In Washington, there was Pandemonium.

For Stephanie, Conch, Prof, and the gladiators, there was wild celebrating as the news came in. The Marine Corps had joined their cause, the Army regulars would not be arriving. How long it would take and how many lives it would cost was yet to be seen, but Melanie and her forces would take the city, that was now a foregone conclusion.

For official Washington, the news could not possibly have been worse. They'd lost the allegiance of practically the whole Navy and Marine Corps and most of the Air Force. There was a massive popular uprising against them that was growing more massive almost by the second. The Air Force had bombed the runways at both Washington airports and the Navy had taken out the railroads and the Interstate bridges on all sides of the city except the side Melanie and her army was coming from. Popular forces under other commanders were pressing toward the city from all sides. Across the country, statehouses and governors' mansions that would not repudiate the Federal government had been sacked by their citizens. The President, his cabinet, the Senators and Congressmen, the Supreme Court justices--all were meeting at that moment in the capitol building to decide what to do. That they should flee seemed obvious, but they had nowhere to go other than to some foreign country they'd befriended, like Saudi Arabia.

But they had no way left of getting there.

Now it was they who needed time; time to arrange for an escape from the besieged Capitol. Orders went out, orders which were intercepted by Mitch and his team of computer hackers and relayed to Stephanie and the others in the city. The Airborne divisions confronting Melanie's troops were to hold the line at all costs. They would be reinforced by Special Forces troops and Rangers already on their way from Fort Bragg, still the stronghold of loyalty to Washington. If Washington fell while the men making up the government were still there, it would mean, the President said, the end of the United States. They would, they said, go into exile, and from there they would direct the retaking of the country from the "traitors." Stephanie, listening, was reminded of the history she'd learned in school, how the Nationalist Chinese had retreated to Taiwan promising to retake the mainland--which of course they never did. That the Army was apparently accepting this and fighting on--when practically everyone, including the other services, had turned against them--seemed incredible to Stephanie.

"It is and it isn't," Conch told her as they watched the bulletins come in on her computer. "I doubt seriously if the men on the line are cheering tonight. But the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs were Army men, and Generals like Hammerhill were dominating the military before all this started. They were on the take, too, much more so that the Air Force or Navy people--we've benefited, without a doubt, from the hard feelings all this created. We suspect that it's spread down through the ranks, too; how far we don't know. But we do figure we're going to be seeing a lot less willingness from those Airborne troops to stand and die trying to hold the line." He sighed. "Green Berets and Rangers may be another matter. For them it might be a matter of pride. And they won't be easy to beat."

"I'm sure they won't," Stephanie agreed. "I just wish we had something more to do, some other way to help. I don't like just sitting here. But those are our orders: sit tight."

"That's all we can do, then," Mindy said. She looked off to her left, into space. "I do have a feeling," she said, "that we will have something to do that'll make a real difference. That we have some purpose."

"That's good enough for me," Stephanie said with a smile. Not one person disagreed, not with an opinion from their oracle rendered like that. They all turned back to the news bulletins, still coming in non-stop on the computer; story after story about the successes of the revolt, unrelieved by even one piece of good news for the President. One piece which was of interest to Stephanie--and she was quite sure, from what she'd heard, that Melanie would be interested as well--concerned the giant Gallagher Corporation in Montana. After it had become common knowledge that Melanie had been sold to Gallagher, demonstrators--who later turned into attackers--had gathered around the Corporation's gates. Stan Gallagher himself, founder and CEO of the corporate giant--and major contributor to President Bussman's campaigns in his two runs for office--had finally broken his silence and had been interviewed on television. It was not rare today, he said, for corporations to register as private executioners and to conduct executions for the entertainment of foreign clients, clients in whose own countries such things were illegal. In order to be competitive, he said, Gallagher had done the same.

But he denied the charges about having sold women to foreigners. More, he denied that he'd ever had an idea that the ten-year survivors of the Preserve were being sold to his company. All his company ever did, he insisted, was to buy the rights to execute women already condemned by the state.

There were, the news commentator noted, "quite a few questions about all this" still remaining.

"I'll bet there are," Stephanie said with a laugh. She frowned. "What the hell does Gallagher do, anyway? I've heard of them, but only in terms of their being one of the largest companies in the country. What do they make?"

"Nothing," Prof told her. His manner suggested that he was about to launch into one of his well-known lectures. "They're a holding company; energy interests, mostly. Among other things, they act as a middleman for the sale of Middle Eastern oil all over the world." He paused. "Nothing new in that. Back in the Nineteen-eighties and on through the turn of the Century, there was a noticeable shift in American business, from large numbers of small entities in competition to a very few very large ones holding effective monopolies. Much earlier, the government put checks on this sort of things, they stopped the oil companies and railroads from over-consolidating through anti-trust laws. Later in the Twentieth Century that changed, in part because of a subtle blending of government and business; note that I say business, not industry. The checks stopped. These large business entities started following rules that resemble those of biological systems out of control; the large ones fed on the smaller ones, buying them up, sucking them dry, and discarding the residue. Unfortunately--viewing the process in biological terms--they were destroying their resources, overutilizing them and giving nothing back. That has an obvious and disastrous outcome. To avoid it--or at least postpone it, although I doubt many of them thought in those terms, they thought only in terms of profits--they turned to the government. Tax relief, at first; it isn't common knowledge, but these companies were instrumental in getting taxation shifted away from themselves to the point where it became unbearable for average people, thus leading to the tax revolts and to the "government as a business" model that led us to where we are today." He shrugged. "Gallagher is one of the most successful of these businesses--simply because they are absolutely dedicated to maximizing profit, no matter what it takes and no matter how many innocent bystanders are crushed. That they'd be in the forefront of executing women to entertain their foreign clients is completely consistent with their business philosophy. There have been a few scandals involving them--a scheme to literally swindle their own retirees out of their pensions comes to mind--but they use top-flight law firms and they usually stay right at the edge of what's legal. I think I can assure you they would not have been in the slavery business if they hadn't had a go-ahead from Washington. Too risky."

"They sounds like such nice people," Mindy said sarcastically.

"Just business as usual today."

"No," Stephanie said with a smile as the news turned to the advances Melanie's army had made before sunset. "Business as usual yesterday. Today we're in limbo, tomorrow things are going to be different!"