of their own inside Poland. Those only made the fallout level worse. They’d also done a lot of damage to Tosevite centers and to those of the Race in this subregion.

Lodz had gone up in a hideous, beautiful cloud. Nesseref wondered if the Big Ugly called Mordechai Anielewicz remained among the living. She hoped so. She also wished his youngest hatchling well-she’d met young Heinrich, after all, and heard about his beffel. Her concern for the rest of Anielewicz’s family was considerably more abstract. They mattered to her not for their own sakes but because her friend would be concerned if anything happened to them.

Orbit came up and turned an eye turret toward the screen, as if the tsiongi were examining the fallout levels, too. His other eye turret swung toward Nesseref. When she made no move to take him outside for a walk, he let out a dismayed hiss of his own. No matter how he looked at the monitor, he couldn’t understand what the numbers displayed on it meant.

Unfortunately, Nesseref could. “We cannot go walking today,” she said, and scratched him between the eye turrets. She’d said that so often lately, Orbit was starting to know what it meant. This time, the look he gave her was halfway between dismayed and speculative, as if he was wondering whether biting her on the tail-stump might get her to change her mind. She waggled a forefinger at him. “Do not even think about it. I am the mistress. You are the pet. Remember your place in the hierarchy.”

Orbit hissed again, as if to remind her that, while inferiors were bound to respect superiors, superiors had responsibilities to inferiors. One of her responsibilities was taking the tsiongi for a walk whenever she could. She’d never been home and still failed to take him out for such a longtime. As far as he could see, she was falling down on the job.

The trouble was, Orbit couldn’t see far enough. “Suppose I feed you?” Nesseref told him. “Will that make you happier?”

He wasn’t smart enough to understand what she’d said, but he followed her out of the bedchamber and into the kitchen. When she pulled a tin of food from the shelf reserved for him, his tail lashed up and down, slapping the floor again and again. He knew what that meant.

She opened the tin. The food plopped into his dish. He started eating, then paused and turned an eye turret toward her. “I know,” she said. “It is not just what you would get back on Home. It is made from the flesh of Tosevite animals, and it probably tastes funny to you. But it is what I have. You can eat it, or you can go hungry. Those are your only choices. I cannot give you what I do not have.”

Orbit kept on giving her that reproachful stare, but he kept on eating, too: he kept on eating till the bowl was empty. Nesseref knew the food was nutritionally adequate for tsiongyu; the label on the tin assured her of that. But Orbit hadn’t evolved eating the beasts from which the food was made. Animals were even more conservative than males and females of the Race. If something was unfamiliar to them, they were inclined to reject it.

Nesseref heated a slice of smoked and salted pork for herself. She found ham and bacon quite tasty, even if they weren’t salty enough to suit her. After she’d eaten, she went back into the bedroom and ordered an exercise wheel for Orbit. It would take up a lot of space in the apartment, but it would also go a long way toward keeping the tsiongi healthy and happy.

When she entered her name and location, a signal flashed onto the screen. Due to the present unfortunate emergency, it read, delivery of the ordered item is subject to indefinite delay.

“Oh, go break an egg!” she snarled at the monitor. If only she could get out of her apartment, she could walk to the pet shop where she’d bought Orbit, buy an exercise wheel, and carry it back. But if she could walk to the pet shop, she could walk Orbit, too, and then she wouldn’t need the wheel.

Your account will not be debited until the ordered item is delivered, the computer told her. Thank you for your patience and cooperation during the present unfortunate emergency.

“It is not an emergency,” she said. “It is a war.” She knew a war when she got stuck almost in the middle of one. She’d never expected to do that, not when she’d gone into cold sleep in orbit around Home. Everything about Tosev 3 had turned out to be different from what she’d expected.

She went over to the window and looked out to the streets that were so silently, so invisibly, dangerous. Far fewer motorcars and other vehicles moved in them than they usually held. The ones that did move had all their windows rolled up. Some of them, she knew, boasted air-filtration systems of their own. Even so, she was glad to be inside here.

At the moment, she couldn’t launch out of the local shuttle-craft port even had she wanted to. Deutsch aircraft had pounded the site, doing their best to smash up all of the once-smooth landing surface. Repair efforts were supposed to be under way, but the radioactivity had inhibited them, and airfields had higher priority because more supplies and reinforcements went through them than through shuttlecraft ports, and there was generally too much to do and not enough with which to do it.

She was still peering out the window when a convoy of ambulances came racing into the new town from out of the west. Warning lights flickered atop them. Even through the double-paned insulated window, their alarm hisses hammered Nesseref’s hearing diaphragms. They sped on toward the hospital a few blocks away. She marveled that the hospital hadn’t been overwhelmed; war produced injuries on a scale she’d never imagined till now.

Orbit came up and stood on his hind legs, leaning his forepaws on the glass so he could get his head up high enough to see out. Nesseref scratched him on the muzzle; he shot out his tongue and licked her hand. She wondered what he made of the view, and thought he’d come over mostly because he wanted companionship: like befflem, tsiongyu paid more attention to scent than to sight.

Other alarms began to hiss. A voice from the computer monitor shouted stridently: “Air raid! Take cover! Deutsch air raid! Take cover at once!”