Andrew shook his head. “Well, perhaps you had best come and talk to someone a bit higher up the chain of command than a mere Lieutenant.”

The young couple looked at each other before turning back to the assembled Ostrayans.

“Actually, I should go and see if Uncle Xen is available. We are not any sort of official contract mission or anything. I was just practicing my gate-making. I’ll go and see if he is available. Can you stay here, Roly?”

“Um, sure, I guess.” The young man didn’t look like he was that certain her running off and leaving him there was a good idea. “Is that all right with you guys?”

Andrew glanced at Simpson, who shrugged slightly, indicating she was leaving it up to him. Great.

“Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”

The girl nodded and turned to the young man. “The gate’s been open so long I’m surprised Mother hasn’t turned up. I’ll just go and check if Uncle Xen is available and pop straight back.”

The young man nodded, and she turned and disappeared into the little hut and stepped through the slowly turning whirlpool.

“So, are you people still fighting the Japanese off?” Roland asked.

“No. The initial invasion caught us by surprise, coming as it did in the middle of our capital. All our best troops are up in the north, and it took a while for them to reposition down here, not that we had a big army anyway. The government launched a big recruitment drive, especially looking for people with mentalist talent like me, as they discovered the Japanese invaders had many powerful mentalists. There weren’t that many to be found because mentalist talents had been frowned on in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear war, and many had been killed.”

He shrugged. “Anyway, the Japs advanced fifty to sixty kilometers in most directions, more along the south coast. They reached the radioactive remains of the former capital, Melborn, to the northeast and worked their way north from there while we got our act together.”

He eyed the young man. “We matched their mentalists with our mentalists, and I personally found having a sniper with a high-powered rifle handy meant that I could attack their mentalists with energy and mental spells, although you probably call them impressions, yes?” The young man nodded. “So while I was attacking them with those sorts of impressions, my sniper would take them down if they were too strong for me.”

The young man nodded, looking thoughtful, and Andrew continued. “We received some help from our neighboring countries as well, which made a difference, and as they ran out of mentalists, between our experienced northern troops, our allies, and all the new recruits, we just rolled them up. In the end, they were using women and children carrying grenades, but a mental shield pushed to cover the women and children released their mental control, and most of the women and children threw the grenades away and ran for our lines as instructed.”

“Women and children,” Roland said, shaking his head and looking distressed.