"We'd have got smoked. Planetary Defense doesn't waste time shitting around with Fleet couriers.

They're busy covering the lifter pipe from the Pits. They don't want to hear from home anyhow." He patted the case chained to his wrist. Odd, I thought, that it should be so huge. Suitcase size.

Big suitcase. "They'll cuss me for two weeks."

I studied the chain. "Damn. I'll have to cut your hand off now."

"That isn't funny." The poor bastards. They get so paranoid they won't turn their backs on their own mothers.

The chain was long. He put the case down and sat on it. He said, "Just open them baby blues and turn yourself a slow circle, Lieutenant."

I did. The plains. The grass. The cowboys, who showed no interest in the boat.

"What do you see?"

"Not a whole lot."

"You've seen it all. Change your plans. Come on home with me."

"There's more to it than this."

"Well, sure. Trees, mountains, some busted-up cities. Big deal. Look, at those bastards. Hunking around on horses. And they're the lucky ones. They don't live in caves. No boomer drops on cows."

"I fought too hard to get here. I'll see it through."

"Fool." He grinned. "Climbers, yet. Here it comes." He pointed. A skimmer wove a sinuous path across the green, a small, dark boat chopping through a breezy sea.

It rumbled up to us, down wash whipping torn grass against our legs. "Still not too late, Lieutenant. Go hide in the boat."

I smiled my holo-hero smile. "Let's go."

It's easy to grin when the fiercest monster in sight is a cow. I'd ridden the killer bulls of Tregorgarth. I was ready fpi anything.

The skimmer driver waved impatiently. "Not the wide-open-spaces type," the courier guessed.

We boarded. Our steed surged forward, arcing past the herd, leaving a long, dull snail track of smashed grass. Cows and cowboys watched with equally indifferent eyes. Our driver had little to say. She was the surly type. You know, "My feelings are hurt just by being here with you."

The subLieutenant stage-whispered, "You're an offworlder, they figure you're a High Command spy.

They hate High Command."

"Can't blame them." Canaan had been under soft blockade for years. It made life difficult.

Back when, the other side hadn't thought Canaan worth occupation. Big mistake. It was a tough nut now. The senior officer in the region, Admiral Tannian, had assembled scattered, defeated, ragtag units for a dramatic last stand. The Ulantonids disappointed him. So he dug in and began gnawing on their supply lines. Now they are too heavily committed elsewhere to give him the squashing he wanted.

Great stuff, Fortress Canaan, High Command decided. They sent Tannian the first Climber squadron into service. He saw their potential instantly. He created his own industrial base.

You couldn't question the Admiral's energy, dedication, or tenacity. Canaan, an agricultural world sparsely settled, overnight became a feisty fortress and shipbuilding center. A loose frontier society became a tight warfare state with a solitary purpose: the construction and manning of Climbers. All Tannian demanded of the Inner Worlds was a trickle of trained personnel to cadre his locally raised legions. A bargain. High Command gladly obliged. To the sorrow of many ranking officers with ambitions or personal axes to grind.

Admiral Frederick Minh-Tannian became proconsul of Canaan's system and absolute master of humanity's last bastion in this end of space. Down the line, on the Inner Worlds, he was considered one of the great heroes of the war.

It was an hour's run to the nearest Guards' outpost. The place fit the Wild West image. Adobe walls surrounded scores of hump-backed bunkers. Most of those boasted obsolete but effective detection antennae. There were barracks for several hundred soldiers, and a dozen armed floaters.

My companion said, "I usually put down here. One company. It patrols more area than France on Old Earth. Six regular soldiers. The Captain, a Lieutenant, and four sergeants. The rest are locals.

Serve three months a year and chase cows the rest. Or dig turnips. They bring their families if they have them."

"I was wondering about the kids." It was the most unmilitary installation I'd ever seen. Looked like a way station three years into a Volkerwanderung. It would've given Marine sergeants apoplexy.

The Captain wasted little time on us. He spoke with the courier briefly. The courier opened that huge case and passed over a kilo canister. The Captain handed him some greasy Conmarks. They were old bills, pre-war pink instead of today's lilac gray. The courier shoved them inside his tunic, grinned at me, and went outside.

"Coffee," he explained. And, "A man has to make hay while the sun shines. A local proverb."

My glimpse inside the case had shown me maybe forty more canisters.

It was an old, old game with Fleet couriers. The brass knew about it. Only their pets received courier assignment. Sometimes there were kickbacks. My companion didn't look like a man whose business was that big.

"I see."

"Sometimes tobacco, too. They don't raise it here. And chocolate, when I can make the contacts back home."

"You should've loaded the boat." I didn't resent his running luxuries. Guess I'm a laissez-faire capitalist at heart.

He grinned. "I did. Can't deal with the Captain, though. After a while one of the sergeants will notice that nobody has patrolled that part of the plain lately. He'll make the sweep himself, just to keep his hand in. And I'll find a bale of Con-marks when I get back." He hoisted his case.

"This's for special people. I sell it practically at cost."

"Conmarks ought to be drying up out here."

"They're getting harder to come by. I'm not the only courier on the Canaan run." He brightened.

"But, shit. There had to be billions floating around before the war. It'll come out. Just got to keep refusing military scrip."

"I wish you luck, my friend." I was thinking of a few items in my own luggage, meant to sweeten the contacts I hoped to make.

The subLieutenant kicked a floater. "Looks as good as any of them. Throw your stuff in and let's go."

We had to cross two-thirds of a continent. A quarter of the way round Canaan's southern hemisphere. I slept twice. We stopped for fuel several times. The subLieutenant kept the floater screaming all the time he was at the controls. My turns, I kept it down to a sedate 250 kph.

He wakened me once to show me a city. "They called it Mecklenburg. After some city on Old Earth.

Population a hundred thousand. Biggest town for a thousand klicks."

Mecklenburg lay in ruins. Threads of campfire smoke drifted up. "Old folks with deep roots, I guess. They wouldn't pull out. They're safe now. Nothing left to blast." He kicked the floater into motion.

Later, he asked, "What's the name of that town where you want off?"

"Kent."

He punched up something on the floater's little info screen. "It's still there. Must not be much."

"I don't know. Never been there."

"Well, it can't be shit, that close to T-ville and still standing. Hell, you'd think they'd take it out just for spite."

"The way our boys do?"

"I guess." He sounded sour. "This war is a big pain in the ass."

That was the one time I didn't like my companion. He didn't say that the way the grunts and spikes do. He was pissed because the war had disturbed his social life.

I said nothing. The attitude is common among those who see little or no combat. He viewed the brush coming in as part of a gentleman's game, a passage of arms in a knight's spring jousts.

We roared into Kent in midaftemoon. Kent was a sleepy village that might have been teleported whole from Old Earth's past. A few scruffy Guards represented the present. They looked like locals combining military responsibilities with their normal routine.