The citizens of West Gotha valued whatever time they could steal from the grind of work and fightning, to pursue love or pleasure. Behind the thick blackout curtains of a luxurious industrial executive suite, such a drama played itself out tonight. The hereditary executive of one of West Gotha's top wartime industries, a beautiful young baroness, had been working alone at her huge desk. As the evening wore on, she often stopped to chew her stylus and look up at the clock. She was expecting someone, and he was late. Or was he coming at all? She put her stylus down, closed her laptop, and rose. Sensually fingering her delicate wrist in its lace ruffle, she strode across the marble floor to the wet bar. There, she poured two crystal glasses of a premium sec champagne from a bottle leaning in an ice bucket draped with linen hand towels. She loosened the kerchief around her neck, and fluffed her blouse open a button or two. Holding one of the glasses, she sauntered over to the entertainment bar and twisted a few knobs. The room filled with the seductive rhythms of recorded big band music. The atmosphere dimmed a bit she switched off the working lights. The ambience in the room, already seductive with her light perfume, turned amber, at the edges verging on rouge.

The tall double doors opened at the other end of the hall, and a man stood in the high rectangle of light. She clutched her bare neck, fearing for a moment that the servants had intruded at a compromising moment. "Alton!" she said, recognizing Captain Hedrock's handsome features despite the shadows. He had to be the most charming, reckless man she'd ever known, but she would throw her sizeable share of West Gotha's wealth at his feet if must be. He closed the doors, locked them, and strode confidently toward her, taking off his jacket and tie. He wore the uniform of an officer in the West Gotha Guards, but she knew he worked for East Gotha. Her hope was to turn him--to help her overturn both wartime governments and restore peace to a newly unified city that ruled the world. As he approached, he grinned in his seductive, irresponsible manner and opened his arms to take her. They flew together, kissing hard in an embrace that could not be enough. They refilled the champagne glasses and toasted each other. Outside, in a grim and different reality, bombs fell on the city's force shields and exploded with deafening echoes. Inside the muffled executive suite, there was only sinuous Latin dance music and the sound of their laughter and heels as he spun her around on the marble floor. Only gradually did she notice the lipstick on his shirt, and smell the other woman about him--and thus another kind of war was about to begin.

As Tonsonby came to the end of the dizzying walkway above West Gotha City, the first tendrils of daylight streaked the horizon from black to gray. Glad to get back into shelter, he entered the far half of the administration building.

He entered a wood-paneled lobby where uniformed figures with hard mouths and suspiciously swiveling glances stood smoking and exchanging conspiracies. Up Tonsonby went, two steps at a time on a wood staircase with blood-red carpet runners. He dodged between streamlined staff officers, and one-armed or one-legged infantry officers retired to administrative duties.

Hugging his tan leather briefcase under one arm, and holding his cap in his teeth while he pulled his black gloves off, Tonsonby came to the third floor. As he hurried along the mezzanines overlooking the grand hall. The passages up here seemed claustrophobic and overpopulated. They smelled of paper and ink, of wet coats and soggy leather boots, of harsh coffee and thick cigarette smoke that cast a pall resembling that of the battlefield. Tonsonby had both arms and legs intact, a fact of which he was exquisitely aware in this retirement farm of blinded, limping, amputated combat veterans. Tonsonby, however, was not a paper pusher. He was an important cog in the Strategic Information Group (SIG), a central intelligence service attached directly to the Leader's offices. He was also a distant Moss cousin, which explained much to anyone who cared or dared to ask.

As he hurried into the increasingly plush, quiet, and sparsely populated mahogany row area, male and female desk clerks rose and snapped to attention like a series of dominoes rising rather than falling, and each held a telephone receiver to one ear to announce his arrival. For that reason, the double padded doors of Chancellor Moss' office suite seemed to swing open without need of a knock.

"Come in!" said the round-faced man in brown suit. He had a harp of thin black hairs combed meticulously over a round skull gleaming like aged cheese in yellow wax. "Just in time." He offered a cigar from a silver etui, but Tonsonby politely refused. This was Leader Moss, a grandson of the Original Leader. Leader Moss did not look happy as he stuck the huge brown rod in his thin mouth. Immediately an aide snapped forth with a lighter.

"Did you bring the device?" Leader Moss said as he puffed on the cigar, and dry acrid smoke filled the air. Dawn was breaking, and its harsh light etched itself on the already harsh figures of Leader Moss. The office was wide, with oriental carpeting and rich antique furniture. The windows were framed in dark wood, and part of an edge-down orange-slice effect running across six irregularly shaped double panes of heavy glass. From here, Leader Moss had a panoramic view. The city, with its domes and rectangles under gunmetal-gray roofs, glowered under charcoal clouds that looked smokier than Leader Moss's cigar smoke.

"Bring in the detector dock," Leader Moss ordered. Three corpsmen in drab fatigues wheeled the refrigerator-sized electronic unit across the thickly piled carpets. Moss asked Tonsonby: "Is the latest upgrade fully functional?"

"Yes, Leader." Tonsonby addressed his cousin in the prescribed manner.

Laying the briefcase open on the glass-topped desk by the window, Tonsonby donned clean white gloves. He extracted a flat, rectangular container of creamy factory porcelain from the briefcase. Opening this, he carefully removed from its padding a wide green circuit board etched with myriad gleaming silver patterns. Gingerly, he lifted this into the cold gray light so that its silver lines glowed like molten, flowing chrome. Tonsonby wondered if the day would become any brighter than this as morning wore on. The dozen or so orderlies in the room, hovering in the shadows until bidden to light a cigar or fetch a brandy, let out a barely audible gasp. Tonsonby stepped up to the tall, rectangular electronics closet and offered the circuit board to a wide mouth-slot. He heard whirring inside the unit, and felt the circuit board pulled away from his fingers and into the maw of the machine. It would travel on rails through a sort of digestive system until it came to rest in the unit's functioning core brain area. The newly added component would raise the unit's artificial intelligence by several exponential factors.

"Readings are normal," said a technician nearby after a moment of silence.

"Good," Moss said. "Now we wait. Brandy?"

It was too early in the morning, but Tonsonby nodded. Nervously licking his lips, and feeling his hands suddenly cold and trembling, he stepped beside Leader Moss. Brandies arrived (smooth, sweet, tangy, nutty--not the cheap, harsh fluid of average little citizens).

Out in the distance, a rocket nose cone stood out like a needle above a forest of supporting gear. Gantries hemmed it in on either side, and many lights glared with a harsh bluish-white intensity almost like arc welders. Tonsonby saw the first major sign of activity before launch: a vast white cloud of steam grew over the launch area, so that only the nose cone and a few bluish-harsh lights were visible anymore.

"Launch time is minus 35 minutes and the clock is running," a female technician's crisp voice announced in the office where Tonsonby and Leader Moss stood looking out over the city.

"Patch into the tower chatter for us," Leader Moss commanded with quiet authority. A minute later, there was a constant chain of quiet, efficient conversation as the launch engineers talked among each other and the final countdown sequences began.

Tonsonby stole a glance sidelong at his cousin. The older Moss had a veiled, unreadable look as he smoked quietly and regarded the city with slightly red, smoke-rasped eyes. Far off in the distance, past a faintly shimmering force field, Tonsonby could see mountains in East Gotha, in enemy territory. Far away, when the clouds shifted, one could see the defensive domes and turrets of the massive fortress that was the equal and the deadly enemy of Tonsonby's motherland.

The nose cone atop the rocket contained sixteen MIRVed antimatter warheads, each with the ability to dig a crater a mile deep--and one would impact the central headquarters of East Gotha within the hour--hopefully ending the generations-long war of the sister states once and for all, with total defeat for the Eastern upstarts, and a great victory for the glorious West.

The two spies sat in a van. Parked on a promontory, overlooking West Gotha, was Captain Alton Hedrock of the East Gotha National Information Processing Agency (NIPO). Hedrock was the quintessential tall, dark, and handsome lady killer with a small mustached pressed hard on the rim of his upper lip. With him sat the West Gotha professor of computer information systems he had seduced into becoming a fellow spy--his boss in the West Gotha Special Projects Branch (SPB), Dr. Moira. They sat silently sipping lukewarm coffee that filled the van's dingy cab with a wood-like aroma of artificial cream, too much sugar, and too-thin brew of chicory with a sprinkle of real coffee. Rain pattered on the roof and echoed in the van's half-empty interior. Moira had one cold, trembling hand on his thigh. He considered pushing her hand away, but calculated that she needed reassurance more than she needed warmth.

"How could I let you lead me to betray my fatherland?"

He was absorbed in the distant view of the West Gotha launch port, and almost did not hear his lover speak.

"You're a cool one," Moira said.

He gently patted her icy hand, which gripped his knee, and smiled at her. He was fond of her, well enough, though his duty always came first and she was expendable like any other attractive woman he seduced in the line of work. He raised a pair of small, strong binoculars and scanned the city for reference points only he recognized. Moira had helped calculate the triangulation of three seemingly innocuous microwave patterns that would intersect at a dumb, blind transponder hidden in a tower among the many towers near the launch gantry.

"Let's talk a little about the purpose of today's launch," Leader Moss murmured softly, so only Major Tonsonby could hear. Moss put an arm around Tonsonby's shoulder, and guided him out of earshot. They stood by the cold, frosty window glass overlooking tawdry streets with dim neon cheer below. Cars and ant-like citizens pushed through the drizzle and vapor on the dark streets. The very street lights were still lit, though it was midmorning. "Good day for a launch," Moss said with a tight little grin. He clapped Tonsonby on the shoulder a last time, then sat on the window sill in a pensive mode as if he had much to say. An orderly tiptoed near to refill their brandies. After the quick dip here, there, of the bottle, Moss waved him away. Moss said to Tonsonby: "I'm afraid I have disturbing news for you."

"I was afraid you might, Leader."

Moss shrugged disarmingly, though his eyes had a dangerous light that contradicted his words. "Nothing to fear. I have it all under control."

"What, Leader?" Tonsonby's gut wrenched. He thought sickeningly of his wife, his two little children, his safe and comfortable existence ... how easily it could all fall away into an abyss. The thought of losing it all suddenly loomed terrifyingly--perhaps even spending the rest of his life in a dungeon somewhere, with his family told he'd died in a plane crash while on duty or some such nonsense.

Moss took a quiet breath, utterly in charge of himself and the world around them, and said: "I'm afraid we have learned that your subordinate Dr. Moira is working for the other side."

"No." Tonsonby felt horrified as his world started to melt around him like candle wax.

"I told you not to worry," Moss said. He gave Tonsonby another cold, domineering, but somehow vaguely reassuring clap on the shoulder. "Drink your brandy. You look as if you need it."

Tonsonby obeyed, shooting the burning sweet liquid down his throat. He almost choked, fearing it was a trick and they'd put something in there to corrode his insides and make him collapse of a faux heart attack. He regarded Moss with utter terror, like a drowning man looking up at someone coldly amused by his plight. But the feeling passed. The brandy was good and warm. Moss wasn't amused by his terror but apparently pleased to have outwitted the other side. Every such victory gave off a rewarding glow, since such triumphs were few and far between in this endless, nerve-wracking war to the death between two alienated super-states that dominated the entire Earth between them.

"The launch isn't going to happen," Moss said quietly.

"It isn't?"

Moss nodded. "Think about it. They have a new technology for stopping our launches dead. If we were to actually send up nukes today, they'd blow them up over our heads. No, my dear fellow, we're after a different brace of game today. We'll reserve the antimatter bombs for another day. Today it's all a show of pyrotechnics, while my agents swoop in and clean up the nest of spies you've been brooding like a hen in your shop over there."

Tonsonby stumbled back and clicked to attention. "Leader, I beg your forgiveness."

"Stop making a scene," Moss growled through gritted teeth. "Play it straight, you dunderhead. We don't want these boys to understand that something is afoot."

"Of course, Leader." Tonsonby was still sweating, and trembling, but he pulled himself together as best he could.

"Ten seconds to launch," said a controller's voice far away at the rocketdrome, echoing in Moss's office public address system.

"Ten seconds to launch," said a controller's voice far away at the rocketdrome, echoing faintly over the eavesdropping radio in Hedrock's van.

"Oh my God," Moira said, "what have I done to my fatherland?"

"Relax and enjoy the show," Hedrock said, giving her his seductive, boyish smile. "You are helping me save the world. There must be one Gotha under a new leadership, not East or West, not Moss nor Gruen."