I nodded. It made sense, what Ho said, but it sounded too much like Barnard's comment a day or two before that "perhaps saner heads would prevail," or whatever. They obviously hadn't prevailed yet. Was that going to change?

I turned back to the window. Now that the demonstration was over, there were cars on the streets again. Not as many as usual, but at least Waikiki didn't look like a ghost town anymore. From somewhere to the west-Sand Island? I wondered idly-a small constellation of lights was approaching, burning bright against the darkness of the sky. Choppers-two or three of them. Corp shuttles, maybe, coming downtown to pick up VIP vacationers and take them to the airport for a suborbital off-island? I didn't know, and I didn't really care at the moment. I started to turn away.

I didn't see it happen straight on, just in my peripheral vision. Without warning something flashed upward from somewhere to my left, almost like a Thor shot in reverse. The lance of fiery light transfixed one of the helicopters, blotting it from the sky in a dirty orange-black puffball. The surviving choppers broke formation, diving for the deck, killing their anticollision lights as they did so. In a second or two they were lost to sight.

I flattened my nose against the window, watching in shocked horror as burning wreckage plunged to the street or smashed down on top of buildings.

Gordon Ho hadn't seen it, but he knew something had happened. He gaped at me. "What was it?"

I didn't answer right away. Instead, I came over and fragging near collapsed into an armchair. Finally, I said, "It doesn't look like it's a good season for saner heads."

The downed chopper was a corp bird, Gordon Ho's informants confirmed an hour or so later. (I'd guessed as much earlier, but this wasn't a time when I felt good about being proven right.) The lance of fiery light I'd seen had been a Parsifal man-pack SAM, an obsolete Saeder-Krupp design. Ironic, since the chopper that ate the missile was a Saeder-Krupp bird.

Gordon Ho and I were shoulder to shoulder again, looking silently out the window of room 1905. The streets below us were empty now, except for the occasional corporate security vehicle screaming by, light-bars ablaze. There were more choppers in the air-angular, brutal-looking gunships now, instead of me more streamlined unarmed transports- buzzing around like angered hornets. Most of them were maneuvering radically in case there was another missile team out mere somewhere, jinking back and forth, up and down, randomly. Some were dropping flares just in case, sun-bright points of light. I couldn't make out colors or insignias so I didn't know whose the choppers were, but it was easy to fig¬ure out mey were from different corps. It was also easy enough to figure out mat said corps weren't talking to one another efficiently; in a fifteen-minute span, I saw half a dozen near misses when choppers fragging near slammed into one another. Every now and then I could hear the rip of autofire, muffled somewhat by the double-glazed window. Were ALOHA assault teams actually engaging the corp forces, or were the corp sec-guards shooting at one another-a ground-based version of me chaotic gavotte in me skies? It was impossible to tell.

Finally, the ex-Ali'i turned away from the window and returned to me couch. After a few moments I joined him. Pohaku still looked as though he wanted an excuse to rip somebody's lungs out-anybody's-but at least he still had the presence of mind to freshen our Scotches.

Ho stretched, working his neck and shoulders. He looked like he'd aged a decade in me past couple of hours, I noticed suddenly. Well, I guess getting deposed, men seeing your country stumbling toward me brink of war might do that to you.

"What now?" I asked.

Ho looked over at me and smiled. (I think mat's what the expression was supposed to be, at least. It looked more like the facial reaction of a torture victim.) "I've given up on me oracle business," he said. Then his smile faded, and his eyes seemed to grow even more haunted.

"The government doesn't have much choice," he went on quietly. "They've got to act fast, before the Corporate Court does. Which means they can't do much about ALOHA."

I nodded. That made grim and nasty sense. Hunting down and neutralizing a militant policlub-a terrorist group by another name, when you mink about it-is never a short-term solution. It takes resources and it takes time. The Na Kama'aina-dominated Hawai'ian government might have the former, but Ho obviously didn't mink the corps would give it the latter… and I had to agree. Hell, when you came right down to it, stamping out a militant policlub wasn't necessarily possible even in the long term. Ask the FBI teams tasked with eliminating Humanis and Alamos 20K. "So what are the options?" I asked.

Gordon Ho shrugged. "Few." He sighed. "Negotiation- but that requires the corps to be interested in listening, which isn't a certainty at this point.

"Or a counterthreat," he went on, his voice bleak. "The corps have a gun to the government's head, Thor. The government has to draw its own gun." He shrugged again. "Mexican standoff. But at least it gives both sides a little more time to negotiate before me killing begins."

I raised an eyebrow at mat. "Bluff, you mean?"

"Bluff wouldn't work. The counterthreat has to be substantive."

"Yeah, right," I snorted. "Threatening the corps?" The idea was so ludicrous I almost laughed out loud.

But Ho obviously didn't mink it funny. "You'd be surprised, Dirk," he said darkly.

I did laugh out loud now… and then shut up so abruptly I almost swallowed my tongue. Suddenly, I'd remembered some of the weird things Scott had rattled on about during our first breakfast together, about me freaky drek that had gone down around Secession Day. Frag, now that I let myself realize it, there'd been some major questions rolling around in my head about the Secession.

For one, how come the U. S. had let Hawai'i go so easily? (Okay, the feds had tried to clamp down… once. But after the warning Thor shots on the naval task force, they'd basically rolled over and played dead. No attempts to take back their military bases.) For another, how had the equivalent of a civilian militia been able to defeat the Civil Defense Force-full-on military? The only answer that made any sense whatsoever was some kind of big stick with which to threaten the good ol' US of A.

I turned to Gordon Ho. "Spill it," I said quietiy.

"Magic, of course," he answered at once. "Nui magic. Big magic."

In the back of my mind I heard a kind of almost subliminal click. "Sites of power," I said.

The ex-king nodded. "Of course," he confirmed. "Hawai'i has some major ones."

I felt a cold wind blow through my soul. "You've got some kind of project going, haven't you? Since before Secession, you've had it going."

"Of course," he said again. "We're a small nation. We need an equalizer."

'Tell me about it."

Ho shrugged. "It was my father's idea, I think. He and his kahuna-his shamanic advisor-they came up with the details. They'd heard about the Great Ghost Dance in the States, of course," he explained softly. "The federal government wanted to suppress details, but news always leaks out. When my father and his advisors learned that another group of aboriginals, the Amerindians, had developed large-scale magic as a military tool, they figured if it could work on the Great Plains, why not on the islands?"

"You did your own Great Ghost Dance," I said wonderingly.

Ho nodded. "In essence, yes. The details were different, of course. Hawai'ian traditions are very different from those that Daniel Howling Coyote used. But the principles were the same: massed shamans-kahunas-using their own life-force to power a great ritual.

"We had a major advantage that Howling Coyote didn't, however," the Ali'i continued. "We had those sites of power you mentioned. The kahunas were able to draw a large measure of the mana they needed directly from the land, rather than from their own life-force. Some died anyway, of course, but the cost was much less for us than for Howling Coyote."