Professor John Christian Falkenberg II:
Delivered at West Point, June 17, 2073
The soldier and the spy have always been uneasy bed-fellows doomed to unwilling cohabitation. First and foremost among the military virtues is loyalty, above all to one's salt. Correspondingly, the most despised military sin—beyond even cowardice—is betrayal of the oath of service. There are, of course, sound and obvious functional reasons for this ethic; the primary emotional cement of armies is and must be, trust. Without it, no military force can operate for a moment. The spy proper—the clandestine operative—is above all one who wears a mask, who dons a uniform and takes an oath under false pretenses, who abuses trust to pass vital information to the enemies of those whom he infiltrates. Accordingly, none of the protections of the Laws of War apply to the spy. Indeed, historically some military forces have hesitated to use information from such "tainted" sources.
Yet there is no substitute for HUMINT—direct intelligence of the inner councils of an opponent. Even where the full panoply of technical intelligence-gathering is available, HUMINT is priceless; it gives direct access to the intentions of the enemy, always the most difficult aspect of military intelligence-gathering. Just as important, the knowledge that one's own ranks have been infiltrated is a powerful tool, sowing suspicion and dissolving the bonds of mutual loyalty that sustain the operational capacity of a military unit.
Both principal intelligence officers of Falkenberg's Legion sat at the table. Captain Jesus Alana was a short man, dark and slim with a well-trimmed mustache on his upper lip. His wife Catherine was two fingers taller and flamboyantly red-haired, and also a Captain. As the joke ran, virtually everybody in the Legion was; the chain of command depended on your job, not your pay-scale. Apart from them the office in Fort Plataia was empty The spring rain was falling, mild here only a few kilometers outside Sparta City; it carried a smell of wet adobe clay through the slit of open window. Over that came a sound of boots splashing down on wet gravel and a voice counting heep . . . heep. Cadence for another group of recruits; they were pushing them through as fast as possible. Three Legion battalions now, spawned by the 5th, and the Royal army had doubled and redoubled.
"Not very hopeful," Jesus Alana said.
The files lay in front of him, in hard copy. Only two names . . .
"Not very hopeful, that one, eh, mi corazon?"
"Thick as a brick," Catherine replied. "He could take the biofeedback, but he's hopeless for anything requiring an imagination. With luck, he'll make a passable rifleman."
"That leaves the young woman."
"From the file, much more hopeful. Finished basic training, and non-com school. Very reasonable to make her an officer. Higher IQ. Also, lots of determination, with that background."
"I know. Yet—"
"Yet you're a romantic, Jesus. She got out of a Welfare Island."
"Yes," he sighed, and touched a control on the table. "Recruit Talkins, please."
Margreta Talkins was a young woman. The russet eyes were harder than her twenty years would justify. Medium height, olive skin and dark-mahogany hair cropped to a short cap of curls, with a wary edge to her expression. Looking a little weary; neither the Royal army nor the Legion accepted women for combatant positions, but their basic training didn't reflect that. We may not want them to fight, but it happens often enough, Jesus thought. Firm body, looks good on her. She will have no difficulty seducing her targets. Talkins returned Jesus's hard look, then her eyes darted to the equipment on the table, a set of flat screens and a few crackle-finished milspec electronics modules.
"Sir. Ma'am." Her Anglic was North American, almost-but-not-quite Taxpayer class, the voice of someone who carefully copied the upper-class accents on the Tri-V.
"Please sit, recruit Talkins," Catherine said. "Now, I'm going to ask you a series of questions. The answers aren't important in themselves—just say what comes into your head.
"First, how do you feel about the Helots?"
When the interrogation finished an hour later, Talkins' hair was plastered to her forehead, although her face was still calm.
"Perfect," Catherine said. "Not only can she do it, she'll volunteer to do it."
"Volunteer for what, ma'am?" Talkins said.
Jesus Alana leaned forward. "Clandestine operations. Very secret, very dangerous."
"Will this hurt the Helots?"
"If it works, it'll be very damaging to the enemy. We need your agreement, first."
Silence stretched; then she nodded with a bitten-off: "Yes, sir."
"Why?" Captain Jesus Alana said to the young woman in recruit coveralls. "The machinery—" he indicated the book-sized display unit, open on the table "—tells us you mean it. But that doesn't tell us why you are willing to take the risk."
There was a trace of anger in her voice; Alana frowned slightly at that, then recognized it. She was volunteering, and she had the slightly bitter self-accusatory air of a veteran cursing himself as he volunteered for something he knew was stupid. The young woman spoke at last.
"My brother," she said flatly.
"Killed in action," Catherine Alana said. "Revenge?" she went on, keeping half an eye on the Voice Stress Analysis readouts. There was plenty of data to be authorized in more detail later.
"I told George not to enlist," she said. "Look, sir . . . ma'am. We both came from Columbia Welfare Island, you know?"
Jesus nodded. He did know; he'd heard that something like half the population of the US lived in places like that now. Of course the intentions had been good. Make the cities safe, get the festering legions of the underclass out of the downtown ghettoes, put them where they can be educated, learn to be somebody, leave the underclass. And, incidentally, put them in controlled areas. Let them riot, they couldn't get at the wealthy.
Now the Citizens—some bureaucrat seventy-five years ago had a sickly sense of humor to name them that—sat and rotted, and the Taxpayers paid for it, and paid more for the police who guarded them from the Citizens. Borloi from the convict-worked plantations of Tanith kept the Welfare inhabitants pacified, that and cheap booze and the Tri-V. But some escaped. It was possible, barely.
"Yet you managed an education," Catherine said. "How? Or perhaps better, why?"
"Sister Mary Margaret cared. After a while, I did too."
Catherine smiled reassurance. "Not unlike me, then."
"You're from Welfare? Ma'am?"
"The Legion cares no more where you came from than Sparta does," Jesus said. "Nor do either of us usually care why you joined, but in this case we must know more." He touched the personnel forms on the table. "Edison Technical School in Pittsburgh. No record of drug use. Minor crimes—I assume you were intelligent enough to avoid being caught at anything major. You and your brother did well on Earth. With your education you should have been welcomed into the—normal society."
"As trained seals," Margreta said. "Our sosh worker was proud of us. Offered us a shot at civil service."
"Which is the dream of half those in the Islands," Catherine said. "So why are you on Sparta? It says you were voluntary emigrants."
"Didn't seem like a lot of future on Earth. What's the use of reading books if you don't think? Clear to us, United States wasn't like what the history books said. We wanted—" She stopped. "Damn if I know, ma'am. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time."
"Your intentions here?"
"Start a business. Own our own life. Make Citizen. That was why George enlisted—I told him it was better I do it, less dangerous. George and I always looked out for each other. There was nobody else but the two of us, but I couldn't in the Army. He thought the stats looked good, but somebody has to be unlucky."
The Alanas nodded. Private George Talkins had been in the field one week, as a communications tech, when the truck he was riding in went over a land mine.
"Anyway," Margreta said, "George and I . . . George made it sort of personal. I was always for the Royalist side—I like the way this place is run—but George, that makes it personal."
Talkins looked up, and the Alanas both felt a slight cold chill at the intensity. "Sir, what is it exactly you want me to do?"
"Infiltrate," Jesus Alana said. "Both sides have been trying that, of course. And we've combed out a lot of people from the Royalist organization with this." He reached out a finger and tapped the Voice Stress Analyzer.
"The problem is, the enemy evidently have something like this too. They also have better computer equipment and more and better technicians than we do; the Meijians are expensive but they have the best there is, a slight edge even on Fleet Intelligence standards. They've been running rampant through the local computer nets, and only the fact Legion equipment is ROM-programmed has saved ours from penetration—we hope. Per Dios, every time we compare hard copy with government or Royal Army computer files, we find discrepancies! Any operation we really want to keep secret is to be word-of-mouth only."
Talkins blinked. "How can I help you beat their screening, if they have that, sir?" she said, nodding to the equipment.
"Well," Catherine said, "it is possible to beat voice-stress detection. Not without elaborate hypnoconditioning and biofeedback training, and even then only a very small minority can hope to get through more than a superficial scan. Then, only a small minority of that minority is qualified for the job in other respects."
Talkins closed her eyes in thought for nearly half a minute. "And I fit? Must be. And the Legion is handling this because of security. Does this count for Citizenship?"
"Assuredly," Jesus Alana said.
"It's dangerous, Margreta," Catherine said. "If you want to walk out of here, no one but us will ever know we talked."
"How long?"
"A year. Perhaps two. No more than that. But understand, it will not be easy. For one thing, the Helots are certain to require your participation in an atrocity. To prove your loyalty to their cause."
"You mean like—"
"Like shooting prisoners," Catherine said. "Perhaps not so clean as shooting."
"Jesus. Like back in William Penn Island." She was quiet for a moment. "I can really make a difference?"
"Yes."
"And Citizenship when it's over."
"Yes."
"Okay I'll do it. What happens next?"
"You'll be sworn in to the Legion—that's plausible, we need people with your sort of educational background, and we've started recruiting locally for a lot of positions. You have been through the Royal non-com school. Assuming you can get past our OCS, you will become a Cornet, a very junior officer in training."
"That counts for Citizenship?"
"In your case, certainly. Whatever your Legion rank on discharge, you will have been a commissioned officer in the Royal Army."
Margreta nodded thoughtfully.
"It will all appear to be entirely natural. We train you, then send you on temporary duty to the University. It is certain that the Helots will try to recruit you once you are there."
"You've tried this before."
"Yes."
"What happened to—my predecessors?"
Catherine grinned. "Not what you think. She married an exchange student, and went to Friedland with him."
"You let her go without finishing her hitch?"
"Special circumstances," Catherine Alana said.
"I don't see that happening to me. Not that I wouldn't do it if the right guy asked. Or was that last one really special?"
Jesus shrugged. "We will cross that bridge when the chickens are hatched. For now, you will be transferred to the Legion and sent to officer candidate school. Understand, you must do well there, your instructors will have no hint that you have any special status. When you are commissioned, Catherine or I will speak with you again. No one else will know of your assignment, not now and not later."
"No records?"
"When next we meet we will tell you how to prove your status in the event that both Catherine and I are unavailable. Otherwise, no, no records. Now, we meet again in six weeks' time."
Good tradecraft, Cornet Margreta Talkins thought, as the waiter brought her lunch, with a sideways glance for her blue and gold Legion walking-out uniform. Nobody's going to suspect this as a Helot dropshop.
She very much doubted the owners knew that the underground arranged rendezvous here. Half the patrons in the courtyard tavern were in Royal Army uniform, mostly recruits out on their first post-basic furlough, sitting with their buddies or girlfriends or both; there was a sign outside offering them a discount. Many of the rest were machinists or fitters from the Works, in grease-stained overalls. Von Alderheim was running three shifts now, with the war effort.
The Cock and Grill was on Burke Avenue just off the Sacred Way, not far from the CoDo enclave at the northern end of Sparta City's main avenue. West of here and stretching to the edge of the Minetown slums was working-class housing, two or three-story buildings divided into modest apartments; within easy walking or bicycle distance of the docks, the big von Alderheim plant to the south, and the tangle of small factories that had grown up around it. Many of the buildings had shops or service industry trades on the ground floors, like this one. A brick-paved courtyard facing the sidewalk across a low wall, set with wrought-iron tables and wooden chairs under umbrellas; even on an early spring day like this, Sparta City's climate was comfortable enough, so long as the rains held off. The traffic in the sidestreet beyond was light, an occasional van or horse-drawn dray, bicycles and electrocars.
"Here you are, Miss," the waiter said. "One garden salad—" a heaping bowl of greens and vegetables, colorful and neatly arranged "—one mixed grill—" a wooden platter of spiced steak strips, pork loin and lumps of rockcrawler claw with mushrooms and fried onions "—and a wine seltzer."
She reached into her belt-pouch for the tenth Crown piece; about what a dockworker made in an hour, fairly steep by local standards.
"No charge for Falkenberg's Legion, Miss," the waiter said. He looked about seventeen, with a pleasant freckled face and was probably the son of the owners. "Compliments of the proprietors."
"Thank you," she said sincerely; he reminded her of George, a little. More naive, but then, on Sparta a kid could find time for childhood. And the Legion was popular in this district. She remembered the clinegraphs from briefings at Fort Plataia; about a quarter Citizen around here, and most of the rest established family people, ones who hoped to see their children make Citizen, or were saving to homestead in the outback. The Non-Citizen's Liberation Front didn't route demonstrations through here, since the inhabitants tended to turn out with baseball bats and shotguns to stand in menacing silence.
She took a bite of one of the steak strips; beef still tasted a little odd to her. Few enough on Earth ate much meat these days. Taxpayer food, she thought. A far cry from the endless starches, synthetic protocarb and bacteria-vat protein they issued in the Welfare Islands.
Still no sign of the contact when she had finished. Waiting. Soldiers and spies, they both spend a lot of their time waiting. Students evidently did, when they could afford to actually attend a University and not cram the study in where sleep ought to go. At the University of Sparta she had met Mary Williams; conversation had led to talks about her background on Earth, the squalid poverty of the Welfare Islands. That made a bitter radicalism plausible—plausible to the children of privileged who seemed to make up the Non-Citizen's Liberation Front at the student level.
Idiots, she thought contemptuously. Wealthy enough to despise money. She—and George, God damn them to hell—had worked their butts off to get into the middle classes, not overthrow them. Casual meetings had led to the legal NCLF organization, and then to the clandestine.
Mary had hinted that this would be a real contact, someone she couldn't reach herself except through a series of blind drops and cutouts. No listening bug woven into her uniform, that was far too risky against opposition of the quality the Alanas suspected. There was a team observing her, a reaction-squad and snipers with heavy Peltast rifles, so she was probably quite safe. And she had the biofeedback training that made it possible to baffle detectors. Had that, and her native wit.
Datamonger, soldier and spy—and all before my twenty-first birthday. What's next, the circus?
Swallowing the last of the food turned out to be a little difficult. She concentrated, breathed deeply, used the trick Catherine Alana had taught her of thinking of a pool of still water, it was quicker and less de-energizing than the techniques she had used to overcome fear back home. No-Nose Charlie was nerve-wracking enough. They had never been part of the Organization back on Earth, but they had been contractors. Too many licenses for legit operation, too much paperwork and graft and pull. Everything outside the Welfare Islands was sewn up tight by the guilds and the unions and the big government-favored corporations. Who else was there to work for, she thought. All No-Nose cared about was whether you could make computer systems sit up and beg. She and George could do that, any day of the week.
After a moment her pulse slowed and the muscles in the back of her neck relaxed. Margreta sighed, ordered coffee and pulled some lecture notes out of the attaché case she was carrying. They were on software design, the University was trying to resurrect that, along with a number of other sciences. The problem was that the CoDo Intelligence people had made more effort to corrupt those files than any others, even to falsifying the early history of its development; BuInt's attempts to suppress all dangerous science—which turned out to mean all science, period—had been all too successful. Reinvention had to go back almost to the beginning to do anything more than assemble the standard premade blocks in new positions. Xanadu and Meiji were rumored to have made a good deal of progress, but if they had nobody was talking.
A shadow fell across the paper. "Yes?" Margreta said, looking up and around. It was the waiter; the place had grown a little more crowded, extra tables set out for more soldiers and the afternoon shift from the factories. "I'm sorry, I was expecting someone; I'll leave if you need the table."
"No problem, Miss," the waiter said. He smiled shyly. "Besides, I may need to keep on your good side." At her raised eyebrows. "Just accepted as an ephebe of the Brotherhood last week, Miss, and reporting to Fort Plataia for training with the 7th Royal Infantry Monday next. Anyway, your friend called. Says they'll be by any time now."
"Thank you. And good luck in the army; I hope you haven't been listening to too many romantic stories. It's hard work." Even by her standards; still, it would be very useful to have a scientific understanding of combat. The Talkins' twins had learned a good deal on the streets, and there was teaching available there if you could pay, but the Legion was a different category altogether.
"You're welcome, Miss, and my brother's in the 1st, he fought in the Dales—you'd think they crawl up cliffs pulling themselves along by their lips, to hear him talk."
Margreta smiled and shook her head as the young man bustled away, catching a tray of beer steins at the serving window and weaving between the tables to a boisterous party in high-collared gray tunics and stubble-shave haircuts. Imagining himself one of them, she supposed, as she clipped the attaché case closed. Babies, she thought All overgrown babies. Trying to prove how tough they were.
She started slightly when the dark man in the conservative brown tunic and tights stopped at her table.
"Do not be alarmed," he said, moving forward with fluid smoothness. He took her hand in a grip like a pneumatic clamp, as impersonal as a machine too.
"We have now," he went on, seating himself and laying an attaché case on the table, "eliminated the obvious; police tailing efforts, implanted electronics, and the rest. Passive observation is possible, of course."
The man was about 175 centimeters, brown-skinned, Latino from the cast of his features. Unusually fit, not massive but broad-shouldered and moving lightly as a racehorse. Not a native Anglic speaker, she judged; an ear for the nuances of language was another thing common to her new profession in Intelligence and her old life on the fringes of the illegal. The mystery man had no trace of a regional or planetary accent. That was rare. Definitely not a Spartan, their dialect was so archaic that it was almost English; it retained the final "g," differentiated between "c" and "k," and had fewer of the Spanish and Oriental loanwords that made up so much of the modern language. This man's Anglic had a pellucid clarity like a very good Al language program or someone high up in the CoDominium information services.
"I should think the information I've delivered over the past weeks would be proof of my bona fides, sir," she said; a combination of respectfulness and firmness was best here.
A slight chuckle. "Yes, but as we both know, Miss Talkins, it is often worth the sacrifice of real data to plant a double agent who can feed disinformation into an opponent's information-bloodstream. Granted that the files you have contributed are mostly useful, and all have been corroborated independently, this possibility remains."
Margreta allowed herself to lick her lips; they tasted of salt. "Paranoia is also a threat in this business, sir," she said.
A quaver? No, too much. He's got to think I'm valuable, and an agent with weak nerves is a walking invitation to disaster. "Properly safeguarded, an agent in place in the Legion's intelligence section would be a priceless asset."
"Quite. But an exceedingly risky occupation for an agent with a comfortable position elsewhere," he said dryly.
"I'm scarcely comfortable where I am, sir," she said coldly. "My origins . . . I have abundant reason to sympathize with the Movement."
A skeptical silence. All right, girl, time to really act.
"All right. Sir." A calculating viciousness in her tone now. "I've seen enough to know the Helots stand a good chance of winning. If I get in on the ground floor, I can really get somewhere—all the best jobs in the Legion go to Falkenberg's cronies, and you can't get ahead unless you hold a line command and women can't. I don't want to spend thirty years being a glorified commissioned clerk, or marry some po-faced whiskey-swilling mercenary and breed a litter of officerlets. I want to be something, myself.
"And," she added, panting slightly, "I want the satisfaction of seeing those bungling incompetents who got my brother killed stood up against a wall and shot. All my life—all my and George's life—we've had to wade through wet cement to get a living, while morons without a tenth our brains sat fat and happy up on top, rigging the game against us. We couldn't break in back home because we didn't have parents in the business—bad as bloody India. And here, these so-called generals couldn't figure out anything better for a man with George's brains to do than carry a field computer over a minefield."
Amazing what buried resentments you can find, she thought with a slight tremor of distaste, turning her head aside and controlling her breathing. Be what you want to seem, as Socrates said.
The unseen man laughed. "Better. Altruists are unreliable, while resentment and spite are the unfailing twin engines of conspiratorial politics." A long silence, while he looked into the briefcase. "Sincerity, or so my equipment assures me. Well.
"However, another problem arises. You have made yourself an object of suspicion to your superiors by associating with members of the NCLF which is popularly—" a shade of irony "—suspected of having links with the People's Liberation Army. 'No politics in the Legion' will scarcely stretch to cover that."
"I never joined," Margreta said. "Just hung around with them and didn't win many arguments." God, don't let the deal be queered by its own camouflage! Gradual disaffection was much more credible than a Saul on the road to Damascus conversion; those were rarer than hen's teeth had been before genetic engineering.
"I've staged some quarrels with the NCLF people at the University"—which was no problem, what a group of geeks, Mary apart; she's quite nice in a spoiled-brat way—"and made friends with Royalists. They've welcomed me back like a strayed lamb."
"Perhaps. Although I have a healthy respect for the Captains Alana. The Legion is a small organization and tightly-knit, its officer corps very difficult to infiltrate; particularly as they also have access to voice-stress equipment."
Another pause. Who were these people? She thought. Not Spartans, not part of the NCLF's underground apparat. Off-planet hired specialists—she almost snorted at the irony. Mercenaries. Meijians, from the captured equipment—although possibly other Orientals, say from Xanadu or even Earth, trying to make everyone think they were Meijians. Clandestine ops were like that.
"You are correct, though," the man continued. "Such an asset is too precious to risk. Continue to use the present dropoffs; a call to this number—" he slid a slip of paper across the table "—will give you an emergency contact. Please remember that emergency is the operative word. Please also remember that you are now committed; refuse to carry out orders, and we will simply let your Legion superiors know what you have been doing." The Legion's punishment for treason was hanging.
"We won't use this location again?"
"No, its utility is at an end. Good-bye, Cornet Talkins. Leave the location quickly, please."
He nodded and rose to go, brushing past her. She waited a safe ten minutes, then rose and packed the satchel, remembering to leave a decent tip, and flagged a taxi.
"Definitely Meijians," she said, sliding into the back seat. "They've got voice-stress equipment, too."
"Good to have confirmation," Captain Jesus Alana said from the front seat. "It would be splendid," he went on wistfully, "to pull in that son of ten fathers and sweat out what he knows. Not with a Meijian, though."
Margreta nodded; the technoninjas used a suicide-conditioning process, they could stop their hearts by willing it. And would; if captured.
"Feeding them disinformation will be even better," he said. "And now . . . debriefing."
Julio McTieran grinned to himself as he saw the young woman hail a taxi-van and drive away.
God, talk about cute, he thought Walks like a palm swaying in a south breeze. On her, red hair looks good. It was very dark red, of course. His younger sister had an orange thatch, and in his private opinion she was homely enough to stop a clock. So that's one of the terrible slave-driving mercenaries Mike's always moaning about. He'd have to tell his brother about that one when he came back from Mandalay on leave.
"Julio, you good-for-nothing, stop dreaming and help me with this!"
"Yes, mother," he said resignedly, throwing the towel over his shoulder and taking the trays.
A big order for the new bunch of soldiers and their dates; five roast chicken, six burrito platters, seven orders of home-fries, ice-cream to follow, three sarsaparillas, a carafe of the tavern red, two half-liter steins of Pale Brewmaster. This bunch weren't recruits; they had the Dales campaign ribbon, and one ferret-faced trooper with monitor's stripes had the Military Medal. Yellowed teeth showed as he sprawled back in his chair, stein in one hand and the other arm around the waist of a girl.
Transportee, Julio thought. He lifted one tray on each hand, corded forearms taking the strain easily; Julio believed in being prepared, and he had been working out more than the Brotherhood training required. Running up and down Thermopylae Point with hand-weights fifteen times every morning, then back home through the streets before the traffic started. If a transportee can get the Military Medal, I certainly can.
His mother was laughing and talking with the soldiers; some were from the neighborhood, some from the Valley, a few even from the Minetown slums, but they were all enjoying her banter. Julio felt invisible as he held the trays for her to serve, watching the way the soldiers' girls clung to their arms, smiling and looking pretty and fresh in their thin print frocks. Only one more week, he thought doggedly. One more week till I report.
He was turning with the empty trays when he noticed the bicycle stopping outside. Nothing unusual about it, a two-seater commuter model, thousands like it. The two men on it were dressed in ordinary clothes, except that they were wearing white Carnival masks weeks and weeks before the season. The young man recognized the shape one drew from beneath his cloak easily enough; the Walther 10mm machine-pistol was part of the training program for his Brotherhood. It was the fact that it had no place here, that it was so strange, that was what kept him standing and staring blankly while the man raised it, finger tightening on the trigger.
One of the soldiers had better reflexes. The snaggle-toothed monitor kicked the table over for a barricade and drew his sidearm in the same motion, firing without even getting out of the chair. The terrorist gunman lurched backward off the bicycle, and most of the burst went high, cracking into the rooftiles. Diners were shouting, trying to get to their feet, but they were blocked by the table and their chairs and the screaming, milling patrons, bottles and food and wine and blood. The soldier fired again, not quite quick enough to stop the second man on the bicycle as he jerked the pin from a grenade and lobbed it into the Cock and Grill's courtyard. Julio's eyes followed its arc.
Five second fuse, he thought with detachment. The men on the bicycle were both down now; the soldier who had shot them was prudently behind the heavy oak of the table, and his hand reached up to jerk down the girl who had been sitting beside him. Few of the other patrons had that training, most had not even seen the weapon land.
Three seconds. The oblong grenade clattered to the brick not far from him, spinning on its side like a top. Fragmentation model, he realized; that was part of ephebe training too. Lined with coils of notched steel wire, kill-radius of fifteen meters.
It detonated less than a second after he dove onto it and flattened himself to the ground.