"No, Ib," Tyra Nordbo said, lowering her rifle.

"Fire!" the young man said.

"No!"

One of the prisoners looked up from his slump; tears rolled slowly down through the dirt on his cheek; and the thin wispy adolescent beard.  His lips moved soundlessly.

"Squad - fire!"

The magrifles gave their whispering grunt, and the five prisoners toppled into the graves they had spent the last half-hour digging.  Behind, the villagers gave a murmur, halfway between shock and approval; they were Amish, men in dark suits and women in long black skirts.  The half-ruined houses of the farmtown beyond were slipping into shadow as Alpha Centauri set; the moon was up, and Beta, leaving it just too dark to tell a black thread from a white.  The air smelled of death and of moist turned earth from the graves, and from the plowed fields beyond, purple-black rolling hills amid the yellow of reaped grain and the dusty green of pasture.  Orchards and vineyards spotted the land, and small lakes behind dams.  Woodlots were thef deep green of Terran oak and the orange-green of Kzin, tall frondlike growths in Wunderland's reddish ocher.  Westward the last sunlight touched the glaciers and crags of the Jotuns, floating like a mirage seen through glass.  The mountains were close, the dense forest of the foothills less than a day's walk away.

It was hard to imagine war had passed this way, until you saw the graves.  Many fresh ones in the churchyard, and these five outside it, along the graveled main street.  The other soldiers in the squad lowered their weapons and turned to watch the exchange between brother and sister.

Tyra Nordbo was 180 centimeters, as tall as her brother, but she lacked the ordinary low-gravity lankiness of Wunderlanders; she was robust and full-bosomed, and strikingly athletic for a girl of eighteen.  Her brother was only four years older and much alike in his high-cheeked, snub-nosed looks.  There was a hardness to his face that she lacked, although she matched the anger when he swung to confront her.

"Karl, Yungblut," he snapped over his shoulder, "bury them.  Kekkonen, get the dogs back to the van."  He raised his voice to the villagers.  "You people, return to your homes.  Justice has been done."

The black-clad farmers stirred and settled their hats and turned back to their houses.

"Justice, Ib?" Tyra said, her voice full of quiet fury.  She slung her rifle and reached to tear off the Provisional Gendarmerie badge sewn to the arm of her bush jacket.  It landed at Ib's feet with a quiet plop of dust.  Her holoprinted ID card followed it.

"Those were bandits!" Ib said, jerking his head at the graves where earth fell shovelful by shovelful.

"Thieves, murderers, and rapists," Tyra said, nodding jerkily.  The sight was not too bad; the prefrag penetrators were highly lethal but did not mangle flesh much.  She had seen much worse, working in an aid station for the underground army, during the street fighting in Muchen at Liberation.  "They deserved to die - after a fair trial."