THE MARY-SUE EXTRUSION

Four months before, the planet Dellah had undergone a global

revolution and shut itself off from the galaxy at large. The

knock-on effect of this had been one of destabilizing the

balance of power for systems all around – all those threads of

interest suddenly cut loose, and whipsawing, and looking for

something to which they could attach. Such situations have a

habit of spinning catastrophically out of control as the various

local and galactic factions fight over a new and different pie.

Diplomatic and commercial relations were strained to breaking

point, and there were even the first rumblings of incipient

territorial war.

And this is where I came in. I was going in, quite simply, as

a representative of Pseudopod SA to look after their interests

in this new situation, and to salvage what I could from the

wreckage.

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THE MARY-SUE EXTRUSION

Dave Stone

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by

Virgin Publishing Ltd

Thames Wharf Studios

Rainville Road

London W6 9HT

Copyright © Dave Stone 1999

The right of Dave Stone to be identified as the Author of this Work has

been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

Bernice Summerfield originally created by Paul Cornell

Cover illustration by Fred Gambino

ISBN 0 426 20531 6

Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real

persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade

or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the

publisher‟s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other

than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Preliminary notes

It‟s always good to give yourself a bit of cover when you can.

In the following, I‟ve tried to give a full account of my

involvement in what has, for a variety of reasons, become

known as the Dellah Conspiracy. It‟s those soddy Little sons

of fun at the New Frontier Adventures yet again...

I can only talk about what I personally learnt, what I

thought and what I did, and this can only skew the story in a

certain way. Then again, so many people have got the facts,

as I know them, so completely and utterly wrong that this

can hardly make things any worse. At the very least, it might

make somebody aware that there‟s an Alternative Point of

View. But then again, of course, there always is.

On a vaguely personal note, I‟ve tried to structure this

account in a form approaching that of a novel – something of

a dead art, but, as a form, it remains one of the best for

concentrating lots of human-level information into an

interconnected, some-way coherent and easily assimilable

lump. It‟s no accident that old espionage reports really do

read like spy novels, and vice versa. Plus it‟s about as low-

tech as you can get without actually reverting to smoke

signals - and is so simple and easy to reproduce and

propagate that it‟s almost absurd. A picture might be worth a

thousand words, apparently, but, if a single holo-still transfer

were a text file, it could contain the complete text of every

book ever written a thousand times over and then some.

As a novel, of course, the whole thing blows dead rodents

somewhat more than a dead-rodent-blowing thing. What the

hell do I know about writing novels? I had an editorial

package go over it, like they use to smooth out all the lumps

on that New Frontiers stuff, and it threw several varieties of

violent transputronic fit. Erratic and idiosyncratic grammar,

lurching descents into circumlocutory chattiness, utterly

unrelated infodumps coming in from far left field, the fact

that the whole thing falls apart spectacularly at the end...

On the whole I‟m rather glad this is not intended for

general publication - at least, the sort of publication for

which novels were originally meant.

(I didn‟t take the edit-package‟s advice. I‟d have had to

spend half a day, as it merrily changed all the „fucks‟ to

„funks‟ and so forth, checking the corrections to make sure it

didn‟t garble the hard information itself - the hard

information being more or less the entire point. And it‟s half a

day I don‟t have. I‟ve stayed too long in one place, anyway. I

have to make it with the happy feet and move. Plus there is,

of course, the small fact that I loathe and despise the

Adventures of the New Frontier with a vengeance, and I

refuse to end up with anything that resembles the bastards

in any way, shape or form.)

I said that this wasn‟t intended for general publication -

and there are two ways you could be reading this. If there‟s

suddenly been some big development in the Dellah Situation,

you‟ve pulled this out of the relevant files and you don‟t need

any further explanation from me, so thank you, good night

and good luck. I hope you find something you can use.

On the other hand, this and a bunch of other stuff

comprises the payload for a number of info-bombs I‟ve left

scattered around, here and there, as a small form of personal

protection. If they‟re primed and I don‟t key in the proper

protocols at regular periods, they‟re set to dump a lot of

interesting material to various news services, multiplexal in-

boxes and law-enforcement agencies. Anything happens to

me and they get the lot. I‟m not conceited enough to think it‟s

going to bring down planetary governments, criminal

syndicates and incorporate boards, but there‟s enough good

stuff to give the, in quotes, Great and the Good, a few nasty

and potentially terminal problems. Fuck „em, frankly.

It‟s also primed to send it to a bunch of people whom, to

various extents, I personally know and trust. So, if you‟re

reading this, and you know me, and I‟m not dead yet, could

you please come and rescue me?

INSERT QUOTES:

Let‟s talk about the story of Pandora for a moment – ancient

Greek mythology from preindustrial Earth, several millennia

away from atmospheric breakout. So for those who don‟t

know, or have simply forgotten, let‟s run it from the top.

Pandora was basically one of those proto-robo, golem-like

automata that keep popping up all over the human

mythological landscape - the idea of creating artificial

humanoid life being apparently wired right into the human

psyche from scratch, long before even the most basic

understanding of the processes that could make such

dreams a reality. Pandora was created out of raw clay by the

god Hephaestus (he of the disfiguring plummet), life was

breathed into her by Athena and Aphrodite gave her such

surpassing beauty as to make her irresistible to mortal man.

Hermes, the messenger of Zeus - and, for „messenger‟, read

the sort of right-hand-man enforcer who delivers the mail by

way of terminal kicking - fitted her out with a generous

portion of guile and arranged for her marriage to

Prometheus.

Yes, that Prometheus. The one that came up with

barbecues and napalm gel and Zippo lighters. Prometheus

was, of course, a Titan, one of that other, older race of

immortals from whom the gods wrested the world, and who

in a certain sense balanced the gods themselves up. It wasn‟t

a question of good versus evil as such - both gods and Titans

were fully and spectacularly capable of both - but of opposing

factions. If the gods did something petty, cruel and

devastating in some particular area then the Titans were

forced, almost in spite of themselves, into a more or less

opposite stance - and vice versa.

In this light, the giving of Pandora to Prometheus might be

seen as an innocent and simple gift of reconciliation, a little

something to keep the opposition sweet. The fact that

Hephaestus - whom the Romans renamed Vulcan - is most

closely associated with the forging of weapons, and the fact

that he supplied the thunderbolts to Zeus, might have given

some small clue to the true nature of his creation.

It was, of course, about as sweet and innocent as the

Trojan Horse: it was the precision-delivery system for the

mythological equivalent of a weapons package. Zeus was

behind it ultimately, of course, being the sworn enemy of

Prometheus.

Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods (from

Hephaestus‟s forge itself, as it happens) to make the lives of

mortals better, so with a masterful bit of prototypical game-

theory, Zeus set up a scenario that would, metaphorically,

blow up in everybody‟s face and make life that much worse.

He sent Pandora into the world with a little going-away

present: a box containing all miseries and ills. This was, in

the purely logistical sense, the payload. All it needed was a

trigger.

Epimetheus was the best friend of Prometheus, and a

mortal. The moment he clapped eyes upon the goddess-given

beauty of Pandora he was smitten in a way that a Titan could

never be - he would, quite simply, die if he could not possess

her for his own. The fact that in real life he quite obviously

wouldn‟t has no place in the game-theory structure of myth,

which is what we‟re talking about, as opposed to the drama-

theory structures of, well, drama. The Rules were that if he

got her he‟d live and if he didn‟t he‟d die - simple as that.

We‟re dealing pretty much in binary-notational absolutism,

here.

Prometheus loved his friend and didn‟t want him to die.

Prometheus himself would not die if he lost Pandora, so he

did what, on the surface, seemed to be the best thing for

everyone. He allowed Epimetheus to marry Pandora in his

stead. Big mistake. As a mortal, Epimetheus didn‟t have the

power over Pandora to prevent her from opening the box, and

we all know what happened then. Misery and ills let loose in

the world, only hope remaining, plagues of whatever, wailing

and gnashing of teeth, the usual stuff - and Zeus, the

mastermind behind it all, stands there with a who-me

gesture and gets away with it clean. Pandora‟s daughter

subsequently goes off with the Greek version of Noah, but

that‟s not strictly relevant here.

But what, you ask, is the relevance of all this to

archaeology as a science? It‟s a matter of context. The above

is a relatively full account of the Pandora myth, but people

never seem to remember it in full - I myself had forgotten that

Pandora wasn‟t, precisely, a mortal woman until I actually

went and looked it up. We tend to concentrate upon the easy

flash and thunder of an event, a discrete and catastrophic

node of transition and/or transformation, without a clue as

to the complex interplay of relationships and second-order

events that brought it about. The Event becomes detached

from its context, its relevance to the world in which it occurs,

and in which we live, and thus becomes all but meaningless.

In the same way, and without quite realizing that he or she

is doing it, the archaeologist is in constant danger of

concentrating upon the artefacts - of choosing one as

relevant, another as irrelevant - purely on the basis of

themselves as objects, as opposed to their relationships to

history, the culture of the times, their larger context. We can

become focused on the completeness and condition of some

unearthed urn, forgetting that our primary concern is in the

whys and wherefores of how it came to be there for us to dig

it up in the first place.

This is such an obvious point that it‟s almost embarrassing

to state so baldly, like a reminder that the pants should be

worn inside the trousers - but that‟s precisely why it should

be stated baldly, as a constant reminder. We can become so

inured to the obvious that we lose it, and, the instant that we

do, we fall flat on our collective face into disaster. We become

booksellers as opposed to librarians, operating on a level no

better than some sad little adolescent storing pristine copies

of comics magazines in little Mylar bags. We confuse the

content with the form, the pages with the binding, the

chocolate with the wrapper - we forget, quite simply, and if

you‟ll forgive the unforgivably trite, what it all should really

be about. To bring this back to Pandora, finally: when you‟re

aware of and recall the whole back-story, you can sometimes

see the key events in a new light, see how much else is going

on and realize that it isn‟t just about some silly bint opening

a box.

- Extract from Down Among the Dead Men by

Professor Bernice Summerfield (pub. various)

On looks and appearance

After the court had fallen silent for a moment, Bernardo

Bibbiena said, with a smile, „I remember your saying earlier

that this courtier of ours should be naturally endowed with

beauty of countenance and person, and with an attractive

grace. Well, I feel sure that I possess both grace and beauty

of countenance, and that is why so many women, as you

know, are madly in love with me. But, when it comes to the

beauty of my person, I am rather doubtful, and especially as

regards these legs of mine, which do not seem to be as good

as I would wish; still, as to my chest and so on, I am quite

satisfied. So please explain in more detail about what shape

of the body one should have, so that I can extricate myself

from doubt and put my mind at rest.‟

After everyone had laughed at this for a moment, the Count

said, „Certainly, it is no lie to say that you possess the grace

of countenance that I mentioned, and I have no need of any

other example to illustrate it, for undoubtedly we see your

appearance to be very agreeable and pleasing to all, even if

your features are not very delicate - though, then again, you

manage to appear both manly and graceful. This is a quality

found in many different kinds of face, and I would like our

courtier to have that same aspect. I do not want him to

appear soft and feminine, such as so many try to do, when

they not only curl their hair and pluck their brows but also

preen themselves like the most wanton and dissolute

creatures imaginable. Indeed, they appear so effeminate and

languid in the way they walk, or stand, or do anything at all,

that their limbs look as if they were about to fall apart. They

pronounce their words in such a drawling way that it seems

as if they were about to expire upon the spot - and, the more

they find themselves in the company of men of rank, the

more they carry on in that reprehensible way. Since nature

has not made them the ladies they seem to want to be, they

should be treated not as honest women but as common

whores and be driven out from all society of gentlemen, let

alone the Courts of great lords.

„Then, as for the physical appearance of the courtier, I

would say that all that is necessary is that he should be

neither too small nor too big, since either of these two

conditions causes a certain contemptuous wonder, and men

built this way are stared at as if they were monstrosities.

However, if one is forced to choose between the two evils,

then it is better to be on the small size than unduly large - for

men who are so huge are often found to be rather thick-

headed and, moreover, are also unsuited for sport and other

recreation, which I think a most important aspect of a

courtier.

„So I wish our courtier to be well built, with strength,

lightness and suppleness, and to be good at all the physical

exercises suitable to a warrior. In this sense, I believe, his

first duty is to know how to handle every kind of weapon,

whether on foot or mounted, to understand all their finer

points, and to be especially well informed about all those

weapons commonly used among gentlemen. For apart from

their use in war - when, perhaps, the finer points may be

neglected - often differences arise between one gentleman

and another and lead to duels. And in these cases, very

often, the weapons used are those that come most easily to

hand. So, for safety‟s sake, it is important to know about

them - and I am not one of those who assert that all skill is

forgotten in a fight, because anyone who loses his skill at

such a time shows that he has allowed his fear to rob him of

his courage and his wits.‟

- Extract from II Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the

Courtier), Baldassare Castiglione, 1528

PROLOGUE

I suppose I might have been a little hard on God. Purely in

the heat of the moment and all that. I just hate not knowing

things, of simply being told to run along and never told, and

this was very much the big one. Something about just leaving

us here, blundering around in the confusion and the dark,

running off and just assuming that we‟d work it out for

ourselves, still sickens me. The fact that he‟d been planning

it for years - for centuries - doesn‟t excuse that. It just makes

it worse.

Clarence as religious icon, in the end. Ha, ha, bloody ha. A

particularly asinine joke that only God himself got. Well, now

we know the power of the image, the punchline to the Shaggy

God joke, and it quite simply wasn‟t worth the working out.

I think that in the end, though, he really was trying to look

out for us, in his own mysterious way. They couldn‟t deny the

transparently holy - the effect was too primal, working

directly on the reptile brain. It hit those inbuilt, innate

switches hard enough, and for just long enough, to break the

spell for a while.

But I have the distinct feeling that what I assume to be the

New Moral Army were new to their job and their new god. The

grip wasn‟t tight enough, then, to stop us from getting out in

the end - but it will be. Maybe tight and strong enough to

pull us back, if it ever feels like it. I saw the change in James,

the total subversion of identity and will. He lost everything

that was himself in his faith, and gave that faith wholesale to

Maa‟lon. I don‟t think images of angels could have ever got

through to him, could have ever shaken his resolve.

But perhaps the plans of God go deeper still. It would be

nice to think that. I think that, in a certain sense, upon levels

of which we can never be quite conscious, we have to think

that. The legacy of the People is, after all, still hemmed in on

Dellah. We don‟t know how many Believers they actually

need to achieve an, as it were, critical Mass and achieve

breakout, free themselves totally. Maybe they don‟t have

enough.

In any case, I know that I‟ve had enough. I‟ve had enough

of playing games and never being told the rules; I‟ve had

enough of worlds that die and leave you crawling, sobbing, in

the wreckage. And I know what I must do. I‟m going to take

the Mary-Sue and walk away. I‟ve had enough.

Rebecca is with me almost constantly now, taking care of

me while I recover. It‟s a strange sort of comfort. She was

unapologetic when she came back - as she shouldn‟t be after

the way I treated her - but she was gentle and concerned.

She was worried about me. She couldn‟t leave me in that

state. She just wanted to help.

When she came back to me, it was like the other times. I‟d

long forgiven her for all the times she hurt me, the things

she‟d said and done that split us last time. I missed her so

much that it was like a hook twisting in my heart - but I was

terrified that I simply wouldn‟t feel the love again, as though

a switch had been thrown, a connection broken, something

in me dead beyond all resurrection.

And then she came to me and touched me and I fell in love

all over again. I love her. I love Rebecca. And this time I‟m

going to stay.

- Extract from the journal of Bernice Summerfield,

recovered from the ruins of St Oscar‟s University, Dellah

CHAPTER 1

It‟s called the Ptolemaeus Staging Port, Puerto Luminae,

Earth Station Prime, Heng O‟s Refuge, Lunaville, Colony One,

and any number of colloquial or mistranslated names

depending on your culture, language, species, temporal-

dislocation factor or religion. The Luna port is one of the

major crossover points of the galaxy and as such operates

upon interstellar terms. It can call itself anything you like,

down to and including an ordered sequence of pheromone

markers that could be literally parsed as Place on Big Round

Pumice Thing Go Round Origin Big Round Thing of Monkey

Bald-thing People Humans.

It‟s also a kind of glorified orbital interface; it‟s the point

from which the concerns of Earth extend their spheres and

tentacles of influence out into the galaxy at large, from the

multiplexes with entire worlds as their own personal

manufacturing base, to the big commercial shipping lines, to

the ratty little chancers who wander the more out-of-the-way

places, picking up and moving anything they can get. All of

these myriad concerns need people working for them, in one

form or another, on a kind of sliding scale of cleanliness -

and they‟re always hiring somewhere on that scale.

That was why I was here, quite frankly. I needed a job,

simple as that. And I wasn‟t feeling picky.

Let‟s be clear, here. Planetary cultures, colonies and

empires, populated satellites and BDOs, conglomerations of

free-space-living life forms around suns - places where there

are basically stable populations, in short - can make and

enforce their own laws. But in interstellar terms there is no

such thing as an overall Authority. And there are no such

things as criminals per se. There can‟t be. An incredibly

dangerous and addictive drug to one species might be

something that another merely sprinkles on its cereal in the

morning. How do you enforce the anti-polygamy laws of your

culture when there are species that need three, or four, or in

some cases over a thousand, separate and distinct sexes to

breed - or murder laws in the face of species that, as part of

physically inbuilt cultural hospitality, expect a guest to kill

and eat them in a variety of interesting, ritual, gustatory

ways?

What there is, in the galaxy at large, is an almost infinite

number of factions, of various sizes, each operating with its

own agenda and to its own sense of morality. Occasionally

these factions intersect and there is consensus – piracy

against ships of several species will make you an Open

Target, say - but there are far more cases where they don‟t.

This was why I was able to swan into Luna, straight off the

Wolfram Line, with a bag containing enough refined ginju leaf

extract to hook, kook and kill every man, woman and child

on Earth if it ever made its way down there, and nobody

could touch me for it.

All the same, I didn‟t feel exactly good about it. Not about

the package itself - I really did believe the incredibly sincere

bonded seals that said it was destined, ultimately, for

Dramos in the Horsehead, where the indigenous and non-

human population use it for synthesizing complex antixeno-

carcinogens. I didn‟t feel good because of what the job meant

for me, personally.

It was the lowest form of courier work. You carried

something from one stop to another in return for the seat on

the transport in which you carried it. It was one step up from

sneaking out to the private launch sites, setting your suit

comms to a begging frequency and trying to hitch a lift before

the air ran out. I‟d have preferred to do that rather than this,

purely out of professional pride - but I didn‟t even have the

small change necessary to rent one of the deathtrap vacuum

suits used by people for doing it. I was that broke.

The reasons for my being that broke aren‟t important.

Suffice it to say that I‟d had to take the only professional job

going to get me where I wanted to go, and try to live down the

fact that it would appear on my CV for ever.

I handed in the package at the bonded drop point, chopped

the hard copy, jostled my way through a bunch of losers who

seemed even worse off than myself and headed down the

ramps towards customs. The far wall had a mirrored finish -

no doubt specced by some environmental designer with a

nasty, knowing mind to show people just how far down they

had come. I saw a ragged scarecrow in a stained jumpsuit

and a bulky combat jacket, unshaven, makeshift dreads

matted and choked with grease, a ratty holdall slung over the

shoulder that contained all he currently owned in the world. I

almost walked into the mirrored wall before I recognized him.

There are certain things you don’t sell, no matter what.

Wrapped around my left forearm was a small package of

customized, electromagnetic artificial neurotechture upon

which, even sold second-hand, I could have lived for a

standard Earth year - but then how could I ever afford

another one?

„Any joy with the Luna systems, Box?‟ I asked it.

„It‟s still locked off,‟ it said. „Interlocking self-generated

quasi-viral blocks. I‟m working on them.‟ For some reason

people tend to spend a lot of time and effort making the

sound systems of their PDUs sound mechanical and tinny -

the gods alone know why. Maybe it‟s out of some sort of

vestigial racial technophobia. I prefer to concentrate on

upping the sensors and the referential response-bubbles -

with the result that the thing‟s all but sentient with a capital

S, and sounds more like a real person than I do myself, half

the time.

„Keep working on it, Box,‟ I said. „Crack „em and find

another way inside, even after they want to let me in.‟ I‟d

have automatic access to the Luna comms and data systems,

streamed and transponded through Box via inductance, from

the moment I cleared customs, but it always pays to keep in

practice. Besides, the people I wanted to work for would

never take me seriously if I didn‟t talk to them through a

back door. They leave back doors open for just that reason,

kind of like a preliminary test.

Customs resided through a kind of partition-baffled

archway, over which was stencilled, YOU ARE ENTERING

EARTHSEC™ JURISDICTION. WE CAN SEE YOU. HAVE A

GOOD ONE. I felt my insides settle as I entered the gravmetic

field that, for the duration of my stay in Earth-human-

occupied spaces, would give me an apparent weight of Earth-

normal. The offset impact-carbon planes of the baffle were

built to slow down any sudden influx of people and force

them into single file. I sauntered through.

EarthSec are the basic peacekeeping force on Luna so far

as humanity‟s concerned. Ostensibly a private agency, they‟re

funded by a consortium comprising almost all the big

commercial guys, and as close to a police authority, in the

planetside sense, as you can get. There‟s a hell of a lot of

rivalry between them and the hypercity Adjudicators,

naturally, but, since their remit and processes of operation

are somewhat different, actual clashes are few and far

between. A trooper covered me with a pulse pump while

another ran his sensor rig over me - and promptly hauled his

own weapon out as the rig had a small electronic fit.

„What the hell are these, guy?‟ He jerked his head to

indicate the items that had appeared on the rig‟s big graphic

display.

I shrugged, just like I couldn‟t feel the static in the bells of

a couple of pulse pumps, which if discharged could burst my

heart and turn my brains and other secondary organs to

mush. „Hand-pressurized needle gun, a plasmatic flenser,

three or four knives, a concussion detonator and a bunch of

neuruptor grenades, I think. I haven‟t checked lately. I‟m a

fully licensed security operative. Stratum Seven. Is it OK if I

go for my ID?‟

One of the troopers nodded almost imperceptibly. „Slow. Do

it slow. I can make you go bang-splat.‟

„I‟ll do it slow,‟ I said.

A security operative covers a lot of ground and a multitude

of sins - remember what I said about there being no such

thing as the good guys and the bad guys in and of itself?

Likewise, formal ID is almost purely relative in the

interstellar sense. What good does it do you to be the greatest

and best-respected particle physicist on Earth if you‟re

suddenly stranded on a planet going through its early bronze

age? What good does it do you to be the absolute ruler of an

entire people, only to wake from some form of suspended

animation or a malfunctioning sublight flight to find that

every single one of „em is long dead? You meet some

skaghead mugger in an alley - does he care that you‟ve got

friends, somewhere nebulous, up in high places? In a very

real sense, personal identity is dependent upon who you say

you are, when you say it, and how much the people you say

it to are willing to go along with it.

A Stratum Seven clearance is, however, an effectively other

thing entirely. (There are no such things, incidentally, as

Strata One through Six.) It‟s an indication of certain skills,

certain contacts, a certain standing among the people who

know about the classification in the first place. And, if they

don‟t know about it, then, hey, you‟ve still got the skills and,

if you can find a way to contact them, the contacts.

Telegraphing no degree of threat is an art. To do it

consciously, you have to make your entire body move,

modulate your voice and even make yourself think things in

a way that triggers absolutely no hint of a danger-signal

response in others. This can be a tall order, when the simple

act of handing over a credit chip in a crowded store can make

it perfectly, unconsciously clear by way of body language how

you‟d like to horribly murder the cashier, the old lady

blocking your way, the screaming kid by the jerky stand and

everybody else in the immediate vicinity. I made my body do

it right as I pulled my Stratum Seven card from my jacket.

They‟re individually keyed to their owners‟ DNA and morphic

pattern signature, locked into subroutines hardwired into the

physical ROM of almost every major data system in the

galaxy. The cards themselves are almost impossible to

duplicate, replace or forge – the very ability to replace or forge

them would mean that you‟re someone who would have one

of them in any case.

What I‟m trying to get across here is that a Stratum Seven

clearance might not tell people that you‟re working for a

specific world, or power, or organization - or even which side

of any specific conflict you might be on - but in a very real

sense it tells people who you are. And it confers certain

privileges.

I handed the trooper my card. „There you go.‟

He ran it through the scan, nodded grudgingly, and

gestured for his friend to lower his weapon. „Incorporated or

freelance?‟

That sort of question is the equivalent of asking visiting

royalty if there‟s really a chamber pot under the cushion on

his throne. I let it pass. „Freelance.‟

The trooper snorted. „Figures. We‟ve had a whole pack of

you types through here recently. OK, you can keep your

stuff. Just remember, discharge of powered or projectile

weaponry inside the dome carries an automatic death

penalty. I think I‟d like to see that.‟

„I‟m sure you would,‟ I said, shouldering my bag. „Have fun.‟

I wandered through that public concourse Luna has, the one

that‟s used in all the holo-sim productions with its

distinctive, actual brass and pewter orrery, balls of metal

ticking slowly round the inner roof on cams. In real life, even

at a distance, you can see the dents and flakes, the

imperfections inexpertly painted out.

From the extraterrestrials in the crowd I got the standard

reactions to humans in public space. From the humans I got

the sort of mix one gives to the kind of semiderelict I looked

like: the occasional individual or family nearly losing their

luggage in their hurry to get out of the way, the occasional

guy doing that little open-handed shrug and mumbled „sorry‟.

I think that if I‟d been able to afford one of the hideously

overpriced lattes from a kiosk, a couple of people would have

absent-mindedly dropped some coins into the cup. Mostly I

just got those little looks and shudders of low-grade revulsion

that, cumulatively, grind your self and spirit down to the

point where you really start to believe that all you are, or

were, or can ever be is what they think they‟re seeing. I was

getting heartily sick of it.

„Have you cracked the comms yet, Box?‟ I asked. I was

almost prepared to give up and go through overt channels if

it had said no.

„I‟m in,‟ said Box. „I‟m running a trawl now. Any

preferences?‟

„Easy money, paid in advance. Run it through the default

profile just to make sure it‟s not too easy. Watch out for

trapdoor spiders in the mesh.‟

„Gotcha.‟ There was an almost imperceptible pause, just on

the ragged edge of human reaction, and picked up by me

only because of the slight biohancements basic to my line of

work - slight because, in my line of work, anything overt can

be a positive liability. Human beings move through a world

designed precisely, and, by definition, to human dimensions

and tolerances. Make yourself any bigger, stronger, faster

and smarter than a human can possibly be and you turn

yourself, by definition, into the kind of freak that human

beings notice.

„I‟ve got one,‟ said Box. „High-level, open-ended and a

retainer. They‟re offering an immediate consultancy fee. Want

me to dump your CV?‟

„Do it, Box‟ I said. „Make the best deal you can.‟ If they

weren‟t interested in talking to me purely from my specs, I‟d

lose nothing. If they were interested in talking then I‟d have

instant eating money and maybe enough for a change of

clothes. I only hoped the job I‟d just done hadn‟t knocked too

many points off the abstract.

„OK,‟ Box said. „I‟ll have to shut up for a minute, now.

They‟re using one heavy mother of a negotiations package

and it‟s like playing chess in nine dimensions.‟

As Box fell silent, I headed in the direction of one of the

fast-food stands, on the chance that Box would score, half-

undecided between ersatz Venusian kinu-sai and the

ubiquitously human King McOffal. Two days in economy-

class transit, with nothing to consume but chemical-tasting

water from a communal cooler and a half-inched fragment of

someone else‟s packed lunch, had taken their toll. I needed

something in my system fast, and the extruded, processed

semi-predigested materials of fast food would do the job

quickest. One of my most overt enhancements is just a minor

jacking up of the basic human ability to extract some form of

sustenance from anything you can force down your throat

the best two times out of three.

On the way to the stands I took an active interest in the

people around me, the prospect of being solvent again now

allowing me to view them with something more of a lofty

superiority. A gaggle of vapid young girls in halters, blocky

shoes and very little else, obviously local - the daughters of

Luna service-industry workers but as yet too young to tend

kiosks, mop floors or join the elite of hotel receptionists

themselves - were hanging by the pillar that supported the

orrery, boasting about their various boyfriends in piercing

voices that seemed more directed to the world in general than

to each other.

A Vononian with hir brood of ambulatory pupae still

attached to hir by cartilaginous tubes ambled across my path

on complex limbs that seemed more like naturally evolved

caterpillar treads than anything else, the pupil of hir single

eye revolving around the domelike membrane of hir head in a

coincidental imitation of the orrery in the concourse.

A big, blond-haired, suited exec from one of the

intercorporate multiplexes (I was unable to read his sigil, his

back being towards me) stormed dynamically towards one of

the departure gates, firing off instructions to the lithe young

secretary walking beside him (I noted my flash of insight that

she was actually in control of things, the guy being merely a

drone, there to act as a target for any strong-arm stuff from a

rival concern in whatever deal she was currently putting

together).

Various other people stood around or passed by, none

worth the bother of detailing. They were predominantly

human, this being the human sector of the Luna station. I

took them in and filed them away, basically keeping an eye

out for any detail that seemed wrong.

„I‟ve got a deal,‟ Box said abruptly.

„Is it a good deal?‟ I asked.

„It‟s a pretty good deal.‟

„So go for it.‟

Again there was a momentary pause. „OK,‟ Box said. „You‟re

on the payroll for a consultation. The guys are logging you as

active now.‟

The blaster bolt shot through the space that had been

occupied by my chest - professional doctrine: you go for the

main mass of the body in the hope of at least hitting

something, thereby disabling the target to be finished off at

your leisure.

My chest wasn‟t there, of course. I‟ve been around long

enough to know full well the downside to instantaneous data

transfer. I‟d dropped like a brick and boosted myself back in

a kind of supine slide with my heels - the move presenting

the smallest possible target to the shooter, and being slightly

less expected than dodging or diving to one side or another.

The bolt flashed past me and I heard its discharge and a

scream.

I felt rather than heard the impact of the second bolt, a

tenth of a metre short of my boot. The shooter had had to

consciously think about it rather than automatically track-

and-pop, and had misjudged. That gave me the second in

which - still on my back - to boost myself into a small forest

of legs belonging to a now panicked and milling concourse

crowd, adding to the confusion and tripping several of them

up. I hoped for their sakes that the shooter wasn‟t sufficiently

incompetent to try for a third shot.

He or she didn‟t. After a while I climbed to my feet and

looked around. The first shot had hit one of the girls by the

pillar. She was slumped against it, white-faced, clutching at

her ruined arm while her friends snarled packlike at the

complete strangers trying ineffectually to help. Off to one side

of them, a wiry, middle-aged woman had dropped her travel

cases and was heading purposely for the wounded girl - one

of those off-duty nurses who seem to materialize instantly at

the scene of any injury, but are in fact entirely likely, an off-

duty nurse being almost certain to be among any largish,

random cross section of people and their occupations.

The remainder of the crowd was still in shock, but in that

dazed sense that crowds have when the danger seems to

have come and passed quickly. I tried to look just like

another of the sheepish people who had dropped to the floor

or nipped behind a pillar the instant they had heard the

shots.

Of the exec-type man and his pretty secretary, as I‟d

expected, there was no sign. They had long since faded out. I

heard the screech-alerts and garbled bullhorns of EarthSec

troopers as they finally arrived, and decided it was time for

me to fade out, too.

ATTACHMENT (SUPPLEMENTARY):

[The following attachments might need a bit of explanation.

Some time after the events I‟ve detailed here, when the dust

had settled and I was wrapping up the case, I backtracked

through GalNet with the benefit of hindsight, access codes

and a couple of names to find a number of coded textmail

messages. While being relevant, they‟re not important, if you

get my meaning, containing as they do information of which I

wasn‟t aware at the time. Had I known it, it might have

influenced and altered the entire course of my adventures -

but I didn‟t, so it didn‟t, so there.

Each communiqué consisted of two separate mails sent to

a command-keyed drop-box rented in the Luna Dome

datacores - and the coding method is so laughably simple I‟m

not even going to dignify it with a decryption. I‟ve included

them purely in the interests of completeness. Feel free to

skip. Nobody‟s holding a gun to your head and making you

read the damn things.]

To: brown@ 135474.346.12.ccserv.dnet.com

From: pubterm@lunet.com

Organization: Archive News Services Bibliotheca

Subject: FYE

Dear Mr Brown

Here is the article as per your request.

-BEGIN-

POLICE TURN THIEVES IN NOVA KANTAR STREETS

Report by DataDay Frontier Correspondent Sela Dane,

Nova Kantar, Proximan Chain Sector, G34

The common-knowledge suspicion that the greatest danger to

the Law of troubled Nova Kantar comes from the policing

services themselves was given new fuel today by the

statements of the convicted urban bandit Qunto Milos.

Speaking from his high-security cell, as he awaited sentence

for fifteen unlawful killings and more than 125 separate

counts of armed robbery, Milos painted a grim picture of an

active involvement of the authorities in the activities of Nova

Kantar‟s organized criminal gangs.

Milos described how officers of the Militia would routinely

take bribes for allowing criminals to escape - even lending

armed escort and air support from the scene of the crime. He

fully expects, he says, to be killed for his disclosures „Any day

now‟.

„Don‟t mind that, much,‟ he told me on my most recent visit

„Blaster bolt in the head. Better than waitin‟ for the *grija*.‟

The *grija* is the common method of penal execution on Nova

Kantar. It involves an automated form of hanging, drawing

and quartering, and has been described by galactic-rights

observance agencies as „an unusually cruel and barbaric

practice‟,

[click to download still]

„Before they kill me,‟ Milos continues, „I want to make things

right. Someone has to make things right.‟

Milos intends to make further disclosures, involving the

organized trafficking of ginju leaf throughout the Proximan

Sector and the involvement of several interstellar-based

criminal cartels. The Commander Genera] of the Nova Kantar

Militia of the Light of Judgement, Rano Karma, has said that

he will visit Milos in his cell, to „deal with the matter

personally‟.

Milos‟s claims will come as no surprise to the citizens of Nova

Kantar - where the policing services have been long since

seen to be inherently corrupt. Banditry, in the general sense,

is acknowledged to be common throughout the society - three

months ago, as a result of miscommunication, Militiamen

broke a long-standing murder-for-hire ring, almost all of

whom were Militiamen themselves, Milos‟s only crime, it

seems, being that of going into business on his own.

- transcript of DataDay broadcast filtered for text

transmission by Archive News Services Bibliotheca

-END-

To: brown@ 135474.346.12.ccserv.dnet.com

From: winwinwin@yourfriend.com

Organization: [type your organization here]

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[to remove your name from this mailing list, type „remove‟

in the header line and hit „send‟]

CHAPTER 2

My prospective employers, Box had told me, were a holding

incorporation by the name of Pseudopod Enterprises SA. For

„holding incorporation‟, of course, read „front‟ – but even then

it‟s never quite as simple as that.

It‟s not like centuries ago, when you could more or less sit

down and draw a line back from some „legitimate‟ cement-

and-haulage company that laundered money, via clearing

houses, to the gambling, drugs and prostitution rackets of

some single and identifiable family or gang. It‟s not even like

the old-style corporations that had a finger in any number of

predominantly „legitimate‟ activities (there go the little quote

marks yet again), but if you sniffed around them enough

you‟d find some fingers in things a little bit more rotten than

pies.

We‟re living in an age of almost instant informational

transfer, now - at least in the major population centres - and

what used to be called criminality is spread, thinly and for

the most part evenly, through absolutely everything. But,

then again, you could say precisely the same thing about

building shelters for the homeless, or food production, or

Medicare, or funding new, innovative, creative artists in their

culturally valuable but immediately non-commercial work.

That‟s not to say that there aren‟t individual businesses on

the human scale of things, discrete projects, independent

gangs of racketeers and so forth - merely that the interest in

them is spread far and wide. If I were to ask Box for a

complete and detailed rundown on the entity known as

Pseudopod, I‟d get a list of almost everything on the galactic

stock exchanges, the only difference between Pseudopod and

any other holding incorporation being in the fluctuations of

the percentages it actually controlled. And this is why,

naturally, these whole vast business-interest amalgams are

known collectively as multiplexes.

On the other hand, Pseudopod was an entity in its own

right, in the same way as a man is an individual, with his

own particular likes and dislikes, wants and needs, with an

ability to move through the world and affect it, and be

affected by it, rather than a mere chaos of cells. This is why

Pscudopod was, in the singular sense, an incorporation. And,

as when dealing with a man, one doesn‟t focus too minutely

upon the processes of the digestive system, or the specific

functions of the pulmonary system: one deals with it or him

as a whole and decides whether one likes it or him or not.

Thus it was that Box had taken all the tiny details of the

Pseudopod operation and integrated them into a gestalt I

could properly assimilate. Pseudopod was by no means

saintly - decidedly iffy rather than otherwise - but was far

from being actively evil. If Pseudopod were a man, it would

pick your pockets with a cheerful grin, and fight when

cornered, but would never knife you in the back and, if you

were a friend, would never turn its back on you. In short, it

seemed just that little bit untrustworthy enough to be

trusted, and honest enough, ultimately, in an imperfect and

dishonest world.

All the same, as I made my way to the Pseudopod SA Luna

offices, I took precautions. A lot of it was just on general

principle - but the attack in the concourse was still fresh on

my mind. I had drawn out my consultancy fee in untraceable

credit chips (poised for some further attack the instant the

withdrawal registered on the Luna systems) and then headed

for the hinterland subdomes, buying what I needed piecemeal

in the stores that catered for travellers, following a completely

random pattern that would, hopefully, by sheer force of

attrition, lose anybody on my tail. In the holo-sims, the hero

is somehow, magically, able to spot the people following him

out of a crowd of thousands, many of whom just happen to

be going the same way. In reality that just ain‟t so.

I‟d fetched up, eventually, in one of those communal public

rest-and-refresher rooms that tend to be used for assignatory

rather than ablutionary purposes, checked via Box‟s sensors

that the EarthSec securicams had been disabled by the more

usual occupants, had shaken the travel dirt off in the

ultrasonic shower, politely declined the advances of a middle-

aged and vaguely timid intercorporate exec, stuck my head in

a depilatory unit and changed into my new stuff - keeping

the combat jacket, boots and holdall, which the ultrasonics

had cleaned up enough to be vaguely presentable.

The rest rooms had had one of those little concealed

cubicles that had once been used by EarthSec for the

purposes of entrapment, until the high-profile series of

lawsuits a few years ago stopped the practice. I‟d picked the

lock and chucked my bundle of old clothing inside. I‟d no

intention of ever going back for them, but it‟s useful to

squirrel things away when you can, balancing it off against

the risk of serious forensics being done on them, just in case.

Now I was making my way to Luna‟s intercorporate sector,

working my way through the maintenance corridors and

ducts that run through any large-scale installation in the

way that the lymph runs concurrent and complementary to a

body‟s bloodstream. The life-support systems were dormant

here, and I couldn‟t turn them on without drawing attention

to myself, but the vestigial air pressure was more than

enough if I didn‟t overexert.

There were perfectly serviceable, pressurized access tubes

that led directly to the Pseudopod offices - but, as I said, I

wasn‟t taking any chances. The shooting in the concourse

could be the result of any number of things, none of them

exactly reassuring.

I ran through my impressions of the exec and secretary

again - mnemonically - and tentatively revised my estimation

of the guy slightly upward. They were a team, with the

woman still in control, but the guy had been the actual

shooter - I recalled catching the danger-pattern-recognition of

the start of his smooth turn-and-draw, before I was too busy

with immediate survival to catch much of anything else.

A team, then. A team working for whom? Some rival

incorporation, who wanted anyone Pseudopod tried to hire

eliminated from scratch? Prospective candidates for the job I

was going for, deciding to do a bit of impromptu competition-

cutting? A practical test by Pseudopod itself to see if I was up

to the job, whatever the job in fact was? Any number of other

reasons, down to and including the remote possibility that

the guy‟s gun went off accidentally, and by an unlikely

combination of events happened to go off twice, while by pure

chance aimed at me, coincidentally at the precise time my

name went into the system?

Sherlock Holmes said that once you eliminate the

impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be

the solution - but that‟s just so much bullshit. Any

complicated, improbable, but not impossible, explanation you

can think up for an angel appearing before you, for example,

strumming a banjo and singing „I‟ve Got a Loverly Bunch of

Coconuts‟, is just one of any number of other complicated

and improbable but not impossible ways in which it could

have been achieved.

Someone else, whose name I completely forget, once did

that thing where you take the precise opposite of something

else, turn it on its head, and come up with something that

seems to make more sense - until you start to think about it.

He said that to call something impossible is merely to say that

there‟s something you don‟t know - and if you gloss over that

inconvenient impossibility, rather than building insanely

complicated theories to explain it, you come up with a

solution that‟s far more simple, and thus more likely to be

right.

Both of these approaches are OK for fiction, where the

creator of it has some specific answer in mind, cuts the

extraneous matter and makes damn sure that all the clues

point to it. In real life, it doesn‟t work like that at all. In real

life, your best bet is simply to run through all the options,

factor them into everything you do know about the nature of

the world and people in it, look for the things that strike you

as somehow right, and just generally try to work out what the

hell is going on. Calling the process fuzzy logic tends to

formalize and demean it; the instinctive pulling of the right

answer - whether its actually right or not - from chaos is the

greatest, perhaps the only, real human strength.

That, when it came right down to it, was the problem I had

with the shooting on the concourse. Given everything I knew

about the world, none of the options I could think of seemed

to fit. The execution of it had been sloppy in the extreme.

Quite apart from the fact that it had failed, it had been done

in public, in full view of the EarthSec securicams and any

number of witnesses.

It had been the work of amateurs - and amateurs who

thought nothing of firing into crowds of civilians - but what

would those amateurs be doing hooked so tightly into the

Luna systems that they could peg me as a target in the

process? Maybe they weren‟t. Maybe one of the big boys was

hooked in and passing them orders via comlink – but what

would any of the big boys be doing, working with a couple of

clowns like that?

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that the

attack had been intended to fail - though what purpose that

would serve, apart from instantly putting me on my guard, I

had no idea. I simply didn‟t have the data, as yet, to draw

any meaningful conclusions. I shoved it to the back of my

mind to let the subconscious work on it - merely making a

mental note to make the shooters suffer, as and when. There

are some things you simply don‟t do. Letting off projectile

weapons in a pressurized environment had been the least of

it; these bastards had fired into the crowd, and hadn‟t cared

who or what they might hit...

Going by the patched-together map that Box had integrated

from freely available floor plans and extrapolative guesswork,

I judged that we were coming up on the spaces owned by

Pseudopod. I went through a hatch and headed up the tube

to the main incorporate entrance.

Once through it, I breathed a little easier. The spaces

owned by an incorporation are the modern-day equivalent of

sacred ground, or the hospitality of a Bedouin. Whoever was

trying to kill me, even if it was Pseudopod itself, couldn‟t

touch me here without breaking the - not rules, as such, but

the kind of intercorporate d6tente that allows the entire

multiplexal system to operate. I couldn‟t think of anything

heavy enough to risk an all-out intercorporate war by

breaking those rules, and certainly nothing that might be

connected with me.

Now, the way I‟ve been talking about the multiplexes as

entities in their own right is in a lot of ways specific only to

me, and people like me, and our specific relationship to

them. From it (if you‟re from one of the more out-of-the-way

and backward parts of the galaxy) you might infer that the

multiplexes are nothing more than insect hives writ large and

abstract, the people in them mindlessly following some over-

riding process of ur-imperative like ants.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In another and

slightly more objective sense, like planetary governments,

interplanetary empires or any other economic system, the

multiplexes are just extended mechanisms built for the sole

support of their human parts - they‟re machines built for the

purpose of allowing large numbers of people to live. Lose

sight of that, as the various corporations, institutions and

holding companies did back in the twentieth century, and

you end up with the sort of lumbering, inhuman

monstrosities that proved so spectacularly unsustainable in

the end.

The intercorporate multiplexes do not operate upon the

same level as the monolithic corporations of before the War.

They work like intranets. However far they might extend,

wherever any local office might be, no matter what the other

local and galactic concerns with which they might coexist, an

incorporation is as effectively self-contained, self-governing

and insular as any Japanese shoen, or fifteenth-century

Latinate city-state. They can be positively tribal, at times,

and I, and people like me, are and always will be the Stranger

at the Gate.

Of course, it‟s not thought of in those terms, any more than

I think of myself as a saburau without a plot of land to till, or

my business ethics as Bushido, but the overall dynamic is

remarkably similar. The receptionist looked at me from

behind her streamlined, power-sculpted desk as if I was

tracking things into the Pseudopod incorporate front end off

the soles of my boots. I get that a lot. I was reminded of the

only slightly more overtly violent reaction of the EarthSec

troopers.

„Let‟s try to keep things friendly, eh?‟ I said, simply to

annoy her as she ran the name I was currently using. „What

do you do when you get off work?‟

„Nothing with you.‟ Slim fingers moved with intricate (trace

over a compact data-entry pad that had about as much

relation to a keyboard as a theremin does to a piano. „Please

wait one minute, sir.‟ Never mind cutting ice, you could have

brought on an impromptu Ragnarok with the „sir‟.

A cubicle door slid back and a boy of about ten appeared, a

little too puffed up and proud in his Pseudopod livery, which

told me that he‟d only just recently been given it. The

incorporations find work for the children within them at all

ages. This has any number of planetary-local child-protection

agencies up in several varieties of arm, of course - and the

multiplexes looking on those planetary-local agencies with

blank contempt. How the hell, they say, do you expect

children to learn anything other than prison manners, if you

just lock them all up together for years on end, with someone

shouting multiplication tables and things at them?

„Take the, uh, gentleman to Drop Nineteen,‟ the receptionist

told the boy, managing to rhyme the „gentleman‟ with „scum‟.

The kid looked me over and then led me down a corridor to

the tubes. The visible extensions of them were racked against

one of the walls, one side going down, one side going up,

each wide enough to accommodate three at a time, or five if

they were feeling particularly friendly, each running down to

a specific level of the Pseudopod complex. There were twenty

of them in all, so Drop Nineteen was going to be either a

short one or one of the longest. I didn‟t get my hopes up.

I stepped into the tube and dropped at something nearer to

Luna gravity than that of simulated Earth, it being simpler to

use a stock impeller-rig that, on Earth, would give the

impression of floating gently down. Even so, the drop was a

long one, I was building a fair bit of momentum, and nasty

thoughts of sad and tragic „accidents‟ were starting to occur

before the cushioning field caught me. I stepped out into a

shortish, blank-walled corridor with a double door at the end.

„Anything on the other side of those doors I should know

about, Box?‟ I said.

„Just the usual power, servo, comms and air conditioning,‟

Box said. „Nothing giving off a weaponry signature, nothing

suspiciously unidentifiable. There‟s six biologicals with a

whole bunch of passive implantation and some actives.

Maybe seven biologicals - only one of them‟s moving around

much, and it‟s hard to tell unless they move.‟

Nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing particularly

dangerous - and let me say right now that all the low-grade

paranoia and suspicions I keep going on about are no more

than the things that half-subconsciously cross my mind all

the time; a constant evaluation and correlation of potential

threat, a part and parcel of the work I do. I‟ll mention them

from now on only if they are of actual importance - if I kept

on going into the minor details of every little thing that

flashes through my mind upon seeing a garbage canister and

the possibly dangerous things it might contain, we‟re going to

be here all night and no further on by the end of it

All the same, I‟m chary about going through strange

doorways blind, and this was why, when I went through

them, the first thing I did was shoot a glance around, behind

and up - just in time to catch the flat and razor-sharp edge of

a blade as it sliced down.

CHAPTER 3

It wasn‟t a blade, of course - as I realized in time to stop

myself reacting, acting totally inappropriately and having a

damn good crack at killing everybody in the room. It was an

electrogravmetic privacy field, intended to block remote

camera signals, clamp-mike pickups and any other well-

known form of electrobased snooping. It demonstrates every

property of a solid, apart from that of your not being able to

stick your hand through it - effectively a dome of hard light

unfurling through the walls around me, and what I‟d

mistaken, momentarily, for a blade was just its visible and

mirror-bright quasi-surface coming down across the open

doorway.

While one part of my brain had been assimilating,

evaluating and rejecting thoughts of guillotine-instigated

death from above, the other parts had been taking in the

room in general: domelike, lit by tracking lights that tracked

by some retinal-recognition system so that they never shone

directly into the eyes, giving the light a shifting but diffuse

and sourceless quality. The lighting diffusely and

sourcelessly lit a slickly gleaming, genuinely antique inject-

polypropylene boardroom table of generally horseshoe

construction, the bitten-out bit facing me directly.

Around the table sat five heads of the Pseudopod corpus, in

their sloppy sweats, doing their Stanislavsky and Strasberg

exercises and getting into character. The real heads of

Pseudopod, the men and women in real control, were of

course scattered around in offices and complexes throughout

the Solar and other nearby systems. For reasons of security,

however, and as a result of their personnel-intensive way of

doing things, the multiplexes have hit upon an alternative to

what would ordinarily be a conference call that, to outsiders,

might seem somewhat unique and strange.

Leaving aside the meme-implants, the conditioning from

birth and the systems of informational transfer and

redundancy that make the process actually work, the

incorporations basically employ a bunch of highly trained

method actors at each major organizational node, each actor

spending his or her life simulating the thoughts and

reactions of his or her more genuine counterpart. The end

effect is a kind of artificially created, policy-implementing

group dynamic, more than up to dealing with the day-to-day

running of local interests, wherever such local interests

might be - and more suited for the local conditions by its very

nature, since the people who comprise it actually live there.

Those who‟ve somehow still completely missed the point

might think that this would free up the real heads to go

around water-skiing, sunjammer racing, attending glittery

society balls and the suchlike. In fact, it frees them up to run

around dealing with the various crises and problems for

which the system was never set up and with which it can‟t

cope.

The sixth figure in the room told me that this, the job I was

in line for, was one of those problems.

An enormously fat man - fat from growing up in free fall,

where matters of weight are irrelevant and one ends up

occupying one extreme of the endo/ectomorphic bell-curve

scale.

On first sight, he seemed to have been covered in a custom-

tailored, human-shaped and articulated cage of gold wire -

but this was merely a personal gravmetic unit that allowed

his body to exist and function under Earthlike gravities. His

bulk was such that it would injure badly at the slightest fall,

and things would herniate and prolapse even if he just stood

upright for too long.

The face had that dimpled, smoothed-out, ageless look

common to faces with an affluence of subcutaneous fat, but

the bone-structure character under it seemed strong and

alert, indicating a capable and effective man with eyes that

missed nothing, secure enough in his own abilities to relax

into them, to suffer fools to a precise and particular point

and then no more, like a steel trap buried in lard.

„Good evening,‟ he said, with a sardonic little smile that told

me I could ultimately trust him rather less than I could sling

a seventy-kilogram pig. „I‟m glad you could find us.‟

„I just followed my nose,‟ I said. I have no idea why I said

that.

I recognized the guy from the incorporate data that Box

had streamed me after setting up the interview, plus a

general following of the intercorporate news in which he was

a player, having the sort of distinctive and charismatic

persona that the news people seem to like. Formal naming in

the multiplexal overstructure works on the name of original

family line from which one derives, given name and

modifiers, then the incorporate. Thus, this man was

Michaels-Presteign Volan Tiberius of Pseudopod Enterprises

Society d‟Anonime. Almost all of that‟s mere extraneous

bollocks, of course - as I said, he‟s one of the movers, and out

of the movers there‟s only one Volan.

I recalled the précis Box had presented me with: Volan was

known for honouring the spirit of agreements rather than,

unless in extreme circumstances, delving deep into the

minutiae, which was a nice enough thing to know. (The last

thing you want when, say, a courier job goes bad in the worst

way is to know that your employer is going to walk away if

you miss some arbitrary and completely unimportant

deadline by so much as a minute. Some have and do, but not

Volan.)

He was also known - so far as such things can ever be

known - for never having messed up his hands with some of

the dirtier aspects of the intercorporate cut and thrust: wet-

work, extreme prejudice, scorched-earthing and the like.

That was even better to know, in a world where you wouldn‟t

believe how serious the „hostile‟ in a hostile takeover can get.

If that makes him sound soft, then it couldn‟t be further

from the truth. There was a touch of the old Medici Prince

about him, and people lived or died by his command – the

point was that they didn‟t live or die mindlessly,

thoughtlessly or needlessly.

I know the outsiders to the world I inhabit can‟t see the

subtleties, see us as glorified, dirty-working murderers and

thugs, working for the highest bidder, switching masters at

the drop of a payoff. If that were the case, we‟d be no better

than the scum we claim to be above - let alone the small fact

that if that were the case then the entire system would fall

spectacularly apart The fact is, once we‟ve licked the salt or

kissed the ring or whatever, we give our word and loyalty

completely for the duration of a job - and this cuts both

ways. There is a code of conduct you follow if you want to call

yourself a Stratum Seven. And there‟s a minimum standard

of conduct if you want to hire a Stratum Seven, and Volan‟s

specs told me he could clear that standard minimum from a

standing start. He was, in short, a man to whom I could

swear allegiance with a working minimum of honour.

Of course, the question now was whether I could clear his

own standards.

Volan gestured, absently, taking in the assembled ersatz

heads. „I hope you don‟t mind an audience. They won‟t play

any active part in this meeting, but I‟d like them to be aware

of what transpires.‟

I shrugged. „Anything you tell me they‟ll know about

already. Anything I say is going to be what I want people to

hear.‟

Volan nodded. „A commendably candid attitude.‟ He Mowed

gracefully under his own personal antigrav to the lable and

picked up a datapad, glanced at the screen and then looked

back at me steadily. „Under common intercorporate

agreement I have to inform you that I am implanted with

Grade III psychometric sensors that will monitor and log

these proceedings. Do you consent to the use of such

methods of personal verification?‟

„I consent expressly,‟ I said, equally formally. Names,

reputations, verifiable histories, self-identity, phenotypes and

even basic cytoplasmic codecs being as mutable as they lire,

psychometric implants of this kind are an absolute necessity

in these formal situations. They monitor several varieties of

physical and mental response, not so much to catch lies, as

such, or even to distinguish between lies and truth, but to

determine whether or not the „lies‟ were self-consistent

enough to be solid. A nervous system jacked up to the point

where one can pick a fly out of the air is a kind of

fundamentally physical lie, for example - but it doesn‟t stop

you from being able to pluck a fly out of the air.

Memories and entire personalities, likewise, can be

changed with tech-med assistance. Even unassisted, the

basic human cell-regeneration cycle means that human

beings, effectively, are completely different people every seven

standard years. All in all, what with one thing and another,

you, me, us, them, anybody and everybody else could have

been a completely different individual last year, last week - or

even a couple of hours ago - and we‟d never know the

difference.

Personally, whatever other enhancements I might

contemplate, I‟d rather blow dead rodents than have the kind

of brain change I‟m talking about here - but what the hell. I

could have had a brain change to make me the sort of

person, in the here and now, who thinks that.

Spin off down that ontological vector too far, of course, and

you disappear up your own noumena - and good luck. The

purpose of the psychometric implants was, quite simply, to

check that I was who I said I was, in the instant that I said it,

from which could be extrapolated a model of future

probabilities based upon my characteristic gestalt. Volan

merely nodded, gave the funny little multiple blink that

switched his implants on and looked back at the datapad.

„Your CV says that you‟re a person of meta-temporal

displacement...‟

„I prefer the term time traveller,‟ I said.

„Really?‟ Volan raised an eyebrow, a trifle sardonically. „I

was under the impression that you people considered that

something of an insult. Far too many connotations with

gibbering idiots in flappy scarves, elderly Victorian gentlemen

in wire-frame spectacles, stovepipe hats, and so forth.‟

„We‟re reclaiming it.‟ There are certain people who actively

discriminate against those who originate from a time frame

other than their own - for no better reason than those with

prejudices against anything else. „It‟s actually an advantage

in my line of work, which is, after all, a basically nomadic

way of life. It keeps you slightly out of place, wherever you

happen to be.‟

„Quite so,‟ said Volan. „Pseudopod is, of course, an equal-

opportunities employer. You won‟t find any of that peculiar

brand of rudeness from my people, not if I have anything to

do with it I merely mention it because, in this particular

instance, a knowledge of and experience with time travel

might prove decidedly useful.‟

There didn‟t seem to be anything to say to that, so I didn‟t.

The main agenda of this meeting was to evaluate me as a

person rather than to dwell on the specifics which, as I said,

are ultimately unprovable for absolutely anybody. My

responses, or lack of them, to any question, however

inconsequential or irrelevant it might seem, were being

weighed against some transputronic Ideal at which I could

only guess - and all I could do or say was what I felt like at

the time.

„You were born at the end of the twentieth century,‟ Volan

continued, reading from the datapad, „and subsequently

disappeared from record at the age of fourteen. Nothing out

of the ordinary in that, as so many records were lost in the

twenty-first-century social and geopolitical Collapse. There

are references to certain, shall we say, problems with the

authorities of the time, but those were the times, and it‟s to

your credit that you survived them. You reappeared

approximately nine years ago, complete with Stratum Seven

clearance, and with a subjective personal age of twenty-five.

The activities involved in acquiring a Stratum Seven

classification are a given, in general, of course - but is there

anything you can tell me about those subjective missing

years?‟

„Any number of things,‟ I said, „but anything you‟d be

interested in hearing about would be confidential matters. I

can‟t even give you a hint.‟

That was slightly untrue - at least about my method of time

travelling being confidential. The fact of the matter, though,

is that my own particular method was incredibly complicated

and, unless explained properly, it tends to knock off

credibility points. Here and now, it simply wasn‟t worth the

bother.

„Quite so,‟ said Volan. „I understand completely. I‟d expect

you to extend that same concern for privacy should you work

for me.‟ Volan turned his attention to my public-access files.

This is where the double-edged sword of confidentiality

comes into play: the files relating to work and not bound by it

have disclosure on everything, good or bad. I knew that I was

cleaner in that respect than most but, believe me, there are

more and worse things I‟m ashamed of than taking on the

odd low-rent courier-for-seating job. When you skim the

highlights, plumb the depths and simply wrap up and

discard the run-of-the-mill, I‟m not sure how it makes me

look myself, far less how it looks to anybody else.

„The business on Dramos,‟ Volan said. „Quite impressive. I

don‟t think I‟ve ever met anyone who has literally been given

the Keys to the Citadel before...‟

„All it means is I can walk into the colonist-only recreation

habitats if I feel like it,‟ I told him. „With a couple of people

spraying me with detergent all the time and hoping like hell I

don‟t touch anything.‟ I shrugged. „I just found myself up to

my neck in one of those big political situations that had

nothing to do with me, and I was trying to get out of it alive.

It was pure luck that one of the people I ended up saving

from the Soldiers of the Light was the half-niece of the Regent

Elect.‟

„All the same,‟ said Volan, „it‟s nice to have the occasional

friendly ear in a high place.‟ He skimmed onward: „Mentioned

in dispatches and decorated three times in the

Hanoth/T‟kuulk conflict - two on one side, one on the other..

„Different jobs,‟ I told him. „You know how it works.‟

„Indeed I do. Recorded vote of thanks from the New

Barquentine Provisional Governance - the fact that we none

of us knew how that particular regime would turn out is

neither here nor there, of course...‟

I shrugged again. I tend to do that a lot. „What are you

going to do? Yesterday‟s underdog is at your throat

tomorrow. That‟s one of the main reasons, quite frankly, why

I don‟t do long-term contract work.‟

Volan raised an eyebrow at me. „Is that entirely the reason?‟

He chuckled a little sardonically. „I myself have never given in

to my urge to be a cat burglar - an abstinence that bolsters

up my sense of moral worth no end.‟

I took his point. „I said it was one of the main reasons. I‟m

quite aware there‟s not much chance I have the mix for

people actually offering the long-term work.‟

„Don‟t sell yourself too short.‟ Volan scanned the pad again,

his expression not changing in a way you could point out,

but obviously having hit the bits that didn‟t show me up in

what you might call the best possible light. „Your

unsatisfactory performances, in general, seem well within

tolerable limits,‟ he begrudged, at last, „but two things seem

to stand out. Cantor Prime and Golgotha.‟

„Cantor Prime was entirely my fault,‟ I said. „I fucked up the

job, simple as that, and, having fucked up so badly, I should

have walked away. Instead, I tried to fix it and just made

things worse - catastrophically worse. You and everybody

else know how worse it got as well as I do.‟

„And how do you feel about that?‟ Volan seemed

sympathetic, for some reason, rather than anything else.

„How do you think I feel about it?‟ I said. „I don‟t know how

I feel about it. There‟s not a day goes by when I don‟t wonder

how I feel about it, but I don‟t think I‟ll ever really know.‟

This was drifting from the candid into dangerous self-pity,

so I changed the subject, a little, to something where I felt,

inside myself, to be on solid ground. „Golgotha, I won’t hold

my hand up to. The basic facts are there, but they don‟t show

my true relationship to them. The people involved set me up

and lied when they sent me in, sent retrieval as an

afterthought, and after five months in the Skull Maze I wasn‟t

in any fit state to peg the good guys. A lot of the wrong people

died. My mistake was in not recognizing my employers‟ basic

incompetence until it was too late. If I had, I‟d have done

things differently from the start. As it was, I had to improvise

with what I had.‟

Volan nodded, more or less to himself, as though I had

confirmed some inner suspicion - about the Golgotha

incident or mc, I couldn‟t say. „Have you ever thought of, uh,

taking up the issue personally with the people who sent you

into Golgotha?‟

„I want to eat at some point in the future,‟ I said. „And I‟m

on enough better-dead lists as it is.‟

„A perfectly understandable attitude.‟ Volan switched off the

datapad with an air of finality, and looked me over. „Yes,‟ he

said. „I think we can find a use for you in the current

situation. Hook your mobile to our transputer base and our

negotiators will take care of it.‟

The receptionist‟s name, I learnt, dispensing with the

Pseudopod peripheralia, was Liau Mei Chung - a little bit of a

surprise for me, being still to a certain extent canalized by an

early upbringing that expected an Occidental rather than an

Oriental-sounding name.

I‟d been perfectly aware of her interest under the hostility,

but I was also slightly surprised by the sheer force and

enthusiasm of it when it went overt. A few hours after my

meeting with Volan, I asked her about it, what she had seen

in me. I‟d like to say that a significant part of asking wasn‟t

to assure myself that the pickup hadn‟t been set up as part

of some greater plan by Pseudopod or anybody else - the girl

being used as the sweetener for a setup - but, what with my

well-known, overly suspicious nature, I‟d be lying if I tried.

„You walked in like an animal,‟ she said. „Like a predator, a

panther or something.‟ She brushed the skin of my arm with

a finger, tracing the outline of one of the tattoos I was

currently cultivating. „All those muscles moving under the

skin. I looked into your eyes and knew that you had hurt

people and you didn‟t care. You kill people for money. Would

you do that to me? If I talked about you, would you kill me?‟

I said what she wanted to hear. „Without a second thought,

if it was necessary.‟ The fact of whether that was actually

true or not is quite beside the point - she was obviously

speaking to some image of me, who and what I was, inside

her head.

After Liau Mei had drifted off to sleep, I extricated myself

from the razor‟s-edge slice of the single bed I was occupying,

pulled on my clothes and prowled around her apartment,

predatory and panther-like.

Standard young-and-single habitation for the Pseudopod

rank and file, decorated in that abstractly homey, modular,

interchangeable way reminiscent of a hotel room in one

sense, but which always reminds me vaguely of a waiting

room - people waited in rooms like these for the Next Step in

their lives, whatever that might turn out to be. While she was

waiting, Liau Mei seemed to have a thing for ghastly little

pewter-alloy unicorns inset with rhinestones, balanced on

the outer edges of bookcase shelves.

As I‟d expected, the bookshelves themselves were crammed

with neatly ordered data-wafer packs, each purporting to tell,

the majority in trilogy, some vast, tnie and magical saga of

Outland adventure and romance. These True Life Stories

can‟t even be dignified as fiction - historical records from the

galactic Frontier (i.e. anywhere outside of the major

population centres) are taken and put through the

transputronic spaghetti machine to churn this drivel out,

skeening out tales of supposedly real people, and actual

events, but having about as much to do with the truth of

matters as The Adventures of Buffalo Bill has to the man

himself, or a Penny Dreadful has to the actual forensics and

pathology behind the Grisly and Abominable Murders of

Springheel‟d Jack.

The good and sedentary people of the population centres,

who wouldn‟t be seen dead catching the real news services

and getting some real insight, eat it up. They follow the „lives‟

of certain favourite, supposedly factually based characters

and even, in some cases, attempt to send fan mail. I‟ve even

appeared in a couple of these things myself - or at

least a number of stories have accreted around a name by

which I once and briefly went, most of them with me as the

villain, for some reason. One or two of them even have some

minuscule relationship to one job or another with which I‟ve

been involved. I noted with a kind of guilty pride that Liau

Mei had a copy of The Matrox Conundrum, which I sort of

enjoy despite myself for its flat-out, barefaced, frankly

unrepentant gall. I copied it into Box just for the hell of it.

I noticed, also, that Liau Mei had several paks dealing with

the galactic sector I‟d be heading into - nothing even remotely

suspicious about that, of course, it being one of the favourite

sectors for such things in the way that the Old West was a

place to find a horse thief. I copied them into Box, too, on the

you-never-know principle.

Across the chamber, Liau Mei stirred on the bed and

muttered something. She didn‟t have to be up early and

neither did I, but the unspoken, tacit agreement in this deep

and meaningful relationship was that she‟d wake to find me

gone, vanished like some puff of romantically cruel and

dangerous smoke.

All the same, I didn‟t want to sample the dregs of Luna

night life, and wandering the tubes until the breakfast bars

opened appealed even less. I sat at Liau Mei‟s rather prim

little kitchen counter, poured myself a cup of caffeine-laden

cinnamon and hooked Box into the Luna systems. I still had

a few things to set up, and put in motion, for my journey into

the Dellah sector.

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

...a red light was blinking on the dash. It didn‟t matter what

McCrae did now, the car was almost out of power and

running on reserve cells. And the sleek black limousine of El

Diablo still followed inexorably.

They were nearing the edge of the New Chicago city centre

now. If McCrae left it too late, he would find himself involved

in a firefight in some residential area, rather than a zone of

shopping precincts shut down for the night. Innocent people

would die.

„Ah well,‟ Flint McCrae growled to himself, taking the data

wafer containing the Matrox Formula from the shotgun seat

where he had tossed it and slipping it in a pocket of his Hunt

& Sons dinner jacket. „Here goes nothing.‟ He slowed the car,

locked the auto-guidance system, shot the doors and

jumped. He hit the ground rolling and bounced alert and

lithe to the balls of his feet. The Sikorsky V9 Triple-Turbo

Hovjet carried on under its own momentum for some

hundred metres before slowing, turning and parking itself

with neat and automatic precision by the side of the road.

The limousine of El Diablo squealed to a sudden and gear-

stripping stop. A black door slithered back and a figure

lumbered out. Even in the dim light of street lamps, it

seemed too bulky, its movements too lurching to be a normal

human being. Flint McCrae pulled out his Spanda PPX with

integral sighting and bonded-rubber grip, optional fastload

key-release and digital alarm clock, and shot it, twice.

The Teflon-coated, .38, full-metal-jacket slugs bounced off

it with a clang. The figure closed in fast. It was a cyborg, an

obscene technological hybrid of steel and flesh. It reached for

McCrae with fingers like snipping pincers, the LEDs behind

the membranes of its eyes flashing balefully. It seemed that

the saga of Flint McCrae had at long last met its end!

Or possibly not - for Flint McCrae, in addition to his

expertise in skydiving, cordon-bleu cookery and advanced

sexual technique, was a Master of the Technological Arts, a

four-year college course which, such was his genius, he had

completed on a two-week vacation some years before. He

knew everything there was to know about these abominable

creatures - and he knew their weak spot. His hand whipped

out like lightning and pressed a certain spot in the cyborg‟s

chest with fingers of steel. A small hatch sprang back in the

mechanical monster‟s chest to reveal its wires and glowing

transistors. As the cyborg lurched back in alarm, McCrae

brought up his Spanda and plugged it squarely in the chest.

The cyborg screamed, and plucked at the sparking, gaping

wound, and then exploded in a shower of burning steel and

meat.

„I‟ll take my order from the barbecue well done and with a

side salad and a bit of coleslaw,‟ quipped McCrae grimly.

El Diablo‟s limousine was circling in for the kill. McCrae

knew that the lives of every man, woman and child in New

Chicago - maybe even the lives of every galaxy in outer space

- depended upon his keeping the Matrox data wafer safe. So

he reluctantly held back from dealing out the fiendish El

Diablo the justice he so richly deserved. He saw the lights of

a metro station nearby - and headed for it, the tensile thews

of his thighs pumping like steel pistons.

* * *

In the sybaritic luxury of his limousine. El Diablo toyed with

his silver-handled cane as he watched McCrae‟s dramatic

escape. The silver top was fashioned in the form of a naked

woman, complete in all anatomical details, and could be

unscrewed to reveal the blade of a sword - as many an

unwary adversary and several luckless henchmen who had

failed him had learnt to their cost.

„Amazing!‟ exclaimed the other figure in the car. „This Mint

McCrae seems truly unstoppable. What can drive a man like

that?‟

„Strange impulses that we can hardly even imagine,‟ said El

Diablo. „A love of truth and justice, friendship and the light of

happiness in a small child‟s eyes. What can it be like to

experience such strange feelings, do you think?‟

„I doubt if we will ever know.‟ The other gave a sudden,

vicious grin. „Do you want me to go after him?‟

El Diablo thought for a moment. „Yes, Moloch,‟ he said at

lust. „Bring me back the Matrox formula, and bring me back

his head.‟

The metro station was deserted. McCrae‟s footsteps rattled off

the white-tiled walls. It would be some minutes before a

transit capsule arrived, and so he repaired to the rest rooms

to change his face. A master of disguise, he emerged looking

completely different from the man known by men and loved

by women the universe over as Flint McCrae.

A capsule arrived with a hiss of compressed air. He entered

it, noting that it, too, was empty. Just as the doors slid shut,

however, a dark figure flung himself at them and levered his

way through.

The man was thin and dressed in black, studded leather,

grubby with wear and stained with old, dried blood that he

had not bothered to remove. His ragged, jet-black hair was

slick with grease. His skin was the unnatural white-face

pallor of a vat-grown clone, his eyes encircled by pure black.

He leered at McCrae - and McCrae‟s steel-trap mind

recognized him. His name was Moloch, a vicious and sadistic

killer, who hired himself out to the highest bidder, currently

working in Diablo‟s bloody trade as his right-hand man.

Moloch was well known for preferring the blade, or

scratching with his blackened nails, to each of which he‟d

added some subtly different poison. It was a measure of his

fear for a man like Flint McCrae that he had decided to use

his gun - a little Matsui Flintlock IV that would have

ordinarily have been found somewhere in the bottom of a

woman‟s handbag.

„Time to die now, Mr Hero Man,‟ he sneered snidely,

bringing up his little gun.

The shot was aimed at McCrae‟s heart - but Flint McCrae

wasn‟t there any more. Even so, even with the lightning

reflexes of his dive for the cover of a row of seats, the ceramic

slug from the Matsui Flintlock IV slammed into his shoulder.

McCrae mastered the searing agony without even so much as

a grunt.

Seeing that he had merely wounded his opponent, Moloch

jumped behind one of the Plexiglas partitions flanking the

doors of the tube, and began firing blindly. As slugs

ricocheted off the walls, McCrae knew that one must surely

hit him, by pure luck, in the very near future.

The slug was lodged under his collarbone and the wound,

though not enough to incapacitate a man like McCrae, was

bleeding profusely. With a flash of inspiration, McCrae

squeezed the wound, hard, collecting a quantity of blood in

his hand. He waited until Moloch fired yet again, and threw

the blood in the air with a cry of pain. He then lay still and

silent, as though in death.

After a while, gun still at the ready, Moloch approached. He

aimed a heavy kick at the supine form of McCrae and, when

there was no response, put his gun away with an odious and

satisfied grin.

„And for my next trick…‟ quipped McCrae, and shot him in

the mouth.

- Excerpt from The Matrox Conundrum,

a True Adventure of the New Frontier

[And this is me again.

I was just going to insert this and let it speak for itself, but

I can‟t. I mean, big fat hairy total bollocks or what? Guess

which one‟s supposed to be me. Go on. Have a guess. And

the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, I‟ve never been

shot in the mouth by way of a gun that does not in fact exist,

has never existed and never will, is the least of my problems

with the bloody thing.

I mean, Flint McCrae? Give me a fucking break. The guy

that this particular instance was based on wasn‟t Flint

McAnything. What he was was a complete and utter tosser.

And say hello while we‟re about it to the only evil cyborg

killing machine ever built with a sodding great key sticking

out of its back. And just where that little filler scene came

from about not getting truth and justice and little fluffy

kittens I have no idea.

Anyhow. Interests of verisimilitude. What really happened

was this:

It was one of those little bits of commercial by-play that

seem amusing on the surface, until you realize that people

are really being taken out and shot for it, like the Third World

cola wars of the twentieth century, or certain dealings

between the pair of jumped-up burger bars. I was working for

El Diablo‟s, a fast-food division of the Matrox Incorporation,

tailing some low-rent little chancer who was trying to extort

money from them by contaminating the Special Secret Sauce

in selected hot-dog restaurants with industrial bleach. The

idea‟s to put the frighteners on him a little and make him

stop, on account of how El Diablo‟s can live without the

unfavourable publicity.

I go through hoops trying to get this tosser to notice me -

and, when he finally does, he flips out, loses control of his

autohov and smacks into a bollard. He then staggers into the

metro tube, in the middle of the rush hour, with me hot on

his heels. He never even made the capsule.

Now, maybe he‟s not feeling himself after just front-ending

his car, but I think it was just because he was a tosser.

When he sees me coming after him, he pulls out this fuckoff-

huge handgun and just starts blasting away. Three people

die, eventually, and several more are wounded before I close

the gap and disarm him. He gets away for the simple reason

that I spend the next ten minutes holding on to the carotid

artery of some kid until the paramedics arrive.

The guy‟s still wanted in New Chicago on three counts of

murder, various malicious woundings, and another couple of

murders that came to light when the cops went back and

looked through his life. I took the opportunity, however,

when I disarmed him, to slap a little tracer unit on him. The

cops are never gonna find him.

It‟s on such incidents that the New Frontier Adventures like

the continuing saga of Dick McPillock and the like are based.

I include it, here, just so‟s you realize precisely how far they

can be trusted.]

CHAPTER 4

There‟s a common misconception that interstellar travel over

serious distances takes an extreme degree of effort, peril and

time. This is because for the most part, even now, people still

have an image in their heads of humongous colony ships

rumbling ponderously through space at something like a mile

a minute - something that the cruise-liner operators (cruise

liners being the only direct experience people for the most

part have with space) go out of their way to propagate. Even

now, the vast majority of any planetary population have

never thought, and will never so much as even think, of

leaving the system of their birth. It takes a planet-cracking

global catastrophe to get „em to migrate, and, even then, most

of the buggers dig their heels in and refuse to go. However

skin-of-the-teeth precarious they might know the universe to

be in the ultimate sense, they seem to think of their own

personal environments as, somehow, inviolate and absolutely

solid.

In reality, of course, you can cross from one side of the

galaxy to the other - from one galaxy to another relatively

easily - in terms of the physical processes. The basic limiting

factor is the sheer cash overhead of processing power capable

of calculating the vectors to the correct decimal point, the

transputer banks that, essentially, make sure that you‟re

pointing the ship in the right direction. This is why so many

man-hours and resources are sunk into data analysis and

the transfer of information rather than the more crudely

physical sciences. The important things to deal with, now,

are knowing where the hell you are, and what you can

actually do when you get there. As things stand at the

moment, translation across half a galactic spiral arm is

practicable. Translations of a higher order are still the

domain of neurophysicists with grants and transputer blocks

the size of three largish moons.

Time travel as such, on any noticeable scale, is of course,

for any number of reasons, still verboten. We can talk about

just why that is, and my own small relation to that, sometime

later.

The upshot is that interstellar travel is about as arduous

and difficult as the intercontinental travel I knew about when

I was a kid. Intercontinental travel in the planetary sense, for

that matter, operates on about the same level - and therein

lies the rub. It‟s the farting around at either end that does

the damage and, in the end, it‟s a matter of making

connections. The sixteen hours on the Luna-Proxima Line -

that being the major jump en route to Dellah and the

surrounding systems - were going to be the easy part. It was

after it that things were going to get more hairy than

somewhat.

Now I was on expenses - and expenses paid up front - I

didn‟t have to bother with steerage. I spent my first five hours

on the Line stuffing myself with complimentary delicacies

delivered by the live and humanoid attendants (their revived

use in recent years, as opposed to clunky and incredibly

stupid-looking Dumb Waiter™ automata, being one of the

small joys of intercorporate involvement in day-to-day life)

and hit the bar quite hard. It was quite probably going to be

my last chance for a while. The rest of the time I spent

napping in my seat and reviewing the background specs and

support files supplied by Volan:

Four months before, the planet Dellah had undergone a

global revolution and shut itself off from the galaxy at large.

The knock-on effect of this had been one of destabilizing the

balance of power for systems all around - all those threads of

interest suddenly cut loose, and whipsawing, and looking for

something to which they could attach. Such situations have

a habit of spinning catastrophically out of control as the

various local and galactic factions fight over a new and

different pie. Diplomatic and commercial relations were

strained to breaking point, and there were even the first

rumblings of incipient territorial war.

And this was where I came in. I was going in, quite simply,

as a representative of Pseudopod SA to look after their

interests in this new situation, to salvage what I could from

the wreckage. When it came right down to it, my job was to

find out what the hell was happening, what I could do about

it and then do it - and, if that all seems incredibly ambiguous

and vague, well, hey, if the job could have been summed up

easily then Volan would have sent in one of his spanky-

suited incorporate drones. That autonomous and open-ended

flexibility of action, the ability to take the hits and kick

against the pricks, to improvise on the fly towards some

greater end, was precisely what I was being paid for.

Hard facts upon the Dellahan situation were sketchy at best.

Certain revelations that would later change things far more

seriously in the wider sense would not come for months if not

years. What scraps of information we had suggested that,

while the violence on Dellah had been directed against off-

worlders in general, its primary target had been the campus

of the University of St Oscar‟s, an autonomous and

interstellar-based concern operating under fief from the

Sultan of Tashwari, a relatively minor province. Whereas

other off-worlders had been, shall we say, encouraged to

leave, the university had been actively targeted and

destroyed.

Quite what a locally well-known but galactically mino seat

of learning had done to earn such animosity I had no idea.

The place had seemed to have concentrated upon the arts

and the softer sciences - and, if that had been a cover for

harder research by somebody or other, weapons R&D, say,

then I couldn‟t find so much as a sniff of it. As I skimmed

through the faces, names and personal histories, however,

one name seemed to ring a couple of bells. There‟s no way I

can say, precisely, what made me skim it, go back and skim

it again and then start digging further. It just seemed that

this individual was somehow important.

One Bernice Surprise Summerfield, ostensibly a Professor

of Archaeology and with enough expertise and practical

experience in the field to make no difference if the ink was

dry or not on the credentials. In the few years she had been

there, she seemed to have been involved with far too many

incidents of a certain kind, had a suspiciously large number

of a certain sort of acquaintances - and there were strong

indications that she had been working for several heavy

factions as a double agent. Whether any of these factions had

been using her for their own ends, or whether she had been

quite knowingly playing them off against each other,

remained to be seen.

There was no recorded trace of her life before she arrived at

St Oscar‟s one term, seemingly out of midair - until you took

the time lock off your spiders and let them scuttle around on

a word search. Then the names leapt out at you - a tracery of

references and connections, running back and forth through

the last five hundred years of galactic history, from the

starting point of some forgotten little planetary backwater

taken out and sterilized in the last big War.

As I‟ve mentioned interminably, time travel, though entirely

possible, is so relatively uncommon an experience among

humans to be the Least Likely Scenario. Far more people did

it the hard way via cryogenics and stasis, even accounting for

the vast majority of them who didn‟t survive. People can just

have had similar names, or family lines with traditions and

so forth that give the surface impression of a single, similar

person appearing in different decades, centuries or entire

eras. The basic pattern of this four-dimensional tracery,

however, was distinctive. Our Bernice had done the real

thing, and done it so extensively that it was a wonder she

wasn‟t a walking wormhole. And anybody wondering if this

might involve sucking someone into a completely new

dimension will, at this point, be shot.

Take it from those who know. For most of us time travel is

an accident, a one-way trip with no hope of ever getting back.

Bernice Summerfield, on the other hand, seemed to be one of

the more spectacular exceptions - but none of the harder

records showed her as older than her current biological age.

That could mean any number of things, from the possibility

that she had now lost the means to the immediately bloody

obvious. Whatever the reasons, here and now, Bernice

Summerfield seemed to hold the keys I needed. She had been

involved in the Dellah situation up to her neck.

From the stills provided it seemed like a very nice-looking

neck. I rather hoped I wouldn‟t end up having to snap it.

An hour out from the Proximan terminal, I encrypted up my

notes and shoved the datapack into the package of various

other items I‟d prepared. I was going to have to lose these

items, for a while, for what was coming next.

Of the items left, only two held any kind of immediate

interest. The first was a copy of Summerfield‟s book – an

actual book, facsimiled up to look like genuine paper and

card, which seemed vaguely appropriate for a text attending

to the arcane art of Archaeology. I set that aside for later. The

sheer alliteration of it all was getting on my nerves quite

apart from anything else.

The other item (three discrete objects, but you know what I

mean) were the three data-wafer fictions I‟d copied in Liau

Mei‟s apartment - proper commercial copies I‟d picked up at

the Luna Terminal, for the same reason I had picked up all

the other untraceable and completely unsuspicious stuff for

the trip.

Summerfield, it seemed, was something of a minor star in

these tales of outworld life. Each of the copies I currently had

seemed to be by a different hand, none of them exactly

literate, and they couldn‟t seem to make up their minds

whether they were adventure stories, murder-mystery stories

or some half-baked bastard hybrid of the two.

It was an odds-on certainty they‟d contain nothing of actual

use, about either Summerfield or Dellah - but what the hell! I

was in the mood for some brain candy, and I might just hit

upon that thousand-to-one chance and glean something

useful. I settled back, skimmed the wafers, and the time flew

by like a great auk.

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

In an alcove of the Starfire Lounge, Bernice Summerfield

nursed her Maldovian boilermaker and scowled as, from the

room beyond, there came the sound of shrieking laughter like

a red-hot poker being forcibly inserted into a macaw. She

was increasingly aware of the weight of the throwing knives,

stitched into their graphite-lubricated sheathes in the

reinforced armour of her leather combat jacket.

„Parasites,‟ she spat. She felt a steadily increasing itch to

pull out the knives and throw them. Cruise liners were

almost exclusively the domain of the rich and well bred, and,

in the week she had been aboard the Titanian Queen, she had

come to know and loathe every one of the other passengers.

„Chinless fucking wonders, Berni.‟ Across the table, her

sidekick and sometime lover, Jason Kane, tried to comfort

her by going against his easy-going nature and falling in with

her mood. He was a big and heavily muscled lunkhead with a

heart of gold and a straight-arm punch that had once

stopped a charging Varjaxian rhino. His essentially simple

cheerfulness won out and he grinned at her.

Bernice found herself smiling back despite herself. Jason

was like a clumsy puppy sometimes, and would follow her

loyally into the jaws of death - that was one of the reasons

why she liked him.

She tossed back her drink. „I‟m going to get another one.

You coming?‟

The walls of the Starfire Lounge crawled with gilt and velvet

plush in a particularly bilious shade of maroon. The red shag

carpet was so thick that Summerfield fancied, if she listened

hard enough, that she would hear the distant clanging of

bells from the minarets of miniature cities lost in it Reddish

filters over the lights gave the impression that those upon

whom the illumination fell had been recently filleted.

At the bar, Summerfield set down her glass and glowered at

the barman while she waited to be served. Kane took the

opportunity to look around himself with interest - it was

seldom that he moved in such circles, and this was

something of a new experience.

Off to one side the slumped and slightly ragged form of Mr

Roger Awlson, the well-known holomovie method actor and

dipsomaniac of no small renown, was regaling the world in

general with the apparent events of one evening in October,

when he was far from sober, and dragging home a load with

manly pride. Some short while after, his feet began to falter,

it seemed, and he had lain down in the gutter and a pig had

come and parked down by his side.

Beyond him, a Ms Lobelia Romp-Specimen, the Dravish

medicated goitre heiress, stood resplendent in a glazed bread

mask (which she raised and lowered by way of a miniature

silver hoist) and tucked into a plate of slightly lethal-looking

canapés, while proffering the occasional bon mot to her

tuxedoed paramour, Mr Rupert Glome-Rotring. (At one point

before Bemi had put him right, Jason had been under the

impression that a bon mot was a variety of boiled sweet.)

To one side of this pair, the Viscount Jeremy Tarquin

Temporal-Lobe was dancing on the little space of floor set

aside for that occasion, stripped to the waist and in the

company of several like-minded friends, with the occasional

happy whoop and with a faintly nascent air of body oil.

Beyond them, at a candlelit table - in the company of a

gigolo who had quite obviously fallen upon hard times, had

taken the job out of desperation and who was now counting

the hours of the days till he was paid off - the large and

jewel-bedecked Dowager Duchess of Ghent dropped the glass

from which she had been drinking a light Sauterne and

clutched a trembling hand at her throat.

The Dowager Duchess coughed, explosively. She retched.

And then, with a muffled hissing of the discharge from some

fiendish contrivance of a canister, she began to inflate.

Perhaps as a result of his slightly simple-minded nature,

Jason‟s physical reactions were second to none. Without

pause for thought he grabbed Bernice Summerfield and,

despite her protests that she was in the process of trying to

buy a packet of nuts, hauled her under the nearest table.

The now distended Dowager Duchess exploded with a bang

- leaving no trace but for the epidermal, visceral and digestive

matter spattered around the Starfire Lounge and its

occupants. Several slightly scorched lace veils, which the

Duchess had affected in her manner of dress, fluttered gently

to the floor like dying bats.

After a time, or possibly two times, Bernice Summerfield

and Jason Kane crawled out from under the table.

Summerfield looked down, and up, and indeed around at the

mortal remains of the Duchess, and at the patrons of the

Starfire Lounge so understandably shocked and disconcerted

by the mode of her departure from this life.

„Possibly some sort of meso-electromagnetic element in the

drink,‟ she mused. „It disrupted the cumulative internal

cellular pressure - and whammo! I think we should go and

have a -‟

Jason never learnt what Bernice thought they should go

and have, because at that moment the door flew open, and

through it burst a bald and portly figure of medium height,

with a waxed and twirled moustache and his mouth wrapped

around a Churchwarden (which was, as Bernice Summerfield

explained to Jason Kane, a kind of pipe). This slightly

unprepossessing figure was, they later leamt, no less than M.

Emil Dupont, renowned the galaxy over as the greatest

detective on Nova Belgique!

„There has been a murder here!‟ cried M. Dupont. „Murder

most foul! The Dowager Duchess of Ghent lies dead, in a

rather unconscionably wide blast area, and someone in this

very room is responsible!‟ The Great Detective strode into the

room. „As we are, at this moment, outside the jurisdiction of

any reputable judiciary service, I myself will undertake to

investigate.‟

Bernice scowled, and then shrugged to herself. „Suit

yourself.‟

It was slightly later. The Starfire Lounge had been cleared by

burly ship‟s stewards, and Dupont and the suspects had

retired to the cabin suite of the late Dowager Duchess, there

to further the investigation under Dupont‟s watchful eye. The

suspects included: Roger Awlson, Lobelia Romp-Specimen,

Rupert Glome-Rotring, the Viscount Jeremy Tarquin

Temporal-Lobe, Ron the gigolo, Bernice Summerfield and

Jason Kane.

„Why us?‟ Bernice said indignantly.

„Was it not just this lunchtime that you became rather

more inebriated than is seemly, and declared to all and

sundry that you‟d see the lot of us dead and screaming in

hell if you could get away with it?‟ enquired Lobelia Romp-

Specimen, with happy malice.

„She has a point, you know,‟ said Jason.

„Shut up, Jason,‟ said Bernice,

„All right, I will,‟ said Jason.

Bernice turned away from him, and amused herself by

rifling surreptitiously through the late Dowager‟s movables

and drawers, while Emile Dupont elicited information from

the other suspects.

„I loved her like a mother.‟ Lobelia Romp-Specimen ratcheted

up her mask and dabbed at her kohl-rimmed eyes with a

dainty handkerchief. „She was like a mother to me, always at

hand with advice upon comportment and other subjects of a

particular nature. Even the time when, on a whim, she

brutally dismembered my pet hamster, Crippin, with a bone

saw and served him up in a short-crust pie didn‟t matter,

because I really, really...‟

The young Viscount, on the other hand, seemed unflustered

and perfectly calm under Dupont‟s probing interrogations. „I

barely knew the woman,‟ he drawled. „We moved within

completely different social circles. What reason could I

possibly have for...?‟

Bernice Summerfield, meanwhile, had unearthed a large

and leather-bound dossier from within the late Dowager‟s

steam trunk. She examined the contents, snorted with barely

restrained laughter, and passed it on to Jason.

Jason scanned a page, and then stared at the Viscount

Jeremy Tarquin Temporal-Lobe, his simple soul shocked to

the foundation by what he had seen within.

„Is that really possible?‟ he said. „With the gene-spliced

heifers, the electrodes and the pair of Wellington boots? Can

you really do something like that?‟

The interrogations wore on. It transpired that Rupert Glome-

Rotring was also mentioned in the shameful dossier - in, as it

were, the appendix. When the full and detailed

circumstances had been revealed, Lobelia Romp-Specimen

had clapped a hand to her mouth and run from the suite, to

return, some moments later, looking slightly pale and wan

and covered in breadcrumbs from where her hand had

broken through her mask.

Roger Awlson, who was in such a state of alcoholic stupor

that it was doubtful he was aware of the very nature of these

proceedings, then treated everybody to a song, detailing how

he had once had occasion to discover that his new bride was

a multiple amputee, to the old music-hall tune of „Side by

Side‟.

Ron the gigolo then revealed that he had, in fact, been?

plotting to murder the Dowager Duchess all along, but that

her murder had taken place before he had been able to put

his own plans into effect.

All through this, there was something nagging at the back

of Bernice Summerfield‟s mind. It was something to do with

the actual sequence of the murder, though for the life of her

she could not quite pin it down...

‘Alors!’ Dupont exclaimed at last, mopping his face with a

handy croissant from the Dowager‟s untouched breakfast

tray. „After such a cavalcade of infamy, I must admit that I

am not closer to a solution than before. I am - how do you

say it? - at least two stumps short of the wicket!‟

He turned his attention to Bernice Summerfield. „And you,

madam, what do you have to say upon this whole

unfortunate occurrence?‟

Bernice frowned. „It‟s Miss, actually. Well I do have

something to say, as it happens - but you‟re not going to like

it.‟

„Ah yes?‟ said Dupont. „And what would that be, exactly?‟

„I think I know who the murderer is,‟ said Bernice.

This elicited a positive gasp of surprise from all who were

gathered here - save for Jason, who had become bored and

was staring happily at the pattern on the cabin‟s wallpaper.

„And how might this be, Miss Summerfield?‟ said Dupont.

„It‟s simple, really.‟ Bernice climbed to her feet and

wandered about the cabin, counting points off on her fingers.

„I think we can all agree that the unfortunate Dowager

exploded. I think we can agree that she exploded with a very

loud bang. The thing is, if you didn‟t see her doing it, you

wouldn‟t know it was a person exploding. We‟re on a ship and

it could have been anything. An airlock blowing out, a meteor

strike, the air conditioning backfiring - it could have been

anything.

„Furthermore, after she died, the Dowager Duchess was

hardly in a fit state to be recognized by anybody. There might

be teeth and bits of finger scattered around for a post-

mortem identification, but -‟

„I think I‟ve got her glass eye somewhere,‟ said the young

Viscount helpfully, rooting around in his trouser pocket.

„Spare me.‟ Bernice Summerfield walked over to where the

shameful dossier had been left on an occasional table, and

looked down at it thoughtfully. „Moreover, it seems that every

single one of us had some motive or other for murdering the

Duchess - but doesn‟t it strike you as slightly odd that we

were gathered together before this common factor came to

light? And will you please stop picking at that wallpaper,

Jason!‟

„Sorry.‟ Jason sat on his hands with a slightly shamefaced

expression.

„As I was saying,‟ said Bernice Summerfield. „There is one

person in this cabin who not only knew that a murder had

occurred, but knew precisely who the victim was – and was

not at the scene of the crime, in the Starfire Lounge, at the

time.‟

„I admit it,‟ Emile Dupont cried, falling on the carpeted cabin

deck before the startled suspects. „I admit it all. I would also

like four hundred and seventy-three counts of a similar

nature to be taken into consideration, including several

incidents of matricide, fratricide, regicide and seven counts of

cattle rustling, which involved the wrapping of gene-spliced

heifers in brown-paper bags - for export to those who deal in

depraved practices concerning them, electrodes and a pair of

Wellington boots.

„I have roamed this sector of the galaxy for years,

slaughtering wherever I go as the whim takes me, and then

passing it off upon some innocent bystander who just

happened to have a motive for the act. My greatest triumph

was in decimating the population of an entire Proximan

colony and laying the blame upon an itinerant traveller in

medicated goitres. His own medicated goitres, you

understand...

„But now,‟ he continued, an evil cunning forming in his

features as he leapt to his feet, „you shall never take the

greatest mass murderer in all of Nova Belgique alive!‟

With that, Dupont bounded for the door. The various

suspects tried to stop him, but he had taken the liberty of

purloining the body oil belonging to the young Viscount, and

slipped through their grasp. Enraged now, beyond belief, the

suspects stormed out of the cabin suite in hot pursuit.

„I suppose we‟d better go after them,‟ said Bernice.

„What?‟ said Jason. „Oh. OK. Where are we going?‟

They found the suspects in a gangway, crowded about one

of the emergency airlocks of the ship. Emil Dupont was

within, having attempted to hide here and being brought up

by the exterior hatch.

„All right,‟ he said through the speaker unit that relayed his

voice from within. „I‟ve changed my mind. You can take me

alive.‟

„I don‟t think so,‟ said Bernice, grimly. „Do you want to do

the honours, Jason?‟

„Sure.‟ Jason hit the airlock controls. There was the sound

of bolts and outer hatch retracting, an outgush of air and a

brief but fading scream.

„Scratch one problem,‟ Bernice said. She and Jason turned

their backs on the various suspects and headed back to the

Starfire Lounge for a drink. Hopefully, by this time, it would

have been cleaned up.

It had. But that was only the start of the adventures of

Bernice and Jason aboard the Titanian Queen...

- Excerpt from Ship of Death

a True Adventure of the New Frontier

CHAPTER 5

The ship was called the Star of Afrique - though, if it had ever

been a star, it was one well past its days as a matinee idol

and with a career quite frankly down the toilet. A raddled old

trading scow, barely held together by caulking, welded

patchwork and, quite probably, spit and string. A six-man

crew, not one of whom I‟d trust to stay awake four hours out

of five, let alone to do their jobs. Without usable ID, however,

it was the only way I was going to get off Proxima IV and to

where I was eventually going.

You‟d have to look closely at the engine pods, and know

what to be looking for, to see that they were rather more

powerful than you‟d expect - and powerful in a certain, highly

specialized way. The docking clamps were likewise modified,

servo-adjustable to any number of configurations as opposed

to any standard gauge. I‟d booked passage on the Star of

Afrique after leaving the Line by the simple expedient of

waving a big wad of cash at the captain, pulling off enough

chips for a down payment and stuffing the rest back in my

pockets.

Believe me, if you think you can act, you should try acting

clever enough to have a lot of money in the first place, and

then stupid enough to do something as inexpressibly asinine

as that in the same breath. I even submitted to a pat-down

showing I had no weapons of any kind, just so they could be

sure that they could trust me on the trip.

The passenger compartment (SSPASC-spec mandatory for

any ship, for, quote, the succour of those bona fide travellers

in distress, unquote) had been converted into storage. I laid

the dubiously stained sheets of acceleration foam I had been

reluctantly given over a line of packing crates of foodstuffs

and spread out, breathing deeply despite the standard

shipboard odour of stale sweat, oils and urea that seemed

even worse than usual, space smugglers and pirates not

exactly being noted for their sartorial demeanour or

scrubbing behind the ears - or, indeed, anywhere else. The

jolt of liftoff as we crash-accelerated to escape velocity

jammed me down into the foam, and I felt every vertebra as it

skinned against the splintery fibreboard of the crate

underneath.

The ship was too small to pack gravmetics, but the

acceleration laid in after leaving the gravity well was enough

to give some semblance of weight. I lay back and moved my

limbs into the posture of sleep, gazing absently at the dalon-

mesh securing lines that dangled, swaying slightly, above me,

working my muscles and joints through warm-up routines

that, to the untrained observer, would seem all but

motionless, and from which I could instantly return to

complete relaxation.

It was almost exactly an hour and twenty minutes outside

Proximan jurisdiction that they came for me: two crewmen,

skinny-framed as one has to be for sustained work in

cramped and weightless spaces, but with muscles like

slightly undersized rugby balls, and the captain himself -

doubtless making sure he was going to get his preliminary

cut. In any number of senses. They had something like seven

knives and a couple of grappling hooks between them, stuck

in various places, and there was I, poor little me, completely

and utterly alone and unarmed.

The crewmen hauled me off the foam and I looked up, pale

and shivering and broadcasting fear on every wavelength.

„You can‟t do this!‟ I quavered, in the same kind of cracking

easy-prey voice I‟d used when dealing with the captain, back

on Proxima, but racked up a couple of notches. „We had a

deal…‟

„Well, now, then,‟ the captain said, giving me a friendly

wink, putting his face very close and menacing to mine. „The

deal has sort of changed, you see.‟

„Fair enough,‟ I said, shrugging an arm out of the grip of

one of the guys who were holding me and jamming a splayed

set of fingers into the captain‟s eyes, up to the knuckles.

Scratch one problem.

Two problems left, so I dealt with one by wrapping a

securing strap around his neck and using his own

acceleration-assisted weight to strangle him, and the other by

smacking his head a couple of times into a capped and

truncated conduit pipe sticking out from the balk. Scratch

problems two and three - and if you‟re after excitingly

dynamic descriptions of Whipcord Reactions of Death, gory

depictions of people hanging by their faces off a pipe and

suchlike, then you can ask someone else. Go and get one of

those True Adventure data wafers or something.

Likewise, there was none of this stalking-in-the-dark

bullshit about dealing with the rest of the crew. I just hauled

up to them under free fall and put them down, a job made so

much easier by the weapons I‟d liberated from the captain

and his pair of friends. I left the guy on the bridge until last,

just to make sure that the automatics were sufficient for a

single pilot - I knew that this class of ship was rated for that,

but I didn‟t want to find too late that it somehow wasn‟t.

I left the automatics ticking over, dragged the bodies to the

airlock and crash-dumped them, just as they had intended to

do to me. The difference between the principles of piracy and

privateering might be a narrow one, but it‟s good enough for

me, and I certainly wasn‟t going to lose any sleep over these

little innocents.

I then went through the ship and stripped it of ever

armament - hand-held weapons for the most part, hull-

mounted laser blasters, torpedo racks and the like being the

province of military ships, which operate more or less like

thruster-powered chess pieces in the Game of War. The

practicalities of piracy are more concerned with worming up

to some unsuspecting prey, clamping on, cutting through,

and going in like a squad of combat troops in a planetside

guerrilla war.

The various hand blasters, tasers, concussion caps and

even a genuine, antique cutlass went the same way as the

late crew. I likewise scoured the ship from top to bottom for

contraband - this took slightly longer as I wanted to be at

least as scrupulous in looking for hidden compartments and

the like as a customs official who hasn‟t had his bribe. Bye-

bye, eventually, up to a couple of million shillings‟ worth of

chemicals, potables and perishables, depending on the state

of the market for each of them at the time.

Back on the bridge, I looked over the boards again. The

bolt-on modifications, again in keeping with the basic

function of the ship, were concerned with real-time

manoeuvring. The navigation banks had your standard

astronomical destinations, preprogrammed and updated on a

second-to-second basis on the GalNet subetheric. The only

anomalies were a couple of unnamed extra destinations,

which I assumed to be the equivalents of Barbary Reef bolt

holes, and which I dutifully deleted. I left the ship‟s

transponder codes as they were - the late pirates would have

made damn sure that they were clean enough not to arouse

suspicion, and they had obviously been a small-time,

independent operation. Nobody was going to be actively

looking for those codes.

The Star of Afrique was now as clean as I could make it

without going outside and physically scrubbing off the name,

so I turned my attention to where I should be taking It. The

decision seemed to have been made for me in this. The

Dellah system had been declared a no-go area by Earth

Force, the stellar tracking access taken off line.

Now, a planetsider might think it strange that a ship

capable of flipping between star systems might be stymied by

that, but in a baby-flip-capable heap like that Star it was the

equivalent of driving an auto and finding that the bridge over

the ravine ahead of you is out. It comes down to a simple

choice between turning back and trying some other day, or

finding somewhere to pull over, leaving the car and looking

for some alternate mode of transportation.

The best bet for that latter seemed to be the planet

Thanaxos - one of those neighbouring systems I talked about

earlier. It had an Earthlike atmosphere and a basically

humanoid population - their distinction, to outsiders, being

their slate-grey skin and a crest, a bit like a bony Cornish

pasty, on the front of their heads. It had a relatively high if

newly evolved level of technology and - best of all – some

nascent acquaintance with such local intercorporate

interests as remained with the disruption of them upon

Dellah. It wasn‟t civilization by any stretch of the

imagination, but it would do. I‟d fit right in.

I barrelled into Thanaxon airspace on manual, refusing to

answer increasingly vociferous ID queries and putting

mayday signals out on all channels. I hit the atmosphere

rather harder than automatics would have allowed, shearing

off a couple of the nonessential superstructures, confusing

the heat- and pattern-recognition sensors of any GTA

defences that might be pointed at me and, coincidentally,

burning off the distinctive markings of the ship‟s last paint

job. I grounded some way out on the spaceport landing field,

well away from any official-looking and restricted area, sat

tight and watched with interest as a couple of disaster-

control trucks headed for me, slackening their pace as they

realized that my landing had been under control and there

was no immediate danger.

As the fire appliances slackened off they were overtaken by

a medium-sized troop carrier, a brightly coloured lump of

prismatic-fractured steel and Teflon that sped ahead on

cantilevered treads. This was, quite obviously, going to be my

welcoming committee, and the last thing on their mind was

camouflage. I slid out from the pilot‟s cradle, shot the hatch

and strolled down the gangway, just in time to see the

transport pull up and several figures pile out. Armed

Thanaxon troopers with their pale, matt, slightly marbled

faces, their uniforms reminiscent of functionally evolved,

nineteenth-century Hussars, though without the silly hats. I

kept my hands where they could see them as they cover me

with weapons of some local design, but obviously based upon

the galactically common blaster-bolt principle.

A rather snotty-looking adjutant with a little clipboard

came forward and demanded to know what I was doing,

violating the airspace and soil of Thanaxos without permit. I

spun him a story of how I was a humble trader, set upon by

privateers, but who had managed to escape after they had

taken my cargo. He then asked to see some form of

identification. I told him I didn‟t have any identification. I

might have got a bit irate about it. I may or may not, in fact,

have spoken my precise mind as to the treatment I, a

civilized man, was getting at the hands of some crappy little

excuse for a backwater planet and its obviously stupid and

incompetent officials, in the most insulting way as was

possible...

In any case, by dint of my well-known, innately polite,

commodious and easygoing nature, I managed to turn what

could have been a perfectly ordinary encounter - and one

that might have given me some basic if restricted access to

the facilities of Thanaxos - into an interpersonal disaster. If

I‟d been a diplomat it would have been a Diplomatic Incident.

They impounded my ship, strip-searched me on the spot,

declared me an undesirable alien and dragged me off to the

detention camps pending a hearing that, I gathered, would be

several years in coming, if at all. They weren‟t particularly

vicious about it, but they weren‟t that gentle either.

As a trooper slapped the manacles on me, and another one

gave me a kick for good luck, I succeeded in holding back a

smile. Everything, so far, was going precisely according to

plan.

BACKGROUND INSERT (PERSONAL FILE):

Scenes from an Ordinary Childhood I

After three hours of waiting, watching through brittle, grey

and nicotine-encrusted net curtains, the signal finally came.

Leaning on the broken iron stump that was all that remain;

of a lamppost, on the corner of a street dripping spraybomb

and crawling with tangles of razor wire, Joey lit a cigarette

Joey was a heavy smoker, when he had a stash, and he all

but ate the thing.

I splayed my hands, first one and then the other, until the

tendons cracked, shoving out the tension-cramp of waiting

and glanced back into the room at Annie, who was sitting on

the bed with her knees rucked up and cradling a sick-looking

nine-month-old child - not hers, though Annie being sixteen,

a year older than I was, it wouldn‟t have been unremarkable

if it were. The girl from whom we‟d borrowed it was, in fact, a

couple of months younger than myself.

The way we lived, in those years after the Collapse, women

tended to have babies as soon as it was physically possible.

From the lofty heights of a historical perspective, people can

talk about a reassignment of biological imperatives in

response to environment - but that‟s just a poncy way of

stating the completely bloody obvious. We lived from day to

day, and we never knew if we were going to see another one.

You had kids early if at all.

With her halfway freeish hand, Annie was flipping absently

through a book - a yellowed but pristine copy of Now We Are

Six, one of a small pile she had taken from a bookshelf in the

comer. The room itself had obviously, once, been the domain

of a child much older than the one she held, preserved after

it had gone like a kind of shrine.

„Things are moving,‟ I said. „Are we ready to go?‟

Annie nodded and climbed off the bed, holding the child to

her in the firm but careful way of one who knows the thing

won‟t break, but has been given it in trust. Keeping her

shadow off the window, she backed to the door and slipped

out through it. I turned my attention back to the street

outside. A squad of dogboys were coming up it, taking

advantage of available cover, their combat shielding activated

and their smart systems tracking like nobody‟s business. Fat

lot of good it would do them, on account of how military-

based technology tends to operate on a kind of constantly

elevating, narrow bandwidth. The sensors hooked into these

guys‟ heads were useful only for picking out the energy

signals of weapons on the same comparative level as their

own - and in that sense the dogboys had the only game in

town. My antique Armalite with solid optic sighting slid right

under it.

Two years before, the dogboys had been soldiers in the

proper sense of the word - soldiers of the Emergency Military

Government that had taken control of Britain, as a whole, in

a last-ditch attempt to hold things together. Now they were

cut from the main body of the corps and just another faction,

just another set of people trying to take control of and hold a

blockaded city in a country - in a world - piling like a ton of

bricks over the lip of the catastrophe curve and with the

infrastructure quite frankly fucked. The names aren‟t

important now. There are hyper-cities floating over it all now,

and nobody remembers the name „Birmingham‟ as anything

other than a historical footnote. The important fact was that

the dogboys were the faction with the heaviest firepower, and

that meant that all the other factions, however they might

squabble among themselves, had to be against the dogboys

to survive.

The window was open a bare crack. I loosed a round to get

my bearings, leaning into the recoil as I‟d learnt

compensated, fired again, tracked and fired and fired again.

I snapped a conscious look at the scene below, as opposed

to mere instinctive track-and-pop. Two for four. The first

target was already on the ground and bleeding, a round

having gone straight through a power mesh designed to

counter state-of-the-art energy bolts as if it wasn‟t there. The

second was still in the process of spinning - caught in that

instant of my attention as if by time-lapse photography. One

round had mostly taken his arm off at the shoulder, the

other entering at a downward angle, just left of the sternum,

to blow his renal system out of his back.

Good enough. Moving slowly and easily - a sudden,

movement, even at this distance, would have acted like an

electromagnet for the eye - I pulled the business end of the

Armalite back and sank back from the sill. Sweat was

pouring off me now, and the rifle nearly slipped out of my

hands. Out of the line of sight from the street below, I could

move faster: a knee-skinning scrabble across the floor, up

and out of the door, down a bare and shabby staircase

(noting, in passing, the change in tone from the pristine,

maintained neatness of the dead child‟s room) and taking the

Armalite apart as I went, tossing the lumps of scratched and

slotted metal to Mico, who was waiting in the hall with Annie

and the baby. They shared that cramped space with the iron-

and-enamel bulk of a baby‟s pram that was older than all of

us combined. The pieces of rifle slotted easily into holes cut

in the expanded polystyrene foam that lined its bottom.

At this point, of course, Joey would be outside, spread-

eagled on the street while a slightly depleted squad of

dogboys gave him the once over. Joey, at least, would be

completely and utterly clean.

„Everything OK?‟ I asked Mico, jerking a thumb towards the

interior door behind which were the actual occupants of the

house, an elderly couple called the Theads, I think it was.

Mico nodded. „light. I tied them and belted the old guy a

couple of times to give him an alibi. They‟ll come out of it OK.

No problems.‟

I didn‟t bother or need to check that things were just as

Mico said. There were people who‟d have used a knife (bullets

being slightly hard to come by, dontchaknow) out of cold

witness-losing ideas of professionalism, but in fact because

they got off on it. I mean, how the hell can you be a

professional insurgent? This was why, even then, I worked

freelance, never allying myself to one particular movement or

another - and I worked only with people I could personally

trust. Mico and Annie were two of the few, and for certain

other reasons than professionalism.

Annie finished piling blankets and suchlike on an Armalite-

and-baby club sandwich and gave it a peck on the forehead.

„Are we ready?‟

„As we‟ll ever be.‟ I gave her and then Mico a rather more

extensive kiss than she‟d given the baby. It might have been

the last chance we‟d ever get. You gots the stuff, you puts it

where it do most good. „Let‟s go.‟

Mico and I headed back through the house while Annie

went out through the front door. In the period of confusion

after the shooting, if they didn‟t simply fire on her for being a

moving target, Annie had a better-than-average chance of

sliding past the dogboys before they got themselves together

enough for a house-to-house. As for Mico and me, we went

out through a back garden long gone to seed, hopped over an

ancient fence and wandered up the alley backing on to the

terraced rows, talking vaguely about the strange shots we‟d

heard, beer and its current woeful unavailability and

wondering how we were going to get the smell of creosote off

our hands.

I lit another roll-up and coughed as the recycled draw from

old charring, saltpetre and any other amount of

contaminated crap hit my lungs. I could just about

remember the time when cigarettes came in the precisely

packed cartons, their straight clean lines like little dreams of

the perfectly evolved good-stuff dispenser. Of course, when

cigarettes looked like that, and not like something left behind

by a miniature dog with a training problem, I‟d too young to

even think about smoking. And doesn‟t that just sum the

bloody world up?

„Forget it,‟ I said, „it‟s just not possible.‟

„What about that guy with the lawn-mower engine and the

home-made microlight?‟ Joey said. „He got over.‟

„What about the twenty other people who tried to cop the

idea?‟ I asked him. „They went down in flames.‟

„You‟re just frightened.‟

„Too bloody true,‟ I said, looking out at the expanse of

rubble and wire, the vague shapes of armour and artillery

moving at a crawl in the middle distance. „Last of the great

yellow hunters, me. Note how I never set up a hit until I‟m

damn sure I can get away from it with my skin and the

sweet-young-girl laugh intact.‟

„Right,‟ said Mico, who when you came right down to it was

as complete an utter coward as I.

„We missed a couple of easy targets doing that,‟ said Joey,

thoughtfully.

„We‟d miss a fuck of a sight more if we went in without

taking care and got our heads blown off. Or worse. Shit.‟ The

scavengings-and-bible-paper fag had fallen apart on me.

„Anybody got any more?‟

„Here.‟ Annie tossed her stash over. It was almost fresh and

almost full since she tended to use it for currency rather than

consumption.

I took a carefully measured pinch. „You want some of the

booze?‟

„Sure,‟ she said, a bit flatly, and I handed her the quarter-

bottle of black-market-liberated NAAFI Scotch I‟d acquired m

return for a couple of favours, none of them worth bringing

up here and now.

Annie sipped a minute quantity. There had been something

odd about her voice, and it was a moment before I got it. You

have to understand, in the world in which we‟d found

ourselves, that simple pleasures like alcohol and tobacco,

things you could buy elsewhere without thinking about it,

had become as precious as gold and jewels and suchlike. It

was like in prison - and while we can get our heads around

the idea of an entire city, an entire world being a prison now,

in those days the condition was relatively new. You don‟t go

throwing such stuff around - somebody gives you a snout

and they damn well expect to be paid. I had done that

automatically with Annie - and realized only belatedly that

she had offered me her stash as a genuine gift of friendship,

and had been hurt a little by my instant offer to pay. I felt

embarrassed, and tried to think of something to say that

wouldn‟t call attention to it and make things worse.

I turned my attention out on to the wastelands again. You

don‟t need a wall to block off a city, in the end: you just need

the will. And minefields and 105-millimetre seven-pounder

cluster-frags, of course.

We did this every now and then, Mico, me and Annie and

Joey when he was alive, hanging just back from the very edge

where the forces outside would take a pop at us from general

principles, taking in the perimeter of the blockade as you

would take in the view of a mountain or a chasm. It was like

a geographical feature, a piece of the world as it was, and one

of these days we‟d find a way across.

„There‟s worse things than having our heads blown off,‟ I

said. „We could be taken in alive.‟

„Not me,‟ said Mico. „I‟d kill myself first.‟

„Doesn‟t work like that,‟ said Joey cheerfully. „They

hamstring you first chance they get. I suppose you could do

it with a suicide pill or something...‟

„Where the fuck would we get something like a suicide pill

from?‟ I snapped. Changing the subject back had brought it

around to the one that distressed me most, on some deep

level, for reasons I could not quite name. In die months the

EMG had held the entire country as a single and coherent

power, they had concentrated their Psychological Warfare,

Biochemical and other Research and Development divisions

here. Indeed, that had been a major factor in isolating the

city when things fell apart - the process had begun already to

turn it into a prison of a different kind, a testing zone for new

processes.

The R&D people were still holed up here, in the building

that had once been the Festival Hall, and took care of anyone

captured alive by the dogboys. That was why the dogboys

didn‟t automatically shoot to kill. It wasn‟t as if there were

desperate and heart-rending screams coming from the place

night and day or anything - the acoustics of the building had

been modified to produce an almost perfect soundproofing.

That was part of its special terror. There‟s something simply

terrifying and wrong about a building, obviously occupied

and full of activity, that seems to broadcast silence.

It was a pretty safe bet that those taken in were

interrogated and used as test subjects of some kind - though

what kind of tests precisely nobody would ever know. People

went in, people never, ever came out.

„Look over there,‟ said Joey, breaking into my mood.

„Someone‟s trying his luck.‟

Way off to one side, a figure was making its tentative way

across the wasteland. At this distance it was too far to see if

it was a man or a woman. You couldn‟t catch any clue as to

his or her state of mind, either - all you could do was think of

how you‟d feel if it were you.

„Ten‟ll get you seven it‟s the mines,‟ said Mico.

„I call the snipers,‟ said Joey.

„I‟m not playing,‟ said Annie. „It‟s sick and I‟m not playing.‟

That left me with the shells, so I didn‟t say a thing. We

watched the figure for the sake of something to watch. After a

while there was a detonation and a distant squealing.

Depending on how much of the lower body had gone, it could

be any time before he or she actually died.

„It‟s almost always the mines,‟ said Mico. „That‟s why I

always pick „em.‟

„That‟s why you always nip in quick with them,‟ said Joey.

One of these days we‟d crack it. One of these days we‟d get

out. And one of these days pigs would be taking airfare.

CHAPTER 6

The trouble with writing a subjective account is that it‟s a

constant balancing act between recalling what I knew at the

time, and the true facts of matters as they eventually came to

light - indeed, have in a large part become, if not common

knowledge, then at least incorporated into the mythos of our

common interstellar world. I‟ve mentioned a few famous

people - Figures of Historical Importance, even - and you,

reading this, are no doubt wondering whether anybody could

possibly be so dense as not to have noticed it at the time. The

point is, as I say, I‟m talking about what I or anybody else

knew of them at the time.

Likewise, you have to dance a line between simple

exposition and the overexplication of every single thought,

impulse and self-contradictory motive that goes through the

head with even the simplest of acts. The reasonably attentive

reader might, for example, be wondering why I had chosen to

begin my mission on an entirely different planet and in a

manner that seems so superficially dumb in almost every

respect. The reasonably attentive reader has a point. Why go

to all that trouble just to end up being dragged off in

manacles?

Well, the first reason was, as I‟ve said, that Thanaxos was

relatively advanced in the sense that it had connections to

the galactic networks. The lines of communication were

basic, but they were there. This was something of a blessing

and a curse - at least it was a factor that I had to take into

account. Anything I did on Thanaxos overtly was going to be

known, the instant I did it, by anyone who had an interest.

The tortuous route I‟d taken, the scrupulous cleaning of

identifiability, was an attempt to slide out from under that for

a while, in the hope that it worked well enough for long

enough.

The second reason was far more concrete. Bernice

Summerfield seemed to be the best lead I had; I wanted to

talk to her; and the last recorded thing that anyone had seen

of her was in escaping Dellah. The vast majority of those

escaping had hit Thanaxos as their first port of call, had been

treated as stateless refugees and promptly placed in mass

detention. Subsequent official records of them were buried.

I had no idea, at this point, whether Summerfield was alive

or dead, but this was the best place to pick up the trail. My

major intention, in arriving upon Thanaxos in the way I did,

was to put myself on to the precise same track and see where

it led. It had to be finely judged - I had to come over as some

easily disposable off-world annoyance, but not such an

annoyance or active threat that I‟d be liquidated on the spot.

And, if I say so myself, I made a damned good job of it.

The reason I‟ve gone into the whys and wherefores of my

plans, here, in all their exhaustive and tedious detail, is that

said plans went tits up in remarkably short order. It was my

fault entirely. If there‟s a flaw in my otherwise perfect,

rounded and almost entirely laudatory nature, it‟s a touch of

that special breed of arrogance that what you might call a

galactic sophisticate has for planetary cultures in general.

You might have noticed. The sort of thing where one confuses

the tourist quarter of a city for the city itself, or will blithely

walk out into a planet‟s polar regions in sun hat and shorts

on the basis that said planet is famous for its tropical

beaches. Or you might wander through sacred burial

grounds, secure in the knowledge that the local religion is

extremely silly and couldn‟t really be taken seriously by

anyone. The sort of thing, in short, that in other times and

climes had the Little White Rajahs thinking of the Sepoys as

nothing more than wilful children, and certainly incapable of

posing any kind of serious problem to – quote - civilized men.

Everybody‟s got a tang of this to some extent, and the nasty

thing about it is that it creeps up on you unawares. In my

case, in my first dealings with Thanaxos, I made an error in

my thinking so fundamental that I didn‟t see it until it was

too late - and it damn near gave me my comeuppance.

The off-worlder detention complex didn‟t have a name as

such - you need at least two of something before it needs a

name. The various boroughs and townships and hamlets of

Thanaxos dealt with criminals in their own ways, and the

majority of those ways, not to put too fine a point upon it,

tended to make places for long-term incarceration

unnecessary. The off-worlder complex had been built, on the

one hand, to avoid the stellar-level censure that would result

from the full-scale execution of undesirable transients and,

on the other, to prevent said transients infecting the local

population with their undesirable foreign ways. It consisted

of a floating platform, held up by huge and impermeable

tungsten-shell pontoons full of helium, tethered to what had

once been a petrochem rig, a hundred miles offshore of the

land mass that accommodated the Than axon global capital.

Look at it on the map and you‟d think - as I subconsciously

had, looking at it on the Star of Afrique’s datapack

schematics - that getting off the thing and back to dry land

would be a doddle. Look down at the cold and raging sea

below, and you realized the truth of the matter, the fact that

the only way in or out for anything was by airlift. The

choppers came once a local week (six Earth days, more or

less) to drop off new detainees, take rather fewer of the old

ones away, to dump a load of foodstuffs and other

consumables and to top up the helium. The second week, I

hung off an aluminium honeycomb girder and watched them

do it, by way of a kind of narrow-gauge and flexibly

segmented metal pipe, manoeuvred by an arrangement of

rods and wires that made it look like a puppet elephant‟s

trunk on a string. Good for a laugh, if you were that way

inclined, but way out of reach for any thoughts of grabbing it

and hanging off it for an informal trip back to shore.

The week before, I‟d assured myself that there was no hope

of getting close to the chopper when it actually landed to

exchange detainees. Those going in were blindfolded, booted

out of a hatch while still four metres in the air and hustled

off the landing pad before they quite knew what was

happening. The chopper then put down and those going the

other way - those who survived - were taken to it under

guard and under watchful weapons-tracking systems.

There was only one way on to the pad, a gantry twenty

metres straight, and anyone who tried to cross it without

matching the record-stills of that week‟s discharged prisoners

precisely, or even went near it save at that one time a week,

would be shot on sight. A list of those to be discharged for

their hearings was posted in the complex every week by the

Guard Service - and, if you happened to miss your particular

week, well tough luck. You were stuck here for good.

In the years since Thanaxos had opened up to galactic

trade, the detention complex had evolved into a kind of self-

enclosed community in its own right - a violent and

incredibly dangerous community given the nature of most of

those who were dumped here in the first place. People don‟t

realize quite how easy it is to slip into a kind of collective

madness when you‟re bottled up in close proximity to others,

self-contained, with no way of judging the appropriateness of

an act other than in terms of itself. In the small scale it‟s

called cabin fever, and guys chop up their companions with

an ice saw. On the larger scale you can see it in those

centuries of chronic warfare you tend to get on planets before

space flight, subsets of the species fighting over a finite

amount of territory. I first saw it directly back when I was a

kid, in the blockaded city in which I‟d grown up. You lock

people up together and the next thing you know they‟re at

each other‟s throat, the step-by-step process from one state to

another seeming so low-key and natural at the time that you

don‟t quite notice what you‟re doing till it‟s done and the

blood‟s all over you.

The lack of high-power weapons that could have turned it

into full-scale slaughter meant that the situation in the

complex operated at a cutoff level of violence, from which it

couldn‟t escalate. Effective power was in the hands of gangs,

who fought constantly for supremacy, and the only way for

the common run of any new intake to survive was to be

adopted by one or another of them. As for the guards

themselves, their only duty was to prevent people from

escaping. They watched the access point and patrolled the

perimeter with lethal force, but left those within to stew in

their own compounded juice.

Personally, I did what I‟ve pretty much always done. I

declined the offers of various clans to join them, dealt with

their reaction to that, and then dealt with their slightly more

extreme reaction to my dealing with the first one. I made sure

that I didn‟t actually kill anyone - the last thing I wanted was

an intermural vendetta on my hands - and let it be known

that I would entertain one-off jobs for food and in return for

being left alone. The trick, as ever, was to make it just that

much more preferable, to every faction, to leave me walking

around as a possible resource rather than to wipe me out as

a possible threat to everyone.

* * *

In the third week after my arrival I was hauling myself along

the underside of the structure by way of ropes, clamp hooks

and crampons I‟d devised from the local materials. In

addition to food, the Thanaxon authorities supplied a

minimum degree of resources that would keep the prison-

economy ecology of the complex ticking over, and the specific

stuff I‟d used to make this makeshift mountaineering

equipment isn‟t important. Plaited blanket fibre, shapes cut

out from tin plates with shears, crimped and slotted together

to strengthen them, that sort of thing.

Below me, the sea heaved. Between me and it, something

like a hundred metres below, curved down one of the tensile

steel lines that tethered the entire complex to the oil rig

below. I suppose, if one judged the fall right, one could have

simply dropped off, grabbed the line and slithered down it.

That is, if one wouldn‟t mind having one‟s arms wrenched out

of their sockets trying to grab the line, maybe even lopped in

half by it if one hit it badly, skinning several kilograms of

viscera off on the slide down and ending up lying, with every

bone in one‟s body broken, tangled up in the wreckage of an

on-site petrochemical refinery and with nowhere else to go

from there. The good news was that I didn‟t have to look out

for Guard Service fliers, but that was simply because they

knew that nobody was stupid enough to be down here in the

first place.

I‟d done a number of odd jobs by this time, small-scale

stuff and nothing worth mentioning. A bit of bodyguarding, a

bit of leaning, you know the drill. This job was of a higher

order, so far as that was possible in this microcosmic world:

a snatch job - or possibly a resnatch. The R‟Kanrak clan had

lost someone who was under their wing to the T‟galk clan

and they wanted him back. (Those names mean precisely sod

all, incidentally, except in the absolutely literal sense of „three

small lemur-like creatures of a certain sort found only on the

distinctively shaped peninsula of the major southern

continent of Zaijax‟ and the like. The neural webs grafted to

the neocortex that allow me to pull meanings out of any

number of different languages are set to simply stream them

to me as the basic sounds.)

The guy I was after had been „won‟ in one of the ritualized

interclan battles as a kind of hostage-wager, and the

R‟Kanrak were adamant that the T‟galk had cheated in some

abstruse way. I couldn‟t give a toss about the quasi-legality of

it, personally. The reason I was interested was that this guy

was one of the refugees from St Oscar‟s, a research chemist -

and the value of such people to the clans was in their ability

to find uses for the diminutive resources of the complex, from

brewing ethanol from bread-and-water rations to the

fashioning of primitive power weapons. His value to me, of

course, was as a source of information, and possibly a lead to

the elusive Summerfield.

Thus far, for all my searching and asking around, I‟d found

no trace of her. Possibly it was my own personal response to

the cabin-fever-like mass psychosis I‟ve talked about, or

maybe it was brain-chemistry imbalance brought about by

the bad and vitamin-free prison diet, but over the past weeks

Summerfield had gone from a simple place to start, a lead to

follow just to see if it led anywhere, to a kind of emotional

Grail.

I kept a kind of vision of her in my head, a composite of the

stills from the data files: the long and slender neck, the

quirky, slightly too-big mouth that seemed perpetually

caught between solemnity and a spontaneously wicked grin,

the eyes that were... inexpressible. Even in the stills

something informed them, lived behind them; you couldn‟t

talk about the slightly wounded look they had, the hint of

mischief, the potential for a sudden flash of anger, humour

or spite, for the simple reason that you can‟t detail every

single shifting of mood and expression, over the course of

years, of a person that you‟ve known for years.

I don‟t mean I fell in love with Bernice Summerfield from

her pictures or anything, or that I‟d become obsessed by her,

but she‟d become a kind of Real Person in my head. A sort of

imaginary mental friend, who helped me through the misery

and friendless life in the complex.

Objectively, of course, she was still just a person I wanted

to find and pump for information. I really wanted to meet her,

though, on the purely personal level. I pictured her in her

leathers and with her throwing knives, her quick wit and full-

on lethal response to any threat of danger. That tended to

preclude the idea that she had even been here in the first

place, though. If even half of the stories about her were true,

and she‟d been here, then, far from dying some nameless and

anonymous death, she should have been damned near

running the place by now.

One thing was for sure: that muscle-bound dimwit Jason

didn‟t deserve someone like her...

The sanitary arrangements of the complex had been designed

to be as simple and as maintenance-free as possible. They

were, quite frankly, a series of wide and strategically placed

pipes that ran straight down through the structure to dump,

as it were, into midair and then the sea below. They were

wide enough to fit a human body - the Thanaxon designer

realizing that a primary danger of blockage would come from

people trying to stuff human bodies down holes that weren‟t

quite wide enough. I crawled along until I found one that, by

my reckoning, should take me up directly into T‟galk

territory, putting me past their guarded perimeter, and began

to climb up it. And the less said about that the better.

The name of the ex-chemist was Professor Sabron Jones. I

found him in a cell guarded by a couple of minor-league and

inattentive T‟galk bravos, whom I dispatched by the simple

expedient of smacking the brain stem, first the one and then

the other when he came over to see what was going on. One

of the bravos was basically human, with the minor variations

that come from a colony gene pool: bony temple-ridges and

greenish mottling down the sides of the throat. The other was

a Draal from one of the ocean-world colonies - a kind of

bipedal arthropod, it‟s body and limbs covered with a jointed,

crab-shell carapace. You can deliver a disabling or killing

blow, however, by using soft-karate techniques to transmit

the force into the soft matter beyond.

I wasn‟t about to kill anybody here - but let‟s be clear about

this. The idea that people can wander around getting

smacked in the head, plunging into blackness and then

waking up just in time for the Next Exciting Episode, is

complete and utter toss. A head injury severe enough to

make you lose consciousness does brain damage, to some

extent or other. As I said, I didn‟t want to kill anybody, but

then again I didn‟t want them getting up again any time

soon. I hit the bravos hard enough to ensure that they

weren‟t going to be much use for anything afterwards.

Professor Sabron Jones wasn‟t looking good. He might have

been valuable to the T‟galk in one sense, but in another he

was just the kind of overrefined, eggheaded weakling that

they would innately regard as a victim. He had not been

treated well. In late middle age to start with, he was

emaciated with the catastrophic weight, teeth and hair loss of

active starvation, as opposed to mere chronic malnutrition.

The flesh of his cheeks had shrivelled to a kind of thin and

bloodless membrane, the incipient stages of that catastrophic

weight-loss condition that eats holes in them.

Short rations weren‟t the worst of it: he had suffered a

series of severe beatings, both at the hands of his original

captors and now these new ones - he was covered with

contusions and welts. Some were half healed, and the only

thing that stopped the later ones from being stomach-turning

was that his body was too wasted to kick in with the various

biological damage-containment processes that can make

injuries look worse than they are. It might seem strange,

given my line of work, that I can get queasy about such

things - but the point is that such things have to be done

cleanly, and sparingly, and always with some purpose in

mind. The damage to Jones was just brutal, clumsy and

mindless. This had been done simply because he was weak

and it had amused someone stronger to do so. My better-

dead list notched up a number of new candidates on the

spot.

Jones cowered away from me, gibbering, and so I went into

my nonthreatening routine: „It‟s OK, Professor Jones, I‟m a

friend. I‟m here to help you.‟ One of the common mistakes in

reassurance, incidentally, is to say you‟re not going to hurt

someone and the like - which instantly concentrates the

mind upon the word in question. „I‟m here to help.‟ I told him.

„I‟m here to save you.‟

The combination of posture, tone of voice and cumulatively

meaningless platitudes seemed to mollify him. He looked up

at me with the kind of trapped eyes you normally only see in

the terminally senile, his mouth working feebly. A vague

murmuring came out that my translators tagged as

„indistinguishable muttering‟ and filtered out.

Time to push my own agenda a bit „Before we go. I have to

know some things. You were on Dellah. Something happened

on Dellah. What happened on Dellah, Professor Jones?‟

He flinched each time I said the name, as though I had

physically slapped him. The interrogational law-of-three,

however, the repeating of a key trigger word, did its job and

something spilt out:

„My prize begonias,‟ he said in a faint and reedy voice.

„You what?‟ I said, momentarily nonplussed. This didn‟t

seem to have any relevance to Dellah, chemistry, metallurgy

or anything useful at all.

„My begonias,‟ Jones repeated, in the calm, chatty and

surprisingly precise tones of the profoundly shocked, the

mind latching firmly on to some specific thought as a kind of

talisman against pain. „I grew them from seed, you know. As

a hobby. I won prizes for them. I kept them in the gazebo by

the Botany Department - and didn‟t old Chalmers make a

fuss about that! Contamination of local flora and fauna

indeed! Well I showed him...‟ Jones trailed off into a little

senile-gleeful chuckle at a minor victory in some long-gone

interdepartmental tussle.

I went along with him. „You grew begonias as a hobby?‟

Jones nodded happily. „I won prizes for them.‟

„I thought begonias were extinct,‟ I said. „How did you grow

begonias, then?‟

„A bunker,‟ Jones said. „A bunker on the Moon, an

emergency storage facility for Earth‟s DNA, lost and forgotten.

For thousands of years. They had samples of genetic material

there, for transplanting on the colonies. Embryos from

ocelots and elephants, seeds and bulbs of plants. Buried and

forgotten. Some of the samples were still viable. Miss

Summerfield dug them up and -‟

„Summerfield?‟ I cut in sharply, despite myself. „Bernice

Summerfield?‟

„Oh, do you know her?‟ Jones said brightly. „Lovely girl.

Lovely girl. She gave them to me. She knew that fool

Chalmers wouldn‟t be interested - oh no, not Chalmers. Far

too interested in keeping local food chains absolutely clean...

I... she gave the seeds to me. I grew them as a hobby. I won

prizes for them, you know...‟

There was, at this point, one question and one alone that

could be asked. „What happened to your begonias?‟ I asked.

„Gone... all gone. When the university was... it was, it was

there, you see. I won. And then it was... We didn‟t know.

Things were there, sleeping. Gods woke up and walked and

razed the university to the...‟ Jones worked his mouth,

blatting at it with a withered and trembling hand. I‟d diverted

his thoughts to the one thing he didn‟t want to think about,

and it was as if he was trying to force out something too big

for his mouth.

„You got out,‟ I said. „You got out and came here. What

about the others? What about Summerfield?‟

I don‟t quite know what I was expecting - but I was utterly

surprised by his reaction. Abruptly Jones stopped shaking,

and smiled at me with a kind of mad and deep and

beauteous joy.

„She‟s gone now,‟ he told me with absolute solemnity, but

with an underlying sense of what I can only describe as

rapture, like he was imparting to me the kind of Truth that

has pairs of people knocking on your door the moment you‟ve

got into the shower. „She‟s in Heaven and with God. I saw her

go, lifted up within the arms of an angel.‟

BACKGROUND INSERT (PERSONAL FILE):

Scenes from an Ordinary Childhood II

One of the weirder things I remember from old science-fiction

as a kid - the sort of stuff that said, in the Future, with a

capital F, we‟d all be zooming around in hyper-wobble ships,

eating chocolate made by nanites out of old socks and living

on Uranus - is not just the fact that they got things wrong,

but how they got things wrong in a certain and specific way.

They turned things, almost exactly, on their heads.

On the one hand the basic, animal humanity of people was

given a superficial, bolted-on exoticism - we‟d have all evolved

physically impossible telepathic powers, we‟d have slightly

anodyne

and

by-the-numbers,

polyamorous

sexual

arrangements that had every good point about them and

none of the bad, we‟d have every single one of us achieved

Enlightenment and stopped being racially, sexually and all

sorts of other kinds of bigoted on the dot of noon, 12 May

2154, and so on.

On the other hand, we‟d spend our lives being utterly

astounded by the simplest and most basic facts of the world

around us. „Gosh,‟ we‟d go around saying, „have you heard

that the new recycling plant and combined heat sink is going

on line tomorrow? That will help the power levels of this

particular part of the city immensely!‟ Or, „Aha! We are living

in an age of true galactographic expansion! Even now the

mighty behemoths of starships ply the ghusty depths of

space! The Manifest Destiny of the human race awaits!‟ Or,

„Dear me, how tedious it is to live in this totalitarian state

with the guards going by in their armoured trucks, clunky

Bakelite television sets on poles and nothing to eat but week-

old cabbages…‟

Neither and none of which, quite frankly, are what people

actually do. We‟re still just people, after all. We‟re far more

interested in the latest catchphrase that‟s doing the rounds

from some amusing holoshow: we‟re more interested in

smacking in the face of some creep who‟s just annoyed us by

looking at our girl in a funny way, or whether there are

actually going to be any cabbages in the shop this fortnight.

The basic conditions of the worlds in which we find ourselves

fade into the background. If those conditions are even

remotely computable with life as we know it, we just get on

with it and live it. It‟s only when we have some basis for

comparison that we feel as though we want to die.

By the summer after Annie died, the EMG curfew was more

or less a formality. If you just happened to be out, and looked

as if you were minding your own business, the dogboys were

as likely to let you run as to shoot you on the spot. I kept an

eye out for street cleaners - and, believe me, in our world the

term took on a slightly different meaning than some guy with

a mobile trash bin and a broom - as I made my way towards

the Night Market My name was known, by now, and my face

was on the files. I took precautions.

Crawling over rooftops by way of sneaking up and down the

drainpipes and fire escapes that hadn‟t been scavenged for

their iron might sound incredibly dynamic and exciting, but

if you have to actually do it then it‟s just slow, interminable

and tortuous pain: I‟d started across the city at twilight and

it was long gone midnight by the time I reached the Night

Market. The smells of gasoline and cooking meat, the lights

and the sounds of warm bodies told me I was near before I

was even close.

The Night Market was situated in what had once been the

Bullring shopping centre. It was a free-zone, a place that was

allowed to operate after dark and, if we weren‟t too blatant

about it, a place where you could get black-market goods in

from the outside world, via the various nefarious ways that

black-market goods just seem to suddenly appear all the

time. Even the dogboys had finally cottoned on to the fact

that places like this simply have to exist, as a way to blow off

steam, like knocking a hole in a can of something before you

chuck it on the fire. They policed and regulated it, and

policed it hard, but they allowed it to exist.

It was a building that had been erected - on the cheap - on

the bomb site that had been its predecessor, and several

floors had fallen in to give the place a cavernous aspect, lit by

the flickering light of braziers and the jittery light from banks

of headlights scavenged from derelict cars, hooked up to the

sputtering bulk of a slightly malfunctioning generator. (I

remember a time when I was a little kid and I was taken to a

funfair. The generator here reminded me of those that

powered the rusty and clapped-out-looking rides that, even

at that age, I knew better than to even want to go on.)

Even so, even now, when I go through some low-tech-world

bazaar, my first thought is of the Night Market. Makeshift

stalls were piled with bolts of cloth and rugs and complicated

strings of trinkets. Stacks of battered old books and third-

hand clothing, old and easily portable bits of furniture and

objets d’art. The scent of sizzling contraband meats, from

chicken and lamb to genuine horse, swept over me; saliva

spurted into my mouth, my stomach yawed and I felt that I

might almost faint from the hunger. I wasn‟t here to eat,

however - or, for that matter, to take advantage of the rather

fetching array of young women and boys who were on offer,

ranged in their own corner in cobbled-together damask and

fur and cracked scraps of jewellery.

I was here to meet someone on the fringes - that strange

little edge-world that lives between the sort of commerce of

whores, drugs and violence-for-money, and the sort of

commerce that buys you your food, power and house. This is

the sort of world where you can buy bongs, say, when

cannabis-derivatives you could smoke in them are illegal, an

aromatherapy massage equidistant between the clinical and

the sexual, and any number of things that are, when it comes

right down to it, about as much use as a chocolate nob.

I‟m talking about a world where you pay over the odds to

have someone slap down a ratty pack of pasteboard cards

and then say Death doesn‟t really mean death, literally. A

world where some ineptly riveted-together amalgam ankh

suddenly jumps in value by a couple of hundred per cent,

because somebody‟s spit on it the right way and tuned it to

your aura. A world, to cut it short, where people make their

livings by selling dreams made out of shit.

Believe me, I‟m not knocking it. On a hundred planets,

under regimes and conditions you couldn‟t imagine unless

you‟ve been there yourself, I‟ve seen people selling those

kinds of dream - and known that, however bad things might

be, they could have been one hell of a lot worse. It‟s a sign

that people want and need and can still make things, even if

they make them out of nothing.

At some point, a bunch of old railway sleepers had been

dragged into the Night Market, and piled up in a kind of

crazily interlocking ziggurat. The patched-together construct

was longer than it was broad, and along one long side of it

were pitched the dealers in the intangible: the holy idiots,

prophets, soothsayers and fortune-tellers. Even here, there

was a pecking order - it was like one of those streets you get

in any city in miniature, one of those streets devoted to a

single product or craft, the better side of it at one end, the

lowest of the low at the other.

I walked on past the ragged and skeletal wretches with

bowls to catch crusts given in pity for their psychosis, past

the hellfire-and-damnation crowd and the speedy-looking

cybermancers, with their cargo-cult mosaics of techno-

garbage that didn‟t work, and found myself before a kind of

open tent, built from sacking stitched with astrological signs

and supported by the kind of desiccated bamboo poles that

might once have adorned some nice little suburban garden.

Within the relative murk of the tent, lit by squat and

dribbling tallow candles that seemed to make it darker than

anything, was a woman. She was well past middle age -

which in the world we lived in made her something like an

Elder if not an actual Ancient. She was wrapped up in a

ragged sari, threads of fuse wire weaving in and out of the

cloth. Her hair was brittle, coming loose in patches from the

scalp above a lined and somewhat scaly forehead. Her eyes

were sharp. It was her that I had come to see.

She flicked her sharp eyes towards a three-man dogboy

patrol working their way through the crowd, judged that they

were too far away to be a consideration, turned her attention

back to me and nodded almost imperceptibly. I sat down on

the splintered sleeper-wood before the tent. „Evening, Megan.‟

„Allo, pet.‟ Megan leered rather theatrically at me, exposing

yellowed stumps of teeth, and gave me a broad wink. „What

brings you out on this most star-crossed night? A philtre? A

yen for knowledge of things to come, of which a mortal man

should never ken? You want me to make you up a chart?‟ In

a time when accents meant anything, hers was a strange

kind of cross between the Wolverhampton and the Welsh -

with a large dose of sarcasm thrown in for good luck.

„I‟d rather have my hand felt, Megan,‟ I said.

„My lucky night. Come close.‟

I shifted forward and held out my hands. She felt the

palms, kneading them a little, first one and then the other,

with dry and strangely scratchy fingers.

„Now that‟s a lifeline and a half,‟ she said cheerfully. „Years

left yet in you? I think so...‟

„Pigs fly, Megan,‟ I told her.

„New shipment came through. And look at all those breaks

in the heart line. You‟re playing fast and loose. You playing

fast and loose with your best girl, lover?‟

„As if I would, Megan,‟ I said. „Source?‟

„You are that. Old Provo cache. One of those Mickey Mouse

outfits that wouldn‟t take a telling after the ceasefire.‟

„Ceasefire?‟ I said.

„Way before your time. You wouldn‟t understand. They were

going to take it out on to the streets personal, like, but they

never got around to it. Yes, those are definitely the hands of a

heartbreaker, young fella me lad. The stuffs thirty years old if

it‟s a day, but they greased and wrapped it nice and tight. It‟s

usable.‟

Across the Market, the dogboys were homing in on some

guy selling salted fish from a tray. There didn‟t seem to be

any reason for it rather than the hell of it. Maybe they‟d seen

the doomed look about him - or maybe the doomed look had

come upon him when he‟d seen them coming.

„Anything I can use?‟ I asked Megan.

„I know what calibres you‟ve got, and I know how many

favours you‟re owed. Fifteen rounds, point thirty-eight, and

you‟re getting the best of it.‟

„Good enough,‟ I said sourly. If it hadn‟t been good enough

it would have just been tough shit. „Want me to cross your

palm with silver?‟

„What do you think?‟ said Meg.

The trick here, incidentally, is to do it slow, relaxed and

smooth. You want to talk about something, you talk about it

in the exact same way as you‟d talk about anything else.

Likewise, the package Megan had passed me had been in

plain view for quite a while - at least, I wasn‟t trying to

conceal it in that kind of guilty way that draws the eye like a

magnet. It was just something I happened to be holding.

Now I put it in the pocket of my jacket, and came back out

again with a coin. I forget precisely what it was, and it was

absolutely worthless in any case. Nobody used cash any

more, and you could find bits and pieces of it scattered

around all over the place. It was the posture of transaction,

the fact that it was a token of my paying back a couple of

favours to various people, that was important. I tossed the

coin to Megan, who plucked it from the air and peered at it

critically.

„I can remember when that would buy you a big meat pie

and a bus ride,‟ she said.

„What days they must have been,‟ I said.

„Don‟t knock „em,‟ said Megan. Abruptly, she became

serious. I was a little startled. I‟d never really seen her

without her ingrained patina of sod-you irony before. „By the

way, I‟ve heard a little bird. There‟s people looking for you.‟

„Same as ever, Megan,‟ I said.

„I mean seriously. Actively. Asking around by name.‟ She

looked at me - and I got one of those little flashes you get,

when you realize that someone you just happen to know and

banter with genuinely likes you, and is concerned for you.

„You be careful going home.‟

As I walked off I saw that the dogboys were still kicking at

the fish-seller, who had long since lost any sense of

coherence and was just sort of squealing that it wasn‟t his

fault, over and over again. I knew how he felt.

It was nearly dawn by the time I made it back to the fire-

gutted tenement I was currently calling home. There was that

greenish nimbus on the skyline that was one of the results of

all the weird things that had been done to the atmosphere of

Earth in the last few decades, from the cumulative releasing

of chemical weapons into it, to the detonation of dirty-cobalt

bombs inside it. The greenish tinge, I later learnt, was a

result of fallout from a nuclear detonation in one or other of

the new Western Europe city-states in the last two weeks,

and it might have been a good idea to get under deep cover

and get qualified medical help as soon as possible. There was

none of either available, of course, and I didn‟t know I should

have them in the first place.

Besides, as it turned out, I wouldn‟t have had the time to

take advantage of them in any case.

Megan‟s warning had hit home. I thought I‟d perfected the

knack of moving inconspicuously through the world, but I

had stayed in the same place for too long. Keep on moving

and you knock back all those little threads of association

that accrete about you - not by anything you do, but by the

simple fact of being there and alive – without even being

aware of it. It was long past time to tie the spotted hanky on

the stick again and blow.

If people were looking for me, my best bet would have been

to simply walk away from it, to pick a direction from the

Night Market at random - any direction other than the one

where I actually lived - and just keep on walking. The

problem was that my weapons cache was there in the house,

and how many years would it take to accumulate a new one?

It wasn‟t as if it had been easy for a civilian to get firearms in

the first place, even before the dogboys sealed the cracks.

Standard punishment for so much as carrying one, let alone

intent to trade, was a waistcoating - and if you don‟t know

what a „waistcoat‟ is then, believe me, you never want to. It

had taken over as their favourite from necklacing, the rubber

inner tubes of old tyres being increasingly hard to come by.

Plus there were still some bits and pieces Annie had given me

in the house - nothing much important, but I didn‟t want to

lose them if I could help it.

I don‟t want to come on like I went back to pick up my stuff

out of some kind of doomed and noble sentiment – I mean,

the house was where I‟d started from on my trip to the

Market and the people who were looking for me would have

been looking for me even then. I just simply decided it was

worth dropping back in before I moved on. I clambered over a

low wall of fractured brick, slid back one of the loose boards

over a window and slipped inside.

A couple of dogboys were waiting inside. It was almost

pitch-dark, but I knew they were dogboys because they, were

fitted out with snoopers. In the holomovies, someone kitted

out with the things can move through the dark with complete

invisibility, but in real life that isn‟t so. There‟s a tiny and

very faint glow of visible light back-reflected from the

phosphor in the eyepieces through the lenses, and a little

electrical hum that is utterly distinctive.

I just had time to recognize the little glow and hum before a

muzzle-flash went off to knock out all my rods and cones and

something detonated in my guts. I might have lived for up to

half an hour in that condition, as I‟d seen people do, but the

shock of it stopped my heart, and killed me stone-cold dead.

CHAPTER 7

Just my pissy bloody luck, basically. I‟d come to Thanaxos,

miscalculated completely and ended up in this hellhole for

almost a month, only to be told by this mad old bugger that

the one positive lead I had was a complete dead end.

Professor Sabron Jones was looking at me, his flash of

rapture wiped away as suddenly as it had come, to be

replaced by stark and abject terror. He‟d no doubt caught the

flash of rage that had me wanting, above all else, to give him

a smacking that would make his previous beatings look like a

chuck under the chin.

I quashed it instantly. It wasn‟t Jones‟s fault that

Summerfield was dead, and he could hardly be blamed for

the experiences of the last few months turning him to

religious monomania. Besides, I had a job to do.

„Come on, chum,‟ I told him, lifting him up by the scruff of

die neck and dragging him from the cell. „Let‟s get you back

to where you came from.‟

„Are you taking me home?‟ he said, in the kind of plaintive

voice that had me picturing his visions of going back to his

childhood, his childhood home and his mother, as if they

were my own. I resolved there and then that, once we were

out of T‟galk territory, I would hide him somewhere rather

than take him back to the R‟Kanrak clan. I‟d tell „em I‟d been

forced to eliminate him, and sell it as being necessary to keep

him from falling back into their enemies‟ hands. It would be a

dangerous move - and the last thing I needed in this place

was a hanger-on with an extra mouth to feed - but what the

hell. Sometimes things stick themselves in your face and you

just can‟t walk away. Besides, looking at the wreck that had

once been Professor Sabron Jones, I judged that he would

last only another couple of days, tops, in any case, and I

might just be able to pump out some last dregs of

information before he died. I‟m just an incredible softy old git

at heart, basically.

I hauled him back to the waste disposals, unhooked one of

my makeshift ropes from my shoulder and tied one end to a

bit of exposed stanchion pipe. Jones caught on to the idea as

I tied the other end around him in an impromptu sling. He

started to struggle, so I was forced to simply shove him down

the hole and grab the rope before he fell too far, then lowered

him until the slack was taken up. With a bit of luck, he‟d

now be hanging off the underside of the complex, twisting

merrily in the wind and waiting for me to haul him in when I

emerged from the bottom of the pipe myself.

Some hopes. The line was too short and he ended up

hanging in the pipe itself and wailing. I wouldn‟t have

thought a man, and especially a man in the condition in

which Jones had been, could have made such sheer noise.

Almost instantly I heard other noises that might have been

quieter, but crystallized the attention far more than the

noises coming from below. Through the twisting corridors

and openings of T‟galk territory came the stirrings and

shouts of puzzled and waking alarm at hearing Jones‟s cries,

I heard running feet, and shouting; caught the first flicker of

movement in a doorway. There was no time to make a secure

line for myself so I did the only thing that was possible: I

jumped into the pipe.

For maybe twenty metres I slithered down it, splaying

myself and bracing forearms and the fleshy flats of shins

against the sides. In the end it was Jones who saved me - or,

rather, the tension of the rope from which he was hanging

against my chest - it skinned it royally, but it slowed my

momentum until I could find stable purchase on the pipe.

Now, if you‟re wondering just precisely what I could find to

grip on in a smooth pipe, then just think of how a toilet

occasionally gets when you don‟t scrub it on a regular basis

and don‟t ask me again.

Above me, amplified and reverberating so that they were

almost a match for the wailing below, I heard the sounds of

confusion and anger. The T‟galk were awake, had found the

state of the guards and the missing state of Jones. Fuck „em,

quite frankly. There was nothing they could do about it now.

Of course, there was something they could do about it. I

will swear to the death, under torture, brainwashing or

taking me back in time to physically prove it isn‟t so, that the

T‟galk cut the rope that was tethering Jones. It wasn‟t a

question of my making it too weak - I wouldn‟t have trusted it

with myself otherwise - and it wasn‟t due to the extra stress

I‟d put on it by my own descent. So far as I‟m concerned, they

just knew it was supporting Jones, his re-abductor or both,

and so they just cut it.

Either way, the broken end of the rope whipped past me

and made me lose my grip for a couple of metres before I

managed to slow myself to a stop again. The now almost

constant wailing of what had once been Professor Sabron

Jones suddenly switched to a kind of diffuse and fading

scream as, below, he dropped out of the tube and fell to his

death in the sea below. Maybe he was sliced in half by one of

the wires that anchored the detention complex itself, as I‟d

worried that I would be. I don‟t know. The screams had

Dopplered away to nothingness, even to my own personal

aural enhancements, long before that point.

Either way, if I had thought that I had anything left to learn

from the guy, it would have to wait until I was lifted on high

upon the wings and in the arms of an angel myself.

I‟d love to say that I got out of the detention complex by dint

of the courage, resourcefulness and sheer stick-to-it genius

that are my watchwords. I‟d love to say that, with a mind like

a tungsten trap, the eye of a hawk and the perseverance of a

minaret-building weevil of Galos XIV, I spotted the fatal flaw

of its construction and its infrastructure, bided my time and

then, at the propitious moment, via precise and complicated

and incredibly heroic means, made my escape.

Reality don‟t work like that. In reality, I got out by one of

those deus ex machina events that happen to us every day

but, if this were fiction, nobody would believe it for a second.

The death of Sabron Jones, though unfortunate, didn‟t

mean much in the scheme of things. There was no comeback

from the R‟Kanrak, his death suiting their purposes almost

as well. It didn‟t do them any good, but it tipped the balance

back from the T‟galk‟s unfair advantage. In the normal course

of events I would have simply shrugged it off. On top of

everything else, though, it was the final straw. It was as if I‟d

somehow returned to some abstract of a trapped and

hopeless, brutalizing childhood... and what came after.

Everything I‟d seen, or been, or done had come again to

nothing and there was no way out. There would never be a

way out.

And so I reverted. Something inside me just turned up its

toes and gave up. I gave up on any pretence of working, stole

food from people when I could and got into a series of vicious,

pointless fights. I didn‟t actually kill anyone, but I came

damned close to it a number of times. The days blurred into

each other and I lost track of time; I had no use for it, any

more than a snow leopard prowling the tundra needs to know

what day of the month it is. I didn‟t care who I offended now,

and if I‟d known that there were prison contracts out on me

then my reaction would probably have been „Good! When?‟

It was in this general mental state that I was wandering

through one of the communal areas, a hall-like space packed

with tiers of scaffolding, in which the inmates came to trade

whatever sorry wares they had. A scrap of meat for a handful

of raw tubers. Trash metal fashioned into tools for a tobacco

stash. Sexual favours for protection. The postures of

commerce and barter, even though there was next to nothing

to barter with.

I walked through the crowd, aware, without putting much

importance on it, that people were getting the hell out of my

way. I grabbed a stick of jerky from some guy or other and

was automatically cuffing him as he protested, when I

became aware of a commotion over to one side.

Guards were spilling into the chamber in a kind of double

wave, the first front shoving back the crowd with billy clubs

and riot-gear shields, while those behind covered them with

automatic weapons, should some bright spark decide to try

his or her luck. It wasn‟t really necessary: the crowd was

offering no resistance - not out of surprise so much as a kind

of collective astonishment. The difference between the two

was the fact that this happening, the appearance of guards

this deep in die complex, was so utterly at odds with the way

things were that people seemed at a loss as to how to react in

any way at all.

„They come to kill us!‟ squeaked the guy from whom I‟d

taken the food. „Come to kill us all!‟

The knock-on effect of his fear took hold in those around

us - it‟s quite interesting to watch it as it spreads out from

the starting point where you happen to be. It‟s like a sort of

sonic version of watching ripples on a pond. I found myself

shoving through the crowd, trying to get a closer and better

look at what was going on. The fact that this would put me

closer to any hypothetical firing line didn‟t even occur to me;

this was the first event after weeks of violent drudgery, and

something inside me was starving for it.

After the guards had cleared a space, a group of other

figures came through the hatch - human holocam and sound

technicians in those bright, fluorescent, orange coveralls that

mark them out the galaxy over as noncombatants in

whatever war, upheaval, civil disturbance or societal purging

they happen to be covering. A news crew from one of the big

outfits, DataDay or FNN, one of those guys. These people can

move through situations that would kill the rest of us stone-

cold dead with an almost complete impunity. One reason for

this is that, in the purely physical sense, they remain entirely

impartial - they might show a burning baby, and say

precisely what they think about that, but they wouldn‟t put it

out. The other reason is that they have the backing and

resources to make people, let us say, regret attacks upon

their person - by way of the sort of reprisals that stop just

short, on the scale of lethality, at Extreme Prejudice. Those

incredibly distinctive and unmissable coveralls I mentioned

are of a precise hue that the camera can‟t pick up - and

that‟s as good a metaphor for the interesting societal

dichotomy that these people represent.

(Note to self: It‟s far too early in the morning to ponce on

about interesting societal dichotomies. Don‟t do it again.)

The technician fussed around for a while setting up, and

then a final figure emerged from the hatch. Dark and female,

dressed in sloppy-looking combat greens reminiscent of a

guerrilla, but cleaned and pressed and couture-designed to

within a micron of their lives. The living spit of a hard-bitten

trouble-spot journo that takes two hours in hair-and-make-

up and a couple of crocodile clips around the back to get

right. In one hand she held an overlarge and archaic-looking

mike that, over centuries, has become a kind of Sceptre of

Office rather than serving any kind of functional use. She

conferred with the main cameraman for a moment, then

positioned herself in front of his rig for a run-through.

If you‟ve ever faced a gun and survived, or been jerked back

from a precipice from which there was no hope other than to

fall, or jumped back from the path of some speeding twelve-

ton truck, you‟ll have some idea of how I felt at that point.

The miasma of depression into which I‟d sunk burst like a

detergent bubble and the light was back on again inside me,

just like that - a positive surge blasting from the pit of the

stomach to fill me to bursting. I only now became aware of

how withdrawn I‟d become, how remote from the world

around me and the specificity of it, when I snapped back to it

with a bang. It was the nearest thing I‟d ever come, I think, to

the kind of rapture I had seen in Sabron Jones.

Other people were still crowded and pressed against me. I

shoved them away without noticing or caring who or what

they were. I stuck my hands in the air and waved them.

„Sela!‟ I shouted at the top of my lungs. „Sela.‟

Several guards reacted first, swinging their weapons round

to track me. I saw a couple of them making ready to move

forward and haul me out and deal with me.

Then the woman‟s face snapped round. I was too far away

to see her eyes with any detail, but it was obvious from the

way her body jerked that she had recognized me, too. She

turned and stalked over to one of the armed guards,

obviously their squad commander, and hurriedly conferred

with him. He glared at her with taciturn suspicion and the

discussion became more heated, on the woman‟s part at

least, with a little bit of arm-waving thrown in for good

measure. Eventually the captain of the guard nodded, though

he didn‟t seem too happy about it. He motioned to three of

his men, and they broke formation, heading towards me

through the crowd and clubbing anyone who got too close

with their rifle butts. The weapons were attached to them by

lengths of chain, but I‟d have personally left them behind. I

hated to think what might happen if the mood of the crowd

chose this moment to change from puzzled shock to anger.

Fortunately it held.

What with one thing and another it took several minutes to

haul me back through the crowd and into the guard

perimeter. By the time I got there and the guards released me

with bad-tempered shoves, the woman was back in front of

the camera, speaking into her nonfunctional prop mike:

„ . . . sources in the Thanaxon parliament have remained

reticent as to the true nature of conditions for off-worlders in

what has been described as the “best-kept secret on

Thanaxos”. I now pass you over to our roving reporter, uh,

Humphrey Pipkin, who has been working undercover these

last few weeks to get a picture of the current situation.

Humphrey?‟

The cameraman tracked his rig to me, and I noticed with

some relief that it wasn‟t uploading in real time. I‟d be able to

get to the storage wafer before it shoved my bare face out on

to the galactic net. „Well, Sela,‟ I said, sliding my face, voice

and posture into the persona of a noble member of the

journalistic profession, haggard but quietly undefeated after

a job well done - and making a small mental note to pay her

back in spades for the Humphrey - „I first became aware of

what was happening here when I…‟

ATTACHMENT (SUPPLEMENTARY):

To: brown @ 135474.346.12.ccserv.dnet.com

From: pubterm@lunet.com

Organization: Archive News Services Bibliotheca

Subject: FYE

Dear Mr Brown

Here is the article as per your request.

-BEGIN-

MASS RELEASE HAUNTS THANAXOS

Report by FNN-DATANEWS Correspondent Dick Chancey,

Rakath, Thanaxos, F45

M‟rago Tan, a bar owner in Rakath, recalls the days when

transient control on Thanaxos was lax, and brawls and

murder were commonplace.

„The fights and murders were commonplace,‟ he says. „We

had just opened up to galactic contact, and we attracted the

scum of the galaxy, looking for a fast buck. Murderers, thugs

and all sorts. I never knew if I‟d have a bar by the end of the

night or a knife in my chest.‟ Tan lifts his shirt to show the

scars left by, he says, „a late-night meeting with a Thraal

machete‟.

Now, it looks as though these days are coming back.

Following the intervention of Sela Dane of DataDay News,

together with her so-called „special correspondent‟,

Humphrey Pipkin, it seems that the Thanaxon policy of

detention for galactic undesirables is up for review.

News of this impending mass release has brought a dramatic

increase in tension to the increasingly fractious Thanaxos -

already beset by problems due to the Dellahan Blockade and

its effects upon legitimate trade - as the fear grows that the

population, when confronted by this wave of hardened

criminals, will take the law into its own hands.

The Minister for Justice Pursuant to the Advisory Council of

the House Royal, K‟narom Veed, is sanguine. This will be

merely a procedural review, to ascertain the facts of matters

in each particular case.

„Pressures of administration mean that proper procedures

were not always followed,‟ he says. „Although we believe that

many of them are guilty of wrongdoing, we are obliged under

the norms of basic law to release them. If evidence then

emerges confirming their guilt, we will, of course, detain them

again.‟

His rival in the coming Advisory Council elections, A‟toth Nar,

is less forgiving. „Make no mistake, the vast majority of these

people are killers.‟ A‟toth Nar believes that the incumbent

members of the Council are lying when they say they lack the

evidence to detain these suspects. „This is a political decision,

not a legal decision.‟

An officer of the guard at the off-worlder detention complex

confirms that reactions to this move, among those who will

be forced to deal with it, is hostile. „These people are scum,‟

he says. „They‟re just scum. They should all the lot of them

be put down.‟

- transcript of DataDay broadcast filtered for text

transmission by Archive News Services Bibliotheca

-END-

To: brown@ 135474.346.12.ccserv.dnet.com

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Organization: [type your organization here]

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[to remove your name from this mailing list, type „remove‟ in

the header line and hit „send‟]

CHAPTER 8

I‟d first met Sela Dane when I‟d been hired by DataDay a few

years back, to retrieve her and her crew from a collection of

White Fire terrorists out in the Cool Star Hegemony - who

simply hadn‟t been able to get the rules and had taken them

hostage. The ins and outs of that affair aren‟t strictly relevant

here, but suffice it to say that we went through a lot back

then, and she saved my life a couple of times to my maybe

twenty of saving hers - but what the hell. I was getting paid

to do it and she wasn‟t. We formed an attachment.

Ostensibly, I was one of her so-called criminal-world

„contacts‟. You know the sort of thing in the holomovies: hot

young journalist or private dick comes running in saying, „My

contacts say there‟s a contract out on Angelface McBumfrey

„cause of what he did to the Don‟s sister,‟ and the like. Thing

is, things like that work both ways: it‟s like a symbiotic

relationship, not parasitic, and if you want to hold it together

then you‟re ready to help each other out at the drop of a

homburg with a press ticket stuck in it.

After hooking up with Sela, getting out of the detention

complex was simplicity itself. I did my bit to camera,

improvising about nothing much, secure in the knowledge

that nothing was going to make the final cut. The point was

just to be convincing for the guards. Then someone from the

crew found me a coverall, I hung around while they did the

location work and then just trooped off with everyone else to

the helipad and the waiting DataDay chopper. The fact that I

was a nobody, one of the „disappeared‟, the basic fact that

had made escape impossible for a month, now worked in my

favour. Nobody cared either way if I lived or died, and I

simply wasn‟t worth the trouble for any guard to make an

issue of detaining me now that my apparent status had been

redefined.

All the same, the prison-lag had really got to me -I didn‟t

realize quite how much until we‟d taken off and laid in a

course to the mainland. I just found that I was shaking, and

couldn‟t seem to stop myself. It must have looked worse to

Sela than it really was, because she stopped rapping with the

techs about the footage-editing, slithered over to the seat

next to mine and held herself to me.

„Jeez, boy!‟ she exclaimed after a while, shoving herself

away from me with a scowl (I was strapped into my seat,

remember, and she wasn‟t). „You look and smell like shit on

toast with extra shit and no toast. Don‟t you come near me.‟

I got that feeling where you want to cry, but don‟t dare start

because you‟re not sure, if you do, that you‟ll be able to stop.

I looked down at myself and did that very gentle breathing

through the nose that lets you smell something of yourself.

Up until that point I really hadn‟t realized how bad I had got.

„I could do with a bit of a wash and brush-up, I‟ll admit,‟ I

admitted. „Humphrey Pipkin?‟

„More like a shave, a sandblast and a sluice, mate,‟ said

Sela, wrinkling her nose and gagging in a way that seemed

theatrical, but only because the genuine reaction was so

extreme. „I think I‟ve caught lice just from looking. I had to

make a name up off the top of my head, didn‟t I? We get back

to the hotel and get you cleaned up, we‟re gonna have to

burn those clothes and then the room. We‟re gonna have to

get another one, and it‟s your fault, so you‟re fucking paying

my old son.‟

I honestly don‟t remember much about the next twenty-six

hours; I know what happened and what I did, but there are

just jumbled flashes of it happening and me actually doing it.

So in quick and point-to-point order:

Sela scrounged a bunch of munchies and carob and candy

bars from her crew and I wolfed them down, hardly stopping

to chew; I was ravenous. I like to think that the sweet-stuff

counteraction of my delayed-shock reaction balanced out the

insulin-shock of gorging sweet stuff after a month of all but

starving. The DataDay chopper hit Rakath, the capital city of

the main Thanaxos landmass, and landed on the roof of the

hotel - one of those swanky interstellar travellers‟ chain jobs

frequented by those swanky interstellar travellers who didn‟t

end up getting shoved in the poky the instant they landed.

Sela more or less dragged me to her suite and dosed me with

antibiotics and glucotics from her field reporter‟s kit, then

stripped me off, shoved me into the Jacuzzi and slathered me

with depilatory, insecticidal, antifungal and dermal

stimulation creams to deal with the worst and most

embarrassing effects of my month of incarceration. I then,

apparently, spent two hours wolfing my way through four of

the set high-protein meals of the sort intended for

honeymooners to keep their strength - which must have

induced a number of dark suspicions among the room-

service staff as to Sela‟s lifestyle – before crashing out into a

sleep so deep and dreamless that Sela was on the point of

calling paramedics before she found a pulse.

I woke up feeling better than I had in weeks. The various

medications and my bio-modifications had done their work: I

had bulked up and the surface of my skin felt raw and fresh,

pricking with the stubble of new hair. It was late afternoon.

Through the window I could overlook the Rakath

conurbation: a number of high edifices, with those slightly

uneasy, squat and blocky proportions that tall buildings

evidence when built on soft river-valley loam rather than a

granite island, interspersed through a sprawl of the more

common two- to four-storey structures. The architectural

landmarks had a kind of triumphalist quality, an abstract

use of human forms, like the tomb of Oscar Wilde set on its

side.

I buzzed up room service, pointedly ignored the liveried

waiter as he hovered by the door waiting for his tip, and

settled down to a trolleyful of all-day breakfast. My

metabolism was still hiked up in a healing cycle and I was

still ravenous.

Half an hour later, Sela came in. Her technical support

were now off doing whatever technical support do when

they‟re not technically supporting. She was still in the

designer combat gear that was her DataDay trademark, its

artfully contrived folds and rumples more pronounced and

slightly greasy after a day of hard work. Tomorrow she‟d

discard it and select another of the nearly twenty identical

sets of working clothes hanging in the closet. In one hand

she held one of those minicams a journo uses when going

solo, and draped over the other arm was a crinkly vegetable-

cellophane bag in which was sealed a dark, and off-the-peg

suit. She tossed both items on to the bed, wandered over to

me and planted a kiss on my stubbled head.

„The sleeper awakes,‟ she said.

„As he‟s ever going to be,‟ I told her around a mouthful of

the local equivalent of bacon, which seemed to consist of

vinegar-cured donkey. „You shouldn‟t have let me sleep like

that. There‟s things I should be doing.‟

„Yeah, well, I tried to kick you awake this morning before I

went out. You were completely dead.‟ Sela went over to a

bureau and pulled out a recorder pack. „Hang about for a few

minutes, will you? I‟ve got to download.‟ She wired the pack

into the socket behind her car. „Don‟t worry, I‟ll edit anything

sensitive and confidential out and EM-pulse it.‟ She smiled.

„I‟ve messed around with my journalistic ethics too much for

you already for it to make a lot of difference.‟

All DataDay front-end correspondents have their optic

nerves and aural centres wired to implanted storage wafers,

which store everything they see and hear on a rolling twenty-

six-hour basis, like a jar being filled from the top as it

empties from a hole in the bottom. Given that, you might

wonder why they still have to mess around with other

cameras and complete news crews. The simple answer is, of

course, that the implants show the scene from only one point

of view, you can‟t get shots of yourself with them - and there

are cases where the intimidation factor of a bunch of

technicians comes in incredibly useful. Sela hit the switch on

the recorder, and her face relaxed as the implant dumped its

cache. There was a kind of animal stillness about it when she

did this, a sense of perfect repose. I looked on her strong,

sharp features, the innate set to the muscles under the

mocha-coffee skin of her face, just for the pure enjoyment of

it.

The download ended. Sela blinked and turned her head

with no sense of transition or disorientation. „Nothing much

there, of course,‟ she said. „Just a bit of vox pop and

background. It‟s just a waiting game till things go bang.‟

„What brought you here in the first place?‟ I asked her. I

was genuinely interested, but, having been out of the loop for

so long, I also needed a quick way back in - and Sela had the

knack of pulling out the significant details of a situation and

giving them a shape. That was one of the reasons she was so

good at her job - the fact that the camera translated her

beauty into something that made anything with a hormone

system lie back and howl was just a bonus.

„We‟re here to cover sentient-interest issues,‟ she told me.

„Agreed-rights violations, tacitly sanctioned murder, people

driving tanks over protesters, just the usual stuff. That‟s one

of the reasons we organized a visit to that prison complex you

were in. The local authorities have promised a full review of

the procedures, by the way. Amnesties and repatriation

under interstellar-conclave observation.‟

I thought of the people in detention who had actually

deserved amnesty and repatriation who had not survived - or

would never survive - long enough to take advantage of it. I

shrugged. „That‟s nice to know.‟

„Don‟t hold your breath,‟ said Sela. „There‟s some silly dick

from FNN going round and talking like a horde of off-world

killers are going to be let loose tomorrow, but it‟s not exactly

a high priority at the moment. And all this rights-violation

stuff is just the ostensible reason why we‟re here. I could

name you a thousand planets and colonies just as bad and

worse. They‟ve jumped over the last few months, and that‟s

the hook we‟ve hung it on to get here - but the point is that

they‟ve jumped in a specific way.

„Our psychometrics people have run the figures, and the

result is that this stuff is happening because the whole

society‟s putting itself on a war footing. It‟s this Dellah thing.

It‟s really jacked up in the last month or so - you can smell

the tension of it on the streets.‟ She grinned at me, rather

nastily. „Now it‟s no place of the news services to attempt to

precipitate this sort of thing, just for the sake of all that

lovely footage, but there‟s no crime in going to the right place

and waiting for the right time…‟

„Like a crowd of orange jumpsuits jumping around the

place, and loudly wondering when the first attack starts, isn‟t

going to make a difference?‟ I said. „Like people aren‟t going to

pick up on that?‟

„Yeah, well,‟ said Sela. „What are you gonna do?‟

„So when do your psychometrists tell you that the various

balloons are going up?‟ I wandered over to the bed and

fiddled absently with the cellophane-wrapped suit. It was, as

I‟d known already, just my size.

Sela waggled a hand noncommittally. „Medium-soon. We‟re

talking order of weeks, as opposed to days or months.‟

I stripped the wrapping off the suit. „Then I think it‟s time I

got back to work.‟

Thanaxos was a basically monarchical society, which has one

thinking of splendid pageantry and plumage, royal crests on

every available surface, state processions, monumental

statuary, household guards in endocephalically silly hats and

all the rest of it - and so it was, in the tourist quarters. The

mistake is to think that it is nothing else. It was also a post-

industrial, interstellar-capable, globally cohesive and

complex humanoid society. The streets and structures of

Rakath were as functional, advanced and diverse as in any

other capital city you can name. The only difference between

this and, say, Aeon Flux on Mars was in the minutiae of the

details - the uniforms and ranking-system of the cops, the

design of the street lamps, the language on the signs.

The street lamps were on by now, gas-powered with a faint,

pervasive tang you get because they‟re methane-powered

from some distant recycling plant. There were more official-

looking uniforms around than otherwise, maybe two to a

street on average, but they were obviously the uniforms of

civilian policing rather than military.

The lack of an obviously military presence on the streets, of

course, was not a particularly reassuring sign. It just set the

mind wondering as to where, in fact, all the soldiers might

actually be.

All the same, I thought I could detect that war-footing smell

about which Sela had spoken. I can‟t point out what caused

it specifically - and maybe it was just because Sela had put

the thought in my head - but it was a definite impression I

got, in the same way you know whether or not you‟re going to

like a bar the moment you walk through the door. There was

a kind of violence-tension in the air – not that of an

impending riot, but more sort of self-righteous and directed,

if you get what I mean. Just feeling it around you, you could

imagine all these people thinking, Hah! If that dastardly

Johnny Hun tries anything here he‟ll get the shock of his life,

and we‟re just the chaps to give it to him! - and suchlike. I

suppose the word I‟m groping for is jingoism - though

directed at whom or what I couldn‟t say.

The native Thanaxons looked at me a bit suspiciously - as

if, as a stranger, I might be a spy or something - but not with

the flat-out hatred upon which they‟d look at an Enemy. My

experience with detention had left me with the subconscious

impression that I‟d stick out like a boil here, but I was only

one of several off-worlders around, dressed better than most

in my spanky new suit, and I wasn‟t being treated any

differently.

My translation implants don‟t deal with the written word

very well, in the sense that they flady refuse to do it. I knew

where I was going, though, from having memorized the route

from a public map unit back at the hotel - and the small fact

that such places are prominent, well lit and open twenty six

hours a standard day and have huge illuminated signs in

languages that I can recognize.

GalEx Courier Services pride themselves on being able to

deliver a package to anywhere they have an office, unopened

and intact, under absolute guarantee. They use only full

Stratum Seven operatives and they‟re the nearest thing in an

imperfect world to perfect certainty. (Every so often, some

bright local spark will catch on to the fact that this is an

obvious route for locally illegal materials and try to shut

them down - only to be met with extreme and obliterating

reprisals. The GalEx setup is something like a physical law,

like gravity - and you might not like gravity when it drops

things on you, but just try living if it wasn‟t there. Its

advantages outweigh its disadvantages - it‟s something you

have to deal with, rather than try to change.)

GalEx rates are astronomical, of course, but my Pseudopod

clients could afford it, and when I had decided to head for

Thanaxos I had sent a package on ahead. And if you think it

shows any kind of foresight to send said package to the

GalEx main office in the city centre of the Thanaxon capital,

within easy walking distance of the hotels where all the off-

worlders stay, then you really ought to get out more.

I ran through the scans and keywords that told them who I

was, and took the package to a private booth. I strapped on

and concealed the various tools and weapons around my

person and suit, making a note to get something custom-

fitted the next day, when I went out to buy a new pair of

boots. Sela always seemed to see me as a cross between a

dance-hall instructor and a mob enforcer from an old movie.

Then I fired up Box and strapped it to my arm.

Box chimed a couple of times as it booted and hooked itself

into the data stream. Then: „Hi there. Long time no see. A

rather suspiciously long time no see, if you get my drift. Is

there anything I should be aware of?‟

„Nothing much, Box,‟ I told it. „Hook in with the Pseudopod

people and let „em know I‟m still on the case. No real updates

on what they got before, but let them know that the

Summerfield lead is dead.‟

„Total and confirmed?‟ Box asked.

„Dormanted and hearsay. I don‟t think I can follow up. I

want to find a way to Dellah now, so check with „em what

parameters they‟re happy with, up to and including buying

my own ship on a legal basis and their money. I don‟t really

want to do that. Cheek, specifically, if they‟re happy with me

contracting out for local piecework that might take me there

as part of it - there‟s no point in letting it go to waste if there

is. Plus there‟s the question of cover stories to be considered.‟

Box had been working on what I said as I said it, so there

was no processing break. „They‟re up for hiring a ship rather

than buying,‟ it said. „Blind-financed from a numbered

account. They‟re happy for you to hire yourself out but don‟t,

quote, forget who you‟re working for in the end, unquote.‟

„Fair enough,‟ I said. „By the way, hook into the credit

houses and divert some into the account of Sela Dane -

friend funds and completely above board. Don‟t make it look

like a payoff or anything. It might be nice to find a local florist

and have them send a bunch of something. She‟s staying at

the Connaught Transient.‟

„Sela Dane?‟ Box said. „I like her. Lovely technical package.

I have to tell you that they don‟t go much for flowers, here.

Local specialities are a variety of chocolate ginger and leather

goods made from the skins of ghouties, which are a sort of

cross between a donkey and a three-toed sloth.‟

„Even better. Have someone send some chocolate ginger,

rather than the leather goods.‟

„Are you sure she‟d prefer that?‟

„For the moment. We can explore that other particular

avenue later.‟

„I‟m sure we can,‟ said Box, with an arch and Turing-

envelope-pushing bit of artificial interaction.

„For the moment, Box, I want you to put out a trawl for that

piecework deal we talked about. It‟s got to be one-off, short-

term and it‟s got to get me in and out of Dellah. Those are the

only things I care about. Only let me know if the job is on an

immediate-reply basis. Store up anything else that comes

along and I‟ll go through the file later.‟

My route back to the hotel took me past a row of mismatched

tourist shops, each open late and lit up, each selling an

almost identical selection of local-speciality leather goods and

all of them, in all probability, owned by the same concern.

Now that my attention had been drawn to it, I saw that the

workmanship and the stuff itself was of a genuinely high

quality. I spent a happy half an hour picking out the combat

jacket and boots I had promised myself next day, paying

tourist prices for what I‟d probably get for half that much if I

spent hours rooting through the back streets - the point

being that not spending hours rooting through the back

streets was what I was paying for. This made me a few

minutes late for the hotel bar, in which I had arranged to

meet up with Sela.

The bar was pretty much the same as you‟d find in any

better-class transient hotel anywhere, in the sense that it

had been ponced up as an anodyne abstract of just about

anything you can name rather than a bar. The lines and

fixtures of this one were attempting to be suggestive of an

early-twentieth-century cruise boat. It was called the

Captain‟s Cabin. Manfully fighting the urge to go out and

hunt down interior designers with a big gun, I carried my

bulked-out tourist shopping bags to the counter, ordered a

beer and looked around for Sela.

I couldn‟t spot her, but that wasn‟t worrying in itself. We

knew each other well enough that she wouldn‟t have stormed

off if I was ten minutes late, and neither would I. She was

just running late. I settled down on a bar stool and scanned

the light early-evening crowd in more detail. Just your basic

bunch of commercial and recreational travellers, interspersed

with locals: a few general acquaintances of guests, a few

subtly provocative good-time boys and girls, plus a

smattering of boys and girls running the key-game scam and

who had to advertise more blatantly so that the clueless

idiots who could be taken in by it could be caught...

My head snapped round so hard that I almost sprained my

neck. My reflexes had cut in far too belatedly to more than

catch a glimpse of the couple who were walking out of the

door, with the studied, casual haste that had set off my

internal alarms. I caught only a glimpse of them – a big,

blond man; a smaller, dark-haired woman - but the pattern-

recognition smacked into me like my synapses were

electromagnetic bolts.

I‟d seen this pair before. The last time had been Luna,

when they‟d fired on me through the crowd.

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

The House Royal has remained, over the course of centuries,

the official residence of the Kings of Thanaxos and their

courts - indeed, has been so since the Enlightened

Consolidation (TB 1542) that united Thanaxos under one

rule. The most elegant and sumptuous palace in the sector, it

has been much imitated by foreign rulers and the equivalents

of many off-world species. Originally a hunting lodge, some

way from Rakath, it was rebuilt massively over successive

years and now resides towards the centre of the still-

expanding city.

The baroque forms of the palace itself are complemented by

the extraordinary spectacle of the formal gardens, designed

by the celebrated Sanguinity P‟tantang, in TB 1687, who

arranged innumerable statues, vases, fountains and floral

clocks throughout the grounds. The addition of the

amusement park, complete with parking space for more than

fifteen thousand carriages, has been especially themed to

carry on the spirit of this noble work.

Throughout the grounds are situated smaller, subsidiary

enclaves, each designed to form, so much as is possible, a

haven of tranquillity and a distinct environment in its own

right. The most applauded of these so-called „Little Gardens‟

must surely be the Shon-Thu garden, with its elegant sweeps

of powdered coral and samphire, and its exquisite tearooms

of lacquer and jade, in which refreshment may he purchased

for a reasonable price.

Within the House itself, many rooms are open to the public,

containing the riches of almost half a millennium. See the

footstool, upon which the notorious Vertog IV was resting his

feet as he signed the death warrant for Mara, Queen of the

Woods. See the sumptuous majesty of the Ballroom, with its

unsurpassed and painstakingly annotated collection of balls.

See the chambers of Hairy Rolf XITV and marvel at the

carefully preserved contents of the convenience under the

bed...

- Excerpt from The House Royal -473 Years of Thanaxon

Splendour, available from Ye Olde Royale Gift Shoppe

CHAPTER 9

Sela‟s suite was on the fifteenth floor, the direct route being

taken by brass-cage elevators that were deliberately slower

than their potential, to give the hotel patrons a kind of

luxury-hotel elevator „experience‟. I took the emergency

stairs. Quite apart from their being faster, the physical

exertion helped to divert me from the realization and shame

of my utter stupidity, which if I‟d thought about it for an

instant would have crippled me completely.

It was only when I saw the couple in the bar that I realized,

truly realized, what I had been doing. After a month held

prisoner I was suddenly free, and had been going through the

reaction to it without so much as noticing. I had been farting

around stupidly and with a stupid grin on my face, stupidly

forgetting the job and being too stupid even to watch my back

- and I had ended up doing something so utterly and

unforgivably stupid that there was no way I could ever take it

back. I‟d linked Sela Dane to me, while on an active job,

giving out the hotel where she was staying and everything. I‟d

killed her with a free box of chocolates thrown in.

I hit the fifteenth floor still breathing easily but with a

singing in my tendons telling me that the lactic acid in my

muscle tissue was doing its work. Ah well. Poor me. I

wrenched back the fire-escape door and pigged on down the

corridor, knocking aside an unattended room-service trolley

with a shower of used cutlery and plates.

Here‟s a little trick. Hotels tend to be security-minded. The

doors to rooms are heavy and solid - more to give the

impression of security, of course, in this temporary home

from home, rather than anything else. You don‟t, whatever

you do, attempt to force them open with a shoulder. Not

unless you know how to shove it back into its socket

unassisted. What you do is this: you lie on your back and

slam at it with the flats of your feet. This (a) gives you all the

force of the most powerful muscles in the body, (b) directs

said force into an area that the door designers didn‟t expect,

and (c) means that whoever‟s actually behind the door finds

themselves facing a target-profile somewhat out of the

ordinary, and so is somewhat slower to react. The door gave

on the second kick, the hasp of the lock bursting from the

frame, and I rolled out of the line of fire - fixing the image

before me in my mind before I bounced to my feet and came

back round the doorway to do something about it...

All very dynamic and heroic, naturally. On the whole it was

a bit of a pity that the image consisted of this: Sela was

sitting on the suite‟s chaise longue, wearing that little black

dress some women have as a secondary sexual attribute and

dalons, unconcernedly sipping at a cup of coffee. Two men

were in the room with her, two soldiers - but soldiers in the

dashing if faintly ridiculous dress uniforms of the Thanaxon

House Royal. All high collars and sabres, frogging and braid.

I‟d seen little models of them in the tourist shops and on the

stalls in the hotel lobby. They were in the process of reacting

to the door as it burst open, but there was something in their

posture that suggested a chivalrous impulse to protect a lady

from some possible assailant rather than anything else.

Sela raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow as, rather

sheepishly, I walked back into the doorway. I noticed that

she‟d spent a lot of time on her face, while I was gone,

applying make-up in the precise and seamless way that can

accentuate a basic beauty without making one look like a

painted doll. I wondered who she‟d been planning to meet

after having a drink with me.

„These guys would like you to accompany them to the

House Royal,‟ she told me, flicking an amused glance at the

soldiers, who were backing down from their reaction and

replacing it with the kind of slightly contemptuous suspicion

that, as I‟ve said before, I tend to get a lot. „Someone wants to

talk to you. What have you got yourself into now?‟

The Thanaxon House Royal was situated off to one side of the

Rakath tourist quarter - on the one hand for its public spaces

to be relatively near enough to rake in tourist credit, and on

the other to be as far away from bloody tourists as possible.

We were taken there by the Thanaxon variant of an

automobile, a kind of modernized hansom cab, a black

polypropylene shell over tungsten-carbide chassis, drawn by

a small team of engines operated by steam superheated by

passing it over radium. Slightly out of the ordinary, but no

more inherently stupid than an internal-combustion engine,

or having to keep a bale of horse feed in the boot.

By „we‟ I mean the two palace guards, Sela and myself.

Upon learning that I was to be taken to the House Royal she

had demanded to be taken along - and I had flatly refused. It

was an odds-on bet that this was just a setup, that these so-

called guards were going to just drive me somewhere

secluded and put a bolt in the back of my skull. The two

guards had taken extreme umbrage at this, which didn‟t

prove a thing - that would be precisely the act they‟d have

gone into if they were going to leave me lying in an alley

somewhere.

Sela had refused to be budged. She had pointed out, at the

top of her voice, that if removing me or herself was an option

we‟d be dead already. There was quite possibly a story in

this, at some point, and she was damned if she‟d let herself

be muscled out of it. Besides, she had added, it would be

safer to take her along. Cleaning up some grubby little

chancer into something over his head was all very well, but

taking out a bona fide member of the press into the bargain

was something of a completely different order. (Sela could

never quite get her head around the levels upon which I

operated, thinking me not much more than a pawn in the

underworld game with delusions of grandeur. What the hell.

She might well have been right.)

Sela had then turned to the guards and stated flatly that if

she didn‟t come along then neither would I. This had led to a

hasty conference via portable radiophone - the hush-field

activated so‟s I couldn‟t hear what was going on - with the

result that she would be allowed to come with me, subject to

confidentiality protocols that meant she wouldn‟t broadcast

or divulge the material she gathered without express consent.

Sela had had the forms already punched up on her datapack.

Her presence in the cab was something of a mixed blessing.

It meant another random factor, another person to look out

for, but, even so, it was nice to have a friend around. It was

what I needed after so long isolated, a reminder on the deep

subconscious level of the connections that hooked me to the

wider human world. Plus the fact that her perfume, together

with the feel of her in the seat beside me, where we touched,

was doing things to my limbic and hormonal systems that I

thought I‟d forgotten about.

The two guards sat in little pull-down seats and with their

back to the driver, regarding us stonily. This made my bolt-

in-the-head ideas slightly more unlikely - they‟d have tried to

bracket me if that were so - but they remained

uncommunicative as to whom we were going to see and what

it was about.

The House Royal resides in a geodesic dome, in the centre

of a landscaped garden of surpassing elegance and

tranquillity. A guidebook I‟d skimmed as part of general

research made comparisons with Babylon, Blenheim Palace

and the Forbidden Citadel rolled into one. That may be so,

but we didn‟t get to see any of it. The cab took us through an

unlit section and deposited us by a rather scuffed and

utilitarian-looking side door of the palace itself. One of the

guards rapped on it and it was opened, after some wait, by a

frail-looking and elderly footman.

„Ah, yes,‟ he said, in a papery little voice that reminded me

uncomfortably of the late Professor Sabron Jones. „You‟ll be

the visitors the Minister is expecting.‟

„If you say so,‟ I said.

The footman led us down the corridor, the guards in tow. I

don‟t know why they followed, rather than going about some

other duties. I felt that very faint electromagnetic hum, on

the very edges of perception, that told me we were being

scanned by the House Royal security systems seven ways

from Sunday. Maybe they just wanted to make doubly sure

we weren‟t going to steal the ornaments - and there was even

less chance of that. The corridor was incredibly shabby and

unadorned save for some ratty items of furniture and a few

crumbling egg-yolk paintings that looked as if they would fall

apart to the touch.

„People don‟t see this wing of the house,‟ the footman

explained, as if we‟d asked him about it directly. „All the

choicest items are arranged in the public areas, on display.

This is where we keep such things as are of no real value.

They took everything else away. It‟s a crying shame, casting

things aside and leaving them to gather dust when they

could so easily be brought back to their former glory. That‟s a

genuine Flotgrang, that is...‟ This to a table by the wall that

looked something like a plank nailed to a couple of

sawhorses. „Bit of lacquer and a French polishing and she‟d

come up lovely, so she would.‟

He gestured towards a picture frame so choked with the

gunk of ages that it was impossible to discern more than

vague shapes beneath. ‘The Little Sisters and the Nine Wide

Swans, by Meechum, you know. I remember when you could

see the brushwork clear as day. Do they clean it up? Of

course they don‟t. That would be far too much trouble for

them and so they just dump it here...‟ The footman continued

what seemed to be an automatic, querulous litany and I

tuned it out.

„What‟s that one?‟ Sela said abruptly, pointing to a frame. It

seemed rather newer than the decrepit antiques around it

and was partially obscured by the leaves of an overgrown

potted aspidistra, as though hidden away out of some

unconscious embarrassment. Through the leaves I caught

the distinctly unprepossessing features of a youngish man, a

protruding set to his ears, an even more protruding set of

front teeth and a jaw you could swing off, giving it the aspect

of the cruellest caricature imaginable of inbred Royalty with a

capital R.

„That doesn‟t look old and worn out enough to be

discarded,‟ Sela commented. „Rather ghastly, but not exactly

old.‟

„Ah, well, that particular piece is something of a special

nature,‟ said the footman, his automatic enumeration of

disapproval at the capriciousness of the world momentarily

derailed. „That was painted by the Artist in Residence to the

Court to commemorate the occasion of the Young Prince‟s

twenty-first birthday.‟ You could hear the capital letters in

the old man‟s voice, a kind of ingrained sense that the „Young

Prince‟ was an entity set apart, a personage to which the

common human responses and values did not apply. It was

the modern-day equivalent of a mediaeval serf knowing, deep

in the bones, that the King held appointment directly under

God, and could not be looked at, no matter how many cats

actually did just that. Given that different basic way of

thinking - a way of thinking that hardly a one of us has any

more - a fable like „The Emperor‟s New Clothes‟ takes on a

new and slightly different poignancy.

„A quite unfortunate affair,‟ the footman continued. „I

gather that the artist in question is still in the Tower,

awaiting his excruciation

„

„Not a good likeness, then?‟ said Sela.

„Not exactly, but it‟s something one shouldn‟t really be -

Aha! And here we are.‟ The footman had led us onward with a

new haste, as though trying in as seemly manner as possible

to put some space between us and the unfortunate portrait of

the Young Prince. He announced our arrival, at a stout set of

double doors, with something like relief.

The palace guards took up position on either side, poker-

faced as ever. The footman went through one of the doors

and held it open for us.

Sela started through. „Ladies before gentlemen.‟

I grabbed hold of the back of the dress and pulled her back,

not quite hard enough to tear it fetchingly, but hard enough

to make it quite clear that she wasn‟t going in. „Ladies went

before gentlemen in the days when gentlemen didn‟t care if

ladies got eaten by a cave bear or trod on a mine. I go first.‟

„Oh but you‟re just so butch and manly,‟ Sela muttered

sarcastically. „My hero.‟ But she let me go ahead.

The chamber was a conference room, reminiscent of the

one I‟d encountered back in the Pseudopod offices in Luna.

The details were different - the table was oblong and covered

with archaic-looking paperwork, the lighting was a variety of

gas lamp, the door was baroque and antique - but there was

something about it that recalled the Pseudopod boardroom

right away.

This something was the figure who was waiting in it,

leaning against the mahogany conference table with a relaxed

if slightly studied nonchalance. Others were in the room,

seated at the table, but they contrived to be mere background

to this one man.

It was Volan.

CHAPTER 10

It wasn‟t Volan, of course, not in that sense. For one thing,

he wasn‟t quite as fat, and for another he was quite obviously

of native Thanaxon blood. The impression was there,

however, a sense of recognition so powerful that I‟ll swear

that I knew who he was, essentially, even before he so much

as mentioned that he was one of those counterparts I talked

of earlier, the embodiment in spirit, if not in fact, of Michaels-

Presteign Volan Tiberius of Pseudopod Enterprises Society

d‟Anonime.

„A good evening to you,‟ he said, a trifle sardonically. „I trust

that you are quite recovered from your unfortunate

experiences in detention. Had I but known of your

professional status and predicament, or even your existence,

I‟d have arranged for your release immediately. I‟m afraid

that your, uh, methods of entry into our jurisdiction were

rather too unorthodox for our poor resources. We‟re a little

off the beaten track, here, you understand.‟

„And who might you be to take such an interest?‟ I said,

playing it cagey - I didn‟t know the situation, yet, and the last

thing I wanted to do was blow what might or might not be a

cover identity.

„Oh, the name I went under before my employment with

Pseudopod Enterprises - that being my occupation ex officio -

is neither here nor there. In my actual job of work I‟m the

Thanaxon representative of an incorporate head by the name

of Volan, and the name of Volan will suffice.‟ The ersatz

Volan waved an airy hand - he seemed to have the manner

off pat, if a bit overcharacterized and affected. „You meet me

now, however, in my capacity of Minister for Foreign Affairs

Pursuant to the Court of the Thanaxon House Royal.‟

This told me two things in short order: that I didn‟t have to

dance around Volan‟s connections with Pseudopod, but that

it wouldn‟t be a good idea to say how I was working for them

as well.

„What, really?‟ I said. „Doesn‟t that knock into your time a

little bit? Not to mention the question of a conflict of

interest?‟

Again that rather studied wave of a Volan hand. „Not at all.

The one does not preclude the other. I am a distinct

individual, a man of substance, prominence and good

standing, with influential business contacts in the galaxy at

large. What better choice, as a Thanaxon by birth, for

election to the Council?‟ Volan gestured towards a military-

looking gentleman seated at the table and bad-temperedly

knocking back a glass of spirits. „To say otherwise, you might

as well say that Field Marshal G‟ran here should not be

Commander in Chief of the armed forces because he‟s an old

soldier.‟ Volan turned back to me with a little smile. „Believe

me, if I were to promote my own personal business interests,

or the interests of Pseudopod Enterprises, at the expense of

Thanaxos, the people would have something to say about it -

as would what you might call my rivals in the incorporate

world.‟

What he said rang true. I‟ve already mentioned my blind

spot when it comes down to the minutiae of planetary

politics, but I was generally aware that while the monarchy

held the power here on Thanaxos, the administration was in

the hands of an Advisory Council that was, ostensibly,

democratically elected. These administrators worked on an

effectively part-time basis and were not expected to give up

their outside interests - the idea being that this (a) kept them

in contact with the real world, and (b) didn‟t give them the

time to get bored and so get up to all kinds of bureaucratic

mischief. If I could have been bothered to research further

and learn the faces and the names, I would have known from

the instant I walked into the room that I was in the presence

of the people who basically, when they had a spare moment,

ran the planet.

I fixed the faces in my mind, now, of the twelve people in

the room apart from Volan. Four women, eight men, nothing

particularly worth relating about them save for an air of late-

night, shirtsleeved tiredness. Cups of the local equivalent of

coffee were in evidence, and Field Marshal G‟ran wasn‟t the

only one who had moved on to something stronger. I

shrugged to myself - it was their planet; they could do what

they liked with it.

Volan turned his attention from me and nodded to the

footman. „Thank you, Gnatbeadle. You may go. I do hope

Gnatbeadle hasn‟t been boring you with his tales of

antiquity,‟ he continued, somewhat more chattily, when the

servant had withdrawn. „In happier days he was quite the

expert on the wing that houses these chambers, and he‟s

never quite come to terms with these harder, more pragmatic

times.‟

He then turned to Sela and beamed with what appeared to

be genuine pleasure. „Ms Dane! It is always a pleasure to

receive a visit from a member of the news services, especially

one so accomplished and, dare I say it, charmingly attractive

as your good self.‟

„Thanks,‟ said Sela vaguely. „Just pretend I‟m not here.‟

„But of course,‟ Volan said smoothly, as if both of them

didn‟t know that this was complete toss. Administrative

discussion of death-camp quotas, riot-control procedures,

off-world annexations or the like was simply not going to

occur and everybody damn well knew it „As it happens,

though,‟ Volan continued, „we are here to discuss a matter

with which you might like to be personally involved. That

was, of course, the foremost reason why we allowed you to-‟

„Look, can we get on with this, Volan?‟ snapped a harassed-

looking and middle-aged Thanaxon whom I later learnt to be

the Under-Secretary for Agricultural Development „I haven‟t

been home before midnight in a month and the kids are

forgetting what I look like. Can‟t we just move things along?‟

„My apologies, D‟nar,‟ said Volan. „To the matter in hand,

then.‟ He turned back to Sela and me, speaking to us both:

„As you‟re no doubt aware, relations with the planet Dellah

have been somewhat strained of late...‟

Field Marshal G‟ran snorted. „If by strained ye mean shut

off entirely, and without so much of a by-your-leave. Damned

impertinence, I call it Buggers should be taught a -‟

„Yes, quite, Field Marshal,‟ said Volan hurriedly. „Be that as

it may. The fact of the matter is that such a sad state of

affairs cannot be allowed to continue. Now it just so happens

that we have received a communique from the Sultan of one

of the Dellahan principalities, offering to broker a deal for the

re-establishment of diplomatic contact...‟

A little thought was forming in my mind. „That wouldn‟t be

the Sultan of Tashwari, would it?‟

„As a matter of fact it would,‟ said Volan, with a meaningful

little don‟t-push-your-luck-sunshine look. „We‟ll be sending a

diplomatic mission to Dellah within the week.‟ He turned to

Sela. „Obviously, the eyes of the world - the world of

Thanaxos and the galaxy as a whole - will be on such a

venture, and I would deem it an inestimable pleasure, Ms

Dane, if one such as you were to join the diplomatic party as

an independent observer.‟

Sela‟s enhanced eyes lit up at the chance of an exclusive.

„Full access?‟

„Within agreed limits. Our negotiations packages can

handle the specifics. Your reputation for even-handedness

and integrity of fact is well known, Ms Dane, and our

interests coincide in that we are only interested in the facts.‟

Was this edition of Volan so blatant as to actually wink, or

did I just imagine it?

Sela nodded thoughtfully to herself. „Do I get to take my

crew?‟

„Subject to file vetting and veto.‟

„Fair enough. I‟ll talk to my people at DataDay and see what

they want to go for.‟

„I await their response with bated breath.‟ Volan turn his

attention back to me. „Of course, the actual negotiation will

be handled by fully trained diplomatic staff - but the mission

itself must have the sanctioned validity of the House Royal.

To this end, it must be under the titular command of a

member of the Royal Family. Sadly, the King himself is of

such age and infirmity as to make such a venture impossible

in person. In the light of this, we have decided to call upon

the gracious service of his Regent, the Young Prince…‟

A kind of murmur ran through those assembled in the

room. It had a note similar to that recognition of otherness as

evidenced by the footman, Gnatbeadle, when he had

mentioned the Prince - but tinged with something more. I

couldn‟t quite put my finger on it, but the tone seemed

decidedly uncomplimentary.

„Security,‟ said Volan, „is thus of paramount importance -

and, while our military forces are more than up to the task,

one cannot be too careful. It would be a disaster

unsustainable, a loss beyond our bearing were we to lose

such a splendid national treasure as our Young Prince.‟ For

some reason, I got the distinct impression that the Minister

for Foreign Affairs was flatly refusing to meet the eyes of the

other members of the Council. „In this light, when we learnt

via the datanet that a security operative of your calibre was

accepting commissions, it was too good an opportunity to

resist. This is why we have brought you here - I trust you

understand now why we have brought you here in secret.‟

Volan struck the slightly fey but nobly heroic pose of a man

hell-bent on doing his best for King, or even Prince, and

country. „Would you, sir, be willing to accept a contract as

the personal bodyguard of the Young Prince, for the duration

of this mission?‟

Which was of course my cue. I didn‟t want to overplay it, so

I just sat there for a while, as though in serious thought. „It

would be an honour, Minister,‟ I said at last.

Volan sighed with barely affected relief. „Rest assured, you

will be rewarded fully commensurate with your expertise. For

the moment, though, I think it might be well you meet your

charge.‟ There was a small ivory bell push on the table, which

he depressed. After a while, he depressed it again, for rather

longer this time. „Where is the little -‟ He appeared to catch

himself. „I mean, I‟m sure the Young Prince will be arri-‟

Off to one side a door swung open, and a figure blundered

in, tripped over the carpet and fell flat on his face. I had been

partially prepared by the glimpse of the portrait in the hall

but, even so, the reality was worse, far worse, than I could

have ever possibly imagined.

It was wearing what might have been a splendid military

dress uniform, had it been buttoned up the right way, or

indeed at all, and if one absent-mindedly chewed epaulette

wasn‟t hanging off it by a thread. The addition of trousers

and underwear might have also been a help. The apparition

stumbled to its feet and beamed around itself with the

cheerful, drooling, self-important idiocy of a complete and

congenital idiot.

„What-ho, chaps!‟ he exclaimed. „I waited a really long time,

don‟t you know! Then I had to take my pants off „cause I was

dirty.’ He nodded solemnly at this last; being dirty was

obviously a very, very bad thing indeed.

From somewhere behind me I heard Sela snort with barely

suppressed laughter. Volan stared grimly and rigidly into the

middle distance. Around the table, various members of the

Council put their hands over their eyes.

„Allow me to present,‟ Volan said, in a voice so tight it

occasionally squeaked, „His Most Excellent and Puissant

Highness, Prince G‟jimo, Regent of the Thanaxon House

Royal. This man is here to look after you, Jimbo. Keep you

safe. Say hello to the nice man, Jimbo.‟

„Bingo!‟ Prince G‟jimo - Jimbo - bounded over to me, stuck

out a hand and then, as I shied away from it despite myself,

absent-mindedly wiped what I could only hope was dribble

off it and on to his tunic. „Hallo.‟ He looked at me sideways,

conspiratorially. „I saw a monkey, today. It was a funny

monkey. It was wearing a hat.‟

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

Oh Ye Believers,

Fellow compatriots in this noble and most excellent venture

to bring the Light of Truth into the eyes of the Infidel, as

sanctioned by and in the Name of the All-High Gods of the

New Republic;

Peoples of New Tashwari, that finest of all citadels under

the Gods that shines in the dark night like the most precious

and costly of all jewels;

Peoples of the most estimable and Revolutionary Republic

of New Dellah, that beacon of Holy Light and Hope that

shines in the firmament‟s dark, bring light to the souls of all

Believers;

True Believers and converts everywhere, though we know

your numbers are lamentably few, living as you do under the

iron boot heels of the worshippers of false gods, the slavers of

commercial enterprise and the lies of propagandists;

Fellow travellers, who might yet be taught the errors of

your foul, unsanitary and hell-bound ways;

Infidels

I welcome you to this triumphant and most glorious

venture that shall bring the Light and Truth to those Infidels

who even now pollute the heart of our blessed and most

beautiful republic with their heathen and noxiously animal

presence.

(Stormy and prolonged applause from all Believer gathered

here.)

All glory to his mighty and most regal excellency, the

Sultan, father, his palace staff and his Guard, who under the

All-High Gods has made their will known and provided the

facilities. And especial glory to the caterers.

(Stormy applause.)

Long live the glorious and triumphant Republic of New

Dellah, which inspires and organizes all victories for the

Believer under the magnificent and splendid auspices of the

All-High Gods! Divine will lights our destiny and causes us to

perform prodigious feats for the benefit and Enlightenment of

all Believers!

(Stormy and prolonged applause.)

In the name of Malon and His Brethren

(Stormy and prolonged applause and cheers.)

Coffee will now be served for fifteen minutes in the

hospitality lounge.

Was that all right, do you think?

(Realizes microphone is still on.)

- Thanaxos-Dellah diplomatic mission: transcript of

opening speech by Dellahan Chief Consul

CHAPTER 1 1

The ruins of St Oscar‟s lay around me: smashed terracotta

and ash as far as the eyes could see, the broken stumps of

buildings protruding jaggedly through it like a misshapen set

of bloodstained teeth. Or teeth with the enamel stripped, to

show the dentine and the bloody pulp below.

Here and there the glass and metallic scraps of scientific

equipment, the scorched remains of papers, the general

personal detritus of the four thousand or so who had lived

and breathed and eaten and worked here while they got into

tussles about it being forbidden to grow begonias in the

greenhouse. As with any large-scale massacre or destruction,

the magnitude becomes too great to really feel it unless you

fix on some specific, someone or something you know,

something that can bring the full impact of it home to you -

and I was stuck with Sabron sodding Jones and his bloody

pot plants.

Prince Jimbo was sitting on a small pile of pottery. „Uncle

Mumfrey said I could go to university,‟ he proclaimed with

idiot pride. „The moment I learnt to tie my shoes. And I can.

Look!‟ He climbed to his feet, took one step forward with the

laces tied together and fell flat on his face.

I have no idea what the Thanaxon diplomatic party were

expecting from Dellah and the Sultan of Tashwari, but I very

much doubt if it was what they actually got It was made

perfectly clear from the start that we were all the lot of us

Hated Foreign Dogs of Unbelievers, but under Dellah‟s code

of cultural hospitality, we were to be afforded the status of

Honoured Guests for a time up to but not over three local

days and nights. We were offered every service and

comestible, by sweetly smiling and quite resplendent

servants, whose sweet smiles nonetheless contrived to

suggest what would happen if we outstayed our welcome by

so much as a nanosecond.

The diplomatic function itself would take place in a kind of

splendid, gilded rococo auditorium, in which the Thanaxon

envoys would sit and be harangued in the sight of a crowd of

the Faithful as to their Godless, decadent and warmongering

iniquity, never being allowed to rebut refute or indeed make

any kind of reply at all.

Before the upheavals and the Earth-imposed blockade, as I

understood it the spiritual life of Dellah as a culture had

been expressed through something similar to Hindu

Buddhism - the specifics were different and it was more

complicated than that but that was the nearest analogy in

human terms. Now, and almost overnight it seemed that

things had shifted into the equivalent of some fundamentalist

Islam. There seemed to be a new god in town – or rather,

multiple gods, the specific nature of which remained

unspecified. Maybe someone told you their names when you

became a Believer. These various All-High Gods were the only

gods, and if you didn‟t Believe you might be pitied, but you

certainly didn‟t deserve to be allowed to live. You couldn‟t fart

without exhorting, in the most boastful terms imaginable, the

glory of these gods, the Revolutionary Order of New Dellah

and its Glorious Leaders, both coming and going, whose

unstinting efforts for the betterment of humankind had made

the fart in question such a triumph for New Dellah an Order.

Like as not with all around you breaking into wild

spontaneous applause at how triumphant - as a splendid

example of the glory of the All-High Gods and the

revolutionary New Dellahan Order - that fart in fact was.

Thing is, while the dogma and constructs of Islam evolved

so that what appeared, on the surface to outsiders, as a

simple trotting out of platitudes could in fact convey nuance

and true meaning, a defining of relationships, this new

Dellahan dogma seemed a bit bolt-on. It was as if they were

going against the grain, trying their damnedest, couldn‟t

quite manage it and so were doubling their efforts to try to

get it right. This tended to beg the question of who, or what,

was watching them to make sure they did.

On the subject of going through this diplomatic farce, the

Thanaxon delegates had decided to do it - hoping by their

calm and reasonable demeanour to make an impression and

win on moral points. Personally, I thought they were on a

hiding to nothing.

Prince Jimbo, they had tactfully agreed, would take no

active part in the proceedings, and it was tacitly agreed – on

oh-so-civilized and respectful terms - that my job was to keep

him the hell out of the way. It was yet another example of

that curious double-think I‟d encountered in the Council

chamber on Thanaxos and again on the jump into the Dellah

system in the Royal Yacht, as everybody had tried their level

best to ignore the fact that he was pawing the flight

attendants with the mindless persistence of a priapic stoat

with a lobotomy. Everybody knew the guy was a blundering

little inbred tit, with the personal habits of a bare-arsed

baboon and the mind of a plank, but nobody was going to be

the first to come out and say it.

Ah well, I‟d thought - as I sat back in my acceleration seat

and tried to tune out the happy burbling to the effect that it

was amazing, wasn‟t it, and that we must be travelling at

more than a hundred miles an hour - if anyone was going to

try to knock the little bastard off, it was me who‟d have to be

lucky all the time, and they who‟d only have to be lucky once.

I remembered a certain call I‟d got...

The call had come the night before we were to leave and take

our respective places in the diplomatic party. Sela had

stirred, and muttered something unintelligible that sounded

a bit, to me, like „Monkey on a stick‟.

„It‟s not for you,‟ I told her, recognizing the tone of the

bleeps. „It‟s coming from Box. It‟s for me.‟

I disentangled myself from her and padded over to the little

truncated hallway and door that separated the bedroom of

the hotel suite from the lounge area, snagging Box, from

where I had left it hanging from the back of a chair, on the

way.

„Incoming and private,‟ Box told me as I entered the lounge.

„Audio and visual. Want me to put up a resonance field?‟

„Yeah, do it,‟ I said, plugging Box into the suite‟s comms

monitor. I‟d swept the place for bugs and suchlike, but there

was the possibility that Sela might wake up properly and

come in to hear something that might jeopardize her. Box set

up the field that would counter electronic and physically

sonic eavesdropping and, from the outside, make the air haze

so that the movements of my mouth could not be read.

A face popped up on the monitor, wearing that little

subconscious look of irritation of someone who‟s made a call

and has being waiting for the other end to pick up – the look

that‟s the first thing everyone sees, and has seen since the

days phones first got screens.

It was Volan. Not the latest fake one, the one who helped to

run Thanaxos in his spare time; the one who helped run

Pseudopod all the livelong day.

„Why am I not surprised?‟ I said. „I thought the setup had to

be too good to be true. That other Volan might talk about

keeping his responsibilities separate, but we all know what‟s

really pulling his strings.‟

The real Volan‟s features assumed that smooth insouciance

that I had come to realize was his defining characteristic -

having seen it aped so actively by his local counterpart.

„Actually,‟ he said, „the setting up of it was a unilateral

decision by my counterpart. I only became aware of it when

he conferenced me to get the all-clear. Too good an

opportunity to miss, I understand - but I must admit that the

end result is entirely more fortunate than otherwise for us

all.‟

„Yeah, whatever,‟ I said.

„The reason I‟m calling,‟ Volan continued, „is that I‟m after

your opinion on this matter. Now, my counterpart swears

blind that this so-called “diplomatic mission” you could hear

the little quote marks around the term „- is absolutely in good

faith. He makes it sound plausible - but then, I know myself,

and plausibility is my middle name..

„What? You‟ve got yet another one?‟ I said.

„I am,‟ said Volan, „a remarkably substantive person.‟ His

expression became deadly serious. „So, in your professional

opinion, is this “diplomatic mission” a genuine attempt to

salvage a working peace in the face of a potential war, or is it

just a bit of window-dressing before the first shot is fired?‟

„It‟s window-dressing,‟ I said. I didn‟t even have to think

about it.

„All right,‟ said Volan. „I‟ll take that into account.‟

„What, that it‟s window-dressing or that I just think it‟s

window-dressing ?‟

Volan beamed. „What do you think?‟

„I try not to, much,‟ I said.

„Good man. Now, the matter of guarding this Young Prince.

I know you people take your work extremely seriously, but I

want to be clear about one thing. Protect him from harm, by

all means, but not at the expense of your prior commitments.

I want you to know, for what my word‟s worth, that there will

be no comeback should the Prince suffer an, as it were,

unfortunate accident that you‟re unable to prevent.‟

„Volan,‟ I said. „It‟s late and I‟ve just woken up. Tell me if

that‟s meant to be any kind of hint.‟ I pantomimed putting a

gun to a head execution-style and cocking it, for Box‟s visual

pickup.

Volan looked at me a little angrily. „Absolutely, positively

not. All I‟m saying is, if push comes to shove, you remember

where your prior commitments lie.‟

I had expected to have problems getting away from the

Sultan‟s palace. We might be here as guests and our persons

sacrosanct, but I was far from sure how far this would

stretch if we started sticking our noses in where they weren‟t

wanted. In the event, though, I needn‟t have wondered. In

some way that, at the time, I couldn‟t fathom, both Prince

Jimbo and I seemed to do something odd to the Dellahans‟

perceptions.

It wasn‟t, quite, that they didn‟t see us: it was that they

didn‟t notice us. You could get a tray of food from one of the

servants, say, if you asked for it forcefully enough, but, if you

didn‟t keep following him and reminding him about it, he‟d

forget about it and wander away. It was like looking at

something, deciding you‟re not interested and then putting it

out of your mind - but on a deeper, stronger level.

I learnt why this was happening sometime later, of course,

and the slightly different reasons for it - but the fact that it

seemed to affect only me and Jimbo scared the hell out of

me. I kept poking at it with my mind, like a tongue pokes at a

broken tooth, trying to find some similarity between myself

and this drooling moron that could explain it, and which

wouldn‟t want me to immediately stick a gun to my head.

In any event. I had hung around the conference hall for

maybe half an hour of day one, in the equivalent of a Royal

Box, munching the complimentary delicacies - which had

been laid out beforehand, in anticipation of the arrival of

some important personage, as opposed to an Invisible Idiot -

and looking down upon the stormily applauding crowd as yet

another Dellahan delegate made yet another quarter-hour-

long speech to announce what his name was before I decided

I had had enough. I had a job to do.

Prince Jimbo seemed happy enough, having found a piece

of string from somewhere, which had kept him amused since

breakfast. Possibly it was just me, but I got the distinct

impression that, on leaving Thanaxos, he had reverted even

further from the cheerful drooling idiot I‟d originally met to

an actual moron with the mental capacity of a small dog and

the mental age of a toddler. Maybe it was just that he had

been extensively coached for that first meeting - but I

couldn‟t shake the feeling that there was somehow more to it

than that...

I debated whether to just leave him here - he‟d probably be

safer than if I took him, if only on account of not being

noticed - but there‟s such a thing as professional pride. I

might be using this job as a cover, but it was still a job and,

while I‟d have rather pitched the little sod over the rail and

into the crowd below, I‟d been contracted to look after him. I

couldn‟t let him out of my sight.

I sighed. „Come on, Jimbo,‟ I said shoving him rather

harder than I‟d meant to in order to get his attention. „We‟re

leaving.‟

A look of petulance crossed Prince Jimbo‟s face for having

his fun with this marvellous bit of string spoilt, and then he

forgot about it. „Are we going somewhere nice?‟ he said, a

childish hope briefly animating his slack-jawed features.

„We‟re going somewhere,‟ I admitted.

The petulance was back again. „Don‟t want to go if it‟s not

somewhere nice.‟

I sighed. „All right, Jimbo. It‟s somewhere nice.‟

„Bingo!‟ The imbecilic, sunny joy of the terminally retarded

burst from him. And then his face changed yet again.

„What the hell are you doing now?‟ I shouted.

Prince Jimbo had clenched his fists and face and stuck his

elbows out in a horribly familiar-looking little tableau of inner

strain. He relaxed again.

„Uncle Mumfrey told me to always go before I go somewhere

nice,‟ he said proudly. „And I just have.‟

Professional pride has a hell of a lot to bloody answer for.

We had simply walked out of the palace, unaccosted,

unremarked upon and, apparently, barely even noticed. The

city outside was your usual hubbub of urban sprawl, and

you‟d have to be a new arrival from where conditions were

slightly better - even a Thanaxos soft-shoe-shuffling itself

into a war footing - to catch the impression that a faint

patina of seediness and grubbiness had only quite recently

come across this scene. And that, by degrees imperceptible

except over the course of months, the trend was going down

rather than up.

Now there are any number of travel journos, outworld

correspondents and the like (Sela wasn‟t one of them) who

will tell you that, when you visit a basically theocratic

culture, you can smell the raw Faith with a capital F in the

streets. No you can‟t. Raw something else, perhaps, but not

raw Faith. What you‟re smelling is the fact that mere, prosaic

things like building things, repairing them and keeping them

clean are done in a cursory, slipshod fashion, because the

effort, attention and time of the people who should be doing

them is eaten up by the protocols of the intangible. Likewise

producing any kind of art outside the prescribed bounds, or

thinking up new gadgets to do things, or ways to make sure

that almost everyone is pretty-much fed.

As I‟d seen in the palace, Dellah was in transition – was

willing this transition - but the cultural lag of a billion-odd

people trying to get their heads around the same idea meant

that by my lights things could have been worse. It would be

quite some time before the beggars outnumbered the people

giving alms. For the moment Dellah retained some semblance

of the development it had achieved before the blockade.

There were hover cabs, here and there - and the thing

about hover cabs was that with their floaters and the

working-life perpetual engines that kept their maintenance

down, they were, effectively, all-terrain vehicles with no limit

on the distance. It was but the work of an increasingly

infuriating hour to drag Jimbo through a crowd that kept

bumping into us unawares, locate an empty cab, plug Box

into it and short the controls to manual. I could only hope

that this strange sense of obscurity we possessed didn‟t

somehow extend to the fact of this large lump of metal and

moulded resin barrelling through pedestrian-crowded

markets, streets and combinations of the two. Fortunately, it

didn‟t.

There‟s a long, long tradition the whole galaxy over, upon

the various planets of the galaxy at least, of cities deriding

the open country and vice versa. The city, says the country,

has cut itself off from Nature and wallows in its own

decadence and filth, while the country, say the city dwellers,

stands up to its collective knees in the shit of its farm

animals and shags them. In fact, from the outside, you can

see the two planetary states as being roughly equal – the

cities merely being scrunched up tight and the country being

laid out flat. In any case, after getting out of the city and its

declining but still relatively high levels of wealth, I got to see

how the other half were living under the revolutionary New

Dellahan regime. They weren‟t doing very well.

I gather that it used to rain all the time on Dellah – the

result of the Sky Pylon, a vastly extruded, monomolecular

cable that physically connected the planet to its orbital space

station and disrupted the weather patterns. Now the Pylon

and the station were gone, and the world was reverting to

desert. There were sad little clusters of sandstone huts that

looked like outhouses. The outhouses, of course, were

nonexistent. Each grouping was surrounded by a scraggy

patch of cultivated land that I assumed was the equivalent of

a vegetable garden - but if they were, the lot of them wouldn‟t

have produced the garnish for a tub of coleslaw.

I saw figures in the landscape, just standing there as if

they had been dumped - I recalled those faceless, spectral

creatures you see, in the murk between the Futurism and the

motorways, in a lot of Nazi art. The land itself seemed half

dead as I drove through it. I was just following a direction as

opposed to actual directions, for there was no road, paved or

otherwise. It was all scorched foothills and flatlands well on

the way to becoming desert, a crazy paving of eroded

trenches, the skeletal remains of cattle in the pastures that

they‟d overgrazed.

Prince Jimbo just sat there, gazing out of the window, his

mind seemingly switched completely off. He‟d had another

accident, and even with the cab‟s air conditioning - working,

for a wonder - on full blast, the smell was getting to me.

It was almost a relief, in the end, to come upon the

devastated wreckage of the university.

* * *

The immediate area was secure in that this sector of the

ruins of St Oscar‟s was deserted. There‟s a kind of specific

tang to a place - if you get what I mean - where once you

know who‟s there and have counted noses, you know, deep

inside, that there‟s no one else.

Of course, the fact that Box‟s sensors showed no body-heat

signatures or movement was a help as well. There was

absolutely nothing. Even animal life, such as might have

survived in this drought-struck desert, didn‟t seem to want to

enter the wreckage. I left Prince Jimbo trying to work out

what was wrong with his shoelaces and went for a wander.

The trick is, sometimes, not to think about things too

much, let your mind go and just go where your feet want to

take you, let your eyes fall upon what they want to fall upon,

your hands pick up and feel what they like. I found what I

was looking for some fifteen minutes later. Mind you, I didn‟t

know what the hell I was looking for until I found it. It could

have been anything.

It was four big, crosslike, impacted indents in the ground,

obviously the landing gear for a ship, maybe a planet-hopper

but far more likely a small cruiser of some kind. The depth of

compression within the indents told me that this ship had

rested here for some time - it was impossible to be sure, but

we were talking weeks if not months. The fact that there were

shards of red pottery driven into the ground, of course, told

me that this ship had come, and stayed, and gone away

again, after the university had been destroyed.

I walked up and down, picturing the ship in my mind. If I

were a ship this big, depending upon which way I was facing,

I‟d have an exit hatch either here or here...

I picked the wrong direction first and had to backtrack. The

other way led into the broken remains of one of the potlike

buildings. Just the place, if you wanted to make camp, to go

back and forth between the ship.

The broken remains of a sign clattered under my feet. It

read:

DEPARTME

0

ARCHAEOL

AN

XENOARCHAE

Off to one side, piled up against the inside of the outer

pottery wall, was a makeshift shelter, built from old support

beams and a large board, which had once served as a

reference map for the surrounding buildings, and now served

as a kind of slanting roof. It couldn‟t be to keep the rain off,

and the lee of the wall protected against the sun – it could

only have been built out of that innate desire for something

sheltered and enclosed that has people making tents and

pulling the blanket over their heads.

I clipped a little mesmetic pinlight to my teeth and went

inside. A bedroll and an archaic-looking Primus stove. A pile

of empty and discarded military-spec ration packs. A smaller,

neatly stacked heap of same that were still full. Various other

items of a generally personal nature, a littering of little yellow

paper scraps and so forth. But my eyes were immediately

drawn to what was on the bedroll...

It was a largish, ledger-like and new-looking book – a

genuine book, bound in synthetic leather, with gold tooling

and everything. Inside, precise lines of scrupulously neat

handwriting marched across unlined, rag-bond pages smooth

as vellum. The materials and craftsmanship, the condition,

the sheer effort that must have gone into its neatness,

combined to give it the aspect of some precious object in its

own right. I closed the book gently, and carefully opened it

from the start to read the title page:

- A Journal -

Bernice Surprise Summerfield

„Slightly Problematic‟ to „You Never Know‟

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

...and for hours after we left the space station Rebecca just

piloted the ship in a stony silence. The weals on her face and

neck slowly darkened to actual bruising. I wanted to say

something, but I was obscurely ashamed of myself, full of so

many other conflicting emotions that I couldn‟t quite bring

myself to open my mouth. Of course, I rationalized it - it was

Rebecca, after all, who wasn‟t talking to me, and if she wasn‟t

I‟d be damned if I started the ball rolling.

Eventually, I decided this was silly. „Look, this is silly,‟ I

said. „It looks as though we‟re going to have each other‟s

company for some considerable period of time yet so we

might as well find some way to pass it in as friendly manner

as possible.‟

Rebecca snorted. „Yeah, right. Let‟s play a little game or

something.‟ She peered rather theatrically through the

canopy of the little craft. „I spy with my little eye, something

beginning with S. Your go. I spy with my little eye, something

beginning with S. Your go. I spy with...‟

„I mean,’ I said, rather more cuttingly than I had meant,

but she had annoyed me - oh, Goddess, how she could get

under my skin and annoy me. „I mean,‟ I said, „that we could

just talk. Tell each other what‟s been happening with our

lives and so forth.‟

„Fine,‟ Rebecca said uninterestedly. „You go first.‟

I have to admit to being caught a little wrong-footed, even

though I had laid myself open to it. I think it was because of

that unconscious egocentricity that everyone has - I had

unconsciously expected her to know everything important

about me as a matter of course. Seen in that light, having put

myself on the spot in that manner, it was hard to think of

precisely what to say. What could I say, what had I done,

what had happened to me in my life that could ultimately, in

some final sense, define it...?

...I‟d forgotten about Gerhardt. He‟d died. No, let‟s be honest,

here if nowhere else - I‟d killed him less than an hour before.

Perhaps now, Gerhardt‟s mother or lover or sister was sitting,

waiting for the news. Did any such women exist? I‟d lived

with him for three months, but didn‟t know anything about

him. He must have had family, though. Across the world,

women were sitting in houses and factories, waiting for their

men to come home, dreading the fact that they might not.

Rebecca was in the same situation, of course. I didn‟t quite

know how to feel about that. Sympathy? Sorrow? Gratitude

and love? Guilt at what I was putting her through, what she

was going through? Such little worlds but they encompass an

entire world...

...the conclusion that there is no single root source. I think

that, in the end, all those stock elements you find in

children‟s stories come from two distinctly different realms of

human experience, at the very least. Things like elves,

gnomes, goblins, pixies, you can draw a through-line back

through racial memory, to when we were all bushmen in the

Kalahari, and we shared it with gibbons, baboons and other,

smaller primates. Anyone who‟s seen recorded instances of a

bushman tricking a gibbon into finding water for him – he

puts the stone in a crevice, an inquisitive gibbon grabs it and

finds he can‟t get his hand back out until the bushman frees

him - doesn‟t need too big a leap to equate that with stories

of tricking a leprechaun, say, out of his crock of gold. These

stories carry the cumulative received wisdom of millennia.

When we talk of giants, on the other hand, I think the time

frame‟s rather smaller. We‟re talking about big, strange and

impossibly old people, who fly into unpredictable rages and

cow us with arbitrary rules we can‟t quite work out, who

might not be ogres as such, but still hold all proper people -

i.e. us - in thrall by way of their sheer size and strength. It‟s

interesting that these stories, when we develop sufficient

intelligence as a child to understand the words, have the

inbuilt notion that giants lived in the past and that their age

has long since gone. It‟s because, of course, when we talk

about giants and ogres and trolls, what we‟re really talking

about is us when we were very, very small and our parents

were impossibly big...

...I didn‟t desert from the Military Academy out of fear or

cowardice, and I certainly wasn‟t a traitor - however they

might like to bandy phrases like „face of the enemy‟ and „in

time of war‟ around. Much as I‟d like to, I can‟t say I deserted

out of some sense of higher nobility either – some sense that

the War we were prosecuting was somehow immoral or wrong

and that I had to take a stand against it. We were fighting a

race that razed planets for the simple reason that they could,

and just killed everyone who was not them or of them for the

simple reason that they were not. You couldn‟t reason with

them: you could only fight or die. It was us or them.

I deserted for the simple reason that I was fundamentally

incompatible with military life. Through the training and

indoctrination I saw precisely what they were doing to us,

and why they were doing it, and it jarred on me, like biting on

a bit of foil or taking a mouthful of wine so corked it‟s all but

pure acetic acid. Now, that might not sound like much - but

that‟s because if you bite on the foil or take the mouthful you

instantly spit it out by pure reflex. Imagine, though, that you

were forced to keep on biting or keep on swallowing and there

was no way you could ever stop, for minutes, and hours, and

days and weeks, and months...

I couldn‟t live like that. There was no way that I could make

myself. So I didn‟t and I got out the first instant it was

possible. Simple reflex, simple as that.

Rebecca didn‟t agree. When she came to me in my bunk

and we talked, she told me that she‟d stick it out, laughing

inside at some of the nonsense, but ready to stand up and be

counted for something that was so right to her that believing

in it didn‟t even enter the equation. It was around that time I

truly realized how different we really were, in so many

things...

...never really notice how debilitating it is to go through life

with a Big Secret, something you must never, ever tell on

pain of, well, pain. Seven for a secret, never to be told.

Something of which you must be constantly aware, so that

you don‟t let it slip out. It becomes the gorgon of your

thoughts.

Someone - I forget precisely who - who liked to think he

was carrying on the Discordian tradition, once told me of one

of the processes he used in his own personal self-imposed

religion - the idea of it being that he got all the benefits of

being a spiritual being without having to associate with those

people who got organized and burnt things because they

didn‟t quite conform to some set of other-imposed rules. What

you did, he said, was put some arbitrary Article of Faith in

your head. It didn‟t have to be a major thing, just something

that stayed in your mind whatever you did, informing your

impulses and actions in the world. You didn‟t have to even

follow it. The point was that, like the injunction for a Muslim

not to eat pork, which over the centuries after actual pigs as

such became extinct has evolved into something almost

entirely different, it would always be there...

In my friend‟s case, he chose „I will not eat green food.‟ As

with most of the males of the species, eating up his greens

was something he would cross the street to avoid in any case,

so he thought that it would make no difference at all to his

day-to-day life. And then, over weeks and months, he started

to notice just how many other foods were green, like lime-

flavoured sweets and avocados, and just how many of the

basic meals he ate, like burgers from a burger bar, contained

green things...

...after my mother died, there was nobody to look after me.

My father had long since gone - I didn‟t even have a memory

of him. Oh, there were family pictures and pictures in the

news, most of them in the stories about how he had turned

his ship on its tail and run, but I could never feel a

connection. I was so young when they were both gone – I look

at the families I happen to know, how they squabble or fight

or get along, and I wonder about that almost telepathic link

they seem to share, the way that they seem to simply get

what some other of them has just said, and I wonder if I‟m

just imposing that impression upon them. Am I just so

desperate to feel some sense of connection myself?

Refugee ships, running from dead worlds. Does it always

come down to that? Maybe I read too much into it for the

simple reason that I first knew Rebecca then, as a child, on

the ship that took me away from the dead planet that was

Beta Caprisis...

Rebecca‟s always had a soft spot for the Bastard Don John.

When he says, „I cannot hide what I am‟ - so she says - he‟s

effectively sticking a couple of fingers up at the saccharine

piety of Leonato‟s court, and the subsequent events are more

the result of the hypocrisy of others than of his own quite

frankly villainous involvement.

Like that nifty Beatrice/Benedick subplot, so Rebecca nays,

it‟s as relevant now as then. We‟re all of us forced by

circumstance into roles we don‟t want, must walk the walk

and talk the talk until we collapse under the weight of it all -

the only way out, if you have the strength for it, being to take

what is essentially a villainous stance...

- Random extracts from the journal of Bernice

Summerfield, recovered from the ruins of

St Oscar‟s University, Dellah

CHAPTER 12

The story seemed simple enough. Bernice Summerfield had

escaped the upheavals on Dellah and any subsequent

incarceration on Thanaxos - either through her contacts or

the simple fact that she had ended up on some other planet,

somewhere else. She had then, for reasons I couldn‟t as yet

fathom, organized a ship and come back. She might have

slipped past the planetary defences in the confusion before

the Blockade locked in, or maybe the ship had been cloaked

in some way. And then she‟d waited, passing the time by

writing in her journal.

So what had she been waiting for? And why, when

whatever she was waiting for happened - or it didn‟t, and she

gave up - did she leave the journal behind?

The journal itself had quite obviously been written out over

the course of weeks if not months. I got the impression that it

had been edited down from other, far more circumstantial

material, so as to collate together certain thoughts, reactions

and ideas in general that she‟d wanted to preserve as

important in some way. On the whole, though, I could have

done with all the circumstantiality of whatever Summerfield

used for a diary, rather than interminable musings upon the

nature of art, philosophy, personal and familial relationships

and how they were related to the antics of the baboons in the

Kalahari.

As I skimmed through the entries, trying to get some sense

of Summerfield‟s actual life, I came across a number of

names I was familiar with from the files - and one new name

that stood out by sheer repetition. This Rebecca seemed to

have run through her life like a golden thread, being there at

every key point - or, if not, Summerfield‟s thoughts were

never far way from her, turning to her like the needle of a

compass. Their relationship seemed stormy at best, and they

had split up more times than I could count, but she had

loved her since she was a child, and they always seemed to

find some way to get back together in the end.

I found myself feeling a bit jealous. I recalled some of the

thoughts I‟d had back in the detention complex that had kept

me going, happy little daydreams of going up to an idealized

Bernice Summerfield, showing her what she was missing

with that clown Jason Kane from the New Frontier

Adventures by the simple fact that I existed, promptly

sweeping her up and heading off into the sunset.

This was different. Summerfield‟s relationship with her girl

was such a real and complicated and long-term loving thing

that I wasn‟t in with a chance, and wouldn‟t have tried for

one if I was. Maybe „envy‟ is a better word for it than

„jealousy‟ - that little weaselly feeling you sometimes get that

two people are being in love with each other and incredibly

happy just to spite you, when they are of course completely

unaware of your existence.

Of course, on the plus side, it was lucky that I‟d found out

she was that way inclined before I met her, if I ever did, so I

wouldn‟t make a complete and utter fool of myself by hitting

on someone who was, fundamentally, not interested. I

reminded myself sternly, yet again, never to believe one word

of anything I‟d ever read in the New Frontier Adventures.

The main thing was that I had another solid lead.

Summerfield was still alive, and if she was alive then she‟d be

with her girl - or, if they‟d gone through yet another break-

up, they‟d be back together at some point. From the looks of

it, it was a cycle of love and irritated argument rather than

any violent or abusive pattern that either of them would ever

truly want to break. It was just a matter of locating this

Rebecca. From just that name. And from the complete lack of

physical description that people always fail to give for those

they love, in the same way that you don‟t write lovingly

precise descriptions of your right arm...

I skipped to the back of the journal. There were fifty-odd

blank pages left, but the text ended with a finality that told

me that, so far as Summerfield was concerned, the work was

complete. It dealt with those last events on Dellah but, as

with all else in the journal, it was more concerned with what

she thought about it than what had actually happened. I did

my level best to read between the lines:

...in any case, I know that I‟ve had enough. I‟ve had

enough of playing games and never being told the rules,

I‟ve had enough of worlds that die and leave you

crawling, sobbing, in the wreckage. And I know what I

must do. I‟m going to take the Mary-Sue and walk

away. I‟ve had enough.

Rebecca is with me almost constantly now, taking

care of me while I recover. It‟s a strange sort of comfort.

She was unapologetic when she came back - as she

shouldn‟t be after the way I treated her – but she was

gentle and concerned. She was worried about me. She

couldn‟t leave me in that state. She just wanted to help.

When she came back to me, it was like the other

times. I‟d long forgiven her for all the times she hurt

me, the things she‟d said and done that split us last

time; I missed her so much that it was like a hook

twisting in my heart - but I was terrified that I simply

wouldn‟t feel the love again, as though a switch had

been thrown, a connection broken, something in me

dead beyond all resurrection...

And there it was, right in front of me. It was nice to see that

Bernice and Rebecca were back in love again and all, but

„Rebecca‟ wasn‟t the name that leapt off the page and hit me

like it was written in flashing neon light.

Sometimes, you can be waiting by the doors for hours,

periodically checking the windows just in case - and the

buggers come out through the ventilation shaft behind you. I

looked at that name - which wasn‟t precisely a name, if you

get what I mean - and all of a sudden a number of things

became clear. I might or might not have exclaimed

something, the eyes might or might not have popped out on

extensible stalks, I may or may not have stuck a pontifical

linger in the air with a hearty „By Jove, I think I‟ve got it!‟ -

but you get the general idea.

I tucked the Journal of Bernice Summerfield under my

jacket and wandered out into the sunlight. The shadows of

the terracotta ruins were longer now and the light had a

reddish tinge. The afternoon was wearing on. I found Prince

Jimbo sitting more or less where I had left him, staring

vacantly into space as though his mind had simply been

switched off.

„Come on, Jimbo.‟ I nudged him with my boot. „We‟re going

back now.‟

He looked up at me with a blank expression. „Yes,‟ he said.

„We will return to the palace, now.‟

The problem with sudden flashes of inspiration is that they

can blind you to all else. At the time, what with other things

on my mind, and a determination not to give the little idiot

any more attention than I had to, I missed a number of

important things. The sense of vacancy about him I put down

to his basic doltishness, just another aspect of the stunted

mind that had him prattling about everything that crossed it,

now dormant because, here in the ruins, there was nothing

to set it going. I noted in passing that his shoes were tied

correctly now, and just assumed that he had hit upon it by a

couple of hours of trial and error.

It‟s on such suppositions, incidentally, that the good

intentions that pave the road to Hell are laid.

Some hours later I was back in the palace; Prince Jimbo was

tucked up safely in his guarded room and I was in minor

showering off the grit and stink of travel.

Sela came in and dropped her camera. It might have

seemed odd, what with the recent fundamentalist spin given

to Dellah an society, that two unmarried people were allowed

to share a bedchamber, but it didn‟t seem to be an issue.

Possibly it was the result of that strange quality of being

unnoticeable that appeared to affect me. Personally, though, I

think it was the fact that, by their lights, it demonstrated the

loose morals of Unbeliever dogs, and they allowed it to occur

for the precise reason that they could then point it out and

get all judgemental.

„Good day at work?‟ I asked when she had discarded her

clothes and we were scrubbing each other off.

„If you mean I got the job done, sure,‟ she said sourly.

„Eight hours of covering this rabble-rousing hoopla, not

counting coffee breaks and lunch. They wouldn‟t let me shoot

anywhere else. I mean Jeez!’ She spat down into the shower

drain. „My crew could have handled everything that‟s going

on their own. They could just have pointed an autocam at the

stage for all the direct input I‟m allowed.‟ She stomped from

the shower and towelled herself off with angry vigour on the

luxurious towels provided, each with the Sultan‟s crest

stitched into a corner.

„How long have we got before we can get out of here?‟ she

asked me. „You have the inside track.‟

„Another day and then back to Thanaxos,‟ I said. „It‟s a good

idea, apparently, to get out before the ritual hospitality

expires.‟

„It can‟t run out soon enough as far as I‟m concerned,‟ said

Sela.

We slept.

In the depths of the night, I woke up in a cold sweat. Sela

tossed and turned beside me, muttering some fitful kind of

dream-litany in her sleep. I decided it would be better if I let

her dreams run their own course and didn‟t wake her. I sat

in the bed and tried not to shake, trying to pin down the

nightmare that had woken me:

A sense of being utterly alone, hanging in some gulf of

sense deprivation but with voices jabbering at me – my

eardrums vibrating not from sound waves carried by the air,

but by the fact that the voices were making them vibrate,

firing off the sections of my brain that processed sound and

language, giving me the physical sensations of hearing them

in a way roughly analogous to the way that a speaker

diaphragm can be used as a microphone, the signal going

precisely the opposite way.

The voices had jabbered in chorus, discrete threads of

intonation winding through their polyphonic mass - no, not

threads exactly: more like tentacles - tentacles squirming

round my mind and probing, trying to find a break in the

defences, looking for a way in past the wall...

I had it, then. It was just a flashback to the time when I

was a kid and in the EMG think tank. I get them,

occasionally. My mind tends to shy away from them, and it

takes some time to consciously work them out. Once I had, I

could put them away from me and use a couple of auto-

hypnotic techniques to seal them off. I shut my mind and

visualized a translucent tetrahedron of jade, floating before

me. I wrapped the memories inside it and made it spin, and

watched it as I drifted off to sleep...

And woke. It was early morning, brilliant white light casting

those hard-edged perspective rays you get in pictures of God

behind a bank of cumulonimbus, through the muslin over

the windows and the canopy over the bed.

Sela wasn‟t there. She was in the shower room, having just

showered off the sweat of the night - the Tashwari he made

three or four showers a day almost mandatory, if you were

expecting to move in polite society. I reached out and touched

her shoulder - and felt a little strange. It wasn‟t much, just a

kind of emotional equivalent of the crack when you touch

earthed metal and discharge the static electricity from your

body. It‟s just that sense you get, on touching someone with

whom you‟ve been intimate, that some connection has been

dropped or broken.

She turned to face me, and I saw it in her eyes before she

even spoke.

„Listen...‟ she said. „I‟ve been thinking, and I think we

should cool it for a while. You know that what we‟re doing

goes against the moral tenets of the All-High Gods...‟

This was sufficiently unlike the Sela I knew - a Sela who‟d

have a bunk-up on the observation deck of the Luna-Titan

ferry if the mood took her - that I raised an eyebrow in

surprise.

Sela noticed. „I mean, the locals here get hung up on things

like this, and it‟s not making either of our jobs easier. Why

don‟t we just leave it till we‟re back on Thanaxos and then

take it from there?‟

„Sure.‟ I shrugged as though it didn‟t matter. „Let‟s take it

from there.‟

The sudden change in Sela preyed on my mind all through

the long hours of shepherding Prince Jimbo through the day,

as the diplomatic ceremonies wore to a close and we

embarked upon die Royal Yacht for the journey home. For a

wonder, he was remarkably easy to deal with, that switched-

off blankness he had demonstrated in the ruins of St Oscar‟s

carrying through and replacing his more ordinary drooling

idiocy. He went where I told him to and then just stood or sat

there quietly. I decided not to push it by attempting to force

some further response, and counted my blessings.

As for Sela, well, people have got sick of me and dumped

me before. It was just possible, I supposed, that she had

been villainously brainwashed and was under some nefarious

and evil control - but that seemed a bit of a long run for the

short slide of stopping her despoiling the sanctity of the

Sultan‟s palace with acts lacking in propriety. I shouldn‟t let

my suspicions run away with me and build up vast and

complicated constructs of conspiracy, just to account for and

rationalize away the fact that someone had gone off me and

I‟d been dumped. I didn‟t mention it in the slightly but

distinctively different mission reports I prepared for the

various editions of Volan - what would be the point?

The farcically haranguing and denunciative rigours of the

diplomatic mission had taken their toll upon the various

Thanaxon envoys. They slumped in their seats on the journey

back in a defeated and slightly dazed manner that reminded

me a little of Prince Jimbo‟s vacuousness. After a couple of

days of being shouted at for being Unbelieving heathen dogs,

I couldn‟t blame them. The Royal Yacht grounded, I delivered

Prince Jimbo into the care of the palace guard, fired off my

brace of reports, watched my clearing account until the fund

transfer from the Thanaxon Council was confirmed and then

headed off to the private landing fields.

One of the first things I‟d done upon escaping the detention

complex was to have the Star of Afrique released from

impoundment. She waited, now, under a merchant-freighter

cover name that was clean down the line, her lift and

propulsion systems recharged and ready to go. Thanaxon

airspace security had been tightened up in the last weeks, as

a prelude to the coming war, but I had taken the opportunity

of a spare moment to download the overriding protocols from

the Royal Yacht. I had little trouble getting out.

The „name‟ I‟d chanced upon in Summerfield‟s journal had

been Mary-Sue. Now that might not seem like much to you,

but, believe me, it was the equivalent of intercepting a

textmail message and reading, „we explode the thermo-

nuclear device under the President‟s bed tonight‟. In the past,

doing a Mary-Sue was a term used by critics to denote the

act of the author‟s putting him- or herself into a work of

fiction, like as not to get all hot and bothered at the idea of

copping off with the lead character.

Nowadays, it means something different. A Mary-Sue is a

mindwipe-and-rebuild process, used by the more heavy-duty

policing, covert-observation and espionage services to give an

operative a deep and unshakable cover – total conversion into

a distinct new person, complete and whole, complete with

memories, personality and an airtight life on file. If the

person who had once been Bernice Summerfield had gone

through a Mary-Sue, she was involved in something so heavy

that this had been the only way to survive it - and I wanted

to talk to her about it more than ever.

A Mary-Sue is almost impossible to acquire, outside of the

seriously Big Boys. Even with my Stratum Seven status,

there was only one place such a thing could be arranged. I

cleared the Thanaxon atmosphere, reorientated the Star of

Afrique on its axis, and laid in a course for the Proximan

Chain.

BACKGROUND INSERT (PERSONAL FILE):

Scenes from an Ordinary Childhood III

Moments of transition: the feel of plunging headlong through

the void, the half-glimpsed flashes of reddish, slimy, organic-

looking membrane walls, lit by clusters of sore-like polyps

that seemed to be infecting them and giving off a sickly,

phosphorescent glow. The slippery feeling against me as my

fall brought me in brief contact with the walls before reaction

bounced me off...

An explosion of static across my entire field of vision, the

sound of white noise in my ears...

An endless time with no sight, or sound, or sensation at all

- not simple darkness, because darkness at the very least

needs some possibility of light with which to stand in

contrast. No sound at all, not even the never-noticed pulse of

the blood, the sounds we live in all our lives and never hear,

and which I only so much as barely intimated, here and now,

now that it was gone. No sensation, none at all – I could not

even feel the secondary senses, the internal gauges of

position and orientation through which one can develop

strategies to deal with prolonged terms of sensory

deprivation. Nothing but the blankness. I existed as a kind of

singularity of identity, alive in some sense and aware – but

without thought process or memory, and there was nothing

for me to be aware of...

I have no idea of how long I existed in that state. Could

have been minutes, could have been weeks. Could have been

years.

Then the static was back, and everything changed. It was

like a monitor being switched on in front of your face, or a

full-sense VR rig running with the gain to high and plugged

straight into a sequence that was already running. Ragged

blazing lights tore across my vision and a shriek split

through my ears. My skin burnt with agony, something

exploded in my guts and I screamed, soundlessly and unable

to make the muscles work in my mouth.

My senses spun with synaesthesia, then settled down a bit.

The forms resolved themselves in front of my eyes: a grainy,

strobing face that filled my entire sight. The colour register

was off and the image was distorted, so that the eyes seemed

huge and the lower face and mouth Dopplered off in a

manner reminiscent of those old pre-space-flight sketches of

the Grey aliens, who abducted people and did nasty things

with probes. Even so distorted, I got the distinct impression

that this was not a particularly nice face – not the face of a

particularly nice man at all.

The diminutively shrunken mouth worked. A fraction of a

second later, the voice sounded in my ears - a kind of tinny,

modulated buzz like you get when you plug a sound system

up on maximum gain through a speaker without

amplification.

‘‘Test subject, oh one seven three four six slash, ah, four

seven three point one point two,’ the tinny little voice said.

‘‘Initialization routines complete. Resetting input preferences

.. The sound of breathing and a little, absent-minded grunt

filled my ears with the force of a thunderclap directly

overhead in the middle of a gale - then the noise-levels settled

to something approaching normality.

„Hello, there!‟ said the face in front of me, the voice and the

mouth now more or less in sync. „Don‟t try to speak, yet it

wouldn‟t do you any good. We‟ve yet to bring your response

mode on line and fine-tune it.

„Now, I expect you‟re wondering what‟s happened to you.

You things always seem to want to know. Well, the bad news,

I‟m afraid, is that you‟re dead. You died resisting arrest by

EMG ground-force operatives, seven years ago, of let me see -

severe gunshot trauma to the abdomen and chest. I

understand that the result was not a pretty sight.‟

The distorted face warped even further as it beamed. „The

good news is that the head - and, more to the point, the brain

- was preserved intact. You‟ve been kept on cryogenic ice

since then, here in the good old Festival Hall facility...

„Dear me, look at those telltales - I do believe your synaptic

mesh is positively spiking. Just let me... There we are...

„There‟s nothing to worry about. You‟re not some

disembodied head hooked to the power grid or anything like

that that would be completely and utterly ridiculous, and not

to mention in entirely questionable taste. Strictly speaking,

you‟re not a head at all. Your head’s already sliced up and

thrown away like so much leftover wafer-thin ham. Do you

remember when you could get such a thing as wafer-thin

sliced ham? I do.‟

The face smacked its lips reminiscently, and resumed:

„Strictly speaking, you‟re in what we call the Think Tank. The

Emergency Military Government has found applications for

the process in what might be called Information Gathering, of

course, but that‟s neither here nor there – you are, whatever

else, participating in the greatest advance in artificial-

intelligence research since the construction of the very first

transputronically based machine network. Think of that!

„For far too long,‟ the voice of the face continued, obviously

burning to share some long-held personal enthusiasm, „the

development of true artificial intelligence has been

hamstrung by the mechanistic approach of Turin and his ilk.‟

The voice of the face contrived to give the impression that it

wished it were physically possible to spit out the word „ilk‟.

„He and others mapped their theories and their rather squalid

little personal neuroses on to the world rather than vice

versa. They persisted in seeing human intelligence -

intelligence itself, as we know it – as algorithmic, when it is,

in fact, holistic.

„The refinement of holographic technology in the world

outside, the ability for a holographic matrix to evolve in real

time, has given us an entirely new approach - the way to go

is the generation or replication of a synaptic structure in its

entirety, as opposed to merely emulating that structure‟s

apparent function by way of some imposed decision-tree

nonsense of a step system...‟

The voice of the face paused, proudly. I got the distinct

impression that whoever the voice and face ultimately

belonged to was simply reeling off ideas parrot-fashion, with

no real idea of what it actually meant.

„The Think Tank is basically a real-time holo-projector,‟ it

continued smugly, „of such a high resolution that it operates

upon the subatomic level - the level, it seems, upon which

true consciousness operates. The brain of a subject - you

yourself, of course, in this case - is scanned by high-powered

lasers and mapped into the Tank as a stable system of

connections. The process destroys the brain itself, naturally,

but you can‟t make an omelette without breaking eggs, can

you? Or make progress without breaking skulls.

„A stable structure is of no use at all, however. It doesn‟t

move. The process of human thought is merely the by-

product of the incremental collapse of the brain under

entropy. So we destabilize the artificial construct, simulate

the decay of an actual brain. The resulting output is

transferred by some rather sophisticated imaging techniques

into a real-time simulacrum, precisely mimicking the

thoughts and responses, even the memories and personality

of a living human brain - and that, of course, is you.

„The only drawback is that the unstable construct is

subject to accelerated decay. At the moment, I‟m afraid, you

have a life expectancy of around seven hours. So I think I

have to turn you over to the more, ah, practical-minded

powers that be before you become completely unusable. I‟ll

moderate your impulses so you don‟t act inappropriately,

make sure you tell them what they need to know, never

fear...‟

For hours another face asked me questions: yes-and-no

answers read off a list. Did I have regular contacts, when I

was alive, who supplied me with arms? Was it a person with

this name? What about this name? Had I met people who

might have somehow broken the Perimeter and come in from

the outside world? That sort of thing.

I couldn‟t have lied if I‟d wanted to - or told the truth, for

that matter. In my virtual state I could feel that I had lips

and a mouth, but nothing I did seemed to make them work to

answer yes, no or none of the above. I assume they just

monitored my virtual thought processes to see how I

responded, in the same way as in some kind of polygraph

test. My only comfort was that any information they might

glean was at least seven years out of date - if I could believe

the voice of the first face I‟d seen - and a lot can change in

seven years.

Throughout it all I hunted round what I assumed to be

still, in some sense, my own mind with a kind of desperate

terror - trying to find the sort of damage that I assumed

would be the result of its destroying itself from the inside. I

couldn‟t seem to find any - but that wasn‟t exactly

reassuring. If there were blank holes eaten in my mind, then

how the hell could I think of them in the first place and

realize that they were blank?

After a seemingly endless time the questions stopped and

the other face went away. I looked for a while at a hazy

collection of forms that might or might not have been a wall,

something that might or might not have been a notice board

on the right periphery of my vision, smaller, vaguely oblong

shapes on it that may or may not have been tacked-up

notices that I would never be able to read.

The original face - the face of the guy I‟d first seen and who

seemed to be into casual torture of the helpless little putative

AI experimental construct - hove into view again, and

regarded me, so far as my grainy vision could guess,

critically. It didn‟t say anything.

The burst of static and white noise and then, again, the

blankness.

I opened my eyes.

That was the first surprise - the fact that I had eyes to

open. The second surprise was how utterly well I felt. I mean,

I don‟t mean I felt well after being some kind of disembodied

and prototypical AI construct - if I could believe the Voice and

it hadn‟t all been just some incredibly complicated

interrogation technique. I mean that I had never felt this

sense of physical strength and lack of pain in my life - and

certainly not for the years of chronic malnutrition, lice and

hard knocks of the Birmingham EMG Zone.

I was flat on my back, lying on something almost

impossibly smooth-feeling and soft, in a cool white room. The

air tasted weird, until I realized that it just tasted fresh.

Somewhere I heard the distant sound of air conditioners.

A face loomed over me. Female, quite possibly the most

beautiful face - and certainly the most healthy-looking - I‟d

ever seen. There was a vague sense of disorientation about it.

though - look, given the tenor of my times, I was slightly less

of what used to be called racist than otherwise, and the self-

enclosed, blockaded life within the city meant that what in

my day was called mixed race, and in these days is called

hybridity, wasn‟t much of an issue. But even so, the face of

the woman just seemed wrong. Little things happening at the

edges of her eyes and mouth, a skin tone that had a slightly

greenish tinge - it wasn‟t that she was some saurian monster

with scales and claws or anything. She just seemed somehow

fundamentally wrong...

Panic reflex cut in. I tried to lurch away, found that my

forearms and shins were restrained - and then I saw just

what,

precisely,

these

forearm-and-shin-restraining

restraints were restraining. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’

You have to remember that I came from a time when body-

swapping or even body -bepple wasn‟t even so much as a

workable concept. There was a small minority of people in my

time who were transsexual, trapped in a meat machine that

was entirely wrong for them, and had the sheer guts and

courage to undergo extremely primitive surgery to correct

their bodies into a form that was approximately right for the

person inside. The point is, to be a candidate for such

procedures, you went through years of psycho-testing

beforehand and intensive psychotherapy after.

It wasn‟t just the fact of sexual reassignment that made

this necessary: it was the simple, fundamental shock of

waking from the anaesthetic to find yourself inhabiting a

completely different body. Similar counselling was needed for

amputees or those with spinal injuries - no spare body parts

in tanks or nerve-regeneration grafts in those days.

Embodiment was so much of what we were that finding our

bodies suddenly and irrevocably changed was literally

unthinkable. Oh, sure there were wish-fulfilment fantasies of

saying a magic word, or being shot to a low-gravity planet

where you‟re really, really strong in comparison - but these

were of the nature of the happy little thoughts you have to

help you to get to sleep. Of copping off with a girl you saw

that day and fancied, of smacking the face of somebody who

irritated you. If it really happened it would flat-out kill you

with its psychic blow.

All in all, and all things considered (and due in large part, I

later learnt, to a couple of months of subliminal conditioning

before I was even woken up), I‟m rather proud that my

reaction was as calm and restrained as it was.

„Listen!‟ the rather nice but fundamentally wrong woman

cried as I struggled in vain against the straps. „Just listen,

please! We‟re here to help you through this. Please, try to be

still and I‟ll try to explain...‟

CHAPTER 13

The Habitats of the Proximan Chain are a sort of three-way

hybrid of the various ideas of space stations, colonies and

planetary settlements. That is, the physical space they

occupy is spread out over those locations, but they‟re linked

by a series of mass-transit pads, taking you from the one to

the other instantly, so that the end result is a single and

coherent environment.

„Coherent‟, though, is probably not the right word. I‟ve

mentioned how places can be low- or high-tech – but the

Proximan Chain takes the „high‟ in „high technology‟ to the

extreme. It‟s a kind of playground for the grey-market people

involved in anything from body-swap, mind-sculpting, Al-

envelope-pushing,

tailored

pharmaceuticals,

weaponry

development and anything else with an acronym or a hyphen

you can name.

I love it, frankly, in the same way I love my arms or my eyes

- it‟s my natural environment, simple as that. I‟ve talked

about the way that things get around in other places, but

here, in the Proximan Chain, you can‟t make a move without

everybody knowing - if they happen to feel like pulling it out

of the informational chaos of what everybody else is doing as

well - and you know that, deep in your bones and in your

implants.

The feeling of hooking yourself in and moving through is

impossible to describe if you don‟t know it, any more than a

mediaeval peasant could describe all the feelings he got

walking through a field and being aware of all the plants in it,

knowing that each one was special and had any number of

uses and aspects. It would take an hour to list the specifics

of experiencing a minute of it. It was, quite simply, home.

„Put out a trawl for anything useful. Box,‟ I said, as I came

down the ramps from the docking complex. „I‟m looking for

refs on a Bernice Summerfield, out of Dellah, possibly going

under the name of Berni.‟ What the hell. The New Frontier

Adventures might pay off at some point, if only by the law of

averages.

„Time frame?‟ Box asked.

„Stuff from the last four months. See if anybody‟s got a

physical lock on her and wants to share. Weed out all the

spam, New Frontier Adventures shit and word-search

wannafuck personals and just tell me what you think I want

to hear. Your fuzzy-logic routines should have more than

enough parameters by now to give you an idea of what I‟m

after.‟

„Pretty much,‟ said Box. „Just be nice when I come up with

weird stuff and you knock me back on it. This Bernice

Summerfield paradigm‟s getting rather more complex than

most.‟

„Don‟t I just know it, Box,‟ I said.

The Habitats are a place where you don‟t need maps – a

place where / don‟t need them, at least. You know where you

want to go and you just drift through them, through the

crowd, and sooner or later you just find yourself there. I

breathed in that mix of esters, pheromones, secondary

ketones, that aren‟t so much a fixed and constantly

distinctive smell as the culmination of diversity. Everybody,

every species and racial subset of those species, comes here

at some point and leaves a trace. It‟s that special kind of

sensory overload that you get here, and nowhere else. It‟s like

the taste and feel of tobacco smoke in the lungs: there‟s

nothing quite like it and you miss it when it‟s gone.

I wandered through the catwalk streets just breathing it in,

taking in the sights in an absent way: an animated bundle of

splintery sticks that was in fact a Drolag from the Cool Stars,

opening up his meat locker - sculpted from real meat - to

display a collection of hoki crystals to some interested human

customer; the Spindlekings dancing through the crowd,

moving so fast when they moved, and staying so still when

they stopped that they seemed like statues appearing and

disappearing at random; an Oroborous Worm, sedately

rolling along a walkway as it ate itself... It‟s nice to be

reminded sometimes that humanity isn‟t, in the end, a kind

of galactic species-default setting, and of how insular the

human way of looking at things can sometimes be.

I picked up a hoki crystal from the Drolag and carried on,

the smooth-plane facets in my palm making my nerves sing

in a way that‟s, apparently, cumulatively harmful, but no

more harmful on a day-to-day basis than a double Scotch.

„I‟ve got a possibility,‟ said Box

„Is it a good possibility?‟ I said.

„It‟s a pretty good possibility. No real names, just a mail

drop and the location for a meet. Dead Dog in the Water

Preproductions. Learn something to your advantage, so they

say, and they‟re naming a price. Twenty-five per cent up

front.‟

„So pay it,‟ I said. „We‟re on expenses.‟

Box transferred the funds and reeled off a location - you‟d

never find it now if you went to the Proximan Chain. The

addresses in the Proximan Chain tend to move around. I

flagged down a traveller as it sculled through the

thoroughfare by way of an even hundred little oar-like

appendages between its flotation tanks, hung on to the

straps it had thoughtfully bolted to its carapace and, when

its ear-and-eye appendage swung back to regard me

enquiringly, gave it the address.

My destination wasn‟t exactly prepossessing. It was the

kind of low-rent storage-and-repair garage for personal fliers,

off to one side of a citadel in one of the planetary-based

habitat areas, that you just knew was the front for a busy

little chop shop.

It was night-time. The doorway was open invitingly,

revealing the brightly lit workshop space beyond, so I walked

round the structure until I found a side hatch. It was

padlocked, so I pulled out my Allen key and little bit of wire

and went to work. Holomovies notwithstanding, it takes a bit

of time to pick a lock - but what the hell. I had the time. The

hatch swung open smoothly, on oiled hinge springs, to show

utter blackness within. The hatch obviously led into a room

blocked off from the workshop space. It was too dark even for

my slightly enhanced eyes and optic nerves to pull out

shapes and forms. I hung back to avoid presenting a target

profile and considered my options.

In the dark, what with the ambient street light from the

hatch, I‟d have a slight but possibly vital advantage over

whoever might be waiting in there for me - if they weren‟t

wearing snoopers.

As it happened, snoopers weren‟t the problem. I went

through the hatch doing all the right things - and felt the

muzzle of a blaster pressing firmly into the nape of my neck.

„Hang loose,‟ said a cheerful, female voice. „Take ya head off

if you don‟t.‟

Fluorescent neon flickered on. I was in a smallish office, a

battered panel door blocking the path to what was

presumably the workshop. Racks of old and dirty-looking

mechanical parts ran along one wall; another wall was

covered with a blizzard of old tacked-up invoice forms,

manifests and a calendar intended for the Sloathe market,

and which was probably highly erotic, assuming that your

tastes ran to amorphous slimy lumps with tubes and

suckers.

There was an ancient, roll-top desk that looked like it had

actually originated from Earth. Lounging by it with a kind of

easy nonchalance was the figure of a man. Mid-thirties, with

the lean kind of muscularity that comes from putting

muscles to their daily use, brown-skinned with that

distinctive tone that spoke of expensively microcustomized

gene-modification so that the skin could stand long periods

under high-UV and high-radiation suns. Baggy trousers of

green-stained suede, tucked into calf-high lace-up combat

boots; a vest that showed the traces of primitive childhood

gang tattoos on his shoulders and arms.

His hair was cut in the kind of ragged mop worn by people

who don‟t care much about their hair and just want to keep

it out of their eyes. A month-old shot at bleaching it was

growing out. His face was one of those you just see every day,

on the people who walk by as part of the mobile scenery -

unremarkable, save for the fierce and bright, if somewhat

transient and unpredictable, intelligence behind the eyes.

The man grinned with a kind of easy nastiness reminiscent of

the tone of voice of the girl with a gun to my head. „Wotcha,

cock.‟

There were any number of witty responses to this, but I

wasn‟t in the mood. I debated with myself whether or not it

was worth trying to catch a glimpse of the woman behind me,

and decided against it. I knew where she was, and what she

actually looked like while she was there was beside the point.

„I think this is the point,‟ I said to the grinning man, „when

you say I don‟t have to worry, you mean me no harm, and

you tell your friend to put the gun away.‟

„I don‟t think so, matey.‟ A look of barely suppressed rage

crossed his face. „My name‟s Jason Kane. And I want to know

what a Stratum Seven mechanic out of Pseudopod

Enterprises is doing, nosing around and looking for my wife.‟

I think I might have stared at the guy, startled. Once again,

the assumptions I had subconsciously made, from reading

about real people in the New Frontier Adventures, had turned

around and bit me on the arse, snapping me back to reality

with an almost physical jerk. Whatever this guy was, he

certainly wasn‟t some amiable, muscle-bound lunkhead who

needed to be told by Bernice Summerfield, or anyone else,

what to do.

The woman took advantage of my moment of surprise to

shove me forward with the flat of her hand, catching me off

guard so that I lost my equilibrium and stumbled. This was

nice in that the gun was not now pressed directly to my neck,

but not so nice for the same reason: there are a hell of a lot

more things you can do to counter a projectile weapon when

you actually have close contact with it. I heard the hatch

behind me shut with a clang and then she walked round me

to join the man, still covering me with the gun. I was rather

glad I hadn‟t seen it before - I have a sort of allergy to

plasma-based handguns so fuckoff huge that you could drive

a hov-truck up the ejection snout and park.

She was wearing something skin-tight, black and shiny

under a voluminous, full-length overcoat, and had a widow‟s

peak of cropped, jet-black hair and a foxy-looking face half

buried in its tumed-up collar. A street-kid-grown-up face,

interesting rather than classically beautiful - and, classical

beauty being as overrated as it is, I‟d go for interesting every

day of the week and twice on Sundays.

She scowled at me. „I‟ve got a girlfriend and I don‟t like you.

I know what you‟re thinking - I mean I really know what

you‟re thinking - and I don‟t look even remotely similar under

the coat.‟

Just my luck. I think I‟ve mentioned that the old sci-fi idea

of telepathy is physically impossible - and this woman was

one of the telepaths we haven‟t got. Something like the

implantation Volan and his sort use for business negotiations

- but jacked completely off the scale. These people are packed

with superconductive sensor systems, running parallel to the

major ganglia, which can be set to resonate along with an

approximation of a target‟s automemic neural construct.

With the proper training and a certain degree of personal

insight, they become what might not technically count as

mind-readers, but are so close that you might as well call

them that and give up.

On the one hand this made me feel better about myself - I‟d

been doubting my own skills for a moment, thinking how I

must have slipped one hell of a lot if you could get the drop

on me so easily. I hadn‟t missed noticing her when I came

through the hatch because of any lapse, though, and neither

had she been preternaturally stealthy and quiet. She‟d made

moves and noises - but she‟d made them at the precise point

that she knew my attention was elsewhere. On the other

hand, I felt obscurely, going about things in that way wasn‟t

quite playing by the rules.

„Hey.‟ The woman winked at me. „Whatever gets the job

done.‟

„You still haven‟t answered my question,‟ said Jason Kane.

„What do you want with Benny?‟

„So it‟s Benny, is it?‟ I said, more or less to give myself time

to think. „I thought it was Bemi or something.‟

„Not if you want to live. That‟s not a threat, though. She

just hates it.‟ Kane gestured towards the woman‟s gun.

‘That’s a threat So cut the who-me crap and spill.‟

„I just want to talk to her,‟ I said. „She‟s involved with my

case and I want to know what she knows.‟

„So making sure she‟s not in a position to tell anybody else

isn’t part of it?‟ said Kane - and I didn‟t need to be any kind

of mind-reader to know what he was thinking.

„It‟s not that sort of job,‟ I said.

„He‟s telling the truth,‟ said the woman to Kane, in that sort

of clinically chatty way some techs have of passing on the

data from their readouts. „I mean, he‟d do her if he had to,

but he wouldn‟t like it, and he doesn‟t think the situation‟s

anywhere close to that.‟

„Yeah, well.‟ Jason Kane wandered from the desk and came

to get a closer look at me, stopping just short of the point

where, if I tried to make a lunge-and-grab, it would do any

good. It seemed that he just knew instinctively at which point

to stop, rather than out of any fear or caution that I might

have been able to turn against him. „Much as I trust your

judgement, Mira, this guy‟s about as shifty as they come. The

moment you came sniffing round our patch -‟ this to me „- we

put together seven sorts of dossier on you from Sunday.‟

„So what‟s your line of business in this “our patch”?‟ I

asked.

„You‟ll never know. Suffice it to say that we know stuff from

the people that even the people you don‟t know don‟t know

about. What‟s this total shit about being a time-traveller?‟

„What would you call it?‟ I said, a little indignantly. As I‟ve

mentioned before, my temporal status is one of the things

that, while it doesn‟t prey on my mind the livelong day to the

detriment of all else, it‟s like a burr in the brain. It gigs me

when I brush against it. „One minute I‟m lying in a twenty-

first-century pool of gut-shot blood and dying, the next I‟m

waking up with a freshly cloned body in a Catan Nebula

medical centre. What would you call it.‟

„I wouldn‟t call it the real thing, sunshine,‟ Kane growled.

„Some of us have done the real thing.‟ He scowled at me with

a kind of vague contempt. „You know what the Catan

Nebula‟s famous for, right? They breed up artificial humans

and load them up with synthetic personality constructs and

memories...‟

„Of course I know that!‟ I said.

„Hey, there‟s no need to shout,‟ said Jason Kane.

„Of course I know that,‟ I said. „And just what do you think

the constructs and memories are synthesized from? They

needed a model, and it was the rediscovery of a cache of EMG

engram records - what they used to call Think Tanks - half a

century ago on Earth that formed the basis for the entire

process. They‟ve been trying for years to reintegrate those

original engrams properly - and I‟m about the only one with

which they had any real success. The process involved

destroying the engram itself, in the same way that my

original brain was destroyed to make it in the first place.

They can‟t make any more of me. I‟m the culmination, a

complete and distinct individual and basically as human as

you are.‟

I tried to keep my voice level and calm throughout this little

speech. I knew it was true. After I‟d worked off my

manufacturing indentures - bought my body and my life

back, in effect - I did a little high-level checking, and the

story matched up all the way down the line. But then again,

like so much else in life, you can never be entirely sure...

Jason Kane snorted. „That‟s the sort of rationalization

people like you are always coming out with.‟

„I‟ve never seen an artificial quite so complex, for what it‟s

worth,‟ said Mira, instantly earning herself a little note in my

good books. „It‟s as close to human as I can‟t make the odds.

Either there‟s been some whole new order of breakthrough in

the nebula, or he‟s maybe telling the truth...‟

I shrugged it off. „And plus I‟ve got a physiology and a

biological life expectancy that would make you sick. Not that

bad a deal. And, even if it wasn‟t true, what would you expect

me to do? Go around going click-click-whirr and pretending

to be a robot? In the end they‟re still my memories and it‟s

still my life, so what‟s the difference?‟

The difference didn‟t seem enough for Jason Kane to think

it worth pursuing. „OK,‟ he said. “You want to meet Benny

so‟s you can sit down and have a nice little chat, all friendly

and individual, like. So do we. She‟s sort of known for

dropping out of sight, for months at a time, and coming back

with the sort of stories that would make your toes curl - but

she‟s never been out of contact for this long and we‟re getting

worried.‟ He smiled at me rather humourlessly. „Tell you

what, why don‟t you tell us what you have? And if we feel like

it we‟ll share.‟

I thought about it. Sometimes in this life you‟ve got to give

a little to get a little more back. „What about the confidential

details?‟

He grinned with some genuine humour this time. „Hey,

don‟t worry about it. You don‟t have to land your bosses in it

or anything. Besides, we already backtracked your

employment record for a couple of years before we lost

interest, anyway.‟

I told them of the leads I‟d followed, glossing over the time

in detention with a few quick sentences (though I noticed

Mira‟s mouth tighten a little sympathetically). When I got to

the point where I had found the journal in the ruins of St

Oscar‟s, Kane‟s eyes widened a little.

„Can I see it?‟ he said.

I nodded my head towards the holdall I‟d been carrying

since entering the Habitats. „It‟s in here. I have to tell you

that when I open it up you‟re going to see quite a large

number of weapons in there.‟

„So give the bag to me,‟ he said impatiently.

„You‟d also find a couple of rather nasty security devices.

Active security devices as opposed to passive. Take your arm

off if you don‟t have the right DNA.‟

Kane nodded thoughtfully. „OK,‟ he said at last. „Do it slow

and easy.‟

I stuck my hand in the bag, doing it slow and easy, and

pulled out the Journal of Bernice Summerfield, then handed

it to him. It might or might not have been possible for me to

make a move as he took it - but the dynamic seemed wrong

for that, now. At this point I‟d get further with these people

talking to me, if not actually trusting me. In turn, I was

almost completely sure that Mira wasn‟t going to shoot me

out of hand, just so long as I played nice. Almost completely

sure.

Kane flipped through the pages of the Journal in the

manner of one who handles books badly, tearing through

them literally and figuratively, more concerned with the

words than the form. As he did so, his expression darkened

from the puzzled to the suspicious to the out-and-out

incredulous.

„What the hell is this shit?‟ he said. „Who‟s this Rebecca? I

was on the Squaxis border, and I know for a fact there wasn‟t

a Rebecca there - and I know for a fact that in the Dagellan

Cluster it was me... ‟ He flipped back and forth through the

pages, muttering bad-temperedly at the intransigence of

those who go around changing historical fact without any

kind of thought.

Abruptly, towards the start of the Journal, he stared for

almost a full ten seconds at an entry, and his face seemed to

collapse in upon itself. It wasn‟t so much that he was upset,

it seemed, but that his mind had hit upon something so

painful that it was too busy coping to remember to look after

the muscles of his face. Off to one side, Mira shot him a

glance of fearful concern.

„Oh dear God,‟ he said at last. „I think I know who this

Rebecca is. And I think I know where Benny is.‟

ATTACHMENT (SUPPLEMENTARY):

To: brown @ 135474.346.12.ccserv.dnet.com

From: pubterm@lunet.com

Organization: Archive News Services Bibliotheca

Subject: FYE

Dear Mr Brown

Here is the article as per your request.

-BEGIN-

In the name of the All-High Gods, the carbuncles upon the

heels of whom mere mortal life is unworthy to scrape

ALL HAIL THE TEACHINGS OF PRINCE G‟JIMO UPON HIS

RETURN FROM THE NEW REVOLUTIONARY PARADISE OF

DELLAH, AND FOR HIS TEACHINGS WHICH SHALL GUIDE

THE HEATHEN UNBELIEVERS OF THANAXOS TOWARDS

THE REVOLUTIONARY LIGHT!

(Op-Ed by ex-DataDay outworld correspondent, Sela Dane)

Oh Ye Believers

Glory to those Believers working assiduously towards the day

when the light of revolution under the All-High Gods shall

sweep the galactic firmament clear of all filth and evil

conduct, damnation in the very bile of Hell for those

Unbelievers, in whose employ I was, to my everlasting shame,

until this very week, and who now - terrified of the Truth of

Light and the True Faith, as only worms should be - consign

my words to their public-access channel.

I have no fear, however, that the Truth shall not reach the

Believer in all its bright, unvanquished light. The hands of

the All-High Gods shall guide his way that he might spread

their word to further ignite the Faith of all who hear.

Since my return from the Revolutionary paradise of New

Dellah, I have been sickened by the most foul and obscene

depravity of conduct I see about myself. I see the heathen

dogs of Unbelievers making light of the True Faith as

evidenced by the good Believers of that now-glorious planet

from which I have returned. They are dogs, and lie in filth

like dogs, and when the Light of the True Faith shines upon

them they shall burn and die like dogs.

For all of this, there is hope. There is news so Great and

Good that I, a mortal of the weaker sex, whose lips are not fit

to kiss the lowliest garment of the All-High Gods, barely dare

to speak it.

A Prophet has returned this day from New Dellah, returned

to Thanaxos to make his Word known and to bring Light and

Peace under the All-High Gods for all eternity. It is the

Prophet G‟jimo, the Prince Regent of the Thanaxon House

Royal, within which now all Unbelievers must needs now

tremble at his Name and we must now perforce call Lord. His

word is the Word of the All-High Gods and his

pronouncements shall soon bathe his word in Holy Light.

This Melkinday. Royal Festival Park. Tickets retailing at 15

Royal Crowns. 9 RC Concessions.

In the Name of the All-High Gods and their Thanaxon

Prophet, G‟jimo, who in his Worldly Guise as Regent is

become our Lord.

- transcript of DataDay broadcast filtered for text

transmission by Archive News Services Bibliotheca

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CHAPTER 14

The Star of Afrique ploughed the - ahem - ghusty depths of

space on overdrive, hopscotching through various jump-

nexuses with barely an on-the-fly recharge. It might seem

slightly weird, after weeks and months of searching, to rush

like this - whatever might have happened having possibly

already done so and so forth - but how would you feel if, once

knowing where the object of your search was, you took your

time, ambled along when you felt like it, and found that the

worst had happened bare minutes before you actually

arrived?

It might seem even weirder, on the surface, that Jason

Kane and Mira let me tag along - but only on the surface. For

one thing, I had a fast ship on short notice. And for another,

they might not trust me, but they didn‟t actively distrust me

enough to shoot me on the spot. They knew that if they left

me I‟d be coming after them in any case, and they wanted me

where they could keep their eye on me.

After I had given the Journal to Kane, they had taken me out

of the office and into the workshop where, on a hydraulic

ramp, sat a big red hov-car reminiscent of a mid-twentieth-

century convertible. I had nasty thoughts of being taken for a

short ride but a happy one in the boot, but Mira had put her

gun back in her pocket. The fact that she kept her hand in

the same pocket thereafter stopped me from being too

reassured: I only hope she was aware of the recent

development known as a safety catch.

The car was lowered and Mira took me into the back to

keep an eye on me. Kane had swung himself into the front,

racked down the control bar, and off we went - at such speed

going into the corners that I felt as if the bottom might fall

out of my world, if not in fact vice versa.

As the lights of the various Habitats flashed past, Kane had

pulled a small comms pack from the heavy, battered flak

jacket he had pulled on before leaving.

„Kimo Ani?‟ he said into it. „It‟s me. Small job for you. I‟ll be

there in five - No, I‟m on an open line. Tell you about it when

we get there...‟

In the promised five of whatever it was, we had pulled up

outside the sort of dive that would merit a lot of further

investigation - if this were the holomovies. An expensively

seedy-looking subterranean nightclub dive, in a Habitat

where it was always night, the ramp leading down into it

flanked by animatronics of rather fetching young ladies in

top hats sitting on chairs the wrong way round, and a

tethered and illuminated pink polyurethane blimp in the

shape of a pig in a suspender belt.

Strolling out of this, at the precise moment we arrived, was

a thin man of indeterminate age, with that greyish, ravaged,

teak-hard look of a user who has taken everything that the

pharmaceutical industries can throw at him for years, and

possibly even centuries. He was whip-sharp in a black

tuxedo, the collar and bow tie hanging open from his neck.

Obviously this was Kimo Ani. He had appeared to be wearing

dead-black wraparound shades, until he pulled them off with

an audible and multiple click, and I saw the spikelike

contacts that had been plugged into his engineered eye

sockets, feeding the signals from the microcams in the

shades to his brain.

Kimo Ani had plugged a couple of customized datastream

units into his sockets, then lounged in the shotgun seat

while Kane fed him the search parameters.

„We‟re looking for a guy who does Mary-Sues. Doesn‟t

matter if he‟s ethically iffy - just so long as he does them well.

I can‟t see Benny going to some cowboy outfit. Check

anything that looks like a confidential file, „cause he‟s gotta

know what the old life was before he builds a new one. He

might just have left some traces lying around. Use the data

on Benny you already have for a match. Keywords: Bernice

and Benny, obviously...‟ Kane looked at me and frowned.

„Maybe even Berni. Usual phonetic variations. Joker-word:

Rebecca.‟

We had then just driven around for a while, while Kimo Ani

lounged there silently and apparently asleep. We went

through places in the Habitats I knew like the back of my

hand. It wasn‟t particularly odd that, whatever Kane and

Mira and their Dead Dog in the Water were involved in, I had

never come across „em, or had never so much as been aware

of their existence. There are so many outfits and factions,

rival concerns and scams running parallel to each other in

the Proximan Chain that it‟s impossible to know of even a

fraction of them.

After maybe half an hour, Kimo Ani said, „I‟ve got a name.‟

And Jason Kane nearly got us sideswiped by three cargo

pods and a motorized rickshaw turning the car around.

The name Kimo Ani had got was that of Dr [name withdrawn

from manuscript]. Dr [name withdrawn from manuscript]

gave off all-but terminal vibes of being a bootleg medic, even

in a place as law-and-order-free as the Habitats. In his

grubby consulting offices, perched and hunched behind his

desk and looking like a kind of humanoid cross between a rat

and a guinea pig with his elongated and yellowed incisors, he

had been quite naturally reluctant to break his oaths of

confidentiality.

„Fair enough,‟ Kane had said. „I‟ve never been an

unreasonable man, who‟d work some poor sod over with a

pair of pliers, douse him in heating oil and then torch him

and his house just because the guy crossed me. My associate

-‟ he gestured in the direction of me „- on the other hand, is.‟

I did a kind of method-acting thing, where I imagined what

I‟d feel like if Dr [name withdrawn from manuscript] were on

my better-dead list, and smiled at him. I honestly have no

idea why doing that appears to work.

„Toast your teacakes as soon as look at you, probably,‟ said

Jason Kane.

Dr [name withdrawn from manuscript] suddenly allowed

that, just in this special and particular case, given Kane‟s

obviously quite genuine concern for his friend Summerfield,

his oaths of confidentiality might be relaxed.

Kane had then turned to me. „Look, I‟m not going to hold

out on you much - but this is my wife we‟re talking about.‟ I

got the distinct impression that, even if they weren‟t still

married, there was some connection that was so deep as to

make the wife more than an unconscious refusal to admit

that they weren‟t. „Stuff like this can give you power over

people, and, while I wouldn‟t trust myself with a hammer and

a piggy bank, I want to be the only one who hears what the

guy‟s got to say. Don‟t worry,‟ he continued, turning back to

Dr [name withdrawn from manuscript]. „One thing I‟ll be sure

to tell him is if you don‟t give me what I need.‟

I remained in the waiting room, with Mira keeping watch on

me. I strained my aural enhancements to breaking point

trying to pick out something useful in the offices beyond, but

the door was soundproofed solid.

After five minutes Kane had come out, frowning and

seemingly a little worried.

„Any luck?‟ Mira said.

„Not really,‟ he sighed. „It confirmed my suspicions, but you

could hardly call it luck.‟

„So where to now, then?‟ I said.

„You have a ship?‟ said Kane. „We‟re going to your ship.‟

On the drive back to the Proximan Docking bays and the Star

of Afrique, blipping through the transmat portals that would

take us to the space-station complex where the bays were

situated, Kane had explained certain things in general, and a

couple of others in the specific. Specifically, he had told me

that there was a Rebecca in Bernice Summerfield‟s life, but

in the Journal she appeared absolutely everywhere other

than the place and time in which she had actually existed.

Whatever else Benny might be working out in writing it, the

Journal had been left as a specific and positional clue - if not

for Kane, then for anyone who knew her well, and cared

about her, and wanted to know where to find her.

And then he‟d told me just who this Rebecca was.

I spent the trip out on the Star of Afrique, sitting on the

bridge and brooding about it, while Mira (any other names of

whom I never did learn) worked the comms, using her

preternatural insight to negotiate express passage through

any number of complicated spatial protocols for any lone

ship that doesn‟t want to be pulled over into the locally

official dock.

Kimo Ani had decided, so he said, to come along for the

ride, and spent the time with his eyes hooked up to the

navigation and propulsion units - one to one, the other to the

other - overhauling the specs of each in real time so that by

the end I think they were something like two hundred per

cent more powerful, in their respective ways, than before.

Kane did the actual piloting, with an innate fluency that

gave me a vaguely greenish tinge of envy. Since the ship was

mine, in the sense that I was the one who‟d stolen it

originally, I suppose I was the captain - but I was feeling

more and more like a fourth wheel on a tricycle.

I was brooding about Rebecca, and her relationship to

Bernice Summerfield, not so much because I‟d got a lot of

things completely and utterly wrong - I‟m fully capable of

doing several completely and utterly wrong things every day.

It was more a question of how I‟d got things wrong. I was

starting to realize that I‟d been thinking in a certain way for

so long that I‟d become incapable of thinking any other way.

There‟s a syndrome common to those who survive urban

disasters, whether that disaster is due to earthquakes,

warfare or a direct meteor strike. The edifices of buildings,

the underlying layout of the streets, might change and evolve,

gradually, over time, but they‟re sufficiently solid to become

the bedrock of your environment, the foundations of the

world, upon the deep subconscious level. The sudden

conversion of them into bombed-out rubble and smoking

craters deals the human psyche a catastrophic, devastating

blow.

For Bernice Summerfield, the destruction of St Oscar‟s had

been just the latest in a long line of such blows – the death of

her mother and the planet of her birth, her desertion from

the military, the wrench of being hurled through time to find

everything and everyone she‟d known long dead and gone -

and it was the one that finally broke her.

Benny Summerfield had escaped the upheavals on Dellah

and the razing of the University that had become her home,

and then, for whatever reason, she had come back. She had

wandered through the ruins, and written out her Journal,

and then she had left again. And she had gone to the

Proximan Chain and she had paid through the nose for Dr

[name withdrawn from manuscript! to put her through the

Mary-Sue and wipe her mind. The pain of losing everything

yet again must have been unsupportable, and driven her to

the ragged edge of madness. She must have hurt so much

inside that she didn‟t want to be Benny Summerfield any

more.

Beta Caprisis was one of those worlds devastated and

irradiated in the War. A planet-wide wreckscape of ruins,

rubble and ashy slag, it has never been repopulated. The

universe is infinite, the galaxy is very big, and there are more

than enough other planets to go around without attempting

to recolonize a world that, after a while, would have

everybody in the colony trying to slit their wrists en masse.

Nothing lived or moved down there. Nothing moved or sang.

It was therefore relatively easy, by way of the Star of Afrique’s

Kimo-Ani-enhanced sensor rig, to track down the single

pattern-signature of human life.

We grounded on the edge of a plain of molten glass, long

solidified like lava, the result of some ground-zero detonation

in the War. The radiation levels had subsided to the point

where a short exposure wouldn‟t hurt, but you wouldn‟t want

to build your house there. We pulled on the kind of protective

coveralls normally worn under pressure suits, armed

ourselves with our various personal weapons and went out

through the lock.

On the very edge of the plain was the crashed wreckage of a

ship. It was of some alien design, vaguely reminiscent of a

tungsten and polymerized ceramic squid. It‟s limblike

protrusions, which had once, presumably, held some

previously ejected reaction core, were clumped together in a

sad and broken tangle. Sitting outside it, having come out to

see us land, was the bone-thin figure of a woman.

Months of chronic malnutrition had withered her. It was

hard to see the similarity between this wasted creature and

the vibrant woman I remembered from the stills I‟d seen.

Beside her lay the sickly and fitfully dozing form of a once-

large cat, now in hardly any better condition than she, who

might have been anything from black to tortoiseshell under

the grime that caked it long past any hope of licking off.

The woman looked up at us - at Jason Kane and Mira and

me - with a polite and distant little smile, as though she had

asked a collection of people who were barely acquaintances,

but to whom one must be polite, around for tea. In one hand

she held out what appeared to be the tattered remains of

what had once been a handmade rag doll, but there was

absolutely no way it could have been the doll once owned by

Bernice Summerfield - the doll that her mother, after getting

the seven-year-old Bernice to a shelter, had then run back

out to collect, only to die almost instantly under alien

blasters.

„Good afternoon,‟ she said. „My name is Rebecca, and this -‟

she vaguely held up the doll for our inspection „- is my friend

Bernice.‟

Kane was just standing there, staring at the woman who

had once been his ex-wife. It was impossible to tell much

from a face covered with goggles, filter mask and the sort of

tightened-up cagoule hood of the radiation-proof undersuit

that has always, for me, made the experience of wearing a

spacesuit - which should be all exciting and dynamic – feel

vaguely ridiculous; so you couldn‟t tell much from his face,

but, from his posture and body language, he seemed to be in

some kind of shock. Mira was shaking him, obviously far

more frightened for him than for Summerfield, whatever state

she was in. Over the day or so I‟d known the pair, watched

how they worked together and interacted, I‟d tried to work

out what the deal was with them and failed. All I knew was, it

wasn‟t the immediately obvious.

„Come on, you silly sod!‟ she was snapping at him. „Get

your finger out and get the bloody woman out of here! We

have to go…’

The physical shell of Bernice Summerfield still sat there,

looking with a kind of polite, bemused smile from one face to

another. Well, this little tea party didn‟t seem to be going

quite as smoothly as she‟d expected...

What with everybody being thus disposed, I was the only

one who noticed a metallic flash up in the flat-grey sky - just

before the voice of Kimo Ani patched itself through on Box‟s

comms systems: „We‟ve got a bogey. Nasty-looking bogey,

heading right for us.‟

The metallic flash resolved itself into a smallish courier-

class pursuit ship: little more than cockpits, quarters and

provisions stores for two, bolted on to a drive core and a

thruster array for manoeuvring. It seemed to be coming for

us, as Kimo Ani had said, its descent somewhere on the

other side of recklessness. Atmospheric friction bum left a

trail behind them and the leading edge of its nose seemed to

be actually glowing...

Now I‟m going to break in here and spoil the world-

shattering surprise that the people who were in this ship

meant us harm. I‟m sorry and all, but it has to be done -

things got a bit hectic after the ship landed, and I‟d far rather

talk about these things here than have everybody sit down in

the middle of some jolly exciting action, and wait while I have

a chat. „Jolly‟ and „exciting‟ are relative terms, of course:

those expecting a spectacular and pyrotechnic firefight, with

all guns blazing and lots of people being flung around

dynamically by artfully detonated, low-yield, powder-packed

incendiaries are going to be sorely disappointed. I just mean

the situation transformed itself into something slightly more

potentially dangerous than popping down to the shops. Then

again, it depends on which particular shops.

Anyhow, because of the holomovies, the New Frontier

Adventures and their ilk, people seem to have the idea that

starships zoom around firing blasters at all and sundry in a

blaze of stuttering photons and discharging singularity mines

left right and centre. In fact, they carry nothing of the kind - I

mentioned before that the process of pursuing or defending

against space piracy is one of hand-to-hand combat inside,

after the space pirate‟s ship itself has clamped on. The only

spacegoing weapons that are armed, in this sense, are the

ones that are weapons in and of themselves - kilometre-long

rail guns, with a minimal control gantry and thrusters, and

which have to be manoeuvred into position by tugs.

Planetcrackers, which are basically five-mile-wide bombs

with drives, and which have pressurized human-type

conduits left over from their construction, and a control

bridge to use for positioning them over the planets they‟re

going to crack. Orbital strafers, the only function of which is

to orbitally strafe. Stuff like that. The point being that if a

ship has some integral weapons package, then there‟s simply

no room for it to be anything else. Freighters, corvettes and

the courier-classes by their very nature don‟t pack

armament.

All of which is to explain why the approaching ship,

meaning us harm, didn‟t simply fire upon us or drop a pony

bomb on us from the air. Even so, had I been piloting it with

evil and nasty intent, I could have thought of a number of

things to do, working with what I had. I could have landed

the damned thing on top of us, or put it down between us

and the Star of Afrique. I certainly wouldn‟t have done what

the ship in fact now did - which was to set down at a point

roughly equidistant from both us and our ship, forming the

third point in a positional equilateral triangle.

The new ship sat there for a while, turning whatever was

suspended in the air around it into a kind of greasy steam

with the heat of its atmospheric entry. Even at this distance,

I fancied I could hear the pings and crackling of its cooling

polyceramic sheath. After a while, someone shot the hatch

and two figures came out, dressed in actual armoured

vacuum suits rather than the radiation protection we had

opted for. Each carried one of those lightweight but bulky

and heavy-duty cases that one just knows don‟t contain

happy little treats and party favours.

Kane had got the dazed Bernice Summerfield to her feet

and was attempting the impossible juggling feat of chivvying

her along without losing his temper and struggling with a

now awake and annoyed cat, which he had picked up by the

scruff of the neck. Mira had pulled her overlarge blaster and

was watching the activity of the people from the other ship

with an expression of alarm.

„They‟re setting something up,‟ she said.

„Tell me about it, why don‟t you?‟ I said as a patch of glassy

plain between us and them exploded into crystal powder, the

sound of the weapon‟s discharge coming a bare fraction of a

second behind.

I think it was the chance to finally do something positive

again, after feeling a bit like a spare prick for a while, that

had me taking charge of things. I mean, I got on with these

people OK, and they seemed OK as people, but that‟s not the

same as really knowing or trusting them, or they me. On the

other hand, we were all in the same boat - and here and now,

if I was going to throw my lot in all the way with one faction

or another, there was hardly any choice.

„Get her back to the ship,‟ I snapped at Kane. Then I

overrode him totally as he opened his surprised mouth to say

something that at any other time might have been pertinent

for me to take on board. But here and now that would just

have us farting around and arguing until we died. „Just shut

the fuck up and do it. Don‟t worry about being a target. Bad

guys will be taken care of.‟

Another detonation courtesy of the other team. They‟d get

the range less than ten seconds from now. I thumped Mira

on the arm, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to get

her full attention. „You and me are going for them,‟ I told her

as she spun to face me indignantly. „You dodge left when I

dodge right, you get me? Good. Let‟s go!‟

I broke from our position from a standing start, dodging

initially away from but inclining ultimately towards the new

arrivals, not bothering to check to see if Mira was doing the

same. That‟s a part and parcel of the way to snap orders and

have them obeyed that I can‟t convey in cold print - it‟s a

combination of the tone of voice, the rhythm in which you

rap said orders out, the fact that you never apologize or

explain, or give „em time to argue, „cause, if you hang around

dithering and discussing in those times right on the edge,

then you‟re dead. You‟re telling people how the world is going

to be, and the fact that it could, hypothetically, be any

number of other things doesn‟t enter into it.

All the same, I was glad to hear the sounds and catch the

peripheral flashes of movement that told me Mira had

followed my lead. Maybe Kane had got his finger out by now,

and was hustling Summerfield towards the Star of Afrique.

Maybe he was even bothering to take the cat. It was his

lookout either way. My unilaterally imposed strategy was in

place and we were committed to it.

And it was strategy. It wasn‟t actual combat in the sense

that we could now respond and react. Instead of a static

group target, we now had three separate targets, all of them

moving. The Kane-Summerfield axis might have been the

easy one, but Mira and I were the actively and erratically

threatening ones. The optimum result was that it would

disrupt and confuse our attackers‟ own strategy, but, even if

it didn‟t, at this point there was nothing that could be done

about it.

I didn‟t let myself feel fear or excitement or anything else

that might have me break momentum - concentrating my

entire being on closing the gap between me and our

attackers. It‟s moments like these that seem an eternity when

you‟re actually going through them, but less than the blink of

an eye when you look back.

I was coming up on their position fast. The distinctive form-

and-posture patterns of the two were familiar - one big male,

a smaller female - but there was absolutely no use in that

here and now. They were crouched by a big precision-aiming

blaster on a stand, reminiscent of an ancient Vickers gun

and used for precision-placing over distance - and were just

starting to realize that it wasn‟t much good for fast-moving

targets coming rapidly up close.

Having gone into the details of our actions, I might have

given the impression that they took far longer than they

really did. In real-time terms, it was maybe five or six

seconds since Mira and I had begun our mad advance – just

long enough to catch the tail end of our opponents‟ surprise,

the lag of action that comes from having to improvise and re-

evaluate on the fly (if you want to do something, you just do

it; reactions take a little longer) and of having to switch from

one kind of weapon to another. Whatever else they are, power

weapons tend to be relatively heavy and cumbersome items

of machinery; it takes a little bit of time to fiddle around with

them and heft them around by sheer physical law - and, in a

case like this, fractions of a second either way can make the

difference between life and death.

In any event, that said, none of it would have meant a rat‟s

squit - and me, and Mira, and quite possibly Summerfield

and Kane, would have been left lying on the ground with

smoking holes in us - had not our attackers made the

mistake of wearing armoured suits that were really not

meant to operate under gravity. Even the space-station

riggers who wear them all the time, in free fall, take a couple

of seconds to so much as pick up a spanner.

Under gravity - and if you‟re unused to wearing them - they

slow down the speed of human action immensely. Thinking

about it later and consciously, I decided that this had been

the impulse behind our, quote, mad dash, unquote, in the

first place. By the time I‟d closed the distance, this couple of

clowns had barely lurched up from their long-range weapon

to track a couple of clumsily held sidearms in my general

direction.

I was subconsciously aware, without quite seeing, that

Mira was off to one side and keeping up. „I take the big guy

and you take the girl,‟ I called to her, and hoping like hell

that my awareness of her was actually true and not wishful

thinking.

„Story of my life!‟ she panted, from more or less where I‟d

expected her to be, which was a bit of a relief.

The big man‟s sidearm discharged as I barrelled into him. I

have no idea where the charge ultimately went; maybe it

went into the air. The blowback burnt me across the chest

rather nastily and half-blinded me for an instant. My

transferred momentum toppled the guy over and on to his

back with a crash. I landed on top of him and windmilled my

arms around to slap away anything that came near them, on

general principles, until I could see again.

Off to one side I heard a similar crash and the sounds of

Mira‟s struggling.

My sight cleared and I found myself looking at my own pale

and rather desperately terrified-looking face, reflected back at

me from the mirrored surface of my opponent‟s helmet visor.

The guy himself was struggling, but feebly, weighed down by

the suit. He made absolutely no sound, the suit being air-

sealed. He probably talked to his little friend via two-way.

I bounced off his chest and backed slowly off as he

struggled and jerked with the clanks, clicks and hisses of

various servomechanisms. As I‟d suspected - from just after

hitting him if not the start - toppled on to his back like this

he could no more get up than could an upturned

Bolobarbiquan turtle. I glanced over to where Mira was

standing, looking down at the suited woman, having

discovered pretty much the same thing.

„What do we do with them now?‟ she said.

I turned to look at their ship and jerked a thumb towards

the open hatch. „We‟ll take that away from them for a start.

Just leave „em here, I suppose.‟

The struggling of the suited figures became noticeably more

frantic. I hefted their long-range gun off its rack, broke it

down and wedged a couple of components either side of the

man. That‟d stop him from making it any time soon, if at all.

Off in the distance, I saw the figures of Kane and

Summerfield standing by the Star of Afrique. I pointed to our

attackers‟ ship and pantomimed speaking to someone on a

comms rig.

A thought occurred to me. „Any chance you can scan these

creeps and pull out their names?‟ I asked Mira.

She nodded dubiously. „I could do that I‟d have to pulse-

pump through their suits to get anything useful, though. Do

too much and it could seriously scramble their brains, what

with the harmonics from all this metal and stuff.‟

I looked down at our attackers and shrugged. „The poor

dears. My heart bleeds. You going to do it or what?‟

CHAPTER 15

Our attackers‟ ship was of the sort you can charter on the

cheap from just about anywhere. There was nothing inside it

worth learning, save that, in the cramped living space, one of

the occupants had been obsessively neat and the other

hadn‟t given a damn. This had led to one half of the

compartment being neat and clean, the other piled with dirty

clothes and trash with an almost perfectly straight dividing

line between. This told me something about the relationship

between the two people who shared it, but nothing of any

actual use. Strangely, and going against the more common

arrangement for cohabiting humans of different genders the

galaxy over, it was the female side that seemed to be the

messy one, and the male side the neat.

Once we were in orbit, the Star of Afrique docked with us,

and Mira and I transferred back - me lugging the pair of

sidearms I‟d taken from our attackers on the planet below,

and nothing else. I suppose we could have stripped the ship

down and sold it for parts or something, but it simply wasn‟t

worth the bother. I‟d made sure from the control systems

that it couldn‟t be called down again to land on remote, so we

just cut it adrift.

Jason Kane laid in a course back the way we had come, set

the automatic protocols and then went back aft to the

sleeping quarters where he had taken Summerfield. The

Mary-Sue restructuring from Dr [name withdrawn from

manuscript] had not, apparently, been a complete wipe-and-

burn. Summerfield‟s memories and personality had simply

been repressed and overlaid with the new one, this latter set

to self-destruct over the course of a few months in any case,

and he had high hopes of speeding the process along with

certain keywords and mental triggers that Dr [name

withdrawn from manuscript] had given him. Out of gratitude

for my recent help, he promised to let me question her about

my own concerns the moment he was sure I could do it

without damage.

Mira went off to do something or other - I have no idea

what - and Kimo Ani stayed hooked to various ship‟s

systems. He seemed to be happy enough just doing that

thing where you play around with a transputer rig

sometimes, for no other particular reason than for the fun of

it; fiddling with the interplay of its configurations to get the

most out of it as if you were playing with a puzzle box - but

on a level that someone without Kimo Ani‟s various

enhancements and implants could barely comprehend. He

didn‟t seem inclined to talk, and so I was once again, for the

moment, at a bit of a loose end.

I passed the time by hooking Box up to the comms rig and

the GalNet data stream, and running down the names Mira

had pumped out from our attackers. As I‟d suspected, it had

been the pair who had shot at me on Luna and whom I‟d

seen in the hotel on Thanaxos. The ID stills I pulled from

their personal records tied in with the glimpses I‟d caught,

and I now fixed their actual faces and specs in my mind.

They might or might not get off the planetary ruin that was

Beta Caprisis, but I wanted to be ready for them if they did.

The woman was one Mara Lutace Grabor. The recent stills

of her showed a physically beautiful face, but with the kind of

cold and dead-eyed stare that gave the mind a little shiver

when you looked at it. They were the sort of eyes that, if she

couldn‟t get at you, spoke of some past trauma that might

explain her to you - but if you came upon them when she

could get to you, and had access to a knife or suchlike, you‟d

back off slowly and then run a mile.

Grabor had come out of the Squaxis Sulan colonies, born

there rather than deported. They were the modern-day

equivalent of a Botany Bay for their galactic sector, their

economy based around heavy-metal mining and refining by

way of convict-slave labour. The place was a hellhole and I

suppose, in one sense, she got out in the only way she could.

She hooked up with an escapee, and for two years they

terrorized the surrounding systems in a crime spree

reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde without the restraint.

When the local authorities finally tracked them down, she‟d

set up her lover to take the fall and got out. Sporadic

reappearances, some for what you might call criminal activity

but most involving dirty working for various low-rent

concerns. The people who don‟t care how sloppy the work is

if it gets halfway done, and don‟t care how many people die.

Whereabouts currently, so far as anyone was going to admit

on GalNet, unknown.

The man was one Simonon Leviticus Sleed. The stills

showed a face that looked as if it was going through the

throes of terminal constipation and a short, severe haircut

dragged firmly back against the grain, thus looking far more

wrong than if it had been just allowed to grow how it liked.

Like Grabor, he was one of those people you could say were

born into a certain life rather than just drifting in or jumping

into it spectacularly.

In Sleed‟s case, this life was that of the White Fire, that

repository of militantly active bigotry that seems to turn up

right across the human spaces of the galaxy. White Fire has

no overall galactic cohesion or political ethos, of course,

being merely just a kind of easily recognized, samizdat

franchise trademark, serving as a kind of handy tag for

morons, thugs and whackos to swarm around wherever

somebody feels that somebody else deserves a good kicking

or worse.

Sleed was born into an offshoot of these charmers in a

fortified commune on Squaxis Prime. This particular White

Fire subsect variety had fixed upon the idea of natural

selection as a way of Improving the Human Race and,

naturally, had twisted it out of almost all recognition. They

sent out squads of paramilitary troops to deal it out at the

sharp end, taking groups of people hostage and then picking

off those who, by their lights, didn‟t measure up. An

interesting aspect of that was that they tended to utilize a

series of complicated Al-based weapons designed to home in

upon specifics of so-called inferiority. This had tended to

backfire rather more than otherwise, what with the fact of

being used by a paramilitary squad drawn from thugs and

morons and whackos.

Sleed had been on one such hostage-taking operation when

the Squaxis local authorities did something broadly similar of

their own but on a larger scale, by laying siege to the White

Fire commune and eventually obliterating it - more or less by

misfired accident - by way of a small tactical nuclear device.

The support of his particular White Fire subsect now gone,

Sleed was forced to eke a living doing whatever jobs he

could...

All in all, the files on this pair seemed to confirm what I‟d

suspected from the start. A couple of jokers, doing what

could be broadly considered the same line of work as myself,

but on a level so far down the food chain that they were like

bugs. This made the fact that they seemed to have got as far

as they did, for as long as they did, all the more worrying.

Someone was running them, and was giving them access to

some high-level, heavy-duty resources – and seemed utterly

unconcerned that these people didn‟t have the first clue

about how these resources should be handled. It was like

giving a loaded handgun to a young and stupid but

particularly evil and nasty-minded child. When the gun went

off it could blow anybody away.

Maybe it was a double-bluff and there were checks and

balances in place on the pair. And that was worrying in itself,

because, if there were, then they were so good that I couldn‟t

so much as spot them. Or maybe it was this putative

controller who was really the hypothetical kid with a loaded

gun - didn‟t know what the hell he, she or it was doing with

all that potentially lethal power, and simply didn‟t care. That

was even worse...

My somewhat gloomy reverie was cut short by a chime from

the Star of Afrique’s internal comms. It was Jason Kane.

„Benny‟s feeling a bit more like herself,‟ he said. „She wants

to talk to you about Dellah and Thanaxos. She says it might

just be important.‟

Bernice Summerfield looked entirely different from the

wasted form I‟d seen on Beta Caprisis. Physically, she

seemed more or less the same, because the various glucotics,

nutrients and anti-radiation compounds being plugged into

her from the medical stores had not yet had the time to do

their work. That personality and intelligence that had so

informed the stills I‟d seen of her, months before, was back

with a vengeance, like a light going on behind her eyes. She

sat up weakly on the bunk and regarded me through them.

„I hear you‟ve been looking for me,‟ she said drily – I mean

sardonically dry, as opposed to a dry croak, though there was

still an element of that, too. „Should I be afraid?‟

Something about her elicited candour. „You know,‟ I

admitted, „it‟s been so long since I thought about it that I‟m

not sure. I don‟t think so. Besides...‟ I glanced to where Jason

Kane was hovering protectively. „I think your husband‟s

maybe good enough to stop me if I try anything. He‟s got the

incentive, after all.‟

Summerfield turned to Kane and raised an eyebrow, then

turned back to me. „He‟s not my husband.‟

„That‟s not what I‟ve heard,‟ I said.

„Well, if you think about it, Benny, we never really got a

divorce,‟ said Kane.

„Well if you want to think of it that way, sweetie,‟ Bernice

said to him, archly, „we never really got married in the first

place either. Long-dead religious ceremony and there‟s

absolutely no record of it anywhere. What do you think?‟

„I think I could take your proper diaries to any court of law

and put you in the poorhouse with the alimony,‟ said Kane.

„Once they work their way through all those bloody Post-it

notes.‟

I‟d reflected upon the rather complex nature of Kane‟s

relationship with Mira before - but, watching these two

together, even just amiably digging at each other like this,

that now seemed about as simple as I feel myself, most of the

time. There was a sense of so many things moving under the

surface - some of which might be so nasty as to pull you

under and rip your arm off, if you weren‟t careful - that I

could imagine them taking years to fathom. In the sort of

relationship that could last for years. Here and now, though,

I didn‟t have that sort of relationship and I didn‟t have the

time.

The mention of Summerfield‟s diaries reminded me of the

Journal I‟d found, the one that had led us, via Kane‟s leap of

intuition, to where we were at this point.

„Did you just want to get out?‟ I asked her. „Did you do the

Mary-Sue so you could get away from it all, stop thinking

about the stuff that happened on Dellah for a while?‟

Summerfield frowned. „I hadn‟t thought of it in those terms,

actually. Now I come to think about it, that might have been

a part of it, unconsciously. That wasn‟t what I thought at the

time - and what I thought at the time was quite bad enough,

believe me.‟ She looked up at me with a complete and utter

seriousness, made all the more poignant by the fact that, in

her basic person, she didn‟t allow herself to be completely

and utterly serious if she could help it.

„Jason‟s told me what you saw on Dellah,‟ she said. „At that

diplomatic conference thing. The thing is, I think, to a large

extent, what you saw on Dellah was what They wanted you to

see.‟

You could hear the capitalization as if it were cut into a

stone slab.

„Who‟s this They?‟ I asked her, with the nasty suspicion

that I already knew. „Are we talking about the All-High Gods

or something? Like they really exist?‟

She nodded, slowly. „They weren‟t called the All-High

anything, exactly, last time around, but I suppose it‟s as good

a name as any for these... entities.‟ She shrugged to herself

and smiled, her innate humour bursting through the

seriousness, momentarily. „If that‟s what they‟re calling

themselves now, I suppose we‟ll have to live with it.‟

She became serious again. „These All-High Gods of yours

are incredibly dangerous. They do things to the minds of

those around them, twist them into a state of unquestioning

belief. I think they feed off that belief...‟

I remembered the obviously recent changes I‟d seen in

Dellah an society - even without having seen the state of it

before, I realized that it was as though something, whatever it

was, was changing whatever it had been before into a kind of

global Belief Machine.

„...then there are cases of active, absolute possession,’

Bernice Summerfield was saying. „I think I was slated for one

of those. After I escaped the first time I felt this - I don‟t know

what to call it - this overwhelming urge, like a fist around my

soul, hauling me back. I could just about control it, but it

preyed on my mind and invaded my dreams...‟

„So why go back?‟ I asked. „If you could fight it then why go

back?‟

Bernice grinned - that sudden flash of humour again.

„You‟ll think me silly when I tell you. There was something I

just couldn‟t leave behind. Something I had to find and save

whatever else happened...‟

„She went back for her fucking cat,’ said Jason, obviously

not a cat person - something I can get behind, personally,

one hundred per cent. „Can you fucking believe it? I fucking

can‟t.‟

„Well, leaving the multiple expletives aside for the moment,‟

said Bernice, coldly, „it was something that I had to do. I took

precautions, and left that Journal behind so I could be found

in case something went wrong. Anybody reading it would

know from the start, if they knew me, that something was

wrong with it and wonder why...‟

The businesslike way she said this had me thinking again

that, despite protestations to the contrary, there had still

been certain things about the Journal, on the personal and

emotional level, that she refused to admit. There was

something just that little bit too studied in the way that she

dismissed it.

„For a number of reasons,‟ she was saying, „I knew people

who could organize me a ship, and provide me with the

technology sufficient for getting through the Dellahan

planetary security completely unnoticed. Then I just

wandered around until I found Wolsey...‟

„The fucking cat,‟ Jason cut in again.

„Quite,‟ said Bernice icily. „The poor thing had been living

on the local equivalent of rats, a kind of six-legged iguana

that doesn‟t do much for the feline digestive system. He was

skin and bone by the time I found him.‟ Bernice frowned,

thoughtfully. „By the time I found him, I wasn‟t in a very good

state myself. Something seemed to be moving through the

ruins of St Oscar‟s - I don‟t know if it was one of those things

you now know as the All-High Gods, something related or

even something else. Something the Advanced Research

people let out and forgot to tell us about, maybe. On the

whole, though, it seems to fit with the things known as the

All-High Gods. All I truly know is I could feel it probing at my

mind, tearing at it, trying to find a way inside…‟

Her face cleared a little and she smiled. „Fortunately,

finding Wolsey was the trigger for the Mary-Sue procedure I‟d

had done. I found him and went dormant. That broke the

connection with whatever it was. The new personality – the

new person, I suppose - had been constructed with certain

overriding impulse-complexes. She just picked him up,

walked back to the ship, blasted off and headed for Beta

Caprisis on overdrive.‟ Bernice scowled. „I wish I‟d

remembered to specify a person with the ability to land a

ship properly, when she got there.‟

She paused, waiting for some reaction. Personally, I was

kicking myself mentally for not realising she‟d had the Mary-

Sue done before returning to Dellah. All the clues had been

there.

„Still seems like a lot of trouble to go to just for a cat,‟ I said

at last.

„Too bloody right,‟ said Jason.

„Well, the trouble‟s not over yet,‟ Bernice said, with that

cool and pointed contempt that cat-lovers have for those who

loathe the little bastards the whole universe over. „What with

you -‟ this while pointing to me „- taking an entirely

unjustified interest in me and my doings, it appears that the

Dellahan situation has taken to a bit of planet hopping, and

not to mention species jumping, on the quiet.‟

This, if it were so, was news to me. „What are you talking

about?‟ I said uneasily.

„Show him, Jason,‟ said Bernice.

„Mira pulled this off the news services.‟ Kane passed me a

hardcopy flimsy. It appeared to be a text-converted printout

of a GalNet item. A piece by a suddenly ejc-DataDay outworld

correspondent, Sela Dane, dated a couple of days before.

I read it. Then I stared at it. Then I read it again.

„Oh shit...‟ I said in a small voice, as I finally realized how

stupid, how short-sighted, and how wrong about almost

absolutely everything I had been from the start.

„That‟s putting it mildly,‟ said Jason Kane.

„The thing I‟m worried about,‟ said Bernice, rather calmly

and clinically I thought, given the circumstances, „is the

question of biological imperatives - if we can truly apply a

term like biology in this case. Why do organisms swarm?‟

„To reproduce.‟ I rattled off the answer automatically, still

too dazed to take in the full enormity of it. „To breed.‟

„That‟s right,‟ said Bernice Summerfield. „They swarm to

breed.‟

CHAPTER 16

This new planet didn‟t have a name. It could just about

support life, but not a lot, and as opposed to Beta Caprisis -

where entirely too many interesting things had happened for

it to be inhabited - this planet simply wasn‟t interesting

enough. It had a galactographic classification, in a desultory

sort of way, but for various reasons you‟re not going to get it

out of me.

We had come here, at the insistence of Bernice

Summerfield, as a small diversion en route to Thanaxos.

„Remind me again,‟ I prompted Bernice, as Jason took the

Star of Afrique down on a spiral incline, heading for the

location - rather like we had on Beta Caprisis - of the single

point of organized life. „What is it we‟re doing here, precisely?‟

„Looking for a friend,‟ she said, a little vaguely. Though still

very weak, she had insisted that she be on the bridge, with

everybody else, for the landing. „He‟s another survivor from

Dellah.‟ She frowned a little worriedly. „Then again, you might

say he‟s a... casualty. Though not in the usual sense.‟ She

turned to the acceleration couch in which Mira was lying.

The telepath we didn‟t have had a strange look of

concentration on her face.

„Did Kimo Ani modify your systems properly?‟ Bernice

asked her. „Can you broadcast the proper selective fields?‟

„I think so,‟ Mira said. „If you gave me the parameters, and

if you all stay close. It‟s slippery, though. It‟s a bit like

juggling with frozen balls.‟

„And you‟re sure you can keep us covered?‟

„Maybe.‟ Mira looked around with the kind of careful

precision you get when you‟re thinking of the things around

you and don‟t want to break the thought. „You and Jason,

Kimo Ani and myself.‟

„What about him?’ Kane gestured towards me from the

conn.

„His mind doesn‟t fit the parameters. The constructs might

be complex enough to be human, but the artificial nature of

them puts them out of sync. I can‟t get a lock on them

without losing everybody else.‟

„For what it‟s worth,‟ said Benny, turning to me, „I think

that means the Entities we‟re talking about can‟t get a lock

on you either. I think, from what you said, that stopped you

from being converted back on Dellah.‟

„Personally, I think we should just dump him somewhere,‟

said Kane. „Just to be on the safe side. It‟s your call, though,

Benny.‟

„Yes,‟ said Bernice, shortly. „It is.‟

We grounded on a rocky plain, bare of almost anything but

lichen - another similarity to the planet from which we‟d just

come, achieved by this planet from going in an opposite

direction. A small pup tent had been pitched here as

protection from the minimal elements, secured by way of

crampons hammered into the rock, and outside it sat a

cross-legged figure - yet another echo.

There the similarities ended, however. This figure was

male, naturally slim of body but better fed than Bernice had

been, and little more than a boy. His head was shaved, his

features delicate in a way that, I suppose, a certain kind of

man could go for big-time. When I go for men, personally, I

tend to go for the masculine rather than the feminine -

otherwise what would be the point?

The boy wasn‟t particularly interesting in himself – what

was interesting, to the extreme, was the collection of small

and rudimentary sluglike creatures before him, and what

they were doing.

The boy looked up as we approached, and, very carefully,

smiled.

„Hello, Benny,‟ he said. His voice was even more careful

than the smile. It was the voice of someone exercising

complete and entire control, not so much for the sake of it in

itself, but out of fear of what might happen if he lost it „What

are you doing here?‟

„We need your help, Emile,‟ said Bernice, gently. „We need

you to come with us.‟

„I... can‟t,‟ Emile said. „I just can‟t. I came here to try to deal

with the thing inside me. To try to keep it where it can‟t do

harm. It... just wants control, you see. That‟s all it wants.

Control of everything. And there‟s just so much you can do to

pognophores...” He gestured to the little sluglike things.

These, presumably, were they.

„It can‟t control us for the moment‟ Bernice said. „See for

yourself, Emile. Let it try.‟

„I...‟ Abruptly, the face of the boy went blank. And then

something surfaced in it something else. I really don‟t know

how better to describe it. It was inimical to life - perhaps all

life - but it didn‟t seem monstrous as such: it seemed to have

no connection with evil, or good for that matter. It was an

Entity, truly, in the sense of being completely in and of itself.

It was unknowable, on any human level - and as such it was

somehow worse than if it had been merely evil: it was simply

something else.

I felt a kind of intangible probing at my head, at the mind

inside the brain inside the skull - I flashed upon the so-called

dreams I‟d had on Dellah, before the minor and, so it had

seemed at the time, ultimately unimportant change in Sela.

„Oh little creatures,‟ said the Entity, speaking through the

boy Emile‟s mind and mouth. „Do you really think you

can...?‟

And, quite suddenly, Emile‟s face changed again. „What...?‟

said the Entity. „What .. .?‟ said Emile - and then the haggard

and precisely careful expression that was himself surfaced

again.

„You see?‟ said Bernice, speaking as gently as ever. „It can‟t

harm us, for a while at least. We need your help, Emile.

Please come with us.‟

As Emile walked with us to the Star of Afrique, I glanced

back. The little pognophores, who had been doing

complicated midair somersaults, and arranging themselves in

the sluggy equivalent of human pyramids, were crawling

aimlessly away.

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

Summerfield gripped the controls of the African Star and

swung it through a ninety-degree turn with a roar of megaton

thrusters. The spiderlike alien fighter failed to make the turn,

shot on ahead and crashed into an asteroid with a gout of

flame.

„Scratch one problem,‟ Summerfield said grimly. She turned

to Jason. „Make sure our little friend doesn‟t try to escape.‟

„Sure thing,‟ Jason said, looking with disgust at the trussed

form of Moloch on the floor. His simple but essentially noble

heart was sickened by the sight of the assassin, who had so

recently tried to use Berni‟s own, stolen knives on her. It had

only been the fact that Berni made her own blades, he

thought, and that this killer had not the expertise to use

their specially customized nature, that had saved her life.

Moloch glared up at him, the dark eyes in his unnaturally

pale skin flashing with pure hatred.

„You‟ll never get away,‟ the brutal assassin spat. „You might

have won this round, but our plot to kill King G‟jimo of

Thanaxos continues unchanged. You‟ll never make it in

time...‟

Jason cursed the luck that had had him imprisoned, for a

crime he did not commit, on the prison planet of Caprisis

Beta, forcing Berni Summerfield to cut short a long-deserved

butterfly-hunting vacation and go there to effect his escape.

Had it not been for that, he thought bitterly, they would not

have found themselves two galaxies away from Thanaxos and

the plot to kill the King. Even now, the demonic monster that

these villains had summoned by their blood-soaked rituals

on Dellah could be lurching through the streets towards the

Royal Palace, feeding off those poor victims it encountered in

the night and growing stronger all the time as it made

towards its goal.

Only Berni Summerfield could stop it now, he thought. She

alone in all the universe had reached the centre of the

Temple of Tashwari, through any number of fiendishly

designed death traps, had read the inscriptions written in the

human blood of slaves and made it out again, despite the

Temple‟s huge revolving granite balls.

Only Berni Summerfield, he knew, could say the words that

would send the Dellahan monster back to the nether regions

of the cosmos whence it came...

- extract from The Dellahan Conspiracy,

a True Adventure of the New Frontier

CHAPTER 17 (ENDGAME)

Now, right at the start of this I said how things fell apart

spectacularly right at the end. That‟s not quite true. In

another sense, they came together catastrophically, in a

moment of transition and transformation that changed

everything. Whether for good or for ill, in the end, it‟s

impossible to say - the point being that in an instant they

changed. It was like carefully putting together a lump of

plutonium, gram by gram, over the course of months. At

some point things hit a critical mass, and suddenly

everything‟s happening in an instant and all at once. The rest

of your life, for starters...

So much has been said of the events on Thanaxos at this

point: the sense of religious monomania that seemed to be

sweeping the planet, converting the extant sense of

impending war into a jihad aimed not so much at the planet

of Dellah now, but at absolutely everything and anything in

the galaxy - the entire universe, for that matter - that was not

Thanaxos and didn‟t Believe. So-called heretics were being

burnt on the streets, people were committing ritual suicide

left, right and centre, and off-worlders in their thousands

were making hurried preparations to leave - a lot of them

with the intention of leaving to spread the Word, whatever

that word might subsequently prove to be.

The planet, in short, was dancing on the lip of the

catastrophe curve. The finger of history was poised on the

button of the blender of Chaos, and gods (or whatever

Entities might ultimately emerge) knew what would happen

when the button was pressed.

Thanaxos as a planet was going through the incipient

stages of the upheavals that had so changed Dellah. All it

would take to tip things over the edge was a minor shove in

the right direction.

So much has been said about it - but, as I‟ve said from the

start, this is a personal and subjective account. It might not

be the whole truth and nothing but - and it‟s an odds-on bet

that it won‟t be yours - but it‟s my truth, and all I can really

talk about is what happened to me, and what I thought, and

what I did. And, if that leaves gaping holes in the Big Picture,

well, find somebody else and ask them to take up the slack.

It‟s no skin off my nose; it‟s none of my business and I

couldn‟t care less.

We gleaned the salient points noted above as we burst into

Thanaxon airspace. What with Bernice working in

conjunction with Kimo Ani, the various systems of the Star of

Afrique were set to avoid any planetary defensive measure a

relatively minor world like Thanaxos, in the great galactic

scheme of things, could throw at us. I don‟t know the full

specifics of what they did to the ship, and I wouldn‟t tell you

if I did. The last thing such things need to be is commonly

known. For one thing, their blanket use would lead to inter-

stellar chaos before countermeasures are devised - and for

another, once those countermeasures are devised, the people

who might really need to use the techniques won‟t be able to.

Suffice it to say that we pancaked down on the lawn of the

Thanaxon House Royal, with nary a glitch on the planetary

defence sensors. The Royal Guard were another matter

entirely, of course - it‟s hard to disguise the fact of a fuckoff-

great space cruiser coming down from plain visual sight. I

detonated a couple of neurasthenic smoke bombs that had

been part of the Star of Afrique’s arsenal when she was a

pirate ship, which I had missed in clearing her of suspicious

items after stealing her, and which I had subsequently

discovered in a hiding place so obvious that I‟m too ashamed

to so much as say where it was.

If you‟ve been reading carefully enough, you‟ll probably be

able to hazard a guess. The important point was that the first

squad of guards to arrive on the scene stopped being a

problem long enough for us to disembark - Bernice, Jason

and Mira shepherding Emile - leaving Kimo Ani behind to

deal with any reinforcements, by way of his implants hooked

to servo-assisted weapons packages we had improvised.

The more ostentatiously splendid public areas of the house

were still wide open to the populace, but we eschewed them

in favour of the shabbier, workaday areas I had been in once

before. We weren‟t interested in dealing with the flashy

trappings - we were here to deal with the worm in the true

heart of planetary power.

„How could things have got so bad so quickly?‟ I asked as

we ran through the worn and peeling corridors. The violent

confusion of the disrupted news reports was preying on my

mind. „It‟s only been a few days...‟

„I saw something similar to it on Dellah,‟ Bernice said. „It‟s

like a ripple effect. The Faith spreads like wildfire,

accelerating as it goes. I think that, in a sense, these Entities

create the medium through which they can move and

propagate...‟

„And with luck,‟ said Jason, „we can stop the actual

propagation at its source.‟ He hefted the handgun he carried,

one of those I‟d lifted from Grabor and Sleed on Beta

Caprisis. „Are we clear on what we‟re doing?‟

„I am prepared,‟ said Emile in his distant and tightly

controlled voice.

The plan was relatively simple, if dangerous enough to put

several varieties of willy up a braver man than I. We were to

meet the Entity and its host, face to face, in its lair, relying

upon Mira‟s enhanced and pulse-pumped psychic fields to

protect us against those under its direct influence, making

us unnoticeable to them in a way more or less similar to that

which I‟d come across on Dellah, when the native Dellahans

in the Sultan‟s palace had looked through me and continued

on their merry way without a second thought. The Entity

inside Emile wanted control of all things for itself and,

brought into contact with each other, these two opposing

powers might at some stage, we hoped, cancel each other

out.

That was what we hoped, of course - this specific part of

the plan had had to be discussed outside of Emile‟s presence,

to prevent the thing inside him catching wind of it, and so far

as he knew he was along merely to help his friend Bernice

and the rest of us out if he could. Personally, I wished that a

way could have been found to ask him for his advice on the

matter. I had a nasty feeling that we might be just

participating in a dynamic that allowed a pair of the buggers

to breed...

So far as the rest of the plan went, it was utterly simple,

owing to the fact that it was utterly nonexistent. Whatever

the presence of Emile‟s Thing did, one way or another, it

would at the very least disrupt things and make a change -

and from that point we would simply try to take advantage of

it and attempt to improvise.

We burst into the Council chamber. Floating in the centre

of the room, arms akimbo, an unearthly light blazing from

his eyes and surrounded by the members of the Thanaxon

Advisory Council to the House Royal, was the Prince Regent -

Jimbo. The members of the Council stood stock-still, gazing

at him with a kind of divine adoration that was effectively

catatonia. Among them I saw Sela Dane, as slack-jawed and

drooling as the rest. The sharp, designer combat-gear that

had been her trademark hung off her, like grubby rags: she

hadn‟t changed, or washed, or eaten in a week.

Prince Jimbo turned, slowly in the air, and regarded us

with a knowing smile.

„Good evening,‟ said the Thing inside him. „So glad you can

come - especially my little brother, there. Do you expect to

fight me, little brother? Do you expect to fight me for

Dominion of this place?‟

„I don‟t think so,‟ said Emile - but it wasn‟t Emile now: it

was the Thing inside him. „I expect to eat.‟

„Ah yes?‟ said the Thing inside Prince Jimbo. „And how do

you expect to accomplish that in the face of Me, who have

grown strong, have gorged myself upon the Belief of all these

people till I am all near inviolate?‟ It chuckled. „When I found

this host, a mind so blank and empty that I couldn‟t see the

end of it, I filled it up. I am bigger, little brother, than you can

ever possibly imagine.‟

„No,‟ said the Thing inside Emile, softly. „You don‟t

understand. It is not the satiation, or the size - it‟s the

hunger that‟s the thing. This host of mine has tried to starve

me for a long time now, and I am very, very hungry.‟

Now, in other accounts I‟ve read of the events on Thanaxos

- and guess which ones are the worst - there now occurs a

massive discharge and battle of energies, laying waste to all

around them and lasting for up to a week.

In reality, in this universe at least, what happened was

this: the lights simply went out of Prince Jimbo‟s eyes and he

dropped like a stone. And light‟s came on in the eyes of

Emile, and he began to rise...

„Oh, dear God,‟ cried Mira. „He‟s taking on the power! I can‟t

hold him, I can‟t...‟

Bernice and Jason stood transfixed, as the protective

mental field of Mira spun away from them. They stood

helpless, their faces blank and slack as the thing that had

been, and to some extent still was, Emile rose before them,

reaching for them with hands that seemed part those of an

angel taking supplication and part the claws of a devil.

It was at that point that I recalled something. It was

something about the fact that I was, in some sense, when it

came right down to it, an Artificial Personality - and the thing

about Artificial Personalities was that these Things seemed to

have no effect upon them.

It was a fraction of a second after that, that I turned and

rabbit-punched the thing that had once been a Thing that

was in some way still Emile in the face. The light died in his

eyes and he hit the ground with a thump.

It was slightly later.

A rather bemused and shaken Council had emergency-

convened and were sitting at their scuffed official table,

looking at Bernice Summerfield, Jason Kane and me. Off to

one side lay the still unconscious Emile, watched over by

Mira with her full enhanced attention, ready and waiting to

put a mental lock-hold on him if he so much as stirred.

Off to one side, the newly exorcized Prince Jimbo sat in a

high-backed chair, returned to what for him approached

normality, and beamed at all and sundry with imbecilic

stupidity. I could have personally done with the Thing that

had possessed him leaving behind some trace of an

intelligence, or a personality, or indeed any kind of a clue.

We had filled the Council in on the basics of what had

happened to them, and what we had done - basics of which

they were largely aware on the subconscious levels that had

remained awake and aware even when they had been in the

thrall of the Entity that had so subsumed them. Enough, at

least, so that they had accepted our story, in broad outline,

without question. However, being a bit of a political body on

the quiet, they were quite prepared to question, debate and

demand satisfaction upon the minutiae - and now they all

began to try to talk at once.

„Gentlemen and ladies, please!‟ The Minister for Off-world

Affairs, the Thanaxon counterpart of Pseudopod‟s Volan,

waved a silencing hand. „I think that we may safely leave

such trifles for later. For the moment, I suggest that we vote

these remarkably courageous people our heartfelt thanks,

both on behalf of ourselves and the nation itself, and turn

our attention to setting to rights the deplorable state of

affairs that these recent disruptions and upheavals have

caused.‟ Receiving an apparent consensus, he glanced

meaningfully towards Bernice, Jason and me with an air that

informed us that, for the moment, our audience with the

Administrative Council to the House Royal had ended.

„Not so fast, Volan,‟ I said.

The ersatz Volan paused in the act of returning to the Acts

of State. „Pardon me? I beg your pardon?‟

I climbed from my chair and fixed him in the eyes. „I have

something to say that is not strictly relevant to the matter in

hand, but is nevertheless interesting to you in a personal

capacity.‟

„Well if it‟s a matter of a personal nature,‟ said Volan, a

little stuffily, „it can surely wait until the Council is not in

session. Now, as I was saying …‟

„Oh it‟s of interest to the Council, too, all right.‟ I said. And

oblivious to his attempts at interruption I began to prowl the

room, making use Of the fact that a moving object becomes

the centre of attention and counting points off on my fingers.

„As you are well aware in your private capacity, Volan, I am

currently in the employ of Pseudopod Enterprises. In the

instant I was engaged for a consultation with them, an

attempt was made upon my life by a pair of low-level little

sods going by the names of Grabor and Sleed. As I‟ve

pursued my duties, in locations known directly only by me

and a very few others, they‟ve always been one step behind

me. Now, there could be any number of reasons for that, and

if this were a detective story there could be a lot of abstruse

and complicated mileage in it - but in real life, I tend to find,

the simplest and most obvious solutions are more usually

correct than otherwise.

„I was looking, basically, for someone who could know my

movements in every detail, but at the same time wasn‟t quite

good enough to have first-rate people working for him -

someone who was, basically, just that little bit naff...

„I‟ve done a little bit of digging into your life, Volan, and

guess what I found. Large lumps of Pseudopod funding have

been parlayed through your political connections here on

Thanaxos into a number of anonymous private accounts. It‟s

been going on for years quite happily - but, with the Dellahan

situation disrupting Pseudopod interests, you knew that

they‟d be sending one or more heavy-duty and free-ranging

operatives, and that in all probability they‟d stumble on your

personal scams. Setting those two jokers on me was your

attempt to lead me off the scent or kill me - but you did it so

ineptly that, in the end, they led me straight back to you.‟

Volan was looking at me sardonically, having gone into

method-acting mode to cover up any sense of dismay he

might be feeling.

„Essentially correct,‟ he said, „barring one or two

particulars. The particulars in question being the details of

my escape upon being found out. Here - catch.’

With that, he threw what seemed to be a silvery globe

about the size of a clenched fist, using the resulting

confusion to step backward through a hatch that rose and

lowered with a clash and the electromagnetic chunking of

deadbolts.

I‟d instinctively ducked when Volan had thrown the object -

but now I saw that it was floating in mid-air. It began to spin,

slowly at first, and then accelerated.

„My Goddess,‟ breathed Bernice. „What is it?‟

„Not good news,‟ I said softly. „I recognize it from

researching Grabor and Sleed. He must have got it from

Sleed at some point. It‟s a stupid grenade.‟

„A what?’ exclaimed Jason Kane.

„You‟ve heard of a smart bomb, right?‟ I said. „This operates

on a completely different principle. A certain sub-sect of the

White Fire used it to, in quotes, improve the race. It‟s thrown

into a room and, once primed, it hunts down the stupidest

person in it and detonates...‟

„Well, I personally think that certain tropes and themes to

be found in Finnegans Wake were rather overdone,‟ said

Bernice, instantly and brightly.

„And the X-factor, in the Special Theory of Relativity could

be better described as Universal Consciousness,‟ cut in

Jason Kane, almost as fast, „as opposed to some

anthropomorphic Mind of God.‟

„Time flies like an arrow,‟ called out Mira, from where she

was still looking after Emile, „but fruit flies like a banana...‟

Around the room, all the members of the Council were

suddenly trying to make intelligent-sounding noises. Then

they stopped and, slowly, inexorably, every pair of eyes in the

room turned towards Prince Jimbo.

„Hello, chaps.‟ He beamed back at them. „I had eggs for tea.‟

There remains little more to tell, so far as it directly concerns

me. I feel I have to add a small personal incident, though, in

the interests of completeness - and not for any kind of Active

roundness, which I have no truck with, in any way, shape or

form.

After the dust and various other things had settled, I

needed to go and clean up - and realized that, on Thanaxos, I

had nowhere left to go. The private rooms of the House Royal

weren‟t open to such as me, and the ablutionary facilities of

the Star of Afrique were a bad joke. In the end, with nowhere

else to go, I settled on the hotel where I‟d stayed with Sela

Dane.

I found her in the room, miserably packing an even dozen

of identical suits in her bag. I‟d noticed that she‟d gone, after

the spell in the Council Chamber had been broken, but I‟d

had no idea where.

She turned to look at me, with eyes that seemed to have

been crying quite recently.

„Jeez, guy, but you look a mess. What the hell is that?‟

„Just a bit of blood,‟ I said. „It‟s not important. It‟s not

mine.‟ I glanced towards her travel cases. „Where are you

going?‟

„I don‟t know.‟ Abruptly, there were tears in her eyes again.

She dashed them away, angrily. „I‟ve pissed on my chips with

DataDay, I know that. I‟m gonna be a laughing stock. How

could I put out shit like that?‟

„Hey,‟ I said. „It wasn‟t your fault. People are going to know

that‟

„Yeah, but shit sticks. They‟re never gonna take me

seriously again.‟

It wasn‟t a big thing or anything. I just gave her a hug to

try to make her feel better - but she laid her head against my

slightly blood-spattered chest without caring, and I knew the

spark and light were there. They had never, really, gone

away.

„Don‟t worry about it,‟ I said. „I know a few people. We can

sort something out.‟

ATTACHMENT (TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS):

It‟s not my job to draw any real conclusions from any of this -

and I don‟t think I‟d dare. Nothing really ends in life - you

feed some drugs to a laboratory rat and, two hundred

generations down the line, the monsters start being born.

Drawing conclusions is for those who have to deal with them

then, somewhere down the line. All I can do is be as honest

as I can, tell you what I can, and say something about how

the lives of myself and those with whom I was involved have

carried on.

Was the Entity inhabiting Prince Jimbo one of the All-High

Gods of Dellah? Did it really die, locked up in his head as it

was, when he did? Neither I nor anybody else can be

completely sure, but I think the answers are, in order, yes it

was and yes it did. There was nothing to suggest otherwise,

then or later. Nobody suddenly acting strangely and out of

character - at least, no more than to the extent that real

people, as opposed to characters, in the holomovies of the

New Frontier Adventures, do. In the times when I‟ve been

bothered to look, I haven‟t seen anything to do with Thanaxos

that would suggest an outpouring of mass religious mania,

any more than any other planet with its fair share of religious

monomaniacs.

In any event, if this Entity still somehow survives, it‟ll have

a job getting out of the lead-lined casket in which Jimbo was

buried, with full State Honours. On the one hand, in the

larger sense, this helped diffuse the vestigia] Belief he had

engendered in his last days. A combination of this Belief and

a refusal to really believe how much of an embarrassment he

had been at all other times, converted him into a state of

instant martyrdom. The mass Thanaxon grief at his death,

and subsequent interment in a specially commissioned tomb

- visitors permitted at a reasonable price - went some way to

displacing and dispelling the warlike emotions that had had

Thanaxos turning its eyes to Dellah. For the moment, the

Earth-imposed blockade of that planet was safe, from the

Thanaxon quarter at least.

I‟ve mentioned how ultimately nebulous my work for

Pseudopod Enterprises was - and playing a part in achieving

this fragile stability meant that my work was done. At least

that‟s what the original Volan assured me, when he called me

at my and Sela‟s hotel room (a different one from the one

we‟d shared before: this one had been rented by me on the

Pseudopod expenses that would not be curtailed, and that

had been replaced by what Volan called „a commensurate

sum‟ of actual pay).

I wasn‟t so sure. Not about my work being done – but about

just what that actual work might have been.

„I get the feeling that all this “preserving the stability of the

Sector for Pseudopod interests” stuff was just window-

dressing, wasn‟t it?‟ I said. „Correct me if I‟m wrong, but

wasn‟t it really about rooting out the iffy things your local

counterpart was doing and fingering him for them?‟

„Not at all, my dear chap,‟ Volan said. „Though I must admit

that, in that particular respect, that was a little and

completely unexpected bonus for us all. Such a pity you

couldn‟t actually catch him, but at least he‟s well out of

harm‟s way now...‟

That and his tone told me all I needed to know. „So all the

other things that happened, all the good and all the bad,

were just incidental details to your own personal agenda?‟

Volan appeared to change the subject. „Do you know that

one of the circles of Hell contains a table, laid out with the

most sumptuous banquet imaginable?‟

„OK,‟ I said, „I‟ll bite. What the hell does that have to do

with anything?‟

„Seated to either side of it,‟ said Volan, „are the Selfish

Damned. They‟re all of them starving, but their elbows are

splinted. They can‟t put a scrap of this luxuriant repast into

their mouths...‟

„And it never occurs to them to feed each other across the

table, „I finished for him, sourly. „Very deep. Very apposite.

Very moving.‟

„Enlightened self-interest, occasionally harnessed to the

greater good, is one of the few things we‟ve got going for us,‟

said Volan sternly. „In the end, I sometimes think it‟s one of

the few good reasons for having human beings in the galaxy

in the first place.‟

After those last fateful events in the House Royal, Bernice

Summerfield, Jason Kane, Kimo Ani and Mira had taken the

Star of Afrique and conveyed a slightly punch-drunk Emile

back to his sinecure, before exposure to all the potential

Thanaxon victims broke the fragile control he had achieved

over his own Entity. They then, presumably, went their

separate ways, Jason‟s people to carry on doing whatever it

was that they did, and Benny to recover from the rigours of

the past few months and then get on with whatever she was

going to do next.

There are a few odd, nebulous rumours about her.

Personally, I‟m waiting for the next Adventure of the New

Frontier in which she stars - so I can work out what she‟s

doing, by the simple expedient of taking what it says and

inferring the precise opposite.

Sela Dane, having blown her reputation so spectacularly

with DataDay while under the influence, is going to make a

comeback - though not quite in the usual way. A couple of

months from now, half the galaxy is going to wake up to find

a hot new interstellar reporter, beautiful and elegant and,

with the guts and steel-trap mind to take the datastream by

storm, someone everybody‟s going to be talking about and

wanting to talk to. She might look a little like Sela, but hardly

anybody‟s going to make the connection, the tags and

identifiers and memory of celebrity being incredibly mutable,

given the right amount of torque. The girl‟s gonna be huge. I

know this for a fact. I know this „cause I‟m going to have a

hand in it. And anybody mentioning the immediately obvious

will be shot.

As for me, I‟m just going to fade. The people who know me

know who I am, if you get what I mean - and for the people

who don‟t I‟m not gonna let anything slip even by implication.

In writing this out, I‟ve done my own impromptu and

informal Mary-Sue - changed my fundamental aspects of

persona, my personality, the basic facts of my life and

history, my entire manner of speaking. The gist of events is

here, but there is nothing to tie the man in the centre of it all

to who I truly am. I could be anyone, basically.

But you‟ll never know.

Document Outline

Front Cover

Back Cover

Preliminary notes

INSERT QUOTES:

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

ATTACHMENT (SUPPLEMENTARY):

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

CHAPTER 4

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

CHAPTER 5

BACKGROUND INSERT (PERSONAL FILE):

CHAPTER 6

BACKGROUND INSERT (PERSONAL FILE):

CHAPTER 7

ATTACHMENT (SUPPLEMENTARY):

CHAPTER 8

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

CHAPTER 11

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

CHAPTER 12

BACKGROUND INSERT (PERSONAL FILE):

CHAPTER 13

ATTACHMENT (SUPPLEMENTARY):

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

SUPPLEMENTARY INSERT:

CHAPTER 17 (ENDGAME)

ATTACHMENT (TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS):