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had a lot of heavily armed people who were eager to make her acquaintance. If she wasn’t careful, some people might not survive the experience.
    Most definitely, Kris did not want to be on the list of those who didn’t see sunset tonight.
    The dirt road they’d been hiking led them straight through what looked like dry rice paddies. Kris had never seen potatoes growing, but she guessed the low, leafy, green plants now spreading over the paddies were what potatoes pushed up above ground.
    Sergeant Bruce’s computer had spun off a nano eye. It now drifted about two thousand meters above his location; Kris studied its feed. Lieutenant Stubben had deployed first platoon along a paddy dike on either side of the road. As elements of second platoon arrived, Stubben sideslipped his troops to the left of the road, concentrating second to the right.
    “It looks good,” Kris told Jack, “but I would prefer us farther forward. Didn’t Mr. Annam say they were eating a lot of potatoes?”
    Kris looked over her shoulder; the couple were keeping up with them. Of course, Jack had shortened his usual long strides to accommodate Kris’s slower, cane-assisted pace. Now, both of the locals nodded vigorously at Kris’s remark.
    Jack must have been getting the same overhead feed as Kris. “There’s a newly mown field about a klick farther out. If we deploy carefully along the last paddy dike, all those other trampling feet ought to stay in the stubble.”
    “We were going to replant those barley fields today,” Annam said. “I guess we can wait until tomorrow.”
    Jack started issuing orders to his Marines.
    Kris found herself negotiating with her computer . . . and Nelly’s kids. “Nelly, Chesty’s eye spy nano has done good. Could you spin off a couple more from Penny and Jack’s computers to cover the road all the way back to town?”
    Penny and Jack didn’t raise any problems with that.
    Nelly mulled it over for several nano moments. “Both Mimzy and Sal still have uncommitted matrix and Smart Metal™ they can spare. I’ll ask them to generate one remote each. Aren’t you glad now, Kris, that I ordered more material than just the minimum for nine new computers.”
    Kris tried not to sigh. “I am now, Nelly, but as we have talked about before, I want to preapprove your spending such a large wad of my money in the future.”
    “But you never would have approved money for my kids.” Nelly didn’t quite whine. Not quite. “Don’t you often say that it is easier to get forgiveness than get permission?”
    “Nelly, you’ve picked up bad habits hanging around Kris,” Penny put in. “You’ve got to learn to do what she says, not what she does.”
    “When pigs can fly,” Nelly suggested.
    Kris decided her response could wait for a less busy day. “Longboat crew,” she said on net.
    “Yes, ma’am, we’re still here. Still working. We need more time,” came in a rush.
    “I expect you will,” Kris said dryly. “Could you have a couple of dozen bags of famine biscuits brought up here?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am.”
    “That’s a seriously worried fellow,” Penny said.
    “If they hadn’t been so eager to take on reaction mass, they wouldn’t be in this mess,” Kris said with a sigh. “Being too eager to please can be more trouble than . . .” Suddenly Kris thought better of finishing that sentence.
    “Than getting a little lip, huh, Your Princessship?” Nelly finished.
    “Doesn’t look like there are any more trucks coming out from town,” Jack said, changing the topic. “You have a problem with transportation, Mr. Annam?”
    “When something breaks, there are no spare parts. And then there is the matter of food. You can either eat or make biofuel,” the farmer said. “We used to eat the barley and feed the chaff to the fuel vats. Now the potato crop is all going for food. There’s nothing to drink except the vat alcohol. Some people really need a drink.”
    “So what we see is