Scott Cleveland

‡

PALE BOUNDARIES

To my many friends, family and coworkers

whose contributions and advice made this book possible,

But especially to my wife, Carol,

for her patience, encouragement, and keen editorial eye.

PROLOGUE

Algran Asta: 2706:10:19 Standard

“Yankee sierra five, adjust heading to one three five and contact Approach Control on final.”

“Rodger, Center, turning to heading one three five. Yankee sierra five out.”

The blades’ pitch altered slightly as Terson Reilly turned the heavy, ponderous aircraft to the new course and contacted Approach Control. He wouldn’t land for another quarter-hour if the aircraft stacked ahead of him in the holding pattern were any indication. From this distance they looked like insects swarming carrion.

The object of their attention, unfortunately, was the corpse of Algran Asta’s capital city.

The volume of cargo moving through Windstone was higher than at any other time in its history, but amounted to nothing more than the agonal gasp of a community in the grip of a slow, irreversible decay. The city’s breath faded with every departure, sucked away by transports that landed empty and launched loaded to capacity, pushing the city’s infrastructure closer to failure as the skilled personnel vital to its maintenance left.

A larger prefab compound, surrounded by berms of razor wire and guard towers, stood off the far side of the runway. A line of prisoners escorted by Colonial Police walked single file through a gate to a shuttle waiting on the tarmac. Marines, in turn, watched the police.

Terson shook his head at the sight. He’d entered his compulsory two-year tour with the Colonial Police at eighteen and received his discharge before the force was federalized. A few months later and it might have been him down there, caught between the contempt of his fellow colonists and the suspicion of the Marines, who considered every colonial cop a Militia sympathizer waiting to get caught.

“Watch your course,” Jack Tham admonished from the copilot’s seat. The helicopter’s assigned approach brought it uncomfortably close to the prison. The Colonial Resistant Militia had launched two unsuccessful raids on the compound in the past month and the military was understandably jumpy.

“We’re fine,” Terson replied. He brought the huge helicopter down and taxied to the shipping terminal where a refrigeration unit waited to receive their load. They unstrapped while the engines spooled down and ducked through the cockpit access to the main body of the aircraft where Nick Foster was already breaking loose the chain binders securing dozens of pallets to the deck.

“Ease up there, son,” Tham drawled. “That won’t get the ramp down any faster.” The teenager broke into an embarrassed smile and mumbled an apology. He fidgeted while the rear hatch groaned open, six months worth of pay burning a hole in his pocket. Tham dropped to the ground and guided the K-loader into contact with the bumpers on the end of the ramp.

“We’ll get it,” Terson told Tham. “Want to see if we got anything going back?” It wasn’t likely—there hadn’t been any return cargo except mail the last four runs.

The rose-tinted liquid dripping from the crates as the beef inside thawed attracted a swarm of bugs greedy for the iron-rich hemoglobin. Terson turned on the blowers just inside the ramp to keep them at bay, but the tenacious creatures massed as close to the opening as the jets of air permitted. They descended on each crate as it rolled out, taking the opportunity to bite any exposed flesh they happened upon.

A lifetime of exposure to Algran Asta’s bloodthirsty fauna had hardened Terson against the constant attacks, but they were such a vivid reminder of the colony’s misfortune that he cursed and swatted at the damnable pests with impotent fury, drawing a curious stare from Foster. The younger man was too preoccupied with thoughts of booze and friendly city girls to appreciate the fact that their cargo had been someone’s prime breeding stock a few days before, and that the infusion of livestock that had so far kept the Hanstead herds safe from the butcher’s block was dwindling.

Tham motioned from the doorway of the shipping office. “Interested in a bush drop?” He asked quietly, dipping his head toward Tyus, the shipping agent.

“No,” Terson replied flatly. A few months earlier he might have been—the recipients then were frightened, desperate people who’d assumed the worst and fled before the Commonwealth Colonization Board clarified its intent. Now it would most likely benefit hard-core holdouts or Militia forces who wouldn’t hesitate to use it against those who disagreed with their aims, including fellow colonists who proved more cooperative with the authorities than the Militia considered proper.

“He’s paying premium rates, and I’ll need the money,” Tham urged. His background was a bit vague; certain rumors held that he was wanted, and therefore could not file a claim for compensation without exposing himself.

“It’s not worth the risk,” Terson replied.

“Maybe not for you,” Tham shot back.

“Oh, fuck off,” Terson spat. Boss Hanstead had managed the trust holding the Reilly family homestead since taking Terson in and given the estate the same attention as his own holdings. The value translated to future monetary compensation due Terson when he eventually relocated. Terson’s coworkers stood to receive pittances by comparison, which occasionally made him a target of their frustration. Terson’s status as Boss Hanstead’s protégé tempered their jealousy somewhat due to the widely held opinion that the position wasn’t an enviable one.

“It’s just spare parts and first aid supplies—nothing proscribed,” Tham insisted.

The military wouldn’t care what it was if they caught them dropping it in the middle of nowhere, but if there was one thing Boss Hanstead had criticized Terson for his whole life, it was a compassionate streak. “Alright, but you’re the one to tell Foster.”

“Naturally,” Tham grinned as he sauntered back inside.

Terson headed for the helicopter to start his preflight. Foster had been looking forward to the carousal that accompanied overnight trips, and Terson wondered how he’d take the news. Under ordinary circumstances they’d leave him to his own devices for a few hours, but the number of Marines in town made that prospect inadvisable. A civilian might not be held criminally liable for an altercation with a soldier, but those detained by the military were typically processed for immediate deportation. The soldiers knew it and took great pleasure in taunting the locals.

Terson stepped around a blood-tinged puddle of water behind the helicopter. A growing mat of drowning insects covered the entire surface as the weight of new arrivals pressed those who gorged too long deeper into the carnage where they, too, quickly expired.

The K-loader trundled back across the hot tarmac carrying a single pallet. Jack, Foster, and a third man pushed the pallet onto the rollers in the helicopter’s deck. Tham climbed into the copilot’s seat and gave Terson the paperwork while Foster and the stranger strapped in.

“You didn’t say anything about passengers,” Terson said.

“Neither did Tyus,” Tham replied uncomfortably, accurately reading in Terson’s expression that he considered the development cause to back out. “I already frisked him; he’s just the guide.”

Terson mulled it over. The Colonial Resistant Militia was growing more desperate as forced evacuations dried up their base of supply and support in the bush; there had been incidents of hijacking and worse aimed at those they considered collaborators, and Hanstead ranked high on the list. But the guide was unarmed, outnumbered, and an airdrop wouldn’t put the crew at any great risk from anyone on the ground. “I assume Foster’s okay with the change of plans?”

“It cost me a couple hundred of my share,” Tham shrugged.

Free of its earlier burden, the helicopter climbed swiftly and Terson turned onto the heading their passenger provided the moment Windstone Center released him. It took them toward the intercontinental basin that held the closest thing Algran Asta had to a sea: the impenetrable, planet-spanning swamp from which the chinche had emerged to confound the colonists.

Seventy-five years of human habitation had not ended rumors of strange, wily creatures skulking around outlying communities stalking children and killing livestock. New species of varying hazard emerged from the jungle every year, and most people assumed that the chinche were merely one more irritation to deal with.

The pivotal event occurred when a hired hand at a remote homestead killed one as it lapped up the blood of his employer’s wife in her own kitchen. The unfortunate incident might have been noted, remarked upon for a few days and forgotten, but the creature possessed what some interpreted as primitive tools and jewelry.

Predation by an animal acting out of instinct was one thing; the existence of a reasoning predator that consciously sought out human victims was intolerable. Despite the fact that the total number of deaths attributed to chinche since their discovery was a tiny percentage of the annual mortality rate—more people died annually at the hands of fellow humans—Algran Asta’s ruling body launched a campaign to eradicate the creatures. Unfortunately, it was the fervor with which they did so that spurred the CCB to investigate the reason behind Algran Asta’s sudden thirst for defoliants and nerve agents.

A bare, rocky spine ridge jutting upward through the jungle canopy ahead spurred Terson to glance at his altimeter. There wasn’t supposed to be anything higher than seven hundred meters in the area, but maps had been wrong before.

His headset popped with an unfamiliar voice: “Colonial aircraft, this is the Marine gunship at your five o’clock. Hold your present direction, altitude, and speed. Acknowledge.”

Terson’s kept his voice steady, though his pulse sped. “We copy,” he replied before covering the mike with his hand. “We’ve got company! Gunship at five o’clock—can you see’im?”

Foster clambered over the crates to the portside door, pulled it open and peered back along the tail, into the sun. “Two Headhunters!” Terson looked at Tham and shook his head—told you so.

“Colonial aircraft, state your destination and purpose.”

“Making a supply run to Rimhead, sir.”

“You’re off course, mister. Rimhead is seventy-five degrees to port.”

“Yeah, roger that. We’re having trouble with our GPS; thanks for the advisory, over.”

The Marines didn’t buy it. “Turn right heading one two five point seven. You will proceed to Windstone under escort, and submit to inspection. Over.”

“Roger, Marine. Changing course now.” He eased into a long, gradual turn as the Headhunters moved to the port side, forty degrees above the helicopter. Tham twisted his head around to shout back to the passenger: “Buddy, you got anything in there you don’t want’em to see, now’s the time to dig it out!” The passenger knew the drill: he loosened the cargo straps and flipped up one corner of the tarp.

It was a familiar game: the Marines intercepted aircraft suspected of transporting Militia supplies, the colonists played lost and dumb. The Marine’s rules of engagement prevented them from opening fire without provocation and for the first few months they could only watch helplessly as the colonists dumped their loads into the deep bush where the chances of recovery were virtually zero. The practice grew so prevalent that the Board finally decreed the dumping of any man-made object a deportable offense.

Now the trick was to jettison the contraband without getting caught. Windstone lay far enough away that they could break the packages down and toss out individual items as they passed through mist banks. Terson and Tham turned their full attention to the search for such opportunities and did not immediately notice the scuffle that broke out a moment later.

“He’s Militia!” Foster shouted.

Tham rolled his eyes, twisting around to calm the teenager. “No shit, kid—Jesus Christ!” His hand flew to his chest, fumbling to release the seat harness. The object the passenger had removed from the case, and which Foster now grappled for control of, was a single-use, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile launcher. The Militiaman wrenched the weapon from Foster’s grasp and raised it, sighting on the Headhunters through the port hatch.

“Hang on!” Terson yelled. Foster leapt for a cargo net as Terson banked hard to port. Searing propellant exhaust filled the cargo compartment; the Militiaman lost his balance and vanished through the open door. The abrupt maneuver broke the weapon’s target lock and it sailed harmlessly past the two gunships, but it was too late for apologies. The Headhunters pealed off in tight turns, circling in behind the helicopter from opposite directions. Projectiles rattled along the airframe like gravel. Something slammed the back of Terson’s head, driving his chin into his chest.

His ears popped from a sudden burst of pressure accompanied by acrid fumes and moist air. The helicopter went gyroscopic; the sky streaked into a horizontal blur of green, blue and smoky gray. He glimpsed the tail section spinning away and Foster falling with it, legs pumping, hands pawing with splayed fingers as if he could gain purchase on the air itself.

Terson thrust his hand through the rubberized boot covering the panic bar between the pilots’ seats and wrenched up with all his might. The engine screamed, transferring a flood of kinetic energy to the blades before the squibs detonated, flinging them away like a quartet of scythes. The cockpit module separated, thrown forward by centrifugal force and Terson’s stomach rose to his throat in the terrifying moments of free-fall before the parachute deployed.

The broad crown of a tree rushed up at him and the cockpit module crashed through half a dozen meters of foliage until the chute snagged in the ruin of broken branches left in its wake. The situation went from deafening chaos to near absolute silence in an instant. He hung limp in his seat harness, gasping for breath while the ghastly image of Nick Foster flailing against the relentless pull of gravity looped through his mind’s eye.

“I’m sorry,” Jack Tham choked out. “Jesus H. Christ, I’m so sorry.”

Jack’s guilt was nothing compared to Terson’s. Boss Hanstead expected him to make the right decisions, not let Jack Tham talk him into risking life, limb and property. The fact that it hadn’t taken much talking only exacerbated his guilt.

Terson swallowed the emotion, blinked the wetness out of his eyes and twisted around to haul out the survival pack stowed behind the seat. A firm jerk released a coil of rope attached to a tie-down ring in the floor.

Insects swarmed around the two men by the time they lowered themselves to the mound of taproots at the base of the tree. Terson dug into the pack for a tube of greasy salve which they applied liberally to their exposed flesh. The chemical stung skin and was excruciatingly painful if it came into contact with the eyes, but it was the only topical repellent capable of deterring the bugs.

Next he checked their weapons: a short bull-nosed automatic rifle he kept for himself and a semi-automatic shotgun with a pair of twenty-round drum magazines that he handed to Tham. His copilot set the weapon aside and sat down while he packed his pipe with his personal blend of mildly narcotic homemade tobacco.

“No time for that,” Terson told him, gesturing to the bright orange parachute fluttering in the crown of the tree above them. “This is the first place they’ll look for us.”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” Jack said as wisps of smoke curled around his hand.

Terson didn’t like the sound of that. “What are you trying to tell me, Jack?”

Tham blew smoke over his head. “You were born here, right?”

“Might as well have been,” Terson replied. “My parents immigrated when I was two or three.”

“I figured. Kid, as planets go this one is a shit hole, and even Hanstead knows it’s only a matter of time before they yank the rest of us off. A cell is a lot safer than walking a hundred kilometers through this shit on the slight chance that we’ll get to suffer through another few months of hell.”

“I never expected to hear that from you,” Terson said, “considering the rumors.”

“Yeah, well, they’d get me one way or the other,” Tham replied.

“What if we didn’t have to leave?”

“We won’t have a choice when they start knocking down the walls at the ranch,” Tham snorted.

“I know a place.”

“The Militia is getting its ass kicked.”

“Not Militia,” Terson said, “Passive Resistants. Good set-up, well hidden. We can walk it in a couple of weeks.”

Tham’s shoulders sagged. “I can’t. The ranch I can handle, you know?” He gestured around. “Not this!”

“Jack, I can get us out!” Terson insisted, frustrated by the man’s fatalism.

“Shut up a minute, Reilly, and listen. Listen hard, and tell me what you hear.” There was no harm in humoring his idiocy, so Terson closed his eyes and tilted his head and heard—nothing. “That’s my point,” Tham said when Terson told him. “To me, right now, it’s so goddamned noisy I can’t hear myself think! You’re half my age, and conditioned to this place. I weigh twice what I’m used to, my back hurts all the time, I’ve had one knee replaced already and the other is bad.

“I’m forty-four, Terson, but I’ve got the body of a sixty-year-old. I won’t make it if I try to walk out.”

Terson stood, resigned. He didn’t want to leave Jack by himself, but he wasn’t about to sacrifice his own freedom so lightly. “We’ll get you set up here before I leave, okay?”

Tham tapped the ashes out of his pipe. “Yeah. Sure.”

CCB regulations demanded that nothing man-made remain on the planet and no expense would be spared to recover the wreckage of the helicopter. Locating survivors was merely a by-product of the effort, so there was no telling how long Tham might have to wait. Terson helped him build a simple shelter and left him the bulk of the survival rations, along with both personal rescue beacons and all the bug-bombs.

“Sure you don’t want a couple of these?” Tham asked of the potent insecticide foggers.

Terson shook his head. “I’ll be on the move.” They shook hands solemnly, and Terson set off through the shaded twilight.

He’d traveled less than one hundred meters and caught the first pungent whiff of burned plastic when he heard the rapid thud of Tham’s shotgun behind him. He hurried back the way he’d come, moving faster along his back trail than he had cutting it, and emerged at the base of the tree where he’d left Tham.

Something had shredded his clothing; his torso was crosshatched with wounds from which blood still flowed. His face was frozen in an expression of wide-eyed horror that Terson would never forget. A perfunctory check of his vitals confirmed what Terson already knew: Jack Tham was dead. A fresh torrent of guilt washed through Terson as he stood. He would never have left an injured comrade alone, and even whole Jack Tham proved no more capable of surviving on his own.

A faint scrabble overhead made Terson glance up—into the iridescent, multifaceted eyes of a chinche poised to slash at him with a primitive razorgrass blade. Terson blocked the attack with the butt of his rifle and stumbled out of range. The insectoid’s powerful rear legs were capable of propelling it twice the distance that separated it from the human, but its abdominal cavity was grossly swollen with blood, hindering its range of motion.

That did not prevent it from calling for help.

The vestigial wings on its back vibrated, filling the air with a piercing, high-pitched whine that set Terson’s teeth on edge. Other chinche responded to the call. Their individual replies merged into a deafening drone that seemed to come from everywhere, growing louder by the second.

Terson slung his rifle and snatched up both the survival pack and the shotgun. He was too exposed in the dense jungle to fight off the creatures, but he might have a chance if enough of the helicopter was intact. He crashed headlong through the jungle along his earlier route, digging in the pack for the bug-bombs. He dropped them in his path every ten meters, leaving a trail of toxic mist behind him. Chinche could not hold their breath and the first to enter the cloud fell writhing and spinning as the nerve agent worked its havoc.

The foggers would only provide a few moments of lead time before the chinche simply swarmed around them, but it might be all he needed to reach the helicopter and whatever protection it might offer.

A smoky fire line appeared ahead, flames on the ground crackling weakly, struggling against the moisture-laden plant life. Terson pushed through, eyes tearing in the smoke, and broke out into a bare blackened patch fifty meters across. The inferno left nothing of the fuselage but a ring of blackened titanium ribs.

He increased his pace across the hot ash, weaving through a stand of blackened tree trunks to the center of the burn where the impact and subsequent explosion had gouged out a shallow crater. The material mounded around the edge provided a barrier sufficient to conceal most of his body when he knelt, shotgun clamped firmly between his elbow and hip.

The chinche’s maddening war cry grew louder, threatening to split his skull, and then fell abruptly silent.  Minutes passed. Terson did not misinterpret the silence as a sign of the insectoids’ retreat; he knew they were watching, planning, and that he would not learn the outcome until they acted.

The sound of a metal pan dragging across a washboard emerged from the jungle to his right. Answering calls sounded from the left, rear and directly ahead. A moment later he heard a single chirp, and chinche rushed in from every direction. The actual attack was surprisingly silent, compared to the pursuit. The creatures generated no sound but the gentle rustle and click of their pebble adornments as they raced across the clearing and leapt from trunk to trunk.

Terson’s response was immediate and devastating. He hurled a withering stream of shotgun fire through their ranks, exploding carapaces and blowing off chitinous limbs. Fletched razorgrass darts rained down from the branches above, burying themselves in the ground and biting into fallen logs. Terson turned the shotgun skyward, blowing apart the tufted masses of twigs and leaves where the chinche hid. He killed dozens with each sweep of the barrel, but one advanced for every five he stopped. His perimeter shrank until the projectiles they flung began landing inside the crater.

A dart sliced into his calf; another glanced across his shoulder. The cuts burned with pain beyond the physical injuries. The cumulative effects of the poison increased with each additional wound; his sight swam and blurred, the grip on his weapon weakened.

Terson dropped the shotgun when the ammunition ran out and reached down for his rifle. He couldn’t lift it, and the effort exhausted him too much to stand upright again. He toppled on his side, muscles soft and sluggish, struggling for each breath. He soon experienced the horror so evident on Jack Tham’s face. The chinche surrounded him, fighting each other for a claim of the booty. Blades slashed his flesh from every angle, inflicting wounds from which they raced to lap up his blood before he expired.

Intense, agonizing heat washed across him accompanied by a sudden, massive downdraft that whipped up a choking cloud of ash.

Terson stared dumbly at the Colonial Police helicopter hovering overhead as the door gunner played the beam of his Active Denial weapon back and forth over the chinche in the crater. The Colonization Board mandated the use of the supposedly non-lethal device in any situation involving chinche, inadvertently supplying the colonists with their most effective weapon against the insectoids to date. Although the microwave energy spent itself against the first layer of skin in mammals, producing an excruciating but harmless burning sensation, it penetrated the chinche’s dry, porous chitin, exciting the moisture in their innards faster than their bodies could dissipate the heat.

The chinche clinging to Terson dropped dead, roasted in their own shells.

Terson dimly perceived someone rappelling from the helicopter, then a dizzying harness ride ten meters into the air where the gunner pulled Terson and his rescuer into the helicopter. The last thing he remembered was a laryngoscope blade sliding down his throat as they intubated him.

ONE

Saint Anatone, Nivia: 2708:08:19 Standard

The sound of a steel door slamming against its stops tore through Terson’s throbbing head like a bullet. His eyelids felt like they were lined with sandpaper. His mouth tasted like a small animal had crawled inside and shit itself to death.

“Reilly; out!”

Terson pulled himself to his feet and shuffled across a floor tacky with bile and stale urine. The jailer took him by the arm and led him to the discharge station. A tall, slender man in a black jumpsuit stood in the foyer bouncing on the balls of his feet—Captain Maalan Bragg, the Federal Police investigator who also acted as Terson’s probation officer.

His belongings spilled onto the counter before him. Nothing was left of the hundred-euro note he remembered leaving home with but small change. The arrest bond slid across to him.

“Twenty-five hundred,” the jailer smirked. “Cash or credit?”

Terson flipped his debit card back. “Cash—and I want my receipt this time.”

The transaction processed and his card hit him in the chest. “See you next week, smartass.”

Bragg intercepted him as he headed for the door. “You violated probation again.”

Terson examined his knuckles. New cuts and scrapes lay atop old scars and partially healed wounds. He explored the inside of his mouth with his tongue for cuts or missing teeth, but everything was as it should be.

“I guess I won.”

Bragg only shook his head and pointed at the door.

The humid air outside enveloped Terson like a moist blanket. His eyes teared up in the bright, clear sunlight. He fumbled at his pockets but his sunglasses were gone, lost during the night’s binge. He stepped into Bragg’s shadow and followed the officer to a car equipped, mercifully, with tinted windows.

Bragg was already sweating heavily in the heat and humidity, but to Terson the air was just on the edge of comfortable. He had yet to experience more than a few days he considered hot. He certainly didn’t sweat like the locals, who dashed from air-conditioned dwelling to air-conditioned vehicle as if their veins coursed ice water, and then massed on the beaches to expose their bodies to insects and the crisping radiation of the sun.

No one thought to caution Terson about the sun when he arrived. Algran Asta’s perpetual cloud cover blocked the most harmful radiation, and the rare periods of clear sky were too brief to do damage. Terson found Nivia’s deep blue sky fascinating the first day, but he woke that night in horrible pain to find his face, neck and hands bright red and blistered. He rushed to the local hospital in near panic, convinced he’d contracted some disfiguring disease. The medical staff chuckled at his ignorance, adding anger to his anxiety, which brought on an attack of another sort no one thought of, this one life threatening.

Terson grew up in high gravity at an altitude lower than Nivia’s sea level on a planet with an average atmospheric oxygen level of twenty-seven percent. Consequently, his lungs lacked the capacity to oxygenate his blood normally on Nivia, where the air pressure and oxygen levels were considerably less than what his physiology was accustomed to. He collapsed in the hospital and almost died before the staff realized that he was suffering from acute altitude sickness.

The damnable AC in Bragg’s cruiser came on before they reached the street. Terson closed his eyes and rested his head against the warm window while they drove downtown. He could not say he received less than a fair deal from the Commonwealth, though it was a close thing. The prosecution painted him as not merely a Militia sympathizer, but an active member who participated in a potentially deadly attack on two Marine pilots engaged in the performance of their lawful duties. The alleged Militia member who launched the weapon was never found and therefore existed as nothing more than a transparent fabrication intended to deflect responsibility for the crime from the real culprit.

The defense produced the falsified manifest signed by the shipping agent in Windstone who was later indicted for an unrelated incident in which he attempted to funnel weapons to the Colonial Resistant Militia disguised as legal cargo using an unsuspecting shipper. The Marine pilots confirmed that they observed two individuals eject from the helicopter, but the prosecution could not adequately explain how either man could fly and fire the weapon at the same time.

Terson was found guilty of providing false statements to an agent of the Colonization Board, to wit: the Marine pilot who first contacted him. He received four years, suspended, with credit for time served, and maintained his resettlement rights plus full compensation for the family homestead and herds held in trust for him by Boss Hanstead.

Bragg turned down a ramp leading to the Federal Police garrison’s parking garage. He boasted a corner office on the upper floors with a good view of the ocean two kilometers distant. Terson sat, rubbing his temples while Bragg shuffled paperwork.

“It becomes a felony if you accumulate too many probation violations,” Bragg said.

Terson shrugged.

“We’ve got people you can talk to,” Bragg said. “There’s no reason for you to live like this.”

Terson rested his face in his hands; a wad of scum oozed down his throat. He’d heard the coming lecture a dozen times, but the sooner he got through it the sooner he could go home.

The vidcom behind the desk chimed. Bragg stabbed the privacy switch and picked up the handset. The light over the video transmitter gleamed, though the screen and speaker remained inactive. “Yes, ma’am,” Bragg told the unseen caller, “I’ll bring it up right now.” He pulled another file from his desk. “Wait here.” The door closed behind him with a well-oiled click.

Terson could hardly believe his luck when they offered him another Class I colony; planets with a breathable atmosphere were rare, and after months in a cell he would have accepted transportation to anyplace with a sky, breathable or not. Had Terson actually read Nivia’s strict environmental charter before he signed he might have changed his mind.

Though inhabited for just over one hundred and seventy-five years, with a population barely over the median average of Algran Asta, Nivia was far from the raw, burgeoning colony Terson expected. Habitation was forbidden on two of the planet’s three continents; new development on the Alpha continent required years of permits and hearings.

Slow growth coupled with advanced technology offered a standard of living higher than colonies twice as old. The state provided for the colonists’ organic needs through carefully managed harvesting of wildlife, making large-scale agriculture and animal husbandry unnecessary. The ocean yielded the bulk of the food, but even getting a job as a deck hand required education and certifications Terson didn’t have.

The thing he found most confounding was the strict population control program, which dictated that the arrival of every Permanent Foreign Immigrant reduced the quota of authorized pregnancies among native Nivians by an equal number. Inexplicably, the locals blamed the immigrants, or phigs, as they preferred to call the newcomers, rather than their own idiotic policies.

The office door opened but instead of Bragg, a girl swept in, skidding uncertainly when she saw Terson. Red hair framed her face and shoulders in soft curls, and obvious feminine curves strained under her sleeveless summer blouse, which had been cropped to her midriff revealing a firm, tanned stomach.

She gazed at him quizzically for a moment. “I’m here to see Captain Bragg.”

“He had to step out.”

“Oh.” A smile lit her face. She flipped her hair over her shoulder and sat down. “I haven’t seen you around before,” she decided. “My name’s Virene.” She extended her hand, surveying him with intelligent green eyes. Perfume wafted around her, ambrosia compared to the drunk tank’s bouquet.

He shook her hand perfunctorily. The brief contact set his heart thudding in his chest and he hoped that he didn’t smell as bad as he suspected that he did. If she detected his bodily fragrances, she kept it to herself.

“Your turn,” she prompted.

“I’m sorry?”

“My name is Virene,” she explained, hands turning inward to indicate herself, then outward toward him, “and your name is…?”

The feared blush rushed up from his collar. “Sorry. I’m Terson. You must be his…daughter?”

“Me? Absolutely not!” Virene exclaimed with melodramatic horror before breaking into laughter. “I like to think I’m his number one miscreant. So, Terson, what are you in for?”

“A series of unfortunate misunderstandings.”

“I’ll bet. I have been brought in three times for public indecency, although,” she grinned with a wink, holding out her arms, “I dare you to look me in the eye and tell me there’s anything indecent about this.”

He couldn’t, though the thoughts that rushed into his mind clearly were, and he was certain that each and every one advertised itself on his face for her to see. He stood abruptly. “I have to go.”

“Well, nice meeting you, Terson,” she said as he headed for the door. “I work at The Pit—you should stop by sometime.”

The door clicked shut behind him. The memory of her perfume lingered all the way to the street.

The cramped public housing they’d assigned Terson when he first arrived was infested with Saint Anatone’s entire population of addicts, mental cases and petty criminals. Terson had never been forced to tolerate the like on Hanstead Ranch and made no attempt to hide the disdain he felt for his neighbors, who returned it tenfold.

Phigs occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder, even among scum.

Mutual disdain escalated to occasional harassment and threats of violence before Terson discovered that there was an isolated area in which a man could travel with relative freedom: the two hundred kilometer band of coastal waters that ringed the continent between the northern thirty-eighth parallel and southern thirty-sixth.  Flat, open water wasn’t exactly what Terson considered a wilderness, but it offered the only available respite from Nivia’s inhabitants and their bizarre rules.

The rent on a comfortable self-contained boat was exorbitant, but not beyond Terson’s means and he went out several times a month. Eventually the rental agent, admittedly motivated more by concern for the safety of his boats than the nautical idiot using them, pointed out that Terson could buy his own cheaper than he could continue to rent.

Mac Toner, the surly marina operator, appeared in the doorway of his office as Terson reached the boardwalk. “I see you fishing off my pier again you’re gone Reilly! Y’hear?”

“Blow it out your ass!” Terson snapped back.

“In the office!” Toner bellowed. “Now!” The frigid air inside chilled his skin as he entered. Toner followed him in, slamming the door and drawing the shade.

“What was that all about?” Terson asked.

“Environmental Protection’s got plainclothes hanging around again,” Toner explained. “Beer?”

Terson’s stomach rolled at the thought. “Sure.” The bitter liquid eradicated the aftertaste from the previous evening’s binge. “They watching my boat?”

“Yep.”

“You want me to pull out?”

“Hell, no!” Toner exclaimed, “You’re a pain in the ass, but the moorage on that monster of yours makes up for it. I just needed a show—those people in slip ten had a line out the window last night and maybe they’ll get the message before I get a fine.

“Anyway, that stuff you wanted came in,” Toner said. “I put it in your live-hold. You sure you know how to handle it?”

“No worries,” Terson assured him. He drained the bottle and sauntered down to the slip where his twenty-meter hydrojet tugged at its moorings in the gentle swell, as anxious as Terson to be off. Most people preferred to dock as close to shore as possible, but the craft’s starboard wing-in-ground-effect surface extended over the dock several meters and Toner had assigned him a slip at the very end of the pier, leaving the adjacent slips vacant.

It was as much an aircraft as a boat, but like all WIG craft the hydrojet’s altitude was limited by its wingspan to thrust ratio: ten meters in this case. The three fifteen-hundred horsepower jet turbine engines could propel it to a speed of three hundred knots in flight. One engine on either side of the nose swiveled to vector exhaust beneath the wings where flaps and wingtip endplates created an air cushion to help lift it out of the water during takeoff. The third, in the tail, added additional forward momentum. A two hundred horsepower impeller provided propulsion on the surface.

Terson stepped up on the deck and took the package Toner had left in the live-hold down to the galley. Inside he found one hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammunition and twenty-five 12-gauge shotgun shells, all carefully triple-wrapped to prevent inadvertent contact with the lead shot and bullets. Acquiring the illegal ammunition had proven inordinately expensive, but Terson had little confidence in the biodegradable rounds available to the general public.

He showered and ate and found himself pacing restlessly through the boat. He’d intended to fly out to the Humboldt Archipelago for a week or so before the altercation that landed him in jail again. He could still make it by dark, but his mind kept turning to a certain pleasant smelling green-eyed redhead.

The islands could wait, he finally decided, at least long enough to divest himself of the fantasy.

The Pit lay in the ring of establishments that invariably sprang up around college campuses. Smoke glowed in multi-colored lights flashing on the dance floor. Bass rhythms beat against his chest; relentless noise blasted his ears. The crowd consisted of stylish young people his own age. Terson’s clothing, though clean, was more suited to working class joints and the distinction was not lost on the revelers who eyed him with casual disinterest if they noticed him at all.

Virene hadn’t told him exactly what she did. She looked too young to tend bar, but he didn’t see her among the waitresses delivering trays of drinks and appetizers. He bought a beer and circulated through the club, his vision hampered by the crowd. He’d grown several centimeters without Algran Asta’s crushing gravity to compress his spine, but he would never be a tall man by Nivian standards.

She walked out from the kitchen toweling suds from her hands, hair pulled back in a tail, dark and stringy with moisture. She held a glass of ice water against ruddy cheeks and laughed at something the bartender said.

She was beautiful.

Terson’s fanciful hopes evaporated. It was hopeless—she’d been polite with him to deal with an uncomfortable situation and he’d chosen to interpret it as something else. It wasn’t likely that she’d even recognize him, and approaching her would only lead to embarrassment for them both.

She saw him before he could turn away and waved. Terson worked his way across the room cautiously, expecting whoever she really waved at to appear at any second. The acoustic qualities of the room protected the bar from some of the noise, but she still had to lean close to be heard.

“Bragg was pissed when he came back,” she laughed. “He canceled my appointment to look for you. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Despite his earlier trepidation she seemed genuinely engaging, a gratifying development in otherwise uncertain territory even if it turned out that she was nothing but a flirt, and he ordered another mug of beer while they chatted. The girl stole sips from it whenever the bartender wasn’t looking, a transgression that she acknowledged might cost her a job, but which Terson found appealingly rebellious. He finally asked if she wanted to do something when she got off.

“I’ll have to go home and change,” she said, picking a tangle from the end of her maligned tresses. “I hope you don’t mind waiting.”

Terson’s gaze fixed on two uniformed figures that appeared in the mirror behind the bar, strutting through the crowd with the same mien as the Marines on Algran Asta. He watched them stiffly as they approached, but they weren’t Commonwealth Marines, he realized, though the uniforms were somewhat similar. The crowd edged away from them discretely, maintaining a cautious distance in spite of the press.

“Cadets from the EPEA academy,” Virene volunteered, identifying the source of his sudden tension. “They’re assholes.”

The Environmental Protection and Enforcement Authority was notoriously brutal in dealing with poachers, both actual and suspected. Nivian law authorized EPEA agents to shoot poachers on sight, and anyone beyond certain boundaries were automatically defined as poachers whether they were observed engaging in the activity or not.

“Look close; you can see their scars,” Terson said, aiming to regain their lighthearted conversation.

“What scars?”

“The ones left by the lobotomy.”

Virene snorted beer through her nose and buried her face in the towel. The hair rose on the back of Terson’s neck. The cadets were staring back.

The drinkers around Terson darted away like a school of fish at their approach. He drained the mug and belched. The cadets settled in on either side of him, mean-eyed and drunk.

“You looking for trouble, little fella?” one asked.

“Not tonight.”

“Then why you lookin’ at us?”

“Just imagining how excited you must have been to find out your IQ was low enough to be an Eepee.”

The cadet stared, certain that Terson had insulted him but too drunk to figure out exactly how. He gave up after a moment, moving on to the more obvious issue: “Hey, you’re a goddamned phig!” he exclaimed, and threw a punch.

Nineteen years in Algran Asta’s high gravity paid dividends in strength and reflexes; Terson moved his head slightly and the intended blow whispered past his chin. The cadet looked puzzled, tried again with the same result. The bad asses where Terson usually drank had learned their lessons early, but he wasn’t drunk enough to want a fight tonight. He grimaced apologetically to the girl as he slid off the stool to leave.

An open hand caught him in the side of the head.

The blow wasn’t that strong; the delivery was sloppy and ineffective, intended to intimidate rather than do real damage, a sign of self-important arrogance on the part of the assailant and contempt for the person on the receiving end.

That made Terson angry.

Pent up frustration from months of trying to fit the expectations of a society that wouldn’t cut him a centimeter of slack for the slightest mistake welled up as icy, focused rage. He slapped the next punch aside with one hand and drove forward with the heel of the other. Blood sprayed from the cadet’s nose.

Terson blocked a round-house kick from his partner with his forearm and caught the man’s foot before he could recover. The first assailant advanced on him while his hands were busy; Terson wrenched the foot around, ripping cartilage in the knee and effectively taking its owner out of the fight before addressing the threat.

He struck the advancing cadet in the ribs, snapping bones with each blow. Terson caught him by the front of his collar before he fell and held him up while he drove a fist into his face over and over, battering the flesh until it sprayed fluid like a blood-soaked sponge.

Someone in the crowd jabbed Terson in the kidney with a stunner. His head snapped back as a blue halo blazed around his body. His jaws clenched like a vise as every muscle in his body convulsed. He landed on his side, vision reduced to a tunnel that rapidly collapsed into total darkness.

Terson’s hearing took place after three days of motions and legal gibberish. Bragg acted as his council, a duty that irked the police officer to no end. He took the responsibility seriously, however. If Terson Reilly was to be crucified it would be by the book.

Terson sat through the proceeding listlessly. His head throbbed and he really, really needed a drink. An abrupt silence fell around him. Terson looked up slowly to find the magistrate, prosecutor and Bragg all looking at him expectantly.

“What?”

“I asked,” the magistrate repeated, “if you wish to make a statement.”

“You people are insane.”

The magistrate pursed his lips. “Would you two gentlemen leave us alone for a few minutes?”

“Your Honor, I object,” Bragg said while the prosecutor gathered his documents without trying to hide a smile. “Mister Reilly has the right—”

“I am fully aware of Mister Reilly’s rights, Captain,” the magistrate sighed. “Indulge me.” He leaned back in his chair after the door closed behind them. “Terson, do you know how natural selection works?”

The odd question threw him off his mark. “Natural selection?”

“The means by which an organism adapts to its environment,” he explained, taking Terson’s question for a negative response, “though it applies to populations, not individuals. Say for instance you have a herd of horses and you apply a selective vector artificially—every so often you shoot half of the horses that have four legs. One of three things has to happen: eventually you have a herd of three-legged horses, the horses become immune to bullets, or the herd becomes extinct.”

“I know what natural selection is,” Terson snapped.

“Good. Then you know that a similar process operates within human societies. To survive in a community we develop artificial standards that we call culture,” the magistrate continued. “Now, human cultures are amazingly diverse and adaptable when viewed as a whole, but for individual humans culture dictates conformity. Those who cannot conform disrupt the community and endanger the survival of the entire group.

“Obviously a society can’t cull every non-conformist any more than a breeder could continue shooting four-legged horses. Minor nonconformities can be tolerated, but the more significant ones must be dealt with. A horse can’t survive by choosing to drop off a leg, but a human can be encouraged to conform—up to a point. Past that point society must remove the offender to protect itself.

“This brings us to you.” The magistrate pushed a document across to Terson with his finger planted on a signature block. “Your continued participation in this society will be decided within the next few minutes. My signature, on this spot, will remand you back to Commonwealth custody. I couldn’t care less what happens to you then.”

Terson’s throat constricted. He gripped the edge of the table as the room swam around him, unbidden memories of his first incarceration welling up in an inexorable tide.

“Just between you and me,” the magistrate continued, “the two cadets that jumped you are thugs. What you did was justified to a degree, considering what they might have done to someone without your…background, but I have no doubt that you would have killed one or both of them if their plain-clothed friend hadn’t interceded. Rest assured that they will be dealt with appropriately, but make no mistake: you are absolutely worthless to this society as you are. I’ll let you walk out that door once, but if you cross paths with this court again, ever, you might just as well hang yourself.”

Terson lay across the hydrojet’s impeller engine cowling fighting a new fuel pump into place. His fingers located the bolt hole by touch and he maneuvered the pump into place. Supporting it with his other hand, he reached out for the bolt and found—nothing. “Son of a bitch! Fuck!”

“Hey, watch the dirty talk!” a feminine voice quipped.

Terson peered under his left armpit to find Virene watching him from the dock. “Do me a favor?”

“You’ll have to do more than talk dirty,” she warned.

“Yeah, ha ha. There’s a bolt on the deck down here somewhere. Will you get it for me?”

She hopped onto the boat and peered around. “What kind of bolt? There are a lot of them.”

“About twelve centimeters long.”

“Male centimeters, or the real ones?”

“Geez,” Terson barked. “You never quit!”

“Not when I’m winning. This one?” She handed it over and rubbed the grease off her fingers against the pier’s weathered surface while Terson got it started.

Terson stood and peeled off his shirt, wadding it into a ball as he scrubbed the worst of the oil and grime from his hands, stalling until his fastidiousness became awkward.

“You don’t get much sun,” she observed. Terson’s face and hands were darker than the girl’s own honey complexion, but his skin was white as ivory from neck to wrists, unblemished except for a crosshatch of scars.

“I guess not. You want a beer or something?”

“Sure.”

Terson took two bottles from the deck cooler and twisted off the tops. “So what brings you here?”

“Curiosity,” Virene shrugged. “I wondered what happened to you.”

“Bragg give you my address?”

“He uses his wife’s name for his password. Your file didn’t say anything about jail, so I figured you must have gotten off.”

“The magistrate sentenced me to college,” Terson shrugged. “I guess he pulled some strings to get me into the Spaceflight Training School at Malone.”

“That’s amazing,” she smiled. “I had you pegged for a plant psychiatrist specializing in thorny shrubs and nettles, the bane of geraniums and flowering houseplants.”

Terson smiled despite himself. “You think you’re funny?”

The tips of her ears reddened. “I hope you think so.”

Terson finished his beer. “I’ll have the engine together in an hour,” he said. “Want to go for a ride?”

“I’d love to,” she smiled. “Or did you mean in the boat?”

TWO

West of the Humboldt Archipelago, Nivia: 2709:03:24 Standard

The channel between the reef and the island’s shore looked like the miss-stroke of an artist’s brush, a slash of blue amid the pale green of shallower water. Terson blinked his eyes irritably. His brain chose the damnedest times to remind him that the shadows were just a bit too sharp, the light too intense. He couldn’t blame it all on his brain, though; he’d pretty much ignored it during the long post-wedding party the night before. He flared back later than he should have and the hydrojet met the ocean with a jar. Beside him Virene opened her eyes, awakened by the slap and bounce of the craft’s hull as it settled into the water.

The small island was formed by a minor volcanic vent that emerged five hundred kilometers west of the main archipelago. It boasted two cones, one a little over one hundred meters above sea level, the other slightly less than fifty. The forces that created them had been dormant for centuries, and the sea worked at the windward bulwark of black cliffs relentlessly, grinding them down one millimeter at a time.

Virene smiled at her husband as the growl of impellers drowned out the rhythmic assault. He was a sharp contrast to the man she’d met a year earlier. Tanned skin accentuated coils of muscle in his arms and legs where once the very idea of exposing limbs was foreign. Around strangers he stood reserved, but no longer surly. He’d softened over time, but was by no means tamed. Her parents had made their disapproval painfully clear from the moment they learned of the affair. He was dangerous, they said, undisciplined and lawless. Virene did not disagree: they were the very attributes that made him so attractive.

Rough rock walls slid past. The island’s lagoon was the remnant of a volcanic crater. At some point the ocean had worked its way through the hardened magma, creating a thirty-meter long curved canal nearly invisible from outside the reef. The bottom sloped to a depth of four meters, and then dropped off into blue, impenetrable depths. Along one side of the lagoon a huge tree had fallen into the water. Eventually tunneling sea worms would break it up, but in the meantime it made a serviceable dock.

Virene jumped out and made the boat fast while Terson held it snug against the tree with the impeller. He slid out the gangplank and gave her a hand back aboard, and they slipped into each other’s arms. She flicked her tongue past his teeth teasingly as his hands slid down her back and fingers slipped beneath the waistband of her shorts.

She stepped back with a grin. “You’ve still got that kind of energy after last night?”

“Warming up.” He stood back, ogling her. “That outfit looks uncomfortable. Why don’t you slip out of it?”

Virene pointed at the equipment locker behind the cockpit. “I think you’ve got some work to do, first.” She turned with a grin and vanished below deck. “Call me when you’re done!”

Terson pulled the tent from the locker without enthusiasm. Virene found camping a great adventure. Terson, conversely, had spent his share of time among creatures that flew and bit, crawled and bit, and swam and bit. Given the choice, he preferred the boat’s cabin. He carried the tent onto the beach and checked his rifle before slinging it across his back and taking a machete to the overgrown campsite.

The blade sang as it sliced through tender regrowth, eliciting pleasant ghosts of home. When he closed his eyes and sucked in the hot, humid air he could almost be home, except that the wind smelled like salt instead of jungle rot.

Rivulets of sweat streamed down his chest by the time he finished assembling the tent, the most irritating sign that his body had acclimated to the new environment. He walked back down to the hydrojet where Virene stretched out on the front deck wearing nothing but the skimpy thong she’d purchased a few months after they met, the only compromise she was willing to make with the authorities after repeated arrests for sunbathing in nothing at all. Terson leaned over the edge of the boat to fill a bait bucket with water and slipped along the walk between the guardrail and the main cabin wall.

A torrent of water hit him from above.

“I knew your intentions weren’t honorable,” Virene laughed. Terson’s counterstrike left her soaked and sputtering, dark red bangs plastered to her forehead.

“Never talk when you should run,” Terson advised.

Virene pressed her palms together under her chin and bowed. “Yes, O Great Purveyor of Superfluous Bullshit.”

“Submissiveness, at last,” Terson sighed. She stuck her tongue out at him and sat down, dangling her legs over the edge of the roof. Her eyes rested on the rifle barrel behind his shoulder briefly, then moved to his face without comment. By now she accepted his proclivity to keep the weapon close at hand. It was a remnant of his past that she could not influence any more than the scars crisscrossing his body.

“What’s for dinner?” she asked.

“Grab whatever you want. Freezer’s full.”

“There is no romance in pre-packaged frozen dinners.”

“I suppose you want me to kill something,” he sighed.

“Mm-hm. Then I want to drag you to my cave and use you.”

Terson pinched her cheek. “My horny little poacher.”

Virene reddened uncomfortably. “I wish you wouldn’t say that. It sounds dirty.”

“Pre-packaged frozen dinners, then?” he asked hopefully.

Virene pinched him back. “You’re trying to get out of cooking. I’ll get the beer.”

They let the faux pas pass, as they’d done before. The concept of poaching simply did not exist on Terson’s homeworld. On Nivia, it ranked somewhere between murder and incest. The locals invested a lot of emotional energy in guilt over filched berries and pilfered fish.

Terson loaded their gear into an over-sized backpack and they set off up an overgrown path that crossed the saddle between the island’s peaks. A comforting sense of menace settled over Terson’s mind as the trees closed in on them. He struck to and fro with the machete rebelliously, lopping off more foliage than he needed to, burning away unconscious frustration. The civilized veneer his new home demanded chaffed. The island gave him the opportunity to throw it off without the immediate danger of incarceration.

The trail emerged on a wide, sandy beach protected by the reef thirty meters off shore.

Terson had never imagined any part of a planet could be so flat. Algran Asta lacked open water, per se, and he’d never learned to swim. It was a necessary skill on Nivia but his first attempts in Saint Anatone’s tropical waters made him feel like he was floating in blood. He didn’t learn to enjoy it until he met Virene.

Virene set up the cooking pot and gathered wood for the fire while Terson searched the bushes for a pair of forked sticks with the necessary angle and flexibility to hunt with. She made a face when he handed one to her. “Can’t I just make moon eyes and fawn over the mighty hunter and his catch?”

“You could,” Terson smiled as he dug out their snorkeling gear, “but what would you eat?”

She stuck her fork in the sand at his feet and headed for the water with her mask and flippers.  “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Terson hurriedly unpacked his gear and waded in after her. The reef protected the tiny inlet from the open ocean, but twice Terson had found deep-water predators trapped inside the reef by storms. Most Nivians were oblivious to the sophisticated system of sonic emitters and physical barriers around their cities and roads that kept the wildlife at bay.

He checked the safety pins on the pair of bang sticks slung across his back in place of his rifle and dove into the murky shoreline waters. Visibility improved dramatically ten or fifteen meters out, where the bottom angled down and the first mounds of coral appeared.

The world beneath the surface was as noisy as any jungle, filled with chirps, grunts and cracking as fish circled within the inlet grazing on coral and seaweed or sifting smaller creatures from the sand.

Virene’s hair rippled along her back as she swam, her aquatic grace blending naturally with the reef’s inhabitants. A school of tiny fish briefly encapsulated her like a mist of jewels. They darted away in terror at Terson’s clumsy approach. Virene pointed downward where a troupe of crustaceans caught in the open sand had massed together. The creatures waved their claws overhead menacingly as they retreated toward the nearest crevice.

Terson plunged his stick into the chitinous mass, wedging one of the creatures between the forks. He transferred it to the mesh sack at his side and repeated the procedure until the troupe reached cover and the survivors vanished. He probed the holes and crevices with his stick while Virene plucked hapless, slow-moving shellfish from their nests beneath the seaweed. The humans returned to the beach with Terson’s sack filled to capacity.

The shellfish only needed a few seconds in hot water to emerge from their armor. Terson skewered the naked mollusks and dropped them in a pan to fry while the water came to a full boil. The crustaceans did not surrender as willingly, pinching at Terson’s fingers as he transferred them to the pot.

Virene flicked pebbles into the sand while they waited, unusually introspective. Terson pulled out a beer for each of them and offered one to her. “Are you disappointed your folks didn’t come to the wedding?”

Virene took a swallow and smacked her lips. “No. Should I be?”

Terson shrugged. “They’re your parents.”

“Only by an accident of nature. But… I thought Vern might come.”

Her elder brother’s signature was the only one missing from the letter Virene received from her mother after announcing her engagement to a phig. The handwriting began with precise lettering, expressing strong disapproval. By the closing the woman’s sentences swayed erratically across the margins, barely legible, but the word whore appeared frequently. Beside her vicious scrawl lay the father’s signature, little more than a feeble first initial trailing into a few arbitrary loops. Terson had wondered at the time if the man’s personality was as weak. The rest of Virene’s brothers and sisters added their names in two neat rows.

“I’m sorry they felt that way,” Terson said.

“I’m not.”

Terson picked up a piece of shell and threw it into the water. “Maybe we should have waited.”

Virene rubbed his shoulder. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. Besides, I was starting to wonder if this was going anywhere. I think you would have waited forever if I hadn’t been the one to ask. I wasn’t ever sure if you’d say yes.”

“I did, though.”

“I’m not sure why.”

“Maybe because I love you?” Terson replied, exasperated.

“That isn’t always enough,” she said. “I could always tell you’re not completely happy here; that you might want to leave some day.”

Terson slipped his arm around her. “Not if you didn’t go with me. I’d stay for you.”

“You love me that much?”

“More.”

Virene leaned over and kissed him, long and deeply. “Good answer,” she whispered in his ear.

They cracked shells between rocks to get at the sweet white meat inside, spitting fragments of grit into the sand between their feet, and washed it down with beer until their bellies bulged. Afterward they lay in a sated drowse while the shade crept slowly toward the jungle. Eventually the burn of sunlight on their bare legs roused them again. They sat up, stretching for a few moments before starting to break camp.

Virene reached into the frying pan and held up the remains of a mollusk daintily. “Eat up,” she called. “Can’t let it go to waste!”

Terson opened his mouth obediently. The meat was cold but still tender until his teeth came down on something hard. He separated it with his tongue and spat a light blue sphere almost a centimeter in diameter into his hand.

“What’s that?” Virene asked, leaning in for a closer look.

“Some kind of pearl, I guess,” Terson said. He held it up where motes in its surface sparkled in the failing sunlight.

“It’s beautiful,” Virene breathed.

He held it out to her. “Accept it as a token of my eternal devotion.”

“I love you, Terson,” she smiled.

Any lingering doubts about their decision evaporated then and there.

The sun sank bloodily into a cloudbank on the horizon while they put out the fire and gathered their things. An enormous moon took over, casting its pale, cold light through the trees. Terson shouldered the backpack and turned to the forest. The reassuring light of the moon stopped dead at the tree line, making him wish that they’d packed up a little faster. There’s nothing on the island bigger than your forearm, he assured himself, but nineteen years of conditioning were hard to overcome.

Terson gripped his rifle and stepped into the darkness. Humidity clung to the tree line like a damp shroud; goosebumps raised as the forest closed around them. His eyes flicked, scanning the shadows. A drop of condensation splattered down his right arm—he started to bolt, held fast, spine buzzing with cold terror.

Virene walked on, oblivious to the battle waging inside him. Terson forced his attention away from the jungle, concentrating on the woman walking beside him, the future they were making and the family they would have one day. The cadence of his heart and breath slowed again; he was okay.

But later that night, he saw Jack Tham die again.

Chinche wings whined in the jungle around them. Jack reached inside his pocket for a pipe and tobacco. The whine grew more intense, sharper, like a fly deep in his ear. Terson rapped himself on the side of the head with the heel of his hand, trying to knock it out .

“What’s wrong, pal, need a hit?” Jack held the pipe out to him, wisps of mildly narcotic smoke swirling around his hand.

The jungle rustled and thrashed, each stem and branch moving of its own volition. A huge leaf fell. It melted and stretched, gained mass, solidified into a chinche. Terson yelled; no sound issued from his throat. He struggled to raise his bushgun, but the harder he tried, the slower it moved. The jungle collapsed, flowing toward them, a living wave of chinche. They brought Jack down from behind with sheer numbers, hacking, stabbing with knives of cured razor grass. Jack’s fingers dug furrows in the dirt and he looked up at Terson with an agonized, accusing expression.

The chinche began to feed.

Terson ran, Jack’s screams echoing behind him in the dark. He felt the chinche leap on him, felt them pummel his body, felt the blood on his skin. The ground went liquid, climbed up his legs, dragged at his feet until he couldn’t run anymore. Blood gushed across his eyes, ran from his chin.

“Terson!” A blinding flash of light ripped at the darkness, shocking his eyes, turning the blood to water.

He stood up to his waist in the lagoon. Virene stood next to him, brushing aside the lock of hair channeling water into his face. Terson pulled her into a fierce embrace and buried his face in her hair, letting her warmth melt the twisted knot of ice in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t realize how badly he’d been shaking until he stopped.

“Honey, I need to breathe,” Virene said. Her voice barely overcame the constant rumble of thunder. Terson let her go with a pang of guilt. She gave him a squeeze and drew his arms about her again. Lightning flickered in the clouds. “The way you ran out of there, a girl would get the idea you didn’t like sleeping with her,” Virene said.

“What do you mean?” Terson stammered.

Virene put her hand over his mouth. “I’m teasing, Terson.”

Terson felt a twinge of annoyance that must have shown on his face, because she laughed and leaned away from him, stretching her arms over her head. Rain spattered her upturned face and shoulders, cascaded over her taut breasts.

“Are you trying to seduce me?” he asked.

“Yes,” Virene giggled. He let go of her. She went all the way under and came up sputtering. “Wait until Mother finds out her son-in-law would let her daughter drown for a cheap thrill.”

“I was hoping you’d need resuscitation.”

Virene snaked her arms under his and began to kiss his neck. She had never asked about the dreams, even when they’d been a nightly plague. The worst ones taught him to trust her, when she held him and cried with him without knowing why, and what passed between them never found its way to her friends. He didn’t have anyone who understood. Having someone who cared was enough.

He kissed her shoulders slowly, cupped her face in his hands and met her lips with his own. Lightening split the sky so close the ground jumped. Virene grasped his wrist. “Wait, wait,” she gasped. “If we don’t drown out here, we’ll get electrocuted.”

Inside the tent their skin still tingled from the rain’s battering. Terson stroked her cheek with the back of his finger, felt the edges of her mouth curve upward. She kissed his knuckles, then his wrist, then took his face in her hands and drew him down to her. He’d never believed he could feel what he felt for her, could still hardly believe that it was his touch she wanted, his touch that made her shiver.

They held each other for a long time, kissing tenderly. Virene rubbed the backs of his legs with her feet, nuzzled her face in his neck and shoulder to inhale his musky male scent. His hands slid under her shoulders and cradled her head. It was times like this she felt closest to him, when they managed to put passion aside for a while and really experience intimacy. “I wish I could hold your whole body inside me,” she murmured in his ear.

“I do love you, Vi,” he whispered.

Her body was softer, silkier than anything he’d ever felt. He buried his face in the warmth of her flesh, flicking his tongue against her skin, sucking up the beads of water clinging to her body. His head buzzed, drunk with her. She kneaded his back, felt the power in his muscles.

They were one, bodies and souls moving toward a single purpose. Her desire to possess him matched his desire to possess her; she accepted that part of him that needed to be accepted and he filled that part of her that needed to be filled. Virene’s breath came in gasps and a tingling ache built in her loins. Terson moved against her slowly and deeply, her head swimming with the pressure of his thrusts. Her desire hovered on the edge of fulfillment and she pushed against him desperately, crying out as the pull in her loins built. He raised his head and called her name as the climactic shock raced through his body.

The storm outside drowned out their exclamations.

God’s Saucer, Nivia: 2709:03:24 Standard

Noise was a constant companion to those who lived and worked at God’s Saucer. During the rare moments when the supersonic boom of starships and shuttles died away and the distant howl of engine test cells faded the air gave out a long moan as if it had exhausted its ability to meet the demands placed on it by human activity.

It was during one of these lulls that Cormack MacLeod heard dogs baying amid the scrapped hulks of starships and aircraft behind him. He quickened his pace toward the edge of the boneyard, skinny frame bent beneath a backpack full of stolen property.

It had taken longer than expected to pry the instruments and circuit modules out of the hulk he’d scouted days before, long enough that the effects of the drugged meat he’d tossed over the wall had worn off. It might have been wiser to abandon his burden, but MacLeod decided that he’d be damned if he let a pack of filthy animals rob him of what he’d gone to so much trouble to steal.

He reached the wall as the pack emerged into the open less than fifty meters behind him. The baying fell silent abruptly as the animals spied him and broke into a full sprint. MacLeod shrugged out of the straps and spun once, twice, three times. He let go, sending the backpack arcing over the top of the three-meter wall.

The dogs had halved the distance. Puffs of dust rose from the ground beneath their feet as they closed on him. He jumped into a narrow manhole at the base of the wall and reached up for the grate. The dogs snarled and nipped at his fingers as he slid it back into place. One thrust a paw into the narrowing opening and yelped in pain when the edge of the cover fell on its toes.

The others, realizing that the interloper had effectively escaped, took the only option left open to avenge their comrade: one by one they lifted a leg and pissed through the grate.

“Goddamn!” MacLeod let go and dropped the last meter to escape the shower of urine. The dogs, satisfied that they’d accomplished what they could, trotted away with tails high.

MacLeod cursed under his breath the length of the concrete tube and lay on his back to squeeze under the bars at the outlet where the infrequent rains had eroded the ground beneath their footings. He retrieved his backpack and dragged his tricycle up the bank from its concealment in the bottom of the dry flood channel then set off along the edge of the sterile alkali plain peddling furiously.

He encountered the perimeter road a few minutes later but did not slack off until the road merged into a main thoroughfare a few minutes after that. Satisfied that he’d escaped observation, assuming that the rent-a-cops at the boneyard had even bothered to investigate the ruckus, MacLeod eased into a less exhausting cadence.

The ground beneath him began to vibrate moments before the sound reached him through the cold, dry air. The powerful low-frequency rumble vibrated the organs within his body as a starship rose from its pad several kilometers distant. MacLeod paid it no mind; he’d seen the same spectacle several times a week for more than twenty years. Of more interest were the other vehicles around him, some so large that they could crush cycle and rider beneath their treads without the driver noticing so much as a bump.

The tempo at God’s Saucer never slacked, save when the rare rainstorms flooded the alpine desert and hydrated the lakebed, turning it into a quagmire within hours. No one complained, though. The soaking hardened the fine dust kicked loose by wheels, tracks and the blast of engines, and filled in the gouges, scrapes and craters left by botched landings and outright crashes.

Cormack encountered no pedestrians other than those walking short distances between vehicles and buildings. Here and there he saw riggers cabling loads for crane hoists and laborers going about any number of activities, all bundled and masked against the cold wind and dust. Those that noticed Cormack stared for a moment wondering what fool risked his life and comfort traveling by cycle, unprotected against the elements.

MacLeod had experienced exposure to worse weather than that at God’s Saucer during his sixty-three years of life. His hide had been baked by innumerable suns, freeze dried by arctic winds, attacked by fungus, radiation and chemicals. The only extra protection he afforded himself when he ventured out was the patch covering his empty left eye socket. Without it the cold penetrated his skull like a knife, leaving him bedridden with headaches that lasted for days.

At last his destination hove into view: a rundown compound consisting of a single building with three sets of rollup doors that doubled as both workspace and living quarters. The hulls of more than two dozen small spacecraft in various stages of cannibalization littered the grounds, one more miniature boneyard among hundreds at God’s Saucer. A high fence of heavy-gauge chain link, crowned by a double coil of electrified razor wire to discourage the type of thievery MacLeod had just committed, surrounded the entire compound.

He coasted to a stop at the gate, punched a code into the electronic cypherlock, and pushed his cycle through as soon as the gate shuddered open enough to let him pass. He repeated the process at the building and doffed the irksome eye patch once the rollup had sealed itself once more behind him.

MacLeod’s shop was as cluttered and messy inside as out. A few custom hull molds leaned against the rear wall surrounded by numerous machining tools. Power hand tools, cutting torches and grinding devices, electronic test equipment and tangles of wire and circuit boards lay scattered about the workbenches along the walls. The only comparatively clear space was that immediately around his latest and recently completed project: a ten-meter-long baffle-rider resting on a stout timber cradle. He’d spent the better part of three months rebuilding the badly damaged ship and though he was pleased with the result, pleasure didn’t make up for the fact that the ship’s owner had stiffed him.

Finding a buyer was only a matter of time: MacLeod was known in certain circles for the quality of his work and his abhorrence of paperwork and regulations. Still, he’d been saddled with a number of bills and it wasn’t as if he could just pack up and disappear to escape his creditors.

He pushed aside a pile of clutter on one bench and dumped out the contents of his backpack in its place, then headed for his sparse living quarters to prepare his evening meal. He broke the seal on one of the long-expired space rations he subsisted on and turned to a cupboard where he kept his vids while it heated. Hugh Jorgan and the Space Nymphs, he decided.

MacLeod carried the vid disk and space ration to the only furniture he owned: a high-resolution tri-dee projector and a pilot’s couch he’d salvaged from a long-range scout craft several years earlier. He settled into the chair’s aerogel padding contentedly and activated the built-in heat massage. Before long he was laughing uproariously while Hugh Jorgan engaged in an astounding number of dalliances with a bevy of vacuum-breathing nymphomaniacs bent on enslaving mankind with kinky sex.

A buzzer over one of the rollups cawed. It repeated its call every few seconds while MacLeod crossed to the personnel door. He killed the interior lighting and cracked it open a few centimeters. A lone figure supporting itself with the aid of two canes stood at his outer gate, illuminated by the single overhead floodlight. The figure reached out carefully, as a man perched atop a tall pole and fearful of falling might, and pushed the button mounted on the fence again.

“I hear ye!” MacLeod shouted when the bone-rattling sound of the buzzer finally cut out. “We’re closed!”

The man said something, his voice drowned out by the scream of an engine test somewhere out on the lakebed. The budding confrontation paused until the test ran its course and the man repeated himself.

“I come for my ship!”

Cormack recognized him, then: it was Stoyko, the owner of the small ship in his shop. Until that moment MacLeod’s dealings with the man had been by vidcom. The spacer seemed to have aged twenty years in the two weeks since they’d last spoken. Too much time in space without gravity had atrophied even his facial muscles, which sagged under the unaccustomed physical strain.

“Then you come with money, I expect.”

Stoyko looked down ashamedly. “I told you before I got no money.”

“An’ I told ye I ain’t a charity,” MacLeod yelled back. “I’m out o’ pocket a hundred thousand euros an’ more. No money; no ship!”

“I got trade,” the man offered hopefully.

“What sort o’ trade?”

The man leaned on one cane and beckoned to him as he reached down to open a bag at his feet. MacLeod approached cautiously, staying to the shadows until he was sure the object wasn’t a weapon. He wouldn’t have ventured out in most circumstances, but the spacer could barely hold himself upright and decalcification had weakened his bones. Though twenty years his senior, Cormack knew he could break his arms with no effort at all. He peered through the fence at the object.

“This here’s the flight data recorder from one of the ships I told you about,” Stoyko explained, “the one’s that busted me up. There was cargo aboard. It’s yours.”

“Keep it,” Cormack snorted. “I got a drawer full o’ treasure maps.”

“But it’s all I got!” the spacer protested.

“Then ye got nothin’ at all,” Cormack enlightened him. He felt a faint twinge of guilt when he turned his back; he knew desperation when he saw it. He’d been there a time or two himself. But he’d done worse than walk away from a beggar and the guilt didn’t last as long as it took to reach his door.

MacLeod found the body the next morning, curled up in a fetal position outside the gate. “Ach, ye poor bastard,” he said sadly, and rifled Stoyko’s pockets for valuables before he called the authorities.

THREE

West of the Humboldt Archipelago: 2709:03:25 Standard

“Breakfast!” Terson called. He slid a reconstituted omelet onto each plate. Virene entered the hydrojet’s tiny galley combing out her damp hair, wearing nothing but a pair of Terson’s boxer shorts. “Didn’t mean to rush you,” he said.

“What’s left of these ugly tan lines will be gone before we get back,” she informed him. “After that it’ll be fifty euros a viewing, so get it while it’s free.” She took a bite of omelet and aimed her fork at his waist. “You could use some evening-out yourself. Nothing frightens a woman more than Moby’s Dick coming at her in the dark.”

“Not in your lifetime, baby. There are some places the sun will just never shine.”

Virene took their plates when they finished and began scrubbing them in the sink. “Terson, have you ever thought about leaving here?”

“There have been times I wished I wasn’t here,” he said, “but the alternatives weren’t that attractive.”

“But if they were—if another Class I world opened, would you want to apply?”

“Are you saying you’re not happy here?”

“How would I know if I am or not?” she asked. “I never went more than two hundred kilometers from home until I got into Malone!” She dried the plates and put them away. “Three years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of being a—of poaching. Now I have, and there are still plenty of fish. I couldn’t imagine not having babies, but now I have friends who want them but haven’t gotten approved.”

“You know what I think of the laws here,” Terson replied, “but there are worse places to be.”

“You wouldn’t have said that two years ago,” she said.

“You wouldn’t have considered leaving, either,” Terson grinned.

“People change,” she shrugged coquettishly.

High, shredded clouds laced the sky when Terson and Virene emerged from the boat.  Broken branches and bits of leaf littered the sand and bobbed in the lagoon. Tiny shore scavengers had already been at work among the debris, weaving multi-legged trails across the damp sand. Virene found a clear spot for her blanket and lay down to read, brown back and bottom glistening with oil in the sun. Terson carried the larger debris to the burning pile at the far edge of the lagoon and began to rake the sand clear of the smaller remains.

The nightmare disturbed him more than it should have.

The dreams had tapered off over the past two years. Sometimes they cropped up like familiar, albeit unsavory, acquaintances when he felt stressed but they’d long since lost their power to unsettle him. The untimely recurrence struck him as a bad omen, though his intellect scoffed at the notion. A dream was nothing but a dream, a symptom, at most, of his subconscious coming to terms with his marriage and the final, irrevocable resignation of his past.

Virene saw a bright future, but Terson’s life had coincided with tragedy too many times to look ahead with the same enthusiasm. He hadn’t leapt into marriage with abandon, by any means. Though he loved Virene intensely, he’d privately agonized over each step of the relationship, forced her to make the first move through inaction, let the momentum of her personality carry them along as if ensuring her freedom of choice would relieve him of responsibility for what might happen later.

He cast a glance at his wife, who lay on her side watching him, head propped up in the palm of her hand. She smiled suggestively when she had his undivided attention and beckoned with a fine-boned finger. Something in the air behind him caught her eye, however, and her lascivious expression morphed into curiosity. She sat up, shading her eyes for a better look.

Terson followed her gaze and spotted a wisp of vapor high in the atmosphere to the north, growing in length from east to west at incredible speed. It didn’t look quite right for an aircraft contrail. He trotted to the boat and took another look with the binoculars he kept in the cockpit. The computer-enhanced image was grainy with distance, but there was no doubt that the object was man-made—and it was tumbling out of control, burning up in the friction of atmospheric reentry.

A slightly smaller object fell away from the main body. Breaking thrusters flared in short bursts to shed velocity and orient the escape pod for touchdown, but they didn’t have the muscle or the fuel to completely cancel the gyration inherited from the mother craft. The pod was still spinning when it jettisoned the engine housing and deployed its high-altitude airbrakes. The four huge, heavy, fabric streamers wrapped themselves around the pod as they emerged. Three sorted themselves out after a few more rotations and sprang to their full length, flapping wildly, generating enough drag in the thin air to stabilize the craft.

The functional airbrakes and steadily thickening atmosphere slowed the pod until the main parachute could deploy without ripping to pieces. The tangled fourth airbrake did not detach properly, however, and fouled the lighter canopy as it emerged. Half of the parachute managed to inflate, sending the entire mass into an irrecoverable flat spin.

Terson took note of the compass heading and ran to cast off the aft line. “Virene, get aboard!”

His urgency sent her dashing for the hydrojet. Terson gave her a hand into the boat then cast loose the fore line and climbed into the cockpit.

The hydrojet’s impeller kicked up a surge as he backed away from the dock. He negotiated the canal out of the lagoon in full reverse, water splashing over the wing-in-ground-effect surfaces along the hull. Once clear of the rocks he paused momentarily to survey. The hydrojet needed more room to take off than to land; the channel just outside the lagoon entrance was only long enough for the latter. The meandering path through the reef to open sea took ten or fifteen minutes to negotiate, but it was high tide and the hydrojet’s draft was only a few centimeters at take-off. He backed to the edge of the channel, eyes glued to the depth gauge. Ten meters. Seven. Four. Point seven. He goosed the impeller forward, killing their momentum, and clutched the impeller engine to the jets.

The turbines spooled up in a matter of seconds. The engines coughed once and ignited, spitting out a short-lived cloud of half-burned fuel before they settled down to a throaty roar. Terson shoved the throttles forward and the hydrojet leapt ahead, jetwash blasting up a cloud of vapor behind it.

The far end of the channel rushed to meet them with frightening speed; the pale green sea beneath gave way to mottled shades of brown as the craft raced into the shallows. It skimmed across water no more than a few centimeters deep, the force of the engine exhaust exposing the surface of the coral, leaving a trail of sterilized rock and dead marine life in its wake.

The hydrojet’s nose lifted. The WIG surfaces caught purchase in the air compressed between the surface of the water and the hull, lifting the craft clear as they drew lift from the aerodynamic phenomenon of ground effect.

Terson banked starboard, scanning the cloudless blue sky for the pod but spied instead the spacecraft’s smoking wreckage as it vanished over the horizon. A plume of steam rose into the air a split second later. “Do you see it?” he asked.

Virene didn’t answer. She sat frozen, her legs braced against the floorboards and fingers digging into the armrests, eyes squeezed shut. Her lids spasmed open and shut again at the sound of his voice, then stayed open. Her body relaxed with a loud exhalation. “You bastard!”

“Sorry. Didn’t scare you, did I?”

“Scare me? Why would—if you—Oh!” She crossed her arms haughtily and turned as much of her back to him as the seat harness permitted. “Is that what you’re looking for?” she demanded, pointing at the escape pod spiraling down several degrees farther along its arc.

They reached the pod moments after it splashed down. The hull had buckled under the impact, tearing open a gash that vanished below the waterline. Terson scrambled out of the cockpit and grabbed his diving mask.

“You can’t go in there,” Virene said incredulously. “The thing is sinking as we watch!”

“It won’t take long. I’ll be careful.”

“You better be!” she yelled as he stepped off the deck. He swam to the handholds and crawled up to the pod’s escape hatch. The release resisted at first, then popped and blew the door away.

Displaced air sighed through the hatch. The pod dropped beneath Terson as the ocean, no longer impeded by air pressure, rushed in from below. Luminous webs of light reflecting from the water inside danced across the interior walls. Two of the occupied seats had broken loose and crushed the occupants to death against the bulkhead. Two more crewmen, a man and a woman, lay flaccid in their restraints while water rose around them. The man turned his head and moaned when a wavelet splashed across his face.

Terson hoisted himself into the opening and lowered himself by one arm until his toes touched the water, crossed his legs and let go. Debris swirled around his hips. Shorted power supplies filled the air with a haze of smoke and the stench of ozone. He moved quickly to unbuckle the crewman’s crash harness and pulled him out of the seat, letting the spacer’s life jacket support his weight as he towed the man back to the hatchway.

The water beneath the hatch was almost up to Terson’s armpits, and he looked at the opening with consternation. Without the crewman’s help there was no way to get him up to it—but the water could do the work for him. Terson jumped up and caught the lip of the opening with his strong hand. The crewman floated nearly half a meter below him, out of reach.

Within a few seconds, however, the water rose to the level where Terson could catch the front of the man’s life jacket. He set his grip and lifted the crewman out of the water. The cords in his neck throbbed as he raised the dead weight over his head, simultaneously hoisting himself up with his other arm until the man’s torso flopped over the edge of the hatch and gravity carried him over the side.

Virene snagged the spacer under the arm with a dock hook and pulled him alongside the hydrojet. Their eyes locked in the instant before Terson dropped back into the pod. She yelled something as he vanished, but it was lost in the hiss and crackle of shorting circuits.

The female spacer was completely under water. Terson ducked under to release her straps and she popped to the surface, buoyed by her life jacket. He pulled her toward the hatch, now less than a meter above the water line. A pocket of air somewhere below escaped in an explosion of foam and the pod rolled to compensate for its altered center of gravity.

The hatch vanished and debris rained from the new ceiling. Terson dove for the submerged opening only to be brought up short by the woman’s life jacket. He turned back to release it in time to dodge aside as the seats ripped loose in the crash swept past him with their gruesome occupants. The wreckage landed against the hatchway, totally blocking it.

Terson sucked a great lungful of air from the shrinking pocket over his head and dove, abandoning the spacer to save his own life. He tugged at the seats jamming his escape, but could not find the leverage he needed to shift them. The urge to breathe overwhelmed him and he exhaled, giving up what air remained in his lungs.

The pod rolled again, and the wreckage blocking his path rushed toward him. A piece of debris tore the mask from his face. Seawater rushed into his eyes, but not before he’d seen what lay beyond the hatch—water. The pod had sunk, carrying Terson down with it.

Virene watched in horror as the pod went under. She stared at the spot it once occupied while the gentle swell of the ocean erased the ripples it left behind.

The comprehension of what had happened struck her heart an agonizing blow. Virene raised her fists to her temples and uttered a ragged, grieving wail. She turned a slow circle, searching the empty ocean for some sign she was not alone. Huge bubbles burst from the depths, carrying up scraps of padding and insulation. A moment later the body of another spacer bobbed to the surface, Terson’s muscular arm hooked in its life jacket.

Virene snatched a dock bumper and dove in, cutting through the water like an eel. She pulled his face out of the water and lodged the bumper under his armpits. Supporting his head with her hands in front of her, she used both thumbs to pinch his nose shut, clamped her mouth over his and blew.

Terson’s diaphragm tightened reflexively. Virene pulled away as his body shook, expelling water and replacing it with air. He came to and looked around with a dazed expression. “That was close.”

Virene slapped water into his face, though she felt like killing him. “Close? I told you not to go back in!”

“You did?”

She splashed him again. “Why do I bother? You never listened to me before; why should you start now?” Virene was too relieved to see him alive for her anger to last, however. She held him tightly when they got back on the boat, oblivious to the spacer still lying on the deck next to them until a rattle escaped from his throat.

Virene’s face went white. “Terson I-I think he just died!”

“See if you can raise the portmaster in Saint Anatone,” Terson said. She nodded and walked forward to the cockpit. Terson climbed to his feet, still shaky. The spacer hadn’t died, but Terson suspected he wouldn’t reach shore alive. He carried the man down to the main cabin and wrapped a blanket around him, then retrieved the woman’s body.

“There will be a medic waiting in port,” Virene said when he climbed into the cockpit. Her color was back, but her speech and movements were uncharacteristically directed and formal.

“I guess you’ve never seen a corpse before.”

“My grandmother, at a funeral,” she said, “but she didn’t look dead.”

The medics boarded as soon as they made fast at the marina in Saint Anatone, but pronounced the man dead after a cursory examination. “I suggest you grab anything you need,” one told Terson. “The police will seal up your boat until they decide whether or not it’s a crime scene.”

Virene came down while he packed their bags. “What about the tent and the rest?” she asked when she saw the luggage.

“We’ll go back for it later,” he said.

“So much for the honeymoon,” Virene scowled.

“I know a nice place up the coast,” Terson offered.

Virene buried her face in his shoulder. “Tell me nothing like that could happen to you.”

“I could,” he said softly, “but I’d be lying.”

“So lie.”

A tall, lanky man in a black jumpsuit stood talking to the medics at the end of the dock when they emerged. One of the medics pointed at them and his face twisted into a frown.

“Just great,” Terson muttered darkly. Virene put a hand against the small of his back.

“Behave yourself,” she whispered as the man approached. “Captain Bragg,” she smiled brightly. “We missed you at the wedding!”

Maalan Bragg had joined the Federal Police straight out of Malone and rose from beat rookie to lieutenant during his first ten years with Enforcement. He enjoyed the work, but the challenge ebbed quickly. Nivia’s low population and high standard of living didn’t make for interesting street crime. He transferred to the smaller, more challenging Investigation wing where he made captain. The workload was light, however, and most cases revolved around poaching and reproductive crimes. He’d requested additional duty as a Reserve Probation Officer for the filler more than the stipend.

Sometimes he wondered if it was worth it.

“I’d like to go a month without seeing you two professionally.”

“You were the farthest thing from our minds,” Terson said.

“I would hope so. Ms. Van Strahlen—”

“Reilly.”

“Excuse me. Mrs. Reilly, please wait here. Mr. Reilly, come here for a moment.” Bragg pulled a tiny microphone from his pocket and clipped it to his collar. “I’m required to caution you that this conversation is being recorded, and is admissible as evidence in a court of law. What were you two doing out there?”

“Camping.”

“In the archipelago?”

“A couple hundred kilometers farther out,” Reilly said.

“That’s outside the coastal boundary,” Bragg replied sharply.

“I know.”

“I see. Tell me what happened.” Reilly did so, though there wasn’t much more than Bragg already knew. The cargo shuttle had lost contact with Space Traffic Control during launch and fallen out of orbit. The remains came down far out to sea, and it was only a fluke anyone was near enough to attempt a rescue. He hoped it was just a fluke the rescuers were his own two problem children.

“I shouldn’t have to remind you of the prohibition on travel outside coastal boundaries,” he said when Reilly finished. “The marina has maps available. Check them.”

“Sure,” Reilly said.

Bragg withdrew the cassette. “Please sign here.” He tucked it away with the microphone and relaxed his official mien. “You need to stick to the rules, Terson.”

“We weren’t doing anything anyone else doesn’t.”

“Anyone else isn’t in your legal situation.” He gestured to the hydrojet. “That’s a fast, expensive boat. Some people might think you were poaching. Some poacher might like to have a boat just like it.”

“I’m not one of your juvenile delinquents,” Reilly said flatly. “I don’t need a lecture and I don’t need you to state the obvious. I know you can bust us for dirtying up your water and scaring the fish. We didn’t have to help!”

Bragg lowered his voice. “I don’t have any doubt that you can take care of yourself out there, but she can’t! You might know the risks, but Virene can’t begin to comprehend them! You got me?”

Reilly lowered his eyes. “Yeah, I got you.” It was the first time Bragg recalled him backing down.

“I’ll let you know when you can have the boat back.”

The young couple disappeared into the marina without looking back. Bragg leaned against the railing while he waited for the coroner and dug out a wad of raw tree gum, working it in his jaws until it softened and the victrotine spread a soft buzz through his head. He rationed his consumption carefully; more than two or three a day left an incriminating stain on his teeth and he’d catch hell if his wife found out he’d started again.

His training hadn’t prepared him for Terson Reilly. Most people on probation were first-time offenders, chronic losers or eighteen-year-old coeds out from under mommy and daddy’s thumbs for the first time in their lives and suffering delusions of independence, like Van Strahlen. Hard core criminals spent their lives in rehab or living beyond the pale of civilization and law, barely scraping out an existence in the wilderness—until the EPEA caught up with them. A few made it to the Beta continent, safe for the most part from even the EPEA. Rumors abounded of frontier communities full of criminals and social mavericks, rough and primitive; a place very much like Terson Reilly’s homeworld, Bragg suspected.

The coroner’s van huffed to a stop at the end of the dock and onlookers began to gather. The coroner captured the in situ images before Bragg helped slide the corpses into body bags and escorted them off the dock. Reilly hadn’t posted the hydrojet’s registration on the bow, and for once he was pleased with the kid’s noncompliance. If the media got wind of his record they’d have a field day.

Bragg had been Terson’s probation officer from the time he immigrated, and he arrived with enough strikes against him to make it a dubious proposition from the start. Between the chip on his shoulder and the look in his eyes, Bragg would have bet the farm that the kid would get deported or go beyond the pale in six months.

Bragg wasn’t far off. He had no doubt Reilly would be on the next shuttle out when they met with the magistrate. Good thing he hadn’t bet the farm on that. Something had gotten through when the kid realized what was at stake, but Bragg didn’t believe the kid was likely to change. Matters seemed likely to worsen when Reilly and Van Strahlen met.

Her family complained about their sweet, incorrigible reprobate dating a borderline sociopath and phig. Bragg suggested they stop paying her tuition and force her back home, half a continent away from her beaux. At least it would have gotten her out of his jurisdiction. They hadn’t liked that idea. They didn’t cut off the money until after Terson and Virene were engaged, but Reilly kept them both in school with his wad of Commonwealth credit.

Kids that age shouldn’t have that kind of money. Bragg spat the bleached wad of gum out the window. Reilly still walked the razor’s edge, but he’d been right when he said he hadn’t done anything anybody else didn’t. Lots of people cruised past the coastal boundaries without permits. Sometimes the Coast Guard caught them and slapped on a fine. Mostly nothing happened.

Bragg hoped it stayed that way. The cruiser’s integrated satphone warbled and he thumbed the connect button on the steering wheel. “Bragg here.”

“Maalan, this is Alan Chin. I need you at Saint Anatone General, Code Two.”

“On my way now,” Bragg replied, accelerating to twenty kilometers an hour over the posted limit. Alan Chin worked for the coroner’s office, and Code Two meant ‘Serious, Proceed With Reasonable Haste.’ “This isn’t about the pair of bodies from the marina, is it?”

“No, it’s worse. I’ll explain on scene.”

“Understood; out.” The absence of Chin’s usual banter was an indication of just how serious the situation was. He heard sirens as he turned onto the thoroughfare leading to the hospital’s main entrance and met two ambulances going the opposite direction. Overhead a helicopter made a slow approach to the building, waiting for one already on the pad to depart.

Another ambulance turned onto the street from the lot, lights blazing, and Bragg saw a line of emergency vehicles crowding the emergency entrance’s departure lane. Strangely, it appeared that patients were being transported away from the hospital. A pair of paramedics exiting the building with a patient confirmed his impression. He spied a patrolman directing vehicles and asked after Chin.

“He’s in Obstetrics,” the man told him.

Bragg’s heart rose to his throat. The Pediatric and Obstetric wing of every hospital on Nivia were veritable fortresses—any incident that occurred inside the enclave was by definition serious. There had been plenty of those over time, primarily infant kidnappings, but significant numbers of assaults on children as well. The most horrific had occurred in that very hospital fifteen years earlier when a deranged couple penetrated security with a number of weapons, targeting expectant mothers.

Eighteen were killed, not including the suspects, and nine seriously wounded before it was over.

The armored portal leading into the wing was propped open, watched over by the hospital’s own formidable armed security. They passed Bragg straight through with only a cursory inspection of his credentials and it was soon apparent why: every patient within had already been evacuated except for the dead.

Another pair of medics, accompanied by a security guard and a doctor, came around a corner guiding a gurney. The occupant, a woman in a nurse’s uniform, exhibited the vacant stare of shock or heavy sedation. The doctor held a file folder over her face as they left the portal to prevent her image from being captured outside.

Alan Chin was close behind and nodded toward a conference room when he saw Bragg. The man didn’t look good at all. “It’s bad,” he said once they were inside. “Seven dead in infant ICU and three adults upstairs.”

“How?”

“Unconfirmed, but it looks like a number of bad oxygen bottles. The three adults went first, starting about four this morning. They were all in pretty bad shape, so nobody got suspicious until it hit this wing.

“The monitors on the incubators alarmed at the same time—blood oxygen levels in all the infants took a nose dive. The head nurse on duty kept bumping up the oxygen levels, but that only made it worse. That was her you saw coming in.”

Bragg closed his eyes. It was difficult to shunt emotion aside when the victims were children, but it had to be done if answers were to be found and additional deaths or injuries prevented. “Who’s managing the incident for the hospital?”

“Doctor Lauder, the chief physician—that’s him now.”

The door opened and the doctor he’d seen escorting the nurse out of the building entered. His face was pinched and very pale. “How is she?” Bragg asked after the introductions were made.

“Distraught,” Lauder replied. “We’re all very upset.”

“I understand,” Bragg said. “Do you have any immediate patient welfare issues to take care of?”

“No. All patients requiring oxygen have been transported to other facilities and we’re not admitting any more until this is cleared up. I’ve notified them to check their oxygen, also. It will take us four or five hours to complete those checks here.”

“I need you to stop that immediately,” Bragg ordered. “It runs the risk of destroying or tampering with potential evidence.”

“Tampering?” Lauder grunted. “Do you mean to suggest that this incident was caused deliberately by someone on my staff?”

“I don’t mean to suggest anything,” Bragg assured him. “It’s a matter of forensics, and I’d appreciate your voluntary cooperation.”

“Yes, of course,” Lauder nodded. “I’ll see to it.”

“I’ll have a team assembled in a few hours,” Bragg said. “They’ll need full access to the area; it will be helpful if someone is available to unlock doors and answer questions.”

“Be honest with me,” Lauder said before Bragg left to start making his calls. “You don’t believe that this was deliberate, do you?” The look in his eyes made it plain what he wanted to hear, but Bragg had never been one to give false assurances.

“I hope not, doctor. I sincerely hope not.”

Terson and Virene returned to the disarray that was their new apartment. Packing boxes sat where they’d been left next to a dozen wrapped gifts from Virene’s friends. Several pieces of new furniture were pushed up against the living room wall, still covered in plastic. A pile of envelopes and circulars lay on the floor under the mail slot. Most of it was addressed to the previous tenant, but Virene sorted out a thick wad intended for the two of them.

Three were bills, the rest congratulatory cards from the same friends who attended the wedding and sent the gifts. Virene opened them excitedly, gushing over the sentiments expressed within, making careful note of the senders so she wouldn’t overlook any of the requisite thank-you’s. One expensive-looking, pearl-white envelope kept appearing in her hand only to be moved to the bottom of the pile. Eventually it remained the only one unopened, but Virene didn’t appear inclined to change that. Terson leaned over for a closer look.

It was from her parents.

Virene studiously ignored his questioning glance. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

“No.”

“They’re your parents.”

“It’s from Mother,” Virene clarified, “and she expressed herself very clearly last time. I’m not going through that again.”

Terson found her family’s whole relationship confusing and contrary to what he was certain was normal for most people. The clearest memories of his own parents and sibling centered on their deaths and he’d never put much effort into holding on to them. A collective of Boss Hanstead’s household staff had raised Terson until Boss sent him to live in the hired hands’ quarters when he was fourteen. He’d never lacked for affection and support from the people around him, but they had families of their own and Terson had always believed that those children had something wonderfully special.

Boss Hanstead, a spouseless, childless workaholic had steadfastly refused to let Terson be adopted into any of those families, insisting that such attachments would leave him soft. The subject resulted in frequent, vehement arguments between him and his head housekeeper, Marta, the closest thing Terson had to a mother.

Terson felt a deep sense of loss for years after she died of a fever when he was seventeen. He found it incomprehensible that a parent and child could disappoint each other so badly that they would forever cut off all civil contact. He didn’t want Virene to miss a chance at reconciliation out of stubbornness.

“It might be her way of making amends for that,” Terson suggested.

Virene’s eyes glistened. “You can open it if you want.”

Terson felt like he was intruding on an exceptionally personal matter when he broke the seal, but he hoped he was right. The addressing on the outside held both their names, whereas Virene’s mother had declined to acknowledge his existence except in the abstract in all other correspondence.

The outside of the card was pristine and attractive. He opened it to find the pre-printed message carefully blackened out and the surrounding blank spaces filled with vicious insults in neat, feminine handwriting.

Terson slipped the card back into the envelope. “You don’t want to read this.” He tore the card into tiny pieces and they never spoke of Virene’s family again.

FOUR

Beta Continent, Nivia: 2709:04:35 Standard

Halsor Tennison shaded his eyes against the glare off the water. His shuttle wallowed at neutral buoyancy, bare centimeters above the surface. Occasional waves washed across the hull, splashing his feet while a launch cut toward him from shore.

Hal tossed his bag into the small boat, stumbled onto the dipping bow, and dropped awkwardly into a seat. He twisted his back as he went, sending a bolt of pain through his right leg. The pilot’s dark almond eyes regarded him inscrutably as he spun the tiny craft and headed for shore. Hal punched a key on his remote, sending his shuttle to the bottom in a foam of venting ballast.

The launch revved and lugged in the waves until the pilot matched speed with the crest of a swell. The ride smoothed and the engine steadied. The surf along the base of the cliffs was light, indicating a deep bottom. A few birds rode the updraft along the nearly vertical escarpments. The launch took a suicidal tack directly into the shadows at the base of the cliff, nosing through a barrier of meter-wide, overlapping plastic sheets textured to match the surrounding rock.

A small harbor lay on the other side inside a gigantic cavern. Hal counted three submarines, seven small ships and docks for twice that number. A flurry of activity caught his attention as they rounded one of the vessels. Minzoku sailors unfurled tarps across a dry-dock, but not before Hal spotted the bullet riddled hull of an EPEA patrol boat. I’ll throttle the old bastard!

The cavern narrowed to a dark tunnel and ended at a wall of bedrock where the pilot shut off the engine. A rust-stained metal door sealed the channel behind the launch, and the surface boiled as water rushed in, lifting the launch ten meters up a vertical shaft to a ledge where two armed men waited. The diminutive Minzoku soldiers led him through corridors only a few centimeters higher than their heads, forcing Hal to bend almost double. His back ached by the time they reached a familiar chamber where he could unfold.

The room had been his grandfather’s office once, and at the height of the Family’s prosperity Den Tun had poised obeisantly before the great hardwood desk Hal now faced. The desk was lower now; Den Tun had sawed off the legs to accommodate his height.

Hal regarded the old man austerely. Den Tun had been ancient when Hal was a child; it was a wonder to many that he remained as spry as he did. Time hadn’t let him off easily, however: his tight curls had diminished to uneven patches about his scalp; the hair he still possessed was bleached by senescence. Wrinkles cut deeply into his flesh and one eye had gone chalky with blindness. He spoke to the guards, who bowed at the waist and backed out, closing the door behind them.

“My apologies for the lack of a chair,” Den Tun said. “I rarely entertain visitors of such stature.”

You could get one, asshole! Hal regretted never having learned the convolutions of Minzoku conversation with its double meanings and subtle insinuations, as well as his late father had, or his father before him, but he’d learned enough to know when he was being insulted. Hal visited the Family’s operations twice a year, often enough to rate at least a decent chair, but the old Minzoku preferred his visitors to sit on cushions, positioning the tops of their heads at an elevation respectfully lower than his own.

Hal chose to remain standing. “How much cargo have you salvaged?” he demanded.

“Very little. The wreckage lies at great depth, difficult to reach with what we have.”

“Your people have accomplished more difficult tasks with fewer resources.”

“Protecting your interests is costly!”

“The cost will rise if you don’t stop skirmishing with the EPEA! I saw the patrol boat you captured.”

“They provoke us at every opportunity,” Den Tun insisted. “You have less influence with the gaijin than your honored ancestors.”

“Don’t overestimate yourselves,” Hal warned. “There may come a day when we do not influence the gaijin at all.”

Den Tun fell stone-faced and silent.

“I’ll be staying indefinitely,” Hal said. “I want an inventory of the salvage and a status report on the operation every twelve hours.”

“Of course.” Den Tun clapped his hands and a young woman appeared from an alcove behind the desk. “Lieutenant Dayuki will see to your needs.”

The young officer deferred to Hal as he passed. She remained the requisite number of paces behind, advancing to his side only after they passed beyond Den Tun’s perception.  Dayuki was a head shorter than Hal, but still a third taller than any other Minzoku he’d met. Her ethnic features had been softened by mixed bloodlines, resulting in a unique, exotic beauty.

“What do the gaijin know regarding the crash?” Hal asked. The slur flowed easily from his lips. The term did not include the Family—yet.

“A civilian boat picked up two of the crew,” she replied. “One was dead. The other died before reaching shore. They have made no attempt to recover the wreckage.”

“I must still hold some influence with the gaijin,” Hal said.

“Den Tun speaks from frustration,” Dayuki said in defense of her superior. “We spend as many resources defending ourselves as serving yourselves, the honored Onjin.”

They entered an opulent room three times the size of Den Tun’s office, filled with fine rugs, couches, and cushions, all collected by the room’s past occupants. Hal had yet to make any contributions, other than the clothes and toiletries he’d stocked in the closets.

“The days ahead of you may be hectic,” Dayuki said. “I would be honored if you would join me for a more amiable evening while the opportunity exists.” Hal accepted, surprised at the offer. Dayuki backed out with a courteous bow, drawing the doors closed.

Hal ruminated on the situation while he showered and changed into a set of clothes from one of the hardwood wardrobes. The Family’s operations on Nivia were nearing the end of a long decline beginning several years before his birth. He found it ironic that the slow, inevitable failure of the cornerstone of his Family’s rise from obscurity was due exclusively to its own success.

The rise to power and influence began with Hal’s great-grandfather, a man who scraped a living on the fringes of a crime syndicate as hired muscle yet aspired for more. It was he who usurped control of a counterfeiting ring from a non-affiliated amateur and found a passion for manufacturing financial instruments. That passion drove him to improve the quality of his product until he came to the attention of an influential syndicate member who contracted with him to produce custom documents.

Success in that endeavor and a reputation for uncommon quality allowed him to take over or buy out unprofitable ventures from other Families. Within fifteen years he controlled a far-flung conglomerate that counterfeited products ranging from banknotes and tax stamps to microcircuits, fasteners and pharmaceuticals.

Eventually laws of business and economics common to all entrepreneurial pursuits, legal or otherwise, led to consolidation. The development of a new colony presented a unique opportunity; though it nearly bankrupted him, he financed a quarter of the colony’s charter and concentrated his scattered holdings on Nivia, where they flourished beneath the Commonwealth’s very nose.

The note he held on the colony allowed him unbounded leverage for decades. When the colony repaid its loans, Hal’s grandfather funneled a percentage of his profits into its coffers as generous grants, preventing the need to answer any awkward questions. It was he who engineered Nivia’s zealous environmental amendment to the charter, and within a single generation fewer than a dozen top officials knew anything was amiss on the Beta continent.

Using Nivia as a kicking board, the Family launched into activities throughout the Commonwealth and depended less and less on their old operations. Family presence declined as influencing the gaijin government and avoiding detection became more difficult. Hal’s father abandoned most of the bulk manufacturing interests.

In Hal’s time the grants were a fraction of what they had been and the colony was not so desperate for capital. Those few still directly influenced by the Family had become mindful of their political futures and more cautious in their participation. The Minzoku took over tasks once performed by Family administrators and only a small number of researchers and technicians remained full time.

It didn’t look good for Hal’s first year of administration now that the entire quarter’s worth of production lay scattered on the floor of the ocean. His father held things together with experience and alliances Hal simply didn’t have, yet. The prudent thing might be abandonment, not that it could be accomplished quickly or cheaply. The expenses involved in covering tracks were greater and more immediate than the operating costs of a now minimally profitable venture.

He slung his compact needle-beamer under his right arm and pulled on a tunic, checking himself in the mirror. The face staring back raised one eyebrow as it often did. The skin was just starting to lose the glow of youth; he could point out the places where fine lines would one day tell others whether he tended toward worry or laughter. Dark highlights crept into once gloriously blond hair, complimenting pale brown eyes. He’d put on a few pounds, but it didn’t show. Midway through his third decade, his only regret was not accomplishing as much as his predecessors.

A timid knock clued him to Dayuki’s arrival. Hal opened the door but his greeting faltered at the sight of an elegant young Minzoku woman. Long, ebony hair flowed down her back like a waterfall, rippling as if it were lighter than air; a gown of colorful, lustrous fabric hugged her body in lieu of the utilitarian tunic and trousers Hal expected.

Dayuki bowed shyly at his expression.  “Have I come too soon?”

“Ah, not at all. Lead the way.” Dayuki turned down the corridor, motioning him to follow. Open seams up each side allowed long-legged strides to replace the submissive half-steps she affected on duty, though decorum demanded that legs thus revealed be clad in the same type of fabric as the gown.

They walked down a dim side corridor to a heavy metal door that opened into the bottom of a ladder well. Dayuki went up first to unlock the trapdoor at the top. Hal had a bad moment when his chest threatened to become wedged in an opening designed for more slender bodies, but he emptied his lungs and slipped through.

A horse and cart stood nearby. The animal watched them approach, snorted, and stomped a hoof. Dayuki took up the reins and slapped it on the rump with a long, narrow stick. It took a few halting steps and looked back mournfully at the unusually heavy load. Another slap convinced it to continue.

The air was dry and chilly, almost biting, an early symptom of approaching winter. Insects stopped chirping when the cart approached, took up again when it passed. The horse worked up to a trot on the smooth, sandy road, taking them farther inland. It turned abruptly, the reason clear when they left the trees. A lake spread out to the left and the road ran along the edge of a high embankment or cliff that sloped down to the near shore. The water reflected the lights of a small town on the other side. The presence of electrical power surprised Hal. Despite Den Tun’s control of the old manufacturing facilities and the technology he acquired from the Family, he kept his own people agrarian and backward, for the most part. Most Minzoku were as blissfully unaware of Den Tun’s dealings with the Family as the gaijin were their own government’s malfeasance.

“Is that where you’re from?” Hal asked.

Dayuki shook her head. “I was born in a fishing village to the south. This is Tessaoua, where the families of the base personnel live.”

Bright pagodas rose three and four stories. The main street was paved and lit by electric lights and filled with people. There were a few military vehicles here and there, but the primary modes of transportation were horse and bicycle. Dayuki turned onto a side street, keeping the animal at a trot all the way to an alley that ran along the rear of the buildings.

The horse assumed a three-legged stance as soon as they stopped. Dayuki wrapped the reins around a post and pointed at the door. “In there, quickly.” Hal ducked through to find himself in the back of a kitchen. “Wait here.”

Dayuki vanished through another door, returning shortly with the proprietor, who greeted Hal with a smile and bow. The man took them to an alcove that had been partitioned off from the rest of the room with a framework of wood and dark paper. The only furniture was a low, expertly carved wooden table with pillows on two sides. Dayuki took off her slippers, indicating that Hal should do likewise, and sat down.

Hal picked up the little scrolled parchment he assumed was the menu. It was pleasing to look at, but he couldn’t make head or tail of it.

“Bulao is known for his sashimi and duck,” Dayuki suggested.

“What’s sashimi?” Hal asked.

“Specially prepared raw fish,” she said.

“I’ll take the duck,” he replied without hesitation. Hal studied the room while she gave Bulao their orders. The decorations on the walls testified to the unique blending of African and Asian cultures that bore the Minzoku. Hal was amazed that they’d maintained anything of their ancestry after the brutal circumstances that lead to their purchase and relocation to Nivia. Not even the Minzoku themselves could say exactly where they came from. The Big Empty was littered with backward, pre-Commonwealth colonies that suffered greatly at the hands of their discoverers, more often than not.

The Minzoku’s sense of honor demanded they serve their saviors unquestioningly, but time had a way of erasing old debts. They had never lost their identity and their hunger for self-determination had reached the point where their own agendas held priority over those of the Family.

Hal wondered if they would survive Den Tun’s ambition.

“I shouldn’t be here, should I?”

“Den Tun prefers your people to remain…unapparent. He would not be happy to know you are here.”

“He already plays the gaijin and the Family against one another,” Hal said. “Why does he complicate his balancing act by deceiving his own people?”

“He fears mortality will overtake him before he accomplishes his objective,” Dayuki explained.

Bulao carted in a steaming tray and distributed the dishes before them with an efficient flourish. Vegetables surrounded the duck on Hal’s plate and a light brown sweet and sour sauce covered the entire serving. There was also a bowl of fried rice with squares of meat in it, served with a dark, salty liquid. Last was a covered, high-sided bowl. Hal lifted the lid to find a dozen white, squirming bodies the length and thickness of his thumb.

Dayuki saw the look on his face. “Bulao will understand if you do not eat them.”

“What are they?”

“Immature insects. I do not know your word for them. Very tasty.”

Hal wasn’t bothered by what they were, but by the fact that they were still alive. He’d eaten many strange things in his lifetime, but they were usually incorporated into another food or, at the very least, cooked. He picked one up and bit it in half. The inside had the color and consistency of butter, with a taste like cream. He popped the other half in his mouth.

“What is Den Tun’s objective?”

“Once he would have said independence,” Dayuki replied. “Now he would settle for our survival.”

“We’ve always guaranteed your safety.”

“How long will that continue?” Dayuki asked. “Some day the honored Onjin will leave us to our own devices. We need strength for that day and our greatest strength is our spirit. How strong can a people’s spirit be if they believe their patrons have abandoned them?”

So he obscures the existence of the patron, Hal thought. “He told you this?”

She shook her head slightly. “Den Tun keeps his own counsel. His actions betray his thoughts.”

Her insight impressed him. For years the Family humored Den Tun’s eccentric methods and demands, riled at his actions when they crossed purposes. Dayuki put it in a context Hal understood, and the implications worried him. If Den Tun played the game this far ahead, what plots were already afoot, and how much could he damage the Family?

“What are your thoughts?” Hal asked

“Honor dictates that the Minzoku exist for the sake of the Onjin,” she said. “Our fate is your prerogative.”

“Rather contradictory philosophies,” Hal noted. “How did you come to work with him?”

Dayuki looked into her lap, suddenly introverted.

“Just curious,” Hal added quickly.

She looked up with a brief, uncertain smile. “Many know, but it is not spoken of.” She took a breath. “My village was raided by gaijin outlaws. My mother was just a girl, very pretty, and one of them—” She stopped, flustered. Hal found himself embarrassed at being taken into her confidence. Dayuki took another breath, cleared her throat, and continued:

“The man who sired me is buried in an unmarked mass grave. Each time I return home I spit on that place.” Dayuki looked up with renewed confidence. “The circumstances of my conception made me unlucky and I was cursed with height. No man wants a wife that towers over him. My family would have hidden me away, but my grandfather was wealthy and did not want my mother to be shamed by birthing an unsuitable daughter. He dowered me five times what was appropriate, but the intent was to save my mother’s honor, not mine.

“The poor men in the village made offers of marriage and my grandfather told me to choose, but I would not. I knew that my suitors only intended to hide me away and use the dowry to pay the bride price for another woman. I was too proud for that, but my grandfather threatened to choose for me.

“It was then that my great uncle arrived to visit. He told them I could be a great service to our people and I left with him.”

Hal nodded. “Den Tun is your great uncle.”

“Yes,” Dayuki said.

The main street was almost empty when they left, and noticeably colder. Dayuki got out a thick blanket with holes cut in one side for the reins, and urged the horse into a canter when they were out of the village. The combination of warmth, full stomach, and rhythmic clopping put Hal to sleep.

He woke when a wheel bounced over a rock, to find them back at the manhole shaft. Dayuki walked him back to his room. “Thank you for your company,” she said demurely.

“The pleasure was mine,” Hal replied. “I hope we can do it again.”

“Of course,” she said. “I am at your disposal, should you require anything.”

“Thank you. Good night, Dayuki.”

She smiled uncertainly, seemed about to say something, but changed her mind. “Good night.”

Saint Anatone: 2709:04:36 Standard

Terson woke, aware something was wrong by the absence of subtle body sounds beside him. Virene’s side of the bed was empty, but not yet cold. He got up and padded into the living room where his wife stood before the window in her nightshirt, hugging herself. She leaned back against him when he wrapped his arms around her.

“It’s beautiful up there,” she said, “but it looks cold, too. Unforgiving.”

“It’s all that,” Terson agreed. They lapsed into silence again until a shooting star flashed across the sky. A dull orange trail remained against the darkness for an instant before fading away. Virene squeezed his elbow.

“I’ll never look at one of those the same way again.”

“Still thinking about it?”

“All the time. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since we got back.”

“I didn’t know that,” Terson said. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Worrying is silly.”

“Not silly,” Terson said. “Pointless. I could trip going down the stairs in the morning and break my neck just as easily.”

“Terson,” she sighed, “do you really think that’s what I want to hear right now?”

“Sorry; no,” he said. “Remember who you’re talking to.”

“Life would be much simpler if men would learn to read minds,” Virene said.

“Make do with what you’ve got,” Terson suggested. His wife did not pick up the banter. She moved his hands down to her belly and clasped her own over them.

“I want to get our contraception reversed,” she said. “I want to apply right away—today.”

“Isn’t this kind of sudden?”

“We might have to apply three or four times,” she explained. “I need a part of you to keep, if anything ever happens. I want it to be your baby.”

“You think they’ll actually let us reproduce?”

“It’s random,” she replied. “You know that.”

“Then how’d your parents manage to have so many kids?”

Virene turned toward him, resting her head against his chest. “They’re lucky,” she said, “and so am I.” She made love to him with purposeful intensity when they went back to bed. Terson obliged her willingly, though unable to match her ardor, and afterward held her until her breath fell into the rhythm of sleep.

Terson did not drop off so easily.

He felt the small, fan-shaped pattern of subcutaneous contraceptive implants on the inside of Virene’s upper arm that she’d carried since the onset of puberty. Terson possessed a set of his own: three thin, two-centimeter-long capsules identical to hers except for the chemical they leaked into his bloodstream. It was another small detail they’d neglected to mention when they shoved the papers at him for signatures. It didn’t seem significant at the time; a minor procedure far less invasive than a vasectomy and easily reversible, though the penalties for doing so without proper authorization were stiff. The penalties for unauthorized fertility were not foremost in his mind, anyway.

The implants were seen as a rite of passage to native Nivians, an acknowledgement of adulthood and sexual license, whether or not an individual chose to exercise that license. Nivians were surprisingly chaste in that regard compared to the wanton rutting that Boss Hanstead’s hired hands pursued on every trip into Windstone. The ubiquitous specter of mortality on Algran Asta seemed to spur the instinct to spread genetic material whereas the conditions on Nivia sought to suppress it.

Repression, it seemed to Terson, was the less desirable end of the continuum. He could not understand, at first, why small children were seen in public so rarely, or why those with them tried so obviously to insulate themselves from their neighbors. The sight of pregnant women or infants was unheard of, as if parenthood was some kind of stigma.

The reality was entirely the opposite, he now knew. Parenthood was highly valued but it was also dangerous. Terson likened it to carrying a jug of whisky through a crowd of thirsty drunks: everyone wanted it and a certain percentage was willing to do anything to take it or at the very least prevent others from having it.

Winning the reproductive lottery left the woman with two choices: safety or freedom. Most hid their condition from everyone, including friends and family, for as long as possible and cloistered themselves the moment secrecy failed, sacrificing careers and most outside contact until the child was old enough to enter school.

Terson didn’t want Virene limited to those choices and the fact that she would have to make them pointed out a grave Nivian hypocrisy: how could a society demand a standard of behavior from him that it could not enforce among its own people to prevent violence against its most vulnerable members?

His conscience would not permit him to leave her alone in such circumstances, without even the support of her damnable family, but he knew that she would not permit him to sacrifice his chosen profession on the alter of her wishes.

Terson did not look forward to the day of that confrontation.

God’s Saucer: 2709:04:36 Standard

Cormack MacLeod knelt beneath the cargo sled playing a flashlight beam across the craft’s once-smooth undercarriage. The surface was gouged and creased beyond normal wear and tear; several of the scrapes looked deep enough to cast doubt on the integrity of the sheathing, a serious matter given the necessity of operating in low pressure and toxic atmospheres.

The front third of the port repeller unit had broken loose from its mounts and shifted several centimeters inward where the retractable taxi gear had apparently caught it during extension and damaged it further. Cormack found the remains of a tree branch as big around as his wrist jammed cross-wise between the top of the repeller and the undercarriage. He pried it loose and crawled out to confer with the supposed owner.

“Not a lot of trees hereabout,” Cormack commented as he handed over the incriminating evidence.

The big spacer rolled the thirty-centimeter stick over and over in his fingers for several moments. “I got no idea where this came from.”

“A tree,” Cormack explained.

The spacer’s face turned red and he studied the object at length for several more seconds, unable to concoct a suitable explanation, and finally crossed his arms behind his back, transferring it out of site in a clumsy attempt to conceal it. “So you can fix it?” he asked of the sled.

“Aye, no problem there. Have to overlay and bond new sheathing. Repeller ain’t hard to get if I can’t rebuild this one—expensive, either way. When ye need it back?”

“Tomorrow.”

“This time next week, if I work on her straight through,” Cormack grinned. “I charge overtime.”

The spacer looked skyward, rubbing the back of his neck. “Just great! Okay; I’ll have the money when I pick it up.”

“Two-thirds, up front,” Cormack corrected.

“Fine,” the spacer groaned. “Will you take an electronic transfer?”

“Absolutely,” Cormack nodded. “This against a ship’s account, then?”

“No!” he exclaimed hurriedly. “Personal.”

“Alright.” Cormack flipped to a fresh sheet in his tattered work order book. “What name?”

“Ben Grogan,” the spacer mumbled.

“Ship and account code?”

“I told you this is personal,” Grogan snapped.

“Aye, an’ your ship’ll know if ye got credit t’cover it,” Cormack explained patiently, “unless ye got a planet-side account ye want t’draw against?”

“No, okay, I understand. Ladybird. Five oh eight eight three oh six. Can you make the charge read kind of vague?”

“Aye. ‘Materials an’ services rendered’ or some such suit ye?”

“I guess so. You, ah, don’t need inside, do you?”

Cormack shook his head. “Not unless ye want me to test her ahead o’time.”

“No, that’s fine. I’ll do it when I pick it up,” Grogan said with visible relief. He left the vehicle parked in Cormack’s compound and departed on foot.

Cormack waited until the spacer was out of sight before he broke the lock encryption and climbed in to take a look around. Based on what he saw of the cockpit the sled had been hard used but well maintained. A few personal items protruded from seatback pouches in the passenger compartment below, but nothing worth stealing. Moving aft, he opened the hatch leading to the cargo compartment where he found three banks of large, self-contained cold storage units full of bush meat.

The spacer was poaching, as Cormack already suspected, but it wasn’t a case of a crewman running amok with his ship’s equipment for personal gain and trying to hide the damaged of some misadventure. The freezers and the alterations necessary to mount them indicated a long-term operation, suggesting it was a bone fide endeavor blessed by the Ladybird’s captain.

None of this really surprised Cormack. God’s Saucer lay only a couple of hours away from the Great Northern Preserve, a heavily forested region of several hundreds of millions of square kilometers taking up most of the Alpha continent’s northern half. The pickings were rich for those willing to chance a lethal encounter with the EPEA and transient spacers frequently took advantage of the opportunity to smuggle bush meat to the Belt where it sold for extraordinary prices.

The morality of the issue didn’t interest Cormack in the least; the financial rewards for exposing an organized poaching operation, however, were substantial. There was no hurry, though. The Ladybird wasn’t going anywhere without her wayward son or the sled.

Besides, it was in Cormack’s best interest to complete the work he’d been hired to do and collect the pay for it before he turned them in.

FIVE

Beta Continent: 2709:05:01 Standard

“Sir, good to see you again!” Stan McKeon grasped Hal’s hand firmly. They stood in the base’s cavernous landside entrance, amid the bustle of sailors and vehicles. “I hear you’ll be with us a while.”

“Looks that way,” Hal conceded. His father had always been amazed at McKeon’s ability to ferret the most unlikely information out of the Minzoku’s colloquially tangled grapevine. Though not Family, McKeon was a trusted agent in charge of the expatriates’ physical security who’d lived on Nivia for over twenty years, married a pair of Minzoku women, and never requested or accepted a transfer in all that time.

“It’ll grow on you,” McKeon assured him.

He tossed Hal’s bag into the cargo compartment of his squat armored ORV and held open the passenger door while Hal boarded. The housing of a high-output nuclear battery separated the two front seats by an arm’s span. Conduit vanished into the floor, feeding the independently powered electric motors at each wheel. A gunner’s chair hung from a turret mount between and slightly behind the front seats. McKeon chirped his siren as the vehicle accelerated silently toward the exit.

Outside they turned south, away from Tessaoua. The vehicle hardly swayed as it crossed ruts and potholes in the primitive roadway. The road turned west gradually, winding up through the low coastal mountains. McKeon skirted a short convoy of Minzoku trucks at the summit. “That should be the salvage they’ve brought up so far,” he told Hal.

Their destination hove into view on the opposite side. Unofficially, the Fort was the oldest permanent settlement on Nivia. It stood on the crest of a hill, surrounded by a wall of native stone ten meters high, spaced evenly with watchtowers and gun emplacements. None of the structures therein rose above the height of the wall except an array of satellite dishes and antennas near the center. Three fences of increasing voltage ringed the wall, with land mines in between.

The Fort housed nearly six hundred offworlders, including families. It contained a hospital as well equipped as any Federal facility, a commissary, and any number of recreational endeavors. It once housed Minzoku domestic servants as well, until an uprising orchestrated by a tiny cadre of Minzoku officers thirty-five years before.  The poorly executed coup was destined to fail, but the loss of life would have been significantly higher if not for a timely warning from Den Tun.

Hal’s father suspected Den Tun of being involved in the plot himself and informing on his co-conspirators only to eliminate a powerful rival. The old man would have joined his colleagues in the killing fields had he not assumed leadership of his people so quickly.

From that day on the Minzoku were forbidden to enter the Fort and the compound went “dry” in regard to the carnal pleasures some of the Onjin indulged in. An aggregate of drinking houses and brothels sprang up around the Fort, inevitably named Sin City, and later the shops and homes of more legitimate means. McKeon’s siren chirped constantly as the car cruised through the de facto town.

The road ended at a well-defended portcullis. One of the guards made a cursory visual inspection and waved them through, a sign of sloppy security had Hal not already been aware of McKeon’s subtle all’s well signal.

“The department heads are at the command post,” McKeon said. “Den Tun’s update should arrive with the salvage.”

They parked in the shadow of a satellite dish. Computers maintained a constant link with the geosynchronous satellites monitoring the quadrants where the Family operated. Artificial images of virgin forest and coast, based on minute to minute changes in weather, temperature, and season replaced the real data in black-box components in the satellites themselves, components manufactured and installed by a subsidiary controlled by another Syndicate family. If necessary, they could conjure up images of weather or ocean conditions inclement enough to alter the course of any gaijin vessel or aircraft that might venture near. Direct observation from orbit was countered by an efficient blackout system that could be implemented in seconds. Every major facility was equipped with cold-smoke generators that produced convincing ground fog. If all else failed, the expatriate’s arsenal could prevail against anything short of nuclear detonation or orbital bombardment.

Sergio Cirilo, a distant cousin and Deputy Administrator of the outpost, met them at the entrance. “Welcome back,” he said soberly. “I wish the circumstances were different, but it’s always a pleasure.”

“Likewise,” Hal replied unenthusiastically. Sergio was a handsome man by anyone’s standard, a blood member of the Family by both parents, a distinction Hal could not claim. Sergio had been born on Nivia and long aspired to become Chief Administrator. The aspiration had been cruelly crushed when Hal’s father assumed the title. Time had tempered his bitterness, and he accepted his position as site chief. Sergio had developed another aspiration, one that depended significantly on Hal.

“I hope you’ll join us for dinner this evening,” Sergio suggested. “I have some minor matters to discuss, since you’re here, and Tamara is off duty tonight.”

“I’ll do my best,” Hal said noncommittally, “but you understand you have my full confidence, just as you had my father’s.”

“Of course. The department heads are waiting in the conference room.”

The assembly stood as they entered. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” Hal said as he took his place at the head of the conference table, “please be seated. Sergio, could you bring us up to date?”

“As most of us are already aware, the shuttle carrying our last shipment suffered a massive malfunction short of reaching orbit. Map, please.” A holographic globe materialized in the air above the table. Red tracings showed the shuttle’s path. “It survived reentry and impacted here, about twenty-five hundred kilometers off the coast. The wreckage is scattered over three kilometers at a depth of five hundred fathoms and salvage is underway. A small quantity is already on its way back.”

A dashed line split off the shuttle’s arc. “The crew ejected here and landed about three hundred kilometers from the mainland. A civilian boat picked them up, but none survived.”

“Any word as to the cause of the crash?”

“Not yet. The Federal authorities are reviewing Space Traffic Control tapes and radar images, but without the flight data recorder they’ll probably write it off as unsolved. The first EPEA boats to arrive had a skirmish with the Minzoku and consider a recovery operation too dangerous.”

“Anything that could cast suspicion on the cargo’s source?” Hal asked.

“No, sir. The material went through our front in Saint Anatone. Unfortunately, most of it went up on the same shuttle.”

Hal thanked him and turned to the other department heads. “Now, how much can we reasonably expect to recover intact?”

“That depends,” said Erin Nowatchik, the head biochemist. “The shipment was hardened against vacuum, not external pressure. I’d give each container a fifty-fifty chance of leakage or rupture. Some components of the shipment won’t be harmed by ocean water, some will be. Some can be recovered through reprocessing, if it did get wet. It’s not worth speculating on; we’ll have to see what we get.”

“I want a running report as it comes in,” Hal said. “The delay is going to cost us, even if we recover everything. Derner, I need to talk to you.”

The metallurgist slowly resumed his seat while the others filed out.

“The Old Lady got your request for reassignment,” Hal said. “She sent it back down to me, where it should have started in the first place. Care to explain why you went over my head?”

Derner crossed his arms defensively. “You didn’t approve the last one.”

“You didn’t give me sufficient justification to.”

“The Old Man would have,” Derner blurted. The metallurgist shrank in on himself as soon as he uttered the words.

So we’ve come around to that, Hal thought. The Old Man’s death had come without warning. Hal never expected to be thrust into the heart of the business so soon and neither had anyone else, obviously.

“I’m sorry,” Derner stammered, “I didn’t—”

“If you have a problem with my decision, you tell me to my face,” Hal said. “Go behind my back again and you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

Derner’s face grayed. “I understand.”

Having settled the issue, Hal’s voice took on a friendlier tone. “Why do you want a reassignment? You’ve been heavily involved in our production of optical semiconductors and earned top bonuses for the past ten years.”

Derner took a moment to adjust. “I came on board as a researcher,” he said. “We were trying to develop a monoisotopic semiconductor through molecular beam epitaxy. Granted, we didn’t get anywhere, but I think the refinements I brought to our first-stage production warrant my request.”

Derner’s contributions had been instrumental in establishing the Family’s profitable trade in exotic crystals, particularly indium gallium antimonide, a substance vital to the optoelectronic and thermophotovoltaic energy industries. Better than ninety percent now came off the line defect-free, at a quarter the overhead of any other producer, and received legitimate certification after laundering. The culls still went the old route, entering the market through counterfeited certification as a competitor’s product.

“Production and quality peaked five years ago,” Hal noted. “Why didn’t you request transfer then?”

Derner nodded. “My project was still making progress. Two years ago success seemed imminent but we hit a dead end, scrapped years of work. Since then the metallurgy community has pretty much given up serious research in that area and I’d like to move on.”

“I’ll take your request under advisement,” Hal assured him.

“Thank you.” Derner left a happier man.

Hal remained for a few minutes. Solitude would be a rare commodity for the next few days, given his next task: paying a personal visit to each of the department heads, answering what complaints and requests he could, giving lip service to those he could not. “Pressing the flesh,” his father called it—politicking. Hal had never developed the stomach for it. Real and perceived nuances attributed meaning to the most innocent comment, the most mundane action. The Old Man had a gift for it and decades of credit in his political accounts.

The Derners of the world would never have dreamed of pulling a stunt like that on the Old Man.

Saint Anatone: 2709:05:01 Standard

Virene pounded on the bathroom door irritably. “Terson, come on! You can go when we get there.”

“Just give me a minute,” he sighed. She’d been frantic about the appointment all morning and the extra half hour she spent primping had suddenly become his fault.

Automated traffic monitors issued three speeding citations between their apartment and the freeway. Virene weaved through traffic all the way to the downtown exit and put the wheel hard over, cutting across traffic in the right-hand lane, ignoring angry gestures as the little sports car dropped to street level. Terson endured the reckless exhibition silently.

Virene pulled into a parking space in front of the Social Services building, breaking hard. They hopped out and dashed through the entrance. Terson wrestled briefly with the idea of continuing out the back, but his wife would beat him bloody if he cut out regardless of his abhorrence of bureaucracy.

Virene squeezed his hand as the elevator doors parted.

The Reproductive Service Center took up the entire sixth floor. The reception area held seating for at least one hundred and fifty, walls and ceiling covered with sound deadening fabric and acoustical tile. A path had been worn in the light maroon carpet between the elevators and an island of computer screens and desks inside a circular counter. They signed in with the receptionist less than five minutes after their scheduled appointment. She gave each of them a pamphlet and clipboard.

“Fill these out as completely as you can,” she said. “A family counselor will call you shortly.”

They found seats, instinctively leaving unoccupied chairs on either side to insulate themselves from the other applicants. Terson sensed observation almost immediately after starting on their forms. He cast about with a surreptitious glance to see eyes and faces turn swiftly aside. The anxiety in the room was palpable. No one spoke. Except for an occasional whispered murmur the only sounds were those of pen and paper. A few locked eyes with him and stiffened, offended that he did not alter his gaze as quickly as etiquette demanded. One or two took it as a challenge and stared back with open hostility.

These were not fellow applicants, he realized, they were competitors, each couple seeking to outdo the others, to prove themselves more fit to receive the gift of fertility than any of the rest. The colonists of Nivia had made a prize of the most basic biological drive and began fighting for their children’s lives before they’ve even been conceived. Terson knew, without a doubt, that somewhere in the room was a person willing to destroy a friendship, betray a spouse, and perhaps even plot murder if they believed it could get them a child.

“Mr. and Mrs. Reilly?” The counselor’s eyes fixed on them when they rose. “This way, please.” She turned and led them into the warren of cubicles. Terson felt like a rat in a maze, trapped with desperate wrecks of his own kind, about to be tortured by a civil servant with a degree in witch-doctor psychology.

The faces he spied in the labyrinth were naked, stripped of the masks they wore in the reception area. He saw young, hopeful couples, first-time applicants like Virene and himself. There were slightly more mature faces, some relaxed, comfortable that they’d had one child already and expected to again, some uneasy and concerned because they’d been turned down before.

The very mature couples bothered Terson the most—people conscious of their biological clocks, anguished by the string of rejected applications, following their counselor’s every word praying to learn the reason why.

“But we’ve done everything you’ve said,” he heard one tearful woman cry. “Everything!”

“Have a seat, make yourselves comfortable,” she said when they reached her cubical. “My name is Theresa, and I’ll be helping you with your application.”

“Thank you,” Virene said. She touched a framed picture of two children sitting on the desk. “Are these yours?”

“Yes,” Theresa smiled. “Adam and Joy.”

“You’re very fortunate,” Virene said.

“Oh, I’m sure you will be, too,” she replied.

Terson snorted inwardly. Wonder where you put it when someone not so fortunate shows up, he thought. Or do you leave it there to rub it in?

“Virene, let’s start with you. I see you come from an unusually large family,” the counselor commented. “Do you want several children?”

“We, um, haven’t really decided,” Virene said. “I think I’d by happy with one.”

“Of course,” Theresa said. “Most people would be. Now, your education appears fairly standard; you took the usual childcare and parenting classes in high school; you are due to graduate from college this year with a BA in Liberal Arts. Your work experience seems rather limited. You haven’t held a job for the last two years?”

“I chose to concentrate on my studies,” Virene said.

“Of course. Do you see yourself embarking on a career, or staying at home?”

“I guess I haven’t thought about it,” Virene said weakly.

“That’s not unusual for someone your age,” Theresa said. “Now, I see that you two have had some trouble with the authorities.”

“Not for a while,” Virene said quickly, concern evident on her face.

“It shouldn’t be a problem if you haven’t had any recent infractions,” the counselor said. “You’ve maintained your contraceptive treatments the whole time and that counts for a lot.

“Now, Terson, I see that you are on probation. Can you tell me about that? Your records aren’t very detailed.”

“If you check your regulations,” Terson smiled thinly, “you’ll see that I’m not obligated to answer.” Virene kicked him in the ankle.

“You are enrolled in the Spaceflight Training School at Malone,” Theresa said, recovering smoothly. “How will your career impact your ability to raise a child? Won’t you be absent from home?”

“My specialty is aerospace operation,” Terson explained. “Shuttle work.”

The woman asked a few more questions, making notes on his application, and finished with: “I’ll need the name of your probation officer, of course.”

“What happens now?” Virene asked.

“Your applications will be sent in for review,” Theresa told her. “You should have a response one way or the other in two weeks. If your applications are declined, there will be some material explaining what you can do to improve your chances next time.

“If you’re approved, your case number will go into the queue, then it’s just a matter of time until your turn comes, based on the monthly quotas.”

Maalan Bragg gazed out a window in the Mental Health reception room on the tenth floor of the Social Services building. He could see his own office window glinting in the sunlight at the Public Safety building, the place he would much rather spend his afternoon than here, waiting for his annual mental health evaluation and counseling session. His eye caught a sleek sports car turning off the street below at high speed. The driver slammed on the brakes and screeched to a stop in a parking slip at the curb, wisps of smoke rising behind each tire.

He recognized the couple that emerged all too well even from this height: Terson and Virene Reilly. Maalan stifled the impulse to rush down and confront them and whatever trouble they were about to cause. What he viewed as dedication to duty, however, might be misconstrued as erratic behavior by his counselor, leading to additional sessions, a possibility he wished to avoid.

Doctor Lutz appeared in the doorway. “Maalan,” he smiled, offering his hand. “Please, come in.”

Mario Lutz was a short, portly man twenty years Bragg’s senior, soft-spoken with a kindly face that elicited trust and eyes that could bore through solid concrete at the first hint of deception. Experience taught Bragg to speak frankly or endure more sharply probing questions. The counselor led him to a pleasant sitting room decorated with soothing abstract art and furnished with two comfortable chairs arranged so the occupants could talk without the impression of an interrogation.

“How do you feel about your session today, Maalan?” Lutz began.

“Irritated,” Bragg replied, “but resigned.”

“I see. Why is that, do you think?” Lutz didn’t encumber himself with a notepad, allowing his posture, body language and gestures to fully engage his subject. Bragg had no doubt, however, that the session was carefully documented in some other way.

“I have work to do,” Bragg explained.

“You don’t view this session as a legitimate aspect of your work?”

“I understand the reason for it, intellectually,” Bragg expounded, “and I agree with its purpose, but, no, I don’t view it as significant to my ability to perform my duties.”

“Has anything significant happened since your last interview?”

Bragg hated that question. What qualified as significant and in whose opinion? Significant to Maalan Bragg personally, or significant to the public at large? This time, at least, he had something that qualified on both counts. “I made an arrest in a big case last week.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“I was lead investigator into the deaths at Saint Anatone General last month,” Bragg said.

“I found that incident particularly disturbing myself,” Lutz acknowledged. “Did you find it satisfying to apprehend the perpetrator?”

“Not particularly,” Bragg replied. “He was an idiot—there was no way he couldn’t get caught and he missed his intended victims by about as wide a margin as could exist.” The man worked at a medical supply service and filled medical oxygen bottles with carbon dioxide. He intended them for an elder care center but they found their way to Saint Anatone General instead. It was a simple matter to track the serial numbers to their source, where company records identified the person who prepared and inspected them.

“You felt the case was a waste of your investigative skills.”

“No. Well, maybe, in a way—it wasn’t a challenge, if that’s what you mean, but I’d rather get someone like that off the street as quickly as possible than be challenged.”

“How do you feel about the suspect himself?”

“Contemptuous,” Bragg said without hesitation. “He wasn’t remorseful over the mistake. He said—now, get this—he said ‘At least they aren’t suffering anymore.’ I’ll tell you what, that’s the closest I’ve ever come to pistol whipping a suspect.”

“Was that his motivation?” Lutz asked. “The relief of suffering?”

“Not at all,” Bragg chuckled bitterly. “His son and daughter-in-law had their application for contraception reversal denied a few months ago. They were about to reapply and he decided that he could improve their chances by reducing the population by a few dozen. He figured anyone who was both old and on oxygen probably didn’t have a decent quality of life anyway.”

“Do you agree with his conclusion?”

“That’s hard to answer,” Bragg said. “Logic would seem to dictate that life shouldn’t be extended beyond a certain point if it means preventing someone else from being born. I’ve filed legal instruments to prevent anyone from putting me on permanent life support because I think that it’s socially irresponsible to do otherwise, but that was my choice.

“Making that choice for someone else is unconscionably arrogant and cowardly. You’ll notice he didn’t feel strongly enough about it to kill himself.”

“Would you feel differently about him if he had?” Lutz asked.

Bragg shook his head. “His targets were still helpless and vulnerable.”

“I’m referring to those who engage in descendant-motivated suicide,” Lutz clarified.

“It makes me angry,” Bragg told him.

“But it’s clearly an act of personal choice,” Lutz said. “Many people view it as commendably altruistic.”

“I’m angry that a system exists that makes suicide seem like a reasonable option,” Bragg said. “Once you accept it as such you’re one step closer to justifying euthanasia of the elderly or the mentally and physically challenged.”

“You don’t have any children yourself,” Lutz noted. “Is that a choice you made because you disagree with the system?”

“I guess that depends on how you look at it,” Bragg said tightly. “My wife and I applied several times. Eventually the stress and disappointment outweighed our desire and we stopped. It’s open to debate whether that constitutes personal choice or concession.”

Bragg shifted in his seat, trying to swallow the acidic anger welling up in his gut. They’d done everything the bastards suggested to the letter, striving for an impossible perfection until it became the central focus of their lives. The strain showed in the psychological screening and their last failed application cited marital instability.

“I take it you wouldn’t object to loosening of the reproductive laws,” Lutz guessed.

“That, Doctor, is a political issue that I certainly don’t intend to discuss,” Bragg said, getting to his feet. “I believe I’ve had enough.”

“I apologize for upsetting you,” Lutz told him. “It wasn’t my intent.”

“I never thought otherwise,” Bragg assured him. “I appreciate the opportunity to get these things off my chest; I feel much better, and I look forward to next year’s session.”

He drove the highway that circled Saint Anatone three times before he calmed enough to go home.

Beta Continent: 2709:05:01 Standard

Cargo damage proved to be as bad as Hal feared. The depth had crushed fifty percent of the containers; nine out of ten intact containers had leaked. For all practical purposes, the entire shipment was a loss.

If the customers on the other end could abide a delay, or accept partial shipment, he might be able to get things back on schedule. If not, the only choice was to refund those with the most power and stiff the ones without. No doubt Den Tun saw an opportunity to gain concessions in return for stepped up delivery of the raw materials needed to increase production.

Hal sat at his desk through the day and remained there hours after his shoulders cramped, dividing his gaze between the computer screen and the clock. There had to be more work, something he could use as an excuse to avoid Sergio Cirilo’s hospitality.

The vidcom buzzed.

Hal considered ignoring it, locking the door and pretending he wasn’t there, but feigning absence would only put the Fort’s security people in a spin. Better to face Sergio and deliver a bald faced lie.

McKeon’s visage appeared instead of the Deputy Administrator’s. “We’ve got a live video feed from the crash site,” McKeon said. “You’d better come to the command post.”

“On my way,” Hal said, disturbed by the edge in the security officer’s voice. As soon as he entered the Fort’s command post his eyes locked on the over-sized video screen mounted on one wall. Against the gray-brown sediment, pinned by a submersible’s spotlight, lay a broken cargo container. Not crushed.

Burst.

The ribs bulged outward; one side sported a gaping hole, the edges peeled back and blackened by a tremendous explosion. Sea creatures swam slowly through the gap, investigating the unusual addition to their habitat.

“Collateral damage from whatever brought down the shuttle,” Hal surmised.

“Not likely,” came a throaty feminine voice from behind him. Hal turned to find himself illuminated by the liquid brown eyes of Tamara Cirilo. If the father was handsome, the daughter was gorgeous. Auburn curls cascaded over her shoulders; her skin seemed to glow from within, like light seen through bone china. The mere sight of her sent a shock through his system. “As far as I’ve been able to determine, the cargo didn’t include any reactive substances.”

“So we may be looking at the cause of the crash, not a symptom,” McKeon concluded.

“I’ll have the Minzoku bring it up for analysis.”

“Make the flight data recorder a priority as well,” Hal ordered.

McKeon’s people moved in for their instructions, forcing both Hal and Tamara to the outside. The woman’s perfume made it impossible to concentrate on what was happening inside the circle.

“Dad and I were just putting dinner on when they called me,” Tamara said. “I’m sure we have enough for three.”

“I’ll have to take a rain check,” Hal apologized. “I shouldn’t leave now, in view of the circumstances.”

McKeon appeared at his elbow. “It’s all right, sir. There’s nothing more you can do here. I’ll call if anything new develops.”

Tamara slipped her arm through his and guided him into the cold night air. “And how are things Out There?” she asked.

“Dark and cold,” Hal replied crisply.

“It’s dark and cold here,” she noted. Tamara Cirilo, like her father, had been born on Nivia and had never set foot off Beta continent, to Hal’s knowledge. She, however, had aspirations that did not limit her to administration of the Fort.

The signs had been evident as early as their teenage years. Tamara had been a willing conquest and continued to court Hal’s advances long after the other girls turned their affections to men prone to stable relationships. Tamara never voiced objections or exhibited jealousy of Hal’s other affairs, but as each ended she was there, ready to take up where she’d left off.

Just like now.

The warmth of her body against him was temptation enough without the memory of their past familiarity. Hal was keenly aware of the situation and the weakness of character that threatened to re-ensnare him in a relationship with the woman.

Hal withdrew himself from her grasp brusquely. “I’m sorry, Tamara, I’m not up for this. Give my regards to your father.”

Her mouth turned up in a shy smile. “You can stay with me tonight, Hal. I’d like your company.”

Turning down her invitation should have been easy, Hal reflected, but it wasn’t. She was warm, friendly, and as good in bed as her appearance promised. Her flaw was ambition and the quid pro quo it suggested.

“I’m sorry, Tammy. I have to go.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she replied, business again. Knowing the game for what it was, she played it like a pro.

Hal checked into transient quarters and spent much of the night wondering who’d won that round.

SIX

Beta Continent: 2709:05:02 Standard

The shipping container sat in an empty warehouse outside the walls of the Fort. Seawater dribbling from between the double walls formed puddles on the floor that sent random, silvery tentacles across the uneven surface. Hal looked inside expecting to see a fish or two slapping against the bottom. The interior was coated with black, greasy soot.

“What could have caused this?” Sergio Cirilo asked no one in particular.

“That’s no mystery,” McKeon said, referring to the lab report he held in his hand. “The residue indicates ammonium nitrate, petroleum and traces of trinitrotoluene.”

“But what was the target?” Hal wondered. “As impressive as this looks I can’t believe anyone expected to destroy a freighter with a fertilizer bomb.”

“Not one this small,” McKeon agreed. “It was a fluke that it brought down the shuttle.” He pointed to the bulging ribs. “The outer shell contained the explosion, for the most part. I’m guessing that the breach occurred near some of the flight control circuits. The flight data recorder indicates that they lost their orbital maneuvering system.”

“So the target was the shuttle,” Sergio said.

“It depends on whether the bomb was too small to do the job, or too big,” McKeon said. “If this particular shipping container hadn’t been where it was, the shuttle wouldn’t have crashed. Take the explosion to the next order of magnitude and it would have blown the bottom out of the hold and the shuttle might have crashed. To get a blast big enough to ensure the shuttle’s destruction you’d have to fill the entire container with the reactant—”

“In which case we wouldn’t be looking at it,” Hal finished. “So the actual target may have been the cargo. They made the bomb too powerful.”

“Or the shipping container was flawed.”

Hal turned to Sergio. “What was in this container?”

Cirilo shrugged helplessly. “We won’t know that until we get a copy of the load list,” he said. “All our goods were contracted as individual consignments; the shipper packed the containers.”

“A dead end for now, then,” Hal said. “Who could have done this?”

“The Minzoku use ammonium nitrate fertilizer,” McKeon said. “They refine quantities of petroleum for their machinery.”

Sergio looked stunned. “At lease a quarter of our shipments are handled exclusively by Minzoku,” he said. “My God, what is that old man trying to accomplish by this?”

“As much as I’d like to blame Den Tun, this isn’t his style,” Hal said. “He’s not one to chance this sort of evidence turning up.”

“I agree,” McKeon added. “This was amateur.”

“Besides,” Hal pointed out, “it was a Minzoku submersible that located the container. If Den Tun arranged this, we’d still be wondering.”

“Could this be part of a power struggle among the Minzoku?” Sergio asked.

“I haven’t caught wind of anything like that, but it’s possible,” McKeon replied. “The man is old and there is no heir apparent.”

Wars have started over less, Hal thought. “This remains classified, for now,” he said. “Our official stand is that a third party’s cargo caused the explosion. I want copies of the lab report and the flight data recorder. Sergio, get me the load lists.” Hal went back to his office to start writing his initial report. He sincerely hoped he would have answers by the time the Old Lady got it.

It was nearly midnight when Hal pulled himself painfully into the passenger seat of McKeon’s ORV for the ride back to the Minzoku base. Bursts of pain shot from his hip to his toes incessantly no matter how he positioned himself.

“Back acting up?” McKeon asked.

Hal grimaced and nodded. “I haven’t been doing my exercises,” he said. “Leaning over a keyboard hasn’t helped any.”

“Mind if I ask something personal?”

“Go ahead.” If he mentions Tamara Cirilo I’ll scream!

“Not many people make it through a car bombing in such good shape,” McKeon said. “What happened?”

“I guess you could say I owe my life to the Sundowners.”

“The who?”

“Sundowners. Local music group. The Old Man was taking care of some business and I wanted to listen to the Sundowners, so I sat up front with the driver,” Hal told him. “There was a shaped charge mounted in a tunnel and tied it into the traffic computer, timed so perfectly that the driver didn’t get a scratch. It shredded everything behind the front seats, and I caught a piece of shrapnel in the back.”

“Damn.”

McKeon fell silent again, and Hal stared ahead dolefully. The headlights illuminated scores of hapless insects as they splattered against the windshield. A few of them stuck there, quivering, broken by the impact but alive for the moment, helpless and doomed. Hal felt some sympathy for them, recalling a similar feeling during months spent immobilized in a Family clinic while Khold biotechnology acquired at unimaginable cost knit his severed spinal cord together.

They rounded a corner to find a herd of knee-high herbivores in the road. McKeon turned off the headlights and didn’t slow down. Hal braced against the inevitable impact, but the ORV roared through the spot and there was no sign of the animals when the lights came on again.

“Sorry about that,” McKeon said, noting Hal’s alarm. “They freeze in the lights. Couldn’t move if they wanted to.”

“Must make hunting a breeze,” Hal noted.

“Hunting quixok with lights is a Minzoku idiom for unscrupulousness or villainy,” McKeon said. “It means to take advantage of inherent weakness. Like shooting someone in the back.”

“You know a lot about these people,” Hal said.

“More than any one person in the last fifty years,” he agreed.

“Do you like them?”

“I admire their way of life,” McKeon said. “Day to day living is more defined and basic. Everybody knows their purpose.”

“But…” Hal prodded.

“I speak their language, live among them, and married their women, but they never let me forget I’m not one of them and never will be. They’ll bend over backward for us, but it’s giri, not respect.”

“Giri?”

“Moral debt. Repayment of giri is a matter of honor with them. They’ll do almost anything to satisfy it, which gives most Onjin the impression they worship us. They don’t—they just owe us.”

“Den Tun must figure his giri is about paid up,” Hal noted wryly.

“Sure he does,” McKeon chuckled. “The coot’s almost a hundred years old.”

Hal hadn’t eaten anything since a sparse breakfast that morning and the aroma of spices and stir-fried vegetables set his mouth watering as he entered his quarters. Dayuki knelt by the low table, pouring tea. She rose as he approached and held out the cup.

“What’s this?” Hal asked.

“Spicebark tea,” she said, ushering him to the sofa. “Some find it energizing.”

He sipped the brew dubiously while she dished out rice and stir-fry. Strands of hair sprang haphazardly from her hastily pinned tresses. Even disheveled, she was alluring.

Hal folded his legs beneath him and accepted the plate gratefully. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“It need not be,” she chided. “Engage your mind with your tasks; I will see to your well-being.”

He wolfed down two helpings and quaffed half a liter of tea. While Dayuki cleared away the dishes he slowly unfolded and arched his back, wincing at the twinge that lanced his spine. “I have got to get a real table in here,” he grimaced.

Dayuki put her hands on his shoulders before he could rise. “Lay down.” He stretched out on his stomach stiffly. Dayuki’s fingers worked across his back with an almost painful vigor, overpowering each muscle in turn, leaving them placid. The knots eased one by one. Hal’s consciousness drifted, as if it were about to float out of his body. She paused at the straps of his shoulder holster.

“I must tell you something.”

“Umm?”

“It was an accident,” she said. Her fingers moved around each vertebra, aligning them with subtle pressure. “I made a mistake, and it went off too late.”

“What did?”

“The explosive I put in the container.”

Hal lunged away from her. Dayuki followed with two nimble steps and struck him in the middle of his back. His legs went dead under him and he crashed to the floor, twisting to get to his needle-beamer. She touched his neck, light as a feather, and Hal’s arms quit working. He collapsed on his face, chin tucked into his chest so far his airway closed. He realized that he was suffocating with rising panic and strained to rise, to roll over, to move anything. Just when it seemed his brain would reconnect with his body, the most excruciating pain he’d ever felt coursed up his spine and spread to his limbs.

“Stop!” Dayuki commanded. “Struggling will do permanent harm!” She rolled him onto his back and lifted his chin. A shuddering gasp filled his lungs with sweet air. Hal tried to calm his breathing. It wasn’t easy; the memory of the paralysis after his injuries in the car bombing was terribly fresh, and this was worse. He could manipulate his eyes, but nothing else.

Dayuki took his head in her hands and turned his face toward her. Sadness marred her beauty. Gold flecks floated deep in her brown eyes, conveying a serene, deadly resolve. “I have disgraced the covenant between our people,” she said. “I will do what I must to restore honor, but first you will listen:

“Den Tun has betrayed you to the gaijin. They have helped him infiltrate your systems and take your secrets. His researchers have grown a Tiger Opal, which he intends to give to the gaijin. I did not discover his betrayal in time to warn you. My attempt to stop him went terribly wrong.”

With that pronouncement she rolled him onto his stomach. Oh, God, what now? “What the maki suru steals, the kaidokuzai restores,” Dayuki explained. “Lie still until your strength returns.” Her hands worked up his spine again, and something in his neck popped.

Sensation rolled back into him like a wave, bringing both relief and pain. Dayuki turned him onto his back again. A long, involuntary groan rattled his lips as millions of white-hot needles pricked his skin.

Hal’s mind raced with the implications of her charge while his body slowly regained control of itself. It was not inconceivable that Den Tun could develop his own lines of commerce with the gaijin. The Onjin had become insular over the years, complacent in the Minzoku’s history of obedience. Given the freedom they enjoyed, some kind of contact was inevitable.

Dayuki moved about the room purposefully. She retrieved a lacquered wooden box, an objet trouve’ collected by a previous occupant, and set it on the table. Her loose cotton pajamas fell in a heap at her feet. Naked, she knelt facing him from the other side of the table.

Her skin glowed the hue of ripe barley in sunlight. The sleek, tight lines of her stomach and hips spoke of lithe strength, guiding his eyes to the shadowed dip of her navel. High, full breasts swayed as she opened the box and removed its contents. She wrapped herself in a light silk kimono, white as milk, knotting the sash at her waist.

Dayuki untied her mane and flung it forward, brushing until the locks separated and layered in fluid waves. Satisfied, she flipped them back over her shoulders where they flowed with life of their own. Her delicately boned hand dipped into the box and came up with a twenty-centimeter tanto, a wickedly sharp dagger with the angled tip distinctive of Minzoku cutlery.

“N-nogh…”

Without the force of his lungs behind it the sound barely escaped his lips, but it was progress. Oblivious, the woman inspected the blued steel in the light, fogged it with her breath and buffed away some blemish. She set the blade on the polishing cloth and held her palms beneath her chin, eyes closed, and began a prayer-like chant.

The tingle in Hal’s limbs had diminished. He tried to move his hand and was rewarded with a single twitch. Dayuki’s voice droned on; Hal caught himself echoing the cadence in his mind, mesmerized by the narcotic rhythm.

The mantra ceased abruptly. Dayuki lifted her chin and positioned the blade to sever her trachea and jugular. She held it at arm’s length for a moment, and then drew it to herself as if embracing a child.

Hal strained against the fading paralysis. His body still couldn’t perform to his will’s expectations—pain flooded back down his nerves and he groaned again, loudly. The sound startled Dayuki. She faltered and the blade entered her flesh less than a centimeter. She raised her arms to strike again; by that time Hal had her by the wrists.

“You can’t repay your giri this easily,” Hal gasped. “Until you can, your life is mine to take, not yours!” His hands had no strength; it took everything to stay upright. She looked at him with bottomless eyes, considering. Choosing.

“As you wish.”

Dayuki helped him to the couch. Blood trickled from the shallow wound in her throat, forming a stream between her breasts and over her belly. She slipped out of the kimono, using it to staunch the sanguine flow, then braced the blade of the dagger over the edge of the table and brought her elbow down, snapping it off at the shank. Once blooded it could never be allowed to serve any purpose less noble. Both parts went back into the box, wrapped in the polishing cloth along with the brush. She laid the container, tied with the sash, at the foot of the couch.

Dressed again in the pajamas, she helped him sit up. But for a lingering soreness, the pain was gone, and he took the opportunity to ask the obvious question: “Dayuki, what the hell is a Tiger Opal?”

The girl stared at him uncomprehendingly, answering only after he repeated the question. “I do not know,” she said at last. The confidence she’d exhibited only a few minutes before evaporated. “It—it was a secret that he stole from you!”

Hal shook his head slowly. “If it exists, I don’t know it by that term.”

The revelation cracked her composure and her face filled with incredulous horror. “But it—I—oh, what have I done?” she cried, burying her face in her sleeves.

Hal caught her by the chin and forced her to look at him. Her eyes welled with tears, but flashed angrily at his rough handling. “Listen, damnit! I don’t know what you’ve done, so answer my questions! You don’t know what it is, but you’re sure it belonged to us?”

“It is something difficult to make,” she elaborated, wiping her eyes. “Something powerful, which Den Tun believed would give the Minzoku leverage over Onjin and gaijin both. I thought destroying it would give me time to warn you!”

“Do you know where it was made?”

Dayuki shook her head miserably. “Only Den Tun knows that.”

Saint Anatone: 2709:05:03 Standard

Terson arrived at the flight training building early to check the roster for the Advanced Flight Skills Evaluation but his name was not listed. Dean Whitman, the chief flight instructor, motioned Terson into his office when he stopped by to inquire about it.

“A situation has come up,” Whitman explained, “and I moved you to the second round so we could discuss it before you went out.” He paused as if trying to decide how to continue. Terson began to worry about legal fall-out from Bragg’s discovery that he and Virene had knowingly violated the coastal boundaries, but Whitman’s next words took him completely by surprise:

“A number of your colleagues have expressed apprehensions about flying with you for the evaluation,” Whitman said. “You’ve been an exemplary student, and I’ve received no complaints until now, but is there something I’m missing?”

“I really can’t think of anything,” Terson shrugged.

“I’ll ask this straight out, then,” Whitman continued severely. “Did you force Max Brichen into the airlock and threaten to space him on your last flight?”

“Does he claim that I did?” Terson asked cautiously.

Whitman let his breath out. “No, but the source of the problem appears to be a rumor to that effect that’s been circulating for several days. Brichen denied knowing anything about it when I asked him, but I could tell he was hiding something. I think you’d better tell me what happened.”

“I didn’t touch him,” Terson said, “but I suggested the possibility of spacing when I caught him pencil-whipping the preflight.”

“I see. I’m curious why you didn’t report such a serious violation.”

“I wasn’t trying to sink his career,” Terson told him, “and I think I scared him enough that he’ll think twice about it next time—especially if he’s flying with me.”

“It isn’t all about you,” Whitman said emphatically. “What about the people he’s flown with since? Do you think they deserve protection from someone so irresponsible as to skip a preflight inspection?”

“I—” I’m not responsible for them, he was about to say, but choked back the words before they could escape and send Whitman into an apocalyptic fit. Anyone with a gram of instinct for self-preservation would take responsibility for themselves and double-check the inspection however surreptitiously, but that wasn’t what Whitman wanted to hear and Terson had learned that on Nivia self-preservation sometimes meant saying things he didn’t believe. “Yes. Yes, of course they do. That was a bad call, and I apologize.”

His response appeared to placate Whitman somewhat.

“It was noble of you to protect Brichen,” he said, “but the requirement to report the violation is just as important as that to follow proper procedure. I take it you’ve chastised other trainees for similar transgressions?”

“Probably.” He had, in fact, on numerous occasions, but he wasn’t prepared to apologize for chewing somebody’s ass when their poor performance ran the risk of getting him killed.

“You can see where it’s led,” Whitman nodded. “Alienating your crewmates just makes it harder on everyone. I don’t expect you to tolerate dangerous behavior in your peers, but don’t take it upon yourself to correct it. There is due process to handle that sort of thing and I expect you to use it.

“I trust that the point has been made. The pairing for your evaluation will be random, as always, but I will have this conversation with your partner if you anticipate any conflict.”

Terson kept his voice carefully neutral. “That won’t be necessary.”

He stalked out of the building in a dark, foul mood. It was bad enough that his whiney, weak-kneed classmates had the gall to complain about him because of a few justifiably harsh words, and then to take a scolding over it from the one person who should have backed him up, but to get bumped from the first rotation as well? Granted, a delay of two or three weeks didn’t amount to much in any tangible sense, but it was generally understood that the best performers tested out first and anyone who looked deeply enough into his transcripts to notice a bump would naturally wonder what caused it.

He relished the thought of tracking down a few of the offenders and giving them something worth complaining about, but doing so would only get him in trouble with Whitman. What he really needed was to get the hell off campus for a while.

Despite attending countless hours of instruction at Malone’s central campus, the two square kilometers of sprawling academic and administrative buildings connected by wide walkways and meticulous landscaping remained the place Terson felt the least comfortable. In view of his obvious off-world origins, the students and faculty considered his presence at Malone an admirable demonstration of commitment to adapting Nivian culture and they went to great lengths to help him fit in, most often by subjecting him to condescendingly simple (and inaccurate) lectures on minor facets of their society that any fool could ascertain by direct observation.

The institution dripped with naïve idealism, exhibited by cheerful students following established tracks of study leading to guaranteed careers and faculty who feared no criticism because conformity and trust in authority were encouraged, expected and visibly rewarded. Their world was certain, stable and uncomplicated, a condition that ran completely counter to the environment of rugged self-reliance that produced Terson’s pessimistic realism.

Their blind assumption that Terson strove to embrace the same values contributed more to the gulf between them than the overt rejection he faced off-campus. Reining himself in required constant vigilance, and when that vigilance failed him the consequences were painful and embarrassing.

Virene had dropped him off at the central campus on her way to classes at one of the smaller annexes on the other side of Saint Anatone, expecting the coordination for his exam to last until mid-afternoon. After that they had an appointment with one of the half-dozen reproductive security firms that served Saint Anatone for a free consultation.

Terson considered it prematurely optimistic, but he’d since learned that dangers existed even for potential expectant mothers—not the news he wanted just prior to leaving his wife alone for the better part of a month. The delayed departure served to reduce his stress on that count, somewhat.

Public transportation might get him to their apartment with just enough time to catch the next bus back to Malone to meet her. He decided to head for a tavern he knew of instead where he could get a sandwich and a couple of beers while he waited for Virene without encountering any of his loose-lipped peers. He hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps in that direction when someone fell in next to him.

“Hey, Reilly. Have you talked to Whitman today?”

Whitman’s cautions be damned, Terson wasn’t going to take any more shit. He let the rage flow and spun on the interloper with murder in his eye—and corked it up again, but not before Zarn Vondelis saw the expression on his face and took two long and deliberate steps backward.

“Whoa, I guess you have!” Of all Terson’s classmates, Zarn was the one who least deserved to get unloaded on. He was nearly a decade older than the rest of them, aerospace operations being his second career. The added maturity made him tolerable, and he seemed to have shaken off the environmental zealotry of youth, assuming he’d had it to begin with. If he didn’t know better, Terson would have taken Vondelis for a fellow immigrant. He and Terson had flown together on several occasions and remained one of the few partners Terson hadn’t threatened to stuff out the airlock.

Still, Terson didn’t feel charitable. “You guessed right. What do you want?”

Vondelis stepped back into a friendly proximity and held up a printout. “I picked up our navpoints. You have time to work on the flight plan?”

“I got bumped to second string,” Terson told him.

“I know,” Vondelis said. “I went to Whitman as soon as I heard and told him I’d fly with you. I assumed you knew.”

“First I’ve heard of it.” Whitman probably wanted Terson to sweat a little, or believe that the crew assignment was random because making an exception might be perceived as rewarding bad behavior. But that didn’t explain why Zarn was willing to take a bump to partner with him.

“The first-round schedule conflicts with some personal matters,” Vondelis explained when Terson put the question to him. “I was going to request a reassignment anyway, so I figured I’d go up with you rather than get stuck with a wash-back or somebody like Brichen. I’d have loved to see the look on his face when you shoved him in the airlock.”

Terson didn’t bother to set the facts straight. Sometimes rumors were more advantageous than the truth.

They returned to the flight operations building where they encountered a small crowd gathered around the newly posted second-round assignments. Terson noted relieved expressions on several faces as he and Zarn made their way through. “Poor bastard,” someone snickered.

Mercifully, the chart room was deserted. Zarn logged into one of the navigation consoles and activated its holographic interface. A representation of the Nivian system appeared, showing its planets, their moons, major orbital habitats and significant asteroidal bodies (none of this was to scale, otherwise the orb representing the farthest planet would appear nearly three kilometers from the console).

Nivia Prime held five planets in its gravitational clutch: Fuma; Nivia and its single moon; Caliban, a jovian-class gas giant with five natural and one manmade satellites, none inhabited save Caliban Station; Othello, another gas giant half the size of Caliban with three moons, the largest of which, Iago, was inhabited; and the dim and frigid Hades, orbiting just inside the Kuiper belt.

Zarn entered their assigned navpoints and began plotting a course. Although both team members were expected to collaborate on all aspects of the evaluation, Terson was more than willing to let Zarn handle the lion’s share of the navigating. Terson did not consider strategy his strong suit, but he excelled at execution so Zarn typically deferred to him in matters of tactics—one of the reasons they worked so well together.

The test was straightforward and simple, on the surface: each two-man team received sixteen navigation points spread through the Nivian system. In order to pass, they merely had to approach each point close enough to register their transponder identification with the monitoring system. The reality wasn’t nearly as simple, of course. Their navpoints included several high-traffic destinations where they’d be subject to general Space Traffic Control regulations as well as local procedures. Points would be deducted for any officially noted violations, and the unpredictable nature of public traffic might require them to adjust their flight plan in transit.

Then there were the matters of refueling, re-provisioning, and unavoidable layovers, all requiring some form of docking and another layer of procedures and bureaucracy. When it was all over they would have to endure a three-member panel review of their overall performance, to include efficiency of fuel and time, ability to remain on schedule, response to unforeseen circumstances, and explanations of any documented violations.

In some ways the evaluation began the moment the teams received their navpoints, because high-traffic jumpzones required time-slot requests as far in advance as possible. Those who chose to procrastinate in filing a flight plan could find their carefully crafted route useless if a vital transit slot was already filled.

Five of Terson and Zarn’s navpoints were major traffic centers. The rest were variously uncongested, unrestricted, or unmanned private platforms operated and maintained by Malone itself. Zarn’s preliminary route looked like a grand tour of the Nivian system: from Nivia Station to Caliban, where they would dock at Caliban Station for a two-day layover before jumping back toward the sun to touch the two asteroidal habitats, A-30-Sierra and A-1140-Delta. From the asteroid belt they would pinball through several unmanned navpoints before heading for Othello and land on Iago for five days before their departure window for a flyby of distant Hades. Then inward again, bouncing across several of Malone’s private platforms before returning to Nivia Station. The only one of Nivia’s planets they wouldn’t approach was tiny Fuma, orbiting too close to the primary for safety.

It was nearly time to meet Virene when they finally finished.

“Thanks for doing this,” Terson said.

“Thank you,” Zarn replied. “I hate waiting for those other knuckleheads to get in the mood to do the paperwork.”

“I mean flying with me,” Terson clarified.

“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t trust you,” Zarn told him. “I wanted to talk to you about something else, too, if you’ve got time.”

“I’ve got an appointment with the wife I dare not miss,” Terson apologized.

“No problem; I’ll catch you next time.”

SEVEN

Beta Continent: 2709:05:03 Standard

McKeon chose a spot five kilometers up an overgrown trail at the end of a blind ravine where a single gunshot would go unheard and a body undiscovered for years. Dayuki pressed herself back against the unyielding gunner’s seat, curling like a leaf in the hot sun under Hal and McKeon’s inimical gazes.

“Where did you learn to build that kind of bomb?” McKeon demanded.

“Books,” Dayuki responded with barely a whisper. “Gaijin books in the old library.”

“Books!” the security officer spat, “You expect us to believe that?”

“It is the truth,” she murmured.

“You couldn’t have built it alone,” Hal said. “Who helped you?”

“A Minzoku boy,” she said. “A soldier.”

“Who is he? We want to talk to him.”

“He became a Buddha,” Dayuki said.

“A what?”

“He’s dead,” McKeon translated. “And just how did you pull that off?”

“His heart burned with lust,” she explained. “I told him to wait at a small cove up the coast where I would come to him. He drowned.”

McKeon nodded unconsciously. “Get out,” he told her. “Stand at the front of the car with your back to us.” Dayuki exited wordlessly and took position where she’d been ordered, hands clasped together and head bowed.

“Do you think she’s telling the truth?” Hal asked.

McKeon nodded again. “The Minzoku transport the cargo to our front by submarine. If her bomb had gone off as planned we’d have lost nothing but the load on that one sub. Nobody would wonder what happened for too long; they’ve lost subs before.” But the bomb had malfunctioned and lay undetected in an anonymous warehouse while the Family’s front collected the rest of the consignment and detonated on the way up, destroying far more than Dayuki intended.

“What do you recommend?” Hal asked.

“Kill her.”

“She could help us find out what Den Tun is up to.”

“I’ve never heard a whisper about this Tiger Opal,” McKeon sighed. “We can’t confirm any of her so-called evidence of a Minzoku conspiracy, and even if there is some kernel of truth to it her solution caused a lot of damage. She meant well, but a loose cannon with good intentions is still a loose cannon.”

Dayuki’s feat was impressive for a young woman without a lick of formal education whether it was based on fantasy or not. Her devotion to the Family was obvious and Hal’s sense of fair play shrank from the thought of killing her for it. And how much of McKeon’s recommendation was based on prudence versus embarrassment at the possibility of a Minzoku conspiracy occurring under his nose?

“I want this checked out first,” Hal decided. “She can die as well tomorrow as today.”

Dayuki maintained a sober expression when she learned of her reprieve, perhaps sensing that it was only temporary and depended entirely on the accuracy of her accusations. More surprising was McKeon’s willingness to let her return to the Minzoku base unsupervised.

“She doesn’t have a lot of options,” he explained after they dropped her off at the portal she’d used to spirit Hal away a few days before. “She betrayed Den Tun, regardless of whether this Tiger Opal is real or a figment of her imagination. The Minzoku will kill her for us if he finds out.”

Hal wasn’t so sure; she was related to Den Tun by blood, and the old man might be lenient if she confessed all and threw herself on his mercy—especially if what she said was true and a warning allowed the Minzoku to conceal evidence of their treachery. Either way, her unexplained absence from the base would certainly raise suspicions and make it that much harder to expose Den Tun. Releasing her now was an undesirable but necessary operational risk.

They returned to the Fort and went straight to Tamara Cirilo’s office where Hal repeated Dayuki’s revelations. “I’m not going to claim that the Minzoku cracking our network is flatly impossible,” his cousin said, “but the chances are very slim. The connections we use to monitor Den Tun’s network are heavily firewalled and very well hidden.”

“But if he had outside help…” Hal pressed.

“Still not that likely,” Tamara insisted. “They’d have to defeat multiple layers of security that are explicitly designed to detect and warn of such attempts. Anything man-made can be defeated, but it would take years.”

“Who says it didn’t?” McKeon asked. “She didn’t claim that the penetration was recent—only that her learning of it was.”

“Hard to prove,” Tamara nodded, “but easy to fix. We’ll just break all external connections while we run a comprehensive system probe.”

“Not yet,” Hal said. “I don’t want anything to alert Den Tun before we know what he’s up to—if anything. What does your database have on Tiger Opal?”

Tamara ran a search of the Fort’s comprehensive cross-referencing database, but shook her head. “No direct correlations. The closest indirect hit is a loose translation of a Minzoku word, ‘milenopar,’ which translates literally as ‘stripe-having jewel.’ The index lists the last recorded use in a report relating to deliveries of raw materials about fifty years ago. Pretty archaic.”

“A dead end,” McKeon snorted.

“Archaic,” Hal murmured to himself. It was not a word, then, that most adult Minzoku would be likely to use, much less so someone of Dayuki’s generation. Den Tun, however, might have been familiar with it in his youth. “What were the materials for?”

Tamara ran another search of Family historical records. “An obsolete optical semiconductor—indium gallium arsenide. It’s since been replaced by—”

“Indium gallium antimonide,” Hal finished for her. Den Tun must have discovered the use to which the Onjin put the raw materials his people supplied. The growing circumstantial evidence suggested that the old man was trying to produce the substance and may have succeeded. Though no scientist himself, Hal knew that the production process did not lend itself to establishment in the facilities the Minzoku controlled. At least not the ones that the Onjin knew about.

The Onjin consumed massive quantities of electricity in the course of their activities, power they did not share with the Minzoku. Den Tun and his people possessed a single oil-fired electrical generating plant constructed to power their base when the Onjin originally occupied it. That would be the simplest place to construct a laboratory, but the Onjin had detailed blueprints of the base as well as full access anytime they wished. They rarely exercised that prerogative, but the possibility made it too dangerous for the Minzoku to house an unsanctioned facility there.

That left only one Minzoku possession with an established power grid and a ready explanation for the level of consumption a single production facility required. “Do a detailed, multi-spectral satellite survey of the area around Tessoua,” Hal ordered.

Saint Anatone Aerospaceport: 2709:05:03

“Final boarding call for Flight 6721 to Nivia Station. Any remaining passengers for Flight 6721 please report to the gate immediately.”

“That’s you,” Virene sniffed miserably. “You’d better go.” Her arms remained around Terson’s neck despite her words. He looked to the gate where Zarn spread his hands, entreating him to finish up. Terson waved him on and pried himself from his wife’s grasp.

“Virene, I really have to go!”

“I just told you that!”

“Will you be okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said primly, wiping at her eyes. “You’re the one still standing here.”

“Sorry; I’ll call as soon as I can.” Terson kissed her and dashed for the gate, shrugging at the attendant’s deprecating frown. He caught up with Zarn at the shuttle hatch and ducked through. The flight attendant inside checked his ticket and indicated the rear of the vehicle, redundant information given that it was a full flight and Terson was the last aboard. He dropped into the acceleration couch next to Zarn and buckled in.

“She always this emotional?” Vondelis asked.

“Not usually,” Terson replied. “She’s still rattled over that thing with the cargo shuttle.”

“I think flying would make me a little queasy, too, if I were married,” Zarn said. “The idea of dying in a crash doesn’t bother me as much as the thought of leaving somebody behind.”

The passenger across the aisle way cast them an unfriendly glance and Terson decided not to engage the subject further. The boarding tube and gantry disconnected from the commuter shuttle and swung away. The flight attendant appeared, demonstrating the craft’s restraints and pointing out emergency exits. “In a few minutes the captain will rotate the passenger compartment to launch position,” she said happily. “Please ensure all personal items are secured in the locker beneath your seat, as loose objects may injure you or other passengers during launch.”

Terson’s weight shift as the passenger compartment tilted back 90 degrees so the occupants lay on their backs. The countdown appeared on the view screen at the front of the cabin. At ten seconds the pilot brought the orbital engines up to idle; at zero the craft leapt from its cradle as if it had been kicked. Terson relaxed into his seat, letting the force flow through him as the pressure against his chest increased. Within seconds the vibration and crackle eased in the thinning atmosphere.

“There it is,” Zarn said four hours later, drawing Terson’s attention to the cabin viewscreen. Nivia Station was of classic wheel-and-spoke construction from the decades before affordable gravity control technology became available. The architects and engineers overcame the difficulty of docking a ship with a rotating object by splitting the station into two concentric rings connected by maglev rails, allowing the inner habitation ring to spin while the counter-rotating outer ring remained stationary relative to space. Dozens of spacecraft of all sizes sat in dock, sleds and tugs swarming around them. Dozens more lay in parking orbits a few hundred kilometers away.

The station monitored everything that entered or exited Nivia’s atmosphere, the stellar equivalent of a firewall separating the planet from the rest of the system. The Commonwealth required that all planets with native biospheres maintain a significant degree of physical isolation from the outside to prevent biological cross-contamination. The mechanisms developed to accomplish this varied from system to system, but typically included the orbital population on the “secure” side of the theoretical line, allowing spacers and groundhogs to travel freely within the star system without decontamination or quarantine.

Nivian policy drew the line at the atmosphere, with the exception of exempted stations and vessels, to the point of using proprietary docking mechanisms to physically prevent spacer craft from mooring at “secure” facilities. Hence, any spacer visiting Nivia station was restricted to the quarter outfitted with standard couplings, and Nivian vessels designated as “secure” were incapable of docking at spacer facilities or with spacer vessels. The arrangement gave the planetary population enormous political leverage to the dismay and dissatisfaction of the larger space-based population.

Terson and Zarn headed straight for Malone’s dock, located half way around the station’s outer ring from the shuttle terminal, to check in and file their final flight plan then inspect the ship they’d drawn for the evaluation. The T-108 trainers Malone operated were impressively large viewed from the outside, but huge liquid oxygen and hydrogen tanks took up most of the internal volume. Chemical thrust was inefficient compared to the amount of power an equal weight of hydrogen could produce in a modern fusion plant, but the difference in maintenance costs more than made up for the cost of the fuel.

The 108’s tiny flight deck contained a single sleeping bunk only slightly larger than the pilot and navigator stations, shared by both occupants on alternate watches. It connected directly to a primitive zero-G toilet facility. The ship offered no shower; bathing had to wait for a layover or be conducted with moist body wipes. The difficulty in removing a pressure suit in such confined space was prohibitive except in extreme circumstances.

The galley consisted of a storage bin full of space rations.

Terson made no secret of checking Zarn’s work as he performed his own, and once or twice he found Zarn checking up on him. They still had several hours to wait before their scheduled departure, and Zarn suggested they take the opportunity to fill up on real food, since the chances of rescheduling their transit slot were essentially zero.

They crossed over to the main station and headed for a chain restaurant they were both familiar with. Terson permitted himself a single cold beer while they waited for their orders, as did Zarn. “I heard you got an interview with Outbound,” Vondelis said. “How’s that fit in with married life?”

“Not so good,” Terson replied. Especially now. “Virene’s not thrilled with the idea.”

“I wouldn’t think. You pretty much set on deep-haul work?”

“There aren’t that many alternatives,” Terson said. “Sun Cargo gets more applications than openings, and Outbound is the only long-haul shipper based on Nivia. I’ll be damned if I move to the belt.”

“There are options,” Zarn said nonchalantly. “You don’t usually hear about them unless you’ve got an inside track or know somebody who does.”

Terson put his bottle down and regarded his classmate, wondering if what he’d heard was what he thought it was, or if he was about to run smack into another bizarre Nivian social convention. “I’d appreciate the chance to consider any option,” he replied with what he hoped was the appropriate degree of leading ambiguity.

“It’s not a line of work you can talk about,” Zarn cautioned.

“Illegal, you mean?”

“What? No! Not illegal at all, just… unpopular.”

“I’m still listening.”

Zarn lowered his voice. “I assume you have unofficial flight hours, based on how fast you picked up your light aircraft certification.”

“I started back home when I was twelve,” Terson said. “Regulations were pretty loose; we didn’t need formal training in the bush.”

“I thought so,” Zarn nodded. “There is a selective market for pilots with those skills,” he said.

The revelation came as a surprise to Terson. “I looked for that kind of work right off,” he said. “I got the impression it didn’t exist here, as such.”

“It’s that inside track thing,” Zarn explained. “Does that line of work still interest you?”

“Sure,” Terson said, “but tell me why you quit in favor of this.”

“I didn’t quit. The harvest exporter I work for is paying for my orbital certification.” All certified harvesters exported a certain percentage of their quota to the belt, he explained, but his employer was the only one that specialized in the off-planet market. Since most Nivians considered exporting unethical, if not downright immoral, the company did its best to keep out of the public eye, including running a small fleet of shuttles directly from its harvest camps in the bush.

“Lots of people get orbital licenses, but seat-of-the-pants experience is hard to come by. I can guarantee an interview once you graduate, and I’ll lay you ten to one odds they’ll hire you.”

“And this is legit?” Terson pressed. It surprised him that he cared, but having invested so much in getting clear of Nivia’s legal system he wasn’t a bit interested in running afoul of it again.

“Absolutely,” Zarn assured him, “and the profit margin means starting pay is higher than at Sun or Outbound.”

That didn’t surprise Terson a bit. Habitable planets were the rare exception in the universe and the systems that possessed them were wealthy beyond any monetary expression. Inevitably a rivalry developed between planet dwellers—groundhogs—and those born in space on any number of moons, asteroids, stations and starships.

The rivalry was healthy and symbiotic, ordinarily. The spacers provided easily mined and refined metals, staffed orbital factories that generated materials too dangerous or difficult to produce in a biosphere, and in return the planet provided variety, recreation, the opportunity to relax the strict rules of space survival and, most importantly, inexpensive and abundant food. A suitable planet could supply the dietary needs of over ten billion people. Terson’s underpopulated homeworld had managed to feed the spacers in its own system and still exported millions of tons out-system. Nivia, however, generated less than five percent of the food consumed in its system despite its vastly more user-friendly landmasses.

Nivia’s regimented population control eliminated any need to expand the planetary infrastructure and the maintenance needs weren’t enough to purchase more than a fraction of the spacers’ resources. The bulk of their production left the system as exports at prices so low the miners barely broke even.

Invariably the spacers paid the higher price. Meat animals were impossible to raise in contained habitats; even hydroponically-grown vegetable protein was prohibitively expensive, relegating most spacers to imported and therefore only slightly less expensive processed foodstuffs. The poorest subsisted on soy derivatives if they were lucky, algae and yeast cakes if they weren’t.

The philosophy of fanatical environmentalism and the laws of economics should have strangled the system; Terson did not understand how the whole dysfunctional relationship held together. Groundhogs like Zarn seemed unable to perceive the undercurrent of resentment among the spacers they met on the station. They assumed that since they had enough air, water and food so did everyone else. Upstanding citizens who’d never set foot off the planet nodded in grim satisfaction when the EPEA intercepted spacers trespassing—poaching—on their chaste world.

No one ever wondered why spacers were desperate enough to risk death for a few thousand pounds of roots, berries and fish.

No one ever wondered what would happen if they grew any more desperate.

Beta Continent: 2709:05:03 Standard

Hal and Dayuki slipped away from the Minzoku base in the same horse-drawn cart they’d used before. The weather this night was a little cooler, and Dayuki wore her uniform instead of the casual kimono and leggings. Hal likewise wore a night-camouflage uniform McKeon provided. They followed the same road as before into Tessoua, but stayed on the thoroughfare through the center of town instead of turning into the alley behind Bulao’s little café. No one on the street spared the cart or its occupants more than a casual glance as it passed by, and soon enough the streetlights fell behind and darkness enveloped the roadway once more.

Two kilometers beyond Tessoua, Dayuki turned the cart off the road into a sparsely-wooded clearing where McKeon waited in his ORV with a passenger of his own: a nervous and jittery Derner, pulled from his bed and stuffed into the chief of security’s vehicle without explanation.

“Tell Derner we’re not going to kill him,” McKeon suggested when Hal and Dayuki boarded.

“We’re not going to kill you, Derner,” Hal said cheerfully.

The promise comforted the metallurgist only slightly. “T-then why am I here?” he demanded querulously. “What do you need me for?”

“We’re conducting an operation that might benefit from your expertise,” Hal explained. “That’s all you need to know for now.”

McKeon pulled onto the road and accelerated into the darkness with the aid of infrared contact lenses and filters over the vehicle’s headlights. The contacts lent his eyes a disconcerting monochrome glow.

Tamara’s scan of the countryside around Tessoua revealed a singular oddity: a road and structure that appeared in certain wavelengths but which vanished completely in the visible spectrum. That inconsistency alone warranted investigation.

The satellite imagery placed the junction just five kilometers from where Hal and Dayuki met McKeon, but without the detailed map derived from it they would have discounted the turn-off as what it appeared to be: the entrance to a primitive sand and gravel quarry.

The hooves of draft animals had churned the ground into a slurry of mud, pebbles and manure, eradicating any coherent pattern of use. Piles of hand-sifted sand and rock, separating grates, broken tools and other refuse left behind by peasants scratching what they could out of the low-quality deposit supported the illusion. McKeon continued on to a rocky, rain-washed trail ascending a hillock steep enough to dissuade anyone without rugged mechanical transportation from attempting to negotiate it.

The ORV made the climb with little trouble and hopped over the crest onto a narrow, smooth road bedded with material from the quarry behind them. The tops of the trees on either side were bowed inward slightly by a thick layer of interwoven evergreen vines, lending the trail a cave-like quality.

McKeon stopped and referred to his satellite map. “The structure is about a kilometer and a half away,” he said. “We won’t be able to pull off if the underbrush beside the road is this thick the whole way. I recommend we walk in.” Hal agreed, and the Fort’s chief of security backed their heavy vehicle into a tangle of lighter brush near the mouth of the passageway. Hal helped him pull a length of plastic camouflage netting from a dispenser under the front bumper that hid the ORV from immediate view.

Hal, Derner and Dayuki donned night-vision spectacles and set off with McKeon in the lead. It was quickly apparent that the metallurgist was no outdoorsman: he stumbled over rocks and depressions even with the aid of his light-enhancing eyewear, voicing monosyllabic expressions of discomfort and unhappiness that drew several reproachful hisses from Dayuki. McKeon finally threatened to gag the man if he couldn’t keep silent.

A short time later the road widened into a cul-de-sac fifty to sixty meters across. Like the road, it was hidden by vines strung overhead which were partially supported by masts extending from the roof of a windowless, single-story concrete building. The slab of wall facing the road was featureless except for a formidable steel blast door large enough to accommodate a vehicle three times the size of McKeon’s ORV. The personnel door built into the lower right-hand side was secured by an electronic combination lock.

McKeon touched Hal’s elbow and pointed to one corner where a young Minzoku soldier with an automatic rifle slung across his back ambled into view. A moment later another appeared from the opposite direction. They exchanged a few words as they passed, then vanished again. McKeon drew the Onjin back to the relative concealment of the road and shrugged out of his pack.

“I brought a decoder,” he said quietly, “but we’ll have to take out the guards.”

“I don’t want to tip off Den Tun,” Hal reminded him again.

McKeon held up a small aerosol can. “This is a mild anesthetic and short-term memory blocker. It takes effect quickly, but has to be deployed at point-blank range.”

“Give it to Dayuki,” Hal instructed. McKeon looked uncertain, but complied. Dayuki was either trustworthy or she wasn’t. They would find out soon enough.

“This stuff is primarily an inhalant, but it will absorb through the skin, too, and it’s persistent,” McKeon explained to the Minzoku girl. “Don’t touch anything that’s been sprayed. They’ll act a little drunk when it takes effect and they should be fairly compliant to verbal direction—just send them on their way and they won’t remember anything that happened for five to ten minutes before it’s administered.”

“I understand,” Dayuki said.

“I’ll cover you from here, in case anything goes wrong.”

Dayuki only nodded, offering no comment on the double meaning. The guards were not in sight when the four Onjin crept back to the clearing. Dayuki stripped off her spectacles and strode into the open, navigating through the darkness with the aid of a tiny electric torch. McKeon gave Hal one more uncertain look as he unlimbered his compact machine gun and screwed a suppresser onto the barrel. He settled into a sitting position, bracing his elbows against his knees, eye firm against the night scope.

The guards had still not reappeared when Dayuki reached the door; she paced back and forth with an air of irritated impatience until they arrived. The first to round the corner quickly brought his weapon to bear when he saw the torch and called out a challenge. She replied with obvious exasperation and gestured angrily at the door, railing at the guard with a rapid-fire staccato in their common tongue. Hal itched to understand what was said, but didn’t want McKeon distracted with translating.

The second guard appeared at a brisk trot, rifle at the ready, and turned on a moderately powerful hand-held spot light. It illuminated Dayuki and blinded the first guard as well as offering him up as a target. He stepped back into the building’s shadow and shouted at his companion, who lowered the beam to the ground at Dayuki’s feet. The egregious violation of procedure gave her more verbal ammunition and she gestured at both to approach.

They did so with caution, weapons trained on her in such a way that they stood an equal chance of shooting each other as well. Dayuki informed them of their error with an impressive display of official fury, screaming at the inexperienced solders until the instinct to obey a superior overcame their orders and they snapped to attention before her, shoulder to shoulder.

Dayuki sprayed both of them in the face with a single smooth back-and-forth wave of her hand. The soldiers stepped away from her in surprise, then the full effect of the chemical cocktail hit and all expression faded from their faces. Dayuki ordered them to continue their rounds and they wandered out of sight, slouched and unsteady.

McKeon led Hal and Derner to the door where he fit a decoder over the lock. Though high-tech by Minzoku standards, the electronics weren’t particularly sophisticated and the bolt snapped back after only a few seconds. McKeon pulled the door open a few centimeters. Interior illumination cast a shaft of light across the ground, accompanied by the faint hum of fans and compressors.

“Clear,” he said softly. They stepped into a large parking vestibule as featureless as the outside of the building. A roll-up door was set in the wall directly ahead and next to it a second personnel door secured by a lock identical to the one outside.

McKeon’s gadget defeated it just as quickly. He entered first, followed by Hal, with his needle-beamer ready, then Derner and Dayuki. The hallway beyond led past a mechanical room, the source of the noise, then turned left sharply, doubling back the way they’d come. Administrative alcoves and offices, all vacant, lay off the right side of the corridor. The passage turned right and ended at a personnel-sized blast door that presumably emerged on the opposite side of the building from where they entered. The left-hand side of this leg held three blank stainless steel fire doors, all dogged but not locked. The first led to a small warehouse. The second was a transitional vestibule between a clean room and the rest of the building. The third door revealed a control room with a large window looking into the actual laboratory.

“The Minzoku built this?” Derner exclaimed.

“You recognize this?” Hal asked.

Derner sat down at a terminal. “Of course. The configuration is different, but it’s the same equipment we use to produce indium gallium antimonide.” He gestured to the chamber beyond the window. “Three computer-controlled injectors deliver the molecular elements to the press, where they combine to form the crystal. This console monitors the process.”

“Den Tun must be trying to peddle our methodology,” Hal surmised. “His contacts probably wanted proof that he could deliver.”

“Son of a bitch!” Derner tapped carefully at the Minzoku keyboard. Indecipherable text scrolled up, interspersed with chemical equations and molecular diagrams. “We tried this once!” he exclaimed.

“What are you talking about?” McKeon demanded.

“Monoisotopic optical semiconductors!” Derner said, “They’ve done it with a process that didn’t work for us!”

“You said it’s the same equipment we use,” Hal reminded him.

“Yes, to form the actual crystal,” Derner clarified. “The key to producing a monoisotopic version is the discrimination process. I didn’t spot it because they’ve integrated both systems in a single plant.”

Hal decided to wait for a more auspicious moment to tell Derner his life’s work had been sabotaged and stolen by Den Tun’s spies. The look on his face would surely be a sight to behold. “The research you did before,” Hal asked, “does it still exist? Can you duplicate it?”

Derner tapped his head. “What isn’t archived is up here,” he said. “If a bunch of illiterate Minzoku can figure this out, so can I.”

“If we don’t need to preserve this, we should destroy it,” Hal decided. McKeon knelt to open his bag and removed several blocks of plastic-wrapped gray putty. “It needs to look like an accident.”

Derner stood. “I can help with that,” he said. “This process uses chemicals that generate explosive fumes if misused.” The metallurgist found what he needed in the storerooms and went to work with fervent concentration, never once decrying the loss of scientific data about to take place. Like a mountaineer tearing down the remnants of a flag left by an anonymous climber at the summit of an unconquered peak, he chose to destroy the evidence of his predecessor’s success rather than applaud the achievement.

He waited for McKeon to set his charges, and then poured the contents of a large bottle into a noxious brew of chemicals in one of the laboratory’s sinks. Fumes began to rise immediately. “We have to hurry; any kind of spark will ignite the vapors!” He pushed past Dayuki and headed for the exit, leaving Hal and McKeon to close and dog the door before they followed. They caught up with the metallurgist in the vehicle vestibule as his hand closed on the door handle.

“Wait!” McKeon hissed. “The guards—!” Derner swung the door open and skidded to a halt so quickly that Hal and McKeon piled against his back and Dayuki just managed to skip aside without falling.

The Minzoku soldiers stared open-mouthed at the intruders they had no memory of encountering less than thirty minutes earlier. Everyone went for their weapons at once.

Bullets struck on either side of the door at the same moment McKeon fired over Derner’s shoulder and Hal’s needle-beamer cracked. Both guards crumpled and McKeon stepped forward quickly to apply a coup de grace lest one of them survive to inform Den Tun.

“Everybody okay?” the security officer asked.

“Yes,” Hal and Dayuki replied.

“Derner? Derner!”

“He is here!” Dayuki called. The metallurgist lay on his side just inside the door. His eyes stared stupidly into space; the hole above his right eye was surprisingly bloodless. “He is still breathing.”

The ground beneath their feet bucked with an audible thump. Hal stood from examining Derner and looked at McKeon sharply. “Did you—?”

McKeon shook his head, holding up the transmitter, still unarmed. “But if the heat gets to the detonators—” A second more powerful jolt heaved the ground. Dayuki backed away from the building, wide-eyed as the men came to a simultaneous decision: “Run!”

A thundering roar lifted the roof off the building as they made the trees. Chunks of concrete crashed down, stripping branches as they came. Flames extinguished by the explosion reignited, consuming the lab and offices in a chemically fed conflagration so hot that leaves at the edge of the clearing began to smoke. The vines overhead caught fire and collapsed as secondary reports flung debris skyward; fire licked up in the brush downwind. The doorway where they’d abandoned Derner roared like the mouth of a blowtorch.

The wind shifted, carrying smoke and glowing embers back over them as they raced back to the ORV. Hal leaned against an armored fender gasping for breath and spat a wad of phlegm onto the ground.

“Thought I… was… in shape!”

A sharp pain lanced from his right hip down to his toes as he boarded behind Dayuki and McKeon. He needed both hands to pull the uncooperative limb inside. The ORV roared from its hiding place in the brush, careening back down the steep trail and through the quarry in total darkness. Hal stripped off his night-vision spectacles; he preferred not to see the tree trunk likely to end his life.

Ahead, light cast from the other side of an ascending curve in the trail flickered against the trees. McKeon slammed on the breaks. “I was afraid of this!” He began to back up at almost the same speed.

“Here, here!” Dayuki cried. McKeon backed into an overgrown, steeply descending spur just as the headlights rounded the corner. Three truckloads of Minzoku soldiers rumbled past but none noticed the ORV.

McKeon used a rough secondary pass to reach the Fort. He roared through the town scattering late-night revelers ahead and debris behind, skidding to a halt at the entrance. “Sound recall!” he told the guards. “I want everyone accounted for in thirty minutes!”

EIGHT

Beta Continent: 2709:05:04 Standard

Tamara Cirilo arrived at the command post ahead of the rest of the staff lacking her habitual make-up, her ordinarily coiffured hair tied back in a ponytail. She was not pleased when she learned of Hal’s overnight adventure, though he couldn’t decide if her anger at the jeopardy in which he placed himself stemmed from concern for him personally, or for her goal of reaching the Family’s inner circle through him.

“That was exceptionally reckless,” she admonished Hal. And to McKeon: “I can’t believe you went along with this. You should have informed me!”

“With all due respect, ma’am, he is the Chief Administrator. I work for him, not you.”

“Let it go, Tammy,” Hal said tiredly. “He was following orders.”

“Ridiculous, foolish, stupid orders!” his cousin seethed. “You should have left the investigation of that facility to me! It’s my job!”

“It would have taken too long,” Hal said, “and given Den Tun that much more opportunity to cover his tracks. Now we know what he was up to and managed to put a stop to it without him being any the wiser.”

“At the cost of a valuable employee,” Tamara reminded him, “and don’t think for a moment that Den Tun doesn’t have some inkling that we were involved. There are half a dozen confirmed Minzoku intelligence agents living in Sin City on a permanent basis; they know who comes, who goes, and when. They won’t consider it a coincidence that we went on alert the moment you arrived. There’s nothing like barreling through town in the middle of the night to clue the local spooks that you were up to no good!”

“It’s coincidental,” McKeon replied. “Gaijin outlaws have raided villages even farther inland.”

Dayuki chose that moment to remind them of her presence: “Den Tun places great importance on what others consider coincidence.”

Tamara’s head snapped around, fixing a disdainful gaze on the Minzoku girl as if she were some offensive substance Hal had neglected to scrape off his shoe. “It’s bad enough that you brought one of them into the Fort, but to the command post, of all places? You didn’t give us enough notice to sanitize the facility, there’s sensitive information all over, and did you even manage to search her?”

Hal closed his eyes. He was in no mood to be scolded; the muscles in the small of his back were tight and hard as rocks; pain shot through his leg like jolts of electricity every few seconds. He was tired, he was dirty, he was irritable and he’d reached the limit of his tolerance. “Tammy,” he said quietly, “shut the fuck up.”

McKeon ducked his head, rubbing at his eyebrows with the thumb and forefinger of one hand to shield himself from his employers’ brawl. Tamara wasn’t certain at first that she’d heard correctly. “What did you say?”

“Enough. Lieutenant Dayuki has proven to be a completely reliable informant and I expect to learn considerably more about Den Tun’s activities with her cooperation. Bringing her was my decision and you will respect it as such.”

Tamara’s eyes narrowed and her voice turned dangerously sweet: “I sincerely apologize for criticizing the way you violated half a dozen standing security protocols. I’ll be more circumspect when I bring them to your attention in the future. Did you need me for anything else?”

“Monitor the situation and notify me if anything happens tonight. We’ll do a full debrief in the morning.”

“Of course. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll see that the rest of us contain the fallout while you rest.” She strode out before Hal could chastise her again; McKeon took the opportunity to escape as well, leaving him alone with Dayuki. If she was disturbed by the revered Onjin’s squabble she didn’t show it.

“You believe that Den Tun will act on this?”

“Yes. Den Tun takes nothing for granted. It might have been better not to alert the Onjin, but your absence, and mine, would fuel his suspicions regardless.”

“But suspicions are all he has,” Hal noted. “No evidence. We may be able to keep him guessing a while longer.” He motioned her to accompany him as he stepped out onto the mezzanine overlooking the pit of the Operations Center. Dozens of faces turned upward, startled at the sight of a Minzoku uniform, and followed them as he led Dayuki down the stairs. “Get me a line to the base,” he ordered. “Audio only.”

“Incoming call from Den Tun,” McKeon replied almost before Hal finished speaking, “on visual.”

“Shit! Get me another shirt!” McKeon commandeered the clothing while Hal shrugged off the black tunic. Den Tun exhibited a convincing show of relief when the call connected.

“You are safe!” the old man exclaimed. “I was concerned when we found your quarters empty. Is all well at the Toride?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Hal said gravely. “We’ve taken mortar and small arms fire from the foothills north of the Fort.”

“Most distressing! Have you suffered casualties?”

“One casualty from gunfire,” Hal nodded.

“And Lieutenant Dayuki—she is with you?”

“She is,” Hal said.

“I will dispatch troops immediately,” Den Tun assured him before breaking the connection.

“Get some men up in the hills,” Hal told McKeon. “Give the Minzoku something to chase. Don’t cause them more than light casualties and don’t let them get close enough to cause us any.”

“Yes, sir.” McKeon’s gaze lingered on Dayuki. “I can handle things here,” he said, “if you’d like to arrange quarters for your guest.” The security officer’s meaning was clear: he still did not trust Dayuki and considered her presence in the command post a serious liability.

“I’ll do that,” Hal said. “Thank you.”

Hal had taken a suite at the VIP quarters the first night he spent at the Fort, and it was there he led Dayuki rather than the rarely used ten-cell jailhouse lying just off the Security offices. Each suite contained a complete kitchen, formal dining room, parlor, office, four bedrooms and two doors at either side of the parlor leading to adjoining suites. The four bedrooms shared access to a miniature replica of a Minzoku bathhouse, complete with communal soaking pool, with the added Onjin features of steam sauna and cool-down showers.

The suites’ arrangement and infrequent occupation made the VIP quarters a popular spot for clandestine parties among the Fort’s youth; Hal had attended a number himself when he was a teenager, one of which led to his first tryst with Tamara Cirilo not two doors down from the one he now occupied.

He had no doubt that the tradition continued and checked both connecting doors to ensure they were locked from his side. Twinges of nerve-pain lanced through his right buttock as he gave Dayuki the tour, growing progressively worse with each step. He eased onto a bench at the edge of the pool with a low hiss when they reached the bathhouse. “Does that maki-whatzit have any lasting effects?”

“Not if it is performed properly.” Dayuki felt his back gingerly. “After we wash you should take a bath to relax the muscles, then I can adjust the vertebrae.” To the Minzoku, washing and bathing were two entirely different activities, linked only by coincidence. One washed before bathing, and washing in a bath rated only a step higher than pissing in it.

“If you insist.” What Hal really wanted to do was go to bed, but he knew from past experience that if he didn’t address the pain immediately it would put him out of commission for days, giving justification to Tamara Cirilo’s criticism of his decisions. Dayuki took his arm and helped pull him to his feet, but instead of returning to her own bedroom she led him around the pool to the shower spigots where she began stripping off her uniform. Hal recalled another peculiarity of Minzoku culture: communal baths were exactly that, and the Minzoku were anything but body-shy.

He’d seen her disrobe less than seventy-two hours earlier, and the tiny wound at her throat from the encounter was red and puffy, a minor defect on her otherwise flawless completion. His paralysis had occupied his attention at the time, and he watched her surreptitiously from the next spigot as lukewarm water sluiced down her flanks carrying sweat, blood and soot with it. Her body was lithe and toned, slender, but without the protruding bones that many Onjin women considered necessary to reach an attractive weight.

Her casual bearing when she approached him to scrub his back stripped the moment of eroticism, but he was glad the cool water that brought her nipples to attention had the opposite effect on his anatomy when he returned the favor. The steaming water of the bath felt especially good after the chilly shower. Dayuki moved behind him and worked the muscles in his lower back with the heel of her hand as he leaned against the rim. The tightness eased quickly, as did the pain. His vertebrae slid back in place with an almost audible click. “Woman, you have the touch of an angel,” he sighed.

“I doubt you thought so earlier,” she said, a slight smile curling the edges of her mouth. Her hands continued up his back and she had to stretch to reach his neck and shoulders, bringing the length of her body into contact with his.

He’d never been in such close proximity to any woman in such a state of undress who wasn’t a lover, and a spark of concupiscence flared in his loins. Hal doused it with conscious effort. Any number of the Fort’s women, not to mention Tamara Cirilo, would leap between his sheets at the snap of his fingers if he needed an outlet. In any event, he found the platonic intimacy surprisingly pleasant, and didn’t want to endanger it, or Dayuki’s trust, with an ill-conceived pass. Besides, Dayuki’s likely surprise at such a move, combined with her skill at the chiropractic arts, would like as not leave him paralyzed again, only this time facedown in the water.

“Are all Onjin so tall?” Dayuki asked, innocently unaware of his conflict.

“Some are,” Hal said. “Most aren’t. You are about average, for a woman.”

Dayuki laughed without humor. “I have never been average.”

“Exceptional, then.”

“You say that as though it were a good thing.” The sudden despair in her voice caused him to turn.

“Dayuki, what’s wrong?”

“How could you understand?” she asked. “You want for nothing; you come and go at your own beck and call!”

Hal scowled. “You’re not a prisoner; tomorrow, or the next day, you can go back. As far as I am concerned your giri is paid in full.”

“My throat will still feel the dagger,” she said, eyes filled with sudden anguish. “A few days ago I would have gladly died with my honor intact, but you prevented it, and now—now I want to live, but honor may not allow it.”

“You people use honor like a crutch,” Hal snapped, “like you’re afraid to take responsibility for yourselves! If you want to live, then live, and to hell with your honor!”

Dayuki shook her head in dismay. “Den Tun may only suspect that I helped you, but when he finds the seppuku kupiga—the suicide box—he will know! He will offer me the choice of completing the task or facing his justice. Seppuku is quicker.”

“He wouldn’t kill you out of hand,” Hal countered. “You are his own flesh and blood. You said yourself that he saved you, offered you the opportunity to help your people.”

“Den Tun took me from my village to make a gift of me—for your father!” She saw his shock and quickly made amends for the perceived offense: “Your father was an honorable man.” She rose and sat on the edge of the pool. “I was happy enough to go; better to live as the property of the Onjin than sold to a brothel like the other half-breed girls. Your father was dismayed at Den Tun’s gift, to say the least. I was provincial and ignorant, even by our standards. He made it clear to Den Tun he had no interest in a young kahaba.”

“So he never…”

“He never took me to his bed. I worked as his house girl, learned your language.  He had me educated, to Den Tun’s consternation. He gave me authority over his affairs at the base while he was absent. Den Tun had no choice but to commission me, to give my people an excuse to tolerate my presence.

“I earned enough status to rate third wife of most of Den Tun’s officers. One even offered me a marriage as his second.”

“Why didn’t you accept?” Hal asked.

“I could not, until your father abdicated his ownership.”

“Which he did not do before he died,” Hal concluded. He thought of something else: If Dayuki was considered chattel, without the rights to even enter into marriage by her own will, it could mean—” Dayuki, did I…inherit you?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she smiled. “I feared you would not be as noble as your father but you never treated me like a servant. You let me walk at your side, Hal-san; you were always kind to me. It is for that I will give you all I have, little as it is.” She touched his face lightly with her fingertips as she spoke, a gesture of fondness that cast their relationship in an entirely new light, as if drawing a shade from his eyes.

Hal had never really seen her until that moment: she was nonpareil, a product of countless random paths and unique circumstances bound to him by an honor system he could not claim to understand, brilliant, deadly, and unremittingly lovely. He drank up the sight of her: strands of ebony hair plastered across her breasts, beads of moisture clinging to eyelashes and taut, glowing skin, the tight, flat stomach and sensual, curvaceous hips.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful, Dayuki?”

Her eyes dropped. “No.”

Hal tilted her chin up with his finger until their eyes met again. “You are beautiful.”

The world dropped into her bottomless eyes. Her lips brushing against his, trembling, then urgent with a hunger never experienced, never recognized, until that moment. The kiss lasted three seconds, five. Heat burgeoned in his chest and he reached for her.

Dayuki pulled back and stood, walked away, leaving him flustered and unsteady, head ringing with endorphins and hormones that suddenly had nowhere to go. She looked back at him over a perfect shoulder, one eyebrow arched.

It wasn’t just any look.

It was the look, as much a challenge as invitation, the final notice of the first and last chance, the look that all men longed for but few received and fewer still found the courage to act on. Hal followed her to her bedroom, trembling like a schoolboy, where she turned and let him take her in his arms.

“Are you sure you want this?” he asked huskily. “It might not be what you expect.”

Dayuki smiled at his chivalrous attempt to protect her. “You think I do not know sekkusu because I have never shared a bed? Minzoku mothers tell their daughters everything they need to know.”

Despite her confidence in her sophistication, she found herself innocent enough to be surprised at the number of things her mother left her to discover on her own.

God’s Saucer: 2709:05:05 Standard

A bitter knot settled in the pit of Cormack’s stomach as the scrap truck bounced through his gate. The wad of cash in his hand was barely a tenth the value he might otherwise have received for the material had he sold it off as functional components, but those who dealt in second-hand instrumentation would easily recognize their own property.

Cormack glowered at the tiny baffle-rider gathering dust in its cradle. None of the offers he received for the vessel came close to covering his costs—the wealthy could buy a brand-new custom ship for a few thousand more than the price he asked and traditional ‘Riders generally couldn’t afford it. At this rate it was destined to end up some brat’s in-system hotrod after the bankruptcy court sold it at auction.

The cash he’d just received and the payment due for repairing the Ladybird’s cargo sled could keep the credit hounds at bay for another few weeks, or pay the freight charges to get the little ship boosted into orbit with a little left over for outfitting. He owned significant equity in the lease on his shop; the price he locked into twenty years ago was a steal by present standards and the owner would be more than happy to cash him out in order to free it up. The windfall would permit him to add upgrades to the baffle-rider that would make life in the lanes just a bit more tolerable.

Unfortunately, both options favored the likelihood of ending up a penniless beggar: he’d lose everything if he stayed; the little cash left wouldn’t last long if he ran, and soon he’d be one more space hobo trying to lie, cheat and steal his way across the Commonwealth until he ended up like Stoyko.

Submit to bankruptcy or to save what he could by returning to the life of a vagabond he’d sworn off so many years earlier? There must be another course, if he could only find it!

His attention drifted to the cargo sled, which Ben Grogan was coming to retrieve the next morning. The reward for turning in the poachers wouldn’t do much to get him out of his hole, but there was more than one way to use the discovery. The knowledge might be enough to leverage additional payment—a small gratuity for his silence—but an attempt to blackmail the wrong sort of people could land him in an awkward position.

A crew unscrupulous enough to be vulnerable to extortion might turn out to be unscrupulous enough to cut his throat. Cormack couldn’t determine that based on meeting a single crewman; he’d have to use other means, starting with the public record.

That evening found Cormack in his aerogel pilot’s seat brooding over the choices left to him, none of them obviously the right one. He’d found out less about the Ladybird than he expected: no one on her crew belonged to any of the local spacer unions, she claimed no alliance with any independent shipper’s guild, and was a non-entity as far as the local organizations that tracked merchant vessels’ reliability, performance and consumer complaints were concerned.

The Ladybird was on the large side for an independent, but the few consignments he managed to associate with her were all low paying, space available freight, hardly enough to meet typical operating costs even factoring in poaching income. Such circumstances might not be unusual for a startup operation, but the Ladybird had been in and out of the Nivia system for nearly four years and what he found during the repair of the cargo sled suggested that the same small cadre of mechanics had been maintaining it for longer than that.

A once-successful independent fallen on hard times? Maybe, but Ben Grogan’s private account held at least enough to cover the costly repair and he hadn’t hemmed and hawed like someone about to take a fatal hit in the pocketbook. The ship obviously had income—it just wasn’t legal, above-board income.

None of it added up, and Cormack knew better than to ignore that. Knowing the Ladybird was deep into something illegal, however, didn’t do him any good if he didn’t know what that something was. It would take hands-on detective work to figure that out, but he couldn’t just bang on the lock and ask for their itinerary and manifests, nor could he afford the cost of commercial passage necessary to trail them.

He needed some clue to suggest whether or not it was even worth considering, and at the moment the only possible source of that clue lay with the Ladybird’s cargo sled.

Cormack entered the craft again, searching more thoroughly this time. It had been well sanitized; nothing left behind could link the sled to a person or a ship. However, any device used to house or transport human beings held tiny caches of artifacts, a history of travels and occupants that often escaped cleaning and tidying-up because cleaning and tidying-up were visual activities. The nooks and crannies not immediately visible accumulated crumbs and coins, buttons, orphaned jewelry, scraps of paper, writing instruments, drugs of varying quantity and legality and, not infrequently, weapons. The larger the vehicle, the larger the voids and the larger the artifacts, a rule of thumb that occasionally led Cormack to the discovery of lost and forgotten contraband and, once or twice, a mummified corpse.

Nothing so dramatic turned up this time. He returned to his shop with a small bag full of the usual detritus and dumped it out on a bench. The pile didn’t hold anything incriminating: the average collection of coins, a dried-up stylus, assorted small hardware, a black metal button and a dozen scraps of paper lacking any significant annotations. A dirt-encrusted memory plaque turned out to be a cheap pornographic novel that Cormack had already read.

Defeated, he picked out the coins, tossed the hardware into one of dozens of small containers full of the same, and pushed the rest off the bench into a trashcan. The button bounced off the edge and skittered across the floor, emitting a high-pitched ring each time it struck the concrete.

Intrigued, he dropped to his knees and groped through the dust and fuzz beneath the bench until it came to hand again. It was heavier than it had any right to be, and Cormack realized that the black coating was tarnish. It was a silver button from an officer’s dress uniform. The outer surface bore a sigil or coat of arms.

He buffed it against his shirtsleeve until the contrast between the oxidation and polished silver brought the details into relief. The sigil depicted a human hand grasping a crown. Tiny lettering curved along the top and bottom, so small that Cormack had to use a magnifier to read it clearly. The writing on the bottom was four words in a language he didn’t know: Maher Shalal Hash Baz. The writing at the top was a single word that Cormack suspected was the name of a vessel: Embustero.

Nothing suggested that the button was related to the Ladybird, other than that it was on the Ladybird’s lander, but it was the only possible clue he had to go on. After a few more hours of research he found considerably more information about the Embustero than had turned up about the Ladybird.

The Embustero was a privately-owned and operated general transport hull of the same class as the Ladybird. She had a long history of unremarkable service as a trader and charter cargo carrier and had been registered with the Merchant-Trader Guild for most of that time. Feedback on file with the Guild was good to excellent, the few complaints lodged against her no worse than anyone would expect of a ship with her length of service.

She’d even received a Commonwealth governmental transport contract, and it was at that point things appeared to go bad. The details of the contract weren’t available, but it was rescinded a few months after the award, the only official comment being that the ship had failed to meet certain prerequisites.

A shipyard on Spencer filed a formal lien claiming that the Embustero had failed to pay for services rendered and the account had gone to collections. The last entry in her record was nearly three years old, stating that the Guild had revoked the ship’s membership for failing to respond to the complaint.

The collection agency listed in the Guild file had offered a percentage of any monies recovered to anyone with information leading to the Embustero’s successful apprehension. He had yet to prove that the Ladybird and the Embustero were one and the same, but it gave him an avenue to pursue and either outcome stood to solve his financial woes. If the Ladybird was willing to pay for his silence concerning her poaching, the Embustero would certainly pay for his silence concerning her location and alias. Failing that, the skip-tracer’s bounty would satisfy Cormack just as well.

There wasn’t much time to gather the proof he needed; the Ladybird was scheduled to depart Nivia’s orbit three weeks hence and wouldn’t return for at least four months if her established pattern held. He hated to spread his finances any thinner but it was necessary to get the baffle-rider into orbit to track the freighter.

NINE

Beta Continent: 2709:05:05 Standard

The call began as a gentle tone: a mere peep, an audible itch that Hal chose to ignore in favor of the warm, soft bedding and silky female body curled in his arms. The call repeated insistently: loud and ragged, a discordant irritation that he had to ignore very hard.

The third call exploded from the bedside panel as a continuous, deafening claxon that vibrated Hal’s teeth. He sat bolt upright, stabbing at the device until the sound stopped and McKeon’s face appeared. Dayuki stirred beside him in the sudden lonely chill, but McKeon spared her barely a glance before Hal whisked the blankets back over her.

“What!”

“Den Tun is massing troops on the other side of the pass,” McKeon said evenly. “I don’t think he bought it.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes; get him on the horn.” He broke the connection and turned his attention to Dayuki, who waited until they were alone again before she emerged from beneath the blanket. “Hell of a way to end a very pleasant evening,” he apologized.

She sat up and stretched with a sigh, disheveled hair spiking in all directions. The sight tempted him to burrow back into the sheets with her, and to hell with McKeon, Den Tun and the rest of the mess, but Dayuki seemed to sense his impulse and steered his attention back to the immediate concerns. “How do you intend to deal with Den Tun?”

Talking business in bed with a beautiful woman he’d just spent the entire night making love to struck Hal as somewhat ludicrous. The morning after usually entailed insincere mutual mooning or awkward small talk until one party or the other made their escape. Neither reaction fit these circumstances, considering that post-coital avoidance wasn’t practical and there simply wasn’t time for affectionate chat. The fact that he regretted the latter suggested that the encounter wasn’t entirely casual on his part, although Dayuki’s detachment left him with the uneasy impression that the same might not be true of her.

“I’m not sure,” Hal replied. “We have limited tactical offensive capability, but he doesn’t know that. What sort of threat do you think would make him back down?”

“None,” Dayuki told him. “The troop mass is a defensive measure. He already believes that the Onjin intend to attack him, or he would not employ it so openly. An explicit threat will only reinforce this belief.”

“We have attacked him, in a manner of speaking,” Hal said. “I don’t know what I can say to convince him that I don’t intend to take it any farther.”

Dayuki tilted her head. “The truth,” she said, as if it were obvious.

Every face in the command post fixed on Hal and Dayuki when they arrived, he in his usual attire while she now wore a rumpled one-piece jumpsuit that fit her passably well after she rolled up the sleeves and pant legs. Some exhibited surprise at the sight of the Minzoku woman, though not enough to assume that rumors hadn’t already started their rounds, but most looked worried. The only means of escape was Hal’s starship, which could by no means evacuate the hundreds of people in the Fort. Left the option of the much vaunted, never used defensive weaponry, they found their confidence not nearly as unshakable as when the Minzoku behaved with proper servility.

Tamara Cirilo’s lips pressed together in a thin line on spying Dayuki, but Hal had more to worry about than her opinion of his choice of advisor. Dayuki was most qualified to interpret the nuances of Minzoku speech, with all apologies to McKeon, and she knew Den Tun better than anyone at the Fort. “Do you have him?” He asked curtly.

“Coming on line,” McKeon said. Hal sauntered into position before the projector. Dayuki sidled to the periphery, but Hal motioned her to join him. Den Tun’s eyes narrowed perceptibly when he saw his grandniece.

Hal addressed him before he could speak: “I take it I destroyed your only facility.”

Den Tun hesitated. “I do not—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hal interrupted. “If not, you’ll produce another Tiger Opal. You might even get it off-planet.”

“I—”

“Then the gaijin you conspired with will use it to reverse-engineer the process and discard you like garbage.”

The old man’s jaw set. “Impossible!”

Hal shook his head. “Inevitable. It never takes as long for others to reproduce a technological advance—the battle is half won simply by knowing it can be done.” Den Tun stared back, inscrutable as always. “Clearly you have resources we are ignorant of. You’ll reconstruct your laboratory eventually, in spite of our attempts to stop you, but it will take years and eat resources better used elsewhere. Meanwhile we’ll revisit our old experiments without your interference and we’ll figure it out, too, eventually, but at considerable cost.

“Or we can collaborate and accomplish it in a matter of months. I’m willing to cooperate, Den Tun. As equals.”

Den Tun shook his head. “I know the Onjin for the pale-eyed devils you are.” Dayuki’s spine stiffened with outrage. Hal kept her silent with a squeeze of his hand while her uncle continued: “You can be trusted no more than the gaijin—less so, because you take advantage of our honor! You, who have none!”

“It is the Minzoku who have violated our trust,” Hal replied coldly. “The Tiger Opal proves that. The Onjin have honored our commitment, and will continue to do so—provided you cease undermining the covenant between us.”

“WORDS!” Den Tun exploded, angry past all reserve. “Nothing but words! Actions betray you!” His jowls quivered; Hal wondered how much more enraged the old man could become before stroking out. “The number of Onjin here dwindles with each decade while the gaijin grow bolder; Minzoku numbers increase each year, yet you provide us with no more resources with which to defend ourselves.

“I have seen with my own eyes the plans and mechanisms in place to remove the Onjin to safety if necessary, yet no preparations exist to evacuate the Minzoku! I know the penalty the gaijin impose on those who break their law and what will happen to my people when the Onjin finally depart.

“The Tiger Opal represents the only viable hope I have to achieve the leverage necessary to save the Minzoku. Why, in the face of all this, should I believe that you will now deal with us in good faith?”

“I suppose,” Hal replied in all earnestness, “you’ll have to trust that self-interest will outweigh our base villainy and that the economic benefits of your discovery warrant a reevaluation of our policies. I will put the issue before the Onjin council personally but they need reassurance that you harbor no ill will.”

Den Tun’s composure returned as Hal spoke; the old man appeared thoughtful, but not convinced. “I have submitted many requests for certain materials,” he replied. “You will provide them through established channels. In exchange, I will withdraw our forces from the pass.”

“Done,” Hal said, “but I require the technical data on the Tiger Opal’s production process, as well.”

Den Tun looked unhappy. “Your assertion that we possessed a single facility was correct,” he said. “The data you speak of was destroyed with it—in the accident.” His choice of phrase struck Hal as profoundly odd given what he knew to be the truth. McKeon threw him a quick thumbs-up from beyond video range, indicating a positive development. Hal assumed it had something to do with Minzoku honor, a way to proceed past an otherwise unforgivable offense.

“However,” Den Tun continued, “a detailed, encrypted description of the process accompanied the Tiger Opal,” Den Tun said. “The package was hand-delivered to a gaijin courier on the shuttle crew, but we have not yet located it among the wreckage. The Onjin are in a better position to ascertain if it was taken to the mainland with the bodies than we.”

“I agree,” Hal said. “Thank you for your cooperation, Den Tun.” He signed off with a slight bow, and turned to face the clamor that erupted when the link broke. His cousin voiced the most vehement disapproval.

“We can’t give him carte blanch!” Tamara exclaimed. “We deny them certain material and technology for a reason!”

“It’s done,” Hal said flatly, “and I’ll be the one to answer to it if the Board objects, which they won’t if we get what we’re after.”

“This is a set-up,” she insisted, then pointed at Dayuki accusingly, “and she’s been a part of it from the beginning! I want her locked up if you insist on keeping her inside the Fort!”

“I have to agree, sir,” McKeon said.

An acidic knot burned in the pit of Hal’s stomach; Den Tun’s tirade revealed the degree to which he’d penetrated the Fort’s network, ferreting out information not intended for the eyes of most Onjin. The old man may have taken more damaging action than stealing industrial secrets had he penetrated another level of security and found the complete version of the Family’s evacuation doctrine.

“Lieutenant Dayuki, however unwittingly, has brought to light an incomprehensible compromise of our security,” Hal snarled. “How the fuck did you two miss it?” McKeon had enough shame to look embarrassed, but Tamara hadn’t reached the limit of her defiance and opened her mouth for another salvo. “Don’t,” Hal warned with a raised finger. “I want preliminary information on the shuttle crew and the civilians that picked them up in one hour.”

He returned to his suite with Dayuki in tow. He placed an order with the cafeteria to deliver breakfast as well as groceries to stock the kitchen, since it seemed that they would be staying for a while. Dayuki needed a full set of new clothes and toiletries, but that would have to wait a few more hours.

“Was Den Tun telling the truth about the Tiger Opal?” Hal asked as they ate.

“I cannot say with absolute certainty,” Dayuki replied. “Nothing he said contradicts what I discovered, but Den Tun is practiced at intrigue. Nothing he does or says may be taken for granted.

“You were fortunate to catch him at a disadvantage; he cannot be certain what you have learned from me and he feels insecure because of it. He would not have lost his temper had he been as prepared for the confrontation as he ordinarily prefers.”

“I’ll be depending on you to help me exploit that,” Hal told her. “The more he thinks we know the less comfortable with lying he’ll be.”

It was nearing two hours by the time the pair returned to the command post where Tamara, McKeon and Sergio waited in one of the secure conference rooms. They had the good sense to conceal any hint of impatience and Tammy even managed to smile at Hal when he entered, though she pointedly ignored Dayuki’s existence.

“Let’s have it,” Hal ordered.

“All four crewmen were long-term employees of Sun Cargo,” McKeon said. “We have nothing to indicate which one was Den Tun’s agent. Autopsy reports included a list of the clothing and property associated with each body but none of it appears to be what we’re looking for.”

“What about the civilians that brought in the bodies?”

“Terson Reilly and Virene Van Strahlen,” Tamara said, indicating a video monitor on the wall. Two photographs appeared, both police mug shots obtained through one of several illicit links into Nivia’s official network. “Reilly is an immigrant; Van Strahlen is a native. Both have criminal records.”

The subjects were markedly different, notwithstanding their genders: Van Strahlen smiled at the camera impishly; her hair was combed, her face was clean, and she did not appear overly concerned with her arrest. Reilly glowered; his eyes were bloodshot, his hair unkempt and his face swollen, marred by a fight with the police or some other adversary.

Tamara continued: “According to the police report, Reilly was the one who entered the escape pod and recovered the bodies of the pilot and one other crewman.”

“A sure bet they pocketed any valuables,” Sergio said. “No doubt it’s been fenced by now.”

“I don’t think so,” Hal replied. “Compound semiconductors don’t look like anything special. Unless someone knew what it was they wouldn’t be interested. It’s either rattling around in a drawer somewhere or it went down with the pod—or Den Tun is lying through his gums.

“Anything else?”

“They’re newlyweds,” Tamara said. “Both are students at Malone. Reilly is in the pilot training program; he and another student are engaged in some kind of performance evaluation at the moment.”

“We need to interrogate him,” Hal decided.

“How much attention are we willing to generate to do it?” McKeon asked.

“As little as possible—and it goes without saying that we don’t want them talking about it later.”

“We’ve got their flight plan,” McKeon said, switching the image on the monitor. “They’re scheduled to use a waypoint that’s well beyond radio contact with shipping lanes; they won’t be missed for several days, at least.” And when they were missed the search would focus far from Nivia.

“Is the student with him a high profile?” Hal asked.

“Nothing much on him beyond his university transcripts—no relatives of stature or influence,” Tamara said.

“How firm is his ETA?” Hal asked

“Plus or minus three to five days,” McKeon replied. “They’ve got the platform tagged as a refueling point, so getting them stopped shouldn’t be a problem.”

“We can use your ship,” Tamara said. “Arrive before he does and send over a boarding party when he docks for fuel. Once we have what we need we can liquidate both pilots and dispose of the ship.  His disappearance will set things up for the woman’s suicide if we still need to interrogate her afterward.”

“One versed in criminal activity may recognize others who intend foul play,” Dayuki said quietly.

Tamara ignored the comment. “We’d only need half a dozen people.”

“Dayuki’s right,” McKeon said. “Approaching him is a problem if he catches on. We need to lure him in as non-threateningly as possible.”

“Send a woman,” Dayuki suggested.

“Hal, these interruptions are disruptive,” Tamara said.

“He’s less likely to feel threatened by a woman,” McKeon agreed, “but it can’t look too contrived.” Tamara gave the security officer an icy look at finding herself the one ignored.

“Could we influence something to put Reilly in need of assistance?” Sergio offered. “A friendly couple could appear to offer aid—Hal and Tamara, for instance.”

Tamara warmed to the idea immediately. “I can be very helpful.”

Alone with Tamara for a week or more? In a pig’s eye! “We don’t need to come up with the details today,” Hal told them. “Write up an operations plan and get it to me in time for the intercept.” He stood, signaling the end of the meeting.

“And, just so you know, sir,” McKeon said, “we’re analyzing the network to find Den Tun’s access point. There may be some interruptions while we isolate the vulnerability.”

“Hold off on that for now,” Hal said. “Partition the sensitive data—airgap the system if you have to—but don’t cut him out. He’ll be more inclined to trust us if he thinks he still has that advantage.”

“Is that your idea,” Tamara asked tonelessly, “or hers?”

“One more comment on the subject and I’ll relieve you of your duties,” Hal told his cousin. The unprecedented threat left all three staring at his back in disbelief as he and Dayuki made their exit.

Dayuki’s service to Hal-san, she quickly realized, did not abate the mistrust of other Onjin. They became tight-lipped and skittish when she was about, impairing Hal-san’s efficiency, and he was obviously distracted by her reception. She could not dissuade him from taking her along during routine business until, exasperated, she told him to cease trying to reverse their roles.

“I am Minzoku,” she said, “not a guest. I serve you. If it is best that I do so from these rooms, then in these rooms I shall remain!”

A Minzoku man might have beaten her for such impudence, but Hal-san thanked her for her forthrightness. They soon anchored themselves in a routine that placed her under virtual house arrest, out of sight in his quarters unless she accompanied him while he performed his duties. The restriction was unwelcome but not intolerable.

Each morning Dayuki rose with Hal-san and prepared his breakfast while he bathed. They often talked about the developing situation between the Onjin and Den Tun while they ate, and Dayuki made suggestions or offered insights as the situation warranted. She cleaned the quarters and bathed afterward and, if Hal-san did not require her assistance that day, sat down at the library terminal to study.

The Onjin’s electronic library was the most marvelous device Dayuki had yet to discover. She need only enter a subject and the information appeared at her fingertips at once. If the Onjin’s expansive files lacked the information she desired she could ‘surf’ the gaijin Hypernet, which had yet to admit ignorance of any topic.

If anything, its greatest fault was the sheer volume of responses: almost always hundreds, frequently thousands, occasionally hundreds of thousands! Hal-san showed her techniques to eliminate many spurious hits, but she still had to sift through hundreds of files to find what most interested her.

Dayuki decided to practice closer to home and chose a subject she was innately familiar with. She entered “Minzoku” expecting to find a few files about her people written by scholarly Onjin. What appeared instead was a dictionary entry:

minzoku, n. Japanese for people (race). See Also: 1. hitobito (persons) 2. kokumin (nation) 3. ichizoku (relatives).

Dayuki frowned. She knew of only three races: Minzoku, Onjin and gaijin. What was this Japanese? She typed the word into the search engine. The matches numbered nearly a million. She scrolled through the titles until one caught her eye.

Land of the Rising Sun: A Traveler’s Guide to the Japanese Islands.

Dayuki browsed through images of shrines, gardens and villages amazingly similar to those she was familiar with, confirming what she’d suspected when she saw the title. These Japanese were one of the fabled co-progenitors of the Minzoku.

Most evenings Hal-san was considerate enough to let her know when he expected to return. Dayuki bathed before he arrived and always had the evening meal ready the moment he walked through the door. Many times he came in so late they hardly spoke before he fell into bed exhausted. More often they chatted over dinner about his activities that day, or something Dayuki had learned from the library. She carefully avoided talking about the Japanese, fearful that Hal-san might somehow interpret her interest in the origins of the Minzoku as disloyal to the Onjin.

As the day of Hal-san’s mission approached he returned to his quarters remote and distracted. Dayuki respected his quiet moods and kept her distance when she sensed he needed room to sort out whatever disturbed him. She initiated lovemaking if he remained awake and restless, which never failed to end his sleeplessness. The night before he was due to leave, however, sekkusu could not soothe him. “Hal-san,” Dayuki finally asked, “what troubles you?”

“I cannot spend half a month alone with Tamara Cirilo,” he said. “I cannot spend a day alone with that woman!”

“She seems overbearing,” Dayuki said, “though that is not unusual among Onjin women. I have noticed that she defers to you readily enough. What do you find objectionable?”

“Her deference is a ploy,” Hal-san replied, “part of a scheme cooked up by her father to arrange a marriage for us.”

“Is there any benefit in such a union for you?”

“In some ways, yes, I suppose so.”

“Then marry her.”

“What?”

“The party with the least interest in a relationship wields the most power,” Dayuki explained. “Use their desire for a union to further your own interests.”

“I can’t marry a woman I don’t even like!” Hal-san sputtered like a drowning man.

Dayuki sighed. “Surely, Hal-san, you have the means to support more than one wife?”

“I can’t have more than one wife,” Hal-san exclaimed.

“What a strange custom,” Dayuki said with a shake of her head. “A Minzoku man may take as many wives as his wealth can support, but a wise and discerning man marries three times: once for comfort, once for wealth, and once for power.”

“Never love?”

“He takes a mistress for love,” Dayuki said, “and a wise mistress stores up his gifts against the time when he loves another.”

“Interesting,” Hal-san replied, “but that isn’t the way it works for me. Once the Family arranges a marriage it doesn’t permit divorce.”

“Then what you say is true: you must not be left alone with this woman.”

“I can’t avoid it, now.”

“Hal-san,” Dayuki said patiently, “who is the—leader? The boss here?”

“I am.”

“Of what value is that if you cannot use it for your own benefit?”

The alarm that went off in the command post two hours before dawn cleared Stan McKeon’s head of drowsiness. “East sally port!” someone shouted. McKeon snatched an assault rifle from the rack and rushed out with a handful of his men. Outside, the Fort slept on in the chill autumn air. The nightly lockdown protocols in effect made external alarms unnecessary and would only serve to alert the invaders of their detection or send some panicked Onjin rushing outside into harm’s way.

The armored sally port was closed and locked tight. False alarm, McKeon thought, but the command post informed him otherwise: “Sentry reports two subjects heading away from the east wall.” McKeon and his detachment caught up with them at the edge of the old landing strip east of the Fort.

“Change of plans,” Hal explained. He held his shuttle’s remote-com in his hand. “I’m leaving early. Lieutenant Dayuki will accompany me.”

“Sir, I don’t recommend this,” McKeon said. “Why don’t we go back inside and talk about it?”

“Stan, this is the way it’s going to be,” Hal said. “There’s nothing you can do unless you’re planning to shoot me.” The shuttle’s landing lights came on a hundred meters out as it settled toward the ground. Hal lowered its ramp remotely so they could board.

McKeon’s shoulders slumped. “Shit.”

Nivia Station: 2709:05:06 Standard

Technically, baffle-riders fell into a class of small, privately owned and relatively unregulated spacecraft the Commonwealth considered Recreational Aerospace Vehicles. The only specific requirements to meet the loose definition of an RAV were that the craft possess no jump capability and that it never be used to transport paying passengers or cargo.

That lack of regulation gave rise to vehicles of all shapes, sizes and quality of construction, and made their use attractive to individuals who, by temperament or necessity, sought to avoid the intrusion of official authority in their activities. RAV’s were a constant irritation to said authorities, who had difficulty distinguishing between those who operated the craft as a pastime and those who made it a lifestyle that frequently demonstrated disdain for rules and regulations in most other aspects of society as well.

Of greater frustration was that, although baffle-riding was strictly illegal and vessels constructed to engage in the practice possessed specific common characteristics, the only way to legally divine the difference between an RAV and a baffle-rider was the act of baffle-riding itself. The activity fell under theft-of-services laws in most local jurisdictions and Commonwealth regulations made it a violation of a number of intersystem transportation statutes.

Law enforcement took strident steps to discourage baffle-riding through nit-picking, contradictory and frequently draconian local policies or unabashed harassment of anyone who appeared likely to offend. As a result the tiny ships lurked on the skin of Nivia Station and its associated docking platforms like parasites, concealing themselves in shadows and radiant hot-spots. It was a constant game of cat-and-mouse, a test of skill, luck and daring.

Philip Sorenson had worked all day to maneuver himself into position near the Ladybird, a freighter bound for Tammuz. It was the most distant system he’d yet had the opportunity to visit and beat the current record among the loose gang of locals he ran with. It didn’t matter that ships to and from Tammuz were rare at Nivia—Philip had been stranded twice before and his father had readily shelled out the freight and passage costs to get him home.

The freighter uncoupled from the platform and began its tack into the traffic pattern, passing within eighty meters of Philip’s vantage point. He released his magnetic grapples and flexed his hands on the controls. He had to be fast if he didn’t want the starship or Orbital Security to spot him.

“Don’t even think about it, laddie,” a static-distorted voice advised. “I been here three days; my ride.”

Philip spotted his competition: a patched-up rattletrap of a ‘Rider emerging from behind a nearby radiator vane. It surprised him that the hobo chose to contest the right to the ride. Baffle-riders were generally reclusive and typically yielded to the local gang. Nevertheless, the other ‘Rider had called dibs fair and square. Etiquette required Philip Sorenson to cede the ride but Philip Sorenson had little use for etiquette that didn’t suit him.

“Tough shit old buddy,” Sorenson shot back, and fired his OMS.

The hobo fired his a second later. Too late, Philip realized the ‘Rider wasn’t going for the freighter; it was running at him! Philip threw his arms up instinctively. The OMS cut off when he released his controls and the hobo clipped him broadside—just a bump, but enough to bounce him against the platform. Alarms went off in the cockpit as momentum sent him spinning away from his concealment. The hobo ‘Rider slipped into the radiation plume of the freighter’s drive—the baffles—while Philip fought to bring himself back under control.

“You son of a bitch!” he shouted. “I see you again I’ll have your ass!”

“You’ll suck vacuum, you don’t mind the rules, laddie,” the voice warned. “Count this your one free lesson from ol’ MacLeod.”

Philip scampered back into his hiding place, steamed but grateful that none of his peers had witnessed the equivalent of a bitch-slap he’d received at the hands of a fucking bum. He wasn’t likely to find another ride that day; there were no more departures for anyplace worthwhile close by, but a few minutes later a good-sized yacht eased by in the freighter’s wake.

A yacht implied wealth and exotic destinations. With bare seconds to make a move Philip gave no consideration to the consequences of ill-prepared travel. He goosed his OMS and slid into the sweet spot behind the larger craft. He matched thrust and velocity, his own drive plume swallowed up in the hellish radiation pummeling his shields. He quickly realized that he couldn’t employ his normal tactic of creeping close to his host and grappling on; the yacht lacked the rigging mechanisms on larger vessels and his additional mass would significantly alter his host’s center of gravity.

Holding position manually during the hours-long run out to the jumpzone was physically exhausting. Philip was happy to release the controls when the yacht jumped, carrying him along with it, and he settled in for a rest.

It wasn’t long before the ship’s sensors alerted Philip to a fluctuation in the jump field. His expectation of an exotic destination evaporated with the reality that such a short transit time meant an intrasystem jump. He strapped in again quickly. The egress was the most dangerous moment; his stomach knotted in anticipation as the adrenaline rush he craved roared through his veins.

Even in the best of circumstances—arriving with knowledge of the destination’s traffic patterns and the intercept capability of local authorities—a ‘Rider might have only seconds to react. In most cases massive delta-v carried them safely away from their host and into the traffic pattern where they disappeared before they could be intercepted.

This time he had nothing. Would his unwitting host slow suddenly, causing a crash assuredly fatal for him? Would it go full throttle before he could back away from the deadly core of the drive exhaust? His senses seemed to extend beyond his body into the skin of his tiny ship, watching for the slightest vibration, the most minuscule change in his instrumentation to clue him to the larger ship’s intentions.

For all his anticipation, the drop was routine, without so much as a flash of dying matter. Philip’s host maintained its heading and brought its engines up smoothly, leaving him plenty of time to fall back fifteen or twenty kilometers in the exhaust plume before he lit his own drive.

He kept pace with the larger ship, hidden in its baffles, while he worked to determine his location. His passive sensor package compensated for the radiation-induced interference and scanned common radio and beacon frequencies. The receivers found nothing and switched to the secondary frequencies. Failing that, the scanning cycle defaulted to the low end of the RF spectrum and began scanning up. Still nothing. No ship-to-ship, no Space Traffic Control, not a single radar pulse.

They’d emerged at an unofficial waypoint, Philip decided, denying the cold dread gathering around him. His host was merely calculating the next leg of its journey and it would slow to reorient itself before long, allowing him to slip in close for the next jump.

The yacht continued to accelerate.

Philip’s thrust-to-mass ratio was ten times that of the yacht; he could catch up within minutes if need be, but the baffle-rider’s necessarily small size limited his fuel capacity. He’d already used a significant portion of his reserves to maintain his position and before long he’d be down to nothing but his OMS. He had a decision to make: stay with his host on the diminishing chance that it would jump shortly, take a chance on the other captain’s good nature and contact him, or coast on this unwavering course to save fuel for rescue or escape later on.

He cut his throttle and let his host walk away, hoping he could pick up some signal once he was clear of the radioactive exhaust. The other ship shrank to a star-like dot and vanished altogether from his visual instruments. Hours later it crawled off the edge of his scope leaving him utterly alone in the black void of interstellar space.

Philip coasted for three days along the yacht’s last course. He’d endured much longer flights alone, but never as alone as this. He’d heard tales of ‘Riders who’d spent weeks stranded alone, with no apparent way out of their predicament, who survived. Such adventures required mental discipline and emotional strength to survive. Philip compensated for his lack of those qualities with a stash of drugs secreted away in one of his storage compartments. He was not a person comfortable with himself; he needed an audience to be at his best and it wasn’t long before he began to wonder how much he could use and still have a lethal dose left if he needed it.

His receivers locked on a frequency for a split-second. Philip stared at his indicators. Nothing. A natural spike in the background noise.

Then it happened again.

Moment by moment the interval between signal losses shortened until it chattered in his ears and finally locked on solid. Within moments his passive sensor array indicated a direction and his Navcomp determined the optimal burn to put him on target.

He wouldn’t reach the signal’s source for several days, but the mere presence of a human artifact lifted his spirits. Philip dug out his stash to celebrate.

TEN

Nivia System: 2709:05:35 Standard

The T-108 reentered the sidereal universe as the bubble of energy encapsulating it shoved aside the incumbent space-time to make room for its payload. A few dozen hydrogen atoms died in the space-compression tsunami, vanishing from existence in a burst of gamma rays an instant before the usurping volume blinked into existence.

Terson and Zarn fell to the tasks of establishing their actual position relative to the theoretical point of emergence, locating their destination and altering course to reach it. They communicated in the monosyllabic shorthand of men who’d spent enough time together that each instinctively knew what the other was doing and therefore had no need to expound on it.

“Son of a bitch,” Zarn mumbled angrily over the intercom. The change in routine caught Terson’s undivided attention. “Navcomp crashed and won’t reboot,” Zarn replied to his query. “I have to translate the beacon by hand. Damn thing was fine until we dropped!”

Terson loosened his straps and settled in for the wait. By rough calculation they should have emerged about six million kilometers and fourteen hours away from the platform, out of range of the T-108’s modest radar. The navpoint itself lay perpendicular to the orbital plane of the Nivian system at a distance roughly twice that of Hades from the sun. Terson scanned the sky with the 108’s optics, searching first for the primary, a distant but significantly brighter star than the rest, then her planets. The only two he could identify with any certainty were Caliban and Othello; the rest, including Nivia, were lost in the expanse of stars in the background.

“Stand by to set reference,” Zarn said. “Vertical plane fifteen point seven degrees. Horizontal plane two hundred fifty-six point eight degrees. Reference range to beacon five hundred thirty six thousand, one hundred eighty nine kilometers.”

Terson echoed the settings as he entered the data in his console. “Got it.”

“Target coordinates: vertical plane seventy degrees, horizontal plane one hundred twenty five. Range unknown.”

“Set and locked,” Terson said. “Hang on.” The OMS fired, reorienting the craft with a lurch. He goosed the acceleration to two gravities for nearly half an hour to build up momentum before backing off to a comfortable one-third G. Their calculated fuel consumption left a reasonable reserve for docking, but they’d need to take on a full load to make good time on the last leg. “Going to auto and transferring control to Nav,” Terson said. “Wake me in ten.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Terson unstrapped and pulled himself into the narrow corridor leading aft. The long period of continuous thrust confused his body and he lost his equilibrium momentarily as his mind’s concept of up and down fought physical reality. He swallowed a surge of nausea, concentrating on a single point at the end of the corridor until it passed. He made it to the bunk without losing his stomach and strapped down, catching a few fitful hours of sleep until Zarn buzzed him and he woke with hands flailing, convinced he was falling.

“We’ve got the platform on radar,” Zarn explained, “but I’m painting two targets. I think we’ve got another ship out here with us.”

Shit! Terson unstrapped and pulled himself hand over hand to the cockpit with visions of their carefully crafted schedule falling apart. It was entirely possible that someone had been rerouted due to a platform failure at some other navpoint and was at that moment gulping down the fuel he and Zarn desperately needed.

“What’s the transponder say?”

“No transponder from either target,” Zarn informed him. Now the possibility existed that this platform was the one experiencing the malfunction and the ship with it was a maintenance crew. Neither option boded well for their schedule, but a maintenance ship should still exhibit a transponder code.

A third possibility came to mind, one which might not have occurred to civilized folk such as Zarn: the school’s unmanned training platforms were vulnerable to anyone who knew where to find them. Looting and vandalism were rare but not unheard of.

“How much longer before our reverse burn?”

“Four hours,” Zarn said. Terson sucked his teeth. Once they rotated and fired their engines to slow they would be blind. If the second target was a maintenance crew there was no worry. If it was a thief, they might be in trouble. Zarn acknowledged Terson’s concern without debate. “Are you suggesting we abort? They’ll give us credit for extenuating circumstances.”

“It’s too late,” Terson explained. “We’ve got enough fuel to rendezvous with the platform but not enough to get back to the jump zone even if we start now.” That wasn’t technically true: stopping used about the same delta-v whether it happened at the platform or four-fifths of the way there. The vapors left in the tanks in either scenario could send them back to the beacon at a few hundred KPH, but it would take so long that they’d run out of food, water or air before they got within range of its transceiver, leaving them to hope that Malone would realize they were overdue and send assistance before that happened.

The other option was to jump from where they were and take their chances with the mayhem an unscheduled arrival would generate at Nivia. With any luck they wouldn’t emerge on top of some other vessel, destroying both in the process, or run up someone’s ass before they got slowed down to the authorized speed limit.

Precedents in Commonwealth law held that self-preservation was insufficient excuse to hazard another vessel or habitat and that doing so subjected the offender to the possibility of capital punishment. The concept of death through voluntary inaction went beyond the pale of human instinct, but it was pounded into the head of every ship’s crew until their ears bled.

“Let’s power up the communications laser,” Terson suggested. “See what we get back from a hard ping.” They trained the optics on the distant platform, though at such extreme range they could barely discern one point in infrared.

Terson locked the targeting cursor on the approximate center of the mass and double-checked to ensure the range determined by radar was within a few percent of that entered into the laser. The beam could reach a distance one hundred times greater than the radar and he didn’t want to burn a hole through the platform’s thin skin by inadvertently miss-setting the power.

He gave the platform several minutes to detect the beam and reply. When the estimated time came and went he began the painstaking task of sweeping: adjust the bearing a micrometer, wait; adjust again, wait. Every minute without a response brought them closer to their burn point.

Finally the platform’s transponder data leapt to the screen, proof that the platform wasn’t dead, suggesting that the problem might be nothing more than a malfunctioning RF transmitter and that the mysterious companion really was a repair crew. Terson intended to confirm this now that he had a reference and knew generally which way to steer the beam to interrogate the companion object. Instead of a response from a transponder, though, he got one from Zarn:

“He’s moving away! Three hundred KPH, perpendicular to our course.”

“Recalculate the burn,” Terson ordered. “Three separate bursts; keep from giving him a solid ETA.” If they overshot the platform at a thousand KPH or so they’d get a chance to look the bogie over without burning up all their fuel. If they didn’t like his look they’d just keep going and decide what to do when the time came.

“I’ve got an idea about that,” Zarn said. “Instead of jumping for Nivia we could jump to a Standard Traffic Entry Portal. The traffic laws are a lot more forgiving and we should be able to get off an SOS through the hyperlink.”

“If we’re still alive when we get there,” Terson said. The nearest STEP was a long way off and the T-108’s jump drive was capable of neither the range nor relative speed of a true starship. “Getting there would take as much time as staying here until Malone figured out we were missing.”

“I didn’t hear you come up with any better idea,” Zarn groused.

Terson didn’t think he could get back to sleep, but the monotony couldn’t sustain the worry and he dozed for a couple more hours in his seat. Zarn woke him for the first burn and Terson took over the watch. The bogie lingered a few kilometers away from the platform, giving no indication if it was waiting to pounce or flee. By the time they initiated their last burn they could pick out two distinct objects with the optics but the mysterious vessel either could not or would not respond to repeated laser pings.

“He’ll be at eleven o’clock, fifteen degrees above our horizon when we cut thrust,” Terson said. The seat cushion rebounded with enough force to unseat him, had he not been strapped in. His stomach argued with zero G while Zarn got a visual lock on the bogie.

“What the hell is a baffle-rider doing out here?” Zarn exclaimed. Baffle-riders ranged from those cobbled together from spare parts to those professionally built for thrill seekers. Judging by the sleek lines, garish paint job, and the unmistakable shape of a fusion drive bell housing, their bogie was one of the latter.

“He’ll be disappointed if he thinks we’ll let him ride us back,” Terson said. How he reacted to that disappointment could be interesting. It was patently illegal to arm a civilian vessel without Commonwealth licensing, a process that took months if not years to complete, but baffle-riders squabbled with each other frequently and weren’t known for compliance in that regard. Fortunately, the types of armament capable of escaping the notice of the first law enforcement agency to lay eyes on it tended to be crude projectiles launched via one or more compressed-gas tubes mounted on the hull and camouflaged as an OMS port. Blowguns weren’t particularly lethal, but could do significant damage to an unarmored hull.

A factory-built hot rod wasn’t likely to come equipped that way and Terson didn’t see any indication that this one had been retrofitted, so his greater concern was the question of how it got out to the middle of nowhere. “Scope’s clear,” Zarn reported in answer to the obvious question. “Maybe he came out with a refueler.”

“Why would he stay?” Terson boosted again to kill the last of their momentum and crawled back to the platform at a velocity low enough to control with OMS. The fuel indicators crept ever closer to empty and it was with considerable relief that Terson activated the platform’s Automatic Docking System.

Nothing happened.

Why doesn’t this surprise me? Terson wondered. No matter what the instructors said, the number of minor glitches and inconvenient times they occurred had long ago convinced Terson the little T-108’s were programmed to malfunction. He took the OMS back to manual and flipped out the optic sight. The 108’s cross hairs eased onto the platform’s target. Terson rolled the ship for better alignment and the docking clamps met with a shudder. Umbilical connections made a moment later.

Terson requested fuel from the platform. The oxygen cell filled rapidly, but the indicator for the hydrogen cell barely moved. Terson queried the platform’s computer and found that its supply tanks had been refilled two months before. The platform would only dispense to ships it recognized by a coded chip in the docking circuitry, or if someone went inside and entered a billing account manually. The withdrawal logs indicated that the hydrogen tanks contained more than enough to fill the 108.

“I’m going inside,” Terson said. He pulled himself to the nose and cycled through the airlock to the platform. It stank so badly inside that his stomach lurched. In reality it didn’t smell any worse than the inside of the 108, but over the weeks his olfactory senses grew accustomed to the particular combined body chemistry of the occupants. The sudden onslaught of new molecules from other sources hit his nose like a flashbulb in the dark and it took a few minutes for the shock to wear off. Once it did he took a closer look around and decided that maybe his stomach hadn’t overreacted after all.

The platform’s small service access doubled as an emergency life support module, and this one had been lived in for a while. A few articles of abandoned clothing left floating loose had clogged the main air return; mesh bags full of empty ration wrappers hung tethered to the walls, swaying in the attenuated air current. The body waste collection system consisted of elbow-length plastic mittens used to catch feces manually as it emerged before being pulled inside out and tied off. The effectiveness of the method depended a great deal on consistency of the material and suspicious smears on the walls suggested that the occupant lacked either the diet conducive to solid, bulky excrement or experience using the mittens.

Terson cleared the vent, palpably improving the air quality within seconds. He soon found the fuel storage system’s manual control panel hanging by one rivet, jumper wires sprouting from inside like tiny vines. The platform’s communication system, which included the RF transponder and emergency hyperlink transmitter, appeared to have been cannibalized for the materials used to defeat the fuel storage system.

Terson pulled himself back into the 108 and delivered the bad news to Zarn. “He knocked out the hyperlink when he bypassed the fuel controls, and drained the tanks. We can’t even call for help.”

“Then we’re one hundred percent screwed unless he coughs some up,” Zarn said. “I’ve been hailing him on the guard channel, but he doesn’t acknowledge.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not listening,” Terson growled and jacked in. “Listen, pal: we’re out of fuel. You transfer us a few thousand kilos and we’ll forget we ever saw you.” The only reply was silence. It began to look like the baffle-rider’s pilot was content to remain so indefinitely, leaving Zarn and Terson to find some other way out of their predicament. Terson took one last stab at it: “We haven’t got anyplace to go,” he said, “and you’re not getting back on the platform until we undock. I’m guessing from what I saw inside that we’ve got enough food and water to wait you out.”

The video screen blinked on. The face that appeared with the voice belonged to a young man no more than nineteen or twenty Standard. It was impossible to tell if his tangled hair and scraggly, unmanaged beard constituted his habitual appearance, but Terson doubted that the darkened flesh under his eyes and the hollowness in his cheeks had anything to do with fashion.

“I can’t spare any,” he said. “I need the delta-v at the other end.”

“So do we!” Zarn exclaimed.

The ‘Rider shook his head. “Not to jump. You just have to clear the platform a few thousand klicks. Orbital Security can send someone out to refuel you.”

“Good point,” Terson conceded, “aside from the fact that we aren’t about to jump into Nivia’s traffic pattern without clearance and you’re too big even if we were.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

“Taking chances is what got you stranded,” Zarn said. “Your record doesn’t engender confidence.”

“I’ve got the fuel,” the ‘Rider said smugly. “You don’t have a choice.”

“That my friend is where you are wrong,” Terson replied. He broke contact. “Zarn, how much burn time have we got left at ten percent thrust?”

“Off hand, a little more than an hour, depending on whether or not we vent the oh-two to normal up the reactant ratio,” Zarn said. “Why?”

“It only matters if this doesn’t work,” Teson replied. “You strapped in?”

“Uh, yeah…”

Terson disengaged the T-108 from the platform and backed away with a hard burst of OMS. He aimed the com laser at the baffle-rider’s hull just forward of the fusion drive. The range finder squawked, warning that the power setting was too high. He flipped the override.

“What are you doing?” Zarn exclaimed.

“Forcing the issue.” Terson triggered the laser. A tiny shower of sparks flew away from the ‘Rider’s hull propelled by hydrogen gas jetting from the thumb-sized hole left by the laser.

“Are you crazy?” Zarn cried. “You’re going to kill him!”

“Just slowing him down,” Terson explained. “Killing him depends on what he does next.”

The pilot applied his OMS to correct the spin induced by the escaping gas. His angry face appeared on Terson’s console a few seconds later. “You breached my hull, asshole!”

“Sorry about that,” Terson apologized. “Guess I had the power a little too high. Hey, I bet you could transfer quite a bit to us before it all boils off! What do you say?”

“You assaulted me!” the ‘Rider yelled. “That’s illegal!”

“So is stealing fuel and vandalizing property,” Terson said, “not to put too fine a point on it. Now how about that hydrogen?”

“Fuck yourself! You’re not getting a goddamned drop!”

“Well, here’s the thing,” Terson lied. “My partner and I have enough fuel to get us back to the jump zone—it’ll take us a long time, and we’ll be pretty hungry when we get there, but we can do it. You, on the other hand, are venting your go-juice at a rate that will leave you dead in your tracks in three or four hours. So I suggest you quit talking and get back to the platform before that happens. We’ll let the authorities know you’re out here—if we remember.”

“They’ll confiscate my ship!”

“Should have thought of that before you went tooling around the universe without a jump drive,” Terson commented.

“Yeah, well, I saw what vector you came in on; maybe I’ll just head for the zone now and wait for you to get there!” he sneered back.

“That is an excellent idea,” Terson agreed, “but you’ll still be out of fuel by the time we get there.” Without fuel he couldn’t approach them to ride their baffles, leaving him in the same pickle.

It didn’t take long for that fact to dawn on the baffle-rider. His tactic altered accordingly: “Don’t think I won’t report you! My old man will sue you for everything you—”

“I look forward to hearing from him,” Terson promised. “Good luck! Over and out.”

“Wait!” His eyes appeared to bulge as tears welled up, collecting on the corneas without gravity to draw them down his face. “Don’t leave me out here! I ran out of food three days ago!”

“Are you going to keep giving us shit?”

“No,” he blubbered, “I promise.”

“Then by the authority granted me as captain of this vessel under Commonwealth Treaty Regulation One, Article Five, I hereby place you under arrest for piracy in open space, to wit: the assault upon and theft from Malone Institute Platform Niner Five Niner,” Terson chanted. “Heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

“That was a bit melodramatic,” Zarn drawled.

“It’s important to observe the legalities,” Terson replied. He maneuvered the T-108 into contact with the baffle-rider, a tricky move because of the other vessel’s inclination to rotate due to its outgassing fuel. There couldn’t have been enough hydrogen left in the 108 to fill a party balloon when the docking clamps finally mated. He unstrapped to meet their guest at the airlock.

“You realize we can’t leave him out here,” Zarn said.

“Sure we can; it’s not like he can get away and neither of us want to sleep in our seat for the next week and a half.” Ironically, the baffle-rider’s crew space was two to three times greater than the 108’s. If they took the pilot aboard the only place to keep him was the bunk. “We’ll give him enough rations to tide him over until the cops get here.”

“I hate to rub your nose in your ignorance,” Zarn said in a tone of voice that let him know he was going to do it anyway, “but you’ve overlooked the fact that his ship draws its power from a fusion reactor.”

It took a moment before Terson caught on. The platform’s emergency life support system was just about spent. The baffle-rider’s hydrogen leak would leave the reactor nothing to burn and his batteries wouldn’t last even as long as it took the 108 to get back to the beacon. The kid would freeze solid before the authorities got to him.

“Son of a bitch.”

Beta Continent: 2709:06:02 Standard

Tamara Cirilo strode into McKeon’s office and slapped a printed transcript on his desk. Her thin-pressed lips hadn’t relaxed since the indignity of her cousin running off with the Minzoku girl. Now her cheeks glowed with the rosy hue of outrage.

McKeon skimmed the document while she leaned against the doorstop, drilling holes through him with her eyes. The blood drained from his face as the implication of the contents sank in. His chest tightened as if each word was a stone on a pressboard, slowly crushing him until he either admitted the unthinkable or died of denial. It took conscious effort to draw each breath by the time he reached the analyst’s summary at the bottom.

“When did this come in?”

“Just now,” she said. “Stan, how the hell could you let him go out there alone?”

“I work for him, remember?” McKeon snapped defensively.

“You work for the Family!” Tamara shouted. “It’s your responsibility to keep him out of trouble!”

“Yes, I suppose he isn’t any good to you in prison.”

“That’s none of your business,” the woman replied dangerously. She aimed a manicured fingernail at the center of his chest. “Fix it.”

McKeon read the document again after she left, hoping that, somehow, it would get better—it was hoping too much. Approximately four hours earlier, Terson Reilly had emerged from jump and promptly declared an in-flight emergency. Soon after he notified the authorities that he and his copilot were transporting a prisoner—a male prisoner—who refused to identify himself.

McKeon didn’t spend any time wondering what had gone wrong; it didn’t matter. A member of the Family had been apprehended on his watch and if he didn’t get Tennison back it would mean his own head any way he looked at it. Likewise, he didn’t give much consideration to the fate of Lieutenant Dayuki or the yacht. Personnel at the Fort left Nivia so rarely that keeping a starship on standby wasn’t practical; they traveled by commercial or charter carrier when it became necessary, which meant he had no resources available to secure the spacecraft even if he knew for certain where it was. His attention had to stay centered where it would do the most good.

The procedures for this contingency assumed the presence of several Onjin agents on the mainland. Unfortunately, decades of downsizing had pared those resources to a single safe house manned by an administrative staff of four on a five-month rotation. None of those presently on duty had the experience necessary to manage an operation of this nature, and even if they did the severity of the situation demanded that he handle it personally.

Getting on-scene involved ten to twelve hours of travel. McKeon read the transcript again, line by line, making note of the time stamps. Reilly’s T-108 was only sixteen hours from Nivia Station but his arrival was sure to generate some confusion while the authorities sorted out where and how who did what to whom. It might take another two to three days to positively identify Halsor Tennison, maybe a bit faster if they coerced it out of him somehow. Given those delays, half a day in transit wouldn’t put his employer at any greater risk.

He called the Chief of Operations at the command post. “Get the plane ready.”

The order set in motion a complex ballet of subterfuge. Brief coded commands flitted into the Federal data network through the Fort’s covert connections, triggering subroutines buried in the Air Traffic Control system. A flight plan identifying the aircraft as an EPEA patrol materialized in the appropriate databases by the time McKeon reached the Fort’s airfield. Once inside unrestricted airspace the EPEA patrol would transform into a previously non-existent cargo flight for the rest of his journey.

McKeon dashed across the tarmac to the plane’s rear boarding steps, cringing at the thundering roar of its four idling ramjets. The passenger compartment was smaller than one would have suspected from the outside. The bird couldn’t refuel en route, so fuel tanks had commandeered most of the available interior space. The passenger cabin was sufficiently insulated to block the engine noise as soon as the hatch sealed. After a few minutes a discrete chime and flashing panel advised him to fasten his restraints and return his seat to its full upright position.

The aircraft rotated sixty degrees as it cleared the runway and climbed straight out. Low cloud cover quickly obscured the coastline. The pilot leveled off at the lower end of the plane’s optimum cruising altitude, high enough that McKeon could see the curve of the planet but several thousand meters below Space Traffic Control radar.

He used the onboard communications system to apprise the staff at the safe house of the situation and begin laying the groundwork for the rescue. The Onjin had the ear of a few high-ranking gaijin in Nivia’s government who might be persuaded to arrange Tennison’s release. McKeon had to tread carefully, though; cooperation depended on political convenience. If he made his request too emphatically or too far in advance curiosity might lead them to ask just who it was they had in custody and tempt them to use Tennison for their own purposes. If McKeon waited too long, however, they would make the same discovery through the routine process of identification with the same result.

McKeon had to acknowledge the reality that he might not be able to secure Halsor Tennison’s release through coercion or diplomacy. In that case Sergio Cirilo would officially notify the Family of the situation, bringing its attention to bear on the Chief of Security who, as a mere employee, did not relish the scrutiny. He had little doubt that Tamara Cirilo would spin the truth to her benefit, emphasizing the fact that it was McKeon’s plan that put their kinsman at risk while downplaying the degree to which Tennison himself refused to follow it.

The Onjin were at a grave disadvantage if it became necessary to repatriate Halsor Tennison by force. Every adult at the Fort was familiar with basic weapons and tactics, primarily so they could anticipate the security force’s actions and stay the hell out of the way during a response, but few had advanced training and none, save McKeon’s own people, practical experience. The personnel manning the safe house might hold their own defensively with someone to direct them, but using them in an offensive operation was out of the question.

McKeon would have to draw upon a small pool of local individuals who worked on a fee-for-service basis, though it increased the risk significantly. Locals didn’t necessarily adhere to the game plan without constant, direct supervision and had a tendency to make decisions based on their own priorities if circumstances took them outside the mission brief.

McKeon directed the safe house staff to find out who was available, then told the Chief of Operations to contact him on the aircraft’s encrypted satellite link if there were any new developments before reclining his seat to catch what sleep he could. He woke again a few hours later from turbulence generated when the airplane shed velocity and dropped deeper into the atmosphere, slowing below mach one to emulate the supposed cargo flight. The raucous warble of the telephone shattered the silence. McKeon snatched it before it could sound twice. “Yes!”

“Command Post, sir. We have the name of Reilly’s prisoner and it is not, repeat not Halsor Tennison.”

“For God’s sake, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to give his own name!” McKeon exploded. “We need better verification than that!”

“Coming in now,” the man said, stoic despite his superior’s outburst. “Age and physical description are inconsistent with Tennison…we have located records under the given name. It’s not him.”

“Thank God,” McKeon sighed, lightheaded with relief, but he still had no idea why Tennison and Dayuki hadn’t intercepted Reilly. “See if you can find out what that’s all about, and keep me informed. The plane will have to refuel before we head back, and the pilot may need crew rest.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, Ms. Cirilo wants to speak with you—stand by.”

“Stan, I want you to interrogate Reilly’s wife. Do you understand?”

“Ah, yes ma’am, but I believe we should consult with the Chief Administrator before we take any further action.”

“The Chief Administrator is not presently in contact with the Fort,” Tamara Cirilo informed him icily, “and is therefore unable to direct us. Besides that, he is apparently suffering under the undue influence of that Minzoku bitch, and you can see where that’s led.

“If Reilly’s wife proves disappointing as an informant, she’ll still be useful as a hostage.”

ELEVEN

Nivia System: 2709:06:08 Standard

Hal and Dayuki’s flight out went according to the hastily-altered plan: the yacht dropped into normal space several hundred million kilometers from the sanctioned jump zone used by Malone’s students, a calculated risk and serious offense, if anyone noticed, but one Hal was confident it could be explained away as a navigational error if it came to that. Although the yacht’s countermeasures would have prevented the beacon from identifying it, the Fort’s technical geeks weren’t good enough to prevent it from recording the arrival itself and the last thing he wanted was to leave evidence of an irregular visitation. Ships vanished mysteriously all the time and the fewer the clues, the easier it was to close the case.

It took a few minutes for the navigation system to shoot the stars and determine the yacht’s exact location. Dayuki, sitting in the copilot’s position, watched intently while he programmed a course to the training platform. The girl was curious about everything, down to the most mundane detail. It made him a little nervous. There were lots of things to be curious about on a starship and unsupervised exploration could easily lead her into dangerous places.

So far she’d been strictly obedient to the limits he placed on her movement aboard the ship and she’d brought along an immense volume of material downloaded from the Fort’s network to study during the trip. Hopefully it would be a short trip, thanks to the intelligence collected by Tamara Cirilo.

The thought of his scheming cousin’s reaction to his escape made him smile. “I’ll bet Tammy’s having kittens right now,” Hal thought aloud.

“Kittens?” Dayuki asked dubiously. “Giving birth to animals?”

“Panties in a knot,” Hal explained. “Angry. Upset.”

“Her crown is tilted,” the Minzoku girl offered.

“That’s too dignified.”

“You Onjin wallow in vulgarity,” Dayuki chided. “If I said ‘Her crown is up her ass, sideways,’ you would laugh. It does not become you.”

Hal did laugh. “That’s a thought I can live with.”

Within a few hours they entered into range of the platform’s communication package and established a remote connection on the maintenance interface using the authentication Tamara’s people provided. The Fort’s technical staff had compiled a script file that effectively back-doored the platform’s user interface, did its mischief, and purged itself from memory.

The snare was set. All that remained was for his quarry to walk into it.

The yacht jumped again, this time to a random point in space well beyond the Nivian system. Hal composed a short message informing the Fort of the mission’s progress, encrypted it, and activated the yacht’s short-burst hyperlink transceiver, impressing high-energy data packets onto the fabric of space-time itself. One of the permanent hyperlink taps in the Nivian system recognized the addressing on the packets at virtually the same instant and transferred them to a message server until the Fort downloaded them.

The yacht automatically generated another set of packets, querying the same message server for any outgoing data addressed to Hal’s transceiver and gobbled up the packets transmitted in response. The decoded message, as expected, came from his irate cousin and he deleted it after a quick scan to confirm that it held nothing of importance, glad in this instance that the huge amount of energy necessary to tap into hyperspace made real-time communication with a starship the yacht’s size impossible. She would know he’d received it, of course, and his failure to respond would gall her to no end.

He activated the second account, a ghost identity that would cease to exist a few minutes after the yacht stripped off the only message it would ever contain: a random alphanumeric string generated by the training platform, the digital version of a bobber on a fishing line. Hal and Dayuki would jump back to reel in the fish, then clean up and return to Nivia.

There wasn’t much to do in the meantime, and Hal did not look forward to the coming days with any enthusiasm; space flight was not nearly as glamorous and exciting as the commercial carriers would have the general public believe. The comforts and entertainment advertised were nothing more than diversions from the incredible monotony, and once their novelty wore off the monotony was waiting to take up where it left off.

Hal flipped through the charts, tables and instruments painted onto his retinas by the VR visor mechanically, paying no real attention to the contents, which had gone unchanged every day for over two weeks. He believed, perhaps naively, that any significant variation would catch his attention on its own. In fact, he could have programmed in alarms to notify him without the need to actually look at them, but he relied on a strict regimen of exercise and performance checks, meals and carefully rationed leisure time to get him through his frequent journeys, even the ones that lasted weeks. Of course, there had always been a quantifiable end to those trips. The waiting on this voyage was as torturous as staring at a teakettle trying to anticipate the whistle, knowing it had to come sometime, surely any moment.

McKeon’s plan contained a degree of inherent uncertainty. Nothing said Reilly wouldn’t meet with a delay or change his flight plan entirely. “Barring accident,” McKeon said, “he will arrive sometime during this time frame. We’ll just have to wait.”

Easy to say for the guy that isn’t doing the waiting.

Dayuki accepted the interlude with a remarkable serenity. “My heart beats as well here as anywhere,” she said.

Hal envied her simple world. He wondered how she would feel toward him the day she realized that her association with him had destroyed it. He wanted to protect her from that eventual certainty, but short of cloistering her in a rough plank hut on the outskirts of Sin City there wasn’t much he could do. Her exposure to the world of the Onjin in the Fort, and now in space, billions of kilometers away from home, had awakened her to possibilities she’d never imagined. She could never resume her old life even if he took her home that moment.

Dayuki had summed it up best herself as she hovered over a video screen devouring the contents of the ship’s library at an inconceivable pace.

“How much can you possibly remember?” Hal asked.

Dayuki looked up from her screen and smiled. “I remember everything.”

“It must be overwhelming.”

“Sometimes it is so,” Dayuki nodded. She motioned around the expansive cabin, indicating the universe itself with the gesture. “I have lived my life at the bottom of a well, catching glimpses of a tiny patch of sky. Now I know the sky is larger than I ever imagined. I understand little of what I see, but that is as it must be. If I saw the entire sky at once I would no doubt go mad.”

Hal wondered how many like her through human history had lived ignorant lives as goatherds and peasants, oblivious to gifts that would have made them great authors, mathematicians, composers or philosophers had they been born a few centuries later. And then he wondered how many great authors, mathematicians, composers and philosophers would have lived happier lives as ignorant goatherds and peasants.

Dayuki turned back to her terminal and accessed the mass of files she’d downloaded from the Hypernet before departing Nivia. The Minzoku and Japanese languages shared many words in common, but the grammar followed a different set of rules and most idioms were incomprehensible. As badly as Dayuki wanted to learn about the Japanese through their own words, she was better equipped to learn about them from the gaijin.

The Japanese had not always been a united people, she discovered as she delved into the recorded history. Although they reached an ethnic and cultural purity through isolation, protected by the sea and the kamikaze, the divine wind, the feudal warlords that ruled the islands only stopped fighting each other for as long as it took to repel occasional invasions launched by gaijin on the neighboring mainland.

Outside contact was inevitable, given industrialization and exploration by other nations. The Japanese resisted the gaijin influences even as they embraced the benefits of industry and it was here, Dayuki felt, that they made their mistake.

Materialism soured pride and honor. Technology and isolationism bred arrogance. The Japanese had never been conquered; honor, sword and the warrior’s heart had overcome every foe that challenged them. With guns, airplanes and navies they were invincible! Old enemies fell before them, their people and lands providing labor and raw materials to further the expansion of the Empire.

The gods punished them for their presumption. How else could a people of such honor and superior spirit be defeated by gaijin? Atomic fire burned their cities; gaijin occupied their soil and stripped the Emperor of his godhead. Their victorious adversaries rebuilt their nation for them, memorializing their defeat in perpetuity. They became an economic power on their own virtues but the warrior’s heart was forever chained.

A few Minzoku words lead Dayuki to her second ancestral parent, a peaceful forest-dwelling people called the Mbuti. Apparently not as prominent as the Japanese there was little information to be had regarding them, but what she found suggested a culture that fared even worse, victimized by the bloody wars and greed of the surrounding gaijin.

Surely, Dayuki thought, Den Tun could see the futility of his actions! The Minzoku embodied the inescapable legacy of their forefathers, a legacy of misery and suffering at the hands of the gaijin. Absent a powerful patron, her people faced certain destruction; observation and strict adherence to the Covenant was the only way to ensure their survival and she would defend the Covenant and her people from Den Tun’s perversity no matter what the cost to her own honor or life.

The communications panel chimed for attention, alerting them to a message downloaded during the yacht’s brief scheduled tap into hyperspace. Dayuki sprang to the console before Hal-san could rise. It displayed text in an alphanumeric jumble, but after a few moments the computer identified encryption algorithms and prompted for a password. Dayuki resisted the impulse to enter Hal-san’s password herself, correctly assuming that he would not be pleased to discover that she had both seen and remembered it.

Hal-san sighed when he saw the prompt. The notification that their trap had sprung would not be encrypted, meaning this was a message from the Toride, probably another shrewish communiqué from Lady Cirilo. He allowed the system to decode it and frowned at the result while Dayuki read over his shoulder.

Abort abort abort. Reply soonest and return ASAP.

“Hal-san, what does this mean?”

“It means,” he sighed again, “that something went wrong.”

Saint Anatone Aerospaceport: 2709:06:08 Standard

Bragg stood in the deserted foyer outside the Portmarshal’s office wearing civilian clothes. Terson didn’t recognize him at first and declined to acknowledge him when he did. The officer fell in next to him unfazed. “God help us if it isn’t Terson Reilly, champion of interstellar law and order!”

“I already talked to the Portmarshal,” Terson said tiredly. “I was outside your jurisdiction.”

“I know; they called me as a courtesy.” He rubbed at his nose and looked Terson up and down. “They wouldn’t let you clean up?”

“I would have missed the shuttle. The next one isn’t until sometime tomorrow.”

“And your copilot is where?”

“He’s not married,” Terson sighed. “Anything else you want to know?”

“How’d that kid get all the way out there?”

“The hell should I know?” Terson shrugged. “The little bastard took a swing at me and spent most of the trip back strapped to the bunk with a sock in his mouth. Ask him yourself.”

“Can’t. He bailed out half an hour after you turned him over.”

“They questioned me for three hours!”

“Tribulations of the righteous. There’s your wife.”

Virene waved as she approached from across the concourse, the pearl dangling from a gold chain around her neck flashing in the light. “Captain, you smell like week-old underwear.”

Bragg stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”

“I didn’t mean you,” Virene smirked, “but since you mention it—”

“I’m official now,” Terson said. “Jump certified for interstellar travel—aboard small, non-commercial spacecraft, anyway.”

“That’s not all,” Virene added theatrically. The smile on her face couldn’t have gotten any bigger. “They approved our application, Terson. We’re in the queue. We get to have a baby!”

Bragg choked, thumped his chest with his fist, and swallowed. “Really. That’s—ah, wonderful news. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” she said sweetly. “Now if you’ll excuse us, Captain Bragg, I’m going to take my husband home, clean him up, and welcome him back for a couple of hours.”

“Too Much Information,” Bragg grimaced.

The moist, warm air outside felt like a sauna after weeks in the T-108’s drier climate. The parking lot beyond the two rows closest to the entrance was deserted, but Virene, ever the door ding fanatic, had parked her roadster by itself in the center, across four spaces. A weak breeze fluttered a parking ticket on her windshield.

“Damn meter maids,” Virene exclaimed, glaring around the lot on the slim chance of spotting the offender. “Like a million people need to park now!” A hover van cruised across the lot and pulled up centimeters from her driver’s door before settling onto its skirt. Virene stormed ahead, spine stiff with rage at the interloper’s position relative to her beloved sports car. “I parked out here for a reason moron!”

“That’s a nice pearl she’s got,” Bragg noted. “How much did it cost you?”

“What makes you think I bought it?”

“I don’t. Go to the Game Department and get a recreational harvest permit. Take the pearl back in and get it registered so they can give you a provenance. Don’t tell them you were outside the coastal boundary when you found it or you’ll get nailed for poaching.”

Terson stopped and turned to him suspiciously. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you just tried to entrap me.”

Bragg rolled his eyes. “Reilly, you haven’t had a probation violation worth reporting in over six months. Don’t blow it over a pissant environmental regulation!”

Terson didn’t bother to express his view of Nivia’s environmental laws. Bragg had heard it all before. “Thanks for the tip,” he said instead. “I’ll take care of it.”

Virene reached the van and began haranguing the occupants. “Will you at least move so I can get in?” she yelled. The driver had darkened his windows, refusing to acknowledge her. She stalked around the vehicle banging on the side with her fist, face flushed and nose going pale, signaling the onset of the temper for which she was so well known.

The van’s rear doors crashed open, slamming the side of Virene’s car. Her outraged cry choked off in a gasp of surprise when two men leapt out and grabbed her arms. Virene kicked one of them in the knee and wrenched free. The other caught her around the waist and lifted her off the ground, seemingly oblivious to the bloody furrows she raked in his bare arm. “Terson help me!”

The state psychologists, observing the processes in Terson’s mind, would have been pleased to see that civilized influences interrupted his violent instincts, causing him, for a brief moment, to question the wisdom of his inclination to fly into action fist-first.

In short: he hesitated.

The man Virene kicked punched her in the nose. Her head snapped back from the force of the blow, flinging an arc of blood into her assailant’s face, and then lolled forward, limp, a heavy crimson stream staining her blouse.

Terson sprinted toward them with a bellow. The man holding Virene threw her into the van and jumped in. The other drew a sidearm and fired. Nauseous vertigo set the ground rocking under Terson’s feet; he couldn’t get his arms out in time to break his fall and his face skidded along the pavement, sand and gravel grinding into the flesh of his cheek and temple. He squinted through the light dancing in his eyes, heard the whine of another stun bolt, a door slamming.

The hovervan pulled away, slipping sideways on its lift field as it sped across the parking lot toward the exit. Terson raised himself on his elbows clumsily, trying to get his knees under him to stand, his muscles cooperating only halfheartedly. He staggered to where Bragg lay sprawled on his side, rendered unconscious by the acoustic pulse, and pried the half-drawn pistol from the officer’s convulsed hand.

The van swam in and out of focus, dancing wildly as Terson fought to center it in the gun’s sights. Although he sensed his fine muscle control improving, each second took the vehicle farther away and it reached the street before he could draw a bead on it, straightened out, and accelerated into the darkness.

A surreal silence fell; Terson stood dumbfounded with a gun in his hand aimed at nothing, an unconscious cop at his feet. Virene was gone. His thoughts raced, trying to attribute meaning or context to events that simply had no precedent or connection to reality as he’d understood it minutes before.

Bragg uttered a long, piteous moan.

Something in Terson’s mind gave way like an eggshell shattering under immense pressure; the civilized attitudes and priorities he’d struggled so long to incorporate into his world view collapsed, swept aside by cold, murderous calculation. He stumbled to Virene’s roadster, fumbling with the combination strip under the lip of the driver’s door handle like a drunk until the latch released and the car’s electronics activated.

He fell into the seat and managed to shut the door without crushing any wayward appendages. Sitting down, the nausea wasn’t so bad and his equilibrium improved tenfold. He shoved the gearshift into drive and mashed the accelerator with his foot; the tires smoked as he roared out of the parking lot.

Few vehicles plied the spaceport’s main thoroughfare at that time of night. The sports car whizzed past the light traffic as he approached the first major intersection without a glimpse of the van. A right turn led back to the passenger terminal and parking facilities. Straight through opened onto the northbound lane of the freeway leading to Ipswitch, seven hundred kilometers away. The kidnappers’ best chance to escape quickly, assuming they stayed with the van, was to vanish in the nearest population center—Saint Anatone.

Terson turned left, against the light, heading for the southbound on ramp. The automatic traffic monitor at the intersection flashed as he passed, dutifully logging the car’s ID plate, speed, time and date, before adding yet another traffic violation to Virene’s record. Ahead, clearly visible in the darkness, a single set of taillights ascended a distant rise and vanished on the other side.

Terson turned off his lights and pushed the powerful engine to its limit, depending on the single half moon to cast enough light to discern the edges of the roadway and, hopefully, any wildlife that might have found a way through the fence and repellant devices. A stray thought from the same quarter that caused him to stand by as someone attacked his wife suggested that the prudent course of action was to contact the authorities immediately. Terson discarded it as quickly as it occurred; there was no telling how long it might take them to find the van. He had seen what a group of men could do to a woman in ten minutes on Algran Asta; he didn’t intend to let that happen to Virene.

Terson examined Bragg’s pistol while remnants of his civilized facet squirmed at the candor of his thoughts. It was a ten-millimeter automatic with open sights, twelve rounds in the magazine and one in the tube—a competent, powerful utility weapon. He checked the safety and wedged the gun securely between the seats by the barrel, butt to the rear, where he wouldn’t have to move his hand more than a dozen centimeters from the gearshift to grasp it.

The sports car crested the last rise in the series of rolling hills, obliging Terson to hit his brakes to avoid over-shooting the van, which appeared less than half a kilometer ahead of him. He approached as close as he dared without a reflection from the van’s taillights giving him away.

Forcing the van over was problematic. If the roadster slipped under the side skirts and caught the lift field the van might ride over it and roll, quite possibly killing Virene in the process. If he did get the van off the highway, it could negotiate low obstacles that the roadster could not. Damaging the rear field ports, however, should activate the van’s internal safeties and shut down the engine.

The van rocked when the roadster slammed into its rear skirt, throwing Terson hard against the seat belt and startling the van’s driver so badly it almost ran off the road. The skirt held and the van accelerated with a burst of speed that took the meat out of the second collision.

The van might have out run him had it not reached a sharp incline and encountered two freight trucks laboring toward its crest, blocking both lanes as one tried to pass the other. The roadster’s bumper went under the van’s rear skirt and locked. Terson hit the brakes and felt the car strain to pull away, the tires emitting short, chopped squeals as the maneuver overtaxed the ABS.

One side of the skirt gave way, exposing the rear field port and releasing the two vehicles. A wide gap opened before Terson got his foot back on the accelerator. The engine roared, hurling the sports car forward. This time the impact pushed the van into the rear of the truck ahead of it and tore off the rest of the rear skirt.

Terson reached for the pistol, intending to jump out and dispatch the driver while the other vehicle was still sandwiched between the truck and the sports car, but the truck continued forward and pulled onto the right shoulder, giving the van a narrow lane of escape. The driver took advantage of it, squeezing between the two trucks as the passing vehicle moved back to its own lane, cutting off the roadster. Terson wrenched the steering wheel to the left and punched the accelerator, throwing up gravel from the shoulder as he raced around the trucks in pursuit.

The van didn’t put as much distance between them as Terson expected, evidence that the damage done to the lift field was already having an effect. He closed on it quickly, trying his best to relax his muscles and unlock his joints in preparation for the impact.

The van’s rear doors opened as the sports car drew near. Two men appeared in the doorway, one holding Virene’s feet, the other her arms. Her limp head hung at a painful angle; dark red hair lashed in the wind, some sticking to the blood on her face, some hanging in thick, heavy, blood-matted strands. A spike of horror froze the blood in his veins.

The roadster was closing so fast that they could have thrown her onto the hood, or into the windshield, but they didn’t. They dropped her onto the roadway when Terson was less than three meters from the van—right in front of his bumper, and one of them was laughing when they did it.

The front end of the car hopped as it struck her, then plowed into the rear of the van as it came down, slipping under the frame and destroying the other vehicle’s rear field ports. The van’s weight settled on the hood of the car, trapping Virene between the undercarriage and the highway. Terson stood on the brake; the left front tire locked and screamed. Thumps and bangs rolled along the bottom of the undercarriage in concert with impacts that he felt all the way to his knees; terrible sounds that he could not fathom being produced by a human body.

The men in back of the van lost their footing. One sat down hard. The other fell out on the roadster’s hood, face pressed against the windshield. Shock at his predicament changed to fear when Terson pulled the pistol from between the seats. He put two rounds through the glass; the body left a bloody smear as it slid off the car.

Terson let off the brakes but the left fender well had buckled inward, producing a billowing cloud of stinking smoke as friction burned tread off the tire. The front of the car began to pivot to the right, swinging the van in the opposite direction. The roadster’s nose twisted out from under the van, sending the car into a four-wheel slide until the rear tires left the pavement and sank into the gravel shoulder, dragging it into a spin.

Pain exploded along the entire left side of Terson’s body. He raised his head to find the inside of the car hazed with choking dust and smoke that stank of scorched tires. The driver’s door was pushed in at least twenty centimeters. The single surviving headlight illuminated a bank of dirt and rock sprinkled with cubes of glittering safety glass.

A grunt of pain escaped his lips when he moved his left arm, the grinding sensation deep inside telling him that it was broken. The leg on the same side ached as if someone had beat on it with a large hammer, but it didn’t object to moving. He released the seatbelt and slid his behind across to the passenger seat.

The door groaned open on stiff hinges. Terson climbed out and looked back the way he’d come, where the two cargo trucks had pulled off to the side of the road with their warning lights blinking. Figures gathered around something on the ground—someone—he realized, though it was hard to believe that a human being would be recognizable as such considering what had happened. His chest fluttered as a sob tried to work its way out. Terson forced it back down; now was not the time.

Red and blue flashing lights lit the sky beyond the crest of the hill, growing stronger. He had to hurry. He turned toward the van, which lay on its side in the middle of the road, headlights illuminating Virene’s second assailant face down on the pavement.

Terson put two rounds in the man’s head as he passed by.

The vehicle’s rear doors were still unlatched, one lying flat on the pavement fully open, the second swinging back and forth on its hinges above. Terson knelt to peer inside. The cargo area was empty; the sliding door panel separating the payload space from the cab was closed. Terson put three rounds through the panel in a neat vertical row where a properly belted passenger would be and five more in a loose group where an unrestrained passenger and/or driver would have fallen.

Satisfied that he wouldn’t find anyone waiting to ambush him from inside the cab, Terson stood and walked to the front to see the result of his handiwork. The van’s shattered windshield hung like a curtain, connected to the frame only on the passenger’s side. The driver lay limp with blood pooling around him, dead or unconscious. Terson used Bragg’s last bullet to ensure it was the former.

He tossed the pistol aside and turned back to the logjam of vehicles at the crest of the hill. Crouched figures moved forward cautiously, guns drawn. Someone shouted something that Terson couldn’t discern over the wail of sirens and the ringing in his ears from the gunfire. It didn’t really matter: they’d see what he’d done in a few minutes.

A sound behind him penetrated the bedlam at the same moment the significance of the van’s dangling front windshield dawned on him: it hung the same way it might if a passenger kicked at it to escape.

Someone slammed into his left side, sending him staggering against the van. Blinding pain exploded in his injured arm from the tips of his fingers to his shoulder and neck, so intense his knees buckled. A smaller pain, sudden and sharp, accompanied by a mechanical click, stung the back of his thigh before he could regain his feet.

The pain vanished. He flailed at his assailant despite the grinding bones in his arm, but a growing euphoria quickly replaced the fear and the effort no longer seemed warranted. A voice urged him to walk into the dark underbrush near the road, but the approaching lights were far more appealing. He resisted the tug, though he was more than willing to answer the questions put to him by the voice’s owner before the euphoria carried him completely away.

TWELVE

Saint Anatone: 2709:06:15 Standard

Bragg keyed his vidcom on the third ring. “Special Investigation Department, Bragg speaking,” he said automatically, although he recognized the woman at once.

“He’s stable now,” said Dr. Alsept, the head trauma medic from the Saint Anatone Community Hospital. “You can speak with him for a few minutes.”

“On my way,” Bragg said. He stood without thinking and stumbled as a rush of vertigo tipped the room on its side. He clutched the edge of his desk until it passed.

My balance isn’t any better than my—the—investigation. Bragg’s coworkers claimed that as doctors made the worst patients, so cops made the worst witnesses. Officially he was a victim of the crime, forbidden to work the case. He’d received some leeway because of the department’s low manning and his insight into Terson and Virene Reilly’s lives, but even so he’d been warned off twice already for his unsolicited—the actual term had been meddlesome—suggestions. Every investigator has his own style, Bragg thought. Just because they don’t do it my way doesn’t mean it’s the wrong way. But, damn it, he’d transferred into the department for just such challenges! He couldn’t ignore it and spent the ten-minute flight to the hospital mulling over what little they knew.

The van used in the kidnapping belonged to an 80-year-old woman who claimed it had been stolen over three years before. The report was not in the Vehicle Department’s database and the registration had been renewed every year since the alleged theft. Colonel Cai ordered a background check on the owner, her friends and relatives, and their friends rather than determine where the van had been for the last three years. Bragg earned his first warning when he urged the detective officially assigned to the case to search the archived records instead, in case the report had been mistakenly removed from the active files.

All three perpetrators were known felons who frequently acted as hired muscle. A fourth set of fingerprints had not been identified. Combined with Terson Reilly’s criminal record, those facts pushed the crime into the “poaching-related” category, a class so broad that only cases impacting innocent citizens received any attention. Apparently Bragg’s superiors did not consider Terson or Virene Reilly innocent.

Bragg urged his colleagues to consider the reproductive angle based on the Reillys’ recent entry into the queue in an attempt to get the priority bumped up a notch, but privately he didn’t buy it himself. Reproduction-motivated crimes were generally committed only by those with a stake—real or perceived—in the outcome. Hired killers didn’t generally go to the trouble of capturing their victims before witnesses if they could just as easily gun them down.

Bragg’s attempts to reclassify the case infuriated Colonel Cai, who firmly believed the crime’s motive lay with Terson’s activities and issued a second warning. Bragg knew that he risked stronger censure if he kept interfering, but he wasn’t about to permit bias to dismiss a murder. He was prepared to concede Reilly’s culpability if evidence pointed to it, but objectivity required that they concede the possibility that Reilly was innocent of wrongdoing as well. Cai might view interviewing Reilly as insubordinate, but Bragg was still the kid’s probation officer and had official authority to speak with him until she did something to change that.

The skyhopper touched down on the hospital roof. Bragg showed his ID to an orderly who escorted him to the trauma medic’s office in the intensive care ward.  Doctor Alsept shook his hand firmly. “How are you feeling?” she asked, smiling at his puzzled look. “I worked on you when you came in.”

“That day is a little fuzzy,” Bragg admitted.

“Subsonics can be nasty,” she nodded. “You didn’t sustain any permanent nerve damage, but the inner ear may still be irritated. Over the counter motion sickness pills should clear up the vertigo. Come back in a week or so if it doesn’t.”

“Thanks. What’s the word on Reilly?”

She handed a file to him. “Mister Reilly is a bundle of medical curiosities. Did he ever mention that he has a bullet in his head?”

“He was shot?”

“At a very young age.” She clipped the scans against the back lighting and pointed out a bright, tiny mushroom in his brain. “There’s no sign of a wound. If I had to guess I would say it entered between the skull plates, before the sutures fully fused. Judging by the distortion, it spent its energy passing through another object before it hit him. Probably would have bounced off his skull if he’d been an adult.”

She indicated an indistinct, cloudy trail behind the bullet. “This is scar tissue. You can see that it loses definition the farther away it gets. That indicates how long ago the injury was done to the brain. The definition improves the closer it is to the bullet, which means that it’s migrating.”

“Is it operable?” Bragg asked.

“Yes, but let me qualify that,” she said. “Chances are removing it would do more harm than good at this point. Barring repeated blows to the head he can expect to lead a normal life. If migration leads to serious problems, surgery is an option.”

“What if he does get knocked in the head?” Bragg asked.

Alsept shrugged. “Impossible to predict. A strong blow could bring on myriad neurological difficulties, or he might drop dead.”

“He’s lived with it this long,” Bragg said. “I guess he came through this pretty lucky.”

“Not entirely,” Alsept said. “You know what Rhapture is?”

Bragg nodded. Rhapture was the street name of a chemically tweaked version of victrotine. The base drug, in small doses of its natural form such as the tree gum he indulged in occasionally, offered the user a mild buzz. Refined victrotine made a potent euphoric. Refined victrotine combined with a little kitchen chemistry produced Rhapture, an insidiously dangerous substance with several times the euphoric effect. It made the user uncontrollably talkative and attacked organic membranes. Chronic users eventually died of internal hemorrhaging, jabbering away until the very end—talking themselves to death.

“Reilly and his wife were both injected with it. One in a hundred people are allergic to it; she died of anaphylactic shock a few minutes after it hit her bloodstream,” Alsept said. “We nearly lost him, too. He suffered withdrawal syndrome a few hours after the Rhapture broke down and went into seizures.

“Dependency on Rhapture doesn’t develop from a single exposure, as you know, and seizures are not associated with withdrawal from it. After some tests we found a chemical locked in his fatty tissues that we’ve never seen before and doesn’t appear in any of the major medical databases. His medical records don’t exist prior to his immigration, so I have no idea what it is or where it came from.

“Apparently the Rhapture is bonding with the second chemical, forming a substance similar to those in the benzodiazepine family. Benzodiazepine drugs aren’t normally prone to dependency unless they’re taken for more than two weeks, but the severity of his withdrawal was equivalent to an exposure of several months.

“We got him through the withdrawals this time but if he ever takes Rhapture again, or ingests some other chemical that reacts with the substance in his body fat, it could kill him.”

Bragg cringed when he saw Terson. The younger man lay in a bed surrounded by monitoring equipment. Tubes emerged from his body like parasitic worms.  The right side of his face was a mess of stitches and scabs. His left arm was in a cast. He didn’t smile when Bragg pulled a chair up to the head of the bed and sat down. “Hello, Terson. They told me you’ll be okay.”

He looked at Bragg with a weariness he’d only seen in men much older. “It doesn’t matter. They used me to kill her.”

“You didn’t kill her,” Bragg said softly.  “She died of an allergic reaction to the same drug they used on you. She was dead before she hit the road.”

“They were dead the second they touched her.”

Bragg found the flat statement of fact chilling. He fervently hoped that Reilly wouldn’t bring it up again. Though the Federal Police never looked too deeply into the deaths of career criminals, it did not tolerate overt vigilantism. Reilly’s actions toed that line but any decent lawyer could make a convincing argument for self-defense if it got that far.

“Do you know who they were or why they attacked Virene?”

“How the hell should I know?” Reilly exclaimed. “I was gone nearly a month!”

“I know,” Bragg said, choosing his words carefully. “I am reasonably sure that you aren’t involved in anything you consider illegal, but you need to understand that my superiors will formulate their conclusions based on our way of life. The fact that you routinely cross the coastal boundaries and the identities of the men who attacked you suggests poaching, as far as they’re concerned.

“Without anything else to go on they won’t look for any other reason. Virene’s murder will get filed away as a poaching-related crime. I’m the only one who will give you the benefit of the doubt, Terson.”

Terson closed his eyes. “I can’t tell you anything! I didn’t do anything to anybody, Vi didn’t do anything to anybody, I don’t know!”

“Captain, that’s enough for today,” Alsept said from the doorway.

“All right,” Bragg said, and stood. “I’ll be talking with you again, Terson.”

Bragg watched rooftops flow past below the skyhopper. He’d discovered a few basic patterns in police investigation that held true in most crimes: murder victims usually know their killers; the most obvious answer is usually the correct one; sometimes the obvious is so obvious—

“Oh, hell!” Bragg snatched the skyhopper’s handset and dialed the office. “Dwin! The guy Reilly hauled in with him—who was it?”

“That exporter, Neil Sorenson’s kid. Philip, I think his name is.”

“You might want to check that fourth set of fingerprints against Philip Sorenson’s record.”

The kidnapping had come soon after Reilly landed. Philip Sorenson had been remanded to his father’s custody almost three hours before Reilly left the port, plenty of time to make a call and arrange something, even if he wasn’t personally involved.

Bragg called the legal department at Malone, got an answering service and left a message. Next he called Alsept and asked her to take particular note of anyone trying to visit Reilly. The existence of material witnesses had provoked murder attempts before.

Nivia System: 2709:06:15 Standard

Jumping from controlled spacelanes to unregulated systems or waypoints was relatively simple. Getting back wasn’t; unscheduled jumps ran the risk of a close and deadly encounter with other vessels.

Hal first jumped to a Standard Traffic Entry Portal—a deep space waypoint equipped with an unmanned Space Traffic Control buoy—and transmitted a request to the Sector Control Office. A few hours later he received an approved flight plan. The wait was comparatively short: Nivia’s traffic was light compared to destinations in the Commonwealth’s core where approval of a flight plan might take days.

“This is my world?” Dayuki gasped in astonishment when Nivia’s blue, sunlit face appeared in the port. “Why did it not look like this when we left?”

“We departed from the night side,” Hal explained. He pointed west. “See? There is the gaijin coast, just coming into morning. There,” he pointed east, “is your continent, moving into night. That sliver of land sticking out of the darkness to the south is part of Nivia’s antarctic continent. It’s still winter there so we can’t see the rest.”

“So,” Dayuki murmured thoughtfully, “Dusk and dawn stay in one place, and the ground moves.”

“Of course,” Hal laughed. “Did you think the sun circles the planet?”

Dayuki arched an eyebrow. “Why would I not think that? You Onjin mock us for believing what seems obvious, but do not see fit to teach us differently!”

“Hey, sorry! I take certain things for granted; choose to think of it as a loveable character flaw.”

A faint smile cracked her stern countenance. “I pray I do not find too many reasons to love you.”

“I’ll try to do better,” Hal promised. “How else may I enlighten the dark pit of your ignorance?”

“All right, Hal-san.” She pointed at Nivia. “This ‘gravity’ makes us fall toward the world. Since I see nothing holding the world up, it is falling too, yes?”

“Strictly speaking, yes,” Hal agreed.

“And the sun, it has this ‘gravity?’”

“Certainly.”

“Then why does the world not fall into the sun?”

“Well, as the planet falls toward the sun, it also tries to get away from it, you see, so the world falls in a circle.” His explanation faltered under Dayuki’s skeptical gaze. “Look it up in the library.”

They left Hal’s ship in a parking orbit and made planetfall aboard the shuttle. Hal maintained contact with Space Traffic Control until they handed him off to the ground based Air Traffic Controllers. His transponder activated a circuit covertly installed in the traffic control systems by the Family years before. A subroutine verified the hand-off with STC, then erased all record of the shuttle’s flight from the tapes and blanked the raw radar video. ATC was never advised of the hand-off and the target’s abrupt disappearance raised no alarm.

Hal landed at the Fort’s tiny field rather than Den Tun’s base. Dayuki would not live long if she ever fell into Minzoku hands again and he didn’t trust Den Tun enough to let his people ferry them ashore. An armored ORV raced out to meet them.

“McKeon is waiting at the command post,” the driver told him. “Also, the Chairman tried to contact you while you were gone. We sent word of your arrival as soon as you started down.”

Hal sent Dayuki to their quarters and went to the command post to find McKeon. One of the night shift staff directed him to a conference room. His jaw dropped when he caught sight of his Chief of Security. “What the hell happened to you?” The right side of McKeon’s face was one solid, black bruise, the eye almost swollen shut. A patch of scalp over his left ear had been shaved and stitched; he walked with a distinct limp.

“Ran into a complication,” McKeon replied and related his encounter with Terson Reilly, fleshing out the account with information he’d acquired after the fact. “I couldn’t get past the Commonwealth seal on his records, but he knew what he was doing.”

“Christ, maybe we should have recruited him. The girl didn’t know anything?”

McKeon shook his head. “Didn’t seem to. I got in about a minute’s worth of intelligible interrogation before her heart stopped. The only object she associated with that day was this.” He held out his hand and let dangle a broken gold necklace weighed down with a large blue pearl. “I brought it back just in case, but it turned out to be exactly what it looks like.”

Hal took the necklace and bounced its weight in the palm of his hand. “I should have been consulted first, Stan,” he said.

“I was under orders,” McKeon said. “At least it wasn’t a total waste; I’m confident they never had the Tiger Opal. We have a couple Federal contacts in a position to bury the whole thing, if we offer the right incentives.”

Hal rubbed his temples. “Do it. Feed them something to satisfy their curiosity, if they get too interested. What did the Old Lady say?”

“Wants to talk to you ASAP,” McKeon said. “She knows you’re here. We can maintain the hyperlink for about four hours before it causes a brownout.  I can have it piped in here, if you want.”

“Let me know when you’ve got her.” Hal closed his eyes, welcoming the silence after McKeon’s departure. How the hell could anybody have such a run of bad luck? The video monitor flickered to life. Hal found himself under the Old Lady’s bemused scrutiny. “Madam Chairman,” he nodded.

“I understand you’ve had an interesting few weeks,” the woman stated. “The Committee is concerned.”

“I share their concern,” Hal replied. “The crash was a serious setback.”

“The crash doesn’t concern us as much as the promise you made Den Tun.”

“It was politically and strategically expedient, considering the circumstances,” Hal said. “We can afford to throw him a few bones until we locate the crystal.”

“Ah, yes, the crystal.” She pursed her lips. “Rumors are circulating regarding the existence of this crystal, and the process to produce it. Rumors with a disturbing quantity of fact.”

“Den Tun’s contacts,” Hal decided.

“I agree,” the woman nodded. “Find out who his contacts are. In the meantime, consolidate the research data you have and transmit it to me. Then destroy your records. We will recreate the process at a location we can better protect.”

“That may not be necessary if I can recover the existing technical data,” Hal said.

She shook her head. “You must concentrate on increasing production of our other products to make up the shortfalls and satisfy the obligations we’ve incurred. Our competitors are already using the delay to undermine our markets.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“If Den Tun has become this brazen we may have to discontinue our operations on Nivia sooner than we ever anticipated,” she said. “Others on the Board may disagree, but I believe I have more than adequate influence to override them. You must be prepared to deal with the Minzoku. All of them.”

Hal cleared his throat. “Yes, Madam Chairman. That brings up an interesting point…”

“The half-breed girl you think so much of?” the Old Lady asked.

“Dayuki, yes,” Hal blinked. “How did you know?”

“You aren’t the only one I receive reports from,” she chided. “Your father was impressed by her intelligence. He was also of the opinion that her devotion to the Onjin was based solely on religious fanaticism and isolation from her own people. The girl will have to prove herself before the Family could even consider adopting her.”

“She has already done so, to my way of thinking,” Hal stated.

“Her actions have yet to benefit us,” the Chairman snorted. “Your father murdered his own parents to prove himself. This girl has sacrificed nothing.”

“She was willing to take her own life!” Hal insisted.

“Which is worth little, by her reckoning. Her devotion is too brittle to place any significant trust in—it may shatter when she realizes we are not the virtuous benefactors she believes us to be.”

“You can’t decide her motives,” Hal said. “You don’t know her.”

The Old Lady’s eyes squinted suspiciously. “Is this more than a desire to reward her loyalty?” Hal felt his face flush. The woman nodded knowingly. “You may keep a mistress for the time being,” she said, “nothing more permanent. The status you enjoy in the Family carries certain obligations.”

“You know how I feel about that.”

“We both know your feelings are irrelevant,” she countered. “The Family must approve, if not decide, who you marry.”

“Yes, Madam Chairman.”

Her eyes softened. “Don’t do that. It’s hard enough to know I cannot always allow you the happiness I have the power to grant. We can discuss it another time. Good-by, Hal.”

“Good-by, Mother.”

Hal sat alone in the darkness after the connection broke, absently weaving the necklace around his fingers. He had avoided the subject of marriage for most of his adult life, though the reasons changed through the years. In his youth he’d thought himself skilled at enticing members of the opposite sex into his bed and viewed the prospect of marriage as the absolute end of the world.

The eventual realization that he owed his numerous conquests to political status rather than sexual prowess, like a crown prince to whom flocked scullery maids and princesses with equal enthusiasm, shocked him into a period of serious introspection.

And he had his own parents’ example to consider.

Hal’s father had been a minor Commonwealth functionary in a minor Commonwealth system. He’d been seduced by the Family through a character flaw, or perhaps the romanticism of espionage. During the endgame, with the authorities closing in, he murdered both his parents in their sleep to protect the Family and the Family rewarded him with a new life. They gave him a home, a purpose, a job, and when the situation suited them, a wife.

The only positive outcome of the arrangement, Hal thought, was that his parents waited until their forties to have him. By then they’d both given up trying to live together and accepted their fate in a culture that did not allow divorce. Hal was spared the years of anger, fighting and hate between them, and was raised shuttling between parents that loved him, but not each other.

Hal did not intend to make the same mistake; he would not allow anyone to force the issue.

Tamara Cirilo’s sleepy eyes lit up when she answered the door. “Hal! Come in.” The apartment was dim and quiet. “We had a scare while you were gone.”

“So I’m told. Where’s Sergio?”

“Sleeping. Would you like a drink?”

“Thank you.” Somehow the bodice of Tamara’s nightgown came unbuttoned between the time she let him in and fixed his drink. He caught a flash of breast when she gave him the glass. The alcohol burned on the way down, adding heat to his simmering rage. “I just talked to the Old Lady,” he said.

Tamara turned her face away and poured her own drink. “Oh?” The catch in her voice confirmed his suspicion. He gulped back the acid rising in his throat.

“You don’t have the right to report my private affairs,” he said.

“I’m the intelligence officer,” Tamara said. “I have the right and the duty to report significant observations and events. That includes your violation of a long-standing security policy.”

“Not if you do it to serve your personal interests.” The glass quivered in his hand.

“Hal, you put your own life and the Family’s interests in jeopardy for nothing more than an adolescent fling!”

Hal dropped the glass and slapped her.

Tamara’s face twisted in a grimace of shock that transformed to fury as they stared at each other. “You…! You—get out!” Hal knew he’d crossed the line. Tamara was Family, not an employee to be assaulted and threatened, but he didn’t care; truly did not give a damn, which in itself warned him that he had to leave before it went farther. “Enjoy your Minzoku slut!” she screamed at his back. “That was the last time you’ll ever touch me!”

Hal spun and hit her again.

She staggered back, dazed. Blood welled from her lower lip. He seized her nightgown and ripped it to the hem. She struggled weakly as he forced her down on the couch.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Please…!”

“Isn’t this what you want?” Hal shouted. “Isn’t this what you’ve been after since I got here?”

“Get away from my daughter!”

Hal looked up into the barrel of a gun. His rage evaporated with astonishing haste. Tamara pulled her torn gown around her and folded into the couch, sobbing. Hal straightened up slowly, careful to keep his hand away from his needle-beamer. Sergio was a coward. A coward with a gun was a dangerous thing.

“Get the fuck out of my home!”

“Going,” Hal assured him. He backed to the door. “Just remember, Sergio: you were willing to prostitute her for what you wanted. Put that in your next report.”

The shakes caught up with him in the corridor. He paced the dark stone paths outside, struggling to put aside the emotions that Sergio’s intervention had momentarily diverted. Cold and discomfort dulled the fire after a few minutes; he was still angry, but trusted himself not to stalk back in and put a hole in both their heads.

I made my point, he decided. They would not trifle with him again, although he had to be careful not to give them any opportunity to come back at him. He’d learned enough from his father to recognize when the time came to bank political capital, and he thought he knew how to do it.

Dayuki greeted him from where she lay curled beneath the plush bedclothes. “Is something wrong?”

Hal sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off his shoes. “I had an argument with Tamara and Sergio.  Would Den Tun tell me who his gaijin contacts are if I asked?”

“If it offered him sufficient advantage,” she replied.

Hal’s shirt and trousers followed his shoes. “Is there anyone at the Minzoku base willing to turn informant?”

“The officer’s servants are peasant stock, always alert to improve their lot. Many would accept a bribe without hesitation.”

“Contact them. We need to know about any dealings Den Tun might have with the gaijin.” Hal slid under the covers, where he discovered that Dayuki had decided to forgo her nightclothes. She slid against him with a sly smile and proceeded to take his mind off the evening’s concerns.

Saint Anatone: 2709:16:16 Standard

“Captain Bragg, I am Christopher St. Germain, from Malone Institute. I believe you wished to speak to someone in our legal department?”

“Yes,” Bragg said. “I called in regard to an act of vandalism against one of your training platforms.”

“I was handling that case for the university,” St. Germain said. “I wasn’t aware the Federal Police had any interest in it.”

“Not the case in particular. I’m also Terson Reilly’s probation officer.”

St. Germain consulted something beyond the range of the video pickup. “That would be the student who apprehended the alleged vandal. The university appreciates his actions. I hope he didn’t violate any of his conditions.”

“Not at all. Were you aware that Mr. Reilly and his wife were assaulted a few days ago?”

“Yes, a terrible event, terrible. How can I help?”

“I’m interested in any unusual evidence you may have happened upon.”

“I can transmit you a copy of the entire file,” St. Germain said.

“That may undermine your case,” Bragg warned.

“There is no case,” the lawyer said, “and I don’t mind telling you I’m not disappointed.”

“Why is that?”

“Mr. Sorenson intended to fight every step of the way. I believe he preferred the expense of a criminal trial to settling with us. He filed a motion to dismiss based on the Castaway Act.”

“Which is?”

“Essentially it allows persons to utilize, consume, or damage another party’s private property without consent as a matter of basic survival. Sorenson asserted that his son had been marooned.”

“And so the university dropped its claim?” Bragg asked.

“Yes, but not for that reason. Our platforms are equipped with emergency hyperlink systems for just such situations. His son never attempted to use it—disabled it in order to commit the theft, in fact—and I believe his lack of intent to do so would have outweighed the equipment’s misalignment in court.”

“Go on,” Bragg urged.

“We’re getting into technical areas here,” St. Germain apologized. “Sorenson requested, as was his right, a detailed evaluation of the station’s damage and operating systems. Apparently something was wrong with the addressing in the hyperlink transmitter. There is a copy of the report in the file.”

“I’d like to read it,” Bragg said. “Just out of curiosity, why did the university drop its claim?”

St. Germain smiled ruefully. “Mister Sorenson learned that Mister Reilly’s arrest of his son would involve action by Commonwealth authorities. He offered the governing board three yearly donations, each of an amount equal to our original claim. No court proceedings, no publicity, and no admission of wrongdoing or liability, official or otherwise. Neatly swept under the rug.”

Bragg spent two hours gleaning the pertinent information from the volume of legalese that arrived in his e-mail a few minutes later. Everything appeared unassuming until he reached Philip Sorenson’s statement and the evaluation of the platform’s condition.

Bragg sat back, working a wad of tree gum in his jaws. Neil Sorenson was the largest exporter of raw materials and natural foodstuffs on Nivia, a man successful in a business nearly as vilified as poaching. The bad press of a criminal trial, not to mention the liability, might be enough reason to take a stab at Reilly through his wife—a warning that went wrong.

Sergeant Dwin appeared in the open doorway. “That stolen vehicle is legit. I found the report in the archives. Negative on the fingerprints, though.”

“Thanks. I got some material from Malone, and I want to bounce something off you.”

“Sure.”

“Philip Sorenson fancies himself a baffle-rider,” Bragg began. “Most baffle-riders know where the big ships are going beforehand, but sometimes they hook a blind ride. According to young Sorenson’s statement, that’s exactly what he did with an unidentified private starship. Imagine his surprise when they drop out in the middle of interstellar space and his unwitting host leaves him in the dust.

“Sorenson tracks the ship as long as he can, figuring it has to be going somewhere. A few days later he finds Malone’s training platform with no starship in sight. We’ll assume it just kept going and jumped again.”

“That happens,” Dwin agreed. Some captains went out of their way to strand baffle-riders if they got the chance.

“So Sorenson docks at the platform,” Bragg continued, “goes aboard and uses parts of the communication unit to hot wire the fuel system instead of calling for help. He figures another ship is bound to show up sooner or later.”

“And it turned out to be later,” Dwin grinned. “Reilly and Vondelis arrive, but he didn’t leave enough fuel on the platform for them to get back.”

“Wrong!” Bragg exclaimed. “The platform’s fuel cell was already empty when Sorenson got there. His ship has a high-pressure storage system and he only got a few hundred kilos before the pressure equalized and he couldn’t draw any more.

“If Sorenson had managed a full load, he would have had plenty to give Reilly and still had enough to make his getaway. The fuel Reilly drew was basically just the fumes left in the cell. What he got from Sorenson’s ship included some of Sorenson’s own fuel, or he still wouldn’t have made it back. Those little T-108’s are a lot less efficient than a fusion drive.”

“Bad luck,” Dwin said. “The starship he followed in stole the fuel. It’s known to happen.”

“It looked that way to me, too, until I read this,” Bragg said. He handed Dwin a hard copy of the platform’s analysis. “The hyperlink addressing was wrong. If Sorenson hadn’t been there, Reilly and Vondelis would have had to call for help. Only the message would have gone to an account that doesn’t exist—at least, not anymore.”

Dwin let it sink in a moment. “That’s crazy. If this were all intentional they would have grabbed Sorenson right off. They couldn’t assume he wouldn’t call for help first.”

Bragg shook his head. “Stealth is a baffle-rider’s stock in trade. That starship lit off after the platform as soon as it dropped out of jump and never knew he was there.”

“So they showed up at the port to grab Reilly,” Dwin ventured. “But why grab the wife?”

“It went wrong,” Bragg shrugged. “Now—guess who owned the majority of the cargo that went in the drink in front of Reilly and his wife a few weeks ago?” He paused dramatically before answering his own question: “Sorenson Exports.”

“Circumstantial,” Dwin commented, “but plausible. The Colonel will have a fit you got involved.”

“That’s why you’re going to say it was your idea.”

Terson went to school the morning after his release from the hospital but couldn’t muster enough motivation to keep his mind on Multiple Engine Theory. His mind drifted to the empty, aching absence of his wife and the overwhelming details of arrangements that shouldn’t have been needed for decades.

That afternoon he ate a large supper and got drunk with Zarn.

The night after that he got drunk with someone he didn’t know.

On the third night Terson got drunk by himself.

THIRTEEN

Saint Anatone: 2709:07:15 Standard

Bragg scanned the faces in the waiting room; he wasn’t surprised that the one he was looking for wasn’t present. “Has Terson Reilly checked in?” he asked the receptionist.

“No, sir. Hasn’t called, either, that I’m aware of.”

“Thanks. Cancel my next appointment.” He stepped into the elevator and jabbed the button for the garage. Reilly had shown up for his previous appointment hung over. None of the patrol officers, who all remembered him very well, reported seeing him around the clubs and he hadn’t gotten himself arrested yet, but Bragg’s experience told him that it was only a matter of time until he reverted to his old habits—or worse. One thing Bragg was certain of: he could count on Terson Reilly to lean toward extremes. The only question was whether he would strike out at himself or others.

The elevator doors parted to reveal a dim, concrete cavern broken up by shadowed support columns and vehicles. Illumination from inside the cab spilled through the opening onto the stained concrete surface on the other side. The gloom sucked the vitality from the light; Bragg’s feet rooted to the floor in reaction to a deep, visceral dread. His heart slammed against his ribs like a jackhammer as sweat beaded his forehead. He couldn’t bring himself to step out, as if doing so would permanently cut him off from the comfort and safety of the orderly world a few floors above. He fought the compulsion to back into the corner, to retreat from the void and return to the well-lit offices where he could make up some excuse to have one of his subordinates drive his car around to the front for him.

The elevator chimed, the final notice that his time was up and began to close, threatening to crush the shadow he cast across the threshold. Bragg watched the passage shrink with dismay and shame at his unreasoning cowardice. An arm shot out of the darkness at the last moment to block the converging panels. Bragg uttered a startled exclamation as he stumbled back, hands raised to fend off the intruder. A patrolman stepped through as the doors reversed themselves, watching Bragg with evident concern.

“Everything all right, sir?”

“Yes, of course,” Bragg replied shortly, angry with himself and embarrassed by another incident sure to generate gossip around the water cooler. He strode out, heart in his throat, as the elevator doors swished shut again. Echoes followed him through the garage accompanied by the tic…tic of cooling metal in the distance. His hand sought the butt of his service pistol—not, thankfully, the same one Reilly used to kill three men—but the weapon’s presence did not comfort him.

Not much did, these days.

He attended the compulsory counseling session as required for any officer involved in a shooting, whether as shooter, victim, or witness and came out certified to return to full duty. He was glad to get that out of the way and put his minor part in the incident behind him; as a police officer he accepted the risks inherent to his position and it wasn’t appropriate to waste time with psychobabble when it should be put to better use tracking down the criminals responsible for Virene Reilly’s murder.

A few days later he awoke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, convinced that someone had attempted to break into his house. He found nothing amiss after checking each door and window, but checked again, sure that he’d missed something. He hadn’t, of course, but couldn’t remember for certain if he’d locked them all and checked a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, and lost track after that. The compulsion didn’t fade until the sun finally came up the next morning and he realized that he’d been at it for nearly five hours.

Bragg shrugged it off as a curious but minor anomaly not worth reporting, especially since the department shrinks would attribute more significance to it than it deserved. The “episodes,” as he came to think of them, never struck quite the same way twice, occurring without any pattern that he could discern, and each passed as quickly as it came.

Just like this one would.

He slid behind the wheel of his car and immediately locked the door. His uniform clung to him as if he’d jogged half a kilometer at noontime, sticky and damp. He backed out and headed for the exit, determined to make a more graceful egress from the tomb of a garage than he had the elevator.

The anxiety did not fade when he reached the street. He noted every seedy alley, every loitering pedestrian and every passenger van and delivery truck as potential threats. There were more now than he would have thought possible a few days earlier, before the event that reordered his universe drew them to the forefront of his perception.

Try as he might, Bragg could not look at Saint Anatone the same way as before. The assault proved that the security he’d taken for granted for so long was an illusion; nothing could protect anyone from a determined perpetrator. He’d always acknowledged that fact, intellectually, and delivered dozens of conciliatory speeches intended to restore the confidence of traumatized crime victims over the years. It was ironic that he didn’t understand how hollow those speeches were until he was the victim.

His shoulders ached from clutching the steering wheel by the time he arrived at the complex housing Reilly’s third-floor condominium. Virene’s roadster still sat where the tow truck dropped it, covered by the thick layer of dust that invariably gravitated to immobile cars. The faded parking ticket languished under the wiper next to a bright orange notice from the homeowner’s association warning that hulks stored on the premises were a violation of the covenants and subject to removal at the owner’s expense.

Bragg parked next to the wreck and climbed the stairs to the third floor terrace. He recognized the subtle signs of abandonment as he approached Reilly’s door: grime on the front window, a slight accumulation of dust on the front walk and a single, water-stained envelope laying on the threshold. The envelope was inconsequential in and of itself—junk mail—but the last rainstorm had been over a week earlier.

Bragg rang the doorbell for several seconds and knocked when there was no response. He cupped his hands around his face to peer through the window but the curtains inside were drawn. He couldn’t simply force his way in without sufficient cause, leaving no option but to contact the homeowners association to gain entry. He slapped the door handle in mild irritation as he turned away.

The handle turned; the front door swung inward a few centimeters.

The hair rose on the back of his neck and his mouth went dry. The narrow, dark space between the door and jamb swelled like the maw of a predator. Bragg swallowed his heart as he drew his pistol and thumbed off the safety. He eased the door open with his toe, allowing sunlight to spill into the room. The illuminated patch of floor was covered with bottles and fast food containers, many holding remnants of half-eaten meals. The sickly-sweet stench drifting out suggested that there might be more than food rotting somewhere inside.

As unpleasant as it was to find a days-old corpse inside a residence, Bragg had experienced it often enough to know what was coming. The knowledge was enough to unseat the phobic anxiety gnawing at his brain. He holstered his weapon and stepped inside expecting to find Terson Reilly’s remains slumped over the kitchen table with a gun in one hand and a bottle in the other.

He was half right: Reilly was holding a bottle, but the drunken snort that drew Bragg’s attention to the couch where he’d passed out halfway through it proved not only that the stench was rotting food after all, but that Terson Reilly was very much alive.

“Jesus.” Bragg kicked a path to the sofa and shook him. The bottle fell from his hand and spilled liquor across a pile of missed counseling appointments and other mail before coming to rest against an empty trashcan. Bragg dug his thumbnail into Reilly’s earlobe. The young man’s eyes fluttered and he turned his head, exhibiting enough consciousness to convince the officer that he hadn’t suffered alcohol poisoning. Bragg rolled him on his side so he couldn’t aspirate his vomit. A dark, fast-growing stain appeared at his crotch accompanied by the fetid reek of urine. Serves him right to lay in his own piss!

Bragg scooped handfuls of garbage into the trash and dumped it down the recycling chute in the kitchen. It took four trips to clear the living room; he gathered up the mail piled at the corner of the couch and swiftly separated it into stacks on the kitchen table.

The unanswered correspondence reflected a life falling apart: bills unopened and presumably unpaid; a rambling form letter regretfully informing one Mr. Terson Reilly of his expulsion from Malone’s commercial pilot program due to a medical disqualification; a copy of a legal form from a lawyer acting on behalf of the Van Strahlen family demanding release of Virene Van Strahlen’s body to their custody. Terson Reilly’s name was scrawled sloppily across the bottom without regard for the confines of the signature block, leading Bragg to conclude that the kid was drunk when he signed, drunk when he mailed it and obviously drunk ever since. He stared at the pitiful figure on the couch.

Not my business. If ever there was a time to walk away, it’s now. Instead, he let his wife know that he wouldn’t be home for dinner and dumped every bottle of booze he could find down the sink.

Terson’s body metabolized the alcohol through the night, depleting its reserves of moisture and setting the stage for the only form of revenge available to it—the hangover. Eventually his blood-alcohol level dropped below the threshold necessary to keep him senseless and he immediately sprang to near-full consciousness.

He sat up woozily, blinking rapidly at the unfocused double images swirling before his eyes, disoriented by the darkness and a pounding headache. He felt around for the bottle he knew had to be close by, growing increasingly frustrated at his inability to locate it. The dim ribbon of light from the fixture next to the door outside that penetrated a gap in the living room curtains and struck his face was just enough to destroy his night vision. He fumbled around for the lamp on the end table next to him.

The commotion stirred a figure in the recliner across the living room, which stood and approached to help. Terson was simultaneously ashamed and elated; ashamed that Virene had to witness his weakness of character, but elated that the nightmare was nothing more than a drunken hallucination.

“Welcome back,” Bragg said as the lamp came on.

The elation sprouting within Terson’s heart withered, replaced with bitter disappointment and anger. “What are you doing here?” he croaked.

“You missed your appointment yesterday.”

“It’s not ‘till the day after tomorrow!”

“Do you even know what day it is?”

Terson struggled to his feet. His odds of making it across the room were in doubt but he was loath to exhibit weakness in front of the officer. “Get out.”

“Make me.”

Terson started for him but the floor went rubbery; his head swam and his innards threatened to go uncontrollably liquid. He veered toward the bathroom with as much dignity as he could muster where he leaned over the sink waiting to vomit while thick ropes of drool dripped from his open mouth. It passed after a few moments and he turned on the light over the mirror.

A stranger’s pallid, gaunt face stared back. Lusterless hair lay flat against his skull. Uneven patches of beard sprouted from his neck and chin. He turned away and stripped off his urine-soaked clothing, choosing to ignore the emaciated body beneath.

The exertion of undressing left him exhausted. He sat cross-legged in the bottom of the tub and let the water spray over him, scrubbing feebly at the shell of filth encasing his body. Overcome by uncontrollable thirst, he turned his face into the spray and gulped warm water only to spew it up again moments later. He doubled over in agony, gagging on bile when his stomach had nothing else to expel.

Bragg came in and lifted him back into a sitting position by his shoulders. “Swallow this.” Terson’s mouth filled with a thick lemon-flavored liquid. He tried to push the officer’s hand and the squeeze bulb it held away, but wasn’t strong enough. His swallow reflex finally betrayed him and the substance went down. The nausea vanished almost instantly. “Now eat this, slowly.” The officer forced a few pieces of crushed ice into his mouth.

“Why are you still here?” Terson mumbled around the cold slush.

“We need to talk,” Bragg said, “if you can pull yourself together.”

“Fine. How about some goddamned privacy?” Bragg left the bowl of ice with him. Terson nibbled at it sedately despite his craving for fluids. The hot spray worked at the sick lethargy in his body, easing him toward a more natural, recuperative drowse. He fell fully asleep for a while, only to snap awake from the cold spray when the hot water ran out.

Terson knotted a towel around his waist and teetered down the hallway to the bedroom where he heard Bragg clang away in the kitchen. The smell of fried meat and eggs awoke stabbing hunger pangs. He dressed as quickly as his condition allowed, noting on his way back that the garbage in the living room was gone. He reached for a plate piled with food but Bragg cut him off.

“That’s mine.” He pointed at a plate of lightly buttered toast. “That’s yours.”

“The hell!” Terson reached for the plate again and Bragg shouldered him away.

“Think you can take me?”

Terson doubted it, considering the ease with which the older man deflected him. Bragg shoveled food into his mouth with dogged determination while Terson nibbled at the toast. He started to feel nauseous again, obviously enough that Bragg handed him another small squeeze bulb. The substance inside soothed his stomach enough to finish eating.

“What is this stuff?”

“Nausecon. It keeps the drunks from puking in the cars.”

“Can I get it over-the-counter?”

Bragg scowled at him. “You need to lay off the booze.”

“You need to go to hell.”

Bragg knew that there was no winning the argument. “The investigation into Virene’s murder is stalled,” he said. “It’s going to go cold if you can’t help us out.”

Terson cocked his head. “Who are you hoping to charge? The corpses?”

“There were others involved.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because nothing about this fits with any conceivable motive, but there has to be one,” Bragg said. “The three you killed don’t appear to be anything but hired muscle, therefore the motive lies with someone else. Ergo: others.”

“Every second we sit here somebody somewhere dies for no other reason than some bastard feels like killing him,” Terson shrugged. “The bastards usually get away with it. They didn’t this time, but the fact that there are bastards out there doesn’t mean that there’s a conspiracy. Sometimes bastards do what bastards do, and that’s all the motive there is.”

Bragg shook his head. “The drug they gave the two of you wasn’t intended to kill—aside from Virene’s allergic reaction the dose in her blood was high but not lethal. The weapon they used on us wasn’t lethal, either, and I suspect that if I hadn’t drawn one of these,” he patted the handgun at his hip, “they’d have shot you with it instead and loaded you up right along with her.

“And that wasn’t the first attempt: somebody drained the tanks on that platform before that baffle-rider got there, and altered the emergency com system’s hyperlink address,” Bragg continued. “If you’d been able to use it the message would have gone to someone else.

“And just to confuse the issue a little bit more: the kid you arrested out there—the baffle-rider—is the son of an exporter. The cargo on the shuttle that splashed in front of you a few weeks ago belonged to the same exporter.”

Terson shook his head. “I’ve spent most of my time since I got out of the hospital wasted. If somebody wanted me, all they had to do was walk through the door, same as you.”

“Maybe they got what they wanted.”

“If I knew what that was I’d tell you, Captain, just to get you the hell out of my life, but I can’t.”

Bragg waved a hand. “Sorry. I didn’t come here to interrogate you. I just hope that you’ll let me know if you think of anything.”

Terson indicated the stacks of mail. “I’ve got enough to think about.” The strength of the bitterness surprised him. He drank to dull it, but there it was again, sharp and undiluted.

Bragg fingered the notice from Malone. “I’m sorry about this, Terson, I really am.”

“Fuck them,” Terson said. He clenched his shaking hands into fists, enraged by his helplessness, but had to let it fade away, too weak to maintain the emotion for more than a few moments.

“How did it happen?” Bragg asked softly. The memory flooded in, surprisingly vivid:

Something slammed the back of Terson’s head, driving his chin into his chest. He fell, stunned, without even the meager reflexes of a four-year-old to break his fall as his sister’s cradling arms slackened. Fire spread through his body, burning away fear and breath with equal agony.

One of the men who’d touched Mama lay vomiting and clawing at himself. The Big Man took away the knife and cut her neck. Terson was glad when Papa came home. The floor was cold and sticky. Papa wiped Terson’s face with his shirt and cried. He said he loved them all and put his gun in his mouth.

Swarming insects blackened the floor and bodies around him as they fed on spilt blood. He’d given up trying to move, to call Mommy and Daddy. He couldn’t feel the hard floor anymore, or the icky bugs walking on him. His attention was riveted by thirst.

He experienced a fresh surge of terror at the sound of footsteps outside the door. The Big Man was coming back! If able, Terson would have giggled with relief at the sight of the figure that appeared in the doorway instead: a man smaller than Mommy, who walked as though he commanded the entire world.

He turned to someone outside: “Shoot them in the knees. Find out where the others are, then hang ‘em both!” Voices accepted the task eagerly.

Boss Hanstead carried Terson to the helicopter himself.

“I don’t remember much,” Terson said. “It was a long time ago.”

“I guess life pretty much screwed you,” Bragg said. “What are your plans?”

Terson shrugged. “I haven’t given it any thought.”

“Any chance you’ll, you know…” Bragg extended his thumb and index finger, pointing at his head.

“Leave me your gun and I’ll let you know in the morning.”

Bragg shook his head and stood. “Get some rest. I’ll stop by again; maybe I can find some options for you.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Bragg stopped at the door. “I can talk to a magistrate for you,” he said. “You can get her back.”

Terson shook his head. “Virene’s dead. The body doesn’t matter.”

The officer nodded and closed the door behind him without questioning the lie. The maddening silence closed around Terson as the officer’s footsteps faded. The apartment seemed to hold its breath when he was alone. Dozens of minor chores waited to be taken up, though he could not begin one without realizing its futility and abandoning the effort. Why do the laundry when she would never again wear the clothes?

The mundane objects—toothbrush, combs, magazines arranged just so on the end tables, a crumb-flecked plate by the sink—reinforced her absence more than anything else. He could not disturb them without severing the fragile strings connecting her to his life that stretched back through time to the moment she last touched them. Their home had become a shrine he would desecrate each time he cleaned or rearranged or bumped the sacred objects.

It was the inability to disturb those things that left him nothing to do but sit on the couch and dwell on his losses. Lack of purpose left him with time on his hands and alcohol gave him something to pass the time. He had to fill his time with something else, away from the reminders of his suddenly and irrevocably interrupted life.

Terson left the key on the kitchen table next to a voucher for the remainder of the lease.  The taxi driver eyed him sympathetically as he struggled to unload his two bulging duffel bags at the marina. “You want a hand with those, mister?” Terson waved him off and swayed down the pier. He managed to swing them onto the hydrojet and dropped beside them to rest.

The lazy afternoon sun tempted him to stretch full out on the hot deck and let it bake the fatigue from his body. The entire length of public waterfront sighed with the same laziness; shops lay quiet between the waves of noon and evening customers. The harbor’s long, smooth swells lapped against piling and sea wall, mixing the odor of warm, salty rot with the smell of foods cooked and consumed hours ago, hot masonry and spilled fuel.

Reluctantly, he made his way to the rental building instead. A chime sounded in a back room. Cold, desiccated air dried his nostrils as he stepped into the tiny foyer. The space was too small to hold so much as a chair, so Terson leaned against the counter to support himself. He’d once asked Mac Toner why he didn’t knock out a wall.

“Cut into my office space,” the rental agent had explained. “Besides, if somebody hasn’t got the patience to wait standing, they probably don’t have the patience to read the starting instructions bent over.”

Terson cleared his throat. Mac Toner looked up, looked again. His habitual, bushy glare softened with surprise; he rose and engulfed Terson’s shoulder with a strong, callused hand. “Reilly, you look worse than I ever felt in my life.”

Terson suspected that that wasn’t exactly true. Local lore alleged that Mac Toner had run a charter cruise boat with his wife until a storm five years before Terson was even born took both. He’d never gone back on the ocean, though he didn’t separate himself from it completely. A taunting revenge, Terson thought, to take his livelihood from the sea without venturing within its grasp.

“I came to pay my rent.”

“Ah! Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s been eight weeks,” Terson said. “I’ve got the money.”

“Dock hasn’t been full for a long time. I ain’t lost anything.” Terson slid his card across the counter. “Not like I’m poor,” Toner grumbled, but he took the card and processed the transaction. Terson folded the receipt and stuffed it in his wallet.

“Got a tie-up with utilities available?”

Toner nodded. “Other side—number fifteen. Let me lock up, I’ll handle the ropes.”

Terson eased the boat through the marina on impellers and snugged up against the bumpers where Toner showed him. The other man tied him off and had the utility lines plugged in by the time Terson reached him.

“You want me to put you on the locator?” Toner asked.

Terson shook his head. “Anybody wants me bad enough, they’ll find me.” Toner trotted back to his shop, leaving Terson to contemplate the silent, reproachful craft. He slapped the hull apologetically. “Just you and me again, old girl.”

“You wanted to see me, ma’am?”

Colonel Cai motioned to a chair. “Have a seat, Maalan.” The Colonel’s taste in furniture ran toward stylish and uncomfortable, a deliberate eccentricity intended to deter frivolous visits and encourage unavoidable visitors to expedite their business. How quickly she invited those she summoned to sit indicated her level of dissatisfaction. Bragg turned on his halo and perched on the edge of the chair guilelessly. “Yes, ma’am?”

“I understand you’ve made inquires into Reilly’s case.”

“Yes,” Bragg replied guardedly. “I’ve made a couple of calls.”

“Three this week alone.”

“I won’t dispute that,” he conceded.

“I made it clear you were not to involve yourself in this investigation,” she said. Bragg opted for silence. “As of this morning, the case was formally turned over to the EPEA. I believe I have you to thank for that.”

“I don’t know what you mean, ma’am.”

“Maalan, do you take me for an idiot?” she demanded. “Dwin is a competent officer, but connecting Sorenson Exports to Terson Reilly’s escapades has you written all over it! I don’t appreciate losing cases to other agencies!”

“That was never my intention,” Bragg said defensively. “It was just an interesting coincidence.”

“The EPEA found it a compelling coincidence. What the hell did you think would happen, getting inflammatory speculation put on record?”

“Damn it, Colonel, this investigation has been misdirected from the beginning! We have four people dead, an officer assaulted and not an inkling of why!”

“That’s enough, Captain!” Cai barked. “You will not involve yourself in this case again! If you already have significantly new information pertinent to the investigation it will be relayed to the EPEA through this office. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am. I believe I do.”

Cai sighed. “You are an excellent officer, Maalan. I don’t want something trifling as this to impact your record, but I will take action if I have to. Take a couple weeks leave, starting now. Relax. Get focused. And make an appointment to see someone over at Social Services. That’s not a suggestion.”

“Of course, ma’am; I understand. Thank you, ma’am.”

Bragg took the stairs down, seething the whole way. He had assumed that Dwin would relay his suspicions verbally, though in all fairness he couldn’t blame the sergeant for following established protocol. He should have talked to Cai himself and accepted an ass chewing that would have been forgotten by his next appraisal. He should have anticipated the consequences of linking the case to the possibility of poaching. The EPEA’s priorities were environmental first, last, and always. The agency would not divulge evidence of secondary crimes, no matter how egregious.

Let it go, he would have told another officer. It’s over! You can’t save the world. Hollow words, compared to the impotent rage that scorched his bowels at the memory: a young woman, brutalized before his eyes, kidnapped and murdered while he did nothing. The experience forever altered his self-image: no longer was he inviolate as a law enforcement officer.

He filled out a leave slip and locked his office. At least she hadn’t made it an official suspension.

FOURTEEN

Beta Continent: 2709:08:21 Standard

Dayuki’s inquiries into her Japanese and Mbuti ancestors inevitably led her to the conflict that brought them together, hundreds of billions of parsecs from their native lands on a world unknown even to their descendants. Most Minzoku considered the legends on the subject just that—legends—but to read the words of one who allegedly experienced the major events personally was an experience akin to spiritual, even if the narrator was a gaijin.

The Qu’a’i, it seemed, were not as sophisticated as they were technologically advanced. The fleet followed a more or less linear course through the Milky Way, turning aside only as necessary to reach nearby star systems when it grew hungry, and then returning to that path until attracted by another system. Barring undue influences, scholars believed that it would have continued on, oblivious of the Sol system, if not for an unfortunate by-product of human development.

To a creature accustomed to browsing the meager offerings of lifeless, barren star systems, artificially generated radio signals heralded the existence of a lush oasis like the sound of flowing water in a desert. The Qu’a’i fleet rushed headlong toward the source with gluttonous single-mindedness in a series of jumps that brought it to its destination in less than fifty years.

Fortunately for mankind, the logarithmic increase of human technology that occurred between the time the signals originated and fleet reached the system was an aberration in Qu’a’i experience. The fleet’s sudden appearance in Sol system was met not with the awed wonder of a technologically primitive society, but the paranoia of a species that had, until that moment, been destined to destroy itself with weapons easily reconfigured for use against spacecraft.

Billions of beings on both sides perished in the first few days, reducing the Qu’a’i fleet to a disorganized rabble of thousands of individual vessels and plunging the nations of Terra into chaos. Damaged Qu’a’i starships disgorged millions of frightened, desperate alien refugees representing nearly one hundred different life-forms across the face of the planet where they were met by equally frightened, desperate humans intent on protecting what little they had left.

The vast majority of the refugees were as ignorant of the inner workings of the Qu’a’i fleet as Minzoku peasants were of the Onjin, but those able to communicate with their human adversaries assured them that the parent Qu’a’i armada would soon arrive to finish what its foraging child had begun. History would later prove those claims vastly overstated, as the alleged parent fleet never arrived and no evidence of its existence, other than Qu’a’i legends, ever presented itself.

The threat was entirely credible at the time, however, and induced the Terrans to engage in a level of cooperation unheard of in human history and never matched since. They salvaged derelict Qu’a’i ships, using them in turn to seize operational vessels, marooning the occupants on Mars and Terra in order to evacuate entire human populations from their homeworld, abandoning it to a fate that never materialized.

Only a fraction of the ships that fled Terra were ever heard of again, although two of them, apparently, sought safe harbor on the same world where their cultures and genes commingled to form the seed that one day blossomed into the Minzoku.

The door chime startled Dayuki. She quickly logged off the terminal and crossed the room, breathing deeply to calm herself and clear the guilty flush from her cheeks. It was not Hal-san, she reasoned: Hal-san had no need to ring and always called before he returned. She turned on the monitor to find the Onjin woman, Tamara Cirilo, waiting in the corridor.

Dayuki debated briefly whether to acknowledge her or not. Although Hal-san had never addressed the issue of opening the door to Onjin other than himself, Dayuki preferred not to. Refusing to answer, however, might raise concern, so she activated the intercom as the Onjin woman reached for the chime button again.

“Good morning, My Lady. How may I help you?”

“Halsor sent me to fetch you; he needs you to interpret for him.” Interpret? McKeon-san was fluent in written and spoken Minzoku—but he had been injured by the gaijin, she remembered. “Halsor couldn’t reach you,” the Onjin woman added during the pause. “He’s outside the Fort.”

“Of course, My Lady,” Dayuki said. “I will require only a few moments.” She slipped out of the kimono she wore around the suite and changed into the Onjin clothing Hal-san had provided.

Tamara Cirilo smiled at her when she emerged. “All ready? This way; I have transportation out back.” She led Dayuki to the emergency exit stairwell at the end of the corridor. Her voice echoed from the walls as they descended. “You must look forward to getting out,” Lady Cirilo said. “I don’t think I’d like being cooped up in a room like that all day.”

Dayuki didn’t like it, of course, but it was not proper to acknowledge that fact in the Onjin woman’s presence. “I serve Hal-san however I may.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Lady Cirilo said. Dayuki thought she detected a tremor of anger in the woman’s voice. The door at the bottom of the stairs squealed open on rusted metal hinges; Lady Cirilo motioned Dayuki to precede her.

Dayuki stepped out into a narrow, unpaved alleyway less than two meters wide between two buildings. The ground was covered with a deep, unbroken layer of leaves dropped by the thick, overgrown decorative bushes that blocked the alley from outside view at both ends.

Dayuki realized she was in grave danger.

She turned to face the Onjin woman as the emergency exit groaned shut. Tamara Cirilo’s smile transformed to a triumphant smirk. She held a needle-beamer identical to Hal-san’s in her right hand. From her left sleeve appeared a short, crude tanto of the sort sold by souvenir venders in Sin City, which she flipped at Dayuki’s feet. The blade bit into the moist humus soundlessly.

“Looks like you aren’t so smart after all,” Lady Cirilo mocked. “Pick it up!”

Dayuki felt humiliated that she’d walked into such an unimaginative trap. Worse, she’d failed to anticipate the trick that facilitated it. Hal-san had explained the conflict between Tamara Cirilo and himself, but Dayuki hadn’t taken the time to understand the implications. A highborn Minzoku woman would not have felt threatened by the mistress of a man she had designs on. Obviously the Onjin woman viewed her as an obstacle.

“Pick…it…up!” Lady Cirilo repeated. Dayuki’s instinct for self-preservation prompted her to calculate the most effective method to neutralize the threat to her life a split-second after she perceived it. The woman stood within effective range, should Dayuki decide to strike but the Covenant forbade her doing so.

She took a step back and bowed. “This unworthy life belongs to the Onjin,” Dayuki said. “My Lady needs no excuse to take it.”

Tamara Cirilo hadn’t steeled herself for calm acquiescence. Her smirk faded, replaced by determination, and she took aim at Dayuki’s face. Their eyes locked and the gun’s muzzle began to quiver. The Onjin woman was too insecure to pull the trigger, yet too proud to back down. Dayuki turned away from her slowly and knelt.

“If I may suggest, My Lady, a shot to the base of the skull would be most effective,” Dayuki said. The silence stretched on, broken finally by the whisper of branches against clothing.

The Onjin woman was gone.

Dayuki reached for the dagger still protruding from the ground but thought better of it. She kicked it aside and swept leaves over it, then turned to the door. There was nothing but a metal plate and keyhole where a handle should have been; it took over an hour to pick the lock with her hairpins.

Back in her quarters, Dayuki wondered what to do. She’d been entirely sincere when she told Lady Cirilo that her life was the Onjin’s to take; therefore Dayuki had no basis on which to seek revenge. Hal-san’s apparent affection for her was gratifying, but it was not up to Dayuki to choose sides in an Onjin conflict—he had as much right to preserve her life as Lady Cirilo did to take it. That said, her affection for Hal-san gave her sufficient motivation to protect his interests whenever possible.

In that regard, it was important that Hal-san be aware of the lengths to which Lady Cirilo was willing to go in pursuit of her own agenda. Hal-san was hot-headed and impulsive, however; Dayuki could not predict how he would react to Lady Cirilo’s actions. Dayuki decided that it was better to leave him ignorant of the event than to risk the consequences an ill-considered retaliation might bring down on him.

Saint Anatone: 2709:08:21 Standard

Terson experienced a tinge of guilt over the salt deposits on the hydrojet’s windows and tarnished deck fittings; the main cabin looked more like a store room than living quarters, cluttered with gear he’d been too busy to stow properly the few times he checked the boat over the past few months. It had entered Terson’s life long before Virene and the memories of his time there with her were diluted by a greater number of those without. The craft had been a refuge and deserved better than the neglect it received as he moved on with his life.

He did what he could to make amends: he opened shades and portholes to vent the dank smell of vacancy, polished fittings, washed windows and scrubbed bird shit from the deck. The moderate effort exhausted him and he collapsed into bed sore and dizzy well before the sun went down. Random, disconcerting images filled his dreams; he woke with a start hours before dawn when his body encroached on the cold spot beside him Virene once occupied.

Terson employed a paradoxical aspect of human metabolism to regain the weight he’d lost during his hospitalization and the drinking binge that followed: he ate his fill regularly for two days, and then fasted for two more, consuming nothing but water. He gorged again on the fifth and sixth day, followed by two more days of fasting. The cycle awakened ancient memories in his genes, primitive remnants of a time when the ability to store energy against periods of starvation was more valuable than the ability to use it efficiently and his body soon lost its gaunt appearance. His endurance returned along with his weight and he spent an hour every morning and evening performing simple exercises to increase it further.

Before long he could walk the length of the pier and back without resting, though those daily jaunts exposed him to attention he’d just as soon avoid. The pier hosted an active social scene and the sudden appearance of a long absent owner piqued the interest of others who lived aboard their vessels full-time. He’d politely rebuffed a number of invitations to gatherings aboard some of the other long-term moorings, but knew that gossip would inevitably fill the void left by lack of information.

The solitude he sought was available only if he cloistered himself aboard the hydrojet, a cost he could tolerate for only so long. He held his freedom just as dear, but he could not have both as long as he stayed at the marina and there was more to do before he could head out to sea and walk undisturbed along the shore of his island.

He spent several days servicing the engines and performing the preventative maintenance neglected for the previous few months. Once everything above the waterline was shipshape, he slipped over the side to inspect the hull. Thin streaks of algae bloomed where the gelcoat had been scraped or worn off. The growths broke loose with a swipe of his hand, and none of the tenacious pseudocoral formations had managed to take hold.

The condition of the screens covering the intake ducts was another matter. The brief time he’d run the impellers whisked away the fragile algae, but the lattice pattern was exceptionally inviting to pseudocoral. His bare hand detected a sandy coating invisible to the eye on the normally smooth surface immediately. A few small barnacle-like crustaceans used the pseudo-coral seedcoat to anchor themselves to the hull. The effect on water flow was minimal, but bore watching. A prolonged flight should kill the existing coral and barnacles and retard the development of more fouling organisms, delaying the need to repair the gelcoat.

The boat rocked slightly as someone stepped onto it from the pier. The hull propagated the sound of footsteps traversing the deck above, allowing Terson to swim to the ladder on the opposite side of the boat from the intruder before hauling himself out.

A man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, shorts, and semi-casual button-down shirt stooped to peer through a porthole carrying a six-pack of local beer in one hand and a large manila envelope in the other. “It’s courteous to request permission to come aboard,” Terson informed the stranger coldly as he stripped off his mask. A social encounter on the pier was one thing; he felt no reservations about making his displeasure at an unsolicited intrusion on his deck forcefully clear.

The man turned, unconcerned by Terson’s tone. “Courteous probates inform their probation officers when they change addresses,” Bragg replied. He pulled a bottle off the six-pack and tossed it to Terson with irritating familiarity.

It was either catch it, or let it hit him, the deck or the water. Terson plucked it out of the air, but did not open it. “You on vacation or something?” he asked, indicating Bragg’s casual civilian attire.

“Sort of,” the officer replied tightly. “I got suspended more or less. Can we take this inside?”

Maalan “By-The-Book” Bragg, suspended? His estimation of the man improved markedly at the news. He wasn’t about to let the story of how it happened get away. “Come on down.”

The officer appraised the main cabin appreciatively. “This is the first time I’ve actually been inside this thing.”

“Don’t get attached to it.” Terson set down the bottle. “What the hell did you do?”

“You going to drink that?”

Terson shook his head. “I’m back on the wagon.”

“Good for you.” Bragg twisted the top off and sucked down half the contents before he continued. “I floated a theory that got the EPEA involved in the investigation, which pissed off my CO and got me put on forced leave. They took jurisdiction and they don’t generally take any interest in crimes against persons—unless it’s one of their own. Virene’s murder is a closed case, as far as the Federal Police are concerned. I thought you should hear it from me.”

Terson eyed him skeptically. “You thought you’d need a whole six-pack to tell me that?”

“I’ve had some other problems since that night,” Bragg sighed. “I need to talk to somebody.”

“You have people for that,” Terson pointed out.

“Somebody who understands,” Bragg elaborated. He gulped down the rest of the bottle and opened another. “My wife doesn’t want to hear about it—my getting shot freaks her out more than it did me, I think. A few people at the department have been in gunfights, but they’d just tell me to visit the shrink—or report me for not referring myself.”

“I don’t think I’m qualified to advise you,” Terson said. “I don’t have any memory of getting shot.”

“That’s not it,” Bragg said. “What happened to me was traumatic, by anybody’s definition; I didn’t know it was just a stun at the time. I was pretty convinced that I was dying, but getting shot isn’t what’s messing with my head now.”

“I can tell this is important to you, Captain,” Terson said politely, “but I just don’t follow.”

“God, I wish I could get this into words!” Bragg exclaimed. He set the second empty next to the first and twisted the top off a third. “I woke up to the fact that the world is a dangerous place, that I’m charged with protecting people in it, but I’m not sure I’m equipped to do that. I remember starting to draw my gun, but deep down I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to have to make the decision to fire, to take somebody’s life.” Bragg sucked down another half bottle. “I keep wondering how I’d feel if I had shot one of those guys. I like to imagine it wouldn’t be any big deal—they had it coming. But what if he didn’t just drop dead? What if he flipped around and crying for his goddamned mother, or something?” Bragg finished off the bottle and reached for number four. “What would you do, Reilly?”

“Shoot him again.”

Bragg’s hand stopped mid-reach. “My God, you’re serious! What kind of hellhole did you grow up in?”

“Look,” Terson sighed, “here you have a static population of around ten million, all concentrated on one continent. Algran Asta had the same number of people spread out over the entire planet with a high transient population and we didn’t restrict travel.”

“Really? How’d you control poaching?”

“We didn’t!” Terson exclaimed. “There was no such thing! If you wanted to chop down a tree you chopped it down. If you got hungry you hunted. If somebody tried to take what was yours, you shot them.”

“I have to believe there was some kind of law,” Bragg objected.

“Sure there was,” Terson said. “We had more cops than you have here, in fact. Problem was we were too spread out to handle everything.”

“‘We?’” Bragg gaped. “You were a cop?”

“Two year compulsory tour with the Colonial Police,” Terson nodded. “All the big ranches and timber camps had a couple reserve deputies, too.”

“And people still took the law into their own hands.”

“They had to!” Terson said. “If you hear your neighbor beating the hell out of his wife here you make a call and a cop shows up in a few minutes. If somebody landed on your ranch on Algran Asta and started loading up your stock the cops wouldn’t get there for days. You had to handle it yourself, and if you caught somebody rustling your neighbor’s stock you did something about it because you knew he’d do the same for you.

“So if you’re asking me how to deal with the fear of killing someone, I can’t—we don’t share a common frame of reference.”

“That helps explain why I couldn’t keep you in line,” Bragg sighed. He held out the envelope.

Terson felt several loose objects inside when he took it. “What’s this?”

“Virene’s personal effects,” Bragg said. “The EPEA declined to take custody of the evidence, so it’s been released to the next of kin. I figured you deserved first right of refusal.” Terson spilled them onto the table: wristwatch, a single earring, wedding ring, and a few coins. “I’ll ship it off to her parents, if you don’t want it.”

The diamond in the ring still shone with the fierce inner fire that had matched the woman who wore it so well. It should have gone out when she died, but the stone was aloof, unaware of the fate that befell its wearer. The life of Virene Reilly was a flicker in the existence of the cold, carbon nugget.

Terson paused before he swept them back into the envelope. “What happened to the necklace?”

Bragg grimaced. “She suffered some very…traumatic…physical injuries. It probably broke off.”

Terson closed his eyes, concentrating. He was sure she wasn’t wearing it when they threw her out. A possible motive for the whole thing began to form in his mind. “You said it was valuable. Is that because nobody’s allowed to collect them, or are they actually rare?”

“I don’t know, but there’s somebody nearby who might. Come on.” Terson followed him back up the pier—straight to Mac Toner’s door. Toner’s instinctive glare deepened when he saw Bragg. “Hey, Mac,” Bragg said cheerfully. “Let’s talk in your office.”

Toner leapt to his feet as the officer came around the counter. “Not without a warrant, you don’t!”

“Nothing official, Mac. Reilly has a couple questions for you.”

Toner turned the glare his way. Terson shrugged with his best Don’t-Look-At-Me-I-Don’t-Have-A-Clue look, followed by a tipping-the-bottle gesture, which apparently satisfied whatever concern Toner had about Bragg’s official status. He hung out his Back in One Hour sign locked the door and drew the shades “Mind you keep your lip buttoned!” he warned Terson.

He took them into his minuscule office and pulled open the door leading to what Terson had always believed to be his storage and repair facilities. Refrigerated air gushed out, carrying the coppery smell of blood and offal. Freezer units lined the walls and two young men turned from their work at a butcher table, startled by the sudden intrusion. They dropped their fillet knives when Toner flicked his head and hastily vanished through another door toweling viscera from their hands.

Toner moved the plastic crate filled with fillets from beside the huge carcass and shoved it in a freezer, straining to lift it to the top of a stack of identical crates.

“You’ve got some balls,” Terson said approvingly. “This would get you what—fifty to life?”

“Every one of these fish is legal,” Toner declared. “Every one!”

“There are a few loopholes in our harvest and export laws,” Bragg said. “There’s a limit on how many fish you can pull in with a recreational harvest permit, but there’s no limit on how many you can buy from permit holders. Private citizens can resell to anyone in any quantity once they have the provenance.”

“Huh,” Terson grunted. “So you use the rental business to launder the biomass?”

“Some folks put it that way,” Toner said sourly. His conversion from charter cruising to exporting had begun long before the fateful storm that drove him from the sea. Ignorant of the loophole, sport fishermen willing to buy a recreational harvest permit and charter his boats were often happy to settle his fee and avoid the perceived hassle of processing their catch by turning it over to him and walking away with a photograph and a good story. Meeting a rich Belter vacationer interested in a lucrative partnership had been inevitable. “How they get it off-world isn’t my concern.” He leaned against the table and crossed his arm. “What do you want to know?”

Terson described the pearl and the suspicions its absence raised about the attack on Virene. “Are they rare enough that somebody would take that kind of risk stealing one?”

“They aren’t rare,” Toner said, “All mature pearl mollusks grow one just before they spawn and die off, but you never know where a colony will turn up so they’re hard to find. Somebody might want to know where you got it.”

“What’s the off-world value of a pearl that size?” Bragg asked.

“Depends on the quality. A good specimen could get you five to ten thousand euros.”

“I don’t understand,” Bragg said. “Why pay that much for a pearl when they mine precious metals in the Belt that cost a tenth of that?”

“Supply and demand,” Toner said. “Most Belters have never set foot on the surface of this planet or eaten anything but hydroponically produced soybean. A chunk of driftwood the size of your hand will fetch fifty credits in the Belt. Pearls, amber, and mother-of-pearl are as valuable to them as gold is to us—because we can’t dig them up.”

The concept astounded Bragg and for all his sophistication Toner only understood the obvious. Terson could well imagine how millions of people toiling in a deadly environment, contributing to the lifeblood of a planetary civilization that could not survive without them yet cut them off from its basic riches would hunger for a symbolic connection to the lush world shining just beyond their reach.

“Would an outfit as big as say, Sorenson Exports, risk poaching of that sort?” Bragg was asking.

A startling transformation contorted Toners face: shock, grief, guilt and under it all a long-smoldering rage. “The bastard’s a drift-netter! Of course he would! Now get out! Both of you! Out! Come back with a warrant or not at all!”

Bragg’s mouth clamped shut and he followed Terson back outside, treading on his heels in his rush. Toner’s door slammed shut behind them. The officer wiped at the sudden perspiration on his face. “Damn! What the hell set him off?”

“What’s a drift net?” Terson asked.

“Fine filament fishing net,” Bragg said, pulling his lower lip, “about ten kilometers long or so, hundreds of meters deep that kill everything in their path. Poachers buoy them with a beacon and set them adrift for weeks at a time, then come back and haul in whatever hasn’t rotted.”

“And Sorenson Exports uses them?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Bragg said absently, “but the name keeps coming up. Sorenson Exports owned the cargo on that shuttle and I’m starting to wonder…

“What’s your boat’s maximum range, round-trip?”

“Officially, about eight hundred kilometers,” Terson told him. “Three to four times that if it has extra fuel bladders installed in the hull cavity, but that’s illegal, you know.”

“Plenty, then,” Bragg said, still preoccupied. “Are you up for an extended fishing trip?”

Terson vacillated between telling him where to shove it and curiosity. “Possibly…”

“Tomorrow, first light unless I let you know otherwise. I’ll have to pick up some gear.” He spun and headed up the pier without a word of explanation.

Terson tried Toner’s door, found it unlocked, and went back in. Toner sat hunched over his desk with his face in his hands. Tears dripped out of his beard when he looked up. “Sorry, Reilly. It’s not you. It just…he asked out of nowhere. Didn’t expect it.”

“Your wife?”

“Yeah. It was some Belter clients, real good money. Ran over a drift net, fouled the props. We worked at it most of a day and night. Next morning, right at dawn, we saw the ship recovering the net. The registration was tarped over, but when you been at sea long as I have, you don’t need a name to recognize a boat. It was one of Sorenson’s.

“They just cut the rest loose and took off. When the storm hit we wallowed. Hell, I been through worse, but I couldn’t maneuver. Wave rolled us. She went down like a rock in thirty, forty seconds.

He sucked in a ragged breath. “Janny got tangled in the net.”

“The Coast Guard found you,” Terson guessed. “They didn’t believe you?”

Toner uttered a single barking laugh. “I didn’t tell’em. We were way outside the coastal boundary.” He regarded Terson with naked grief. “If I hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have hit the net.”

Beta Continent: 2709:08:21 Standard

McKeon had just shut down his office and was preparing to hoist himself to his feet for the painful trip to the command post garage when Tamara Cirilo entered. He hadn’t seen her all night, but she looked like she’d gone without sleep for a while.

“Stan, do you have a minute?”

“Can it wait? I’m not feeling—”

“Please?” The sincerity of the request took him aback. ‘Please’ was a word rarely used in Tamara’s vocabulary, reserved for subordinates when she wished to appear considerate while issuing commands they dared not fail to obey.

McKeon settled back onto his chair. “What can I do for you?”

“I was going to kill that Minzoku girl living with Hal today,” she said. “I gave her a knife so it would look like she attacked me, but she wouldn’t touch it.”

The same chill washed over him as when he’d heard that Tennison had been captured. “Lieutenant Dayuki is a trained martial artist,” he said. “You’re lucky she didn’t kill you.”

“I know; I saw it in her eyes,” Tamara said. “She knew she could, but didn’t. It was like she didn’t believe I would shoot—or didn’t care.”

“If you expect me to run interference for you, it’s not going to happen,” McKeon said. “Problems between Family are just that. I won’t get in the middle.”

“No,” Cirilo said. “If she told Hal I would have heard about it by now.”

“Then I don’t know what I can do for you.”

“You can be honest,” Cirilo said. Her eyes became desperate. “Would you do that for me, Stan? Please?” McKeon’s head spun with the outrageousness of hearing the word yet again, but replied in the affirmative. Tamara Cirilo began to cry, right there at his desk. “What am I doing wrong?” she sniffed. “Why did he choose her over me? How could he humiliate me like this?”

“The problem,” McKeon said, “is that you come across like a cheap whore.”

Tamara sat up straight. Her wet eyes narrowed angrily. “You’ll regret that, McKeon!”

“The fact remains that it’s true, and everyone sees it but you. You act like a dog whining for a bone when he’s around; all you see is a ride straight into the Family’s inner circle. Why would Halsor Tennison be interested in a woman who only sees him as a means to an end? Why would anyone?”

“But I’ve got something to offer!” Tamara exclaimed. “That Minzoku bitch is the gold digger!”

“The difference is that you scheme; she just gives. You might take a lesson from that, whatever the outcome between you and Hal.”

McKeon expected a blast of fury, but her face relaxed instead, calm and thoughtful as she turned to leave. “Thank you, Stan. I appreciate your candor.”

FIFTEEN

Saint Anatone: 2709:08:22 Standard

Sunrise cast spears of light into the morning haze from the summits of the coastal mountains east of Saint Anatone as it approached. The peaks blazed as the sun lit their tips, driving back the pale face of the false dawn and cooking the dampness out of the air.

Mac Toner’s heavy tread rocked the deck. He planted a foot on the rail next to Terson and handed him a cup of brew the locals called coffee. It tasted nothing like coffee from Algran Asta, derived from a root rather than bark. A new planet deserved to be described in unique terms, but the old ones clung to the human psyche. Birds were birds because they flew; things in the water were called fish.

Something hot you drank in the morning was coffee.

“Beautiful morning,” Toner noted.

“Yeah,” Terson agreed. He’d risen early to watch the sunrise for weeks after his arrival on Nivia, gorging on the sight like a child locked in a confectioners shop. Catching a clear view of it on Algran Asta was nearly impossible due to the nightly fog, which refused to relinquish its hold until the sun was well along its journey and settled in again hours before sunset.

The allure waned with time and troubles. He abandoned the practice after the cynic in him decided that the sun’s course must be dictated and enforced by the same regulations that controlled everything else on Nivia. It wasn’t until he watched it rise with Virene in his arms for the first time that he realized what it was that drew him to the event: each day dawned innocent. It rarely ended that way but the certainty of its return, clean again, afforded him the barest hint of hope when nothing else did.

It was his first sunrise without Virene and he was glad he didn’t have to spend it alone.

“What got you up in the morning?” Terson asked at last. “How did you get through it?”

Toner blew steam off his cup. “Moment by moment. Then day by day and year by year.”

“Ever think about getting married again?”

“Not very long. For me it was Janny or nobody.”

“Were you ever sorry she met you?” Terson asked.

Toner looked him in the eye without any sign of the emotion he’d exhibited the day before. “You mean because of what happened; she wouldn’t’ve died if she’d never met me and all. I did, for a while. Sometimes I still catch myself thinking I got her killed.” He took a noisy slurp of coffee. “It’s easy to think that; comforting, because it spares her any guilt. The truth is Janny made her choices; she was as much a poacher as I was. If I’d gone down, she’d stand here telling you she wished it had been her instead.” Toner pitched the dregs overboard and stepped back across to the dock. “Here comes your probation officer.”

Bragg arrived moments after Toner’s steps faded, huffing under the load of two hand trucks bearing a stack of rotation-molded equipment cases. “That’s not fishing gear,” Terson commented.

“Not in the common sense, no,” Bragg agreed. “Can we get it stowed before it attracts attention?”

Terson cleared space in the midship storage compartment while Bragg fidgeted like a kid with a pocketful of stolen candy. “The only thing attracting attention is you,” Terson said as they stowed the containers. “What’s this stuff for?”

“You’ll see when the time comes,” Bragg replied. “Suffice it to say I broke a few rules signing it out. You’ll find plausible deniability advantageous if the Department figures out before we’re on our way.”

“Do you mind telling me where we’re on our way to, and what we’re doing when we get there?”

“Plausible deniability,” Bragg reminded him, “but you’ll want to refuel at the Archipelago.”

They were underway minutes later, observed by a handful of early risers aboard nearby boats who gestured greetings as the hydrojet made an unremarkable departure. Terson gave the impellers more power beyond the no-wake zone, boosting his speed to twenty knots, and proceeded to the take-off buoy three kilometers from the marina. Bragg adjusted the copilot’s seat along the way to accommodate his legs, severing Virene’s last connection to the boat.

The surface of the water developed a moderate chop as the offshore breeze strengthened. Terson surmised that Bragg didn’t have much experience on the water, if his white-knuckled grip on the armrest was any indication. The chop got worse during take-off; Terson held the craft to the surface longer than necessary, using the bone-jarring impacts to visit his revenge on the man for his unknowing offense.

He pulled the yoke back sharply. The boat left the water with a stomach-tossing hop before settling onto the ground-effect cushion between the hull and the water. Terson spent a few minutes trimming WIG’s and flaps, watching the radar for any approaching surface vessels with a superstructure or mast high enough to clip.

Bragg drew deep, measured breaths through clenched teeth. His face was white and glistened with sweat. Terson experienced a twinge of shame at what he’d done, given the officer’s concern for him weeks earlier. “There’s a bottle of motion-sickness pills in the head,” Terson told him.

“I’ll be okay,” Bragg insisted.

“Not if you’re queasy already,” Terson replied. “It’ll get worse when we land again.”

“You’ve convinced me.” Bragg unstrapped and made his way down the narrow steps from the cockpit to the main cabin. Terson heard him retch once in the head. He came back looking a little less uncomfortable.

“I think you owe me an explanation, now,” Terson told Bragg after he strapped in.

“Mac Toner isn’t the first person to claim that Sorenson Exports is engaged in organized poaching,” Bragg said. “All exporters get accused of it, but Sorenson’s name keeps popping up. I’m wondering if that shuttle cargo could tie them to it, and by inference to the attack on us and Virene’s death.”

If Bragg’s only interest in finding out was to satisfy his own curiosity, he must not have a high regard for his own life, Terson decided. Knowing and proving were distinctly separate activities. People tended to turn up dead somewhere between the two.

“Except for the escape pod, Virene and I were nowhere near the shuttle,” Terson reminded him.

“I know,” Bragg acknowledged, “and I remember what you said about the universe being full of bastards, but even bastards have motives. So far I’ve had to stretch incredulity to come up with any. That means I’m missing something.”

“So you’re willing to break the law and risk your career to find it,” Terson said. “That meets the definition of obsession, in my book. Maybe you ought to consider the possibility that you aren’t missing anything. The universe is full of coincidences, too.”

“I don’t understand how you can be so sanguine about this,” Bragg exclaimed. “Your wife is dead, and you’re not a bit concerned about why!”

“I don’t need to know why!” Terson shot back. “No answer can bring her back; no reason can justify what happened! I’m satisfied with killing the sons of bitches that did it. If it turns out that there is some great conspiracy at work, then by all means send them my way so I can put a bullet in a few more!

“In the meantime, don’t use Virene as your excuse to turn your life inside-out. Every bit of guilt for her death belongs to me, and I’ll be Goddamned if I share it!”

Bragg’s jaw clenched in anger; he turned to glare out his side of the cockpit. “Turn around, if you want to.”

“You were there for me, as much as I hate to admit it,” Terson replied, reigning in his own temper. “If this is what you need to find peace, fine, but admit that you’re doing it for you, not Virene. Or me.”

“Fine.” Bragg left Terson to his piloting, intent on the view out his side of the cockpit. Soon, though, the coast vanished behind them leaving water and sky to dominate the horizon in all directions. Bragg succumbed to a side effect of the medication and began snoring softly into his chest.

The hydrojet’s radar showed empty sea to the limit of its range. Not even a contrail marred the sky overhead. Terson enjoyed the peaceful isolation. It was easy to imagine himself the only person on the planet, Bragg’s rhythmic breathing aside.

Terson felt a mild resentment at the officer’s presence. On duty or not, the man was an extension of Nivian regulation that now intruded into the safe haven he’d shared only with his wife. How did I let this happen? Had Virene’s death left him so desperate for human contact that he was willing to tolerate the man who represented everything he hated about the damnable society he’d landed in?

Yet he didn’t hate Maalan Bragg, or even dislike him, though that had once been the case. Perhaps he’d simply grown accustomed to the man during their long association. Perhaps recent events had eroded Bragg’s status as an authority figure and Bragg, through those events, was now closer to understanding Terson Reilly than anyone else on the planet.

Their relationship had certainly changed in the last few weeks, as Bragg’s experiences catapulted him into territory where Terson was the one better equipped to function, reversing their roles. Terson knew he had to be cautious, had to avoid becoming the means by which Bragg pursued his obsession beyond the point he would if limited to his own resources.

Terson would have made this flight on his own eventually, with considerably more preparation, but without the intention of returning if Maalan Bragg had not invited himself along. Any ties to Saint Anatone unraveled with the loss of Virene and the only career he expected to embark on. Not even the contradictory craving for and revulsion of human company that afflicted him on his arrival to Nivia existed.

He could survive in Nivia’s remote reaches unencumbered by rules, regulation, or the frailty of any man but himself if he exercised a little patience, planning and bought the right equipment.

Regrettably, his little island was not suited to this purpose. Its edible flora and fauna were too limited to sustain him and replenish themselves; it was too close to the Alpha continent and known to too many people. It would make a secure place to stockpile fuel and supplies while he found a better location across the sea, however.

The first of the Archipelago’s tiny outlaying atolls appeared on radar an hour later.

Terson slowed and veered north, following the designated air corridor skirting the concentration of islets. Air and surface targets bloomed as he approached the larger developed islands. He performed the requisite fly-over of the landing buoy to inform nearby vessels of his intent, then lined up and brought the hydrojet down, skipping across the wave tops until he’d shed enough speed for the water to seize the hull and drag it to a stop.

Bragg straightened in his seat and rubbed his face, bleary-eyed and dazed from his nap. “Umph. Where are we?”

“The Archipelago. Round trip to the marina for fuel will take about an hour.” It was still early in the day due to their sunrise departure. The vacationers were still berthed or ashore, taking advantage of the languid island pace. Terson only had to wait for a single floatplane to clear the fuel bay at the marina and sent Bragg on deck to toss the mooring lines to the attendant. Fifteen minutes later, with tanks topped off, the hydrojet cruised back into open water.

Bragg gave Terson the coordinates and Terson punched them into the boat’s Global Positioning System Transponder. The point was just over half the hydrojet’s maximum range. If Bragg intended to dally in the area they would have to stop in the Archipelago again to fuel up on the way back.

Terson turned his bow south. “That’s the wrong way,” Bragg noted.

“I’m the expert here; trust me.” Radar hits and transponder signals increased steadily as they approached LaCrosse Island Resort, playground of Saint Anatone’s rich and famous. Terson cruised through the private offshore moorings past large motor yachts, hydrojets, and a lavish sailboat crewed by half-naked female sailors. No one spared the interloper a second glance, assuming anyone with the money to operate such a vessel must be a fellow member of the elite. He finally spied what he wanted: a mooring with the tell-tail signs of long-term vacancy. Terson released the controls and unstrapped. “Take the wheel,” he told Bragg.  “Veer left at the buoy.”

“I can’t drive this thing!” Bragg exclaimed.

“You don’t have to—just steer.” Terson pulled a wiring harness from beneath his seat cushion and opened the access door beneath the control panel. “The impeller’s going to cut out for a second.” He flipped the bypass switch hidden in the mass of wires. The engine sputtered and died.

“What happened?” Bragg asked. “I’ve got all kinds of red lights up here!”

“I’m bypassing the GPST,” Terson explained. He disconnected the stock harness connections and attached the custom wiring in its place.

“You aren’t supposed to be able to do that!”

“Remind yourself of that when we get back.” The engine rumbled back to life.

“Damnit, Reilly, you know how much trouble you’ll get in if you get caught tampering with your transponder?”

“A little less than sneaking past the coastal boundary, I think.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot who I’m talking to,” Bragg sighed.

They cruised back to the take-off buoy. Once airborne they continued east, bearing northward as if flying a circuit around the islands. Terson stayed as far out to sea as he reasonably could without raising suspicion if a Coast Guard patrol happened by, waiting for the right moment to duck and run. It came as they traversed a twenty-kilometer gap between islands where no other transponders appeared on the scope.

Terson turned hard to port and dropped to within five meters of the surface where the craft rose and fell in concert with the swells beneath it. Skimming waves would not hide them if they crossed the path of the Coast Guard or EPEA, but it might make the difference if they skirted the outer range of its sensors.

Bragg took a second dose of motion sickness medication, but the anxiety of what they were attempting kept him alert and fidgeting. He started when the GPST sounded a warning to notify them as they approached the programmed limits of permitted travel. “You’re sure that jerry-rig of yours works, right?” Bragg asked. “The GPST isn’t transmitting our location?”

“It is transmitting our location,” Terson explained. “The transponder calculates it based on signals from the satellites and transmits it back. The wiring harness I put in has a module that locks the transmitted coordinates wherever I want them to be—in this case the mooring back at LaCrosse Island.”

“I see,” Bragg chuckled. “No matter where we go the satellite thinks we’re in the Archipelago.”

“You catch on fast.” Terson disconnected the speaker when they passed the point of amnesty and the GPST resorted to a constant, ear piercing alarm.

The sun was passing through the midpoint of its descent when the hydrojet landed just short of Bragg’s coordinates. The sky was cloudless still, no indication of inclement weather approaching. The boat rode the long, low swells comfortably, good news for Bragg and his sensitive stomach.

They pulled Bragg’s cases out of the storage compartments assembled the contraption on the hydrojet’s rear deck. It consisted mainly of tackle and a hydrodynamic sensor pod. “High resolution side-scan sonar,” Bragg said. “Tow it at about ten knots. It self-adjusts its depth to scan a wedge about fifty meters wide. The data gets processed here,” he patted a case, “and displays a topographical image of the seabed accurate to ten centimeters.” The second set of cases contained a tiny wireless submersible. “Once we find the wreckage we send this down for a better look.”

Terson programmed the hydrojet’s autopilot to sweep back and forth over a one hundred square kilometer area. Bragg hovered at the screen, intent on the map building slowly before his eyes, but Terson knew that the shuttle had disintegrated on impact, making it unlikely that they’d locate the primary debris field before dark. He set about preparing the boat for a night on the open sea. “Did you bring a gun?” he asked Bragg.

Bragg reached under his shirt and held up his automatic. “Of course.”

“Save it to use on yourself,” Terson said, holding out a speargun and a brace of bang-sticks. “These are tipped with twelve-gauge, single-aught shotgun shells.” He pointed to a pin at the base of the shell. “Pull the pin to arm; it only takes six pounds of pressure to trigger and goes off on impact, so don’t wave them around. Effective range is about ten meters under water.”

Bragg took the speargun and inspected it dubiously. “I’m not planning to get in the water.”

“You don’t necessarily have to be in the water to need one,” Terson informed him. “There are some big, curious fish out here that like to rub against things.”

“Big enough to threaten a boat?”

“I’ve seen a couple that big,” Terson confirmed. “I don’t want to take chances.”

The sun set before the sonar identified anything. Terson convinced Bragg to leave the monitor long enough to eat. Afterward they went back on deck and propped their feet on the gunnels, listening to the gentle lap of water against the hull while the vestiges of light faded over the horizon. The sea had gone unusually calm, and a glorious river of stars flowed across the cloudless night sky.

“I understand what draws you out here,” Bragg said. “I don’t ever remember seeing so many stars before. It’s like being in space.”

“This is better,” Terson replied. The field of vision in orbit was restricted by miniscule viewports, and any breeze strong enough to rustle a person’s hair meant a blown seal. Lying on your back under the stars was infinitely more pleasant than being in them.

“I’m surprised you’d say that,” Bragg said. “Every other space pilot I’ve ever talked to acted like grounding was worse than death.”

“Most space pilots don’t appreciate atmospheric flight,” Terson said. “Spaceflight is ninety-nine percent computer work. Spacecraft handle like pigs in the air; it’s not their element. Spaceflight isn’t flying at all—it’s falling. What an airplane does, that’s flying.”

“Then why did you get into it?”

“No demand for bush pilots here,” Terson explained. “Shuttle work was the next best thing.”

Bragg didn’t respond for several minutes, then: “Be careful, Reilly.”

“Of what?”

“When you go, just… be careful.”

“I never said I was going anywhere.”

“You didn’t have to. You’re more relaxed than I’ve ever seen you, like somebody who thinks he’s found a way out. That means either suicide or Beta continent and you’re not the suicidal type.”

“You going to stop me?”

“I might have tried once, but… no. Now I know what it’s like when who you are runs smack up against the system,” Bragg said. “I’m risking everything I’ve worked for to prove a point, but even if I find what I think I will it might not be enough to make the system do its job. I’ll have to suffer the consequences of standing on my principles or say nothing. If I say nothing, it means my principles aren’t really worth standing on and once that happens I contribute to the failure of the system.”

“You don’t have to participate in a system you don’t agree with,” Terson pointed out.

“No, but I sure can’t run off into the woods and as for resigning…I don’t know if I can live under a system I don’t trust.”

“Sounds like you’ve rationalized yourself out of options,” Terson said. “You’d better hope we don’t find anything.” He decided to give it a rest when Bragg didn’t reply. “I’ll take first watch. The couch in the main cabin folds down into a bed.”

Bragg declined the offer. “You go ahead. I won’t sleep anyway.”

“You’re call. Wake me up when you get tired.” Terson used the head and rolled into bed where he lay watching the stars bob up and down through the porthole at his feet.

The cloud of misfortune surrounding him since the day of his birth had overtaken his parents, his sister, Jack Tham, then Virene and now it seemed Bragg was in danger as well. A few years earlier the officer wouldn’t have been caught dead violating the law. His contact with Terson had shifted his paradigms enough to make him susceptible to a truth that, once revealed, would not allow him to return to his comfortable world of black and white. Terson was a carrier, immune to the deadly effects of the disease, but unable to keep others at a safe distance.

Bragg stared at the sonar until his eyes stung and uncontrollable yawns wracked his frame. The image grew at a glacial pace. A rough calculation told him it would take slightly over a week to scan the entire one hundred square kilometer area. A week! He’d only allotted his hastily conceived plan a few days including exploration of the wreckage.

Had he really believed that it would be as easy as dropping the device in the water and trolling around for a couple of hours? He must have, or he wouldn’t have jeopardized his career with a deception as transparent as lying to the property manager when he signed out the equipment. It wasn’t as if he could avoid getting caught. The probable loss of his job over a misappropriation was an irony too painful to contemplate.

Bragg turned away from the screen to rest his eyes. Artificial light on the otherwise dark sea was sure to draw the attention of any EPEA craft that happened by; consequently Reilly had extinguished the boat’s running lights well before dusk. The deck’s features aft of the sonar’s control head emerged from the darkness as Bragg’s eyes slowly adjusted to the ghostly illumination cast by the display. He stood, stretched and ambled over to lean on the rail overlooking the boat’s dive platform. A plume of subsurface bioluminescence rippled in the wake of the impeller jet as thousands of tiny organisms protested the disturbance.

Reilly had been completely correct in his assertion that Bragg’s campaign was driven by an unreasonable obsession. Maybe, if he referred himself the moment he returned to Saint Anatone, the Department would chalk it up to post-traumatic stress and show a compassionate degree of lenience.

Above all, he shouldn’t have placed Terson Reilly in a position to share the consequences of his misdeeds. The kid had problems of his own whether he admitted it or not and it wasn’t Bragg’s place to goad him out of the denial he used to insulate himself from his wife’s murder. He would let Reilly sleep through the night, he decided, call a halt to the search in the morning and return to Saint Anatone to face Colonel Cai’s displeasure.

A brighter patch of luminescence flashed near the surface to his left. It was gone before his head completed its turn in that direction, but another appeared closer to the boat, a long streak that intersected the impeller plume. Dozens more sprang up around the boat, twisting and spinning as a school of larger creatures fed on the zooplankton, eliciting the only reaction the tiny creatures were capable of.

Bragg patched together an image of the attackers in his mind’s eye from partial glimpses in the flashbulb-like pop as they struck the shoal: flat, ribbon-like bodies with a bulge in the center and clusters of tentacles fore and aft. They ranged in size from the length of his forearm to nearly two meters.

The feeding ended abruptly. The predatory ribbons vanished as swiftly as they arrived and the shoal of zooplankton quieted. Bragg waited a few minutes to see if the show resumed before turning back to the sonar. It was then that he discovered the reason for the predator’s rapid departure.

A patch of luminescence slid through the darkness thirty or forty meters off the hydrojet’s bow as something passed by at or just below the surface of the water. It was large enough to generate ripples that splashed against the boat a few moments later. Thoughts of sea monsters filled his mind; he wondered how Reilly’s bang sticks could possibly dissuade a creature of that size from doing whatever it pleased.

Bragg belatedly recalled the binoculars Reilly kept in the cockpit and made his way to them as quietly as he could to avoid piquing the behemoth’s curiosity any further. It was already sliding beneath the water by the time Bragg brought them to bear. The only thing he glimpsed before it vanished reminded him of a mollusk’s eyestalk, only a thousand times larger.

He considered waking Reilly as he patrolled the deck, peering into the darkness, but whatever it was seemed to have satisfied itself that the boat wasn’t worth investigating any further and departed. Bragg returned to his vigil at the sonar screen.

The first piece of wreckage appeared just as daylight touched the eastern horizon.

Beta Continent: 2709:08:23 Standard

Hal sighed contentedly as Dayuki’s hands worked at his back. She insisted on opening each day with the administration of a therapeutic massage and often closed with one as well. Hal resisted the ritual at first, citing a lack of his most critical resource—time—but she firmly overrode him with the assertion that her ministrations would, in fact, save triple the amount of time spent undergoing them through increased stamina, productivity and general well-being.

Hal wasn’t convinced yet, but the pain and stiffness in his back had subsided to a shadow of what they had been and his sciatica hadn’t relapsed since the night Derner died. That relief alone made it worth the effort, considering everything else he had on his mind.

Hal had pointedly neglected to explain the Onjin’s sudden lack of interest in the missing Tiger Opal and its accompanying technical data. Den Tun’s mystification was satisfying for a while but it hadn’t taken the old man long to figure out the game had somehow changed. Whereas the raw materials necessary to catch up on production had come in punctually after their agreement, the Minzoku now routinely contacted him with requests for parts or equipment to “repair” breakdowns and end work stoppages. Hal filled most of the requests from the Fort’s boneyard, old technology generations ahead of what the Family had allowed in the past, but more and more Den Tun insisted it was not sufficiently modern to meet the need.

Hal fell to playing Den Tun and the Chairman off one another to convince the Minzoku that the Family simply wouldn’t allow such disbursements while assuring the Chairman that the Minzoku would certainly cut off desperately needed materials if Hal didn’t give the appearance of cooperation.

The door buzzer intruded on his thoughts and Dayuki left him to check the monitor. “It is Lady Cirilo,” the Minzoku girl reported.

Hal pulled on his trousers and turned on the speaker. “What can I do for you, Tammy?”

“Den Tun is asking to speak with you, Hal. He says it’s urgent.”

“Of course it is,” Hal sighed. “We’ll be right there.” Worthless old fart! What would he attempt to extort from them now? “Weren’t you on duty last night?”

“Yes, I was just getting off when he called.”

“You should have let McKeon get me.”

“He was going to. I need to talk to you about something else. A personal matter.”

“Now?”

“If it’s convenient.” She and Sergio had been understandably cold and distant since the encounter in their apartment. Perhaps Tamara had decided to let it go. Dayuki offered Tamara a polite bow and drifted toward her room when the Onjin woman entered. “Would you stay, Lieutenant Dayuki?” Tamara asked. “This concerns you as much as Hal.” Dayuki returned to Hal’s side, her face suddenly as inscrutable as Den Tun’s.

“I owe you an apology,” Tamara said to Hal. “I should not have passed personal details to the Old Lady. Rest assured that it won’t happen again. If I learn of anything that concerns me I’ll discuss it with you directly. My apology extends to you, too, Dayuki.”

Dayuki bowed again. “My Lady need not apologize,” she said.

“Thank you, Lieutenant, you’re very gracious. I’ll see you both at the command post.” She departed with a friendly smile, which merely kindled an uneasy wariness within Hal.

“Did anything about that strike you as strange?” he asked Dayuki.

“Lady Cirilo was quite courteous.”

“That’s what I mean.” He thought he’d witnessed every facet she possessed over the years, from seductive scheming and icy disdain to blistering rage, but he could not recall a single occasion in which she offered an apology with any semblance of sincerity.

Dayuki accompanied Hal-san to the command post. He insisted on her presence during any direct communication with the Minzoku, but despite Den Tun’s outward indifference to his former protégé the old man grew especially evasive if he spied her and was not as apt to betray some nuance she could decipher for Hal-san. McKeon, therefore, provided a small video-equipped conference room where she could ensconce herself to observe the exchanges.

Dayuki went straight to her post while Hal-san conversed with his staff. Lady Cirilo fell in next to her. “We need to talk,” the Onjin woman said. “In private.”

Dayuki stepped aside when she reached the door. “Please,” she gestured to Lady Cirilo politely, “precede me.”

Tamara hesitated uncertainly for a moment, and then shrugged. “I guess I deserved that.” She went inside and waited for Dayuki to shut the door before she spoke again: “Thank you for not telling Hal about our encounter.”

“I did not remain silent for your sake,” Dayuki said. “Hal-san might have reacted rashly if he learned of it.”

“Yes,” Cirilo smiled. “I’ve been on the receiving end of his temper. It wasn’t pleasant.”

“Is this what you wished to discuss?”

“No. You need to understand that I have plans for Hal; nothing that’s happened has changed that. But if I get what I want I will not interfere with whatever relationship the two of you choose to pursue. You won’t lose your access when I marry him.”

Dayuki regarded the Onjin woman sternly. “If you intend to persuade me to help you, I will not. Hal-san does not desire a union with you.”

“I know,” Cirilo conceded. “But that could change, and I’m not asking you to help. I’m asking you not to interfere.”

“Then we have an understanding,” Dayuki said.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

Dayuki’s monitors flickered to life.

The connection caught Den Tun in conversation with someone outside the camera’s range. “How may I help you?” Hal asked casually.

“A gaijin vessel arrived at the crash site sometime last night,” he replied. “Your instructions in this event were clear, but I must ask if they remain valid.”

“What is the nature of the gaijin vessel?”

“We have video; a moment…” The screen split abruptly, showing the view as seen by a submarine’s periscope. The boat lacked official markings. The two bare-chested occupants standing in the rear appeared to be deep-sea fishing with heavy deck-mounted tackle. The camera zoomed in on the men a few seconds later.

McKeon leaned close to his ear, lowering his voice so Den Tun could not hear. “That’s Terson Reilly. The other man is a Federal Police investigator.”

That kid shows up in the damnedest places. Hal again regretted not having the foresight to extend an offer of employment to the man to begin with. “Nothing has changed,” Hal said. “Feel free to add the boat to your collection.”

“As attractive a prize as it is, I regret we cannot,” Den Tun apologized. “Our vessel is little more than a reconnaissance boat, without effective weapons or a crew large enough to conduct a boarding.”

“Then what good is it?” Hal demanded.

Den Tun ducked his head. “It seemed your priorities no longer warranted the resources of an armed vessel. I will correct the situation immediately.”

“That will take too long,” Hal snapped. “Keep us apprised of the gaijin’s position until we can handle it!”

“As you wish.”

McKeon stepped up again as soon as the screen blanked. “No federal cop would violate environmental boundaries without a damn good reason.”

“I agree,” Hal said. “Call in whatever favors you need to take care of the problem once and or all.”

The Minister of Navy spun on Den Tun in disbelief. “Your pardon, Honored One, but my crew could overwhelm that small boat in moments!”

Den Tun cut off the officer’s protest with a sharp gesture. “The Onjin hireling recognized them. Track their movements, and let us see just how significant these two gaijin are.”

SIXTEEN

Humboldt Archipelago: 2709:08:23 Standard

The Message Alert beat at Lieutenant Samuel Ramos’s ears like a metronome, dragging him from a deep, satisfying sleep that he wouldn’t recapture later no matter how hard he tried. He flailed in the darkness, striking repeatedly at his alarm clock until, stirred as much by frustration as the noise, he realized what was happening and turned on the light. The console next to his bunk continued its summons until he keyed in his password and silenced the infernal racket.

The Comsec officer enjoyed a number of perks due to the nature of his work—the cramped but private berth, for example—but he was perpetually on call.

Ramos dressed while the cryptography gear verified his key and decoded the message. The printer spat out a single sheet of paper. A second sheet emerged as he was slipping the first into an unmarked pouch. His pulse quickened at the sight of the garbled jumble of characters. Ramos stuffed the second sheet into his pocket and hurried to the bridge. “Message for the Captain!”

The Coast Guard vessel’s commanding officer accepted the pouch and read the terse message with a sigh. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a boundary runner, ladies and gentlemen. Helm, come about to course two-eight-seven, full speed ahead.” He handed the pouch back to Ramos. “Thank you, Lieutenant, that will be all.”

Ramos saluted sharply and headed below deck but not to bed, as his Captain assumed.

Nivia’s Secret Service inducted its members from all agencies and it was no mistake that every vessel, even the lumbering harvesters, carried a handful of agents. An instructor who turned out to be a high-ranking member himself had recruited Ramos at the beginning of his career in the Coast Guard.

Ramos knew from the start that his assignment in the Guard would be based solely on his temperament and abilities despite his SS membership. Even so it was with some disappointment that he found himself junior officer on a ship in the Search and Rescue branch, destined to spend his days on a milk run in the Humboldt Archipelago rescuing weekend boaters from their own stupidity, rather than a combat vessel.

Nevertheless, he performed his duties with the same pride and fervor that caught the attention of his instructor, content in the knowledge that as he advanced in the ranks of the Guard, so would he advance in the SS, which had levels of power and secrecy within itself extending beyond that of Nivia’s Governing Council. The Captain recognized and rewarded his excellent performance with rapid promotion and added responsibilities that placed him in a position to be called upon by the SS on two previous occasions.

Back in his quarters, Ramos flattened the second sheet on his desk and closed his eyes, reciting the complicated mnemonic phrase that helped him recall the proper algorithm for the month and day. He painstakingly decoded the message by hand through three layers of encryption, reducing the page of characters to a single sentence: Neutralize occupants with extreme prejudice.

He put both messages and the paper he’d used to decode into the shredder, where they were ground to dust and vented into the wind.

Terson woke with sunlight streaming into his face from the porthole at his feet. He held up a hand to shield his eyes as he sat up, slow to remember where he was and why, while his sleep-addled mind sorted through the discrepancies between what it found and what it expected to find. Concern gripped him, increasing by the moment as his mental processors defined the problem.

It was daylight and Bragg hadn’t passed on the watch.

Terson kicked off the thin blanket and stumbled across the main cabin to the stairs. Bragg might have simply fallen asleep, but it was equally likely that the land-lubbing police officer had gone overboard while pissing off the back of the boat.

Bragg looked up from his equipment as Terson emerged on the deck. His eyes were tired and red-tinged from hours staring at the screen. “You’re up,” he noted unnecessarily. “Have you got some coffee?”

“Cabinet above the stove,” Terson told him. “You didn’t wake me.”

“It didn’t seem fair; it’s my boondoggle,” Bragg shrugged as he stood. A huge yawn overtook him, and he shook his head to clear it. “Not a great idea, in hindsight. However,” he tapped the screen with a triumphant smile, “we started picking up wreckage a couple of hours ago. Looks like the debris field is only a couple of kilometers long.”

“I’ll tighten up the grid,” Terson told him. He used the head first and snagged a cup of coffee from Bragg as he passed back through the cabin on the way to the cockpit to reprogram the autopilot. “Anything happen last night?”

“Something swam by,” Bragg said. “Something big. I don’t think your little spear guns would have done much.”

“That’s why you have a handgun,” Terson reminded him.

They sat on deck eating space rations, squeezing the contents of foil packages into their mouths while the boat followed its truncated circuit. The debris field was nearly half a kilometer wide. The sun beat down on the boat relentlessly by the time Terson and Bragg were satisfied that they’d located the bulk of it. Despite the sonar’s tight resolution, the wreckage was difficult to identify as the remains of a man-made object. If not for the pod’s accompanying magnetometer and the occasional square-angled shipping container, it could easily be overlooked as a rocky anomaly in the otherwise smooth seabed.

They stripped off their shirts and hauled up the sonar pod. Terson brought the hydrojet back around and parked it above a cluster of containers. The sound of the boat’s impellers oscillated as they vectored thrust to maintain position against the steady push of current and wind.

The tiny submersible weighed considerably more than the sonar and required additional tackle for the umbilical that provided its power and communications. The sea floor lay only ten meters short of the line’s maximum length, restricting the submersible’s field of operation at the site. Bragg and Terson eased the device into the water and ran it through its paces on the surface before allowing it to begin a slow fall into the depths.

Bragg donned the control interface, a set of goggles calibrated to synchronize the movement of his head with the view of the cameras positioned around the submersible’s hull. The little craft’s accompanying processor at the surface converted the video into a time-lagged three-dimensional scene through which another observer could move independent of the pilot.

The water cleared as the light from the sun faded and the submersible passed below the threshold at which efficient photosynthesis occurred. The craft’s powerful lights stabbed into the darkness, illuminating small creatures that subsisted on the bits of organic matter falling from the lighted world above. The seabed appeared at last, a remarkably smooth, desolate landscape of muddy sediment.

Bragg maneuvered toward the nearest debris, guided by the sonar map. The impact had shredded the shuttle’s hull to the degree that it was nearly impossible to identify as having come from a spacecraft. Terson spotted a few structures and components he recognized, but most of the wreckage was impossible to place as to what part of the shuttle they were looking at. Much of it had already become home to bottom dwellers that vanished to safety within the tangle at the submersible’s approach.

The first shipping container in the cluster appeared out of the gloom. The force of its impact staved in the doors on the end, hydrostatic pressure ballooning its sides as it tried to plow through the water just short of orbital velocity. The contents were crushed against the rear in a solid, intermingled mass as if compressed by a hydraulic ram.

Nearby lay a mass of cargo compressed and extruded in a neat rectangular plug when the rear wall of its container failed under similar circumstances. The next container appeared to have survived intact, but succumbed to pressure and imploded during its descent. The rest of the cluster told a similar story. None of the visible cargo survived in a recognizable form.

“This isn’t right,” Terson said, rotating the virtual view in the screen before him. “These containers should be spread out like the shuttle remains, not gathered together in piles.”

“I agree,” Bragg said. He swept one of the submersible’s lights back and forth across a furrow in the mud leading to one of the containers. “What does this look like to you?”

“Drag marks,” Terson replied. On closer inspection they discovered that nearly every container in the cluster lay at the end of a shallow furrow, proving that they’d been separated from the rest of the wreckage and intentionally concentrated in one area before being abandoned.

Terson adjusted the hydrojet’s autopilot to transect the debris field in a slow, controlled drift.

They found dozens of furrows with no sign of the objects that created them. Numerous indentations in the soft sediment remained where objects had been yanked free.

A detail at the edge of the screen caught his attention. “Pan back to the left,” he told Bragg. “You see that?”

“That fish? What about it?”

“It’s dead,” Terson told him, “and it’s not the only one.” Scores of sea creatures lay about, all dead. Bragg turned the submersible to follow the trail of carcasses. A few minutes later an eel-like creature appeared, writhing in agony. Nearby lay a large dented canister bearing chemical hazard warnings. A reddish tincture oozed from around the lid’s seam and quickly dissipated in the water. Unfortunately for the nearby wildlife, dissolution did not reduce its potency.

“Toxic waste,” Bragg said. “There’s another one.” In all nearly fifty containers littered the muddy bottom suffering various degrees of damage. Obviously the shuttle’s valuable cargo had been salvaged. What remained did nothing to confirm or refute Bragg’s suspicions—or so it seemed.

“Looks like somebody beat you to it,” Terson said.

“I can guess who,” the police officer said grimly. “No one would go to the trouble of salvaging the cargo if there was nothing to hide.” It didn’t seem to occur to him that the same cargo constituted a windfall of material wealth to the outlaws reputed to lurk beyond the pale of Nivian law and order.

“This might be a case of legitimate salvage,” Terson offered. “Sun Cargo or the consignors would want their property back.”

“The loads are insured,” Bragg said.

“There you go,” Terson replied. “The insurance company recovered what it could to offset the loss.”

“The loads are insured,” Bragg explained irritably, “because the physical and financial risks of salvage this far from the coast are prohibitive. The only entity legally authorized to perform a recovery in this instance is the EPEA and they certainly wouldn’t have left toxic materials behind.”

“You did what you could,” Terson said. “It’s not your fault it didn’t pan out.”

“I know that,” Bragg sighed, “but that doesn’t make it any easier. Let’s pack it in.”

The sun was well past its zenith by the time they recovered, packed and stowed the equipment. Bragg slowed the process with the fumbling and mild confusion resulting from nearly forty hours of sleep deprivation. Terson converted the couch in the main cabin into a bed and Bragg was sound asleep seconds after he hit the mattress.

Terson secured the deck for flight and turned the boat’s nose toward the Archipelago. Instead of taking off, however, he ran on the surface for a while with the canopy rolled back to let in the moist salty air.

Bragg seemed to resign himself to the likelihood that he’d never know the answers to his many questions, but fatigue had a way of diverting attention from even the most pressing issues. Terson prayed that the man’s tenacity wouldn’t reassert itself once he was rested. The portal leading back to his simple, secure life was still open; all Maalan Bragg had to do was step through, close it behind him and forget about Terson and Virene Reilly.

One of the problems with being a cop, though, was the way it altered perceptions, defaulting to suspicion so that the slightest coincidence suggested conspiracy and any argument to the contrary, deception. With the exception of fellow police officers, everyone—friends, family, spouse—became potential suspects made to account for every innocent, incongruous act and comment. Terson observed the phenomenon in career officers during his short tour with the Colonial Police and it was the rare individual who escaped its consequences.

Many times the most unlikely string or combination of coincidences was exactly that and the connections existed only in the mind of the observer. A shuttle crashed. A rich, spoiled young man vandalized Malone property. Hooligans assaulted and killed a young woman motivated by greed. Bragg’s conspiracy could not stand on its own without the single unifying detail—Terson and Virene. Bragg would get more benefit using them as a case study to educate other immigrants why it was dangerous to exhibit the same flagrant disregard of Nivian values as the hapless couple had.

Guilt stabbed Terson under the ribs with such ferocity that he flinched.

Ultimately no matter who did the deed or the degree that Virene willingly participated, her death was Terson’s responsibility. He was the one who led her beyond the pale of her society, made her the target of criminals who correctly assumed that the bauble she wore was poached, he who didn’t protect her when she needed him most.

Terson slammed the back of his head against the headrest over and over; his jaws clenched against the despairing pain of what he’d done to the only human being who had ever honestly loved him. The pain didn’t abate—wouldn’t, couldn’t cease as long as he drew breath. He heaved himself out of the seat and lunged toward the back of the cockpit, stumbled down the narrow access to the main cabin.

He pulled a bang stick out of the gun locker, sending the rest tumbling to the floor with a clatter, scattering at his feet as he turned, pulling the pin. He clutched the shaft in both fists just under the shell. The bright red dot on the tip glowed in his eyes like a beacon in the dark, leading him toward the only peace he’d ever find. A solid tap against his forehead would end the pain.

Bragg hoisted himself up on one elbow, eyes bloodshot and bleary. “Whasrong?”

The fire in Terson’s mind vanished as if doused by a bucket of cold water. He looked from the tip of the shell to Bragg. “What?” he panted.

“Wharyou doin?”

“I—nothing,” Terson stammered. Bragg harrumphed and rolled onto his side, his breathing falling instantly back into the rhythm of sleep.

Terson began to shake with the realization of what he’d been about to do. Never in his life had he ever seriously contemplated suicide, much less acted on the thought. The most frightening thing was how fast the impulse came over him and how little thought accompanied it. For the space of thirty seconds self-murder seemed like a perfectly reasonable method to end the excruciating emotional pain.

His unsteady fingers managed to replace the stick’s safety pin, then gather the rest and return them to the locker. Despite the noise, Bragg didn’t stir again, leaving Terson to wonder what had roused him the first time. He didn’t dwell on it too long, though, because he had a more pressing thought: where had the mindless anguish gone and what would he do if it returned?

He banished the thought; his task now was to get Bragg back to the mainland before the pilot-captain of his boat went suicidally berserk again, stranding him beyond the legal coastal boundaries on a craft he had little hope of operating on his own.

Terson took off with significantly more consideration for his passenger than when they departed Saint Anatone a day earlier. A check of the time and a mental calculation made him adjust course as the sun fell closer to the horizon. They wouldn’t reach the Archipelago until after dark, when the coastal patrols increased their vigilance to intercept poachers. There was only one place that he and Bragg could wait out the night safely.

They arrived at the island two and a half hours later. Bragg was splayed out on his back on the couch, snoring like a chain saw when Terson padded through to collect his rifle from the gun locker. He was more than happy to let the officer sleep; he wasn’t in the mood to give a tour and the mere possibility of a stranger’s feet tracking across his beach tempted him to head for the Archipelago anyway.

If he got up early and headed out again before Bragg woke in the morning the officer would never even know he’d been there. Satisfied that his sanctuary would remain unsullied, he slung his rifle across his back and went ashore.

Nature had reclaimed the beach in his absence. A thick berm of tangled seaweed and driftwood stretched along the high tide mark like a torpid serpent; dead, matted foliage carpeted the sand. Fresh shoots had overgrown the campsite. A forlorn aluminum pole covered with creepers jutted up from the collapsed tent.

The corrupt stench of mildew rose from the damp bedding inside when he pulled it out of the undergrowth, sending sand runners scuttling away. The sight of scavengers crawling from where he and Virene had once made love so passionately sent tremors of revulsion through his limbs. Terson backed away and sat down hard, resting his head in his arms until the fit passed.

Bragg’s presence was nothing compared to the blow he’d just experienced. Of all the places he might have expected a reminder of his failure to protect his wife, this was the very last. The island was his, damn it!  If keeping it meant eradicating every reminder of Virene then so be it!

He got out the rake and pitchfork and scoured the beach, each furious sweep of his arms slinging refuse across the sand, mind vacant of everything but the beach, the rake, and the arms wielding the rake. A pile of flotsam grew next to the campsite. When the last leaf was swept from the sand he lit the pile on fire, dragged out the ruined tent and threw it on top with all it contained.

Smoke rose skyward over the lagoon in swirling, amorphous tendrils. The heat baked his skin dry and tight. Flames leapt free and danced like red, windblown hair before vanishing into the smoke.

Terson knew he was a fool.

He could not erase her from this place. Every touch, every word, all that he’d shared with her had blended with the aura of the ground, trees and air. His shameful, selfish attempt to wipe away the memory of their time together made him no better than the members of her dysfunctional family.

Virene deserved better than that. She deserved a husband willing to fight for her, but the one she got gave her up in favor of drunken self-pity. He’d never even visited her grave. Terson sat by the fire and closed his burning eyes, squeezing his lids tight, unable to stem the flow of tears down his face.

Lieutenant Ramos arrived at the Coast Guard cruiser’s forward observation platform and returned the lookout’s salute sharply. “What have you got, sailor?”

The lookout motioned to his Big Eye. “Have a look, sir, bearing one-one-five.”

Ramos put his eye to the huge scope. Even at maximum magnification it was hard to see the smudge as the horizon moved with the ship’s bobbing. “A cloud,” he guessed.

“Possibly,” the sailor said, “but there is a hint of pluming, and the color isn’t right. I want to call it smoke, but not bad enough to tell the Captain without verification.”

“Have we passed the NPA?” Ramos asked.

“Not yet,” the sailor told him. “Should be within the next few minutes.”

The NPA, or Nearest Point of Approach, was the closest distance a moving vessel came to a stationary point on a parallel course. Not that it did much good if that point was over the horizon, Ramos reflected, which was no doubt why the lookout wanted an officer to make this particular call.

Radar had sighted the craft briefly, heading southeast from the location specified in the message earlier. It quickly outdistanced the cruiser and the Captain ordered his ship to follow along the last known course. Diverting to chase atmospheric phenomenon would eliminate the already infinitesimal chance of sighting it again.

The tip of an island rose above the horizon as the minutes ticked by, one of hundreds of such uncharted minor landmasses sprinkled off the continent’s coast. Ramos snatched the intercom microphone. “Lookout to bridge, land ho! Smoke bearing one-one-five!” He turned to the lookout and gave credit where it was due. “Good eye, mister.”

Terson left the fire to its work and wandered across the island, following the neglected trails that he’d blazed in the months before Virene came into his life. The paths leading to their favorite spots were still discernable as such, but he avoided them whenever possible, preferring to rediscover older routes leading to places that, in many instances, she’d never visited.

One such was the summit of the larger volcano, a steep, arduous climb even for him. It was nothing but bare rock and scrubby growth, the only feature of note besides the view was a smelly, stagnant pond in the remains of the crater. He made the ascent more swiftly than any native Nivian was capable of, but the burn in his legs proved how much strength he’d lost to the lower gravity. The human body managed its resources jealously and considered the atrophy of underused musculature a fair trade for calories.

He sat down on the lip of the crater and took a long draught from his canteen. He couldn’t blame the stabbing pain under his ribs on the tough climb. It was the same one he felt when he came out of his paralysis on Algran Asta and realized that Mama and Papa weren’t coming for him.

Terson pushed that thought away before it dragged him into another spiral of grief and self-pity over the long list of people he’d lost. Thought itself was the enemy at the moment, the process that dredged up memories of unpleasant events for reanalysis which invariably uncovered his mistakes and shortcomings. He closed his eyes and cleared his mind, pinching out any spark of complex reasoning, reducing his consciousness to the moment.

Nothing in the past mattered; nothing in the future could be foreseen.

At this moment the sun was bright and hot. At this moment the dry smell of hot basalt filled his nostrils. Somewhere nearby rock expanded minutely, just enough to dislodge a few pebbles from their centuries old resting place. They dislodged a few more in their tumble and stabilized again mere centimeters from where they’d begun, where they might lie for another day, or week, or century, before continuing on their journey to the bottom of the crater.

A mere flick of his wrist would shorten their journey by thousands of years if he chose to intercede on their behalf, let human caprice interfere with the geologic progression that would eventually carry them down to the sea to be ground into sand, deposited on the seafloor, and, someday, thrust skyward again as sedimentary strata in the side of a mountain.

At this moment, over these pebbles, Terson had the power of a god.

A faint, rhythmic beat broke the threshold of conscious perception, intruding on his meditation and reminding him that, in the real world, he had power over very little. He crouched in the shadow of an outcropping and shaded the lenses of his binoculars with his hand, scanning the horizon until he spotted the profile of a ship.  A helicopter flew a straight course toward the island as a second lifted from the ship’s deck to follow.

He made out Coast Guard markings on the side of the lead aircraft, a common model used for search and rescue, a huge, lumbering airframe with a belly formed like a boat hull for water landing. Not particularly fast, but powerful enough to maintain stability in weather that would knock other aircraft out of the sky.

The pressing question was what stirred their interest in the island? One by one, Terson trained his binoculars on the handful of places that a boat or raft could reach shore on the chance that his island had become the refuge of castaways of some sort or another.

He found nothing indicating the presence of other humans, but something else caught his attention as he panned past the lagoon where the hydrojet was tied up: a thin wisp of smoke rising from the embers of the bonfire. Terson hung his head with a groan. Whatever the Coast Guard’s purpose in the area, smoke was one thing they were certain to investigate.

The helicopter broke to the south and slowed as it reached shore. Terson stood to keep it in sight as it settled to the coarse pebble beach. Three armed figures in khaki fatigues leapt out and ran into the jungle.

Terson crouched behind a rock, heart thudding. This was no search and rescue team! The helicopter continued around the southern tip, then north along the windward side of the island, vanishing briefly behind the smaller volcanic cone. It made four more three-man troop drops and headed back toward the ship, passing the on-coming helicopter half way.

The second aircraft resembled the first in every detail but sported a gun pod in the nose and rocket tubes under its belly. It skirted the southern side of the lagoon and banked hard to the north, slowing to a hover at treetop level.

The blades beat the air like thunderclaps, but Bragg had yet to appear from inside the boat. Terson slapped the ground futility. “Wake up, you idiot!” The police officer’s civilized senses didn’t equate the sound with danger. If he woke he was more likely to offer refreshments than high tail it into the brush.

A dozen figures rappelled to the beach. Half formed a perimeter; the rest stormed the hydrojet while the gunship circled overhead. Terson waited breathlessly for the pop of gunfire that never came. After a few minutes most of the squad sauntered back to the beach where an officer or platoon sergeant divided them into three-man teams and sent them into the jungle.

The commander and two others re-boarded Terson’s boat and threw the lines into the water before vanishing inside. The hydrojet backed up in a clumsy turn and crept inexpertly through the channel toward the reef. They ventured into water so shallow Terson could almost feel the bottom scrape as they probed the treacherous coral again and again, coming ridiculously close to escape several times before being cut off, but there was only one way out and they would not find it by accident.

A glimmer of hope lifted Terson’s spirits when they gave up and anchored. He wasn’t insane enough to leap into the water from the cliffs, but there was another option if he could get off the peak while the helicopter was occupied with the shoreline.

Terson rolled in the stinking pool at the bottom of the crater, covering himself in black mud from head to toe. When the aircraft started around the windward side of the island Terson headed down the peak’s opposite slope. He leapt from rock to rock with every ounce of strength he possessed and made the tree line just as the aircraft reappeared.

He paused in the shade for a few minutes to catch his breath, and then crept into the jungle.

SEVENTEEN

West of the Humboldt Archipelago: 2709:08:24 Standard

Maalan Bragg awoke to the sound of feet pounding across the deck over his head and thudding down the steps. He sat up groggily as armed men exploded into the cabin. One of them thumped him in the forehead with the butt of a sub-machinegun before he comprehended that they were after him.

The blow flattened him again, and a crush of bodies pinned him to the bed while stars spun in his eyes. Hands stripped him of his pistol as they flipped him over and clamped manacles around his wrists. They unceremoniously dumped him on the floor to frisk the bedding for weapons, ignoring him as they proceeded to search the rest of the boat.

Maalan took advantage of the reprieve to gather his wits. He rolled onto his side and bent his knees slightly to relieve the pressure on his chest. All he could see of his assailants as they tromped back and forth through the cabin were black combat boots and khaki trousers. He also spied a single bangstick under the bench seat against the wall opposite the bed as the stars faded from his eyes. Whoever these people were, they’d failed to isolate their prisoner from his surroundings, a departure from standard procedure that could prove fatal to either party.

He made out a cliff and trees through the porthole across from where he lay, suggesting that he’d been asleep a lot longer than he thought and that Reilly had brought them back to the Archipelago. Obviously they’d been spotted, which suggested that it was the Coast Guard ransacking the boat. His theory proved accurate several minutes later when a young seaman entered the cabin to stand guard.

He shifted his weapon nervously when he noticed Bragg watching him. “Careful with that thing, son,” Bragg said as calmly as he could manage.

“Be quiet!”

“You’re Coast Guard, right?”

The kid’s eyes flitted around the room. “Stop talking!” he hissed.

“Okay, relax.” He lay back and tried to ignore the throb in his head. Where the hell is Reilly? Bragg could see the empty pilot’s seat in the cockpit from where he lay. He hadn’t heard any shots and he didn’t believe Terson Reilly could be physically restrained without a great deal of commotion. The lack of both strongly suggested that he was gone when the Coasties arrived or slipped away as they approached.

The men searching the boat were taking no chances, assuming that they’d come to the same conclusion Bragg had. The frenetic pace of the initial sweep gave way to a more deliberate investigation as they opened access hatches and rummaged through the boat’s utility lockers.

Finally, the majority filed ashore and two men—one officer, the other a senior enlisted—climbed into the cockpit. The hydrojet’s engine turned over and the impellers whined as it began to move. Ominous bangs and scrapes from beneath the boat and cursing from the Coasties filled the next forty-five minutes. Eventually the boat stopped and the engine died.

The two men in the cockpit, a chief petty officer and a lieutenant, descended into the main cabin. The officer sent the seaman out to set the anchor and eyed Bragg coldly. “Sit him up.”

The petty officer lifted him by his arms and pushed him into a seat. The manacles bit into swollen wrists and Bragg squirmed to relieve them of the added weight. “I’m a Federal Police officer,” he informed them, intending to establish his official status as quickly as possible.

“We found your identification,” the officer said. “However, a poacher is a poacher. Your occupation does not mitigate that.”

“We aren’t poaching!” Bragg snapped.

“We haven’t found any contraband—yet,” the man acknowledged, “but you’ll admit your presence here constitutes an embarrassing impropriety, at the very least.” Bragg declined the bait and did nothing of the sort. Personal experience had taught him that most people interrogated by law enforcement personnel were exquisitely uncomfortable with silence and tended to fill it with incriminating chatter when offered the opportunity. He couldn’t afford to let himself fall into the mindset of a perp—to the contrary, the course out of his predicament lay in accentuating his identity as a law enforcement officer.

“If you have done nothing wrong,” the Coastie officer continued after the protracted silence, “you will not object to answering a few questions.”

“All you have to do is ask,” Bragg smiled with as much sincerity as he could muster.

“How many others are with you?”

“One.”

“His name?”

“Terson Reilly,” Bragg said. The officer nodded, though he wrote none of it down. As a matter of fact, Bragg realized, he didn’t even have anything to take notes with.

“And what is your relationship?”

“I’m his probation officer.”

“I…see. And where is he now?”

Bragg inclined his head toward land. “I’ve been asleep for a while,” he said, “but I assume he’s ashore running some errands.” That drew an amused chuckle from the petty officer and an irritated scowl from the lieutenant. It all came together as Bragg looked closer at the shoreline and surrounding water, both vacant. Reilly had stopped at his island instead of returning to the resort.

The situation was considerably more serious and complicated than Maalan had believed. Legal constraints were different for a red-handed travel violation as opposed to investigation of an alleged misdeed after the fact. The Coast Guard was legally within its right to use deadly force to apprehend suspects in these circumstances and Reilly, being who he was, wasn’t likely to surrender. Bragg doubted that he’d seek a confrontation, but if the Coasties cornered him the kid would cut a bloody swath through them to escape if he had to. “You won’t find him,” Bragg added quickly. “He knows this place too well.”

“He would do well to come forward.”

“He doesn’t trust you, but he’ll listen to me. Pull your men out and put me ashore.”

“So you can vanish as thoroughly as you claim he can?” the officer smiled slyly. “I don’t think so. It’s a small island and we have plenty of time.”

Like the Marines on Algran Asta, the sailors were inept woodsmen, tramping and slashing through the jungle like cattle, believing themselves stealthy the whole time. Their inexperience made Terson’s sophisticated woodcraft unnecessary, but to his perception his skills were soft and rusty, compelling him to even greater caution.

He moved in spurts and pauses, staggering his stride to avoid any pattern of sound recognizable as footsteps, wormed through the most tangled, thorny undergrowth he could find, and froze in place at the slightest evidence of approaching sailors. They nearly walked over him a number of times. He quickly realized that he could avoid them indefinitely—almost.

When night fell the island would radiate the heat it had soaked up during the day back into the atmosphere. The ground would shed enough energy to eliminate most infrared interference by two or three in the morning. One pass with a thermal imaging scanner then, and they’d have him.

Terson paused just short of his goal: an ancient, broken lava flow thrusting into the sea a few hundred meters from the hydrojet. He drained his canteen as he surveyed the blackened scabland. Seventy meters of skin splitting rock, thorn bushes and knee-high salt grass lay between him and the ocean. Where the flow met the sea, waves had broken the cliff face into a tumble of huge boulders and suck holes where an insanely desperate man might reach the water if he was lucky.

There was no overhead cover; once begun he was committed. Terson took one last deep breath and raced onto the flow. The temperature was twice that beneath the jungle canopy. The heat reflecting from the rock overpowered the sea breeze and penetrated his light footwear after only a few steps. Dry thorns tore at his exposed skin and rasp-like basalt punished every slip with bloody scrapes on hands, knees and shins. The edges of the wounds dried almost immediately, congealing the blood as it emerged, only to break open again at the next misstep.

The earth shook beneath his feet as he crossed from one hell into another. Deafening explosions of wind and spray exploded from openings all around him as he eased down the jumble of boulders. One moment of inattentiveness could pitch him into a suck hole to be drowned or beaten to death by the wildly oscillating water.

The boulders grew fewer and farther between as they marched into the sea. Terson watched the swells, timed his leap and hit the water swimming during the brief instant the waves paused. He had just enough time to surface for a vital lung full of air before the incoming waves crashed on top of him. The deadly washing-machine effect of water curling down and out under its own weight pulled him below the surface. He surrendered to the rip current, which carried him away from shore far faster than he could swim, praying that it would release him before the building pressure imploded his eardrums.

He struck for the surface the moment the current weakened and swam parallel to shore, just beyond the white line of the island’s lethal surf.

“Sir, when would you like to transport the prisoner to the ship?” the petty officer asked Ramos.

“We’re in no hurry, chief,” the officer replied. He rubbed the side of his nose with his little finger for the third time. Again, neither the NCO nor the seaman responded with the counter-sign identifying them as fellow secret service agents. Damn the luck!

“Lieutenant, this vessel is insecure,” the enlisted man insisted politely.

“It has been thoroughly searched by your own men,” Ramos pointed out. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t trust them?”

“Trust isn’t the issue, sir.”

“I think it is,” Ramos said. “If you would like me to pass your concerns regarding their inadequacies on to the Captain, I would be glad to do so.”

The NCO’s jaws tightened. “That won’t be necessary.”

“I didn’t think it would be.” Ramos climbed up onto the deck where he’d posted the seaman. “Give me the radio.”

“Yes, sir.” The seaman unclipped the handset and held it out to him.

“The radio, sailor,” Ramos snapped. “The whole radio!”

“Oh! Uh, yeah—yes, sir. Sorry sir.” He shrugged out of the straps and handed it over. “Is there a problem, sir?”

“It can’t reach the teams on the other side of the island,” Ramos said, precluding any opinion to the contrary with a withering look. He carried the mobile set to the cockpit, jacked into the boat’s antenna, and stood as far from other ears as the handset’s cable permitted.

Some characteristic of the hydrojet’s com system and the military set wasn’t entirely compatible. Voices leaked over onto the speaker in the cockpit that Bragg, sitting at the bottom of the companionway, could just make out. The sound didn’t reach across the cabin and likely wasn’t audible outside the cockpit.

Bragg sensed very quickly that something wasn’t right. The Coast Guard officer exhibited the smug air of someone with a secret—a secret kept not only from Bragg but from the enlisted men as well. The petty officer never said a word, but he clearly didn’t appreciate being cut out of the loop. A flicker of puzzlement, annoyance and once or twice outright suspicion crossed his face with each variation from established protocol.

Bragg kept his mouth shut and listened. Their search wasn’t coming along very well.

Twice the ship’s commander ordered Bragg transferred to the cruiser. Both times Ramos stalled, assuring his superior that Bragg’s cooperation would shorten the search, but beyond the first interview they hadn’t said or done anything to coax or force his cooperation at all.

They found no sign of Reilly, although there was some excitement when two groups engaged each other in a firefight. Ramos’s smugness eroded to agitation. The petty officer remained stoic when the lieutenant was nearby but exhibited his disgust with grunts and rolled eyes when he and Bragg were alone.

He was ripe for an appeal, Maalan decided. “Excuse me. Chief? Could you loosen the cuffs a little—I can’t feel my hands anymore.”

“Nobody ever lost a hand to snug cuffs.”

“Listen, chief,” he pressed. “I haven’t done anything to warrant this kind of treatment and I haven’t given you any trouble. Sooner or later my boss and yours will be having a talk. You know how shit rolls.”

“Oh, it’ll be sooner,” the NCO assured him. “My Captain will hear all about it when we get back to the ship, I promise you. Now just sit quiet.”

Above in the cockpit, the radio signaled for attention. Bragg held his retort and closed his eyes to listen as Ramos answered.

The initial sting of salt water in Terson’s wounds faded quickly, replaced by the intense ache of muscle fatigue. Without mask, snorkel or flippers his progress was torturously slow and the water temperature, he discovered, was deceptive. Warm by most standards, the ten-degree difference between the ocean and his body, coupled with water’s capacity to trap energy, slowly siphoned the heat out of him.

What began as a swim in pleasantly warm water gradually transformed to a struggle through an increasingly chilly bath. Goose bumps rose on his skin as his muscles tightened up, threatening to cramp, and each stroke propelled him through the water a bit more slowly than the last.

Terson was shivering by the time he reached the reef; his limbs felt like raw meat in a refrigerator. He slipped into a shallow, sun-warmed tide pool where he lay for over an hour, reclaiming the warmth stolen from him by the deeper water. Once rested he eeled farther into the reef toward his boat. He found a vantage point next to a mound of coral-encrusted basalt where he could raise most of his body above the surface of the water without exposing his profile.

The sentry stationed on the hydrojet’s deck was no more than eighteen or nineteen, Terson guessed, and his training was not yet fortified with experience. He scanned the shoreline and the stretch of water between the boat and the island with binoculars frequently, but kept his back to the afternoon sun. When he did shade his eyes to peer that direction it was nothing more than a cursory glance to gauge how much time remained before dusk. Another hour or two, Terson guessed, and the setting sun’s glare would reach all the way to the horizon. That was when he’d approach, provided that they didn’t try to escape the reef again before then.

The commander remained near the cockpit. There was no sign of Bragg. Until that moment his plan consisted of nothing but getting his boat back, but now that he had time to mull it over he wasn’t sure what to do with it. They had to know who he was by now, either through Bragg or the hydrojet’s registration, so sneaking back to the mainland like nothing happened wasn’t an option. The smart move was to surrender and take his chances in court, but the magistrate’s threat those many months ago squelched the thought before it took root.

He would not let them take him into custody, even if that meant marooning himself on the island to linger on the edge of starvation. He had to get aboard the hydrojet if only for a few minutes to snatch the supplies he’d need to make his exile remotely survivable.

Terson crept into position as the sun settled closer to the horizon. He swam the thirty meters between the reef and the boat underwater, surfacing once along the way. He came up gasping for breath in the shallow pocket beneath the port WIG surfaces, too exhausted to care if the echoes reached the deck.

After ten or fifteen minutes his breath calmed and he paddled to the rear of the boat. The swim ladder between the jets slid out of its housing and folded down with a gentle thump. He crept onto the deck behind Bragg’s equipment cases, which the sailors had hauled out of the stowage compartment during their search, quietly draining the water out of his rifle barrel and magazine before peeking out.

“What’s your status, Ramos?” the Captain asked.

“One of the teams located a trail,” Ramos lied. “I’m certain it won’t be much longer now.” He crossed his fingers mentally as the silence drew out. He’d managed to delay his commanding officer from taking any unilateral action so far.

“I want the prisoner moved to the ship,” the Captain said.

“But sir, he’s been very helpful,” Ramos objected. “We wouldn’t have picked up Reilly’s trail without his cooperation.”

“This is taking too long, Ramos! I’m sending the helicopter to pick you up. Move the teams to their staging points and activate their ID strobes. We’ll sweep the island with thermal imagers tonight.”

“Yes, sir,” Ramos growled. “Out!” He hurled the microphone back into the cockpit savagely. The Captain had run out of patience and Ramos had run out of time. He had hoped to get both of them at once. One at a time would have to do.

He took the police officer’s service weapon out of his pocket, ejected the magazine and thumbed out the ammunition. Killing the man would be a simple act if one of the Guardsmen with him were a Secret Service member. Now he had to make a show of it. He replaced the empty magazine and put the gun back in his pocket. Be firm, Lieutenant, he thought. Be smooth; no hesitation.

The petty officer snapped to attention when he entered the cabin. Ramos motioned Bragg to his feet with a smile and directed the NCO to remove his restraints. “The Captain had you checked out. Your commander wasn’t pleased with your indiscretion, but he assured us that your offer of assistance was sincere.”

Bragg’s heart leapt to his throat. That’s not right; that isn’t what he said! He shook his hands, grimacing as circulation roared through the swollen flesh with the accompanying pain, stealing a few precious moments to compose himself. “About time,” he snapped.

Ramos turned to the petty officer. “Raise anchor. We’re going ashore.” Ramos calmly pulled Bragg’s service pistol from his pocket as the man turned to the hatchway and clipped him across the base of the skull. The chief collapsed on the steps in a groaning heap. Ramos tossed the gun at Bragg’s feet and drew his own sidearm.

Bragg stared at the weapon for a split second before he got the idea and dropped to one knee, fumbling at the weapon with sluggish fingers while Ramos watched disdainfully. Bragg glanced up into the barrel of a weapon for the second time in his life and rolled aside as two rounds punched through the floor into the bilge with deafening reports.

Bragg launched himself at the officer. He got inside his reach and his greater weight carried the smaller man backward into the wall, but he couldn’t hold him. Ramos scrambled away into the narrow companionway leading to the cockpit, screaming at the top of his lungs.

“He’s loose! Shoot him; shoot him!”

The petty officer rolled over, struggling to unlimber his sub-machinegun, half blind with pain. Bragg scooped up his pistol. Too light—it was empty! “Drop your weapon!” Bragg bellowed, and hit the floor as a spray of slugs perforated the air he’d occupied. The machinegun’s bolt stove-piped.

Bragg abandoned his pistol while the sluggish sailor grappled to clear the jam and dove for the bench seat, reaching for the bang stick beneath it. He ripped out the pin and launched himself at the sailor, thrusting the stick ahead of him like a lance. The Coastie got his bolt cleared and loosed another staccato.

Bragg jabbed the business end of the bang stick into the man’s sternum at the same time the hot kiss of lead ripped through his side.

Terson peered through a gap between two containers. The sailor standing watch on deck rocked back and forth on his heels, bored to death and daydreaming. His superior stood just forward of the cockpit facing the bow, speaking animatedly into a radio handset.

Terson choreographed his next move in his mind, charting a path around the containers and across the deck to the sentry. Knock him off the deck and reverse direction; commander hears the splash, looks aft and starboard as I come around the cockpit from forward and port. Put him over the side and jump into the cockpit. He could move the boat to the other side of the channel while the Coast Guardsmen were occupied getting ashore.

The commander exclaimed loudly and threw his handset into the cockpit. The sailor snapped to, suddenly vigilant as his superior strode aft and descended through the hatch. Terson heard faint voices.

More than just these two, then. That changes things.

Two gunshots rang out. “Shoot him; shoot him!”

Terson hit the deck and rolled, certain that he’d been seen. His body came up against the starboard rail, trapping him behind another container that afforded some protection against fire from the main cabin but exposed him to anyone on the bow. Adrenaline-charged blood pounded in his ears as he rose up with the stock of his weapon flush against cheek and shoulder, preparing to throw himself back over the side of the boat into the water.

The young sailor’s back filled his gun sight. The seaman had taken a few reluctant steps toward the hatchway when the commotion broke out. He stood frozen until a burst of machine-gun fire from farther forward, inside the cabin, answered the command.

He spun on his heel and ran straight at Terson, wide-eyed with terror.

Reflex tightened Terson’s finger.

The rifle bucked in his hands as bullets stitched the sailor’s body, throwing up a spray of bloody mist. The last round tore through his throat and severed his spinal column, killing him instantly, freezing an expression of surprise on his face. His lifeless body pitched forward and slid across a deck lubricated with his own blood.

Another gunshot shattered the corner of the container at Terson’s elbow. He vaulted the obstruction and rushed the cockpit. The Coast Guard officer inside dropped the microphone he’d been screaming into and used both hands to steady his sidearm. He anticipated the recoil, subconsciously pushing the barrel of his gun down as he pulled the trigger and planted each round in the deck not two meters away.

Terson fired from the hip. Bloody mist mixed with sparkling fragments of the canopy and the man folded sideways, dangled upside down with his legs caught inside the cockpit. Blood welled from his nose, ran up his face into his hair and pooled on the deck beneath his head.

Silence then, except a voice over the cockpit radio demanding to be acknowledged. Terson stepped lightly over the sentry’s corpse, trying to ignore the dead eyes and the voice inside telling him that he’d just committed murder. He bobbed his head, looking for movement inside the cabin and saw none.

He found Bragg clutching a spent bang stick at the bottom of the steps next to a dead man. The police officer’s face was blue. His chest heaved wildly, but the wet sound of air being drawn in did not come from his lips.

Terson ripped Bragg’s blood-soaked shirt and found crimson froth bubbling from a wound in his side. He grabbed a plastic garbage bag from the pantry, smeared it liberally with Bragg’s own blood, and slapped it over the hole. The officer strained to breathe again. A few torturous moments later air rattled into his lungs. His color returned while Terson ripped strips from his shirt and wrapped his chest to maintain the seal over the wound.

“I…I had to…to k-kill him!” Bragg moaned.

“He did a fair job trying to kill you!”

Bragg shook his head emphatically. “The officer…set us all up. He was…the one. The chief and the kid…he used them!” He put his hand on the dead man’s arm. “Look what I’ve done!”

The faint thump of rotor blades echoed from the cliffs.

Terson dragged the policeman up the stairs and dug a life jacket out of the locker. Bragg let him slip it over his arms, complacent as a child. Terson tugged the straps tight and snatched one of the life raft canisters as he dragged him aft to the diving platform. “I can’t take you with me,” he said as he yanked the lanyard to trigger the gas cartridge, and eased the policeman into the inflating raft. “You’ll be okay.”

Bragg was deep in shock and didn’t answer. Terson pushed the raft away from the boat and headed for the cockpit, pausing to shove the young sailor’s body overboard.

A helicopter appeared over the trees as he reached the cockpit—not, he noted relief, the gunship. He unhooked the officer’s legs and flipped the corpse over the side. A few slugs had penetrated the dash; blood-spattered gauges stared at him like dead eyes. Terson’s guts knotted. He leaned over and wretched, spewing a thin stream of bile over the seat and radio set.

He wiped his mouth and vaulted into the pilot’s seat. He held his breath and flipped on the power. Damage to any imperative circuits or the ignition system would make for a short-lived escape. Acrid smoke poured from the panel with a sizzle as half a dozen fusible links blew. He didn’t try to figure out what worked and what didn’t; he’d know soon enough.

Rotor wash filled the cockpit. “We’ve got bodies in the water!” the voice on the radio yelled. Terson ripped out the wires and hurled the radio overboard. It left bile on his hand, slick and cold. He held his rifle overhead in one hand firing randomly and heard metallic pings as slugs caromed off the side of the aircraft. The pilot piled on collective and banked away.

Terson jettisoned the anchor and flipped on the engine compartment blowers and primer as the anchor chain rattled through its eye and splashed in the water. His indicators would not confirm whether the blowers and primer worked or not, but the engine rumbled to life when he activated the ignition. He jammed the impeller in full reverse, allowing the hydrojet to surge backward until the stern bumped coral. It wasn’t high tide this time; he needed all the room he could get. The turbines spun up with a howl.

The gunship appeared from around the cliff half a kilometer away, moving low and fast. The nose pitched up slightly. Fire erupted from the rocket tubes under its belly at the same moment the turbines hit starting speed. Terson shoved the throttle forward and spun the yoke starboard. The hydrojet stood nearly on its side; the nose lifted out of the water and the boat started to flip. He cut throttle and the nose slapped down, sending a wave rolling along the starboard side that slopped into the intake, dousing the engine. Rockets splashed around him, but the eager pilot had fired from beyond effective range.

Terson clutched the impeller engine back to the turbines. They spun up raggedly, spitting water through the exhaust ports. Suddenly the surface ten meters to starboard thumped and geysered foam. Another geyser erupted fifteen meters to port, this one sending shards of coral whistling through the air. He heard the scream of another shell and understood: the helicopter was spotting for the ship, firing blind from the other side of the island.

The jets roared, spewing clouds of greasy black smoke, but the boat moved. He shoved the throttle forward and shot away as a barrage of shells splashed around him, heard a crash aft as the loose containers struck the rail and spun into the wake. The reef ahead rushed toward him with unimaginable speed. The nose began to lift but just when it seemed he would make it the bow hit a coral protuberance with a sickening crunch. The impact hurled the boat into the air where it hung, balanced between gravity and the jet’s raw thrust. Slowly, the jets prevailed. The hydrojet accelerated, wobbling drunkenly. A stream of tracers flashed past, but the gunship fell behind, unable to match the boat’s speed.

Terson flew west without instruments, following the sun as it fell below the horizon, every moment a battle to keep the craft level and true. Wind screamed through the shattered canopy; the damage done to the hull made the craft pull to starboard constantly. Without GPS the autopilot would not engage.

A warning chime startled him a few hours later. The fuel gauge showed full, which was impossible, but enough of the sensor circuits worked to sound the alarm as the fuel level fell. When it ran dry the hydrojet would plow full speed into the ocean and make a quick end of him.

Why he opted to land instead he did not know. Certainly a swift death was preferable to drowning or starvation on the high sea. Nevertheless, Terson did his best to bring himself down in one piece.

Water rushed through the hole in the bow washing loose objects out through the aft gangway. The deluge swamped the boat before it came to a halt. Terson dashed down through the main cabin as the bow sank. It reached his waist as he splashed past the dead petty officer. He caught the second lifeboat canister as he scrambled to the stern and threw it in the water. It inflated dutifully and Terson stepped in as water rushed up around his ankles. The hydrojet went down nose first with a short hiss as the jets went under.

Terson sat in the lifeboat, bobbing gently in the vast, dark sea.

EIGHTEEN

West of the Humboldt Archipelago: 2709:08:34 Standard

A sea vulture wheeled in a high, wide circle with half a dozen of its flockmates, eyes fixed on a strange object floating in the ocean below.

The vulture had evolved to soar, as evidenced by its six-meter wingspan and comparatively small body. It rode air currents like a sailplane, wings locked open by a bone spar-and-notch in its shoulder, an energy efficient adaptation that allowed it to remain aloft for weeks at a time but at a high cost in terms of take-offs. Flapping its wings to regain flight burned up precious reserves, and as a result it instinctively limited its landings to the necessities of rearing young and feeding.

The opportunistic scavenger subsisted almost entirely on small fish snatched from the water on the fly using its long neck and beak. Occasionally, however, it chanced upon the floating carcass of a large aquatic denizen or, once in a great while, a land animal swept out to sea by rip tides or coastal floods.

It was the enticing possibility of such a meal that persuaded the flock to pause in its journey, but caution prevented them from falling to immediately. Calories obtained by landing had to exceed those expended during takeoff later and of course there was the issue of predators that lured their own prey into striking range by feigning death.

The flock’s spiral tightened over the space of hours, sharp eyes alert for such deception as they came nearer. Finally, satisfied that all was what it seemed and the rewards worth the risk, the lead vulture flexed the muscles that slipped its wing spars from their notches and alighted clumsily on the water. The others exercised a selfish caution, waiting to see what happened to the first of their number before they, too, left their natural element.

The vulture kicked its wide webbed feet to circle the object, puzzled by the scent of neoprene, but decided it was of no account and approached to examine the creature within with one flat, black eye, then the other. It did not smell rotten, but the vulture recognized the sores resulting from the ravages of sunburn and salt. The creature had not yet expired, then. So much the better; the flock would not have to contend with competitors attracted by putrescence while they fed.

It extended its neck and pecked at one of the weeping sores experimentally. The creature didn’t react, so the bird struck more boldly, this time lifting out a tiny gobbet of flesh, which it gulped down while blood welled up in the wound. The rest of the flock landed, screeching and jostling each other as they paddled toward the feast.

The vulture moved in close to defend its right to the prime feeding position and turned its head to warn off a flockmate who ventured too close. At that instant, the creature lunged with a scream and seized it by the neck just below the head, turning aside the long, sharp beak and leaving the vulture with no weapon but its great wings, which it beat furiously to escape.

The rest of the flock shrieked and took to the air, ramming and beating each other with their wings, leaving behind feces and drifting feathers. The captive vulture redoubled its effort, dipping its great wings in the water like oars, dragging the creature that held it from its floating perch into the water. Escape seemed certain, but once off its perch the creature produced a lower pair of appendages, which it wrapped around the vulture’s body, hindering the motion of its wings and freeing the upper pair to twist its head around on the long neck.

The vulture’s trachea twisted shut; pressure built at the base of its skull. A spike of numbness shot through its body with a crack and its primitive consciousness vanished from the world.

The bird’s neck proved more flexible than Terson expected. He twisted the head over three hundred and sixty degrees before the bones cracked and the wings extended in a quivering death spasm.

He caught the rope along the outside of the raft and hauled himself in, collapsing on his back in the bottom from where he saw the rest of the flock wheeling in a circle overhead, gaining altitude. A pair lingered hopefully as he plucked his catch, but flew away when it became apparent he would neither drop dead nor throw the remains of their unfortunate companion overboard.

Terson stripped the skin off with his teeth and bit out ragged chunks of rubbery meat from which he sucked the moisture and fluids. His hunger pangs, which had faded two days before, resumed at the promise of food but he spat each bite into the bottom of the raft. Digestion used up more water than it released and the human body could go far longer without food than it could water, though Terson did not intend to expire from a lack of either.

The life raft’s manufacturer, however, appeared to have just such a fate in mind when it stocked the craft with a laughably sparse “survival kit” that did not include food or water. The sunscreen ointment proved to be water-soluble and washed off in a squall the second day. Without any means of propulsion the compass was useless. The finish on the plastic signal mirror began to react with salt water the moment the packaging was opened, turning dull and ineffective. The rest of his material wealth consisted of three fishhooks with two spools of line, which until that moment he’d been unable to use for lack of bait, and a surprisingly sophisticated emergency locator beacon that was sure to come in handy if he chose incarceration over death by exposure.

Once again Nivian culture had shafted him. It shouldn’t have surprised him that the supplies were rudimentary, given that law-abiding operators never ventured far from rescue, making the locator beacon a more than adequate safeguard. It was Terson’s own fault for not anticipating the deficiency and correcting it in advance.

He allowed himself two mouthfuls of raw meat after extracting as much moisture from the tissue as he could and jettisoned the remains of the ungainly carcass, hoping that whatever scavengers it might attract wouldn’t be the sorts inclined to investigate the raft as well.

He baited a hook with a piece of meat and dropped it over the side, bobbing the line up and down with only a vague notion of what was supposed to happen. Line fishing had always struck him as an impractical means of obtaining food, and most of the people he observed engaging in the activity appeared to be men using it as an excuse to escape from their wives. He played the line out farther and farther as the sun’s rays intensified overhead.

Terson’s only source of shade was a pair of trousers washed out of the hydrojet as it sank which he’d ripped apart at the seams after discovering the sun lotion’s shortcomings. Sewn back together with a hook and line in a solid sheet and draped over his head and back, it afforded some degree of protection, although not enough to completely eliminate further sunburn. The only true relief came at night when he curled under his makeshift blanket shivering and waiting for the sun’s return.

The wind had maintained a steady tack northeast at ten to fifteen knots. He estimated the raft moved at roughly half that in the same direction, though without charts he had no idea where it might take him. Assuming, of course, that he wasn’t in a current traveling a different direction at a greater speed, in which case he might yet find himself back in Alpha continent’s coastal waters. That unlikely circumstance seemed to be his best chance of survival, though how long it might be before it happened and his condition at the time were impossible to guess.

His reception was more certain: incarceration or death. Bragg’s perception of what occurred aboard the hydrojet before Terson’s arrival was filtered by the police officer’s own conspiracy theories, of course, and his explanation was nearly incoherent, but the events Terson witnessed for himself went a long way toward convincing him that Bragg was more correct than not.

Terson had never heard anything that hinted at the Coast Guard being a shoot-first organization when it came to travel violations. Certainly they responded in kind if fired on, and failure to heed an order to heave to came at one’s own peril, but even then they fired to disable, not to kill. The fact that they approached the island already expecting a violent confrontation indicated their certainty that whoever they found was in need of arrest, not rescue.

Distracted by his ruminations, Terson missed the first experimental nibble on his line. Something took the bait with full force and fled, drawing the line taut and dragging it through his fingers, spool dancing wildly at his knees. In his surprise he set his grip tighter and felt the filament tear his flesh like a dull knife. He let go with a curse; the spool hopped over the side, vanishing into the water with a splash.

He gritted his teeth against the pain while blood dripped from his fingers into the water where it dissipated like smoke, mingling with that of the two men he’d killed. For the officer, he felt no remorse, but the young sailor…he balled his hands into fists, squeezing hard to accentuate the sting. He wished like hell it hadn’t happened, but the feeling of guilt for spilling innocent blood was strangely absent. He remembered being sick at what he’d done, but acute emotion was distant and disconnected. For all Terson knew, this was exactly what a murderer felt like.

He cut ten meters of line off the second spool but this time wrapped it around the ridiculous signal mirror before baiting the second hook and tossing it over the side. The water was startlingly clear, allowing him to follow the gobbet’s progress as it descended so he wouldn’t be caught by surprise again.

Long rays of sunlight danced in the depths, flickering in and out of existence with the movement of surface ripples. The only constant feature was the sharp-sided shadow of the raft, forming a deep, perfectly proportioned shaft that vanished into the depths like a hole in the water.

A flicker of motion caught his attention as a ribbon-like fish with tentacles at both ends of its body approached his hook. Terson tightened his grip on the mirror, prepared to snag the creature when it gulped down his offering. Another movement drew his eyes to the right in time to see something rush up from below, something dark, swift, and massive, growing larger by the second as it by-passed the crumb dangling in the water, heading for the source of the filament, instead.

Terson fell back with his forearms raised to deflect the attack, screaming, as a black snout exploded from the surface in a spray of brine. It towered over the raft for a heartbeat, blocking the sun, and descended with a boom as its belly slapped the water, generating a wave that nearly capsized him. Terson buried his face in neoprene as a torrent of spray spattered across the raft, his heart in his throat.

Then silence.

The sea calmed and Terson slowly lifted his head to find a submarine floating quietly a dozen meters from the raft, water running from its deck. The vessel was small, but still three times the size of the hydrojet, painted a solid flat black without any identifying markings like an EPEA boat. His stomach knotted; of all Nivia’s policing agencies, the EPEA was the one he could count on to gun him down in his tracks without so much as a word.

His concern was well warranted; he heard a hatch groan open and three men appeared atop the submarine’s conning tower, two of them armed with automatic rifles. Another hatch opened in the hull at the base of the tower from which two more sailors emerged. Terson squeezed his eyes closed, and shook his head—either the submarine was considerably larger than he first thought, or it was crewed entirely by dark-complected midgets.

His eyes did not deceive him, he discovered. The tallest of the two sailors by the conning tower, now swinging a weighted line over his head, stood barely taller than Terson’s elbow and the other, bearing a long boathook, was a good ten centimeters shorter yet.

The lineman sent the weighted end of the rope unerringly over Terson’s raft to plunk in the water less than a meter away on the opposite side. Terson caught hold of the line before it slid away and looped it around the raft’s edge rope so they could pull him in.

Terson crawled aboard but once on deck the toll on his body from a week without significant food or water made itself agonizingly evident. His legs cramped and shook uncontrollably when he stood. The deck felt like it was spinning beneath him and he would have fallen if the lineman hadn’t steadied him with his stout frame. The sailor pointed at the deck emphatically, speaking in a high, rapid tongue that was so much gibberish to Terson’s ears, though the meaning was clear: sit down before you fall down!

He obeyed, and the sailors turned their attention to the raft, leaving the armed men above to guard him. Terson took advantage of the opportunity to observe them more closely. All of the sailors had tightly curled hair cut almost to the scalp. Their skin tone varied from the lineman’s light chocolate to the nearly midnight black of one of the riflemen. Their facial features were uniform: slightly flattened, each dark brown eye displaying a prominent epicanthic fold. All wore light tan dungarees. Black braid and small gold insignia decked out the uniform of the third man in the tower.

The lineman apparently reached the same conclusion as Terson regarding the usefulness of the raft’s contents and returned carrying only Terson’s blanket while his partner untied the line and pushed the raft away from the hull with his boathook. One of the riflemen raised his weapon at command from the officer and fired a burst into the raft, deflating it with an explosive pop.

They helped Terson descend the ladder into a passageway clearly constructed with a full-stature crew in mind. The two sailors bore him aft through a deserted corridor past dogged hatches. He saw no sign of other crewmen, though he could hear voices.

They turned into a short side-corridor after a few meters, pausing long enough to spin open the dogs on a featureless hatch that led to a tiny, bare, cabin that was nonetheless expansive compared to the living quarters of a T-108. The only appliances were a stainless steel sink and toilet against one wall and a pair of thin mats on the floor—the brig, apparently.

Terson hesitated. He looked over his shoulder where the two sailors gazed back at him warily, correctly reading his train of thought. For the first time since his arrival on Nivia, Terson’s size alone was a significant advantage. The sailors knew that, too, but Terson’s obvious weakness balanced it, putting them back on equal footing where numbers shifted the outcome of a physical altercation back to their favor.

The two riflemen arrived as if on cue and took up station by the hatch.

Terson sighed and stepped through. Lineman followed him in, indicating that he should disrobe and sit down on the toilet. Boathook appeared with a pail of hot water and a pair of washrags as Terson complied. They moved the mats aside, revealing a drain in the floor, and proceeded to scrub him down under the officer’s watchful gaze, unfazed by his nakedness even to the point of cleansing the intimate areas Terson preferred to take care of himself.

Rinsed and dried, they let him knot a towel around his waist and slathered him down with an antiseptic-smelling ointment that stung his blisters but soothed his sunburn like magic. The officer, satisfied they’d done what they could for him, ordered them out and pulled the hatch shut.

Panic rose in Terson’s throat when the dogs clanged and he fought to calm himself. The nearly bare room and locked door were frighteningly reminiscent of his incarceration at the Commonwealth’s hands, but he recognized that he was far better off than he’d been an hour earlier. He was helpless, but reasonably comfortable and in no imminent danger if their care of him so far meant anything. He had no choice but to trust them and wait to see what happened. It left one simple question: who the hell were these people?

A narrow slot opened at the bottom of the door just then and a metal tray bearing a scoop of plain white rice and raw, unfamiliar vegetables slid through. Terson resisted the urge to gulp it down and ate with slow, measured bites to avoid getting sick by overloading his digestion. A short time later a bundle of cloth came through the slot that turned out to be his trousers, re-sewn and almost as good as new, flimsy slippers with drawstrings at the ankles and a loose pullover shirt made from pieces of three or four khaki uniforms.

The faceless guard was the only person Terson interacted with for the remainder of his captivity. Twice a day he came with food and never stayed longer than it took to collect the dishes from the previous meal. Terson tried talking to him on several occasions but the man would not respond, even in his native tongue. The closest thing to communication occurred one day when Terson set the empty tray well back from the slot and grabbed hold of the crewman’s wrist when he reached in for it.

Terson had regained most of his strength by that time and the ensuing struggle was entirely one-sided. Resistance ended abruptly, the arm going limp, and the sailor spoke to him for the first time: “Nekkyo gaijin!” The hatred in the two words stunned him. He relaxed his hold and the man wrenched his arm free. A mop handle poked through to retrieve the tray thereafter.

He didn’t know how long he’d been held when the routine finally ended. Although he thought of a day as two meals for the sake of convenience he had no means to keep track of them. One day, instead of a tray sliding across the floor, the dogs in the hatch groaned and one of the guards stepped in followed by the officer and the crewmen, Lineman and Boathook.

They led him back through the submarine to an egress ladder where the officer handed Terson a length of heavy black cloth, indicating he should blindfold himself with it. The man looked like he meant business, and Terson complied.

The air on deck was still and damp. It might have been an unusually calm night, but the faint echo of waves and the drip of water gave him the impression that they were inside. He felt a wooden gangplank beneath his feet, then a solid surface of concrete or stone. Metal hinges groaned after a few minutes; once across the threshold the humidity plummeted and the temperature grew more comfortable. Terson lost all sense of direction in a series of twists, turns, and doorways. Eventually they stopped, the hands leading him fell away, and a door closed behind him.

It took Terson several seconds to realize that he’d been left alone. He raised the blindfold to find himself in a windowless room hewn from living stone, filled with fine rugs, cushions and a couch. The floor was smooth-finished concrete; the walls worked with a skill that left them nearly as smooth as the floor. A tapestry woven to appear as individual panels stretched along two of them.

The first panel depicted a planet populated by dozens of symbols and mythological creatures. Terson recognized a few; most he did not. In the second panel hordes of demonic entities filled the heavens and by the third the beautiful planet was fully engulfed in a conflagration of war, death and destruction.

“This is the story of my people,” a reedy voice at his elbow explained, “and to some degree of yours as well, I imagine.” Terson spun to find the owner of the voice watching him solemnly. The tiny man was old, his hair white and patchy, face and hands wrinkled, and one eye was milky with blindness. He gestured to the tapestry. “Do you know this story?”

Terson nodded. “This is Earth; the demons represent the Qu’a’i harvester fleet. The third panel is the War—Armageddon Minor—and the fourth,” he hesitated, “I guess is the start of the Exodus.”

The old man nodded. “So my grandfather told me. The demons destroyed many. The wounded fled leaving only the strongest to fight: the Eagle, Maple, Bear, Dragon and a few others.” He pointed at the fifth panel, depicting two of the fleeing entities. “This is where the story of the Minzoku begins:

“The children of the Lion and the Rising Sun fled to the heavens,” he said, walking slowly along the tapestry. “As Fate decreed, both found Ardhi. Neither was strong. Each feared the other would destroy them to take what little they had. Soon their fear led to battle and many perished, the machines necessary to their survival destroyed. Winter came and more died. The children of the Lion froze to death while the children of the Rising Sun starved.”

A mountain crowned by a triple summit separated the adversaries. The area around the mountain and part of a coastline had been woven with incredibly detailed topographical features. Elsewhere, the map was featureless except for symbols Terson took to be the equivalent of “Here be dragons.” The old man’s narrative drew his eyes on to the next panel.

“One day a son of the Lion and a daughter of the Rising Sun met while foraging in the wilderness, both near death. The Lion shared his food and the Rising Sun shared her warmth. They found each other pleasing and lay together and conceived a robust son, stronger than either of the parents. When the others saw this they forswore their weapons. The children of the Lion and the Rising Sun lay together and became the Minzoku.”

The old man stopped. “Here the original weavers ended their tale, or so we believe. Some say there was more once, but it was lost when the tapestry was cut into pieces to conceal it from our enemies. I have doubts, but true or not this is the last artifact that remains of our homeworld.”

He went on: “No one knows how many centuries passed before Fate again tested the children and disaster fell from the heavens once more. The gaijin came with weapons the Minzoku no longer possessed. They plundered and killed, and those they did not kill they took into slavery. The Minzoku toiled under a terrible burden and our numbers dwindled.

“The Onjin saw our distress and offered us succor in return for a covenant: the Onjin would protect the Minzoku, but in return we would serve them. The Minzoku accepted, and the Onjin brought us here, to our new home, where we grew prosperous once more.” The old man stopped at the end where a blank panel had been added. “This is our future. What it will be no one knows, but soon I believe it will be time to weave again.”

Terson studied the next to last woven panel carefully. It depicted a fairly accurate map of Nivia. On the Alpha continent lurked the cruel gaijin, while on the Beta continent the Minzoku prospered under the godlike countenance of the Onjin.

“One of your men called me that: ‘guy-gene.’” Terson said.

“My people dislike your kind,” he said. “Rest assured, mister Reilly, I do not share their bigotry.”

Terson went on guard instantly. “How do you know my name?”

The old man raised a placating hand. “We observed your battle with the gaijin,” he explained, “and raised the remains of your vessel. Your belongings identified you.” He gestured to the couch. “Sit, please. You have more questions, of course. You may ask them.”

“Tell me who you are,” Terson said, “and why you helped me. I doubt you typically rescue guy-gene on humanitarian grounds.”

“Your wisdom belies your youth,” he smiled. “My name is Den Tun. I am the kiongozi—prime minister—of the Minzoku, and I need your help.”

Terson chose his words cautiously. “I was transported by submarine to an underground facility in what is supposed to be an undeveloped outback inhabited by outlaws. I’m the one who needs help.”

“Our individual needs present an opportunity for mutual rewards,” the old man said.

“You haven’t explained how I’m supposed to help you,” Terson said, “or why I should.”

Den Tun looked surprised. “Did the Minzoku not rescue you from certain death? Does not honor demand repayment of that debt?”

“You saved me to suit yourselves,” Terson replied. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“You speak truly,” Den Tun agreed. “If the demands of honor do not move you, perhaps you consider revenge sufficient motivation.”

A sick, chilling premonition washed over him. Rage bubbled just below the surface, held in check by the hope that he was wrong. “What are you talking about?”

“You suffered a tragic loss recently,” Den Tun began. His words clipped off in a strangled “Urk!” as Terson seized him by the throat. The old man fought his grip futilely, face darkening with blood. His good eye rolled up and Terson loosened his hold enough to let air pass.

“You will not survive if I die!” Den Tun gasped. “Do not destroy your future with a rash act!”

“I had a future,” Terson said hoarsely. “Who killed my wife?”

“It was not the Minzoku!” Den Tun cried.

“Then who?”

“I know only that the Onjin and gaijin each had reason to harm you! Help us and you can wound them both far worse than by killing an old man!”

Terson almost killed him anyway. The fire in his veins demanded blood, not promises, but guilty blood would quench the fire more thoroughly than innocent. He flung the old man against the backrest. “Talk!”

Den Tun held up a hand, imploring patience as he rubbed at his throat with the other, wheezing. “The Onjin have used us poorly,” he explained, voice gravely from his choking. “My people have extracted the natural resources of this continent for decades, surrendering the fruits of their toil to the Onjin in return for their so-called protection.”

“And the EPEA allows this?” Terson demanded.

“Not by choice,” Den Tun said. “Somehow the Onjin hold the gaijin at bay—their claim of protection is true, in this regard—but they permit the gaijin to destroy any endeavor of ours that does not further their interests.

“We are trapped in a precarious stalemate between the two, our mere existence evidence of heinous crimes perpetrated by both. Neither can afford to let us grow too strong, lest we bring the wrath of your Commonwealth down on them. Therefore, our bid for freedom must be undertaken in absolute secrecy, for if either suspects our intent to pursue self-determination, both will take measures to prevent it. If they even suspect that we may be successful, they will utterly destroy us to protect themselves.

“I gathered incontrovertible evidence to support my claims and spent years seeking a sympathetic gaijin willing to contact the Commonwealth and advocate on our behalf. A few months ago a fortuitous chain of events allowed me to send the evidence to my contact hidden within the Onjin’s own cargo.” He bowed his head. “One of my officers betrayed me. The shuttle was destroyed, and with it our last hope.”

Terson closed his eyes. “The shuttle you’re talking about,” he said, already knowing the answer, “was the wreck Bragg and I were looking at. The one my wife and I saw crash.”

“So it would seem,” Den Tun confirmed. “The Onjin were not pleased with your interest. Given the previous actions taken against you, I assume that they believe you were involved with my plot.

“For that, inadvertent as it was, I offer my apologies.”

Terson struggled to make sense of it all, but it came down to a single mistaken premise. “They thought we had the evidence you tried to smuggle off-world?”

“It was not among the wreckage,” Den Tun said. “It was almost certainly destroyed, but they felt it necessary to pursue any contrary possibility.”

“They thought the possibility was worth killing for?” Terson exclaimed in disbelief.

Den Tun’s face lengthened with sadness. “Every man decides for himself what is or is not worth killing for,” he said. “I cannot offer you reason, only the opportunity to strike back in the only way that will matter to them.”

Terson sat down and put his face in his hands. “What do you want?”

“I have duplicates of the evidence they do not suspect or, if they do, do not believe we can get off-world. I ask you to deliver it to my gaijin contact.”

Terson uttered a short, barking laugh. “What makes you think I’ll succeed if you failed after years of preparation?”

“We were betrayed from within,” Den Tun explained. “You will not betray us, because you stand to lose your own life. Less than a dozen people know that you are here. Fewer will know that you are our courier. If you succeed we owe you our lives and you will save your own in the bargain.”

“And if they intercept me, it exposes another traitor,” Terson said. “What happens if I decline?”

“Strongholds of gaijin outlaws dot the hemisphere,” Den Tun said. “You may make your way to them, if you wish.”

“Without your help.”

“We have already saved your life,” the old man reminded him. “We owe you nothing.”

“What happens to me if I help you?”

“I will attempt to facilitate whatever arrangement you wish,” Den Tun replied. His use of the word ‘attempt’ did not pass unnoticed, and meant that his resources were limited. At least it was honest; the old man could have agreed to anything and Terson wouldn’t find out that he failed to deliver on his promises until it was too late.

“I’ll do it,” Terson told him. “But I want off this planet.”

“The details must be worked out,” Den Tun nodded. “It will take a few days. You may ask for something else if it proves unfeasible.

Den Tun rose and clapped his hands. The door flew open revealing four anxious soldiers and the Minister of Defense, General Cha’Cain. “Take him to a cell,” Den Tun told them in Minzoku creole. “Find him suitable attire, and food.” He turned to Reilly, shifting to the gaijin’s tongue, “I apologize in advance for restricting your freedom. It is necessary for your protection as well as ours.”

“Not like I haven’t been there before,” Reilly muttered cryptically. Den Tun felt genuine sympathy for the boy as he was led away. A pawn’s lot was never an easy one.

“Shall I call the Healer?” Cha’Cain asked, eyes flicking over the bruises on his throat.

“I am well enough,” Den Tun replied with a slight shake of his head, “and doing so would require that I explain the injury. If it is necessary that I endure ill effects in silence, I shall.”

“You took a terrible risk,” Cha’Cain informed him sternly.

“And you demonstrated admirable restraint.”

“Only because of your orders,” the Minister admitted. “Another few seconds would not have earned me such praise.” His eyes filled with heartfelt concern. “We would be lost without your wisdom to guide us.”

“Then may Fate protect you when I die,” Den Tun muttered with a shake of his head. The continuity of his leadership over two average lifetimes had its drawbacks. Chief among them was the fawning devotion of his staff, most of whom had no memory of any other kiongozi than himself, or the base methods he employed to gain the title. Sometimes the weight of responsibility it placed on his shoulders threatened to crush him. “Forgive me, my friend.”

Cha’Cain waved a hand. “It is forgotten.” They walked in silence until they arrived at Den Tun’s office, where the reverence of the base’s personnel protected the pair from the danger of unannounced ears. “You told the gaijin too much,” Cha’Cain said.

“Nothing he heard is more damning than what he saw,” Den Tun replied, “and convincing lies require a foundation of fact.”

“I would be more comfortable assuring his silence,” Cha’Cain said with a flick of his thumbnail across his throat.

“I am not surprised,” Den Tun smiled. “Under other circumstances I would agree. However, the Onjin’s loss of interest in reacquiring the Tiger Opal constitutes a potentially greater threat. We must use this opportunity that Fate has seen fit to visit upon us.”

“I fear we tempt Fate with our recklessness,” Cha’Cain replied. “We were fortunate to recover the Tiger Opal and mislead the Onjin as we did. Do you truly think it wise to risk it again by placing it in the hands of one who may yet realize our part in his misfortune?”

“No,” Den Tun answered. “But Fortune favors the bold.”

“Yes, but—”

“Enough,” Den Tun declared firmly. “Forgive me yet again; I must hear no more of this. Seek to make arrangements with our contact—swiftly—for each moment this gaijin remains here is a knife in our side.”

The Minister bowed and withdrew. A nostalgic fantasy sprang to mind as Den Tun watched him go, one he often retreated to when the burden of leadership seemed too much: Den Tun, the aged farmer, warming himself before a winter fire, surrounded by his children and their children’s children, with no worry but when to cast the next branch on the fire.

His own decisions had cost him that dream three quarters of a century earlier.

NINETEEN

Beta Continent: 2709:09:17 Standard

“Someone in the village has information for us,” Hal-san told Dayuki.

The young woman spread a pinch of powdered spice over the contents of her wok. “Word came in the manner I prescribed?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I must go alone.”

“It could be a trap,” Hal-san said. “Even if it isn’t, your life isn’t worth a plugged nickel in the village. McKeon says Den Tun put a price on your head.”

“Is the blood-price higher than what we offered?”

“No.”

“Then it is not a trap set by my uncle.”

Hal-san took her gently by the shoulders, inviting her to turn. The motion of her kimono against her breasts sent sparks of pleasure through her body, but Dayuki declined despite the warmth his touch elicited in her belly.  Her thoughts had been of sekkusu most of the day and she did not trust herself to keep the welfare of the Onjin and her lover ahead of her own desire. She kissed his hand quickly to quell the uncertainty she sensed in him at her resistance.

“I’ll send a few men in ahead of you,” he told her.

Dayuki dished dinner onto a pair of plates. “Their presence will discourage an attempt on my life,” she conceded. “It might also frighten away our informant.”

“Your show,” Hal-san said, “your call.”

He did not always take her advice, but did so often enough to let her know that he did listen. Hal-san evaluated her point of view as an issue separate from her gender instead of dismissing it instantly, as a Minzoku male was apt to do. It was this that attracted her to him as much as anything else.

After dinner Dayuki sifted through closets full of cast-off Onjin clothing. Hal-san was correct: walking among her own people was dangerous. She could not hide her stature, but could hide her face. More than a dozen half-breed prostitutes lived in Sin City and Dayuki could easily pass for one of them. She settled on a worn cloak of a quality a prostitute might accept as a gift or payment.

Hal-san awaited Dayuki at the sally port in the north wall. He held out a palm-sized needle-beamer. “It’s only good for five shots,” he said. “Use it if you have to.” Dayuki tucked it in the folds of her cloak, bowed, and slipped outside. Her breath misted in the biting air. The winter snows weren’t far away but Dayuki was warm enough in the Onjin clothing beneath her disguise.

Sin City was quiet in the absence of its Onjin customers. Most of the transient merchants had returned to their homes; many permanent businesses had closed when it became clear the Onjin would not leave the walls of the Toride again for some time. A filthy Minzoku herdsman could now afford the company of a prostitute for a week at the same price the Onjin paid for an hour. Many of the half-breed prostitutes dyed their hair in gaijin colors to attract peasants with fantasies of mounting Onjin women.

Dayuki experienced a shiver unrelated to the cold as she slipped through the back alleys to escape the attention of said peasants. If not for the favorable intervention of Fate, she might have found them using her body to satisfy their abhorrent lusts.

At last she reached the specified meeting place clutching the beamer within her cloak. “I am here,” she said clearly. Someone groaned. Part of a garbage heap struggled to its feet. The hunched figure shuffled into view with the aid of a walking stick.

“Ah, it is true after all,” the old woman said. “You betrayed your own people to consort with the Onjin.” These were not the obeisant words of a greedy maid. Dayuki glanced around quickly, freeing the beamer from her garments. “I am alone,” the woman chided. “Fate’s whim, girl, do you not know your old friend Libwe?”

“Libwe, the old head maid? How did you come here?”

“My own two feet and the kindness of strangers. I expect to return more comfortably and a good deal wealthier!”

“You were pensioned years ago! How could you know anything of interest to the Onjin?”

The old woman held an arthritic hand up in the light. “My pension does not buy enough gaijin medicine to relieve my pain. Den Tun allowed my return as a kindness, but the pay is still too little.”

“And you dare judge me?”

“Hypocrisy comes easily at my age and you promised payment.”

“Yes. Tell me what you know.”

“One of the fleet returned unannounced,” Libwe said. “Den Tun restricted the servants to quarters as soon as it arrived.”

“You expect a reward for this trivial thing?” Dayuki demanded. “Pray the kindness of strangers is sufficient to carry you home again!”

“Patience, girl! The soldiers told me to search the old Onjin stores for a man’s clothing of a particular size. The vessel was gone again when they released us, but I was sent to clean one of the visitor’s quarters where I found ragged clothing that stank of gaijin.”

“Do you know what became of him?”

Libwe shook her head. “Even the soldiers who sent me searching are gone, without so much as a word to their families. I’m certain that they assigned me the task without Den Tun’s knowledge or I would be with them now. Is this trivia worthy of payment?”

“Quite so.” Dayuki held out the bag of coins. Libwe extended her hand, bowing as she accepted it. Dayuki applied the maki suru with her free hand and eased the old woman to the ground. She arranged outer garments as if they’d spread open in a fall and closed her gnarled fingers around the coins.

“You will not suffer in pain much longer,” she whispered in the woman’s ear. “Your service to the Onjin has reserved your place in heaven.”

Hal rushed to the command post with Dayuki as soon as she related her conversation with the old Minzoku woman. Finally, finally he was a step ahead of Den Tun. With Reilly gone and the revelation of the Minzoku’s gaijin contacts within reach Hal could put an end to the present debacle.

“Show me the magnetometer scans of the coast starting ten days ago,” he ordered. The Onjin’s efforts to conceal the Minzoku included a system that automatically erased their submarines’ magnetic signatures before the satellite data reached the mainland. It was a simple enough matter to call it up again from the archives.

“These are Minzoku submarines,” McKeon said as a number of circles appeared. “The scans frame forward at one hour a second.” The traffic around Den Tun’s submarine pens was routine for the first thirty hours. Then, inexplicably, arrivals stacked up in deep water one hundred kilometers from shore and departures halted entirely. The tableau held as a single vessel transected the sector from the southeast and entered the cavern.

“It’s too bad the scans can’t distinguish between vessels,” Tamara said thoughtfully.

“We’re not interested in the submarine,” Hal said darkly. “We want the identity of the man it’s carrying. Although,” he wondered aloud, “why would Den Tun bring a gaijin all the way from Alpha?”

“Perhaps,” Dayuki offered, “the gaijin did not come from the Alpha continent.”

Hal sighed; yet another assumption lacking empirical substance brought to light. They continued to operate on preconceived notions of what Den Tun and the Minzoku were capable of—notions consistently proven incorrect. If that didn’t stop immediately the Onjin would continue to fail in their efforts to anticipate Den Tun’s actions.

“Backtrack the sub,” he said. The origin of the gaijin might give some clue to his identity.

“It appears to be the one the Minzoku had on picket duty at the crash site,” McKeon reported a few minutes later. He highlighted the location and let the data run forward in time. “It headed east from there for several hours before turning west again, back toward the crash. It cruised around in circles for several days before heading for the pens.”

“So it didn’t go anywhere near Alpha.”

“No, sir.”

Hal rubbed his face. I’m missing something. Maybe the assumption that the gaijin in question had entered the base with the submarine was also incorrect. There were gaijin criminals living on Beta; maybe it was one of them, and the subsequent lockdown of the servants was simply coincidental to the arrival of the sub. That didn’t make much sense either—why recall a vessel to transport someone when there were already others in port? Unless that was the point: dispatching another vessel on short notice might draw attention or start rumors, but secretly recalling one already at sea left no such trail.

Hal stared at the sector map, eyes following the submarine’s course. The vessel steamed straight and true from the crash site toward Alpha until the captain appeared to change his mind and headed back for Beta. Along the way indecision set in, compelling him to orbit in an ever-expanding spiral until finally settling on a course back to port. Comprehension struck with a wave of triumph. “They’re looking for someone!” Hal exclaimed, pointing at the spiral. “They picked the gaijin up at sea.”

“But there’s nothing else out there,” McKeon frowned. “No aircraft, no ships.”

“There might have been earlier. Reverse the timeline again, but stay with this sector.”

The Minzoku submarine’s icon raced out of frame, leaving vacant ocean for several days until, suddenly, a tiny target appeared out of nowhere just about the center of the sub’s search pattern and swept eastward at high speed toward the Alphan coast.

“It’s an aircraft of some kind flying right on the deck without a transponder or GBST beacon,” McKeon said. He ran the scan forward again. The aircraft flew back into frame then suddenly slowed, stopped, and vanished. “It almost looks like he ditched—just a second.” He strode to his station to consult a file and returned with a grim look on his face. “That thing appeared right about where our Federal source said Reilly’s boat went down.”

Hal stared at him dumbfounded, face blushing with anger. “They told us he was dead. They assured us he was dead!”

“He was, to their way of thinking,” McKeon shrugged helplessly. “He would be if the Minzoku hadn’t picked him up.”

Hal fought the urge to hurl a chair into the screen. “And why,” he choked out, “would the Minzoku pick him up? Take a wild guess!” McKeon faltered, unsure which would infuriate his boss more: silence or the wrong answer.

“The Tiger Opal,” Dayuki said with surprising assurance. “Den Tun lied about its loss. He recovered it from the wreckage but left it on the bottom of the sea for his gaijin lackeys to recover later.”

“But Den Tun reported them to us,” McKeon objected.

“Covering his bases, knowing that we might detect them independently,” Hal decided. “He made excuses not to take them out, remember? He assumed that they’d make it back to Alpha before we got to them.”

“But he was mistaken,” Dayuki said proudly.

“Very mistaken,” Hal agreed. “Reilly may not have had it before, but you can bet the farm he’s got it now,” he said, stabbing a finger at the overhead monitor, “and it’s right there!” Or was, considering what the old maid told Dayuki. If Reilly and the Tiger Opal left the same way they arrived there might still be time to intercept them.

McKeon reset the display to the point that the submarine carrying Reilly entered the pens and resumed the playback. The vessels parked off the coast entered the pens, joined by stragglers arriving over the next several hours. Nothing departed during that time and Hal could imagine the chaos inside as the pens grew more cramped with each addition. The logic behind the tactic was as obvious as it was frustrating to watch when Den Tun finally made his move: dozens of subs exited simultaneously and scattered, all heading in the general direction of the Alpha continent.

“Show us where they are now,” Hal sighed. McKeon brought up the live feed showing the flotilla mere hours from the gaijin coast, evenly dispersed along the continent’s entire length.

“There’s no way we can intercept them all,” Tamara declared unnecessarily.

“No kidding,” Hal growled. Instead of getting a step ahead of Den Tun he found himself half a step behind with no conceivable way to catch up. “Continue monitoring,” he said. There was always a chance that something might give away which sub carried Reilly and the Tiger Opal.

Hal fumed on the way back to his quarters considering what form of vengeance might satisfy his anger at the duplicitous old bastard who had made a complete and utter fool of him. The call light on the com panel was already lit when he and Dayuki arrived.

“We need you back at the command post,” Tamara apologized. “We have another problem.”

“What the hell is it now?” Hal snapped angrily.

Cirilo raised an eyebrow. “I can’t discuss it over this circuit,” she replied evenly. “That’s why you need to come to the command post.”

The main overhead screen displayed a satellite view of Alpha continent’s northern peninsula when Hal and Dayuki entered. Dozens of aircraft icons speckled the display, most headed more or less southeast, apparently out of the path of a strong weather front moving in from the ocean. Tamara indicated the screen. “This is restricted airspace over the Great Northern Preserve,” she said. “There shouldn’t be so many aircraft in there, and more keep popping up as the storm gets closer.”

“EPEA?” Hal asked with a frown.

Tamara shook her head. “This is pre-edited data. This is what the gaijin are receiving.” Another image appeared on the secondary screen, identical to the first in every way but for one detail—no GPST icons. “They’re using blocking transponders.”

Hal couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it coming. Den Tun’s gaijin connection was the single most obvious organization on the planet, one that had operated with the blessing of both the Family and the Federal authorities for years: “Sorenson!”

“Who is this So-Ren-san?” Dayuki asked.

“Our front,” Hal explained. “We’ve given them a few blanking transponders over the years to facilitate moving our merchandise off-world, but not nearly this many. The devices are supposed to be impervious to reproduction.” Apparently Sorenson Exports had done so. Their presence in the Preserve pointed to poaching, a matter of no particular interest to the Onjin except for the risk of discovery by the EPEA. The blanking transponders masked boats and aircraft from orbital detection but the radar of individual EPEA aircraft were not susceptible to the transponder’s magic.

“Arrange for transportation and accommodations at Saint Anatone,” Hal told McKeon and Tamara. “Get a couple of men and meet me at the shuttle in an hour. We’ll pay Sorenson a visit.”

“You think he’ll cooperate?” McKeon asked.

Hal smiled grimly. “I’ll see to it that he does.”

Saint Anatone: 2709:09:17 Standard

Neil Sorenson arrived home expecting to discover another of his son’s drunken parties when he saw a light on in the pool house. It came as a mild surprise that there were no strange vehicles in the driveway, and Philip’s car was parked safely in the garage. He heard the rattle of ice in a glass as he entered the house and spied light coming from beneath his study door. He stormed in angrily, this time expecting to find his son guzzling a bottle of centuries-old whisky from his collection.

But the man drinking his whisky was a stranger.

It took the exporter a moment to recognize Halsor Tennison and lower his hackles. One of McKeon’s men closed the door behind him. Sorenson approached, unfazed by the goons.

Hal finished pouring a second drink, which the exporter accepted with an unpleasant frown. “That whisky is three hundred years old, Tennison.”

“Really? Good stuff. Smooth.”

“To what do I owe this pleasure?”  The exporter sauntered to his desk and opened a drawer.

“You’ll want this,” Hal said, tossing the empty pistol magazine onto the desk. “Sorry for snooping; I was concerned that you might mistake me for a common thief.”

Sorenson put the magazine in the drawer and closed it. “Why are you here?”

“I understand what Den Tun stands to gain by betraying us,” Hal replied, “but what’s in it for you?”

“Your question implies that I have betrayed you,” Sorenson said.

“We know you’re using more blocking transponders than we gave you,” Hal said. “My conclusion is that you built your own to facilitate poaching. I hope I’m wrong.”

“You’re not,” Sorenson replied matter-of-factly.

Hal’s anger welled up. “Use of that equipment other than as specified in our agreement was expressly forbidden!” he snapped. “You’ll expose my operation if you get caught!”

“Your operation would have been exposed years ago if I hadn’t,” Sorenson snapped back. “The Belter habitats in this system can’t produce enough food to feed themselves. The need exceeds the quantities we can move legally, thanks to the environmental laws you people influenced. Without poaching, the rest of the system will starve! How long do you think your parasitic little sub-culture will stay hidden if that happens?”

Hal bristled at the exporter’s characterization. A parasite wasn’t an organism one cooperated with or protected—it was something to be eliminated. “How exactly does helping Den Tun penetrate our network help feed the hungry masses?” Hal demanded.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t have time to quibble,” Hal said coldly. “Den Tun confessed; the only thing keeping you alive right now is my curiosity.”

“Then I certainly don’t have anything to gain by satisfying it,” Sorenson said.

“Let me show you why you’re wrong.” Hal motioned for McKeon’s men to follow and they fell in behind him and Sorenson. The exporter sauntered along beside Hal without apparent concern, more interested in his drink.

Sorenson stopped suddenly as they entered the pool house; one of McKeon’s men nudged him forward with the barrel of his gun. Philip Sorenson sat in a chair at the water’s edge flanked by Tamara and McKeon, his face puffy and bruised; Dayuki stood behind him with her hands resting on his shoulders. He looked beseechingly to his father, but kept his mouth shut.

“You have a tendency to save your son from himself,” Hal said. “Now you have the opportunity to save him from me. Would you like me to repeat the question?”

Sorenson’s eyes flicked from his son to Dayuki, then McKeon’s men and back to his son. He swallowed hard and licked his lips, his bravado gone. “None of what’s happened is irreversible,” he said.

“Answer the question.”

“The Minzoku penetrated your network without any help from me,” he claimed. “I discovered it when they tripped an intrusion alarm in my own network four years ago.”

“God-damn it!” Hal exploded. “Why didn’t you inform us then?”

“I could provide Den Tun with things that you wouldn’t,” Sorenson told him, “and he was willing to give me access to your network in return. I already knew what Nivia’s association with you had cost us; I was looking for a chance to do something about it. Den Tun offered me the opportunity.”

Hal’s bowels turned liquid with dread. Not one, but two outside entities had access to the Fort’s network for four years? The Fort’s system was isolated from the rest of the Family’s network but still stored sensitive information about their broader operations.

“So you helped Den Tun interfere with our research into monoisotopic optical semiconductors to thwart us?”

“You underestimate Minzoku resourcefulness,” Sorenson said with an ironic chuckle. “They pulled that off on their own, too, though I provided them with some of the equipment. Den Tun was determined to offer the Nivian government something worth more than Onjin payouts in exchange for recognition of the Minzoku’s right to exist.

“I was after information that would expose the sellouts in the Nivian government who make it possible for you to function here.”

“What a relief,” Hal exclaimed with feigned gratitude. “For a minute there I thought you might be after us.”

“It would have been easier,” Sorenson admitted, “but it was never my intent to cause harm to your Family—nor was it Den Tun’s, though he had every reason to do so. We simply want your influence over our world to cease.”

Hal clenched his teeth. Both Sorenson and Den Tun would have had their way eventually through the natural course of events—not that either of them would have lived to learn of it—but their impatient scheming had damaged Hal’s credibility within the Family and jeopardized the Old Lady’s ability to maintain her office. It was even possible that compromising the Fort’s network had played a role in his father’s assassination, assuming that certain elements within the Family might have discovered Sorenson’s role in the Onjin’s operation and penetrated his security.

“Where,” Hal asked carefully, doing his best to hold his temper, “is Den Tun’s courier?”

“I really haven’t the slightest idea,” Sorenson replied with a shrug.

“I’m not playing games, Sorenson.” Dayuki applied the maki suru at Hal’s signal; McKeon and Tamara tipped the chair forward. Philip Sorenson splashed into the pool and bobbed to the surface face-down.

“Philip!” Sorenson’s snifter of three-century-old whisky shattered on the floor as he bolted toward his son. McKeon’s men seized his arms just short of the edge. “You’ve killed him!”

“Not if he holds his breath,” Hal said. “He’s got thirty seconds or so if he stays calm.”

The man’s face twisted in anguish. “Somewhere along the coast in the Great Preserve!” he cried. “I have people waiting, but until they hear from the Minzoku I don’t know exactly when or where!”

“The submarine carrying Den Tun’s courier will put him ashore in the Great Preserve?” Hal clarified.

“Yes, yes! I’ll inform you the moment I know, just get him out!”

“I think that’s all I need,” Hal growled as he raised his arm and put a needle beam through the back of Sorenson’s head. The man’s skull vented its contents through his eye sockets, spraying chum across the surface of the pool. His body fell into the pool next to his son. Bubbles exploded from around Philip Sorenson’s head. Spasms shook his body as he sucked in water, lost buoyancy, and sank.

“You shouldn’t have done that!” Tamara gasped.

“The gaijin betrayed Hal-san,” Dayuki declared approvingly.

“He controlled most of our supply line!” Tamara exclaimed. “He may have arranged to disclose what he knew about us if he died!”

“Then you’d better arrange to get someone in here to find out,” Hal replied. “In the meantime, we know right about where Reilly is going to be in a couple of hours and we need to get there before Sorenson’s people pick him up.”

Hal slugged down the last of his whiskey and tossed the glass in after the bodies.

TWENTY

Great Northern Preserve: 2709:09:18 Standard

The Minzoku sailors did not bother to blindfold Terson at the egress ladder—it was pitch black outside and cold as an icebox. His borrowed clothing offered no barrier to the incessant coastal breeze and the air was heavy with the ominous promise of worse to come. Lineman and Boathook helped him into a waiting inflatable raft. The flat-bottomed little craft rode the swell of each wave as its electric motor propelled it across the water, adding nausea to Terson’s discomfort.

They’d taken Terson back to the submarine after a wait of mere hours. Upon reaching the submarine’s destination—a detail Den Tun refused to reveal—Terson would turn over the old man’s evidence to someone who would ferry him to “sympathetic gaijin.”

It seemed unlikely that the Minzoku or their sympathizers could hatch a feasible scheme to get him off-world in such a short period of time, and he suspected that the Minzoku were under pressure to get the transfer underway as soon as possible, leaving the responsibility of arrangements to their mysterious contact.

Terson wanted an explicit statement to that effect, but Den Tun made it clear that he was not privileged to details beyond those necessary to perform his task, answering his demand for more substantive information with an offer to release him immediately and point him in the direction of the nearest outlaw gaijin colony. If not for what he’d already seen and heard Terson might have accepted the offer, but his practiced cynicism could not ignore the probability of a bullet to the head—some irony, there—within his first ten steps.

He had no choice but to accept Den Tun’s refusal to offer detailed assurances as evidence that he had none to give. At least he proved reliable in one respect: he turned over the documents and small possessions from the hydrojet’s strongbox in their entirety and provided Terson with a smuggler’s belt in which to carry them.

He spent the trip back no less a prisoner than before but moderately more comfortable.

The Minzoku sailors slowed as the sound of surf grew louder. Lineman probed ahead with a pole and Boathook steered carefully, correcting at his pilot’s direction. Then they were among the low breakers and Terson could just make out the shore. A beach of brilliant white sand stretched for a quarter of a kilometer inland from the high tide mark, ending abruptly where the forest sprang up like a defensive wall. The two sailors dragged the raft onto the pebbly shore and turned to launch it again the moment Terson stepped out.

“Wait a minute!” Terson exclaimed. “There’s no one here!”

The men paused. Boathook gave him a gentle push in the direction of the trees. “Yugo now,” he said thickly, then scrambled into the raft. Terson choked off the urge to call out again as they vanished into the darkness. They’d followed their orders; the gaijin was someone else’s problem now.

He headed up the beach seeking shelter for the night. The sand crunched under his feet and a chill spread up his ankles. The shore wasn’t covered with sand, he realized. It was snow!

The sky tore open at the revelation, releasing its burden of moisture in thick, wet clumps of snow. Terson continued on to discover that the shore’s smooth upward slope was an illusion produced by snow suspended atop bushy shrubs. He waded into the mess with a drowning sensation as the undergrowth deepened, dumping slush on him as he thrashed onward. The spindly, interwoven twigs compressed into a nearly impenetrable mat before him, dragging him to a halt several times before he finally crashed through to the other side, emerging wet, cold and shivering.

A beam of light stung his eyes, startling him. “You were supposed to wait on the beach,” stated a reproachful but strangely familiar voice as Terson held up a hand to shield himself.

“Get that thing out of my face!” he growled.

The beam dropped to the ground. “You were supposed to wait,” the voice reiterated. “I almost lost you.”

Again, the feeling that he should know the name behind the voice. Terson made out the form of his surly contact as the dazzle faded from his eyes—tall and bulky in cold-weather clothing, face obscured by a parka hood. “Why weren’t you there to meet me?” Terson demanded.

The figure gestured about with his hands, as if the answer were obvious. “It’s snowing,” he said with a dry chuckle, the final clue to the speaker’s unlikely identity.

“So what got you the shit detail, Zarn?”

The light shot back to Terson’s face. “What the hell are you doing here?” Vondelis exclaimed.

“Flirting with hypothermia,” Terson replied through chattering teeth.

Zarn removed his parka and threw it around Terson’s shoulders, exposing a handgun strapped under his right arm, comforting evidence that he hadn’t come unprepared. “I’ve got transport nearby,” he said. “You can warm up and tell me what the hell’s going on.”

Zarn’s flashlight beam lanced through the forest, illuminating the surrounding trees in a ghostly backwash. Snowflakes that found their way through occasional breaks in the thick canopy overhead drifted down in glistening columns, collecting in small piles on the ground below. Zarn avoided stepping in them and Terson followed suite, unsure if they represented some local hazard or if it was merely an attempt to limit obvious tracks. Fifty or sixty meters back the trees gave way to a meadow. The men tramped through the chilling fluff to a two-seat aircar blanketed with several centimeters of new snow.

“Get those wet clothes off,” Zarn ordered. Terson complied and stood shivering in his underwear while Zarn opened the aircraft’s cargo hatch and pulled out a bundle that disgorged an insulated one-piece coverall, boots and mittens. None of it fit well, even after adjusting the straps and draw-strings. It was just as cold as the cargo space, but at least it was dry and presented a barrier to the wind. A hard, heavy lump in a pouch at the right hip turned out to be a power cell. Filaments in the fabric began to heat seconds after Zarn showed him how to turn it on. Terson climbed into the aircar’s rear seat and cupped his leaden hands around a heat vent.

Zarn cleared the snow from the front windscreen, climbed in and pulled the gull-wing hatch closed with a solid thump. “So, Reilly,” he said conversationally, “what brings you out tonight?”

“What did they tell you?” Terson asked.

“Not much,” Zarn replied. “The boss said to fly here and wait for somebody to show up. He said you’d have something for me, and I’m supposed to give you this.” He handed a sealed packet over his shoulder. “Then I drop you off at God’s Saucer and head back to camp.”

Terson broke the seal and looked inside to find a set of Nivian ID with his picture but someone else’s name and a bearer instrument for ten thousand euros. Zarn cleared his throat and snapped his fingers.

Terson handed over Den Tun’s package. Zarn’s ignorance, if genuine, made him nothing but a mule. Whether that meant the information was less significant than the old man claimed, or the risk of transferring it too great to jeopardize someone more informed, it made no sense to endanger his friend with knowledge he didn’t already possess.

“My advice,” he said as he stuffed the new items into the smuggler’s belt, “is to do what they told you and forget you saw me.”

“I figured as much,” Zarn sighed.

“What’s this God’s Saucer you’re taking me to?” he asked.

“A big industrial spaceport about eight hundred kilometers north of Ipswitch. I grew up there.”

Terson wasn’t aware of anything north of Ipswitch. “I never heard of it,” he noted suspiciously.

“It’s our dirty little secret,” Zarn chuckled. “Did you ever wonder how Nivia generates enough income to support the infrastructure down south?” Despite the draconian restrictions, Terson had always assumed that Nivia derived its income from food exports. Zarn shook his head. “God’s Saucer sits on top of a big reserve of petroleum. It was too far into development and generating too much income to abandon back when the Southies went all crazy with environmentalism.

“We were already exporting a hundred times more than we used, so the Legislature promised not to expand it. It already had a spaceport, so they never bothered to connect it to Ipswitch and Saint Anatone by road. We pretty much stay up here, and the Southies pretty much stay down there. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s like being on another planet. I’m surprised they settled you in Saint Anatone instead of up here.”

“Saint Anatone’s got the courts,” Terson guessed.

“I suppose. Take some time to look around; I think you’ll like it.” He applied power to the four ducted fans mounted fore and aft. Vectored thrust blasted snow back into the air and the car rose quickly. Terson tugged the harness over his shoulders as the car accelerated, experiencing the universal anxiety of a pilot reduced to the status of passenger as wind buffeted the airframe.

Terson rubbed a circle in the fog of moisture clinging to the inside of the windows to find that they were just meters above the treetops, a mistake common among those who assumed lower was safer. “Get some altitude!” Terson exclaimed. “A wind-shear will put us in the ground!”

“Sit back and shut up,” Zarn quipped. “I know what I’m doing.” The temperature dropped rapidly as they flew inland. The strength of the storm increased as higher elevations ahead blocked the front’s progress. The atmosphere dumped more moisture in order to rise and what started as wet snowfall on the coast threatened to transform into a roaring blizzard. Despite Terson’s anxiety, the car and its pilot appeared capable of handling it. Eventually his eyelids grew heavy and his head began to nod.

A flash of light bright enough to sting his eyes through closed lids jarred him awake. He straightened up in his seat to question Zarn, but a deafening boom and simultaneous concussion struck the car before he formed the words and all he could do was brace himself while the car spun like a leaf in a hurricane. Zarn’s curses competed with the howl of the fans as he fought to regain control.

Branches beat against the fuselage like drumsticks as the car lost altitude. A glancing blow wrenched at Terson’s straps; the canopy blew out over his head, showering him with fragments of windscreen and tree bark. The car caromed off another tree, snapping it with a crack, then plowed into the ground. Snow exploded through the shattered windows as the car slid across the ground. The safeties finally blew, silencing the fans’ tortured rattle and plunging him into a sudden, eerie silence broken a moment later by the distant rumble of a sonic boom.

He knew then that the light that woke him came from the thrusters of a large aircraft traveling well above mach. The shock wave had proven as effective as weapons fire against the light aircar. Fortunately, the speed of the assault had carried the attacking aircraft several kilometers past its quarry, offering a head start that Terson and Zarn couldn’t afford to piss away.

Terson pushed out clods of heavy, packed snow until he found the door release; once open it took only minutes to completely extricate himself. He hadn’t heard so much as a groan from Zarn and Terson made his way forward to find his worst fears confirmed: the front of the car had taken the brunt of the impacts and the entire right side of the fuselage was missing. The damage had compromised Zarn’s harness anchors, partially ejecting him from the cockpit to be battered to death by the trees.

Terson went to his knees next to the wreckage of his friend’s body—the misfortune clinging to him was intent on destroying everyone around him while leaving him unscathed. A ragged scream of rage and frustration tore at his throat until it drove the last trace of breath from his lungs and he collapsed against the side of the car.

Something in the dark void responded with a predatory yowl.

Terson’s sense of self preservation prodded him to take action to defend himself, but he resisted. What good was his survival if it only doomed those close to him? Wouldn’t surrendering to the wildlife or the elements be more responsible than living only to cause someone else’s death? With that thought came the realization that there was no one else. Zarn’s death removed the last person from the face of the planet that Terson even remotely gave a damn about.

The faint hum of repellers rose above the rustle of branches. A spotbeam illuminated a haze of fine snowflakes in the air as it swept back and forth some distance away. Whoever knocked the aircar out of the sky was returning to check their handiwork. Terson climbed to his feet with a burst of adrenaline singing in his veins.

The possibility that Den Tun or his mysterious gaijin planned to silence Terson permanently after he did their bidding was always in the back of his mind, but he doubted that they would attempt it until after securing custody of the old man’s package. An EPEA patrol would certainly attempt to take out the aircar, but would have employed gunfire or missiles to do so, not a method as dubious as a sonic boom.

The obvious remaining suspects were Den Tun’s Onjin, who cared nothing for the aircar’s passengers but had sufficient motivation to preserve the information it carried; the Onjin, who murdered Virene and hounded Terson beyond the boundaries of civilization. Terson welcomed the chance to confront them on his own terms. They might kill him in the end, but at the very least he would die knowing that Den Tun could confirm another traitor among his people.

First, a weapon: Zarn’s gun was gone; there was nothing left of the shoulder holster but a broken strap. Belted to his hip, however, Terson found a sheathed blade—the local variant of the ubiquitous Bowie knife. He scooped snow from the remains of the cockpit as fast as he could, tunneling down to the glove compartment where Zarn had stowed Den Tun’s package. At best he could use it as a bargaining chip; at worst, prevent the sons of bitches from learning anything from it.

He found it, apparently undamaged, and beneath it the flashlight. Terson shoved the package inside his coverall and fumbled with the light. He cupped a hand over the lens allowing only a narrow ribbon of illumination to escape from between two fingers while he did a quick scan for anything else useful in the debris. Nothing—at least nothing he wouldn’t have to dig for. The roving search light was only a few minutes away now and he was out of time.

Hal, Dayuki and McKeon slowly traced the path of destruction left by the shuttle’s supersonic, low-altitude pass. Heavy snow reduced the craft’s scanners to near-worthlessness. All three peered down through the cockpit ports hoping to catch a glimpse of their quarry among the bent, broken and fallen trees illuminated by the landing lights.

“We’ll never see it if it’s buried,” McKeon said.

“The snow is not so deep,” Dayuki responded. “The seedlings would be covered otherwise.”

The security officer offered up an irritated frown that she blithely failed to notice. Hal watched the exchange with some amusement. Proper Minzoku women, like the two McKeon had married, did not contradict men so blatantly. That Dayuki exercised the prerogatives of an Onjin female clearly consternated him.

“There!” McKeon pointed.

Hal brought all floodlights to bear and circled back around to land. McKeon went to the salon and rousted his men. A gust of wind above sent snow drifting ahead of the armed party as it converged on the wrecked aircar.

“All clear,” the leader radioed back. Hal, McKeon and Dayuki joined them outside. “Passenger side is open, just as we found it,” he said. “There are tracks. The pilot’s on the other side.”

Hal inspected the body somberly. The upper half of his torso looked like the frayed end of a bloody rope. His trouser pockets were pulled inside out. Tracks churned the crimson snow around the remains and struck a straight line into the trees, filling quickly with snow.

“Reilly,” Hal said.

McKeon prodded the corpse with a toe. “I remember him a little taller.”

Hal pointed at the tracks leading away.

“Get after him,” McKeon said, dispatching his men. He walked around and brushed the snow from the aircar’s tail. “Unmarked,” he announced. “I doubt we’ll find a VIN number, either.”

Damn and double damn! There wasn’t enough left of the pilot to identify except: “Take some blood and tissue samples,” Hal said. “He may be listed in the Federal DNA database.”

“Unless he’s a spacer,” McKeon said.

Hal grunted at that. The Family had become complacent in more than Minzoku obedience. His attempts to resolve the situation subtly had failed. Subtlety had, in fact, been a major contributor to the present situation over the years. Laissez-faire had allowed the cogs to develop into mechanisms in their own right that must now be dealt with as such.

The snow began falling at an angle as a brisk breeze kicked up. Somewhere in the darkness an animal yowled, eliciting a chorus of answering calls and counter-calls that built to a raucous crescendo before falling abruptly silent.

“That sounds close,” Hal noted, turning toward the shuttle. “We should wait inside.”

“Wait,” McKeon said, pointing in the direction his men had gone, where the trees now fractured a jostling flashlight beam. “Someone’s coming back.”

Terson knelt beneath a tree a few dozen meters from the aircar. Gaps in the drooping, snow-laden boughs offered a relatively clear view while simultaneously obscuring him from observation as the sleek, expensive shuttlecraft bearing Zarn’s murderers settled to the ground, preceded by an avalanche of snow and broken branches.

Figures in battle-dress dropped from the nose ramp before it fully extended and advanced on the downed aircar with weapons at the ready as the whine of repellers died away. Moments later three more people disembarked to confer before sending them off on the obvious trail Terson laid before they arrived.

Terson froze in place, resisting the urge to crouch lower lest the movement betray him to alert eyes, but his caution wasn’t necessary. They stomped past like a herd of cattle, assuring him that the steps he’d taken to misdirect pursuit would go unquestioned.

The three who remained stood together chatting, arrogant in the assumption that their quarry wasn’t capable of bringing the battle to them—arrogant enough to stand with their backs to the wide-open and unattended shuttle while their best means of defense followed a torturous trail leading right back to where it started.

If Terson had his way their security would return to find nothing but the bodies of their employers and an empty space where the shuttle had been. He slipped from his shelter and made his way to the tracks of the men sent to find him, completing the circuitous loop.

The wind gusted fitfully, one moment obscuring their voices, the next erasing them entirely. The wind died for an instant, allowing a snippet of incongruous conversation to reach him sharp and clear: “—doubt we’ll find a—”

Terson’s pulse hammered in his forehead; his breath quickened and his muscles quivered. Something in that snatch of speech—perhaps a particular tone, inflection or the combination of words themselves—matched a voice he would not forget as long as he lived: the voice of Virene’s killer whispering questions in his ear while the drugs dragged him into oblivion.

He clenched the Bowie in his fist and turned on the flash light.

He’d start with that one.

One of McKeon’s men appeared from the trees where Reilly’s trail entered and waved an arm. He called out, but the combination of wind and hood clutched tight against it muffled his voice beyond intelligibility. “Use the radio!” McKeon yelled.

“Broken,” the muffled voice replied, beckoning again. “Found something!”

Dayuki caught Hal’s coat sleeve as he started to follow McKeon and stood on her toes as he bent toward her. “Look at his clothes!” she whispered urgently.

The Fort’s security personnel wore state of the art, individually tailored cold weather uniforms. This man wore a utilitarian, ill-fitting one-piece bunched at the knees and ankles as if too long for his frame—the kind of thing someone might carry as emergency gear.

Oblivious, McKeon stomped on, too intent on his footing to notice what Dayuki had and already too far away to warn without alerting Reilly that his deception had been discovered. Hal pulled his needle-beamer from inside his coat, stepped to one side, aimed and fired in a single swift motion.

He missed.

The beam spent itself against a branch behind Reilly, igniting needles with a crackle and showering him with burning pitch. The gaijin hunkered down, spoiling Hal’s second shot. McKeon drew his beamer as he spun to identify the source of the gunfire, offering his back to the quarry.

Reilly closed the intervening distance in an instant, right arm held straight down and stiff. The naked blade clutched in his fist flashed as he swung it from the hip. McKeon gasped as it plunged into his kidney. He dropped to his knees, driven as much by the force of the blow as the sudden gushing wound in his side. Reilly had an arm around his throat before the shock wore off and drove the blade in again, higher, aiming for a lung. Reilly released his hold and plucked McKeon’s needle-beamer from his nerveless fingers as he toppled face-first into the snow.

The stunning speed of the attack left Hal momentarily nonplused. Before he could gather his wits again, Reilly raised his arm and fired. Puffs of steam appeared in the air like an ephemeral string of pearls as the beam vaporized the snowflakes in its path. The left side of Hal’s hood ignited, scorching his face. He fired wildly as he retreated, slapping at the flames with his free hand.

“Back to the shuttle!” he cried for Dayuki’s benefit before taking off as fast as he could run. Reilly’s weapon hurled one more steaming spear past him, and then Hal was at the base of the ramp. He turned back for Dayuki, and it was only then that he realized that she hadn’t followed.

The Minzoku girl ran straight at Reilly, twirling her coat before her in an ill-conceived attempt to draw his fire, and he obliged.

Dayuki advanced behind a shield of illusion as she spun the parka back and forth, the blur of speed expanding it to twice its size to the eye of the gaijin. He fired on her with cold, measured calculation, each shot placed unerringly in the center of mass confronting him but Dayuki skipped back and forth, opposite the direction of her decoy. The beams sizzled past her body with mere centimeters to spare and she reached her quarry unharmed, though the coat was little more than smoking rags when she cast it away.

She struck the gaijin with foot, fist and elbow, knocking the weapon from his hand, but discovered a flaw in her strategy: striking the gaijin was like attacking the trunk of a tree. Thick muscle armored his pressure points; she elicited nothing but startled grunts with assaults that would leave normal men groveling at her feet. Dayuki knew, however, that the tiniest of axes, skillfully wielded, would eventually fell even the mightiest of trees.

But to do so the axe must still find its mark.

The gaijin’s shocking speed, combined with his greater mass and rudimentary blocks, proved sufficient to rob her blows of their full power even when they landed. His competence increased as his surprise wore off, and one thing became quickly apparent: Dayuki would lose this battle.

Her gender did not constrain the gaijin; his counter-strikes were capable of breaking bone. Dayuki exerted as much energy defending against his attacks as launching her own; it was inevitable that one would connect. Her only remaining option was to delay defeat long enough for Hal-san to reach safety. The gaijin seemed to sense this and pressed his advance, driving her back by the step.

The cold air seared Dayuki’s lungs as she gasped for breath. To her amazement the gaijin appeared to be losing his stamina at a greater rate, though the fight was little more than a minute old—long enough for Hal-san to reach the shuttle. Dayuki invested all she had left in another attack; a slight opening rewarded her initiative and she drove her fist into the gaijin’s throat. His thick neck saved his larynx but a spasm closed his windpipe and he fell back a step.

Dayuki risked a quick glance over her shoulder; Hal-san had still not powered up the shuttle’s thrusters—he hadn’t even bothered to close the hatch behind him! He peered through one of the cockpit windows as he stood at the console frantically manipulating controls. She felt a stab of dread when she realized why he hadn’t taken the opportunity to escape: Hal-san was waiting for her.

Dayuki paid for the split-second distraction. A foot caught her in the side, driving her sideways to the ground. She struggled to rise, gasping against the lancing pain in her ribs, made it part way up but tripped over McKeon-san’s sprawled legs and crashed back into the snow. She rolled over, sick with pain, but determined to resist the gaijin to her last breath.

The gaijin hauled her roughly to her feet, his hip deflecting the knee she aimed at his groin. He spun her around; one massive limb clamped her arms to her sides as he pulled her back solidly against his chest. His free hand closed around her throat. “Do you fly that thing?” he demanded. Dayuki saw no harm in the truth; she shook her head slightly. “Then I’ve got no quarrel with you,” he growled in her ear, “but I’ve got issues with your friends!”

He lifted her off her feet and strode toward the shuttle. Dayuki raked her heel against his exposed shin, but the gaijin merely cut off the blood to her brain with a slight tightening of his fingers. The world faded to gray for a moment and by the time she regained her faculties he’d carried her to within a dozen meters of the shuttle, close enough for Hal-san to recognize the futility of her situation. Surely he would make his escape now, and allow her to die in honorable service to the Onjin!

But Hal-san only stared down at them from the viewport, arms limp at his sides.

“I’m coming aboard,” the gaijin shouted. “Interfere and I’ll kill her! Do you understand?”

Hal-san nodded mutely. Dayuki drew a breath to object but the gaijin’s fingers shifted to the base of her jaw and forced her teeth together before she could form the words. She held Hal-san’s eyes with her own, trying to communicate a final silent plea to save himself as the gaijin carried her closer to the shuttle hatch.

Hal-san’s expression held the one emotion that Dayuki never expected to see on his face: fear.

TWENTY-ONE

Great Northern Preserve: 2709:09:19 Standard

Time became a finite resource the moment the first shot rang out.

The seconds ticked by in Terson’s head—incessant, inevitable—like the timer of a bomb in the hands of a blind man. Every moment brought him closer to feeling a bullet in his back but all he could do was try to get a bulkhead between him and the men with the bullets who’d marched into the forest a few minutes before.

The woman held prisoner in his arms wasn’t helping. Her earlier demonstration of hand-to-hand combat belied her current passivity. She was a cask of gunpowder: inert and pliable until joined with a spark, and an instant’s distraction was all the spark she needed.

“You’re going to call your friend there down to the hatch,” he whispered in her ear as he carried her closer to the shuttle. “Once he’s out we’ll back up the ramp; then I’ll let you go.”

“Hal-san will kill us both first,” she replied through stiff lips.

Her accent caught him by surprise. “You’re Minzoku?” She nodded slightly. “You must be Den Tun’s traitor,” he decided. “That makes you fairly valuable.”

“I am a faithful servant of the Onjin,” she replied emphatically. “A tool to be used—or discarded—as Hal-san sees fit!”

Terson tilted her chin up to face the figure looking back from the cockpit. “The look on his face says you’re a lot more than that.” The woman fell silent, whether abandoning the subterfuge or reconsidering her outlook in light of the revelation he couldn’t tell. It would have been interesting, in other circumstances, to discover what chain of events led her to betray her people and filled her with such pride at being considered disposable.

Terson took another step, and the ground erupted beneath his feet.

Dayuki lay on her back, spread-eagle in the snow, staring up at the blackened sky with wet, stinging eyes. A high-powered energy weapon cracked off another pulse and the ground beneath her shivered as moisture in the soil somewhere nearby changed state to steam and expanded with explosive force. Silence fell for a moment, broken by the soft patter of falling mud.

“Dayuki!” Hal-san fell to his knees beside her. “Dayuki, are you hurt? Can you speak?” He lifted her by the shoulders and cradled her in his lap. The shuttle’s hatch was still wide open. She could not see the gaijin.

“Go back, Hal-san,” she groaned. “It is not safe!”

“He’s gone,” Hal-san assured her. “He ran away.” He hugged her close and she uttered a surprised cry of pain as his parka rasped across her scalded face. “I programmed the sentry gun to fire a near-miss warning. It was the only thing I could think of that wouldn’t kill you, too. Thank God you’re alright!”

Elation and shame warred in Dayuki’s heart as the obvious truth of the gaijin’s observation set in. The expression of fear on Hal-san’s face had been out of concern for Dayuki’s well-being, not his own. He’d risked his safety to preserve her life and thereby allowed the gaijin Reilly to escape. She did not know what the ramifications for the Hal-san and the rest of the Onjin would be, but she vowed never to let such a thing happen again.

McKeon-san’s men arrived at a run, weapons raised and scanning for targets as they advanced in a disciplined rank. “See to McKeon!” Hal-san called, but they ignored his command and surrounded him and Dayuki in a tight, protective ring.

“Sir, please remain where you are until we secure the area,” the leader asked in a tone that suggested steps would be taken to compel cooperation. Only after he sent a pair to sweep the shuttle did he allow Hal-san and Dayuki to rise, though the ring moved with them to the hatch. Anything more than a shallow gulp of breath triggered excruciating pain in her ribs; the few meters it took to reach the shuttle and the climb up the ramp left her dizzy and panting.

“Are you alright?” Hal-san asked.

“I am fine.” The pain in her ribs was worse, but other issues demanded Hal-san’s attention. “You must find the gaijin,” she urged. “He cannot be far.” She leaned against the wall, still short of breath, as a wave of nausea overtook her.

“We’ll find him,” Hal-san assured her. “Sit down.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I must rest a moment.”

Hal left Dayuki and returned to the hatch. They’d moved McKeon to the bottom of the ramp and the snow around him was strewn with packaging from the shuttle’s medical kit. “How is he?”

“In a bad way, sir,” said the securityman who’d taken command. “He’s effectively bled out.”

“Do what you can and get him aboard. We’re not done here, yet.”

The man’s expression went blank. “I apologize, sir, if I was unclear: he won’t survive without advanced medical intervention.”

“You were perfectly clear,” Hal replied, “and the sooner we complete the mission the sooner he’ll get it.”

Their gazes locked. Hal knew his command of the situation was tenuous, at best. Like many administrators, he paid little attention to security personnel unless they were needed, and expected them to fade into the background again afterward. He recognized a face or two among the members of this team, but knew none of their names—and they knew that. They gave their personal loyalty to the man lying clinically dead at the bottom of the ramp; whether they would follow orders indirectly assuring his death remained to be seen.

Finally, grudgingly: “Understood, sir.”

Hal returned to the passenger compartment to check on Dayuki. Her face managed to appear ashen even through the blush of her burns. Her lips were tinged with blood. “Difficult…to…breathe,” she panted.

“I need assistance up here!” Hal bellowed.

The securityman previously working on McKeon came at a run. “She’s bleeding in one or both lungs,” he informed Hal as he strapped an oxygen mask to her face. “This is serious—life threatening.”

That decided it. “Get everyone aboard. We’re going back.”

Terson’s first instinct was to put as much distance between himself and the shuttle as quickly as possible, but blindly fleeing danger was apt to get him caught more easily than a slow, methodical retreat. His initial dash had taken him downhill, the direction nearly every human ever born took in flight. Uphill was harder, and slower, but exactly the opposite course they’d expect, especially if they assumed panic had influenced his actions and did not follow his physical trail very far before turning to the shuttle’s advanced technology.

It took a while before he realized that he was getting cold.

The Minzoku woman had taken the brunt of the first blast, and though it was obviously intended to miss it accomplished its purpose by separating captive and captor enough for the second, more prejudicial shot. Whether by mere good fortune, extraordinary reflexes, incompetent aim or a combination of all three, that shot, too, expended its energy against snow and frozen ground, sending him flying in a cloud of scalding steam.

The human nervous system’s ability to differentiate between hot and cold existed within a fairly narrow range. Beyond that range in either direction the signal sent to the brain was basically the same: pain. Applying both extremes at the same time made it difficult to tell where one stopped and the other began.

Terson leaned heavily against the trunk of a tree, chest heaving for breath in the thin, cold air, and pulled off his gloves to check the connections of the power cell at his hip. Along the way his fingers encountered large tattered strips of the coverall’s windproof outer covering where the force of the shuttle’s parting shot had separated it from the inner insulating layer.

The battery was rapidly expending its charge to warm a garment no longer capable of efficiently retaining heat. Alone, without weapon or tool, surviving the night was a dicey prospect. The flashlight was still secure in a pocket and he risked a quick look around. The trees were fewer, petering out at higher elevation, while the snow grew deeper. Shelter clearly lay down slope, but the terrain would funnel him closer to the area that Den Tun’s Onjin were most likely to search for him. The only viable option was to find shelter in another draw. He’d have to traverse the ridge forming the one he was in now, which meant going higher yet.

The temperature dropped quickly as he climbed. The deep wet snow developed a crust almost thick enough to support his weight. Fluffy snowflakes gave way to dry needles of ice driven across the hardening surface by steadily strengthening wind. Terson had never even been as far north as Ipswitch in all the years he’d been on Nivia, and the reason was no surprise: If Saint Anatone felt chilly to him on its hottest day, why would he ever consider going farther north?

Now he wasn’t just cold, he was damn cold. Bone chillingly, mind numbingly, unimaginably frighteningly cold. Colder than he’d ever expected to be on the surface of a habitable world, and uniquely unprepared to deal with it. The one thing he knew with absolute certainty was that he was a dead man if he didn’t find shelter soon.

He paused again to probe about with the flashlight. Snow. Everywhere he looked a whipping sheet of white blocked sight of everything more than a few meters away—everything except the shining orbs of eyes. The twin points of light vanished from one place and appeared in another as the animals moved about, making an accurate count impossible. Half a dozen or fifty, it didn’t really matter: he was outnumbered and unarmed.

Terson had no idea how long they’d been following him, but the fact that they were content to do nothing more was a good sign that he was large or alien enough to make them cautious. The fact that the weather didn’t overcome their interest, on the other hand, was not a good sign at all. He pressed on again with the flashlight constantly in hand to verify that they didn’t come closer or surround him entirely. Soon, he hoped, he’d reach the summit that would signal him to head down again, toward shelter.

The wind whipped heat away from his extremities faster than physical exertion generated it, drawing down his core temperature by tenths of a degree until he began to shiver uncontrollably, staggering forward on legs that couldn’t feel the ground beneath them.

He grew so accustomed to putting his weight on a limb that he couldn’t feel that when his left foot came down with nothing to support it, he didn’t realize it until it was too late. His body pitched sideways, splaying out on the frozen crust, and he began to slide down the side of a monstrously steep incline. Terson fought to get to his feet on the bare, windswept crust but they shot from under him as he accelerated.

A tree trunk flashed by, then another and another, all too large to grab hold of but plenty big enough to smash into. All he could do was roll away as he spotted them, invariably moving into the path of another. They came faster and more tightly spaced the farther he went, and he was skinned and bruised by glancing blows by the time the slope began to level out.

Then he encountered the architect of the ravine he’d fallen into.

The frozen crust beneath him vanished and he fell into the darkness. A light appeared below him, approaching rapidly, and behind it his own shocked face as the surface of a misty, black pool rushed up to meet him. Terson plunged into water so cold it felt like fire. He surfaced gasping and floundered toward shore until his knees touched bottom and he crawled out to collapse, exhausted, in the warm mud.

Warm mud?

Terson sat up and wiped water off his face. He’d lost his grip on the flashlight and its beam illuminated the pool from within. It wasn’t mist rising from the water’s surface, he saw.

It was steam.

Terson stuck a hand back into the pool. It felt scalding to his near-frozen digits for a moment, but both the sensation and the steam was misleading. The water was certainly close to body temperature—sixty degrees centigrade, at least—warm enough to awaken sensation in his flesh, but not warm enough to survive in indefinitely. The air, at least, was several degrees warmer near the water than the surrounding forest, a circumstance that might prevent him from ending up like the trees and bushes surrounding the streambed, which the rising steam had encased in a crystalline sheath of glittering ice.

The indirect illumination from the flashlight shining up from the bottom of the pool revealed a shallow undercut in the bank which offered at least some protection from the snow. The synthetic fibers forming his coveralls’ insulating layer shed most of the water that entered through the damaged outer shell leaving him damp instead of soaking, and once out of the wind the battery was able to make some headway against the cold.

It had been mere hours since he’d left the relative comfort and safety of the Minzoku’s submarine. In that time he’d reunited with a friend only to see him die, confronted his tormentors only to be routed, and escaped death by exposure only to enjoy a respite that could not last. Burying a blade in the chest of Virene’s killer should have offered some solace, but his satisfaction over the revenge he thirsted for so badly faded at the prospect of the suffering awaiting him in the next few hours.

In a just universe, a bullet would have caught him in the forehead while he still felt the gush of the bastard’s blood over his hand.

A chorus of inquisitive yips drew Terson’s attention to the opposite bank, the one he’d flown from so inelegantly a short time earlier. Furtive shadows with luminous eyes paced to and fro in the tree line. Apparently his sudden departure from the slope above had not discouraged the creatures from following. They inched closer, seemingly more nervous of the open water between he and they than the light. Eventually a handful of the bravest padded onto the muddy bank.

They were not particularly large—fifteen to twenty kilograms, at a guess—and appeared dog-like at first glance, though closer examination proved the resemblance vague at best. Their heads seemed out of proportion compared to the rest of their bodies, unusually large for the long necks that supported them. The snouts tapered to a rodent-like point and wide, erect ears with tufted tips flicked independently of each other. The tips of retractable claws glinted between the toes of large forepaws and patterns of vertical white and gray stripes broke up dark brown coats.

One or two wouldn’t present much of a danger, but Terson counted at least a dozen in the pack and they appeared a bit gaunt. Like most native life on Nivia they possessed no genetic fear of humans and, unlike those near Saint Anatone, no personal experience that might otherwise cause them to shy away.

Terson decided to educate them.

He seized a nearby rock and sprang from his meager shelter with a shout. The creatures froze, making stationary targets for the stone he flung spinning at the nearest of them. The surprised animal leapt straight up with an ear-splitting screech and scrambled into the trees. The rest of the pack vanished with it, but their retreat was short-lived. Pair by pair their eyes reappeared, but well back in the tree line. Terson decided not to waste any more effort trying to drive them away—they could watch as long as they wanted provided they remained on their side of the stream.

The animals lost interest on their own. Their eyes winked out over the course of an hour while Terson’s bladder filled to the point of discomfort. Only one remained by then. It ventured closer and closer to the bank of the stream until, satisfied that Terson wouldn’t hurl any more objects across, it ventured out to drink. It was twice as large as the others, the coat lush and full without a single rib showing. It sat back on its haunches after slacking its thirst and began to groom, paying the human no mind at all.

Terson decided that he couldn’t hold it any longer. None of the other animals had reappeared, and he wasn’t about to give this one the satisfaction of watching him wet himself. The creature’s mobile ears tracked him like radar when he stepped away from the bank to piss but its eyes remained intent on its own task.

Terson had just finished when the thing pitched its ears fully forward, glanced up and adjusted its stance, eyes intent on something behind him.

Terson spun, swinging his fist with all his might. It caught the first predator in the side of the head mid-leap and sent the animal crashing to the ground, senseless. A second launched itself from the bank above him with jaws agape, claws extended like a double handful of knives. He stepped into the attack, slipping beneath the phalanx to seize the creature by the loose ruff under its chin. His other hand opened to catch the greater part of its weight at the chest as its own momentum carried it up over his head. He straightened his legs to give it a boost and sent it into the pool with a splash. Whatever their other strengths, the creatures were poor swimmers. It struggled futilely for a few seconds before vanishing beneath the black water.

Terson made for the nearest tree.

He leapt for a branch overhead, but his hands slipped from the icy shell and he fell to the ground. He caught movement in his peripheral vision and fended off another lunge with his elbow and a hard kick. With three of their number repelled, at least one fatally, the rest encircled him, none brave enough to charge. Terson shook off his gloves, spit in his hands, and jumped again. This time his hands froze to the ice, providing enough grip to hoist his legs over an adjoining branch.

One of the animals leapt onto the tree trunk. Though its claws were aptly suited to climbing, the sheath of ice couldn’t support its weight and it, too, fell. Meanwhile the rest of the pack fell to fighting over his discarded gloves, reducing them to shreds in a wild tug of war.

Shriveled, ice-coated pods dangled from the branches above Terson. He pulled loose those within reach and flung them down on the heads of the pack until they withdrew from the base of the tree. They settled back on their haunches just out of range, tongues lolling from between their jaws. A few licked and gnawed at the frozen pods he’d thrown, apparently drawn to them by the traces of blood from the missing patches of skin on his hands.

A while later the large pack leader sauntered up from downstream. It eyed him for a moment as if surprised the pack hadn’t already torn him apart and nosed among the shreds of glove until it found one to its liking and settled down, chewing fabric with the same gusto as those with pods.

It must be the blood, Terson thought. His coverall was covered with it from handling Zarn’s body as well as from the wounds he’d inflicted on the man responsible for Virene’s death. Hopefully they’d take what they had and leave.

They didn’t.

The illumination emitted by the flashlight in the water below slowly faded as the night wore on. Hunger began to gnaw at Terson’s gut, but it was far less an issue than the cold working its way back into his body as the battery built into his coverall expended itself. His only satisfaction was that the animals below him were going cold and hungry, too, though he was at a loss to explain why. Rather than gathering around the water or cannibalizing the one he’d brained, they paced round the tree yowling their displeasure.

Terson began to shiver. He blew into his hands, beating them against each other to elicit sensation but they were no more responsive than a pair of sticks. He leaned against the trunk despondently. I’m as dead as if the sons of bitches shot me, he thought. The only difference is I’ll die by centimeters.

As if it mattered. Everyone died sooner or later; at that moment hundreds and thousands of people across human space were dying, some innocent, some not. In the end it did not matter who deserved it.

Terson recalled the young sailor he’d killed on the boat again and the surprise on his face—the surprise of someone expecting to live forever, barring accident. But it was no accident that killed him—Terson Reilly did, abetted by the decisions that led him to that moment with anger in his heart and a finger too tight on the trigger. “I’d take it back if I could,” he croaked.

The wind quit at dawn. Visibility increased to a quarter of a kilometer. Clouds drifted overhead, seemingly close enough the reach up and touch. It was as if Terson sat in the center of a quiet, peaceful box lined with white satin.

His coffin.

His eyes grew heavy. He shook his head trying to stay awake, but the inexplicable warmth he felt made it harder and harder. His shivering slowed. Warm front moving in, he thought. Okay to sleep…

Benjamin Grogan and Sheila O’Brien made their way down the ravine on showshoes.

“You picked a hell of a time to go hunting,” O’Brien told him.

“I didn’t ask you to come,” Grogan replied, an uncharacteristically civil response given his propensity for obscenities and expletives. O’Brien had toyed with the idea of letting him go alone, to fall victim to the elements or wildlife, but he was the only decent pilot in the group.

They reached the bottom and paused to listen. After a moment or two the sound that brought Grogan on his last minute hunt reached them again from the forest ahead. The half-bark, half-roar of the creatures Grogan referred to as hellcats.

Grogan and O’Brien crept into the trees upstream and kicked off their clumsy snowshoes. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” O’Brien whispered. Grogan unslung his rifle and pulled it from its protective scabbard.

“Belters’ll pay a months pay for a mangy hide,” he whispered back. “Imagine what they’ll pay for one of these beauties. You just keep’em off my back.” He stalked forward, leaving O’Brien to uncover her shotgun and follow.

The poachers had encountered hellcats on several occasions. The creatures were territorial and hunted in packs using a cunning method of ambush that sometimes suggested they were smarter than they were. Once hellcats chose their prey the pack leader exposed itself, drawing the attention of the intended victim while the others came at it from behind. The animals used the same method in every circumstance, even when the ploy was inappropriate. Still, O’Brien found it difficult to look behind her when the danger was so obviously ahead.

Grogan stopped suddenly and brought the rifle’s scope to his eye. O’Brien scanned the forest behind them with her finger on the trigger. “They treed something,” Grogan reported. “We can get a little closer.”

O’Brien relaxed considerably. The other characteristic she’d noted about hellcats was their tendency to forget everything else once they’d cornered prey. More than once she’d seen slower, weaker wildlife dart from cover only meters from a hellcat whose attention remained riveted on something beyond any hope of reach.

Grogan rested his shoulder against a tree trunk once the snow-blurred forms of the hellcats came into view. They sat in a circle at the base of a tree, heads elevated toward a large animal ensconced on a branch above them. The muzzle of the poacher’s weapon settled on a target.

The barrel jumped with a crack.

The pack scattered with howls of terror, leaving behind one hapless member who spun circles where it landed, painting the snow crimson with its lifeblood. The hunters didn’t approach until they were satisfied that the surviving pack members were gone for good. O’Brien peered into the tree to see what manner of creature they’d saved from tooth and claw.

“I’ll be damned!” she exclaimed. It was a man. He didn’t acknowledge their presence and did not appear to have moved despite the gunshot. “You think he’s still alive?”

“Only one way to find out,” Grogan replied, bringing the rifle to his shoulder.

“Grogan, don’t you dare—”

The base of the branch supporting the man exploded. He tumbled backward, bouncing off branches as he fell and landed in a heap in the soft powder below. O’Brien dug him out and felt a faint pulse in his neck.

Grogan slung the hellcat carcass around his shoulders, gathering the limp front and hind legs together at his chest, and started back up the ravine. O’Brien stood, cursing him furiously. “Where do you think you’re going? He’s still alive!”

“I come for a hellcat, I got a hellcat,” he shrugged. “You wondered if he was breathing, now you know.”

“Help me move him,” she insisted.

“Worst thing about you, Sheila, is you’re never satisfied,” Grogan sighed. He clutched the hellcat’s paws together with one hand and grabbed one of the unconscious man’s sleeves with the other. Together they pulled him through the snow back to their camp.

TWENTY-TWO

Saint Anatone: 2709:09:19 Standard

It was a rare occasion when someone arrived at work before Colonel Cai, and unheard of that they could gain access to the building and enter her office without setting off myriad alarms, but that was precisely what the elderly gentleman she found waiting for her had done. He sat behind her desk with his hands folded in front of him, the ornate handle of his cane just visible near his right hand.

His face was dignified, calm, and friendly in the sort of way that put people at ease very quickly. He smiled warmly when she noticed him. “I hope you don’t mind, Colonel. It’s been a long time, and I wondered if the desk still fit.”

“I don’t mind at all, Mr. Undersecretary,” she replied, hiding her sudden anxiety as best she could. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

“Likewise, Colonel. We have a matter to discuss.”

“Of course, sir. I’ll only be a moment.” Cai put up her coat and lifted the cover of her aquarium. Her hand exhibited a slight tremor as she sprinkled food flakes across the surface of the water. The gentleman’s appearance outside his official scope foreshadowed an event of import.

Mitchel Gidden and his cohort were fixtures of Nivian politics, though not a one of them had ever held elected office. Their appointments changed with administrations, but despite long tenures none had become partisan and always found a niche no matter how inauspicious.

Gidden had been commander of the Federal Police garrison at Saint Anatone when Cai joined the force. He was elevated to Commissioner shortly thereafter, serving five more years before retiring from the Federal Police and embarking on his career as an appointee. Currently he was Undersecretary of Economic Development. Ten years prior he’d been Director of Reclamation. If anyone doubted his influence, they had only to recall what the man responsible for garbage collection and recycling had done to the career of a certain popular and powerful political aspirant.

Cai performed the rest of her morning ritual with less economy than usual, buying time to compose herself, just as the man occupying her chair intended. Gidden took his cane in hand when she turned back to her desk. “Once more I relinquish the throne, madam.”

Cai waved him down. “It’s no bother, Mr. Undersecretary. Do you care for coffee?”

“Please. And thank you for indulging me,” he said with a gesture to her chair. “These old bones no longer appreciate steel and plastic.” He accepted the cup and saucer gingerly and took a sip as he set them down. “Very good, thank you.” He nodded toward the chair that she reserved for subordinates. “Make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you, Mr. Undersecretary, but I prefer to stand.”

“But I,” he replied with a mischievous glint in his eye, “prefer that you sit.”

Cai sat. His amusement at waving her own stick at her did not make the situation any less serious, and she did not attempt to feign guiltless innocence as Maalan Bragg had some months before.

“Our partners in this sordid arrangement of ours occasionally express a degree of dissatisfaction with the quality of our support,” Gidden said. “I take pains to ensure that we fulfill our obligations to the best of our abilities so that they have no excuse to shirk theirs, but a situation has come to my attention that lends their claim credibility. It involves your department, Colonel, however indirectly, and I feel it necessary to discuss the issue with you personally.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Undersecretary.”

“Am I correct to assume that you have some idea of what I’m talking about?”

“Something to do with Captain Maalan Bragg,” Cai guessed without hesitation.

“Correct. And?”

“Maalan was a peripheral victim of an assault against a young couple he monitored as part of his ancillary duties,” Cai told him. “He developed a personal interest in the case as a result. Certain irregularities led me to suspect that our so-called partners might be involved and I attempted to redirect his attention, but ultimately it became necessary to place him on personal leave due to performance issues resulting from post-traumatic stress.”

“Not so-called at all, Colonel,” Gidden interjected. “Our organization and theirs are inexorably linked whether we like it or not.”

“They overstepped their bounds!” Cai shot back, unable to conceal her anger. “They bypassed established protocols and exposed themselves with sloppy trade-craft! An investigator half as sharp as Maalan Bragg couldn’t help but see the tracks they left, and I’ll be damned if I sit back and let one of my people pay the price for their incompetence!”

“Duty may require you to do just that,” Gidden warned, “though I will bring the infraction to their attention, if that is any consolation. Continue.”

Cai swallowed her anger. Another outburst wouldn’t aid her career or improve Bragg’s chances of survival. “Several weeks ago he accompanied a young man named Terson Reilly on an unsanctioned voyage beyond the coastal boundaries that resulted in an altercation with a Coast Guard vessel. There were several deaths. Reilly vanished, and Maalan was severely wounded. He is currently being treated at Saint Anatone General Hospital.

“I should point out, Mr. Undersecretary, that he has yet to be interviewed, and the capacity in which he acted is unknown. Mr. Reilly has a significant criminal history, and I believe that Maalan was acting under duress or coercion.”

“Then you are unaware of the sanction issued against Maalan Bragg and Terson Reilly?”

The revelation stunned her; a sanction virtually condemned Bragg to death. “Apparently so.”

“Then let me enlighten you,” Gidden said gravely. “Terson Reilly engaged in activities that our partners felt endangered their position, activities that Captain Bragg appeared to participate in willingly. Further, I determined that those activities endangered Nivian security and issued directives to your counterpart in the Coast Guard instructing him to take adverse action against Maalan Bragg and Terson Reilly. I was notified of the action’s successful prosecution and thought the issue closed.

“Imagine my consternation when I learned that this was not the case. I consider myself a fair man; I understand that circumstances beyond human control occur, that ‘shit happens,’ if you’ll pardon the indelicacy of the phrase, but misinformation of this magnitude verges on criminal.

“Your counterpart at the Coast Guard regaled me with excuses when I called on him yesterday morning to discuss his retirement. Unfortunately, he thought to salvage his career with threats, and it became necessary to have him removed during the night. I will attend the funeral, of course.”

Gidden’s friendly blue eyes regarded her with great interest. “Will you regale me with excuses as well, Colonel?”

“As I just stated, Mr. Undersecretary, I was ignorant of the existence of a sanction until this moment,” Cai said with the confidence of manifest blamelessness, though dread began to mount with the turn the conversation had taken.

“Your enlightenment obligates you to act, Colonel. This will not be a problem, I’m sure.”

“Captain Bragg is in critical condition, his survival in question,” Cai said. “It may not be necessary.”

“You are being evasive, Colonel.”

“And you are asking me to have a fine police officer, a good man, killed!”

Gidden’s face softened. “A course of action to which you object.”

“Absolutely!”

Gidden raised his hands imploringly. “What would you have me do? You know the stakes.”

“He doesn’t know anything,” Cai said with as much assurance as she could muster.

“He suspects the existence of something worth knowing,” Giddens countered, “otherwise he would not be in this position.”

“The best way to keep a hungry man from searching for food is to feed him,” Cai said. “The same is true of curious men. We’ve inducted those who acquired condemning information without malice before.”

“But once fed, he may lead others to the trough,” Gidden pointed out. “People like us require a particular flaw in our moral character to function, Colonel; a certain self-interest that allows us to rationalize the enforcement of contradictory values.

“Captain Bragg has already demonstrated a steadfast moral character that demanded he risk his life and career in pursuit of the truth—despite evidence that ignoring it would benefit him far more. It is not likely that he could endure the hypocrisy inherent in our existence.”

“His own life, perhaps,” Cai said.

Gidden grimaced. “Holding the lives of a man’s family over his head is a distasteful business, Colonel, even for a jaded old man like myself. It would be more merciful to simply kill him.”

“Frankly, Mr. Undersecretary, it disturbs me that your solutions always seem to default to the taking of life,” Cai said lightly. “It would be disappointing to learn that you’re too jaded to entertain other options.”

Gidden chuckled. “It’s been a long time since anyone offered me such pointed criticism, Colonel. I find it refreshing.” His eyes drifted to the side thoughtfully for a moment before returning to her. “Very well. I lay the situation at your feet, to deal with as you see fit.”

“I’d expected to do more convincing,” Cai said cautiously. His easy acquiescence suggested the existence of a snare. “I may need some latitude to make promises not ordinarily within my power.”

“You have it,” Gidden smiled, “though I remind you that by accepting this responsibility you also accept the consequences of the outcome.”

“Of course.”

“Then I shall be on my way,” Gidden said, leaning on his cane to rise. “It has been a pleasure.”

“Likewise, Mr. Undersecretary.”

Gidden winked at her as he passed. “You are an excellent liar, Colonel.”

Great Northern Preserve: 2709:09:21 Standard

Sheila O’Brien sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, eyes drinking up the stunning view beyond the cave mouth. Bright sunlight streamed out of the clear, cobalt blue sky, spilling across jagged peaks topped with curls of snow that trailed wisps of sparkling crystals into the air as the frigid breeze worked to ablate what the storm had deposited.

The snow-covered slope below the cave stretched unbroken for nearly a kilometer before the first puffed mound of a buried tree cast its long shadow toward the bottom of the valley. O’Brien longed to strap on a pair of skis, plunge into the powder outside and race through the crisp, clear air as she had during her childhood on another planet a long time ago.

The glint of sunlight from an object hurtling through the sky reminded her why she couldn’t. The object came on quickly, resolving into an airsled before it buzzed overhead, past the poachers’ hideout. Now she regretted her soft heartedness, which stood to cost them all dearly. If Grogan hadn’t had a hard-on for a fur, if the storm hadn’t lasted as long as it had…

If she’d just left the guy where they found him.

The wind and early snowfall both protected and trapped them now. The path they’d worn up the slope to their hideout over months of hunting was hidden under a meter of virgin snow, but the pristine surface would betray them if they ventured outside, even to drag their inadvertent charge into the open where his friends could find him. The Embustero could not delay its departure for too long, and would not return to Nivia for several months.

Another airsled appeared for a moment before dipping out of sight again. As near as she could determine, the search area ended at the ridge just west of their hideout.

Jerrell Mackey squeezed between the Embustero’s cargo sled and the cave wall to squat next to her. “They still at it?”

“Haven’t let up since the snow stopped,” she told him. “How’s the dirtsider doing?”

“Liz says he’s got pneumonia.”

“Guess I screwed him all the way around. And us,” she sighed.

“Maybe so. Maybe not,” he said. “Help me set this up, then I’ve got something to show you.” Together they assembled the tripod and fanned out the antenna dish, aiming it toward the sky where the Embustero’s orbit broke the horizon every eight hours, permitting thirty minutes of tight-beam communication before it passed beyond line-of-sight again. O’Brien plugged the cable into the remote head and spooled it out behind them as they picked their way back into the guts of the mountain.

The irregular walls cast nightmarish shadows in the lights and O’Brien experienced a healthy unease as they descended. Their hideout had been formed not by centuries of water eroding limestone, but a catastrophic landslide. They padded through spaces formed by slabs of rock the size of buildings jumbled together like a child’s building blocks. The chaotic mass seemed ready to tumble the rest of the way to the bottom of the valley at the least provocation, though what she and the others had stumbled upon during an early expedition suggested that it had been stable for centuries.

Their path took them steadily downward through a series of difficult, claustrophobic passages interspersed with openings to side passages. Some led to useful voids where the poachers stored equipment or bushmeat, but the hand-written chalk signage and stacks of rock outside others warned of hidden pits, unstable strata or dead ends.

The main passage finally ended at a pit descending straight down another ten meters. Light from below illuminated an A-frame spanning the void. An electric winch for supplies dangled from one side of the crossbeam, a rope ladder for personnel from the other.

What began as a hole in the floor of a cave ended as a hole in the ceiling of a man-made tunnel lined with tool-worked stone and buttressed by reinforced concrete pillars. The passageway predated the landslide by an indeterminate number of years, but all evidence pointed to the cataclysm as the cause of its ruin. Branching corridors suggested that it was a small portion of a larger complex, but they all ended abruptly where crushing weight overcame structural integrity.

The portion they’d stumbled upon while searching the voids for hibernating furbeasts during one of their earliest expeditions consisted of four corridors, each roughly thirty meters in length, arranged to form a square; branch corridors extended beyond the corners in both directions for varying distances before ending at cave-ins. Interconnecting rooms of varying dimensions occupied the central square.

Artifacts implying some kind of communication and administrative facility filled the rooms. None of it had been disturbed since the disaster—since the last survivor died, rather. The spacers found the skeletal remains of seventeen individuals huddled in a single room, and interred them permanently beneath the contents of other offices as they cleared them for their own use.

O’Brien still felt queasy whenever she passed that doorway. It wasn’t the thought of human skeletons just meters away that disturbed her, it was the thought that what had happened before could happen again; that she and her fellow crewmen might become the next to survive long enough in the darkness to suffer death by suffocation, dehydration, or starvation. The possibility alone was enough to discourage the Embustero’s crewmen from disturbing the collapses despite the possibility of finding other portions of the complex intact.

Mackey and O’Brien continued down the tunnel toward the entrance to the main room guided by battery-powered illumination installed on previous expeditions. Inside they found the other members of their party gathered around three radiant heaters, silent and worried. There hadn’t been much to do after packing up the cargo sled except worry, though O’Brien noticed that someone, probably motivated by their space-bred dislike of dirt, had swept the floor clean enough to eat from.

O’Brien bore them no malice for their fastidiousness. It was easier for a dirtsider to adapt to space than it was a spacer to adapt to a planet. Even so, after years in space she, too, had to remind herself that wind was not an atmosphere leak and soil not a detestable source of contamination or waste of delta-v.

She plugged the antenna cable into the encryption module of their receiver and turned on the alarm that would alert them when it detected the Embustero’s carrier wave. “What did you want to show me?” she asked Mackey.

He led her from the common room to the adjoining space they used as a bunkhouse and withdrew a belt made of small linked pouches from under his cot. “Liz found this when she stripped him down to cool the fever,” he said. He lay out the contents: miscellaneous personal effects, a bearer instrument for ten thousand euros, two identical envelopes.

A wad of personal documents slid into O’Brien’s hand when she opened the first. The face on the Nivian identification card was that of the dirtsider, clean-shaved and unmarked by frostbite and deprivation. Joseph Pelletier. She opened the second envelope to find documents identical to the first, from the ID card to the basic starpilot’s certification, but under the name Terson Reilly. Both sets were stained and water damaged, making it impossible to tell if one were newer than the other.

“I don’t know what he needs two sets of ID for,” Mackey said, “but I can tell you one thing: it ain’t legal.”

“And the people looking for him aren’t his friends,” O’Brien groaned. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“They can’t search forever,” Mackey shrugged again. “We can wait them out if we have to.”

Which meant nothing if the Embustero left without them. Shadrack might be inclined to set up an account for them with enough credit to survive on until the ship returned, but then again he had to consider the possibility that they’d get caught, in which circumstance a paper trail leading back to the ship wouldn’t be the best idea. Even if he was successful in disavowing knowledge of their activities, the scrutiny might reveal secrets that made poaching a minor footnote.

They had to leave soon, if for no other reason than that a truly significant snowfall would trap them for good if it buried the entrance to the cave before they got the sled out. O’Brien strode back to the common. “Where’s Grogan?”

Lad Hussein pointed to another doorway. “In the trap room.”

Dozens of snares and springtraps hung from spikes in the walls, clean, oiled and ready for the next expedition. Grogan and Berriochoa hovered over a workbench with a toolkit trying to rebuild the cargo sled’s FLIR pod, though it was roundly accepted by the rest of the party that the blow it took when Grogan hit the trees—again—was irreversibly fatal.

“How’s it going,” O’Brien asked.

“Just about got it,” Berriochoa replied with the same conviction as the last four times she’d asked. “We need a little more time.”

“A little time might make the difference between getting back to ship and getting stranded here,” O’Brien told him. “We have to be ready to go when Shad gives the word, and we can’t fly with a hole in the hull. You need to have that thing installed, working or not.”

“Quit bitching!” Grogan growled.

It was hard to ignore the man’s incessant barbs, so most of the crew pretty much did whatever it took to elude them, which often meant giving in to his petty demands and withholding valid criticism. It was the effort to avoid a confrontation that led O’Brien to hold her tongue when he let the sled’s altitude drop uncomfortably close to the treetops, even though she knew that his irrational self-confidence often resulted in his repeating the same mistake.

“It goes back in when the link with the ship comes up,” O’Brien told them. “You’ve got until then.” Both men studiously failed to acknowledge the ultimatum, and O’Brien opted not to play the game by insisting they do so.

A fit of coughing erupted from the makeshift infirmary between the trap room and bunkhouse, a wet, whooping explosion of breath painful to listen to. The spasms carried on and on, increasing in length and intensity until each ended in a choked, gasping wheeze just before the diaphragm rebounded to begin the cycle again.

Grogan spun toward the door and hurled the tool in his hand against the wall with a clang. “Shut that fucker up!” he bellowed. “I have to listen to this shit one more night I swear I’ll bust his head!”

“I’ll take care of it,” O’Brien hastened, stepping to the door to block his way if he decided to make good on the threat. He glowered at her, but snatched the tool from the floor where it landed and turned back to the pod.

It was hard to believe that a person could remain unconscious through the paroxysm. The dirtsider lay against one wall on a doubled-up sleeping pad, covered by a thin, sweat-soaked blanket. Leprous-looking gray patches of frostbite marred his face and Liz hovered over him, covering his mouth with a cloth to catch the blood-flecked sputum and muffle the sound as best she could.

“How’s he doing?” O’Brien asked.

“I finally got some meds down his throat,” the younger woman replied tonelessly, “but it’s a waste of time. You should have left him.”

O’Brien wasn’t certain which made her feel the most uncomfortable: hearing someone talk about another human being as if he were a piece of equipment that was too much trouble to fix or the fact that, for just a split second, she agreed.

The Fort: 2709:09:21 Standard

Dozens of aircraft icons crawled across a map of the Great Northern Preserve, a near duplicate image of the one that sent Hal on the disastrous foray to confront Sorenson and locate Reilly less than forty-eight hours earlier.

“They began to move in the moment the storm broke,” said Tamara Cirilo via video link from the safe house in Saint Anatone. “Based on the chatter, I’m confident that they’re only looking for their missing aircar.”

“Can you call them off?” Hal asked.

“Possibly, but I recommend against it. They’ve got more resources than we can field, and if they do find Reilly we’ll know it.”

“Agreed. Anything else?”

“We’re getting a good picture of Sorenson’s illicit operations now that we have access to his network,” Tamara said. “Apparently Sorenson Exports sells poached animal protein to the Belters in return for refined elements, most of which they ship out-system. Some of it gets smuggled back to Nivia and traded to the Minzoku for grains, fruits and so on.”

“What elements was he selling to the Minzoku that they couldn’t get themselves?” Hal demanded.

“Indium, gallium and antimony,” Tamara replied glumly.

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Hal asserted.

“Unless he and Den Tun were stockpiling it for large scale production of Tiger Opal,” Tamara suggested.

“How did he move that volume of material off-world without getting caught?”

“The company that handles ninety percent of Nivia’s toxic waste disposal is a subsidiary of Sorenson Exports,” Tamara said. “I suspect we’ll find that he accomplished most of his out-bound smuggling by disguising the cargo, including ours, as waste. That’s one export the federal authorities don’t look at too closely—they’re happy to see it gone and don’t ask questions about where it ends up.”

“Did you find anything likely to lead back to us?” Hal asked.

Tammy pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Not directly. His poaching operation involves most of his company, but effectively camouflaged his interaction with the Minzoku from even his own people. He played that aspect of his operation close to his chest.”

“Lucky for us,” Hal sighed.

“Not entirely,” his cousin said. “It appears that he managed the Family/Minzoku facets of his operation personally.”

“And I killed him,” Hal groaned. “The Old Lady is going to have a fit when she finds out!”

“Probably,” Tamara smiled, “but my report could read several ways. We’ll talk about it when I return. One last thing,” she added. “Sorenson’s death will draw a lot of attention from the local authorities. I recommend we come clean about it with our federal contact—as clean as we need to, anyway.”

“Fine,” Hal sighed. “Set it up.”

“Done. I’ll see you when I get back.”

The connection faded and Hal ran both hands through his hair. I did it to myself. Built the trap for her and walked right in. The fact of Sorenson’s death would be of less interest to the Family than the repercussions it had on their currently unfulfilled obligations and future operations. Blaming the assassination on a fit of pique would do him no good at all and Tamara knew that.

Hal left the command post and headed straight back to his quarters to check on Dayuki. The Fort’s physicians had confirmed the field diagnosis—a lung punctured by a broken rib, a serious injury but survivable with adequate care. The trick, it turned out, was convincing Dayuki that her greatest obligation to him was to recover, not to concern herself with his comfort.

She was awake when he arrived, the pain medication he’d set out for her that morning untouched. “The doctor said you’ll heal faster if you take it,” Hal informed her.

“The medicine makes me sleepy, and I wish to hear what you learned from Mistress Cirilo,” she explained.

“Mixed news,” Hal sighed, and explained his predicament.

Dayuki put her hand on his arm when he finished. “Perhaps,” she said consolingly, “you will learn to love her.”

TWENTY-THREE

Great Northern Preserve: 2709:09:23 Standard

Terson drifted in dreamlike confusion; thick, muddled perceptions of the present blended with the past. Someone held him on his side and beat on his back, commanding him to cough. Virene swam within a school of bejeweled fish. Wet, hacking spasms shook his body. Jack and Terson stood back to back in the middle of the tavern giving as good as they got. Angry demands for silence.

The Big Man passed him on a street in Windstone one night.

Their eyes met and Terson felt the helpless terror of the paralyzed little boy he’d once been, but the Big Man shambled on without any hint of recognition. The young boy whose family he’d butchered had changed considerably more during the intervening twelve years than he had.

Terson turned to follow. The Big Man turned into a dimly lit alley, stumbling in a little way before stopping to piss.

Terson slipped the knife from his boot used it like Boss Hanstead taught him. It was easier than he expected—the Big Man was nothing but a drunk now, and the bottle had taken away any fight left in him. Terson stared at the lifeless body at his feet for a moment then leaned over and added vomit to the pool of blood and urine.

Terson spun in total, absolute darkness. He tried to speak. A painful, racking cough exploded from deep in his chest instead. “God damn you!” someone hissed from the darkness, “Start that shit again I’ll cut your fucking throat!”

“I’m cold,” he managed to croak out.

A light flicked on suddenly. Terson squeezed his eyes shut against it. Someone laid a cool object against his forehead. “Fever hasn’t broken,” a woman said, “but it’s dropped. See if he’ll drink.”

A warm hand lifted his head. A tube touched his lips. “Slowly.” Terson sucked on the tube, found his mouth full of cold water. He let it trickle to the back of his throat, swallowed a little, then a little more. The tube withdrew. “Go back to sleep.”

Terson gazed down on Den Tun’s tapestry from orbit, taking in the rare view of the planet as seen from the northern approach to Saint Anatone. Tiny figures of finely stitched thread cavorted at the base of a triple-peaked mountain.

The universe snapped into lucid focus, and Terson’s eyes flew open.

He knew the reason for the tickle of familiarity when he first saw the tapestry. He knew what Den Tun’s Onjin and gaijin were willing to kill to protect.

The revelation that explained everything blazed in his mind as he woke, crisp and certain and unassailable, then guttered out like a snuffed candle before his consciousness could seize hold of it. He lay still, listening, with the dank, musty scent of stagnant air in his nose. Illumination from beyond one of two doorways cast enough light to make out smooth stone walls. Lighter colored lime deposits lined cracks in the ceiling above.

He was naked except for his shorts, swaddled up to his neck in blankets. He wrestled with them for a moment to free himself and sat up, head pulsing with waves of dizziness amplified by hunger and thirst. The tips of his fingers and toes ached, and his chest felt as if someone was sitting on it. He was somewhat more than mildly surprised that he was alive.

Low voices emanated from beyond the room. Terson pulled one of the blankets around his shoulders and sidled up to the lit doorway, ears straining for the sound of anyone approaching. The room on the other side was larger, filled with trapping paraphernalia and unoccupied. A sensor pod sat on a work bench surrounded by tools.

A topographical map lay next to the pod. The maddening tickle in Terson’s head stirred up again as he approached. Someone had penciled a path leading from a location apparently inside the Great Northern Preserve eastward to the edge of the map. Judging from the notations scrawled alongside the course they’d misinterpreted the elevation lines and their journey would end in an abrupt intersection with the ground roughly fifteen kilometers from its point of origin.

The damaged sensor pod explained the use of the map, but offered no clue to the identity of those who’d rescued him. If they were the same people Zarn worked for he could be on his way to freedom, but there was no guarantee that all of Zarn’s coworkers were privy to the plot. They might hand him over to the authorities as a suspected poacher. If they were poachers themselves, they might decide to kill him to spare themselves the risk of discovery.

Terson needed a weapon. The room contained plenty of blunt instruments, but nothing small and effective enough to conceal. He crept back to the room he woke in and peered through the second, darkened doorway. This room, too, was larger than the first, and possessed a second entrance on the right-hand wall from which the voices came.

Mounds of bedding and personal gear on the floor emerged from the darkness as his eyes adjusted. The nearest pile yielded a twelve-centimeter hunting knife, which Terson thrust into his waistband at the small of his back. Another pack rewarded him with a package of hard candies. He shoved a handful into his mouth then stepped lightly to the second doorway. It led to a small lit anteroom and yet another doorway. Through it he heard people moving about and conversing. He edged along the wall to a shadowed corner where he could peek out without being seen.

Half a dozen men and women wearing shipsuits sat around a bank of heaters. Two more knelt by a communications module discussing their situation with someone on the other end of the circuit. It didn’t take Terson long to get the gist of who the spacers were, what had happened to them, and his own part in it. Eventually they got around to talking about what to do about him.

“…So we can’t fly in daylight until they leave,” O’Brien finished, “and getting out at night will be dicey without the FLIR.”

“I understand your situation,” Shadrack’s voice cracked back, “but the only other option is to leave you behind.”

O’Brien looked sidelong at Grogan, who nodded his head as if addressing their captain in person. “We’ll do’er, Cap’n.”

“The lander’s at the spaceport now. It lifts in the morning, with or without you.”

“Sir,” O’Brien said, “What about our, ah, friend?”

Shadrack replied with dead air for a moment. “Use your best judgment.”

“We leave him here,” Grogan announced when the Embustero signed off.

“He goes,” O’Brien countermanded. “He’s our responsibility, and he’ll die for sure if we just go off and leave him.”

“Your responsibility,” Grogan said, “not ours. You want him along, you give up your cargo-share; equal mass.” He looked about for allies. The others seemed inclined to agree.

“I didn’t say take him to the ship!” she exclaimed in exasperation. “We can drop him off in God’s Saucer.”

“So he can turn us in?” Grogan snorted.

“He’s been unconscious since we found him, you idiot!”

“And how do we explain where we got him?” the man demanded. “Medics are going to ask questions, and remember us when the folks looking for him track him down.”

He had a point, there. “We’ll pay somebody to get him to a hospital,” she ventured.

“We’ll pay?”

“God damn it, I’ll pay, alright?”

“Suits me,” Grogan shrugged.

“We’ll split the cost,” Mackey said, turning to the other spacers. “Would you like to get left behind for the sake of a few hundred euros?” It wasn’t a fair question; involuntary grounding was a fate worse than death to a spacer.

“She already said she’d pay!” Grogan objected.

“Put a sock in it, you pitiless bastard.”

“And who the hell are we going to get to do it?” he pressed.

“That guy you paid to fix the sled the first time was willing to make a buck without asking too many questions,” Mackey replied with a tight smile. “Maybe you can have him rebuild the FLIR, while he’s at it.”

Grogan glared at him. “Go to hell!”

“But how do we get there?” Berriochoa asked, bringing the conversation back to the subject that concerned them the most.

“Leave that to me,” Grogan told him. “I can fly out of here with my eyes closed.”

“They must have been,” Mackey sniped. “Try to spare the trees, this time.”

“He’ll hit more than trees, if he doesn’t learn how to read a map,” said a gravely voice. The blanket-clad dirtsider emerged from the shadows in the anteroom leading to the bunks and leaned heavily against the threshold, pale and unsteady. He turned his head and hacked a wad of crimson phlegm into the corner.

“If it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t be in this fix,” Grogan growled, advancing on the man menacingly. “I should pitch your ass back outside!”

The dirtsider was in no condition to defend himself. O’Brien jumped to her feet, too far away to intercept her crewmate. “Leave him alone, Grogan!”

The dirtsider shifted his weight from the wall and extended a stiff arm to ward off the spacer. Grogan stopped abruptly and looked up at the ceiling with eyes wide, arms limp at his sides. “Easy with that, now,” he said in an unusually restrained tone.

It took the rest of them a moment to recognize what the dirtsider had pressed against the underside of Grogan’s chin. “He’s got a knife!” Mackey exclaimed. The spacers scrambled to their feet, snatching up whatever weapon or blunt object came to hand.

Perspiration beaded Grogan’s forehead. He held still, not daring to so much as swallow while the others circled uncertainly. “You threatened to cut my throat, I recall,” the dirtsider said. “Not much fun on the receiving end, is it?”

Mackey pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the pair. “Let him go!”

The dirtsider’s hard eyes turned to him. “You’re just as likely to hit him, the way your barrel’s wobbling. And if you do happen to hit me the last thing I’ll do is rip him open.” He pressed the blade a bit harder to make his point. Grogan rose up on his toes, whimpering.

“We’re not part of whatever you’re mixed up in,” O’Brien said. “We’re getting ready to pull out and there’s people looking for you. We’ll leave you for them if that’s what you want.”

“Who are they?”

“We don’t know,” O’Brien said.

“You’re poachers,” the dirtsider observed.

“We saved your life,” Mackey reminded him.

“Yeah, I guess this isn’t very grateful of me.” The knife left Grogan’s throat, but he did not offer to surrender it. “You did me a favor; I’ll return it.”

“How do you think you’ll do that?” Grogan glowered. He rubbed his neck instinctively to reassure himself he was well and whole.

“I can get you out of the mountains,” he said.

“We can do that ourselves!”

“I can get you out of the mountains alive,” he amended.

“Sure,” Grogan scoffed, “like we trust you to know what you’re doing!”

“The papers in his belt say he’s atmosphere rated,” Mackey confirmed.

“I want my property returned,” the dirtsider said.

“We’ll hang on to it for now,” O’Brien replied. “Are you sure you can get us out of here?”

“Not absolutely, no,” he shrugged. “But I’m so sure you won’t make it if he flies that I’ll go ahead and take my chances here.”

“That’s a plan I can live with,” Grogan sneered.

“Shut up,” O’Brien sighed. “Liz, go get the map.”

As anxious as the spacers were to find a way out of their predicament, watching the dirtsider hunched over a map of indecipherable squiggly lines could only hold their attention for so long. They drifted back to the heaters by ones and twos, leaving the responsibility of monitoring him to O’Brien. Monitoring in this case simply meant observing where he went and what he did, both of which were essentially irrelevant.

Her observations did, however, raise more and more questions about him—where he came from, for starters. They’d found him in a shredded emergency survival suit without even street clothes underneath. There were no roads or civilian flight paths for hundreds of kilometers in any direction, yet he clearly wasn’t part of the local militia or law enforcement. He appeared competent and familiar with the wilderness, yet ended up perched in a tree surrounded by vicious predators, slowly freezing to death.

Grogan maintained that he’d made no errors in deciphering the topographical map the dirtsider now studied. The explanation the dirtsider offered as proof that he had required an understanding of the concepts involved that none of the spacers possessed. Had it been luck that got him this far, or ability? The distinction was important, given that they were about to place their lives and freedom in his hands based more on Grogan’s known inadequacies than trust in him.

It was hard to trust anyone as guarded as he was.

He avoided small talk; he wouldn’t confirm his origin, though O’Brien told him flat out that she knew he wasn’t a local because his accent was wrong his physique could only come from a high-grav environment.

There was no doubt in her mind that he didn’t ordinarily need a knife to defend himself from someone like Grogan. The old scars on his arms and torso offered plenty of evidence that he’d successfully defended himself against someone or something far worse, though; again, he wouldn’t discuss it.

“How about a damned name, then?” she demanded in frustration. “You’ve got two to choose from!”

He looked back at her with an expression that gave nothing away. “I’ll answer to either.”

Was he a Joseph Pelletier, or a Terson Reilly? No way to tell by looking at him. “I had a boyfriend named Joe once,” she informed him. “He was an uncommunicative asshole, too.”

Oddly enough, the fact that he didn’t try to ingratiate himself with the spacers put O’Brien more at ease than if he’d been a gregarious extrovert. He had something to hide and wasn’t about to apologize for it; he knew the spacers had something to hide and didn’t care. The arrangement they’d entered into was all business; nothing personal, no hard feelings, hope we never see each other again.

He looked up from the map and motioned for her attention, then held a rag to his mouth as his body shook with another fit of coughing, staining it with more blood-flecked sputum. “How you feeling, ah, Joe?”

“Been better,” he replied. “Been worse.” The spacers had given him a shipsuit meant for a man several centimeters taller; one of Grogan’s as he was the only one with a girth to match. It bagged at the seat and ankles, but at least it protected him from the chill. “Does your sled have a GPS?”

“It does,” she told him, “but it fried when we took out the FLIR pod.”

“How about a compass?”

“I’ve got a little electronic hand-held.” She got it out of her pack for him.

“It’ll do. Is it calibrated for true north or magnetic north?”

“I didn’t know it mattered.”

“It doesn’t—I just have to know.” He punched through the simple menu for a moment. “True north; that’s fine. Does the sled’s altimeter work?”

“Isn’t that part of the GPS?”

“That answers my question,” he replied, and went back to the compass menu. “Never mind; this has one. I can calibrate it from the sled’s atmospheric pressure sensor and the map. Won’t be as accurate as I’d like, but it will work.”

O’Brien’s stomach began to hurt. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re going to try and navigate using a dime-store compass and a paper map?”

Pelletier nodded. “And a copilot with a sharp eye and a rudimentary familiarity with basic land navigation.”

“Maybe we should rethink this,” she said.

“Fine by me,” Pelletier shrugged. “You’re the ones in a hurry.”

He had her there. They could rethink it a hundred times, but it all came down to the Embustero breaking orbit without them in a little over sixteen hours—a deadline only slightly less certain than the sun coming up in the morning.

His confidence made him appear a godsend at first, but what he proposed to do bordered on ludicrous, now. It was easy for a spacer to say that death was preferable to stranding, but as the possibility loomed she found herself thinking that a dirtside prison might not be so bad after all.

Her attention turned back to Pelletier, who watched the play of emotions across her face while she thought it through, patient and impartial. He wasn’t constrained by a deadline, but was willing to take what struck her as an absurd risk. Was he just crazy, or was he really that good?

“Tell me straight,” she demanded, looking directly into his eyes, “what are our chances?”

“Eighty percent we get out,” he said. “Sixty percent we get out in time for you to make your lift. Twenty percent we don’t make it.”

“Twenty percent being we get killed, or get caught?”

“If we get caught the EPEA will execute us on the spot,” he assured her.

“Comforting,” she replied sourly. She nodded at the map. “Explain how this works.”

“We’ll fly out in a series of legs,” he said. “I’ve identified landmarks at each waypoint. The map gives us altitudes, the compass direction, and we’ll need a clock or stopwatch for duration. We find the landmark at each waypoint to confirm location, then change course and reset for the next waypoint.”

“That’s the craziest idea I’ve ever heard,” O’Brien told him.

“Maybe so, but it works. I’ve done it before.”

“In the dark?”

“Where I’m from we got fog so thick the visibility was no better.”

“Oh? Where was that?”

Pelletier ignored the question. “Who’s flying right seat?”

“Grogan’s got the most experience with the sled.”

“Grogan’s an idiot. Who’s second?”

“I guess that would be me,” she sighed.

“You need to study this, then,” Pelletier told her, gesturing to the map. “It’s going to be up to you to spot landmarks and keep track of where we are.”

She looked over his annotations, which indicated that they’d head south for quite a distance before turning east toward the preserve’s border. “What was wrong with Grogan’s course?” she asked. “We know that route a lot better.”

“Those valleys are perfect for avoiding radar,” Pelletier agreed, “but the terrain’s too narrow and rugged to navigate this way at high speed. You wouldn’t make your lift if we flew it slow enough to avoid crashing.

“This route,” he said, finger tracing the series of doglegs, “is more open and the elevations change more gradually. We can fly faster, and the trees should provide better contrast against the snow.”

“But they’ll see us on radar,” O’Brien pointed out.

“Maybe, but we’re heading away from the main search area, and they’re not looking for another aircraft. If they do happen to see us, they’ll most likely assume we’re one of them.”

O’Brien combed her fingers through her hair. Pelletier’s self-assurance was difficult to argue with, under the circumstances, but she and the others were fools to give him their trust and confidence carte blanch. “What’s the fastest you can fly the first leg?” she asked.

“The ridge should hide us for a while, so we can fly higher and faster here than we can when we get to the bottom of the valley. Why?”

“I’m going to put out a rescue strobe when we leave,” she said. “That’ll draw them all here while we haul ass the other way.”

Pelletier frowned. “Not necessarily the best idea,” he said. “The more eyes that point this way, the more likely that someone will spot us.”

“Then you’d better be as good as you seem to think you are,” O’Brien replied. “It’ll be dark in another couple of hours.”

“I’ll be ready.”

The poachers finished loading their gear as dusk swept across the mountains. They chose to abandon the non-essential and consumable supplies. Grogan performed the preflight and powered up the sled’s systems before relinquishing the pilot’s seat to Pelletier. “All yours, genius.” The sled’s repellers came to life as he withdrew to the passenger compartment. “Everyone’s strapped in,” he announced.

“Let me know when you’re ready,” Pelletier called back to O’Brien.

O’Brien pulled the rescue strobe from its charging socket in the sled and carried it to the aircraft’s tail. She set the strobe frequency and aimed it into the depths of the cave. “Fire in the hole!” she called, closed her eyes and triggered the strobe.

The flash dazzled her eyes through her lids and the strobe emitted a high-pitched whine as it recharged its capacitor for the next flash. O’Brien lugged the device to the mouth of the cave and shoved her feet into her snowshoes. Drifting snow had constricted the entrance to less than half its original size, raising concerns as to whether the sled would even fit. It was still more than large enough for a human being, though, and she trudged out to seat the strobe in the snow a few meters from the opening.

Back inside, she caught a handhold long enough to kick loose the snowshoes and swung herself aboard. She left Grogan to secure the hatch while she made her way to the cockpit and strapped in next to Pelletier. “Four minutes left!”

The sled moved forward slowly. O’Brien held her breath as the nose came in contact with the low trailing edge of the drifts and began to plow it into a hump that climbed toward the cockpit windows. The sled’s mass proved too much for the obstruction; irregular blocks of wind-compacted snow broke free and slid aside, tumbling into the darkness down-slope.

“Three minutes,” O’Brien said.

Pelletier turned onto the compass heading for the first leg. “Start the clock.” She toggled the counter, and the sled accelerated down the mountain’s flank at full speed. Dark splotches appeared in the dim gray expanse of snow beneath the sled, flocked copses of trees that grew larger and more frequent as they approached the valley floor then merged into unbroken forest.

“Any second n—” A burst of light bright enough to be seen from orbit lit the sky behind them before she finished. Reflections from the surrounding hills illuminated the valley for a split second, long enough to spot the first landmark: a pass through the foothills into the next valley. “Five minutes to the next strobe.”

Pelletier had seen the pass, too, and altered course slightly without slowing. His eyes flicked back and forth between the sled’s maneuvering clock and the little compass. O’Brien leaned forward, peering through the useless front window, straining her eyes for any clue as to what lay ahead. Her neck and shoulders tensed in anticipation of the certain impact.

The clock reached zero and began to count up. Pelletier cut power to the thrusters and pulled the nose up suddenly, using the sled’s belly as an airbrake. The added stress of the maneuver proved too much for someone in the passenger compartment. Groans of disgust followed close behind the retch and splatter of stomach contents.

Pelletier eased ahead at a snail’s pace. “That was the easy part,” he said. “Let me know when it looks like we’re on the other side.” The timely arrival of illumination from the second strobe confirmed the sled’s position a few moments later. Pelletier adjusted their altitude and turned onto the heading for the second leg.

A streak of light appeared in the darkness back the way they’d come. It sped across the sky for a moment, and then blossomed into a fireball that quickly faded to a rain of burning wreckage. “What the hell was that?” O’Brien demanded.

“The EPEA must have seen the strobe too,” Pelletier said placidly as he reset the clock. “Things’ll get pretty exciting back there.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Great Northern Preserve: 2709:09:24 Standard

“I said land, goddamn it!”

Terson shook his head. “Just gimme another stim.” His voice shook so badly the words were nearly unintelligible.

The strain of flying blind for so many hours had taken a toll on all of them, Terson and O’Brien most of all, and of the pair Terson was by far the worst off. His coughing had worsened beyond the ability of medkit’s low-grade suppressants to control it by the time the spacers reached the halfway point. His movements and mental acuity grew progressively more sluggish with each leg, and he had to slow their flight accordingly.

The stimulant patches that kept O’Brien awake and alert had only slowed Terson’s physical deterioration, pushing his body to use up reserves already depleted by its earlier ordeal and continuing battle against the infection attacking his respiratory system.

And now, the infection was winning.

“Look,” O’Brien ordered, pointing out the dim, pale light on the eastern horizon. “Look over there! We’ve got three legs to go, and we won’t make it before daylight if you try to keep this up! Another half hour and there will be enough light to fly by ourselves.

“You got us through the worst of it; don’t kill us on the home stretch!”

Terson drew in a breath to argue, but it set off an explosive cough that sprayed blood across the flight controls before he uttered another word. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and nodded, releasing the controls to O’Brien. She brought the sled down in the trees, setting off an avalanche of snow and broken branches beneath it.

“Grogan, Berriochoa, get up here,” she yelled. “Our dirtsider’s just about had it.” Terson was too weak to make the short trip to the passenger compartment under his own power. The two big spacers half-walked, half-dragged him from the cramped flight deck to a seat where the one they called Liz wrapped him in blankets.

“He’s relapsed,” Liz announced after a cursory examination.

“It’s going to be hard to get rid of a corpse in town,” Grogan said. “Best we leave him here if he’s going to die anyway.”

“Shut up, Grogan,” O’Brien snapped. “We’ll get him to a hospital like we said.”

“That was before he woke up and saw us all,” Grogan reminded her, “and we’ll barely have time to make the port as it is.”

“Then you’d better get your ass to the cockpit and fly,” O’Brien said, “because we’ll have plenty of time if we miss the lift!” Grogan snarled under his breath and stomped off. Her face swam in Terson’s vision, concern evident, as the chills took him. “Don’t worry, Joe, I won’t let them leave you.”

Terson opened his mouth to express his gratitude the only way left—by trusting her with his real name, the one he had no doubt that she would find a way to mark his grave with if the worst happened—but his attempt to speak triggered another fit of bloody coughing. That final exertion pushed him past the threshold of the stim’s ability to keep him conscious.

O’Brien surrendered to her own fatigue and curled up in a seat next to one of the tiny ports with a blanket. Unfortunately the residual chemicals in her blood from the stim patches weren’t ready to release her.

The snow thinned as they left the mountains, now moving at a rate considerably faster than the darkness constrained them to. An hour later the sky above was pale yellow and free of all but the brightest stars. Grogan kept to the shadowed valleys as long as he was able, but eventually they had to climb over the last of the high peaks and head down toward the arid plain toward God’s Saucer.

O’Brien experienced a great deal of relief at spying familiar landmarks. For the first time in several days it seemed possible—inevitable, actually—that they’d get back to the ship and brush the dust of this miserable planet from their feet.

The western end of the lakebed came into view at last.

“I got Figenshaw on the horn,” Berriochoa called back. “They’re just starting the prelaunch checks. We should make it in plenty of time.”

Now was the last chance to jettison Pelletier’s body. He was hanging on, but looked far worse than he had when they first found him. His face was drawn and ashen; greasy sweat gave his skin an unhealthy sheen. Most telling, however, was that twice as many stim patches as O’Brien used couldn’t keep him conscious.

He’d given everything he had to get them home, but O’Brien was ashamed to admit that she didn’t intend to go to the same extreme to keep him alive. When weighing the interests of the ship and a dirtsider, the scales always tipped in favor of the ship—but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t willing to take a chance. “Grogan, swing by that refitter that did the work on the sled for us.”

“It’s on the opposite side of the port from the lander,” he objected.

“Just do it; we’ve got time!”

“You’d better be right, Sheila,” Grogan replied, “‘cause none of us will cover for you if we miss the lift.”

The sled banked to port, following the north rim of the lakebed toward the seedy side of the field, home to shipbreakers, boneyards and shady repair facilities. The sled had to slow to a crawl when it dropped to surface roads, but it was large enough to usurp the right of way from lighter vehicles and less assertive drivers.

“This is it, up ahead on the left,” Grogan called back. “The gate’s closed.”

“So get out and yell.”

“Why the hell don’t you do it?” the big spacer exclaimed.

“Because he knows you,” she shot back.

Grogan cursed and slapped the harness release. He forced his way past her to the passenger compartment, popped the main egress hatch and dropped to the dry ground without waiting for the stairs to unfold.

“Thank you for contacting BlackBay Recovery,” said a pleasant female voice. “This circuit is unsecure. If you possess a BlackBay encryption certificate, please upload it now.”

Cormack MacLeod inserted the memory stick and waited while the system at the other end read the certificate and implemented the encryption. The toll calculator at the upper right corner of the black screen incremented just faster than the progress bar at the bottom, reminding MacLeod why he detested real-time hyperlink transactions. His only comfort was the knowledge that a full-bandwidth video link would have driven the toll ten times faster.

“Thank you. This circuit is now secure, and is being transferred to a BlackBay Recovery agent. Please have your Gamma Three passcode ready.”

A genderless, electronically distorted voice came on the circuit a moment later. “Thank you for waiting. Your passcode is required to continue.” MacLeod recited the alphanumeric string. “Thank you, sir or madam. How can I help you today?”

“The amount deposited to me account for the information I provided on the Embustero is more than a wee bit less than what ye led me to believe,” MacLeod said. “It doesn’t even cover me expenses!”

“Anonymous informants are not paid on the same schedule as those who can be fully vetted,” the entity on the other end explained. “I apologize if that wasn’t made clear when you first contacted us. Rest assured that you will receive the full payment once your information has been verified by field operatives. You will receive an appropriate percentage of the recovery fee paid to us by the lienholder once the actual recovery takes place.”

“Aye. Any idea when that’s likely to happen?” MacLeod demanded.

“For security reasons, I do not have access to operational information.”

“I need the blasted money now, damn ye!”

“I appreciate your predicament, sir. However, these protocols exist to protect us from false informants. The very people we’re attempting to recover property from frequently attempt to pass themselves off as concerned citizens such as yourself in order to obtain funds or lay false trails.

“The balance of the payment would be available to you within five business days if you care to submit to full disclosure at this time.”

“Nay, I do not,” MacLeod groused. “Thanks for a whole heap’o nothin’!”

“You’re welcome, sir. Feel free to contact us at any time if you change your mind or have other questions.”

MacLeod worked out his frustration peddling his tricycle from the hyperlink kiosk back to his shop. Hours of research, weeks of travel, a significant payout of operating capital, and he found himself slightly deeper in the hole than when he’d started. Chances were excellent that he’d be paid eventually, but he might be living in an abandoned shipping container by then. One of his more persistent creditors was due payment within the next few weeks. The only liquefiable assets on hand were tools and test equipment the loss of which would devastate his business.

He was not so caught up with his troubles that he failed to notice a familiar cargo sled settle to the ground on the road outside his gate as he rounded the fence from the opposite direction. He skidded to a stop and back-peddled instinctively, reaching cover as a hatch opened and Ben Grogan dropped to the ground.

The spacer’s reappearance constituted an eerie coincidence, setting off mental alarms that Cormack’s long experience taught him not to ignore. Perhaps Grogan was simply looking for more repairs on the sled; perhaps the master of the Ladybird had caught wind of someone looking into the ship’s affairs and deduced who that someone might be. Grogan held his finger on the buzzer as he peered through the fence. With no response forthcoming, he picked up a stone and threw it onto the sheet metal roof to bounce and clatter its way back to the ground with considerable racket. He appeared to satisfy himself with that provocation and jogged back to the sled. The craft lifted again and cruised off in a cloud of dust.

Cormack pushed his ‘cycle around to the smaller back gate, just in case.

“Nobody home,” Grogan reported when he reboarded. “We wasted half an hour. Happy?”

“Head for the hospital, then,” O’Brien told him.

“Haven’t we had this conversation already?” Grogan asked sharply. “The ship can’t get clear before they figure out who this guy is and who dropped him off!”

“Just go,” O’Brien sighed. “I’ll think of something.” She sagged into her seat and pulled the blanket up around her chin. Her stims were finally wearing off. A huge yawn overtook her, and her eyes squeezed shut of their own accord. She forced them open again, shaking her head.

Grogan’s muted voice reached her ears from the cockpit, a litany of complaints and recriminations. She saw the same in the eyes of her crewmates, all of them hoping Pelletier would take the decision and its consequences out of their hands by simply dying. Jerrell Mackey moved next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him, wishing she dared to close her eyes.

Grogan’s smug voice shattered the brief reverie: “O’Brien! Markland wants you.”

Markland, the Embustero’s hard-boiled First Mate. Grogan had decided to raise the stakes by inviting the command staff to the party. O’Brien went forward to the jump seat behind the pilots’ positions and pulled on a headset.

“Grogan says you’re taking the dirtsider to the hospital instead of making the lift,” Markland said flatly. “Is that true?”

“We’re dropping him off at the hospital before we meet the lander, yes sir.”

“That is an absolute, unequivocal negative, O’Brien. Get your asses to the lander ASAP, understood?”

“Yes, sir. What about the dirtsider? Liz says he’s critical.”

“Unload him at the first public area you come to; let someone else deal with him.”

“They’ll just mistake him for a drunk, sir. He’ll die.”

“Not your problem.”

“I’d like to talk to the Captain.”

“Shadrack’s not on duty—I am. Do as you’re ordered.”

She took a deep breath. Going over the First Mate’s head risked ramifications she shuddered to consider. “Respectfully, sir, I request a Captain’s Call.” The satement met dead air for a moment; even Grogan’s eyes grew large with shock.

“Stand by.”

“You are one crazy bitch,” Grogan murmured.

O’Brien flipped him off with as much vehemence as she could pack into the gesture.

The Embustero’s captain came on a few moments later. “Shadrack here. What’s the situation, Crewman O’Brien?”

She explained as succinctly as she could, and waited for his decision. Once given, there was no arguing or variance. If she didn’t obey, her crewmates were obligated to enforce the order or suffer the same punishment she would incur.

“You said he was unconscious, the last time we spoke,” Shadrack said. “When did that change?”

“He made us aware of it shortly after we lost the line-of-site with the ship,” she replied. “We’re not certain how long before that he came to.”

“So you have no idea how much he knows about us.”

“No, sir, I’m afraid not.”

“Very well; proceed to the lander immediately.”

O’Brien’s heart sank. “Yes, sir. What do you want us to do with the dirtsider?”

A hint of surprise crept into the Captain’s voice. “Bring him with you, of course. We can’t risk leaving him behind.”

“Yes, sir!” She paused on her way to the passenger compartment and turned back to Grogan. “I judge him about a hundred kilos. I think you and I should pay the others back out of our cargo-share.”

“Why the hell would I do that?” he snorted.

“Because nobody likes a tattler, asshole!”

The cargo sled merged into the traffic pattern and circled until it received clearance to enter the field. It drifted slowly over the tarmac toward the idling lander and slipped into the waiting bay. “Chain her down,” Grogan ordered. The spacers scrambled out the hatch; O’Brien and Mackey moved their patient to the lander’s passenger cabin where Liz went to work with the larger vessel’s more sophisticated medical supplies to stabilize him for take-off.

The lander finished taxiing into launch position just as they strapped a respirator to his face to assist his breathing during the G-force strain. The jostling roused him, and he looked around, confused by the restraints and change of scenery.

“What’s going on?” he rasped behind the mask.

“It’s okay,” O’Brien assured him as she strapped in next to him.

“Stand by for launch in thirty seconds,” Figenshaw announced over the all-call. The lander’s engines rumbled to higher power and the craft began to vibrate.

The Pelletier’s eyes widened; he clutched at the harness release. O’Brien seized one of his arms, Mackey the other. “Sorry, partner,” Mackey apologized. “The Captain says you’ve seen too much.”

Brute engines roared, crushing them back in their seats.

Saint Anatone: 2709:09:28 Standard

“That’s her,” Undersecretary Mitchel Gidden said from the back seat, indicating an auburn-haired woman seated at a sidewalk café. Cai brought her unmarked cruiser to a stop. Gidden rolled down his window, raising the polished handle of his cane to catch the woman’s attention. “I’m a bit early, my dear,” he called. “I apologize if it’s inconvenient.”

The woman approached the cruiser with a fond smile. “Seeing my favorite uncle is never inconvenient!” She slid into the front passenger seat, abandoning the charade the moment the door closed. “Who are you?” she demanded of Cai.

“This is Colonel Cai,” Gidden replied. “You will deal with her, from now on. She knows everything.”

“I know you people don’t retire,” she said, flashing an arrogantly self-assured smile. “Have you finally felt the clammy hand of death on your shoulder, Mr. Gidden?”

“No more so than your former Chief Administrator did,” Undersecretary Gidden replied flippantly. “Good day, Ms. Cirilo.” He exited the car and walked up the street, cane tapping the flagstone sidewalk.

The shadow that crossed Cirilo’s face at the remark remained when she turned her attention back to Cai. “I don’t appreciate surprises like this,” she said.

“Then get out,” Cai suggested. Despite their shared culpability, their professions made them natural enemies, and she found it difficult to set that fact aside. Unfortunately it was she who was betraying her nature, not Cirilo.

Cirilo declined the bait, instead appraising her with dark brown eyes. “It seems like a rather abrupt changing of the guard,” she said. “Anything I should know?”

“I’d tell you if there were,” Cai replied coolly, “and if it suited me. You asked for this meeting; let’s get on with it.”

“Neil Sorenson, one of your local exporters, stuck his nose were it didn’t belong and discovered things that he shouldn’t have,” Cirilo said. “He’s been silenced rather permanently.”

“You killed Neil Sorenson?” Cai demanded incredulously. “Are you people insane? You can’t go around murdering high-profile citizens!”

Cirilo’s eyebrows shot up. “He uncovered some very incriminating information about our activities and your own government,” she explained. “Things best left unknown. He also ran the largest poaching operation on the planet.”

The latter revelation didn’t surprise Cai in the least. It had long been assumed, but never proven, that Sorenson Exports was engaged in large-scale poaching. “Did this have anything to do with the sanction you convinced Gidden to put out on Maalan Bragg and Terson Reilly?”

“I’d tell you,” Cirilo said with a tight smile, “if it suited me. I believe our business has concluded.” She made to open the door.

“Wait,” Cai ordered, drawing an irritated look from Cirilo even as she paused. “A gang of poachers escaped from the Great Northern Preserve a few days ago,” she said. “We have reason to believe that they were spacers.”

“In what way does this interest us?” Cirilo asked.

“They were working out of a pre-settlement complex buried in an old landslide,” Cai explained. The section that the poachers had penetrated was a tiny portion of what survived the slide; fortunately they didn’t possess the equipment to tunnel into the rest. The Secret Service would use explosives to collapse it in its entirety once they’d satisfied themselves that they’d found it all and mitigated the primary environmental hazard—the semi-functional nuclear reactor which turned out to be the source of the mountain’s many hotsprings.

“And I repeat the question.”

Cai looked at her skeptically. “You mean to tell me you really don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“I suggest you pass it along to your superiors, if it doesn’t mean anything to you,” Cai suggested.

“And what the hell do you expect us to do about it?” Cirilo demanded.

“Your organization is better equipped to find a privateer than we are.”

“I’ll consider it,” she conceded, “but I expect something in return. We have questions for Maalan Bragg.”

“You’ll stay away from Maalan Bragg,” Cai replied coldly. “Your own incompetence put him on your tail. Neither of us can afford a screw-up like that again.”

“I’ll be sure to pass that along as well,” Cirilo said with similar ice, and got out.

Bragg continued to occupy the Colonel’s thoughts as she drove away. He’d pulled through, physically, at least, and was due to return to work on light duty in a few more days. His mental state was still in question, especially given the shattering revelations she’d dropped on him at the hospital. She had to get him involved in police work again, regain what trust she could, and give him a chance to accept the new way of things.

She’d successfully undermined his personal integrity already; undermining his professional integrity wouldn’t be nearly as difficult, and Neal Sorenson’s murder was the perfect opportunity to get that out of the way.

TWENTY-FIVE

Beta Continent 2709:09:30 Standard

Sergio Cirilo remained understandably acrimonious toward Hal after the attack on his daughter. They hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words to each other since the incident and Hal made a point of avoiding the Fort’s Deputy Administrator whenever possible.

The Old Lady’s summons, unfortunately, was not an event either man could avoid. Sergio’s expression when Hal entered the room and seated himself was positively glacial. The two men endured an uncomfortable silence until Tamara Cirilo arrived.

Despite her earlier promise to discuss the matter, Tamara had refused to tell Hal exactly what she’d put in the report she was about to present to the Old Lady. Neither Tamara nor Sergio had made overtures he could consider extortion, which meant that the truth was sufficient for their purposes.

Sergio’s smug smile when his daughter entered the room seemed to support Hal’s fear.

The Fort’s Intelligence Officer offered a cheery greeting and took the seat next to Hal, a move that puzzled both Hal and her father. Hal didn’t have time to dwell on the issue, as the oversized monitor at the end of the conference table flickered to life a moment later.

The Old Lady regarded them with a grim expression.

“Tamara, I’ve read your initial report. Is there any doubt that Sorenson and the Minzoku are colluding?”

“None whatsoever, ma’am,” Tamara replied.

“Then we find ourselves in a very serious predicament,” the Old Lady said. “We must give Sorenson no reason to suspect we’re on to him until we’re in a position to act preemptively.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Sergio said blithely. “He’s dead.”

The Old Lady’s eyes focused on Hal suspiciously. “How did this happen?” she demanded. The acidic taste of fear rose to the back of Hal’s throat. He ached to backhand the smug smile from Sergio’s face.

“He was murdered,” Tamara said. “Hal found him dead when he went to Sorenson’s estate to confront him about the Minzoku.”

Sergio’s face went blank with shock, and then blushed with anger. Obviously Tamara hadn’t been any more communicative with her father than she had with Hal, and managed to neatly trap them both. She could demand any price she chose from Hal and any attempt Sergio made to set the record straight would perjure his daughter.

“That was a stupid thing to do!” the Old Lady exclaimed. “That half-cocked temper of yours will cross the line some day if you don’t learn to control it!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hal managed humbly.

“It was fortuitous,” Tamara reminded the Old Lady. “We were able to secure all information linking us with Sorenson. We’d face a more difficult situation had the authorities arrived first.”

“I doubt that you were entirely successful,” the Old Lady snapped. “One man can’t manage so far-flung a deception single-handedly! A murder investigation will certainly shake out something pointing to us!”

“Our contacts assure me they’ll handle that,” Tamara said.

“Their eagerness to cooperate has eroded over the years,” the Old Lady reminded them. “Tamara, I expect a full follow-up within forty-eight hours. What is the status of our last shipment?”

“Well on its way to Caliban,” Tamara said. “Sorenson’s death will not impact materials in the standard transport stream. Our people should receive it within weeks; about the same time our current production cycle ends.”

“Maintain a normal appearance for as long as possible,” the Old Lady instructed. “Anything more out of the ordinary could severely complicate matters.”

“The gaijin have found other things to distract them,” Hal said. “They seem more concerned with some old structure in the Great Preserve than our activities.”

The Old Lady stared at him intently. “What did you say?”

“The gaijin have greater interests than investigating the death of a suspected poacher. They aren’t likely to put much effort into it, reducing the likelihood that they’ll discover anything about us.”

“Not that—you said something about the Great Preserve.”

“Apparently spacers found the remains of some sort of structure while poaching in the preserve,” Hal said. “The gaijin expect us to track them down.”

“I damn well expect so!” the Old Lady exclaimed. “Why didn’t you inform me immediately?”

“It’s not significant,” Tamara replied for Hal, mystified at the Old Lady’s concern. “Their poaching problem has always been just that: their problem.”

“Excuse us for a moment,” she ordered. “I’d like to have a few words with Hal in private.”

The Cirilos looked at each other curiously as they filed out. When they were gone the Old Lady sat back, tilting her head disbelievingly. “Didn’t your father ever tell you?”

“Ever tell me what?”

“Where the Minzoku came from.”

“They’re the remnant of some pre-commonwealth colony,” Hal said. His mother cocked an eyebrow at him. Comprehension sent the blood rushing to his feet. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

The Old Lady shook her head. “They’d devolved technologically,” she said. “There were barely five thousand of them left and the Commonwealth wasn’t so vigilant, then. Nivia’s underwriters hired the Family to remove the Minzoku and the colonial government destroyed archeological evidence of their existence. The most enduring was concentrated in what is now the Great Northern Preserve.”

“We just moved them to Beta,” Hal groaned.

“Not until a decade later,” the Old Lady explained. “We put the Minzoku to use elsewhere. Your great-grandfather extorted the colony when we needed a base of operation. The Minzoku still don’t know they’re on their own planet.”

“What was he thinking?” Hal wondered. “If the Minzoku can be linked to this planet—”

“The Commonwealth will spare no expense to crush us,” the Old Lady confirmed.

It was a little-known fact that the Commonwealth Colonization Board was created not to protect primitive alien races, but primitive human populations. The Terran Exodus had scattered human kind farther than the Commonwealth had yet expanded. Every few decades evidence of the migration emerged: dead ships orbiting inhospitable worlds, abandoned habitats, and other desperate, failed attempts to colonize environments inimical to life. Explorers occasionally found friendlier worlds already inhabited by the descendants of those who blindly fled the Qu’a’i fleet and pushed them aside by whatever means necessary to lay their own claim.

Many populations vanished without a trace. Others fought back, and the bloody massacres on Tammuz led to the creation of an oversight agency to prevent it from happening again. Since then the CCB had ordered the removal of colonies from two worlds usurped from their original inhabitants.

The Old Lady shook her head. “After all this time I never expected it to come to this. Transmit me the information the Nivians provided you about the spacers and initiate Stage One immediately. I’m afraid our presence on Nivia has become untenable whether we find these people or not, and the Minzoku’s existence has become too great a liability.”

“We can’t eliminate them all,” Hal pointed out.

“We don’t have to—just those that know about us.”

Her gaze became pointed. “All of them.”

Saint Anatone: 2709:10:01 Standard

The elevator doors closed on Maalan Bragg before he could maneuver himself, his briefcase and his cane into the hallway. They sighed open again when they detected the obstruction, allowing him almost enough time to collect himself before they threatened to catch him again.

Colonel Cai appeared at his side and blocked the doors with her forearm. “Let me help you with that, Maalan.”

“That’s not necessary!” Bragg protested as she plucked the briefcase from his hand.

“Nonsense; I can see that it is.” She walked alongside as he hobbled toward his office. “I’m surprised your doctor let you give up the wheelchair so soon.”

Bragg’s doctor had no inkling, of course. The deep ache in the left side of his chest had already convinced him that his impatience was foolish, but his coworkers would continue to defer to him, the wounded hero, as long as his infirmity was visible. He accepted their sympathy and accolades graciously, in public. Privately, he felt dirty. Decency demanded he resign but his courage hadn’t overcome Cai’s unveiled threat.

“I’m glad you’re recovering so quickly,” she said, following him into his office. Bragg settled into his chair with an involuntary sigh. “What did you have planned today?” she asked.

Bragg gestured irritably to the printouts stacked about the top of his desk. “Paperwork.”

“That can wait,” she said. “I’ve got a job for you.” She wrote an address on his blotter pad. “Have Dwin drive you.”

“What is it?” Bragg asked suspiciously.

“A situation requiring a discrete and rapid resolution,” she said. “Someone will fill you in when you get there. Your report won’t take more than a couple of hours.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Cai reached into her pocket and set a pair of major’s clusters on his desk. “You’ll need these,” she said. “I apologize for the informality.”

“Is this what I think it is?” Dwin asked as he drove through the ornate gate.

You already know, Bragg thought, but said: “Neil Sorenson’s estate.” A meticulously groomed hedge blocked the grounds from view. The drive made a gentle S curve and opened into a cul-de-sac full of unmarked vehicles. Two EPEA troopers stood at ease at the walkway leading to the mansion. Submachine guns suspended from three-point harnesses tracked the police car as Dwin pulled up.

“Ah, you want me to come in?” Dwin asked.

Bragg shook his head. Once he would have appreciated the backup. Now he operated under the assumption that Cai would allow no one outside her clandestine cabal near him for the foreseeable future. Therefore, he had no more to fear from the EPEA thugs than his own driver.

“You got an evidence kit?”

“Under the seat.”

Bragg rummaged through the kit and pocketed half a dozen evidence bags, a pair of sterile sample tubes, latex gloves and a fingerprint wand. He checked the chamber of his automatic before he opened the door and leaned on the cane to stand up. The EPEA trooper studied his ID carefully for a moment. “We’ve been expecting you, Major. This way.”

They led him through the hedge and turned onto a pathway rather than the steps leading to the main house. The grounds were artfully over-grown with native flora, a model of environmentally friendly landscaping. Half a dozen more EPEA personnel loitered outside the pool house, including one lieutenant. The ripe stench of decomposition wafted through the open door.

Bragg ignored the EPEA officer’s salute. “What have we got?”

“Neil and Philip Sorenson,” the EPEA officer said, following him in. “Both found in the pool, dead. No marks on the son. Father was shot in the head.”

The bodies lay at the edge of the pool already zipped into black plastic bags. Bragg stepped as close as he dared to the edge and peered into the murky, putrescent water. “I suppose you people have trampled the crime scene already?” Bragg asked.

“We’re here to sanitize it,” the lieutenant said emphatically, “not protect it.”

“Then I suggest you have someone get that glass off the bottom of the pool,” Bragg said. “What else did you pick up?”

The young officer looked flustered. “There was a deck chair here,” he said. “I moved it back to the table. And there was another glass, broken, over there.”

“What kind?”

“Sir?”

“What kind of glass! A kitchen glass or a bar glass like the one in the pool?”

“I don’t—”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bragg interrupted. “What are you calling this?”

“Poaching-related double homicide,” he ventured uncertainly.

“Oh, that’s original.” He pulled out a pair of evidence bags. “Put the glasses in these.”

“Sir, we threw the broken one in the garbage.”

“Then get it out!” Bragg exclaimed. “My God, it has to look like we at least tried!” He glanced about the pool house while the officer ordered one of the EPEA troops into the pool and another to dig the glass shards out of the garbage.

Nothing here they haven’t destroyed, Bragg thought. The glass in the pool had been submerged too long to recover any latent fingerprints or DNA. He needed to get into the main house without raising suspicions.

“Philip Sorenson was drunk,” Bragg told the lieutenant when he returned. “He fell in and drown. What did Neil Sorenson do when he found his son dead?”

“He killed himself,” the man answered.

“Good! Now you’re getting the idea. Where’s the gun?”

“The… gun?”

“Lieutenant, it’s difficult to make a case for suicide when means for it is absent,” Bragg sighed. “We need a gun. Did Sorenson have one?”

“There’s one in the study. I’ll have someone—”

“I’ll get it myself!” Bragg snapped. “Just point the way.”

Sorenson’s home lacked the grandiose accessories Bragg expected a man of his wealth to accumulate. Everything he owned was of the highest quality, but there were no gaudy paintings or statuary. The decor was expensive, but strictly conservative.

The study smelled strongly of whisky. Bragg found and bagged the pistol, then traced the source to an open bottle on the bar near a display case filled with vintage liquor. There was an empty ring on one shelf, and the remains of the seal lay next to the bottle.

The bottle was less than a quarter full. Sorenson might have cracked a bottle now and then, Bragg supposed, but a serious collector and connoisseur certainly wouldn’t leave it to evaporate. He cast a furtive glance at the door to the hallway, half expecting to find an EPEA watching. No one. He knew what he should do, which direction the wise course pointed. He didn’t have the power to oppose Cai, lacked the resources and knowledge necessary to effectively subvert her, but the thought of meekly acquiescing to the new order she’d thrust on him made him sick.

He’d betrayed his oath as a police officer once already, sacrificed Terson Reilly—dead though he may be—before the idol self preservation. By all appearances, Cai took that to mean that he considered himself irrevocably damned, and she would have been right, once. A few months earlier Maalan Bragg would have condemned anyone who stepped from the path of truth, who washed his hands in another man’s innocence, with no regard to circumstances.

Now, however, Bragg held fast to the conviction that, though he condemned himself, the person he’d wronged would not. Reilly, he was certain, might even approve, provided Bragg make an attempt to set things right, no matter how long it took.

Bragg sprayed graphite powder over the bottle. Fingerprints leapt out immediately; it hadn’t been handled more than once or twice since the last time it had been polished. He scanned each print with the wand, and then capped and wiped down the bottle but paused before returning it to the display case. He wasn’t likely to get a chance like this again on his salary—even as a major. He pulled off the cap again and took a straight slug. The liquor flowed down his throat with a smooth, even burn.

Fiction, he discovered, was easy to write; it took far less than the two hours Cai allotted to work up the report. His conclusions as to the causes of death—“accidental: alcohol related” and “suicide” met with Cai’s full approval.

She gave him the next two days off, and suggested that he and his wife pay another visit to Reproductive Services.

EPILOGUE

Beta Continent: 2709:10:03 Standard

Den Tun sat with his eyes closed on a bottom-polished stone bench beneath the shade of a patiently trained and manicured tree in his garden, listening to the lazy trickle of water against stone in the stream at his feet.

The tree was nearly as old as he was, not much more than a sapling when he planted it with his own hands decades ago. It had survived the whims of fate and circumstance as he had, passing from the careful tending of the young Minzoku gardener who first planted it for the pleasure of the Onjin whose garden this had been to the rough handling of those who saw it as nothing more than a prop.

Den Tun was pleased to find it still living, albeit shamefully neglected, when the garden came into his hands once again half a century later. The tree had gone its own way, as trees were wont to do when left unguided; the struggle to tame it again had been arduous, and Den Tun would never claim that it had been he who prevailed in the end. The tree was now pleasing in form and function, but any who cared to look could see the signs of its wild years.

Den Tun and the tree had compromised.

The quiet shuffle of feet drew Den Tun’s attention to his visitor, whose patience had finally lost out to the urgency of his news. General Cha’Cain bowed deeply in apology.

“The gaijin Sorenson is dead,” he announced with unusual bluntness. “Killed by the Onjin.”

“This is grave news,” Den Tun replied. “And the young gaijin who carried the Tiger Opal to him?”

“Lost to the wilderness.”

Den Tun closed his eyes again. The reversal of fortune was bitterly disappointing. Tree fronds rustled overhead; the tree cared nothing for those who guided it—left alone, it would slowly wake to its wild nature and continue on until confronted by something that mattered. Lack of water. Too little light.

“Eminance,” Cha’Cain asked urgently, “what shall we do?”

“We were in error to seek the assistance of gaijin,” Den Tun announced. “This is a matter of honor between Minzoku and Onjin. We must look to ourselves, revisit…old plans.”

“There was no honor in that,” Cha’Cain objected, shocked. “You put an end to it for that very reason!”

“The dishonor lay in the intent,” Den Tun replied. “The method… the method bears consideration.”

THE END

EMBUSTERO Anonce

Terson Reilly’s adventure continues in

EMBUSTERO

Coming in 2012

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About the Author

Scott Cleveland holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Eastern Washington University. Consequently his day jobs have included house painter, radar maintenance technician, and he is currently employed as a network management and cryptographic systems technician. He resides in Eastern Washington with his wife, Carol. Pale Boundaries is his first published novel.

How This Book Was Made

The files for this book were created on a PC. The pages were created in Microsoft Word, and the cover in Microsoft Powerpoint. PDF files were created with Adobe Acrobat Pro. The interior text font is 11-point Garamond with 14-point linespacing. The chapter title font is 24-point OCR-A II. The cover typeface is OCR-A II and Neuropol.

Copyright

Copyright © 2010 by Scott Cleveland and licensors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced except in the case of brief quotations used for the purpose of critical articles or reviews.

Front cover art by Corey Ford

www.coreyfordgallery.com

Rear cover art by Kirill Alperovich

www.alperium.com

Images licensed via www.BigStockPhoto.com

Cover design and layout by Scott Cleveland

Interior design and layout by Scott Cleveland

ISBN-13: 978-1-449-99495-2

ISBN-10: 1-449-99495-4

Genre: Science Fiction

First Edition: January 2010

Second Edition: February 2010

Kindle Edition: February 2010

Printed in the United States of America

Content

Scott Cleveland
‡
PALE BOUNDARIES

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

EPILOGUE

EMBUSTERO Anonce

About the Author

Copyright