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"A Success In A Way"
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"Canada is divisible because Canada is not a real country."
- Lucien Bouchard, former Premier of Quebec

There were a surprising number of people, Corporal Gaetan Bastien thought, brave enough to fly the Canadian flag in Montreal. Most were ripped, torn, and faded almost beyond recognition. They hung from every pole on Canada Day, of course - the Army made sure of that - but today they seemed like trespassers, frozen solid by the cold autumn breeze. In Montreal, everyone knew God was Quebecois.

He walked carefully. Two feet to his right, Private Nick Tiffin was telling a joke that would've got them all shot in Quebec City.

"--so the Ontario guy, he thinks for a minute, then he says to the genie, 'So let me get this straight. Quebec's surrounded by this wall, a thousand feet high and a hundred feet thick, and nothin' can get in or out, right?' And the genie says, 'yes, that's right.' So then he--"

"God dammit, Nick, I thought I asked you nicely not to--" Bastien said. Tiffin talked over him like a machinegun blazing.

"Come on, this is the best part, let me finish. So then the Ontarian, he looks right at the genie and says, 'Fill it with water.' Fill it--!"

Tiffin's chuckles turned into deep guffaws, and in a few seconds he was doubled over with laughter. He almost lost his glasses, and he was lucky that he didn't manage to drop his weapon as well. Bastien shook his head and snorted. The kid should have stuck with playing war from behind a keyboard.

The wind blew a discarded poster against his boot. One quick glance was all he needed to crumple it up and toss it away. Another one of those posters glorifying the Foundation, an alliance of most of the insurgent factions that fought over the ex-province's scraps like mangy dogs. Vive le Quebec libre! He cursed and wished he could bury them all.

"Don't be an idiot, Tiffin," said Master Corporal Kevin Crawford. "Especially not today. Goddamn felkies'll be hunting for idiots today. Best day for a sacrifice. Goddamn terrorist sons of bitches."

Not many people were out along the patrol route. Bastien watched a woman and a young boy, both bundled up in heavy coats, scuttle across the street with their eyes down. He could remember a time, not so long ago, when the streets would have been full of children getting ready for Monday's trick-or-treating and families enjoying what time they had left before winter. No kids would be going from door to door this Halloween, not if they wanted to live to see November.

The kid looked up, just for a moment, and saw Bastien and his section. His eyes lit up like little stars and he broke from the woman's grip, wriggling out of his heavy coat before she could pull him back in. His underclothes would leave him freezing before too long. Crawford looked at Bastien and Tiffin and nodded. The kid couldn't be hiding explosives, even if the FLQ had sunk that low.

"Look, Mommy!" the kid shouted in French, scrabbling across the dirty road. "Soldiers, Mommy, soldiers!"

"Jean, don't!" the kid's mother shouted. "It's dangerous! You'll--"

"It's all right, ma'am," Bastien said. The kid came to a stop just in front of him, so fast he almost fell back onto the asphalt. Bastien kneeled down and offered him a hand. The kid looked up at him like a lost puppy. "There you go, little guy. Jean, right?"

"Yes, sir," the kid - Jean - said, with the kind of practiced diction he'd expect from a schoolchild reading Shakespeare. "Mommy named me after the prime minister. She says God rests his soul."

He looked at the kid for a long moment. He couldn't be more than six, nowhere near old enough to remember Ottawa. Bastien envied him that.

"A lot of people say that," Bastien said. The way things were going, Jean Chrétien would probably end up being Quebec's last friend in Canada for a long time to come. "My name's Gaetan. It's good to meet you and your mother."

Jean's mother didn't waste any time racing after her son. She gathered him up and bundled his coat on as fast as a magician pulling the tablecloth out from under the dinnerware. Once she was done she stepped a few paces back, eyeing the three soldiers carefully, as if deciding whether to fight or flee.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but could I please see your passcard?" Crawford said. He spoke in French only because it was polite, but the language couldn't hide the menace. The woman shivered and fumbled in her pockets for a moment before producing the passcard, a thin brown booklet about the size of a passport and emblazoned with the national coat of arms.

Despite his coat, made for Arctic winters, Bastien shivered. Martial law or no, those damn things only belonged in dictatorships.

"Begging your pardon, sirs, but we don't want any trouble," she said once Crawford handed the passcard back with a gruff nod. "It's been a quiet day and I'd like to keep it that way. Come along, Jean."

"But Mommy, I want to talk to the soldiers!" Jean said. "Can't we, please?"

"The soldiers are busy, Jean," she said. "They have enough to worry about without you bothering them."

"It's no bother, ma'am," Bastien said. "A lot of kids your age would be afraid, Jean. You're pretty brave."

"I have to be, sir," Jean said, as earnestly as if he was telling Santa Claus what he wanted to find under the tree. "I'm the man of the house and I keep Mommy safe from the terrorists. Just like you."

"Just like us," Bastien said. He dug into one of his pockets and produced a chocolate bar. Jean's eyes lit up like miniature supernovas when he saw it. "Here, promise me you'll keep your mom safe, and you can have it."

"I promise, sir," Jean said. Bastien gave him the bar. "Thank you." There wasn't a word of French on the wrapper, but Jean didn't seem to mind. Most kids he met in his patrols would have wolfed it down on the spot. Jean put it in his pocket and trotted back to his mother's side.

"Have a good night, soldiers!" Jean said as his mother hustled him away. "Mommy says I need my sleep and you need it too. Bye!" Bastien smiled as he watched them turn down a side street and disappear.

"Let's get a goddamn move on," Crawford said, motioning forward with his rifle. The shadows seemed to have lengthened in the few minutes they'd been stopped. "Time's wasting. Goddamn felkies'll be coming out soon. Goddamn cockroaches."

Bastien nodded and tightened his grip on the light machinegun he carried. The Front de Libération du Quebec had grown up since the kidnappings and terror bombings of 1970. No matter how tightly Canada and the United States clamped down on Quebec's borders, the scum always oozed through - money-hungry mercenaries, irredeemable IRA bastards, even Middle Eastern jihadis trying for a crack at the Great Satan. Quebec was where they all met and Montreal was where the line was barely held.

"I can't believe you gave that kid your chocolate, man," Tiffin said. He lifted his helmet, brushed some sweat off his brow, and grinned. "I'd have been happy to take it off your hands if it was gettin' too heavy for you. Not like he'll remember it at all anyway."

"The only heavy thing you've got to worry about is that helmet of yours," Bastien said. Tiffin's headgear might not protect him from a heavy caliber round or an improvised explosive device, but it was leagues better than the ceremonial beret he'd been saddled with. "Besides, it's called being good and decent, Private. Try it sometime. Maybe you'll get fewer nightmares."

Tiffin turned toward him, probably getting a snide comeback ready, but he never had the chance to say it. Entire libraries could have been filled with the words people hadn't had the chance to say since the dark clouds of terror had fallen over Montreal. Thunder cracked, tearing through the air, the man-made thunder that filled all the island's storms.

He saw a blur to his right, and turned to see Tiffin collapsing like a rag doll. Some lucky insurgent's bullet had tore through the man's neck with a spray of blood and flecks of bone, and his eyes didn't go dark until he fell. It took him a few seconds to stop jerking, and by that time Bastien had thrown himself behind a burned-out car for cover. Bullets ricocheted off its rusty frame. Obscene shouts of victory filled the air.

"The roof!" Crawford shouted, pointing. He'd taken shelter behind an old, overflowing dumpster. "The fucking roof!"

Bastien spared a glance. There was a small apartment building across the street, about three stories tall with crumbling balconies. He saw what could have been half a dozen insurgents up there, spraying the street with automatic weapons fire. If they'd shown up a few minutes earlier, would they have spared Jean and his mother?

He opened up with a blast from his light machinegun. The heavy bullets, more than enough to punch through a man, stitched across the concrete. Fist-sized chunks of masonry rained onto the street, but the insurgents wouldn't yield. Not until they were all dead.

A bolt of lightning slammed into him, knocking him down to the ground. He barely had time to gasp before the darkness took him.

#

"--listening to CBC Radio One, with the news for Sunday, October 30, 2005--"

Gaetan Bastien blinked, and for a moment he saw the world in double. Patterns of darkness and light swam above him, and for a moment he thought he was dreaming. Then he remembered the bullet, the brief pain, and then nothing. So much nothing... he grunted and pulled himself up toward the light, and it felt like doing a chin-up with legs of lead.

He must've hit a piece of debris on the way down and been knocked out. His head felt like it was bobbing in a sea of molasses and his eyes spun like those on a child's googly-eyed doll. He'd been shot before and he'd had a concussion before, once on the same day. This was a better day than that.

"--say that we should give in! That we should reward the terrorists for their bloodthirsty--"

That voice. Calm, authoritative, powerful, just like his old pulpit-preaching uncle. He reached toward it and found a radio.

"--and to all of those people, I have only one thing to say. We will not stand back, we will not turn away from the task, as dirty as it is. This government will not bow down to terrorism. We will continue forward until justice is served, peace established, and unity restored in every part of Quebec. We can't--"

Bastien exhaled with all the reverence of a prayer. He'd seen the shadow of Death back there on the street, when his scythe had cut Tiffin down, and he'd expected that shadow to cover him as well. Still, he was hard-pressed to imagine a hereafter where he was greeted by the Prime Minister's blood-and-guts rhetoric.

"--Toronto Police bomb squad disarmed the device, which is believed to have been intended to detonate in the crowded--"

He sat up, carefully, and looked around. He was in a small, cluttered room with heavy curtains drawn over the windows, but a few fingers of light trickled in nonetheless. Morning light. It was too bright to be from streetlights, and there had only been a couple of hours until twilight when his section had been attacked. The rest of the men should've found them before too long, unless--

"Captured," Bastien said. "Good Christ."

Thoughts of escape offered themselves almost at once, but Bastien laid back down on the cot and forced himself to evaluate things calmly. Going off half-cocked, with no weapons or equipment at all, would do him no good. The absence of anyone else in the room struck him as strange, as did the lack of restraints. None of the hardline Felquistes would have such a soft touch.

The flag of Quebec was tacked to the wall, light playing across the cross and fleurs-de-lys. Bastien winced and tried to forget. That wasn't his flag anymore. Not after Ottawa. He'd got there almost a week after Canada Day, and the fires had still been burning.

"--detonated between Outremont and Acadie stations on the Blue Line. Unconfirmed reports indicate at least one hundred people were killed or injured in the explosion. Military authorities have urged all citizens to remain in their homes until--"

In the end, it wouldn't matter. Every able-bodied terrorist in the FLQ was probably on the streets of Montreal today, waving their AKs at anyone who crossed their path. Twenty men and a couple of Leopard tanks might be enough to do the job his three-man section had been doing the day before. Bastien wasn't willing to take his chances out there, alone and unarmed.

"--in Camp David today, Prime Minister Harris and President Bradley have pledged to combat terrorism in North America and around the world, ten years after the historic vote that separated Quebec from--"

The news couldn't end soon enough. The soothing strains of some old jazz band didn't completely settle him, but they helped. He could forget the world outside for a little while. He got so caught up in the wail of the saxophones that he didn't hear the door creak open.

"Bon matin, caporal." It was a woman's voice, soft and flowing like honey. He groaned and tried to focus. In the room's darkness he could only make out the impression of a finely sculpted face framed by long, dark hair. The voice, though-- "It's good to see that you're awake and all right. He stayed up most of the night watching you, Jean did."

"Jean!" It all came back to him, the woman and child who had almost lingered long enough to get caught in the ambush. "What happened? I remember an ambush, and then--"

"I heard the gunfire," she said. "Jean wanted to rescue you. I've never known a more steadfast six year old. I knew he would never forgive me if we left, so... I went myself, and I found you unconscious. You'd hit your head on a piece of rubble. It was a good thing I found you first, you know."

"The other men," Bastien said with a cough. "What happened to them?"

The woman looked down and shook her head. He'd known that Tiffin wouldn't have had a chance, even if they'd been right outside an emergency triage station, but he'd have expected at least Crawford to get away. To think that he was the last--

"Thank you," he said. "I owe you my life. I don't even know your name."

"Call me Marie," she said after a moment's hesitation. It was a common enough name and pretty as well, whether it was really hers or not. "I'm sorry that I didn't bring your equipment, but it couldn't be helped... I'm only one woman. I can see that you're tired, sir. Rest a while longer."

"Marie," he said, tasting the name. Soft, sweet, and satisfying. "That's a nice name."

Marie turned toward the door. As it creaked open Bastien could see her features, a thin nose and wide violet eyes that seemed too bright to be real, to bright to be anything but a dream, wreathed in light from the next room. He sat up and coughed.

"You were right," he said. "It was dangerous. Why did you come back?"

She turned to look at him. The heavy shadows under her eyes looked like they could swallow every bit of light the sun had left in it.

"Because you were kind to my son," she said. "Please, rest. Breakfast will be ready soon."

She shut the door behind her and cast Bastien back into darkness. He met it gladly, but sleep did not come easily. It was a bright day behind the curtain, but all he could hear was the thunder.