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having live human beings do all this!
    "I'd never've et in here if it weren't on the station's ticket," Patsy confessed in a whisper during a lull in the service. "Or unless a date was really tryin' to impress me. More relaxin' with another female—you kin concentrate on the food without insultin' 'em."
    "If this weren't complimentary, I wouldn't be here now, either."
    They grinned at each other.
    "Well, thank you fer invitin' me," Patsy said. "I woulda thought you might invite that med-tech you were talkin' to last night."
    "Please, I'm looking forward to this meal. I won't be able to eat if I remember him. Have you heard some of his anecdotes?"
    "All of 'em," Patsy said, nodding solemnly. "You've a point thar, ma'am. Chaundra's a nice enough feller, but his stomach's a mite too strong fer me."
    "Besides, you and I have similar taste in music. You can always talk to someone who likes the same music."
    Talk they did, touching on everything from Geranian folk ballads to eighteenth-century Earth composers, eventually matching the personnel of the station to various types of music.
    "Simeon? Straight honky-tonk, no question," Channa said firmly.
    Patsy laughed. "Oh, c'mon, Channa, there's unplumbed depths there. He's not that simple. It's just that the minin' center assignment came at an impressionable age fer him. Rough, tough rockjack, you know.
    His public image."
    "Well." She looked down at the menu. It provided motion holos of the dishes as she ran her finger down the page. "I'll start with these grumawns, first, in the fiery sauce. Cleardrop soup. Grilled rack of jumbuk from Mother Hutton's World—good grief, they do have everything here!—baby carrots, salad. Spun pastry bluet confection for dessert, with Port Royal coffee. Castiliari brandy."
    "Sounds good. I'll go with the jumbuk too, but . . . hmm. Fennel-leek soup first. Wine?"
    "I don't usually—" Channa began.
    "If I might suggest?" Mart'an appeared at their table. Appeared, Channa thought, as if he'd blinked out of some hypothetical subspace. "The Mon'rach '97 to begin with, a half-bottle. Then, with the main course, a Hosborg estate-bottled '85. I'll open it now so it can breathe."
    "Sure," Channa said, then sighed with pleasure. "You know, I was looking forward to the Perimeter, ever since they told me SSS-900 would be—"
    "SSS-900- C , now, Ms. Hap."
    Channa blushed. "—would be my next assignment."
    The first course arrived. The pink grumawns were coiled steaming on top of a bed of fragrant saffron rice, the sauce to one side. Channa took a sip of the wine, chilled and with a faint scent of violets, then lifted one grumawn on the end of a two-tined fork.
    "I did do a lot of work today," she murmured to herself. She opened her mouth, and—

    * * *
The Confederate armor was grinding through the woods and fields north of Indianapolis. The burning city cast a pall of smoke into the sky behind them. Diesel engines pig-grunted as the smooth low-slung shapes of the tanks and tank-destroyers crashed through brush and twelve-foot high cornstalks, past the flaming shards of a farmhouse and barns. The long 90mm barrels of the tank guns swung toward the thin strung-out lines of the Union convoys, caught in the flank as they attempted to switch front. The fighting vehicles surged back on their tracks at each monster crack of high-velocity cannon fire, and the air filled with the bitter scent of cordite. Chaos spread through the blue ranks as tracer and cannon fire sent trucks exploding into globes of magenta fire. A Northern tank dissolved, the turret flipping up like a frying-pan, a hundred meters into the air.
    Behind the fighting vehicles, long lines of men in gray uniforms followed, advancing with their semiautomatic rifles carried at the port. Here and there an officer carried a sword, or the Stars and Bars fluttered from a staff.
    "Now!" General Fitzroy Anson-Hugh Beauregard III said into the bulky mike hung from his vehicle helmet.
    His command tank was a