Ray Gun Revival magazine, Issue 53

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ISSUE.53 ALONE AT AX-1 by Swapna Kishore BFF.JOV by Scott Davis INTO THE DEEP by Brandon Meyers HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NIATTI by Raz Greenberg NEW SERIAL FICTION by L.S. King , M. Keaton, Justin R. Macumber, and Keanan Brand

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Overlord Paul Christian Glenn continues to tweak the zine. Catch up with Issue #53 here!61 pagesThe Overlords' Lair: Trek, Terminator, and the Tenacity of HopeAlone at AX-1 by Swapna KishoreBff.jov by Scott DavisInto the Deep by Brandon MeyersDeuces Wild, Season Two, Dining With the Enemy by L. S. KingHappy Birthday, Niatti by Raz GreenbergCalamity's Child, Chapter Seven: Rodeo Bull Ballet, Part Two by M. KeatonFeatured artist Martin Steil, GermanyTales of the Breaking Dawn: The Ties That Bind, Part Two by Justin R. MacumberRGR Reviews: Book Reviews by Donald Jacob Uitvlugt and Matthew WinslowReviewed this month: The Dragon's Nine Sons, by Chris Roberson. The Stormcaller and The Twilight Herald, by Tom LloydThieves' Honor: Episode Eight - Endgame, Part One by Keanan Brand

Transcript of Ray Gun Revival magazine, Issue 53

Page 1: Ray Gun Revival magazine, Issue 53

ISSUE.53

ALONE AT AX-1by Swapna Kishore

BFF.JOVby Scott Davis

INTO THE DEEPby Brandon Meyers

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NIATTIby Raz Greenberg

NEW SERIAL FICTIONby L.S. King, M. Keaton,

Justin R. Macumber, and Keanan Brand

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OVERLORDS (FOUNDERS/EDITORS)Johne Cook, L. S. King, Paul Christian Glenn

Matthew Winslow Book Reviews EditorShannon McNear Lord High Advisor, Grammar Consultant, Listening Ear for Overlord Lee

Paul Christian Glenn - PR, Executive Tiebreaker, Desktop PublishingL. S. King - Lord High Editor, proofreader, beloved nag, muse, webmistress

Johne Cook - art wrangler, desktop publishing, chief cook and bottle washer

Submissions Editors John M. Whalen, Alice M. Roelke. Jenn Silva, Martin Turton

Cover Art“Real Air Force” by Martin Steil

Bill Snodgrass Site host, Web-Net Solutions, admin, webmaster, database admin, mentor, confidante, liaison – Double-edged Publishing

Special ThanksRay Gun Revival logo design by Hatchbox Creative

3 Overlords’ Lair: A Shiny New Trek by Paul Christian Glenn

3 Alone at AX-1 by Swapna Krishore

9 Bff.jov by Scott Davis

14 Into the Deep by Brandon Meyers

18 DEUCES WILD: by L.S. King

22 Happy Birthday, Niatti by Raz Greenberg

35 CALAMITY’S CHILD - CHAPTER 7 ROP: Rodeo Bull Ballet, Part Two by M. Keaton 45 Featured Artist: Martin Steil

46 TALES OF THE BREAKING DAWN: The Ties That Bind, Part Two by Justin R. Macumber 51 RGR REVIEWS by Donald Jacob Uitvlugt and Matthew Scott Winslow 53 THIEVES’ HONOR - Episode 8 Endgame, Part 1 by Keanan Brand

Ray Gun Revival Issue 52 © 2009 by Double-edged Publishing,a Memphis, Tennssee-based non-profit publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTSv53b

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Overlords’ Lair:Trek, Terminator, and the Tenacity of Hope

by Paul Christian Glenn

Alone at AX-1by Swapna Kishore

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of hope. What it does

for us, how it harms us, and it’s role in the stories we write and read.

Of course it’s possible to craft hopeless tales, but let’s face it, those stories don’t capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of great au-diences. And even many ostensibly hopeless tales ultimately captivate their audience with the subtle no-tion of mad hope (or, as Gandalf might put it, “fool’s hope”) in the face of unstoppable destiny. Take, for example, the “Terminator” films, which are predicated on an overtly dark and fatalistic idea, yet driven (through four films and a television series) by characters that choose to struggle in conscious futility against a predetermined future. Not many people would describe those films as necessarily “hopeful,” but there it is: hope in action. Is it any coin-cidence that the latest chapter, by far the most dour and despondent installment, has already become an epic disaster at the box office?

Let’s contrast that with the sum-mer’s biggest hit thus far: “Star Trek.” Here is a tale that is overtly hopeful (as the franchise itself has always been). The action is kicked into gear by the hopeful goading of Captain Pike, who senses potential

The melted controller unit lay ex-posed amidst twisted machinery

and crashed mining scoopers. My fingers trembled as I adjusted the high-res visual feed transmitted by spacecams over Delta. Station Delta had been my star performer, my most profitable mining unit, and one of the best in the belt. I had mailed in-numerable cost-justifications to my bosses at Realtor to fit it with state-of-art machines. Now everything was rubble.

“Earth, Jerry! I never knew a rogue could be so...brutal.” Cheng, standing behind me, said softly.

I winced and continued to experi-ment with view-angles and zoom to study the ruin; I needed to under-stand the rogue’s attack algorithm to design a workaround. I clicked on the data dump sent by Delta’s interceptor before it succumbed to the rogue.

“Now, Jerry?” Cheng’s voice quiv-ered.

I glanced at his pale face. Station-head AX-1 was Cheng’s first posting after his training at Ceres; he prob-ably fancied himself as a glamorous adventurer flashing laser cutters, rip-ping asteroids apart, and transporting ore in sleek ships to grateful colonies. Our temperamental equipment and

ongoing struggle to extract ore from ugly lumps must have shocked him. And now, this attack.

“Rahul will repair the station.” I had sent Rahul to Delta to restart mining immediately after the attack yester-day. “Meanwhile, I must shield our remaining stations.”

“Is Rahul in danger?” Cheng asked.“No, rogues don’t—”Beeps erupted around us. Red

lights pocked the panel, and new data flooded my monitor. My stomach clenched; some station’s intercept program was reporting intrusion. An-other rogue strike.

Station Beta.Cam-feeds from Beta showed ro-

bots smashing into each other, scoo-pers screeching to a halt, and pickers dropping rocks. Crazed machines tan-gled and collapsed. Hex code from the interceptor streamed on my monitor.

Cheng gasped. “What the—” “Damn.” The data dump stopped

abruptly. The visuals died seconds later. In less than five minutes, my sta-tion was reduced to a pile of garbage. I’d never seen such swift savagery, human or automated, in my nine de-cades of belt mining. Typically, rogues disrupted work by affecting a couple of machines. This was annihilation.

greatness in a shiftless young ruf-fian, and is carried to it’s climax by the irrational hope of an old man who refuses to settle for anything less than what could be. The film practically vibrates with optimism, and has spellbound millions of fans.

The first question, then, is why? Why do we seek hope in the sto-ries that live with us? The answer is obvious: fiction is, to some extent, escapism, and when we cheer the exploits of the U.S.S. Enterprise, what are we escaping from, if not the utter hopelessness of the world we live in? In the real world, hope is rarely rewarded, or even justified. People are wicked and broken and confused. Good never completely triumphs over evil. Failure is the rule, not the exception.

The second question, then, is stickier: Is fictitious hope a good and healthy thing? Or is it naive, dan-gerous and irresponsible to fill our minds with such fantastic notions of hope? From a purveyor of space op-era, a traditionally hopeful genre, it is perhaps an odd question, but I’m curious to see how other fans of this genre feel about it.

Are we better served by cheering for Captain Kirk and Luke Skywalker, or gritting our teeth with John Con-nor?

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Two stations down, ten to go, I thought bitterly. With Beta and Delta destroyed, my AX-1 production would plunge by fifteen percent.

“Will you inform Base about Beta?” Cheng asked me.

That Ceres Base! When I face-to-faced yesterday to report Delta’s sta-tus, a junior technician, barely eight decades old, officiously told me to focus on protecting my stations. The brat could still be on duty if Amelie weren’t back from her implant up-grades.

“Base gets direct cam-feeds.” I mailed a formal notification anyway. “Cheng, you will leave now to repair Beta.”

“But I...I’ve never repaired a station and I’m not sure I...”

“You don’t know how to debug a rogue,” I said bluntly, “but your train-ing covered the protocol to repair sta-tions.” I softened when he wiped his brow nervously. “Our maintenance transpods are fully equipped. You can handle the job.”

“You can do it better.” “I have to beat the rogue.” After Cheng left, I paced my me-

tallic-gray control room, surrounded by the low buzz of machines. Both my juniors were off for repairs, and I was the only person on Stationhead. Though I didn’t consider Rahul or Cheng company—we shared no com-

mon interests—I felt strangely lonely. I rubbed my eyes wearily. I needed Darlene.

***

Lurid reds and blues swirled on Dar-lene’s walls; agonized groans saturat-ed the air. I gripped the door-frame, dizzy and tense. A rogue attack, here? “Darlene?”

“Jerry, has Beta been destroyed?” Darlene’s synthetic voice burst through the room.

At least her speech circuits worked. I took a deep breath and peered past the psychedelic colors. Objects swished around, images morphed, but nothing lay broken, contorted, or burnt. Darlene’s settings were unsta-ble, not damaged.

The news about Beta must have agitated her.

“You’ve been watching Net-home.” I should have guessed. Rogue activities provided sensation-seeking networks opportunities for alarming headlines, good boosts for popularity ratings.

Sure enough, the Net-home corner displayed an old graphic of Station Beta—gleaming equipment, bustling robots, and scoopers piled with rocks. Bold black type declared:

12th victim of Rogue 256: Station Beta of Stationhead AX-1 (Realtor Mining). Stay tuned for our WHO’S

NEXT discussion between experts from Ceres and Mars.

Twelve victims, right. My Delta and Beta, AX-1 stations under Realtor. Six stations of Ays mining. Four stations of Dedalus.

I disabled Net-home and looked around the room. All the displayed cu-rios were pre-World War IV Earth, of course, because that’s all I collected, but Darlene’s selection today reflect-ed her agitation. I noticed a wizened hand purportedly used in witchcraft, a voodoo mask, and a twisted-clock Dali painting.

“Jerry, is Beta as badly damaged as Delta?” Darlene asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I lied. After a pause, I added, “I’ve sent Cheng there.”

“What does this new rogue want?” Such irrational questions were typi-

cal of Darlene. It was my fault; I had incorporated too many emotion mod-ules into her staid, standard house-ware.

I considered calming her by ex-plaining that rogues were merely code segments. But she wouldn’t un-derstand that fluff could drift out of destruction-oriented programs and lump under a knowledge manage-ment engine to cause havoc. Any-way, even if rogues couldn’t “want” anything, they could be vicious. They

infected any station they could reach by piggybacking signals, they self-ex-tracted, and corrupted intels. Worse, we couldn’t “kill” a rogue, only patch workarounds. By the time we figured out how to beat one rogue, the next one began its damage.

“Rogues are not humans,” I said, keeping the worry out of my voice. “They don’t have motives.”

I activated my workstation, adjust-ed my eye-zap for pattern-seeking, and loaded the data from Delta and Beta.

“Are we safe, Jerry?” “Rogues never damage station-

heads.” Not until now, I thought. A sudden image engulfed me: a punc-ture in AX-1’s shield; me lunging for a hard suit; a crazed Darlene dropping her ceiling on me. I fought the surge of panic; such thinking was futile.

Crimson and turquoise robed danc-ers continued to gyrate around me. My head throbbed. The low ambient temperature made me shiver.

“We are safe, Darlene,” I said firmly. “Now I need to concentrate. Please?” I waved my hands.

The room became warmer. The walls steadied, and muted to my fa-vorite lavender.

***

I checked for advisories from the Mining Consortium at Ceres. None.

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Not that I expected action from bu-reaucratic third-centenarians snug in their enormous bubble city. No, Sir, those dodderers woke up after iso-lated controllers like me, struggling to cope with rogues, developed solu-tions.

Forget those fools. I would debug this myself. I had handled the first rogue, a few decades ago. Okay, so that was simple, and rogues were smarter now—they gathered more floating code, coalesced, and spawned mutants and variants. But even if new rogues had more convoluted logic, they were still just code. I could beat them. Even this new rogue, Rogue 256, however malevolent it seemed.

With data from two stations, find-ing the rogue’s core instructions should be easier. I profiled the criti-cal window of the Beta data and the Delta data, overlapped them, and began pattern-seeking for commonal-ties. I touched the screen to enhance my connection with the data. The seg-ment corresponding to 256’s initial query became obvious. I narrowed my looping scope to decipher the rogue’s algorithm. Nothing. I refined my eye-zap parameters and tried again. And again. My tear duct-lubricators start-ed drying.

I lowered my head in my hands.“Can I help?” Darlene used the voice

profile of Rooma, the girl I kissed as a

callow teenager over a century and a half ago. Warmth spread through me. I felt glad I programmed Darlene using a collage of the women I knew, start-ing from Rooma right up to Amelie.

“No, Darlene,” I said. “Thanks for offering.”

“Why do rogues hate us?” “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll design a

workaround soon.” I had to.Darlene increased the illumination

and sprayed lemon-grass essence in the air. A mug with steaming kick, coffee-flavored, appeared near my elbow. I sipped it and continued my analysis.

***

“Jerry? Rahul reporting from Delta, over.”

My display showed Rahul in his hard suit, standing on the debris, his face hidden by helmet and visor. He raised his right arm clumsily to indi-cate endcomm.

“Did you spot any pattern in the rogue’s behavior? Over to you.” I sig-naled endcomm and waited.

“All intel circuits are fused because of neural activity overload,” Rahul said after an irritating signal lag. “Purely mechanical equipment is un-harmed, like cutters, axes, you get it. The invasion proceeded from most to least intelligent, as if the rogue aimed to maximize damage before any inter-

ruption. I’ve repaired the power unit. Restarting mining with minimal scoo-per configuration will take me three days.”

He gave a small laugh that was no laugh. “I’m skipping dome repair. I’m the only one who needs breathable air, and I can work wearing my suit.”

I felt dejected after talking to Ra-hul. It had taken me decades of hard work to make AX-1 Realtor’s best stationhead and achieve profitability comparable with Ays and Dedalus sta-tionheads. Rogue 256 could ruin ev-erything. The consolation, if it could be called that, was that all belt miners were suffering.

Wait. The rogue proceeded down the complexity ladder instead of randomly striking equipment. That reminded me of Darlene asking why do rogues hate us? Definitely, 256 seemed anti-intelligence. Were we humans at risk? Rogues corrupted signals; could 256 mess up a human’s brain? Harm us?

Calm down, I told myself, pulling up the data of stations attacked by 256 so far. Hmmm...no humans were present on any of the affected stations. That was strange. Realtor used remote-managed stations to save costs, so our stations were usually unmanned, but Ays and Dedalus employed heavy manning and applied stringent in-per-son quality checks. The probability of

randomly picking up ten of their sta-tions without any person present was statistically low.

“Maybe this rogue only attacks sta-tions without humans,” I muttered to myself. “Could it have some archaic security law embedded?”

“Are you humans more valuable just because your brains are in skulls?” Darlene sounded petulant.

My head snapped up. I almost pointed out that humans were real while non-humans could be created or deactivated. Then I thought, forget it, she’s just coded to act emotional.

“No, Darlene, all intel is valuable,” I said soothingly.

Human, non-human, hmm....Was that where the clue lay? If the rogue sensed human presence to decide whether to attack, must be checking for human-specific neural patterns. If I patched a bot so that it seemed “hu-man,” and placed it on a station, 256 would be duped into “detecting” hu-man presence and skip that station.

Heartened, I refined eye-zap combi-nations to detect the human-present sequence. I checked for available up-grades to improve the zapper connec-tion to my positron enhancements, and downloaded the latest version. I tried pattern-seeking for one hour. Another. Then, suddenly, a cluster of low-level instructions formed a pat-tern. Pause. Stare. Back. Rerun.

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“Eureka!” “What happened, Jerry?” I sighed. “Nothing.” Darlene lacked

Earth history modules; if Rahul and Cheng had been here, they would un-derstand. Or maybe not; they knew nothing about Earth. To them, Earth was dead, useless.

The Base duty roster showed Ame-lie was back at work. I decided to face-to-face because I wanted to see her expression and hear her voice when I shared my triumph.

***

Amelie filled the screen, warmly human against the backdrop of the sterile Base office. She looked toned and energetic, her new skin glowing with health. “Jerry, I wanted to con-tact you. I’m sorry about your stations. I assume you want the endcomm mo-dality? Over.”

Most controllers chose parallel speaking despite the transmission lag, claiming it saved time, but to me such communication became wasted loose ends, replete with missed sen-tences and mismatched questions and answers. I preferred indicating endcomm and waiting politely.

“Thanks, Amelie. First, let me cross-check my information. Were any humans present on the destroyed stations?” Darlene murmured some-thing, so I whispered, “Later. I am

busy.” I turned back to Amelie. “What does your data show? Over to you.”

I waited for two minutes for my last word and endcomm to reach her, and another two for her response to begin reaching me.

She nodded. “No humans. I noticed that, too. Pity Realtor can’t put hu-mans on every station. To whom were you talking? Aren’t Rahul and Cheng off for repairs? Is that your home? You usually speak from the control room. What’s that metal piece? Over.” Eye-brows arched, she pointed to an ob-ject behind me.

So many questions. I turned around to check. Darlene had changed the room again; the curio on the faux-oak mantelpiece, bought by splurging a year’s savings, was a favorite of mine.

“I am alone,” I told Amelie. “I was instructing my houseware, Darlene. That relic is from Venus XI, Captain Shep’s last mission, when he became paranoid and tried to murder his team members, thinking they were aliens. Endcomm.”

Amelie smiled. “I remember my pre-apo history, thanks. I’m impressed by your collection. So many Earth cu-rios—”

“I respect the world where human-ity originated,” I interrupted. I realized immediately I sounded stiff and for-mal and defensive. Stupid of me. Af-ter decades of focusing on AX-1 prof-

itability, I’d forgotten how to handle banter. Would Amelie get offended?

“—anyway, I’m just teasing, Jer-ry,” she continued, and I realized my words hadn’t reached her yet. “I think you’ve done a great job at AX-1 and—”

“I trained hard for this job,” I cut in, then squirmed while my pompous declaration traversed the spaces be-tween us.

I first met Amelie over a century ago, when both of us joined Real-tor as trainees. We underwent the same rigorous training for station management. Her current work pro-file, though different from mine, was equally challenging. On my last visit to Base, two decades ago, Amelie and I had several enjoyable debates on is-sues ranging from technology to so-ciology. We became friends. When I was returning to AX-1, she joked that no sensible person wanted to live on a flotilla of metal spaceships, control-ling equipment that mined planetoids just a few kilometers wide. On Ceres, she laughed, the club provided nor-mal gravity. And pool tables. And par-ties. Christmas parties with pseudo mistletoe, and piles of pseudo snow.

Looking now at Amelie’s half-smile and teasing manner, I flushed. I had opted for traditional communication format and then violated it myself be-cause I got defensive. Worse, I sound-

ed downright obnoxious. I mumbled, “Sorry, let’s follow standard proto-col,” and indicated endcomm.

She paused after my last set of words reached her. She shook her head. “About this rogue,” she said. She shared her analysis of how it oper-ated, and added, “Here, at Base, they call it Luddite. It’s Earth history stuff, so you would know what it means.” She grinned.

Luddite: a movement where ha-tred of machines resulted in humans attacking and destroying machines. It seemed a fitting name for a rogue as-saulting intelligent, non-human enti-ties. Ironic, too, because the destroy-er was itself a virtual entity.

I smiled. “Don’t start me on history, or I’ll get sidetracked. I’m exploring ways to fool this Luddite.” I described the approaches I was considering, she gave me her comments, and I signed off, suggesting that we compare notes later.

After disconnecting, I decided to re-charge myself by taking a timed nap. My sleep was a muddle of disjoint dreams. A wooden boy, who called himself Pinocchio, waved hinged limbs with amazing grace. He drew a knife out of thin air and chopped his nose. He grabbed a double helix, snapped it into his chest. A girl wear-ing a red spacesuit said something, and he leered at her. “All the better to

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live long, my dear.” I opened my eyes. My throat felt

dry and scratchy; my heart hammered my ribs.

***

Darlene had festooned the ceiling with virtual ribbons of incandescent pinks that rippled in a non-existent breeze. A rejuv tray slid near me and its micro-dispenser flushed me with nano-housekeepers. I flexed my fin-gers. They felt slightly stiff; I slipped on lube-gloves and waited for the sensor to indicate full system balance. The bed enabled its grav-vibrator mode to force me into an overdue workout.

Fifteen minutes later, I returned to my workstation, refreshed and eager to continue. My fingers raced over the keyboard. With an hour of concen-trated work, I coded a patch to fool the Luddite. I executed dry runs, cor-rected bugs and refined my code till it functioned perfectly. I hoped.

Now I needed to try it out on a bot.

The storeroom held twenty iden-tical “Class A” bots, programmed for tolerance of ambiguity and fuzzy deci-sion making, the profile Realtor hoped to replace most humans with. Their advanced neural circuits were a suit-able base to patch for “human” think-ing. I activated a bot labeled Argo. Red lights twinkled atop its apex cube,

garish on its titanium cone body. When I returned with Argo, Darlene

drawled, “A boring management bot.” I was amused. Curious to see what Argo “thought,” in turn, of Darlene, I instructed it to assess my houseware while I checked my mail.

Cheng, now on Beta, had sent a detailed assessment of damages. He was repairing the power unit. I sent him my suggestions while Argo whizzed around. It stopped near the mantel, examined a limited-edition gold watch, and returned it to its place with slow, controlled move-ments. Next, it paused before a Japa-nese scroll to scrutinize the delicate brushwork. It stared at its reflection in an antique silver mirror.

It rasped, “Displayed artifacts clas-sified as Pre-third Millennium Earth Collectibles. Artifacts apart, this houseware is worth 50,000 kruers, more than thrice other sophisticated houseware.”

“Correct,” I said. Darlene’s protest at this mundane approach was a per-ceptible drop in temperature.

I loaded my simulator with my ver-sion of the Luddite algorithm and focused its input port on Argo for a baseline. The result: “non-human.” I streamed my patch into Argo and tested it again. I crossed my fingers, one of those ancient Earth supersti-tions Amelie found amusing.

“Human.”For a few moments, I savored my

victory; I had successfully created a workaround for another rogue. Then I sighed. My work was useless until I placed a “human” bot on every sta-tion.

The fastest and cheapest method would be to stream the patch to each station, and remotely control its up-load on a Class A bot already available there, but a Luddite replica might intercept my signal. If its engine in-cluded self-modification capability, and it recognized the objective of my transmission, it may amend its hu-man-recognition algorithm to exclude pseudo-human bots. Luddite seemed sophisticated enough to make this possibility a real risk.

Another option was sending Argo to the stations to upload the patch. But a bot, even an enhanced one like Argo, could not debug last-minute technical glitches or take decisions on the fly. That needed a human.

I would have to go myself. With a patched Argo here, at Stationhead, a Luddite scan would show “human” presence and keep my stationhead safe from attacks.

But suppose my analysis was wrong? Or my patch buggy? Luddite could destroy Stationhead when I was traveling, leaving Rahul, Cheng and I stranded on asteroids.

Perhaps Consortium had some other advice. I checked my messages. There was no mail with an official ap-proach on tackling the Luddite, but Amelie had sent her version of a Lud-dite simulator. Fingers crossed again, chest tight with tension, I tested Argo using her software.

A pause, and then: “Human.”I leaned back in the chair, drew in a

slow, deep breath, and let the happi-ness wash through me. What I want-ed to do was share my triumph with Amelie, but that would have to wait.

I mailed off my patch to Amelie, requesting her to validate my work. Assuming my code worked (it passed two simulators, so I expected it to), I needed enough upgraded bots to place on my stations.

Back to the control room.I punched orders to activate

enough Class A bots. I planned to carry them in the transpod, patch and test them in transit, and offload them at stations like a delivery boy. My first stop would be Gamma, the best of my remaining stations. Or I could profile the rogue’s attacks to identify which station was most at risk, and unload protection bots in that order.

Amelie would have tested my patch by now. I was grinning as I connected to Base.

“Did you check my mail?” I blurted after reaching her, like a student ex-

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pecting praise for an excellent term paper. “Does it work? Endcomm.”

I expected her to flash a congratu-latory smile, but even after the mes-sage reached her and her expression reached me back, her face remained somber. Her lips were pressed tight.

I tensed. I resisted the temptation to speak out of turn.

“Your patch works,” she said after considering my question for an eter-nally long minute. “I tested it using data from other victim stations. Con-sortium plans to recommend a simi-lar approach. But...doesn’t a fuzzy-human neural patch make the bots too human?” She paused. “I know we have free will while bots are merely programmed...we’ve debated this millions of times...but today...”

Why was Amelie , usually so fo-cused, getting sidetracked into a futile philosophical meandering? A beep made me swivel to a news feed about a Luddite strike on a Dedalus station. I gaped at the live stream of the dev-astation. I turned to Amelie, who was biting her lip; she had not yet signaled endcomm.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I cut in. “The rogue has struck a Dedalus station. I’m sure Base will get the feed soon enough. I must begin implementing the patch.” My throat pulled; my min-iature voice-enhancers needed ser-vicing.

My words would take time to reach her.

She was saying, “...rumors that cy-ber detectives are talking to Ays... someone leaked the story...it isn’t confirmed but...”

Rumors. Who had time for rumors? I gathered data on the Dedalus attack: station stats, order of devastation, de-gree of damage.

Four minutes passed. Five. Six. I looked at Amelie; she had stopped speaking. Her face looked bleached. Suddenly, I wanted to reach out and squeeze her hand.

Finally, her voice came through, a whisper. “I shouldn’t distract you. Don’t worry about what I said. Bye.” She terminated contact.

“See you after this rogue gets solved,” I whispered into nothingness. A trip to Base was long overdue.

***

A pink blush pervaded the room. Impressionist masterpieces deco-rated Darlene’s peach-colored walls. Argo paced on a Persian carpet while diamonds of light danced off silver figurines.

“What’s going on? Darlene? Argo?”

“Darlene and I attempted com-munication,” Argo spoke in a rich baritone, a ridiculous audio-out for a titanium cone. “We encountered

incompatibilities, so Darlene and I swapped code and upgraded.”

“I can think better now.” Darlene’s voice carried an undertone of matu-rity.

“I can sense more emotions,” Argo said. “Darlene is fascinating.”

Unauthorized upgrades. Drastic personality changes. For a moment I felt alarmed. But no real harm had occurred, and besides, more urgent matters beckoned.

“I’m going on a tour of the sta-tions,” I told them.

“I’ll manage Stationhead in your absence,” Argo said. “And don’t worry about Darlene.”

Worry. Argo’s ability to sense my concern was a consequence of Dar-lene’s modules.

Worry. Amelie had told me not to worry. Her face flashed in my mind, and morphed to the Amelie I waved goodbye to when leaving Base for AX-1. That day, her eyes drooped and leaked a bit, and I thought they need-ed servicing.

Perhaps those droplets had been tears.

Stop it, I told myself. I couldn’t af-ford to daydream. After telling Argo how to manage Stationhead in my ab-sence, I sent messages to Base, Rahul, and Cheng, and gathered bots and other material required for the trip. To speed up the “humanizing” of sta-

tions, I could go to Delta and give Ra-hul half the patched bots to deposit on various stations. Even Cheng could help in bot delivery.

I was evaluating possibilities when I noticed the rogue simulator blink. The air chilled around me.

For a long moment I stood there, my skin prickling. Then I positioned myself in front of the simulator’s in-put port and flipped a switch.

“Human,” of course. Why was I so relieved?

I was still shaking when my pod left the double-hatched airlock of the sta-tionhead.

Once my pod was well on its way, I connected to Base.

“Amelie, I cut the last conversation short,” I said. “You were telling me something. Sorry. Endcomm.”

Her eyes had bags under them. Did I miss them earlier?

“You have your job to do.” She squared her shoulders. “But I think you should know the announcement that’s just come through. Cyber detec-tives claim Luddite broke off from the program Ays created to beat Rogue 255. I’m sorry. Endcomm.”

I repeated her words till they sank in. For decades I had been handling rogues as they popped up. Yet the trip I was making could create another rogue. A future Rogue 257 could es-cape from my patch for Rogue 256,

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and a Rogue 258 from the solution to Rogue 257. Maybe down the line, rogues would target humans instead of avoiding them.

Lined near me were twelve bots waiting to become “humans.” Each one would help me protect a station from savage attack.

“Jerry? Please say something. Are you okay? Endcomm.”

I blinked. This was probably the first time ever that Amelie had deviat-ed from our communication protocol. Then I realized that her last message had reached me over twenty minutes ago.

We were zipping through space. I looked out of the port window; the belt always seemed empty, even in this densest part. Amelie’s words were floating fragments drifting to my heart.

I craved to be near her, near real persons, not bots and softwares who passed enough tests to be “human.”

But a vacation would have to wait. “I am okay, Amelie, thanks,” I said

softly. “I had thought, after beating this rogue, I would drop by at Base and meet you and others. We could have caught up with gossip.”

Or discuss philosophy, I thought.I paused to get a grip on myself. “But for now,” I continued, “send

me all you can on the Luddite origin. Tracers, comparison dumps, whatev-

er. I’ll check my patch design based on that. I don’t want to end up generat-ing a rogue. Endcomm.”

A smile started spreading on her face when my words began reaching her, but as my message concluded, her face returned to its sad expres-sion. I felt something twist inside me.

“I’ll mail whatever I can get,” she said. “Meanwhile, I have some in-formation on how Ays designs its patches, and one peculiarity of their approach is...”

We discussed possibilities for over an hour. We considered modifica-tions to my patch to make it a less likely rogue generator, but we needed more data to reach any conclusion. As she summarized our discussion, I ab-sorbed her expression and imagined myself with her at Base, but then I shook off the distraction. There was no time to waste in regrets. No time to relax.

“See you later, Jerry, bye,” she said.

“See you,” I whispered, nodded, and disconnected. I closed my eyes for an instant, sighed, and then began listing priorities.

Alone at AX-1 © 2009 by Swapna Kishore

Bff.jovby Scott Davis

Who could forget the night Jupiter blinked on? At first, Charlie thought some joker in the street was shin-ing a light into his apartment. But it came from above. Maybe a heli-copter searchlight? He hadn’t been able to sleep and this cinched it. Charlie looked from the balcony. It didn’t move. If it were a star it was the brightest one he had ever seen. Three a.m. was no time for dawn, and it was too high in the sky. It was just there, where it hadn’t been a moment before. Insomniacs knew something was up.

***

There were two suns that morn-ing, the rising normal one and the setting little one. Preachers came on the TV saying it was the end of the world. But most normal people kept their heads and watched GNN, which knew nothing, so far. The screen had two heads talking away regardless—noise pollution their proudest product.

Charlie figured there was no bet-ter place to go than the office. His family might have been worried if they knew about the celestial change, but the sandman made

sure they didn’t. He went to their bedroom to kiss his wife. Close-eyed Merrie wouldn’t be satisfied with a quick peck; she pulled at his hand until she got her hug. Charlie tip-toed into his daughter’s bedroom. Violet squirmed—a rather unflat-tering acknowledgement of his kiss on her cheek.

Checkpoints on the road cleared Cheyenne Mountain staff, no one else. The workday was in full swing at the Internet Security Department of NORAD. People were prairie-dog-ging over the cubicles talking excit-edly. Some of these people must have arrived as soon as they saw the strange light, judging by the reflux of styrofoam cups on their desks. Lola sauntered up to him. “Did you hear about the email?”

“No, what email?”“It says, ‘I’m sure you have ques-

tions about the changes in the solar system. For more information click here,’” Lola said.

“It’s probably fake. Copy me.”It wasn’t. WHOIS gave an IP that

mapped to juggernaut.jov. Charlie had never heard of the extension. He looked at the page source. The files had old dates. He looked at

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search engine rankings. Low ranked, so they probably showed up on the third result page, where no one looked. That wouldn’t last. The page views were jumping by thousands with every refresh.

The link on the email signature went to Mypage.jov. Charlie jumped in his chair. It looked just like any other self-indulgent social network-ing site, but the picture was of a thir-teen-tentacled octopus. Not quite. The creature was salmon colored, doe-eyed, and held various gadgets in its various “hands.” The caption had its name: Blimm. Its clothes were fashionable, thought Charlie hysterically, for a Jovian.

The About Me section had this text: “Ever since our sun went nova we’ve been having a really bad time. It’s been so cold and dark on jug-gernaut two, Io in your language. We’ve been hard at work for five of your years tweaking Jupiter. We put a muncher in the middle mass-ing seventy-nine more Jupiters in-side. You call it a black hole, but that name just makes us giggle. We think we got it just right to pull Jupiter to a density sufficient to light it up, spin-ning so fast it will take a while, a mil-lion years or two for the muncher to eat it all. If all goes well we’ll have a

nice, little continuous hydrogen fu-sion sun just like home by the time you read this.

“Don’t worry. Since we breathe sulfur dioxide and you drink corro-sives, I mean breathe oxygen, I don’t think you’d feel comfortable here or us there. But we can always talk! We like to make friends. Wanna chat?”

Charlie tried clicking to chat with this Blimm. No dice. His traffic sur-veillance tools told him why: the queue stretched from Perth, Odessa, Queens—the red pins were cover-ing every populated area. It was 100 million users deep. On cross-check with demographics he found the queue closely correlated with one kind of household: those with minor females. While Charlie was waiting to join the chat he checked the rest of his inbox. There were 102 emails, 101 of which were bank transfer notifications needing his okay to receive a sixteen million from Nige-ria, a hundred of which were scams. The non-Nigerian email was his boss, Dick, demanding a data dump on just what Charlie knew about this Jupiter business. Before Charlie could prepare a response, alarms went off. The launch mainframes had been hacked.

Charlie raced down the red corri-

dor to the ancient black text termi-nals. Lola got there first. He took up a position beside her. Their whole department arrived in seconds, clacking away and finding out the Jovians had downloaded AI avatars into the launch computers. Charlie guessed they were using proxies to lessen the ninety minute light speed delay to Jupiter and back. But to talk to who, girls?

General Richard (“Dick”) Peacock strode into the computer room and shouted: “Men! This act of aggres-sion must not be left unanswered! Shut the launch system down!”

The women computer experts had steam coming out of their ears. It seemed that the entire contin-gent of top brass in residence under Cheyenne mountain had entered the room. There must be no one in the war room. Bart Clambake, Rear Admiral, whined like the little girl he wasn’t, “But Dick! Won’t we be in gravest danger? For years the threat of Mutually-Assured Destruction has kept us safe! We won’t be able to destroy anything once these com-puters shut down. I’m frightened!”

***

“That’s hardly the biggest prob-lem, Clambake! Our undercover agents have just reported that

launch computers from Beijing to Havana—at all of our enemies’ defense networks have also been hacked! MAD’s deterrent value has become irrelevant! You know what that means to our military? Catas-trophe! We must stop the outbreak of peace!” Dick shouted at point blank range.

A breathless subaltern entered, gave Clambake a document, saluted strangely, then quickly exited the computer room. Clambake read the above top secret crypto message: “al’krj elrk reenq.”

“What!?” shouted Dick.“Let me have that,” Charlie said,

swiveling away from the terminal. He pulled a Civil War vintage de-cryption ring from an olive metal drawer. The top brass tapped their shoes, cleared their throats, and in every other way possible, tried to make Charlie understand how crucial a speedy decryption could be: the difference between life and death. He related the gist of the message: “The Jovians have down-loaded their personalities to smart-phones around the world.”

Clambake resumed whining, “How do we defeat enemies sitting in people’s pockets?”

***

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“What of it, Tooner?” Dick shout-ed, using Charlie’s last name.

Charlie breathed deeply, left oth-ers to finish the shutdown proce-dure, and said in the most soothing voice possible, “Collectively, there’s more computing capacity in cell-phones than all other computers combined. Each one isn’t so power-ful, but with more than a billion in service—”

“How did we ever allow such a point of vulnerability?” Dick de-manded. Charlie spread his palms outward soundlessly. Dick looked like he wanted to shoot the messenger. The uniforms of the top brass were sopped with sweat and ripened the atmosphere of the computer room, now that the cooling system had shut down. Dick continued, “This calls for an immediate conference in the war room! Tooner, you’re with me!”

Dick’s face darkened to the color of uncooked liver, then a livid gray. The war room seemed to suck color from every complexion unfortunate enough to be present. Dick was standing before a gigantic, starkly-lit conference table. The top brass came from the computer room, streamed around the table and sat down, overheated and sleepy.

***

“Ideas, gentlemen!” Dick de-manded, pounding the table for at-tention.

Some stirred, face down on the table, others snored, a few struggled against the weight of their medals on their chests to sit upright. Char-lie offered an idea: “Well, the AI replicas of the Jovians have to span hundreds of cellphones. They must depend on the tower network to parallel process their personalities through hundreds of units. If we de-activate the towers, the personali-ties should vanish.”

“Brilliant! Order the Army Corps of Engineers to tear down the tow-ers! Pull the plug on the cellular network and inform our allies to do likewise!” Dick decreed.

“Uh, then the Jovians can have access to our enemies?” Charlie asked, while trying to make his head disappear between his shoulders.

“Good thinking for a civilian, Tooner! Inform our enemies through all known secret channels! Tooner, I need you back in the Internet Secu-rity Department to monitor those mendacious Jovians. Report new developments immediately!” Dick resorted to his extreme stress pro-tocol Charlie had heard about. As

Charlie left he saw the war room fill-ing with what must be a metric ton of meringue Dick was whipping out from his industrial mixer, ensconced in the corner for just such an emer-gency.

***

With the Jovian infiltration sty-mied, Charlie was happy to get home at a reasonable hour, but Vio-let wasn’t in a good mood. Merrie and he exchanged cooking duties, so he listened while crushing garlic. Texting Jovians was Violet’s new fa-vorite pastime, and it wasn’t work-ing!

“Can I see your cell?” Charlie whisked the gravy, stealing licks.

“Daddy!” Violet’s tone was exact-ly as if he asked to use her electric toothbrush.

“Anything there I should be con-cerned about?” Charlie turned and looked at her with what he hoped was a guilt-inducing stare.

“We-e-e-ll, no, not really. Don’t you trust me?” Violet was obviously trying to deduct five years from her smile, getting suddenly pigeon-toed, awkward and in every way little girl-ish.

“Sure. But I’m curious about these Jovians.”

“We-e-e-ll, okay.” Violet gave him

her pink cell in slow motion. Charlie scrolled up through the history and looked:

Viola: I’m gonna flunk the quizBLIMM: What’s it on?Viola: Quadratic equationsBLIMM: CY they’re funViola: DLTM!BLIMM: Watch. All we have to do

is name the variables Brad and Jen on one side and Angel and Hannah on the other. Now, B and J have a fight, and J joins AH on the first floor of the other side.

Viola: KEWL All the girls gang up on Brad?

BLIMM: Now, let’s see what’s left in Brad’s bank account when the la-dies are done with him.

Viola: LOL BLIMM: Tolja. We’re going to toss

BJA&H around ‘til you ace this quiz.Viola: Thx FTBOMH Blimm, you’re

my BFF.BLIMM: Know any other girls who

need friends?Viola: LK, Evrybody?

Merrie, Violet and Charlie sat down for supper. “Violet, we don’t know anything about these crea-tures. I’m sorry, but this will have to wait until they go through proper

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channels,” Charlie said, chewing his meatloaf.

“Dad, you don’t understand! They’re so-o-o great! How can you think they’re bad?” Violet’s eyes were downcast as she played with her peas.

“We just don’t know, Dear,” Mer-rie said. “Best be careful.” Merrie took Apache, their marmalade tom-cat, off the table for the 1,131st time that month.

***

A few days later at school, Coven-try Lipshutz and Violet Tooner liber-ated just a few, little stones from the geology room. They drilled holes in them using a drill press in an empty shop classroom, got some old gui-tar string from a wastebasket in the music department, made the neck-laces ready and put them in their backpacks. Soon, it was recess. They tried to sneak by the teachers on playground monitor duty, but that was unnecessary. The teachers were preoccupied.

“Like, eww?” Violet shielded her eyes.

“Like, you didn’t know? Strip pi-nochle is the new craze. All the old people are doing it,” Coventry whis-pered.

Violet and Coventry walked to the

end of the playground with several precautionary looks behind their shoulders. Then, when no one was watching, dashed over the embank-ment to the wetlands behind the school. Stepping around discarded vials and amorous couples, they came to the lily pond.

“Do you think we got it right?” Coventry said from behind Violet, who was leaning down precariously over the banking.

“Oh please, Covie! If you want to double check, look at the pic the Jo-vians left on your cell, and go over the necklace again. We just gotta try it.” Violet coaxed the swans toward the rushes at the edge.

“Maybe you should use the bread from my lunch?” Coventry offered.

“No, the directions were to say this rhyme,” Violet said:

Oh beautiful Swan!Come to the shore precious oneLet me put this necklace on.Don’t try to undo what I have

doneTake flight, be goneLet the necklace send cell signals

hither and yonAnd let Jovian and girl be one!

“Let’s try some bread,” Coventry

said.

***

The swan must have let hun-ger overcome her caution, though her mate called out a warning. She thrashed about but the girls were motivated. She flew off. The slip-knotted necklace of carefully strung hematite, quartz, lodestone and mica on the metal wire was securely around her neck.

“Try it,” Violet said.“I got bars!” Coventry marveled,

looking at her cell screen. “We did it! How many other girls made neck-laces, you think?”

“Just let them try to stop us now,” Violet said, with a smug smile.

“I’m gonna tell everyone. We can sell these!” Coventry was texting away at full speed.

“You won’t get very far with just one swan. If she isn’t flying nearby, all those messages will be stuck in your outgoing.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot. We’ll have to go back to the playground and actu-ally talk to them, like, in person.”

***

A few weeks later the girls’ moth-ers had an afternoon date. Jody Lip-shutz and Merrie Tooner were fin-ishing high tea. Jody’s great estate

had white peeling columns. Dust danced in the sunlight shafts from windows that had needed washing five years ago.

“Duty calls,” Jody said, leaving the table and the crumpet crumbs for the rats. The two donned English hunting hats. Merrie coughed from the mothball smell. They unlocked the gun cabinet and strode out across Jody’s poppy plantation.

BLAM! BLAM!“Darn it! Missed again,” Merrie

said, reloading her double-barreled shotgun. It had been over a week since open season was declared on the cell tower birds. Many hunters and even amateurs were enticed by the bounties offered.

“Do you think that was one of them?” Jody picked up her dropped shotgun. She plugged her ears whenever Merrie took a shot.

“Can’t see the necklaces from this distance. My motto is, shoot first, check later,” Merrie said.

“It’s a little bit funny,” Jody said. “When Covie came home with wads of cash, I didn’t question, and now here we are, trying to undo what she did.”

“Is that dirt in that barrel?” Mer-rie looked at Jody’s gun.

“Oh, dear. I guess we’ll have to

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rely on yours.” Merrie’s ankles were itching from

ticks. It was hot. The birds were elusive. They tried as long as there was light, fruitlessly, before consol-ing themselves with absinthe back inside. By the time Merrie left for home, the crickets were out in song, Jupiter burned bright in the twilight, and the swans had tucked their heads under their wings, safely hid-den in the swamp’s underbrush.

***

Charlie took off his shoes, padded to their bedroom in slippers, and peered in to see Merrie, already asleep. It had been a particularly late night at the office. I wish I could sleep like that, Charlie thought. He had to decompress before joining his wife, so went back to the living room. He flipped on the tube and flopped on the couch.

“...UFO crashes, hot air balloon deflations, airliner pockmarks, and other friendly fire incidents abound in the effort to take out the cell tower birds. But girls are still able to text,” the mellifluous announcer said.

“What can be done about these terrorists in rainbow socks and yel-low scrunchies?” the man head asked. His hair must be solid vinyl.

“Isn’t that a bit extreme? They’re only children, our daughters,” The woman head said. She had hollow cheeks, a boney face and a blonde mane to complete an equine look. Charlie nicknamed her Anorexic An-nie.

“Look, they’ve adopted their own flag. Changed it to the pink, cream and teal. And the stars!” Vinyl Man was aghast, or was just playing to the camera. “The stars have spar-klies, and they’re all different! Men fought and died for our flag!”

“There, there, you can have your old flag if you want,” AnaAnnie soothed.

“But, but, it’s not the same!” Vi-nyl Man wept like a colicky baby. The tears looked real.

Just then, Charlie’s laptop beeped. It turned out that he was finally at the top of the Jovian queue he en-tered 149 days ago, the morning Jupiter blinked on. Chats must be low on their priority list, with all the texting going on. He went to the den and typed to them under his screen name:

Tuna: Can I talk to you as an adult?

BLIMM: Full text is time consum-ing, but yes, we are also fluent in

your dialect.Tuna: Why have you chosen to go

after our youth?BLIMM: I’m sorry you feel that

way. Can you be more specific?Tuna: Young girls are so impres-

sionable. You’ve taken advantage of them.

BLIMM: Perhaps you need one of your chemical sedatives? You seem upset.

Tuna: I think I’m justified.BLIMM: Initial scans indicated

young girls were the most advanced members of your species.

Tuna: What?BLIMM: They have the most ef-

ficient communication method. In the time we have been conversing, a young girl would have proceeded at triple the rate, through abbrevia-tion.

Tuna: Oh, you mean texting? That’s just a game. Texting is mo-ronic.

BLIMM: If you tried it, you’d see it’s not all that vacuous with us. And, who knows? You just might find you get what you need. TTFN

Blimm moved on to others in his queue. A popup advised Charlie of a Marshall Law Directive to confiscate any cell, wifi or other comm-net

device from minor females. Char-lie stole into his daughter’s room, disconnected Violet’s cell from its charger, and left without a sound.

***

In the morning Violet dashed to and fro. She was frazzled beyond any and all attempts to placate her, and even refused her Ritalin. She locked herself in the bathroom.

“Violet Sassafras Tooner! Come out of there at once!” Merrie used her most authoritarian voice. Sobs and dull thuds of shampoo bottles against ceramic tiles were all Merrie got in reply.

“What are we going to do?” Mer-rie crossed her legs outside the door, looking at her husband, who adopted a stoic expression. He needed to go too.

“There’s always the bushes,” Charlie said.

“Oh, now that’s a realistic solu-tion!” Merrie scolded. “You know how they’re cracking down on in-decent exposure, what with the pinochle fad. And as if that weren’t enough, unsanitary disposal of haz-ardous waste, and livecams on ev-ery light pole? A fine example for our daughter.” Merrie pushed her jaw to one side.

“I’ll break down the door,” Char-

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lie said, getting ready to play hero, like on TV.

“Wait!” Merrie held out her hand like a traffic cop. “You’ll wreck the door. You might hurt her, and for what? I bet the Jovians have some-thing else up their sleeves if this doesn’t work.”

“Yeah, after all they have thirteen of—” Charlie was interrupted by Merrie’s ring tone.

“Yes,” Merrie spoke to her cell, “Violet’s in the bathroom too. No, we’ve had about enough.” Merrie closed the phone and said, “Jody’s going to compromise with Coventry, and says it’s all over the news. This confiscation order is very unpopular, and not just with kids, parents too.”

“At least we won’t be alone,” Charlie said over his shoulder as he retrieved Violet’s cell, hidden in the bookshelf. Soon after he pressed the power button it beeped with a message. Charlie showed the screen to Merrie:

BLIMM: Can’t we all just get along? We’re sorry.

“Ha! Fine time for that!” Merrie said. “After all the trouble they’ve caused?”

“Well, you know, I’ve kinda en-

joyed watching Dick Peacock lose his authority. He’s such a terrible boss. It hasn’t been all bad,” Charlie said.

“I guess it’s time we let young girls have a chance. Old men have been running things, and we know how well that’s turned out,” Merrie said

“Or is this just our bladders talk-ing?” Charlie slid Violet’s cell under the door. The knob turned. “Ladies first,” Charlie said, as Merrie rushed in with no time to spare.

***

And so the frequent need which nature in her mysterious wisdom had placed upon all people of Earth finally handed cherished victory to the girls, who were reunited with their Jovian Best Friends Forever, since everyone has to pee.

Bff.jov © 2009 by Scott Davis

Into the Deepby Brandon Meyers

Lightning flashed across the sky like brilliant spider webs. Rain

poured from the clouds and into the turbulent waves of the ocean’s surface, swirling froth and foam in torrents.

A small white bulb floated across the crashing surface of the water, dipping and bobbing with the force of the waves, but never submerg-ing. The bulbous shape resembled that of a disc or an upturned sau-cer. Rain pelted its smooth top as it coasted along through the vicious storm, rocking in violent jerks.

Inside of the floating orb sat two haggard-looking men in blue flight suits. Facing one another, their har-nesses held them fast to the seat backs as they swayed with the out-side currents. The smooth, mem-brane-walled interior of the vessel was lit with iridescent blue light, which played over the faces of both men within.

“How much further?” the first in-quired.

“It shouldn’t be long, Veedle,” replied his traveling companion, with an irritated tone. “Our coordi-nates were very precise.” Melkins adjusted the sweaty spectacles that framed his beady eyes.

“Right,” Veedle agreed. “The co-ordinates.” A particularly strong wave threw them both sideways in their seats. “As long as we’ve got those.”

When the lightning burst outside, it lit the interior of the compart-ment, pulsing through the thin but tough barrier and nearly blinding the vehicle’s occupants.

“Say, Melkins. Suppose the coor-dinates were off just a little bit...”

“Impossible,” Melkins gruffed. “These are not things that the Gan-try takes lightly. You have no idea how much money was spent on the design and construction of this de-vice.” He struggled to keep his glass-es fixed on his nose.

“Right, right,” Veedle said. “Well, with all that money, you’d have thought they might at least hire some kind of decorator. After all, it’s a little bland in here.”

“Please quiet yourself.”“And supposing I don’t?” Veedle

prodded.“You know the rules,” Melkins

said.Veedle peered over the edge of

the viewing port. Save for the circu-lar bench seat, and a short ledge for their feet, the round vacuous hole

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made up the entirety of the vessel’s base. In clearer waters, it would have provided the riders with a view into the depths below.

“Are you as bored as I am?” Vee-dle asked. “I mean, aside from try-ing to keep your lunch down.”

“Boredom is the solace of busy men,” Melkins said absently.

Veedle raised his eyebrows. “That’s rich, Melkins. Whatever it means. But seriously, I can’t even see out of this damned eyehole, or whatever they called it.”

“Perhaps that would have to do with the fact that we are currently floating in the middle of a storm,” replied Melkins. “And it’s called the keyhole.”

“Right, that one. I mean, it wouldn’t have been so bad if some-one would have told me, ‘Hey Vee-dle, bring along a fishing pole, why don’t ya?’” He watched the round-edged hole in wonder, trying to fig-ure out the miraculous engineering that allowed for the existence of such a gaping thing that permitted absolutely no water to enter the vessel.

Melkins ignored him, or rather tried his hardest not to have to meet Veedle’s gaze, and remained silent. This was harder to do than it sounded, given that the interior size of the orb was achingly cramped,

and Veedle was quite large. While Melkins himself was no skeleton, he and Veedle differed structurally in that Veedle’s immense mass was attributed to mounds of rippling muscle.

Melkins examined the blips on his watch that had begun its count-down sequence the moment they had hit the water. It had been nine-teen minutes, though it had felt like sixty. Then again, having been thrust immediately into a raging storm, perhaps he was experiencing time a little more slowly as they were forced to endure the terrifying ride. At least he had had the sense not to eat anything before the departure.

“So, who’d you piss off to get picked for this job?” Veedle asked after a series of sharp twists rocked the cabin.

Melkins eyed the large man care-fully before answering. “This was my plan.”

“Your plan?” Veedle said. “Wowza, man. You must be outta your damn tree.” He looked the slightly chubby man up and down in his seat.

“Said the pot to the kettle,” Mel-kins mumbled.

Veedle laughed. Lightning out-side illuminated the interior and re-flected off of Veedle’s smooth skull. “I know why I’m here, man. What I can’t figure out is why in god’s

name anyone else would volunteer to come along. I mean, no offense Melkins, but you’re kind of a sorry-looking bastard. What exactly are you planning on doing once we get through the drop point?”

“No offense,” Melkins said. “Hang onto your seat. We should be enter-ing the canal at any moment.”

“Don’t you have any family, or anything? I mean, me, I got nobody,” Veedle said.

Melkins bit down hard on his lip, bracing himself against a turbulent wave.

“No. I don’t have anyone...not anymore.”

At once, the interior of the oblong vessel turned a brilliant white.

“System Alert: entering descent canal,” sounded the bubble’s elec-tronic voice overhead.

“Like clockwork,” Melkins said, satisfied.

Veedle shook his head and laughed. “Here we gooo—”

Much like a fly finding the busi-ness end of a vacuum cleaner, the rocking vessel was sucked into a gaping hole that had formed in the middle of the roiling sea. It shot downward with breakneck trajec-tory, pinning its occupants to their seats. Veedle managed to crack one eye open, looking over to Melkins. Apparently food was not necessar-

ily a prerequisite for stomach expul-sions.

The circular cabin had darkened visibly, and the passing water out-side the paper-thin walls roared like thunder. Just as Veedle was starting to feel unable to control his own stomach, the propulsion slammed to a halt, and veered in another di-rection.

“Melkins, you awake, man?” Veedle ground through his teeth. The momentum was a little less now, and almost afforded him the capability of normal speech. He thought he saw his companion nod his head.

After almost half a minute, the orb came to a complete stop. The subsequent sensation of floating inside the gently rocking vehicle proved to be too much even for Veedle. He heaved his lunch onto the floor. “Hnnph...I don’t remem-ber eatin’ anything that looked like that.”

Melkins rolled his head and breathed deeply. “We’ve made it. We actually made it.”

“Don’t sound so surprised, Mel.”Melkins dared to test his vi-

sual equilibrium and opened his eyes. “Numbers are numbers,” he croaked. “Actually living through the process is something else entirely.”

“Now what?” Veedle asked. Mel-

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kins coughed and cocked an eye-brow at him.

“Now, we wait.” Melkins slid back in his seat and sighed.

Veedle huffed and tried to test his safety harnesses. “Never was much of a poker player, Melkins. Don’t have much time for patience. Just how long you think we’re going to be waiting here?”

“Until they come for us,” Melkins replied softly. “It could be minutes. It might be hours.”

“Any chance I can get these re-straints off, now? I mean, we are out of the rough waters and all.”

Melkins sighed again. “You know the rules as well as I do, sir.” Veedle noted how Melkins seemed to inch away as he said this.

With a chuckle, Veedle stretched within the confines of his bonds, and the tiny compartment. He leaned back and rested his eyes, recalling each detail that had been pounded into his head by the bureaucrats in the fancy suits. It was a rather sim-ple plan, actually. He smiled.

It was going to be a hell of a good time.

At some point, Melkins had dozed off, because he was awoken by force-ful jerking movements of the ship.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Veedle said. “I think they found us.”

“So it would seem,” Melkins said.

A bead of sweat had formed on his brow. “Can you hear anything?”

“Nothing but running water,” Vee-dle said. “Say, do you think it might be a good time to make away with these, now?” Veedle nodded to-ward his restrained arms and legs.

“Almost,” Melkins said. He un-strapped himself and stood up. The ceiling only cleared his head by an inch. The blue luminescence now highlighted his growing sweat stains. Melkins approached the keyhole and peered downward. The faint glow given off by their craft lit up the water in a five foot radius. Noth-ing was visible in the water beneath the viewing window but silt par-ticles. As had been expected, their conveyance was being pulled manu-ally toward the docking station.

Melkins’ hands began to shake a little at the thought of what he knew was coming next. But thoughts of his family hardened his fears and pummeled them away.

“Visual status,” Melkins stated.“Doctor Emmanuel Melkins: voice

identification accepted.”“Please give me a visual record,”

Melkins said. In an instant the cir-cular walls became invisible. Vee-dle jerked in his chair, having been unprepared for the sight of being completely surrounded by glow-ing water. Veedle had the immedi-

ate impression that he was floating within a large soap bubble.

“Pressure status,” Melkins said.“Pressure is within acceptable pa-

rameters, Dr. Melkins.”“Can they see us?” Veedle asked.

He was referring to the transport vessel that was hauling them in tow to Damascus City. It was a large, rug-ged-looking metal ship that coasted through the water without creat-ing any disturbance. It had very few windows.

“No,” Melkins said. “Their vision cannot penetrate these walls. If all is as it should be, they should be com-pletely baffled as to the appearance of this vehicle. After all, it has been nearly a decade since any form of communication was attempted by the topworld.”

“And we all know how well that went,” Veedle spat. Melkins rubbed at his chest blankly.

“Locate Damascus and give arrival estimation,” Melkins said.

“Eight-hundred meters distance. Estimated time to arrival at current trajectory: two minutes.”

“Maybe I’m just an ignorant assh-ole for asking, Melkins,” Veedle said, “but why didn’t they just blow us all to hell when they found our ship?”

Melkins considered this with growing mental distance. “It was all up to chance. There was no way

to calculate the expected odds of just such an occurrence. But ulti-mately, I knew they wouldn’t. They are too curious. I knew that they would want to know how anything had happened to find their means of transport to access the city. The process is really quite genius, ex-ploiting the natural undercurrents of the ocean to create an underwa-ter highway. Fitting that one of their crowning achievements will serve to bring about their own downfall.”

“Sounds like someone took the Rains of November a little person-ally,” Veedle said.

Melkins coughed and pumped his fists. “When nineteen-million lives are extinguished from the face of the planet, Mr. Veedle, there is not a single person still alive who should not take it personally.”

And then Damascus City came into view as they floated over an immense cliff and into an oceanic valley.

“Wow,” Veedle said. “I never imagined so much...light.” Spires of shining rock stood out amongst the layout of the vast city, which was composed of innumerable smaller structures that were unmistakably dwellings. Glowing blue light radi-ated from the very core of the city, all the way to a barrier that, without the light’s reflection, would have

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been invisible.“Approaching Damascus City,”

the computerized voice said.“We stopped,” Veedle said. “Why

did we stop?”“The retaining barrier,” Melkins

said. He urged under his breath, “Keep going. Let us in. Let us in.”

A light flashed from the hauling vessel and engulfed Melkins and Veedle’s orb.

“Internal scan in progress,” the computer said. The light switched off, and they once again felt their vessel begin to move forward.

Melkins let out the breath he had been holding. They were very close now. Both ships lowered to ground-level. The white orb was pulled beside a docking bay of the larger ship.

“What’s that?” Veedle asked.“Dry-dock barrier, Mr. Veedle. You

see, the creatures live in a relatively dry environment, even though they are not aerobic beings.”

“They don’t work out?”“No...They do not breathe oxygen.

But our autopsies have determined that their bodies are well-adapted to dry environments. I think now might be a good time to prepare our air supply.”

Veedle watched as the water sur-rounding them began to lower in level and finally disappear. It took

him a moment to figure out that they had been sitting in a kind of air-lock that allowed the large ship to enter the confines of the city on solid ground. Water dripped down the sides of the drying orb.

Melkins placed a mask on Veedle’s face, fastening it behind his head, as he had his own.

“Just breathe naturally,” Melkins said in a muffled voice.

“How long is it good for?” Veedle asked.

Melkins did not reply.“Well, Mr. Veedle, it would ap-

pear that the time is near for your grand entrance.”

Veedle nodded, smiling beneath his mask.

“The famed Timothy Veedle,” Melkins said. “You make me sick, sir.”

Veedle continued to grin.“I don’t mind telling you now that

the time is near. I think you know how this is going to end for the both of us, and I believe that the time for fear has just passed. May those who you have massacred be avenged this day.”

“Do it,” Veedle commanded.Melkins looked over his shoulder

to watch as the ship was set down on the face of the keyhole, the only truly flat surface on the vessel. Their surroundings, like everything

else in Damascus City, were made of smooth, glowing, natural stone. Melkins watched as the creatures began to disembark from their ship.

They looked eerily like humans, but with aqueous indigo skin, and eyes as black as the midnight sea. They wore no clothing, which re-vealed other dissimilarities, but Melkins had seen them before and was not surprised.

“Ugly little bastards, aren’t they?” Veedle huffed.

Melkins nodded in silent agree-ment and turned to face Veedle. He reached inside his shirt collar for the key that would release his traveling companion. He slid the key into the slot just below Veedle’s neck. The restraints released their hold and Veedle stretched his arms.

“Guns,” he said simply.Melkins spoke again to the com-

puter, “Weapons release. Security code: Tidal Devil.”

Melkins’ seat slid upward to re-veal a hidden compartment filled with weaponry. Hunched over, Vee-dle raided the cache, arming himself with two of the largest guns that Melkins had ever seen.

“Release hatch,” Melkins said, a small tremble in his voice.

The top and sides of the ship ex-ploded outward, leaving Melkins and Veedle standing directly over

the keyhole, looking at the shocked creatures.

Veedle took advantage of their surprise, mowing into them in an ear-shattering spray of gunfire. Bodies toppled to the hard ground in tatters while others began to flee. Veedle laughed.

When none were left stand-ing, he looked around for Melkins, and found that his portly traveling companion was kneeling on the ground.

“No need to be scared of a little noise, Doc.” He pointed the business end of one of the guns at Melkins’ chest and squeezed the trigger.

Melkins dropped in a heap. Veedle stooped to examine the fallen doc-tor, and that was when he noticed the electrical wires that attached Melkins to the luminous stone floor. Pulling the man’s shredded shirt open, Veedle saw a rugged-looking box that displayed the word activat-ed in a digital readout. The wires ran from the box to the strangely glow-ing stone upon which he stood.

“We all died...” cough, “the sec-ond they let us inside the barrier,” Melkins sputtered. “The whole god-damn city. And we used their own power source to do it.” He smiled painfully and rubbed at the device strapped to his chest. Red digital numbers began descending steadi-

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ly. “It was the only way we could do it.

“The hell are you saying, Doc?”“You did your part...bought me a

few moments to charge the bomb. You cannot stop it.” He tried to laugh. “Remember the Rains of November. This war is over.” His eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped over lifelessly.

The clock had just sunk under the two-minute mark.

Veedle laughed hysterically. Apparently the noise from his

weapon fire had caught the atten-tion of others, because a flood of armed guards were making their way out of the nearest building, as well as from the ship.

“Two minutes,” Veedle said. “Bet-ter make it count, then.”

He steadied both of the enormous weapons and charged forward to-wards Damascus City, laughing the whole way.

Into the Deep © 2009 by Brandon Meyers

DEUCES WILD - Dining With The Enemyby L.S. King

Tristan piloted his old partner Reg-gie’s ship safely through the Confed-eration blockade. Tristan now had to face Reggie—where the true danger loomed.

The two guards behind Reggie, flanking his chair, raised their

PBRs. Pursed lips gave away Reggie’s uncertainly despite his smug expres-sion. “Kudos. I see your skill is no less than it used to be. You seem to have aged well, like a fine wine. I as-sume your other talents are equally as honed.” Reggie still spoke in a bit of a close-mouthed drawl, but that broken jaw had caused considerable damage, after all. It didn’t affect his silky voice though, and only in-creased his ability to appear poised.

Tristan didn’t answer except through his stare. Reggie leaned back, tenting his fingers in front of him, his gaze growing curious. “Would you join me for a meal?”

“Are you giving me a choice?”A smile slowly spread. To some-

one who didn’t know Reggie, it might seem genuine, but to Tristan, it was feral.

“No.”Give in to the inevitable, wait for

a chance. Tristan stood. Reggie rose as well, his lifted eyebrows the only indication he was surprised. Did he think Tristan would fight or balk? Perhaps. He remembered a much younger man, one with dark moods and an explosive temper. Could Tristan use that to his advantage?

“I apologize but I must ask for you to relinquish your vest.” Reggie lift-ed a finger. “And don’t try to palm any of your...equipment. You know I would see it.”

And he likely would, having been one of Tristan’s teachers in the art. His gaze didn’t falter as he took the vest off and held it out for a guard to take. None of the items was ir-replaceable, but he would mourn the time, effort, and cost if he had to be put through the process twice within a year.

One of the guards ran a scanner over Tristan, then nodded.

Reggie swept an arm out, inviting Tristan to lead the way. The guards’ aim never faltered as Tristan passed. Once in the corridor—the plush blue fibers on the deck and polished dark mahogany moldings indicating it was a luxury yacht, Reggie said, “The dining room is aft.”

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And dining room it was, with chandeliers, bulkheads of raised, dark mahogany panels accented with light, burl moldings, and a large table, sumptuously laid. Liszt’s Lie-bestraum played softly. Three ser-vants—from their carriage and the fact they bore weapons, they dou-bled as guards—waited at various points around the room. Tristan did a mental calculation; standard crew on this class ship was eight. Two on the bridge, two stationed behind them at the door, and three in the room already. Where had the pilot been when Tristan was flying the ship? And did Reggie double as cap-tain? How many people did Tristan need to worry about?

At the table sat Tristan’s compan-ions. Slap and Addie both glowering, were seated to the left of the empty host’s chair. Carter, on the right, ap-peared worried.

“I was going to confine them to cabins, but that wouldn’t be very chivalrous for a rescuer, would it?” Reggie’s smile flashed as he strutted to the head of the table and indi-cated Tristan should sit to his right, next to Carter.

“And besides, I have a feeling that, given the chance, Lt. Commander Donegal would be attempting some-

thing ingenious which would be det-rimental to the ship.”

Oh, would he ever! The thought of what Carter could do to Reggie’s ship sent ripples of glee up Tristan’s spine. A hint of humor must have sparked in Tristan’s eyes as he and Reggie sat; his former partner shot him an intense, curious glare as he unfolded his napkin.

A servant stepped forward with a bottle of wine. Tristan watched with veiled amusement as Reggie went through the pompous process of approving the selection—from sniff-ing the cork, to swirling it his glass, and the final show of tasting.

When he gave the nod of endorse-ment, the servant then proceeded around the table. Tristan allowed his glass to be filled, but Carter put his hand over his. Slap followed suit. Addie, sitting across from Tristan, let hers be filled, and to his surprise, lifted the glass and stuck her nose almost into it. After a few moments, she took a sip, and held the wine in her mouth, lighting swishing it. She swallowed, wrinkling her nose, and for the first time, endeared herself to Tristan’s heart by announcing, “Well, that’s very bland.”

Reggie’s eyes narrowed, then he quickly smiled most condescending-

ly. “I expect your palette is not used to fine wines, child.”

Tristan tasted his wine as Addie answered, “I’m not a child, and this is tasteless. My daddy taught me wines. What is it, a Chenin Blanc? Bet it’s from Minatoa or Cepheus. Both planets have a reputation for letting Chenin overproduce.”

The girl had it right—the wine was very...uninteresting. Reggie’s taste hadn’t improved; he still didn’t know quality, just played at being cultured.

Reggie’s frown deepened. “The wines of Cepheus are renowned.”

Addie snorted. “Some are, espe-cially the wineries on the west coast of the main continent in the eastern hemisphere. But not all, as this un-imaginative little wine proves.”

Tristan silently agreed. He stared hard at Addie, realizing he never had before. He’d let his eyes slide by her, not wishing to acknowledge her presence. That Addie was fearless in standing toe-to-toe with anyone was not news, but that she knew what she was talking about was.

Reggie inhaled and turned to Tristan, overtly dismissing Addie. “Quaint passenger you picked up. Where did you find her, on a gar-bage scow?”

“Is that supposed to be an in-sult?” Addie shot back. “Try harder you pretentious, low-brow gang-ster.”

Fighting a smile, Tristan leaned back. This could unexpectedly good entertainment.

Slap, sitting next to Addie, pat-ted her arm. “Hush, girl. Be good.” He then scowled at Reggie. “And how do we know the food and drink aren’t poisoned?”

Trust Slap to be blunt.Reggie’s smile grew smug. “You

forget. I rescued you from the ice and cold of that planet, and from the Confederation. Why would I wish to bring harm to my guests?”

Slap’s one-word reply was pure cowboy: direct and earthy.

“Two very quaint companions, I see,” Reggie murmured. “I would not say you have come up in the world in your choices of friends.”

Oh, so tempting to retort, but Reggie expected it, so Tristan mere-ly returned his gaze evenly.

After a few moments, Reggie turned his attention back to Slap. “If I wished to kill you, I could have merely left you on the planet, or in-structed one of my guards to shoot you.”

“What about drugging us?”

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“The only one I might wish to drug is the Lt. Commander here, and that only out of concern that he might be tempted to...be creative in a mis-placed effort to be what he feels is helpful to his friends.” Reggie’s feral smile returned as he turned to re-gard Carter. “But be not alarmed, sir, I have no intention of ruining such good food, and besides, it would eliminate the chance for us to have a heart to heart later.”

Carter didn’t answer. Reggie, still smiling, adjusted the napkin in his lap. “Shall we dine?”

A plate of scallops wrapped in ba-con was set before Tristan. He cut his gaze to Reggie, whose expect-ant look slid into one of innocent bemusement and then into dismay. “Oh, dear. I believe I committed a faux pas. Or do you no longer only eat kosher foods?”

Tristan had never kept kashrut as Zvi did, although he did follow a subset of the laws; a compromise of the two beliefs he’d been raised with. He avoided the slur intended and rounded with one of his own: “Company can render even a kosher meal treif.”

“And which rabbi said that?”“Rabbi Yuri Rabinovich.”Reggie exhaled in a silent laugh. “I

didn’t know Zvi was a rabbi.”“There’s a lot you don’t know.”Reggie’s flinty look quickly disap-

peared beneath his cool demeanor, and he picked up his fork. After sev-eral bites, he glanced around the table, and his expression became pleading. “Do eat. My chef went to great trouble. You wouldn’t want his feelings hurt.”

Arms crossed, Addie asked, “Is the food any better than the wine?”

“Addie!” Slap hissed.“I’m not afraid of him.”Reggie sat back, exhaling in dra-

matic exasperation. “My dear, child, there is nothing to fear from me. You are all guests.”

“Then why the armed guards?” Slap asked.

“Besides the fact I require my crew to be armed at all times? As long as you are under the misapprehension that you are in some danger from me, I find myself in the position of being in danger from you. A delicate standoff, isn’t it?”

“Considering your boss hired you to kidnap Tristan, how are we sup-posed to trust you?”

“Kidnap?” Reggie gazed upward, considering, and gave a shrugging nod. “I suppose, technically. Mon-sieur Lefevre merely wants to bury

the hatchet, but your friend”—Reg-gie nodded at Tristan—”being stub-born, refuses to believe it.”

“So why not leave him alone? Ain’t that buryin’ the hatchet? Or is it that he wants to bury the hatchet in Tristan’s neck?”

“You really should leave discus-sions you know nothing about to your betters.”

Slap’s explosive verbal reply made Addie giggle. Reggie ignored it and said to Tristan, “You should instruct your companions to eat. They must eventually give in or starve.”

“I believe it’s the company, not the food, they find distasteful.”

Reggie’s lips thinned and his face grew pinched. He carefully dabbed his mouth with the napkin. “Fine. You may all eat in your cabins, and remain confined there for all I care.”

All four stood at almost the same time. Slap looked relieved, and Ad-die grinned.

“Except you, Lt. Commander. I wish to have a word with you.”

Carter frowned and spoke for the first time. “I have nothing to say to you.”

Reggie shrugged. “You can listen then.” He nodded to the guards, who stepped forward, weapons

raised. “Please don’t try anything. My people are all well-trained, and if one of you makes a move, all of you will pay the price.”

Tristan allowed himself to be herded out, wondering what Reg-gie wanted to say to Carter. Dray was interested in his genius, but did Dray realize how badly the Confeds wanted Carter, what lengths they would go through to get him back? Even Dray might find himself biting off more than he could chew.

Interesting scenario. If only Tristan and his tag-alongs weren’t caught in the middle. He let out a long exhale. He needed to plan his next move, but he had no idea what cards the other players held.

***

Slap eyed the posh suite as the two guards escorting him took up positions at the door. The living room and bar took up more space than Bertha’s captain’s cabin, galley, and rec lounge/mess. Everything in the place was outrageously luxuri-ous, from the polished, dark wood-en panels on the bulkheads to the thick, carpet Slap sank into. The fur-niture was...swanky. He wondered if Granger would throw a fit if he actually sat on anything. The guard acting as bartender—or was he a

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bartender who also doubled as a guard?—regarded him distrustfully.

Granger entered and crossed to the bar, smiling like a used rover salesman. What is he up to?

“Please, join me.” Granger nod-ded to the guard who began mixing a drink. “What would you like?”

Slap glared at him. “Your heart and liver served up on a platter.”

Granger’s smile didn’t fade. “Your loyalty to your friend is admirable. But misplaced.” The guard placed a stemmed glass on the bar. Granger picked it up and sipped. He stared at Slap as if sizing him up. “He tends to betray friendships, you know. He betrayed me, and our employer, not the other way around. No matter what he might have told you.”

Slap leaned an elbow on the bar, pretending to stifle a yawn. “Ya got anywhere to go with this, or you just blowin’ hot air?”

“He was M. LeFevre’s protégé. Groomed to be his successor. Has he told you why he left?”

Slap poked a finger at Granger. “Think I’d believe anything from space-sucking sleaze like you? You’re wastin’ your time. I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to listen to you, and I ain’t gonna to talk to you no more.”

“He disobeyed our employer, and endangered both his life and mine, all just for self-gratification. “

Slap considered punching Grang-er, but instead decided to be more vocal in his rejection of the conver-sation. He leaned his back against the bar, crossed his arms, and began singing “Home on the Range.”

By the second line, Granger stopped, open-mouthed. He tried to talk over Slap’s singing, but Slap just sang louder. The lizard’s expres-sion changed from amazement to irritation to disgust. Finally, he lift-ed a hand as if dismissing Slap and turned away, pointing a finger at the door guards. They stepped forward and gestured with their PBGs. Slap let himself be led back to his fancy cabin.

Once back in his gilded cage, he prowled wall to wall, helplessness and anger growing in him. How did the man think he could insult Slap’s intelligence—as if Slap couldn’t un-derstand or didn’t remember the way Granger referred to him to Tristan—then try to play up to him? Slap might not have the fancy edu-cation Tristan did, but he wasn’t stu-pid. He wasn’t ever going to believe that smooth-talking piece of slime was someone he could trust, and

he wasn’t going to tell him anything about Tristan either.

Was Granger trying this game with the others? Carter would know better. Addie...Slap grinned, think-ing of the insults the girl would hurl at him, but then he sat, thinking hard. Addie would likely give away anything she knew or thought she knew about Tristan without even realizing it.

But what did she know? As far as that went, what did any of them re-ally know about the man? Granger probably knew more than any of them. An irrational twinge of jeal-ousy rose in him. As much as his friend trusted Slap with his life, he didn’t trust him with his past. If he’d played Granger’s game, the man might have told Slap plenty, but twisted, to fit whatever scheme the lizard was up to.

No, he’d rather not know Tristan’s past than hear Granger’s version.

***

“Interesting companions you have.” Reggie gestured to the chair across from him. Tristan glanced back at the guards and sat, eyes on his opponent.

“Quite diverse,” Reggie added.“I take it you have...interviewed

all three of them.”

“But of course.” Of course. Tristan wondered what

each of them had to say to Reggie.“You have managed to cultivate

an incredible amount of loyalty in your...companions.” Reggie leaned back, swirling the wine in his glass. “Or so it seems.”

Tristan waited. He could hear a “but” lurking.

Reggie let his smirk show. “How-ever, one of them is a spy. Do you know which one?”

Addie. Tristan didn’t respond aloud and kept his face impassive. Reggie often ran fast and loose with truth, but Tristan had begun to sus-pect something himself. Sifting Reg-gie’s words might shed some light on his own ideas.

“That girl disappointed her Con-federation allies when she stopped cooperating with them.”

“I can imagine their kidnapping of her had something to do with that.”

“They rescued her from the origi-nal boors who kidnapped her, but that’s when she decided to stop co-operating. So,” Reggie paused to sip his wine, “they used her as bait to get you and Donegal.”

Addie spying made sense. Her fa-ther probably put her up to it—he

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lost business when the Mordas lost control. The Confederation would want to fill in a power vacuum, and an unscrupulous business man, made wealthy by criminals, would be a perfect in-road for them to gain a foothold. But why would Addie stop spying for the Confederation?

“Is she your lover?”Tristan’s thoughts skidded to a

halt. He blinked. “What?”Reggie stopped, open mouthed,

and a smile slowly spread. “How ex-traordinary. You weren’t aware she’s in love with you?”

Tristan’s astonishment of such a far-flung notion gave way to humor, and he found himself chuckling. “You never were very perceptive, were you?”

Reggie’s grin faded. “I’m serious.” Glass in hand, he pointed at Tristan. “You, my old, dear friend, must be slipping.”

Tristan opened his mouth to an-swer, but a shudder running through the ship stopped him. The klaxon blatted, and a voice over the comm announced, “We’re under attack!”

Deuces Wild © 2009 by L.S. King.

To catch up on previous episodes of the adventures of Slap and

Tristan, visit: http://loriendil.com/DW.php

Deuces Wild is dedicated to the memory of my best friend; my inspiration for an enduring

friendship...http://loriendil.com/Starsky/

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NIATTIby Raz Greenberg

Niatti stood on the platform, looking at her father with tears

in her eyes.“Enough of this, honey,” he said.

“You know I have to go. My crew could barely afford the extra week I stayed here because of your birth-day.”

“But why can’t I come with you?”“We’ve been through all this. You

really want to leave the spaceport? You’ve got friends here, school, your mom...”

“I hate my mom.”Her father’s face hardened. “Niat-

ti, you shouldn’t say such things. Tell me now that you didn’t mean what you just said.”

Niatti gave him a disobedient look. He stared back at her, without moving a single muscle on his face.

She gave up after thirty seconds. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean it.”

He bent down and patted her head. “Honey, the things your mother makes you do—especially your studies—are all important for your future. Don’t be mad at her, and don’t give her a hard time. She’s got enough trouble as it is.”

“Why do you defend her?” Niatti asked angrily. “She never says good

things about you. She always calls you a—” Niatti stopped, not sure if she should finish the sentence.

Her father gave her a sad smile. “Your mother has many reasons to be angry with me, honey, and most of them are very good reasons.”

He looked at his ship, the Lunar-ian, which was ready for takeoff. Then he turned back to face his daughter. “I’ll let you in on a secret. You’re still too young to come with us, but five years from now, when you’re twelve, your mother agreed to let you join us for a year, and see if you like it. And if you do, and if the crew agrees, you will get a perma-nent position on the ship.”

Niatti leaped on her father, hug-ging him. “Yes! Yes! Sure I’ll like it!”

“But only if you promise me,” her father continued, “to be a good girl, do well in school, and not give your mother a hard time.”

“I promise! I promise!” She jumped up and down on the metal floor.

Her father smiled. He kissed her goodbye, and turned back to his ship.

“Goodbye honey,” he said. “Hap-py birthday, Niatti.”

***

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Niatti ran into her mother’s of-fice. “Daddy’s coming today, right?”

Her mother shook her head. “No, Niatti, your father isn’t coming.” She pointed at the large screen hanging from the wall. The screen featured a picture of the Lunarian in space. The system’s news network’s logo ap-peared at the bottom of the screen.

“That’s daddy’s ship. What...”Niatti’s mother pushed a button

near the screen, and the image on it was joined by a voice. “The video you see now was sent to us by an or-ganization calling themselves ‘Spac-ers for Fair Trade.’ Representatives of the organization claim since the Coalition does not intend to act ac-cording to trade agreements made with them, they will enforce these agreements on their own, and will take action against Coalition-favored traders.”

Four smaller, yet heavily armed ships suddenly appeared around the Lunarian.

“According to the organization’s representatives, the ship seen in the video was doing business under terms that contradict the agree-ments, with the full knowledge and support of the Coalition. After refus-ing the demands not to continue in its course...”

Niatti stopped listening to the re-porter’s words. Her eyes widened

as she watched missiles fired from all four ships make their way slowly to the Lunarian, tearing it apart. The ship disintegrated completely after a few minutes.

“A Coalition representative has called the attack an act of terror-ism, and promised that a strong re-sponse will—”

Even after her mother turned off the screen, Niatti kept staring it, speechless.

“Niatti,” her mother finally said in a voice that had a hint of compas-sion, “We’ll have your birthday cel-ebration some other day. You don’t have to work or go to school today if you don’t want to.”

Niatti finally let what she saw on the screen sink in. “No!”

“Niatti, I understand it’s difficult for you, but—”

“He said he’ll be here! He said he was coming to get me!”

The hint of compassion in her mother’s voice turned to anger. “Get you where? That’s the life you want-ed so much? Barely making a living in space, looking for trouble?”

“Yes!” Niatti screamed. “You al-ways lied about him, tried to con-vince me—”

“How did I lie, Niatti? Didn’t I tell you that he was going to abandon you, just as he abandoned me? Didn’t I tell you he was going to fill

your head with dreams and fanta-sies, and leave you heartbroken at the end?” She pointed at the screen again. “Can’t you see that this is ex-actly what happened here, for the last time, thank god?”

“I hate you,” Niatti whispered. She turned her back on her mother and ran out of the office.

***

It was another reception for a VIP—that’s what Niatti’s moth-er called spaceport guests who brought many ships with them and paid a lot of money. In such recep-tions, the spaceport owner and her daughter would usually exchange pleasantries and sometimes modest gifts with the guests. It never took more than fifteen minutes, but Ni-atti loathed almost every VIP guest in the spaceport and felt like each reception lasted for hours.

“It’s so good to see you, Mr. Seward,” her mother said.

‘Mr. Seward’ was an overgrown goon who seemed to fit poorly in his fancy suit. “So, you’re the hom-eowner, eh?” He laughed.

“The owner of this home, and many other homes that can host your fleet, I assure you. This here is my daughter”—Niatti stepped for-ward, dragging her feet, trying to make as much noise as possible—

”who just turned fourteen today. And she’s giving me a lot of trouble, like any kid her age, but one day she’ll be the owner around here.”

Seward’s smile broadened. “That’s a really cute girl you got. Here’s something for her.” He pulled a nice-looking bracelet from his pocket. “Made on a personal order at the most prominent workshop on Noraj.”

Niatti remembered hearing about the Noraj workshops in the news—the Coalition declared their prod-ucts illegal after learning that they employed people in slavery condi-tions. She put on the bracelet with a rueful look on her face.

“Now that I’ve seen your kid, it’s time for you to see mine. Or some-thing like that.” Seward laughed again and turned his head to look at his ship. “Antoine?”

A young man came running out of Seward’s ship, and stood beside him. Antoine’s attempts at social pretension were even worse than Seward’s. Seward was a rough guy who tried to conceal his real char-acter with expansive, respectable clothing. Antoine, with his unshav-en face, punk haircut, and the dirty look with which he examined Niatti, was clearly a criminal of the kind she heard a lot about in the news. His features contrasted badly with

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his fancy uniform. There was also something disturbingly familiar about the uniform too, but Niatti couldn’t figure out just what it was.

“An extraordinarily talented young man,” said Seward. “When I picked him up, he was just released from the jail in Amjan, and they wanted to send him to work on mineral pro-duction, of all things. Now look at him. Barely twenty-two years old, and he’s already commanding my fleet. I’m telling you...”

Antoine smiled at Niatti when he noticed her attention to him. Dream on, she thought. Then she understood what seemed so famil-iar about his uniform—it was the in-signia on his sleeve. Where has she seen it before?

“...those Coalition idiots wouldn’t dare to give me any more trouble. It took them some time, but now they finally understand who’s really run-ning things in the system.”

“No doubt about it,” Niatti’s mother agreed. “These people have to learn things the hard way.”

Then Niatti finally remembered. She stormed at Antoine with a scream, scratching his face with her well-manicured nails. Antoine began fighting back. Her mother grabbed her as Seward did Antoine, strug-gling to break the two apart.

“Niatti,” her mother hissed, “I

don’t know what you think you’re doing but...”

“This man killed daddy!”“Calm down right now, or else

I’ll—”“Look at the insignia on his uni-

form! It’s the same one that ap-peared on those ships that—”

The slap on Niatti’s face wasn’t strong, but it was enough to si-lence her. She looked at her mother through tears.

“Go to my office and wait for me there.”

Niatti blinked to make her tears go away. She wouldn’t let Antoine, Seward, or her mother see her cry. Just before leaving the platform, she noticed that the insignia from Antoine’s uniform also appeared on his ship. Seward’s ship.

***

The ship that finished the docking process was old and rusty. It seemed at home among the platform’s noisy generators and leaking pipes. But the officer who came out—an im-pressively tall woman whose short grey hair, ironed uniform, and shiny ranks stood in sharp contrast to her miserable-looking ship—didn’t seem to mind.

“It’s actually above the standards we’re used to,” she said, amused.

“I’m very sorry...” Niatti checked

her board “Colonel Chen. I’m afraid all the other platforms are occu-pied.”

“No need to apologize or make excuses, my dear. We’re already used to the fact that reasonable platforms are reserved for paying customers, good platforms are re-served for well-paying customers, and luxury platforms are reserved for the criminal types. The garbage platforms are reserved for us the...how does your boss call us, anyway? On other spaceports I hear ‘para-sites,’ ‘vampires,’ ‘fleas.’”

“My boss isn’t such a colorful type. For her, you’re all just ‘scams.’”

The Colonel laughed. “How very disappointing. Anyway, we get sent to places like this all the time. What did you do to get the punishment of handling us?”

“I’m kept out of VIP platforms till further notice. But handling VIPs is the real punishment. I’d rather work with people like you.” Niatti’s board beeped. “Everything looks okay. Tell your people they can get off the ship and settle in. You know the rules—no wandering outside your assigned platform, and you need to check with me before leaving.”

The Colonel raised an eyebrow. “You don’t intend to check our car-go?”

“I just did.”

“I mean, physically. Board our ship, see if we’re not hiding any-thing.”

Niatti tapped her board. “You gave me your cargo manifest. That’s enough for me.”

“And your boss knows that you show such trust in Coalition Patrol personnel?”

“My boss never bothers to get down here herself, so she’ll never find out.”

“Still, what would you do if it turns that we brought some weapons with us to get rid of some problem-atic people in your VIP platforms?”

Niatti’s voice grew cold. “Let me know if you did. I’ll be glad to show you the way.”

The Colonel laughed again, and patted on Niatti’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, dear, but we didn’t bring any weapons with us here this time.” She frowned. “We really need to do something about these peo-ple, someday. But until then...” She smiled again. “We have some merchandise we confiscated from smugglers. We didn’t report it, and we need to get rid of it before we get back. It just happens to be the kind of merchandise that our cook can work miracles with. So how about it, dear? You feel like joining the scams for a luxury dinner? I can promise you something at least as

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good as the stuff they serve in your VIP platforms.”

Niatti blushed. “I’d be honored.”

***

Niatti stood in her mother’s of-fice, wearing a Coalition Patrol uni-form. Her mother’s voice was cold and no-nonsense as usual.

“Go back to your room and take that costume off. I don’t want to see you walking around the platform wearing it.”

Niatti sighed. “I always had the feeling that you forgot my birthday. So here’s an update for you: today I’m officially past the age in which you can tell me what to do.”

“On the other hand, you’re also probably old enough for me to give up on you, and just let you go with-out any guilty conscience.”

“That’s already taken care of. In two hours, I’m boarding a Patrol ship in platform 212, and you won’t have to see or hear from me again, ever.”

Her mother seemed as though she was about to retort with her own snappy answer, but then she leaned back in her chair, and her face softened in an expression that Niatti hasn’t seen before—a com-bination of tiredness, sadness, and despair.

“Before you board that ship, at

least sit down and hear my side. I know you don’t believe this, but I want you to stay here.”

Niatti sat and gave her mother a suspicious look. “Why? Ever since you brought Seward and his gang to the ports, you kept reminding me how I always stand in the way and never do any good.”

“I brought Seward here because of you, Niatti. I grew up with nothing, had to fight to buy my first space-port. Now, thanks to Seward, all the spaceports in the system are mine.” Niatti could hear the pride in her mother’s voice. “And one day they’ll be yours, which means you will own the system. Give it a chance, Niatti. I only want what’s good for you.”

Niatti shrugged. “Even if I give it a chance, it will do no good. The Co-alition is about to approve national-ization of all spaceports next month, and everything you worked so hard for will be gone. Seward managed to get on too many people’s bad side, and now he’s going to take you down with him.”

Her mother gave her a dismissive gesture. “They can nationalize the spaceports all they want. It’s mean-ingless if they can’t enforce it.”

“And you’re not going to let it happen.”

“Exactly.”“So what are you saying? We’re

going to war?”“We certainly are, and the ri-

diculous uniform you’re wearing belongs to the side that’s going to lose. You’ve seen enough Coalition Patrol ships, Niatti. You really think that these pieces of junk can stand against Seward’s fleet?”

“Is that what you want to leave behind for me? The system will be all mine, I’ll just have to share it with a gang of criminals?”

Her mother responded with a bit-ter smile. “You don’t have to believe everything you hear in the news, Niatti. Seward’s people aren’t ter-rorists—”

“I said criminals, not terrorists. Terrorists at least pretend to work for some noble cause. Seward and his gang don’t even do that any-more—they stopped around the same time you let them into the spaceports.”

“If it’s about your father—”“Yes, it’s about dad. But it’s also

about extorting protection money from passengers in Diamond, run-ning blood-merchandise through Emerald, and especially the way you broke the worker’s strike in Onyx.” Niatti paused for a few seconds, when she noticed the guilt on her mother’s face. “Those people were your friends, I even went to school with the daughter of one of them.

How could you let it happen?”Her mother closed her eyes and

leaned back. “I admit, I should have handled it differently, probably gone there myself instead of sending An-toine—”

“Sending Antoine to do anything is a bad idea, period.”

“You’re being unfair, Niatti. An-toine had a very hard life, and still managed to get far. He’s a talented young man, and unlike some peo-ple, he’s willing to listen to others who know a thing or two about the system.” Now it was her mother’s turn to hesitate. “I know you two haven’t gotten along very well so far, and it’s not just your fault—Antoine certainly needs to restrain himself in both his professional and social behavior. But I’m sure it will happen, and someday you’ll need him here besides you, to help you run the spaceports but also for—”

Niatti’s eyes widened. “So that’s what you had in mind for me. Not just spaceports filled with criminals, but also marriage to a psychopath.”

“I had no intention of dragging you to church, Niatti. You’ve already proven that I can’t force you into anything. But if you’re so unhappy about what goes on around here, this is your big chance to change things.”

“What are you talking about?”

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Her mother smiled, pulling an official-looking document out of her desk drawer. “You were wrong about me forgetting your birth-day. I just waited for you to be old enough.”

Niatti examined the document. It was a contract that transferred many of the management duties in the spaceports to her. “It looks very impressive,” she admitted.

“You earned it. I heard many compliments about the work you do with ships that dock in the low-er platforms—and these people had nothing but complaints before you started working there. I’m sure you’ll do a great job with the more prestigious platforms as well. And with all the other spaceports too. What do you think?”

Niatti stared at the contract, not answering.

Her mother leaned forward—could she feel Niatti’s dilemma? “Look, you’ve got an almost un-limited budget for anything you want—clothes, residence, transpor-tation—you won’t get even close to such conditions in the army, even if they’ll make you Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff someday.” Her mother smiled. “It’s never too late to start over, Niatti. Let’s start over. I’m sick of fighting with you.”

Niatti put the document on her

mother’s desk and got up. “No.”Her mother’s face hardened. “I will not be a part of what’s going

on in the ports. As long as Seward is here, it doesn’t matter how much management duties you’ll give me—the ports will still be a den of criminals.”

“Very well,” her mother’s voice returned to its familiar cold, ruth-less tone. “If that’s your choice, and I can’t convince you, go board that Patrol ship. But the moment you do that, it’s a one-way ticket. You’re completely on your own—I have no intention of going after you, or even checking how you are doing. And don’t dare run back to me if you’ll discover that military life isn’t for you—as I’m sure you will.”

Niatti turned her back to her mother, and walked to the door. Her mother’s voice chased her.

“Think about it in the next two hours, Niatti. Your father tried play-ing by the rules. How far did it get him?”

She left her mother’s office, say-ing nothing.

***

Another shot missed Niatti’s head by a few inches, burning a black mark on the wall behind her. She dove for cover behind the stacked tables and crates of the storage room of the

Amber spaceport.“Remind me again,” Samir asked,

“why did we stay here after the or-der to retreat?”

“I didn’t ask you to join me, Samir,” she answered. “I wouldn’t leave the Colonel behind, but that’s my problem. You could have joined the others.”

“What, and let you get court-mar-tialed alone? No way.” He grinned. “I’m sure the first thing the Colonel will do once we rescue her—” he paused for a second, when another shot was fired, “—will be to file a complaint against the three of us for not following orders. You’ll need company in military prison.”

Sergei gave them both a disap-proving look. “I hate to stop you two lovebirds while you’re having so much fun, but I’m out of ammo and if you have any left—”

He didn’t get to complete the sentence. A shot blew a large hole in the center of his face. His body froze for a second before falling on the floor. Niatti and Samir both stared at him, paralyzed, horrified.

The firing stopped, and a threat-ening silence spread in the room.

A familiar voice broke it, just as Ni-atti began to recover from the shock of what she just saw. “I know you’re there, Niatti, along with some other asshole from the Coalition Patrol. I

want both of you to come out with your hands raised.”

“Screw you, Antoine,” she shout-ed back.

A short laughter came in re-sponse. “Fine. Come out with your guns, if you want. You won’t dare shoot me anyway.”

Niatti began to rise before she felt Samir’s hand pulling her back. “You’re out of your mind? He’s probably got at least ten mercenar-ies out there with him!”

“I don’t care. I’ve been dreaming for years about shooting this man.”

She leapt up, aiming her gun—and froze when she saw Antoine holding Chen with one arm, his own gun to her head with the other.

“I’m in a generous mood today,” said Antoine, “So I’ll repeat my of-fer. Drop your gun and raise your hands.”

Niatti stared at Chen, who gave her an angry look. “Lieutenant, I gave you an order—” One of the guards accompanying Antoine hit Chen in her stomach, and she moaned in pain.

Antoine was getting impatient. “The gun, Niatti. Now!”

Niatti eyes ran from Chen to An-toine. She could do it. She was a pretty good shot...

“Dammit, Lieutenant, shoot him already!”

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Niatti stared at Chen’s frustrated expression. Then she slowly let go of the trigger, and dropped her gun. “Sorry, Colonel. Can’t take that chance. I still owe you dinner.”

Antoine did not look convinced. “Tell your boyfriend to do the same.”

“Samir?” Niatti knew she had no right to expect Samir not to try any-thing stupid—not when she herself gave such a bad example. But sur-prisingly, he came out almost im-mediately after she called him and dropped his gun. He was probably under the wrong impression that Niatti knew what she was doing.

Samir ordered two of his guards to cuff them. Then he gave Niatti that satisfied smile she hated so much.

“The prodigal daughter returns,” he grinned. “Too bad she brought some unpleasant guests with her.” He threw Chen on the floor and shot her in the back. Her scream echoed off the walls.

Niatti and Samir began struggling, to no avail—the firm grip of the guards held them in their place. An-toine’s eyes moved joyfully between their frustrated struggle and Chen’s painful crawling on the floor.

He shot again, hitting Chen’s left leg. For a second, she seemed about to surrender to the pain, but

then she kept dragging herself stub-bornly across the floor. Antoine was about to shoot again, but instead he paused, his look fixated on the tor-tured body at his feet.

Niatti understood what Chen was trying to do a second before Antoine did. The gun dropped by Samir was at her left hand’s reach—a fact she concealed by keeping that hand at the side of her body. With her re-maining strength, Chen managed to pick up the gun, aim it at Antoine, and pull the trigger.

The trigger’s clicked on empty cartridge.

Time froze for a second, as Chen stared helplessly, the gun still aimed at Antoine. Then she finally gave in to the pain, letting her hand drop in an agonized cry. Antoine shot her again three times, aiming at non-vi-tal areas in her body to prolong her suffering.

Her body stopped moving a min-ute later.

“Take him to one of the cells,” An-toine told the guard who held Samir. He then turned to Niatti, running his finger along her face.

She spat on him, and he laughed. “That’s very good, you need to practice. You’re going to drool on me quite a lot, Lieutenant,” the last word was said in a mocking imita-tion of Chen’s voice.

He turned to the guard that held Niatti. “Take her to the infirmary, and have her injected with something that will calm her down without taking her completely out of action. Then bring her to my room. Pass through the merchandise section on the way, and have them fit her with something nice to wear. We’re going to have some fun tonight.” His smile widened. “We’re going to have fun every night, from now on.”

Niatti kept struggling all the way to the infirmary, until she felt the needle in her arm.

***

Every time over the next year, Ni-atti returned from Antoine’s room to her cell with a guard accompanying her. The guard was strong enough to prevent any attempted escape, but also young enough to feel sym-pathy for her. It began with friendly smiles and nervous looks at her torn clothes and the signs of violence on her body. Then, a week ago, he no longer held her cuffed while going to the cell and allowed her to walk a few feet ahead of him. Niatti thought it was very unfortunate, considering what she was about to do.

They reached the cell, and Ni-atti forced herself to wait while the guard punched the code that opened the door. When he reluc-

tantly motioned her to get in, she made a single step toward the cell, and then turned around, drew the knife hidden in her dress, and stabbed the guard in his left eye.

The guard fell to the floor, scream-ing. Samir leapt out of the cell. He picked up the guard’s gun, aimed it at him, and shot.

“No!” Niatti hit Samir’s hand, causing him to miss.

Samir gave her an angry look. “Every cry coming from him informs the other guards that something’s wrong.”

“So let’s just get out of here. Just...” she looked at the guard, who was still on the floor, crying. “Just leave him alone.”

They had the advantage of sur-prise when they reached the prison section’s exit—both guards posted there died from Samir’s shots before they managed to draw their own weapons. One of them did manage to push a button on the wall, and sounds of alarm began filling the corridors. Niatti and Samir hid in a small corridor just outside the pris-on section, and watched a group of guards running in. When the last guard passed, they both began run-ning in the opposite direction.

Niatti remembered how, as a child, she ran through similar cor-ridors to avoid her mother. She just

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hoped that the guards’ presence on the spaceport dwindled since she was captured.

Samir started showing signs of exhaustion an hour after their es-cape, and they had to stop every few minutes for him to recover his strength. After a year of not being able to see him clearly in the dark-ness of the cell, she now noticed that he was sickeningly thin. She was in a somewhat better shape, especially since Antoine decided to accompany her torture-nights with luxurious dinners. A very bad deci-sion, she thought as she recalled the knife she managed to smuggle out. Then a memory of the guard she stabbed flashed, and she felt con-sumed by guilt.

“Look,” she finally told Samir. “We can’t go on like this. We’ll find a place to hide, you’ll get some rest and I’ll steal some food—”

“Don’t be stupid. We’re getting out of this spaceport as fast as we can. Figured out how we’re going to do that?”

She hesitated. “Cargo section. We need to look for an unmanned ship with organic cargo—they are launched automatically.”

Samir frowned. “Organic cargo? We’ll be spending the next three weeks with chickens and cows and all their shit?”

Niatti sighed. “Organic cargo ships are the only unmanned ships that contain a supply of oxygen and food.” It was chickens’ and cows’ food, but Niatti decided to keep that little detail for herself.

“So how long does it take us to get there?”

“Three hours, since we don’t use elevators. Hanging in corridors like this one for too long is also a bad idea.”

When they started moving again, Niatti discovered that her assess-ment was too optimistic. Samir had to take longer breaks to recover, and at their current pace, it would take them more than a day to get to the cargo section.

“Just leave me here,” he finally told her.

“I will not.”“Haven’t you learned anything,

Niatti? The reason we got in this mess to begin with is because you wouldn’t leave the Colonel behind here.”

“That’s because you don’t leave people behind, Samir. Besides, Chen could give me orders. You can’t. In fact, I can give you orders. Get on your feet, Sergeant.”

“So I’m going to disobey your or-der, just as you did, Lieutenant. I’m not going anywhere.”

“If you’re not going, than I’m stay-

ing here with you.”“Well, at least we tried.” He

turned to one of the iron walls, and kicked it. A faint echo was heard throughout the corridors.

“What do you think you’re do-ing?”

“Noise, Niatti. They’ll be coming here to get me soon, so you’d bet-ter run.”

He kicked the wall again, hard-er—and this time he cursed in pain immediately afterwards. The sight was almost funny.

“Samir, that’s enough!”He gave her a desperate look.

“Enough yourself, Niatti. You want to help me? Find a way out of here, and come back with the entire Co-alition Patrol.”

She hesitated for another second before turning her back on him and running. She could hear his body falling on the floor behind her.

***

Niatti’s body started shaking. In the year since she escaped the spaceport, her body behaved the same way every evening, as though it was still getting ready for its daily abuse, bringing up memories of breath-stench, rude bragging, and endless pain.

She opened the pack, got a ciga-rette, and brought it to her mouth

while struggling to keep her hand steady and light it. The heat spread through her body, and the shaking was gone. She sank into her leather chair, slowly letting the smoke out of her lungs.

Her body started shaking again almost immediately after she fin-ished the cigarette. She needed an-other one. She sent a nervous hand toward the pack on the desk. It fell, and all the cigarettes rolled in dif-ferent directions. It didn’t matter, really—she could pick them all up later. All she needed now was one more cigarette. She bent under the desk and took one.

She sat back on her chair and was about to light the new cigarette, when she noticed that someone was standing at the other side of the desk. It was General Matsumoto, the newly-appointed commander of the spaceports campaign.

“What do you want?” she asked impatiently.

“I want many things, Captain. But we can start by satisfying my curios-ity as to why you don’t get up and salute a senior officer when he en-ters your office.”

“Funny, I expected you to be wor-ried about bigger things, Sir. Like the war they let you handle. You know—the one we’re losing.”

“We’ll get to that too, Captain,

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don’t worry. But before we do, would you mind telling me why you didn’t attend the memorial service today?”

Niatti lit her cigarette, and the shaking disappeared again. She blew the smoke in the General’s face. “Because I’m sick of it, Sir.”

“’Sick of it,’ Captain?” he respond-ed with a disgusted look.

“I’m sick of it. All of it. All this cir-cus where you cast me as a clown. ‘Memorial service’ my ass. You don’t really care about the Colonel and Sergei. All you want is that the big hero of the Coalition will re-live her moments of pain in front of school kids, or new recruits, or some repre-sentatives that need to approve this budget or another. And I’m sick of it. I went through my torture in prison, and I refuse to keep going through it over and over, this time in the ser-vice of the Coalition Patrol.”

The General gave her a cold look. “Captain, you seem to be under the wrong impression that you are do-ing the Coalition Patrol some kind of favor by attending these events. You aren’t. You are under orders to attend them, and you’re failure to appear to the memorial service to-day joins many other orders you dis-obeyed since you returned—in fact, even before you returned, counting your decision to stay in that space-

port and try to rescue Colonel Chen. So to answer your question, I came here to tell you that it’s over. Every-one in the high ranks has run out of sympathy or patience for your be-havior.”

Niatti wasn’t impressed. “So what do you have in mind for me, Sir? You’re going to court-martial me and throw me in prison? It’s going to look bad if you’ll do that to the woman you’ve worked so hard to portray as the big hero of the Coali-tion. Discharge me from service? It will look even worse once I’ll be a civilian, and have some juicy, heart-breaking stories to tell the media.”

The General was equally unim-pressed. “I’ve dealt with bigger PR problems in the past, Captain. But I already have the perfect solution for your problem—far more elegant than prison or discharge.”

“Really?”“Captain, ever since you returned,

Headquarters has been swamped by requests from the Mental Health Department to have you commit-ted. They’ve been dreaming of a patient like you for years—someone they can test all their new trauma-treatments on. One word from me and you’ll spend the rest of your service, and your retirement as well, as a happy idiot staring at trees in some institute.” He gave another

disgusted look at the cigarettes that fell on the floor. “An improvement, compared to your current lifestyle, if you ask me.”

Niatti realized she had lost. “I’m sorry, Sir,” she whispered. “I prom-ise to make myself available for any future event in which you’ll require my presence.”

The General sighed. “I’m afraid that you’ll have bigger things to deal with, Captain.” He placed a small projector on her desk, and a three-dimensional map of the sys-tem appeared. “We decided on a new strategy. Instead of trying to break into the inner spaceports, we’ll concentrate on taking all the outer spaceports first. It will take more time, but after we’ll have all the outer spaceports, we can shut down Seward’s supply lines, and getting to the inner spaceports will be easier. I believe you’re familiar with the man in charge of the outer spaceports—someone by the name of Antoine.”

Niatti blinked. “How did Seward’s golden boy become the guard-dog for the garbage-spaceports?”

“We’re not sure, but Intelligence heard some interesting rumors. One of them claims that your mother learned of what you went through in prison, and didn’t take it very well. Seward probably decided to

keep Antoine as far away from your mother as possible.”

“Tell Intelligence that they can send my mother a nice card for the next Mother’s Day, as long as they don’t expect me to sign it.”

The General hesitated. “Now that you mention it, it’s a long shot, but we’re actually exploring the possibil-ity of trying to contact your mother and—”

Niatti shook her head violently. “No. Forget it. If that’s what you came here to ask me—”

“Captain, remember what I just told you about how nobody’s asking you for any favors? If we’ll manage to contact your mother, you’ll be under orders to cooperate, and you will. Are we clear on this?”

Niatti said nothing, but nodded.“But like I said, this isn’t a likely

scenario. We need you for other things.” The General pushed one of the projector’s buttons, and all the outer spaceports changed their color to red. “Captain, you know the spaceports like no other soldier in the patrol. This knowledge is an as-set we should have used a long time ago. We intend to start now—you’ll be appointed as a special advisor to Headquarters, helping them build the strategy that will help us take the outer spaceports. And you’d better get ready for many sleepless

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nights, because you’ll have a lot of work on your hands.”

Niatti stared at the map. The role that the General just described wasn’t too glamorous, but it was much better than the toy-soldier the Patrol made of her since her escape. She was about to ask the General when she was leaving, but then she noticed something strange.

“Sir, why is the Ruby spaceport colored differently from the oth-ers?”

“This? Oh, it’s from a previous map. Intelligence thinks that this is where Seward keeps his prisoners.

She felt her pulse quickens. “Samir too?”

“If he’s still alive.”“Sir, I request permission to take

part in the campaign.”The General raised an eyebrow.

“As I just explained, Captain, you will.”

“No, I mean a frontline job: fight-ing, commanding—”

The General laughed. “Sure, Cap-tain. Anything you say.”

“Sir—”“Captain, you’ve been a wreck

ever since you returned. You’re very lucky to have enough useful infor-mation in your head, but that’s no reason to give you a weapon and send you to the frontline. In fact, it’s a very good reason not to do that.”

“Sir, I demand to be given a front-line job.”

“And if you won’t, Captain?”She stared into his eyes. “Then

you can call the Mental Health De-partment, and tell them to start trying all their new treatments on me.”

A moment of silence followed, fi-nally broken by the General. “Very well, I’ll have you assigned to a campaign ship. It’s actually a good idea—you’ll perform better as an advisor closer to the front.”

“And then?”“We’ll see. I still don’t think you’re

fit for combat duty, and you’ll have to work very hard to make me change my mind.” The General turned to the door, but stopped before he got out of the office. “One more thing, Captain. If you’ll get caught lighting one of these”—he pointed at the cigarettes on the floor—”onboard a campaign ship, you’ll get thrown to a military prison for a long time. And trust me, no matter how big a hero you are, there wouldn’t be any PR damage because of that sentence. None.”

The Captain left and Niatti could feel her body shaking again. She was about to pick up a cigarette from the floor but stopped halfway. She leaned back in her chair, waiting for her body to stop shaking on its

own.

***

Niatti decided to try again. “This is the twenty-third platoon, calling Siberni,” she called on her commu-nicator. “Requesting permission to break into the prison section.”

“Permission denied, twenty-third. Please remain where you are and wait for further orders.”

Niatti cursed loudly, without bothering to turn off her communi-cator. General Matsumoto’s voice fi-nally came on-line. “That’s enough, Major.”

“Sir, I don’t understand why the delay in the permission to attack.”

“Headquarters still isn’t con-vinced you’re the right person to lead this attack. And I share some of their concerns.”

“Sir, I have led the attack on five other sections in this spaceport, and I don’t remember anyone complain-ing.”

“Major, the objective in this at-tack is releasing the prisoners, and completing the takeover of the spaceport.”

“I’m well aware of that, Sir.”“Nothing else. I don’t want to

hear about any soldier, including you, who decided to save work for the tribunals. Whenever a merce-nary surrenders, he or she is taken

prisoner. Understood?”“Yes, Sir.” There was a pause. “Very well.

I’m authorizing your platoon to launch the attack. Call another pla-toon for backup. Good luck, Major.”

The communicator went silent. Niatti switched it to speaker mode. “This is a message to all mercenar-ies in the prison section,” she called, her voice echoing beyond the sec-tion’s shuttered doors. “The Coali-tion Patrol is now in control of all the other sections in this spaceport. We demand that you will all come out, surrender, and deliver your weap-ons to us. We promise a fair trial to any mercenary who surrenders.”

She waited another couple of minutes, and when no response came from the other side, she mo-tioned the soldiers in her platoon to start moving, and called the fifty-first platoon to secure the exit.

The prison section’s corridors were too narrow for her platoon to act effectively, and she split it into several squads, leading one squad herself. A few minutes later, the communicator came alive with reports from the other squads’ fire exchanges.

No guards were seen in the corri-dors where Niatti’s squad advanced. A few prisoners in the cells along these corridors noticed the squad

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and started banging on the doors, expecting to be released—but that would have to wait until the entire section was secured.

Niatti led her squad to the sec-tion’s management offices. The of-fices’ doors were large, armored, and blocked from the inside. They used an explosive charge to open them. As the corridor cleared of smoke, the people on the other side began firing. Niatti ordered her squad to keep cover while the mer-cenaries wasted their ammunition. When the firing stopped, she called a squad of the fifty-first platoon to act as her cover, and ordered her own squad to charge.

Four guards waited for them on the other side of the door. An ac-curate shot by Niatti caused one of them to drop his weapon. Two oth-er guards weren’t so lucky, and they fell, dead, when the other soldiers in Niatti’s squad hit them. The last one dropped his weapon and raised his hands. Reluctantly following Ni-atti’s orders, a soldier in her squad cuffed him.

There wasn’t any time for vic-tory celebrations. The next room the squad stormed into was some kind of lounge for the guards, and some of them hid behind a cover of assembled luxury furniture. A shot missed Niatti’s head, and for a

split second she recalled the battle against Antoine in a similar place. But now they’re on the side that needs to take cover, she thought as she shot back.

The guards stopped firing after a few minutes. Niatti estimated two or maybe three people there. She decided to give them another chance. “It is over, people!” she called through the speaker. “Even if you’ll manage to escape this room, the entire spaceport is now under Coalition control. Come out and drop your weapons!”

There was no reply. Niatti was about to order her soldiers to charge, when a small black object was thrown at her squad. The sol-dier standing next to Niatti jumped on her, pinned her to the ground, and absorbed most of the explosion with her body—saving Niatti’s life.

Niatti wasn’t sure how much time passed before she could see again, and before the explosion’s echo stopped ringing in her ears. Her head still ached. She looked around the room that was now filled with bodies. All her squad’s soldiers were dead, as were the guards—the ex-plosion collapsed their cover on them. Didn’t the idiots realize what would happen if they threw a gre-nade?

The backup squad she called ear-

lier swarmed into the room. The squad’s leader helped her up. She couldn’t understand what he was saying. She rose and noticed that her legs were unsteady. Two other soldiers grabbed her gently by the shoulders and started leading her out of the room.

No, no way. She shook free from their grasp, and started to limp to-ward the last office. The squad’s leader tried blocking her way, talk-ed to her, said things she couldn’t and didn’t want to understand. She pushed him away and opened the door.

Inside the room, behind a large wooden desk, holding a gun aimed at his own head, was a single merce-nary. He wore a patch on one eye. A look of recognition appeared in his other eye when he saw Niatti.

It was the same guard who took her to and from Antoine’s room. The same guard who gave her sym-pathetic looks. The same guard she stabbed in the eye.

She leaped toward him in a des-perate scream, and the few feet that separated them turned into miles as he slowly pulled the trigger. She fell on the floor, crying, when a huge red spot appeared on the wall behind the desk.

***

The tense silence onboard the bridge drove Niatti crazy. Finally, a voice was heard through the speak-ers.

“This is the sixty-third platoon calling Siberni. We have Sapphire. Repeat: we have Sapphire.”

The silence broke immediately, as the bridge filled with cheers. Niatti remained silent, but she could feel the tension disappearing from her muscles. General Matsumoto ap-proached her.

“We have all the outer space-ports. And it’s largely thanks to you, Colonel.”

Niatti smiled. “The really tough job is still waiting for us with the in-ner spaceports, Sir.”

He nodded. “So I think it will be a good idea for you to get back to your room and get some sleep. We need you in your best shape on the staff meeting tomorrow.”

She left the bridge relieved, as she didn’t feel like joining the other celebrating officers. Besides, she re-ally did feel tired. Maybe she’ll even manage to sleep without taking the pills...

Niatti froze when she noticed the door to her room was open. She held classified material in there—but that was supposed to be okay, because the door could only be opened by authorized personnel.

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So what was it? A prank? Surprise party? She hoped not. She didn’t feel like celebrating in her room any more than she felt like celebrating on the bridge.

She stepped inside. The door closed behind her and she was about to turn on the lights when a voice echoed in the darkness.

“How’s it going, eh, Colonel?”She sighed in relief, and then

frowned. It was Samir. Drunk, as usual.

“What are you doing here?”“What everyone else is doing,

Colonel. I came to celebrate the big victory with you. And your birthday, while we’re on it.”

“Leave me out of your celebra-tions, Samir. Ever since you were released, birthdays and funerals are all the same to you—an excuse to get drunk and make a fool of your-self. Now if you don’t mind, I want to get some sleep.”

“Bullshit, Colonel. Everyone knows you never sleep.” He gave her a dirty smile. “I know better than ev-eryone else.”

“Get out of my room.”“Not so fast, Colonel. Don’t you

want to see the present I brought you?”

He went behind Niatti’s desk, and kicked a human-looking figure into the center of the room. The figure

wore a prisoner’s uniform, its hands tied and mouth gagged. Its eyes wid-ened in fear as they met Niatti’s.

It was Antoine.“How did you bring him here?”

she finally asked Samir.“Well, you know how I’m best

buddy with all the guys at ship’s se-curity staff. You’ve got nothing to worry about—we agreed on a story about how he escaped from his cell and came to your room, so you had to kill him.” Samir kicked Antoine’s body again, and he moaned in pain.

“Samir, our orders were to take him captive—”

“They never said if he should be dead or alive.”

“Don’t be a smartass. Intelligence needs him for interrogation.”

Samir’s face darkened. “And they’ll probably drop the death pen-alty if he’ll give them the info they want.”

“He’ll still spend the rest of his life in prison.”

Samir kicked Antoine’s body again, more forcefully, and Antoine’s painful moans became unbearable. “That’s enough, Samir. Take him back to his cell.”

Humiliation burned in Samir’s eyes. “Life in prison, Niatti? You’re going to let him get away with life in prison?”

“That’s the problem, Samir? You

can’t kill him yourself, even when you’re loaded, so you come running to me? Next time you feel like play-ing my knight in shining armor, at least do it all the way through. And it will also help the general impres-sion if you’re sober while you do it.”

“Give me a break. You want to kill him as much as I do.”

“I have no reason to kill him, Samir. This whining, pathetic creature you have on the floor here”—Niatti had the urge to kick Antoine herself, but she felt it wouldn’t serve her argu-ment very well—”is a proof that I’ve won. And if you’ll think about it hard enough, in your daily five minutes of soberness, you’ll see that you’ve also won. Now take him back to his cell.”

Samir didn’t seem convinced. “Okay. But there’s something I want you to see first.”

Niatti began losing her patience. “Samir...”

“Trust me, you want to see this. It’s something the General made personally sure you wouldn’t know of.”

“And if I see whatever it is, you promise that you’ll take Antoine back to his cell? No more games?”

He gave her a vicious smile. “Promise.” He placed a projector on her desk. A display of a large room appeared.

“What’s this?”“This is what the team that

cleared his rooms found on Ruby. Notice anything weird?”

“All those things on the wall?”Samir nodded. He pressed a but-

ton, and the display zoomed on the wall. Hanging on it were heads. Hu-man heads. Samir answered Niatti’s question before she could find the words to ask it. “Yeah, they’re real. Our favorite psycho loved looking at his victims in the eyes. Even after he was through with them.”

Niatti fought to control herself. “If you’re trying to make me change my mind, Samir, you’re wasting your time. I won’t...” Her voice died as she recognized one of the heads on the wall.

It couldn’t have been real. The Lunarian disintegrated in space, her father couldn’t have possibly survived the attack and fallen cap-tive...

“Samir, leave me here with An-toine.”

He smiled again. “You sure you don’t want me to stay? Maybe you’ll need help cleaning up after...”

“No. Get out of my room. Now.”Samir shrugged and left.Niatti bent down and removed

the cloth from Antoine’s mouth. He started crying, cursing, begging, and even tried calling for help.

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“It’s no use,” she whispered, bringing her face closer to his. “Ev-eryone else in this section is still cel-ebrating on the bridge.”

She kicked him, making him roll over. “I’m going to kill you. And I’m going to do it the same way you killed Chen.” She drew her gun and fired a single shot at his back.

He responded with a painful scream and useless crawling on the floor. Just as Chen did, Niatti recalled. But she couldn’t feel any satisfaction, any relief. All she could feel was disgust.

She was about to shoot again, but suddenly the gun felt very heavy in her hands. Her next shot missed him, leaving a burn mark on the floor.

She wouldn’t miss again. She moved closer to him—and then felt her stomach turning. She vomited on floor, into the large blood spot that grew around Antoine’s body. A puzzled expression froze on his face when he finally lost his conscious-ness.

“I’m not like you, you son of a bitch,” she whispered. “I’m not like you.”

Then she fired a single shot di-rectly into his head.

***

Niatti decided she had enough.

“Mister Brim, please leave the bridge before I’ll order security to throw you out.”

The Coalition representative gave General Matsumoto a furious look. “General, I am trying to bring an end to this war with no further bloodshed. Please tell your soldier here not to get in my way. You have all done a very good job so far, and now it’s time for diplomacy.”

The General probably noticed that Niatti was about to turn vio-lent, because he motioned her to stay silent. He then turned to the representative. “I am very sorry, Mr. Brim,” he said. “But you came aboard this ship in an attempt to get a surrender announcement from Seward. It was agreed that if you fail, the army reclaims the author-ity here. Given that more than ten hours have passed since you began the negotiations, I think it can be determined that you have failed. Please leave the bridge, as the Colo-nel asked.”

“This is an outrage. I demand that the decision will be reviewed by—”

“You may appeal my decision through the proper channels, but you may not do so from this bridge. Please spare us any further unpleas-antness.”

The representative turned his back to the General, and his frus-

trated steps echoed on the metal floor as he left the bridge.

The General turned to Niatti. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Colonel.”

“I’ve been planning this for years, Sir.” Niatti approached the commu-nication panel. “Seward? Can you hear me?”

Seward’s voice remained just the same as Niatti remembered. “What’s going on? Where’s the clown that talked to me before?”

“The clown went back to perform-ing in his circus. They brought me to entertain you instead. You recognize my voice?”

There was a short silence and then—”Niatti? How’s it going, hon-ey?”

“I’m afraid we just don’t have enough time for the answer to that question. So let’s get to the bottom line here: you lost. The last space-port under your control is surround-ed by Coalition ships, and my good mood is the only thing standing be-tween you and a marine platoon or-dered to capture you and drag you to a war-crimes tribunal.”

Seward did not sound impressed. “Your good mood, plus the dozen-hundred hostages I’m holding here. If you send in your marine platoon, I suggest you’ll equip them with sponges—they’ll have a lot of clean-

ing to do before they’ll get to me.”“These hostages don’t happen to

be civilians who collaborated with you? Because there aren’t many people left who are going to cry over them.”

“Funny you should mention that. I have one such hostage here. You can tell me just how much you’re going to cry over her.”

A new voice came through the communication panel. It was an-other voice that remained just as Niatti remembered—cold and no-nonsense. “Niatti, don’t listen to anything he says, and don’t cut any deal with him. If you have to send in your troops then—”

The communication panel went silent.

Niatti froze for a second, but re-covered quickly when she noticed the General’s worried look. “Seward, you have no idea how happy I am to hear that my mother finally under-stood who she went into business with. Too bad it took her so long. But if you think a few more mur-ders won’t have any effect on your already-bad balance, you are mak-ing a big mistake.”

Seward laughed. “I hope to im-prove my balance, honey, by avoid-ing any more murders. Isn’t this what we’re negotiating here?”

“I can’t offer you a pardon, and

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even if I could—”“I don’t want a pardon. I want a

safe passage.”“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”“I’ll take a ship, a crew and ten

hostages—your mother among them, you can be sure about that—and leave the spaceport and all the other hostages to you. You won’t follow me with any of your ships, and when I’m far enough from your fleet, I’ll release the remaining hos-tages on a planet of choice, and you can come to get them.”

Now it was Niatti’s turn to laugh. “Very amusing, Seward. Do you re-alize how many people in the sys-tem want to see you lynched? You’ll meet these people as soon as you land on any planet within voyage distance. And even if you won’t, I’m sure at least one of the people in your loyal crew will be glad to give you up in return to a commuted sentence.”

“I’ll take that chance.”“And I’m almost tempted to give it

to you. But I’m afraid it’s not within my authority.”

Seward sighed. “I’m starting to get the impression that you can’t of-fer me much, Niatti.”

“Actually, I can offer you quite a lot. The Coalition agreed to get you the best lawyers the system’s tax-payers’ money can buy.”

Seward voice turned bitter. “No lawyer is going to save me from the rope.”

“That’s right. But they can extend it. They’ll drag your trail for years, and you might die from heart-attack before your sentence is even an-nounced. Or maybe cancer—if it helps, I can give you my stock of cig-arettes. I’ve had nothing to do with them since I stopped smoking.”

“That’s very generous. But I’ll still take the safe passage option.”

“As I just explained to you, it’s not going to happen.”

Seward sighed again. “You’re a stubborn one.”

“After so many years in the com-pany of my mother, you should have realized that stubbornness runs in our family.”

“So maybe it’s time both you and your mother will learn that this stubbornness has a price.”

Three shots were heard through the communication panel, and then it went silent.

***

Niatti stood up when General Matsumoto entered her office and saluted him, smiling. “Why, it’s the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff! Congratulations, Sir!”

The General replied with a smile of his own. “Thank you, Colonel. I

understand that congratulations are in order for you to. You and Samir decided on a date yet?”

“We tried, but it’s a little diffi-cult—with all those jobs you give him on such a short notice...”

The General laughed. “Noted, Colonel. I’ll make sure you can both spend more time together.”

“Thank you, Sir.”“Actually, I came here with a pro-

posal of my own. This new job is the last one in my military career, and five years from now, I’ll need a man to replace me.” He leaned back in his chair. “Or a woman.”

Niatti raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure this is a good idea, Sir? My rep-utation is very problematic in some circles.”

The General gave her a dismissive gesture. “You’re a soldier, Niatti. Most people understand that it can be a dirty job.”

She stared at her mother’s pic-ture, hanging on one of the office walls. “Sometimes I find myself thinking just how dirty it has to be, Sir.”

“Haven’t we been through this, Colonel? Seward was going to kill her regardless of anything you could have said or done.” The General frowned. “But while we’re on the subject, I’ve had some complaints about your insistence to keep the

picture here.”“The picture stays,” said Niatti.

“And so do I.”The General gave her a puzzled

look.“Sir, I’m grateful for your offer, but

I have to say no. In fact, it’s probably a good time to tell you that I am re-signing.”

“Colonel, you’ve been through a lot, but you’re still too young for re-tirement.”

“Who said anything about retire-ment? I want to stay here and keep managing the spaceports. It’s non-stop work.”

“Colonel, you can’t—”“Sure I can. I’ve been doing that

for the last two years, and I haven’t heard anyone complaining. Other than that picture thing, of course. But they’ll learn to live with it.”

“You’ve done an excellent job, no argument. But you can’t just take over the job you did as a sol-dier when it becomes a civilian job. There’s a procedure, the Coalition is examining candidates—”

“I know. I’ve registered to be-come one. And you’ll make sure I’ll get the job.”

“Look—”“You’re a big hero, Sir. People

will listen to you. I want the space-ports.”

“But why?”

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“Just like you said, Sir, a military career has to end someday. But running the spaceports is a job for life. People will always need places to dock, buy and sell goods, meet other people from the system. My mother tried explaining all this to me once, but I didn’t listen.” She stared at her mother’s picture again. “And I want to make sure the spaceports will keep running, as she intended me to do, without repeat-ing her mistakes.”

The General nodded. “I under-stand. I’ll see what I can do.” He got up and shook her hand. “Happy birthday, Niatti.”

Happy Birthday, Niatti © 2009 by Raz Greenberg

CALAMITY’S CHILD - CHAPTER 7ROP: Rodeo Bull Ballet, Part Two

by M. Keaton

“Done yet?” Graves asked. The air-conditioned office build-

ing was surprisingly hot. “The se-curity guard is due in,” he paused, checking the time again, “four min-utes now.”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to bypass a retinal scanner?” hissed Priest. “Let me work.”

“Work faster.” The last two days had worn their tempers to a frazzle. Two days of decrypting data by day and stealing it from isolated termi-nals at night while Red Dog stalled the Senate committee below.

Frustration did not help. File after file, database after database had re-fused to yield any useful information. No new connections between the Senators and the Hecate, no links to Casey other than the public records, nothing. Graves had even gone so far as to tell Priest exactly what he was looking on the off chance the Kwakiutl could find something he had overlooked. No luck. They were down to three offices. Admittedly, the three offices of his prime sus-pects, but the complete lack of any information and the risk that the en-tire endeavor had been a wild goose chase was enough to push Graves to the edge.

Priest rolled out from under a desk. “Got it.”

“Too slow.” Graves killed the lights and dropped to the floor next to the hacker. “Red,” he whispered into the microphone that cherry-stemmed around his chin, “we need a distraction.”

In answer, thunder rattled the doors of the building. Thunder that formed words. “Red Dog needs soda!” Despite his tension, Graves smiled. The security detail must think the Cillian was in a perma-nent state of dehydration. “Red Dog needs soda now!”

“I’m gonna kill that bug,” said a voice on the other side of the door. Keys jingled. “Diplomatic immunity or not, I swear...” The voice faded.

Graves counted to ten as his heart beat in his ears. “Thanks, big guy,” he said.

“Red Dog accepts all compli-ments.”

He helped Priest to his feet, checked the hallway. “Let’s go.” They backtracked across the guard’s pattern to an office the man had al-ready checked. To Graves’ surprise, the door was locked. “I thought you disabled the doors.”

“I did,” Priest snapped, kneeling at the knob. “This is mechanical.”

Graves motioned him out of the way, digging into his pockets for a Teflon wedge. He shoved the wedge

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into the gap between the lock and the frame, grabbed the knob in both hands. Drawing a quick breath, he jerked the knob upward and set his shoulder against the door, popping the lock. Priest shot inside. Graves followed a heartbeat later, pressing the door closed. They waited, fro-zen in the darkness.

“Red Dog thanks fool human for soda and watches fool human re-turn to work. Red Dog suggests fool human ask for raise.”

“Got that right,” growled a voice in the hallway, and Graves listened until he was past. Satisfied, he switched on his flashlight, panning the room.

“What on Earth, pardon my pun, is that?” Priest said, pointing to the wall. Instead of the usual desk and terminal, there stood a wooden secretary desk flanked by a pair of square black minarets.

“File cabinets,” Graves replied. Apparently, he was not the only one who understood technological myopia. Few things were as secure on Earth as the written word in a locked drawer. “Have I ever told you that Senator Hazel reminds me of my grandmother?”

***“Cowboys away!”Not a moment too soon. Nuclear

fire smeared across the Orion’s hull, spilling into the still-open launch bay six and wiping it clean like death’s

own hand. The missile’s deliverer was part of the explosion, torn apart by depleted uranium slugs pouring from the point defense turrets.

House prowled the rim of his plat-form in CIC like a lion in a cage. “I asked, how many?” He struggled to keep his voice down, his tone calm.

“PD 4 ammo feed just jammed!”“I can’t tell,” the tech smacked her

console with the heel of her hand. “Somebody’s jamming the sens—”

“Hecate reads at least twenty,” Beta Max interrupted. “Rain’s ask-ing permission to engage.”

“No. Negative.” With his salvage claim being tossed around as a po-litical baseball, House did not dare commit the cruiser, did not dare draw more attention to it. And somebody out there knew it. “Any-thing heavier than a fighter?”

“Two escort-bombers,” Max an-swered. “One now. The other is spread across the hull.”

“Put the cowboys on it. Leave the fighters to PD.”

“Port laser bays one and two on-line. Forward arc, online. Starboard one and two, online.”

House finally smiled. It was not a comforting sight. “Fire at will.”

Two of the attacking fighters erupted, a third tumbled out of con-trol. The escort spun on its axis and a quartet of fighters braced it for another attack run, this one from behind, on the Orion’s engines.

House’s cowboys struggled to find each other in the confusion of a scrambled launch.

“Chase missiles?” House asked, trying to sound unconcerned.

“Coming online now, sir.”“PD 2, 5, 7 destroyed. We’re weak

up front.”“One thing at a time.” House

made himself clasp his hands be-hind his back. “Bring us around. Use the Hecate as a screen.” The Orion maneuvered like a pregnant hippo but he would take what advantages he could get.

“Firing ECM decoys, fore and aft. Chase missiles away.”

A trio of building-sized missiles drifted away from the Orion, dead in space for an agonizing second be-fore their guidance systems locked and thrusters lit. They burned through their first-stage thrusters a second later, the hollow shells falling away. The escort’s fighters poured fire into the missiles as they raced at each other. ECM decoys and tracer rounds twinkled in the void as they died. A counter-missile exploded into a cloud of high-tech ball bearings and one of the chase missiles detonated, its companions whipped through the debris. A sec-ond missile faltered, spinning madly head over tail before detonating. A pair of the Orion’s cowboys found each other, angled in, cutting the distance between themselves and

the escort-class bomber.The third chase missile struck the

escort, slopping plasma across its hull, tearing the ship like a piece of paper. Half of the escort’s missiles and all of its port maneuvering jets joined most of its hull as a trail of dully glowing slag, trailing behind the ship like a comet’s tail. Fiend-ishly, the escort’s pilot kept it steady long enough to fire its remain-ing missiles before one of its own fighters slewed out of control and crashed into the ship, both evapo-rating into a radioactive mist of gas and metal.

Its missiles blossomed against the Orion’s hull and House gripped his railing until he was certain his hands would fuse with it.

“Main engines shutting down.” The tech twisted in his seat to look back at House. “Override?”

“Negative. Containment?”“Containment’s good.”House nodded. “Let the reactors

power down. We’re not desperate enough to risk blowing ourselves up.” Not yet.

“Hull breach! Port foredeck three!”

“Damage control teams en route, sir.”

“As you were.” House stood still. The fight was largely out of his hands. His job now was to look con-fident so his crew could stay calm enough to do their jobs.

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“Upgrade?” Max asked, his own voice deceptively steady.

“No. We’re through the worst of it.” The Orion would be consider-ably safer, and more lethal, if he al-lowed Max to activate the advanced technology secretly installed on the Orion, but he had to play for the long game, hold his ace as long as he could. Assuming there was a long game.

“I’m through the jamming. Put-ting the plot in the tank.” The holo-gram came to life, and House tried not to stare. The space around the Orion was a maze of fighter duels and carnage. But he was right, they were through the worst. If his at-tackers had any sense, they would break off, save what they could.

“Hecate reports a missile launch. Big one,” Max said tersely.

“I’ve got it.” The tech hesitated. House felt the fear in her voice.

“Sir, I think I can pan it with the port laser bay if—”

“Helm,” House interrupted. “Take direct feed from weapons. Put us where he needs us.” He turned toward Max. “Who the hell fired that?”

Max looked through him, listen-ing to the disembodied voice in his ear. “Rain says our mystery ship is back and wants to play. Asks for per-mission to engage.”

“If it fires again, pound it into dust,” he snarled, straightened, took

a steadying breath.“Firing laser bay.”“Launching ECM and decoys

port. Launching anti-missile missiles port.”

The combine assault of offensive and defensive firepower flayed the salvo to rags. House felt his skin prickle with sweat, resisted the urge to wipe his face on his sleeve.

“They’re breaking off,” Max said, almost subdued. “Leaving the fight-ers behind.”

He tried not to think about how many crew members had been in the engine room, or port foredeck three, or the launch bay. “Kill any-thing that stays,” House ordered, “anything we can catch.” A tech turned in his seat at the sound that emerged from House’s throat, saw his face and quickly turned back again. House forced his hands open, releasing the rail. He glanced down at the line of blood drops welling across his palms. With a huff, he swung them behind him and stood, watching lights wink out on the plot.

“You have a call, sir.” Dell’s voice startled him out of the cold river of his thoughts. For a moment, his mind would not wrap itself around the words. Dell would not trouble him with a call during a pirate at-tack. Unless.

“Who is it?”“A Mister Edgar Casey.”

House squeezed his eyes shut, drew his breath through his teeth.

“Sir?”“I’ll take it in my office.” He

opened his eyes, scanning the CIC. No one met his gaze. “SOP,” he an-nounced at last. “Page me if there is any problem.” He started for the door, stopped. “Well done, people. Pass it along.”

He had almost stopped shaking by the time he reached his office. It had taken longer than usual; the lifts were off and damage control teams had the right-of-way in the ship’s passages. House pulled a cloth from his desk drawer and wiped the sweat from his face before activat-ing the screen.

“Hello, Sam.” A conversation in two words. House’s cheek twitched at the memories behind them, schooled his face into a poker play-er’s mask.

“I’m called House.”“So I hear.” Unlike House, Casey

was not a big man, nor an especial-ly small one. People who saw him would later find themselves at a loss to describe him, except for his eyes. They remembered the eyes, the black intensity. He had the devil’s own eyes.

The rest of his face was the same bland mix House had last seen over a decade ago. The cheeks were a bit thinner and the hair line a few inch-es higher but otherwise unchanged.

Except for the bump on the bridge of Casey’s nose where House had broken it.

Casey inspected his fingernails. “I also hear you’ve had a bit of trouble lately.”

“No more than usual. The Orion’s a fat purse. A lot of folks want a bite.”

“Ain’t that always the way? Seems like someone else is always trying to cut in on a man’s business.” Casey paused, choosing his words like cards, deciding which to keep and which to throw away. “I’ve had a bit of trouble myself. A lot of my top men are in jail—trivial things, but I suppose crime doesn’t pay. Kor’s dead. So’s Carlos.”

“You calling to ask for help?”“I’d like to think you’d be there if I

were.” Casey smiled. It looked genu-ine. “No, Sam. I’m doing okay. Still, the Frontier’s a rough place. I’d like to change that someday.”

“Only because you don’t under-stand it. And you can’t abide what you can’t understand and can’t con-trol.” Even as he said them, House wanted to take the words back. Casey had baited him, let him call the tune then danced him into a corner.

“Tell me how it is, Sam. Just one more time; I’ve missed your lec-tures.”

In for a penny; in for a pound. “The Frontier’s big. Bigger than any

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man. And because she’s big, a man can be big here. He can be whoever he wants. No caps, no limits except for himself. It’s a place to be free. A place where a man can start over un-til he gets it right.” House stopped, gave himself a mental shake and began again. “Mankind needs that. Without a Frontier, it’s a zero-sum game where you have to take your share from the guy next to you. But the Frontier’s big. She just keeps on giving.” He looked down at his desk, shaking his head. “You never under-stood that, Ed. You’re never going to break her. You’re too small a man.”

“Always the romantic,” Casey said. “I almost envy you.”

House let the mask slip a little fur-ther, putting his elbows on the table, leaning in toward the screen. “I’m not in the mood for social calls.”

Casey’s smile got tighter, his eyes more intense. “I don’t like to be pushed.” Words snapped like cards against the table. “I’m feeling pushed, Sam. Somebody’s pushing.” He glanced off screen, adding, “I’d hate to have to push back.”

“I don’t think your gun’s big enough.” House felt a surge of sat-isfaction when Casey flinched. “Let me tell you what I’d do, if someone were to push me.” House felt the mad smile from the CIC crawl back onto his face. “I’m an Old Testament kind of guy, Ed. Eye for an eye and all that.” Casey opened his mouth

and House interrupted him. “I don’t want any misunderstanding about this. Anybody touches one of my people, I’ll kill him. I’ll burn down everything I’ve built, spend my bot-tom dollar, just for one clean shot. That’s the kind of stakes I’d play for, Eddie.”

Casey pursed his lips, quirked an eyebrow. “Mighty expensive way to play a hand.”

“Smaller stakes aren’t worth play-ing.” House met his gaze, held it.

The polite smile returned to Casey’s lips. “Good thing we’re not fighting then, isn’t it?”

“It is.”A bit of the smile touched Casey’s

eyes. “You’d have made a good part-ner, Sam.”

“I’ll make a worse enemy.”Casey tapped the ridge of his eye-

brows with his forefinger in mock salute. The connection fuzzed to static.

***Priest sat on the beige office car-

pet with his legs crossed, hands fidgeting helplessly with his bag. “It’s time-locked.”

“What does that mean?” Graves asked. They were down to the final office—Daley’s, the terminal with the external encryption key. Saved for last because Priest was not cer-tain he could break it.

“Even with the key, it can only be accessed at certain times of day.

In this case, noon to four,” Priest shrugged. “It’s a pretty smart secu-rity precaution actually.”

Graves thought for a moment. “So we come back during tomorrow’s testimony. But you can crack it?”

Priest made a sucking noise with his teeth and lips. “Yes, but—”

“Red Dog needs soda!” roared an alien buzz, only slightly muffled for being in another room half the floor away.

“We late?” Priest asked nervous-ly.

“Hang on.” Graves cupped his hand around the microphone at his chin. “Red, what’s up?”

“Red Dog is thirsty!” Graves pinched the bridge of his

nose and sighed. “I may have to kill him myself,” he told Priest. He took a deep breath. “Back to work. ‘Yes, but’ what?”

The other man hesitated, tracing Graves’ train of thought mentally until he caught up. “Okay. Yes, I can break it as long as we’re here dur-ing its time window. But, there’s a problem.” Thin arms fluttered inside crimson sleeves as Priest diagramed his thoughts in the air as he spoke. “The software’s too advanced for anything I’ve got. I could put a leech on it and let it work but, with exter-nal encryption, we could be looking at, I don’t know, a week maybe be-fore it hits the right code. The only other way I can get past is brute

force. You’ll get your data; it’s an isolated terminal, so I won’t set off any alarms. But it’ll leave a trace, a pretty visible one. Next time some-body uses the terminal, they’re go-ing to know.”

Graves scratched the stubble un-der his chin as he thought. It was not a total surprise; he had half ex-pected something like this to come up. “All right. We hit it tomorrow. Get back to the room. I have to make arrangements; I’ll catch up with you later.”

Graves checked the hall, sliding through the door with Priest at his heels. With a nod, he sent Priest on his way then headed for the stairs. “Red, Priest is coming back. I’ll be in later.” He pulled the headset off, stuffing it in his pocket. “Going to pick up some dinner,” he said cheer-fully, waving at the first-floor guard station. “You guys want anything?”

“No thank you, sir. I’ll buzz you out.”

“Thanks. See you in about an hour.” Graves stepped into the street. He walked to the corner, tasting the night air as he waited for a tram. The air smelled of heat, hinted at rain in defiance of a cloud-less sky.

Mankind had developed weather control technology centuries ago only to learn, like many things, the natural method was more efficient than the invented one. By the time he reached the starport, the rain

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was falling as a warm mist. The musk of oil overlaid with a hint of fish came with it. Light spilled from a booth. Graves stepped inside.

“Service required?” asked the soothing female voice all of Earth felt obliged to use for automated vocals.

“Search.”“By berth, ship type, cargo—”“Give me a full list.”“Stand by.” The wall of the booth

filled with script.Graves studied the list. “Next,”

he said, looking. “Next.” He used his finger to keep his place. “Next.” Still nothing. “Next. Wait, go back one.” Not perfect but close enough. His luck was holding.

“Give me a guide light to berth 63 and ping the captain of the Good Karma, let him know I’m coming.”

“Your name?” the machine asked but Graves had already left, follow-ing a line of green running lights. The mist gave the pavement a dark sheen that twinkled with reflected light. Starships and their tenders hissed and sighed in pneumatic chorus as white plumes of steam es-caped into the air. A steady drizzle of rain was falling as Graves reached berth 63.

“Agent Graves,” called a man standing silhouetted in the light of an airlock. “Welcome to my humble ship.” The Good Karma was a cargo hauler with a ‘humble’ 1,420,000

cubic feet of hold.“How’d you know it was me?”

Graves asked, accepting the stubby, childlike hand that reached down to help pull him into the ship.

Wu Lung shrugged. “Who else would refuse to give his name?” Graves chuckled and followed the man’s squat, rolling gait deeper into the ship. “You will share a meal with me?” It was both a request and a command.

“Not if you’re still on your bean curd kick,” Graves joked, mostly. They entered the single room that served as both kitchen and bedroom for the ship’s captain. The room was cramped, more from Wu’s collection of curios and bachelor housekeep-ing than from lack of space. Graves lifted a stack of papers out of a chair and sat. “I was surprised to find you here. What’re you doing on Earth, Wu? It’s an awfully long way from the Frontier.”

“I could say the same for you.” Wu began tossing ingredients into a shallow wok. Most stayed in, a few slid over the opposite side. Wu corralled the escapees, flipping them back into the wok. “I had to have some gaseous holding tanks installed. Couldn’t find a shipyard I trusted any closer. What about you?”

“Talking to the Senate again.”“I don’t envy you on that.” The

wok sizzled and the aroma of sear-

ing meat and peppers filed the cab-in. “I think you’ll like this. Go slow though. It’s a little hot.” As if to em-phasize his point, Wu poured more sesame oil into the wok.

“What’re you shipping now that needs gas tanks?” Graves asked. He had learned, no matter how press-ing the matter at hand, a certain lev-el of polite socializing was required before Wu would talk business.

“DDT-7.”Graves coughed into his fist. “You

know that’s illegal, right? Causes cancer.”

Wu looked over his shoulder and grinned. “For most worlds, yes. But out on Newer Delhi and Ethopine I’m sure it’s not. Between malaria from mosquitoes and sleeping sick-ness from the black flies, their infant mortality is around sixty percent and the average lifespan is in their early forties. To live long enough to run the risk of cancer would be a major improvement.” He lifted the wok, set it on the table. “Mak-ing them suffer when a solution is at hand would not be justice. On these worlds, DDT-7 must be legal.”

Graves nodded. “You’re probably right.” He was not; Graves knew for a certainty that environmental regulations were issued from Earth and no special circumstances would ever change them, but Graves was not about to do anything to stop him. Wu was one of the few smug-glers Graves would never arrest,

even had, in a strange kind of way, a friendship with. The reason was simple. Wu had never met a law he understood. In Wu’s mind, the law was synonymous with justice and the spirit always trumped the let-ter. ErSec agents were expected to employ a certain amount of discre-tion; in Graves’ case, he exercised it toward men like Wu Lung.

Wu handed Graves a pair of chopsticks, lifted his own and be-gan to eat. Graves lifted a curl of meat, sniffed it, popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly. “This is re-ally good, Wu. You missed your call-ing; you should have been a chef.” He snatched a glass of water from the table and drained half of it. “Or an assassin,” he added in a choked voice.

Wu laughed. “I told you it was hot.” They ate in companionable silence for several minutes. “What can I do for you, Agent Graves?” Wu asked.

“What makes you think I need something?”

“You’re here. You only come to visit me when you need some-thing.”

Graves smiled and nodded. “You do the same with me.”

“True,” Wu said amiably. “That’s why we have such a good relation-ship. We understand each other.”

“I need a couple of people off of Earth in a hurry. Unofficially.”

“When? My upgrades will not be

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finished until tomorrow morning.”“That should be fine. If things go

the way I expect, I’ll ship them over tomorrow in the late afternoon.”

Wu raised his eyebrows. “Ship them?”

“You’ll see. One’s an alien. You have any problems with Cillians?”

“I have no problems with any liv-ing thing in this wonderful universe,” Wu replied expansively. “I think I’m a Buddhist.” At Graves outburst of laughter, he amended, “In a previ-ous life, maybe.”

Graves sobered. “I’m asking you to take a big risk, Wu. I’m staying here to lay false trails and give as much cover as I can, but I think the best I can hope for is delay. Sooner or later—” Graves lifted his hands, palms up, and shrugged.

“And what they do to me will de-termine how angry they are. Assum-ing they catch me.” Wu frowned as he thought. “I am just a transporter. Perhaps they will overlook me or decide I’m not worth bothering.”

“It’s possible. I just don’t know.”Wu studied Graves’ face. “This is

important?”“I think so. I could be wrong; I cer-

tainly don’t have the solid evidence I need. But if I’m right, a lot of lives are going to be in danger.”

“And getting these people off Earth might help stop whatever it is you fear?”

“If I’m lucky.” Graves shook his head in frustration. “It’s a long shot

but it’s all I’ve got.”“Then I’ll do it.” Wu motioned to-

ward the wok with his chopsticks. “Eat. You cannot save humanity on an empty stomach.”

Contemplating the future killed Graves’ appetite. He picked at his food without talking, excused him-self, and returned to the Senatorial offices in a heavy downpour.

“Should’ve taken an umbrella, Agent Graves,” teased the door guard, opening the door for him. “It’s been quiet here, though. Appar-ently the bug’s finally had enough to drink.” Graves forced a laugh.

Red Dog and Priest were playing cards when he stepped into the of-fice. “I finished decoding what we had,” Priest said. “Added the in-formation you took from the hard-copies in the Luddite office.”

“Deal me in.” Graves pulled a chair to the table. “Find anything?”

“If I did, I don’t understand it.” Priest scowled at his cards. “The only connection between Casey and the Senate that looks fishy are those factories.”

“What factories?” Red Dog asked, folding his card.

“Call. I’ll take two.” Graves dropped a pair of cards onto the ta-ble. “About two years ago, the Sen-ate approved a grant to develop the infrastructures of Frontier worlds. Turns out, every bit of it went to Casey instead of the local govern-ments.”

“But here’s the part that throws me,” Priest said. “He didn’t just take the cash; they shipped him the parts to build the factories. If it wasn’t Casey, I’d say the entire deal was on the up and up.”

Red Dog watched as Priest won the pot and dealt again. “What do the factories build?” the alien asked.

“Industrial grade ceramics,” Graves muttered sourly, staring at another bad hand. “What the heck do you make with that kind of equip-ment anyway?”

“Transports,” Red Dog hummed. “Raise.”

“Fold. Wait a minute,” Graves stared at Red Dog. “What do you mean transports?”

“During war—” Red Dog made a series of hisses and clicks that did not translate, “—used ships with ce-ramic hulls for transports. Dropped troops from orbit like eggs.”

“It worked?” Priest asked.“Maybe half die. Field rations.”The more he thought about it,

the more plausible it seemed. “It’s strong enough,” Graves said aloud. “It’d handle the heat of re-entry, maybe even better than metal. Espe-cially with breakaway heat shields.” He laid his cards on the table. “They wouldn’t even need their own pow-er source, just dump them out of a cargo hold.”

“Red Dog said so already,” the Cil-lian rumbled, raking the chips into

a pile in front of himself while the humans were distracted.

“But what would he drop?” Priest asked. “Fifty percent casualties aren’t something human troops would stand for. Besides, Casey would have to have an army. Some-body would have noticed.”

“There were Eaters on the Hecate,” Graves’ words came out as a hoarse whisper. Beside him, Red Dog shivered. “Priest, make a copy of everything we’ve got. Take it with you.” He explained about Wu Lung. “We still need to hit Daley’s termi-nal tomorrow, just in case there’s more. If we’re right, it really doesn’t matter if he knows we broke in or not.”

“Red Dog will stall testimony more. If fool Senator must listen to Red Dog after end of time limit, Red Dog gains entire day head start.”

Graves struggled to sort the alien’s syntax then nodded. “Do what you can. The important part is that you two get out of here in one piece.” He ran his hand across his scalp, fin-gers pulling at his hair. “They’ll send people after you. I hope I’m wrong on that but I doubt it. Go to ground for a while. Make yourselves scarce while things blow over; maybe I can pull a few strings, take some of the heat off.” He swore softly. “I hope we’re wrong.”

“We aren’t,” Priest sighed, shuf-fling the deck of cards.

“Red Dog and Priest will go on va-

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cation.” Graves snorted. The Cillian

grabbed his shoulders and pulled him closer, tapping Graves’ chest as he spoke. “Listen, fool human. Tell Kylee. Tell fool Ivan. Red Dog goes on vacation.”

“I’ll find a way to let them know,” Graves agreed, feeling like he was missing something. “You guys should get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a long day.”

“Not much point in it. Don’t think I could sleep anyway,” Priest said. “May as well play cards.”

Red Dog skimmed a pair of chips from Graves while he was still dis-tracted. “Shut up and deal.”

***“Red Dog, what condition did you

find the Hecate in?”“Red Dog was sober.” A buzzing

washed over the audio. “Red Dog has waited all week for joke.”

“Red Dog, please.”“Hecate looked fine to Red Dog.”“Was anyone else with you?”“Red Dog went with stupid fool

human Ivan.”“Why isn’t this Ivan here as

well?”“Ivan injured and busy. More im-

portant events than Senate. Red Dog gets all bad jobs.”

“Ivan was injured reclaiming the Hecate?”

“No. Ivan got tiny scratch later when Red Dog stopped truck with

bulldozer.”No longer concerned about de-

tection, Priest surprised Graves by physically cutting through the side of the terminal and attaching his hardware directly to the internal cir-cuitry. Minutes later, a bar of green lights flashed across Priest’s equip-ment.

“Five more minutes and I’ll have a complete copy,” the Kwakiutl said. “I should have it decoded and copied before we’re due to leave.”

“What transpired after you en-countered these so-called Eaters?”

“Ivan shot Red Dog.”“My word!”“No, Red Dog needed shooting. To

stop pain.”“The Chair empathizes.”Priest slapped a piece of gray

putty over the hole in the termi-nal’s side, nodding to Graves. They stepped into the hallway, made their way back to their quarters, resisting the temptation to run.

“I read here that you reached the Hecate’s bridge shortly following this.”

“Red Dog believes so. Red Dog’s memory not perfect.”

“I would remind the Chair that my client had only recently been shot and his recollection of the events may not be as precise as would be preferred.”

“Understood. Red Dog, I don’t find any mention of what occurred after you reached the Hecate’s bridge and

before your relief ship arrived. Can you elaborate on this for the com-mittee?”

“Red Dog ate chair.”A pained sigh. “What time is it,

Hazel?”“Five-thirty.”“All right. Let’s call it a day. My

head is killing me.”Graves waited in tense silence as

Priest finished copying their data and packed his belongings. Based on a quick scan, there was nothing new in Daley’s database. More de-tails but still no clear answer. Graves was not even certain that he knew what he thought he knew; the en-tire mess was a piecemeal of suppo-sition and gaping holes.

“Those factories,” he asked Priest, “how many of the Senators on the panel voted for them?”

Priest paused, checking. “All of them.”

Graves made a growling noise in the back of his throat. More dead ends, more information that could mean anything or nothing. “I don’t know how far Wu will take you. That’s up to him; I just—” He cut himself off as Red Dog entered the room with his lawyer.

The lawyer glanced at Priest’s bags and nodded. “I suspected an early departure would be in order at some point in these proceed-ings. This seems to be it then.” He smiled warmly at Graves. “Don’t be concerned, Agent. I shall of course

maintain the polite fiction of my ig-norance at tomorrow’s hearing and delay further inquiry as long as I am able.”

Graves found himself returning the man’s smile. “I’d appreciate it.”

“And Mister Red Dog,” the lawyer addressed his client, “it has been my rare pleasure and delight to rep-resent you. I suspect you’re cleverer than even your companions give you credit for. Should you ever re-quire legal services again, within the Hedge or without, do feel free to call upon me.” He nodded to Priest, looked back at Graves. “Goodbye, gentlemen. I wish you all success and safe travels.”

As the door swung closed behind the man, Red Dog tilted his head, gnawing at the end of his staff. “Shy-ster is weird.”

“Get a move on,” Graves said. “There’s a packing crate across the street with your name on it.”

***The tram station below ErSec’s

headquarters in Quantico was un-usually dark; at least half of its overhead lights were either out or flickering. That alone was enough to tell Lumley the situation was un-usual, that he was not alone. Not that he needed the additional hint, the message hand delivered by a perplexed janitor had been enough. “Downstairs at the witching hour. I don’t care who you bring but you’ll

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arrive alone.” It was not signed but it did not need to be.

The hollow silence of the empty station combined with the jumping shadows made the white-tiled foyer disorienting, setting Lumley’s nerves on edge.

“Evening, Lum. Glad to see you made it.”

Lumley jumped, covered the lapse with bluster. “Graves! Damn it, man, you almost scared me to death.” The echoes made it difficult for him to pinpoint the direction the voice came from. “Where have you been for the last two weeks? Half the planet’s looking for you.”

Graves laughed. “Not quite half.” “How’d you do it? This is Earth,

not the Frontier. How’s a man just up and vanish?”

“Myopia. Go to ground, get off the grid, don’t use your electronics. It was easier than I thought.” Graves stepped out of the shadows barely more than an arm’s length away from Lumley. He was dirty, clothes torn, face well on its way to a beard, but otherwise healthy. “You get a copy of the data I sent you?”

“On the Senate? Yeah, I got it.”“Anything surprise you?”Lumley laughed nervously. “Why

do you think I came down to HQ? I knew you were working on some-thing. I just got out of the way and let you work.”

Graves smiled. “Didn’t answer my question, Lumley.”

“Of course I was surprised. I knew something was going on, but the scope,” Lumley shook his head. “It’s bigger than I thought.”

“Still is.”“What do you mean?”“He means that the little bribes

you’ve been taking aren’t fleas on a dog in the big picture.” The new speaker walked toward them from the entrance with a stiff limp, a lean man with a broad face.

“Director,” Graves said courteous-ly. “Glad you could join us.”

The head of ErSec nodded po-litely. “The Secretary of Defense sends his regrets. He was unavoid-ably detained.” The Director smiled. “You’re not the only emergency to come up.”

Lumley’s eyes flicked nervously between the two men. “It’s a good deal,” he told Graves, almost plead-ing. “With Casey in charge, we can bring real government to the Fron-tier, real law.”

“Real law. With Casey in charge.” Graves looked at him, smiling sadly. “The pitiful thing is, you believe that.”

“It’s not too late,” Lumley said. “Come in now and we can make this all go away.” He glanced at the Di-rector. “Can’t we?”

“I suppose we could,” the lean man agreed. “But it doesn’t matter. You see, Agent Graves isn’t like you or me. He’s an ideologue. The ends never justify the means for men like

him.”“You’d be surprised,” Graves said,

his voice tense with an undercur-rent of malice.

“I forgot, the noble sacrifice,” the Director conceded. “We need men like Agent Graves. ErSec needs them. In their proper place.”

“Like on the Frontier,” Graves said. “Well away from the cesspool of politics and pragmatists.”

“You’re a good agent, Hyland. I’d hate to lose you.”

“Did any of them tell you how Casey is supposed to take over the Frontier? About the Eaters?” Graves asked Lumley, his eyes still on the Director. “How many people will end up eaten alive by aliens because of your ‘means’?”

The Director shrugged. “Eggs, omelets.”

“Part of it I already suspected,” Graves explained, taking a calming breath. “I figured that the pirate activity between Third Earth and Farnham was a distraction. It would only take a few well placed leaks in ErDef’s comm net to let the pirates stay one step ahead.

“And I figured that a Senator was setting Casey up with the obsolete stealth ships.” Graves paused, shak-ing his head. “I didn’t expect most of the Senate to be in on it.”

“Not most,” contradicted the Di-rector. “Just two sub-committees. That’s the biggest security risk.

Most of them don’t know much more than Lumley does.”

Graves continued speaking as if he had not heard. “What I couldn’t figure out was why. How does it all fit together? I’m still not sure I know.”

“You’ve done pretty well so far. And I see that Agent Lumley is hang-ing on your every word. Why don’t you go ahead and try?” the Director said.

“Because it’s not a game,” Graves replied, his eyes narrowing. “I don’t really care as long as its stopped.”

“Very noble of you,” the Director conceded. “But what do you want stopped?”

“All right, if that’s the way it’s got to be.” Graves did not bother to hide the anger and disgust in his voice. “I’m guessing the Eaters are the key. I know they’re where your plan went off track. They weren’t as easy to control as you expected.” Graves choked on a laugh. “Aliens usu-ally aren’t.” He paused for breath. “Earth gives Casey the equipment to build transports for the Eaters then makes sure he’s got ships to break quarantine without getting caught.” He finally looked at Lumley. “We could’ve saved them some trouble if they’d asked. We knew Casey was breaking quarantine with the ships he already had. He didn’t need help on that front.”

The Director nodded for him to

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continue. Graves licked his lips and frowned. “The Frontier is bracketed by two main routes: Third Earth-Farnham and Nevrio-Fargone. Con-trol them and you control the Fron-tier.” He paused, considering. “You wouldn’t, but I can see where you would think you did. Let’s just say, control those two routes and you control the shipping. You could put the squeeze on a lot of people.”

“Go on.”“That’s all I’ve got,” Graves admit-

ted. “If it weren’t for all the secrecy and the near-panic when the wrong person recovered the Hecate, I doubt anyone would’ve ever looked twice. As it is, I’m guessing Earth wants Casey to turn Eaters loose on Fargone, Nevrio, or both. Why, I don’t know.”

“You told me Casey would bring the Frontier into the Hedge,” Lum-ley said.

The Director nodded. “Eventually, yes. What both of you still have to learn is that control and safety are the same things.”

“Crisis of confidence,” Graves said. “You don’t care about Casey or the Eaters, you just need a panic on the Frontier. You’re willing to un-leash an alien species on multiple planets, kill tens of thousands—maybe millions—just to scare inno-cent people into jumping the way you want them to.”

The Director scowled, giving a

minute shake of his head. “Earth cares about Casey very much. You see, the Frontier is largely inhabited by people who don’t like or don’t trust the Hegemony. It’s a handy system, like a penal colony except, instead of waiting for the crime to be committed, the criminals line up and demand to be allowed onto the ships.”

“I don’t follow,” Lumley said.The Director frowned, mak-

ing a tsking sound with his lips like a teacher scolding an especially slow student. “To the savages on the Frontier, Earth is the ultimate boogey man. Acclimation has to be done by slow steps. If the Frontier sees Earth as the bad guy, then we use that role and let Casey be the hero.”

“As long as he works for you,” Graves injected.

“As long as he works for Earth. Bad old Earth can’t even do its job. It can’t control the pirates on the one hand or prevent aliens from escap-ing quarantine on the other.” The Director smiled, raised his shoul-ders in a loose approximation of a shrug. “But both problems are too big for the isolated tribes of savages to handle alone. They need a strong man, a big boss.”

“Edgar Casey,” Lumley supplied.“And they trade him safety for

control,” Graves concluded sourly. “He promises to fix both problems

if they put him in charge. Problems he can handle easily since he’s also the cause of them. And just in case, you’ve given him a pair of stealth ships and let him build his own little army of pirates to strong-arm any-one who doesn’t go along with him.” Graves closed his eyes, his lips curl-ing in a snarl of disgust. He coughed out a brittle laugh. “I don’t think you understand the Frontier very well.”

“Maybe not, but as you pointed out, it only takes four planets. And Casey doesn’t have to solve the problems, just be more effective than Earth was.”

“And you really think a man like Casey is just going to roll over and be Earth’s little lapdog?”

“I don’t deserve that, Agent Graves. Of course I don’t. That’s why there was a paper trail for you to follow at all. Earth has proof of the truth to hold over his head, plus we sweeten the pot by making him Senator pro tem representing the Frontier.”

“No chance in hell,” Graves pro-nounced.

“We’ll see.”“No, we won’t,” Graves said stub-

bornly, one hand sliding inside his coat. He stopped, looking down at the red dot flickering across his chest.

“It would be very easy for you to disappear, Agent Graves.”

“Then why not?”

“I doubt if you’ll believe me when I say this but, because ErSec really does need agents of your caliber. And because even those of us in-volved in this little scheme aren’t all convinced that it’s a good one.” Graves gave the Director a confused stare. “Wheels within wheels,” the Director said. “You’re really not cut out for politics at all.” He sighed. “I’m assuming that you’ve made copies of the information you have, put them in places where they’ll crop up if you stay gone for too long, melodramatics like that. It could all be silenced, of course, but that’s even more trouble. No, let me propose a compromise.”

The red dot lay on Graves’ shirt like a stain. “I’m listening.”

“In a few months, you go back to the Frontier. Back to your old job just like none of this ever happened.”

“Just like that?”The Director ignored Graves’ sar-

casm. “Just like that. No matter how this all plays out, there will still be a Frontier of sorts and ErSec will still need agents there when it’s over. You spend another couple of months on Earth and then you nev-er have to come back again. I’ll see to it personally.”

“And Casey?”“He’s on his own now. Earth has

done enough for him to have a chance of success. You’ve muddied the waters here enough to justify

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cutting him off. If he succeeds, he’ll be out of your reach. If he fails, Earth has no further use for him, good hunting.”

Graves eyed the Director cau-tiously. “Whose side are you on?”

“Earth’s, Agent Graves. Always Earth’s.”

Graves thought it over. “What about Red Dog and Priest?”

“It’s out of my hands. A warrant has been issued, men have been sent out. The best, I might add. Daley insisted on it. I think he took your tampering with his database personally.”

“No deal then. They’re my re-sponsibility.”

“I can rescind the warrant. That’s the best I can offer. You’re really not in a very strong position to negoti-ate.”

“Pull the warrant then. If Daley’s men stay after them, my money’s on the Cillian.” Graves hesitated. “And I want Casey. Give me a warrant to bring him in.”

“You know that’s out of the ques-tion,” snapped the Director. “I’m fast running out of patience, Agent.”

“If he drops the ball, you want me to bring him down, right?” insisted Graves stubbornly. “Then give me an excuse. If not on this, then on something else. Anything else.”

“My last concession,” the Director warned. “If you can find evidence of wrong-doing, large or small, then I’ll

give you a warrant.”“As simple as that?”“As simple as that.”Graves nodded slowly. “We have

a deal,” he said, wondering if the Director had forgotten or was only pretending to forget: all warrants on the Frontier were ‘dead or alive.’

“You are a good agent, Hyland. I’m glad you’re sticking with us.” The Director turned to leave. “I’ll go now and let you have a word alone with your former partner.”

Graves glanced down. The ruby splotch of the laser sight was gone.

“Glad that worked out,” Lumley said.

Graves turned, faked a punch at Lumley’s face with his left. As the other man jerked his arms up re-flexively, Graves unloaded a right into Lumley’s stomach as hard as he could swing. Lumley dropped to his knees, retching.

“I need to borrow your comm,” Graves said. Lumley was curling into a ball on the tile floor, too busy gag-ging to answer.

In his pocket, he carried the list of codes and numbers he had found in Senator Hazel’s files, his last bar-gaining chip. Priest had not been able to make heads or tales out of the list. Graves, veteran of Earth bu-reaucracy, had chosen not to inform him. Some he recognized, like the number and code for the Director of ErSec and the Secretary of Defense,

others he had not.Graves lifted Lumley’s comm unit,

punching in the final number on the list then the access code that ac-companied it. Hearing the voice that answered, he broke the link. He had wondered how high the conspiracy stretched.

Now he knew.

Calamity’s Child © 2009 by M. Keaton.

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FEATURED ARTIST: MARTIN STEIL

Name: Martin Steil

Age: 17

Country of residence: Germany

Hobbies: 3D-, 2D-Art, web design-ing, badminton, Stargate

Favorite Book/Author: Harry Potter

Favorite Artist: Chris Diston

When did you start creating art? 2007

What media do you work in? PC: Cinema 4D, Photoshop, ZBrush

Where your work has been fea-tured? deviantART.com, SciFiMesh-es.com, SG-21.de, stargate-project.de

Where should someone go if they wanted to view / buy some of your works? deviantART.com

How did you become an artist? When I was 14 or 15, I started to cre-ate art on my PC. My first steps had been with Photoshop to create wall-papers, homepages, and some small stuff. During that time, I searched a lot on the ‘net to learn more about software, skills, and techniques. In 2007, I finally started doing 3D work. The communities stargate-project.de and thescifiworld.net helped me a lot, and I made a lot of friends who created this kind of artwork too. My main subject is Stargate/Atlantis-Fanart because I like the series very much.

What were your early influences? I think Stargate and Stargate-Project are some of the early influences.

What are your current influences? My friends and my fans motivate me very much. And I want to become a better artist; I’m a bit of a perfec-tionist so I want to improve my skills

and my artwork.

How would you describe your work? In my opinion, it’s (often) good space/sci-fi digital-art. Some works are better then the others, but I think the most are relative ac-ceptable.

Where do you get your inspiration? Stargate and the work at devian-tART give me a big part of my inspi-ration.

Have you had any notable failures, and how has failure affected your work? I often had have some small failures but no really big one. I learn from my failures and mistakes and they are a part of my workflow. Of-ten, I have to do something three or four times until it looks good or even works.

What have been your greatest suc-

cesses? How has success impacted you / your work? I think there have been two big successes. The first one was that I won the First (Best Wallpaper) and the Third (Best 3D Art) Place in the SGP-Fanartawards of stargate-project.com. It was great! But then 2009-05-15 my fa-vourite artwork (RealAirForce) be-come a Daily Deviation. It was very amazing, and I have been very hap-py about this great glory!

What are your favorite tools / equipment for producing your art? I use the following software: Cinema 4D for the 3D art stuff like modeling, lighting, Photoshop for the 2D art stuff like textures, composing, web-designing, Dreamweaver for web designing, ZBrush for special 3D art like organic modeling, displacement maps, and this hardware: Asus X53K, Logitech MX-518, Wacom Bamboo Fun medium.

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What tool / equipment do you wish you had? A better/faster notebook/PC would be very nice especially for the 3D art: More RAM and a better CPU would be great for rendering and the workflow because these programs (Cinema 4D, Photoshop) need a lot of performance if I want to create big models/pictures.

What do you hope to accomplish with your art? I hope to improve my skills, and I want people to like my art—I think every artist wants this. For me, it’s very important to have fun with this because I spend a big part of my free time with this art.

TALES OF THE BREAKING DAWN:The Ties That Bind, Part Two

by Justin R. Macumber

“Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a social call, Jack?”

Jessica asked.Sitting in the Stargazer lounge,

Jessica and Boo of the star-freighter Breaking Dawn looked down at the computer screen that sat on their table. Peering back at them from the screen was the exasperated face of Jack Connelly, a man Jessica had known for over a decade. She’d first met him during one of the last runs she and her father had made together before his death.

“Perhaps because of my harried expression?” Jack replied.

“Don’t snap at me, Jack. This call has to be costing you a fortune, so just tell me what’s going on.”

After huffing for a moment, Jack said, “I’m in a bit of a bind. My ship’s in a bad way, and I really need your help.”

Jessica frowned at the screen. “What’s wrong with the Wandering Star? Do you need a loan or some-thing to help get her fixed?”

“No, that’s not it. I need you to pick up some cargo for me and de-liver it before the contract time ex-pires. It’s really important.”

“Then call for an extension. I’m sure whoever your contract is with

would rather get their cargo late than not at all.”

Jack pulled at the hairs on his chin and shifted his gaze from left to right. “Not these people, Jessie. The contract...it’s with the Gorawnies.”

“What the hell?! The Gorawnies? Jack, are you insane?”

“Now, you listen here—” he be-gan, but Jessica cut him off.

“No, you listen! The Gorawnies are not people you want to get in-volved with! Jesus, Jack! Those guys are nothing but criminals, and folks like us have no business dealing with them.”

The older man looked ashamed, but anger brought a hard glint to his eyes. “First of all, I don’t need les-sons in life from a girl less than half my age. Secondly, I’m trying to join the Trade Guild, and the Gorawnies are charter members. A sponsorship from them would give me a serious leg up.”

“The Guild?” Jessica said. “Since when have you been interested in joining with them? If I recall cor-rectly, the last time the Guild came up in conversation, it was said in the same breath as words like ‘corpo-rate shills’ and ‘damn whores.’ You suddenly have a change of heart?”

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Jack’s angry expression reverted to one of embarrassment, but the older man tried to hide it under a layer of bluster. “I’m gettin’ too old for this small time independent stuff. A man has to start thinking about his retirement at some point, and these milk runs we’re mak-ing just don’t cut it anymore. Guild membership is practically a golden ticket.”

“That may be, but once you’re in the Guild, they own you. And to make matters worse, you’re willing to get into bed with the Gorawnies to do it.”

“Age changes things, Jessie,” Jack said, his face drooping. “You’ll see. Besides, the Gorawnies have never been convicted of anything.”

“Now you’re rationalizing.”“Yeah, maybe, but I entered into

an agreement with them to deliver some cargo, and with my ship now out of commission I can’t complete it.”

“What’s wrong with her?”Jack ran a shaking hand down his

stubbly cheek. “It’s her damn ar-mor-capillary system. She’s sprung a leak, and the weight shift has com-pletely thrown off our engines. If we try to engage our drives at more than half-throttle we list around like a drunken sailor.”

“Dammit,” Jessica replied. “So,

not only are you in a world of hurt, but now you want us in it with you?”

“I’ll pay you, of course. Everything I would have made and more. I just have to get their cargo in. If I don’t, it won’t be pretty. I hate to ask, but you’re the only person I know who can help me.”

“Save the guilt trip. You knew I would help before you even called.”

Shaking his head, he replied, “I didn’t, but I hoped.”

Jessica shrugged her shoulders and tilted her head. “Either way, you know I can’t leave you hanging out to dry like this. Where are you and what do I need to haul?”

“We’re in the Shush’ka Ship-yards out in Outpost 8A-14, but the cargo isn’t with us. I couldn’t take a chance on dock scanners finding it...whatever it is...so I dumped the cargo pod and left it in the Proxius asteroid field.”

Boo gasped. “You mean you left their cargo just spinning with the rocks?! Are you insane?”

Jack jumped to cover the speaker on his comm terminal, then replied, “Of course not! The asteroid belt isn’t very thick, and an onboard nav system can move it with air thrust-ers if anything gets too close. Trust me, it’s safe enough. There’s a pas-sive homing beacon on it though, so

in order for you to find it you’ll need to ping the belt with an encrypted transmission burst. Once you do that it’ll light up enough for you to find it.”

“I know the drill,” Jessica told him. “Don’t forget, it was dad who came up with that smugglers package in the first place.”

“That’s right. I’m sending you the encryption credential right now. Once you’re at the Proxius conduit node, start broadcasting. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes for it to ping you back. I’m also sending you the delivery file so you know where to take it. When you’re done, call me back here and let me know so that your money can be transferred.”

“The money will be sent over now, Jack.” Jessica’s voice was un-wavering. “There’s a lot that can go wrong, and I’m not going to risk being left out to dry along with you should that happen. I love you like an uncle, but even that has limits.”

The elder freighter captain glow-ered at the screen, but his anger and frustration meant little in the face of her resolve. “Alright. I’ll transmit payment as soon as I hang up with you. You’ll find it more than reason-able, I assure you.”

Nodding once to the screen and then once to her second in com-

mand, Jessica said, “Sounds good.”“I appreciate you doing this for

me. I know you don’t agree with what I’m doing, but you’re sticking by me anyway, and I’ll never forget it.”

Giving him a half smile, Jessica replied, “Oh, I think you can count on that. I foresee many retellings of this over drinks in the future.”

Jack smirked back. “I guess I de-serve that.”

“I’ll call you when the dust set-tles.”

“I’ll be waiting, Jessie. Thanks again.”

Jessica and Boo gave their fare-wells. Once the call window faded to black, she downed the remainder of her drink and pulled up a bank-ing window. True to his word, Jack deposited a healthy sum of money into their account.

“You know this won’t end well,” Boo said as they stood from their chairs and began walking toward the exit of the lounge.

“Nothing involving the Gorawnies ever does. Then again, my karma is pretty clean, so there’s always hope.”

Boo grunted and shook his head. Seconds later they were free of the lounge and headed back toward their waiting ship.

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***

“And that,” Jessica said with an air of finality, “is the tall and the skinny of it.”

Everyone around the table that served as the primary gathering place for meals aboard the Break-ing Dawn grunted and sat back to mull over what she’d told them. Af-ter several seconds of silence, one crewmember stood up.

“I’ll not say that I’m entirely pleased with all this,” Zen squawked, her cream-colored feathers barely bristling, “but as your people say, no use crying over spilled muff.”

“Milk,” Boo corrected with a light chuckle.

Zen’s pitch black eyes slid over to the Kleeetan abruptly. “Pardon?”

“Milk,” Boo repeated. “No use crying over spilled milk.”

Clicking her beak lips, Zen tossed her head and shrugged. “Fine. Milk. Thank you, Boo. But my sentiment stands. We are committed, and we have been paid, so I think we might as well get the task done with as quickly as possible.”

Jessica looked around the table. None of her crew appeared happy to be working for the Gorawnies, even if only tangentially, but no one stood up to say they refused either. Nodding, she said, “Okay then. Get to your stations. I’m going to be

pushing the engines fairly hard all the way, and I don’t want any sur-prises.”

Everyone filed out of the room, some going fore and some aft. Jes-sica and Boo made immediately for the bridge. The Kleeetan lowered himself into the pilot’s seat while his captain went to a command sta-tion above and behind him. As he strapped himself in and began pre-flight checks, she put on a headset and brought her communications display online.

“Traffic control, this is Breaking Dawn requesting immediate clear-ance to depart.” Her words were crisp, clear, and direct. A reply was not long in coming.

“Breaking Dawn, you are not yet cleared for debarkation. Stand down while we secure an exit lane for you. One moment please.”

Tapping the screen to her left, she brought up the ship’s status display and saw that all systems were read-ing within nominal ranges. For a ship as old as she was, Breaking Dawn was fitter than most starcraft half her age. All her crew saw to that.

Next she brought her navigation displays to life and started charting a route to Proxius. There were two to choose from, but neither was an easy trip, and ultimately it came down to deciding which was the

lesser evil. One route consisted of eight hops; seven of them through standard Conduit nodes, and one through a Coven gate, with the en-tire trip taking an estimated six days. The other route took only three days, but there were four hops, and all of them were through Coven gates, the last two being within hours of each other. She didn’t want to put any of them through that sort of stress, but the saved time was too great to ignore. In the end, it really wasn’t a choice at all.

“You’re now cleared to leave Vimm’skka Station, Breaking Dawn,” the traffic control operator said. “Exit vectors have been uploaded to you. Deviate from them and you will be fined accordingly. Have a good day.”

Jessica checked her screens and saw the uploaded flight plan. “Thanks, traffic control. Breaking Dawn out.” She then added the transmitted exit vectors to her Prox-ius nav route and forwarded it to the piloting station. A disgruntled snort came seconds later.

“Four Coven gates?” Boo asked. “Was it something I said?”

She laughed, but it was a sound with little humor in it. The coming journey promised to be a trying one, and she silently cursed the bond that had caused her to help her old

friend. Had it been anyone else in the galaxy, she would have turned them away without a second’s thought. But Jack was different, and the old man knew it.

Still, she thought, Zen’s right. We took the job, and we took the pay-ment. No use grousing about it now. Let’s just get it done and move on. The sooner we get all these Coven gates passed us, the better.

***

For the fourth time in nearly as many days, space unraveled itself around Jessica in terrible swirls of light and dark as her ship flew through yet another Coven gate. It was a horrible feeling, like she was dying in slow motion, and it never got easier no matter how many times she went through it.

“One...two...three...four...five...” she whispered, her eyes closed and her skin clammy. “Six...seven...eight...nine...ten.”

By the time she was done count-ing, the medicine Zen had given her kicked in, easing her stomach and frazzled nerves. Going through a Co-ven gate was bad enough, but how the Coven themselves could stand to live inside them was something she would never understand.

Checking her navigational screens, she saw that her ship was

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approximately six million klicks from the conduit node in the Proxius sys-tem. At maximum burn that meant about an eight hour trip to reach the asteroid belt. She didn’t like pushing her engines that hard for so long, but she trusted Duka to keep them operating in the green.

After initiating the ship’s autopi-lot program, she sprang from the piloting chair and exited through the aft hatch to make her way to-ward the galley. As she entered the communal room, Zen came through the hatchway that led to the crew’s sleeping pods, a small black bag in her hands.

“Did the medicine help, Cap-tain?” Zen asked, looking a bit green around the beak herself.

Jessica nodded. “So far, so good. Thanks for the popper.”

Zen nodded, settled into a chair, and opened her medical bag and pulled out a med-patch. After re-moving the adhesive cover, she set-tled the patch over the thin feathers of her neck. A satisfied sigh escaped her beak.

Seconds later Ferron joined them. After a silent greeting he opened a cabinet door and began rummaging around in the pantry until he found a large bag of dehydrated meat. The snack never failed to calm his stom-ach.

“How long until we pick up the

package, skipper?” he asked around mouthfuls of chewed flesh.

Zen, whose species was strictly vegetarian, looked at him with bare-ly disguised disgust. Ferron didn’t notice.

Opening a refrigerated cabinet, Jessica replied, “Eight hours, give or take. After that we hit the node and get rid of it as soon as possible.” As she finished speaking, she withdrew a pouch of chilled nutrient-enriched fruit juice, closed the refrigerator, popped the top off her drink, and started sipping.

“And then we can get back to our normal lives,” Boo said as he shuf-fled through the same hatchway Zen and Ferron had used. Sleep was still evident in his four brown eyes and in the sags of his dog-like face.

“Anyone heading down to the grease pit?” Ferron asked. “Be-cause, if not, I thought I’d take a snack down to Duka, see how he’s doing.”

“Take him a few of those galonaan podberries,” Jessica suggested. “He loves those.”

Nodding, Ferron plucked two handfuls of the sickeningly sweet fruit from a bin and shoved them into one his pockets, and then start-ed walking toward the aft passage-way that led toward the ship’s main engine cluster.

“Do you mind watching the

helm?” Jessica asked Boo as she finished the last of her juice and dropped the plastic pouch into a re-cycling bin.

The Kleeetan pilot answered with a silent shake of his head. He then took hold of a tall metal cup and filled it with steaming coffee, coffee only he could stomach. The strong smell of it made Jessica’s nose wrin-kle up in disgust.

“Okay, thanks. I’m going to take a shower and then snooze for a bit. If I’m not on the bridge in five hours, beep my cabin.”

He nodded, screwed a lid onto his cup, and shambled toward the bridge.

The walk to her cabin was short, and she crossed into it with relief. It wasn’t much, but it was home. The Breaking Dawn only had one full-fledged living compartment, and it was hers. Everyone else on board slept in sleeping tubes, with their few possessions stored in per-sonal lockers, but as the captain of the ship she had a room all to her-self, and even if the quarters were cramped she did all she could to make them her own.

Articles of unwashed clothing were draped over her desk chair and the foot rail of her tiny bunk, while under it were three pairs of boots that had been kicked off and forgotten. One corner of her desk

was cluttered with a haphazard collection of makeup containers, half-empty perfume bottles, and an ancient squeeze tube of hair gel that had hardened past the point of usefulness. The slim closet door next to her desk was half open, and poking from it were the barrels of two handguns that hung in leather holsters from a coat hook, both of them in need of a good servicing.

“Hey dad,” she said to a portrait of her father that sat on the shelf over her bunk. “Hangin’ in there? Yeah, me too.”

Also on the shelf was a picture of her mother, Muriel, a young woman with an angelic face that echoed strongly in her own. Her mother had died minutes after giving birth to her one and only child. All Jessica knew of her was what her father had passed on through stories.

As the hatch closed and locked behind her, she sat down in her chair and undid the buckles of her boots, which were shuffled off to join their companions beneath the bunk. Next she removed her socks, her vest, undershirt, and trousers.

A full length mirror was secured to the wall next to her small bathroom stall, and in it she quickly looked herself over. At five and a half feet tall, Jessica was in average physical condition. She’d never felt that she was an overly attractive woman, at

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least by human standards, though none of her lovers had ever seen fit to complain. Her eyes were gray like the ocean under a stormy sky, and her hair, which was naturally a deep red, hung in thick curls that fell just past her shoulders.

Down her arms and back were tattooed thin swirls of black, red, and blue lines, the result of a drunk-en stay in a strange port. It was the only thing she and her father had ever shared cross words over. Two weeks after the argument, an acci-dent in the forward cargo hold took his life. In his will he’d left everything to her, including his stake in the ship and its business, which amounted to just over half of the freighter’s total worth.

I can’t believe it’s been so long since he died, she thought. How is it possible to feel this young and this old all at the same time?

With a shake of her head she fin-ished disrobing and stepped into her shower. A hot water shower on a small ship like hers was a luxury she rarely allowed herself. Lathering up was a delight, but it was nothing compared to the joy of hot water cascading down her skin to wash the suds away. Next she washed her hair, and then she brushed her teeth. When she was done she felt like a new woman.

On a hook next to the shower

was a towel, which she used and then threw onto the rest of the dirty clothes in her chair. For a moment she toyed with the idea of reading her latest email download, but the warm water had drained the last reserves of her energy away, so in-stead she collapsed onto her bunk and sank into several hours of much needed sleep.

*** “Are we ready to broadcast?”

Boo asked from the command con-sole as the Breaking Dawn reached the outer edge of the Proxius aster-oid belt.

Jessica, her nap still fresh across her pink face, reached out, grabbed the engine throttle, and pulled it all the way back. In space there was no such thing as a true stop, but so far as the rest of the Proxius system was concerned, she was as good as parked. “We are now.”

Boo tapped a series of buttons on his communications panel that sent an encrypted transmission burst into the asteroid field. Several sec-onds later, a beeping sound came through the bridge speakers, and a light began flashing.

“Looks like the package is where Jack said it would be,” he said.

On her nav screen, Jessica saw an indicator icon slowly pulsing at the very edge of the display. “We’re lucky it’s still in range. The belt isn’t

too crowded out that way, but I’m not taking any chances, so get Cam to man the guns. I want him ready to fire on any stray rocks that get too close. And then go get some sleep. We’re nearly on the home stretch, and I want you frosty.”

Nodding, Boo stepped back from the command station and said, “I’ll have him right up.”

She waved her hand and yawned. “I’ll call if an asteroid hits us.”

The Kleeetan laughed as he exit-ed the bridge. Once the door closed behind him, Jessica tapped her nav screen and set up a series of check-points that formed a route through the asteroid belt to their target. The navigational computer checked her course against the drift of all the as-teroids detected and found it to be a sound flight path. As she finalized her preparations, the bridge door whisked open.

“Ready for some target practice?” she asked Cam over her shoulder.

“I don’t require practice, Captain. My skills are constant.”

She shook her head and grinned. “It’s just an expression.”

“I know, ma’am.” As he spoke, the android settled into the tactical sta-tion and plugged himself into the ship’s sensor and weapons grids. Within seconds he and the ship were one. “Tactical is ready.”

Knowing they were as ready as

they possibly could be, Jessica nod-ded and hit a button that activated the ship’s intercom system. “Every-one, we’re about to go swimming with the rocks. Start praying to whatever gods you find comfort in. Bridge out.”

With that done, she grabbed the throttle and slowly pushed it for-ward. The ship’s engines throbbed to life, and into the asteroid field they flew.

To be continued...

Tales of the Breaking Dawn © 2009 by Justin Macumber.

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RGR REVIEWSby Donald Jacob Uitvlugt and Matthew Scott Winslow

The Dragon’s Nine Sonsby Chris RobersonSolaris, 2008, 416pp.

It is 2052 in an alternate universe where Imperial China battles the Mexic Dominion for control of the fourth planet from the sun, Fire Star. Nine trouble-making soldiers are given a reprieve from execution if they undertake a suicide mission: piloting a captured Mexic spaceship to the asteroid stronghold of the en-emy to destroy it from within. When they arrive at the base, they discov-er dozens of Chinese prisoners des-tined to be used as human sacrifices, and their suicide mission becomes a desperate rescue attempt.

The Dragon’s Nine Sons is a novel set in Chris Roberson’s Celestial Em-pire universe, a fascinating alternate history where fifteenth-century China, instead of closing itself off from the world, continued its pro-gram of exploration and wound up becoming the major world power. Roberson has about a dozen or so short stories set in the universe; The Dragon’s Nine Sons is the second novel, with others forthcoming.

The leaders of the assault expedi-tion are Captain Zhuan Jie and Ban-

nerman Yao Guanzhong. Zhuan is a reluctant captain. He joined the Imperial transport forces to escape the family business of training wild animals for the Emperor’s enjoy-ment. When war with the Mexica broke out, Zhuan was pressed into military service where he eventually made captain. He was arrested and sentenced to execution because his own cowardice made him disobey a direct order and command his ship away from a battle.

The other main character, Ban-nerman Yao, is Zhuan’s opposite. Career military from a military fam-ily on both sides, he was a dutiful and honorable officer. Yet when his unit chances upon a Mexic attack of a civilian station on Fire Star, his superiors order him not to engage the enemy. This leads to an enor-mous amount of civilian casualties and unanswered questions for Yao. The Bannerman persists in looking for answers in spite of orders from his superiors to let the matter drop. When he finally finds out what hap-pened he is arrested as well.

Zhuan and Yao are put in charge of the captured Mexic ship, renamed the Dragon, and a team of seven misfits: Ang the pilot, gambler, and

thief; Nguyen, the gentle mountain of a man with a murderous temper; Cai, the awkward prankster; Paik, the self-centered loafer; Dea, the killer marksman who thinks he’s a wild-west gunslinger; Fukuda, the nervous explosive expert; and Syuxtun, communications officer and devout Muslim. Zhuan and Yao must get this motley bunch to work together if any of them are to have a chance of returning from their mis-sion.

Save for the incredibly inventive universe, The Dragon’s Nine Sons does not break much new ground. Roberson could have easily titled the novel, “The Dirty Three-Quar-ters Dozen.” So much could have been done with the voice of the nar-rative, say, by drawing from the rich tradition of Chinese literature or more recent wuxia fiction. In spite of the exotic setting, the novel reads like American action-adventure sci-ence fiction.

For me to say this is unfair, I know. A reviewer must review the book an author actually wrote, not the one the reviewer wishes he had written. Roberson has an excellent prose style, delightfully transparent to the story he tells. The adventure is

engaging. I would not say I was sur-prised by anything that happened in the story, but I consider it a page-turner. And I do want to read more of Roberson’s Celestial Empire sto-ries.

Lovers of military SF and a good action-adventure story will definite-ly want to check out The Dragon’s Nine Sons.

Reviewed by Donald Jacob Uitvlugt

***

The Stormcaller and The Twilight Heraldby Tom LloydPyr, 2008, 2009, 449 pp., 503 pp.

In a land ruled over by distant, ca-pricious gods, a young man named Isak has been plucked from poverty to be the heir of the Duke of Farlan. Isak is a white-eye, born larger and more powerful than most men, a representative of the gods among humanity. As he grows into his new position, he learns that the land is facing a time of struggle the likes of which it has never seen since ages ago when mortals battled with and even slew gods.

The Stormcaller and The Twilight

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Herald are the first two volumes in Tom Lloyd’s high fantasy series, “The Twilight Reign.” The series is projected to run to five volumes, with the third already published in Lloyd’s native U.K. (Pyr has it sched-uled for release later this year in North America.)

The Stormcaller presents Isak finding his way in his new environ-ment, drawing friends and allies to himself (and making enemies), learning to lead men into battle and to control the magic within himself. Isak is a likeable character, but inde-cisive the way an eighteen-year-old youth can be. I often found it un-clear what motivated him, his deci-sions often seeming to stem from mere impulse.

Fortunate for Lloyd, the charac-ters around Isak are extremely en-tertaining and vivid. These other characters take much more of the stage in The Twilight Herald. Dark forces in the minor city of Scree draw a wide range of people to it. Isak’s ally, King Emin, who seeks re-venge for crimes against his nation and his queen. Princess Zhia, an an-cient woman cursed with vampirism and compassion. Doranei, member of Emin’s elite forces, who finds himself falling for Princess Zhia. Count Vesna, Isak’s right-hand man, with a reputation as an irresistible

lover and unbeatable soldier, who now finds himself falling in love and hating war.

And this is all setting the stage for a cosmic battle of good versus evil. Or perhaps better, order versus cha-os. Unlike a number of high fanta-sies out there that I could name but won’t, one feels there is a point to all this. Lloyd is trying to tell a defi-nite story, not writing tomes for the sake of writing tomes.

The style of Lloyd’s prose is rich, but not overly so. To use an image from architecture, if Tolkien is a par-ish church in English perpendicular Gothic, Lloyd would be a chateau in the French Baroque. He excels es-pecially at the vivid description of battle and other action sequences.

The question still may remain why readers of RGR might be interested in Lloyd’s work. A first answer would be the battle scenes just mentioned. Space opera is all about adventure, and Lloyd’s series has adventure aplenty.

But within the adventure, there are larger issues at work. Ques-tions of good and evil. Belief and disbelief. The consequences of indi-vidual choices. The roles of destiny and free will. Speculative fiction re-mains a literary venue where such meaningful questions can be raised. Space opera and fantasy are at their

best when a human story wrestles with human values. Lloyd has a very human story, and I look forward to see how it continues.

Reviewed by Donald Jacob Uitvlugt

Donald Jacob Uitvlugt grew up in western Michigan and now lives in Arkansas with his wife and dog. He can be contacted via www.myspace.com/DonaldJacobUitvlugt

Matthew Scott Winslow has been a science fiction and fantasy addict since he first discovered Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series on his dad’s shelves at a young age. He can be reached at [email protected].

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THIEVES’ HONOR: EPISODE 8Endgame, Part One

by Keanan Brand

Previously, on Thieves’ Honor: Finney, the Martina Vega’s pilot,

still inside Governor Tarquin’s villa, is hiding behind a thicket of potted palms on the edge of the courtyard after escaping her bonds and reluc-tantly making the acquaintance of a guard, Bosko, working for the ex-traction team. However, there’s still the matter of the carlinnian collar set with explosives and locked around her neck, and the voice of her long-dead grandfather, Admiral Cunning-ham, which only she can hear.

Sergeant Frank of the Port Henry constabulary becomes Captain Krist-off’s unexpected ally, and Captain Zoltana and Lieutenant Mars of the aerospace constabulary separately arrive at similar ideas for investigat-ing the crew of the Martina Vega, only to learn that—once again—they’re too late.

Sixteen-year-old Ezra unknowing-ly sees something Zoltana and Mars are trying to find: which Vega crew-man has the IntuiCom implant. In its civilian capacity, the device is used for medical purposes, and law en-forcement uses it to monitor certain released criminals. In government hands, however, it can be deadly.

And now, on Thieves’ Honor:

“What were you thinking, Bosko? Talking up the mer-

chandise like that?” Using a torch so small he appeared to squeeze fire from his fist, a bondsman welded manacles around the wrists of the prisoner lying prone in the court-yard. “Vortuna not teach you noth-in’?”

Bosko’s arms were black with bruises, and one of them twisted on itself like the thick strands of a rope. The man should be screaming, but he lay, unmoving, on the paving stones. A moan burbled from the bloody pulp where his face used to be.

Crouched behind the meager shield of planted palms, Finney cursed all manner of foggy phras-es under her breath, then winced when her own broken bones jabbed at her again. She’d wrapped her shirt around her torso then buttoned her vest over everything to support the ribs. It was crude but functional, learned from the field medics in An-dronicus Settlement when she was young.

She lived there with her grand-parents when she wasn’t aboard a ship with her parents. It was sup-

posed to be a new hope for the col-onies, a place where the differences between the government and the rebels could be resolved, a safe no-man’s-land between armed forces.

Retired from the military, then becoming a sky commander with the constabulary, the admiral vol-unteered as mediator. But he was killed, the settlement burned, and conflict still sent friction sparks skip-ping through the tinder of border towns and outback settlements. Some of those sparks landed in cit-ies, flaring among the discontented, the educated, and the outcasts.

Yet, after years of propaganda and government re-education—centuries-old methods of cultural brainwashing—how many of those who called themselves rebels knew the truth of the rebellion?

“If the merchandise comes out of hiding to rescue Bos, we’ll be all over her like stink on scum.” The bondsman closed and latched the toolbox. “The only thing gettin’ him out of these is—well—nothin’.”

One of the extraction team kicked Bosko’s leg. “What makes you think she’d risk it? Ol’ Bos is one of us.”

“He didn’t alert the rest of us, did he, when she tried to escape?” The

bondsman stood, hefting the large box. “No. They chatted.”

“Bosko talks.” The hunter shrugged. “He gets other people to talk. Too bad he keeps making friends with the merchandise.”

Finney scowled. Merchandise. Made her sound like cargo. Or a street wife.

Bosko’s head moved. “Waaater-rr.”

“Better wash the blood off his face,” said the bondsman. “Keep the flies away.”

The hunter unslung his canteen and twisted off the cap.

“No!” A cloth-draped litter was borne into the courtyard by ser-vants. A crone’s hand thrust through the curtains. “No. He aided my en-emy. He deserves no kindness.”

The house guard fanned out be-hind the litter, their pale, sleeve-less garments almost too bright in the morning sun, and the brown-uniformed extraction team stepped from the porticos to face them.

“Bosko’s our man,” said the bondsman.

Two servants handed her down from the litter, their sun-dark skin gleaming. Once on the ground, she leaned on two canes, hobbled

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toward Bosko, and stared down at him, her mouth contorting, drawing the many lines on her face toward the center like the drawing of tribu-taries into a bitter river. “Our busi-ness is not concluded, your leader is delayed, and the merchandise, as you so quaintly call her, is still not found.” She prodded his broken arm with the tip of a cane, and he groaned. “This man is mine.”

Finney clenched her teeth. Do nasty old hag bones pop when you crush them?

It’d be nice if they popped. Might even make a person smile.

“Best leave him be,” said the bondsman.

“Leave him be?” Tarquin’s sur-prise looked almost authentic. “What more could I do to him that you, his comrades, have not already done?”

The hunter gestured to the side with his weapon. “Back away.”

The governor tilted her head. “Extraction teams have a frighten-ing reputation, but my experience so far has been less than satisfac-tory. And expensive.” She shrugged. “Rather too bad Gregor took your pay with him. He was arrested, you know, he and the rest of your gang. In the hold of the Martina Vega, no less. It appears I am now your em-ployer.” Tarquin smiled. “I do so en-

joy a good irony. “She whacked the side of the

headsman’s block with a cane. “We will be needing this soon.”

***

“What I don’t get is why Tarqu-in wants us?” Corrigan swigged a frosty glass of buttermilk, chomped on the corner of an egg-salad sand-wich, and asked around the food in his mouth, “Why send an extraction team after a whole crew when you already got the person you want?”

“Because Finney’s just an excuse.” Mercedes sipped her tea, and shot a grimace at Alerio. “She’s bait.” He slurped a spoonful of Sahir’s whatever’s-in-the-larder soup then crumbled a few more crackers into his bowl.

Wyatt straightened a stack of banded bills, pushed aside his aba-cus, and made a notation on a clip-board. “Don’t know how you all can eat so much, or so loud. Didn’t no one’s momma teach ‘em man-ners?”

“Didn’t your mother teach you proper grammar?” Ezra didn’t look up from his book, but reached to-ward a plate of thick-cut fries slath-ered in ketchup, and stuffed a hand-ful into his mouth.

With a sour look at the kid, Wyatt snagged the plate.

Still reading, Ezra grabbed for more fries, but his sticky red fingers slammed down and trailed ketchup across the scarred table. “Hey!”

Wielding a fork, Wyatt shoveled fries until his cheeks bulged, then he grinned. It wasn’t pretty.

Sahir wiped his knife blade with a white towel then tucked the blade into the waistband of his apron. He slapped his belly, and beamed like a benevolent uncle upon the crew.

Seated on a stool at the counter, Kristoff downed the last of his cof-fee then slid the empty mug toward the sink. He listened a little while longer to the bickering, and he fid-dled with the sling Doc insisted he wear until her magic elixir closed the wound. She called it by some long, scientific name, but it sparkled and bubbled, and burned worse than drunen acid. At least drunen was a proven agent—it dissolved crud in Martina’s engines—but hy-drobacta-whatever-its-name was pink, and it came in a corked bottle about the size and shape a snake-oil seller might peddle to naïve desert dwellers. Doc claimed it was good medicine.

He’d clenched his teeth like a man until she left the infirmary, then he’d doubled over and cried.

There was still a nagging sting deep in his chest, and the blasted

sling chafed his neck. He ran a finger under the strap.

“This whole thing smells,” said Ezra.

Corrigan frowned, and sniffed the air.

“Smells like what?” Wyatt wiped a smear of ketchup from his chin.

“Not sure.” Ezra closed his book. “Seems like Tarquin has gone through a whole lot of trouble for a simple vengeance.”

“You reckon Finney’s all right?” Corrigan sucked his teeth then swished more buttermilk around in his mouth. “If she’s bait and all, she’s gotta be alive, y’ know?”

Kristoff slid from the stool and returned to the wheelhouse. He gripped the back of the pilot’s chair. A hot pink bandanna knotted one arm. He sat, and the loose ends of the bandanna trailed across his knee. Blast you, Finn. Why’d you leave the ship?

A fuzzy warble emitted from his radio. He unclipped it and hit the button. “Go ahead.”

“Western desert, just outside of Horatio, a garrison city built around an oasis.”

“Anything else?”“Tarquin wants you pretty bad.

She paid them more money than I could make in four lifetimes. Gregor never broke—he’s old school—but

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the others gave it up as soon as they saw all the nifty gadgets at my disposal.” The voice on the radio chuckled. “From all the stories I’ve heard, I expected more. But I guess bounty hunters aren’t what they used to be.”

“These were just cadet thugs. Give ‘em a couple more go-rounds, and you won’t want to meet any in daylight, much less a dark alley.” Kristoff stretched out his legs, and crossed them at the ankles. “Jink Turner and Gleason Holmes?”

“Governor Bat’Alon filed charges this morning. He wanted me to ar-rest you, but I did some wink-wink, nudge-nudge talk, and he backed down, but he isn’t happy.”

“I don’t expect he is.”“Right now, he’s more concerned

about his missing daughter, Rebeka. If I were you, I wouldn’t come back to Port Henry any time soon.”

“I feel the hinterlands calling my name.” Kristoff wound the ends of the bandanna around his fingers. “Finney?”

A brief, reluctant sound, like a sigh and a muttered curse at once. “She was alive when the team left. A little roughed up, maybe, but only because she didn’t go quietly.”

Kristoff ran a hand down his face. “Thanks, Frank. I owe you.”

“It broke up the routine, and this

morning one of my superiors acci-dentally called me sir. I figure we’re even, captain.” A pause. “Happy hunting.”

***

Step, step, turn, step. It was the only exercise the narrow space al-lowed. Finney pressed a fist against her grumbling midsection. Step, turn, step. Almost two days, no food. At least she had water once a day, when the servants—

Here they were now, dressed in white, opening the spigots just enough to release thin streams of water that filled the narrow troughs around the pot rims then dripped through holes in the troughs, soak-ing the soil without flooding it—common practice in the desert, where water was traded like cur-rency.

Finney dropped to a crouch. The long, fluid tunics and wide-legged trousers of the servants swished with every movement, and the soft soles of their shoes whispered over the stones, mingling with the muted music of falling water. She might al-most be watching the quiet, efficient staff going about their tasks at her favorite resort back in Port Henry.

The same resort where she’d been captured.

Out in the courtyard, Bosko

croaked, “Water. Please. Water,” but the servants never turned their heads.

Don’t be feelin’ sorry for him, lass. The admiral’s ghost-voice hadn’t spoken since sunrise. He’s yer en-emy.

“So was Kristoff,” she murmured, “once upon a time.”

Were Kristoff yer friend, he’d turn ye out and force ye to find honest work.

“You forget, Grandfather, I choose to pilot a pirate vessel.”

What did I do wrong?“Nothing. You’re my hero, Grand-

father. When I grow up, I want to be just like you.”

Ah, now yer butterin’ me like toast.

A woman approached Finney’s hiding place, bent at the waist, and pushed aside the broad, drooping fronds near the faucet.

Finney’s muscles ached with the tension of keeping her body abso-lutely still.

The servant turned the knob. Her long hair slid over one shoulder, becoming a veil between her and Finney.

Then Finney’s stomach gurgled.

***

“Captain?” Ezra leaned through the wheelhouse hatch. “Sahir’s

stowed the last of the galley sup-plies, and Wyatt’s a little twitchy about flying without cargo.”

“An empty hold means faster flight”—Kristoff turned in the pilot’s chair—”but twitchiness is dominant Wyatt DNA. Fuel?”

“The fence wanted to unload several barrels of liquid, and even Corrigan’s persuasive powers didn’t work.” Ezra stepped inside. “Doc’s wrapping his hand. A couple broken knuckles, I think.”

So. Kristoff nodded. Skippy’s hired a few strong-arm types. Good for him.

Ezra shifted his stance.Kristoff raised his brows.“If that guy won’t deal with us,

captain, what’ll we do for fuel?”“Skippy’s just flexing his muscle.

He’ll deal.”“How can you be sure?”“Kid. How long have I been doing

this?”Ezra laughed, and looked down.

Then his smile faded, and he tapped the toe of one boot against a tool locker.

Kristoff waited. Ez was a deep well, and he tended to reveal more in his face than in his words, but the words were there.

“After everybody disappeared on the Elsinore, Finney was the first person I saw.” Ezra turned away his

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face. “All that time alone on ship, and I almost forgot there were oth-er people in the universe. Then the Vega docks, and this woman walks right through the hatch like she’s the captain, smiles at me, and says, ‘Hey, kid. Anybody home?’ She’s”—he shrugged—”you know.”

Yeah. I do. Kristoff stood and walked to a

port, his back to Ezra. Beyond the ship spread a dusty village in the foothills of the Riva Mountains, on the edge of rebel territory, and folk dressed in white or varying shades of brown walked past the bow. Mar-tina was as battered as the ships in their scrapyard, and no one gave her a second glance. Good. If any colo-nial troops passed through town, she’d be outside their notice.

“I’ll radio Corrigan. Ez, grab Wyatt and Sahir, and meet me at the for-ward hatch.”

***

Finney looked straight into the servant’s eyes, seeing the pupils widen, but the woman didn’t blink. She didn’t flinch or cry out. Instead, she cupped water in her hand, rose, turned, lifted her hair, and splashed the water onto the back of her neck. Her fingertips traced the white thread of a scar that began below the neckline of her white tunic and

disappeared up into her hair.Dear God and gearshifts. The

woman was a rebel.Another servant, this one a man

with curls of graying hair on his forearms, passed with a tray in his hand. He nodded once, a warning in his glance, and strode out of sight. The woman dipped her fingers into the water again, and wrote on the stones above the faucet: dark. Without looking back at the palms, she flicked her fingers, scattering droplets, and walked to the next al-cove. There was a slight squeak as the spigot opened.

Finney let out her breath, and her hands shook. The letters on the wall disappeared, evaporated by the desert heat.

A rebel. In Tarquin’s household. She gripped the collar. Maybe

she’d keep her head after all.

***

Ezra headed below, and radioed Wyatt and Sahir on their own fre-quencies: “Captain said meet him at the forward hatch. Better be quick. He doesn’t sound happy.”

Kristoff wasn’t frightening, but he wasn’t weak, either. He’d beaten Jink Turner and Gleason Holmes in the same fight. Since Ezra had been aboard the Martina Vega, Kristoff had boarded at least four vessels

and made off with their entire car-gos, without firing a shot or being recognized—neither his crew nor the ship—no simple feat when the ship was a well-known bucket, and among its crews was a giant me-chanic and a cook the approximate shape and size of a small planet.

Once, Sahir had played the cap-tain, and Kristoff acted a slavish idiot. Ezra helped acquire both cos-tumes; easy enough to raggedy-up the captain’s clothes, but finding a white shirt with leather-lacings that was big enough to fit Sahir? Ezra and Mercedes pooled their skills, and turned a bed sheet into a tent-like version of a captain’s signature garment. The escapade ended in the Martina Vega taking on a hold’s worth of foul-smelling but expen-sive agricultural byproduct, and the crew leaning on one another in loud, helpless laughter as soon as the hatches were sealed.

That load sold for a year’s take, and the crew had stayed in port for nigh a month. During that time, Kristoff tweaked the constabulary’s ear a time or two, posed as an of-ficer on occasion, and kicked down a few doors. He seemed to like that bit.

Frowning, Wyatt stepped from the portside companionway into the hold. “What’s this about, Ez?”

Ezra shook his head, closed and latched the first aid kit mounted on the wall, and the pair strode for-ward.

Kristoff was already at the hatch, knife in his belt, gun low at his hip, and an unreadable expression on his face. With his free hand, he hit the release beside the door, and the hatch opened, admitting a blast of heat that nigh sucked the air out of Ezra’s lungs.

Swinging a bulging burlap bag over one shoulder, Sahir arrived, then Corrigan, with Alerio and Mer-cedes close behind.

“I’m only taking three,” said Krist-off.

“I don’t hide behind anybody,” rumbled Corrigan, and the engi-neer and the doctor protested over the top of one another, their words tangling, but the captain shook his head.

“Three.”Then he reached behind him and

tossed a gunbelt wound around a holster. Startled, Ezra almost didn’t catch it, but hooked the belt on his first two fingers, the weight and mo-mentum of the gun wrenching his arm. The leather was sweat-stained, the edges blackened, and the gun’s wooden grip was worn smooth with much handling. Colonial weapons were composite or metal; this one

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had probably voyaged from Earth in an ancestor’s trunk.

Though Ezra rarely spoke of his beliefs unless asked, they were known to everyone aboard. He lived and served aboard a vessel crewed by pirates, but never had Kristoff asked or ordered him to break the law, nor had Ezra ever accompanied the crew on a job.

He met the captain’s gaze; Krist-off’s expression didn’t change. Ezra looked around at the crew, and they looked back, Mercedes with a small frown that might be concern, Corri-gan with a scowl that might be envy, and Sahir with a glimmer of excite-ment as if looking forward to see-ing what the cabin boy could do in a fight. Alerio smiled—he’d taught Ezra how to shoot—and Wyatt nar-rowed his eyes, probably expecting Ezra to give back the gun.

It grew heavier the longer he held it.

Oh, God. A prayer, not a curse, and full of questions.

He looked down at the gun.Was it wrong to commit a crime

against a criminal?Would it be a greater crime to

not do whatever possible to find and free Finney—assuming she still lived?

Finney and the crew were pirates and smugglers.

But, were it not for them, he’d be dead.

He slung the belt around his hips, and buckled it.

Sahir let loose a fat chuckle, slapped him on the back, and thud-ded down the gangway.

***

Either the rebel servant was no rebel, or the house guard had finally arrived at the notion of checking be-hind all the planters. Armed men es-corted Finney past Bosko, lying sun-burned and unconscious, into the cool interior of the villa and down dim corridors to a high-ceilinged chamber hung with gauzy curtains over the lattice-cut windows. In the center sat the governor, canes resting against the arms of a chaise piled with cushions.

Finney lifted her chin, and straight-ened her shoulders.

“Your foray into freedom, brief though it was, seems to have re-stored your attitude.” A smile rear-ranged the wrinkles on Tarquin’s face into a sagging, over-painted theatre mask. “Unfortunately, we shall have to hobble you.”

Two hunters pushed Finney to her knees, while another pressed a block between her ankles.

“No. No.” Tarquin thumped the floor with both canes. “This is my

revenge, and she will feel the full ex-tent of it. Let her see the breaking.”

The block was removed, the guards slewed Finney sideways, kicked her legs out in front of her, then set her upright, yanking her arms behind her back. With the toe of his boot, the bondsman nudged the block into place between her feet then set down his box, tools clanking. He took out a mallet.

Sweat soaked Finney’s back. Heart pounded. Lungs seized.

Tarquin laughed—a broken rasp. “There it is! There is the fear.” She leaned forward, a crow in a plump nest. “Do you know the true irony? Devlin was a headstrong nuisance. My grandson never cared for the family trade. He would rather play, bring home toys like you. He never cared what it meant to belong to my house. Nieces and nephews I have aplenty, my husband’s kin.” She pointed a knobby finger to the shad-ows where men and women stood in pale, loose-fitting garments. “They care. They know the honor.”

Honor ain’t got nothin’ to do with it, you old bat. They know how much is in the cookie jar, and they want a fistful of goodies.

Lowering her hand, the old wom-an slumped against the cushions, her shoulders hunched beside her head like a bird’s wings. “But one

does not let the killing of one’s blood kin go by without an answer.”

No—Finney’s gaze returned to the mallet in the bondsman’s hand—one does not.

She flung herself backward, rais-ing her feet, and the block knocked the mallet upward, catching him under the chin, snapping back his head. He collapsed like an air-less pneumatic. Finney wheezed a laugh.

The men on either side clamped her legs and shoulders to the floor. Her head banged against the stone. Her ears rang, and her sight blurred.

“If you do not be still, Miss Grace, these men will simply shoot you in the legs. Shattered bones and open wounds. Excellent cause for sep-sis. And even more pain.” Tarquin paused. “Why did I not consider it sooner? Shoot her knees.”

***

In the shadow of a mud-and-tim-ber building that listed to the south like the haphazard construction of a tipsy carpenter, Kristoff tapped Ezra on the shoulder and motioned him to step back. Rope coiled over one shoulder, Wyatt walked past on the street, each step raising fine dust in red-brown puffs. Sahir stumped off in the opposite direction, the con-

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tents of the burlap bag shifting a little with each step.

Careful, my friend.Four men emerged from a fenced,

adobe building across the street, the reinforced door clanging shut behind them. They paused at the barred gate, then two followed Sa-hir, and after a little neck craning and low-voiced consultation, the other two followed Wyatt.

Squinting against the light bounc-ing off the fence, Kristoff crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. On the edge of his vision, Ezra crossed his arms too, then uncrossed them; put his hands at his hips; shifted the gunbelt; turned to face the other way down the alley.

“Kid.”Ezra stood still, the back of his

shirt dark with sweat.“When we go in, stay behind me,

and keep your gun in your hand. As soon as you get inside, take a step to the right, and stay there. Keep your back to the wall. Don’t let anybody leave.” Kristoff looked over at him. “You do that?”

After a small hesitation, Ezra nod-ded.

A few minutes later, Wyatt strolled up the alley, sans rope. “All four of ‘em trussed up and ready to broil.” He ran a gloved hand along the back of his head, and his grizzled hair

stood up in sweaty peaks. “They’ll be red as a slapped face by the time somebody unties ‘em.”

Kristoff straightened. “Sahir?”Wyatt nodded. He stripped off

the gloves then flexed his fingers. “These are the hands of an artist. They’re not meant for rough work.”

“Come up with a new grudge”—Kristoff chuckled—”’cause that one’s wearin’ thin around the edges.”

Wyatt scowled. “Say that the next time you need some fancy identifi-cation papers.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. C’mon.” Krist-off led the way down the alley.

Ezra spoke in a low voice, “We doubling back to the other side of the street?”

“That building is the decoy. The real business is right here.” Kristoff hooked a thumb at the ramshackle structure beside them.

“Looks like it could blow over in the next sandstorm.”

They sauntered along the side of the building to the back corner. Anyone passing on the street would think nothing suspicious about three dusty laborers at the delivery entrance.

A quick glance around the cor-ner revealed two men lounging in the shade, one with his head tipped back and his eyes shut, a cigarette burning close to his fingers, and the

other tossing playing cards into an old boot, and between them a faded orange door latticed with carlinnian bars, fitted with a heavy lock.

Kristoff jerked his head, and Wyatt and Ezra backed up the alley several steps. “Two guards. Not the prob-lem. The door’s reinforced since our last visit.”

Wyatt scratched the back of his head. “Dagnabbit.”

“Captain.” Ezra pulled the doctor’s tranquilizer pistol from under his shirt. “On the Elsinore, I learned to break locks, too.” He shrugged. “It’s the only way I could move around the ship.”

Kristoff smiled. “Well, kid, you’re on.”

Seconds later, two men were propped against the wall in the alley, the playing cards and the old boot beside them, and a fresh, cheap cigarette curled up a malodorous smoke from the fingers of one un-conscious guard.

Using the tips of the two tranq darts, and with Wyatt holding a match flame to the keypad feed, Ezra popped open the first part of the lock.

Everyone paused, listening.No alarm. No running feet or

shouts.Kristoff nodded, and Ezra contin-

ued.

The seal gave a little sigh, and a dark seam appeared around the edges of the door. Kristoff kicked open the door, stepped into the dim storeroom, and grinned at the fat man seated at a warped table. “Af-ternoon, Skippy.”

Eyes wide, the man tried to stand, but his feet tangled in the chair legs. Man and furniture toppled with a crash. Armed guards surrounded him, weapons aimed at the bright band of sunlight invading their den. “Shoot him!” shrieked the fat man. “Shoot him!”

Shots pinged off the doorframe and shelving, but three of the four gunmen dropped unconscious, and the fourth lowered his weapon when Ezra pointed the dart gun at him.

“Now, Skippy.” Kristoff gestured with his pistol at the shelves laden with contraband. “Here I was think-ing you were a man of business.”

Wyatt stepped around him, and wagged a bulging purse over the table. Two plump, white hands slapped the tabletop, and Skippy heaved upright. He stared at the purse, prodded it with a thick fin-ger, and smiled when the coins in-side clinked.

Hands spread wide, a tilt of the head, and Skippy might have been greeting a favored client. “You will

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overlook the poor welcome, and convey my deepest regrets to your man for the unfortunate breaking of his hand?” He waved toward a hulk standing behind the remaining gun-man, arms crossed. “Olson is new to my employ.”

Good ol’ Skippy. He never missed a chance to toss a comrade under the keel.

Ignoring the bodyguards, none of whom he recognized from the last time Skippy tried to stiff him, Kristoff ran the barrel of his gun along a row of cylindrical pumps, a triangular void at the base of each where the tri-planet government seal used to be. The metallic click-click, click-click, click-click of pistol against shelving ticked like a robotic heartbeat.

“Y’know, Skip, no better way to hide, sometimes, than to walk right up to your enemy and say howdy.”

Skippy’s smile slid sideways. “I’m afraid I do not follow.”

“I agree. You are afraid, and in-telligence is apparently not requi-site to a successful criminal career.” Kristoff tapped the end of the barrel against the last pump. “I’d have left the seals on. Easier to unload, and no one asks awkward questions.”

“I don’t take advice from pi-rates.”

Kristoff shrugged his right shoul-

der, but the strap of the blasted sling still scritch-scratched along his neck. “I just want my fuel.”

The man spread his hands again, palms up. “I can sell you all the liquid you want, but no pellets. They be-long to a couple rebel leaders with better weapons than this lot carry.” His plump face glistened with sweat. “You understand my position.”

Kristoff sighed. “Skippy, Skippy, Skippy.” He waved the pistol at a stack of chemical bottles. “I’d hate to be the one to put the first scratch on this batch of shiny new—what is this? Looks explosive. Maybe toxic.”

Olson uncrossed his arms, pushed aside the other guard, and grabbed Kristoff’s wrist, twisting the gun from his grasp.

“Now, see”—Kristoff looked up at him; fellow needed a good set of nose-hair clippers—”that kinda be-havior is what gets a body hurt.”

Olson grinned.

***

“Governor,” said one of the men holding Finney to the floor, “shoot-ing her in the knees is chancy. If she moves, bullets can ricochet, hurt anybody in this room. Even if we hit square, bone fragments and blood spatter could make it—messy.”

Tarquin waved a dismissive hand. “Stand her up, then.”

“If we stand her up, we still risk ricochet, ma’am, and there’s no guarantee we actually hit her in the knees. And what if something hits that collar, and sets if off? We’re all dead.”

“What, then, do you suggest?” Her voice tensed with false pa-tience.

By all means, discuss the fate of my knees. Finney blinked her sight back into focus. Take as long as you like.

“We take her outside the villa, away from all this stone. No worries about shrapnel or ricochets, and the sand soaks up the blood.”

Tarquin looked at Finney, who stared back with as much calm as she could rally.

“The smell of blood does not quickly leave a room, especially in the desert.” The old woman pushed herself up on her shaky, stick-like arms. “Outside. But not the garden. The new gravel is still white. Take her beyond the wall.”

***

Ezra fired the sixth and last dart. It stuck into the side of Olson’s neck. He staggered, released the captain, took a clumsy step forward, and plummeted to the table. It creaked and collapsed, its legs and his splayed out like the limbs of a crazy

spider.“Great shot, kid,” said the cap-

tain, wincing as he picked up his weapon. “C’mon, Skippy. Bring your goon. Let’s get that fuel.”

***

The armed escort halted at a set of massive doors embossed with stars and planets arching over a grove of palm trees.

Ye know, said Grandfather, any-thing green that grows on Prospero was brought from Earth, long years past. Before the colonists came, this rock was bald as my Aunt Tildy.

Finney choked on her laughter, drawing a sharp glance from Gover-nor Tarquin.

“Yes, Miss Grace?”The doorkeeper unlocked the

doors, and servants tugged them open, admitting a greenish luminos-ity, the strong sunlight mitigated by more palm trees.

“If I go out that door, you can for-get shooting me. I’ll be headless. So will you.”

Tarquin made a noise low in her throat, and glared at Finney, then demanded, “Get the bondsman on his feet.”

He shuffled forward, a dark bruise on his chin, his course waver-ing from port to starboard and back again.

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“You are, I assume, the one who made the collar?”

He dug two fingers into the breast pocket of his shirt and produced a thin key.

“Well, man, get to it!”Fingers trembling a little, the

bondsman turned the collar to reach the lock. The key missed, and dug into Finney’s neck. She flinched, and the entire group—guards, ser-vants, and governor—tensed with her, some crouching, covering their heads with their arms.

The bondsman cursed, and tried again. The lock released with a click and a whine; the trigger must have been linked in to a sonic barrier. He gave the collar a small tug, it opened wide, and he pulled it from her neck.

Step one, said the admiral.Step one?Aye. Yer enemy is making the es-

cape for ye.This doesn’t look like much of an

escape.Ach, have ye no imagination?The governor’s litter led the pro-

cession along the broad, arched colonnade of trees. Built of quar-ried stone probably hauled from the Riva Mountains by the forefa-thers of many rebels, the villa was bounded by a low stone wall sur-mounted by crisscrossed strands of

razor wire. Between the wall and the villa spread a garden of clipped shrubs and brilliant flowers lining manicured gravel paths.

Guards opened the gates, and the entourage entered a strange desert, grass ending just beyond the gates, then sand and stones into the hori-zon. Finney looked over her shoul-der, through the ranks of house guards and bounty hunters. Houses built of mud brick sheltered in the green shade of an oasis. An old fort rose at the center, its square towers set at the four corners of the wall. She’d come here before with Grand-father. This was Horatio.

The file halted, but she was led several meters into the desert, the bonds tethering her to her guards were released, and the men backed away from her, weapons ready. Her back to the villa, she heard the scuff of boots and the click and hum of weapons being primed.

Step two, said Grandfather.

Thieves’ Honor © 2009 by Keanan Brand.

3 Alone at AX-1 by Swapna Krishore Swapna Kishore is a software consultant living in Bangalore, India with her family.

She writes fiction and non-fiction, and has been published both online and in print.

9 Bff.jov by Scott Davis

Scott Davis reappears after his Ray Gun debut with The Third Shadoc War (see the November 2008 issue). This time, he answers the musical question: Can you make a War of the Worlds story that includes these words: meringue, pinochle, absinthe, quartz, mendacious, fashionable, mothball, clambake, and reflux? If you’d rather, you can see a story that did.

In addition to the two Ray Gun stories, Scott is slated to appear in Sonar 4 and Nova SciFi mid-year. He’s been writing fiction since 2007.

14 Into the Deep by Brandon Meyers Brandon Meyers has been writing fiction for two years. In that time, he has com-

pleted two novel manuscripts, and over thirty short stories. He works in construction during the day, and in his laundry closet with a rapidly failing computer, at night.

18 DEUCES WILD: by L.S. King

L. S. King is a science fiction and fantasy writer with one book, several published short stories, a column on writing, and an ongoing monthly serial story to her cred it.

When on the planet, this mother and grandmother lives in Delaware with her hus-band Steve, homeschools their young est child, and also works as a gymnastics coach. In her non-existent spare time she enjoys gardening, soap making, reading, and on-line gaming. She also likes Looney Tunes, the color purple, and is a Zorro afi cionado, which might explain her love of swords and cloaks.

RGR Author Bios

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22 Happy Birthday, Niatti by Raz Greenberg

Raz Greenberg is a PhD student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has pub-lished several short stories in Israeli science fiction magazines. More recently, a story based on his script Screaming With the Eagles appeared in the British comics maga-zine Futurequake. He also works as a book translator, and his Hebrew translation of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War has won a Geffen Award (given by the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy) for best translated science fiction book in 2007.

35 CALAMITY’S CHILD - CHAPTER 7, ROP: Rodeo Bull Ballet, Part Two by M. Keaton

Growing up in a family with a history of military service, M. Keaton cut his lin guistic and philosophical teeth on the bones of his elders through games of strategy and debates at the dinner table. He began his writing career over 20 years ago as a news-paper rat in Springdale, Arkansas, U.S.A. before pursuing formal studies in chemistry, mathematics, and medieval literature at John Brown Uni versity. A student of politics, military history, forteana, and game design, his renaissance education inspired the short television series: These Teeth Are Real (TTAR).

His literary “mentors” are as diverse as his experiences. Most powerfully, the au-thor has been affected by the works and writers of the “ancient” world, including the Bible, Socrates, and (more modern) Machiavelli, Tsun Tsu, Tacitus, and Von Clauswitz. (This horribly long list only scratches the surface; M. Keaton reads at a rate of over two books per week in addition to his writing.)

46 TALES OF THE BREAKING DAWN: The Ties That Bind, Part Two by Justin R. Macumber

A victim of the economy, Justin is now a full-time writer of space–faringopera and daring-do, working to earn his big break. He’s written stories in almost every genre, but science fiction is where his heart belongs, and it always will. He also created and co-hosts a writing podcast called The Dead Robots’ Society, which you can find at www.deadrobotssociety.com.

And, if you want to learn more about him and read some of his other work, you can go to www.justinmacumber.com.

53 THIEVES’ HONOR - Episode 8 Endgame, Part 1 by Keanan Brand

Writing since age nine, when an English assignment required a short story, Keanan Brand dreamed of writing Westerns or books about history, or recording the crazy stuff of dreams. Late teens and early twenties witnessed the imposition of real life and the putting away of dreams. For a time, he dabbled in nonfiction and freelance journalism, then a supervisor suggested a free writing seminar at the local college, and Keanan returned to a greater love: fiction, specifically fantasy and science fiction. He started entering contests, winning awards for poetry, essays, and short stories. These successes led to freelance editing for other writers, and for a science fiction small press.

His first story to be accepted by a Double-Edge Publishing, Inc., publication was At the End of Time, When the World Was New, a short piece of speculative fiction that appeared in the final issue of Dragon, Knights, & Angels. History, mythology, folktales, C.S. Lewis, Howard Pyle, J.R.R. Tolkien, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Bible remain great influences, as do the family tall tales, pioneer stories, and Southern gothic with which Keanan grew up.