This was certainly a good idea, this shimmying about inside ducts and vents and metal casements which thunder alarmingly beneath the unwanted weight of his passing. His life has been reduced to a pointless series of mechanical motions: forward with the elbows, plant them on a seam for traction, drag the carcass behind; pause a moment to catch a breath because it’s only been, after all, a few hundred meters of constant inchworm contractions through a space barely large enough for his shoulders to pass, let alone his entire body. Someone who didn’t know better might be tempted to think that he was going soft if he stops too often.

So, he fixes his eyes straight ahead and tries to gauge his progress, but the flashlight’s beam is jiggling too much for him to make an accurate guess. The strap that’s supposed to keep the light snug against his forehead has been pulling loose for the last ten minutes. It’s just another aggravation to toss atop the mounting pile. It stinks in here, too. Not the clean, coppery stink of sheet metal and industrial coolant that one should reasonably expect from ductwork, but some noxious chemical combination of sweat, dust, mildew and other assorted skanks that defy ready identification. He thinks about just succumbing to the heat and exertion and odor and just allowing himself to pass out. Let some other idiot worry about how they were going to get him out of here.

Oh yes, it had been a good idea, indeed. Whoever had devised this plan in the first place should be given some sort of citation. With a hammer. To the forehead. Until he was freaking dead.

Now the truth is that he’s an adult. He’s been inside his share of tubes and tunnels and cramped, clammy spaces. He’s not normally one to give up in the face of a little grit. It’s not the getting dirty that he minds at all, nor the heat and odor, nor the hysterically gibbering claustrophobe chained up in the closet in the very back of his mind. Rather, it’s all the intersections. The right angles, to be precise.

He hates those. Hates ‘em. Absolutely.

There are only so many joints in the human body capable of performing a ninety degree maneuver. The pelvis, the knee, the elbow, sometimes the neck, a few other odds and ends. A man forcing himself through a skintight metallic tube like raw bratwurst crammed into sausage casings uses all of them, and then finds that he must manufacture some new ones (or at least makes the old ones serve new purposes) if he doesn’t wish to get himself permanently wedged between a terminal hither and yon.

He’s been finding creative ways to torture his body thusly for the last hour or better, so he feels qualified in making the determination that as right angles go, he hates the one he’s confronting now most of all, a particularly diabolic specimen in the cosmology of Demonic Perpendiculatory Choirs he’s been formulating as he has gone along.

One of the planes in question is a chute of unpleasantly heated air boiling up from the main cooling tanks of the Van Nuys reactor. The other, the one he currently occupies, is a (currently) slightly less infernal duct branching back toward the Sub-Deck Kappa, Section Six tech-maintenance pod. Under normal circumstances, this duct is supposed to be a standard internal cooling tube loaded with envireon refrigerant and absolutely human tissue toxic, maintained at a steady hypothermia inducing eight degrees centigrade. Which it was, right up until about an hour ago when they’d cut off the flow at the main valve and flushed the tube with neutralizing agents for the sole purpose of shoving him in through the nearest access vent.

The tube is supposed to be kept chilly because of the core, of course. Or rather that because without the induced chilliness, the vents that cooled the core would very shortly start to bake, then warp, then ultimately fail to provide safe and adequate heat exchange, which in turn tended to quickly result in things like radioactive contaminants spewing under extremely high pressures into other parts of the ship that don’t seem upon initial inspection to be related to this duct in this place at this particular moment in time. The engineers have stressed all of this in the very recent past, over and over again. The engineers said that under normal operating circumstances the exhaust from the core is saturated by the microscopic envireon particles until it all evens out, until there’s a nice equilibrium point established that keeps everyone happy and glow free. An elegant system, frightfully complex, not to be messed with except in cases of dire, dire emergency lest ducky circumstances suddenly and catastrophically unduck themselves.

From his perspective, things are far from ducky already, here where the HVAC tube lips over into a vertical shaft that plummets all the way down to the reactor core. (Though the air in the shaft itself has been by this time scrubbed and rescrubbed, thoroughly nanomesh strained, then scrubbed once more for good measure until all the nasty radioactive bits have been purged and it was perfectly safe for consumption. Or so they said. “They” being a fairly nebulous concatenation of People Who Knew Such Things and People Who Issued Assurances so normal folk wouldn’t have to worry about the obscene risks they were asked to take.)

Wedged at the zero point between planes, contemplating the theoretical infinity of these axes with his nose and eyes and top of his head peeking over the edge of the HVAC tube and his re-breather unit bruising his cheeks because unlike the straps for his headlamp, these are too tight, is Ray Marlowe. He is sweating profusely inside his rubberized, slip resistant coveralls. His face is smeared with dark lines that look like camouflage grease paint, but really only mark the places where he has wiped the perspiration from his brow with the condensate, dust-bunny grit that inevitably gathers inside HVAC tubes.

Ray has lain here contemplating his assault of the vertical shaft for a number of minutes now. It is a delaying tactic, a shameless procrastination. He has no interest in continuing the chase. The molten heat of superheated reacting agents emanating up from the core streams past his face in waves as thick and suffocating as a winter stack of grandma’s old feather comforters. He imagines as he peers over the edge that he can see the lava glow of the cooling tanks four hundred meters directly below his current position, like peering into the mouth of a dubiously quiescent volcano.

It is an unpleasant and completely fabricated hallucination and he knows it. He just doesn’t particularly want to do the part that comes next.

This is how it works: Nature, in its vast and quasi-nefarious complexity, has determined that there is a corporate value in the evolution of a particular type of creature whose sole contribution to the planetary biosphere is to recycle the detritus of other creatures. These are the scavengers, the bottom feeders (quite literally) of the animal kingdom–your hyenas and rats and barnacles and other generally disgust-inducing entities–who serve the imminently valuable purpose of making certain that waste products disappear and carcasses are broken up into conveniently smaller bits and that most other living things don’t find themselves buried up to their necks in the byproducts manufactured by basic processes like living and eating and procreating and excreting and eventually keeling over. Perhaps even more importantly, they make certain that no biological resources go to waste in what is ultimately a closed ecological system.

The lesson being: nature is a closed environmental system.

Starships, curiously enough, are also closed environmental systems.

Once upon a time, some hotshot, smartass engineering geek with too much imagination or more creativity than sense determined that most folks who traveled about in starships were sick and tired of being made physically sick and tired by the cocktail of laboratory biogenerate mosses and molds and single-celled organisms typically employed for the purpose of recycling starship waste. Biological organisms, no matter how carefully engineered, had a distressing tendency to overproduce themselves, to evolve into annoying flesh or structure devouring slimes, to spontaneously generate lethal spores or find other, similarly disturbing ways to manifest a hostile response to having been subjected to the extreme environment of outer space.

Similarly, this aforementioned engineering geek realized that it would create another subset of discomforting circumstance to pack a starship with rats and hyenas and the like in order to process waste products with a level of efficiency approaching that of the natural world. Hyenas have too much of a tendency to eat indiscriminately if allowed to run loose, thus posing a danger to the edible-looking human types who happen to crew starships. And live rats, as well as having promiscuous reputations that would have created serious population control issues inside a few generations, had displayed a historically documented fascination with items like electrical wiring and electronics boards and any of the thousands of other technological gewgaws which were tedious to replace, unreasonably sensitive to abuse and more or less essential to the proper functioning of an in transito starfaring vessel.

Thus, the doubly aforementioned hotshot engineering geek, who was really merely a cog in a team of engineering geeks, designed, developed and built environmentally and aesthetically consistent mechanized rats to take the place of their organic counterparts in the vacuum-sealed circle of life that was the space voyaging craft, Paraclete. (As well as all other space voyaging vessels, Ray might suppose if he chose to think about it at all. Which he didn’t. At this point in his career arc, Paraclete was the only starship in which he happened to possess anything like a passing interest, and it had more than enough happy little idiosyncrasies to keep him occupied. Other ships could go screw themselves, or more likely, screw guys like him who were charged with keeping the idiosyncrasies from becoming glitches, the glitches from becoming problems, and the problems from sooner or later blossoming into critical threshold events that would make the klaxons blare and people run about in a variety of serious or intense postures searching either for someone to blame or someone to come up with a good idea for keeping said space voyaging vessel from plummeting into the gravitational field of a brown dwarf that had no right to have planted itself directly in their flight path.)

Ray Marlowe has been charged with the singular task of retrieving one of the wayward rats that populates the service decks of the starship which has, for reasons unknown, gotten itself stuck and broken somewhere in the tube above him. If possible, he would like to complete this mission without having to subject himself to the vertical ascent of the primary core cooling shaft. He ponders the possibility of just remaining where he is and calling out sweetly to the malfunctioning unit in hopes that it will scurry down to him. The rats are equipped with a frightening array of aural, optical and chemical sensors. On the other hand, so are human beings, and there’s nothing in his experience that is more detrimental to professional dignity than a grubby man crawling through ventilation ducts being overheard by half the ship’s service crew imploring the return of a drone rat as though it was a recalcitrant kitten.

He really has no desire to subject himself to that sort of abuse.

He unclips the signal tracker from the breast pocket of his coveralls. Ziggy has already calibrated the device to pick up the rat’s unique-signature radio transmissions, but Ray punches in the particular rat’s code sequence once again. He hopes that Ziggy has made an error, that the tracker will give him more useful (i.e. less hazardous) information than it did prior to his tube crawling adventure. It does not.

What it does tell him is that the rat has not moved in the last hour. This would normally be good news. There are few things worse than chasing an ambulatory rat with a software bug through kilometers of cramped tube. But this rat has chosen to lock up its mechanicals somewhere roughly one hundred meters above him, clinging by electromagnetic crampons to the wall of the vertical cooling shaft. He knows from the error reports spat forth from the rat dialogue processor back in the shop that the rat detected an anomalous concentration of radioactive discharge through the vent and gave pursuit. The concentration was well within the bounds of human health concentration guidelines, but like most input/response parameter driven machines, the rats give less of a hoot about what is optimal than about what they perceive as the proper functioning of their universe. Microscopic particles of radioactive isotope were apparently an offense to this rat’s binary worldview.

Ray was not normally a fan of individual initiative. Rogue rats like this one were part of the reason.

He curses a half dozen times as he returns the tracker to its designated pocket. A dozen more expletives escape in the process of contorting his body to access other, more remote pockets on his coveralls, followed by a full cannonade of scorched-earth profanities while he maneuvers the newly retrieved magnetic cups over his knees and hands, and triple-checks that they’re strapped tightly in place.

He tests the distance from his tube to the far wall of the cooling shaft. By hanging most of his upper body over the edge, he can almost brush the wall with his fingertips. He also manages to almost lose his balance and drag his entire body into freefall down the length of the cooling tube, and it occurs to him that he doesn’t like so much having valued parts of his organic being dangling over the roiling exhaust of a reactor’s core. A new approach is called for.

What he eventually settles upon is the rotation of his body in the cramped HVAC tube so that he faces away from the ship’s gravitational center. From this position, it’s simply a matter of clamping onto the vertical wall above him, locking the magnetic grips, and slowly extending his reach until he’s drawn himself completely out of one tube and into the other.

Fixed at the palms and knees to the solid flexsteel ductwork, he is more than capable of hanging in place as long as the laws of electromagnetism hold. Except, of course, that he’s attached to the wrong side of the tube. A situation that can only be remedied by detaching one arm and one leg from the wall and extending them across the shaft to the other side, then anchoring there, setting the grips, deactivating the first set and ferrying them over to the new landing zone and fixing them in place once again. He spends a great deal of time reminding himself that it is essential he carry out these steps in the proper sequence before actually performing them.

After that, it’s a strict regimen of mind-numbing and laborious effort. Unseal right hand cup, reach up, plant and set the grips. Unseal left hand cup, reach, plant, grips. Unseal right knee cup, extend, plant, grips. And so on, all the time trying not to think about the fact that he’s trusting his entire weight to the physical (and theoretical) properties of four scuffed and unimpressive electromagnets roughly the size of a coffee mug if you stacked them one on top of the other. Not to mention assiduously avoiding the thought that that if the magnets failed, he’d plummet four hundred dizzying meters straight onto the nanomesh filters that stood between him and the cooling tanks. Assuming he survived the fall, the mesh would be almost certainly be irretrievably damaged, thus flooding the vent with a fog of steam and radioactive pollutants that would boil his eyeballs in their sockets, sear the hair right off his head, probably curl the skin from his bones like a bunch of old parchment and, if he was lucky, kill him after a few uncomfortable minutes.

Not thinking such things performs wonders for his concentration, and Ray makes admirable progress in a short time.

Five meters below the rat, the tracker begins to vibrate in his breast pocket. For half a second, Ray believes he has just suffered a mild infarction and nearly wets himself. He looks up, sees the rat looking down at him–hanging upside down on the wall, in fact–and experiences a woozy shudder of vertigo. Two ships passing in the night, Ray thinks, then gets his balls firmly in hand and humps it the rest of the way until he has the rat’s nose pressed against the top of his head.

The nose is cold, which is what he would expect from a robotic multi-function sensor drone encased in a pseudo-metallic fiber carapace. If the casual observer somehow neglected to notice the rat was constructed entirely from non-organic materials, he or she might be struck by how rat-like the rat was–the expected chubby rat body, the long rat face, the coiled and icky rat tail. Even the delicately clawed and prehensile paws were rattish. Ray didn’t know if this extreme mimicry had been aesthetic or functional, only that it was a little creepy in a hip sort of way.

At this moment, the rat is doing a big bunch of nothing except hanging on the wall.

“What’s the matter with you, then?” Ray says.

At the sound of his voice, the rat’s small, dark eyes brighten. Its antiquated ten gig processor runs through a voice recognition routine that ties Ray’s particular vocal pattern to an id conversion algorithm that identifies him as an authorized maintenance profile. The rat recognizes him as help, and utters a forlorn chirp.

“Not a complete blowout. That’s something.”

The rat answers with a complex chatter of beeps and whistles translated directly from the binary signal. The diagnostic server down in the shop would know exactly what those meant, and what the rat has recommended that he do to fix it. Ray, on the other hand, has no idea.

He maneuvers himself a bit higher on the wall of the shaft until the rat is even with his chest and plays the beam of his flashlight over its chrome carapace for indications of structural damage or scorch marks from overheated motors. There’s nothing obvious, and this is definitely not the place to begin taking the drone apart.

“Okay, buddy, let’s see if we can’t do this the easy way.”

Ray shrugs his left hand free of its magnetic cup and wiggles his fingers beneath the rat’s body until he’s got it wedged in the crook of his elbow. He tugs against grip of the rat’s crampons. The rat doesn’t move.

“Voice command override, Mr. Rat.”

It responds with an affirmative-sounding squeak.

“Release electromagnetic locks.”

Where there should be a click, there is only silence. Ray tries again. “Cut power stream to electromagnetic locks.”

The rat chitters hopefully at him, but that seems to be the extent of its assistance. Ray tugs on its torso a few more times with no better result.

“This isn’t good, buddy,” he says. “You know what we’re going to have to do now.”

It does not, in fact, know. Nor would it actually care if it did know. Ray understands this, but he hates it anyway. It’s sloppy for one thing. And it offends him on a visceral level, mostly because it makes him feel queasy.

He extracts himself from the rat and retrieves the small saw from the zippered thigh pocket of his coveralls. For a few tedious moments, he plugs in new batteries, exchanges blades, flips between settings. He doesn’t want to have to monkey around with his equipment while he performs the surgery. Like a battlefield triage doctor, he wants the amputations completed with the minimum of fuss.

The diamond tipped saw sounds exactly like a dental drill. He has to force himself to keep his eyes open, to actually watch what he’s doing. His brain flops around inside his skull as though squirming away from his optical input. His stomach crawls away somewhere in the vicinity of his anus and begins to pout. Ray cuts through both of the rat’s forepaws before he remembers he should be holding the tail.

He doesn’t breathe until the work is done, the saw is jammed back in its pocket and the rat, roughly the size of a burly tomcat, is snugged against his belly. For seven full minutes afterward, he does nothing but apologize. He keeps his eyes averted from the four shiny and bodiless paws clamped to the shaft wall.

The rat chirps merrily, poking its nose into ribs and gall bladders, sniffing at belly buttons and livers–performing god-knows-what sensory examinations of this new biological terrain.

“Don’t bite me,” he says.

It does, of course. Ray figures that makes them about even.

***

They’re resilient little creeps, these rats–nearly as resilient as their true-life counterparts. The rat is on its side on the worktable, making more of its annoying chirrups and wiggling its nose at the minute fluctuations in the atmosphere’s chemical signature. Every few seconds, it flexes the new limbs Ray has attached from his stockpile of spare parts. The severed limbs have gone into a bin of damaged parts ripe for scavenging or experimentation or simply held in reserve to jerry-rig workable replacements when they had inevitably used up all the pristine components. A co-ax fiber line stretches from the rat’s anus to the diagnostic server array, with the business end being plugged into an access port in the back. In this way, the rat and the computer exchange loads of pointless information about its recent malfunction.

Ray supposes this is what passes for happiness in a robotic rat.

He sits on a stool beside the table, illuminated by a ring of glaring halogen light. He’s already examined the rat at magnification levels that can only be described as stupid. He’s studied its carapace for structural integrity flaws. He’s performed manual diagnostics on the three dozen or so servo-motors that pass for joints. He’s taken apart all the (supposedly) hermetically sealed sensor boxes and run them through computer mediated test cycles. As of an hour ago, he’d had the rat separated into enough pieces to make a watchmaker wince.

Now the tools are mostly put away, the assorted screws and bolts and cotter pins more or less put back where they came from. Currently, he has the motherboard access panel in the rat’s flank open. He touches an electrode stylus against various contact nodes, then scans the single line LCD display for irregular messages. He already knows the crampon problem was a bad electrical relay. He replaced that before he put on the new limbs. Now he’s just messing around, performing standard maintenance so he maybe won’t have to see this rat again for a hundred thousand kilometers or so.

Despite the fact of their impending separation, he’s taken to calling this rat Nomar. Ray has freely admitted to a near pathological obsession with naming his animals Nomar. Four dogs, three cats, eight fish and a lemming at last count. The lemming could be considered heretical, so it was just as well it only survived for a couple of months.

He finishes with his tests at about the same time as the diagnostic server. Ray unscrews the co-ax cable, closes the panel. The rat rolls onto its paws, either obediently or expectantly, Ray can’t really tell.

“Up for a test drive, Nomar?”

Nomar rises up on his hind legs, nose-scrunching and paw-waggling, then piles off the table onto Ray’s lap. It clutches a rapid descent down his coverall legs and seems to find the replacement limbs reliable enough. Ray follows the rat to the shop door. He cracks it open enough to peer out into the gangway, but doesn’t see anyone.

He peers intently at Nomar until he thinks he has the rat’s attention. “If Ziggy catches us, we’re completely busted, got it? So keep a low profile in the public areas. And try not to look like you’re following me, okay? We’ll shoot up to the Garden Level, then right back down for reconfigure and re-deploy.”

But Nomar is ignoring him. He’s already got his nose wedged between the door and the frame, snuffling at the air and engaging ambulatory motors in an attempt to squeeze through the gap. Before the rat can chitter its frustration, Ray lets him out and follows at a brisk pace. They make it maybe ten meters.

“Ray!”

He doesn’t want to turn around. As a matter of personal policy, turning around seems like a very bad idea…though perhaps not so bad as not turning around, because nobody booms his name down a cavernous gangway with that queer mix of menace and psychic exhaustion like Ziggy. And blowing off Ziggy would constitute a career-endingly bad idea.

Ray rotates on his heels and hisses at Nomar to wait for him, then wanders back toward the shop, and toward Ziggy who stands a little way farther down the corridor, just outside the door to his office. Ziggy has struck his standard pose–hands on hips, neck bent slightly so he peers down the bridge of his nose, head swaying back and forth like a pendulum, as though he’s already anticipating a need to make refusals.

Zig is a large black man, balding, but compensating in the follicle department with a devastating fu-manchu moustache that turns the entire lower half of his face into a forest of bristling pubic hairs. He’s big bellied because Nina, his wife, is one of those rare and wondrous women who can make tofu and protein paste actually resemble something edible. He has the jowls of a bulldog and the temperament to match. The diploma framed on the wall in his office says he’s an engineer, but Ray knows that’s only technically accurate. Ziggy is a hardware hacker retired to administrative oversight. Ray is the only one who calls him Ziggy. Everyone else refers to him as Section Chief Zighowser.

Face to face, Ziggy continues, “You’re not taking that drone abovedecks.”

Ray starts to make the what drone is that? motion with his hands, but he catches a glint out of the corner of eye. When he tracks it, looks down, there’s Nomar up on his hind legs, steadying himself with his paw around a roll of Ray’s trouser fabric.

“Traitor,” he grouses.

Nomar tugs on his leg and whistles.

Ziggy shakes his head. “Commander Sorensen has been pretty danged clear, I think. To everyone but you, that is.”

“There was a memo,” Ray agrees.

“And the memo said?”

“Drones are confined to engineering levels, conduits and appropriate task-sensitive decks and zones.”

“And?”

“Drones are proprietary Federal Space Agency technology.”

“And…”

“They’re not to be considered pets, but members of the engineering crew.”

“There’s something about that you don’t understand?”

“I guess not.”

Ziggy gives him the nod that says the topic is closed for discussion–a brisk up and down. Like an avalanche viewed in slow motion, he folds his legs beneath him and kneels on the deck where he can drop the full weight of his professional attention on Nomar. The rat lacks the good sense to shy away.

For a number of seconds, Zig probes the new limbs with his fingertips while Nomar applies a diplomatic quid pro quo logic in order to inspect the flesh of the Section Chief’s arm. A tongue-cognate sensor whip flicks the sweat from Ziggy’s palm, saving it for some hideously complicated chemical analysis later.

“This the one from this afternoon?”

It’s a pointless question, an icebreaker. There are something like six thousand rats assigned to Paraclete, five of which are active at any given time. Shop rumor has it that Ziggy can individually identify each one of them by physical or behavioral characteristics at twenty meters in a gloomy storage bay after having consumed half a bottle of hooch, and still probably give you the drone’s correct serial number. Ray answers with the properly noncommittal, “Uh-huh.”

“Electromagnetic lock?”

“Relay.”

Ziggy nods as though this information is something other than completely useless and projects the impression that he’s filed it away somewhere important for later review. “The limbs look good. The drone seems to be integrating the new hardware adequately. Decent coordination of extremities. Sound movement tracking. Solid range of motion.”

This is no doubt a sidelong way of suggesting there were methods to test hardware replacements without the necessity of physically wandering all over the ship.

They’re called People Skills, Mr. Marlowe! Perhaps you should look into requisitioning a starter set.

Ray only shrugs. “He didn’t complain. My boy was a model patient.”

Obviously, Ziggy is working up to something he wants to say. Ray is very sensitive to the waffling style of administrative pre-conversational foreplay. It usually means he’s done something so mind numbingly stupid or thoughtless that it has attracted the attention of the Powers That Be, who have thundered their displeasure from the Bridge Deck mountaintop into the Sub-Deck valleys via the comm unit on Ziggy’s desk, and the Zigster is so worn from the verbal manhandling that he just can’t muster the energy to pass it on.

Ziggy says, “You know that HVAC tube we purged was the main coolant pipe for the Bridge.”

“Sure. It was right there in the schematics. I took the liberty of informing the galley well in advance that any attempt to serve ice cream for dessert in the officers’ mess tonight would probably be a bad idea.”

As usual, Ziggy narrows his eyes, trying to guess how much of what he has just said is true. “I won’t tell you how pissed off the Commander was.”

“Maybe we should write this down. I think it’s a notable first.”

“Shut up for a minute and listen to me, Ray. I’m trying to tell you that it was good work, regardless of what anyone else might have to say about it. A hard job done nice and quick and by the book. Most of the system vets would have written off the hardware and let it go at that. Don’t want to inconvenience the captain, you understand.” All along, Ziggy continues his examination of the rat, though to Ray, it looked more like the two of them were playing some arcane version of pat-a-cake. “Do you know why I give you the type of job orders I do, Ray?”

Ray chews his lip thoughtfully, then says, “Because you hate me? Because you know I don’t have a permanent berth and need to stay in your good graces if I want a job next time out? Or maybe just because I’m gullible.”

He grins widely, but Ziggy only shakes his head.

“It’s because you know how to treat the hardware, son. You’ve got the right priorities and you make the right decisions under pressure. You do your job without any fuss and without screwing around with the politics. The other vets don’t seem to see the situation with the correct level of clarity.”

“Bunch of pussies.” Ray makes sure to crack the smile a bit wider. “Does that mean I can have your job when you quit?”

“I don’t think so.”

At least they’ve cleared that up. “Well, thanks for the pep talk, boss. It’s good to know I’m appreciated.”

Ziggy hauls himself back to his feet, once more the scowling, hand-on-hip administrative juggernaut. He sighs heavily, as though their interaction has taxed the reserves of patience he was only pretending to possess.

“Don’t take the rat uplevel.”

“Right. Understood.”

“I’m telling you.”

“I’m listening. Complete focus on my end.”

Ziggy rolls his eyes and flips subjects, some rogue neuron in his brain having misfired and convinced him without any evidence or historical proof to the contrary that Ray is actually going to do what he says.

“Nina made some cookies for you.”

“Your wife likes me. She thinks I’m hot.”

“She thinks you need someone to take care of you so you don’t starve.”

“As far as women are concerned, that’s like the same difference, man.”

“You can pick them up when you’ve logged out for the night. I’ll leave them sitting on my desk.”

The conversation over, Ziggy wanders back into his office and closes the door so he can maintain the illusion that he’s about to be obeyed. Ray watches him go, contemplating the door for several seconds in silence. Nomar gives him only that long before more trouser tugging ensues.

Ray winks at the rat. “Lunch, you say? Sure, let’s go.”

No garden, but there was food–from the basic federal protein paste dispenser available to all passengers and crew at no cost, to the private vendors who had leased ship space and paid a tonnage fee for their business stock of supplies. Mr. Wu’s Taste of the Orient. Li Nan’s Old American Cuisine. The Poultry Hut. An endless succession of franchise burger stands and interstate off-ramp staples. Most of these were permanent berths, as much a part of the Paraclete ecosystem as the engineers, officers, soldiers and crew. There were worse business propositions in the galaxy than having six or seven thousand guaranteed customers for six solid months. Check that: six or seven thousand reasonably wealthy customers, given that they could afford passage on a ship of Paraclete’s class in the first place.

Ray swaps a half hour of Nomar’s waste processing acumen for a leftover calzone at Frankie V’s Sicilian Connection, an undocumented arrangement Frankie has made with most of the system vets to save on disposal fees. Afterwards, he and Nomar spend an hour following the curve of the main concourse around the forward hull of the ship.

Here, the infrastructure resembles not so much Paraclete’s primary mission as a military vessel as it does a cheap knock off of a Singapore hotel specializing in upper class business travelers. Lots of comfortable looking couches in muted pastels, one-stop data kiosks, massive jumbotron media feeds beamed directly from satellites and relay beacons from any of the six broadcasting star systems a passenger might have a remote interest in. The public screens are inevitably tuned to financial market reports or stations dedicated to sporting minutiae or the occasional hard core pornography signal when rambunctious teenagers happen to be in the vicinity. Ray supposes this says something revelatory about the nature of the Garden Level clientele.

Given that it’s something like 10:00 p.m. Greenwich/Terran, Ray and Nomar have the high ceilings and fashionably carpeted runways of the concourse to themselves. Those passengers who aren’t performing their nightly ablutions are ensconced uplevel in the Network Control hub finalizing their instructions for associates and delegates regarding the next day’s financial transactions before the batch transmission deadline.

Like most rats, Nomar is taking advantage of the decreased traffic to make an ass of himself. He spends several minutes tracking pheromone trails, following them to locked doors, which he proceeds to sniff beneath and around, then scratch at until Ray hisses at him to stop. Where he finds actual human beings, he can’t resist the urge to nuzzle legs and sensor whip the soles of shoes. People are a mélange of scents and excretions, bacteria and exotic chemical processes the rats find endlessly fascinating. Fortunately, Nomar is exotic enough in his own right that the passengers accept his probing with well-mannered smiles–and Nomar responds with a well-mannered willingness to be petted and patted and to preen on command. It is part of his core programming to behave nothing like the rat population of which he is a mechanical simulacrum, but he does a passable job of imitating a moderately intelligent lap dog.

An hour later, when Ray would like to be swinging back toward Frankie V’s for a beer or two and maybe a fresh biscotti, they’re standing amidships in the Grande Vista Solarium just outside the velvet lined doors of Madame Trousseau’s Galactic Theatre. Ray leans out over the railing where he can observe a two hundred meter scalloped cross-section of the thirty levels above and below. Most of them have been powered down by Environmental Control to simulate late evening, close-of-business-hours inactivity. From this vantage point, if he cranes his neck, he can see all the way up to the plastisheen observation dome that pokes from the ship’s outer hull like an opalescent pimple. He doesn’t do this anymore, because even at relativistic velocities, the starfield doesn’t change enough to be noteworthy.

Nomar has discovered some sort of sensory nirvana here. He skitters back and forth from pheromone trail to chemical signature, his eyes bright and sensor whip dangling greedily from between his jaws. Periodically, he stops and snuffles at a particularly interesting patch of carpet, and attempts to dig out a few fibers for further study or simple, parameter-driven hoarding. He aims an almost constant barrage of chirps and whistles and chuttering observations in Ray’s direction, to the point that Ray almost feels guilty for not being able to understand and share in his excitement.

The floor in the vicinity of the Madame Trousseau’s is vibrating with sonic pressure. Ray can feel the heavy beat of kettledrums rolling up from the deck into his calves. Through the theater doors, he detects the occasional slap of cymbals or the fine, low hum of orchestral strings. After a few minutes, there’s silence, then a burst of applause whose thunderous sincerity suggests the performance wasn’t a canned holo from the ship’s data library. Either that or the Madame was augmenting the response track to provide her customers with the subliminal cue that they’d gotten their monies worth. It would not have been the first time

Moments later, the grand, crimson velvet doors are flung open by a uniformed usher and the exodus of the Beautiful People of the Garden Level begins. Ray just has time to scoop Nomar out of the way before he tears off to promiscuously lick and fondle the cultured, blue-haired biddies on their way to late teas and private suites and upper echelon gossip. He stakes out a patch against the railing, as far from the herd as he can manage, and sets Nomar down so he’s out of range of immediate notice. He presses the heel of his boot against Nomar’s spinal beam to hold him in place. The rat takes the hint and waits.

“I hope you’re not hurting him.”

If he worked hard at it, Ray could pretend this comment was directed at someone else. He makes a big show of flicking his eyes back and forth around the concourse, busily examining everything at once and nothing in particular. A man with a rat underfoot could get into some serious trouble for casually interacting with Garden-class passengers.

“Sir?”

But someone is determined not to be ignored, it seems. Ray scans the thinning crowd, spots the woman approaching from two meters away. She is blond, twentyish, with wide blue eyes–incandescent in a green silk shift that shows him the top of her pale breasts and the athletic curves of her legs. She is also smiling at him, that sort of glib and mannered expression only the blindingly attractive and socially adept can carry off.

And she is, in fact, stunning.

“I do hope you’re not hurting him,” she says again, close to him now.

Ray swallows hard at a sudden dryness in his throat. “Who?”

“Your animal. The one you’re standing on.”

“He’s a drone, ma’am. No pain sensors.” To prove it, Ray taps his foot along Nomar’s back, producing a dull, metallic clang. Nomar pipes up at him curiously, the way you’d expect a kid to ask what it is you wanted after you’d tapped him on the shoulder a dozen or so times.

The girl bends toward Nomar to confirm his lack of sensitivity to physical abuse. Given the angle, Ray tries admirably not to look down the front of her dress, fully aware that if he chose to look, he could probably see all the way down to her belly button. Amazing.

Nomar catches a faint tickle of her chemical signature, and lifts his head, sensor whip poised, but only gets off a strangled whistle of interrogation. Ray experiences a horrified vision of Nomar lapping his cognate tongue from her collar bone to solar plexus and applies an extra dose of pressure. Nomar backs off at once. He’s not stupid. He knows when he’s being advised to activate his best behavior sub-routines.

“He doesn’t look very happy,” the girl says.

“The rats are curious sorts, and they’re really only happy when they’re satisfying that urge. Unfortunately, their methods are invasive in a way that most people find pretty aggravating.”

She leans back warily, lifting her face toward Ray. “Oh, is he dangerous?”

“No. Just desperately annoying when he wants to be. The truth is, they’re pretty much just fancy assed calculators.”

With an amused giggle, she rises up again. Her laugh has the quality of tinkling glass. “You’re part of the engineering crew, yes?”

“Good guess.”

“Are you on duty? You and your pet?”

Ray considers the stained coveralls he’s been wearing since his vent expedition. “I suppose I look a little underdressed for the occasion. A night at the theatre, I mean.”

“You’re actually quite grubby.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, yes.”

A flush of embarrassment creeps into her cheeks. “I’m sorry. That would be my foot in my mouth.” By way of apology, she adds, “My name is Emma. Emma Whiston.”

She extends her hand, knuckles up. Ray isn’t certain if he is supposed to kiss it like an actor in a movie, so he settles on a gentle, if awkward squeeze.

“I’m Ray.”

“Engineer Ray?”

“Ray the systems vet.”

A crease develops in her brow. “Oh, you’ve been at it a while, then.”

“Actually, no–oh, you mean–sorry. Hardware Systems Technician, First Class, ma’am. The geeks–that is to say, the physical engineers–call us veterinarians, because we maintain the rats. Um, the drones. It’s an old joke.”

“That’s clever.” She says it in a way that makes him actually believe her. “Do you have a last name, Ray?”

“Marlowe. With an ‘e’.”

“Like the playwright.”

“More like the detective.”

“How intriguing! And are you hard-boiled, Mr. Marlowe?”

“More that than I am likely to be making deals with the devil, ma’am.”

Again with the precocious spill of laughter. The girl’s eyes seem wider than ever, her pupils perfect circles the color of glacial ice. “Would you and your friend like to take me out for a drink, Ray? I’d like you to ask me.”

She moves into his space, and he can smell her skin, a scent like cinnamon and expensive soap. Ray swallows hard against a sudden constriction of his throat. “Nice girls don’t usually go out in public with a rat.”

“Whoever said I was a nice girl?”

Her grin is enticing, wicked, reminds him that he could have sworn he’d just said he didn’t make deals with devils.

“I’m not really in a position…” he starts lamely. This is considerably too fast for his taste. He thinks she might be flirting with him, toying with him, but he can’t be certain. Unless nudity is involved, Ray’s sensitivity to flirtation in generally is dreadfully inadequate. “I mean, I’m on duty until 6:00 Greenwich. I’m sorry.”

And he is. Truly. Deeply.

But she dismisses him with a flick of her head, what amounts to an effete shrug. “I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”

Emma Whiston glances back over her shoulder, and Ray notices for the first time the man leaning against the wall by the theater doors. Dark haired, brooding, thin and rangy and cataclysmically poetic, like a walking impersonation of Percy Shelley. He is smoking a cigarette, assuming a casual pose, but the knotted muscles of his jaw and the almost frenetic way he flips his ashes into the can suggest a titanic effort to hide his impatience.

Oops, Ray thinks, and discovers that he absolutely, viscerally hates this guy. Hates him.

Emma winks at him. “My handler is waiting. My brother, that is. You were this close to saving me from him. Some hero you turned out to be.”

“Next time I’ll be sure to pack my shining armor.”

But she arches an eyebrow. “What would possibly make you think there will be a next time?”

I’d like there to be a next time. Thinks it, but doesn’t say it. He knows better. Who is this woman?

Like that, she spins away from him and is gone without another word, leaving her escort to chase after her.

And Ray to watch her until she disappears around the curve of the concourse. To Nomar, he says: “I hope you got that, buddy, because I’m fairly certain it went straight over my head.”

Nomar chitters a response that sounds something like commiseration.

Unfortunately, misapprehension of the precise agenda Ms. Emma Whiston might have had in mind is the least of his problems.

Because suddenly, there is Commander Sorensen in Madame Trousseau’s doorway. Paraclete’s captain has just said something witty to the usher, or at least something the usher determined was best accepted as a witticism, because he’s giving up one of those polite laughs meant to indicate that he’d be happier if everyone just left him alone.

Sorensen is flanked by his First Mate and Security Chief, all three of them stiff and formally resplendent in blue dress uniforms. The captain dresses this way whenever he descends below the Bridge Deck, as though he’s afraid no one will recognize him if he’s out of uniform. Or more probably, that some low level wiseass will be tempted to ignore his direct orders if there isn’t a chestload of brass and medals and epaulets to back them up.

Chief Becker makes brief eye contact with Ray, then immediately engages in an obvious attempt to steer Paraclete’s captain away, going so far as to place his hand on the senior officer’s arm. But it’s too late. Sorensen spots Ray, spots Nomar, and flares from jovial ship’s host to deranged extrasolar mariner in a space of time so brief it can only be measured in wavelengths of light. His cheeks blossom an ugly shade of crimson. He is, Ray observes, actually trembling with fury. This is amusing only in the most abstract of senses.

“Marlowe!” Sorensen barks, not even bothering to cross the concourse before the verbal undressing begins.

Ray jumps to attention and offers a salute that quite possibly qualifies as the worst in documented military history. As if that matters at this point.

Sorensen’s glare is piercing. It rolls up from the rat beneath his boot, takes in the grime streaked coveralls and Ray’s general hygienic neglect, up and up to Ray’s unkempt hair, lack of crewman’s badge, etc., etc. Just behind his eyes Ray can almost see a scrolling list of the precise ship’s policy directives, verbal or written orders and maritime codes of conduct he has violated by his mere appearance. He does his best not to wilt, but it’s really just a matter of waiting for the explosion.

“That’s your drone, I assume, mister?”

Sorensen wants him to deny it, to come up with some plausible excuse for having defied a direct order. It’s obvious from his tone. Something along the lines of: No, nope, not at all. I was just retrieving this one for maintenance. Bad bit of navigational code and all that. But Ray just isn’t up to it.

“I was field testing the equipment.”

It takes a visible effort for Sorensen to keep from dumping about a liter of accelerant on his already dangerously short fuse. “You’ll meet me in my Ready Room, Mr. Marlowe–in five minutes. That should give you just enough time to do something with that drone so I don’t have to see it on or about your person ever again. Are we clear?”

“Yes.”

Seething, chest expanding. “Yes?”

Ray gets the hint, nods. “Yes, sir.”

“If you’re not there in five minutes, I’ll dispatch Chief Becker to track you down–with shackles in hand. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

Sorensen stalks off like a man reciting the combination on his gun safe, dragging his lieutenants behind him.

Ray watches him go, thinking: Rats.

***

He locks Nomar in the shop where (theoretically) he’ll manage to stay out of trouble, then catches the nearest speed lift up to the bridge. The command module is an unattractive bulge on the outer skin of what happens to be a bulbous, unattractive ship. Paraclete resembles a battle scarred narwhal more than the sleek and sexy rockets people generally associated with space craft. Casual observers tend to agree that it has lumps in all the wrong places, ridges where there should be planes. It’s like a high school kid’s first experiments with a battered old jalopy and an industrial sized bucket of bondo.

It is a starship straight from the twisted and lumbering imagination of Bosch.

This is perhaps not surprising given that Paraclete is not designed to slice a clean and brilliant swath through relativistic space, but to trundle along its shipping lanes, to creep into its secret places, to establish contact with hostile elements it might find there and blast the spunky bits out of them. In that light, Paraclete has also been styled as the most secure passenger liner in the history of human transport.

Ray exits the lift doors and takes a left hand turn away from the main bridge. Here there’s a small corridor, at the end of which is a door that he enters without bothering to knock. Becker is there, holding the door ajar as if he was just about to leave. He spots Ray and gives him a look that might be relief. Or it might be more akin to a you are such a tool sentiment. Becker has one of those inscrutable faces that can be difficult to read.

Ray brushes past him and into the captain’s ready room. He likes it here. Sorensen is a man of refined taste, who knows how to walk the line between spartan and elegant. There’s a polished mahogany table with comfortable cloth chairs in the center of the room. The opposite wall is a single sheet of industrial plastisheen, stronger than flexsteel, but completely transparent. The star field beyond creates a sobering backdrop, transmits a sense of transience and insignificance to the observer that is no doubt purposeful. To the left is Sorensen’s massive antique desk, skillfully modified to contain the latest model data terminal. Behind, there’s an expansive wet bar mounted by a wide mirror, so Sorensen can mix drinks for his guests without having to break eye contact.

Ray does not expect the captain to offer him a drink.

Sorensen sits at the conference table rather than behind his desk, which might have seemed significant if Ray wasn’t expecting it. He doesn’t acknowledge Ray’s arrival, but Becker is there with his hand on Ray’s shoulder, guiding him into the nearest chair–which happens, probably not by chance, to be opposite the captain.

Ray realizes the lack of greeting isn’t Sorensen’s brusque attempt at a slight. He’s peering not at the table, but through a clouded glass window at a recessed terminal screen. Every few moments, the ridges of his brow contract as he views something of interest, or perhaps something which troubles him. These things may or may not have anything to do with Ray. Commanding a starship between ports of call is a taxing and time intensive business under the best of circumstances, even when one doesn’t have some low-level muckaluck lugubriously defying your direct orders.

Finally, the captain snorts and raises his eyes. He fixes Ray with a glare that is both fierce and unhappy.

“Why are you such a pain in my ass, Marlowe?” There’s an uncomfortable pause during which Ray tries to decide if the question was rhetorical. Sorensen grunts, pretending to remember his manners now that he’s gotten to say what was really on his mind. “Do you want a drink? I want a drink.”

Ray accepts with a nod. Immediately, Becker is up and crossing over to the bar. “Scotch, straight and vodka with lime. I got it.”

Sorensen murmurs his thanks, then turns his full attention back to Ray. “You’re starting to make me look bad in front of the crew. When you flout my direct orders, people expect me to do something about it. When I don’t seem to do anything, they want to know why. Discipline is all that holds a ship together, and you’re eroding my authority to enforce that discipline.”

“I’m not the one who issued a questionable policy memo in a fit of pique,” Ray says flatly.

On cue, Sorensen starts to rub his temples in small but intense clockwise revolutions. He might as well have been saying, what did I do to deserve this?

Ray gives him a thin smile that surrenders exactly no terrain in this ongoing argument. “I’ve done my best to maintain the appearance of compliance, Commander, and at some expenditure of personal effort, I might add. Entire systems had to be rerouted and drones manually recoded. I’m three days and a dozen terabytes of data behind in terms of analysis. There’s a whole litany of changes I’ve enacted and schedules I’ve thrown off for your sake if you want to hear the gory details of it.”

“Thank you, no. I want to be kept in the dark as much as possible. “

But Ray presses him. “Unfortunately, some excursions are still unavoidable. I’ve got to have the coverage.”

Sorensen waves off his explanations. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It was a childish gesture.”

“I understand. These aren’t the optimum conditions for any of us.”

“I don’t want this spook operation taking over my ship,” he snaps back, but it was too weak to be offensive. Six months of snapping that had proven pointless had worn most of the real protest out of him. By this late in the game, Sorensen’s crankiness is barely a shadow of its previous substance. “I’m a cranky old bastard, Mr. Marlowe. I’ve earned the right to be that way, frankly. It rankles me to have the FSA plant a civilian investigator on my vessel–a civilian with orders that supersede Paraclete’s primary mission. So, when I say that you are a pain in my ass, sir, you understand that I mean no personal offense, even if you do happen to be the worst crewman ever to wear the uniform.”

“Commander, I do believe you’re trying to flatter me. Shameless, but effective.”

Becker returns bearing a tray with two glasses. Sorensen can only grin and shake his head in a way that makes it clear this last speech amounted to nothing more than lodging his official complaint of the situation once again for the ship’s crypto-locked data core–as if he hadn’t already done it dozens of times. Redundancy never hurt anybody. He grabs the tumbler offered to him almost greedily and immediately shoots half of the scotch in one swallow. He grunts with distinct pleasure as it goes down, and the grin is larger and more sincere when he is done.

In turn, Ray sips his vodka and allows the interruption to help them shift gears. He marks that Becker hasn’t mixed anything for himself. The Chief is a vocal and infamous teetotaler. He is also, Ray knows, a recovering alcoholic trying to salvage some respectability out of his career on what is most likely his last tour of duty.

Sorensen is likeable enough. Tall and broad shouldered, well into his forties, but fit enough to whip a man half his age. His blond hair is neither thinning nor showing signs of tending toward gray. He is, in short, a Viking cliché–all the way down to his fiery temper and questionable impulse control. He is also a brilliant naval tactician and has won enough battle citations that the shipping freight from Terra to deliver his medals alone would have bankrupted a small country. He has also been, at least in Ray’s estimation, a model of restraint given the duress the FSA had placed him under. Everything he said was true, or accurate enough that Ray sometimes wishes he could do a better job of playing the disciplined crewman’s role. Unfortunately, it just isn’t in him. Couldn’t muster the energy for it if he had to. Somewhere in his personnel file, buried in a sealed vault deep underground beneath a federal agency that probably didn’t officially exist, he was fairly certain his psych profile contained the words “does not work well in team settings”.

And that was fine with him. He isn’t playing a team game.

His glass drained, Sorensen slaps it against the tabletop like a man summoning his resolve. “Now that we’ve got the preliminaries out of the way…”

“Shop,” Ray finishes his thought. “Let’s talk shop.”

He pauses a few moments to give Becker a chance to retreat to the captain’s desk and disable the data core’s automatic recording system.

After a few moments, Becker says, “Go ahead.”

“I looked into the shipping inconsistencies you uncovered from the cargo manifest. I would tend to agree that one or more of your passenger cliques did indeed smuggle contraband of some sort on board. I’ve had the drones scouring the storage bays for indications of explosive or armament residue, but that search has come up empty at this point. My suspicion is that any smuggling was of a mundane nature–valuables, precious metals, items that can be exchanged for currency–that these folks elected not to add to their customs declarations. Becker can follow up on that.”

Sorensen flaps his hand impatiently. “Bah. We’ll assume they bought off the freight companies rather than Paraclete’s people. I don’t need to cause a row this close to port.”

“That works for me,” Ray agrees. “I’d prefer to avoid any actions that would generate hostility between the passengers and the crew at this point. I’m mostly certain I can confirm the identities of the entire passenger manifest, minus a few of your more reclusive guests. I’ve got positive pheromone matches for all the early suspects, and their chem signatures appear to match with the samples logged in the boarding check files. The software hacks we discussed a few weeks ago to make the drones behave less offensively seem to have alleviated potential clashes with outraged guests, either that or they’ve just abandoned hopes of being left alone. If anything, I may have erred on the side of cuteness since I seem to be missing three drones at the moment.” Ray shrugs off the lost assets to show that he sees nothing nefarious in their disappearance. “What can I say, kids seem to have a thing for rats.”

Sorensen seems to worry less about the missing drones than the implications of his survey. “But that means the passengers are all who they appear to be–and who they say they are. What does that leave us? One of the franchises?”

Ray shakes his head, frowning. “Security Chief Becker’s background checks and pre-boarding examinations were more than thorough, Commander. If Lilaiken extremists have infiltrated this vessel, it wasn’t via that channel.”

“That isn’t to say they’re all doing business strictly above board,” Becker says carefully. “Just that it’s something other than weapons they’re peddling on the side.”

Sorensen scowls, indicating he has no current interest in pursuing those topics. “So we’ve cleared the passengers and the imported labor. God knows we’ve cleared the crew. What does that leave?” Here, the scowl deepens, mostly in Ray’s direction. “What does that leave except bad intelligence, Mr. Marlowe? Other than a completely unwarranted load of aggravation your presence has bid me to endure for the last six months?”

“What I’m saying is that the identities of the passengers have been confirmed. That does not rule out the possibility of sleeper agents or Lilaiken sympathizers awaiting instructions from terrorist controls. It is terribly complex system, trying to keep track of so many people, trying to keep profile databases spread out over dozens of worlds and billions of people and the latest intelligence from a score of covert service branches in any way in some form of coherence, especially while attempting to maintain the illusion that basic privacy rights still exist. I won’t be fully satisfied that we’ve avoided hostile Lilaiken action until we’re back in Terran solar space. But, given the preliminary data, I would think, captain, that you’d be happy to know your vessel was not one that may have been infiltrated.”

Sorensen mutters something Ray doesn’t hear, insulted. “You’d think wrong, then. What that means is that it isn’t Paraclete this time, on this run. Which means it might be us the next time, or the time after that, or as soon as we’ve ceased to pay as careful attention as we ought to be. I won’t be happy until we’ve tracked down the last of these criminals and marooned them on an asteroid pointed at the sun.”

“Understood, sir. And I appreciate it, believe me.” Both the sentiment, in fact, and the subtle expression of the same outrage felt by most captains throughout the deep space fleet.

For almost three years, radical Lilaiken separatists had been abusing the shipping lanes between Alamai Plantation and the frontier colonies, fomenting insurrection against the rule of the Federal Space Administration and the military apparatus in general. Most of their activities took the form of munitions transfers to amenable elements on backwater planets like Frejdan, Orduvai and Sheridan Minor. These had essentially reduced those colonies to a succession of armed camps divided between federally controlled mining stations and outlying tenement villages both more occupied with sniping forays than long term settlement.

Over the last year, a splinter group within the Lilaiken movement had taken the struggle to a new level, content not only with using the space administration’s fleet as unconscious ferrymen, but determined to escalate the burgeoning hostilities from a series of border police actions to outright war between the inner and outer worlds. Beginning last May, over a span of six months, three Goliath class military transports–Hegemony, Asp and Gorgon–had exploded without apparent cause after scheduled shipping drops to the frontier systems, at a cost of eighteen thousand hands and an additional nine thousand passengers.

Enough was known about the Lilaiken extremist movement and its leadership to establish a preliminary list of suspects, but details were scarce beyond that. The group’s cell structure had proved largely impenetrable and reasonably waterproof. The mechanism of destruction that had been leveled against the Goliath ships was still unknown, and it was the sheer dearth of facts that rendered the attacks chillingly personal to men like Sorensen. To be driven like a mule, like some petty, third world rebel’s bitch, was bad enough–to implode in the frozen vacuum of space as someone else’s political message was worse, unconscionable.

And as Paraclete decelerated toward New Holyoke now–the absolute frontier of frontier space, Ray feels the pressure of being absolutely certain he hasn’t missed anything that would imperil the ship. With so little being known about this new breed of Lilaikens, the potential for error was unacceptably high. Almost as lofty as the consequences of failure.

Ray continues, “You should also be aware that your Van Nuys reactor emissions are clean. The disaster reconstruction team shared with myself and my counterparts on the Everpresent and the Layla Shy the current hypothesis that the outworld space events all indicated some form of radical reactor failure. Since they felt like they could rule out any sort of explosive device, they’re working with the assumption that destabilizing isotopes were introduced to the core by some at this point unknown vector. I can’t send a drone into the core itself, obviously, but I did loose one in the venting chute to see what might come bubbling up. That particular experiment has been prematurely curtailed by some unforeseen mechanical difficulties, but I gathered enough raw data to issue you a clean bill of health.”

“Your little experiment cost the FSA about a billion dollars in overheated electronics hardware, Mr. Marlowe.”

Shrugging, Ray responds, “When I became aware of the malfunction, I had to initiate retrieval immediately. I couldn’t run the risk that another technician would be assigned to the task. Chief Zighowser is a savvy enough hardware hacker to recognize that someone had been tampering with the drone.”

Sorensen smiles thinly. “Just remember how vital that risk was when the FSA presents your agency with the bill.”

“As the updates come in, I’ll probably have to repeat the experiment–in the event that the isotope list changes.”

“I understand, though I’ll appreciate a concerted effort to avoid a reprise of today’s events.”

“Certainly.”

The captain nods his approval. “We’ll arrange another meeting next week, hopefully under circumstances that don’t require me to convince my First Mate that I’ve had to bust your ass yet again. Unless you’ve got something else to add, that is.”

But Ray is finished, and he says so. Under normal circumstances, he could have expected Sorensen to reciprocate with the latest military intelligence that might have a bearing on his investigation, but Commander Sorensen generally delegated those duties to Becker, who had the freedom of movement to contact Ray in a timely and inconspicuous fashion as the need arose.

Sorensen climbs out of his chair. “Consider me placated once again, Mr. Marlowe. Please have the courtesy to remember to appear contrite on your way out.”

***

Ray typically spends what he considers to be an inordinate amount of time trying not to freak out. In spite of any personal admiration he might feel for Commander Sorensen, this is part of the reason he dreads their one-on-two little confabs. Sorensen never fails to leave him feeling as though he’s a slipshod revelation from jumping right out of his skin.

Why? Because Ray is not a spook. Not now, never has been. That Sorensen takes his spook-ability for granted is ethically problematic. It has led over time to a troubling divergence of understanding. It has created a webwork of assumptions and inconsistencies. Basic ones, like the unstated belief that even his name, Ray Marlowe, is a legend, a fabrication, a secure identity created solely for the job. Things like this freak Ray out to no end–partially because it makes him uncomfortable to maintain a blatant façade with an officer of Sorensen’s magnitude, partially because it rails against every value with which he has been inculcated. But mostly because he worries that Sorensen thinks of him as a wild card, as a shadow without substance. A man with an agenda outside of and possibly contrary to the mission given to Paraclete.

Consequently, everything Ray says becomes subject to doubt. If Sorensen can’t believe even that Ray is who he says he is, he cannot be legitimately expected to take his reports at face value. And doubt is the singularity in which truth perishes.

Everything else spins off like a spider’s web from that that axis.

Frex, contrary to Commander Sorensen’s esteemed opinion Ray is not a civilian, though he has no definite rank and does not appear in the published or internal records of military hierarchy. He has, in fact, been a Marine, may still be a Marine actually. He’s a little fuzzy on the details of his discharge or lack thereof himself–but as long as the numbers in his bank account change on a semi-regular basis, he doesn’t ask and doesn’t particularly care. What he does now is better than dodging Russoturk depleted uranium bullets and humping back and forth over sand dunes in the New Mesopotamian Emirate, which is exactly what he was doing prior to masquerading as an alphabet intelligence agency spy.

The truth is that he works for the FSA just like Sorensen and the rest of Paraclete’s crew. They’re Exploration and Enforcement Division, and he’s Criminal Investigations Unit. The critical difference between these two departments is that everyone has heard of the EED because it governs much of the intergalactic migration policy and economic development interests on authority practically derived from its possession of a copious number of thirty inch matter cannons and legally supported by a Terran Congressional Forum mandate that is almost nine decades old. The CIU on the other hand, nobody has heard of. Few people even have an inkling that such a department exists. The names of all the FSA officials who can put an acronym to it and identify the individuals assigned to it would fit in one column on one side of a sheet of notebook paper.

But they’re the top names. Names that are preceded by titles like Admiral, Mr. Director and Commander-in-Chief.

What this means is that Ray could run around all day long telling people he was a CIU operative and nothing would happen, except maybe his getting tossed into psychiatric restraints for being a blithering idiot. (It also meant that if he found himself in neck-deep you-name-it peril, he could holler all he wanted that he was CIU and expect no kind of help at all. This was another one of those bits that tended to leave him feeling freaked out. If deception wasn’t the name of the game, then it must be improvisation.)

It has occurred to him before that the whole concept of the CIU might be a fabrication constructed solely for his benefit. He’s never been to the CIU complex, doesn’t have an office or even a desk there that he’s aware of. Could not, in fact, actually find it if ordered to report there. It is reasonable to assume that a branch of the service as decentralized and schizophrenically paranoid as the CIU doesn’t even have an office or a support staff or a human resources department or employees that perform any of the mundane tasks which occupy ninety-five percent of most federal departments. Ray thinks it’s probably even reasonable to assume that the CIU borrows EED support staff to fill these needs, then either drugs them into a brain twisting stupor so they don’t remember having done it, or simply dispatches them outright and arranges to have the bodies jettisoned into unlikely corners of international space.

The fact that he is kept in fairly regular work on one operation or another forces him to assume that someone with a large head and high IQ and color coordinated pocket protectors sits around creating potential logistical nightmares of secrecy and intrigue just to get him his orders. He has no idea how they cut through the massive wall of bureaucratic stupidity to get him placed on a starship, but it probably involves hostages, exchanges of gunfire and gaggles of widows manufactured solely for his benefit.

The EED does all the headline inciting things that keep a far flung human society functioning with some modicum of order and civility. The CIU does all the things they can’t. Like tracking down Lilaiken terrorists in an extremely low profile way and denying them the benefit of a fair trial. Like investigating rogue starship captains and arranging retirement settlements that won’t damage the EED’s or the FSA’s reputation in such a way that it would destabilize governments. Ray and his cohorts are the guys they send after you when they don’t want you to know you’re being pursued until after you’re already dead.

The fact that they frequently do spooky types of things is completely incidental.

Ray remains where he is for some time, canoodling, pressing his palms flat against his temples as if that will contain the throbbing. His blood streams backward into his hair, runs into his ears. It drips off his earlobes and strikes the deck with a fearsomely regular pfft, pfft, pfft that suggests he should probably seek some sort of medical attention.

“Medic!” he mutters with much less intensity than he should. It doesn’t matter. Whisper or roar, the medics never come. Medics are for men in the regular infantry, for salving wounds inflicted during the charges of heroic light brigades. In his case, medics come only to collect dog tags and incriminating papers and highly classified field weapons that the government doesn’t want to let fall into the hands of the enemy. This is completely beside the fact that any man who screams for a medic on the battlefield runs a 2:1 chance of attracting a coup de grace opening of the third eye from a Russoturk crawler rather than the expected course of triage, air evac to Wadi E’lukar, pretty and dark eyed Israeli nurses for two months, then the long, slow flight home to a hero’s welcome and celebratory rural American barbecue.

Ray has seen Tac Sergeant McCoy, his gut wounds spurting an eye-popping geyser of blood, advise a field of corpses: Just rub some sand on it, it’ll be fine. Just rub some sand on it. The same way Ray’s coach in pony league baseball might have extolled the medicinal value of infield dirt. On a muggy Indiana summer night, infield dirt was a panacea for dings on the wrist, bruises on cheeks and lips swollen from the impact of a baseball’s bad bounce–all of which came frequently off the rain-cratered community ball diamond. Rub some dirt on it, Ray! Heart of their lineup’s due, boy! Quit whining and get back to third base before your momma sees you crying!

McCoy would’ve been a great baseball coach. If he hadn’t been dead, of course. McCoy and Lance Corporal Lilly and Lieutenant (Hoo-ah!) Wendell Cain and–

Screw it. He’s not going to go there today.

It’s just after six Greenwich. Ray figures that’s as good a time to get up as any. Lying here certainly isn’t doing him any good. He locates some disinfectant cream and a tube of flesh toned dermaplast bandage paste in his night stand, then wanders into the head. He scrubs the wound on his forehead with cold water.

The rills and crimson contrails generated by his seeping blood look uncannily like the flowing, graceful Arabic script he used to see on posters in Tehran and Baghdad, or the exquisite handwriting of lower level Kurd functionaries on border documents. This had always impressed him mightily, this overt attention to the written word. Long after the Western world had replaced it’s blocky and obtuse written characters with blocky and obtuse typographical characters (and ultimately, blocky and obtuse pixel patterns on terminal screens), the Arabs held fast to sentences that flowed like sweet water across a cream colored page. Every document was a work of art, every writer an Irish monk laboring over a perfect folio of sacred text. Because he had never bothered to learn Arabic, Ray had wondered if it was beautiful to him because he could not read it, or in spite of it. Words outside the context of meaning, like a Tibetan Buddhist’s mandala. Words as objects rather than memes, where content was determined by the eye of the beholder rather than the intent of the artist, the communicator.

In February, what, four years ago, he and Corporal Isaac Rabin, a Brooklyn Jew–and a fellow Red Sox fan, who by his very loyalty proved he knew something about Diasporic existential isolation–spent a weekender pass in Djubruk, Chechnya. The Las Vegas of the Steppes as it was styled, despite the fact that it was ringed by mountains and hundreds of kilometers from any actual steppe-like geography but marketed as such because Westerners, particularly Americans, controlled all the money and bore only a passing familiarity with world geography. (And because Asians and to a lesser extent Eastern Europeans still considered the steppe cultures of Attila and the grand Khans to be vaguely, mythically romantic, and assumed the nuances would be universal rather than merely region specific. By their reckoning, it was a set of legends that was at least as compelling as those of the American Old West. This estimation turned out to be so accurate and to hold so much worldwide appeal that it took nothing less than the eruption of the New Mesopotamian Conflict to save Djubruk and its heavily Chinese investors from an inevitable and squalid decline into disaster.)

But in those days, Ray and Isaac had stumbled into what was still a thriving frontier metropolis of neon casinos, front-window strip joints, sickly sweet opium dens and Third World slave brothels. The type of place where fourteen year old sino-afghani whores unzipped your trousers without asking, began sucking your tool right in the middle of the street, then demanded reasonable compensation by way of the universal language–that is, a rusty spike pressed against the tender lump of your scrotum. All the fun and feckless abandon a soldier could ask for, all priced under a dollar…which happened to be Djubruk’s unofficial civic motto.

Anyway, the bright eyed kid sister of one of those miserable street whores had sold Ray a crayon and chalk family rendering for the exorbitant price of sixty-three cents American. Wonderful blues and greens and ubiquitous camel-browns. In the forefront was cock-sucking older sister fellating a stick figure with a prodigious bulge of manhood–sans tetanus inducing spike to generate the illusion of libidinous consent. Smaller, to the left, Ahkira herself in idealized yellow satin pinafore, dark haired and grinning with her one working eye wide in cyclopean wonder and contentment. (Ray is able to recognize all the family members because Ahkira had subtly identified them with names and slender, accusatory arrows pointing. The fellated individual was anonymous, but Ray supposed it was meant to be him, kind of like the memento photographs you could buy from the camera-wielding barbarians manning steel-reinforced bunker kiosks in U.S. amusement parks). Elevated, but clearly behind Ahkira’s sister is the blackened gorgon lump of B’hutuc, resplendent with jagged silver knives, a menacing shadow cast across the domestic tableau. Much less threatening presented here than it would have been having his actual flesh and blood present to oversee the sexual activity with the toothy smile of a midnight horror and the self-interest of a Djubruk pimp.

Ray has kept this picture. It’s in a locker in a lease-by-the-month storage depot outside Indianapolis currently, sealed in vacuum plastic to keep the mice out of it. It is one of his few prized possessions, because when he thinks of it, what he envisions isn’t Ahkira’s turgid world, but the clean and spidery track of her script, the names and arrows. Things of beauty in a world utterly and pathetically wrong, words outside the context of meaning.

This, of course, makes him think of things that are not nearly so pleasant as slave whores and their handicapped siblings, so he finishes up quickly, trying not to examine his features in the mirror as he does so lest darker revelations be found lurking in the bruised pillows beneath his eyes or sprouting like poppies amongst his nose hairs or peeping like prairie dogs from the cavernous pores on the tip of his nose. A man’s body should not become a personal metaphor system for a catalog of bad memories.

Since he has almost six hours before he goes on duty and a starship traveling through the vacuum of space has no regular business hours, Ray decides that it is not insanely early to think about breakfast. He stops in his room to change into khaki cargo pants and a button up civvy style shirt, then whistles for Nomar to follow. By this time, Nomar has lapped up his spilled blood, added the matrix of Ray’s DNA to a cross-referenced internal database, subjected the proteins to a shocking number of enzymes and stored the residual matter in his internal tank (since Ray’s room, unlike waste bins and storage vaults, doesn’t have a standard sewage flume). Nomar streaks past him into the corridor, then prances impatiently, his iridium-alloy paws ticking against the deckplate like hailstones, while Ray secures the door.

After a fairly heated discussion, they manage to more or less agree that they’re both in the mood for something Thai. Thai trash is always a rat favorite, for reasons Ray has never been able to fathom, especially given that Ng Uk-Thong, the Thai franchisee on Paraclete, steadfastly refuses to strike a food-for-labor deal with the system vets. Uk-Thong is probably aware of his favored-nation status among the rat leadership and sees no reason to make compromises with mere carbon-form emissaries. That, or the fact that it is a staple of Thai culture and subsequently its cuisine to believe that anything worth using once is worth recycling for someone else, which is both an example of cost-controlling efficiency and striking cosmopolitanism. As most inexperienced cooks know, a good food processor covers a multitude of culinary sins. The “chefs” at Uk-Thong’s Bangkok House knew it, and they generated very little raw waste as a result.

Ray and Nomar skitter up to the Garden Level, taking advantage of the early hour and the light pedestrian traffic to grab one of the public lifts. Six months out of the hub-city dock at Stratiskaya Daransk, the business travelers have finally accepted the cold fact that regardless of what the financial markets might be doing, Commander Sorensen isn’t going to let them use the broadcast array to triple or quintuple their fortunes until late in the evening. After some initial whining, they’ve adjusted their internal clocks. Now they rise late, plotting their fiscal strategies in the languid hours between noon and six, laying about in their bedclothes until it’s time to assemble in the queue outside the Network Control hub just off the auxiliary communications bridge. They send their wives to theatres and delicately powdered trysts; shoo their kids out to find mischief or personal drugs of choice on the main concourse; drink themselves into a toxic stupor and pass out at their desks, and in the end, it isn’t so much unlike the life they had planetside, just skeltered a few hours.

So at this hour, they encounter mostly children on the prowl for entertainment and crewmen bustling about in the course of their duties. The children range from barely toddling to grim teenagers. They wander the decks in cliques like street gangs transplanted from Buenos Aires’ urban sprawl–angry, bored, chasing after mischief that will most likely end in violence. The fact that they are mostly effete, lily-skinned poshes doesn’t seem to occur to them. At the lowest passenger level, Ray picks up a boisterous tailing of eight year olds, boys and girls, who had been occupied in attempting to disassemble one of the public data kiosks. They are as incorrigible as a tumble of puppies and won’t leave him alone until Nomar has been poked and examined to their satisfaction and subjected to the sort of invasive curiosity that is second nature to a rat, and would probably have done Nomar proud if he hadn’t been its unwilling recipient. When he neither fetches nor jiggers about chasing his tail, the children lose interest and let them pass without further molestation.

Bangkok House is nearly deserted when they arrive. Ng Uk-Thong’s dowdy Brazilian wife, Maria Concita, mans the service counter alone, wrapped in roughly half a kilometer’s worth of floral print sarong and still displaying a length of cleavage that could probably be detected with satellite reconnaissance photography. Business is slow enough that she doesn’t bother to heave her considerable bulk up from the stool behind the cash register, even in order to engage in her legendary hostile and howling management style at the assorted pot clanging/dish dropping /carefully orchestrated chaos that pours forth from the depths of the kitchen area.

Ray blurts out an order for a bland pad kee mao with tofu and a side of plain jasmine rice in between her outbursts of neo-Mexicali pidgin obscenity. (“What was that you wanted?” I have a customer! Hold your tongue, you goat molesting son of pig! “That is the pad kee mao, you say, sir?” Dent another pot, you discharge of an infected mule’s penis, and Gucho will cut your throat with his box knife! I swear it will be so! “Oh, the chicken is so much nicer! Fresh from the flash freeze unit this morning, mister!” You talk of my large ass! I will show you my lesion encrusted, puss-filled diarrheal ass when I stick your head in it! And so on.) Because it is early in the morning, and Ray is both a member of the crew and known to Maria Concita as a customer, she is making a quite an impressive show of restraint. The fact that Ng has learned to keep her away from the knives also helps.

The stir fried noodles and rice arrive in wide crockery bowls decorated with Thai characters but manufactured in an old Irish factory in Queens. Ray retreats with Nomar to the far corner of the Bangkok House’s open air food court, which is separated from the main concourse by a low wall topped with plastic ferns. A few moments later, Maria Concita abandons her station with a frightening leap and thunderous landing that Ray is certain must have shoved Paraclete three degrees off course. She vanishes into the galley, from which a fresh gale of curses and some indiscriminate screaming noises emerge. Then a clatter. Then silence.

This is why Ray always gets the tofu. Never the chicken. Definitely not ever the beef. Never ever, not with what he knows about the latest advances in industrial food processing technology.

Ray stares intensely at his bowl, then out over the nearly empty concourse, determined to notice nothing. Nomar claws his way onto the tabletop and displays a passing interest in the jasmine rice, but mostly picks the cubes of tofu out from among Ray’s forest of noodles.

They eat for several minutes in this disturbing silence while Ray internally debates the wisdom of slinking away before Ng’s wife can return.

He becomes aware of a shadow hanging over him and glances up sharply, anticipating Maria Concita Uk-Thong wielding a frying pan or a stainless steel wok the diameter of Mount Fuji, determined to leave no witnesses. But it is not Frau Uk-Thong, and the dissonance leaves him dazed, his jaw hanging.

Emma Whiston peers down at him, her eyes squeezed into slits, her hands clasped behind her back. She burrows into him with the intensity of a woodland sprite attacking a man who has inadvertently violated a fairy ring.

“Mr. Marlowe,” she says, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were stalking me. I may very well have to report you to your captain for my own protection.”

Ray swallows an asphyxiation inducing lump of noodles and undercooked vegetables. He remembers to close his mouth after a suitably embarrassing pause. Recognizing Emma’s chemical signature, Nomar climbs onto his hind legs and does his best to attract her attention with a frantic forepaw wave–eager, no doubt, for another taste of her. This happens to be something he and Ray have in common, but only because Ray has a documented a weakness for young women in tight cream blouses and short plaid skirts. It’s an old parochial school hang-up.

“I believe I was actually here first, Miss…”

“As if you’ve forgotten my name already!” She makes a delightful show of foot tapping impatience.

“Emma.”

He surprises himself by winking as he says her name.

“I suppose that’s better than nothing. Not exactly proper, mind you, but it shows you have at least half a brain in your head.”

“Do you always insult acquaintances in public restaurants, Miss Whiston?”

“Most always, when it doesn’t suit me to approach them in more direct ways.”

“And that would be how? With a sharp piece of glass jammed into their ribs?”

This tickles her, and she presses a delicate hand over her mouth as she giggles. “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you, Ray? Oh, except you’ve probably got to go on duty soon. Or you’re already on duty because you’re such a conscientious Systems Hardware Technician.”

It was close enough. At least she’d been paying that much attention. She was very pretty, but exhausting. So much unfocused, exuberant energy. Much more exhausting than pretty, really.

“You’re a very odd girl, you know that?”

“I’m eccentric. My entire family is eccentric. We can be that way because we’re wealthy. Unbearably, fabulously wealthy.”

“Because you get paid by the word? Or by the offense?”

Like slamming a door, all the play goes out of her. “You’re not very nice after all, are you?”

Ray returns to his noodles. He doesn’t watch her anymore, though it normally wouldn’t have bothered him to watch her for quite some time–hours and hours, in fact–if she had a volume control. Eventually, when she doesn’t give up and go away, he says, “I’m actually quite nice, when I’m not being verbally assaulted by pretentious little snits, especially when I’m eating breakfast.”

She is silent for a few moments, and Ray congratulates himself smugly. Then sighs. Then feels the imminent psychic slap his mother would have doled out to him had she been standing close enough to hear.

Ugh.

“Would you like to join me?” Ray asks, smiling thinly in defeat.

See, mom? Mom, you know I love you, okay? You know I think you’re the greatest woman to ever walk the face of the earth. You’re the bees knees and all of that. But I’ve got to tell you, really. I’ve killed maybe a hundred men in the last ten years, and I don’t mean shooting at them across three or four hundred meters of sand or picking them off fortifications from behind a sniper’s scope. I mean, I’ve killed them. Face to face, looking into their eyes, sticking sharp things into places they never wanted pointed objects stuck, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t hate any of them, mom. I wasn’t rude to them or inappropriately angry with them or behaving crassly like those filthy Heatherman kids that frisked around at the end of our street. If such a thing can be said, I killed them in a dignified way I thought wouldn’t make you completely ashamed of me. Most of the time, at least.

I’ve been a good son. Really.

So couldn’t you have just backed off for a second and let me be rude to this annoying girl? I would really have liked you to give me a break on this one.

Emma grins back at him, slowly and warily. In a small voice, she says, “I like Thai.”

The lights come on, her stunning blue eyes spring wide, and she’s off again, electric and vibrant and chillingly incandescent. “I adore it, actually.” Ray pushes the chair across the table from him out with his foot and she drops into it, the tide of her words rolling on. “I would have thought you’d be eating American, Ray, a big, strapping farm boy like yourself. You do like to eat American don’t you? Or has your head been turned by foreign…tastes.”

Oh, she was wicked. Delightfully so in some ways, when she didn’t generate in him the urge to strangle her. “What makes you think I’m American.”

“Your accent gives you away. Like mine, I suppose. I’m American, too. Originally, I mean. I was born there.” The smile, the eyes, a wink. “So do you? Do you like American?”

“American food makes me homesick,” he says, which was pretty much true.

Click. Click. Click. Pieces of a puzzle he wasn’t aware he had been assembling drop into place, revealing a landscape that was hauntingly familiar. That Whiston. Those Whistons. Not a disinherited, starfaring branch living off the name and the notoriety, but the actual root of the family tree. It was as if she’d said the magical words Rockefeller or Gates or Primus to a latter day, goggle eyed Horatio Alger protagonist. The air seeps out of Ray’s lungs and doesn’t return for several seconds.

“Please don’t look at me like that, Ray,” Emma says.

A shake of the head. “Like what?”

“Like I’ve tipped my hand and shown you all of my cards.” She knew that he knew, and the plaint in her eyes was suddenly there, as real and naked as tears.

In that instant, he understands much. “How about I just go back to leering when you’re not watching?”

“I’d like that.”

“I’d like that, too, but it isn’t exactly polite, so I won’t. Would you like me to order something for you instead?”

She eyes his bowl without any self-consciousness. “I’ll just take yours, if you’re done.”

This strikes him as odd, given that she could have probably bought Uk-Thong about a billion times over. But he lets it pass without comment and says, “The rat’s been in it.”

It doesn’t appear to bother her. Emma snatches away the noodles, even the fork from his hand. Nomar whistles at them both as if he doesn’t understand the transaction that has just taken place, except for the fact that proper etiquette has relegated him to a rice diet for the rest of the meal.

Ray waits until she is finished. Emma sucks up the last noodle, bending over the bowl just like a kid experiencing spaghetti for the first time, then leans back into the chair. She slumps down with her arms wound over her stomach, her lips curled in contentment. She heaves an impressively satisfied sigh.

She must be all of twenty years old, Ray realizes, if that. He resists the urge to feel like an old man, thinking about what he was doing when he was twenty. Russoturk bullets and all that.

“So, no escort this morning?” He hopes this does not sound like a proposition. Or is it that he thinks he should hope it doesn’t sound this way, rather than actually feeling it?

She is young, yes, but striking. Her legs, long and athletically sculpted, splay out from the side of the table at an attractively obtuse angle. It’s difficult not to stare at them, and at the shortness of her skirt, and on up her lithe torso at the silk blouse with just the right number of buttons unfastened to be provocative on her terms.

Ray isn’t precisely certain what he’s thinking, and he can’t stop to sort it out. She keeps looking at him, her eyes vast and innocent, her expression so open and trusting, it’s completely disarming. Even before New Mes, he’s never seen anything like it, like her.

“Your brother, I mean,” Ray prompts her.

“He sleeps late. It’s a family curse, you know. We have nocturnal habits. Mostly bad ones.”

“Except you.”

“I’ve been forced to cultivate new skills lately. I was in school.”

“On Stratiskaya Daransk?”

Emma nods, but it’s clear the topic is not of particular interest to her. “At the university. And despite my father’s considerable contributions, the esteemed administration couldn’t be persuaded to make even the basic accommodations to my preferred schedule.” She laughs, a clean and pleasant sound, without undertones. “I’m just being silly, of course.”

“And now you’re done with school?”

Her gaze flickers away uncertainly. “My brother was sent to fetch me, to bring me home. My mother is ill. The family needs–oh, you know. Family responsibilities. Frederick still bears the brunt of it, of course, because he is the scion of such a great and noble house, but he can’t care for mother and the charitable trust and the businesses and everything else, even with Amah–” She stops herself abruptly. “It’s boring, Ray. A long and boring story.”

Ray nods. He understands something about exigencies, long and boring, but which remain exigencies nonetheless.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Don’t worry. I’m certain Frederick has already provided the necessary tutors to complete my education. He can’t very well let his little sister be practically a cultural illiterate! That would be so mundane, so crass.”

Ray had actually been thinking about the ailing family matriarch, but he thinks it’s probably best not to clarify the point. Instead, he says, “Well, maybe getting home won’t be so bad. I’m sure there have been some exciting changes in your absence. Outlier colonies tend to ebb and flow rapidly.”

“You’ve been to New Holyoke?”

“No, but I’ve seen other colonies.”

Emma sits up sharply, her features instantly animated. “Then you should let me show you about when we arrive, yes? At least Blackheath Grange. We could discover it together.”

Paraclete will take at least two weeks to take on new stock and fuel, process outgoing passengers and perform the million other numbing tasks required to hurtle her safely back to Alamai Plantation. “If there’s time,” Ray concedes. “There’ll be a ton of things for me to do during docking protocol.”

“But the captain always lets the crew shuttle down to the city for a little while. Always!”

“I’m sure he will, but who knows when that will be? You might be otherwise occupied by the time I’m free.”

She makes snorting noise, as though he’s the one who has insulted her this time. “I’ll lock myself in my tower until you send me word. That way we can discover the Grange together.”

“Now you’re being facetious.”

“I’m not!”

“You won’t lock yourself in a tower.”

She points an accusatory finger at him. “You don’t think I have a tower, do you?”

“I’m sure you do.”

“You filthy, little liar!” Emma explodes into laughter. “Now you must come down. It’s a point of honor that I show you both my city and my tower–and the fact that my word is beyond reproach.”

Ray tries to think of something witty to say, something unembarrassing that will keep up his end of the bargaining, but he can’t help but think that she’s had much more practice at this sort of thing than he has.

This is all well and good, this casual sexual repartee, punctuated by Emma’s aggressive pursuit and frequent surge of pretty laughter. It has an underlying tone of intensity that Ray finds unsettling, but not in an unpleasant way. He is reminded that it has been a number of years since he engaged with a woman on this level, that is to say, on a level in which he wasn’t mentally thumbing through the bills in his wallet or crunching the digits available on his cred account to determine if he could afford actual intercourse or would have to settle for a blow job–a transaction ultimately made that much more dicey by the fact those women generally spoke a brand of broken, transaction-oriented English that was all but unintelligible.

On the other hand, if this is normal, it is a wonder people ever manage to get together.

The unfortunate part about being a soldier, or having been a soldier, is the tendency of the martial life to strip everything of glamour. World travel becomes hurried jaunts in the bellies of a series of noisy and flopping aircraft which transport you to destinations no man in his right mind would choose. Mano-a-mano battlefield glory turns out to be a sweaty, grunting, exhausting affair after which the only thing you feel is either a growing sense of weariness as your guts collect in a pile on the sand, or a numbing, insistent stab of guilt. Seduction is a financial transaction with girls young enough to be your kid sister, except they’re your kid sister thirty pounds too light, two weeks unbathed and beneficiaries of a dental system whose technology has not yet evolved to include the introduction of the toothbrush.

Suddenly, Emma says, “Oh, crap.”

Because he’s offended her by not saying anything in too long, no doubt. He’s exposed the uneven field upon which they’ve been playing.

“I’m working it out,” Ray says. “Give me a minute.”

But she isn’t looking at him. She’s not actually looking much of anywhere so much as she’s making a concerted effort to fold herself under the table. Ray has had extensive experience with the art of public fellation, so this doesn’t throw him completely off. He’s instantly well on his way to becoming erect, in fact, a reptilian-brain response to a recognized set of visual cues; but he’s also a bit disappointed, given that he’s spent the last half an hour negotiating traditional sexual terrain and was just starting to remember the rules well enough to participate. She could have saved a lot of time and aggravation if she’d gone straight for his trousers in the first place.

Emma doesn’t go all the way under the table, though, just sinks below the level of the privacy wall separating their table from the concourse.

“My brother,” she whispers fiercely.

“Your brother,” Ray says, nodding. Of course. This is another of those traditional sexual terrain bits that he’d forgotten about.

“He’s looking for me.”

And why wouldn’t he be? That is the way brothers act in the normal world, as surrogate guardians of their kid sisters’ virtue. Ray should probably spend a few moments deciding among expressions and body language that suggest abashment, outrage, guilt or just a generalized confusion.

Since he hadn’t registered anything about Frederick Whiston the night before other than an archetypal sense of agitation, Ray peers after Frederick Whiston through the leaves of the ferns. He’s thin and dark, the negative image of Emma’s glowing vibrancy. Sallow complexion, hair slicked back from his forehead, eyes hooded as if the lights are too bright or the lids have been trained to provide an air of condescending superiority. This morning, Frederick has been hastily put together. He’s wearing last night’s dinner jacket and slacks, both of which have the rumpled appearance that comes from having been slept in. He has missed a button on his white shirt, and the collar stabs up toward his chin. Unshaven, glassy-eyed, would probably have been unsteady on his feet if he wasn’t bowling down the concourse like a steamroller without brakes, Ray suspects that Mr. Frederick Whiston carries about him a reek of sour alcohol and liquor sweat in a three foot diameter halo.

Ray sees Frederick coming; Frederick sees Ray watching. The scion of the Whiston fortune switches tracks and banks into the Bangkok House’s food court without slowing down.

“I think he’s spotted us,” Ray says apologetically. “Sorry.”

Emma pushes herself up in her seat, frowning. “I’m the one who is going to be sorry. You can count on it.”

Whiston wheels to a halt beside the table. He’s breathing hard, almost panting. “You should have left word that you were going out,” he says to Emma. “I’ve been looking all over the ship for you.”

Ray was right. He smells like the victim of a liquor store explosion.

“I was hungry,” Emma responds. The corners of her mouth crease in a frown. “I didn’t think you’d be up this early.”

“Obviously.” Ray gets the impression that Freddy rolls his eyes, but he can’t actually see it because he’s facing Emma as if she’s the only one at the table. “Amah sent me to collect you. You need to return to your quarters.”

“I will.” A pause, like defiance. “In a few minutes.”

“That’s unacceptable.”

“Leave me alone, Frederick. I said I’ll be home shortly.”

Like an asp, Whiston’s pale hand darts out and he grips Emma by the arm. He squeezes until his knuckles are white. “Come along, Emma. Let’s not create a fuss, okay?”

For an instant, her gaze dashes from Whiston to Ray, a mute appeal in her eyes, then she gasps. “You’re hurting me.”

“You’re making me.”

Ray figures he’s got old Freddy by three inches, probably thirty pounds and a skill set that includes the ability to kill trained military personnel who possess a strong desire not to end up dead. And he’s tired of glowering at this idiot’s back as though he was invisible. Ray hauls himself to his feet, screeching the chair along the tiled deckplate as he rises, and extends a hand which happens to be roughly the size of the circumference Whiston’s neck in greeting.

“Hey, sorry to intrude on this scene of domestic tranquility,” he says, growling. He jabs his fingers into Whiston’s ribs, in case he’s tempted to ignore something as genial as a handshake. “Ray Marlowe, with an ‘e’. I had the pleasure of making your sister’s acquaintance last evening, and the extra pleasure of renewing it this morning. We were just about to take a stroll with Nomar here.” Nomar, taking his cue, lifts his head and bares a jagged row of titanium alloy canines. “Get some exercise, you know? I could have her back at your place in about an hour.”

To his credit, Whiston does not flinch. He also doesn’t release his hold on Emma’s arm. Turning his head slightly, so he gives Ray a solid profile headshot, he transfers his glare from Emma to Ray. “I can’t say I’m particularly interested in your acquaintance with my sister, Mr. Marlowe. I’ll have to ask you to excuse us.”

“That’s okay, because I’m not feeling much in the mood to excuse you. She’s already told you that you’re hurting her.”

It doesn’t take much, just a focused punch with his index finger to the kidney Whiston has left exposed. Whiston grunts, more in surprise than in pain as the left side of his body–unaccountably and without having been granted the proper permissions–collapses. A pronounced starboard list turns into full on roll, and he spills across the tabletop, arms flailing for something to catch him.

Nomar just has time to skitter out of way by diving from this table to the next. The bowl of rice is not so agile and totters over the edge, where it shatters against the floor, fanning white grains like maggots at Ray’s feet.

Ray doesn’t want to hit him again. Assaulting passengers in public is bad for his cover.

Emma leaps up, gets the chair and a buffering couple of paces between them.

“Your sister is a nice young woman,” Ray growls, fixing Whiston with a cool expression reminiscent of a whetted knife. “I’d appreciate it if you treated her that way in my presence. No, I think I’d appreciate it if you treated her that way in general. Are we clear?”

Frederick Whiston rises, wincing. Bits of tofu Nomar had left undigested cling to the lapels of his jacket. “This is none of your business, Mr. Marlowe.”

He says Ray’s name as if he’s committing it to memory. Probably to file some sort of complaint with the Watch Officer.

But Frederick does nothing more threatening than turn away, back to Emma so that Ray can’t read his face. “Do what you want, but the children are expecting you.”

Children?

Emma cowers for a moment, but her brother, having delivered his message, is apparently done. Still listing, he stalks past her and out onto the concourse. In seconds, he’s disappeared from view. Back to whatever pit it was that spawned him, Ray thinks.

He presses his hand toward Emma, open palmed. “Are you okay?”

She’s shaking, hugging her shoulders as if to keep from sobbing. “I should go.”

“What did he mean about the children?”

But she shakes her head. “Thank you for breakfast, Ray. I had a good time.”

“Emma–”

Does he hit you? This is what he means to ask, what he should be asking, but even the bare thought of it makes him feel violent. But in the space between words, she slips close to him. Her small hands pull his face to hers and she kisses his lips, cool and dry and hungry.

Without another word, she’s gone.

***

The rest of his day is spent the way most of days pass on Paraclete. Ziggy rides him for duty failures that may or may not be legitimate or even vaguely associated with his own personal fault, then tells him Nina has packed along some lasagna from last night’s dinner that he can have as long as he promises to remember to get the dish back to her. He makes two retrievals of malfunctioning drones. He performs some perfunctory upgrades to the drone system control frame. Around this, he codes new search parameters into the drones’ surveillance routines, uploads a dozen petaflops of gathered surveillance data for pattern searches and anomalous chemical traces from the rat network’s latest security sweep, trying to skew all his available resources in a clever and anonymous enough way that the other systems vets won’t notice that he’s been tinkering with the rats, and on the chance that they do notice, won’t suspect it’s anything but a buggy command sequence and definitely won’t trace it back to him.

This extended deception is arguably the most difficult and entertaining portion of his job. He should also be refitting Nomar for another survey of the reactor vent, but for some reason can’t seem to muster the energy to get it done, though he does find the strength to run a separate pattern analysis on the series of rat vocal sequences to see if he could develop a shorthand method of understanding the assorted chirps and whistles and whirs. He doesn’t have a good reason for doing this.

Somewhere in that time, he checks his text messenger and finds the massively encrypted, viciously terse note from Sorensen which says simply Would you like to explain to me why you have decided it is a good idea to start assaulting my passengers? Ray does not feel like fabricating excuses, so he deletes the message unanswered. He spends several minutes plotting ways in which he might plant some explosives of his own in Frederick Whiston’s sleeping compartment while at the same time evading suspicion. The conundrum has all the makings of a logistical disaster, so he abandons it, though unhappily.

He wastes whole hours at a stretch thinking about Emma Whiston. Not proper thoughts like how he can protect her from an abusive older sibling who is about to lock her up on the family’s frontier estate where he can put his hands on her unhindered–those were covered in his Frederick death musings–but highly distracting mental exercises that leave him with wide, goofy grins and a damp ball of queasiness in his stomach.

He also considers that it is way past time that he prepare an official case update for transmission back to his CIU handler, but as he suspects his handler is not a real person, but a computer generated facsimile of an actual CIU agent, he claims investigative latitude or dearth of significant developments or any number of other plausible excuses, and doesn’t do anything. More than likely, when he does generate status reports, they’re deleted unread so as not to compromise his cover anyway. Then the hard disk to which the messages have been saved is removed and incinerated; the assorted satellites and relay beacons which carried his message are remotely detonated to preserve the anonymity of his signal; teams of sweepers are dispatched to eliminate the crew of the ship he happens to be on, plus anyone with whom he might have had contact, plus anyone who might have witnessed him having contact with one those people, and eventually anyone related to any of those witnesses who might be tempted to complain about the sudden disappearance of their family member. That constitutes an entirely too egregious waste of human and material resources to justify sending any sort of message, at least in Ray’s estimation.

About the time he’s finally ready to knock off for the night, Ray receives an encrypted internal comm call from Chief Becker. This immediately strikes him as a bad development. It might really piss him off just hearing the preliminary chime that indicated an incoming encrypted call, except it’s from Becker (which he knows because the comm unit’s LCD screen scrolls Becker’s shipsys ID as the call’s originator), and Becker has not shown himself in the past to be some sort of chronically inflicted idiot who would do something so stupid as to place an encrypted communication to a service level hardware geek–something foreign agents of the Lilaiken separatist movement would be certain to notice, and even if they didn’t, Ziggy certainly wouldn’t let pass without comment.

People in jobs like Ray’s do not appreciate having their cover potentially shot to hell by anyone other than themselves. Becker has been in the security business long enough to appreciate that, even if he did spend three quarters of that time dead drunk.

So it’s only because he trusts Becker that he plugs a privacy headset into the comm unit and punches in his code key. The comm unit is a square, black box like an intercom attached to the terminal on his desk. Most of the time it functions exactly like an intercom, broadcasting personal and ship’s information messages on an open channel. When an encrypted message is beamed to a particular unit, an angry, red indicator begins to flash, the LCD screen tumbles shipsys ID verification codes for everyone patched into the transmission and the unit pings the terminal’s encryption software to challenge the user with his pass key to unlock the message scrambling. An unscrambled voice comm sounds something like a pair of tomcats wailing the tar out of one another, one of those grating noises that have been scientifically proven to cause normal and otherwise sane human beings to grind their teeth down to mere nubbins.

Ray gets to listen to the cats whooping it up for the several seconds it takes him to punch in the text equivalent of a 512-bit encryption key. The comm unit hums for a moment, chugging merrily along, and eventually the cats work out their business, and are replaced by a sultry, southern-tinted woman’s voice informing him in a monotonously looped message that he has an encrypted call from Security Chief Andres Richard Becker! Please input your 512-bit encryption key now.

It is a very sexy voice which says these things, which does not in any way mitigate Ray’s desire to track her down and punch her in the mouth.

He clears the system to patch the message through. The connection opens with an audible click, and Ray says, “I can’t even begin to explain to you how much trouble you are in at this moment, Becker. You’ll be lucky–no, you’ll be officially smiled down upon by God and Jesus and the entire freaking host of heaven–if foreign agents don’t blow this ship up in the next three minutes. Or at the very least send a death squad down here to make a bloody mess of my work area.”

He’s mostly kidding, and laughs to make that point clear. But he still whirls around in his chair so he can watch the shop’s door, in case roaming death squads happen to stumble by looking for directions.

Becker does not return his humor. “We have a problem.”

“I gathered that.”

“I want you to meet me on Sub-Deck Omicron, Section 944. Right now.” Becker’s voice carries an edge as sharp and jagged as broken glass. “Bring a drone with you.”

“What’s going on?”

A hesitation, as though he didn’t trust the encryption. “There’s been a murder.”

Is that all? Ray thinks, but he’s had enough sensitivity training to keep from actually saying it. “I don’t see why you’re involving me in this.”

“You will if you shut up and get down here.”

In the background, Ray can hear a flurry of voices. Then the distinct, guttural burst of someone vomiting, their effluent making a wet slap against the deckplate. Off microphone, obviously to someone else, Becker barks, “Get him out of here, Anderson! This is a crime scene, gentlemen. Let’s try to give it the proper respect.”

Ray stiffens, instantly alert. “Who’s there with you, Becker?” Was the Chief determined to expose him? Because it sounded to Ray’s straining ears as if he had an entire team in place already. A complete klatch of security personnel who theoretically had no need to know they had their very own pet spook on board Paraclete. And Becker, beckerbeckerbecker, understood this! Ray could hear it when he spoke, his consummate understanding of all the things he was jeopardizing. And still he went forward. A surge of adrenaline like an electrical current ripples through Ray’s body.

“Just get here, Marlowe. Nobody is touching a thing until you arrive. I’m out.”

The line goes dead. Sexy little southern belle informs him that the transmission has been terminated and reminds him to log out of the encryption software.

It takes Ray and Nomar a few minutes to get to Sub-Deck Omicron. It is decidedly out of the way of normal pedestrian traffic, down in the bowels of the ship where passengers aren’t permitted to travel and where the infrastructure still manages to resemble the militant design Paraclete’s engineers had originally envisioned. Despite the fact that his cover is more or less wrecked, he avoids the main lifts where he might encounter other crew or franchise workers and wends his way by a complex network of bare stairwells. If he’s lucky at all, he might at least be able to contain the cover-wrecking to the security team Becker has in place. That would be moderately less catastrophic.

Omicron is a drafty, dim, gray space with narrow gangways that pass between pressure resistant bulkheads. Footsteps clang and their echoes roll eerily along naked flexsteel walls, but it isn’t quiet down here. There are no acoustic suppression measures, and the hum of hydraulic lifts, the deep rumble of power generators, and even the growl and hiss of the Van Nuys reactor which powers the thrust tubes reverberate through spaces filled with dead air like the din of forgotten conversations.

Ray counts off section numbers as he goes. Most of the sealed bays in this portion of the ship are basic storage bins, metallic shipping crates stacked floor to ceiling and locked to the deck by localized electromagnetic grids. Fore and aft, in massive, reinforced bays that comprise three full decks, there are auxiliary matter cannon batteries and their attendant munitions depots, but those are vacant unless the Marines happen to be drilling, or in the event of an actual emergency. Goliath class ships like Paraclete tend to avoid most emergencies of the sort that require matter cannon intervention. As a result, Omicron has the hollow feel of a warehouse district, an empty space populated by only drone rats and the occasional security sweeper. A good place for mischief, or in this case, for murder.

Ray is thinking that what he’s going to find in Section 944 is corpses of missing Paraclete crewmen stacked two meters tall, in ordered little rows like sandbags, each conveniently stamped on the forehead with the message I WAS KILLED BY LILAIKEN SEPARATISTS. Probably a few hundred of them. This is the only possibility that currently makes sense to him. Or maybe a plasma bomb the size of an evac shuttle. Maybe a plasma bomb disguised as an evac shuttle. That would be clever, something very Lilaiken. On the off chance that it isn’t a plasma bomb, he tells Nomar to remind him to investigate all the evac shuttles later, just in case.

Anything less than the imminent detention of Lilaiken suspects, their immediate interrogation and short-order voiding into space is probably going to put him in a foul mood. More of a foul mood.

He stops counting doors after awhile, about the time he begins to encounter other people: mostly grim looking security guys heading in the opposite direction. Ray notes that the sec-os are wearing firearms, something they don’t normally do since the passenger classes find armed crewmen to be vaguely disconcerting. Ray has gotten used to this, and he realizes that he finds armed crewmen a bit disconcerting himself. Even more troublesome is the pair of guards stationed outside the bulkhead door to Section 944. Not sec-o guards, but Marine guards. With rifles.

Ray approaches the door, and on cue, the rifle barrels cross to bar his path.

“Id,” one of the Marines demands. He’s shortish, stout, has the ideal jarhead buzzcut, built like a cork in a wine bottle. He’s got sergeant’s stripes on his arm and a badge that identifies him as Kilgore.

Real Marines, Ray realizes. Squared away Marines, as in, combat Marines. Guys who are so used to extreme security measures that they’ve mastered the professional shorthand of the trade. A sec-o would have demanded his Ship Systems Identification, as if courtesy mattered, as if they were dealing with people who didn’t know the protocol and would require patience.

Marines usually just shot people who didn’t know the protocol and rummaged about in their pockets for their shipsys id later, probably sometime after they’d cased the guy’s pockets for cigarettes.

Ray shows them his card, gives them a stupid grin like the one he’s wearing in the photo. The Marines aren’t amused.

The one who had demanded his credentials, Kilgore, nods, satisfied. The rifles are retracted to their upright rest position. “Chief Becker said you should report to him before poking around.”

“So,” Ray says quietly. “What’s going on?”

When he wants the security spin, he’ll talk to Becker. What he wants right now is the truth, the ground level assessment, the bareboned and clinical report one Marine gives to another. And since he’s already cover-wrecked with security, he might as well exploit his assets.

“Couldn’t say, sir.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir’, Marine.”

The man’s eyes narrow, recalculating what he thought he knew–the accuracy of what he had been told. It’s an old joke, basic training barracks humor after the first grunt gets nailed with pushing fifty or taking a five mile double-time nature hike for answering the NCO with ‘sir’ tacked onto the end. Marines find this stuff endlessly amusing–probably only Marines. The guy lets his eyes roam Ray up and down, from rat to id to hardware geek coveralls.

“Right,” he says finally. “Smith or Jones?”

FSA or International Intelligence Agency?

Ray grins. “Worse.”

The Marine stiffens noticeably. Right now he’s thinking military CID or special forces or some other traditional covert organization. It’s enough to shake him up, which is the way Ray wants him.

“We’ve only been on about twenty minutes. Got here just about the time Becker was hollerin’ for somebody to get him a locked line. They didn’t let us in, just told us to guard the door and not let anybody in unless his name was Marlowe or he had captain’s stripes on his sleeves.”

“So you haven’t been inside?”

“Nope. Just watched the dumbasses coming out.”

“What do you think happened?”

He shrugs, doesn’t really care. “Somebody got whacked. People are puking and shit. I figure it must be pretty bad, at least by sec-o standards anyway.”

Meaning, not as bad as they make it out to be, more than likely.

“Does it strike you as unusual that you’re guarding the door to a storage bay for a security investigation?”

“No more’n being chatted up by a Smith for doing it.” Kilgore gives him a convivial wink. “Me and Rodriguez were running inventory on the aft blast dump when the sec-o sweeper found the body. He gave us a shout on his portable and asked us to comm a call Becker on the crypto line. Becker asked us to seal the place down.” He glanced at his partner, Rodriguez. “Figured it was better than counting shells all night, so we got clearance from the Watch and here we are. We didn’t see anything strange, no whacked out drifters or knife wielding psychos–Becker already asked us. I just about punched him in the mouth.”

Ray nods. For the insult, he meant. It was standard procedure when inventorying ordinance to keep the blast doors sealed and locked down–both to prevent hostile forces from gaining access to a ready supply of Marine weaponry and, in the event of an accident, to limit the destructive scope of any unintended explosions. The ludicrously reinforced doors closed when you started your count; they opened when you were done–any deviation from that order was in military terms the rough equivalent of falling asleep on guard duty in a combat zone.

Becker had insinuated that they might have been something other than diligent in observing their duties, that they might not be squared away soldiers.

“Why didn’t the sec-o just call it in himself? Or call his station and have them do it?”

The Marine shrugs, indicating an unwillingness to venture a criticism. “Bobby’s not bad for security. He did a pair in New Mes out of high school, knows the drill. Maybe he wanted somebody to pass the word that wasn’t gonna have to run around pissing in their pants for ten minutes before talking to Becker.”

Rodriguez rolls his eyes, but not unkindly. It was just Marines talking smack, which constituted about half of the average Marine’s working vocabulary. “Omicron is a one man duty station, and that’s too many most of the time. The sec-o is Bobby Diggs, and his station is all the way down by Section 12, right near the express lift doors. We’re just at the end of the block, at least relative to his station. He saved himself ten minutes and stayed within the bounds of protocol by getting the message encrypted. Most of them, the security officers, don’t even march the gangway. Too busy hosing the ethernet for tits, I guess. Bobby’s straight up and five by.”

“Bobby Diggs,” Ray says, stuffing the name into his memory. “That’s a start. I might want to talk to you two again later.”

Sergeant Kilgore snaps to an imitation of attention, mocking. “Hoo-ah. We’re on the hump deck anytime you need us.”

“Marine Deck Four,” Rodriguez clarifies. “In the bulge just aft of the auxiliary bridge. The Deck CO is Captain Cable.”

Ray brushes past them. “Thanks. I’ll talk to Becker and see if I can get you relieved sometime soon.”

“Much appreciated, but no hurry,” Kilgore fires back. “You understand.”

Ray does, in fact. Better this than counting shells for the next twelve hours. At least this way they got to stand around and point guns at people.

Ray punches through door and enters the vast storage area. It does not feel vast to him. Metal shipping crates crowd in on both sides, the stacks easily seven meters high, creating narrow passages constructed of right angles and sharp edges. Pools of flickering light cast from the overhead fluorescents provide a dim illumination at best. As he walks, the naked deckplate rings with his footfalls and the click of Nomar’s paws.

Nomar knows something is up. His sensor whip is fully extended, flapping at the ambient air like he’s licking his chops. He squeaks a private monologue, though conversationally, as though he expects Ray to listen and comprehend.

Together, they home in on Becker by chasing down the strident echoes of what seems to be a heated exchange. It reminds Ray of chasing fleet-footed Iraqi mercenaries through desert arroyos. Wrong turns, pauses at intersections to listen, dowsing for sounds. Finally, several blocks in and near what Ray assumes to be the center of the bay, they enter a sort of clearing. It’s a hastily erected emptiness, apparently. Several crates have been maneuvered off to the side by a Bobcat forklift, cutting off the careful grid pattern with pell-mell obstructions. There was an attempt to stack some of the crates, but without the electromagnetic matrix to steady them, several have shifted, tumbled into passageways or tipped on their sides, suspended above the floor when they wedged between other containers. Given the roughly circular shape of the space and the arcanely fallen blocks, Ray thinks at once about Stonehenge–about stepping into the center of a bizarre druidic rite of sacrifice.

The lights are better here. Becker has introduced a cordon of high powered halogen frames whose power cords snake off into the distance. Drawn from shadow to white glare, Ray shields his eyes with his hand. He hesitates and peers into the circle until he locates Becker.

Becker is on the far side, his face red, his mouth open, blasting away at some poor sec-o who has that bewildered look of some schmuck who has no idea why he’s become the target for a Tourrette’s caliber smack session. Ray scans the area generally, doing everything but shoving his hands in his pockets and whistling so he won’t seem to be displaying overmuch interest in the sec-os undressing by his Chief. He makes it about halfway, holding back a bit in hope that Becker will calm down a little before he arrives.

Because there’s the body, shoved slightly off to the side, not more than a dozen paces away from him. He scuds to a halt without thinking about what he’s doing. Corpses are magnetic, attracting some core of metallic morbidity. Ray feels it’s pull and his feet start to move, and the next thing he knows, he hasn’t just sidled up to it, but he’s standing over it, clawing through a shroud of shock that makes his face go numb and sucks all the moisture from his mouth.

Some kid, he thinks, some stupid kid?

Did what? Got himself on the wrong side of a few dozen rats? Dumped a couple of liters of hydrochloric acid into his lap? Swallowed a thermite grenade?

Stupid thoughts, attempts to grapple with something his mind refuses to understand. It takes awhile to orient himself, always does, no matter how many times you’ve seen it or things exactly like it before. To get over the automatic response that this isn’t a hallucination or a joke, or just something unintelligible that his eyes can’t process correctly.

But it’s exactly what it seems to be. A kid, a boy, probably eleven or twelve years old. The flesh is white, marbled with blue veins, bruised along the naked buttocks and back where seeping blood has gathered just beneath the skin. Head thrown back, eyes wide and glassy, mouth open in a rictus howl that is black and wide and toothy, with the lips drawn up in a snarl. Hands splayed, legs wide, spread-eagled, toes and fingers jabbed at the cardinal points. And a gaping cavity, a mélange of dark crusted blood and white bone, where the torso should be. A body hollowed out like a canoe, done with tools as crude as paleolithic stone knifes.

Ray sees it, wades through his obligatory moment of horror, the steps clear, mentally backs away, kick starts his brain.

So where is the rest of him?

Where is all the blood, the liters and liters of blood that should have spumed from a young body with a strong heart the instant the chest was cracked?

Where are the organs normally crammed breastbone to pelvis, rhythmically chugging fluids along in an approximation of cosmic harmony?

Probably in that stone ring beside him, the one filled to the top with brackish, dark water like a soured well. Entrails lobbed like sticky wads of spaghetti, where they splash, sink, vanish.

But there is no ring. He’s imagined it, made it up out of whole cloth. There’s only the cold deckplate and sealed shipping containers and cold halogen glare.

Ray swallows hard, tries to wet his mouth, but his tongue only makes a clicking noise against his teeth.

“Don’t puke all over my evidence,” Becker says in his ear.

Ray turns to him, a welcome excuse to tear his eyes away from the corpse. “Holy shit.”

“There’s nothing holy about it.” Becker grunts and makes an obvious display of not looking at the thing he’s talking about. “So what do you think?”

“I think it’s a lousy way to kill a kid.” The acerbic distance he has cultivated as a professional soldier used to the presence of violent death is fully in place, and as always, he hates himself for it, if only just a little.

Becker is all business, sporting his game face, grim and determined. He has the same hollow depth to his gaze that Ray imagines in his own eyes. “It’s a lousy way to kill anybody. Messy. Pointless.”

Pointless is a good word for it, for a whole host of things, really. Why he called Ray, for example.

“What’s going on, Rich?”

The Chief kneels down by the corpse. He has a ballpoint pen in his hand, and he uses it like a laser pointer. “If this is a crime of rage, or an abduction, I expect to find contusions here–” He indicates the wrists. “Or around the throat. If the kid struggles at all, I assume that I’ll find marks on the face, or bruises on the neck. Or I expect to find indications of epidermal punctures where the psycho jacked the kid up with meds to keep him docile. I’ve got none of that. And you know what else I don’t have?”

“Blood. Entrails. It didn’t happen here. The body was dumped.”

Becker cranes his neck so he can see Ray’s expression. “Why would you dump a body here of all places? You know it’s going to be found eventually. If not in flight, at the very least when we hit port and start off loading. And that’s not even the beginning of the oddities. Do you know how hard it is to kill someone on a starship? Not physically, I mean, but to kill them and hide it? There’s nobody on the ship that hasn’t been checked in and id confirmed. Nobody gets off without the same procedures. This isn’t some frontier dome where kids disappear by the baker’s dozen every day.”

“Which means that it was supposed to be found. A victim who wasn’t abused prior to death, but was psychotically mutilated and then dumped in a relatively high traffic area.”

“Seems to say there’s more going on here than just murder, I’d think.”

“I don’t mean to sound like an asshole here, but why have you involved me in this?”

“Because I need to know if this is related to your current investigations.”

Ray glances over the body again, pondering thoughts he hasn’t entertained in years, but he doesn’t share them. Becker doesn’t possess the context to make sense of them. “People were killing each other a long time before the Lilaikens showed up.”

Becker scowls. “Not on my watch, they weren’t.”

“This wasn’t done by Lilaiken separatists,” Ray responds, frowning. Dead kid or not, it’s what is uppermost in his mind. That is the extent of Ray’s responsibility, not nosing over carcasses with the Sec Chief. “Even if we stipulate that the kid had some kid of target value, they would have found a better way to dispose of the corpse. And, they wouldn’t have mutilated the body. They’re political terrorists, not monsters.”

“You’re certain of that?”

Something in Becker’s tone nags at him, accuses him. “You believe this is some sort of statement? What would the content of such a message be from the Lilaikens, Rich? ‘Look! We’re not afraid to hack up kids to get our point across’? It’s an untenable argument. They don’t gain anything from a gesture this mentally disturbed.”

“Of course, it’s not nearly as rational as blowing up starships.”

Ray doesn’t know what to say at first. He feels like he’s wincing, like he’s one big, constant wince as he watches his career get sucked down the cosmic drain. “You know this wasn’t done by Lilaikens. So what am I doing here?”

Becker takes a deep breath. “You’re being handed the lead on this investigation.”

“No.” Flat, simple, implacable. This is so obviously bullshit, it has dandelions growing in it. “This is not part of my assignment.”

Slowly, Becker rises. He tucks the pen in his trouser pocket. “It’s being made part of your assignment as of now.”

“You don’t have the authority to pull me off my current mission, and I don’t have time to do both.”

“Time or inclination?”

“Pick whichever one makes you happy. I don’t care so long as you just go away.”

Becker jabs a finger at him and knuckles his features, a bulldog look. “You said yourself that you’ve all but confirmed this ship is clean. You’re wasting your time chasing after terrorists. You have the expertise to catch the animal that did this, but more importantly, you’ve got the freedom to poke around anonymously without freaking the passengers out because sec-os are banging on their doors raising a ruckus and all but accusing them of turning child rearing into a blood sport.”

“Rich, honestly, I don’t have the training to do this job. We’re two weeks out from New Holyoke, and with a learning curve as steep as the one you’re asking me to undertake, the chances that I’ll be able to make any kind of suitable progress are close to nil. It’s a bad idea.”

“I’m not the one who made the decision. Sorensen did.”

So much for appealing to reason. “Sorensen should know better. My superiors aren’t going to tolerate this sort of interference with my primary objectives.”

Becker he places his hand on Ray’s arm, makes a visible effort to relax. It’s hard. Ray can see in the tense, bunched cast of his shoulders how hard it is. The Chief is a man on the verge of strangling someone to satisfy his urge for vengeance. “Your superiors have already consented. You think the captain can’t pull strings with CIU because he’s in deep space? That’s all been done. He’s called in a whole raft of favors to get you involved.”

The fact that Becker has just dropped the three magic letters that were supposed to be the best kept secret on the ship stuns him a bit, shifts his entire perceptual universe on its axis. But it shouldn’t surprise him. Nothing should surprise him anymore, least of all the fact that he has more than likely just walked into a political clusterbomb.

“How long have you known?”

Becker shrugs. “From the beginning. A guy of Sorensen’s stature isn’t going to let some yahoo spook with sealed mission orders on his ship. Sorensen talked to some friends in EED who happen to be friends of yours in CIU. All these guys go way back to the Miners’ Rebellions, and the ties that bind them together are thicker than little things like agency compartmentalization.”

Ray waves him off. “At least you left me my illusions this long.”

Becker chuckles evilly. “The boss can be a real prick when he wants to be, I’ll grant you. Bottom line is that we’re all still on the same side, and the powers that be have agreed that you’ve got better qualifications to handle this investigation than any other available asset.”

The Chief has no idea what he’s talking about, knows nothing about the desert. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Be careful. Be anonymous. Most of all, be delicate. There are potential ramifications here that could shake the foundations of frontier space.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The victim’s name is–was–Micah Uytedehaage. That’s Dutch, in case you were wondering. He was an orphan from one of the dome colonies in the Euro-Prosp, ward of the state. That is, until about six months ago, when he was rescued from foster care by the Whiston Charitable Trust. We picked up him and a couple dozen other kids on Stratiskaya Daransk for resettlement on New Holyoke. That’s their thing, the Whistons, I mean. Rescuing underprivileged kids from the streets or bad social systems, teaching them skills and turning them into productive colonists.

“Frederick Whiston had quite a bit to say this morning in his official complaint to the captain after you put him on his ass. In between demanding that we either place you under arrest or shove you out an airlock, he managed to insinuate that you’ve managed to get yourself something of an entrance to the Whiston inner circle. Is that clearing things up for you?”

“You mean Emma.”

“I do.”

Unbelievable. If he possessed anything resembling a personal life, he would resent this unstated willingness to mess with it. “Freddy has misapprehended the nature and depth of our acquaintance.”

“That may be true, but it still places you closer to the family than anyone else.”

“And you want me to exploit my connections? For what purpose? To find an easy way to break it to them or to convince them not to sue the FSA for criminal negligence?”

“I just want you to cultivate that relationship for the time being. Stay on top of the Whiston family’s movements.” Becker chews his lip, then adds, “I don’t mean it that way, you understand. Though it’s none of my business if you think pursuing a little recreational contact will cement your involvement with the clan.”

Ray ignores him. “The current status of my relationship with Freddy has taken on something of an antagonistic tone, in case you hadn’t noticed. It is not going to prove very conducive to ingratiating myself enough to track them inconspicuously. Am I to assume that we’re placing Mr. Whiston on the preliminary list of suspects?”

“Immediate family is always part of the suspect pool.”

“You’re being intentionally ambiguous, Rich.”

“I’m trying not to be too explicit. In this case, involving this family, explicit is the same thing as politically explosive. Do you understand?”

“I understand that you’re leaving out critical information that I need to know if you really expect me to do anything at all with this case in the time allotted.”

Becker blinks at him, carefully expressionless. “You think so?”

“Much more than I’d tend to believe you’d back down from the Whistons or anybody else just because of the money they have in the bank or the power they might wield.”

“Is that how you see it?”

“Yes. If it was anyone else, any other kid, you wouldn’t think twice about banging on every door from here to the bridge and assaulting either the virtue or the decency of every passenger over the age of eight if it meant you would nail this guy.”

Becker laughs, harsh and humorless. “I really don’t want to spend the next five years of my life dangling in front of Whiston family lawyers, Marlowe. But don’t ever let anybody tell you that wealth and celebrity don’t buy certain privileges. We’re going to be careful here. Careful and quiet and infinitely diligent. If Frederick Whiston is innocent, I don’t want him to ever know he was even a suspect. If he’s guilty, we’ve got to have incontrovertible evidence of his involvement.”

“I don’t think he did this, Rich.”

“No? I would have thought you’d be more likely to assume that he had, given your experience. Care to elaborate on what makes you so certain?”

“Only if you’re going to tell me what it is you’re hiding.”

“Fair enough.” Becker consults his watch. “I’ve got a cleanup crew coming in an hour. You and your rat do whatever it is you need to do to gather evidence to bust this guy, then meet me in the Officers Lounge on Delta. We’ll see if we can’t satisfy our mutual curiosities.”

Ray accepts what has become the inevitable with a quiet sigh. “All right. I’ll play along, but I want you to do me a favor.”

Becker is already moving toward the exit. “What’s that?”

“You know those two Marines out in the hall?”

“What about them?”

“Pave the way for me to have them assigned to the investigation. If I’m going to be dragged into this swirling storm of crap, I don’t want to be working with a bunch of fatass, undertrained sec-os. I want men who know how to do things my way. And I want to talk to Bobby Diggs before anybody else gets to him. Clear?”

Becker pauses, peers at him unhappily. “You just have to make this more complicated than it needs to be, don’t you?”

“I’d say yes, but you and Sorensen have already beat me to it.”

“You’ll only work with Marines. You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

The Chief shakes his head. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Ray lets him go, watching and waiting until Becker has left the bay and sealed the door behind him. When he and Nomar are alone, takes few moments to just breathe. Breathe and focus, breaking down the things he must do into discrete tasks. Small blocks that will consume his complete attention. For this part, he doesn’t want to imagine the big picture, only bits and pieces. Crime scene layout. Ingress and egress angles. Disposition of the body. Grids of likely trace evidence. Reconstructing from physical clues the way things might have happened, and why they might have happened in this particular way, leading to this specific result.

In all instances, he avoids a detailed and personal inspection of the body itself. Even after all these years, all the battlefields and Third World post-street fight abattoirs he has endured, being alone with a corpse still gives him the creeps.

But Nomar is a forensic pack mule, blessedly short on sensibility and long on AI designed curiosity. Ray gives him the necessary series of verbal commands–the most important one being not to break down the physical evidence into its component parts, especially anything that could be tagged as human DNA–then lets him scurry over the body, poking his sensor whip into freshly excavated cavities, along ridges of exposed bone, prying into mouth and eyes. Everything he sees, analyzes, touches is transferred to digital signal and loaded into his data core for later retrieval.

Ray doesn’t even have to watch, so he doesn’t, and by the time Becker’s sweeper crew arrives to dispose of the remains, he is more than ready to leave.

***

Ray has never been to the Officers Lounge, so when he gets to Delta Deck, he’s got to stop an actual officer who seems more or less embroiled in doing important ship-running things and ask for directions. This makes him feel like an idiot, above and beyond the fact that the officer insists on treating him like an idiot, then running him through an episode of Twenty Questions with corollary warnings and officerly pronouncements regarding why he shouldn’t even be concerned about the location of a lounge he’s prohibited by rank from entering.

Ray strongly considers advising him that he seemed much more competent shuffling through his pile of reports than he does when he’s using his authoritative, pontificating voice, and maybe he should just go back to doing whatever it was he was doing before Ray interrupted. Or maybe just knocking him on his ass, but since he’s not certain that he’s done being anonymous with the majority of the ship’s crew, he does a lot of nodding and grunting and mumbling excuses about waste disposal and the weird twists of fortune it provides for Sub-Deck slugs like him until he’s given leave to continue his Quixotic tilt.

There’s a perfectly good reason why officers work so hard to maintain the class barrier between the guys with stripes and the enlisted barbarians. Mostly, this has to do with an archaic concept called Officers’ Privilege, a glorious service ideal that essentially said that officers should get all the goodies and assorted comforts of home while stiffs in the field slept in tents on the ground and ate freeze-dried monkey dung for dinner–a concept, by the way, that the men on the front lines stopped buying roughly about the same time that the divine right of kings went out of vogue. And since most soldiers were handy with a rifle, military intelligence types had long ago determined that the only way to continue the practice of Officers’ Privilege (which was something of a priority unless you wanted to see your best and brightest bolt for careers that actually paid a living wage) was to camouflage it, deny its existence, and otherwise envelope it in a twisted and infantile maze of misdirection.

Thus, without the corroborating testimony of the rat that there was an impending waste disposal disaster that threatened the life of the ship, Ray would have been SOL.

It takes only the briefest glimpse of the lounge for Ray to understand this.

The immediately following thought is that he would like to trade his windowless, suffocating berth for a corner of the Officers’ Lounge. Not even a corner in fact. He’d take a grubby spot under the table, or even a bit of bare shelf space in the kitchen.

It’s like this: if the Garden Level has been strategically designed to make the passengers forget they’re not on luxury cruise liner navigating a splendid Caribbean sea, the lounge begs you to forget you’re not the fancypants scion of an Old World, noble house stopping into a private club to meet with some effete Oxford or Cambridge chums and discuss how best to avoid doing any actually useful labors while still seeming to contribute to expansion of the Empire. There’s rosewood paneling on the walls, polished to a burnished glow; scarlet carpeting deep enough to qualify as an official quagmire that requires a posting of various warning signs; subdued chandeliers that have nothing in common with lighting technology anytime after the discovery of the light bulb. Gentlemen in suits playing cards at circular tables around the room generate a smog of sweet cigar smoke and port wine laughter. Everything is wood, aged and dark and meticulously cared for. Everything that isn’t wood is brass or mirrored or fabricated of some other substance that looks expensive and intimidating without distracting from the lounge’s essential clubbishness.

From the almost tangible air of exclusiveness and privilege, Ray suspects he should probably even be saluting the waiters. He’s almost certain the bartender has stars on his collar. The fact is that everyone is in uniform, but no one seems to notice ranks. Wedged in a leather covered booth by the observation windows, he’ll be damned if that isn’t a two bar lieutenant, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed drunk, grossly enmeshed in getting himself inside the skirt of a full bird Marine colonel (i.e. colonel-ette). It’s shameful, all of it. Shocking and decadent and deeply, deeply disturbing. So much so that Ray considers turning on his heel, marching straight back to his room and researching exactly what qualifications it is that he’s missing for enlistment in the EED’s Officer Training Academy.

Now that he’s seen it, probably the only thing that keeps him from being murdered on the spot to protect its secrecy is Becker’s lugubrious wave from the booth in the far corner. Baleful visaged officers stop short of reaching for assorted firearms and quick-acting nerve toxins and go back to behaving with chummy, un-officer-ish charm and gaiety. No one even makes a show of expecting him to salute, though he’ll probably have to sign a whole raft of privacy and non-disclosure agreements hastily drawn up by JAG wonks and demanding both his life’s blood and the naming rights of his first twelve children if he ever mutters a word of what he’s observed here.

Ray and Nomar navigate the cluster of tables in the center of the room and slide into Becker’s booth. Becker has already ordered a pitcher of dark beer for Ray, but he’s having water with a side order of char grilled steak that is most assuredly not a clever and artful protein paste creation. And a fresh tossed salad with potato. And bread so lately from the oven that it’s still steaming.

This also should be disturbingly impressive, but Ray finds it merely disturbing. Any man who has seen what Ray has seen in the last hour shouldn’t have the appetite. He watches Becker put away a forkful of dripping beef and flinches. He pours the beer and concentrates for several seconds exclusively on drinking and holding it down.

Eventually, when he’s confident that he isn’t going to vomit, Ray says, “You realize that you’ve dramatically overestimated the complexity and skill base associated with what I do, right? I’m not a cop.”

“Sure you are.” Becker wipes his mouth with a pale linen napkin, and has the decency to cover his plate with it. “You’re CIU.”

“I’m not in the investigations division.”

“Then what are you?”

He has no problem being brutally honest. “An assassin, or at least I spend a lot of my time trying to kill people who consider themselves outside the law. All I do is authenticate the target or targets assigned to me by higher ups and drop the hammer on them. Finding the criminals in the first place requires a stockpile of intelligence several orders of magnitude beyond my meager share.”

Becker frowns, an expression that plows thoughtful furrows on his forehead. “I know better than that. You’re a smart guy, Ray. Your test scores pin you as a smart guy. Your mission debriefings and post-incident reports are brilliant. Combat citations, CO letters of recommendation–hell, you’ve got twice as many decorations as any man in this room.” Becker fixes him with a significant look, like he suspects that Ray is considering turning into a wuss. “You are the lead on this investigation, plain and simple.”

“I didn’t say I was trying to get out of it.”

“Then what are you trying to do?”

“Figure out why you’re giving me all of this business about my qualifications and field experience. How about you tell me what’s really going on.”

Becker places his hands flat on the tabletop. Ray expects him to counter with protestations of innocence, or at the very least, deflections to orders from above. The lounge’s abrogation of all things military must be contagious, because Becker doesn’t even make the attempt. Rather, he says, “Why don’t you tell me, eh? Tell me what happened outside Ba’dai, something more revelatory than the more-gaps-than-facts official report that made it into your service record.”

This is the proverbial bombshell, a sub-nuclear blast that jitters Ray right off his personal foundations. He stares at Becker, who props his elbows on the table and his chin on his knuckles and stares right back like a man who can pull out secrets and fling them into the air all day long. It is also all the things Becker would not tell him at the crime scene.

“They never let me see the official report,” Ray muses at last, his voice quiet. “Strange, don’t you think? Considering I’m the only one from my squad who made it out, the only one who could have written it accurately. They never even asked me to file a report. Just made the whole thing go away, turned it into a black bag, I assumed. But I guess they had to notify families and account for equipment. Easier to just half-ass it and bury it under a mountain of paper.” Ray pauses, not wanting to say what logically comes next. “You got me into this because of Ba’dai?”

“Given the recent activities on the Lilaiken front, all incidents of this nature are immediately reported along the command net, back to FSA and related intelligence agencies. Because of your presence here, part of the contact list is the CIU. Lieutenant Colonel John Holcomb said you were uniquely qualified to handle this assignment. He said we should ask you to cross reference the significant details with your experience at Ba’dai, in case these incidents are related.”

Ray snorts, wrinkling his nose the way he would if confronted with a foul odor. This entire situation has a lousy and pungent stink all over it, like rotting meat. “Jack Holcomb is a horse’s ass. And he’s insane. Certifiably so, if you’ll pardon my candor.”

“The way he describes it, he saved your career.”

“Just so he could destroy it now, sure. Holcomb never lets a man wreck himself until he’s wrung the last bit of use out of him that he can. This just isn’t right, Rich. No, it’s more than that–it’s impossible. Isn’t it?”

Becker doesn’t say anything, probably because he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know enough to contribute or how to poke Ray effectively until he gives up his secrets like a mausoleum caught in a temblor.

Ray sighs, deep and melancholy, then offers, “Are you a fan of coincidence, Becker? Of synchronicity?”

The Chief only shakes his head, without comment.

“Neither am I. The problem is, I’m not sure what that means in this case.” Which is exactly what Holcomb would have recognized when Becker contacted the EED about what was going on below decks. The devil was in the details, so it was said, and Jack Holcomb was a man who kept his eye out for strange synchronicities.

He’d also had plenty of time to sit back and wait for Ba’dai and Ray to cross paths again, just as it had been promised. Plenty of time, and even more reasons.

“I’ll tell you about it,” Ray says, “but you keep your mouth shut until I’m done.”

Becker merely nods, and after a time, Ray tells him.

***

For the fifth time in a century, young Marines chopper in low over the Iraqi desert, now the New Mes desert or whatever political hacks are calling it these days. This has become a right of passage for Indiana’s young men–introspective, high and tight, squared away young men like Ray Marlowe. Except he’s been around long enough now that he’s young only in chronological years. In experience years, like dog years, he upwards of a hundred and fifty, and he’s got the eyes for it. Swollen, smudged with bruises, dark like caverns and deep as a geothermal vent. He rides in the back, sitting on the floor, on the hard curve of his cover (what his kid brother would call his helmet), because he doesn’t want to take a bullet up his anus. The underbelly of the chopper is as soft and permeable as Smaug’s waiting for Bard of Dale’s magic black arrow. The cover is nanosteel kevlar. This is an old Marine trick, one everybody learns the first time you see a guy get his balls shot off by a bedouin tribesman taking potshots at an allied bird of prey.

He’s more than happy to give the bench up to the lieutenant, because it not only looks like he’s respecting rank, but the bench isn’t any more armored than the chopper’s floor. And you can’t very well sit on your cover on top of the bench; you’d look like some kind of dumbass, assuming your feet could reach the floor so you wouldn’t also have to worry about an evasive roll pitching you out into the clear night sky and the hundred foot drop onto the flesh-integrity threatening rocks below (which also just now happened to qualify as hostile territory).

This is pretty basic stuff, things like sitting on your cover, or recognizing that the strength of the Predator-class chopper is speed and the twin mini-guns mounted on each flank and not her ability to resist incoming fire, or knowing how to paint your face in tan and black and gray so you don’t stick out when you’re on the hardpan. More than the lieutenant knows, though. He’s stiff in his new fatigues. Still got crease lines where he’s had them hung up in a closet while he wore out his five hundred dollar dress greens.

No matter. These young LT’s, Ray’s seen them before. Suits from the local HQ in Babylon, sometimes from METOC (Middle Eastern Theatre of Operations Command) outside the rubble of Old Jerusalem, or even from Washington, DC. Wide-eyed combat puppies, some older than Ray, the ones with any sense scared and pale as grandma’s fine linen sheets–and finally having it dawn on them that whatever idea they had that seemed so good in an air conditioned command bunker or office building outside New Mes has an entirely new dimension for the boys in the field, the ones toting their M202 snub-nosed assault rifles and cracking off rounds at Iraqi Kurds and Russoturk regulars.

Doesn’t matter at all.

Ray takes them in, these young men, shows them around the semi-permanent tent village the Marines have thrown up in the desert and affectionately christened Wadi Wadi Washington, gets them laid by the cleaner Irani whores, the camp favorites, then provides a safe escort out to the desert combat zone that interests them, scares up some trouble that’s more bang and holler than actual peril, and finally packs them hale and whole back into their transport planes with warm feelings of accomplishment, an impressive new tan, the occasional venereal disease, and the seed of story to share with the grandkids one day. (A story like kudzu, that will grow at an almost exponential rate with each telling until the LT is single-handedly turning the tide of the war with nothing but balls of steel, a recalcitrant camel and a jammed Colt pistol against a whole battalion Russoturk mechanized infantry.)

Everyone knows sergeants are the backbone of the military. What they don’t tell you is that they’re also the entertainment directors.

This LT ain’t so bad, even if he does insist on believing Ray actually likes this garbage duty, this humping of gear through the desert and shooting at ragged bedouins and assorted dusty militants from the New Mes regime who don’t have the sense Allah gave a camel (same camel, different flag) and won’t just drop their rifles and call it a day like a civilized man would. The LT thinks he’s John Freaking Wayne, treats Ray like some kind of July 4^th homecoming hero. Ray thinks this is probably because the kid was twenty-two or three and still a virgin when he dropped in on Wadi Wadi. Ray had shining-eyed Dashira take care of that nasty little problem for him about a dozen times over while he supervised team selection and re-fit and placed his own calls to METOC getting explanations that made more sense than what the LT had to offer.

Only to find that the LT’s bull was less opaque than METOC bull, which was rare and odd and troublesome, but mostly had to do with the fact that none of the wankers at METOC either understood the mission or chose to believe it. In their considered opinion, it was a lark being granted to a highly connected young officer with too much classical education and too much imagination. Ray was more or less ordered to take a hand in the child rearing responsibilities of the LT’s parents–toughen him up, show him what New Mes and the real world look like without him getting killed. The Disneyland of Officer Training.

So it’s dark, it’s like twenty-three hundred hours New Mes local time, they’re ripping across the desert at a height of ten meters and kicking up a skirl of sand that stings the eyes and sticks in your teeth. Ray, Lieutenant Holcomb, Ray’s comm specialist Kev Whitfield and a couple of other guys manning the mini-guns are in the lead chopper, with the rest of the team in the Predator behind them, tracking their route by infrared imaging more than visual. Kev’s stuck on the bench with the LT and not real happy about it. He’s got his M202, his subby, across his knees, but one hand over his balls, though it’s no protection but a psychological one.

To the west, the sky is black, immersed in stars, the sand pale and continuous all the way to the horizon. East is the scant, twinkling lights of Karbala. Over the whup of the rotors, Ray can occasionally hear the massive thrum of the 8^th Tactical Wing bombers shouting toward the industrial complexes on the city’s fringes. Bursts of white hot, angry light concuss the distance like heat lightning or an out of place aurora borealis. He’s got the scent of hot engines and diesel fuel wedged up his nose, but every great while he catches the clean odor of scoured sand and sun-baked rock.

It’s all terribly exciting, and with the Russoturk armored divisions hunkered down to escape the allied smart bombs, Ray keeps having to snatch himself from the precipice of sleep. It’s a helicopter thing, a deficiency he’s not proud of. He blames his parents, who spent many hours of his first two years celebrating the documented American love for the automobile and the open road just because baby Ray happened to have a touch of the colic.

They’ve plugged along for about an hour when the pilot hops onto the comm line patched directly into the remote unit Ray has jammed in his aural canal.

“We’re about a minute out from the drop point, Gunny. I’m going to guide us through a flyover to make sure the zone is clear. We’ll hover three klicks east and wait for your signal.”

Ray presses the pickups on his throat against his vocal chords so he doesn’t have to shout over the rotor racket. “Negative. Do not sweep the drop point, gentlemen. The LT says surprise is essential to this operation. Make your hover two klicks and stay on the alert. Clear?”

Silence answers him, a pilots’ conference in the cockpit. “Whatever you say, Gunny, since the tape’s running.”

A reference to the craft’s flight data recorder. There’s nothing more pathetic than a pilot covering his ass when asked to break protocol.

Ray flips his comm to the open channel and informs his men that the drop point is getting fat. He listens as they sound off, one by one. In the background are reassuring military noises: the click of safeties off, the ratchet of rounds being advanced into chambers, the mutter of private “hoo-ah” pep talks.

Then they’re on the ground and the choppers are peeling back to a safe recon position like candy wrappers caught in a stiff breeze. They sprint almost due east, profiles low, clattering like some antique Industrial Revolution manufacturing machine. He’s left the comm channel open, and he can hear his men, a Greek chorus of grunts and strong, disciplined exhalations. Their breath surrounds him like a geas of invulnerability. Ray drops the visor on his command helmet, obliterating a night of moonlit sand and night shadows. Geography becomes a sickly, greenish mottle sliced by gridlines and a peripheral scroll of compass points and tactical information. Just above his blind spot, left edge, a computer simulation tracks his squad of seven as orange, prokaryote blobs ranged around the yellow sliver that’s supposed to represent him. He jumps the display from light enhanced night vision to infrared with a sub-vocalized command. There are no heat signatures outside the ambient glow of the desert bleeding stored sunshine and the pulsating forms of Marines. Just a quick glimpse, then he flips back so he can actually see where he’s going.

The narrow canyon, really just a sandblasted gully of tight switchbacks and wind carved angles as treacherous as swords, is different than the model generated by satellite images. It always is. Deeper in real life, more solid, the sides sheer and devoid of rugged features that might provide footholds and grips. It’s one way in, one way out territory, a reduced scale model of a wild west box canyon. Seeing it, Ray’s guts twist into a knot.

Another foray into infrared to check the canyon entrance for sentries, of which there seem to be none, then he pushes on with the operation as they drilled it. Dhamers plants himself behind an outcropping where he can cover their entrance with his subby and a patchwork of remote detonated personnel mines. Kluge deploys right, Hanfland left, up the steady incline of New Mes bedrock where they match pace with the insertion team and can provide a nasty crossfire from the high ground if necessary. Or they can pick off Russoturks trying to flee. Or even more likely, they can cower in the open with their thumbs up their asses, waiting for Kurdish bedouin snipers to pick them off while Ray lets Holcomb poke around the ashes of a cold campfire and analyze camel tracks and attempt to figure out why his quarry isn’t where he’s supposed to be.

Now five, himself included, Ray leads the plunge into the gully. Rocky overhangs slice the skyfield into an eight meter swath. Without sufficient light, his visor image shudders, then crashes into a rainbow of pixilated madness, and tries to recalibrate. He doesn’t give it a chance, not when he’s on the move and wending the jagged channels of the canyon, merely rams the plate out of his eyes and squints like everybody else. Cold desert wind cuts through the channel like a storm warning, whipping through the switchbacks and setting up echoes and phantom calls, the sound of spectral voices, the core root of djinn and ifrit mythology.

Definitely some creeperific stuff, despite perfectly obvious explanations.

But this is a straightforward objective. Lt. Holcomb has been using a complex series of high res satellite recon and inspired guesswork for the last two years to track a renegade Dispensationalist cleric named Ramah ibn Ona Hadad nee Mikhail Brezhnaya, sometime freakishly magnetic religious icon, but mostly an assclown terrorist organizer responsible for assorted embassy bombings, the biochem catastrophe in Calcutta and a dozen other moderately interesting attacks against Western tourists in his part of the world. What makes him interesting to METOC policy wonks is his pre-conversion rank in the Russoturk Crescent Army as head of intelligence operations in New Mes. It is a brain begging to be picked, doped, sliced into cross sections, scanned into a secure data environment, and interrogated in AI enhanced simulacrum form.

Holcomb has tracked Brezhnaya’s movements and determined that whatever else he might do to evade capture, the cleric cannot resist this place, this canyon and a tightly scheduled semi-annual pilgrimage with a hand picked coterie of fanatical supporters. It is a defining pattern in a life that is otherwise devoid of useful signals.

Ray has done quite a bit of this, too much really, tracking elusive sandpeople to desert encampments that either don’t exist or haven’t been used in months. He’s been on the trail of a whole constellation of minor military celebrities, with rising star lieutenants like Holcomb spurring him on. He shot Sheik Ahmed (famous enough to need only the one name) through the heart in hallway of a posh Baghdad whorehouse this way. Nothing particularly glamorous. Ahmed didn’t even have a weapon, and even if he had, he was too busy trying to get his pants up above his ankles to put up much resistance. The LT behind that operation was now a Colonel two skips away from either a star or election to public office depending on which career he chose to pursue. These hotshots were right (or lucky) just often enough to be taken seriously.

But most of the time they weren’t. Most of the time it was humping about in the desert on an adrenaline buzz, chasing ghosts like tantalizing sexual fantasies. Good small squad drills, though. Good times.

They break from the narrow defile into a wide, flat plain of solid stone. Ray pulls up, Pelton fans wide on one side, Waeltz on the other, rifle butts pressed against their shoulders, scanning for threats. Holcomb puffs up behind him, tailed by Whitfield, who’s playing Secret Service agent to the erstwhile LT’s Commander-in-Chief. Ray looks up to the canyon rim and runs his eyes around the circumference until he picks out Kluge and Hanfland, crouched low, backlit by stars.

There’s nothing here but darkness and sloughs of loose sand abandoned in odd places by the frenetic vortical winds. And a round hole cleft into the rock. And the faint, almost undetectable yellow flicker of reflected firelight in the hole.

“Gunnery Sergeant Marlowe–” Kluge begins, a whisper in his ear.

“I see it,” Ray murmurs, trying to strangle the projection of his voice. “Get me a good angle on the entrance.”

“It’s clear. No sentries.” Kluge thinks about that. “How weird is that?”

Ray rolls his head toward Whitfield. “Hang back. Don’t bunch up in your excitement.” There’s more ambient light here, and he drops his visor again. He studies the ground under artificial illumination, playing games with his eyes, looking for the glint of tripwires or the false bulge of camouflaged fragmentation mines.

Nothing. That is very weird, indeed.

It’s all hand signals from this point, coordinating their advance toward the gash in the rock, getting Kluge and Hanfland’s attention to indicate the squad is going in. Everyone has their visors down, knows to watch him, because they’ve been through this a thousand times before. Weapon at the ready, Ray advances. Waeltz and Pelton tuck in behind him, then Holcomb, then Whitfield bringing up the rear.

Ray plunges into the darkness. There’s an initial burst of adrenaline, enough to make his hands want to tremble, but he just squeezes his subby that much more tightly, careful to keep his finger poised over the trigger. Then it’s a quick advance, keeping his steps high and regular so he doesn’t make scuffing noises. The path is a steep and angular ascent, stabbing into the rock on a curve, like the blade of a scimitar. It’s dark, but not so dark that his visor can’t amplify the reflected firelight from up ahead, so he relies on his night vision where he can reference the tactical display of his formation. The floor is smooth, chiseled flat by centuries of wind, and covered in sand grit.

A dozen paces in, he can finally hear sounds above the echo of the squad’s collective breath. It’s faint, a guttural moaning that slowly coheres into discrete chunks that are supposed to be words spoken in a shuddering, rhythmic staccato. A religious chant, this punctuated by a rolling thrum and slap like flesh against stone. Ray tells himself to relax, though the hairs have begun to prickle on the back of his neck. This is good news, exactly what Holcomb told them to expect. Brezhnaya is many things, but a cleric above all, and only some sort of ritual exigency would override his intelligence training, because religion is all about patterns and calendrical regularity and fulfilled expectation. It is the antithesis of spookwork.

So Ray slows and lifts his rifle to his shoulder. The path curves around to a portal bright with heat and light; he has to blink away in the instant it takes his visor to polarize, but then his vision is clear again, and he’s looking down a last, brief chute into a chamber of some considerable size. There are no guards here, either, unless they’re stationed inside, where they would do absolutely no good at all.

A long, forlorn and ululating cry chases them the final distance.

But they don’t burst into the chamber as Ray would have them do, as they’d drilled it. Three steps, then a sort of stumbling halt. The soldier mentality drops away, submerged in a vat of darkness that is thick like oil.

The chamber is large, a man-made dome maybe thirty meters across. At regular alcoves around its edges, guttering clay lamps illuminate the dun colored rock, staining the curved walls black with their smoke in straight trails that look like charred ribs. There are a dozen men in the center of the floor, ranked into four neat files; they’re down on their knees, the pose of a good Muslim facing toward Mecca. Except they’re not praying. Rather, they’re bent at the waist, their torso’s straight, their arms extended above their head, and they slap their hands against the bare stone floor. The tight cadence of their slapping has become a reverberation that Ray heard in the tunnel, the chamber itself acting like a bell to their clapping. At the twelve o’clock, there is a sort of natural eruption of stone, a lectern that is melted like wax. Beside the lectern is a pool, a well surrounded by a low, stone parapet in the shape of a ring. The well is full to the top with a turbid and brackish and foul smelling water. In the space between pool and clappers, a shallow depression has been carved. Trenches the span of a hand spoke out from the depression to the pool, runlets which seem to have no purpose at first. Except that in this bowl are seven men, nude, laid out side by side, ranging in age from maybe twelve to thirty. Astride their hips sit seven more men. They’re rigid, backs straight, arms held perpendicular to their bodies, mimicking triangles because in their hands are golden instruments that look to Ray like shovel heads.

A man at the lectern chudders at them in a stiff and incomprehensible dialect that sounds vaguely like Arabic, but not any form Ray has known. His hands gesture over the congregation and occasionally toward the pool in wide, orchestrated swoops. This is the voice Ray heard, rich and baritone, measured in pace, sounding like a New England chorister. He wears a coarse, white keffiya like the other worshippers and desert bedouin’s robes, but his skin is pale, muscovite pale.

Mikhail Brezhnaya.

Ray processes all these images and impressions in the first instants; his mind grapples for meaning, for a frame of reference.

And in that dry, eternal moment, Brezhnaya cries out. The shovel heads plunge in unison. The bodies of the naked men arch beneath the blows and they emit a gurgling, gasping grunt. Strike and drag, like rowing an oar through a sea of flesh, the Dispensationalists core their victims out, scooping entrails and flinging them in wide, steaming arcs into the pool. The depression erupts with blood–spouted into the air, soaking into fabric, fanning out in ovaline swaths. The fluid races down the channels and pours into the pool.

The thrum and slap of the clappers rises to a feverish pitch as Brezhnaya lifts his voice in a counterpoint wail that is both awed by terror and thick with ecstasy, lifting and driving his empty hands in accord with the metered digging in the depression.

Stricken and numb, Ray sees the pool disturbed by blood, clouding the way coffee does when milk is added. But not red, as he expects. Black, and yet not black. Not just black, but an archetypal black that is the absence of light. A darkness that boils, then flares like a fountain; a fountain that draws itself away from the water the way oil floats on the surface of the ocean. And from the fountain emerges first a hand as dark as chiseled ebony, porous fleshed, twice the size of man’s fist. Then an arm, a shoulder, a head cowled in fabric like sackcloth. A mouth of midnight teeth and a throat full of emptiness that roars with a voice resonant with distance and cold and the echoes of frigid space.

It emerges from the plastic chaos of the pool, with a howl that has become laughter as fierce as bloodied spears.

It is three full meters tall; its naked foot and splayed toes as wide as a man’s chest. It has fingers like daggers with long, pointed nails. Completely black, skin and eyes and tongue, immense in dimension, radiating menace or raw, elemental power like a shout of warning.

But it’s more complicated than that. Ray has the distinct impression that he’s seeing with two sets of eyes, the sense of viewing two images, one placed over the other. The first is this massive, impossible humanoid form. Behind it is something else. A thing of long, slick, tapering torso, bulbous head, rings of eye slits that peer in all directions at once. Gelatinous in consistency, sprouting tentacular arms like obscene appendages, sucking air through fine, quivering epicanthal folds.

He blinks at it, trying to correct his vision that will not clear.

Holcomb’s voice comes from the speaker in Ray’s ear, cool and clinical. “He’s summoned it, the Devourer. We’re too late.”

Impossible.

“I would suggest that we withdraw, Gunnery Sergeant. Before we’re seen.”

Ray does not think, cannot think that way. His mind is not wired for comprehension. Consciousness drops, sinking below the higher brain functions, burying him in the cool and reptilian stem where thought dies and instinct emerges and primal shadows lurk in cavernous, midnight kingdoms walled off by evolution. He forgets about things like concentrated fire and three round bursts and center of mass. He just sprays bullets into anything that seems prone to moving. Back and forth, like a man watering flowers on a Saturday afternoon.

The worshippers have no time to react, no space in which to escape, and when Ray fires, his squad erupts in a supporting chorus. For a time, all Ray can hear is the bang and thunderous echo of gunfire. A cacophony of violence shreds bodies, sprays blood, mists the air of the dome with a tangy, cordite haze. He makes dead certain that he plugs Brezhnaya, pops him in the center of his forehead, opens a round hole like a third eye, before he can duck behind the shelter of his lectern.

But above the racket is another sound, vast and rumbling. It takes a moment for Ray to recognize it as a voice. Words emerge, thick like mud, resplendent with echoes of foreign tongues and wordless meaning that shimmers just below the aural surface.

“Fire consume you, strappado wrench your joints,

Limbs snap and bones break, eyes burst and tongue bind,

Love desert you, spirit fail

Ears shatter and flay the flesh,

Scald the nerves and fill with dark emptiness

Dome of heaven close against your prayers

Isolated you are, son of man.

Isolated be.

Windows of heaven shut before you.

Alone. Alone. Alone.

There is no God to hear the faithless faith.”

Waeltz mutters something inchoate, half a thought. He does not so much crumble as he implodes, seems to swell minutely, then deflate as though his bone structure has evaporated. What remains is a pile of flesh, spilling fluids, white smoke sifting up from empty holes where his eyes had been.

On Ray’s tactical display, the orange form that was Waeltz flickers and vanishes. Then Pelton. And Whitfield.

The words roll on, flattening Dhamers in his perch at the canyon’s mouth. Kluge and Hanfland crouched on the rim. More, and Ray seems to imagine a perfect scene of Predators hovering two klicks away in the desert, suddenly stricken, noses dipping, plummeting from the sky, their rotors scraping trenches in the sand before they lock, shatter, detonate the choppers in blossoms of flame.

He knows a sudden and explosive sensation of pressure against his skin. Flame licks across his eyes. Acid seems to scour his nerve endings, buckling his knees. He goes down with his muscles locked in a paralysis like the grip of panic. The immense figure emerges from the pall of smoke, grinning darkly so that Ray can see his teeth, and behind that, the shadow of the other being, whose mouth is a gaping maw of darkness and mucous and razor teeth angled in vicious directions like shards of glass. It stops before him, considers him for a time that feels like eons, then presses a mighty hand–or filthy, slimed tentacle, he can’t tell–against Ray’s forehead. His head tilts back so that their eyes meet, and Ray waits for the end, for the flexing of obscene muscle that will split his skull and spill his brains.

But the grin remains. The mouth speaks, sonorous and confidential. “That one bears charms which bid me hold my hand, child of clay. You would perhaps do well to ask him why he does, but these others were not told of the ancient ways, eh? Require of him an accounting, or withhold, and I will seek him out in time. Short of span, I say to him, both in years and attention. Poor of vigilance is this creature, man. Your kind cannot help but stumble. So I say to him: watch and wait and gird yourself up, but in the end, it will not suffice.

“But to you, I say this: well met, brother. I think we shall meet again.”

And then it is gone. Whether shambled away, out through the tunnel and into the expanse of the desert, or simply vanished, Ray cannot tell.

Ray tells the rest, realizing at some point that his voice has become thin, strained. He sounds like a man on the verge of shrieking. “We located Brezhnaya’s camels tethered in their encampment about a kilometer to the south, right around the ruins of the village of Ba’dai.” His throat is dry, parched with telling stories, and he thinks he’ll probably polish off this pitcher of beer and another two or three besides before he feels right again. “Two weeks of evasive maneuvers and assorted hostile territory hijinks later, we rode into Wadi Wadi. Holcomb was on a transport that bypassed METOC and went straight to Washington by late that afternoon. Holcomb got kicked up a rank. I got a nice citation for valor and a medal, and everybody seemed to forget that I’d managed to lose all of my men out there in the desert.”

He’s spent a good part of the last couple of hours staring at his hands, striving to achieve the clipped, factual tone with which he has traditionally given oral debriefings. He performed poorly, he knows, because–well, because the dissonance between tone and content would only make things worse. But finished now, he shuts his mouth and tries on a grin with all the ambiguity of a shrug. He raises his eyes to the Chief.

Becker has adopted a sunken appearance, with his shoulders sagging like someone who’s been slugged in the gut one time too many. His wrists rest against the table on either side of his plate as if their bracing is the only thing holding him up. He says nothing for a long time, then finally, “That definitely was not in the report.”

Ray arches an eyebrow. “Does that surprise you?”

“Um, no.”

Ray can count on one hand the number of people he’s told about Ba’dai. He might have told more if the information wasn’t still classified as really-ultra-mega secret or whatever the current parlance for weird military data was, but of those who carried the clearance to hear it, he’d only been around maybe one or two of them when they were actually drunk enough to halfway believe him. So Becker’s obviously strained credulity neither surprises nor offends him. With a story like this, you have to give a guy a few minutes, let him roll it over in his brain and run his fingers over its distinguishing features until he finds something that lets him hold onto it, something familiar that will put the rest of it in perspective. Ray suspects that a fairly solid portion of humanity won’t find any handle at all, and they either drop it and forget about the whole thing, or they wander around for the rest of their lives wondering every time they trip over this alien lump of data just how hard Ray was pulling their leg–or just how crazy he was.

Ray has made it a point to only tell people who have the power to check out enough of the details to verify that at least something strange happened, even if they can’t be certain exactly what it was.

If they don’t find something to cling to, there’s a lot of general hemming and hawing or they tell you how interesting it sounded with a little wink that suggests they’ve found you out. But if there’s something, anything, there follows only what Ray can surmise is a radical shift of consciousness, a broadening of perceptual horizons that invariably starts Now let me get this straight.

Becker makes an effort to pull himself together, straightens his shoulders. He rolls his tongue around his mouth and says, “Now let me get this straight. Lieutenant Colonel Holcomb–just plain old Lieutenant Holcomb then–drags you and a squad of combat Marines out into the desert to capture or neutralize a minor terrorist organizer. He didn’t tell you about this, um, this ritual?”

“I wouldn’t have cared if he had. I wasn’t in a position to believe him at the time.”

Nodding, Becker begins to gather speed. “But he anticipated this–what did you call it? Devourer?”

“He was aware that Brezhnaya wanted to summon an extraphysical being. It was my impression that he took the existence of such a being for granted, at least on a philosophical level. Whether or not he really believed it until he actually saw it is open for debate. I didn’t really care to ask him.” Ray offers an uncomfortable shrug. “I know this seems strange.”

“You don’t think it’s strange.” It was a statement, not a query.

“I’ve had a few years to get used to it. And I got out of the desert, where it had more of a tendency to freak me out.”

Maybe it’s the mutilated corpse of the young boy chilling in Paraclete’s morgue, but Becker does not seem prone to disbelieving. “So what does it all mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“It has to mean something,” Becker rumbles, clearly unhappy with the parallels. “Your experience then, what’s happening here. It has to be related. How could it not be?”

Ray has been tripping over the same types of thoughts for the last hour or more, mostly trying to ignore them. He has no insights to offer.

“Tell me about this thing Brezhnaya pulled out of the pool. What was it?”

“It was a shed,” Ray says, his voice low. “The Ialdabaoth’s shed.”

He hasn’t spoken that word in years, and even now it chills him, a talisman of evil.

“What is it? Where did it come from?”

“Rich, I–” Ray spreads his arms, a gesture like pleading. “It’s complicated, and I don’t pretend to understand it. I don’t even like to think about it.”

But Becker is implacable. He shakes his head at Ray’s refusals, crosses his arms over his chest. “Well you’d better get used to thinking about it. We need to know what we’re looking at here. We have to know how to combat something like this. Something that can kill with words, for God’s sake. What it is, where it comes from, what it wants.”

Ray stiffens. “What are you talking about?”

“If there is a shed aboard this ship, we have to know how to stop it. You have to tell us.”

But Ray shakes his head. “That’s just it. There isn’t a shed. If there was, we’d know about it by now. There would be bodies everywhere.”

“Not this time, maybe,” Becker responds. “But that just means that our boy will try again. It means he failed, and next time, he’ll be more careful. He’ll make sure he gets it right. Look, there’s no doubt that our killer was trying to duplicate the rituals you saw Mikhail Brezhnaya practicing. Most killers do not, Ray, do not jerk out the living organs of children. And we’re not going to give him another chance to get it right, is that understood?”

“Yes.”

Becker arches an eyebrow. “You don’t think so?”

“I told you, I don’t know what to think.”

“Then you tell me what it is you know, or think you know, that makes this so confusing. Because from my perspective, this is pretty flipping straightforward.”

He’s right, of course. Ray has known it from the first time he saw the body. Whatever else he might know or think about the murder, what the killer was trying to do–or simulating having done–was summon of a shed.

“I only know what Holcomb told me, the things he said when we were in the desert afterward. When we were making our way back to camp, to Wadi Wadi. I didn’t try to verify his conclusions, Rich. I didn’t care to think about it any more than I had to, and by the time I would have had opportunity, I was…busy with other things.”

This is all embarrassing, vaguely disconcerting, like talking about masturbation.

But Becker waggles his hand impatiently in a gesture of invitation. Bring it on. “Tell me.”

Ray grins at him, wearily, warily, trying very hard to give the impression of a man with a firm and complete grasp on his sanity. “What do you know about the Gnostics, Chief Becker?”

“What should I know about them?”

“Nothing, actually. At least not if the founders and early practitioners of Christianity had had their way. It was one of the first big heresies. It’s also the only way we know anything about the shed.”

Becker grunts. “Then you’d better start from the beginning.”

From the very beginning, Ray thinks, farther back than Becker even imagines. Before the earth was without form and void and darkness gathered upon the face of the deep. How do you even begin to explain such things? So much of it he hasn’t thought about in years, so many angles and bits of information. It’s hard to keep straight, even for a man who might want to.

“I want to be clear with you on this,” Ray says, because if Becker is so determined to pursue this route, he should know that reliability and verification of underlying data structures are not the hallmarks of this reference system. “What I know, and what I’m going to tell you, is all Jack Holcomb’s hypothesis. Holcomb was, and is, one of the leading experts in Gnostic myth and theology. Even by the time I knew him, he’d pored over the Nag Hammadi corpus for years, and later over the manuscripts discovered at Bar Ka’heli. It’s in the Bar Ka’heli codices that he encountered the concept of the shed. And it’s a new idea, one that hasn’t filtered into general Gnostic scholarship because the texts haven’t been released even for general scholarly study yet.”

“But Holcomb’s seen them?” Becker asks.

“Jack’s father is the director of the National Museum’s Middle Eastern Studies archive. Jack has advanced degrees in archaeology, anthropology and linguistics. He has, in other words, the right sorts of connections and the right educational background to have been included in the initial round of translation and study. The military apparatus supported his research since it could feasibly provide further insights into the psychology of the New Mes theater…and because he managed to convince them that Mikhail Brezhnaya was more Gnostic than Dispensationalist.”

Becker nods his understanding. “Go on. What did he find that was so interesting?”

“What he found was a strain of Gnostic thought that was unprecedented, unhinted, tied to older religious impulses and cult practices than anyone had previously established or even imagined. The traditional view of the Gnostic movement was that it was a fairly organic eruption of theological thought centered in the Middle East in the first century of the common era. It was the logical outcome of ancient Judaism, burgeoning Christianity, Egyptian tradition and newer Roman religious structures all brushing shoulders, all thrown together in a very dense and thoughtful social milieu. The flashpoint for drawing all of these ingredients together was this amazing new idea of a god cast into the form of man, who is murdered by men, then ascends back into heaven for the remission of human sin. A god who said, my blood will make you pure, you can be resurrected like me and one day you will rise to meet me.

“Well, this was electrifying, this notion that we could be like gods, that the only thing holding us back was the dark and sinful and animal nature of our own bodies. That our flesh is evil, something to be thrown off like a tattered coat. And like any new religious idea, it created problems with the established ideas, most notably, the Jewish creation myth that the Hebrews and the early Christians both held in common. After all, every good Jew and every young Christian knew that God had created the world, had created mankind from the dust of the ground and had pronounced all of creation to be good. How could the flesh be good if we needed to cast it off in order to be like God, you see?”

“My grandmother raised me to be a good Southern Baptist,” Becker snaps impatiently. “Of course I see.”

“The early Gnostics played with this idea that the flesh was evil. If the body was what kept us from being with God, and the body was made from the dust of the earth, from mud, then there must be something wrong with the physical world itself. All of creation must be wrong, tainted, evil. But if creation is evil, how could God have pronounced it to be good?”

“Troublesome, indeed,” Becker says.

“The Gnostic solution was an ascetic escape from the world and from the body. Anything that gave the body pleasure was rejected. Anything that made the body suffer or that eliminated the individual’s ties to earth and society and all the distractions of daily life became good. They believed that this gradual process of denial would purify the soul and make the believer eligible to receive intellectual revelations of the unknowable God. Minimize the distractions and focus on the divine, right? This is an elegant bit of reasoning, except it didn’t deal with the fundamental error perceived in the creation myth. That required a much more radical shift in thought, though it was not one that the Gnostic leadership was unwilling to make.

“Understand that the early Gnostics were a loose amalgamation of Christians, pagans and Jews all crammed into a mind-bogglingly small chunk of Mediterranean coastline. The traditional Hebrew holy land, in fact. The Christians are already teaching by this time that the Jews have been disinherited because they rejected the coming of the Messiah. The pagans have always rejected Judaism out of hand because–well, frankly because the Jews have a historical reputation for being something of a pain in the ass both culturally and militarily. The obvious answer for the non-Jewish Gnostics was to reject the validity of the Torah as a reliable source of knowledge. They argued that the God of the Torah, the God of Genesis, the God of the Jews–Yahweh–wasn’t really God at all, but a blind and deceived being who only believed himself to be God.

“And they called this being Ialdabaoth.”

“The same Ialdabaoth responsible for the creation of this shed,” Becker interjects, grunting. “So what is it, Ray?”

But Ray waves him off. “I’m getting to that. In this new creation myth, the true God has no contact with mankind at all. He resides in a great heavenly unknown called the pleroma, in perfect and non-physical unity with himself. Part of him, what the Gnostics called Pistis Sophia, what the Jews call Shek-hinah, separates itself from the pleroma and casts its divine reflection of the plastic waters of chaos–formless matter–which exists outside the realm of God. The light on the water spontaneously generates Ialdabaoth, and having been conceived, Ialdabaoth determines that he is the only being in the universe, the highest being, God. It’s Ialdabaoth who creates the world, doing what gods have always done. And because it was fundamental to his nature that he was accidental, that he was separated from the pleroma and the Godhead, everything he manufactures is also irrevocably separated from God. This separation is what the Gnostics termed ‘evil’.

“After awhile, God realizes what’s going on, that Ialdabaoth has made the earth and the universe and mankind, and because he also realizes that part of him is responsible for this chain of events, he disperses into the chaos and into the human vessels sparks of divine light. Souls by which we might communicate with him, by which we might redeem our separation, our evil. He also points out to Ialdabaoth his error and his arrogance in usurping the role of divinity.”

Becker nods. “Which, if I learned anything from having to read Milton at university, did not make him very happy.”

“Exactly. By this time, Ialdabaoth had a whole hierarchy of power in place. Demigods and archons, sub-creation contractors and demonic figures, and way down the chain of command, he had human beings, whom he had created to worship him. God was trying to take his subjects away. Ialdabaoth made it his everlasting task to deceive as many people as he could, to keep us all mired in deception so that we did not ascend to the Godhead. So that we did not recognize the divine spark inside our jars of clay.”

“Which is fine,” Becker agrees easily enough. “Except that it doesn’t tell me anything about how we ended up with a dead kid on sub-Deck Omicron. It doesn’t explain anything about the shed.”

“But it does lead us right to the threshold, because what it sets up is a notion of duality inherent in all living things. Flesh and spark, body and soul, metaphors for a separation from God that exists because of our embodiment. The Gnostics teach us that duality is evil, because the Godhead is perfect unity. Every level of creation below the Godhead is increasingly degraded. This is where Holcomb’s discoveries come into play.

“The Bar Ka’heli material is significant because it illuminated the reactionary viewpoint of the Jewish Gnostics in a way Nag Hammadi did not. As the Dead Sea Scrolls exposed scholarship to an almost unknown mainstream sect of Judaism called the Essenes, Bar Ka’heli revealed the theology of the persecuted sects of Jewish Gnostics, whose voices had largely disappeared from the historical record.

“Jack came across a manuscript called The Seventh Revelation of Ahriman, which is interesting, since ‘Ahriman’ is an Arab name rather than a Jewish one. Our boy Ahriman was, in fact, a converted Jew who brought to the table a vast knowledge of traditional Persian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythology. He’s the Jewish answer to the Christian Magi who leave their pagan traditions to worship the true religion, providing it with a learned stamp of credibility. In his revelation, Ahriman claims to have been given a vision of an cosmogonical event not covered by the mainstream Gnostic creation myth.

“In Ahriman’s interlude, Ialdabaoth does not reject the Godhead. Instead of rebellion, he repents his errors and his arrogance. He places himself in service to the Godhead, and he recognizes what a great evil he has perpetrated by inflicting duality upon the world. And having renounced his usurped power, he gathers his assorted archons and demigods and assistants together and tries to make amends. He tries to erase duality. So he creates a final race of beings, grand and powerful things fashioned from the substance of chaos itself, without any set physicality, pure consciousness capable of manipulating matter without being formed of matter. It is a Promethean impulse, not to steal fire from the gods in this case, but to return it to them. The redemption of duality through sacrifice.

“What he devises is the shed, creatures of stunning power and beauty, unrivalled beings in the hierarchy of mortal creation, perfect–and imbued with the fundamental understanding, the instinct, that they are the inheritors of the world. To the shed, humanity is anathema; humanity has usurped their rightful place in creation. Humanity is, in fact, an abortion that refuses to stop breathing.”

Becker rubs at his forehead, processing all that Ray has said. He watches Nomar scuttle across the tabletop and begin to amuse himself with the remains of his meal, picking at chunks of fat with his paws and nibbling at their edges.

He says, “If we assume that Brezhnaya and our killer both had access to this information somehow, that is, if they knew about the mythological history of the shed, what would lead them to believe that they could control such entities? The shed were made to destroy us.”

Ray exhales loudly. “This is where it starts to get a little complicated.”

“Oh, it starts to get complicated. Great!”

“Look, the problem with Ialdabaoth’s attempt at redemption is that he wasn’t aware that the Godhead had already made provision for redeeming humanity. God had already seeded us with the divine spark, as legitimized our inheritance of the physical world. In other words, even though the creation itself is tainted, God makes it legitimate–this is how Ahriman justified the Torah. So Ialdabaoth, realizing that he has unwittingly placed himself once again at odds with the Godhead, goes back to his pits of creation and tinkers with the shed a bit more. He can’t make them creatures of duality like men, because that would be imposing on the will of the Godhead to justify them as well. So instead, he removes some of essential stuff that make them independent entities. He makes them subject to humanity, limits them in such a way that they retain their immense power, but their will can be guided by men. They can be enslaved, controlled, kept in check. What controls them is blood. Blood as some sort of input parameter. The shed can be understood as neutral memes. Animated, yes. Thinking, yes. Supernatural, yes. But also vulnerable to outside control if the proper rites are observed. They become receptacles for instruction, neither good nor evil, but subroutines of a program intimately bound up with creation. Brezhnaya, for example, was simply plugging in the parameters of his choice and hitting the execute key. After that, the program would run as it had been instructed and heedless of the consequences. It is not the best solution to the shed problem, but it is manageable, and it’s all Ialdabaoth can do because he is either unwilling or unable to destroy completely the things he has made.”

“Which doesn’t make them any less dangerous at all,” Becker points out, “if they manage to fall into the wrong hands, like Mikhail Brezhnaya’s, as we’ve seen.”

Again, Ray remembers clearly the way Kev Whitfield collapsed, boneless. The wet and slopping sound his flesh made against the stone.

“Yes.”

“And you believe this, Ray? You believe the things Jack Holcomb said?”

This is a vital question, one Ray has never been able to answer for himself, let alone to convince someone else. It’s too radical, too fundamentally different from everything he has ever been taught to accept as true. Normal men relegate shed and their complementary mythology to mental files marked “Creepy, but Irrelevant” and/or “Useless Paranormal Trivia”. Preferably, mental files that are locked, buried, only accessed on impenetrably dark nights hemmed in by a thick pine forest when they’re clustered around a roaring campfire with a troop of too-big-for-their-knickers Boy Scouts.

All this, of course, leads him roundabout to musty reflections on Jack Holcomb himself. Jack Holcomb the virgin LT, who knew nothing about actual combat, who talked deeply and intelligently of subjects arcane and occult, who for two weeks in the desert kept one hand over the space between his neck and chest like there was something dangling there and the other on the butt of a Russoturk assault rifle which he field stripped with expert care every morning so it wouldn’t clog with sand. Holcomb wasn’t a normal LT, despite how Ray wanted to characterize him. He didn’t have the earnest idiocy of a puppy with poor bladder control. Not earnest at all, but rather intense in a vaguely scary way. He was squared away, at least theoretically, as close to being squared away as you could get without having been in a combat situation. He didn’t freak out in hostile territory. He didn’t cling to Ray like he couldn’t take care of himself. He’d accepted advice and guidance, but done his fair share of sentry duty while Ray slept and offered salient suggestions like he had a map of the terrain wedged behind his eyeballs. Holcomb had been a soldier in the field, which was high praise in those days, and a large part of the reason they’d made it back to camp alive.

Jack Holcomb believed. He wouldn’t have been mad if he didn’t, at least not mad in the way Ray knew him to be.

But what does Ray believe? Even now, even after Ba’dai, it’s impossible to tell.

“I know the shed exist because I’ve seen one,” he says. “But what they are really, I don’t think even Jack knew at the time. When he called them shed, he seemed to be referencing a whole mythological metaphor that he had devised in and around Ahriman’s text, for which Ahriman’s gnosis was a key to understanding. Shed is actually a Hebrew word, the equivalent of the Greek daimon.”

“Demons?” Becker growls, stiffening.

“Not like that. Not the way we conceptualize them now. Middle Eastern cultures had a much more dynamic view of the supernatural than Westerners have. They didn’t spend as much time wrestling with the problem of the existence of evil. That’s almost exclusively a side effect of Christian theology.

“Ahriman didn’t wrestle with it, except as a reaction to Gnostic anti-Semitism, because Satan and demonology didn’t really exist in the Jewish or the Arab culture. The Hebrew word for evil, and the understanding that went with it, was hasatan, ‘adversary’. Two of the Bible’s oldest stories, the one in Job and the story of Balaam, feature prominent appearances by angelic beings: Balaam who is stopped on the way to a ritualized cursing of the children of Israel by an angel; Job who is tested by Satan after the devil and God have a confab in heaven about what a great and upright man Job is. In both tales, the word used to describe the divine agent is hasatan. In the Balaam story, we accept the angel of God as being a good guy, an angel, because he’s preventing evil from being done to God’s chosen people. But Job is a more troubling issue because the hasatan is almost chummy with God. He’s not Big Evil Guy plotting the overthrow of heaven, but a free agent wandering around between earth and the celestial throne calling God’s attention to things of interest. Doing, in other words, exactly what God had designed him to do. What does God do when confronted with the piety of Job? He sends out the hasatan to give Job a hard time. He programs the hasatan with a mission to test his faithful servant. He makes an adversary where one did not exist and would not have acted adversarially except where it had been instructed to do so.

“Christians decided that this wasn’t a very flattering view of God, that God wasn’t in the business of doing bad things to good people. To think that he might didn’t make them feel very cozy and comforted despite the fact that God had sent his very own son down to earth to get murdered by ingrates. So they changed the article from ‘an’ to ‘the’ and made hasatan a proper noun and gave both themselves and God an Adversary worthy of capitalization who could screw things up on his own, of his own will, and generating a multitude of nasty theological knots in the process. They made armies of angels who could do no evil and demons who could do no good and cast all of human history as a war focused around getting as many human beings on your side as you possibly could. That we’d decide a war in heaven was really all about us as human beings is probably more instructive about human nature than it is about God.

“But Jews understood that angels and demons were the same types of entities who drew individualized definition from the mission to which they’d been assigned. If Yahweh gave them helpful-to-humans parameters, they were angels; if he gave them hostile parameters because the Jews or one of their neighbors were getting out of line, they were ‘adversaries’ designed to bring their targets back into right standing with God. There was no supernatural evil, just divine guidance that looked good or bad depending on your perspective. At the end of the day, God did what God wanted to do, and you either believed he did it for a good reason and went to bed happy that the universe was in order, or you accepted the other option, that it was all random and purposeless and you lived completely at the whim of an insane Deity determined to keep you in the throes of an existential crisis.

“Ahriman is also drawing on a long history of Arabian mythology, on djinn’s, who share this neutral meme design in their original conception. Supernatural beings with immense power who help lads like Aladdin gain their rightful place in the world through the service of wishes, but for every Aladdin, there’s a cautionary tale of some yabbo who tries to use a genie for evil and gets caught up in a semantic web of wish language that ultimate becomes his undoing because like a computer program, genies have this annoying tendency to be literal in their execution. Justice comes to men who are good; judgment to men who are evil. The djinn behaves according to the types of commands the individual inputs.

“The big knock on Middle Eastern deities these days is that that they were so whimsical. They were unreliable, wandering about causing trouble and getting into messes and having internecine wars that generated no real resolution but always led to human suffering in one way or another. Ahriman and his contemporaries didn’t see it this way. They didn’t have a philosophical framework that pointed everything out in terms of good and evil. What they had was neutral memes wandering about doing divinely inspired things. You didn’t try to stop evil so much as keep from attracting the attention of a god or gods who might decide you needed a little adversarial working over for mucking about in their business of running things. If you were so unfortunate as to gain supernatural interest, the one thing you had to keep in mind above all else was that you were dealing with an emissary of your God. Not a bad guy, not some evil wannabe determined to destroy God’s plans and wreck the universe, but God himself–or herself, depending on your cultural orientation–testing your piety.

“This is the core idea: that angels, demons, djinn can bring help or harm depending on how you use them. Always, always, always, extreme caution must be used in dealing with them. Wise men like Solomon can control demons, even Beelzebul, King of Demons, because he understands this inherent peril. Over time, all of these experiences with the supernatural are transformed. Angels become good guys, demons become bad guys. We develop methods for prayer, rituals for delineating the bounds of our interaction with supernatural beings, magicks and words of power to contain and control them. All of these beings become tempered and sanitized by time and disbelief, homogenized into something safe, something that could be dealt with in a fashion other than simple, blind terror.

“But in the beginning, before we child-proofed the supernatural, there was just the shed. Holcomb was certain that the shed was the protomyth from which all these other ideas derived. Beelzebul is a shed; Michael the Archangel is a shed; the Devourer is one. The shed is neither angel nor demon nor djinn, he is all three at once. He is dark matter and irreductible universal algorithms; he is the pulse of Being, fundamental creation stuff–a diagram of the structure of the mind of God.”

Becker chews his lip for several seconds in silence, then says, “Ray, whoever killed that kid did not do it to test our piety. This is not anyone interested in understanding the mind of God.”

Ray realizes he had begun to hunch his shoulders, and there’s a line of aches down the middle of his back as though his muscles have clenched themselves to his bones. He closes his eyes, inhales deeply, then opens them again.

The shed, what Ray believes was the shed, whatever you might choose to call it, was supposed to be New Mes. It is not Paraclete. It should not part of this investigation, not bound up to the corpse of the boy, except as salient background.

“I don’t know why,” Ray says slowly.

Becker only nods. “I don’t know either, but I do know that my good, God fearing, Bible thumping Baptist grandmother wouldn’t have given much of a squat about shed and genies and what old Solomon was doing with anybody other than his idolatrous concubines. She most certainly wouldn’t have cared for the exegesis of some johnny-come-lately Arab Jew trying to rewrite the book of Genesis. What would have attracted her attention was the idea that bad people are using nefarious methods to commit the second oldest sin in the history of humanity, that being murder of the Cain and Abel variety, and seeing to it that justice is brought to the perpetrators. What I know is that murder never happens for no reason at all. Whether it’s done with a knife in a back alley or a gun on the lawn of the White House or some supernatural free agent in the Persian hinterland, there’s always somebody behind it with a grudge, or an attitude or a score to settle. Somebody wields the weapon, and they’ve always got a why or a wherefore. Murder always comes down to the why of it.

“So you tell me, Ray, why was that kid murdered? Why now? Why here? Why in precisely that way, when it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone who didn’t know what you know?”

All the Chief is doing is stating the obvious, the exact thing Ray has been trying to ignore.

“They’re trying to send me a message,” Ray says.

“But why would they do that?”

“Because they want me to know that they know what happened, that they know about the shed.”

“Which means they know a lot more about you than you know about them. The victim here is only peripherally that boy in the storage bin. The intended victim, the target, is you.”

“Sure.”

“Who else knows about what happened to you at Ba’dai, Ray?”

It’s not something he has to think about. There are no survivors to count off on his fingers. “No one except Jack Holcomb–who has his reasons for not telling anyone anything at all. Every other person who knew or has been told about Ba’dai is dead.”

This was an obvious setback for Becker. His features knuckle thoughtfully. “You’re certain?”

“I watched my entire squad die. Of Brezhnaya’s Dispensationalists, anyone who might have had indirect knowledge should have been rounded up and eliminated years ago.”

“What about colleagues? Other people like me who you might have told when you were too drunk to keep your mouth shut?”

Ray laughs grimly. “Dead.”

“You’re certain?”

“The CIU doesn’t make mistakes when it comes to certifying the loss of field assets. When the agency says you’re dead, there’s no coming back.”

“That makes for an interesting problem, then.” Becker says this the way one of Persian king Darius’s generals might when confronted with a horde of Scythians, gold bedecked and poisoned arrow tips glistening beneath the sun, rushing on horseback up from the steppes. “Someone is trying to send you a message, my friend. And I suspect they’ll keep trying to send it until you get it or until we catch him.”

Ray says: “So, okay.”

It’s the sort of meaningless, syntactic noise meant to indicate that they’d smashed into a brick wall. Becker peers at him as though he expects answers to spring from Ray’s forehead as fully formed and jaw-droppingly voluptuous as a Greek goddess. But Ray has nothing left to give him.

“I’ve got to get Nomar back to the shop and start running tests on the tissue samples taken from the victim before he crams his storage compartments with the remains of your dinner. Maybe I’ll learn something that will get us moving along the right track.”

Becker sees this for what it is, an excuse to escape. “What do you want me to do with the two Marines?”

“You’ve cleared them for reassignment?”

“Temporarily. Until we hit New Holyoke.”

Some good news, at least. He’ll feel much more competent to deal with this situations with Marines to back him up. “Send them around to my quarters tomorrow afternoon. I should have something for them to do by then. No, scratch that. If I leave it up to them to find me, they’ll take days to hook up.” He knows that much about Marines from having been one. “I’ll pick them up when I’m ready for them. What you can do in the meantime is see about getting me assigned to a new berth, something with more space and closer to the Garden Level. On the Garden Level, in fact.”

“What, you want me to just kick one of the fares out into the concourse?”

“If that’s what it takes. I’ll also have a list of equipment and computing essentials for you by tomorrow morning at the latest. I’ll need those things delivered as soon as possible.”

Becker starts to protest, then waves himself off. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Ray has already squeezed himself out of the booth. He prompts Nomar to follow with a pair of quick slaps against his thigh. “I’ll let you know if I find anything. First thing.”

“That’s good, as long as you remember to act on it when the time comes.”

The Chief is smiling, but Ray stops in front of him, serious. “I don’t know what’s going on, Rich. I don’t know why this thing is erupting out of my past and what it has to do with me, but I’ll catch this scumbag. I promise you that, and he’ll explain to me face to face what he wanted me to know that was so important it was worth Micah Uytedehaage’s life.”

The CIU spooks showed up in Wadi Wadi looking like bad imitations of Marines (i.e. they had the clothes; they had the gear; they had the righteous, honed killing edge, but when you looked at them, there was a vacuity to their gaze, a disconcerting detachment that suggested their righteous edge might have been gained in tasks less savory than gutting opposing combat forces in legitimate military exercises). It was obvious from an even casual perusal that they were not pleasant guys. They were the kind of folk you suspect are only being nice to you because they want something that you have, but taking it seems like too much effort, even though putting up with your whining and crying afterwards is the hard cap extent of your puerile resistance capabilities against them and whatever it is they want to do to you. The were very slick, very badass. Mucho cool and menacing.

There were two of them, Minos and Thrash, made up to look like dapper Tac Sergeants and they buttonholed him in the PX where he was picking up some razor blades and scanning the magazine rack for this month’s girlie mags. They tried the whole impressive we have a proposition for you from your government spiel, which he blew off with the argument that he’d already been propositioned by his government, and having been screwed more than his handful share of times, he was considering entertaining other offers at the moment. Bad pay, poor working conditions, lousy scenery and he had to pay for his own head jobs, thank you very much. Then they went to the life of excitement and adventure backup, sounding not unlike the recruitment videos the chubby draft sergeants paraded around Ray’s Indiana high school right before graduation. (Pick your service before the service picks you!) Ray preferred backgammon and had just taken up origami, and he told them so. By the time the three of them had gotten themselves wedged into the narrow checkout aisle to watch Ray pay for his purchases, he suspected they were finally gearing up for the hard sell techniques. He more than suspected they were about to divulge that they were, in fact, officers of distinguished rank masquerading as NCO’s for the singular purpose of screwing with him and/or testing his level of Marine dedication and/or they were actually about this close to ordering him to this devastatingly attractive new duty station whether he liked it or not.

All the necessary papers, they seemed to suggest, had already been signed, copied and filed in his absence.

Ray was not in the mood to take orders from spooks, officers or not, and he didn’t like the fact that they had followed him through the entire PX, so before they could tell him something that will put him in hock to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (like the fact that they are, in fact, officers and he’s required to listen respectfully and then obey their commands), he dropped his fresh packet of razor blades and his tit magazine and proceeded to stomp their asses from the candy aisle all the way back to Personal Hygiene Products. Having successfully avoided their recruitment overtures, Ray picked up his personal items and returned to the temporary barracks…

…where they caught up with him, and slipped a cold and nasty auto-injector against his arm and shot him full of a temporary nerve toxin that left him both queasy and paralyzed. They stood over his bed by moonlight, their faces patchwork quilts of bruise and scratch and swelling welts, and said things like you’re an active guy; you like the hard life. More important, you like kicking people around and stopping bad guys from doing the types of things that bad guys like to do. We’re offering you the opportunity to do exciting and interesting crap like that every day for the rest of your life, okay? They gave him some examples of his past enjoyment of this type of activity, just enough to show that they were fluent with the language of his personnel file. They said the pay was great, the working conditions top notch, the benefits outstandingly better than anything anyone else was offering, and even though you still had to pay for your own head jobs, at least you could comfortably afford them.

Ray was impressed not at all by their arguments and incentives, but he was floored by their ability to sneak into a fully occupied NCO barracks in the middle of an armed camp and disable a squared away combat Marine before he’d even had a proper chance to rouse himself. As a man who made his living by creatively and skillfully killing other men, this was a currency of the most fascinating sort.

By the time they said and it’s never dull, like that was supposed to be the big, clenching appeal (rather than what it was, to whit, an indication that someone should look into terminating their staff psychologist for incompetency), Ray was saying something unhiply emotive like you had me from hello.

But here he is, a few short years removed, puttering around the shop, surrounded by terminals and computer equipment and assorted, disembodied drone components, looking to all the world like he is some sort of tech geek, like he is the type of guy who could code a complex DNA sequencer and database-match compiler meshed through a self-developed bitstream interpreter interface between the drones’ internal SQUAL metalanguage and Paraclete’s state of the art DLQ+ virtual sensing medical computing environment. It’s a good thing he and Nomar have the shop to themselves, otherwise he’d probably have to maim someone just on general principle. Nomar has gone into peeved mode from having a data output jack rammed up his anal port for the second time in as many days, and has retreated beneath a desk where he has something solid against his back and can, if Ray gets out the jack again, use his claws against assorted soft tissues in an effort to convey his displeasure. The fact that he is not an actual rat and should not be disturbed by standard data transfer procedures does not seem to have occurred to his processing array, which Ray finds to be an issue of marginal interest from a programming standpoint.

Ray is sitting at his workstation watching meaningless data analysis stream across his monitor while it searches for hits against the med and criminal databases stored in the ship’s datacore. He’s refined the search parameters a dozen times already with unsatisfactory results after he has filtered for the kid’s recorded DNA profile (Parameter argument logic/response technique where unsatisfactory = zero records returned. Alternately: zilch, zip, nada, the dreaded empty set, no data, etc. See alternate references under: Waste of Time, Sleep Deprivation to No Ascertainable Purpose and Tasks Not Specified in Job Description).

The cascade of digits in process is vaguely hypnotic, and Ray keeps flipping back to memories of Jack Holcomb, which is something he most definitely does not want to do. Because he can’t help but think about the way Holcomb always kept one hand over his chest, right where his dog tags would dangle. Only, it wasn’t his tags he was feeling for, but the meticulous stone ring he wore on a chain, the one he’d crafted from descriptions and hints in ancient manuscripts to be just like the ones hoary old King Solomon of Biblical fame had used in legend to subjugate demons and djinn and slave labor them out to various projects culminating in the construction of the Holy Temple.

Exactly like the ones, Holcomb reveals to Ray beneath a starry New Mes night and in a breathless and trembling voice, precisely cognate to the ones he has had surgically fused to the bones of his skull, grafted around his femur and tibia, implanted into his pelvis. He laughs, grim with knowledge, and says over and again: the shed is wrong about that, my friend. I won’t slip; I won’t make a mistake or let down my guard. Im-fucking-possible. He doesn’t know about modern medicine, does he? He hasn’t kept up with time, with technology. There’s no way to trip me up, to steal my talisman and turn me into some doddering Solomon with a shamir in my staff of power. Bring your shiddah veshiddot! You thought Solomon was an asshole? You don’t know the first thing about me, but I know everything about you.

What was the difference between paranoia and insanity? That might be something he’d have to look up.

You’re a good soldier, Marlowe. You know everything there is to know about the currency of the physical world–violence. There’s no fault in that. We’ve trained you to be a ruthless killing machine, and you’ve taken to your lessons like a prodigy, plain and simple. But you need to get this through your head, buddy. You’re not just operating in a physical arena. Not anymore. You see the shed, you read the books I’ve read and seen the forces I’ve seen–forces beyond the ken of simpleminded man–and you’ve got one of two choices: you ignore what you know to be the truth and wait for it to destroy you, or you dive in, you learn, you acquire the currency of the supernatural world–knowledge. Once you take that step, once you accept what you’ve seen as truth rather than illusion or delusion or psychotic break, Marlowe, then the world becomes a totally different place. The horizon takes on a depth you never imagined. The universe is a far vaster and stunningly more nuanced place than you have heretofore cared to believe. Once you know, you can’t ever go back to a place of not knowing, only forward, only better warned and better armed. You’ll see. One day you’ll say to yourself, “that Jack Holcomb with his stone rings inscribed in Sanskrit and Arabic and forgotten Hittite, that Jack Holcomb knew what he was talking about, didn’t he? He had his shit together, yessir. He had knowledge. Magus Fucking Profundus”. Then you’ll be calling me, asking me what to do to save your ass. No shame in that, Marlowe. When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

He assiduously avoids thinking about Ba’dai again. He’s all but purged that impulse for another five to seven years by spilling his guts to Becker. But this doesn’t stop him from coming back to the shed with troubling frequency. As he sees it, he is logically required to dismiss the argument that the boy was murdered in the fashion that he was out of coincidence. Carving out a child’s organs is not standard homicidal technique. It has been done, certainly, by individuals with interests that did not intersect with ancient Middle Eastern occult rites. But he has a hard time believing that this type of child serial killer would randomly end up berthed on a starship with one of the few people in the world who might be tempted to mistake his psychosis for ritual.

The same reasoning applies to bumbling, shed summoning acolytes who lacked the patience to wait until they reached the less monitored frontier environment of New Holyoke.

As Becker had said, someone was trying to send him a message. Someone in a position to know what he had seen.

Someone who also knew about the shed.

Well met, brother. I think that we shall meet again.

But it is a good idea to stop there, to not follow that thread to its conclusion. Better not to dwell on other things, rumors, whispers from Wadi Wadi that reached him only as desiccated corpses of truth, sanitized of their vibrancy because he received them at a dozen degrees of separation.

Staff Sergeant So-and-so from F Company reporting that a night patrol did not return as scheduled, says he dispatched a recon team to locate them after several hours. Recon team walks the grid and discovers a bundle of corpses stashed in a windblown arroyo. Corpses with a distinctly chewed look to them.

Unsubstantiated rumors that pilots had stumbled across abandoned tent compounds that looked an awful lot like those of bedouin Sheik Loyal to the Allied Cause, their herds wandering listlessly, untended.

Forward listening posts gone silent, the troops deserted–always at night.

Filtered tales of Allied Kurd forces laying down their arms and vanishing into the remote mountain wilderness, leaving cryptic messages that they would only fight that which could be killed. METOC sends investigators to look into the possibility of a newly formed, ultra secret branch of Russoturk special forces wreaking havoc on local support.

New Mes became a very creepy place in the months before he shipped off to CIU, and on moonless nights out in the field, at odd hours when he was supposed to be setting up ambushments for tomorrow’s Russoturk convoys, Ray would think about Jack Holcomb and wonder what he made of all the bizarre rumors. Was he running around Washington trying to convince senators and cabinet members to beware the shed? Did he sometimes yearn for moonless nights, when there wasn’t the chance that he would see strange shadows against the argent limned sky?

Push it away, Ray tells himself. It’s a mind game, one he thought he had left behind.

Or had he run away from it? Had he embraced the CIU because it promised to put him on an interminable series of starship cruises, to eject him into the deepness of space as far from New Mes as human habitation ranged?

Did Ialdabaoth create the entire universe, or just the earth? That was a point Holcomb had never made quite clear enough.

So he stops thinking about New Mes and sheds and metaphysics. He can do that, except what’s left to him–the dead kid–is somehow worse.

He’s been at it for about three hours, and despite all the events he has jammed into this day, it’s still early. Just after midnight Greenwich according to the ship’s chron. He’s been up since way too early, and he’s aware that he should be getting tired any time now, should probably just plan on falling over with his fatigue and considering himself lucky if he doesn’t fall so hard he breaks his face. But in the quiet of the shop when his mind isn’t actively engaged, he’s developed an agitating tendency to get all shaky. He has to concentrate on the keypad to keep his fingers from rattling off strings of incoherent letters and digits.

It’s something he’s been through before, too many times to count, in fact. A minor case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, acute in nature. Good Marines measure their level of combat effectiveness by PTSD episode count more than by medals, commendations and field promotions.

Little Micah Uytedehaage is not a combat fatality, but he registers the same way in Ray’s mind. He flashes in and out of Ray’s forebrain with a music video’s stab and cut photographic intensity. His eviscerated corpse. His glassy and staring eyes. His gangly, purple limbs. Ray has the boy’s sweet corpse smell up his nostrils, a constant sensory companion, though he knows he’s just imagining it. The subconscious picks at horror like it’s a scab. Any decent military psychologist will tell you that this is a good thing; it’s an indicator that your coping mechanisms are on-line and humming feverishly over the task of putting the event behind you.

Ray has had to rush to the head three times in the last two hours to vomit. He supposes that this is a coping mechanism, too.

He doesn’t feel like he’s coping. He feels like he’s being eaten alive.

The traditional Marine response to stress on this scale of magnitude is to round up some similarly stressed buddies, find a bar frequented by military types and spend several hours getting astoundingly drunk. Additional therapy comes in the form of locating other military individuals attached to a different branch of the service (e.g., Air Force guys) who seem to have not encountered a combat level of stress induced psychological damage and thumping on them until they can begin to empathize.

Ray suspects that Commander Sorensen would not appreciate his taking this self-actualization tack, so he forces himself to break down the ass-kicking impulse to its base elements in an attempt to find an adequate substitute. It occurs to him that the whooping of USAF butts may be more an artifact of the drinking than of coping, which leads him to believe that drinking itself might also be incidental to the healing process. What remains when he’s done filtering out unnecessary behavior patterns and general Marine tradition is the naked concept of identification. Mutual understanding without words.

He needs to be close to someone who can share his pain.

This is, of course, a sufficiently profound psychological revelation to justify making an odd hours social call on Emma Whiston.

***

Even with an underdeveloped sense of propriety (cultivated by years of hanging around with testosterone enhanced males, and followed by a few more years of elevating sneakiness and network footprint avoidance to the level of a fine art), Ray comprehends that it would be a bad idea to hack the ship’s passenger manifest for the unproferred address of the Whiston suite. Civilized people would consider such behavior either unforgivably rude or stalkingly threatening.

And there are other, more socially conscionable ways of gathering that information.

One of the features of the system terminals on the Garden Level is a public database of ship schematics searchable by deck and passenger name which will, if properly instructed, produce a hardcopy map where you are signified by an X and the recommended route of travel to the specified destination is a dotted red line. Built into this nifty little program is a courteous bit of code that pings the private in-room network of the individual for whom you have just searched to alert them to the possibility of visitors in their immediate future (and/or give them the opportunity to alert security that so-and-so with this shipsys id, who I happen to find personally offensive, is on his way to my rooms and I’d like to have him intercepted before he arrives). This code goes by the name of Distant Doorbell and is one of those innocuous bits of programming that took its creator all of about ten minutes from idea to debugging and rewarded his ingenuity with something on the order of ten billion dollars within six months of the product’s release.

It has since become the minimum standard of decent manners on starships throughout human space.

By the time he reaches the Garden Level to place his obligatory ping, Ray has showered off the corpse smell that probably didn’t exist for anyone but himself, changed into corpse-free khaki and passed several agonizing minutes in front of a mirror trying on facial expressions that conveyed an approximation of human warmth and concern, tinged with a sort of Oh-my-God-I-just-heard consternation. (Somewhat disconcertingly, this looks almost exactly like his I’ll give you three dollars American if you’ll have dirty sex with me face, only with less eyebrow and a touch more goggle. He alternates between the two several times until he’s certain the compassionate one will hold its form with the rigidity of cement.) The map generated by the kiosk terminal bears the title THIS IS HOW YOU GET TO EMMA across the top in perkily obese green letters. The fact that it is six pages long, involves three separate elevators, four staircases and traverses roughly the entire lateral distance of the ship would have been intimidating for anyone not a member of the crew, and Ray suspects that this is might be intentional. It is a “Visitors NOT Welcome” sign hung out by individuals having just enough celebrity to be casually gawk-worthy or notorious enough to want to be left alone.

The Whiston suites are tucked six decks below the Garden Level in a bulbous protrusion grafted onto the original superstructure by design engineers specializing in aesthetics. It is a compound of twelve sprawling rooms with four public entrances, two private egresses with their own personal lift and an entry corridor that dead ends at the hatch to an exclusive emergency jettison pod. The failed illusion that Paraclete is something other than a military craft converted to passenger transport does not exist here in the space officially designated Iota Deck-D, where the D more than likely stood for decadence. Iota-D is a place of vibrant color and understated elegance, of rare wood panels and walls papered with textured earth tones, of crimson carpet, fresh flowers and dewdrop chandeliers. It is, in short, everything the Officers Lounge tries to be except for the niggling absence of about a trillion dollars to burn.

And that’s just the farking hallway.

Ray steps out of the lift feeling a bit breathless. He examines his watch for the tenth time in the last few minutes, but not until this moment has he bothered to consider that it really is almost one in the morning. That maybe whatever it is that brought him down here could wait until the morning, or next week or the day that falls right after “never” on the calendar. But this is a normal sort of freaking out for him, so he plunges ahead, just beginning to sweat and lifting his knees high with each step so the morass of the carpet won’t establish a suction lock on his boots and strand him, paralyzed, out in the open.

Then there’s the knottier problem of which door to hammer at. The map directs him only to the primary entrance, which appears dramatically too public upon actual inspection. It’s a thing of chrome and technological gadgetry, with a secure lock keypad entry system. There’s a high-res flatscreen embedded in wall to the left. At the moment it’s projecting a vid image of the system messenger in kako-daimon mode–meaning that the door is locked and the messaging software routed to a recording device. There’s either nobody home, or whoever happens to be inside isn’t interested in talking to anyone not already on their side of the security.

Ray doesn’t find this surprising given the circumstances, nor did he imagine that given the encounter with the Mr. Whiston of the household this morning that he’d have much luck getting at Emma via the front door in the first place. But with three other doors to choose from, knocking on the wrong one would be a tactical error.

Thus, the Distant Doorbell ping. And the follow-up ping the lift would have transmitted to the security system when it stopped on Iota-D.

But the rest relies on Emma being present and/or paying attention and/or astute enough to realize she should be waiting by the door in the middle of the (chronological) night to meet a man who still technically falls somewhere in the murky acquaintance range between cordial and complete stranger. It is a complex array of variables, none of which reflect positively on his foresight and mission planning skills. Of course, most of his traditional mission planning skills would have dictated kicking in all the doors he found closed, doing a lot of shouting and gun pointing and eventually bayoneting anyone who was not Emma so they couldn’t raise a general alarm.

So this way is probably best.

Though he reserves the right to keep the shouting and stabbing as a viable Plan B.

But at the last, it doesn’t matter. Before he can go digging through his pockets for makeshift edged weapons, there comes a hydraulic wheeze down the corridor to his left. A snooty kako-daimon avatar begins to express his displeasure in a tinny, offended voice at having the seal broken, but is cut off in mid-reprimand. From the farthest door, what would have been the door to the corner room if Iota-D hadn’t been vaguely circular in its construction, Emma peers out, her round face and wide eyes emerging from the flat plane of the wall as though it is disembodied. A pale arm follows and she beckons to him without words. Ray strikes out toward her at an unmanly trot.

His hands are empty. He should have brought flowers or something. It would have been easy enough, since he has connections in the hydroponics section. He could have arranged something if he’d been thinking clearly–which he seems to be not doing now. Though it could also just be a lack of practice at this sort of thing. The last time he brought any woman flowers, he was eight years old carrying a bundle of discriminatingly selected wildflowers to his mother in the hospital right after she’d disgorged Robert Junior (a.k.a. “bobbin”, “bobbo”, “L’il B’, “Roberta Jean”, “punk-ass bee-yatch”, depending on the speaker and the circumstances).

And he thinks: Is this a tryst? Is that what it is? He’s never been involved in a tryst, so he can’t say for certain, but the possibility is both thrilling and alarming at once.

What am I doing?

A moment later he’s inside; the door hisses closed behind him. The much abused kako-daimon announces in a hurt tone that portal integrity has been restored and tacks on a purely malicious notation that the security breach has been documented in the system log. There is a subtle tsk! in its voice which leads Ray to believe that software developers spend entirely too much time generating pseudo-human skins for their avatars when they should have been focusing on the fact that an average skilled hardware hacker could pop the security kernel in just under thirty seconds.

At this point, he decides it would be a good idea to stop the dervish whirling through his neural net before it makes him dizzy. He takes a deep breath, tries to concentrate.

He is such a giddy assclown.

But here’s Emma, small and pale, luminous in blue silk capri pants and a short oriental robe wrapped about her. She hugs her arms against her chest, steps back to create some distance between them. Her lips are drawn together in a thoughtful pout and her eyes dart toward him, then away, considering the door. She seems to be straining forward, as though filtering the ether for voices Ray cannot hear.

Finally, she allows her shoulders to slump and offers him a relaxed and weary frown. Not unhappy, just bland, almost an absence of expression. “It seems I’ve been a bad influence, Mr. Marlowe. You’ve known me for two days, and here you are already behaving audaciously.”

“I know. It’s late, but you didn’t strike me as the type of girl who put to bed early.”

“I don’t believe you know enough about me or my sleeping habits to make such a bold statement. How quickly I jump into bed might just surprise you.”

She speaks without mischief, an innocent absence of intent. There’s no play in her at all.

And Ray remembers that Micah Uytedehaage was not just victim to her, not just a carcass already cooling the first time she saw him. He winces at the thought, at its ugliness.

“Did I wake you?” Ray asks, a form of apology.

Emma shakes her head. “I was–No, not at all. It’s dreadfully early for the young socialite, as you suggest.”

“No, it’s late. I should have been more considerate, waited until tomorrow.”

This was a mistake. What had he been thinking?

“It’s fine, really. I don’t object to visitors. Not you, especially. But you didn’t bring your rat with you, I see. I had conceived a notion that the two of you were inseparable.”

“He’s angry with me at the moment. I’m giving him space to brood.”

She obviously doesn’t know what to make of this, and stares at him with her lower lip caught in her teeth. He’s being nonsensical, of course. Everything is nonsensical. He hasn’t had a clear and focused thought since he walked in the door.

“Why are you here, Ray?”

“I should have just called. Would you like me to go?”

“I knew it was you when the ping came through. I wouldn’t have opened the door if I didn’t want to see you.”

Ray doesn’t know what that means, not in this context. Just polite? Is this what good manners looks like?

Beyond Emma’s shoulder is a short hallway. At the end is a door, slightly ajar, which he assumes must be her bedroom. It’s a space that suits her, this room. Cream colored walls, abstract pastel prints, pale rugs over a white carpet. The furniture is soft, delicately constructed. Where there are flowers, the vases are clear, eggshell thin crystal and the petals pale. Mostly lilies and orchids with their green stalks trimmed by a practiced hand. There’s a simplicity here, an uncluttered grace that is appealing not because it is spartan, but because it conveys a sense of subtle vibrancy–an inchoate potential for definition. Against the far wall is a suede sofa candlesticked by a pair of standing lamps which cast pools of warm yellow light.

Ray reaches out and catches Emma’s hand. He draws her across the room, and eases her down onto one end of the sofa. Ray sits on the far side, a field of neutral cushions between them. She watches him the entire time, and he wonders if she is as confused by his behavior as he is. He has never acted this way around a woman before. Never. And what it means, what it might mean, fills him with a curious mixture of exhilaration and aching, electric terror.

“Emma, you’ll have to forgive me. I’m not thinking very clearly. I know I’m not acting with much coherence. I’m–I mean to say, I think I came because I needed to see that you were all right.”

“Why wouldn’t I be fine?” By syntax, it’s a question, but she speaks it without curiosity. “Because of Micah,” Ray says simply. “The boy from the Trust.”

The name strikes her like a punch. She does not so much wilt as unhinge, her joints and muscles collapsing. She drops her chin until it rests against her breast, and all Ray can see is the top of her head.

But just for a moment.

With a jerk, she stiffens, lifts her head and sets her mouth in a firm, thin line. “News of a Whiston tragedy has always travels quickly. There must be morbid delight in our suffering.”

“No, not at all.” She doesn’t understand, he realizes. She doesn’t see any way he could know about Micah so soon, except as a recipient of a firestorm of gossip. Ugh. “It’s not like you think. I was dragged into the investigation by Security Chief Becker this afternoon–to coordinate the drones, you understand. We use them to gather physical evidence to keep from contaminating the crime scene. Sometimes, it puts me in a position to hear privileged information.” He gives her a grim, understanding expression to hide the lie he has just told. It feels oily to him, like cheap theatrical makeup poorly applied. “Chief Becker is going to play this one close. Murder reflects poorly on security’s reputation.”

“Murder,” she echoes woodenly.

“I’m sorry, Emma.”

She gazes away from him, an alabaster statue of grief. “I tucked him into bed last night, after coming home from the theatre. You probably didn’t know that. He had sneaked into the sitting room to read a picture book after the other children had fallen off. Amah had made it a special task of hers to teach him how to read before we reached New Holyoke, because it was a skill he would need, she said. Even frontiersmen should have an education. The development of human culture depends on it.”

About what time, Ray almost asks, but stops the question before he asks. It’s too obvious.

Treading gently. “Was that the last time you saw him?”

“Yes.”

“And your brother? Did he see him after that, maybe some time this morning?”

“Not that he mentioned, but I haven’t really spoken with Frederick since–” She pauses. “I mean, I’ve only spoken with Amah. She’s the one who told me.”

“Amah?”

“Our domestic. She’s been with our family for years. She raised Frederick and me practically from the moment I was born, after mother became ill the first time. She has a special way with children.”

It’s enough. Even taking this much advantage of her is disgusting.

Ray reaches out to her, taking one of the hands she has folded into her lap. He squeezes it gently. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t think that I am. Not at all.”

“I’d worry if you thought you were.”

“It was bad, wasn’t it? I mean, they didn’t just kill him, not accidentally or even gently. Amah wouldn’t give me any details, any of the truth, except to say that he was dead. But I know it must have been terrible, because she would have said so otherwise. And when I tried to ask her more about it, to give me something to comfort the other children with, she sent me to my room like a little girl. She doesn’t want me to know. She thinks she’s protecting me. But I don’t need protection; I need to know.”

“Becker will catch whoever did this, I can promise you that.”

Emma scowls, her eyes turn hard. “You’re just like Amah.”

“Maybe she’s right. Not that you need protection, of course, but just that there are some things it’s better not to know. You always hear people say that imagining is worse than the reality, no matter how horrible the truth might be. It’s been my experience that the only people who say that are folks who have never seen anything truly horrible.”

This concession seems to be enough. Emma blinks the anger out of her gaze. “You’ve seen terrible things before, haven’t you? You’ve been a soldier.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You talk like a Marine.”

Without thinking, Ray winks. “You’ve known many Marines, Miss Whiston?”

“I have a Terran cousin with whom I’m very close who happens to be a career Marine, Mr. Marlowe,” she replies archly.

Ray smiles softly. “I guess that’s better than saying I remind you of your crusty old uncle or something. Yes, Emma, I was a Marine. Or I am a Marine. They don’t actually let us retire, you know. They just put us on indefinite hiatus.”

“And you served bravely in the desert, yes? Like all the other good Midwestern boys?”

“I did.”

“You were no doubt very brave.”

“No. The brave are the ones who come back in bags. I’m just feisty and clever and stubborn. Like a camel. The best way to survive in a hostile environment is always to emulate the natives.”

“I’d rather imagine you as brave and lucky than camelish. A Lawrence of Arabia romance.” She tilts her head toward him. “Does it bother you to talk about the desert?”

“Not in generalities.” Which is true enough. “Generalities are better, in fact, if you want to keep your illusions of romance.”

“But it was exciting, wasn’t it?”

He laughs without humor. “In the military, excitement is a dirty word. We avoid all things exciting if possible.”

“I don’t believe that. I think your life must have been very exciting, but you don’t want to tell me.”

“Do you really want to know?”

“I do. I want to know all your secrets. Even the terrible ones.”

“Are you always this blunt?”

She narrows her eyes at him. “You’re avoiding the issue. Tell me what it was like.”

“What it was like?” He doesn’t know why this is so important to her, why she wants to know so badly. But he tells her–for no other reason than that she wants it. “Imagine what it would feel like to shiver constantly for a whole year if you can. Every second, every hour, every day, just shivering. That’s what the New Mes combat zone is like.”

Her brow furrows, as if she can’t decide if he’s teasing her. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s why you should keep your illusions, your romance. They’re much better.”

Quietly. “Like with Micah.”

“Exactly like that.”

She sighs then, a deep and cleansing exhalation that seems to lift some of the weight bearing down on her. “I’m glad you came, even if the circumstances are awful. After this morning, I thought…well, I thought that you might not want to see me again. Frederick has a troubling tendency to alienate the men who interest me. He’s very jealous of my virtue, I think. Or he feels like he has to protect the family reputation from unsavory individuals who might be less interested in me than in the Whiston assets.”

Nah, he’s just an asshole, Ray thinks, but does not say.

He has a number of things he wants to say now that His Man Freddy has been brought into the mix, most prominently, he wants to ask her does he hit you or less baldly does he always get off by hurting you, but this isn’t the time. There might never be a right time, but he’s slowly drawing near to an awareness that he wants there to be opportunities, at least. He would very much like to know her more intimately.

“I’m not after your money,” he says, because it’s obligatory at this point. “Not that you know me well enough to have any faith in that.”

With a saucy curl of her lips, Emma returns, “Then it’s my body you’re after.”

“Too honest for this stage of our–” What? Flirtation? Acquaintance? Relationship?

She spares him the necessity of a descriptor. “I see, you want to get to know me better, to deconstruct my behavior and determine what sort of woman I really am before you let your lust get carried away. Is that it?”

“Too mercenary.”

“Then what? Oh, something Midwestern, I suppose. You just like my company and would like to see if it develops into a more permanent structure. You want to fall in love with me.”

He smiles in spite of his discomfort. “Now you sound like my mother. She was a wrecking ball on my dating life.”

“Aren’t mothers supposed to be? She doesn’t want some tramp turning your head with jiggling parts and voluptuous curves and ruining you for the nice, decent girls.”

Ray can’t help but wince. “What? Do they give you guys some kind of manual with this crap in it? Because if they do, it’s grossly unfair. Boys don’t get manuals for comprehending women, or if we did, I was absent that day.”

`”It’s all right, Ray. I like that reason. It’s very romantic, very chivalrous. People who discount solid Midwestern values make a grave mistake. They set themselves up for lifetimes of misery.”

He’s getting dizzy again, as though he’s watching her spin a web around him. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here, let alone what I want.”

“You want me. That much should be obvious.”

“I’m not in your league, Emma. Never have been. This isn’t one of those clever sensibilities the Marines hacked out of me, either. It’s not a class thing or an experience thing. It’s something I never had to begin with. You’re–I don’t know–you’re so far beyond me that I can’t even put it into words. Half the time I want to strangle you because I think you’re just playing with me, teasing me the way a kid squeezes a strange puppy. The other half I want to grab you and hold you at arms length and just look at you, marvel at you. You’re incomprehensible to me.”

She laughs gaily and springs across the couch. Beside him, onto him, with her legs folded across his and one arm thrown around his shoulders and her chin pressed in the ticklish space on his neck. She whispers into his ear, “You’ve only known me for two days. Of course I’m mysterious to you. I hope I’m a complete and overwhelming mystery for a lot longer than that, because if you figure out all my secrets too quickly, I’ll be forced to think I’m as shallow as people believe I am.”

Ray shakes his head, but not too vigorously. He doesn’t want to dislodge her. “How old are you?”

Giggling. “How old are you?”

“Old enough that I should know better.”

“Then I’m young enough not to, which makes us a perfect match until you come to your senses. By then, I should be old enough that you don’t have to worry about it.”

Because he can’t look at her, can’t see her expression, only feel her lips against his ear and her hip touching his, he says, “You’re the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, Emma. And the fact that I feel that way scares me.”

“You’ve been lonely for a very long time.” Her voice is husky, wet with implication.

“Have I?”

“Would you have come tonight if you weren’t?”

Lonely? He hasn’t thought about it in those terms, and it troubles him immediately. Loneliness is a step away from desperation. Lonely men make stupid mistakes, fall into logical traps that convince them those stupidities were warranted.

What was the last thing he always made his men do before a major tactical engagement?

Run into the nearest town and get laid or sucked or jerked off. If a soldier didn’t have the money to buy it himself, Ray gave it to him. Because there was something essential in the release, something necessary and clarifying in having someone else do it for you. Someone soft and receptive, someone who maybe just pretended to care, but if you bought it, if you contributed to the illusion, that gave it enough weight to make it real. And when they came back to camp late in the night or early the next morning, their eyes were brighter, their steps more firm, their hands less prone to trembling. Scared, yes. They were still scared, but they weren’t desperately scared anymore. Getting laid wasn’t going to save their lives on the battlefield, but it gave them a perspective that kept them from making the mistakes by which they might kill themselves.

“I’m not lonely,” he says.

“You are. You just haven’t realized it yet. You’re lonely for me. Lonely and hungry.”

If he was lonely–if his loneliness was obvious to someone like Emma, someone he’d just met–what did that mean? What mistakes was he making or essential facts was he missing? How was he not thinking clearly about the tasks at hand?

“Ray?”

Emma’s voice in his ear, gone from pleasantly libidinous to questioning, bordering on concerned, because he’s been screwing around in his own head when he was supposed to be answering her flirtation.

He draws himself back to the surface, to a place where he’s in even remote contact with reality. “I’ve never said anything like that to a woman.”

She purrs at him, delighted. “Never?”

“I haven’t been in the types of places where there are women you’d want to say them to. And I imagine those types of women wouldn’t have wanted to hear a G.I. actually say it and mean it, anyway.”

Was that a stupid admission to make? He thinks it might have been.

“Then you must be falling in love with me.”

“It’s too early.”

“I thought you said you hadn’t been given a manual?”

“I did–no, that’s not what I mean. Hell, I mean that it just doesn’t work that way. Not where I come from. You don’t fall in love with somebody after two freaking days! You fall into lust, or into deep desire, or into some really gripping kind of titillation.”

“Or maybe,” she says wickedly, “you’ve just never met anyone like me.”

“I don’t even know you!” And you don’t know me, he adds silently. Which was really the whole issue now, wasn’t it? Whatever the relationship between them was or might be, it was already wrong. It was a deception founded on his allowing her to believe that he was just a member of the crew, just a systems vet, a rat guy. It was the same vague, troubling, impossible relationship he had with Commander Sorensen.

Impossible because she was completely right. He was lonely for her, for Emma. Something within her cried out to him, troubled him, lured him in ways he didn’t have the faculties or the experience to recognize. Everything he knew about her, had sensed, had touched, was lightning he tried to catch in a bell jar.

And he was ruining it. Every moment he spent with her like this was a step on the path to destruction because he couldn’t tell her the truth. He wants her so badly he’s risking everything.

Ray surges up from the couch, sheds her like a comforting blanket on a winter night. “I’ve got to go.”

“What? Ray–but I thought–”

He waves her off, stomps to the door. “I know, I thought so to. But I can’t, Emma. I just can’t. Not now anyway. It wouldn’t be right.”

He keys the door, gets to listen to the kako-daimon start it’s outraged blather. He turns back to Emma, still seated on the sofa. She grips the cushion fabric in between her fingers and she’s poised on the edge as though she’s gathering the strength or the resolve to spring after him. There are fat tears gathering in the corners of her eyes because she imagines that he’s rejecting her. Or imagines that he’s angry with himself for taking advantage of her distraught emotional state. He watches this idea dawn upon her, that he’s excoriating himself because of Micah, because just a few hours after the boy was ravaged here he is, the jaunty stranger, trying to dig into the boy’s surrogate mother’s pants.

And because she wanted him to do this, to be here, to make love to her, he’s made her culpable in a condemnation that doesn’t even exist. In her mind, he’s painted himself as honorable, stepping back from the precipice of temptation so that he does not hurt her while she is vulnerable. But because she wants him, because she wasn’t the first to resist, the honor is all his. All that remains for her is shame. He watches this dawn on her too, crumbling her quiet resolve, reducing her to tears.

It’s all deception, has been from the start.

And the thing that kills him is that it’s better this way. It has to be this way. He’s required to make it be this way and encourage her to believe it, that it’s partially her fault. Because the job demands of him that he not tell her the truth, that he not tell her that her brother is a legitimate suspect until further notice, that he’s in the middle of all this tragedy trying to put the pieces together.

He just wants to scream.

“I’ll see you again,” he promises, hoping that she believes him.

It’s all he can do.

But it was all about the text. Read or not, studied or ignored, providing insight into what went wrong (or right) or just circle jerking because the protocols said somebody had to write something up, text was what it was all about. Because text was immutable. Text defined history, even ignored history.

Oh, and appropriations committees loved text. They loved volumes of text, especially at budget time. Military need some cash and the silver-tongued orators with brass on their shoulders not able to hold a congressman’s ear? How ‘bout we just truck to the Forum Clave about ten million pages of last month’s reports? Show them what they’re getting for their money. Prove to them that we’ve done something of value in the last year. It’s all right there in the text, provided you’ve got the clearance to read it.

The military loves text. Loves it so much that they print instructions on all of their weapons so any yahoo that picks up a gun they’ve never even seen before can be an expert on it in something like thirty seconds flat.

The Criminal Investigations Unit hates text for all the reasons that the military loves it. With text comes accountability. Text is fundamentally insecure because it is open to interpretation, because it ends up in the wrong hands, because it inspires questions in people who don’t know enough about what’s going on to reach the right conclusions. The CIU doesn’t care about explaining itself to its detractors, only about achieving results. It’s willing to let the body counts it generates speak for themselves.

Ray has always preferred the Marine method. He likes to have his orders on paper, on record, somewhere handy so he can point to them and say, should it become necessary, I did not screw up here, gentlemen. I was merely the instrument of someone else’s screw up.

On the desk in his room, Ray has a standard issue EED personal terminal. Looks exactly like the terminals in every other enlisted guy’s berth–blocky, ugly, supposed-to-be beige. They run pathetic forty gig processors, which is okay since most people use them for things like checking their mail, receiving the latest policy directives or orders from their immediate NCO, checking out the next day’s menu in the crew mess, surfing for pornography.

Ray’s terminal has a different set of guts. His processor speed is clocked in petaflops, half of which are dedicated to maintaining the encryption system. The other half are tied to the network cable, which itself loops into a disturbingly powerful signal accelerator of the sort usually installed in places like the primary comm bridge. The accelerator plugs into a private router that Sorensen was ordered to install so that any work Ray might perform on his PC would dash right past the network, through the ship’s datacore, directly attach to a dedicated transmitter constantly reconfigured to beam along the EED’s secure channel of Rapid Relay buoys. All of this nifty stealth messaging technology and Paraclete’s attempts to encrypt and/or hide the fact that messages sent through it even existed devoured ominous chunks of the ship’s computing resources. Just turning his terminal on had been known to send computer tech troubleshooters screaming off in a panic. So Ray simply didn’t do it. It made him feel too guilty.

The morning after what his mind has now irrevocably tagged The Emma Debacle, Ray seats himself in front of his terminal. For once, he’s bothered to follow the proper procedures for a CIU agent. He’s sealed the bulkhead door, armed his private stash of motion detectors, white noise generators, listening device snoopers, changed his encryption key and jacked the minimum message lock requirements from 1028 bits to 2056. He has showered and shaved and changed his clothes so he looks the part of a clean cut CIU operative. Lastly, he has retrieved his service worn Oberon Mark IV Marine pistol, stripped and cleaned it, loaded the magazine and advanced the first cartridge into the firing chamber. It’s comforting weight hangs suspended over his left breast in a standard issue tactical harness, reminding him that should he be disturbed, he’s authorized–nope, make that required–to track down the source of the disturbance and encourage them to unflinchingly adopt the CIU’s Code of Silence as a personal standard of conduct. Capital C, capital S, spoken about using that ominous disaster documentary voice. Ray mentally associates the Code with a wet, gurgling noise, the type of sound a lung punctured by a .44 caliber bullet might make as it fills up with blood.

It takes three minutes of beam bouncing to make a connection with the CIU servers, time Ray uses to reconfigure the angle and depth of his terminal’s pinpoint camera. Since this is partly about making an impression, he’d prefer to not show the officer that picks up the line his piles of dirty laundry and as yet unmade bed. He definitely doesn’t want them to see Nomar under the nightstand munching on a pile of sensorily fascinating organic materials Ray has left there to keep him occupied.

In the absence of corroborating text, he’s got Nomar, armed with a disturbing array of aural recording devices. Ray just can’t get over the urge to cover his ass.

The way a progress report is supposed to work is that Ray’s encrypted signal hits the CIU server array, gets itself broken by complex algorithms and randomly shunted to a high level, heavy lidded functionary in a suit who listens for awhile, asks poignant questions, confers with associates on another line, and provides the requisite orders or guidance necessary to continue the mission. Most of these guys look exactly like the two agents who recruited him, except even more nondescript. The one exception was the pretty redhead with the low cut blouse and smoldering green eyes who Ray progressed to for something like two hours, the last forty-five minutes of which involved him pretty much flagrantly making up progress reports just to keep her on the line, until she had to unilaterally cancel the stream before it posed a severe security risk. Why didn’t they send agents like her out to perform recruitments? There’s a question for the ages.

If possible, Ray never talks to the same suit twice on a given mission, thereby (he supposes) fracturing the flow of data among the suits so that only the suits at the top know exactly what’s going on. For all he knows, the suits he talks with each time are taken out behind the building and administered a Code of Silence as soon as they break their connection.

As the remote servers rumble through their web of data transfer routines, Ray waits, subliminally crossing his fingers, hoping his perception of the whole communication schizophrenia is wrong and that he’ll get the redhead again. Too rapidly, the featureless blue screen he’s been looking at flickers and an image pops up. It’s an office with governmental gray walls, bland, without pictures or plants or other identifying props. A desk plain and battered enough to be any desk in any office of any department of government in the universe. Behind the desk is a man, seated, smiling.

Ray makes a verbal outburst that is distinctly impolite in content. Then he says, “Why am I not surprised?”

Jack Holcomb looks older. He’s gray about the temples, has crow’s feet like trenches around his eyes. He’s put on about forty pounds, most of it flab, which doesn’t really look bad since he’s in a Lt. Colonel’s uniform. Flab is what you expect out of a colonel.

Holcomb licks his lips in a way that strikes Ray as greedy somehow, and grins. “I’ve been waiting for you to call, Gunny. Good to finally hear from you.”

“I think I must’ve dialed the wrong number. I was supposed to be contacting the CIU, not the offices of the Army Asshole Department.”

Holcomb’s obvious pleasure doesn’t waver. He looks, in fact, as if he’s trying to restrain himself from giving the old conspiratorial wink. He succeeds in this endeavor, probably because he suspects Ray will turn the ship around and plot a course for Terra, Murder and General Mayhem if he does not.

Ray continues, “So I guess I’ve got you to thank for this.”

“You were growing weary of the desert, Ray. And the desert was growing weary of you as well, or hadn’t you noticed? I thought it might be best for everyone involved if you got away for awhile. Off to a safe distance, so to speak, until your particular case could be examined in more detail. The fact that you had all the necessary skills to excel in this field are something of a bonus, though not an unappreciated one, I assure you.”

As Holcomb blathers, someone sneaks into Ray’s room, opens a hole in his back and dumps about a thousand pounds of molten lead straight into his stomach. His stomach starts to roil and burn with the fierce heat of it. This is not the sinking feeling he’s been told he’s supposed to experience at times like this. It’s a chained at the bottom of a mining shaft waiting for them to fill it up with cement sort of feeling.

Ray says, “You’re about to tell me something I desperately don’t want to hear. I can tell.”

“Like what? You’re afraid I’m going to say that the CIU doesn’t exist? That the missions you’ve completed have been calculated ruses designed to keep you occupied while we kept you out of harm’s way?” Holcomb laughs and shakes his head. A real gut buster. “Sorry, Ray. You are part of the CIU, though we’ve been careful to keep you better screened from the hustle and bustle of agency activity than we might most of our agents. You get special consideration because of your rank, you understand.”

“My rank?”

“A field commission granted just before you left New Mes. Decent scores on the initial examinations just to make it look legitimate. Steady progress through the ranks over the last three years–accelerated, granted, but not without precedent. Not to mention, we couldn’t very well be freelancing you out into the frontier unless the ship captains felt like they should extend you the proper courtesy and cooperation.”

“I didn’t take any examinations,” Ray points out. “And nobody informed me that I’d been given a field commission.”

Holcomb waves his hand vaguely. “Your records don’t lie, Commander Marlowe.”

He can find no reason to be surprised by this information.

“Oh, don’t get self-righteous on me. Except for the test scores, it’s all perfectly legitimate. You impressed a fair number of your CO’s in New Mes, and we encouraged them to make it an official designation rather than just personal file commentary. They were happy to comply. Your CIU instructors asked that you not be informed during your training so you wouldn’t try to pull rank on them, and having known you as I did, I agreed with them. Since then, well, it just hasn’t come up.”

“Does Sorensen know this?”

“He does. He wants you to think he doesn’t because he’s a clever old crank with friends in the right places. He’s aware that you don’t know, or didn’t until now. You can’t blame him for not wanting to share operational command of his own ship.”

“Then why hasn’t my pay grade changed, since you’ve got all the answers?”

Ray is just being an asshole and he knows it. Holcomb knows it too, so he ignores him. “You have, I assume, made contact to apprise us of the change in your status aboard Paraclete.”

“Which you already know about. Chief Becker told me Sorensen had contacted the office and you’d specifically recommended me for the job.” Ray scrambles about for a few seconds, ramming round pegs into square holes, refashioning information gleaned in the past two days to fit this new reality. “This isn’t what you think it is, Jack. I don’t know exactly what yet, but it isn’t that.”

Holcomb nods his head, suddenly serious. “Don’t deceive yourself, Marlowe. You know exactly what this is. And it isn’t coincidence, either. The question is, how is it possible that someone has connected you with events only you and I together witnessed?”

“Witnessed and survived,” Ray says thinly. It’s an important distinction in his mind. “But even if they are in a position to know, what are they trying to accomplish? I mean, other than trying to get my attention.”

“That, I might be able to help you with.”

“Well aren’t you just full of surprises.”

“On our way through the desert, after we failed to prevent Brezhnaya from awakening the shed at Ba’dai, I told you many things that I knew about the mythology of these creatures. You understand that until that time, all of my research had been academic in nature. Meaning, of course, that I knew what Brezhnaya knew, and I knew that he believed it. I did not believe it myself, though I took the necessary precautions.”

“I remember,” Ray says, scowling.

It may be that Holcomb remembers it the same way. A fleeting shadow, like pain or guilt, clouds his features. He continues, “I was a grand fool then, Ray. I admit that. But I was a fool because I came from a rational tradition. Our culture, our society, put away a belief in devils around the time of the Salem witch trials. We responded to our own penchant for hysteria by denying its source, by embracing science and tactual reality and the physical world as a singular, dominant principle. We threw out the baby with the bath water, as it were.

“After Ba’dai, I was insane for quite some time. I won’t pretend that I was anything else. I have distinct memories of babbling to you about things I’m sure neither one of us understood at the time. But I wasn’t insane in the traditional sense. I was achieving some sort of radical reorientation of consciousness. I was developing a perception of the dual nature of existence, with all that such a transformation entails. You know what that looks like, don’t you? What it means? You’ve seen filthy old sinners converted to good Baptist standing, struck by Grace, transmogrified into Sunday-suit wearing zealots who see the finger of the Divine in every decision, every coincidence, every conversation. Conversion to a new paradigm is the introduction to a vast and terrible unexplored country. And turning your back on accepted reality–the reality that the mass of humanity has created and agreed upon–is the definition of madness.

“But you see, I needed to be mad in order to understand more about the shed, Ray. Only through the eye of madness could I go back through the ancient texts and sift through their mythology and their understanding of the duality of creation, and come to understand not what they said, but what they meant. I had to be able to think like them to understand the assumptions behind the written text. Because they’re not just behind it, they illuminate it.”

Ray interrupts him. “You stopped making sense to me about the time you mentioned Baptists.”

Holcomb frowns back and swipes his hand back and forth across his forehead. “All right. We talked once about the nature of the shed. I assume that you retained enough of that knowledge to serve as a background. In fact, I told you a lot about it, but in that entire two weeks that we were alone, and for several months afterward, what I didn’t ask myself was what was Brezhnaya doing? What did he think he was accomplishing?”

“Unleashing an attack against the allied forces,” Ray answers at once. “Breaking morale, punishing sympathizers. Creating a spirituo-terrorist weapon.”

“That was what I thought, too. You heard about some of the incidents, then?”

“Enough.”

“But here’s the problem: the shed was not–is not–a weapon, or not a weapon sufficient to turn the tide of a war on that scale, not when used in that fashion. Maybe a thousand of them would have an impact, but not merely one. One is a devil outside your window, a blight on your neighbor’s crop, a night terror to frighten children. So what was Brezhnaya’s goal?”

Ray shrugs, completely lost. “A test run. He was making sure it could be done or that they could be programmed to follow his command. He wouldn’t have wanted to create a hell he couldn’t control.”

“That’s reasonable,” Holcomb says, “but wrong. You’re being manipulated by your childhood immersion in fairy tales. The post-Ba’dai events in New Mes were not the shed responding to programming. They were, if such a thing can be said, larks. The shed being itself for pleasure. You’re neglecting the concept of the neutral meme.”

“That applies how?”

“Manipulation of the shed in that way is mission oriented. The parameter set that drives the programming, the idea that informs the meme, is reset to zero after the task is carried out. Do you understand?”

He gets it. “It’s too time and labor intensive unless you want to accomplish something you couldn’t do with normal guns and willing followers. Like an assassination of a foreign official, or the infiltration of a nuclear complex. Something big.”

“Except that even to do that, you have to provide a prohibitive amount of guidance. You have to know exactly what you’re making the shed do, because the shed despises you. It does not want to serve your human purposes. In fact, it wants to destroy you for daring to have disturbed it. To command the shed is a nightmare of micromanagement wherein even the smallest mistake generates unforeseen disasters, because it wants to be free.

“That is the hidden concept in all the ancient texts, this idea of disturbance. To call the shed, you disturb it from something else that it was doing. You remove it from an environment that is somehow essential to its nature and pleasure, and drag it into corporeal activity.”

Whatever Ray thought he had understood flutters away. He wonders if it would help or hurt matters if he beat his head against the wall for a few minutes.

But Holcomb, grimly determined, goes on. “Brezhnaya was not summoning the shed to escalate the war in New Mes. He was trying to stop it, Ray. He was trying to end the war by bottling up its root cause. Brezhnaya was trying to put the genie back into the bottle.”

His tone says that this should be a bombshell, that it should radically reorient the perspective from which Ray views the world. Ray swallows hard, trying to make sense of it, but all he can feel is numb. Or stupid. There doesn’t seem to be much difference.

Because it seems like a reasonable question, Ray asks, “How can summoning the shed stop a war, Jack? I mean, the last time I was on the ground, it looked an awful lot like some major world players were firmly entrenched in kicking one another’s asses.”

“Let me put it in Gnostic terminology,” Holcomb begins.

“I hate it when you do that.”

“I know, but the Gnostics were really much more rational about the spiritual world than their counterparts. Where the Hebrews, Arabs and Greeks–and frankly, the assorted Angles and Saxons and our Germanic forbearers as well–had an organic mythology that sprang from a deep seated fear of the natural and supernatural worlds which often became intermixed and inseparable, the Gnostics set about to construct a mythology. Mythology was a symbolic language for their philosophy. It was a very modern viewpoint, I think, even if the concepts they sought to explain were ancient and supernatural in essence.

“In their creation myth, Ialdabaoth makes for himself helpers, followers, created beings. The chief among these were the Archons, who were demigods. Massively more powerful than men, just a step below Ialdabaoth himself, in fact. At levels of near divinity, one degree of separation from a divine emanation is not much, you understand. Ialdabaoth gave to the Archons immense powers over time and space. He gave them areas of expertise, oversight in the mechanisms of creation and the basic forces which compel the universe to cling together and function in some coherent fashion. Thus, the Archons ruled, and to each was given a geographical kingdom. There was an Archon for Persia, for Asia, for Egypt–for the entire known world. The underlying argument being that when nations came into conflict, it wasn’t so much the political ambitions of the human leadership that was at fault, but the Archons manipulating the weak vessel that is man in their own semi-divine power struggles. The microcosm was a mirror for the macrocosm.

“The shed are Archons of a sort. Ialdabaoth’s attempt to supplant humans as the pinnacle of creation, certainly, but Archons as well. You might think of them as junior members of the demigod club–with all the same foibles and plots and ambitions as their senior members, just with a more degraded form of divinity. This shed that I’ve called Devourer, the one Brezhnaya called out, is an Archon of strife, Ray. He and others like him–all the shed are Archons of strife–rule over what we call the Middle East, from Palestine to Turkey, the Saudi peninsula to Kashmir.

“Look, I’ve told you that the shed comprises a neutral meme, which is true insofar as the human connection goes. But they are also fundamental principles of creation. If they respond to parameter sets like a computer program, they must also be viewed as complete computers in themselves. They come with a unique hardware configuration that predisposes them to operate in a given fashion. The Devourer has been hardwired to generate hostility, to cause war, to celebrate martial conquest and the shedding of blood. It’s what he does. Not from a position of evil, you understand, but just as the expression of a universal imperative. Strife is part of reality; Devourer is one of the forms of that imperative. He is shed, an adversary of hostility.”

Ray blinks uncertainly. “And Brezhnaya believed he could do what? Create peace on earth by distracting the shed?”

“Not ‘peace on earth’ as you so glibly put it. Peace in his homeland, yes. A distraction of the shed that would lead to the cessation of hostilities for a time. It can’t make wars happen with a finger snap. War is brewed, and that takes time and effort. I think Brezhnaya was a reasonable man. I think he believed that he could stop the fighting for a year, maybe two, maybe for as much as a decade if he had the stomach for it, for what he would have to do to keep the shed distracted. And in the meantime, he could orchestrate political shifts, assassinations, terrorist actions that might bring leadership to the region that was not such a willing tool in the shed’s hands.”

“Oh hell!” Ray barks back. “You make him sound like a terrorist for peace, Jack. The Mikhail Brezhnaya I read about in the papers was not a nice guy. He was a very bad guy, in fact, who needed to have a bullet put in his head.”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to judge him, my friend. Not until you’ve lived his life.”

“Oh, cry me a freaking river. He was a dangerous, antisocial misanthropist, and you know it.”

“He was also a man who buried his entire family in the name of war. Three daughters, two sons, all under the age of twelve. His wife was purged by his own government for reasons which are not immediately clear, but which we suspect had something to do with a tactical failure that Brezhnaya contributed to. They wanted to send him a message to pay more attention to his work. He was a loyal soldier who found the old axiom that war is a sword that cuts both ways to be horribly true.” Holcomb shrugs, as if these are things he doesn’t expect Ray to understand. “I won’t argue that he wasn’t a monster, but he had his reasons. Any one of us who wears the uniform could just as easily follow the same path if we were forced to endure so much despair. Brezhnaya was weary of conflict, of suffering, and he believed he had found a way to put an end to a generation of carnage, so that no one else would have to suffer the same losses he had known. Despite his methods and ultimately his failure, the impulse should not be comprehended as anything but patriotic.

“Listen to me, Ray. What we witnessed at Ba’dai was a poorly informed tableau of Brezhnaya’s vision. We saw through the glass darkly and reached the wrong conclusions. I’ve spoken to members of his sect, questioned them, shall we say, vigorously in some cases. The rite we interrupted…what we construed as murder–those men were volunteers, Ray. They were martyrs sacrificing their lives to end the conflict. They chose to die at the hands of their brothers, fathers, sons in the name of peace.”

It was enough. It was all he could stand to hear. Ray puts his hand up, shakes his head. Stop. For God’s sake, just stop. He didn’t want to think about crazy martyrs.

“But what does this have to do with me? What does this have to do with a kid murdered on my ship in the middle of nowhere?”

Holcomb sighs, a dry and forlorn sound that translates with frightening clarity across the frozen depths of space. He peers at Ray through the monitor with eyes that appear sunken, bruised. “About a year ago, allied troops finally gained the upper hand in the zone around Baghdad and began occupation. In the first chaotic days after our troops surged into the city, the Iraqi National Museum was bombed. Numerous irreplaceable treasures and archaeological artifacts were destroyed. The initial assessment was that it was some sort of abortive attempt by fleeing Iraqi soldiers to preserve sacred objects from the infidel invaders. Assorted Forum experts and Iraqi antiquities agents swooped in to catalog the losses and to salvage anything that might be saved. It was brought to my attention through various channels that the actual damage to any of the artifacts was quite small and mostly superficial in nature. The explosions that had wracked the museum seemed more engineered to rend the structure rather than its contents. It took them three weeks to determine that the only piece unaccounted for in the destruction was a massive stone ring unearthed in Saudi about two decades ago, during the Republican Guard blitz. Other than the curiosity factor, it was an artifact of dubious historical value–quite possibly because there hadn’t been an opportunity to study it closely. The national museum in Baghdad operates much as its American counterparts in that there are scads more items to be studied and documented than there are people interested in doing the analysis, especially in times of war, where archaeology students can be taught to fire a flintlock just as effectively as a shepherd boy.”

A massive stone ring, Ray thinks. Then, he doesn’t know about modern medicine, does he…You think Solomon was an asshole?…I have a stone ring, inscribed with Solomon’s sacred seals and incantations, fused with the bones of my skull, by God.

Holcomb seems to watch him, nodding. “There was peace in Jerusalem and in all of Israel in Solomon’s time,” he whispers. “Solomon the Wise.”

“What happened to it?” Ray’s voice is thick, clotted. He feels like he’s choking.

“I launched an immediate recovery expedition. People were questioned, bribes were paid…other, less savory actions were taken. But it could have been going anywhere in the world, from any port within driving distance; hurtled to unknown destinations from any of a hundred regional airports. There was simply no way to cover the ground quickly enough. By the time we picked up the trail–from Kuwait to Bangkok to Buenos Aires–the interstellar cargo hauler Fortitude was burning across the void for New Holyoke.”

Ray swallows, and his throat clicks. A chitinous sound, as though he’s gorging on beetles. “New Holyoke.”

“Fortitude was one of the newer class vessels, illegally retrofitted with a prototype Ver Linck Drive. The crossing took four months. Our reports indicate that the cargo shipment was unloaded as scheduled, though nothing of any interest to us appears on the manifest. Her captain is approached by Port Authority investigators, but having transacted his business, he elects not to remain for the investigation. Fortitude burst from her mooring locks like a cannonball with our own EED craft giving pursuit. With her Ver Linck Drive engaged, she outdistances them in a matter of hours. Within twelve, she’s home free. Except, unaccountably, since PA claims and has subsequently proven that our side never fired a shot, Fortitude explodes. Accident reconstruction experts determined that the Drive had been sabotaged by a rather simple explosive device cleverly hidden. Though it didn’t make the evening news, it was the first ship to be destroyed by Lilaiken extremists.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Not at all. They took complete credit within hours of the disaster, before it was generally known that a disaster had even occurred.”

“But you’re telling me that Lilaiken separatists–”

Holcomb nods. “They orchestrated the raid on the Iraqi National Museum in order to obtain a Solomonic ring. They contracted to have the ring shipped to New Holyoke. The question of the hour is whether or not it was just a stone ring. Or was it a stone ring that contained something. A vessel, perhaps.”

“I’m not following.”

“The circle, the ring is an ancient symbol of power. The Qabbalistic sephiroth, the Hindu chakra, the Western fairy ring, what are these? They are vessels of power, containers for the essential energy of the universe. Solomon, it is said and written, captured djinn and demons in stone rings of his own devising. Arabic myth says that elemental beings are subject only to the power of the circle, transfixed by their perfection, lost in curve of space and the tracery of line bending eternally into itself, racing about circumference like St. Elmo’s Fire. So was it just a ring the Lilaikens shipped to New Holyoke, or was it something else entirely, to which the ring was incidental. A shipping container, as it were.”

Ray can hardly choke out the words. “A shed.”

But why?

“To foment war,” Holcomb says quietly, as if he can read Ray’s mind. “To escalate the frontier independence movement by inciting whole colonies to violence against the FSA, against Terran hegemony. To let the genie out of the bottle for a time, enough to serve their purposes, then stuff him back again when his task is completed.”

Ray shakes his head. It’s too much to process, raises too many questions. He needs to keep hold of the root that steadies him. “I’ve been unable to identify any Lilaiken presence here, so this still doesn’t explain what’s happening to me on Paraclete.”

“Oh, I’m certain that it does,” Holcomb answers, smiling. “You just don’t know how yet.”

“But you expect me to find out.”

“Either there or on New Holyoke. Commander Sorensen has been informed that you’ll be disembarking as soon as Paraclete arrives in port, and I’m in the process of transmitting to you the probable specifications of a cargo container needed to ship a ring of the size and weight in question. This is proprietary information, Ray. The local EED organ was only told that the ship contained stolen Terran artifacts, but that’s as specific as we chose to get given the sensitivity of this operation.”

“And since you figured you could always drop me out here anyway…”

“I most certainly did not want them getting their hands on a Solomonic ring without having a reliable agent in place to guide them in its proper handling. So, EED has pretty much allowed the investigation on their end to stall, and even if I was in a position where I could push them without creating inter-agency strife, I wouldn’t want to. This is not one of those situations where I would feel comfortable providing a full and detailed briefing to some desk ape half the universe away.”

Ray nods. “Understood.”

“All the same, when you arrive, you should check in with the locals and enlist them where necessary to maintain the illusion of inter-agency cooperation. But you are going to be largely on your own, though we’ll send appropriate instructions and notifications of your imminent arrival to our EED and FSA counterparts. Letters of reference, as it were. I trust you’ll be able set your own mission goals planetside.”

“I can’t believe you’re exiling me to a frontier colony.”

“All part of the job, Ray.”

“I hate you, Jack.”

“I don’t ask you to love me. Just to make me proud.” Holcomb reaches forward to toggle the switch that will sever their connection. “Do try not to be overly troublesome, Ray. As hard as that might be for you.”

Jack Holcomb grins widely, then the screen goes blank and Ray is left alone in his room.

***

In the afternoon, Ray makes his way uplevel to Marine Barracks Level Four, what Kilgore and Rodriguez had termed the Hump Deck. He hasn’t come this way before, has in fact avoided the area on principle, because he was afraid it would make him feel homesick. Upon arrival at the security checkpoint, he finds that either Becker or Sorensen has already paved the way. The desk sergeant guarding the bulkhead door briefly checks his id against the list and tells him that he’s expected. Ray asks for directions to Captain Cable’s office and is given a refreshingly terse set of instructions.

He wanders inside, and yep, there’s that stab of longing, of old familiarity. The gangways are straight and clean, a glowing olive drab from what he fully expects to have been thousands of hand polishings, deck swabbings, demerit based repainting missions doled out by an officer corps who believed that idle hands were indeed the devil’s playground. If it was physically possible, they would probably have found a way to make the grunts dig completely redundant latrines. He strolls past sharp intersections and through pressure doors that remind him of choke points, places where a squad of well supplied soldiers could hold off a battalion strength invading force with a minimum of force. At every open door, he sees a desk; behind every desk a specialist or sergeant or company clerk; on each face a steady look of calculation because they’ve been tracking the flop of his feet against the deck and have been evaluating his potential threat all the way up the corridor. Deeper in, there are recreation rooms with wide vid terminals, weight and exercise facilities, a general use computing room with rows of currently unoccupied terminals. Everywhere is the corrosive scent of cleaning agents, floor wax, shoe polish.

It smells like home.

He locates the right intersections, takes the correct number of turns, and exactly as promised, he finds a broad gangway which terminates in a sealed bulkhead hatch marked General Barracks Four, 15^th Marine Frontier Expeditionary Force, C Company. Below the official designation is a neatly printed, hand made paper sign taped to the door which reads: The Fighting Astro Nots.

To the left is an open doorway and beside the door there’s a nameplate affixed to the wall identifying it as the entrance to the office of Captain Bran Cable. Ray likes him already, a deck officer who chooses the berth closest to his men rather than closest to the exit or to rooms staffed by other officers. Or it could just mean that the Marines of C Company were pains in the ass who bore constant watching.

Ray ducks inside, into a small reception area with a desk, more glistening olive drab on the walls and an assortment of framed military photographs, most of which are candid shots of soldiers in various goofing around poses, making faces for the camera. There’s a second door behind the desk, and a man leaning against the frame in natty dress greens with his arms crossed over his chest.

He nods a greeting at Ray and says, “If you’re looking for Specialist Harrell, you can catch him in the chow hall. I sent him to lunch about five minutes ago.”

“Actually, I’m looking for Captain Cable.”

“That would be me.”

“The bars on your collar gave you away. I’m Ray Marlowe. Chief Becker has probably spoken to you by now.”

Cable straightens his shoulders and drops his arms to his side, a pose of relaxed attention. “Becker said I would feel the powerful urge to salute you, but that I should probably resist the urge.” He tacks a tentative “sir” onto the end after the slightest hesitation, clearly uncertain about the proper etiquette.

“Stop it,” Ray answers, rolling his eyes. “Becker has delusions of rank inflation. Just call me Ray.”

Cable relaxes at once, much to Ray’s relief. The captain is a massive black man, clean shaven from chin to scalp and roughly the same size and dimensions as the typical Division I All-American linebacker. If he’d wanted to salute, Ray probably wasn’t going to be able to stop him.

“And you’ve come for Rodriguez and Kilgore?”

“Actually, at the moment I’ve come to seek your permission to borrow them. I’m not interested in putting a scuff on your boots. If you can’t spare them, I’ll recruit assistants from somewhere else, but I’d honestly prefer to work with Marines.”

“But are you sure you want those two Marines? Those soldiers’ names and ‘work’ tend to not appear in the same sentence with any regularity.” Cable shows him a slight grin and wink to demonstrate that he’s being playful. “Is this a short term assignment, or should I have them officially transferred to your unit?”

“The plan is to have it wrapped up by the time we dock. My hope is to be sipping pina coladas on the Mezzanine by the end of the week and reflecting upon what a smashing success this assignment was.”

“But you’ll be taking them with you for the duration, correct? Or am I not correctly understanding the situation?”

It takes him a minute, but Ray gets it. Cable doesn’t want Kilgore and Rodriguez left to float around the deck most of the day waiting for Ray to come up with something for them to do. It would look too much like they were slacking off to the other soldiers in the barracks, like they were getting special treatment. It was bad for morale.

“Yes,” Ray says quickly. “Certainly. I’ll find somewhere to stack them, then get them back to you as soon as possible.”

Cable gives him an amiable nod. “I appreciate your courtesy, Ray.”

“And I appreciate the fact that you haven’t pointed out to me yet that I’m a dumbass, Captain. I really am sorry if this is an inconvenience for you.”

Grinning wide, showing teeth. “Believe me, you have no idea how grateful I am for the inconvenience. But you will. By tomorrow this time, you’ll be begging me to take them back.”

“By the time it’s all over, I fully expect that they’ll be the ones doing the begging.”

Ray doesn’t elaborate and Cable has the good graces not to ask what he means. The burly captain strides past him and out into the gangway, beckoning Ray to follow. “Your boys are in the barracks, should be stowing their gear for the move. God knows they’ve had all morning to get it done. Their mates were assigned to pull head polish duty–cleaning the latrine–this morning, so I suspect Kilgore and Rodriguez are getting a might nervous about now. They definitely do not want to be caught lounging when the rest of the barracks troops in.”

Probably a true enough assessment.

Ray follows Cable out the door and through the bulkhead hatch at the end of the corridor. The barracks is a long, low ceilinged chamber blocked into neat rows by sleeping cubicles stacked three berths tall. The cubicles remind Ray of the sleeping compartments on passenger trains, claustrophobic boxy affairs with a dark curtain that can be pulled across the entrance to provide the illusion of privacy. This is not exactly living in comfort, but it’s better than a tent and a cot and gusting desert winds. Most of the cubicles are crowded with pictures, letters scrawled in blocky, children’s handwriting, fading centerfolds. Images of home and family with which the soldiers surround themselves for those quiet minutes before they fall asleep.

Cable guides him through the gauntlet, wending toward the back corner. They encounter Kilgore and Rodriguez tossing a football in low, tight spirals down the length of the aisle. Kilgore has his back to them, so Rodriguez sees them first. He executes a sharp stand to attention, just in time to receive the point of the football from Kilgore’s last throw in the middle of his gut. He doesn’t flinch, which Ray finds amusing more than anything else.

Kilgore barks, “Good hands, assclown.”

“Officer on the deck,” Rodriguez answers, with only the slightest hint of strain in his voice.

Cable turns partly toward Ray and rolls his eyes. “They’re on their best behavior at the moment. It’s all downhill from here.”

By this time, Kilgore has dragged himself to attention. He snaps off a regulation salute for the captain, and shouts, “Begging the Deck Officer’s pardon, sir, but you are unfairly characterizing the efficiency and conduct of this pair of Marines. Respectfully request that you do not screw up this assignment on our behalf, as we two squared away Marines are more than capable of managing same.”

Cable shakes his head. He is not, apparently, an officer who chooses to stand on ceremony. “Just collect your gear, gentlemen. You’re being temporarily reassigned to Commander Marlowe per your briefing last evening. Try to be less of a pain in his ass than you are in mine.”

Kilgore’s eyes go wide. To Ray, he says, “You said you weren’t an officer.”

“I got promoted.”

“Good for you, sir.” He finds a way to sound both patronizing and disgusted.

More eye rolling from Cable. “Commander, any time you decide you might need directions to the Marine brig, you let me know. Day or night. I’ll probably even send an escort detail to give you a hand.”

“You’re killing me, Cap,” Kilgore moans. He lurches into a bottom level bunk and drags out an outrageously stuffed duffel. “This is the closest I’ve ever been to a Commander and I’m trying to make a good impression here.”

Rodriguez jogs up, carrying his own gear. He runs his gaze across Ray’s khaki and buttoned down civilian attire. “Am I to understand that we’ll be quartered in the downlevel portion of the ship?”

“Does it matter?” Cable asks.

“I just want to know if I’ve packed appropriately.”

Kilgore winks. “He’s talking about prophylactics, sir.”

“I’m not talking about prophylactics. I assumed from the previous conversation that this assignment tended to be more oblique in nature than a standard military operation. I left my battle dress uniforms in the locker, except for the one I’m wearing.”

“Smart thinking, dumbass,” Kilgore murmurs.

But Ray nods in affirmation. “Not downlevel the way you’re thinking about it. I’ve secured rooms on the Garden. We’ll be operating out of there. Most of the time, it’ll be to our advantage if you don’t look like a Marine on active duty.”

“Sure, he’s the brains of this outfit. I’m just the sidekick.” Kilgore flashes his buddy a reproachful glare. “That’s still Sergeant Sidekick to you, Corporal.”

Ray notes that Kilgore doesn’t seem particularly interested in repacking his own bag. Cable turns around, pointing back the way they came. Typically Marine, he puts on his confidential tone despite the fact that his men are standing within ready earshot. “In all seriousness, you could do worse than these two. Rodriguez is sharp, knows how to fill in the blanks and color outside the lines. Sergeant Kilgore makes up for what he lacks in social acumen with persistence. I can provide you with their personnel files if you want to examine their backgrounds more closely, but they’re solid enough. They’ve both seen combat in the Mes.”

But Ray declines the offer. Cable is naturally curious about this operation, but his service manners are too well developed to come right out and ask. He’s more than likely aware that this is a loop he’s been left out of with intention, and Ray doesn’t feel the need to explain. “One Marine is as good as another. These two just happened to be handy.”

“Nothing quite like feeling wanted, is there?” Kilgore remarks casually. “Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.”

Ray just says, “Let’s go.”

***

The berth Becker has arranged for them has no running water. Sometime after their departure from Stratiskaya Daransk, it had developed unexpected plumbing issues which rapidly escalated into burst pipes and severe water damage, requiring the removal of its original inhabitants to other accommodations. The sheetrock facades on some of the walls have warped and buckled from the moisture. The carpet reeks of mildew and still feels vaguely squishy underfoot, though Becker has assured Ray that it isn’t sodden and the electrical wiring is sound. But it’s spacious by shipboard standards, which was his primary concern. A broad sitting room with plenty of wall space and its own functional kitchenette, a short hallway leading to a bedroom on one side and a private bath on the other. The bathroom is a total loss. It’s sheetrock walls are unstable, have actually collapsed in some places, covering the floor with chunks of debris. The mirror over the sink is fractured and hangs at a precarious angle. There’s a jagged hole in the bulkhead by the shower where someone torched an access panel into the superstructure to get at the burst pipes. It’s an inconvenience Ray can live with.

More importantly, the suite is situated midway between Madame Trousseau’s and the food court, which places them directly in the thick of the passenger areas–a high profile location where they will see and be seen by Paraclete’s non-crew component. Give them an excuse to rub shoulders with the natives.

After his encrypted call to Holcomb, Ray spent the rest of the morning supervising the installation of two additional beds, the removal of most of the furniture that remained and its subsequent replacement with long, folding tables and a series of mounted marker boards. He provided his own technical assistance in transferring the ultra-powerful terminal from his old room and establishing a similar connection to the broadcast array. It isn’t as secure as the old one, but it’s sufficient. He doesn’t expect to be passing messages to CIU until after he arrives at New Holyoke anyway. He’s added a couple of standard machines to the mix, assuming Rodriguez and Kilgore will be savvy enough to know how to use them. He’s also borrowed the spare drone diagnostic computer from the shop and modified the kitchenette’s electrical system to handle its increased power demand. Nomar is likely to feel crowded perched on the narrow slab of countertop between the small refrigerator and the useless sink, but he’s not in a position to complain.

Ray hasn’t figured out how he’s going to explain his procurement of this equipment to Ziggy. It’s on the list of things to do, right after coming up with a plausible set of reasons that he won’t be showing up for work anymore. Becker could handle it for him, Ray is certain, but Ziggy deserves something better than being treated as a loose end. Besides, it was plain old bad policy to piss off a man whose wife liked to cook for you.

By the time it’s ready for occupation, the stateroom looks much more like a military planning office than a passenger compartment. Ray suspects there will be more additions in the near future, things he hasn’t realized that they need yet in order to run the investigation, but it will do for now.

Kilgore walks in the door, sniffs at the air and makes a face. “Sure, we’re moving to the Garden Level, he says. You didn’t mention that it would be armpit of the Garden Level.” An amused glance at Rodriguez over his shoulder. “Maybe we can talk him into letting us telecommute. What do you say, sir?”

Ray is standing in the kitchenette, examining the diagnostic terminal as it runs through it’s starting sequence. Nomar is on the counter, powered down for the moment while he sucks juice from the charging system. Ray doesn’t turn from what he’s doing. “I say that if you call me ‘sir’ one more time, or if you salute me, or if you in any way treat me like an officer, I’m going to put my fist through your face and pull your brain stem out through your nose. Are we clear?”

Kilgore’s response: “And the place has got rats, too!”

Apparently it was clear enough.

Ray continues, “Toss your gear in the bedroom. It’s down the hall on the left. The bathroom is on the right, but in case you haven’t figured it out, we don’t have running water, so don’t use it. There’s a public latrine just around the curve of the concourse past Madame Trousseau’s. Locating shower facilities is completely dependent on your own personal initiative. You’ll each be issued a ship’s credit chip for meals and other purchases, so if you don’t think you’ve got the right clothes for this job, you’ll be able to take care of that. I expect you to take your meals in the food court, either singly or in tandem. Try to spread the wealth, be seen in as many places as possible so people get used to looking at you. You’re free to use your real names in conversation, but try not tell people that you’re Marines. More than likely they’ll figure it out for themselves, but let them be free to assume that you’re on leave or in transit to a new duty station. For the record, the rat’s name is Nomar. He’s our eyes and ears, and at this point, I consider him the most valuable component of this team, so try not to piss him off. Because he bites.”

“You haven’t actually told us what we’re doing here,” Rodriguez points out. Not curious at all, just recognizing business. “We haven’t been informed of the parameters of this mission.”

Ray turns to face them. “Fair enough. The parameters are actually sufficiently vague as to be practically non-existent. Ostensibly, we’ve been handed the lead in investigating the murder of a boy named Micah Uytedehaage, the body discovered on Omicron last night. I expect that it will become more complicated than that. Security Chief Becker will tell you and anyone else who asks that this issue is too hot for him to handle this close to docking, which is a complete load of cow feces. It’s been handed to me because I happen to possess some expertise that bears on this case that uniquely qualifies me to pursue it with more efficiency. The exact nature of that expertise will be made clear to you if and when the need arises. I’ve drafted the two of you because as a Marine, I prefer to work with Marines rather than sec-os. Until the time that the situation becomes more clear, your primary responsibility in this stage of the investigation is to mingle with the passengers, chat them up, make friends. I want you to gather human intelligence.”

Rodriguez accepts this with a nod. “What sort of intelligence are we looking for?”

“Anything that seems odd. That’s about as clearly as I can state it.”

“And the risk assessment?”

“It’s not the Mes, but I’m not ruling out physical hazard at this point. Honestly, I just don’t know what we’re up against. I hope to have a clearer picture shortly.”

This is annoyingly vague for Ray’s taste, but it’s all he is prepared to offer. Rodriguez only frowns slightly, accepting without comment.

“So you’re telling us that we’re supposed to spend the next couple of weeks hitting on chicks, spending EED’s cash, buying rounds in the local drinking establishments and generally being publicly vivacious?” Kilgore rubs his hand thoughtfully along his chin, mulls the possibilities. “I think I can probably live with that, even if the room does suck. You want we should start now?”

“Get settled in first. This evening, we’re going down to Omicron again for a little confab with Bobby Diggs. I’ll need the two of you there to help put him at ease. You can start being vivacious first thing in the morning.”

Kilgore and Rodriguez exchange a significant look, like they’re trying to decide if it’s appropriate to give a high five. Instead, they nod and troop back toward the bedroom. But at the corner, Rodriguez stops and peers at Ray.

“One thing I’ve got to ask. The rat–you didn’t name him after the ballplayer by any chance, did you?”

Ray beams. “I think we’re going to get along just fine, Mr. Rodriguez. Just fine, indeed.”

Except the way he sits there, his long and lanky limbs slung all over the place, gesticulating with a cigarette whose ashes inevitably end up flung through the air and across the floor, creates a dissonance that is curious. His pupils are like playing a game of Follow the Bouncing Ball the way they roll from Ray to Kilgore to Rodriguez. Everything about him snaps like a sail in a stiff breeze. He conveys the impression that he’s coiled, tense, dangerous in ways Ray can’t put his finger on. Even his slow, languid speech patterns carry the swagger of a long tradition of Marines.

He’s smoking, glaring, shaking his head and saying, “Can you believe this mess, I ask you? I mean, can you comprehend what is going on down here? It’s insane.”

Nomar most certainly cannot believe it, but he’s less fascinated by the content of the man’s speech than the carcinogenic cocktail of his cigarette smoke, which he’s been chasing around the room since they arrived. It doesn’t matter. Nomar is running in full recording mode, taking Diggs’ story with all the precision of a deposition.

Diggs has gone on in this vein for the last ten minutes. The four of them are hanging out in a small, plainly decorated room, seated on stools like the ones that dot bars and taverns all over human space. Just outside the door to this room–what is really just a storage closet that seems to have run out of things to actually store–is the security checkpoint, a wide desk crammed into an alcove just outside the doors to the main Omicron lift. They’re back here in relative privacy because the desk is manned by two other sec-os, one with a sidearm seated behind the desk, another with a full-on rifle, safety off, standing where he has an unobstructed field of fire up and down the gangway. Diggs has already told them that temporary checkpoints have been established at the port and starboard midpoints, one right outside the Marine munitions dump where just yesterday Rodriguez and Kilgore had spent a few hours counting shells.

Diggs finds this arrangement extremely offensive.

He goes on, “For six months, man, it’s just been Bobby Diggs on the deck. That’s it, just me humping the deck twelve hours a day. Me changing lightbulbs and jiggering with the electrical system. Me checking the visitors in, scanning their papers, checking them out. Me supervising the magnetic grid and making sure they were taking only the items they was authorized to take. Then we have us a bit of trouble, and I follow the protocol just like Chief Becker spelled it out, and what do I get out of it?” He gestures vaguely toward the closed door. “These invading motherfuckers who would rather be strolling the Garden trying to tag some rich bitch ‘tang. Come down here with their game faces on and their firearms strapped on their hips like they’re going to do something Bobby Diggs didn’t do. Ain’t nobody heard that bit about the barn door and the runned-off horses? It’s too late.”

He shakes his head, realizes that he’s run his cigarette down to the filter. He digs in his breast pocket and drags out a battered pack of Camels, lights up again, sucking deep like this action is the only thing that keeps him thinking clearly. Nomar picks the used butt right off his fingers and stuffs it greedily into his mouth.

Diggs pokes his finger at Ray. “I saw you last night, ‘cept you wasn’t alone. You had this here rat with you. He followed you like a little dog.”

“And how was that?” Ray asks. He’d made a point of avoiding the main lift.

“I told you, man. I hump the deck. Just because there’s a little excitement amidships don’t mean that I start hugging the desk. I found that boy, Mr. Marlowe. You seen him. That wasn’t no accident, and I didn’t need Chief Becker coming down here with lights and cops and all that screaming to tell me so. I figured there was a chance the sicko that did this was still out there, hiding somewhere, waiting for things to chill before he made his way up. Didn’t find nothing, though. No blood or anything to follow. I guess he must have done it somewhere else and just hauled the boy down here.”

“That was my conclusion, too,” Ray says. “Now here’s what I’m thinking happened: whoever dumped the body–probably the same person who actually committed the murder–did enough scouting in advance to know that you’re the type of deck security who stays mobile. He knew he didn’t have to find a way to drag that body down one of the stairways, that he stood a reasonable chance of not being detected if he just took the lift.”

Diggs shakes his head, a not-so-subtle indication that he thinks Ray must be some kind of stupid.

“Our boy didn’t use no lift,” he says.

“How can you know that?”

“Number one, the non-passenger deck lifts don’t have an express override. He would have been running a chance that anybody who wanted to get on the lift at any point between where he got on and Omicron could just push a button, wait for the doors to open and find him out.”

Rodriguez says, “Unless he was hard enough that he wouldn’t have any qualms killing someone he encountered in an accidental meeting. From what you’ve said, Ray, about the disposition of the corpse, I’d assume this is a guy without qualms.”

Kilgore jerks his thumb at Rodriguez and winks. “Officer material here is forgetting that then the suspect would have two or more bodies to dispose of then, and he’d have a mess to deal with in the elevator. That creates a whole bunch of annoying details to deal with. I’d assume if I was trying to stash a body somewhere that I’d go out of my way to avoid creating extra details.”

“Besides that,” Diggs went on. “I got me a lift sensor that pings my radio whenever the elevator stops on this level. The cargo boys know that they’re supposed to wait for me to come back to them if they need to make a pick up, and they can’t get into any of the bays without my card to admit them, so the system works just fine. I would have known if the suspect had come down on the lift, unless it didn’t happen on my shift. If it happened before I punched in, then the last shift would have found the body–assuming, of course that they even stepped away from the desk in the first place, which is unlikely.”

“So he came down one of the ladders,” Ray agrees. “Gruesome work.”

“But how did he get into the bay in the first place?” Rodriguez asks quietly. “Unless he had a card for the lock. Or unless he knew how to jimmy the lock in a way it wouldn’t be detected.”

“Wouldn’t take no rocket scientist,” Diggs answered. “This ain’t no secure zone, except port and starboard, where the dumps are.”

This is wending in a direction Ray doesn’t want to go. “If our guy has a card, he’s either swiped it–”

“Or he’s a member of the crew,” Kilgore finishes, not liking the conclusion any more than Ray does from the look on his face. “I’ll talk to some of my ladies in equipment and accounting in the morning and see if they’ve had any reports of missing access cards.”

“And if he didn’t have a card,” Ray says, glancing at Rodriguez to get his attention, “there should be something anomalous in the lock’s access log. We’ll need to look into that a little more closely. Talk to Becker or one of his lieutenants tomorrow and see if you can get him to switch out the locks and hand the original over to us for analysis.”

Ray swings back to Bobby Diggs, who has started yet another cigarette. “You’ve already been rather instructive, Bobby, and I’m deeply grateful for your help so far. But I need you to start from the beginning again, from the point at which you came on shift last night and tell it one more time. I know you’ve already filed an official report. I’ve seen that, but sometimes we leave things out in the official reports, you know? Stuff that doesn’t seem important, or things we skip over because we’re trying to economize words and get away from the terminal and clock out. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. I’ve done it hundreds of times myself. What I want now is everything, even the stuff that doesn’t seem important enough to write it down, okay?”

So he talks, and he has a startling memory for details, it seems. Not just individuals who came down to grab supplies, but the franchises they represented, the things they talked about on the way to the bays where their storage was kept, how many cigarettes he smoked on the way. He remembers, it seems, the gangways he traveled in order, the lights that were out, which maintenance closet he pulled the bulbs from and roughly what time it was when it he was doing it.

Bobby says, “Round about ten, I leave the checkpoint. By ten, things get mighty quiet down here. Most of the franchises have stocked for the next day–they get it all out of the way around the same time, as a courtesy to me, you know. They know it’s just Bobby Diggs on the big O. If they’re coming down at odd times, they give me a call and tell me they’re on the way so they don’t have to wait. I always start the round on the hour.” Bobby shakes his head, as though he’s anticipating a criticism. “I know, they teach you in the Marines to stagger your sweeps so’s you keep the enemy guessing. Well, this ain’t the Marines, boys. This is marginally security, but mostly customer service. If I’m predictable, the folk from up Garden way know they can show up at five before or ten before the hour and I’ll be back in just a minute without having to cut short my round. It only looks like a flawed system when something bad happens, like last night.”

Ray understands what Bobby’s telling him and the justification for it, but he makes a mental note anyway. The suspect pool just became necessarily less clever or lucky. All they had to be was observant. “Go ahead.”

“I swept passage four, where there are two bays and a bunch of storage closets for ship materials. Standard procedure is to pop the lock, shine a light in, listen for suspicious sounds, then move on. Maybe a minute per bay. Back up passage three toward the front of the ship, around the concourse against the outer hull, which takes me all the way to starboard, where it intersects with the corridor past the munitions dump, where Rodriguez and Kilgore were. I waved to them through the observation window in the blast door, but they didn’t notice me, and they sure as cathedral bells weren’t going to hear me unless I hit the comm, and that seemed like a little too much bother just for a howdy, you understand. I jogged left to sweep back forward down passage nine, figuring I’d hit ten on the next go. I do try to randomize my sweep patterns, even if I don’t alternate the times I do them.

“So I peeked in 950, which is kitty corner right between passage eight and nine as you’re moving back toward the front of the ship. Sections 949 to 945 are ship storage closets, narrow cubbies running along the outside of the 944 bay, get me? I hit 944 at 10:45 or so, swept my card and opened the door.”

Bobby Diggs pauses, sucks long and hard on the end of his cigarette.

“And you saw the body when you flashed your light,” Ray prompts him.

Diggs tilts his head sideways, considers Ray with one eye, wide, unblinking. “That’s what I put in my report, yes sir.”

Rodriguez nudges him with his knee. “But that isn’t what really happened.”

“Boy gonna think I’m crazy.”

“What happened?” Ray says.

Diggs looks away, stares at his feet, not moving except to piston his cigarette back and forth between lips and thigh, where he rests his arm. “You been in the Mes, Mr. Marlowe? You got that look about you. If not the Mes, you seen action. That’s plain enough.”

Ray nods slowly. “Four years in and around Wadi Wadi.”

“Tent City,” Diggs mumbles, nostalgic. “I did a six month rotation there, but spent most of my time south and east, Wadi Gore, we called it. The main push toward Baghdad, Big B. Some fierce, fierce combat in that zone. Nights sleeping with your chem gear in hand, your bio gear on the floor, your rifle propped against the table by your head. All night long you’re taking mortars; they sound like rumbling thunder the way it used to roll down the mountainside in Georgia, north of Dalton, where I’m from. And you know they’re aiming for the comm shack or the ammo dump or the motor pool, but we’re always moving them around. And we don’t know how good their intel is, but we do know how bad their aim is, and between the two, we know it’s just a matter of time before they drop a shell right in the middle of the tent. That happened, too, an old Russian surplus mortar, must have been twenty, thirty years old. Came through the tent like a stone, with a ripping sound that scared the living bejesus out of me and Krueger and Shireman. Hit the floor with a whump and just sat there, doing nothing. Shireman says, ‘Hey, it’s a dud, man. It’s a dud. Toss it outside.’ And I’m like, ‘You pick it up and toss it outside, motherfucker.’ We argued about who was gonna do it for ten minutes, and here comes Sergeant Buff, who’d slept through the whole dratted thing. He rolls out of his bunk, boy don’t say a word, just gets up, grabs this mortar like it’s a library book and pitches it out the front flap.

“You know how it gets, just like that. When you can grab an unexploded shell and toss it around like it’s just another thing. So much clutter. And you don’t think about calling the specialists to cart it away, because they’se gonna ask questions and ask you file a report, and help them fill sandbags to stack around the damned thing while they disarm it, and the next thing you know it’s morning and you’re on duty and you haven’t got a lick of sleep. So you just take care of it yourself.

“And somewhere in all this mess, if you live long enough, you develop that sense like Sergeant Buff, see? Shireman telling me that it was a dud, and the two of us knowing between us that it was a dud because we was still talking about it, wasn’t the same as believing it. We was too scared. We didn’t have the faculties to think clearly, to sense when everything was all right and when it wasn’t, not then. But we got to that place, we came to know, to tell, to taste an ambush in the air or feel in our bones when something big was going down before we even got the word to gear up or to know from the texture of the darkness when we were alone and when there was some Kurd sapper right outside the wire with a homemade popper strapped to his chest. You learn to use them senses God gave us all, but most men don’t even know are there. Sixth sense, seventh, whatever, right? You just know.

“When I opened the door to 944, Mr. Marlowe, I just knew. It was like the breath of the devil up against my cheek, just like in the Mes. There was something, and I couldn’t tell what. I didn’t have no sidearm, just a flashlight and my churning guts, and I went in there anyway.” Diggs utters an explosive laugh, harsh and castigating. “I must’ve looked like those old movie reels, like Buckwheat. I think my ‘fro was standing straight up, half a meter off my head in all directions. And I’m thinking my eyes must be so big and so white they’ve got to be shinin’ bright as kliegs. And on top of that, I’ve got this flashlight telling anybody with a gun and the ability to hit a barn door right where I’m standing.”

Diggs swings around, his face naked with a sort of supplication. “After I found that boy, I looked for the man that done it. Armed or not, I pounded the aisles–all of them. Shaking like a lost kitten in a snowstorm, too. ‘Cause I could hear him, I thought. I could hear him breathing. I could hear him shuffling his feet, like a rasp against the deckplate, but distant, you know? Like I was hearing it from outside the bay or through the wall. But I couldn’t ever get no closer to him, and after a few minutes I remember that I left the bay door open and provided him a nice, tidy exit. That’s when I went for Kilgore and Rodriguez and set the whole circus in motion. I thought it might give us a chance to catch him, even if it was a slim one. But I guess he was gone by then.”

Ray swallows hard, kicking back the lump that’s tried to creep up his throat and suffocate him. “Bobby, did you touch the body? Even just to check for a pulse?”

He’s thinking about Nomar’s ongoing process of the samples obtained from Micah Uytedehaage’s corpse.

“Didn’t need to. I could see he was dead. And if he weren’t dead, sir, he wouldn’t have been thanking me sincerely for saving him at that point.”

“That’s okay,” Ray says, trying to smile. “I didn’t touch the body either.”

Kilgore shivers violently. “That’s creepy. You really think he was still there? I mean, the killer, right there in the room with you? A guy who could do that to a kid? That creeps me out. I would have just had a freaking heart attack right there on the spot. The big stiffy, I’m telling you, swear to God.”

“I don’t think nothing,” Diggs retorts quietly. “It could have just been my imagination after seeing that kid all tore up. I ain’t the first guy to have seen something like that and had flashbacks to combat. That’s why I left that out of my report. Security don’t want to read about what’s going on in my gut. They want evidence. A footprint, a handcuffed suspect, some spit they can pull the DNA out of. I didn’t have none of those.”

“We understand,” Ray says. And they do, each one of them, the way the brain leaps into overdrive and sensory input becomes confused with memories, with specters dredged up from the past. “You did everything that was expected of you.”

Diggs snorts, expelling a jet of smoke from his nostrils. “Yeah. Tell that to the boys in blue out there manning my desk, walking my rounds two by two, all but strip searching the cargo yuks down from the franchises. They look at me with those grim faces that say Bobby Diggs screwed up. Bobby Diggs got himself the cushiest gig on the whole ship and he messed it up. If this duty was so soft, how come nobody else wanted it? How come it got dumped on me because I don’t got as much ship time as some of the others? Well, these rent-a-flatfoot pricks can have it as far as I’m concerned. I’ll go play on the Garden for a couple of weeks, sip me some espresso and eye rich bitch titties.”

Ray sorts through his pocket and pulls out a scrap of paper and a pen. He quickly scrawls their room number and comm id and hands it to Bobby Diggs. “Chief Becker hasn’t said anything about transferring you off this duty. If it means anything, I don’t think he’s disappointed with your performance. This is just a political gesture–to show the passengers that things are still under control.” He points at the paper in Bobby’s hand. “And since you’re going to be here, that’s our contact information. You see or hear anything strange, or you remember something you haven’t told us, you give me ring, okay? Day or night, one of us will be around to take the call.”

Kilgore winks, smiling. “Can you dig it, Diggsy?”

“Man, don’t make me bust you up.” Then, to Ray, “I’ll keep you in mind, Mr. Marlowe. You’re gonna catch this guy, right?”

“I’m going to do my best.”

But Diggs isn’t happy with that answer. His gaze bores into Ray’s eyes, his jaws set firmly. “I ain’t no officer, sir. I do what I’m told–always have. But I keep my eyes open and pay attention to the lie of the land so to speak. There’s something that’s not right about this. It gives me the heebs; I ain’t ashamed to admit that.”

A nod, that’s all Ray gives him, just enough to show the warning was heard. “You’re not the only one.”

“You watch your back, Mr. Marlowe.”

With that, Ray whistles for Nomar, and they leave Bobby Diggs to walk the deck.

***

They arrive back on the Garden a little after midnight. Kilgore makes some noises about it being too late for proper carousing, like it’s a duty he’s itching to perform, but shuts himself up when they find a sec-o waiting outside their door. The man sees them coming and snaps to attention.

“Commander Marlowe?”

Ray suppresses a groan. Is there anybody Becker hasn’t told about his unexpected rank inflation? But that’s only a small part of the sudden stab of dread that pierces his chest. Most of it is a sense of what now? Where’s the body this time?

He waves the guy off before he can do something silly like salute. “What is it?” he demands.

“Chief Becker asked me to deliver a package to you.” The sec-o produces a rectangular lump wrapped in plain brown paper, tied off with packing twine. Ray’s name, sans rank, is printed on the top in a dark, blocky hand. “He said you would know what to do with it.”

Without knowing its contents, Ray suspects that he will. The handwriting is familiar to him, though he hasn’t seen it in years. It’s Jack Holcomb’s. R’s that look like n’s. Once upon a time, it had driven him nearly out of his mind.

He takes the package quickly, without comment. When he moves, its contents clink, like the sound of stone on stone, like the muddy chatter of a shale hillside collapsing on itself.

Old Jack thinks of everything. Ray doesn’t know whether to be heartened or annoyed by this. Until he receives further instructions, though, he thinks he’s going to opt for annoyed.

Ray dismisses the sec-o with a wave and lets them into the their quarters. Nomar bounds past him and springs up onto the counter. He begins pacing back and forth in front of the diagnostic terminal like he can’t wait to upload his newly gathered cigarette data, courtesy of Bobby Diggs. Ray wonders briefly if it’s possible to get a mechanized rat hooked on nicotine. That would be just his luck, to have a chemically addicted drone on his hands.

“So what’s in the box, boss,” Kilgore asks.

Ray tosses the package onto the closest table, where it slides a short distance, then settles with a mind jarring tinkle of its contents.

“Emergency supplies.”

“An answer that tells me nothing. You catch onto this officer routine quick.” Kilgore drops into a chair at the table and grabs the box. He shakes it a few times, holding it up to his ear like a Christmas present. “Sounds breakable. Okay, sounds already broken.”

To Rodriguez: “Make me some coffee, Corporal. You want some coffee, Ray?”

“I’ll make it.” But first, he settles Nomar down, attaches the output cable and readies the server to dump the latest audio and nicotine tinged files in their own directory.

“Oh, Rodriguez will do it. You probably wouldn’t wash your hands first.”

Nomar chitters something back that no one understands, but it sounds vaguely insulting.

Kilgore continues, “I’m going to open this up.”

“Be my guest, but don’t expect it to be a very illuminating experience.”

“You’re so sexy when you’re cryptic, Commander.”

Ray gets Nomar squared away and ventures back across the room. He settles into a chair across the table from Kilgore. Rodriguez empties a jug of purified water into the coffee maker in the kitchen. He joins them around the package a few moments later, just as Kilgore is flicking his pocket knife through the packing twine. Beneath the wrapping paper is a flimsy cardboard container. Kilgore pops the seal on one side, tilts it up and spills a dozen or more stone rings onto the table top. They’re dark, a sort of metallic blue, vaguely iridescent. The illusion of iridescence comes, in fact, from the imbedded Arabic script, etched in silver, Ray guesses, both inside and out.

“Look,” Kilgore says, snorting. “Ray has a secret admirer.”

Ray picks up the ring that has rolled closest to him, holds it between thumb and forefinger and examines it against the overhead light. Meteoric stone, he supposes. Inscribed with incantations. He shakes his head and jams the thin, cool band onto his right hand.

Kilgore continues to shake the box, but nothing else falls out. For good measure, he turns it over so he can peer inside. “But she didn’t leave a note. That’s pretty rude.”

Rodriguez rolls one of the rings around in his palm, examining it from various angles, obviously intrigued.

“Put it on,” Ray says. “Both of you. Pick one and put it on.”

Kilgore shuffles through the pile, finding one that looks wide enough to fit his stubby fingers. “I guess it’s more interesting than a unit patch.”

Ray scoops up the ones that remain and shovels them into his pocket.

“What are they for?” Rodriguez asks.

“For protection.”

Before Kilgore can come up with a witty rejoinder: “From what?”

From having your bones liquefied by a pissed off demigod, Ray almost says. For an instant, he flashes back to Ba’dai, to Whitfield and the others collapsing like discarded garments, puddles of vacated flesh. Maybe Holcomb wasn’t a complete asshole. Maybe he’d learned a lesson or two in the desert after all. Not that this gesture mitigated in any way Ray’s desire to punch him in the skull.

“What’s all this sand jockey mumbo-jumbo mean?” Kilgore, subtle as a hand grenade. “I mean, I know sand jockey mumbo-jumbo when I see it.”

Ray just shrugs.

But Rodriguez continues to turn the ring over on his finger, tracing the words, his lips moving. He glances up. “’For the terror that comes by night.’”

Silence. Kilgore purses his lips. “That’s a little weird.”

But Rodriguez looks only at Ray, says once again, “Protection from what?”

Ray is exhausted, suddenly buried under the weight of day, under the weight of his entire life. A bubbling cauldron of questions roils inside him, lots of issues he doesn’t seem to glimpse clearly. Holcomb who doesn’t seem surprised by recent events. So unsurprised that he has given Sorensen or Becker this little time bomb package well in advance, its ticking little mindjob clock winding down from the moment they launched. The fact that he’s on a ship bound for New Holyoke–the exact same New Holyoke where an ancient Terran artifact was just transported. All of the non-coincidence around dead Micah Uytedehaage. Was the CIU getting him away from the desert at all, or just setting him up in another place and another time?

And on top of that, he still doesn’t know what to do about Emma. And there’s Ziggy to contend with, who about now is probably pissing acid because he thinks Ray has gone AWOL, which means that Nina knows, and Nina is probably out of her mind with worry given the grapevine of rumor that informs the ship of bizarre happenings like murders in the sub-decks. Now Rodriguez and Kilgore who deserve to know something about the mess he has enlisted them in, but all he’s got to give them is half-baked theories and mystical crap piles and crackpot reminiscences they’re not going to believe anyway. Too many loose ends. Too many unanswered questions, and he doesn’t seem to have the time to deal with any of them in a proper way.

He wonders if this is what it’s like to be an officer all the time. If so, is it too late to turn down his commission?

Ray lets his shoulders sag. “Ask me tomorrow, Rodriguez.”

Which is a surrender of sorts. Which is completely unfair to them, and possibly dangerous as well. He’s already lost men because they weren’t handed the knowledge and tools with which to defend themselves from the unknown.

Kilgore pushes against Rodriguez’s shoulder. “The coffee’s ready. Go get it.”

Rodriguez stares at him for a moment, dumbfounded, then springs away. He creates a thundershower of crockery in the kitchen.

Kilgore levels a disgusted glare at Ray. “All due respect, sir, but I don’t give a shit if you don’t want to talk about it. I don’t give a shit about your need-to-know ideas or emergency contingencies. You need to tell us what’s going on before I say to hell with this reassignment. We can’t help you unless you give us something to work with.”

This is the type of thing Marine sergeants have been doing with officers for five hundred years. Ray can’t help but blink at him, dumbfounded himself. So this is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an officer-sergeant ass reaming. He chuckles lightly in spite of himself, realizes that ‘chuckling’ is way too macho a description for it. By God, he’s giggling. Giggling like he’s losing his mind. Or do you cackle when your mind goes? He doesn’t know.

Rodriguez returns and slides a blistering mug of dark coffee into his hand.

Fucking Marines, Ray thinks. And he tells them. All of it.

Later in the morning, there is shopping carried out by a glowing ensign intermediary dispatched by Becker–at Ray’s request–to fend off the impending mission-threatening crisis. She breathlessly collects sizes, crawls around Kilgore and Rodriguez with a tape measure, tickles inseams with a zest that is somewhere between professional and lascivious, then disappears for better than two hours with their cred chips. When she finally returns, there are bags to open, wads of crepe paper to wad up and toss away. Loads of grunting and I’m-not-wearing-that protestations. Ray issues a whole raft of threatening sounding orders about the fact that mingling with poofs requires looking like poofs. In return, he’s threatened with a mutiny that is only put off by the ensign’s declaration that just looking at the two Marines in their urban camouflage makes her feel rather weak in the knees.

By noon, Kilgore and Rodriguez have drawn up a detailed map of the Garden and its assorted attractions. They argue over deployment strategies, over zones of control and population assimilation and control measures. They chuckle about redefinitions of the term “Fields of Fire”. They pull up confidential ship demographic and transaction history information and demarcate a ten section square block which they label Biddy Central, a sort of No Man’s Land given over to Paraclete’s aged matron and widower set. It is Avoid At All Costs territory, saved for the extremest of exigencies, the most suicidal of intel obtainment tactics. Finally, they agree to rendezvous back at the suite by ten for standard debriefing, then troop out, leaving Ray alone at last.

Ray has coordinated the tactical removal of a battalion strength force of entrenched Russoturk regulars by grossly undermanned allied ground and air forces from four different countries and twelve branches of the military with less general aggravation.

For his part, Ray changes into fresh clothes that are nearly identical to the ones he wore the day before. He takes three minutes to hack the telephony index and track down the private comm nodes of the Whiston compound. He pings Emma’s room with a transmission encrypted lightly enough to hide his contact information and boggle most private industry unauthorized descrambling software.

He tells himself that he does this because his ability to prosecute the tasks of his job requires it of him, because he needs to stay close to the Whistons. He doesn’t want to think about it any other way at this moment, because the wall of deception and lies he is erecting between them is unconscionable otherwise. This much, at least, he owes to dead and mutilated Micah.

He doesn’t even want to calculate the debt he’ll owe Emma for so many lies, so much manipulation.

Her voice sounds thin, drawn when she answers. He’s sent the call as voice only and immediately wishes he would have authorized a vid signal

“Meet me for lunch,” he says.

“Ray?”

“I can be at Frankie V’s in five minutes. I’ll get us a table.”

Hesitation, then sadness, muffled by electrons. “I’d love that, but I can’t.”

“You’re angry with me.”

“I am angry with you. You abandoned me in the middle of the night without anything like an acceptable explanation.” For just a moment she is growling, spurned, arch, but either can’t or won’t maintain it. “But that’s not why I can’t meet you. Amah is furious that I’ve been entertaining strange men, common sailors no less, who haven’t shown her the courtesy of submitting to a proper introduction. Frederick, of course, isn’t helping matters, and has been saying the most scandalous and misleading things about you. I’m afraid she’s generally more prone to believing his side of things than mine.”

“I’ve performed a few clandestine extractions in my time,” Ray says, joking. “And if I had to get rough with your brother again to make good our escape, that would just be a bonus.”

“Frederick isn’t here.”

“What are you telling me?”

“Etiquette, Ray.”

He mulls this strange word, trying to make some sense of it. “Oh. You want me to pick you up. Like a date. Knock on the front door, meet the guardian, all of that.”

Emma laughs lightly. “That is the way it’s traditionally done.”

“Do I bring something? Flowers or candy or something?”

“When you come for dinner, you can do that. It isn’t required when you’re taking me out. Unless, of course, you’re bringing things for me, as a token of apology for the manner in which you abandoned me. In that case, I like chocolate and you can bring as much as you like.”

“So I just come down there and knock on the door, meet your Amah and we’re set, right?”

“The main door, Ray. Not the one to my private room.”

“I would have figured that out. Eventually.” Probably would have, though not necessarily before creating some noxious inter-familial incident. He grins imagining it; it’s probably just as well that she can’t see him. “I’ll be there in ten.”

Chocolate, he remembers. “Make that fifteen.”

“If you’re not here in half an hour, I’m calling security.”

Still smiling, he clicks off. He looks over at Nomar, standing expectantly on the kitchen counter. “Where do you find chocolate on a starship?”

The rat, of course, has a perfectly clear idea.

Exactly fifteen minutes later and a shocking amount of ship’s cred lighter, he’s standing on Iota-D outside the primary entrance to the Whiston suites. In one hand he holds a package wrapped in white satin cloth, frouffy with pastel ribbons and lace. He swipes the other hand against his pant leg to keep the sweat off his palms, and alternately uses it to slap at Nomar who can’t seem to get it through his processing array that the chocolate extravagance is not now and never was intended for him.

He gets thing settled with Nomar in time to ignore the chipper salutation of the security system in agatho-daimon, receptive mode and pound out his arrival on the skin of the front door. It slides open at once, like she’s been waiting for him.

Emma is there, bright-eyed and shimmering with an internal glow. She’s an old time movie star under a soft lens. For several moments he forgets to breathe.

When he does remember, he says, “I’m punctual.”

“If that’s the worst of your vices, I think you might not be a complete waste of my energies.”

“Am I supposed to take that as flattery?”

“Indeed. And you’re supposed to say something flattering in return.”

“If you get me started we’ll be standing here all day.” He’s fairly certain he’s making a fool of himself. Despite everything, just seeing her overwhelms him. “You make me feel dizzy.”

Emma puts her finger to her lips, hushing him.

She mouths one word: wonderful.

But with a toss of her head, she indicates the space behind her. Someone listening in. He suspects this is supposed to make him feel instantly and utterly abashed, but it doesn’t. Whoever it is, he owes them a debt of dignity.

So he’ll have something less awkward to do, Ray thrusts the package of chocolates at her. Grins like an idiot. Emma takes it from him with the proper appreciative noises and exclamations of surprise, but she isn’t really looking at the package. She’s looking at Nomar, who has followed the transaction with a twitch of his nose and a less than stealthy tracking maneuver. Emma raises an eyebrow at Ray, as if to say, Today! Today of all days, you bring the rat! Ray just shrugs. There are certain impulses a man should not be expected to explain.

Finally, she invites him inside. Ray pauses long enough to inform Nomar that he’s going to remain outside, preferably right where he is, even more preferably, without chewing on anything that looks expensive. A brief, but frenzied negotiation results in Emma unwrapping the bundle and handing over a piece of chocolate to placate him.

She leads him through a brief vestibule of white marble floors, soft wood paneling and fine Grecian urns mounted on Romanesque stone pillars, both of which, Ray suspects, are actual antiquities rather than clever reproductions thereof. Through an arched doorway is a large parlor that is everything one would expect from a Whiston family domestic space. The carpet is plush, white, dreadfully soft. There are leather chairs sprinkled about in chummy groups which break up the uncharacteristic vastness of the open room. Low bookcases neatly arranged with dark leather volumes stamped with gold lettering on the spines line two of the walls. The wall directly to Ray’s right is taken up by a massive vid screen, currently dark, but bracketed on each side by fading frescoed tiles, what seem to be remnants of ancient Pompeii. A tasteful assortment of lamps and flowers, flowers hiding lamps, lamps shaped like flowers, generate a white glare that is almost dazzling.

And Ray might be tempted to be dazzled, except he suddenly remembers something Emma had said to him. About finding Micah camped out in one of these soft leather chairs, poring over a book well after bedtime. He can imagine it now, the boy’s small body spread across the seat with a book propped on his chest, his gangly limbs draped over a chair’s arm, his foot swinging lightly in the air, his brows furrowed as he troubles over an unfamiliar spatter of characters and ungainly word forms, unaware that he’s a few scant hours from death.

There are perhaps more important things in the world than making a good impression on Emma’s domestic servant or maternal guardian or whatever it was she happened to be.

Emma leads him across the room to the far corner where space has been carved out from so much opulence for a battered wicker rocking chair that looks old enough to have been transported from Terra during the original settlement of New Holyoke. The woman seated in it is no less ancient in her appearance, and she is exactly not at all what Ray expected.

She is vast, sprawling, with thick legs like industrial pistons, skin brown as burnt cocoa, trunk massive in its proportions. Her upper arms, poking out of a bright, floral print dress are slabs of wrinkled fat which droop down over her elbows like the sleeves of a bulky sweater. Her head is a squarish block seated awkwardly on broad, muscled shoulders. The chair beneath her creaks an alarming plaint as she rocks, the sound of organic materials reaching their critical stress point. Even without standing, it’s apparent that she’s tall, probably a hand span taller than Ray. Almost a freak of nature; a creature of awe.

Ray’s first impression is that age has wrinkled her in curious patterns, but it isn’t wrinkling at all, it’s a fine network of ritual scars. Blackened whorls and loops crowd her arms. On her fingers are delicate stick figures that seem to dance when she moves her hands. The billowing canvasses of her cheeks are cratered spirals spinning away from a central point, ever widening in arcs that disappear behind the curve of her ears.

“Most men stare the first time,” the woman says, her voice rich and deep, projected like a roll of thunder into the room’s quiet.

She has been doing something with her hands which involves thin strips of plaited bark interwoven in a broad, dun colored disk. Basket weaving, Ray realizes. The emerging disk of what will be the base is spread out on her wide thighs, trailing curled strips like creeper vines down her legs. She lifts her eyes to him, stunning wells of darkness, black on black, but shining, perceptive, quick.

“You look, but you don’t gawk, Mr. Marlowe. These are better manners than you’ve displayed toward this family so far. You had a good mother, then, but her handiwork has been blunted by the influence of less tactful teachers.”

“I’m sorry,” Ray says reflexively.

“For what reason, young man? For learning poor lessons? For manhandling poor, earnest Frederick after he let his temper get the better of him? For compromising the virtue of a young woman in the middle of the night when you thought no one was watching? Or for just for being a man in general?”

Not a good start. “Maybe for the insensitivity of others, ma’am.”

Beside him, Emma shifts nervously from one foot to the other. In a small voice, she says, “Amah, this is Ray.”

The woman snorts, but sets her craftwork aside. “I know who he is. I’m just giving him a dose of his own medicine, little Emma. Rude behavior breeds rudeness in return.”

“I had no intention of causing difficulties for you,” Ray says evenly.

“I am fully aware of your intentions, Mr. Marlowe, but what you may intend and what the actual consequences of your actions may be do not necessarily correspond. This family has seen better days than the ones we’ve been granted of late. Trial stacked on trial. First Emma and Frederick’s mother, then Micah, and now here you are, a distraction at best. At worst–well, who’s to say?”

Apparently, this is a woman who has no trouble expressing what she thinks. “I realize the timing is unfortunate.”

“Do you?”

Ray hesitates over his phrasing. “I’ve been apprised of the current situation.”

“Do you think so?”

He can’t tell what she means by this question. “Yes.”

Amah frowns. “You have no idea of the complexities of the current situation. The affairs of the Whiston family are beyond your ken. That you would even suppose to know is foolish and preposterous. Are you a fool, Mr. Marlowe?”

Emma draws a sharp breath. “Amah, you promised.”

But the accusation still hangs in the air between them. Ray peers down at the old woman, his jaw set. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“Indeed. At least, no more than you know about the Whistons. You should not find yourself confusing what you believe with what is true–what you perceive with what is actual. The ability to separate truth from fiction is the foundation of courtesy.”

“Courtesy?” He speaks the word like he doesn’t know what it means.

“Amah, please!”

The old woman levels a glare at Ray, but something about her seems to soften, relent. “I did promise. Not to be hard on you, not to remind you that the ways of the family are old and strange to some. It’s not my place to tell a girl of Emma’s age how to conduct her affairs, and you are obviously a man of the world who knows how to comport himself properly, eh? You don’t need my approval of your business, not when you’re perfectly capable of learning the hard truths for yourself. But I’m old, and I measure by standards that are no longer in fashion.” She fixes Ray with a final, penetrating look from her dark eyes, her wells of knowledge. “Times change, Mr. Marlowe. Standards change. But the Whistons do not. We are as we have always been, and what is demanded of those who would flutter near to our flame is respect. Perhaps in time you will come to see that this is true–if you have the fortitude to endure.”

Emma intervenes before Ray can respond. “Ray just wants to take me to lunch.”

A shake of the head. “Is that what you want, Mr. Marlowe?”

All that you want, she means.

Any time now, he should begin to get properly angry, to pull his sergeant’s voice out of mothballs and use it to defend himself. But he can’t. Doesn’t even want to, in fact, because of Emma. He’s already forced her to bear the weight of his conflicting interests once. He is not going to do it again.

He does his best to smile amiably. “If you don’t mind.”

Amah purses her lips. “None of my business.”

“Then I think I’ll go,” Emma says, hardly more than a whisper. “The children have been fed, of course, and Leela is putting the younger ones down for their nap. I’ve told them not to disturb you. I should be back in time for their afternoon lessons.”

“I trust Mr. Marlowe will help you keep track of the time.” Pregnant pause, almost amused. “And return you in decent order.”

Ugh.

Emma sweeps toward her and kisses her cheek warmly, on the verge of glee, or imitating glee to dissuade her from changing her mind. The old woman clutches at her in an embrace that resembles a mudslide as Emma whispers what Ray guesses must be gratitude or groveling in her ear. Amah’s heavy lidded gaze never leaves him, claws at him like an accusation of rape.

Impending rape at best, he wants to remind her, but doesn’t.

And Miss I-don’t-really-wear-the-pants-in-this-household Nanny might just be rudely surprised by whose name would appear in the security report as the perpetrator of any sexual aggression that might occur.

Bottom line: he is starting to remember why it always seemed easier to just pay for sex rather than going after slutty, sticky, relationship-minded Air Force chicks.

Emma disentangles herself from the old woman’s embrace, smiling again. She springs at Ray, takes his hand and draws him out of the parlor, through the vestibule and out the front door so rapidly he might as well have been sucked through a wormhole.

With the door sealed behind them, Ray says, “That was certainly pleasant. I would like to thank you for subjecting me to such pleasantness. Really. I mean that.”

“Oh, listen to you,” Emma says, giggling, beaming, happy just to have escaped, Ray imagines. She bumps her shoulder playfully against him. “It isn’t as though she doesn’t have a point. You haven’t exactly gone out of your way to make a good impression with my family.”

Flabbergasting! “Freddy got exactly what he deserved. Less than he deserved, actually. At least where I come from.”

“Don’t let him hear you call him that. He hates it.”

“I thought I was trying to be convivial,” Ray says, innocent and impish. “And that’s beside the fact that she practically accused me of sneaking into your room to seduce you, among other things.”

They reach the lift and Emma punches the keypad to call the car. Nomar follows after them, sniffing at the air for more as-yet-unperceived confections.

“Are you saying you had other intentions?”

“Not at all, but there’s no way she could know that. Innocent until proven guilty and so on.”

The car arrives and they step inside. Emma looks up at him as they begin to move. “You’d be surprised what Amah knows, Ray. And you’d do well to remember that she can find out whatever she desires to.”

Her tone is tinged with a distressingly reverential awe. Ray frowns hearing it. “She probably just checked the security log. Assumptions beyond that are fairly straightforward.”

Emma only shrugs. If that’s what you want to believe.

What he wants to believe is that Amah is a cranky old harridan mortified by her advancing age and her increasingly faulty carbon-based husk and takes her disappointments out on the young men her stunning daughter by proxy chooses to bring home. He wants to believe that she has been alone and bitter and charged with the task of raising someone else’s youngsters for so long that her bulldog defense of their interests and innocence has staggered from competent to obsessive and is now well on its way to psychosis.

The truth is that if he had been Emma’s father and had caught some gauche young turk sneaking into her bedroom in the middle of the night, the chances were good that he’d be in lockup for the unauthorized discharge of firearms in the direction of individuals who had not granted their express, written consent to being mistaken for shooting range targets.

Ray can only shake his head and say, “You know, if you weren’t so pretty, this wouldn’t have been a problem.”

“I’m not just pretty, Ray. I’m perfect. You never had a chance.”

He, at least, knows better than to disagree.

They proceed up to the Garden Level, transitioning from the Iota-D lift to one of the public lifts, and arrive at Frankie V’s in time to avoid the press of the lunch crowd. Ray likes it here; it’s his favorite of all the shipboard franchises, and only partially because of Frankie’s under the table food deal, and even less so because of the faux Mafioso/old New York Italian bistro theme to the décor with its red checkered tablecloths and dimly lit, smoky interior where the booths are tall enough to hide you from view and thick enough to stop an assassin’s bullet. He likes it because Frankie is actually Ed Goins from Cleveland, a part Irish, part German Protestant who has to die his dishwater brown hair black before he can slick it, and has to concentrate to look cagey and dangerous rather than bursting into wide, toothy smiles. When he doesn’t think about his speech, his accent is flat, drawl-less Midwestern, which is to say, not accented at all except for a slight tendency to turn “you’re” into yer and “for” into fer.

In Ray’s line of work, finding someone who can make a successful go at assuming a role to which he is entirely unsuited and despite his copious shortcomings is distinctly comforting.

Inside, Frankie is playing maitre d’ to a rapidly thinning clientele, tall and stiff in a shining dark suit with lapels that are too wide and a red silk shirt beneath open at the collar to show his (dyed) chest hair. He spots Ray and scampers across the dining room, lunges for Ray’s outstretched hand and circles it in a double-fisted, vigorous shake.

“Hey! Mr. Marlowe, benevenutti, eh? Carlo said yous was gonna stop by for a little somethin’ this afternoon. How’s it treating you?” Frankie isn’t paying attention to Ray at all, but rolling his eyes up and down Emma’s curves with lascivious attention to detail. When he’s finished his survey, he cocks his head to Ray, wide smiles, winks. “Forget I asked. It’s treating you good, real good, I see.”

He’s having too much fun for Ray to tell him to can it.

“You want a table or a boot, Ray?”

Boot? But Frankie gives him the appropriate hand signal, a snap wave toward the back of the dining room and the booths crowded under pools of low and flickering yellow lights.

“Booth,” Ray says distinctly.

Frankie gives him the wink again–Gotcha. He snaps his fingers at someone Ray can’t see, presumably a waiter, and draws them deeper into the dining hall. Positioned on Ray’s right, opposite Emma, Frankie leans close so he can speak almost mouth to ear.

“Hey, tell me honestly. I’ve been working on the accent, watching some old movies and stuff. Is it over the top? I think it’s probably over the top but none of my guys will say so.”

Frankie/Ed’s “guys” are mostly Koreans still trying to learn more than a passing familiarity grade school English. They wouldn’t recognize over the top if it fell on them, and would be close to the last speakers of the language in human space to criticize anyone else’s mangled accent. Koreans are generally way too polite to give you a straight answer anyway.

“Just a little,” Ray whispers back.

“I knew it. How about the benevenutti?”

“That’s a nice touch, but I don’t know what it means.”

“’Good morning’,” Frankie says guardedly. “At least, I think so. I was hoping you could tell me.”

“I’ll look it up, get back to you.”

“Sure, sure. You gonna use the rat to pay?”

“Not today. I’m trying to make a good impression here, but you’d be doing me a favor if you showed him the kitchen and put him to work.”

Frankie sighs wistfully. “Ah, l’amour!”

“That’s French.”

“Amore?“

“I think so.”

“Good deal. And by the way, a couple of the other guys–system vets–have been in looking for you. Chief Zighowser is pissed enough to skin cats. I’m supposed to pass the word if I see you.”

“You haven’t.”

A nice, Mafia shrug. “I seen nothin’.”

Frankie steps aside so they can fold themselves into the booth, well apart from the dozen or so other customers in the room. “Gino will be with in a moment. Might I recommend the house special?”

Ray doesn’t know what the special is, but he nods anyway.

Frankie bows out, nudging Nomar with his foot and jerking his head back toward the kitchen. It’s a signal Nomar understands and obeys with only the slightest hesitation. The two of them disappear like old confederates slinking off to plot a bank heist.

Emma watches them go, then leans forward with her elbows on the table. “You come here often?”

“Frankie takes care of me.”

“He isn’t Italian, I don’t think.”

“Don’t tell him that. You’ll destroy his confidence.” Ray presses close, lowers his voice. “This is his first franchise voyage. He’s made amazing leaps since Terra, believe me.”

Then, “You’ve never been here before?”

“Frederick doesn’t like pasta, and he despises American kitsch.”

Ray lifts an eyebrow. “And you never go anywhere without his escort?”

“Not if they can stop me.”

Like the other morning, she means. It sits there plainly between them, but Ray doesn’t know how to make her actually say it, recognize it.

“Your family seems to be heavily invested in protecting you.” Big sign, red letters, neon flash: Watch Out for Thin Ice. Ray prepares to wince as she cuts him down.

But she doesn’t. Emma sucks in her lower lip, blinks slowly. “I’m the baby.”

“They let you go off to the university,” he points out.

More lip chewing. She shifts her eyes away. “That’s not completely accurate. I went off to school. Frederick retrieved me from school.”

“Meaning?”

“I had enough money to get to Stratiskaya Daransk and get by for six months. I don’t control my trust until I’m twenty-five, so it wasn’t hard for Frederick to block access to my account. The university expelled me for failure to pay my bill.”

“And your mother?”

“Mother’s been ill my entire life, sometimes better other times worse. The severity of her condition is a pretense to keep people from talking about family affairs.” Emma frowns, then tries to shake it off with a grim laugh. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. It sounds like I’m trying to scare you off.”

“Unfortunately for you, I’m not that easily frightened.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.” Immediately, she puts her hand to her face. “God, that makes me sound so mercenary. It’s not that bad, Ray, really. I don’t need to be rescued.”

Ray reaches for her hand, uncovers her eyes. “It’s okay.”

A moment later, Gino is there, dark and burly, bona fide Italian, bustling them through wine lists and menu recommendations and pronouncements on the virtues of linguini al sugo di pescatore and Sicilian mostacciolo. He’s a whirlwind of jovial service, gregarious high pressure sales, winking too much, slapping shoulders, impressing them with the sense of how deeply insulted he’ll be if they don’t take each one of his menu selections to heart.

Once he’s gone, Ray says, “At least that explains the reception I received.”

“From Amah, you mean?”

“Yes. She’s afraid I’m going to try to steal you away, and that you’re more than willing to be stolen.”

“And that’s not what you want?”

Ouch. “Too early to call it.”

“Why?”

He chuckles uncomfortably. “Because I snore. Because my feet smell bad. Because I sleep with my socks on and like to wear the same pair of skivvies two or three days in a row. I have a whole list of reasons for possible rejection, any one of which I fully suspect will bring to screeching to your senses as soon as you become aware of them. How’s that?”

But she pinches her brow, troubled. “You said the other night that I was out of your league. You’re wrong about that, you know. I’m not like–I mean, I’ve been very sheltered. Most of my life has been spent on a frontier colony with fewer than a million people. I’m not sophisticated; I haven’t traveled. I’m not who you think I am, not who anybody thinks I am.”

“Even Amah?” Ray says, arching an eyebrow.

Emma laughs. “I used to tell people that in many ways, Amah is more Whiston than I am, than any of us are. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Amah has held the family together for years, longer than I’ve even been alive. Amah and her clan.”

It makes her uncomfortable to say these things, like telling secrets. She won’t meet his gaze, the way she always does when she talks about the family, about Frederick, about anything Whiston. Ray doesn’t prompt her. He doesn’t need to. He gets the sense that she’s been waiting to tell someone, anyone, for a very long time.

“You’ve got to understand, Amah’s family has been with us for as long as there’s been a Whiston family, at least in the way people think of us now. As financial juggernauts, I mean. They’ve been part of us from the beginning, when great, great–supply your own multiple–grandfather rescued them from a plague stricken Polynesian island. This is classic family history stuff, Ray, part of the grand tradition. Grandfather Elliot George sells everything he owns in Old Boston, which isn’t much, but enough to purchase a majority share in a trading vessel called Hesperides aimed for China. Since he has nothing to his name but prospects, he convinces the minor partners to let him accompany the ship’s crew as a trade negotiator. It’s by all accounts a disastrous voyage. The hired captain falls ill before they round the tip of Tierra del Fuego, and grandfather is required to take over. Of course, he knows almost nothing about ocean seamanship, just what he’s picked up around the harbor, and then there are storms and diseases and long periods of calm so that by the time they sight land, they’re thousands of miles off course and half of them have perished. But they’re lucky, I guess, those who remain, because they eventually come across a small south seas island.

“They draw the Hesperides into a shallow harbor and man the jackboats to search for water, food, citrus–anything they can find to replenish their catastrophically depleted stores. The bad news is that they’ve arrived on this island at the worst possible time. The indigenous peoples, the Ma’huru and the Dag Maoudi, are entering the final act of a genocidal conflict in which the Ma’huru have the upper hand because they’ve been poisoning the wells of the Dag Maoudi. Grandfather Elliot learns about what’s going on, puts the pieces together, and also discovers that the Dag Maoudi are sailors of some considerable skill. He exchanges the might of 18^th century weaponry and a promise to end the plague for enough Dag Maoudi sailors to replace the crew he’s lost and enough stores to get them to China. The Dag Maoudi agree, and once he’s done his part, they offer him Amah’s ancestors–fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, old folks and newborn babies. Grandfather takes them all.

“After that, the fortunes of the Hesperides change. They reach China, manage an amazing series of clever negotiations and cement trade relationships. Grandfather returns to Boston heroically, and more important, on the verge of fabulous wealth. The Dag Maoudi go with him like good luck charms, adopted into the family as it were.

“They’ve been with us ever since. Through the transitions from trade and ship building to automobiles then aircraft then military manufacturing, now starships, the Dag Maoudi have been the one constant in the family. Amah takes her role, and her clan’s history with us, very seriously. It’s part of who she is, as much a personal definition as the scars she bears to celebrate her heritage.”

“And she’s not about to let you throw all that away in a post-adolescent fit,” Ray finishes for her.

“I’m just trying to help you understand.”

He’s being too hard on her, he realizes. Of course he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t have the experience to make it part of his reality.

“So Amah has essentially taken care of family affairs since your mother became ill.”

“Since father died, actually. Just before I was born.”

Ray gives her a shrug. “I guess I can see why she’s so invested in your success. She’s been working at it for a long time. But here’s what I don’t get: the current Whiston fortune, as immense and gaudy as it is, is based on starship manufacture and trade–all of which is Terran based. What are you doing out on the fringes of human space, for God’s sake? How the heck did your branch of the family end up on New Holyoke?”

Emma grins widely at him, as though he’s said something unintentionally funny. “You know, for a suspected gold digger, you haven’t done very thorough research.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ray, my family didn’t ‘end up on’ New Holyoke. We own it. We–meaning vessels and crews in our employ–we discovered it; we went to the Congressional Forum with a request for charter and trade rights; we paid cash money for private settlement and exclusive commerce considerations with the promise that we’d get a colony up and running and shipping raw materials back to Terra within a half century. It’s China all over again, you might say, and it’s the dirty secret behind the Whiston Charitable Trust.”

“The Trust is a tax break?” Ray barks, astounded. Then he’s laughing, and she’s laughing along with him. “That’s clever. Insidiously so, or admirably so. I’m not quite certain which.”

“You can’t tell anyone, of course, and the Terran branch of the family would deny it, probably destroy you in the process. Or at least to the extent that they’d care. I think they’re still angry that Grandfather Fram cut them out of the deal.”

“Who’d believe it?” He slaps his palm against his forehead. “You’re serious! You really own the entire planet?”

“For what it’s worth. Which, for the record, isn’t much at this point in time. Just enough to meet our quotas and hold onto our charter. We’re still decades away from really profitable resource mining unless we can get more and highly skilled people to immigrate. Labor is the most important raw material on any new colony, especially skilled labor. That’s a much less cynical way of looking at the work we do with the Trust. We take children who would otherwise be hopeless and give them a place and the necessary knowledge to flourish.” She pauses briefly, develops a look of consternation. “Oh, but Ray, you understand that’s just the business side of things, all this talk about ownership. New Holyoke is a legitimate colony with its own governing structure independent of the Whiston corporate aims. We are not petty tyrants ruling by executive fiat. The colony has its own local Congressional Forum that sets domestic policy, its own independent security forces, elects its own delegates to the Terran forum. The family stays completely away from the political side of it.”

Nice sentiment, but naïve. “You’re neglecting the fact that everyone on New Holyoke has to know that there is no colony, or at least not a financially viable one, without Whiston backing. You don’t have to exert your influence explicitly, I’d imagine, for the people who depend on your good favor to do what they believe you desire. It’s the way mining operations work–the way they’ve always worked, and that’s completely beside the fact that a considerable portion of your skilled and educated population owes their livelihood to the beneficence of the Trust.”

“Cultural power is a different animal entirely, Ray. If you believe that we don’t wish to exert some influence over the manner in which the colony develops, then you’re mistaken. We have our own interests in New Holyoke, both financial and otherwise, but it benefits no one if the people aren’t free to be human, free to develop into something grander than they have been before.”

“That sounds very utopian,” Ray says.

“Not utopian, darling. Human. It’s the nature of mankind to rise, to desire elevation. Sometimes, I think we forget that and are content to just expand rather than improve. We have striven for long years to create an environment where that can occur–and occur profitably, of course.”

“But not politically, eh?”

Emma rolls her eyes at him. “If you like, imagine us as akin to the British royal family–good tabloid gossip material, but not really relevant to most people’s lives.”

She’s either very naïve or New Holyoke is a very different sort of place than Ray has ever been.

“It must have created quite the local stir when you ran away.”

Emma is suddenly serious again, verging on bitter. “I’m sure Frederick found a way to spin it to his advantage. He probably announced I was off joining a convent or something, just so I’ll be more subject to humiliation when we return. I’m certain that any rumors of impropriety or tawdriness will be directed at me alone so as not to soil the family’s reputation.”

“So any plans I might harbor to smash him in the mouth probably wouldn’t help matters, is that what you’re saying?”

“Probably not, no.”

Ray gives her hand a squeeze to show her that he’s joking. Mostly. “So what is Freddy’s role in the great Trust?”

“You mean when he’s not getting drunk and losing his temper?”

“You said it. I didn’t.”

She smiles weakly. “He’s the primary administrator of the Trust and its charges.”

“In other words, he’s a high priced babysitter.”

“For me and others, yes.”

“Then Amah runs the household, Freddy runs the family business–what’s the role they’re grooming you for, Emma? Other than closet feckless dilettante slash secluded sociopath, I mean.”

But she waves him off as if the question doesn’t matter to her. “Something innocuous, I’m sure. But tedious, too. While I’m young, something to keep me in the public eye so I can attract a suitable match. That means public relations most likely. The simple truth is that they haven’t told me yet, and apparently they haven’t liked my ideas on the subject.”

“And those would be?”

Emma flings her arms wide, a starlet pose. “Why, to be fabulously wealthy and decadent and die young in an exotic land surrounded by adoring and nubile devotees, of course. Is there anything else worth aspiring to?”

This is perhaps a not so subtle indication that she wants to drop the subject, so Ray lets her. He’s gotten enough out of the business portion of this lunch to justify the expense on the cred pool to Becker.

“So where do I fit into these future plans?”

“You would be the High Priest, Ray, shielding my glory from the masses, worshipping at my altar, heeding my every command.”

She comes across as completely earnest, so Ray nods playfully. “It’s been too long since the universe has seen a well conducted theocracy.”

“I’m glad you see it that way, my love.”

My love. Hearing her say it sends a thrill through him like a jolt of electricity. While he marvels over her, Gino arrives with their food. He makes a big show of distributing plates and rhapsodizing over the perfection of the preparation, the presentation, the complexity of the culinary issues. All the sprawling and glorious history of Italy from trilobite dawn to this morning’s news has conspired to bring them this moment, these dishes, a palate-shattering explosion of delight.

But Ray leaves his food untouched.

“What is it about you, Emma?”

She stops, fork in hand, says matter-of-factly: “I’ve told you. I’m perfect. Perfect for you, at least.”

“You realize that you know next to nothing about me.” And what you think you know is mostly lies too complex to straighten out without hurting you.

“I realize that you think I know nothing about you. I also realize that you’re wrong, which is a convenient balance of power for my taste.”

Ray holds his breath, lets it go slowly. “I’m wrong? How can that be, when I’m pretty sure I remember most of the things I have told you.”

Barring Freddy pulling some corporate strings and hacking into the EED’s classified personnel files, there’s no way she can know anything else. Even then, he couldn’t be certain that an accurate file with his name attached to it even exists. Well, Holcomb suggested one might exist, and Becker had seen a copy of something like his file, but he knows better than to believe anything those sources might have to say about him.

Emma, however, chooses not to elaborate, and he’s afraid to press her. Instead, she says, “Just know that I’m perfect for you. That we’re perfect. Nothing else really matters, does it?”

“I don’t know what that means,” he whispers.

“You don’t have to know yet. It just is. You love me, and that should be all the proof you need.”

How can she say that? How can she say it like it’s irrefutable?

But she believes it all with a fervency so real, so tactile that to deny it would destroy her. He can only stare. Stare at her, drink her image as if he could burn her reflection into his brain if he just doesn’t take his eyes off of her. Because it’s not just irrefutable, it’s true. Despite all the complications, it’s not just her that feels this way. Not her alone, and he has no way of understanding it.

He scrambles through a score of thoughts, all inchoate, unrelated, asinine.

“I have something for you,” he says sharply.

He roots through his pockets, looking for all the world like he’s wrestling with his penis under the table, coming up with nothing but a collection of lint beneath his fingernails. Both pockets, while Emma follows his mounting desperation with a quizzical expression. He remembers his thigh pocket, the one with the zipper and the way he tended to clink on his run from his room to the confectioner for the chocolate.

He doesn’t know what size she wears and can’t make the estimation from looking at her fingers to the shapes in his pocket, so he grabs the whole handful and flings them on the table. Stone rings tinkle across the tabletop, clatter against the dishes. One rolls all the way to the edge against the wall, teeters then falls on its side.

Emma narrows her eyes at the shotgun pattern of the rings, then sets her fork down. She picks the one nearest to her, where it leans against her dinner plate. Like Rodriguez, she rolls it around between thumb and forefinger, holding it up to the light to examine the silver etching.

“It’s a ring,” she says.

“I want you to wear it.” He’s breathing hard. Too hard, really. “All the time.”

“You got me a ring?”

“Not that kind of ring. Just a thing. A–”

“I see you got enough for all your girlfriends.” The dreaded raised eyebrow, suggesting he has either made a major relationship blunder or is acting irrationally. Very possibly both. “What does this mean, this writing around the edges?”

Ray thinks he might be experiencing some sort of lethal medical condition. He’s having trouble taking a breath that’s actually deep enough to satisfy what seems to be a severe case of oxygen deprivation. He suspects his brain itself is suffocating, a billion neurons a second snuffling vacuum, pitching over with a uniform scream. The idea of actually sucking in air to say something seems idiotic to him. “It says I care about you. That I want you to be safe. Just put it on your finger. Please.”

“It’s on.”

Painstakingly, he collects the extras, wiping them off on his pant leg before jamming them back in his pocket. The pressure in his chest subsides gradually, until he’s feeling normal again.

“I’ve never given a woman a ring before,” he offers as an explanation. “Promise me you’ll wear it.”

“I will, Ray.”

“All the time. Until I tell you it’s okay to take it off.”

“All right.”

He takes one last, deep breath, decides that the ship has stopped spinning on its axis, lets himself relax. The food is there, still steaming, and he’s hungry. All he’s had in hours–too many hours–is coffee. Ray attacks the pasta like he hasn’t eaten in weeks.

In his quiet voice, he’s saying: You are such a dumbass.

After a time, Emma asks, “Ray, why did you just give me a ring.”

And because he’s occupied with castigating himself for making such a disaster of it, for being such a freaking assclown, he doesn’t give the proper attention to her question. Shoots the obvious response right past his neural processors, through the Dumbass Alert System and affiliated security checkpoints, straight into the output bin. He simply blurts out the first thing that pops into his forebrain. The true thing.

“Because I love you.”

And she didn’t even have to use sodium penethol to get it out of him. Had Jack Holcomb heard him, he would have busted him back down to sergeant on the spot. Then fired him. Probably had him executed just for good measure before he went off blabbing even more confidential, potentially state toppling information.

He discovers in that moment that silence really is audible. It has a sound like radio static heard through a wall. A low, empty rush against the ears.

In the next instant, though, shame blots it out, triphammers his heartbeat and he can feel that to the exclusion of all other senses. A thump in his fingertips, his temples, the soles of his feet. Because even that isn’t the whole truth, just a piece, a sliver. Less about love than about fear. Less about Emma, than about shed. He can’t seem to tell her anything without making it into a lie.

He lifts his eyes to her, halfway into a blanch as though he expects her to strike out at him. He deserves it.

Emma holds her hand up in the uncertain light, and where the golden glow catches the tang of silver, it seems to erupt in pinprick sparks. She wears an expression that he can’t read, something that seems to be trapped between satisfaction and loss.

Quietly, still watching only her hand, she says, “And the other rings? They’re all like the this one, and like the one you’re wearing.”

“Long story.”

“One you don’t want to tell me.” Oddly, it’s a statement, not a prelude to a pout.

“Not at the moment.”

“But later?”

“If there is a later. If you can forget that I’ve been acting like such an idiot.”

She makes the leap he fears. “This has something to do with Micah, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She looks at him now, and clouds spring into her eyes, turning their extravagant blue into lead. “You’re not who you seem to be, are you?”

“I am,” he says quickly. “Except for a few details.”

“Amah said you were.”

That you were lying. Was that what she meant?

“Emma, I–” I just want you to be safe. I want to protect you.

She drops her hand into her lap and shakes her head, silencing him. “It’s beautiful, Ray. That’s enough for now. Thank you.” The smile that spreads her lips is wide, brilliant, genuine, as though she’s chosen to forget that’s he’s a big, fat liar. “We should eat before the food gets cold. Amah will be expecting me home soon.”

She doesn’t ask him any more questions. But on the way back to her rooms, she takes his hand and walks close to him, their shoulders touching, and it’s enough. Without speaking, she tells him that everything between them is fine.

Poofs, in other words. Guys who can critique the moves of a power forward or shooting guard and mentally compare him to forty other players in a given league to peg his strengths, weaknesses, potential, but couldn’t land a three point shot themselves if you gave them a rack of balls, a free afternoon and a running start.

But also the sort of guys who would study the Whiston Corporation in numbing, statistical detail, who would keep their ears to the ground and snuffle out any tidbits of data, family or otherwise, that could be leveraged for profit. In backwards nations, this is called blackmail. On Wall Street and its assorted doppelgangers in human space, it’s just called business.

Sitting here at the bar on the second day of Operation Bogeyman, Corporal James Rodriguez, lately of the 15^th Marine Frontier Expeditionary Force, C Company, now CIU affiliated covert operative, is growing increasingly disturbed by his perception of the mission guidelines. Or misperception, as the case may be. It has got to be a misperception, frankly, because even without having finished his degree at Virginia Tech, he doesn’t need help recognizing or analyzing the psychotic nature of what he’s been told–though he does completely recognize the military nature with which it is being carried out, which trumps all other concerns in most cases.

But he knows madness when he sees it, even if there’s nothing he can do about it.

The curious part is that he’s not sure if Commander Marlowe even believes it. Despite what he claims he has experienced, it isn’t as though he’s necessarily drawing lines between that event and this one. Other people are drawing those lines for him, and that just seems to piss him off. Commander Marlowe seems to be the type of man who is not particularly interested in coloring between the lines.

That’s a little more difficult for Rodriguez to understand. He’s been inside the lines for his entire life. Parental lines, social lines, lines procedural, martial, racial.

He’s experiencing that again, now that he’s on the outside, not in uniform or graded by the distinct Marine scale where neither officers nor enlisted care about the derivation of your name, your social stratum of origin. Just about competency and effectiveness. The men around him look him over and assume he’s competent, or he wouldn’t be here, on Paraclete with them. He’d be back in some dank office shuffling papers between bins of varying degrees of irrelevance. But these poofs, and the people like them, are snap-quick to pin him down to race by his looks, to socio-economic stratum by his clothes and carriage, education by demeanor and language. They recognize one of their own rapidly, but eat everyone else alive.

It’s a completely different world.

And this kills him. This evening, an hour ago, a woman walked up to him where he was sitting at the bar, maybe mid-fifties, dark, monied from the look of her sculpted features and the playful, casual elegance of her attire. That she was here suggested something about her tastes in entertainment, though Rodriguez suspected that had very little to do with batting averages and goals scored against.

He was, at the time, trying to wiggle his way into a conversation with a tangle of young men ostensibly watching a soccer match, but mostly just drinking beer and complaining about the fact that they had no women (which might have had something to do with the volume of their drinking, but it wasn’t something he was going to point out to them). Rodriguez was not drinking, though he knew he probably should be. Why sit in a bar if you’re not going to drink? Certainly, there was a beer in front of him, but it had been there for an hour, mostly untouched, and that was the type of thing bartenders and waitresses tended to notice after awhile. He didn’t know the terrain well enough to tell if this was the sort of place where the bartenders were friendly with the customers, or if the customers were regulars and/or suspicious of outsiders behaving oddly. And he is somewhat hamstrung by the simple fact that he hasn’t been seen here over the six months of the voyage, a johnny-come-lately who begs the obvious questions about where exactly it is that he came from.

But aside, the woman approached him. Not unattractive, though she was starting to wear her age in the bags beneath her eyes. She was exposing enough raw and surgically enhanced cleavage to suggest a spelunking expedition was in order. Right in front of him she came, from all the way across the room, from the baseball diamond, and began to rattle at him in a tormented, textbook Mexicali-Span variant like the ones they teach in beginner university classes.

Rodriguez blinked at her, uncomprehending. “Excuse me?”

Though he tried to be polite, she flushed, a bit exasperated, and launched into it again. He stopped her before she could get too far, make either a fool or a spectacle of herself. He picked out the word for sex, though she used an insensibly guttural form of it, and suite and that was enough to make her intentions obvious. She was trying to pick him up, smiling all the time, like this was an advanced form of flattery.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he informed her. “I really can’t understand what you’re saying.”

She seemed to wilt at first, but came back at him bravely, with just a tint of self-deprecation. Still very game, and pleased by his clear understanding of standard American. “My pronunciation is that bad, then? I suppose lessons will only take one so far. It’s always better to become immersed in the culture.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what language it was you were trying to speak.”

That, apparently, was a stunner. “But it was Mexicali!”

“Huh. News to me. I don’t speak Mexicali.”

“But…” And she tried, honestly tried, to stop herself before it popped out, before she looked like an idiot.

He used to get that quite a bit, back when he was fresh to EED, away from Terran space, where outside the Spanish Enclave colonies, hispanics were curiosities, cultural artifacts for people who had left Terra in their youth, or knew all they did about her from books and vids and computer software. Enamored by Aztecs was what they were.

Except, he’s not really even hispanic, either, not in the classical, racial, cultural sense. His great-great-grandfather was hispanic, actually lived in a Mexicali barrio. But his great-great-grandmother was Swiss-Austrian. They both had spoken pure, unadulterated American from birth. Worked in American cities, held American jobs, and after the Annexation Act, paid American taxes in return for American citizenship. All Rodriguez had left of his “heritage” was a touch of the looks (which was good) and the name (which was frequently a liability). He was about as close to being Aztec as he was to being authentically hispanic.

Him, he grew up in the suburbs outside Baton Rouge where his father was a chipset design engineer, then moved to Chicago when he was twelve, which excoriated anything like an accent he might have developed. He prefers burgers to tortilla anything. He likes pale, bookish girls with long, light colored hair. Girls cut from his mother’s mold, maybe not so surprisingly.

The assumptions that people make used to annoy him; now he merely finds them amusing mostly, or at times like this, slightly embarrassing.

But that’s done with now. The woman made an effort to chat him up for a few more minutes afterward, but politely and didn’t proposition again before she slunk back to her corner and eventually out of the bar all together. This is another thing that he has found curiously loopy about Paraclete and its denizens. There is so much casual and consensual mating going on, it borders on the outrageous. You would think people had nothing else to do.

Now Rodriguez is a Marine. He did his six month stint in New Mes straight out of basic, just like every other Marine in the last decade, before he traded up to starships. He knows something about cheap, easy sex, because there isn’t a military entrenchment anywhere in the world that doesn’t accumulate an entourage of brothels and whores and available local women willing to trade sex for money. It’s part of the environment, and a sensical one at that. Young men in combat conditions like easy, available sex–require it, in fact. It is very Freudian.

And because Marines like to fuck so much, the EED pursues an aggressive shipboard policy of keeping the Marine contingent as isolated from the paying passengers as possible. The average upper class lady traveling by starship should not be subjected to the typical Marine version of foreplay, i.e. thumbing through your wallet for small denomination bills. It is perceived as a public relations disaster waiting to happen.

This is what he has been told, at least, in the barracks.

It was obviously a big lie.

Because what he has seen in his two days of liberty is that the passengers of Paraclete are sexual freaks. The whole point of the Garden seems to be finding strangers to bump pelvic zones with. You can’t stroll into a public washroom without finding some young gentlemen sticking it to a pretty girl in a party dress on the sink counter. Attractions are instant, obvious, acted upon with hardly a word spoken. Everything is casual; everything is libido. Even asking a women the time of day is roughly equivalent to granting permission for a vigorous fondling.

From a sociological perspective, Rodriguez finds this interesting. Investigatively, however, it presents difficulties he had not expected, though he and Sergeant Kilgore had taken great amusement in discussing the possibilities. It is an odd world in which a Marine finds himself to be the social prude.

So that’s what he’s doing here, trying to solve tactical problems by retreating to a safe position from which can gather intelligence without having to divert a significant amount of his resources to fending off sexual advances. It constitutes something of an early mission failure, he must admit.

By late evening, he’s watched soccer, now baseball, groaned in all the right places, cheered for the right teams and the right players. He has exchanged names with most of the guys immediately around the bar, and finagled his way into buying a good share of the rounds. He took two losing bets on relief pitcher substitutions from the blond accounting exec Aaron Stevenson just to ingratiate himself with the group, then won three more on late inning strategy wagers to demonstrate his knowledge level and win back some of their respect. The current game is early in the third inning, but looks to be a pitching duel, so interest has begun to wane as the chemical lubrication level waxed.

“So what is it you do exactly, Jimmy?” The question comes from Jess Shue, a dark haired statistical savant seated on the stool next to him. Rodriguez has already been warned not to take any wagers offered to him by Mr. Shue.

“Contract negotiation for Nortical-Sheaf,” he says. It was his father’s company.

“They do proprietary chipsets, right?”

“Yes.”

Shue arches an eyebrow. “And you’ve got a contract on New Holyoke? I didn’t think they had the infrastructure in place to start thinking about moving to alternate sets. They’re still running old 66 Cray clones at the mining op.”

Rodriguez shrugs, trying to hide the fact that he’s scrambling. “It’s a private venture, not mining, still in the startup phase.”

“Playing it close the vest, aren’t you?” Shue says, winking.

“The client prefers it that way until they’re ready to go public.”

“Still, that’s high end merchandise.”

Rodriguez can almost see him mentally filing this factoid away for later analysis.

“There’s only a handful of companies I can think of who would be willing to take that kind of financial risk this far out on the fringe,” he continues. “And all of them are independent subsidiaries of the big W.”

Whiston Corp., he means. “That could be.”

“You brought samples?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t show them to you. The design specs are extremely confidential, at the request of the client.”

Shue raises his hands between them, an I’m not trying to pry gesture. “Hey, that’s cool. Fair enough. Just sort of a hobby of mine.”

Of course, digging up clandestine negotiation details is a hobby they all seem to have in common. Corporate espionage is the currency of the young up-and-comer.

But Shue goes on, lowering his voice. “I just find it interesting that the big W is moving in on territory it already has a proprietary interest in, if you know what I mean. The Board has been pretty aggressive, it seems to me, in dealing with the New H branch as it is, at least if you pay attention to the types of signs guys like us look at. Could be a strong move to entice Whelemat back into the fold, especially since they didn’t have to use their own capital investments for the grunt work.”

“Yes,” Rodriguez agrees, though he has no idea what it means.

“Really, I tell you, I’d be pissed off if I was Fred Whiston. The Board has effectively disenfranchised the root of the family from any actual corporate activity, and that’s mostly their own fault. Not Fred’s, of course, but his grandfather, old Fram. What he thought he was going to accomplish way out here is beyond me. But to have the W swooping back in and luring Townshend Wright into a shipping deal that makes them putative partners? That has got to smart. But it figures, right? It was just a matter of time before the Board stopped playing Terran steward and just took over all the related assets. It’s still shocking, though, how quickly they’re accelerating things now that they perceive weakness in the family determination.”

“Weakness, indeed.”

“But it’s all about the money, right? With the dividends the Whistons are pulling in, why would they care?”

“Pride,” Rodriguez offers, suddenly thoughtful.

“Yeah. There is that.”

“On the other hand, given the family’s current troubles,” Rodriguez points out, “one would expect them to appreciate the lack of public focus.”

Shue nods. “Sure. The earnings statement last week was disappointing, and some of their investors are going to take a big messy bath, but that’s mostly academic. It’s just a bump in the road.”

Rodriguez shakes his head, smiling. These guys have a neurotically narrow focus. “Not that. Of course it won’t slow them down. I’m talking about this potential legal mess with the Trust. The murder of the boy.”

But Shue gives him a sort of blank look. “The Trust?”

“Yes. The boy that was murdered the other night. That’s got to have some effect on consumer confidence, even if it’s not really related to Corporation business.”

“What? You mean on New H? Nobody on Terra cares what happens out here.” He speaks slowly, almost mumbling, like he’s trying to sort out the point of this tangent. “I guess it could be a bombshell for the tabloids.”

“No, I mean here. On the ship.”

Just more blankness. Shue has no idea what he’s talking about. “You must have gotten some bad information, Jimmy. That would cause a pretty big buzz, especially with the Whistons aboard. Security would be turning the ship inside out, right?” He lets it go with a small laugh, like he’s just realized Rodriguez was putting him on. “Seriously, I wouldn’t go spreading that around if I were you, not this close to the H. Whiston might be a big pussy with his head up his ass, but the Corp Stewards aren’t. They pay very close attention to who is saying what, especially info that could be a PR deal breaker. You could really wreck yourself. They’re really sensitive about stability issues way out here as it is. And right now, with the Lilaikens kicking up all kinds of trouble? I don’t even want to speculate about the ways they’d screw with you. That’s just too scary.”

The game intervenes for several moments as the New York pitcher plants a fastball over the fat part of the plate and gives up a two run bomb. There are shouts from the Yankee haters, which seems to be just about everyone paying attention.

But at mid-inning, Shue turns back to him. “Look, Jimmy, I can see you haven’t been to New Holyoke before, so I imagine you’re a little nervous. You’re still trying to make your big score–I understand that. It wasn’t too long ago that I was there myself. But you’ve got to strain the rumors you pick up, and you’ve got to verify the nuggets of truth before you pass them along, even in idle conversation.” He’s suddenly very serious, a big brother handing down advice from the mountain of experience. “New Holyoke is frontier territory. It’s rule by corporate fiat where the Whistons in one form or another pay the cops, the judges, the courts. Everybody in power owes their livelihood to Whelemat, the Trust or the family itself, and they’re going to zealously defend the folks who sponsor them, get it? You’ve got to watch your back on the frontier, because people who don’t are liable to find themselves vanished. And the biggest part of watching your back is staying either on the Whistons’ good side, or operating completely below their grid.”

Rodriguez nods, tries to look suitably abashed. “I understand.”

Shue gives him a good-natured slap on the shoulder. “If it makes you feel any better, I saw Fred Whiston just this morning in Iranoi. Absolutely loaded, absolutely gregarious–the same Fred as always. If there had been something like you describe, do you really think he’d let himself be spotted in public following the same old routine? The Whistons are very sensitive to public perceptions.”

“Okay, then.”

Shue gives him another convivial wink. “Besides, Frederick is a pansy. Who wants to talk about him? You want to talk intimately about a Whiston scion, my friend, let’s talk about Emma. Mercy. Did you get a chance to download the tabloid pics they nabbed of her in the shower? I mean, I know they were digitally touched and cheesy as all hell, but I would pay good money to know who the model behind the headshot was.” He laughs. “Man, I tell you, it’s probably a good thing for her that the family has been shunted to the side. If she was anything but a frontier celebrity, she wouldn’t be able to turn around without bumping into stalkers.”

It’s better, Rodriguez thinks, that he disengage at this point. Anything else Jess Shue might have to say about Emma Whiston is not something he’s going to pass along.

And he says plenty.

***

“So, of course, I’m like: ‘Hello! What kind of silly-gilly do you take me for? Just because my father has given me his company cred to buy something decent to wear on my arrival home, and just because every person knows without a doubt what the Whiston cred signature looks like does not mean that I’m going to let them gouge the company and the Whistons like I’m some kind of freeloader. I was incensed, let me tell you. Absolutely incensed.”

Oy.

This girl just will not shut up, Kilgore is thinking. Which on the one hand is not bad, because it occurs to him that he can’t remember her name. Mellisa? Marni? Madelaine? No, that was the one yesterday afternoon, in Olduvai George down on Delta. The pretty blonde with big feet and red painted toenails.

This one is a standard brunette with round features, collagen enhanced lips and eyes that are a sort of muddy green hazel, like a cat’s. Like a pussy. What the fuck is her name? He can’t remember. He’s been chasing her for too long to let a silly thing like her name stick in his memory.

He’s learned a strange thing over the past few days. Much like the Hump Deck, the social circles on the Garden and down here on the more exclusive Zeta Deck, are small. Six thousand passengers, give or take, and most of them are homebodies or parentbodies or high-classbodies or businessbodies. Everybody has their little niche, their little groups they travel in of a few hundred, where folks know one another by name, first or last, or reputation. Gossip is like a wildfire, scorching through synaptic canyons that act as representations of relationships–acquaintance, mutual, sexual, rumored.

He’s tracked this one because of a webwork of connections; things he’s picked up from other girls, grinning guys, fat-nosed old biddies who sniffled every time she walked into the room. What he has gleaned is this: she’s New Holyoke class, middling twenty-something, not intensely bright, which explains why she’s still slogging her way through a 1^st Level liberal arts degree back on Strat, from which she’s on her way home for a brief visit between terms. Hot as a Fourth of July sparkler and bursting at the seams with energy; and those aren’t the only seams she’s about to burst–which you can see for yourself from the way she rims out of her blue cocktail dress in every place she’s got a curve. And she’s got lots of curves. Curves and hills and delectable, delicious valleys in all the right places and all the right proportions.

Oh, and freaking money falls out of her twat. She jingles doubloons when she walks, and jiggles everything else just right the rest of the time. Her father is some sort of third generation Whiston Corp. expatriate bugger, mining engineer or something like that, marooned on New H where there’s nothing worth spending his cred for and the bank account just balloons and balloons. What some people call nouveau riche, Kilgore suspects, but what folks in his part of the country just call Uppity. Uppity or Going Somewhere, and he’s never been completely sure there’s a difference.

So dad’s a mining engineer, the story goes. If that’s true, mom must be some kind of Cro-Magnon moron, because daughter is definitely not firing on all cylinders. Which is possibly due to genetics, but more likely because she carries a complete illicit pharmacy of Rage and Pixie Dust and Boppers and a bee-zillion other illegal substances strapped in her belt. He’s got a contact buzz just from sucking in the air around her.

Which he hopes to God is also the reason she won’t fucking shut up, because at least if it’s drug induced happity-yappity, at least he can expect her to crash some time in the near future. And then: blessed silence. He hopes.

Most important, though, is the fact that she claims to have had contact with the Whistons, both on New H and with Miss Whiston in school on Strat. To listen to her, they (meaning she and Miss Whiston) have been tight since pre-school, hung out together at university like a pair of giggling gadabouts, did everything but the lesbo nasty while Miss Whiston had slipped free of the brother’s leash (and maybe a little of that, too, though Kilgore suspects that’s more chicky fantasy than anything else).

Truth is, if he is any judge of bullshit at all, anything she knows about the Whistons, is only from reading gossip sheets and tabloids and more than likely just plain making stuff up that suits her. She’s all gloss, all stupid cow beneath a glittering veneer (though once again, it most certainly is not a veneer he objects strenuously to). Frankly, he can’t imagine the Miss Whiston he has encountered spending more than a few seconds on a gadfly like…

Jocelyn? Jenna? Jada?

But he’s growing tired of her, nuclear fusion hot or not. It’s late, going on 3:00 a.m. Jedira Dance, the club they’ve settled in after several hours of barstool hopping all across Zeta–because what’s-her-name has to be seen–is sending out all the subtle hints of a jackhammer to the skull that they’re getting ready to close for the night. The holo show dance floor is dark, mopped, WET FLOOR signs posted. The scented synth-smoke machine has been rolled into a closet. The cute little waitress with the bouncing boobs and impressive ass has been back and forth a dozen times, stripping away their empties until only bare napkins with damp condensation rings remain. They’ve even stopped playing any tunes that possess anything even vaguely resembling a beat you could shimmy to. In fact, what is playing sounds like a bunch of dying whales, and is probably laced with sub-hypno messages that are telling them to get out.

Kilgore would very much like to get out. He’s wasted pretty much the entire evening to figure all of this out about poseur chick, and now he’s stuck with her. He has been taken hostage by the enemy; he is down behind enemy lines. If he doesn’t find a way to escape soon, he is bound by ancient codes of honor to gouge out his own eyeballs, rip out his tongue and eventually impale himself on a blunt object.

Oh, and she’s drunk. God, she’s gloriously drunk–despite the fact that he’s had the waiters watering down her whisky sours for the last two hours. First half strength, then quarter strength, then just giving her ice water and telling her she had ordered vodka straight on the rocks. At the last, they were even refusing the tips he offered, just sort of shaking their heads with a feel for you, man expression.

And worse, he’s gotten exactly nothing. Not just tonight, but all week. From the absolute beginning, nothing! It’s like the Whiston clan doesn’t exist in anything but the popular imagination, like there’s no reality behind the imagination. Because he’s been all the way around the block on this one. Guys who might be chummy with Frederick Whiston. Guys who might have a grudge against Frederick Whiston for being a big, wealthy bastard. Girls who might have screwed him. Then it was guys who might have had sex with Miss Whiston (which was no dice at all), or girls who might have had sex with her (which was unlikely, given her vibe, but stranger things had been known in the human consciousness). Now he’s down to people who might know her, however obliquely. He’s running out of options.

Which means he’s running into questions. Like what the fuck is he doing, then? Why is he pressing so hard? Sure, Marlowe is all gung-ho and five by, pushing to nail down this dickhead who thinks he can carve up little kids. Hoo-ah, Kilgore’s all for that. He’s all for playing wastrel, rich-fart, playboy ready to bang three-four-five potential witnesses or informants a day. That’s not just a cush job, buddy, that’s a career aspiration. But there’s this other business, too. This stuff about devils and camel-humper incantations, and that seems to be behind everything. It can’t just be about catching a kid killer, which is where Kilgore would like to keep it. Where fucking common sense would like to keep it, now that you mention it. Seriously, Ray seems a straight-up guy, but how are you supposed to believe a thing like that? And if you can’t believe it, what does that mean?

Maybe that Marlowe’s a straight-up guy who happens to be a little nutcake. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

But if you go that direction, if you assume he’s a raging loony-hatch candidate and that’s the end of it…why is he pushing so hard? “He” being Kilgore, who should know better, who wears this creepy little dimestore ring despite the idiocy.

And in the meantime, what’s-her-name drones on. “And after I had all of that straightened out, of course, and the manager was practically on his knees to apologize to me, I simply had to show him that there were no hard feelings, even though I really have run out space in my closets for more dresses. I swear, I’m going to have to take a private shuttle just for my things! And then my father will absolutely kill me, because it’s so ostentatious, you know, especially with so many of the actual miners hardly scraping by.”

This threatens to send her off on yet another social consciousness tract (which is her duty as one of the privileged classes and because of her abiding loyalty to Emma Whiston and the fine example she sets by spending so much of her time with the orphans). Which are all things Kilgore is supposed to understand and care about inherently because it’s obvious from the amount of ship’s cred he’s thrown about not just tonight, but over the last week, that he fits her profile of the “privileged classes”.

He gives her a “Hey. Yeah. Believe me, I understand. Really” to cut her off, and which does actually (miraculously) slow her down just enough for him to look at his watch in a way that isn’t completely rude. “You know, it’s getting late. I should probably–”

She rolls her eyes. “Oh! It’s so late. I know exactly what you mean. I don’t even know how I keep my eyes open sometimes.”

“Well,” Kilgore says. “Then, okay.”

He levers himself up from his chair, debating the etiquette of leaving her here alone, visibly wasted as she is. Maybe if he offered the waitstaff enough cred, they’d see her back to her berth.

But she pops up like a jack-in-the box, straining the sequined fabric of her bodice in ways its structural engineers probably did not plan on or account for in their designs. “Of course, we’ll finish this at my place, before they absolutely throw us out. I mean, I’d never be able to show my face here again, would I?”

Oy.

And so they walk out, arm in arm, and she chatters all the way around the concourse. Kilgore plots an escape that won’t damage his cover, but keeps running headlong into the critical absence of chloroform in his arsenal to carry off anything convincing.

They walk all the way to the opposite side of the ship, to the compartments wedged against the outer hull in a sleepy sort of cul-de-sac. She punches her security key into the door lock and drags him inside.

Her room is a standard single, somewhere between modest and upscale, with a living area large enough for a couch, an end table and a vid screen; an abbreviated galley area like the one in Kilgore’s room, though he assumes this one works as advertised. He makes sure she gets inside safely, goes so far as to peek into the public area to make sure they haven’t accidentally smuggled in a murderer or rapist under cover of her verbal fusillade, then turns to go. Except the door has closed behind him and the kako-daimon responding to the motion sensor cue just gives him a sort of apologetic, doomed shake of the head.

She’s saying, “So my father was like ‘Tari–”

Heh. Kilgore makes a mental note.

“–you’ve got to study something of social value. You’ve got to contribute something to the colony’. And, of course, I’m trying to explain to him that fashion is completely valuable to a colony. That it’s all about public perception. I mean, really, do we want the other systems to think of us as total and complete bumpkins? But he just isn’t hearing it.” Two snaps, a wiggle, and she leaves her dress in the middle of the floor. Even for Kilgore, this is objectively impressive, since he had more or less decided that clothing that tight had been surgically grafted onto her. She swings back to him, so she won’t have to talk back over her shoulder, a pleasant ripple of pink curves. “I mean, it isn’t like we need another engineer. The entire planet is practically sinking in orbit with them.”

What? He is, after all, a man. What else is he going to do with a naked chick? Walk away from it? Pfft.

There are several confusing minutes which follow, in which she probably says several very illuminating and self-revelatory things he doesn’t catch very clearly because she’s on the couch and his head is wedged between her thighs. After that, she doesn’t say anything for ten or fifteen complete minutes while she undresses him and displays more than a vigorous expertise in other oral skill areas.

But by the time he carries her back to the bedroom and tumbles with her into bed, she’s used up her daily allotment of silence.

She tells him about her gymnastic training, then demonstrates.

She rattles on about her vocal training, and impresses him with a few high notes, though they’re mostly muffled by the pillow.

There’s a bit later on about her adolescent horrors with the size and shape of her ass, but he doesn’t really want to go there.

Finally, he’s exhausted, insensate, scrubbed raw from his knees to his nipples and relegated to the bottom. She’s burned most of her energy away and is content to rock gently back and forth on top of him, eyes closed, dark hair tangled, cheeks flushed. And she is most determined to keep him on the jagged, pulsating edge between orgiastic tension and release.

He’s not thinking very straight, not thinking about anything at all, really, except pressure and wetness and white, glaring glee.

And that he’d really like it if she’d just shut up for five measly seconds. That’s all it would take.

Now slow, languid, she says, “All of our fathers tried to be like him, Mr. Whiston. Not Frederick, you understand, but the old man. I never met him, of course, because he passed away before I was born. I was born the same year as Emma. Mr. Whiston cast a huge shadow across the entire planet, but especially Blackheath Grange. My father said he was such an immense man, not in stature, mind you, but in personality. He built much of the city, drew it up from his own designs. Not a tavern or a hotel or even a home could be built unless the plans were submitted to him first. He controlled everything.

“And our fathers depended so much on his goodwill for their jobs, they wanted to emulate him, which meant they wanted their daughters to emulate Emma. They wanted us to be Emma.”

She digs her pelvis deep into his, and Kilgore has to grip the sheets in his fists and curl his toes until they crackle to keep her from ending it all right there.

“And their sons to be like Frederick,” he groans.

She stops sharply. Kilgore wrestles his eyelids open and looks at her, backlit in the soft glow of the room’s lamps. Her eyes have gone distant, hard, thoughtful.

“What?” he says, and rolls back and forth beneath her to prod her on.

“No one wanted a son like Frederick.” She takes the hint, settles back into her steady rhythm.

“Freddy seems like a fuck up.”

“It isn’t that. Frederick is…” Slows again, maddening. “…different. Not completely–not like a Whiston, I guess. There’s something lesser about him. He’s a shameful drunk, you know. Everyone knows that. And when he isn’t drunk, he’s cruel.”