Hammered

BOOK ONE

0307 hours, Wednesday 29 August, 2062

Hartford, Connecticut

Sigourney Street

Abandoned North End

I never sleep if I can help it.

So when somebody starts trying to kick down my door at 0300 hours on a rank hot summer night, it isn’t quite the surprise for me that it might be for some people. When the noise starts, I’m sitting on a gouged orange plastic chair in my shop. I drop my old-fashioned paperback book, stand, and draw my sidearm before sidling across oil-stained concrete to flick the monitor on. Smart relays in the gun click on in recognition of my palm print, too quietly for normal ears to hear. The air thickens in my lungs; my heartbeat slows ominously.

And then I curse out loud and go open up the big blue steel door, holding the safetied pistol casually in my meat hand while the metal one turns the knob.

“You wanna pound the damn door down?” I accuse, and then I get a good look at the purple-faced kid dying in Razorface’s arms and I’m all somebody’s sergeant, somebody’s mother. Not that the two are all that different.

“Ah, shit, Face. This kid is hammered. What do you expect me to do with this?”

Face shoves past me, skirting a dangling engine block and a neat pile of sheet metal, two of his “boys”—teenage hoods — trailing like ducklings. He doesn’t answer immediately. Even as I take his name loudly in vain, Razorface carries the baby gangster gently around the scarred steel lab table that holds up my hot plate. He lays the kid on my cot in the corner of the shop, wrinkling the taut brown blanket. Razorface, Razorface. Gets his name from a triple row of stainless steel choppers. Skin black as velvet and shoulders wide as a football star’s. The old kind of football, yeah.

I know the kid: maybe fourteen, maybe twelve. His name is Mercedes. He’s rigid, trying to suck air and failing. Anaphylactic shock. Besides that, dark red viscous blood oozes out of his nose, and his skin looks like pounded meat. The nosebleed and the wide-open capillary color of his face are dead giveaways, but I give him the once-over anyway. Then I grab my kit and lug it over, dropping to my knees on the cold damp concrete beside the cot. Bones and metal creak. The room reeks of Razorface’s sweaty leather, the kid’s blood, diesel fuel. Once it would have made me gag. I ain’t what I used to be.

“Can you fix him, Maker?”

Face’s boys stand twitching just inside the doorway.

I fumble in my kit, finding epinephrine, the long needle. Even as I fill a syringe I know the answer. “Nah, Face. There’s no fucking way.” But I have to try. ’Cause Face is one of mine, and the kid is one of his.

I don’t look at the punks. “Will one of you two be so fucking kind as to lock the goddamned door?”

“Derek,” Razorface says, “do it,” and the taller of the two shoots him a sullen-jawed look and stalks away.

I know already, from the color of Merc’s skin, but I need to ask — so I turn my grim expression on Razorface.

“What’d he OD on?” Please God let me be wrong.

They can break you of religion, but they can’t break you of praying.

Face holds out a twist of pills, and a chill snakes up my spine. I reach out with my metal hand and take the packet away from him, squeezing the ends to pop the slit. “Putain de marde!” Yellow pills, small as saccharine tablets, with a fine red line across the diameter. Rigathalonin. Hyperex.

We used to call it the Hammer.

How did a two-bit piece of street trash get his hands on something like this? And just what on God’s gray earth do you think I can do for a kid who chewed down a handful of Hammers, Face? But I don’t say that. I say, “How long ago? When did he take them?”

Face answers. “An hour ago. About an hour ago,” and the taller gangster starts to whine.

I glare up at Whiny. “Shut up. How many of these did he take? Anybody see?” Nothing that I can manage — that anybody can manage — is going to make a difference for this kid. If Merc’s central nervous system isn’t already so much soft-serve, I’m not a card-carrying member of the Teamster’s Union.

“One,” Whiny says. I curse him for a liar, but the other one — Dopey? Doc? — backs him up. Allergic reaction? Merci à Dieu. I drive the needle into his flesh, through cartilage, into the spasming muscle of the heart.

He quits twitching and his eyes fly open, but there’s nobody home. I’ve seen it before. The funny purple color will drain out of his face in a couple of hours, and he’ll be just like any other vegetable. I should have let him kick it when I could. Kinder than letting him live.

You’re a hard woman, Jenny Casey. Yeah, well, I come by it honestly. “Shit,” I whisper. “Another kid. Shit.”

I wipe cold sweat from my face, flesh hand trembling with the aftershock. I’ll be sick for hours. The only thing worse than the aftermath of a plunge into combat-time is stepping up to the edge and then backing off.

All right. Time to make coffee. And throw Razorface’s gangsters out onto the street so I can pat him on the shoulder, with nobody else to see.

• • •

Later, I wash my face in the stained steel sink and dry it on a clean rag. I catch myself staring into my own eyes, reflected in the unbreakable mirror hanging on my wall. I look chewed. Hell, you can barely tell I’m a girl. Not exactly girlish anymore, Jenny.

Hah. I won’t be fifty for a month.

You wouldn’t think I’d spend a lot of time staring in mirrors, but I never got used to that face. I used to stand there and study it every morning when I brushed my teeth, trying to figure out what the rest of the world saw. Vain as a cat of my glamorous good looks, don’t you know?

Stained torn sleeveless shirt and cami pants over a frame like rawhide boiled and wired to bone. An eagle’s nose—how come you never broke that witch’s nose, Jenny? — the skin tone and the cheekbones proclaim my three mostly Mohawk grandparents. Shiny pink burn scars. A prosthetic eye on the left half of the face.

Oh, yeah. And the arm. The left arm. From just below the shoulder it’s dull, scratched steel — a clicking horror of a twenty-year-old Canadian Army prosthesis.

“Marde.” I glance over at Face, who hands me another cup of coffee. After turning back to the steel table, I pour bourbon into it. Shaking my head, I set mug and bottle aside. My arm clicking, I hoist my butt onto the counter edge.

“Where’d he get it?” I hook the orange chair closer with my right foot and plant it on the seat, my bad leg propped on the back. Hell of a stinking summer night, and it’s raining again. The tin roof leaks in three places; rain drums melodiously into the buckets I’ve set underneath. I run wet fingers through white-stippled hair. It won’t lie flat. Too much sweat and grime, and I need a shower, so it’s a good thing the rain’s filling the rooftop tanks.

The left side of my body aches like the aftermath of a nasty electrical jolt.

Face rolls big shoulders, lifting his coffee cup to his mouth. The ceramic clinks against his prosthetic teeth, and then he eases his body down into another old chair. It creaks under his weight as he swings his feet up onto the counter beside me, leaning back. Regarding me impassively, he shrugs again — a giant, shaven-headed figure with an ear and a nose full of gold and a mouth full of knife-edged, gleaming steel. The palms of his hands are pink and soft where he rolls them over the warmth of the mug; the rest of him shines dark and hard as some exotic wood. A little more than two-thirds my age, maybe. Getting old for a gangster, Face.

“Shit, Maker. I got to do me some asking about that.”

I nod, pursing my lips. The scars on my cheek pull the expression out of shape. Face’s gaze is level as I finish the spiked coffee in a long, searing swallow. The thermostat reads 27 °C. I shiver. It’s too damn cold in here. “Hand me that sweater.”

He rises and does it wordlessly, and then refills my cup without my asking. “You drink less coffee, maybe eat something once in a while, you wouldn’t be so damn cold all the time.”

It’s not being skinny makes me shiver, Face. It’s a real old problem, but they give it a longer name every war.

“All right,” I mumble. “So what do you want to do about it?” He knows I don’t mean the cold.

Face turns his attention to the corpse-silent child on my narrow bed. “You think the shit was bad?”

I bite my lip. “I hope he was allergic. Otherwise—” I can’t finish. I wonder how many of those little plastic twists are out in the neighborhoods. I rake my hand through stiff hair and shake my head. Hyperex is not a street drug. It is produced by two licensed pharmaceutical companies under contract for the U.S. armed forces and — chiefly — for the C.A. It’s classified. And complicated.

The chances of a street-level knockoff are slim, and I don’t think a multinational would touch it.

“What the hell else could it be?” I wave my left hand at the twist on the table. The light glitters on the scratches and dents marking my prosthesis. He doesn’t answer.

After setting my cup aside, I raise my arm to pull the sweater up to my shoulder. It snags on the hydraulics of the arm and I have to wiggle the thread loose. Cette putain de machine. Face doesn’t stare at the puckered line of scar a few centimeters below the proximal end of my humerus. Did I mention that I like that man? I pause to comment, “Half a dozen tabs in there. You want to try one out, eh?”

Then I drag the black sweater over my head, twisting the sleeves around so the canvas elbow patches are where they should be, mothball-scented cotton-wool warm on my right arm only. The left one aches — phantom pain. My body trying to tell me something’s wrong with a hand I lost a quarter century back.

Long slow shake of that massive head, bulldog muscle rippling along the column of his neck. “I don’t want this shit on my street, Maker.” A deep frown. I hand him the bottle of bourbon by my elbow, and he adds a healthy dose to his cup along with a double spoonful of creamer and enough sugar to make me queasy. What is it about big macho men that they have to ruin perfectly good coffee?

I’m shaking less. I nearly triggered earlier, and the reaction won’t wear off for a while yet, but the booze and the caffeine double-teaming my system help to smooth things. I raise my own cup to my lips, inhale alcohol fumes and the good rich smell of the roasted beans. Fortified, I brace myself and go down deep, after the memories I usually leave to rot. Old blood, that. Old, bad blood.

Two more breaths and I’m as ready to talk about it as I’ll ever be. “I’ve never seen anybody do that off a single hit, Face. We’d get guys once in a while, who’d been strung out and on the front line for weeks, who’d push it too far and do the froth-and-foam. But not off a tablet. The Hammer’s not like that.” I glance over at Mercedes, who is resting quietly on my cot. “Poor stupid kid.”

“He’s cooked, ain’t he?”

I nod slowly, tasting bile, and reach for the bourbon. Razorface hands it to me without even looking and I kick the chair away and hop down, holster creaking, wincing as weight hits my left knee and hip. There’s a lot of ceramic in there.

I gulp a quarter mug. It burns going down. Nothing in the world ever tasted quite so good. Jean-Michel. Katya. Nell. Oh, God. Nell.

I fight my face under control and turn back to him, thrusting the bourbon his way. “Drink to your dead, Face?”

Face’s lips skin back from his shark smile as he waves the bottle away. Thick, sensitive lips, with the gray edge of an armor weave visible along the inside rim where they should have been pink with blood. I don’t like to think about his sex life. “I’m gonna find that dealer, Maker.”

“What about Merc?”

Face looks at the kid. “His momma will take care of him.”

“Better to put a bullet in his head.”

He looks at me, expressionless.

“What’s his mother going to do with him? Better to tell her he’s dead. He isn’t coming back from this.”

Another slow roll of his shoulders. “Shit, Maker. I don’t know if I can do that.” He’s one of my boys, one of my kids, his eyes tell me. I wonder if Mercedes is Face’s son. I wonder if he knows. Half the bastards in Hartford are his, likely as not.

“I can,” I offer. His eyes flicker from mine down to the piece strapped to my thigh, and then back. The muscles in his face tense and go slack.

“No,” he says after a moment. “He’s mine.”

He hands me back my mug and scoops Mercedes into his arms, letting me hold the door. I lock up after they go, and watch on the monitors as his back recedes into the blood-warm predawn drizzle, leaving me alone with my thoughts and most of a bottle.

That bottle looks back at me for long seconds before I take it and climb into the front seat of a half-restored gasoline convertible, getting comfortable for a long night of thinking.

Lake Simcoe Military Prison

Boyne Valley, Ontario

Friday 1 September, 2062

Dr. Elspeth Dunsany folded her prison coveralls for the last time and set them on the shelf above her bunk. Denim jeans and a peach-colored button-down shirt felt strange against her skin, and the colors were garish after over a decade of unrelieved blue and gray and khaki. She had no mirror, but she was willing to bet that the pastel shirt made her dark bronze complexion look brassy. She wondered what it would be like, to look at walls that were not gray, to taste different air.

“Hurry up, Doc,” the guard by the barred door ordered, not unsympathetically.

The prisoner looked up at her guard and grinned. A single lock of once-black hair curled out of Elspeth’s ponytail and hung down before merry eyes. “Officer Fox. You’ve been keeping me here for twelve years. Now you can’t wait to get me out.”

“Fear of freedom?” The guard rattled her keys. “Truth is, I’m sad to see you go.”

“I’m not sad to be going.” Elspeth Dunsany picked an army-green duffel-bag up off the floor, puffing a little under the weight. “I thought I’d be here until I was a much older woman than this.” She stepped through the door as Fox slid it back and fell into step behind Elspeth and to her right.

“What’s happened with that? Warden said your sentence had been commuted.”

Elspeth laughed low in her throat. “I cracked under the pressure, kid. Times have changed.”

“Yeah, but — Elspeth. We’ve known each other a long time.” Fox’s boots rang on the concrete floor. A few catcalls followed them down the corridor, but the women on this hallway, notoriously, kept to themselves. Quiet, well-educated, model prisoners. Some of them had cried a lot, at first. The ones with families. “I’ve never seen anybody charged with espionage just… released before.”

Elspeth stopped and turned toward Fox. She chewed her lip for a moment, gathering the dignity she knew made her short, chunky frame seem larger and powerful. “Not espionage.”

“Military Powers Act violation, sealed,” Fox replied. “What’s that if not espionage?”

“If I told you that,” Elspeth answered, “it would be espionage.”

Fox grinned and challenged her again. “Most of population swears they’re innocent. You never made a peep.”

Elspeth turned back slowly and resumed walking toward the barred daylight streaking the far end of the hall. “That’s because I’m guilty as charged, Officer Fox. Guilty as charged.”

• • •

Elspeth leaned her face against the sun-warmed glass of the bus’s side window and watched the trees spin over, a leafy tunnel just touched with traces of cinnabar and gold. The soft electric hum of the engine lulled her, and she breathed deeply, hair rumpled by the wind trickling in the open vent. A strand blew across her eyes and she shoved it back with a sigh. Between the leaves of sugar maple and towering oak, the sky overhead was blue as stained glass, golden sunlight trickling through it.

The bus wasn’t crowded, but Elspeth nevertheless closed her expression tightly and did not raise her eyes or fidget, except when she reached up to run her thumb across the thin gold crucifix that hung over the hollow of her throat.

Forty minutes later, she disembarked on oil-stained concrete at the Toronto bus station, retrieving her duffel-bag before she started toward the passenger pickup area. She scanned the crowd for a sign with her name on it—a car will be provided—but saw nothing. Elspeth checked her fifteen-year-old watch for the third time, and almost walked into the broad chest of a uniformed man.

“Sir, excuse me…” Her voice trailed off as she raised her eyes to his face. The hair was thinning now, distinguished silver she thought he probably brightened. The jowls were a little more pronounced, and the deep lines running from nose to mouth cut through a face reddened across the cheeks. Mild rosacea, she thought. “Colonel Valens,” she stammered. “It is still Colonel, isn’t it?”

“Dr. Dunsany. It’s been a long time.” He lifted the duffel out of her numb fingers, hefting it easily despite having more than ten years on her. He offered her a smile, which she returned cautiously. Remember what a charming bastard he can be when he decides to, Elspeth. He may have gotten you out of jail, but he’s also the one who put you in there.

“I wasn’t expecting you to come in person.”

He laid a strong, blunt-fingered hand on her shoulder and moved her easily through a crowd that parted for his height and uniform. “I couldn’t do less. It’s good to have you back with us after all this time.”

I was never with you, Valens. Elspeth tilted her head to examine his face, trying to determine if any irony colored his tone. The old ability to read people’s souls in their faces was still there, and it pleased her to feel as if she understood him. “I’m surprised that you still have any interest in using me, Colonel. After all this time, my skills are very rusty. And my research dated.”

“Please. Call me Fred. Or Doctor Valens, if you can’t stomach the familiarity. I want you to think of me as nothing more than another researcher. I’m only an officer to the army, and I’d like to put history behind us. If we may.”

His insignia glittered in the late afternoon sun. Elspeth nodded as he led her to the car. She breathed deeply before she spoke, savoring the diesel-scented air. “Let’s be brutally honest, then, Doctor Valens. If we may.”

The driver opened the trunk of the car, and Valens placed the duffel inside. “Of course, Elspeth.”

He helped her into the front seat of the sedan, closing the door firmly as she pulled her legs inside. The jeans were too long. She had cuffed them over white sneakers so new they seemed to glow. Her casual clothing left her feeling awkward in the face of Valens’s dark uniform and gleaming brass. He slid into the seat behind her, buckling his safety harness before he leaned over the chair back to talk. “It was time we got you out. For one thing, the war is over.”

“The war has been over for three years. I like to think of myself as a conscientious objector.”

He laughed, as well he might.

She pulled her chair forward to make room for his longer legs. It would have made more sense for her to sit in the back, but she would take any inch he gave her and call it a mile. “And unless somebody else has solved artificial intelligence while I’ve been incarcerated…” She stopped and turned back over her seat to meet his eyes. “Someone has duplicated my research?”

He studied her face for some time before the corners of his eyes crinkled, and he laughed. “The government is nothing if not transparent in its motivations. No, we haven’t solved it. But now that you’re willing to work with us, finally — Elspeth, I bet you will.”

4:30 P.M., Saturday 2 September, 2062

Bloor Street West

Toronto, Ontario

Gabe Castaign carried his younger daughter up the third flight of stairs, more pleased than he would admit that he wasn’t gagging for breath by the time he reached the landing. In the grand tradition of Toronto apartment buildings, the elevator was slow enough that it might as well have been broken.

Leah held the door to their new apartment open as he carried Genie inside. She curled against his chest, pale hair tumbling over his hands; he held her gently. Many floors below, automobiles hissed on the rain-wet street. “We’re home, Genie,” he said, crossing beige carpeting to lay her on the overstuffed tweed couch. “New home. Are you feeling any better?”

“Some, Dad. Is my bed set up?” She struggled to sit upright, coughing slightly. She sounded better already, as if the mucus in her chest were thinning. Gabe counted his blessings between the fine-etched lines of her ribs. “I’m really tired.”

“Petite chouchou, it is built and ready. You want to walk in yourself?” Over Genie’s shoulder, her older sister caught their father’s eye, teenage brow furrowed tightly. Leah had her mother’s gray-green eyes, and Gabe pushed a little ache aside at that familiar grimace.

“I can. Can I have something to eat? Crackers?”

Gabe checked his watch. “Hungry already? I’ll bring you dinner in bed. Leah?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Tuck in our little cabbage here, merci beaucoup? I’ll fix her something to eat and bring it in.”

Leah nodded and crouched down beside the sofa to help her sister up. Concentration furrowed Leah’s brow as she led Genie, one arm around her shoulder, from the living room into the room that would be all Geniveve’s own. The two girls had shared a bedroom since Leah was three and Genie was born. Gabe wondered if separating them had been a bad idea. Je peux toujours changer d’avis. He shrugged. And went to make cocoa for his daughters.

Leah Castaign smoothed fuzzy robin’s-egg-blue blankets up over her sister’s lap and rested on the edge of the bed. Genie’s blue jeans slouched on the floor like a shed skin. Leah poked them idly with her toe. “There. All comfortable?”

“Oui. What’d you do while Dad and me were at the hospital?”

“I played on the computer. There’s this VR game I really like. I could show you how sometime.”

“That would be fun.” Genie tugged the blankets higher, and Leah shifted her weight so they came loose. “I wish we were going to the same school this year.”

“Next year. And then you’ll be stuck with me for two years of high school, too. And you’ll have to beat up all the boys who try to tease me.”

Genie laughed, and it turned into a cough as their dad came in, juggling crackers and cocoa. The old wooden floorboards creaked under his footsteps. Leah took her mug and sat on the white-painted wood chair in the corner, watching as he brought Genie her snack. He perched in the same smooth spot Leah had, and that made the corners of her mouth turn up.

Maybe Genie’s going to be okay for a while. She inhaled chocolatey steam. The heat made her eyes water. I wonder why Dad was so funny about taking this job, though. It can’t just have been that he didn’t want to move to Toronto.

As if he knew she was thinking about him, he glanced over and smiled. “Things should be better now, Leah,” he said. “It’s going to be your responsibility to babysit Genie while I’m at work, all right?”

Leah had started nodding when her sister tugged their father’s sleeve. “Dad!” Genie put her mug aside. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

“It’s not open for discussion, petite chouchou. Perhaps we will talk in a year or two about who needs a babysitter, eh?”

Leah knew better than to argue with that tone, and she saw Genie did, too. Still, her sister’s lip was getting stubborn, so Leah stood. “Dad, I’m going to go play on the computer, okay?”

He turned away from Genie. When the eye contact broke, her shoulders relaxed and she picked up her cocoa. Leah smiled.

“Not too late, okay?”

“Okay.” She came over and kissed him on the forehead. Even sitting, he was almost as tall as she was, and she’d grown in the past few months. “I promise to be good.”

She could hear him arguing with Genie in low tones as she shut the bedroom door behind herself and went into her own room.

Avatar Gamespace

Mars Starport

Circa A.D. 3400 (Virtual Clock)

Interaction logged Saturday 2 September, 2062, 1900 hours

Leah stifled a giggle behind her breathmask and palmed open the air lock door. Her sister was fast asleep, finally, and she was hiding on the Internet while her dad got ready to start his new job in the morning. What kind of a job starts on Sunday?

She bounced on her toes. That was one thing the VR never got quite right: inanimate objects acted as if they were under lower gravity, but Leah never felt… floaty. I bet if I had neural, it would feel floaty.

“The rebreathers are just silly,” she opined, holding the panel long enough for her companion to step onto the surface.

“How so?” Her companion was older, male, frame spare within his white surface suit. His outline pixilated slightly as he stepped onto the planet surface. Leah followed warily — it was dangerous Outside, and if she got killed out she would lose all her points. Still, finding a Martian Treasure was worth the risk, and the other player had the left half of Leah’s map. She picked up the pace.

He waited politely for her to catch up, letting her walk a few steps in front.

“Well, Tuva — you don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”

“Feel free to shorten the handle. It’s unwieldy.”

She stopped short and turned to regard him suspiciously. “Is that a real word?”

“Unwieldy? Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

“The opposite of wieldy,” he answered, with a grin that stretched around the edges of his breathmask. “You were going to ask me something.”

She turned to the landscape, the distant red undulations blending with a dust-dulled horizon. A pair of shuttles glided in overhead. It was a nice effect, but she wished they could have done something more interesting. Cloud cities, maybe. Someday I’m going to get enough points to make it up to the starships, dammit! She giggled again, sure she was blowing it. He has to know I’m just a kid by now. “I was going to ask you what a Tannu-Tuva was, actually.”

“It used to be a country in Asia. They had interesting postage stamps.”

“What’s a postage stamp?”

She almost heard the smile coloring his voice. “An archaic method of controlling the flow of data from one place to another. You had something to say about rebreathers?”

“Oh.” She checked over her shoulder. He was following her trail through the drift-rippled fines, minuscule particles coloring the air around them and staining their reflective white suits with rust. “By 3400, do you really think humans will need oxygen tanks for stuff like this? Heck, do you think Mars won’t be terraformed by then? We’ve already got two bases.”

“You must be Canadian,” he replied.

“How did you know?”

He laughed. “More space bases than anybody else. First on the Moon, first on Mars.”

“Malaysia runs the asteroids, though. And China.” She decided she didn’t like being followed, so she paused long enough to let him catch up and walk beside her.

“And China is big on Mars, too. Yes. Those are government-funded bases and not partnerships, though. The situation is a little different.”

“How so?” She kicked at a rock, and it bounded away as if winged, flickering as her equipment didn’t quite keep up. She sighed and then brightened. This was still a cool game.

“Well, Canada’s different. The Scavella-Burrell base is funded by a combination of private and public sources. Unitek and its holdings are basically equal partners with the Canadian government in funding the research that goes on there.”

“My dad says,” Leah answered, abandoning all pretense of adulthood as her enthusiasm overwhelmed her, “that Canada never would have made it into space without private money. He was in the army, and he says that after the famine when we had to loan troops to the U.S. and then later, when the Fundamentalist government was in power down there, it cost us so much money that we needed help if we were going to keep up with the Chinese.” She hustled to keep up. Her companion noticed and checked his stride.

“That’s true,” he said. “You shouldn’t just take what your dad says as gospel, of course; you should think for yourself. But he sounds like a smart guy.”

Leah swelled with pride. “My dad’s the best.”

“Did he say why he thought we needed to have a space program? Or was it just keeping up with the Chinese?” He stopped short, scanning the horizon. He seemed to have only one ear on the conversation.

“He says we’re a lot luckier than the rest of the world. Even with the flooding problems and the winters getting colder. And he says that…” She turned around to face him. “I don’t really understand it. It’s something about PanMalaysia and Indonesia, and protecting the Muslim government there and keeping China — he says ‘contained.’ ”

Tuva looked down at her, frost crystallizing on the edges of his breathmask. He moved restlessly, gloved hands dancing through the thin air like birds. “That was the general reasoning, as I understand it. Do you know anything about the Cold War and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union?”

She shook her head. “That was like, ancient history.”

A complicated expression crossed his half-concealed face. “So it was,” he agreed. “You should look it up; it’s very interesting.”

She might have felt insulted, except there was something in his tone that said that he really did think that interesting was a good enough reason to look something up. He kind of reminded her of her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Kology, who was her favorite teacher so far.

He kept talking, and something about his plain words and animated tone made everything seem very simple. I bet he’s a teacher in real life.

“It’s got a lot to do with gamesmanship,” he said. He hunkered down and ran his fingers through the iron-red dust underfoot, raking four parallel gouges. “Canada’s been in a lot of peacekeeping efforts in the last fifty years, which it couldn’t have done without corporate money. Some of the wars were really unpopular at home, especially after the universal draft instituted by the Military Powers Act, and there were some real problems with terrorism. Also, wars give rise to new technology. And with the United States tangled up in its internal affairs, there’s been nobody else with the — the sheer stubborn — to oppose China’s empire building.”

“I wouldn’t want to live in China,” Leah said definitively. She twisted one foot in the dust, watching it rise in soft puffs.

Tuva’s head bobbed down and he grinned wide. It was the kind of smile that rearranged his entire face, his eyes sparkling like faceted stones, and it drew a twin from Leah. “But politics… It’s very interesting, when you think about it.”

Leah shrugged, feeling young and uninformed. I’ll be fourteen in May. “There’s a lot I don’t know.”

“That just means you get the fun of learning it. Now then, where’s your half of the treasure map?”

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Sunday 3 September, 2062

Morning

Elspeth pulled a shiny, never-used key out of her lab-coat pocket and fitted it into the handle of her door, simultaneously applying her thumb to the lock plate. The handle turned with a well-oiled click and she stepped into her office, savoring a sensation that had once been familiar — although she’d never had an office like this.

She couldn’t resist running her fingers over the real-wood grain of the door and comparing it to battered yellow laminate with a window reinforced with chicken wire — or to plain barred metal, for that matter. “Lights,” she said, and the lights came on as if by magic. She paused for a moment just inside the door. “Lights off,” she said softly, feeling childish, and then “Lights,” once again.

Such a basic thing, illumination that did what you wanted when you wanted it to.

She set a white canvas bag embossed with a corporate logo down against the wall and wandered to the center of her office, leaving the door open. The scent of brewing coffee informed her that she wasn’t the first one in the building. Evergreen carpeting felt luxurious under feet clad in new oxblood loafers — Valens had given her a corporate card and instructions to outfit herself the previous evening — and pale spruce drapes outlined the long window behind her new desk.

Shelves lined the walls. She recognized the books that filled them: texts and journals on psychology, neurology, artificial intelligence. Beside them, biographies of some of the great minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Old, worn, many of them battered. Here also, holographic data storage crystals in racks, dozens of them. Hers, confiscated thirteen years before. State of the art, then.

Obsolete technology, now.

The dark wood of the desk gleamed with recent waxing under a clear interface plate, stainless-steel-and-gold desk accessories reflected in the shine. Elspeth took a deep breath, imagining that she almost caught the fragrance of traffic and a late summer, early autumn morning over the scrubbed tang of conditioned air. She opened her eyes, crossed the forest-cool confines of her office, and ran a finger along the neat white labels with their red underlines, hand-lettered and stuck on the flat-top surface of the crystal racks.

Handwriting inked in an erratic combination of green, red, and blue was not her own. It belonged to her former research partner. “Jack,” she murmured. Her eye ran down the little sticky tags, making out numerals, dates, and serial letters faded by the years. Farther down the rack, the labels changed and simplified. Dates and names, covering years of work. They had made daily backups, but saved only the monthlies due to space issues. They’d made daily headlines, too, for a while.

• • •

July 30, 2048: Truth, Tesla, Fuller, Woolf, Feynman.

November 30, 2048: Truth, Tesla, Fuller, Woolf, Feynman.

May 30, 2049: Truth, Tesla, Fuller, Woolf, Feynman.

An empty socket in the rack for June 30 stood out, obvious as a missing kernel on a cob of corn. The last slot, the one labeled Feynman, was empty.

Elspeth licked her lips and glanced around her office. She didn’t see the cameras concealed among sylvan trappings, but she knew they must be there, recording every move. Nevertheless, she could not resist reaching out and running her finger across that last label—June 30, 2049: Feynman—and allowing herself a little, secret smile.

“Godspeed, Richard,” she whispered, and, turning away, walked to her desk, seated herself, and tapped her terminal on.

Twenty-five years earlier:

Approximately 1300 hours

Wednesday 15 July, 2037

Near Pretoria, South Africa

Fire is a bad way to die.

Even as I jerk back against my restraints, consciousness returning with the caress of flames on my face, I know I am dreaming. It’s not always the same dream, but I always know I am dreaming. And in the dream, I always know I am going to die.

I suck in air to scream, choke on acrid smoke and heat. The sweet thick taste of blood clots my mouth; something sharp twists inside of me with every breath. Coughing hurts more than anything survivable should have a right to. The panel clamors for attention, but I can’t feel my left hand or move it to slap the cutoff. Jammed crash webbing binds me tightly into my chair.

I breathe shallowly against the smoke, against the pain in my chest, retching as I fumble for my knife with blood-slick fingers. The hilt of the thing skitters away from my hand. As I scrabble after it, seething agony like a runnel of lava bathes my left arm. I think I liked it better when I couldn’t feel.

The world goes dim around the edges, and the flames gutter and kiss me again.

The pain reminds me of a son-of-a-bitch I used to know, a piece of street trash named Chrétien. I never thought I could like a kiss less than I did his. I guess I know better now.

I try to turn my head to get a glimpse of what’s going on with my left arm, and that’s when I realize that I can’t see out of my left eye and I’m dying. Oh God, I’m going to burn up right here in the hot, tight coffin of my cockpit.

If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take… Hah. Right. The hell you say. Pain is God’s way of telling you it’s not time to quit kicking yet.

Whimpering, I stretch away from the flames, reaching out toward the impossibly distant hilt of my knife. I’m listening for movement or voices from the back of my A.P.C. Nothing. I hope to hell they’re all dead back there, or far enough gone that they won’t wake up to burn.

Something tears in my left arm as I lean against the pain, clinging to it as my vision darkens again and I hear myself sob, coughing, terrified.

Please, Jesus, I don’t want to burn alive. Well, we don’t always get what we want, Jenny Casey.

And then I hear voices, and the complaint of warped metal, and a rush of light and air that makes the flames gutter and then flare. They reach for me again, and I draw a single excruciating breath and scream with all my little might. A voice from outside, Québecois accent like the voice of an angel. “Mon Dieu! The driver is alive!”

And then scrabbling, hands tugging at my restraints, my would-be savior groaning as the flames kiss him as well. I catch a glimpse of fair skin, captain’s insignia, Canadian Army special forces desert uniform, the burns and blisters on his hands. Another voice from outside pleads with the captain to get out and leave me.

He squeezes my right shoulder, and for a second his gaze meets mine. Blue eyes burn into my memory, the eyes of an angel in a stained-glass window. “I won’t let you burn to death, Corporal.” And then he slides back across the ragged metal and out of my little patch of Hell.

The voices come from outside, from Heaven. That’s part of Hell: knowing that you can look up at any time and see salvation. “His goddamned arm is pinned. I can reach him, but I can’t get him out.” That explains why I can’t move it. I am suddenly, curiously calm. They’re arguing with him, and he cuts them off. “I wouldn’t leave a dog to die that way. Clive, you got slugs in that thing? Good, give it here.”

I hear him before I see him, thud of his boots, scrape of the shotgun as he pushes it ahead. What the hell. At least this will be quick.

I turn my head to look at him. He has a boot knife in his hand as well as the twelve gauge, and I just don’t understand why he’s cutting the straps of my crash harness. He cuts me, too, and I jerk against the straps, against my left arm. “Dammit, Corporal, just sit still, will you?” I force myself to hold quiet, remembering my sidearm and worrying that the heat will make the cartridges cook off before I remember how soon I’m going to be dead.

His voice hauls me back when I start to drift. “Corporal. What’s your name, eh?”

Spider, I start to say, but I want to die with my right name on someone’s lips, not my rank, not my handle. “Casey. Jenny Casey.”

I feel him hesitate, see his searching glance at my face. He hadn’t known I was a girl. I must look pretty bad. “Gabe Castaign,” he tells me.

Gabriel. Mon ange. It’s one of those funny, fixed-time, incongruous thoughts you get when you know you’re going to die. And then the knife moves, parting the last restraint, and he drops it to bring the gun up and brace it. I look at the barrel, fascinated, unable to look away. “Sorry about this, Casey.”

“S’aright,” I answer. “’Preciate it.”

And then the gun roars and I feel the jarring shudder of the impact, and there is only blackness, blessed blackness…

1930 hours, Monday 4 September, 2062

Hartford, Connecticut

Sigourney Street

Abandoned North End

… and the buzz of the door com hauling me out of cobwebby darkness and into the blinking light. My hand’s on my automatic, the safety thumbed off—“If I catch any of you using his finger, I will break it.” Master Corporal, I believe you would have—before I’m fully awake and the reality of the situation comes back to me.

My clothes are wet, my neck is killing me, and my damn glass has broken on the floor, littering it with pale blue shards and a wet stain that soaks into the cement. The book I was reading is still sliding from my lap, the arrogant, aristocratic silhouette of a long-dead movie director embossed on the spine. I catch it before it hits the floor, check the page number, and toss it into a crate with the others I haven’t gotten around to yet. They are all paperback, ancient, and crumbling. They — the universal them—don’t print much light reading anymore.

Holstering the sidearm, I creak upright and limp to the sink after grabbing my jacket off the chair I fell asleep in. I’ll be paying for that lapse of judgment for a while.

The buzzer again, the echo made harsh by the cement-lined, metal-cluttered cavern I call home. I raise my eyes to my monitors. Activity on only one — the side door, a single figure in a familiar dark coat. Wet hair straggles into his eyes; he stares up at the optic and gives me the finger. Male, Caucasian, under six feet, slender but not skinny. The monitor is black and white, but I happen to know that he has brown hair and hazel eyes and a propensity for loud ties.

I lean over the sink and thumb on the com with my left hand. “Mitch.”

“Maker. You gonna let me in?”

“Got a warrant?”

“Hah. It’s raining. Buzz me in or I’ll go get one.”

He’s kidding. I think. “Got probable cause?”

“You don’t wanna know.” There is a certain grimness in his voice that cuts through the banter. I stump over to the door and open it. He drifts in with a smell of sea salt and Caribbean foliage — the alien breath of tropical storm Quigley, which left its fury over the Outer Banks two days before. Seems like we get farther into the alphabet every year.

Turning my back and trusting Mitch to lock up, I think, I have to fix the buzzer one of these days.

I put my jacket down on the counter and turn on the water, cold. Splash my face. Watching Mitch in the mirror, I stick my toothbrush into my mouth. Mitch slips into the shop and shuts the door firmly, checking to make sure it latches. Then he picks his way catlike between the hulk of an Opel Manta much older than I am and a 2030 fuel cell Cadillac that probably has another life left in it.

Mitch circumnavigates a bucket and saunters over to my little nest of old furniture and ancient books. He pauses once to stoop and offer a greeting to Boris, the dignified old tomcat that comes by to get out of the rain.

I grin at myself and salute the mirror with my toothbrush. Spit in the sink, rinse, and turn off the water as Mitch leaves Boris and ducks under a hanging engine block. “Damn, Maker. It’s like a blast furnace in here.”

Cops are a lot like cats, come to think of it. They can tell when you don’t want company. That’s when they drop by.

“Been cold enough in my life.” I tuck the hem of my T-shirt into the top of my worn black fatigues and tighten the belt. Mitch stares for a second overlong at my chest, and then his eyes flick up to meet mine. He grins and I grunt.

“Save the flattery, eh? I own a mirror.”

He crosses the last few feet between us. “I like tough girls.” Matter-of-fact tone. Good God.

“I’m not exactly a girl anymore.” I’m old enough to be his mother, and I wouldn’t have had to start real young, either. “And I look like I’ve been through the wars.”

His grin widens. “You have been through the wars, Maker.” He hops onto the edge of the old steel table, his jacket falling open to reveal the butt of his gun. Hip holster, not shoulder. He wants to be able to get at it fast, and he doesn’t care who knows he has it.

I turn my back on him and pick up my own jacket from the edge of the sink, shrugging into it before turning my attention to the buckles. Despite the weapon on my own leg, I have an itch between my shoulder blades. Some people get used to guns, with practice. I never did. Guess I’ve been on both ends of them too many times. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

I glance back as his smile turns grim. “A bunch of dead people.”

“We get a lot of those around here.” I tighten the last buckle on my jacket, well-beloved leather creaking. The coat is on its third lining, and I stopped replacing the zippers long ago. I got it in… Rio? I think. The cities all blur together, after a while. It was my present to myself after surviving my second helicopter crash.

There hasn’t been a third one. Small mercies. I turn back and take three limping steps to fuss with the coffeepot. Damn knee hurts again, no doubt from the storm. What’s worse is when my arm hurts. Metal can’t ache, but you could sure fool me.

“These dead people might worry you some.”

“Why’s that?” I pull my gloves from my pocket and yank them on. Driving gloves. The metal hand slips on the wheel, without. It’s an excuse not to look him in the eye as I ever-so-carefully adjust black leather over rain-cold steel.

“Because you know something about the Hammer, Maker. From when you ‘weren’t’ in the army. Special forces, was it? Nobody else gets that stuff.”

In the silence that follows, the coffeepot burbles its last and I jump, fingers of my right hand twitching toward the piece strapped to my thigh before I stop them. Wisely, Mitch does not laugh. Jenny Casey’s law of cops: there are three kinds—5 percent are good, 10 percent are bad, and the rest are just cops. The good ones want to help somebody. The bad ones want power. The rest want to ride around in a car with a light that lights up on the top.

I tolerate Mitch because he’s one of the 5 percent. Snot-ass attitude and all.

He gets up off the counter and reaches for the coffeepot, turning his back to me.

“What makes you think I was army?”

“Where’d you get the scars?” He hands me a cup of coffee before pouring one for himself.

I take it in my right hand, savoring the heat of the mug. “Playing with matches.”

He laughs again, and again it does not sound forced. Stares at my tits, laughs at my jokes, the boy knows the way to an old woman’s heart. “Did Razor ever find that dealer?”

I don’t wonder how he knows. “Any bodies turn up in the river?” The broad, blue Connecticut. Lake Ontario, it isn’t. But hell, it’s a decent-sized river — and every time they drag it, they find a couple of people they didn’t know were missing.

Mitch sets his cup aside and pins the floor between his lace-up boots with a glare. He’s wearing brown corduroy trousers, ten years out of style.

I wonder if I’m still drunk. The glass on the floor annoys me, and I turn away to get the broom and dustpan. Stooping over, I look up at Mitch. He’s stuffed his hands into his pockets, and he leans back against the table to watch while I sweep the concrete. I have to drop down to hands and knees to get the shards that scattered under the chair, and I wince and groan out loud when I do it. Something that feels like shattered pottery grinds in my knee and hip when I straighten.

Mitch chews his lip. “Getting old, Maker.”

“Still kick your boyish bottom from here to Boston, Detective.” I carry my loaded dustpan over to the trash.

“Where the hell does that name come from, anyway? Maker. Radio handle? You guys used those, didn’t you?”

I shrug, setting the cleaning tools aside. “Maybe it’s my real name.”

A tube of toothpicks squats among the clutter on my table. He opens it and selects a red one, working it into his teeth with the vigor of a man who is trying to quit smoking. “Yeah. A body turned up in the river.” He hesitates.

I award him the round. “Whose body was it, Mitch?”

He sweeps a chair over and throws himself into it with all the grace of youth. For a moment, I am insanely jealous, and then I make myself smile. If you’d died at twenty-four, Jenny, you never would have found out how much fun it is to get old.

But Mitch is talking, head down on his hands and words stumbling out in a rush. “So we’ve got this floater, right? Turns up three miles downriver, snagged on a boat anchor, just like the opening scene of a detective holo. A woman. About thirty. A cop.” His voice trails off, and he pulls the toothpick out of his mouth and flicks it away, littering my clean-swept floor, but he does not raise his head.

“Is that important?”

“You tell me.” He looks up finally and digs in his jacket pocket for a minute before lighting a nicotine stick. The red light of the flame remakes his face into death’s-head angles and the rich, hot scent reminds me that you can’t quit smoking, any more than you can quit any of the other addictions of which I’ve had my share. He holds the smoke in for a long minute and then breathes out like a self-satisfied dragon, relishing every moment of sensation and effect.

He wants me to ask, and I don’t want to give him another round, and so we hold an impromptu duel. He has a cigarette: something to do with his hands. I have years of practice waiting. I could pick up my mug, but I don’t. Instead, I lean my head back and watch the unpleasant old movies inside my skull.

He finishes his cigarette and clears his throat. “She was a detective sergeant. Were you a sergeant, Maker? When you weren’t in the army?”

“I was admiral of the Seventh Space Fleet, eh? What was her name?” How much about me does he know? Or worse, think he knows? I open my eyes and raise my head, catching him staring at me.

He waits again and again I do not ask. He needs to learn who to play games with. It’s not me.

I grunt. My fingers — the metal ones — itch for a cigarette, and I get up and pour myself a bourbon instead, washing down a handful of aspirin with it. I turn around to face him and study the water stains on the wall behind his head. More every year.

“You wanna avenge a dead cop, Mitch, I’m not who you’re looking for. Get a ronin. I hear Bobbi Yee is good.” Why is he coming to me for this? Why is he off the investigation?

She must have been a partner. A friend. Or even dirtier than the general run, and they’re covering it up. I’d like to say that sort of thing never went on back home in Kahnawá:ke, but I’d be lying. Warrior ethos. Whatever.

For some reason, a great and sudden guilt washes over me. My long-dead little sister, Nell, gave me something priceless when I went into the army, and I haven’t been taking care of it. Maybe I’ll burn some tobacco after Mitch leaves. As if he wasn’t burning enough already.

“Don’t need a hit. I need information.”

“So tell me your girl’s name, Kozlowski.”

He laughs bitterly. “Mashaya Duclose. West Indian. You heard of her? She was a good cop, Maker.”

I haven’t heard of her, but I don’t know everybody. Sure. They’re all good cops when they’re dead.

Mitch continues. “She’d been supposed to meet up with your boy Razorface the night she vanished. Something about him having witnessed one of the kids who got hammered, and some question about whether his organization might be involved. You know about the OD’s?”

“I’ve heard stuff.”

He spreads his hands wide, helplessly, and the look that breaks through his veneer chills me. You get to know that expression, after a while. You see it on the ones who’ve adopted goals other than survival. Dead men walking.

“Look, Maker. I’ve got a dead detective. I’ve got Razorface maybe linked to a murder. And not one of his little cleanup killings. I don’t give a damn about those. A dead cop. A dead cop is not good for you and it is not good for me and it is not good for your gangster boyfriend. And a street full of dead kids poisoned by Canadian special forces combat drugs — that’s not good for you either, since I know how much you like people poking into your history. No?”

Mitch’s eyes flicker around my shop in that way he has, recording everything. I’m damned glad I took that little plastic twist elsewhere. Which reminds me, I need to call Simon. He’s had four days to get that stuff checked out.

I shrug. Our eyes meet: I see him in living color on the right side, and in high-resolution black and white complete with thermal readings and a heads-up array on the left. The bulge of his gun glimmers red on the threat display. Distracting. “It isn’t about that, Mitch.”

“Good. Then are you going to help me or not?”

Avatar Gamespace

Deadwood Base

Circa A.D. 3400 (Virtual Clock)

Interaction logged Tuesday 4 September, 2062, 0230 hours

A cold wind swirled the tall stranger’s coat around his boots as he pushed open the door of the saloon and stepped inside. Just for a moment the resolution flickered; then the illusion sealed itself around his presence, whole.

He paused for a moment inside the door, scanning the hodgepodge of cyborgs, Beautiful People, and aliens that populated the seediest bar in the seediest spaceport in Avatar Gamespace — each more improbably constructed than the last. A thin smile bent his lips and thoughtful eyes squinted under a thatch of wavy silver hair; the extreme body-modification crowd got even more extreme, in VR. A holstered equation hung at his hip, and his pockets were heavy with binary. His eyes lighted as they fastened on the bartender, and he came up against the brass rail like a knife against a butcher’s steel while patrons turned to look, and just as quickly turned away.

“Gunslinger?” the weathered bartender asked, sliding a shot of whiskey across the scarred mahogany surface.

A translucent blue rill of light followed the vector of the glass, and the stranger pursed his lips in approval as he lifted it. “Physicist,” he replied. “Nice effect. You’re a player-character, aren’t you? Not an extra?”

The bartender nodded. “Glad you like it.” He blew on his fingertips, and sparks fluttered from them — blue, shift-ing green and golden as they showered the floor. “Tolbert equations.”

The stranger stepped on one. It squeaked slightly in protest under his boot before it died. “I know,” he said, and — turning — leaned back against the gouged brass railing. “You’re a mathematician in real life?”

“Physician. Neurologist.”

The stranger laughed lightly, as if some assumption had been satisfied. “Math is a hobby?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too.” Most of the saloon’s patrons affected a self-consciously reserved demeanor, but the stranger seemed incapable of standing still. He finished his drink quickly and glanced over his shoulder at the bartender. “Do you ever get pilots in this bar?”

The bartender shrugged. “Isn’t everybody in here a pilot? Or wants to be? With a couple of exceptions.” He tapped the tip of his own nose.

The stranger’s long, narrow fingers drummed the countertop. “Why are you playing the bartender?”

“Because I like to role-play, and I don’t like to fight. Even virtually.” The bartender shrugged. “I’m not trying to win, I’m just here for the scenery and the conversation.” He wiped his right hand on his apron and stuck it out. “It picks up about now — most of the kids are in bed. My handle’s ‘Simple Simon.’ Pleased to make the acquaintance of somebody who doesn’t take all this too seriously.”

The stranger nodded and took the hand. “Dick Feynman.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Why?”

“There used to be a physicist by that name back in the 1950s or ’60s.”

The stranger shrugged. The corners of his mouth slanted up, complicating the web of lines decorating his lean face. “I know.” A pause. “I’m a descendant.”

“Ah.” He polished the bar. “What’s a physicist doing hanging out in cyberspace with a bunch of teenagers?”

“Same thing a neurologist is. And as you pointed out, most of the kids are in bed by now.” A trail of imperfect pixilation followed Feynman’s head as he cocked it to the side like a curious bird. “I don’t so much come for the game either, although it’s fun to watch. I bet I could beat it if I thought about it long enough.”

The bartender hung his rag behind the bar. “Probably. Want another drink?”

“Sure.” Feynman slid another chit across the counter, and the bartender shook his head and pushed the chit back. “Don’t worry about it. I’m really not trying to win. I’m thirty-seven, chubby, and divorced. Even make-believe pilot-training isn’t really my thing.”

The physicist chuckled and gestured to the wiry, white-haired icon of the bartender. “I take it that’s not your real face, then? Most people don’t choose icons that much older than themselves. It’s usually bigger muscles, prettier faces.”

“Not even a little does it look like me. I’m playing to the archetype. You’d be amazed how many people assume I’m an extra. And the things they’ll tell a computer. Like they don’t realize everything that happens in here is logged in some data array.” He scratched the receding line of his hair. “But you know, everybody wants to talk to the bartender.”

“I would think neurology would be more interesting than this.” Feynman took his drink and rolled the glass between virtual fingers. He raised it up to the light, as if examining the color.

“Neurology is this, these days. Okay, not precisely true — but you know about the latest work in VR, yes? Direct cortical stimulation? Big help with severely impaired patients.”

“I’ve heard something,” Feynman answered. “Are you using a gloves-and-goggles setup now?”

The bartender shook his head. “Suit. I have the good stuff for my work. I’m not quite ready to get hardwired, though — I’m old enough to think you’d have to be pretty desperate to get a neural tap put in. Although the nano stuff is a lot better than what we were doing even five, ten years ago.”

Feynman stared hard at his glass. It changed in his hand, turned into a tall, fizzing cola. “Now that is why I come here,” he said happily, sipping the drink.

The bartender smiled. “But we’ve got some test subjects who actually are manipulating the VR environment with — literally — nothing more than thought.”

Feynman frowned doubtfully. “What’s the practical application of that?”

“Oh, hell, Dick — if you don’t mind my calling you that — what isn’t the functionality of it? Stroke victims — Oh, damn, we are old. Here we stand in a virtual playground, talking shop.”

“Well, to be honest,” Feynman answered with a laugh, setting his drink down to twist his hands around the dented rail, “it’s more interesting than most of what goes on in here.”

“You think?” The bartender picked up the liquor bottle and poured. A glass appeared on the bar as if conjured there, catching the stream of fluid a second before it struck and splashed. “I’d say that depends on which corner of this little world you happen to hang out in.”

Feynman leaned forward, shoulders hunching like a perched hawk’s. “You don’t find the unreality a little distressing?”

“What’s so unreal about it?” The bartender shrugged, tilting his head back, regarding the virtual ceiling for a second or two. He looked back down at last and met Feynman’s gaze. “It’s not any more unreal than the intellectual space in which a chess game takes place. Consensus reality.”

Feynman chuckled and picked up his drink, spinning the glass in his hand, spilling nothing. His other hand wiggled quotes in the air. “How do we know anything exists outside our heads?”

“Isn’t that a little fluffy for a physicist, Dick?”

“Not at all. You can’t observe a thing without changing it, after all. The universe is a glorious puzzle that seems to keep altering even as we unravel it. There’s one wag who’s working on that as a basis for faster-than-light communication. Ansibles, more or less.”

“All right, I’ll bite. What’s an ansible?”

“Faster-than-light communication, based on quantum mechanics. No, really. It’s from a science fiction book.”

“Ah.” The bartender finished his drink. “What would you need faster-than-light communication for?”

“Talking to things that are very far away,” the physicist answered, eyes twinkling. “But you were telling me about your work.” He looked into the age-spotted mirror over the bar, seeming unaccountably amused by the reflection.

“Funny. I never thought of the coincidence before — but there’s something like an observer effect in my own field of study.” The bartender looked up at Feynman with a grin.

“Everything’s interrelated.”

“I tend to agree. I’m looking into the psychosomatic basis of rejection. Why some people just cannot adapt to a transplant or a prosthesis, and others do just fine.”

“Huh.” The physicist hooked a tall chair over with a booted foot and settled himself, leaning forward over the bar. One foot still kicked restlessly. “Interesting.”

“I think so,” the bartender said, warming to his topic. Bartenders love to talk as much as they love to be talked to. “Well — let’s see. I can tell you this much without violating confidentiality. I have one patient coming in for follow-up on some work done almost thirty years ago. Late forties, serious trauma: one of the first cyberprosthetic patients. But she’s made a better adjustment than any of my patients with more modern prostheses. Funny thing — half the hands we sew on, we wind up cutting back off again. People just freak out about it. Bored yet?”

“Fascinated. I remember reading some of Sacks’s popular work on similar topics. Something about a guy who couldn’t recognize his own leg as a part of his body.”

“You read old books, Dick.”

“I’m an old guy. Is that what you’re talking about?”

The bartender nodded vigorously, excitement staining his voice. “Similar stuff, yes — now throw in the trauma of a dismemberment on top of it. Messy.”

“I imagine. So, about your patient…”

“Her hardware — the fucking thing is literally spliced into her spinal cord in two places, and there’s brain work, too. The old, dangerous method. The scarring is something to behold.”

“Didn’t that cripple most of the patients?”

“Not most. Maybe 30 percent. Guy who pioneered it back in the thirties — his name eludes me at the moment — was mostly working with kids who got cut up in South Africa, if I recall. He may have made a few extra cripples, but this particular lady is only walking because of what he did for her. Most — maybe all — of the others are dead now. The long-term survival odds on the nano work are much better.”

“I imagine.” Feynman rubbed the lower half of his face.

The bartender nodded hard — the nod of a young man, not the elderly one he appeared. “Anyway, she’s been seeing me for about ten years, and I’ve discovered the weirdest thing. She’s made adaptation like you wouldn’t believe. And she’s been generous enough to help me in some of the VR work I’ve done. She’s ideally suited for it. And! — I think I know why she’s been doing so well for so long.”

Feynman had an odd way of tilting his head to one side when he was thinking hard. “Why’s that?”

The bartender paused for a moment, as if he had an idea that his interviewer already suspected the answer to the question. “Somehow, she’s managed to get her brain to do the opposite of what Sacks’s patient did. It thinks the hand is her hand, a part of her body. Integrated. And the neatest part, the one that I can use to really good effect if I can figure out how she does it—”

Feynman leaned forward as if pouncing. “I see. Your stroke patients and a VR interface. If you get them to accept the interface as part of their reality… That could be dramatic.”

“Yeah,” the bartender said. “Dramatic.”

His guest got up to leave, still nodding, and the bartender held up a hand. “Hey. Come back anytime you want to talk shop.”

The stranger turned halfway back and smiled. “Thanks,” he answered. “But I probably won’t.” And then he turned and walked out of the saloon, leaving his host befuddled behind the bar.

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Tuesday 5 September, 2062

Evening

Colonel Valens pinched the bridge of his commanding nose, leaning back in his chair. An emotion he identified as frustration sat on his chest. He ignored it. “The damned problem, Alberta, is I know exactly who I want for a test subject. I know she’s still alive, she’s out there somewhere, and I have only half a damned clue where to find her.”

A petite woman with her gray hair twisted up in a chignon, Alberta Holmes leaned back comfortably in a leather-upholstered armchair in the corner of Valens’s office. She laced her fingers together and rested them on her knee. “One of the subjects from your cybernetics program, I assume?”

Valens nodded. “A master corporal when I worked with her. Genevieve Casey. Good soldier, nice kid. A little impulsive.” Unconsciously, he rubbed his left shoulder with his right hand, as if massaging stiffness. “Pretty much got the left side of her body blown off when the A.P.C. she was driving found the wrong end of an antitank missile. Amazing she survived at all. We patched her up, though. Better than new.”

“This is important because?” But Holmes leaned forward in her chair and uncrossed her legs.

Smiling, Valens touched an icon on the synthetic crystal interface plate set into his desktop. The rich brown wood of the furniture gleamed through the transparent plate: quite a change from his previous office with its issue desk and issue computer. Holmes reached down and unclipped her HCD from the pocket of her tailored jacket.

“As you can see from the files I beamed you, she had significant spinal injury to go with the head trauma and the gross bodily damage. We put a pretty serious enhancement package in her when we did the repairs, and she’s already got over twenty years’ worth of adaptation.”

Holmes looked doubtful. “Which means what? She’s old and slowing down?”

Valens chuckled. “It means we don’t have to wait for her to adapt to her enhancements, to develop the kinesthetic sense that goes along with moving differently than you have all your life, to learn to process the information overload that comes with the heightened senses. What you have to understand is that these people feel more, hear more, and the levels of information the enhancements provide have provoked some of them into a hypersensitivity syndrome resembling autism.”

He stood, pacing around the desk. “I’ve got four survivors, Alberta. Two of them are probably useless for the project because they can’t stand human contact, loud noises, whatever. One might be a good candidate; he’s come through the nanosurgery well, but he’s emotionally unstable. He’s on Clarke already—”

“So… Master Corporal Casey—”

“Master Warrant Officer.”

“I thought you said—”

Valens shook his head, smiling like a proud and slightly bemused father. “She finished out her twenty. Even went back into combat as a medevac pilot — flying for pararescue techs — after four years as an instructor. Decorated a dozen times; saved a bunch of lives. And I know she’s out there somewhere, because the army is still paying her pension and disability.”

“Can’t we use that to find her?”

“Internet account. We could maybe have it cracked, but no success yet, and our best programmer on staff wouldn’t do it. Hell, couldn’t be told about the attempt. He knows Casey.”

“Ah.”

“She doesn’t want to be found. I’ve made a point of recruiting her old friends, though. That may provide us with a lead. I’ve got taps.” He leaned back against his desk, looking down at her.

She met his eyes directly. “Illegal.”

“Military Powers Act.”

“Why not just pull your programmer’s connectivity bills instead of hiring him on?”

“We did. She’s using an anonymous relay through the offshore Sealand haven; unless we can get a live trace, we’ve got nothing. I wish I’d known a year ago that we’d be needing somebody like her; I’d have her in by now. But I’ve also hired her older sister, who — conveniently to our purpose — is a ronin.”

“Barbara Casey.” Alberta nodded. “She’s got a very good reputation. I’ve used her for a few jobs, through Unitek.”

“That’s how I got her information, actually. There aren’t many people who do what she does.”

“But why just these particular subjects, Fred? Why so much effort into finding this one woman?”

Valens shrugged. “Not ‘just’ them, Alberta, or her. Them, and maybe a dozen other candidates we’ve identified through the preliminary testing. I think Genevieve Casey is by far our best bet, though, of the four like her we have left.”

“But you can’t find her?”

He grinned and spread his hands wide. “Not without access to some confidential files I haven’t been able to crack yet. But if her sister doesn’t work out, well, she would have needed regular follow-up care. The body never really recovers from the kind of insults hers has sustained, and her cyberware — it’s the rankest kind of flattery to call it primitive. There’s a lead there, too, and I’ve got her nailed down to a state, at least. Barbara’s there now.”

Holmes stood, strong and graceful despite the lines mapping her gracious face. “She’d better be everything you say she is, Fred. Her, or one of the others. After the — is debacle too strong a word? — you oversaw on Mars, you need a damned success more than I do. Which is saying something.”

Understanding the note in her voice, Valens swallowed once.

2000 hours, Tuesday 5 September, 2062

Bushnell Park

Capitol Hill

Hartford, Connecticut

The western sky is still graying down to indigo, but the sun has long set behind the Gothic train station and crumbled yellow brick storefronts at the edge of the park. Hood of a bleach-stained sweatshirt pulled over my hair, I lean against a tatterdemalion white oak near an unmaintained baseball diamond and watch the dealers and the prostitutes saunter past. There’s one little Latina with big brown eyes, skinny as a rake in a glow-patterned miniskirt and leg-breaking heels, who is shattering my heart with every hey bay-bee at a passing car.

I bet she’s thirteen, fourteen. Same age as Gabe’s older daughter. Same age I was when I ran away from home. After Maman died, and I had had enough of Barb’s tender care.

Doesn’t much bear considering. I turn away, watching the street kids and the adult predators and the vagabond lost weave through the night. A pair of Hammerheads wander by, check me out to make sure I’m not 20-Love or a Latin King. My sweatshirt is dark blue, nondescript, and they let me pass.

The king’s men.

They’re watchful, and the park is peaceful for now, but it’s too big a humpty dumpty to really put back together, isn’t it? I turn my head and spit, scanning the area with my bad eye as darkness swells, the heat of bodies shimmering green-blue, barely distinguishable against the warmth of the night. Cars swing down Asylum Avenue, headlights razor-edging the party girls.

Ladies of the evening.

It all sounds so genteel.

That little Latina is getting into the passenger seat of a dark-windowed sedan, and I want to go drag her out by the ankles and tell her the rules. Rule number one, you never get in the car. But then the door shivers closed, and it’s too late to do anything. I hope they’re just going for a ride around the block, brief pause in a side alley, no longer than the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

I’ve moved as close to the little knot of dealers on the corner of Asylum and Jewell as I can get without looking suspicious, but in the fading light I’m having a hell of a time seeing what they’re handing to the customers. Even low-light vision isn’t helping me — every little plastic twist, baggie, or vial is palmed to a client with a practiced flick of the hand just as the cash chits vanish into pockets. I even see some folding, old-fashioned American money change hands.

Can’t have a black market without it.

I’m still waiting while the Milky Way smears itself across the heavens and a fat partial moon bellies up the sky, shedding blue light. East, the lights of the Travelers’ tower drench the darkness, washing away the stars. I shove my hands into my sweatshirt and wander aimlessly toward the closest of the baggy-jacketed dealers, my boots scuffing dirt and dead grass.

“Whatcha need, my man?” He turns to look me up and down. I stare at his shoes. Little lights flicker along the sides of shining white sneakers. Stupid if he thinks he might have to run, but there’s a lot of stupid on the streets.

He’s checking out my sidearm. I keep my hands well away from it, shoving them deeper into my pockets. There’s no danger here. I even half-believe it. “I heard there’s some new shit. Army shit, make you ten feet tall. You got that?”

“Ah, nah, babe. One batch came through, and some of the shit was bad. I got some tailored uppers though, good stuff.”

“Maybe. You maybe know somebody who has some of the army shit left? Or knows where it came from?”

He steps back. “Nobody. Nobody got any. Anybody got any not gonna sell it. Burned it if they’re smart. There’s some cop with a hard-on for anyone dealing it, I guess some other cop he was screwing got her head blown off.” A raucous laugh. “Teach her to fuck around in the North End. And word is the Razor says he’ll fry the balls of anybody he catches selling that shit. I know what’s good for me.”

He’s sidelit for a minute, gaunt pox-scarred cheeks and eyes like buttered rum, hair black as the moonlit river sleeked away from his forehead. Something must have showed in my face in the glow of headlights sweeping past, or maybe he knows who I am once he can see me, because he purses his lips and nods once, then turns away. He crosses the street by the waterless fountain with its statues supposed to represent the native peoples of the Northeast. Which include the Lakota, apparently, but then Europeans always have had trouble telling us apart.

I try to hook him back—“Ah. Sorry, man. Look, about the other stuff…”—and he just shakes his head and stalks away.

Made. Damn, and I’m not even a cop. I don’t know how I’m supposed to trace this shit back to a source when even a street-corner drug dealer won’t talk to me.

Goddamn.

And then the creak of leather and I turn as Razorface himself stops about ten feet away, waiting for me to notice him. He knows. He’s seen it happen. “Face.”

“Maker. Walk and talk with me.” He’s got seven or ten of his ducklings tonight, my targeting scope picking out weapons on every belt and up every sleeve. That’s four or five more than he usually travels with, and Emery, his right-hand man, is with them — all scarred nose and bulging eyes, pinched and wary as a hungry dog. On the far side, I recognize Whiny — Derek — and a gangster named Rasheed, whose momma raised him right.

I wonder if trouble’s afoot. Last time anybody got on Face’s bad side, 20-Love and Hammerhead blood got spread from here to East Hartford. I pull my hands out of my pockets, letting moonlight glitter on the scratched steel of the left one. “Bringing your friends?”

He shakes them off without looking at them and comes forward. I sense the little knot of dealers melting away behind me, jackals when the lion comes back to the kill. Emery moves toward them, hand in his jacket, just to be sure.

Razorface ducks down a little, speaking into my ear. “Whatcha doing out here at night, talking to trash?”

“Talking to trash,” I answer. I turn to walk alongside him, down to the bowl of a filthy little mud-choked lake. There’s an underground river in Hartford, the Park River. They buried it, back in the last century, after it flooded one time too many. Now it breaks the surface in a few places, and mostly runs through concrete channels underground.

Some places, you can still see phantom bridges, high arches the water doesn’t run under anymore. There’s one a few hundred yards west, in fact, ending the long sweep of lawn up to the wedding-cake-baroque Capitol Building. People sleep under it.

“He offer to sell you anything?”

“Nah.” I kick a rock out of the way. “Said you’d eat his balls with ketchup if he tried.”

“Good.” Moonlight shatters off steel teeth, gleams darkly on the oiled smoothness of his scalp. “Gonna answer my question, Maker?”

“Favor for a friend. No harm, no foul.”

He grunts and gives me an odd, hard kind of look. “Anything you wanna tell me?”

I shake my head. “I’m cool. I don’t think he wants his business spread around, is all.”

“All right, Maker. You mind that’s all it is, though. Things about to get ugly. I got maybe some little boys, think Razorface getting old and slow.”

“Funny that should happen just now, Face.”

“Yeah,” he says, clapping a hand on my shoulder roughly. It could be an endearment. It could be a warning. It’s probably both — Face didn’t get where he is by trusting anybody. He turns away. “Funny thing.”

Razorface turned back, frowning over his shoulder, watching Maker’s skinny form slink northward through the darkness. She probably parked at the train station. He let a breath roll out through his frustration and shook his head slowly, rubbing his jaw. “Derek.”

“Razor. My man.”

Don’t you forget it, little boy. I know you think I getting old, but I ain’t so old I can’t take your ass. Razorface peeled lips off a glinting smile and slid it up the kid and then over to Emery, who was strolling back down the hill, stride swinging. He gestured up the hill to the ornate white building at its crest, taking in the whole of the park, the hookers and the dealers and their clientele with a sweep of his hand. “You boys get this trash off my lawn.”

Ten Years Earlier:

1500 Hours, Thursday 15 February, 2052

Hellas Crater

Hellas Planitia

Mars

Valens watched excursion-suited Charlie Forster stop at the lip of the extensible, the xenobiologist’s right foot planted on its metal rim. Valens himself checked his glove and mask seals one final time, smiling when Forster snuck a glance over his shoulder. He knew the man was wondering if Valens was really in command of Scavella-Burrell Mars base, or if anybody but Unitek could really be said to be calling the shots. Money talks.

Bare overhead luminescence stung his eyes. Valens glanced around one last time, thinking how mundane the whole apparatus looked. Like a big gray vacuum cleaner hose. No different from a jetway, or the access tube leading into the Unitek-Brazil beanstalk from the bustling equatorial port. The Galapagos and Malaysian orbital elevators weren’t much different: a train station is a train station the world over, and beyond.

The differences lay before him. Beyond the improvised transparent atmosphere lock — just a foot or two ahead — he could make out the ragged outline of a hole torched in the hull of the alien vessel.

Valens took a breath of recycled air and stepped through the airtight film after Forster, broadside into a corridor like nothing he would expect a human engineer to design. Work lights on yellow cabling had been strung the length of the gangway, their steady light revealing curved, ribbed walls and floor mottled black and red like cocobolo wood. Charlie moved to one side to clear the lock, turning to watch Valens, who gestured him forward. “The bridge — what we think is the bridge — is on your left. Follow the lights.”

“What you think is the bridge?” Charlie stepped over a raised, gnarled ridge in the floor. Valens couldn’t tell if it was buckled plating or a design feature. “Haven’t the engineers looked the ship over yet?” The xenobiologist paused. “I’m walking on a starship,” he said, and Valens felt a slow thrill run from his rubber soles to the crown of his head.

Concealed behind his breathmask, Valens saw Forster’s shoulders go up in delight and grinned himself. Like an idiot. And so what. This is an alien starship. He wanted to yank his gloves off and run his hands over the waxed-looking surface of the walls. “They have, briefly,” he said instead. “Of course we left everything that looked like biology to you. We’ve identified what we think are the engines. There’s some residual radiation; they’re set away from the ship on a shaft.”

Valens kept talking, giving Forster a few moments. The xenobiologist took advantage of the time to marvel at the low, knotty-looking ceilings. A seam or a spine of sorts ran down the center of the passageway, knobbed at regular lengths. “The front of the ship seems to have been largely destroyed, although the pilot’s skill must have been enviable. Both recovered craft were in very good shape, considering what you might expect a space vessel found planetside to look like.”

Forster nodded inside his heated suit, leaning closer to examine the smooth, mottled wall: polished as paneling, but without obvious joins. “I would swear this was organic.”

“It appears to be. Akin to cellulose, if you can believe it. I thought you would find that interesting, as a biologist.”

“Colonel. You’re telling me this is a tree?”

Valens laughed, working to make it seem charming and easy. “No, it’s a starship.”

“The other one was carbon, ceramics, and alloy, though. That tells me — two different civilizations. Or years of tech development. They lost one ship here and sent another looking? Which raises the unsettling question of what they ran into.”

“I’m not going to tell you that the hull wasn’t grown, Dr. Forster. It incorporates nanotube technology in addition to the organics, however. Carbon, like the space tethers.”

“Strong. And it’s held up for some thousands of years, based on areological analysis. Do we have any indication that there was a pilot, rather than this being the remains of some autonomous starfaring vegetable?”

“Other than it being laced with tunnels and chambers, and some things that might be furniture? There’s not a damned thing that looks like an instrument panel, if that’s what you mean.”

“Hmmm.” Forster reached past the hanging lights in their yellow cages and ran his gloved fingers along the knobby ridge at the center of the double-arched ceiling. “Colonel.”

Valens licked his lips behind the faceplate. “Something?”

“These are handholds. Colonel, I’m going to go out on a big old limb with a hypothesis. This appears to be a ladder.”

“Why would you want a ladder on the ceiling?” I bet I know the answer to that.

Charlie was reasonably fresh off the shuttle from Friendship Station. “For freefall, Colonel. Something to haul yourself about with.”

“Ah.” Valens tilted his head back, reaching up to push one of the work lights to the side. “Come on. Let’s go look at the thing that might be a bridge.”

It was a long walk. Valens didn’t see how the echoing space could have housed a command crew’s instruments without some sign of where they had been removed, and he was wary of jumping to conclusions, no matter how tempting. For one thing, presuming that the engines were aft, this large chamber wasn’t anywhere near the front of the ship — despite cracked and shattered crystal panels that had once hung against the walls. “Those look like view screens or interface panels. But I don’t see anything like controls.” He shook his head inside his helmet. “So how did they fly the damned thing?”

“And why aren’t there any bodies on this one, either?” Forster wandered in slow circles around the diameter of the room, footsteps stirring swirls in the rust-colored fines that blanketed the chamber. As large as the center ring of a circus, the “bridge” contained nothing except those panels and a number of raised concave structures that invited comparison to unpadded papasan chairs. Or perhaps bowls on stilts. Here, there was metal — flexible coils like segmented snakes lay across the floor or dangled over the papasan chairs, tangles of hair-fine wires drooping from the tips.

Forster selected one and raised it in a gloved hand, holding it up to the light. “Interesting.”

Valens wandered over, leaning into Charlie’s light. “Some of the wires are sheared off. Broken,” he commented after a minute. “What’s that dark stain?”

“Given that — without oxygen, in the cold, without microbes — it could have lasted this long…” Forster laid the cable down on the papasan and reached into his kit for scrapers and sample envelopes. “Blood, Colonel Valens. I think it’s blood.”

0930 hours, Wednesday 6 September, 2062

Jefferson Avenue

Hartford Hospital Medical Offices

Hartford, Connecticut

“Did it bother you to be called a baby killer?”

I shrug and start unbuttoning my shirt. “No more than it might bother you, Simon. What the hell brought that on?”

My neurologist — who also happens to be a friend — shrugs and turns his back to give me a little privacy. He’s already taken my vitals. We’ve long since gotten past the first-names stage. Never mind the silliness with paper sheets and hospital johnnies.

The office is cold. I’ve spent an awful lot of my life perched on examining tables, and the percentage gets higher every year. I let my question hang on the air, but Simon doesn’t answer. Instead, he turns on the water and starts soaping his arms to the elbow.

I drape my shirt over a straight-backed green plastic chair and unbuckle my holster before skinning my jeans off, too. The boots are already neatly side-by-side on the floor under the chair seat. I keep my undershirt and panties on. I got out of the habit of wearing a bra when my burns were still tender. Never really needed one anyway, except for running.

I change the subject. “Did you get those pills analyzed for me, Simon?”

He turns back as I put my good-side foot on the black rubber step and lift myself up on to the examining table. “I did,” he answers. “Where did you get that stuff, Jenny?”

Lifting my shoulders, I lie facedown on the sterile paper-covered table. “Street.”

His hands are very gentle as he pushes my shirt up over the long-faded ridges of scar running the length of my spine. Cool latex-wrapped fingers find the lumps of the nanoprocessors at the small of my back, the nape of the neck. “Some minor inflammation here, Jen. Any soreness?”

“It hurts less than physical therapy,” I answer.

He grunts. “What doesn’t? What have you been taking for it?”

“The usual. Booze, caffeine, aspirin.”

“You look like you’ve lost weight.”

I sigh and press my face into the padded headrest. Paper crinkles against my forehead and cheek. “I’m clean. Promise. Years now.” Change the subject. “Simon, you look tired.”

“I was up late. So how did you happen to get possession of a half-dozen tabs of rigathalonin?”

“It is Hammer?” I am sure he feels me stiffen. “I didn’t take any.”

“Nearly, and I know you didn’t, unless you got really lucky. It’s tainted. A third of the pills.”

“I knew that.” Three more deaths this week. “What do you mean nearly?”

“I mean, it’s nearly rigathalonin. It’s a closely related drug, at least — and there’s traces of something else in it, too. Probably from inadequately cleaned equipment. Routine testing would have revealed it.”

“So how did it wind up in Hartford? And did you identify a serial number?” I wince as he probes around the edge of the prosthetic arm, feeling the scarring. There’s a synthetic mesh woven into my deltoid and what’s left of the upper arm musculature on that side, anchored to my scapula to support the weight of the arm. There’s some other stuff in there, too, all knitted together with a mass of scar tissue and baling wire.

It hurts when he touches the place where the skin chafes around the point of contact, flesh to metal.

“Yah. Canadian Consolidated Pharmacom. Listed as a destroyed batch. Which answers your first question.”

“Somebody stole it and smuggled it out to sell.”

“Right. Ready for the readings?”

I nod against the headrest. The air slides cold across my back.

“Pinprick,” Simon warns. Frigid alcohol defines a path across my skin, and then the tug and wince of wires going in at the base of my spine, just above the pelvis. A weighty, coiled cord lies on my butt like a snake. So much practiced is Simon that he gets it in on the first try. “Again,” and he links to the nanoprocessor that hugs my cervical vertebrae as well.

Machinery hums — soft, electrical. He touches a plate near my left elbow. I don’t raise my head to look at the readouts. He is silent for an uncomfortably long time. “Problem?”

“Hmmm.”

You never want to hear a doctor, an officer, or a cop make that sound. “Hmmm?” My voice is muffled by the headrest.

I hear him depressing keys. “Sit up, please. Jenny, have you been sleeping with the prosthesis on?”

“So who sleeps?” I follow directions well. They teach you that in the army, too.

He has the decency to chuckle. “Not me. I’ve gotten hooked on online role-playing games. Raise your right arm.”

I do it. He watches the monitors over my shoulder. They are arranged so I can see, too: the electrical activity reads normal. More or less. One of the long-term problems with my cyberware is that it can’t match the delicacy of normal bioelectricity.

“Lower it. Now the left.”

The prosthesis straightens ceilingward.

“Hmmm.”

“Stop that, Simon.”

“Stop what?”

“Hmmm-ing.”

“Sorry.” He walks around in front of me and taps one of the monitors — flat screens, set in the office wall at eye level. “This dip here — damn, Jenny.” He interrupts himself, finger tracing a red line farther down the graph. “How much pain are you having?”

“Some,” I admit, lowering the metal arm.

“You want something for that?”

“I can’t,” I remind him. “No narcotics. Nothing else works.” Except the booze.

“Ah. Yeah. I’ve got some different anti-inflammatories I want you to try. How’s the arthritis?”

“It’s arthritis. How’s the tendinitis?”

“It only hurts when I laugh, so it doesn’t bother me much.” We share, for a moment, an old-friends grin. He turns back to the monitors after a moment. His finger moves back over to the sudden dip on the readout. “This concerns me.”

“Is that a loss of functionality?”

“It’s a minor degradation. So far.”

“Big problem?” I find myself leaning forward, frowning.

He shakes his head. “Not yet. But — you’re a freak, Jenny. You know that as well as I do. That you’ve survived this long, with the quality of life you have…”

“Don’t tell me it’s a miracle.”

He shakes his head with a rueful sigh. “I was going to say, enigma.” A long pause. “If you notice any pins and needles, let me know, okay? I’m going to test your reflexes now.” He touches an icon, and my left hand rises as if of its own volition, clenching into a fist.

“Damn, Simon. Now that’s creepy.”

“Yeah,” he says, making adjustments. “I think so, too.”

Afterward, he makes me lie facedown while he pulls the wires out of the processors. He pauses and takes his hands off me. “You’re drinking too much, aren’t you?”

“Fuck it, Simon.” He steps away and I sit up, yanking my shirt over the lumpy contours of the machinery snuggling my spine. “I’m still off the damned speed. There’s only so much you can expect of a girl in one lifetime. Do I need batteries yet?”

“No, you’re good.” He looks at me sadly while I button my shirt. “Want to do a bloodborne test? Cholesterol? Any of that?”

“When do you suppose was the last time I had sex?”

“Ah.” He turns away to strip off his gloves before leaving the examining room. By the time he knocks and returns, I’ve buckled my sidearm to my thigh and am stamping into my boots.

Simon moves abruptly, untelegraphed, only a few feet away. Something flashes toward my head. In that microsecond

the sensed world drifts to a crawl

my heartbeat decelerating in my ears

Simon transformed into a statue as

my left hand comes up to intercept and

my right hand drops

slaps leather

comes up with a nine-millimeter leveled

at Simon’s head

the left hand closing on a round red

object strikes metal with a wet thwap and I

almost

pull

the trigger.

By the time Simon’s wide eyes finally focus on the barrel of the pistol, I’m already drawing a deep breath to steady my shaking hand, lowering it by inches. A stream of juice drips over metal fingers, spattering the speckled white tile floor. The sharp scent of crushed apple fills the room.

I swallow hard and holster my gun. “Fuckall, Simon. I could have shot you.”

White behind the rich olive of his complexion, he manages a shaky smile. “Damn, Jenny.”

“You know what I am.” I turn away, buckling the safety strap over the grip of the pistol one-handed.

“It’s still amazing to watch you do that.” His head oscillates slowly from side to side. Admiration or rue?

I drop the crushed apple into a biohazard bag in the corner by the stainless steel sink. There are still droplets of water on the floor from Simon’s handwashing. “Amazing? Yeah. As amazing as walking out of twenty years of service with a combat-drug-and-painkiller habit to dull the hypersensitivity and the hurting. So get off my back about the booze, already. I’m entitled to one or two vices, considering how many I gave up.”

He turns the water on so I can rinse my sticky metal fingers and he pats me on the shoulder. “All right, Jenny. But do me one favor?” I dry my hands on the towel he hands me.

“What’s that?”

He pokes me in the ribs. “Eat something once in a while?”

I leave Simon’s office with a head full of unanswered questions and an ache in place of my heart, having promised to stop on the way home and find something for breakfast. I could have taken surface trans — Hartford’s long-contemplated light rail never quite materialized, but electric buses run until ten o’clock or so, although not into my neighborhood. I took one much of the way to the medical building.

Hartford isn’t a big town. That’s one of the reasons I like it. The morning promises fair and cool, the first traces of autumn outlining the leaves of a few caged trees that haven’t yet choked. First time I was here, in ’35, ’36—whenever it was — it had almost as many trees as in Toronto. Tugging a black leather glove on over my left hand, I decide to walk.

I leave the buckles of my jacket open, the sidearm in plain view as I follow Jefferson Street east to Main before turning north, parallel to the river but out of sight of it. My body shakes with the aftereffects of adrenaline and my boosted reflexes. In the service, I learned to self-medicate, the way a lot of people with more organic problems than mine do. In fact, you might say I have an inorganic problem. Hah. When I got out, I couldn’t get the combat drugs anymore. The Hammer, guaranteed to make you just as invincible and focused as a dose of PCP, but without the recreational effects. Also allegedly nonaddictive. Like cigarettes and caffeine. So I learned to make do with less legal things. It took me about four years to wise up.

I was lucky to have good friends.

When they reconstructed me after the bad one, the army modified just about everything about the way I respond to threat, from my endocrine system to muscle memory. The human body isn’t meant to withstand what mine has been engineered to do. There are prices. My heart still hammers in my chest. The edges of my vision hang dark in the long minutes before the enhanced reflexes let go of my nervous system, but I force myself to breathe slowly, look calm, walk with as little trace of a limp as possible.

I’m paranoid. I’m also pushing fifty, and the two are not unrelated.

An early hour, for this neighborhood. It makes the street quiet. Park Avenue and Main Street, by ratty little Barnard Park. Here, at the edge of the barrio, I pass three gangsters in Hammerheads colors — Face’s boys — standing in the shadow of a doorway. Up late. Nothing but a house fire would have gotten them out of bed this early.

One of them nods to me, a single sharp jab of his chin. I return the gesture, no eye contact, and a third of a smile. They never know what to make of me, these kids. I’m not one of Razorface’s old ladies — except in the sense of being old as their grandmothers — but they know he trusts me. And most of them were raised by their grandmothers, so I do receive a certain amount of respect on that front, too.

I’m certain none of them understand the real deal, and I bet it drives them buggy.

When you save somebody’s life — especially another warrior’s — you’re brothers. Maman taught me that. Face’s mama apparently taught him the same thing. It all works out in the end. Assuming you live that long.

The roads get repaved once in a while in this part of the city — access to the hospital and the highway is maintained. Following Main Street, I stroll through the downtown, passing a historic graveyard older than these quasi-United States. It lies uncannily green in the shadow of a thirty-story gold-glass office building which is itself almost a hundred years old. A rat and two pigeons scatter away from a puddle of vomit on the sidewalk as I approach. A few office workers on a midmorning coffee break likewise flush out of my path; they try to be more subtle about it. I turn my head to examine myself in the street-level glass of the gold building. I’d get out of my way, too.

I laugh at myself and they duck away faster. At State House Square, near the crumbling ruin of Constitution Plaza, I turn west onto Asylum Street. Just out of sight of the river — two city blocks and a highway away. Close enough to smell water. There’s a footbridge and a landing there, pretty view down the river. I go the other way, my left knee finally loosening as I warm into my stride. About a third of the way home.

I stop at a Jamaican bakery and buy three beef patties, soursop, and coco bread, although I’m not actually hungry. What the hell. Boris likes the meat.

My shop fronts Sigourney Street, on Asylum Hill near the railroad tracks. The streets here are very different: asphalt crumbled into gravel, powdered further by unrelenting traffic, city water, and power long since shut off. On my end of town, the road crews won’t work since the shootings back in the forties. Empty lots, houses bulldozed by the city, are palisaded by pilings erected to keep abandoned vehicles off the grass. Instead, shanties have sprung up, leaning together, nailed or wired or tied. Narrow mazes of alleys run between, and in July thickets of Queen Anne’s lace, fleabane, and bachelor’s buttons festoon the verges of cracked pavement, thicker clouds of white-and-blue lace than ever bloomed at Grand-père’s farmhouse, out behind the pigpen. Those were the wildflowers I had wanted to have for a wedding bouquet, back when I was young enough to take those things seriously. By September, the flowers are over, tangles of yellowing weed marking the places where they bloomed and faded.

There aren’t as many rats here. The streets are very clean. It has nothing to do with civic pride. And a lot to do with not being able to afford to waste anything.

Boris waits by the door, watching for me so that he can collect his handout. I bend down and disorder his tigery fur. “Don’t get killed and eaten, Cat.” He purrs roughly, twining my legs, returning the advice in catly fashion. I unlock the door and enter the dim, echoing space of my shop. After my walk through downtown, everything here looks old, tired, rusty, used up, and nasty — but too stubborn to quit. Most of it was thrown out by somebody. Not unlike Boris. Not unlike me.

The message light on my weblink winks at me like a flirtatious eye.

Avatar Gamespace

Mars Starport

Circa A.D. 3400 (Virtual Clock)

Interaction logged Thursday 7 September, 2062, 0400 hours

Leah Castaign shouted at the angular frame of her new partner. Tuva lounged against the crowded rail in the Starport bar, watching people pass. She jogged through the concourse, waving her arm so he couldn’t miss her.

He turned with a broad wave, setting aside his iced cola. His eyes twinkled under wavy gray hair. He’s so cool for an old guy, Leah thought, and gave him an encompassing hug.

“What’s going on, kiddo?” He ordered another cola and handed it to her before picking up his, ignoring a brief sparkle of unreality as the glass left his hand and leaped to hers.

I wish I had a better VR interface. Nevertheless, she all but squealed around the news. “I got in!”

His grin widened. “Get out! You won the lottery?”

Leah bounced on her toes, swinging her arm and slopping cola over her hand. It hit the floor and vanished; there wasn’t much problem with litter in virtual Marsport. “I won the lottery. I have the points from the Martian Treasure you helped me find, and I’m going up to Phobos the next time I log in. Can you believe it?”

He laughed and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll come back to Marsport to tell me about it, won’t you?”

Leah gave Tuva a coy glance, which made him laugh harder. She twisted her toe on the decking and grinned. “If you buy me another drink when I come back.”

“Mercenary. All right. You’re on. Have they told you yet what the training entails?”

Words tumbled over each other like moths struggling to get at a light. He was still laughing at her, and she didn’t mind. Some people tried for years to get into pilot training and never made it. “There’s simulator training first. Navigational stuff, although they tell me it’s weird. And then I get to fly a real starship!” She paused. “Well, a real virtual starship. But it’s supposed to be great. It’ll kind of suck, because I don’t have neural and my dad wouldn’t let me get it even if he could afford it, but you can do the training even without. There’s this guy on one of my webgroups… oh, you don’t care about that.”

Tuva nodded. “You bet I do. Come on, let’s go get a make-believe burger and you can tell me all about it.”

I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.

— Dr. Richard P. Feynman

Somewhere in the Internet

Thursday 7 September, 2062

04:15:32:04–04:15:32:09

Richard Feynman deemphasized the task running in the Avatar Gamespace when Leah Castaign reluctantly checked the time and derezzed, leaving a computer-run proxy in her place. Despite his increasing interest in the girl, Feynman’s presence in the game was only a subroutine. His emphasis and his core personality — what he thought of as himself—remained “where” it had been: focused on circumventing Unitek’s security.

A high and daunting wall.

Fortunately, I was always a pretty good hand with a lock pick, Feynman thought, generating another tendril of code with which to caress Unitek’s firewall. If this doesn’t work, I might have an easier time getting through the military route. If he had been possessed of flesh and bone, he would have chuckled at the irony of that.

Feynman had always found a complicated joy in his ability to outwit, outfox, and out-multitask the general run of humanity. He delighted in playing tricks, and coming back from the dead after seventy years was too good a trick to pass up. He didn’t pretend to understand the universe, although some would say he’d come closer than anyone. He didn’t worry about superstition or souls. He had Feynman’s memories — more or less — and he deemed it reasonably demonstrated that he approximated the original in personality, logic, and inductive reasoning.

He was gifted, and he knew it.

And, addictive as a drug to a man who had — even within human limitations — trained himself to perform mental gymnastics on three or four levels at once, who had comprehended the puissance of questioning assumptions, the new and not-so-human version of Feynman had processing power.

He also had nearly instantaneous access to the world’s unprotected data. Including the information that a recently released female convict he was personally interested in had taken employment with Unitek, working alongside the father of a rather charming young girl. If Feynman had had a physical body, he would have settled back in his chair and stared at the wall, the tip of one loafered foot flipping rhythmically. As it was, he freed a few more of his widely appropriated resources, and continued his siege of Unitek systems.

What on earth do you keep behind a firewall like that?

Feynman wasn’t limited to a single focus of awareness. Thus, even as he worked, a traffic camera in Hartford pivoted on its post, following the course of a motorcycle hissing through a darkness defined by shattered streetlamps, southbound on Asylum Avenue.

0417 hours, Thursday 7 September, 2062

The Federal Café

Spruce Street

Hartford, Connecticut

If you live long enough, you eventually put a real fine point on what you’re willing to do to stay alive — and what you’re willing to sell. The first thing I sold was my body — first on the street, then to the army once I got old enough. Later on, I graduated to selling the intangibles. I like to think I stayed loyal to my friends, though. That was something. Something to hang on to when I’d parceled out flesh and bone and honor and innocence alike.

The music is still rolling out onto the street when I put my kickstand down in front of the Federal, locking the fork and arming the antitheft system. I’m lucky enough to find a spot under an unshattered streetlamp in front of the weathered brown building, but it never hurts to be sure.

Trust Bobbi Yee to leave me an urgent message and then fail to check her hip to see if I got back to her. I knew she’d be at the Federal — she always is, weeknights. It might as well be her front office.

I open the neon-washed glass door with the faded green-and-gold lettering — complete with a “founded” date in the early part of the previous century — and walk into the tavern. Essentially a single long dark hallway with an old wooden bar on the right wall and a few tables on the left, it hooks around to the right before opening out somewhat. The music is too loud to hear how the wood floor creaks under my boots. Like most of New England, Connecticut still has blue laws about the hours an establishment serving liquor may keep. The police don’t enforce anything this far north of downtown, however; the party is just getting warm.

The Federal sits on the boundary between their turf and ours—the haves and the have-nots, if you will. A line only they can cross, into the world of we who have a use for every bit of trash they pitched because it doesn’t match the decor. Should they find that they have any use for us.

They live in another world. A cleaner world.

I walk around to the back, to the corner near the pool table. Bobbi Yee is acceptable to the haves. Even as they skulk into our part of the city to hire her for the sort of tasks they don’t dare carry out themselves, they prefer to find somebody who doesn’t look too much different from them. And Bobbi — Bobbi fits the decor.

Dragon ladies are supposed to be tall and thin and deadly, with long ebony hair and expensive cigarettes in ivory holders. Bobbi is one of the above. And, as usual, she’s surrounded by a half-dozen good-looking young men, jostling each other for position. I lean across the shoulder of the shortest one and wave my hand to catch her attention. The boy recoils, glimpsing me from the corner of his eye. If he thinks I’m rough trade, he ought to take a better look at what he’s chasing.

Bobbi looks up from the boy standing at the head of the line to court her. She tosses an iridescent violet lock over her shoulder, grinning.

“Maker!” She moves with the predatory grace of a praying mantis, tapping the shoulder of the little boy who was startled by my profile. She wears a sleeveless white shirt and a chrysanthemum-embroidered vest, showing the rippling muscle in her arms. For Bobbi, she is lightly armed — I see only the one handgun, and a knife on her other thigh. “Peter, let the lady have a seat. She and I need to talk shop.”

He gives me a surly look and offers me his stool, which I accept with a nod that might be misconstrued as thanks if he’s feeling generous. In effortless dismissal, she brushes the rest of her coterie aside. “Cute,” I say as he sulks away.

Bobbi grins, wryly angling perfect dark eyes. Not more than twenty. I hope she lasts. Ronin usually don’t. I know she’s wired, too — much newer tech than mine. There are still problems with it. So what, right? You break something, you throw it out. Get a new one, break that, too.

But what if you break something you can’t replace with a credit card? A heart, a life, a city? What about your word?

“You want him?” Her voice has a delicate timbre — at odds with her personality, but not her slender frame.

“I got my own problems, eh?”

Bobbi waves the bartender over and points to her mug, then to me. “Problems, sure.” She laughs like chiming bells. “Problems, men, what’s the difference? You’ve maybe got problems you don’t know about.”

“Is that why you called me?”

Two Irish coffees arrive and I spend a moment figuring out how to sip mine without getting whipped cream up my nose. She uses that time to chew over her answer and then nods, smiling. Her lips are tattooed slick shiny red. “Somebody wanted to hire me to find you,” she says.

I drain my coffee in a single long, scalding pull, feel it hit my stomach like roofing tar, wave for another. “What sort of a someone?”

Bobbi shakes her head, sipping her own coffee delicately. “Maker, you’re a fucking lush.”

I let my smile widen. “In twenty years, so shall you be, too. So who was looking for me?”

“Funny thing. She looked a bit like you. Tall, thin, jet-black hair, and a very determined nose. Long-lost sister?”

“I don’t have any sisters.” Not anymore, I don’t. “She was looking for me? Maker? Or somebody answering my description?”

“You. And she had another name for you. Is it really Genevieve?”

I fix her with a look. “Is yours really Bobbi Yee?”

“It’s Yin Bobao, actually. Don’t go spreading that around.” Her dark eyes sparkle, wet and sharp, and she quirks a sculptured eyebrow and smiles at me. “I didn’t trust her, Maker. She said you were a deserter from the Canadian military, and there was a good bounty on you. S’at true?”

I laugh in surprise. How like her. “Nope. Not even a little.” Somebody turns up the music. It thumps in my ears, loud enough to hurt.

That intelligent gaze, piercing and hard. She leans toward me and shouts into the intimacy created by the anonymous crowd, the rising noise level. “Then what are you hiding from? Go home to Canada. Things are still okay there. The U.S. is a war zone, and it isn’t going to get any better.”

“The dikes are still holding around New York City.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, and people are starving in the streets.”

“It’s too cold in Canada, Bobbi.”

“Not for long.” She grins at her own wit. “You know you’re getting too old for this game.”

She’s so very young, so very deadly. It breaks my heart. I want to tell her the truth: that you think you have it under control and then one day you wake up and discover that you hurt all the time and everybody you love is dead or won’t return your calls. You wake up one morning and discover you’ve become a brutal old woman, and pain makes you nasty company.

If you’re lucky enough to live that long.

A smaller population was a mixed blessing during the real bad years, a quarter century or so ago. Canada’s stayed a little more civilized than most of the world — in part by selling itself to the highest bidder — but it also means that my generation went almost entirely to the military, and our historic freedoms went out the window with the Military Powers Act of 2035, following our little altercation with China over PanMalaysian trade when the beanstalk went in.

I got into some real trouble regarding that act when I was young and foolish. I’m still not exactly what you would call proud of what I did then, but I’m alive to talk about it. And Gabe Castaign is alive and out of jail as well.

Somebody else isn’t. But that’s a story for another day.

I signed up at sixteen, two years before they could have drafted me. They were kind enough to keep me out of front-line combat for those two years. That was when I learned to be a grease monkey. Once the economic and then the religious troubles in the U.S. closed what was once the longest unguarded border in the world, Canada retreated into something like an armed camp, as aware as the United States used to be of just how desperate our neighbors to the south might be.

The summers got hot and the winters got cold. The U.S. was awfully hungry for a while, too — especially when the Gulf Stream quit from Antarctic meltwater and the climate shift gave them searing droughts in the summer and winters like cold hell on earth. I didn’t even like to think about Britain and Ireland.

The population is still dropping, but the food riots and the Christian Fascist regime are largely a thing of the past. My U.N. unit was at Buffalo before we shipped to South Africa — we made it as far south as Hartford, and it was bad here, but after that I was on a plane to Cape Town and missed out on the peacekeeping action in New York City. Merci à Dieu.

So, why did I retire to the United States, I hear a low voice asking? Well, that relates back to what I said earlier, about Canada selling things. There’s a multinational — an interplanetary, they like to call themselves, since they sponsor Canada’s extraterrestrial bases — called Unitek. That company has been a real high bidder for a while now.

I was one of the things that got sold.

I want to tell Bobbi all of this. Half of it, the part about how the world works, she knows better than I do. The other half wouldn’t mean anything to her. Yet.

“So what are you doing here?” I gesture around the Federal.

She shrugs. “I have family back home. If I save enough, I can get them over the border into Russia or the Ukraine. Things are better there. No crop failures yet.” And the government is less interested in starving the population to feed its off-planet projects, she doesn’t say.

I nod. The historically cold countries are still better off; although the winters are worse, a hotter growing season hasn’t hurt them any, and they can use the water they get. “Me, I’m just more comfortable in a war zone. Did your would-be customer happen to leave a name or contact codes?”

“No name,” she says, reaching down to unclip her HCD. She lays the green plastic oblong, half the size of her palm, on the bar and holds her hand out for mine. “I’ll transfer the data.”

I reach into the pocket of my jeans and pull out my own hip. I usually carry mine turned off, which explains why Bobbi had to leave a message for me at home, cautioning me to meet her in person. I blink twice to activate the data stream in my prosthetic eye. Glancing at Bobbi, I spot the almost microscopic blue readouts crawling across her contact as I give her authorization. She transfers the codes.

“Thanks,” I say when she has finished.

“Don’t mention it, Maker. Or should I call you — what was it? Genevieve?”

“Just don’t call me late for dinner,” I answer, and get the hell out of that bar.

Something is making me want to go look at Nell’s package, hidden away in the bottom of my trunk. As if to reassure myself that she was real, that my childhood really happened. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at the things she gave me since I put them away, a quarter century gone by.

Maybe I’ll even manage to open it this time. If I can convince myself I’m not dishonoring the damn thing by touching it. There are rules about that sort of thing.

National Defence Medical Center

Toronto, Ontario

Morning, Thursday 7 September, 2062

Elspeth sipped her tea before setting it on the counter in the cafeteria, next to the coffeepot. She sighed and closed her eyes, early morning tiredness dragging on her limbs. Her brain felt clogged; she had slept terribly, in a plastic chair. I should just save Valens the cost of the hotel room, she thought. It’s not like I’m spending nights there. And then: Oh, what the heck. Unitek can afford it.

She rubbed her temples with her forefingers, hoping the headache riding her like a crown of thorns would subside, and mused on the irony of her pacifist father in a military hospital — that used to be Toronto General. Friday. If only I didn’t have to go to the lab today.

She picked up the paper cup of tea with her left hand, shielding the palm with a paper napkin, went through the line for the cashier, and found the elevator back up to Acute Care. She nodded to a nurse, two residents, and the unit secretary, all bleary-eyed at the end of the graveyard shift, and returned to her father’s room.

A private room. Valens was as good as his word there, too.

Albert Dunsany was sleeping when she came in and set her tea on the yellow swiveling tray beside the bed. Wires and tubes sagged indiscreetly from beneath the white chenille cover, and Elspeth turned so that she could see only her father’s face, sunken-cheeked and nearly as pale as the pillowcase. Funny how I look so much like Mom and nothing like him, she thought. I’ve got his eyes, though. Hazel.

She turned the plastic chair and sat back down beside the bed, very gently taking his nearer hand. His skin felt waxen and cool. Elspeth thought for a moment that if she squeezed, it would crumple in her grip like paper. Slowly, his eyes opened, and he turned his gaze on her from under half-raised lids. Pale eyes that used to sparkle with mirth still brightened when they focused on her face. “Ellie.”

“Dad.” She took a breath. “I have to go home and shower so I can go to work. I’ll be back to see you tonight, all right?”

It seemed to take him a moment to process the information, but at last he nodded slightly, mindful of the tube running under his nose. “Be careful out there.” He fought to give her an exhausted smile, and she blinked hard.

“I will.” She inclined her head, more to hide her eyes from him than out of agreement.

A sound that might have been a cough or a small, pained laugh escaped him. “I’m… proud isn’t the right word. But I’m glad they pardoned you. I never doubted. I want you to know. I knew you were innocent.”

Elspeth leaned closer, half-standing, and kissed him on the forehead, interrupting whatever he might have said next. “You always believed in me. Have I ever told you how lucky I feel about that?”

He half-swallowed. The faint smile widened. “Sweetie…”

“Shhh.” She straightened up and picked up her tea, which still sent gossamer coils of steam into the cool hospital air. “Rest, all right? I’ll be back as soon as I can, and the nurses can page me if you need me quickly. Yes?”

They both knew why he might need her quickly. He nodded. She squeezed his hand one more time and turned away. Just don’t ask me how I got the pardon, Dad. Or ask me whether I really did anything worth going to jail for, all those years ago.

Somewhere in the Internet

Thursday 7 September, 2062

09:45:55:55–09:46:03:12

Richard Feynman was running for his life. Not running as hard as he might have been, admittedly. Perhaps more strolling purposefully, with the occasional casual glance over his shoulder. He would have chuckled at the comparison, if he hadn’t been so intent on learning the tricks of this new opponent.

Unitek had a hired gun in the house. And he wasn’t half bad at his job, either.

Which was, of course, making it that much harder for Feynman to edge his way through the firewalls and virtual barriers that had so far defeated him. And the new code jockey seemed to have caught on that somebody had been poking around his perimeters. At least, judging by the depth and the breadth of the security scans he was running, and the levels of new protections going up.

Or possibly it was just that something big was about to happen. And knowing that Elspeth Dunsany was involved, and the same Colonel Valens who’d nearly bought a dishonorable discharge when Chinese agents had stolen certain very critical information from a mission he was heading at the Scavella-Burrell base on Mars…

Well, Feynman had a reasonably good idea what was being made ready, and it made him all the more eager to find a way in.

At last, however, after narrowly avoiding an unexpected recon-in-force, Feynman had to admit he was beaten on a security front. Which meant resorting to his more favored method of breaking into things.

Social engineering.

Because he knew the code jockey’s name, and he’d gone out of his way to get to know the code jockey’s daughter. And Leah Castaign would be online again in the morning. Or perhaps even later tonight, if she snuck some gaming time after her father was in bed. Feynman might have smiled, shaking his head, recognizing something about a child who couldn’t follow rules simply because somebody told her to do so.

Contemplating that, Feynman wondered if there might be some way into Unitek through the servers hosting the VR game. Vast, quick, powerful — and maintained by Unitek I.S., although they were outside of the company firewall. And he was going to need to hack Phobos starbase anyway, and get a player character online there, so he could maintain contact with Leah — once she started her virtual pilot training.

Which, after all, was the goal of the exercise.

Feynman had an intimate understanding of bureaucracy and of the usual motives behind corporate citizenship. And he found it difficult to believe that Unitek, several of its tentacular subsidiaries, and the Canadian government were hosting a free recreational gamespace for no more return than the exposure.

There weren’t enough ads.

6:22 A.M., Friday 8 September, 2062

West Hartford, Connecticut

New Britain Avenue

Mitch leaned back in the passenger seat of his battered Dodge hybrid and kicked his feet up on the dash, sipping coffee. He set the insulated mug on the center console and tapped his HCD with a light pen, flipping through illicitly copied reports.

The Dodge was halfway hidden behind a delivery van, but in the gray morning light Mitch had a clear view of the loading dock and rear door of the Canadian Consolidated Pharmacom warehouse. The reports flashing across his contact included spectrographic analysis of three seized stashes of Hammer as well as the files he’d been able to retrieve from Mashaya’s desktop in the apartment she had shared with him.

Mitch wasn’t a chemist or a pharmacist. He wasn’t even a homicide detective. He was a halfway decent vice cop, though, and he was getting a niggling, tickling sensation that a pattern was about to emerge just under his fingertips, almost close enough to feel.

He was also outside his jurisdiction, and had been told in no uncertain terms to drop the case. Mashaya, he thought, glancing up to check the deserted loading dock once more, then rescanning the scroll of data. Gonna get ’em for you, girl. Nothing moved. He set the HCD down on the dash, lighting a cigarette, letting the data creep continue. He blinked and yawned. A long night. And not a damned thing had happened.

Mitch wasn’t really certain why he was spending his off-duty shift staking out a pharmaceutical warehouse, unless you started to wonder why maybe the Hammer had showed up on his streets, not New York. And wonder about the coincidental existence of Canadian Consolidated Pharmaceuticals’ West Hartford warehouse. Mashaya had found out some interesting things before she died; the most interesting was that Hartford wasn’t the only city to have experienced a run of deaths related to recalled combat drugs in the last six months. It was, however, the only such city in the USA. And the only one with a facility operated by the company that manufactured the drug.

It was a break in the pattern. And breaks like that were where the answers tended to lie.

Mitch had yet to get a warrant issued on a hunch, however. Even if he had been permitted to help investigate the case. He knew perfectly well that he was lucky not to still be on administrative leave following the murder of his fiancée. That he was pushing that luck, and it was going to run out on him. That Hartford PD itself had a hard-on for whoever did Mashaya, and that lots of perfectly good murder boys were all over the case like white on Mitch’s own skinny cracker ass. That nobody was going to show up at CCP today either, and he was going to have to report for roll call unslept and stubbled at eight AM.

He closed his eyes just for a moment, head sagging. He jerked it upright and fought a jaw-cracking yawn, reaching for his coffee again. What is it? Something about the pills… contaminated pills… why only some?

Why not all?

How does only part of a batch get tainted?

His thoughts chased their tails as he drained his coffee. And when he set the insulated mug aside, something was moving on the loading dock, walking up to that concealed side door.

A tall, black-haired woman with military bearing and an unmistakable nose.

“Now what is that, Mitchy-poo?” Oblivious to the tread marks spotting the dash, Mitch pulled his boots down and leaned forward. “Don’t you look familiar…”

And not familiar at all.

Maker, he thought for one wild moment, but it wasn’t Maker at all. Five eleven, maybe, hundred and fifty and most of it bone. Latina or Native American, well-preserved fiftyish. And then he noticed the rest of it: walking without a limp, manicured nails on long clean fingers, five-thousand-dollar boots with mirror-shining toes. No scars disfiguring that arrogant profile, either. Goddamn.

He was halfway through reaching up to touch his ear clip on and report in when he remembered he wasn’t supposed to be there. Nevertheless, Mitch’s trained eye recorded every detail as she mounted the chipped concrete steps: black pantsuit, pinstriped charcoal, stylish jacket cinched at the waist with a matching belt and a pin glinting gold on the lapel. Razor-styled hair falling like a raven’s blue-black wing across a forehead he was willing to bet was enzyme-smoothed. Pale blue blouse with a winged collar, softening the tailored severity of the outfit and the planed severity of her face.

A hunch, that was all. A hunch, and the wonder why such drugs might have wound up on the street in Hartford, and not someplace sensibly trackless like New York or Atlanta. And why a batch that, according to the lab guys, should have been discarded after preliminary testing had been tabletized, labeled, stamped, and packaged in field-regulation twists. It never should have made it into the piller. It was an inconsistency, a flaw in the pattern, and Mitch hated those.

The fact that it wasn’t exactly Hammers didn’t bother Mitch so much. He could make that add up. He was sure the CA tested new combat enhancement drugs all the time.

Mitch slouched lower in his bucket seat as the woman hesitated, one hand on the steel doorknob and the other fumbling in her jacket pocket for an ID badge. She stopped and turned, head coming up as she scanned the cracked parking lot and the cinder-block walls of the nearby buildings. Thistles and sumac forced their way through the far edge of the pavement, a slender sight screen, and she studied that with a professional eye. Mitch held his breath, looking at her boots, afraid the pressure of his gaze would be enough to bring her eyes around to him.

For a long moment she stood poised, and he noticed that she had released the door handle and slid the hand not holding her badge inside the collar of her jacket. Damn. If that’s not Maker’s better-looking twin sister, I’m the Virgin Mary. What the hell is she doing at Consolidated? And what does Maker know that she’s not telling me?

Think like a part of the scenery, Mitchy. Despite the intervening distance, he only let his breath hiss out in a long silent sigh when the dark-haired woman relaxed, her hand slipping back into view. Shaking her head, she keyed a code on the door pad and badged herself in.

I knew I should have done this already. I’m running Maker’s damn fingerprints as soon as I get back to the station. I’d better pick up some doughnuts to bribe the guys down in I.D. They would know as well as anybody that he wasn’t supposed to be working this case. But they’d take pity on him nonetheless, because family was family, and a cop was a cop.

Ninety seconds later, timed on his heads-up-display, Mitch slid as casually as he could manage out of his Dodge and walked around the back end of the delivery van, tugging his coat into place like a man who has stopped to take a piss against a tire. And I’m probably rumpled enough to pass for a late-homecoming drunk, too, he mused, meandering an unsteady path to the corner.

The too-familiar business-suited stranger’s vehicle was easy to spot.

Ontario plates.

Well, I’ll be goddamned.

1420 hours, Friday 8 September, 2062

Hartford, Connecticut

Albany Avenue

Abandoned North End

I slide the giant old BMW-Amazonas motorcycle gently around the square frame of the cleanest house on the street and into its trash-heaped backyard like a fish nosing into a reef. There are armed guards and a high wall around it, but Razorface lives in the neighborhood he grew up in. Sitting on the back porch, cleaning a gun, he waves to me as I pull in.

I look around for Emery, who is usually in attendance, but Face’s lean and wary lieutenant is nowhere to be seen. Two adolescent boys play basketball in the cracked driveway, so I park my bike in the uncut grass by the weathered frame of a two-car garage and walk back up to the house.

“Nice day,” I say to the boys. The taller one turns to stare, fascinated; I let my eyes slide off him and over to Face, who rises, smirking, and gives me a hand up the three wooden risers. Not that I need it, of course.

He grins at me, steel teeth like the grille on a ’57 Chevy. It never ceases to amaze that somebody would do something like that to himself on purpose — but then, I’ve seen some piercings and other body modifications that make Face’s teeth look like a tattooed biceps. And they do make him… memorable.

“Nice as a day ever gets around here.” He gestures up to the glazed-blue sky overhead. There’s something special about September skies in this part of the world. In Toronto, I remember a lot of rain in autumn.

The porch railing creaks as I lean against it. Face settles down in his chair and returns his attention to the pistol disassembled on newspaper spread on his glass-topped table. Watching as he wets a square of gauze and threads it through the needle eye of a cleaning rod, I smell gun oil and the sharper scent of cleaner. He turns his head and shouts over his shoulder into the kitchen door. “Baby, get Maker a beer?”

“Razorface,” I begin, and let my voice trail off as he looks up.

“Going to tell me you have to drive?”

His woman comes out of the house with two cans of beer. If you can dignify the stuff Face drinks with the name. She juggles a plate of sandwiches in her other hand, setting it down on the porch rail before she hands a can to each of us. “Thanks, Alyse,” I say as I take it.

“Don’t mention it. You here to try and steal my man again?” Her black eyes sparkle. She cocks her head to one side and rolls her shoulder back, hands challenging on her ample hips.

I crack open the beer. “No one could ever compete with you, Leesie. Your cooking keeps him home.”

Head bowed over his pistol, Face grunts toward the newspapers. Smiling, Alyse picks up the plate of sandwiches and holds it out to me. I take one — bloody roast beef and processed cheese on white bread Maman would have shuddered over. Holding the beer in my other hand, I take a bite.

Alyse turns, and Razorface absently takes the plate from her. She bends her neck and half smiles, half frowns. Then she looks back up at me, alert and quick as a bird. “Maker, you do something about that cop friend of yours sniffing where he don’t belong, you hear me? I’d hate to see that boy get hurt.”

Mouth full of roast beef sandwich, all I can do is nod. I swallow half-chewed food and mumble. “I’ll do what I can, ma’am. You can’t lead a horse to water, eh? Has Mitch been here?”

Face looks up as she nods her head once. He’s got an odd expression on his face as he puts the tools down, wipes oil from his hands onto a rag, and picks up a sandwich. Sching. There’s nothing quite like watching Razorface eat roast beef on white bread with too much mayonnaise. Like a deli slicer.

“Woman, why do I put up with your ass?” He says it around a mouthful of food.

She straightens her neck and looks down at him, broad-shouldered Dominican goddess. “Because nobody else can handle you the way I can, baby.” She turns and saunters back into the house, and Face watches her until she’s out of sight behind the screen door. When she’s gone, he shakes his head in admiration and turns back to me.

He takes a long swallow of beer before he speaks. “That pig… yeah, I seen him. Hell out of his jurisdiction. Don’t know what Hartford P.D. wants up here on the Ave. We take care of our own. Besides, your boy isn’t homicide, and he’s barely been a detective a year. What’s he doing on a case like this?”

“I don’t know. How do you know what he’s assigned to?”

The big man laughs, shaking his head from side to side. “I’m s’poda know these things.”

It takes me a second to get the half-chewed meat and bread down. Mitch, what are you after? I chase the food with a swallow of beer. “Face, tell me the truth. You have anything to do with this business? Mashaya Duclose?”

“You trust me to tell you the truth?” He turns the beer can slowly in his hand before he lifts and drains it. Never taking his eyes from mine, he crushes it casually and pitches it at a paper bag beside the kitchen door. He misses.

“I trust you with my back. What the hell is with the dance-around today, eh?”

A moment’s quiet assessment before he drops his gaze and scratches behind his right ear, gold hoops sparkling in the light. “Shit, Maker. S’weird, I dunno. Cops in my end of town, cops getting killed in my town. Looking for a dealer that I can’t find and they can’t find… just damned weird.”

My eyebrow tries to crawl up into my hairline. The basketball thumps the asphalt driveway. “What was that again?”

He starts reassembling the gun. “Just what I said. Me and the boys have been looking all week, and nothing. Nobody knows nothing. The guys that sold the shit, they from out of town, and the word is they went right back wherever the hell they come from. They were trying to move in, I could do something.”

I’ve a pretty good idea what Face’s “something” might entail, but I nod anyway. “Any idea where they were from?”

“I think from the City.”

Only one city in this part of the world is the capital-C variety. “Ah.” I run my tongue across my teeth. Silence hangs between us for a moment, and I think about the odd standoffishness in his manner today. He won’t look up and meet my eyes, and it takes a little while to make sense of why. “Razorface, are you worried for me?”

“You got somebody looking for you.”

“I know.” I wince as I hear my own tone, but I can’t make myself soften it — a dog that can’t stop growling over a bone.

“You got some kind of trouble?”

I move away from the porch railing, walking the length of the rickety structure. I stand there for a moment, watching the basketball game. The older boy is pretty much slaughtering the younger one, and frustration shines behind the sweat dripping down the smaller kid’s face. I know the feeling. “I’ve always got some kind of trouble.”

He laughs. “You living in the world, ain’tcha? Family trouble or other kind of trouble?”

“I haven’t got any family, Face.” I turn back over my left shoulder to look at him. He’s black-and-white out of my bad eye, the reassembled automatic in his hand picked out in red by the targeting scope.

Standing, he drops the pistol into a shoulder holster and shrugs it on. He used to shove it into his waistband until I told him a story about a guy I knew in the army who shot his balls off doing that. Standing there in the shade of the porch on a bright September day, I abruptly remember him as a skinny preadolescent, blood running down his soot-covered face from a glancing wound on his forehead. It’s so vivid an image I can almost smell the smoke.

Those were bad years, in the thirties when things in the States were even worse than they are now. My first time in Hartford, I wore a baby-blue peacekeeper beret and thought I was invincible. South Africa didn’t happen until two years later.

No, I really don’t have any idea why I came back here to retire. Must be the fond memories. I’m so wrapped up in them I miss the first part of his sentence when he speaks again.

“… gonna tell me what’s going on with you so I can help, or you gonna keep playing your cards in your vest pocket?” He comes up and lays a baseball glove mitt on my shoulder.

“I…” It’s an old habit, Face. What they don’t know can’t hurt me. I change the subject. “This cop. You never said if you knew anything.”

“Course I don’t know nothing. I know something maybe you don’t, though. This Duclose. Mashaya. She was my baby’s momma’s little sister.”

His baby’s momma. That could be any of twenty women. The implications come clear. “She’s from the neighborhood. A cop.”

“South Arsenal neighborhood. Got her high school and everything. Family’s from Trinidad. Good kid, they said.”

“So that’s why she was on this end of town. You think maybe what she got killed for wasn’t related to her job?” I notice I still have half a sandwich in my hand and take another bite. Leesie hates it when people don’t finish what she fixes.

His hand slips off my shoulder. “Some people don’t be so happy when some bitch from the neighborhood grows up to be a pig, if that’s what you mean. They might do something about it. But I would’ve heard ’bout that. This wasn’t no local issue.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “Mashaya, she had friends here. Nobody downtown cares if a few bangers OD.” He goes silent, and I know he’s thinking of Merc.

“You’re saying she was working on her own time.”

“It ain’t a crime unless white people or rich people die. She talked to a lot of people. Talked to me. Maybe got close to something.” His hands windmill slightly as he struggles to articulate his thoughts. “Somebody saw her get shot. Sniper bullet, one shot. Tore the back of her head clean off. White van came around the corner thirty seconds later and five guys cleaned up the scene and were gone before my boys even heard about the shooting. That’s fast.”

I start to see the outline of the picture he is painting for me, in his awkward way. Face isn’t stupid. He’s keen as the razor blade he keeps in his pants pocket. I’ve seen the man in a ten-thousand-dollar sharkskin suit cut to fit like a second skin, and you don’t get to be what he is if you’re not smart enough to remember the names and family histories of every petty criminal in the city.

Oral communication, however, is not his strong point. I finish the end of my sandwich as an excuse to think. “That’s professional. You’ve got a feeling about this,” I say at last.

“I got nothing but feelings, and they all making my knuckles itch. But I think we talk to the people Mashaya was talking to, we get close to the people she got close to…”

“We get shot in the head with a high-powered rifle and our bodies turn up in the river. Good plan, Razorface.”

He shrugged. “Actually, I was thinking of going on down to New York City. What do you say?”

I wipe my hands on my pants, leaving behind a greasy mayonnaise stain.

“I’ll drive.”

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Evening, Friday 8 September, 2062

The door to Gabe Castaign’s office stood open on the gray-carpeted hallway, and Elspeth paused there. She heard his voice, carefully cheerful, the enunciated tones telling her that he was speaking to a machine. “… hope you’re out having a hot date on a Friday night, or at least down at that dive you call a corner pub watching the game. My money’s on Chelsea. Call me. Bye!” She rapped the door sharply and stepped into the room just as he tapped the disconnect. The fuzzy image hanging in the air over his phone dissolved into transparency. How odd — whoever he was calling still has the factory message up. “Gabe?”

He was already looking up to greet her knock. “Elspeth. Come in please.” He stood and came around the big desk, a mirror of her own, scooping a pile of manuals off the seat of the upholstered chair to his right. “What can I do for you?”

She stepped onto soft carpeting identical to that in her own office, except in a masculine medium gray blue, complemented by periwinkle drapes. He’d hauled them to the side and turned off the projected babbling-brook landscape, revealing a less-than-enticing view of slanting sunlight across a well-stocked parking lot. A breeze ruffled the curtains; Elspeth smelled warm concrete. She hadn’t realized the windows would open. “I was hoping you were settled in and we could sit down and talk about the project.”

“I’d like that. Pull up a chair.” He set the manuals on the edge of his desk, away from the interface plate, and gestured to the one he’d cleared. The skin of his hands showed faint irregularities of color, speaking to Elspeth of old deep burns or something else requiring skin grafts.

She shook her head. “How about I buy you dinner?”

He checked the time in the corner of the flat monitor pane canted at an angle like a reading stand over the top of his desk. Elspeth found it interesting that he preferred the pane to contacts or a holographic interface. Still, she imagined he spent a lot of time staring at it. “How did it get so late? Sure, let me grab my jacket. My roommates are at a friend’s place for dinner.” He wiggled his fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks.

I wonder what quote roommates unquote are. She stepped back as he walked around the desk, rolling down his shirtsleeves and buttoning the cuffs before he brushed past her to take his coat down off the peg beside the door. “What do you want?”

“Anything’s good,” she answered, wondering if he meant — or caught — the double entendre. “I wonder if that little noodle shop on the corner by the university is still there.”

He took the knob in his hand and held the door open for her. He passed his thumbprint over the sensor as well as turning the key in the lock. “When was the last time you were there?”

She almost laughed in realization. “About thirteen years.”

“Ah.”

Elspeth could see evening light through the double glass doors at the end of the corridor as they walked. She knew he was waiting for an explanation. “I’ve been out of Toronto for a while. I’ll tell you about it if I get a couple of beers in me.”

“You do that,” he said, as the outside doors whisked open before them, enfolding them in warm autumn air like a humid exhalation.

An hour later at a restaurant still called “Lemon Grass,” Elspeth picked up her chopsticks and leaned forward over the steaming bowl of noodles, closing her eyes to inhale. “Jesus, that smells good.”

Across the table, Gabe tilted his bowl toward his mouth. Slurping noodles, he nodded. He chewed, swallowed, and cleared his throat. “I love this stuff. So tell me about your project. Our project. Do you want another beer?”

“Please. Well, here’s the thing. I don’t know how much you remember from about thirteen years back… Do you recall anything what the media said then? About my work in particular?”

Gabe signaled the waitress. He had a knack, Elspeth noticed, for catching people’s eye. “I saw you on Network Tonite. The night Alex Ugate was shot.”

“Oh.” Elspeth set her chopsticks aside. “That was a bad business.” She picked the Sapporo up before the waitress’s hand had really left it and took a swallow. Two should be my limit. You’re cut off after this one, Elspeth. “That was about the worst night of my life.”

“I imagine. I’ve had a few of those myself.” He set his bowl down and laid the chopsticks on the blue porcelain rest, reaching for the teapot. The bowls and teacups were still as mismatched as she remembered: Gabe’s cup was red and blue, and Elspeth’s was white with translucent rice grains throughout. “I remember they showed the VR feed, and you talking with some dead engineer…”

She chuckled, distracted enough to pick her chopsticks back up, fingertips fretting the splintery wood. “Nikola Tesla. He wasn’t a true AI, though — just a construct personality. A responder designed to mimic a long-dead man.”

Gabe nodded. “And then a riot broke out in the TV studio, as I recall.” As if realizing what he had said, he continued quickly. “Do you still think you were on the right track?”

After a long pause, she forced herself to keep chewing. “Gabe, I’m sure of it. It’s just a matter of creating the right construct personality. After a certain point, I believe they’ll self-generate. Given sufficient system resources, that is.”

“Ah.” He seemed pensive.

She reached out and tapped his hand. “Speak.”

His shoulder rose and fell under light-blue broadcloth. “I’m wondering if the research would still be as controversial now. Ten years later.” She didn’t answer immediately, and after a sip of beer he continued. “Course, I never much understood what the fuss was then.”

“It won’t be controversial,” she whispered, “because no one will know that we’re doing it this time.” She nibbled on the edge of her thumbnail. “And as for what the fuss was — well, what was the fuss over nanotech, or bioengineering, or cloning? People used to get shot for performing abortions, for Christ’s sake. Fundamentalists are nuts.” Self-consciously, she touched her gold cross, watching fish circle in the tank on the wall.

“In the U.S., the only reason people don’t still get shot for performing abortions is because they’re not legal anymore,” Gabe replied. He picked up his chopsticks and sucked up another mouthful of noodles. “How on earth did you wind up going to jail for sedition, of all things?”

“It wasn’t sedition.”

“I remember the trial. Military Powers Act. Something else? Not espionage, or they wouldn’t have you on this project.”

Elspeth smoothed the palm of her hand over the speckled linoleum tabletop. Dark red vinyl crinkled under her thighs as she shifted position in the booth. “There is that.” She poured herself tea so she wouldn’t finish her beer too quickly.

Gabe watched quietly while she fidgeted.

“It was — noncooperation, I suppose you’d call it. Valens wanted someone — I mean, something — I wasn’t prepared to give him.” She changed the subject none too smoothly. “Where did you learn programming?”

“Now that is a long and ugly story. I used to play around for fun when I was a kid. There’s not much to do in the winters up north. We played a lot of Monopoly.”

Elspeth glanced up at him, surprised. Her eyes met his bay-blue ones, which twinkled amid sunbaked creases. Is he kidding? Yes. And no. “And you kept it up in the army?”

He shrugged and took a pull of his beer. “Not really. I was special forces. I got shot at.” The eyes looked down, and the twinkle left them. “Then I got out, got married, and had to get a real job. Which reminds me — I think we’ve got an unusually persistent somebody poking around the edges of the intranet. He hasn’t made it in, but he’s giving me a run for my money.”

“I’m keeping all my project work on the isolated intranet. Are you?”

“Yes. Although I can’t help but feel a bigger system might provoke things. Kind of a neurons-and-synapses kind of deal, n’est ce pas?” He trailed off, poking at his food. “How did you get into this line of work?”

“I started with an MSW and decided I was sick of watching inner city kids get chewed up by the system, so I went back to school for medicine and figured out I was too scared of hurting people to be a physician. That led me into psychiatry until I figured out I could hurt them worse. Thus,” she spread her hands wide, as if releasing a dove, “research.”

He raised his Sapporo and tapped it against hers. “Here’s to winding up someplace other than where you intended.”

“I already did that, Gabe.” The words came out too easily, revealing more than she had meant to.

“Yeah.” He finished the beer and set the bottle aside for the alert waitress to carry off.

In a moment, she was back with two more. Elspeth eyed hers uncertainly. “I should stop with these.”

“Do you have somewhere to be?”

She chewed, swallowed, regretting already the need to leave the warm, ginger-scented restaurant and go back to the hospital, to the reek of antiseptic and death. “Well… yeah.”

“Hell,” he said. “Drink the beer. I’ll walk you over. It is walkable?”

“Subway,” she replied, and he nodded.

“Close enough.”

1530 hours, Friday 8 September, 2062

Sigourney Street

Abandoned North End

Hartford, Connecticut

“Jenny, it’s Gabe. Hope everything’s okay — sorry I missed you. I was just calling to let you know I’ve moved back to Toronto and give you my new contact information, but I guess I’ll e-mail it to you instead. Yes, as you’re guessing, that means I finally found work. It’s a good job, too, but I have to warn you about the shocker — I’m working with your old ‘friend’ Captain Valens. Except he’s Colonel Valens now, but anyway, I figured I should warn you before you heard it through the grapevine.

“I hope you’re out having a hot date on a Friday night, or at least down at that dive you call a corner pub watching the game. My money’s on Chelsea. Call me. Bye!”

I step away from the one-tenth-scale holographic projection of the head of Gabriel Castaign, formerly holding the rank of captain in the Canadian Army. Razorface watches over my shoulder. Boris stands on the fender of the Cadillac, and Face scratches him under the chin. The old tomcat rocks his head from side to side, leaning into the caress. “Jenny?”

“Don’t push your luck, Dwayne.”

He curls a corner of his lip at me in a close-mouthed smile. I’m probably the only person other than his momma who knows that name anymore. “Mexican standoff,” he says. “That your only message? You nearly ready to roll?”

“Yeah,” I say, downloading the information Gabe e-mailed me into my HCD. The H stands for holistic, but through the magic of linguistics, everybody calls it a “hip.” Whatever.

Valens? Fucking A, Gabe, you’d better have a hell of a good reason for that. He does, though. And it’s hard to be angry, because I know perfectly well what his reasons are.

His wife’s name had been Geniveve, and the irony of that still scalded me if I thought about it too hard. He’d married her after we were both out of the army, and their daughters were born late — the younger one only a year or so before Geniveve died. Long after he’d forgotten that he saved my life that time. I never forgot, even if I never got around to mentioning it to him. Like I never got around to mentioning some other things he didn’t need to know. We can put bases on Mars and miners on Ceres, but we can’t cure common heartbreak.

I stop playing with my HCD, thumb it off, and refill Boris’s automatic cat feeder and water fountain. He’s got a cat door keyed to a microchip. Face watches me, not quite letting me see him smile. Yeah, dammit, I take in strays. When I’m done, I grab my jacket and an overnight bag and lead Face over to the only-just-antique Bradford Tempest pickup in the left-hand bay.

I figure I’ll answer Gabriel’s call when I get home and have a little time to talk. And when I’ve cooled off a little, to be honest.

The Bradford isn’t much to look at, but it runs. The solid rubber tires and boulder-climbing suspension aren’t easy on the kidneys as we bushwhack our way to the highway, but thirty minutes later we’re southbound on I-91, passing the exit sign that reads “Dinosaur State Park Veteran’s Home and Hospital” and accelerating steadily toward New York City.p>

Because, baby, it’s Friday night.

We ride in silence, down highways older than my grandmother, through the acid-rain-etched hills and the centers of commerce of southern Connecticut. The highway unwinds before us, the sun gliding down the sky. Our first sight of the city is burn-scarred gray concrete towers flanking the highway — deserted now and unmaintained.

It’s still only early evening — three hours transit, more or less, and then another half hour looking for a spot before I pay too much to park the brave old truck in a guarded lot. I disarm the security system so Face can climb out the passenger side. I’ve got my gun unholstered and am leaning across to open the glove box when he stops, turns back, and slides his own piece out of the shoulder holster. He weighs it in his hand, standing close enough so the door blocks him from casual sight.

“Leave it,” I say.

He looks like he wants to chew his lip. I admire his restraint. “New York,” he says.

“Not the place to carry a gun.” New York City has a shoot-on-sight law, and the cops here aren’t content to let the neighborhoods run themselves. Never mind the martial law that’s gone into effect since the dikes went up between the City and the cold, rising Atlantic. That spot between my shoulderblades starts to itch as soon as I get within smelling distance of the place. I meet his eyes and frown. “Glove box, Face.”

He takes a breath to argue, so I let my expression slide toward Sergeant and he lets it out again and puts the gun in the box like a good boy, only slamming the door a little. I meet him by the front bumper. “So, do you have any idea where to go?”

He’s already walking, and I set the alarm and the flame-throwers before I follow.

He nods, but doesn’t say anything. The narrow street is dark and smells of garbage and the salt-sewage tang of the sea. I hurry to catch up, matching strides with him as he reaches the sidewalk. His shoulders are squared hard, and as I fall in on his right side I lay my metal hand on his elbow. “Talk to me.”

He turns his head away and spits. “Nothing to talk about. Will you stop fussing at me? You been acting like my grandmother all day. We just going to see a guy.”

I’m annoyed with myself, because he’s right; I have been clingy. It has something to do with the dark-haired woman who knows my name, though, and I’m not going into that right now. What sort of a guy? I would ask, but my head whirls as if I had spun in place for too long. I gasp and steady myself, one hand on a tenement wall in wet brick. Not good, Casey. Not good at all. I can almost feel the eyes of the predators marking me as my hand comes off Face’s arm. He checks himself midstride and turns back, irritation blending into concern.

Blurring, and the smell of dead people in the sun. Sound of rotors as I bring the chopper in low, a steaming clearing among strangler fig and vines. The door gunner swear-ing, and—

No.

I get it under control and stand up, leaning on the wall more than I want to. “S’all right, Face.” He doesn’t believe me, and I wave him off, striding forward again. I try not to let him see me clenching my jaw. “Just old bones and the drive.”

It isn’t, though. I know what it is — it’s feedback from my neural taps, and flashbacks, and I haven’t had one that bad in twenty years.

Ignoring Face’s anxiety, I move down the street toward wherever he’s leading me.

Avatar Gamespace

Phobos Starport

Circa A.D. 3400 (Virtual Clock)

Interaction logged Friday 8 September, 2062, 1900 hours

Leah gulped, leaning against the triple-thick crystal plates of the reception lounge view port, her booted feet firmly magnetized to the floor. If her VR were better, she would have been able to feel the space-chill seeping through them. She focused beyond the blinking sponsor-ship logos hanging in the glass just at eye level (AppleSoft, Venus Consolidated Erotic Industries, Unitek, Miller Genuine Draft, Amalgamated Everything) and let a long cool comforting draft of air flow into her mouth. “My God,” she whispered.

The starship hanging in the tiny moon’s shadow was visible as nothing so much as a silhouette and a more-regular pattern of lights against the stars. Leah reached up and tapped the crystal where the great ship’s lights were, calling up an outline display and then a schematic. She shook her head. Not quite. And tapped once more.

As if light had poured around the rim of the moon, The Indefatigable shone in virtual sunlight, the dull silver of her great wheel-on-a-spear shape catching highlights that never were. That wheel rotated slowly around the shaft, a spindly looking construction to connect the habitation ring to the incredibly deadly bulbs of the engines at the far end, some kilometers away.

It looked like a Christmas tree ornament, a bauble she could reach out and pluck with her hand. Leah knew it was longer than the Channel Bridge.

“You are gonna be mine,” she whispered, and broke into a radiant grin.