--Ogden Nash

"It's been declared an emergency, official from Earth," Nordsen said over the desktop in the cubbyhole that served as his office in the Lab Section of the Eurussian compound. "Which means that under the rules that everyone out here has contracted to abide by, the Chinese are empowered to take charge. They're the biggest contingent, and they have the most at stake in the operation. If they say they need a metallurgical physicist at Tremil, we're obligated to comply." He paused, eyeing Kerry dubiously. "If it's any consolation, they will recompense us for your time. So look on the plus side. You can think of it as a spell of paid leave. Being paid to get away from this place for a while...."

Yeah, right, Kerry thought to himself. To get sent to a place where everyone just got wiped out and nobody knows why. One of the reasons why he'd signed up to come out to this god-awful swamp of a world that some administrator with either a terminally warped sense of humor or none at all had christened Priscilla had been to get away from home-style bureaucracy's strangulation of rules and procedures.

That Kerry's enthusiasm lay distinctly to the nether side of total must have showed. Nordsen located a pink memorandum denoting Directorate business beneath the litter of paperwork and equipment parts and pushed it across to change the subject. "They want you over there right away to go through the score. The person you need to ask for is a Xiang-Chu Juanita, Office of Security."

"Juanita?"

Nordsen shrugged. "That's what it says."

Kerry picked up the slip and read it. A small detail that Nordsen had omitted to mention was that the only military presence on Priscilla--reinforced several times now with the general heightening of preparedness that had been in evidence as relationships with the Eks deteriorated--was also predominantly Asian and under Chinese command. So not only was their word law for all under an officially declared emergency; they had the means to back it up.

It seemed that Kerry was going to Tremil.

Okay, so their culture went back thousands of years to when Europe was home to barbarian tribes, and they had emerged as a superpower after America balkanized into self-run racial and ethnic enclaves. That made it all the more amusing that, out of the assortment of state, corporate, private, and other interests whose conglomeration of structures and installations made up Langtry "city," they should be the ones whose internal environmental management had goofed. Everyone else had set up strict controls at the locks in the communications tunnels connecting to the Chinese compound. Kerry went across via the surface route, taking one of the GP robobuggies that provided the main means of getting around outside Langtry and in its immediate vicinity.