Janiver 21, 2036 C.E.

	It is getting light outside. It is getting light, and the snow is waking me, running in a fine shower from the tarpaulin that covers our trench.
	At the end of our trench, I can hear Vaclav coming in to wake us up - though I cannot see him, there is no mistaking that scraping sound his rear starboard knee-joint makes, since the fight with the Siberians last week. He should get it replaced - but we are a long way from our supplies. It is the middle of Winter here, and we are in the deep woods. Close by that spot nobody can exactly locate, the place they call the Triple Point.
	"Got you some Breakfast. Better get out, keep your eyes open. I don't think there's anything doing, but you know..." He gives an all-encompassing gesture at the waiting woods, swollen with snow.
	Behind me, I feel Natya starting to stir. We are both sleeping in our armour, and I can hardly remember now the nights I lay awake, feeling the unfamiliar bends and angles pressing hard into me like a blanket lined with bricks. We have not taken it off in over a week, and I do not think my fur will be up to much when we get to the baths next week. If we get there at all.
	Natya twists round, shoving me to one side; it is a narrow trench, and we both weigh over four hundred kilos apiece. Shaking herself, the big mare heads for the exits.
	I watch her as she ducks her forebody flat, her forearms pushing the draped fabric aside, all four of her legs bent as she crouches her way under the pine-bough roof support we cut last night, and strides out into the cold air. For a second the cold steam of her breath hangs in a fog at the entrance, mixing with the fine dust-snow of this early Baltic dawn, and then she is gone. I twist round, waking the half-wolves behind me; sleepy growls follow me out into the biting cold air of morning.
	Vaclav grins at me. "Place looks empty. Except for ... this." He holds up a kitbag; something is already freezing stiff inside it. "Deer. Stalked it an hour - all for you carnivores. " He drops the bag, and unscrews the silencer from his Mecklen Five millimetre. Turning round to check that Natya is hull-down on the ridge keeping lookout, he opens the bag and unclips his helmet seal.
	I feel my mouth starting to water at the rich, heavy smell hanging in the cold air. Vaclav won't be joining us in this meal - the deer may be a distant relative of his, some four generations removed. He's not really equipped to eat it, though otherwise he's equipped about as well as the rest of us in the Greater Liechtenstein Reich can expect to be.
	Torm and Eric, the half-wolves, come boiling up behind me like two streams of liquid furred smoke, sharp ears and sharp teeth exposed as they get the scent. Scent sinks in the Arctic air, flowing invisibly down like fog into our trench. So we dig in hollows when we can - some of the Siberians out there are minks and wolverines, and just as good with their noses as we are. Which is why there are only five of us left now - and the Englishman we found last week, the pilot. He's still asleep, curled up in the far end of the trench. This is not a place for a mouse who is up to the waist in the snows of January.

	It's Vaclav's right to divide up the deer. He's a vegetarian, but it's his gift to us. Torm and Eric park their back legs down in the snow, panting loudly. It's a strange sight, I think as I look about the clearing - He's feeding THEM. Outsiders might think they'd be feeding on him.
	"Mikel - heads or tails ?" He grins at me. I'm fox/fox descent, and my red ears twitch as he carves up the deer. His Meklen's bayonet is recycled from the exotic alloy of an aircraft turbine blade, double edged and sharp as a razor - we are the only army in the Triple Point that uses them, but we are GOOD at what we do. He disjoints the deer in a matter of seconds, and tosses me a haunch. Tails it is, and Torm can fight Eric for the rest. There's no point in asking them anything, they're the only two Little Brothers we have left. We started off with more of the non-sapients who are our comrades and relatives - but did I say, we've been out here a long time ?

	The haunch is tasting good, and hardly beginning to freeze before it is well inside my first stomach and digesting it is beginning to unfreeze me. Life is good. I stretch and twist, craning my long red snout around as I work my tail inside its articulated armour. I wince at what it will look like - fox tails have to be fur-trimmed severely to fit, and even then the inner suit needs compression straps to pack it into the armour.
	We watch the half-wolves eat, ripping the carcase apart with their teeth, each braced with all four legs, and throwing mock punches with their fists. Now these are not folk who you want to get between them and their food. I begin to wonder if we will find them enough to eat out here; two hundred kilo bodies hauling so much fuel and armour in this cold are burning twenty thousand calories a day just to stay hungry.  
	Vaclav is watching the half-wolves eating, and he gives that wry grin of his again. "Three months and I get to eat free around here. Roll on Spring." His front right hoof scuffs into the deep snow, where the grass is frozen and buried deep. We only dug down that far into the snowdrift last night, the earth is like iron. No digging into that without explosives or long hours of pickwork - and with our Neighbours, we are not the sort to go making more noise than we have to.....
	But I digress. The reason Vaclav is looking forward to Spring, is a matter of ancestry. He is our scout - reason being, he has half the frontal area of Natya as he stands and scans the deceptively quiet woodlands. He's slender indeed - and not surprisingly. Vaclav is as purebred as any of us Genemeld hybrids, being deer/deer derived, from sapient bipeds and four-footed Ancestrals. Though a quarter of Natya's mass, still he stands two metres tall, even in naked fur, and almost that from front to back. And the armour - well, building powered armour for centaurs was a challenge for our engineers. But we have potential. He stands there in plain white-painted armour - we paint them ten or a dozen times a year - lithe and slender, legs still delicate-looking even in their steel casing, wire-wrapped and bulkier at the joints where the suit's activators cluster.
	From above us, a snowball thuds quietly into the powder nearby. In an instant, everything changes. Quieter than a call and less prone to interception than a radio - Natya is telling us she has seen something.
	Vaclav's ears give a convulsive shiver, and he hastily pulls his helmet back on, working his jaw to seat the switches correctly that work his sensor suite. All I have is a passive visor: it clips down tightly, ready to protect my eyes from the blinding lasers that the world outside the Triple Point has outlawed.
	We are a team now. Torm and Eric fan out, with that long, slow lupine stride that makes a continuous hiss in the deep snow that you can't tell is a footfall, no, not until it's MUCH too late. I give that special shake of my head, and the red dot comes into focus on my visor. They used to use laser sights for this effect: nowadays you might as well point a searchlight and expect to get away with it. I see Vaclav swing his arm in front and to one side, and copy his motion.
	These suits are cheap. The Russian ones cost ten times as much - theirs are spinoffs from their aerospace industry. Ours - well, we had a few Tractor factories lying idle, that we put to good use. It rather shows. Welds are left rough, metal unpolished - but what has to work, works. And if it doeswn't, we can generally fix it without having to send for parts to the techmills on the Pacific Rim.  For an instant we look around ourselves carefully, before reaching the crest of the ridge - then we sink hull-down, folding our legs. Our aft bodies almost buried in the loose powder, we look like bipeds caught wading up to our waists. 
	I smile. In the early days, some folk used to make that mistake. They didn't repeat it. Reaching across with my left hand, I grasp the cocking handle of my Mecklen and pull it back soundlessly, the graphite "dry Lubricant" working a charm even in the snow. Minus fifteen, the little digital display reads as I focus on that corner of the screen that would be blocked anyway by the angle of my snout; ears twitch and I tell the suit to adjust sighting range, three strong swallows and the throat sensors tell the tiny microcontroller how much to compensate for bullet drop in the heavy air. The Mecklen is built into the armour of my right forearm: it is a simple blowback-action submachine gun with two moving parts outside the trigger block: the design is a century old, of the kind of simplicity we admire. Unarmoured troops, are simply dead at two hundred metres - the suit's sensors on shoulder and elbow are Very accurate. It knows to the centimetre where the barrel is pointing, and what the red dot shining on my visor sees, I will be hitting. Simple as that. 
	The world isn't that sort of simple place these days. They don't send unarmoured troops in here any more. I run through what we have met before though, and remember how little anyone likes having four hundred rounds a minute pecking at armour joints and optical plates.... we have faced tracked and walking armour, and I have thrown a few distractions their way. Then I reach back and yank the fifty-kilo springs back with all my strength, and smile. It's a good thing we carried these 35 mm cannon all the way with us. Distractions are all well and good, but these are what you might be calling Decisive.
	Everything is very still now. Somewhere behind me comes the thump of snow sliding off a laden tree, the early sunlight melting some critical keystone of ice. 
	Natya waves me forward, keeping her moving hand below the skyline. I have some difficulty in crawling - legs like ours are built to gallop, but we are soon lying within whisper range.
	"Movement," She points slowly to a point on the opposite ridge. I strain my eyes, trying to see where she means. As my head swings, I feel the tiny vibration, and know the twin barrels of the 35's are tracking my helmet's every movement.
	"Scheisse !" Natya's muzzle twitches, and she mutters something in her Slovenian accent I can't make out. "See - three trees right of the big rock there... see ?"
	"Ak. I see them." As indeed I do. On the ridge, we are looking straight at least four S.U.N. walking armours. These are the spindly biped sort, one pilot pod for a small-bodied pilot, walking and running the suit with arms and legs in the usual exoskeleton manner. Each shoulder-pack has half a dozen massively expensive smart missiles. pointing our way.
	"They can't see us." Natya relaxes. "Engines cold, circuits off - and body heat ? Forget it." She plunges her hand into the snow, its white glove vanishing in the cold powder. "If we were using their technology, maybe." From across the valley, my sharp ears pick up a harmonic whine from one of their turboshaft engines, way above the frequency limit most species hear. Probably nobody in the suits can hear anything wrong; just one faulty bearing is sending out what might as well be a warning strobe light.
	"Camera going on," I tell her, twisting the focus control as I brace myself for a steady shot with the old Lubitel aircraft camera. "Hardsuits Look like standard Saab-Scania 1100s - you never know, though. " The manual camera clicks quietly as four walkers pick their way down the steep slope. We don't see a lot of the Scandinavian United Nations walkers round here - their lines are "hard", and their experimental walkers only head in towards the Triple Point when they're looking for trouble.
	"One of those missiles could take out all of us." I remark as they vanish down the valley. "But, one of those costs twenty of us."
	Natya sniffs. "Somehow, that's no consolation. They can afford to replace things - expendable, we're not."
	We exchange toothed grins. Our armour is plain steel, and right now it is so much deadweight. Left and right sides carry what look like big cooking pots, the Wankel rotary cycle diesels that run the suits' pneumatics and all the accessories. Our only electrics are run off twelve-volt DC batteries, heavily shielded - unlike the hundreds of amps those S.U.N. suits carry around in superconducting loops, nobody is going to spot any radio-frequency noise from us. Straight-up fights in open territory, we avoid. Ambushes, however, we are good at  ...
	Natya catches my thought, though none of us here are psykers. "What do you say - we head them off at the pass ?"

	Ten minutes later, we are back at the trench, looking around for the Englishman.
	"Not inside." Natya looks into the trench, worry on her face. "No tracks - reckon he..."
	Just then, we hear a laugh, and the quiet snick of a safety lock going back on. Four of us twist round, our Mecklens pointing up at a tree.
	Natya lowers her burp-gun. "And we've found him. " She shakes her head ruefully. "One thing we've just GOT to keep up -  just keep checking the trees. Just because we can't climb, doesn't mean they can't." She seems to be taking this unusually calmly - it is not that she hasn't GOT a sense of humour, if you know where to look. But it usually finds outlets like leaving grenades behind, for the Russians to find out about the tampered zero-second fuze when they try to use them.
	"Eh, an' a grand day for it." There is a mouse looking down at us, swinging inverted by the crook of his hocks and long tail, and holstering the spare Mecklen that we salvaged for him. His ears are naked in the cold air, and he rubs them absently with the free hand before pulling the hood he wears over his green pilot's suit."Bit parky, like - are we off, then ?"
	Natya's ears flick inside her helmet: I can hear the rustle from here. Her eyes soften, and she reaches back to pat the angle of her spine where she has rigged a heavy towel for a saddle. "We're going up Point." He knows what we mean by now.

	Five minutes later, everything is packed and ready. We look down the valley - the snow is packed a metre deep in the clearings, tougher than the powder under the trees here. Vaclav and I look at each other, and he shrugs.
	"One of us is going to have to break trail. And you've got the quietest engine." His starboard diesel badly needs new tip-seals on the engine rotor; it sounds like a dozen bricks bouncing in a concrete mixer.
	 I grimace. Sometimes, having the best kit only means you get forced to use it. There is an old saying about the pitcher that goes to the well getting broken........
	Vaclav is behind me, with Torm and Eric in the centre. Natya takes rearguard: a huge mare, horse stock both ways, she needs all the help she can get. Anyway, now she has a rear gunner: the Englishman sits in the crook of her back with his big eyes and sharp rodent ears alert. By the way she lets him hold tight, I think she has decided to keep him, and I hide my amused smile. She has twenty times his body mass, and is due in season about the weekend we should get back to our lines. I remind myself not to make any jokes about stepladders or climbing feats, Natya has shod hooves as well as other parts that are oversized and very ready for use.
	"Start up - Zentauren, Los !" It would be a triumphant shout on a parade ground - and the thump of a starting cartridge would kick both engines to life. But we are a long way from home, and the woods have unfriendly ears. So I slip my rear leg into the steel cable stirrup that winds round the output starter shaft, slip the gearbox into neutral, and kick back with all my force.
	"They said this couldn't be done," Natya is remarking to her passenger. "The first suits, you could only do a cartridge start off. And then someone ran out of cartridges, and had to give it a try.."
	The port engine shudders and dies, unburned diesel spilling out stinking onto the snow. I cast her a sharp glance. "And they never DID properly redesign them, ever again," I point out, drawing the stirrup forward for another kickstart.
	Back goes my leg, the muscles twinging with the sudden effort. The port engine spins, and I hear the reassuring bark as the fumes caught in the exhaust pipe ignite briefly. Five kilos of cast iron epicentroid rotor starts to spin up, reaching full revs in a few seconds: I feel the torque gently nudge me  forward like a hand shoving me.
	"Rotor turning, supercharger at zero, exhaust cooler off, clutch off, clutch going ... ON." The familiar litany runs through my mind as I flex my right hand, working the engine controls. Having the Mecklen built into the suit's forearm and triggered by a jaw switch frees us to work our manual suit controls. Manual mechsuit controls ? I check through the system as the hiss of air in the servos brings the all-round exoskeleton to life.
	"Eh, tha build's em plain, tha' does," The Englishman says admiringly. "I don't wonder nobody steals they designs - there's nowt to steal. Though reckon nobody but you could put 'em to any sort 'o use."
	Natya turns round and pats her own flank armour, where the rounded diesel tanks are making a saddle - something else the first engineers got right by accident. "You two-leggers could TRY and wear something similar," she says, and tosses her head. "But you couldn't walk in them without the power on. Burning fuel every minute - you'd need a trailer."
	"Ah sees that." His big ears wave as he nods seriously. " And there's no other centaurs but you Genemeld ones from Liechtenstein - happen tha's got better than a patent on tha' gear."
	How the world has changed, I tell myself as I feel the power filling the artificial sinews that make this suit my second living skin. The oldest of us Genemeld hybrids aren't forty years old - before that, there'd only been the twenty-six original sentient species in Civilisation, the simplecoders. "Simps" as some of us call them, when they make aspersions about our ancestry. Back then, Liechtenstein was a tiny Dutchy, not the power-block stretching from the Baltic to the Aral Sea. And the Scandinavian United Nations - yes, things have changed.
	Natya gestures towards the halfwolves. "Good thingit was me that found you, and not them." They turn at her voice and thump their tails; Genemeld is an inexact science still, and sentience is something some of us seem happy enough to have been born without. "You'd make barely a snack between them. Still - they're our folk and our family - can't say we'd really be better off with a pair of full sapients. Instinct works for them."
	I experimentally flex my arms and legs. Good - everything works, and I stride forward. Dense, refrozen snow ploughs away like fresh powder, only the crackling vibration of rupturing ice indicating the power this is consuming. The port engine hums quietly, its downward-facing exhaust a deep purring that carries little more than a loud conversation. I feel my paws and knees beginning to warm slightly; the high-pressure air channelled through the joint actuators is hot from the compressor, and gradually nerves are waking that tingle painfully as I walk.
	Around us, the forest holds its breath. You might suppose we were ships sailing down some ancient uncharted strait, my spilling wake carving a passage as we explore between great snowy cliffs. The ridge ahead steepens: somewhere over there the S.U.N. suits should be striding blithely along. They're probably feeling quite secure, I remind myself - hearing no detectable emanations, and secure in pricey ceramic fibre armour with very little to threaten it. And unlike us, their pilots don't breathe forest air. Fuelled by Hydrazine, their power-weight ratios beat us by a mile - but our combat mecha is built to take hits. Hits means holes, ruptures, slashed lines and tanks spilling fuel - and theirs is not only highly volatile but grievously toxic. Not the sort of scent you ever want to get a snoutfull of.
	My own port engine begins to slow as we climb. Grudgingly, I stop and put it out of gear for a few seconds, feeling the suit's artificial muscles slacken as ir relaxes and my own joints take the strain again. "Going to Full dry power," I call back quietly, reaching back to the switch on the high-pressure lead that crosses over my back. It's a fighting suit I'm in, unlike some designs I could mention - I can take six air-pipe breaks before losing suit power, and run on either engine. "Starting starboard... now."
	The Englishman looks on in interest, and on Natya's suit traces the matching hose beneath the saddle. It's not complex, none of our equipment is. No need to kickstart this engine, the bleed air does the trick every time. Starboard starts up, and a faint blue haze stains the snow as I forge ahead like an icebreaker in the shoulder-deep drifts, forcing a winter's worth of weight aside.
	"We, I hear Vaclav murmur behind me "are going to HAVE to get to those baths soon. I'll be sweating Diesel myself at this rate." The deer has a nose as sensitive as mine, and hates getting his fur messed. Not that I'm too keen myself, mind you .....

	Vaclav gives a warning cough, and I pull up just in time. The ridge drops away steeper than I'd remembered; I'd been about to stride onto the skyline for all the world to see. A double squeeze, and engines spool down as I drop quietly down in the snow just short of the crest: at least next time my freshly charged air bottles can do the hard work starting.
	The deer centaur works his way towards me, so that we are both hull-down in the metre of powder snow between the trees. There is the slightest of rustles from behind, and I know the Englishman is going up the trunk of a big pine, keeping well inside the snow-laden branches till he can find a viewpoint. Oddly enough, the trees here have no new snow, though fifty metres back they were deep buried in fragile powder.
	Several minutes pass, and I can feel the heat leaking out of my paws as we sit there. Vaclav shifts slightly, eyeing the steep valley beneath us.
	"Cold hooves, cold engines - at least we aren't radiating," he shrugs, reaching back to scoop snow over his back body till it vanishes. "They should be coming down the valley any time now ... I'm going on emission watch." He shakes his head to settle the earphones securely, and closes his eyes as he concentrates on the vague snapping and rustles, trying to catch the radio "scent" from the surroundings.
	"Left, ten o'clock position ... high buzzing in the Gigahertz band .... someone's talking." He points straight up, and I nod. Tight-beam signals going straight up to satellites can't be intercepted, but if you're very close you can spot it's happening. "Sounds like S.U.N. kit - the Russians don't use that band much..." He slowly waves his left arm, the inbuilt directional aerial swinging. "That's close, but ... Frying Bacon ! Loud, just came on ... We're right on top of them !"
	 I know what he hears in his earphones: the harsh crackling notes that a Russian MHD drive kicks out, the sort they use to power railguns and mecha. This slope is a good spot for an ambush, just where the valley bends sharply and the cover thins out upstream. When the S.U.N. suits come down the valley the only way they can without crashing through trees, they'll be clearly in view. Somewhere very near, Someone else has had the same idea.
	My eyes scan the slope below us: nothing there but the tumbled heap of snow where a minor avalanche has slid into the valley. Ear ports open wide, I hear the familiar pattern of fumbled snaps as Vaclav unpacks a starting cartridge and feeds it into his suits' inlet ports. An even quieter rustle further above tells me the Englishman is moving.
	"Shtroumpf !" I swear under my breath as something thuds into the snow by my elbow, adrenalin kicking in with a surge of panic. It's a snowball, thrown from above - Vaclav grabs it angrily, crushing it in his steel fist. And stops. There is something inside it; a torn-off scrap of waxed waterproof paper like they wrap some armies' rations in.
	He passes it to me, and the adrenalin really starts to flow as we look wordlessly at each other. Just at that moment, three things happen.
	Two hundred metres away, a treetop sways, shedding fragile snow. We get just a glimpse of something big and white-painted striding - no, not striding. It is ducking, walking hunched.
	"They can smell the bacon same as us... coming in for breakfast..." Vaclav mutters, and gives a startled gasp. He points downhill, then at the paper lying in the snow between us.
	From his high lookout, the Englishman has seen something, and guessed something else. He's drawn a crude sketch of a snowy slope, with a line and a radiating circle at treetop height - a medium-calibre shell airburst over the slope, leaving no crater but triggering an avalanche, rolling down to cover what caused it.
	What he's drawn is a stylised tank. And from above, I can now see a dark patch of snow - and another, four in all, where exhaust heat is seeping up to melt the snow.
	All hell breaks loose! Four whipcracks ring out as one: the view downslope vanishes in a breaking wave of flame-cored blizzard as four 155 mm sabot rounds slash across the distance ! "Must've had remote cameras or periscopes" I growl to myself, pressing Vaclav down as the rest of the snow really does cascade down on us from the trees. "Wait for it .. wait.."
	A billowing plume of fire rises from between the trees: the S.U.N. suits have a nasty habit of blowing up when penetrated. Our designs wouldn't stop a full tank hit either, but our armour is all on the Outside: fuel, engines and ammunition are frequently blown clean off by far smaller calibre strikes. The only things under the armour are our fragile organic hides: it cuts down the surface area just enough to let us carry real protection you can still walk in. And walk's what we'll do...
	"Stand, slow... " I caution: the five of us rise to our feet, engines still cold, safeties off. Natya and the half-wolves stalk forward to the edge of the trees, where a billowing storm is blinding us, the shock-waves rattling our earpieces and occasional fine splinters tapping at our armour. I find time to hope the Englishman is flat down and burrowing out of this one.
	"They're running ! " Natya shouts: in a massed eruption the tanks are inflating their hover-skirts and charging out onto the plain with a howl of unshielded turbofans. Three walking mecha are crouched like riflemen to steady their aim: from the white-sparking storm bouncing off tank fronts we spot the S.U.N. have turned their splash electron lasers on. Nothing to worry armour, but they play havoc with sensors and viewing plates. The Russian tankers must be staring through almost opaque lead glass screens by now, trying to swing their main guns by luck and judgement - 
	"One down.." Natya half-rears on her hind legs as a hovertank "brews up" spectacularly, the white fire of a missile strike tearing its turret clean off. "Three left of each side .." she eyes me speculatively. "Which side are WE on right now ?"
	I shrug. "If in doubt - kick 'em in the rump !" I point to the hovertanks, sheering and jinking like speedboats on the level plain. "Besides which - you know what Swedish fuel does - even if we took any prisoners..."
	The halfwolves seem to get my drift; their jaws hang open in their suits. The one good thing about Hydrazine, is that it stinks. You couldn't possibly eat someone contaminated by it by accident. Those hovertank turbines, on the other paw, run on fine ethyl alcohol.... and of such considerations are politics in the Triple Point made.
	Sliding down the forty degree slope in white plumes of tormented crystalline whiteness, we have maybe five seconds to get our mecha online before they see us. Starting cartridges bark deafeningly around me: my air tanks give a cough like an athsmatic god as I feel the rotors spin and catch, strength flowing with the surging high-pressure air into my limbs. The armour loses its weight: every joint and limb is massaged by the mechanical reed-switches that sense my movement and amplify it tenfold.
	"Fur Vaduz und Schnellenburg!" I hear Vaclav's war-cry: he alone amongst us is a full citizen of Liechtenstein, and with a hiss the telescopic back-banners shoot up from his suit's saddletank. My own click out: twin nomex banners with the runic script of Neuropa toss and snap in the fiery wind howling around the exhausts, superchargers spinning up and online as we reach the bottom of the slope, every system primed and ready to roll.
	Either they have rear gunners now in these Russian hovertanks, or a fancier tail warning radar than Intelligence have told us about. There is a steep bluff three metres high by the riverside the hovertanks have reached: one of them sheers away like a speedboat plunging down a weir, suddenly out of sight from the S.U.N. walkers. I'd say he's turning to run - but the turret begins to turn - in our direction.
	Nobody needs orders; we are a team. And as a team we spread out, running at top speed through the snowcrust, mercifully refrozen hard out here in the open. The hovertank is a T-028, one part of my brain registers as I close the distance fast: not much armour, but a sharp-eyed radar/infra-red detector on the turret top, with a twin five mil Avtomat that can spot and chew through an incoming missile in milliseconds. A savage grin comes to my face behind the helmet, its oxygen-enritched air sending my blood racing - only Natya has anything big and slow enough for it to spot and stop at this range; our cannon can hit where it hurts.
	For an instant all seems very still, though I am running flat out, my supercharger cranked up to the full military power it can sustain for barely a minute. The flat white flood-plain, ringed with sentinel pines like shock-frozen spectators, the little cliff barely fifty metres away now, and the flat-topped T-028 beginning to turn its main gun on us. Five shots and we're all gone: how fast can that turret traverse, and what are we going to do about it ?
	From either side a dull put-put-putting, like a mallet pounding on a heavy timber. Natya and Vaclav hitting their grenade launchers, the tennis-ball size spheres lobbing in slow, lazy ballistic arcs toward the tank. No way can they hurt it - but a white flicker and a screaming whine like a high-speed drill on concrete, shows where the Avtomats on the turret are forced into reaction. The red dot on my own display shows a bright smear on the engine deck where my own shots would hit; a long-practiced neck twitch and the gentle recoil tells me my own set of distractions are on their way to add to the confusion.
	The timeless moment ends in a thunderous bark: it is as if someone has edited a film and cut to a shot of the inferno, a red-yellow cone of swirling hypersonic gas scythes into the snow. I'm still here, so it must have been either ... then I find myself at the top of the little cliff.
	 A leap into open air would be a spectacular way to commit suicide: the auto-targeters on the Avtomat would leap at such a flying target as fast as their Neo-Tokyo built processors would let them. So I turn and lean into the direction I was going, ploughing four deep furrows as I skid almost to a halt, break through the little cornice - and drop, almost vertically down, to barely twenty metres from the T-028. Its long, low profile is barely hidden by the billowing snow; in the few seconds it has stood here, barrel pointed up at the crest line, most has been blown clear by the powerful lift engines. Even before I hit the ground, bouncing as the suit amplifies the rebound, I am looking right at that side armour like a hungry canine surveying a prime set of beef ribs laid out on a plate.
	The main gun crashes again, concussion at this range hitting my helmet with the force of a hard-swung plank. Another heartbeat and time seems to crawl once more, that sickly thrilling moment in sight of the face of Death, where the mind stores more than a week of peaceful impressions. There is a spot just above the third segment of lifting skirt, that my eyes are suddenly drawn to.
	I have no memory of aiming, of calculating, of any thought at all. It is almost a surprise to me, when I find myself jammed hard up against the frozen slope of the cliff, the eightfold white fire spewing from the muzzle brakes of my 35's, holding that straight line of white tracer rock steady on that crucial side-plate like a drowning man holding a rope. Maybe a second later the thought catches up with action, three score rounds later: that side panel has lost its reactive armour skin. I knew, but did not know.
	My mouth is open, lips drawn back in a soundless snarl, as the main cannon almost completes its traverse. Hovertanks are fast, and the turrets have to turn and track swiftly - and here I am, pinned like a woodpecker caught on a falling tree, hammering my way into safety in the final second before it crushes me. I can see the big main cannon almost end-on, its obscenely gaping smoothbore big enough to clench both fists in without touching those steely lips - 
	Everything goes black. No pain, for an instant - and then it hits me, and I register that the blackness is the instantaneous carbon injection of my visor, saving my eyes from a searing flash. It feels like my armour is stripped off, and several people have kicked me hard - after which is a rending crash and a tumbling, as I end my unguessed flight and rejoin Mother Earth at an unfortunate angle. 
	For a minute, all I can do is lie there, limp as a burst balloon. Then the protective filter drains away, and there is bright blue light all around. I am lying flat on my back, spine straight and four legs waving in the air. Panic sets in as I try and lever myself upright, and find the upper part of the suit is "dead", and wedged tight in the hard-packed snow. 
	"Stuck ?" It is a familiar voice: I can just turn my head in the helmet, to see the upside-down but welcoming sight of Vaclav. Grinning, he grabs my forelegs and pulls hard, heaving me upright. 
	Only the intact strength of my lower armour keeps me standing. My helmet's viewplate is cracked, the right shoulder-plate is bent and threatening to dislocate the shoulder inside it: both brachial air-leads are severed. This suit is hit hard: from several sharp pains and the unwelcomely familiar warm pooling of blood around my paws, it didn't stop everything getting through. 
	I pop the visor, and look round. And would whistle, if my lips were built that way.
	"You should have seen the other fella," Vaclav nods at the crackling inferno downhill where the hovertank burns. Somehow, I was thrown clear to the top of the bluff again. "That's the last of them - it was close, that. The S.U.N. suits legged it."
	I check my ammunition feed, and feel a cold shiver run down my spine. When I finally chewed through the T-028's armour, it was with ten rounds per cannon remaining. "Almost out." I nod, and begin to shiver in reaction, pain and excitement mingling. "Looks like the right cannon feed's cut, too."
	Natya and the half-wolves trot into view, and we drop down out of sight to check over damages. The big mare is walking stiffly, and her external fuel tank is dangling off pathetically. "And here we are, out in the Triple Point, having made enough noise to hear back in St.Petersburg or Tallin," she comments sourly. "Even lost my flag - still, it did its job."
	I nod. The S.U.N. and most of the Russian suits have automatic aiming systems: according to the sales brochures, they are clear winners when things get fast and hot. But when they see a shape, they lock and fire on the "probable centroid", as the adverts call it - the average centre of whatever moving target it sees. Having a two-metre back banner raises that notional spot; when the 028 fired on Natya, its shell passed between her flag and her spine, missing her by half a metre. Still, without armour that might as well have hit: the wake from one of those slams air like a sawnoff shotgun blast.
	There is a silence. And although I am not what a regular army would call an Officer, I know folk are not going to be arguing.
	"We're heading for home."

	Half an hour later, we have picked up the Englishman from the three-metre burrow he dug with such good motivation, and start to cut back through the trees, almost due South.
	"Tha' wants me ta' look at your wounds ?" He asks anxiously. 
	My armour has stopped leaking: no doubt the inner suits are one congealed mass by now. But I shake my head. By the feel of things, nothing major has been damaged. "Not out here. Folk can smell fresh blood a kilometre off," I tell him, remembering the Siberians and their white Stealth suits "Besides - I know once I take this suit off, I won't be able to get it back on." We are moving at a slow trot, suits powered but without superchargers: in our depleted state we want to get out fast, and the extra noise is a worthwhile risk.
	"South, eh." Natya throws her head back, nostrils dilated. She has rigged a new "saddle" of folded tarpaulin for her diminutive passenger: he is looking none too comfortable. "South back Home, West is the Baltic, East and North - " she gestures back to where the battlefield is surely the focus of many curious eyes, flesh and electronic. "East and North, the rest of that pack. What do you think, they got our portraits?"
	I shudder, and it is more than the cold of the short day and the adrenalin reaction. "Chances are, their Gun Cameras took some better shots of us than the main cannon did - and we'd best bet that they had time to uplink the film back home." We are a fairly recognisable hunting group, I realise - and now both the S.U.N. and the rest of the Neighbours will be looking out for us.
	The Englishman looks about us, as we trot through the deepening shadows, still some thirty kilometres from the nearest defined friendly snout. "Tha' reckons, we were on wrong side o' yer territory ?" He asks seriously.
	Natya turns to look at him, and for a second I see her eyeing him up hungrily. We are headed back for some rest and relaxation: though I think he will be getting little of either. "Well - " she dips her ears, and her tail flicks coyly "They never have fixed the border - it's not really worth anyone's while to do so. We're not at war, and probably won't be. As for that -" She tosses her head back the way we have come. "We're not enlisted soldiers, that wasn't a war, and nobody can prove whose territory it even happened on. That was just a "police action" - it won't even make the newspapers back home."
	And then I realise that, contrary to all expectations, a Genemeld horse can learn to grin, and get it recognisable, as she pops her helmet and turns to look her rider in the face. 
	"Just you wait till you see a REAL scrap in the Triple Point !"