Finally, the flow of returning Tesseran soldiers ended. They were followed almost immediately by a new group of troops, jogging smartly and holding weapons.

  Riffle spoke to his men. “Those are allies of ours. Please don’t kill any of them.”

  A few minutes later, Riffle ordered his men to stand up, shouldering their weapons. For the first time, the Tesserans were able to see how very small was the army that had so terrified them. But it was too late to change their minds about surrendering. Laz imagined he could see some Tesserans considering it, but the allied soldiers coming out of Central Time quickly had them back down on their bellies.

  It took a couple of hours to march all the Tesseran prisoners back through the Portal to Central Time. Then they drove all the vehicles through to Central Time. When the wounded and dead had been loaded into ambulances and trucks and carried back to Central Time, a higher-ranked officer than Riffle took charge of sending squads deeper into Tessera to find enemy commanders who had fled. Laz could hear an official of the criminal government that had launched the attack, demand that if the Central Time soldiers didn’t withdraw immediately from Tessera’s territory, an even bloodier battle would ensue.

  Riffle smiled a little when the Central Time leaders listened to the demands. He nodded solemnly when the Central Time negotiators pulled out their sidearms and shot all the complainers.

  Laz was stunned. He looked at Ivy, who was staring at the ground. This is a war crime, thought Laz. Shooting a negotiating party? Killing prisoners after they surrendered?

  But no. There was a ceasefire on the basis of an unconditional surrender. But the Tesserans were making demands as if it were a negotiation between equals. In effect, they were rescinding their surrender, and therefore they were still combatants, not prisoners at all. No war crime at all.

  Laz still didn’t feel good about it, even if it was technically justifiable.

  An ambulance driver called out, quite loudly, “We’d rather carry living, cooperating human beings back to the capital.”

  Immediately the negotiations resumed with the surviving Tesserans, who agreed that their surrender was unconditional and they would all obey orders from Central Time.

  A hoverjeep came skittering across the field, right toward where Laz and Ivy stood. Laz wasn’t surprised when it was Ron who stepped out. “You played your part very well,” said Ron to Ivy. To Laz, he said, “Nobody authorized you to start the battle, but if you had to go freelance, the tactic of achieving complete surprise and throwing the enemy into a panic—that was brilliantly done.”

  “It was Lieutenant Colonel Riffle’s plan entirely,” said Laz. “And Ivy was the one who figured out how to create the ends of Portals at a distance.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Ron. “You did absolutely nothing to promote this victory.”

  Laz conceded the point, and Ron went on with his duties.

  Ron spoke to Laz and Ivy again a little later in the day. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were planning?” said Ron. “I could have given you more troops.”

  “More troops couldn’t have achieved the same level of surprise,” said Laz. “And it was Lieutenant Colonel Riffle, not me, who deployed the men.”

  Ivy said, “Didn’t it work well enough with the numbers we had?”

  “Miraculously,” said Ron. “Do you always trust to pure luck like that?”

  “Riffle’s men were superbly trained and disciplined. I didn’t see any errors at all, in command or in execution.”

  Ron chuckled. “So now you two are military experts.”

  “We always were,” said Laz. “You never gave us any soldiers to train or command. But these guys, they were great. Followed orders perfectly. Outstanding sharpshooting. Good knife work, too.”

  “Considering no war has been fought on this scale in more than twenty years, they fought better than I could have hoped,” said Ron.

  Ivy said, a little emotionally, “I think most of the Tesseran soldiers were decent enough guys. They must’ve hated what their advance troops had done in Central Time, and they wanted to be out of this war. That’s why our guys had only five casualties, and none killed. The Tesserans dropped out and surrendered as soon as they could.”

  “Possibly true,” said Ron. “I could see during negotiations over the past couple of years that, while their leaders blustered and threatened, ordinary Tesserans were not enthusiastic over a war to be fought across the Portal.”

  “So why did they do it?” asked Ivy.

  “When you’re planning a war,” said Laz, “the most belligerent officers are likely to prevail, and the others will go along—until it’s clear that the plan has failed and now they have to save all the soldiers that they can.”

  “Who taught you that?” asked Ivy.

  “My own brain,” said Laz, “because I’m not an idiot and I paid attention when I was reading history.”

  “Not an idiot,” echoed Ivy. “Who could have guessed it?”

  Ron shook their hands. “We lost hundreds of civilians in the initial attack, including the entire student population of an elementary school. But in your flanking attack, your surprise attack, you lost no lives at all, and cost them at least a thousand dead and tens of thousands of prisoners.”

  “What will you do with the prisoners?” asked Ivy.

  “We learn from the Assyrians,” said Ron. “We abolish the Tesseran nation and resettle the soldiers, and their families, in Central Time, under the supervision of the armies of several of the loyal nations. Within a generation or two they will have lost their language and their national identity. They’ll be citizens of a new country and speakers of a language unrelated to their own. You don’t kill the citizens of a rebellious nation. You turn them into loyal citizens of a new nation that doesn’t dare go to war for any reason.”

  Ivy nodded. “Wisely done, sir,” she said. Laz couldn’t tell if her comment was sincere or ironic.

  “It’s a pretty cruel punishment,” said Laz. “Obliterating their national identity.”

  “Their national identity is only a few years old and it hasn’t done anybody any good,” said Ron. “It won’t be missed in the long run.”

  “And they’ll be an example to the next country that decides it wants to overthrow the hegemony of Central Time,” said Ivy.

  Ron protested the word “hegemony” but Ivy didn’t take it back. She had named Ron for what he was—a ruler, a dictator, but a successful one, maybe even benevolent.

  “I’m tired,” said Laz. “I want to go to bed and dream of ways to dismantle and destroy Portals that we don’t need anymore.”

  “Ah, my little ones,” said Ron, “you’ve had a busy day.”

  “And we have a lot of blood to wash off our hands,” said Ivy.

  Ron looked at them both very carefully. “Not one of these deaths was your fault. You weren’t in the fighting force, you were in charge of rapid transportation. Which you did brilliantly.”

  “I hope you don’t mind,” said Laz, “but I’d appreciate it if none of the reports of this battle even mention that we took part. Or secret Portals. I don’t want our names or abilities to appear.”

  Ivy looked at him in surprise. What, thought Laz, did she want recognition?

  Ron said, “Laz, you earned the gratitude of all humanity. You brought about the failure of the first cross-Portal invasion.”

  Laz shook his head. “If they realize that we’re an effective weapon of war, then the next warmongers are going to kill us before they launch their rebellion. To make sure Central Time can’t drop any troops behind their lines.”

  “We’re hoping nobody ever tries this sort of thing again,” said Ron.

  “The public memory of war is about twenty years,” said Laz. “Like between the First and the Second World War. Then they’re willing to go to war again.”

  “So this battle will settle things down for a couple of decades, you think?” asked Ron.

  “I have no idea,” said Laz. “You know that nobody can travel in time. So we can’t go do reconnaissance in the future and return and report on where trouble will break out next.”

  “I’m well aware of your rare but definite shortcomings. Can’t be helped,” said Ron.

  “Do you have any wars planned for tomorrow?” asked Ivy. “Because if so, I need to get to bed early. Otherwise, I won’t set an alarm. I’ll sleep in.”

  Ron laid his hand on her shoulder. “Sleep as long as you like, the two of you. The Portals are still open and the world is at peace.”

  “More or less,” said Laz.

  “You know of any place that’s brewing a war?”

  “I’ve visited enough places in my long and tumultuous life,” said Laz, “to know that there’s always somebody who wants to go to war. They don’t want to eliminate the possibility of victory by negotiating a compromise. And if they decide to go to war, whoever they attack will have to fight back. So this isn’t really a world at peace.”

  “Central Time is free of international conflict,” said Ron. “There are no holy wars going on, no trade wars, no conflict between timestreams.”

  “That you know of,” said Laz.

  “What are you saying?” asked Ivy.

  “Another result of this little war,” said Ron, “is that nobody will let their quarrels get to the point where Central Time has to smack them down. Meanwhile, warlike feelings will get hidden until they’re useful.”

  “They’re never useful,” said Laz.

  “Then let’s hope they stay hidden,” said Ivy.

  20

  THERE WAS NO open rejoicing in Central Time about the victory. In fact, the king of the Netherlands, which had been reestablished in the original location—plus Belgium and most of Germany—declared that day to be a day of mourning every year from then on.

  “Repulsing the Tesserans,” said Colonel Riffle—newly promoted—“was not a triumph in the eyes of the families mourning for their slaughtered children, and families weeping over their dead.”

  “But I know what you did, sir,” said Ivy, “and your tactics and timing, and your superbly trained soldiers, those did triumph, even though there are no victory marches in a heartbroken nation.”

  Riffle nodded with a slight smile. “Maybe there are people who would rejoice at our victory, or at least take pride in it. But our contribution to victory and the capture of the entire Tesseran army, those things were not described in detail and no names were given. ‘The allied forces of Central Time united to subdue the monsters,’ I believe the official report said.”

  “All your men are coming home, Colonel,” said Laz. “For their families, there really will be rejoicing.”

  Now Riffle’s smile became a chuckle. “Officially, Ivy, Laz, we never left the Netherlands. The plane carrying us never took off. As far as most people know, the Netherlands did not contribute any troops at all to the fight.”

  “That’s just wrong,” said Ivy.

  “If there are Tessera sympathizers who want to take terrorist vengeance, the Netherlands won’t be a target,” said Riffle.

  “The story won’t be permanently obscured, will it?” asked Laz. “Witnesses and participants get old and their memories ‘improve,’ or fade away. If the story doesn’t get written down now, or at least soon, it might be entirely lost to history.”

  “People far higher in the system are still at loggerheads about how much, if anything, gets recorded for release in thirty years.”

  “Well, my diary entries aren’t under any political control. I’ll write what I know, what I saw. I’ll name names. I’ll make it clear that you and your men won this war, without any other support until the Tesserans were already surrendering.”

  “You’ll show it to no one, I hope,” said Riffle.

  “He’ll show it to me,” said Ivy. “But no one else.”

  “Not Ron?” asked Riffle.

  “Ron who?” asked Ivy.

  “We help him out when he’s having a problem where side stepping might help,” said Laz, “but we’re not subject to his orders.”

  “It’s possible,” said Ivy, “that we’re still under constant surveillance. Ron’s agents may still be reading our diaries surreptitiously. But since we clones have been granted full citizenship, it’s illegal for them to investigate us like that without a warrant, for which there’s no probable cause.”

  “So if they read about the Low Countries’ contribution to the war—”

  “They can’t publish anything about it even if the orders from on high change,” said Ivy. “It would be a confession of a crime that would undermine everybody’s confidence in the Portal Commission.”

  “And that would be a bad thing,” said Riffle.

  Was he posing that as a question, Laz wondered. “Do you think Ron’s position should be—”

  “Abolished?” asked Riffle. “Someday, perhaps, when it’s feasible for any of the timestreams to be self-sufficient. When we no longer depend on trade among the streams, maybe Central Time won’t have anything to administer. But for now? They won the war.”

  “You won the war,” said Ivy.

  “We won the war,” Riffle said firmly. “All the allies whose troops got there in time to help, like ours, and also the nations that had their soldiers jetting in from all over the world. We would have had way more soldiers than the Tesseran army. Central Time set it all in motion, emergency plans that were drawn up twenty years ago. The victory belongs to Central Time, and to all the nations within this timestream.”

  “Honorable of you to say so,” said Laz.

  “Honorable and also honest,” said Riffle. “Don’t worry about me and my men. I got my promotion. I now command a full regiment, including my former battalion, and my assignment is to train all the soldiers in my regiment to the same standard of excellence my soldiers demonstrated in battle. The true story is known to few, but among those few are some who recognize how valuable our actions were in the crisis. How perfect my men’s performance was.”

  “Perfect,” said Ivy. “That’s the word for it.”

  “My regiment has been designated an elite strike force. Now it’s my job to make that designation reliably true.”

  “I hope your regiment never has to prove themselves again in bloody war,” said Laz.

  “I hope so, too,” said Riffle. “But if there is a war, we’re going to make our enemies pay for their effrontery.”

  “Effrontery,” murmured Ivy.

  “Maybe the next war won’t start with so many atrocities,” said Riffle.

  “Do you think human nature will change?” asked Ivy.

  “I’d be surprised,” said Riffle.

  “We’re glad you took the time to come see us,” said Laz, “when I’m sure your family back in Gouda wants you with them.”

  “I didn’t just come to see you,” said Riffle. “I came for this.”

  He rose to his feet, his posture grew to complete rigid formality, and he drew from inside his uniform jacket two long, slim packages. “In the name of His Majesty the King of the Netherlands, I present to each of you the Royal Order of Honor.”

  They took the boxes, opened them. Splendid little golden sunbursts, attached to ribbons that could be pinned on clothing.

  “These are not to be worn,” said Riffle. “Not in the Netherlands, and nowhere else, either. Photographs get posted online, they get printed in newspapers. This award is actually quite well-known and important in the Netherlands. Even back in the Old Place. It is never awarded publicly. It becomes known only when the recipient dies. Then the obituary is on the front page of all the newspapers and newspages, with a bright golden ribbon around it. And the deeds which earned this medal are then published, and the medal recipients finally receive the public recognition that they are due.”

  “An interesting tradition,” said Laz.

  “I don’t mean to criticize,” said Ivy, “but for the recipients to receive recognition only after they’re dead…”

  Riffle nodded. “It can seem perverse, to outsiders. But inside the Netherlands, the people understand that those who are inducted into the Royal Order already know what they did, and need no public acclaim, because they have the respect of the leaders of the nation, including the monarch, and they are honored by God. It is only after they are dead that the people learn of their achievement, and it fills them with pride in our nation that among us there was such a person, and his worth was recognized.”

  Laz was surprised that tears came into his eyes. “We aren’t citizens of the Netherlands or subjects of your king.”

  “We forgive such lapses in your upbringing. Your deeds will be sung in the Netherlands, because you brought our soldiers, my battalion, behind enemy lines in perfect safety, so that they could achieve their astonishing victory without any loss of life among my men.”

  “Well, when you put it that way,” said Ivy with a smile, “maybe we are something special.”

  “Ivy was the one who figured out how to locate the end of the Portal well inside Tesseran territory,” said Laz. “None of the side steppers knew how to do that. She figured it out.”

  “So it will say in the story about her,” said Riffle.

  “I was just along for the ride,” said Laz.

  “I know better,” said Riffle. “Keep these medals safe. They don’t yet mean as much to you as they do to us, but someday you will look at these and your memory will be clear: We did something that the people of the Netherlands cared about and were grateful for. The people of the Netherlands will remember what we did forever.”

  “Forever?” asked Ivy.

  “As long as there are people called Netherlanders, as long as we remember who we are, we will remember who you were and what you did for us.”

  Then Riffle shook hands with each of them. “This is what I came for,” said the colonel. Then he turned abruptly, with parade-ground efficiency, and walked to the open door of their house and on out into the bright day.

  Laz followed him to the door and watched him return to his vehicle, a limousine no doubt loaned to the Netherlander embassy by some bureau in Ron’s government. Riffle opened his own door—the driver remained inside, if there was a driver, if there had been any escort at all. The door closed. Colonel Riffle was gone.