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alone," I said, reaching over to the dressing table for my pants and struggling to get my bad leg in first.
    "I need something done," the old woman's voice husked in my ear. "Are you fit to travel?"
    Since she could have punched up the latest medical report on me—she'd probably just done so—the question wasn't whether or not I was in peak condition, but whether I thought I could travel on a cane and arrogance, at least for the time being.
    "Yes." Although I wouldn't require the cane. You learn to give up crutches as soon as you can.
    "How soon can you be here?"
    I glanced at my thumbnail and then shrugged before remembering that this was voice-only; when I'm home, I sometimes let myself not pay enough attention to what's going on. It's a luxury. "In case you've forgotten, the Twentieth is only an hour or so out. If it can wait until then, let it. I want to meet the first shuttle."
    My brother's, Ari's, regiment is the Twentieth.
    I once had four brothers. Ari, Shlomo, Kiyoshi, and Benyamin; Ari the baby, Benyamin the oldest.
    The line of dead stretches out past my vision. I can only make out a few of the closer faces, sometimes just my brothers'.
    I see traces of Kiyoshi's face when I look in the mirror. It's not just that we were similar-looking; it's that the blond blandness of our faces is always belied by our Nipponese first names. I never liked Shlomo. I will always remember Benyamin.
    Family Hanavi and clan Bar-El memorialize Shlomo, Kiyoshi, and Benyamin yearly, at the Yarzheit ceremony, along with all the others of the legions of the dead.
    I remember them every day.
    My brother, Ari. . . .
    Fingers clacked on keys in the background. "I'd rather see you now," she decided. "If I send you on this one, your team is leaving in a week, at the outside. You'd be going with Alon to Thellonee. Which doesn't give you long to put a team together."
    If! I thought.
    "If," she answered. She can't read minds—it just seems that way at times. "Pinhas's trust in you to the contrary, I'm not sure it's right for you. It involves your uncle."
    "Your uncle." I had two living uncles. She wasn't talking about the Sergeant.
    "We've gotten a note from him," she went on. "Quote: 'Freiheimers are rivetting their tanks. I know something else of use to you. But I am valuable where I am.' End of quote; and end of message. It was smuggled in via an Orogan trader. I'm having the first part researched, but I can already interpret the second part to mean either that he puts a high price on what he knows, or that he wants you to get him out of whatever mess he's into. Or, more likely, both."
    Probably both. Since he was exiled, Shimon had found that other armies besides ours could make use of his mind, although he had worked only on a consulting basis, and only in wars where Metzada was not involved.
    A very clever man. He knew full well that neither the government, clan, nor the family would tolerate him bucking Metzada.
    Still, the old woman is the second most devious person I know, but maybe she was reading a bit too much into twenty words from the most devious person I know.
    "It can wait." Putting together a team, even quickly, wouldn't be a problem. I'd have Zev as my second, and grab whoever in Section was around. Not a nice bunch of people, but niceness is not an important quality in headsmen.
    "I'll have Levine here in fifteen minutes," she said, as though that ended the matter.
    The old lady's background is Foreign Service, not Section. She's never really understood that chain-of-command doesn't really work when you're usually on your own. The kind of independence of action you get used to in the field tends to stick when you're home.
    Sometimes it tends to push you too far out on a tangent, makes you act too independently. I once had a partner who did that. Once.
    In any case, I wanted to see my brother. It was one thing to read the flash that said he was still alive, that his injuries were minor; it's another to touch, flesh to