“Only if you survive,” Margulies remarked, but she wasn’t serious. Angel’s willingness to take chances was just as important a reason for her keeping him as her permanent driver as his skill at the joystick was.

Angel accelerated to 60 kph. The jeep passed along the right side of the road trains at an increment that was slightly faster than a man could walk.

The convoy consisted of ten articulated road trains, each of which had three track-laying segments with a driver in the lead cab. There was a gun tub crewed by Brigantian troops on the center segment of each individual train, but the convoy’s real security was provided by the four combat cars manned by Frisian military police under Lieutenant Margulies’ command.

The war was over, but the fighting might not stop for years. Brigantian regiments, spearheaded by armored companies of Frisian mercenaries, had swept across Tannahill’s Beta Continent. The armies of the continent’s local population, mostly Muslims of South Indian descent, had been smashed if they stood and run down if they retreated.

The guerrillas, supported by the local communities even when they weren’t actually members of those communities, were a more difficult problem. They were controllable, at least for as long as the Brigantians of Alpha Continent could afford to pay their Frisian mercenaries, but Margulies suspected it would be decades if not generations before the locals accepted Brigantian domination.

That was somebody else’s worry. Margulies had a convoy to take through eighty klicks of—literally—Indian Country.

“Yes sir,” Angel said. “Inside a week and a half, I figure, I’ll be back on Cantilucca with a forty-hectare gage farm of my own. Three more days here. Three days objective to Delos, that’s the cluster’s port of entry. Maybe a day to get transport from there to Cantilucca, another day’s transit, and bam! I’m home, with a discharge bonus in my pocket. How long can it take then to buy some land, hey?”