Priam's Lens

SIX A Tale of Two Women

Bambi the Destroyer was not very pretty when she was pissed, and she was plenty pissed. Almost as pissed as he was.

“I want to know how the fuck you did that!” she spat, sitting down on the stool next to his at the club bar. It didn’t have drinks as strong as at the Cuch, but it didn’t have the roaches or the smell, either, and you didn’t have to put on false hair and such just to be presentable.

It was odd how thin, how vulnerable, she looked without that combat suit on. She was short, no more than 155, maybe 160 centimeters, and if she weighed fifty kilos it would be amazing. Still, her martial arts skills and gymnastic-type moves, even like this, were the stuff of legend among her troopers.

“I opened fire and cut you down,” he responded, sipping his whiskey and soda and trying to sound nonchalant.

“That ain’t what I mean and you know it! I been beat before, sure, when I was just out of school and a smartass second looey, but I ain’t been beat on the sims since. Not on one that easy, particularly!”

“Not so loud,” he responded playfully. “Do you want the word to get around that you got took? Think of what your troops will think of you if that gets around! They might actually shoot you in the heart instead of in the back.”

“Don’t get smartass with me! I don’t like bein’ beat, but I recognize it when somebody does somethin’ I never saw before. I can’t figure it out, unless it was somethin’ brand new they added to your suit.”

“Nothing like that. I just did a flee, execute, and defend in three-sixty mode, that’s all.”

“Bullshit! That’s what all the data said, but I seen a ton of the best of the best and I ain’t never seen nobody able to do that. The human mind and the interface ain’t good enough to make it work.”

“It’ll work. It did work. I can’t tell you how, because I don’t know. I just know that something about that kind of knack is what got me recruited for the Commandos a few years back now. It’s like explaining to a groundling what it’s like to be inside the suit and fight. You either have it or you don’t. Those who have it they somehow spot and train and train and train until it can be executed when needed. I’m surprised I could still do it. Last time I did it I died. They scraped up the pieces and got me into a pickle wagon fast enough to restore me, more or less, but I didn’t know if I still had it until I tried it in there.”

“Teach me!”

“I can’t. I told you. Not even the Commandos and Rangers, the only two organizations where it’s even attempted, can teach it. They can only make you better if it’s already there. Some way in which the brain works. Maybe a mutation, maybe even brain miswiring. They aren’t sure. They been trying to build it into the suits for those who don’t have it for a long time, but they never seem to be able to. The wiring, both suit and soldier, seem to have to be just exactly so. It’s luck. Or a curse. I spent two years in a pickle jar because I could do it, and that’s only because I was lucky. You ever spent any time for major repairs in one of those units?”

She shook her head. “Nope. They had me in for a few days for some burns, but it wasn’t the full treatment and it wasn’t any big deal. Just boring as shit, even with the feel-good stuff they put into you.”

“Don’t let ’em put you in one for the kind of injuries I had. Just—don’t. And don’t let ’em give you that bullshit that you’re not really in pain, that it’s all the consequences of surgery and healing drugs and the reconstitution process and all that. You’re there, you’re aware, you’re in real pain, and you keep living that last hour over and over and over again. When they finally bring you out, you’re whole, but it’s not fun anymore. It’s not fun at all. Enjoy it while it’s still a game, Fenitucci, and then die when it’s your time.”

She looked at him with a grim expression. “It’s really that bad?”

He drained his whiskey. “It’s really that bad. And it never really ends. That’s why they call us the Walking Dead, or, sometimes, the Zombie Corps. There aren’t too many of us. Most blow their brains out in the first year after getting back to duty, or they quit the Navy, or they wind up in rubber rooms. They made me a cop, and I kind of liked the job. It’s busy, always a little weird, and not too demanding.”

“Then why are you gettin’ back in the suit? Hell, man! You’re Navy! You don’t have to do this shit no more! You ain’t Commando now! What’re you tryin’ to prove?”

“Prove? Nothing. They made me a cop, and I just told you I liked it. Beats the Zabulon Five Rebellion three ways from Sunday. Trouble is, once I get a case, I can’t let go until I solve it, or at least find out all there is to know. I’ve got the granddaddy of all cases right now, and I’m gonna need a suit just to see it through. I got to admit, though, I’m so damned rusty I’m beginning to wonder if I can hack it.”

“Rusty! You just zapped the best fuckin’ Marine in the service! I don’t care what you say, you didn’t win them medals and commendations sittin’ on your ass. I seen ’em in your files. You got the Cross of Honor, man! I never met nobody who won that—nobody alive, anyway. You could get busted to swabbie and still rate a salute! And you still got it. I can tell you that.”

“Then I guess you didn’t know. They didn’t tell you?” “Huh? You didn’t make it out in time?”

“I didn’t make it thirty seconds after you went dark. I got so wrapped up in myself at the kill that I forgot to watch my back and something just swallowed me whole and then chewed from the inside.”

“Shit! But that’s why we train, right? I mean, so you remember those things. Besides, if you won all the time, you wouldn’t play no more.”

“It’s no game. I told you that.”

“Hell, man! Everything’s a game! Life’s the game, and then the game’s over. We’re goin’ to hell in a handbasket, ain’t we? I mean, maybe we’ll get off or away ’cause it’s slowed down, but you and me both know humanity’s had it. We’re policin’ the rear guard. Frontier reported some new Titan ships comin’ in now. They’re goin’ to spread at least another hundred light-years after this round. They’ve already started the evacuations, for all the good those’ll do. We’re out of places to put ’em and we’re out of the worlds with the factories and resources to build things where we need ’em. So we may as well all play games, play hard, fight hard, love hard, die hard, ’cause in another couple hundred years, give or take, we’re gonna run out of worlds, and then everything people did in the past thousands of years gets flushed down the toilet. All the books, all the plays, all the pretty pictures, all the ideas. Kaput! Finito! So when you gonna get in the sack with me, huh? They did regrow that part in the pickle jar, didn’t they?”

He chuckled, even though it was an old line—and one of the most asked questions, in fact. “Can’t do it, Fenitucci. I’m afraid I’m beginning to like you, and that makes it impossible.”

“So you want I should kick you in the balls?”

“No, just keep it professional, that’s all. See, there were a whole lot of other people I knew, maybe even loved a little, who got scraped up with me, and while I got four back out, the rest well, I’m the only other one that made it, period. I don’t like going to bed with somebody and then having to scrape her up later.”

“Christ! I’m not talkin’ about a romance! Just a roll in the hay, that’s all. You’re one of the few officers left, male or female, and I got a reputation!”

“You lost. I got to sleep with the sea monster.” She gave him a sneer but didn’t hit him.

“Seriously,” he continued. “Tell me—who sent you in there? You didn’t just happen in.”

“I got a call from Colonel Palivi’s office suggesting it would be a nice time to go down to the base simulator in the kind of terms that indicate that, well, we’re not ordering you to do anything, but you’d better get your ass down there. I got, and they had my suit ready and the tech there told me that I was the live enemy in your sim. Now you know as much as me. More, really, ’cause I don’t know why the hell you need the suit and training. You’re good, but you’re out of practice or you would never have gotten swallowed. Anything that needs a suit is something that should be handled by people whose business it is to fight in them.”

“I agree,” he replied. “But this isn’t about a fight. It’s dangerous, but it’s no fight, because if it becomes one I’ll lose hands down. I just can’t say more right now.”

“Word is you’re gonna try to ride the keel down a hole. That’s suicide, man!”

He stiffened. “Who told you that?”

“Nobody. Well, somebody, but I don’t remember who. It’s kinda the buzz all over.”

“Any other—buzz? On me, that is?”

“Lots of shit. Something about the Dutchman and that parked freak show up there, lots of other crap. Hey—where you goin’?”

“I think I have to have a little talk with somebody,” he replied. “It can’t wait. I’ll see you around.”

“Hey—you really gonna ride a keel?”

He felt a mixture of relief and irritation. “Probably not,” he responded.

Commander Tun He Park did not like to be roused out of n sound sleep, and he was in a pretty foul mood when he let Harker into his quarters. He instantly saw that he wasn’t in nearly as foul a mood as Harker himself, though. He instantly leaped to the wrong conclusion. “The ship’s filed a flight plan?”

“Not that I know of, Commander. But when it does, I’ll be the last to know. The whole damned ship, and, for all I know, the whole base will know first.”

“Huh?” Park took out a joystick and pressed it against his arm. In about a minute he’d be far more awake and alert. “What are you talking about?”

“Just had a go-round in the sim with Fenitucci. I got her, so she tracked me down in the club. Turns out just about everybody knows what I’m training for and at least as much detail as I do. You’re G-2 here. If everybody knows I’m supposed to ride the keel of the Odysseus when it moves out, do you suppose that the people on the Odysseus won’t know it, too?”

“It’s possible. Sticking around all this time is what does it. You can’t keep a secret worth a damn on a small port like this when they just sit out there and drop by the local bar every night or two. It was expected, although I don’t think they really believe anybody would actually do it. N’Gana wouldn’t do it, and he’s a first-order psycho. Of course, they’re being so all-fired conspicuous that I almost think they want you along. Or somebody from the Navy, anyway. Maybe as insurance against the Dutchman, maybe for their own reasons. If that’s the case, I expect that they’ll get you inside just before they inject. In the end, it doesn’t matter.”

Harker was incredulous. “Doesn’t matter! That’s my ass on the line out there! Nobody knows what it’ll be like, or what it’ll do, considering the effects on folks like us riding inside through a genhole.”

“Oh, the only problem is keeping you secured against the very strange forces that come into play in there,” the intelligence officer responded with the same casualness as before. “So long as the suit’s integrity holds, and this one’s been designed to do just that, there won’t be any difference to you if you’re inside or outside. Inside the suit, you’re inside, period. Don’t worry. We’ve spent a lot of time and lots of brains have been on this. We’re pretty sure we have it all right this time.”

He stared at the commander. “What do you mean, `this time’?”

“Well, it’s not exactly done all the time, nor does it need to be. We can usually use robots, after all.”

“Maybe you ought to use a robot this time, too,” Harker suggested. “What can I add?”

“On-the-spot evaluation, my boy! Don’t worry so much!” He paused a moment. “Say—you want to see what’s going on in there?”

“Huh?”

“Sure. Have a seat. It’s been a real battle of wits with Madame Krill in there, but even she doesn’t have everything we have. Come! Sit! Visual, security code A seven stroke three tilde bravo two level. Show digest.”

The wall opposite the utilitarian couch in the commander’s two-room quarters flickered on, and for the first time Harker saw the inside of the passenger quarters aboard the Odysseus. It was quite luxurious compared to Navy ships, more like a passenger liner for the very rich in its appointments and comforts. The view was from above and slowly proceeded down a corridor until it opened into a major lounge. Top of the line robotic bar, what looked like real fruit on the tables in tasteful bowls, very plush seating, and at the far end a screen and stage area.

“They have shows? Or does the old lady sing for them?”

Park chuckled. “Want to see the old bat? Visual—show us Anna Marie Sotoropolis, please.”

The scene jumped, and then settled. The scene was the same, only now there were people in there; it clearly had been a bit busier and had not yet been cleaned and freshened. There was only one person visible, a tiny figure sitting in the center relative to the screen and perhaps twenty percent back. She seemed to be listening to something, but there was not at the moment any audio.

“She does this a lot,” Park told Harker. “Sits there for hours and listens to recordings of her old opera gigs. Never visuals, never performances just audio. I think she really loves the music but she can’t stand to be re-minded of what she once looked like. You’ll see why in a moment. Ah—there!”

Even as somebody used to and victimized by the ravages of space, Gene Harker gasped at the sight. She was a mass of tumors, ugly, multicolored, hanging so densely in places they looked like bunches of grapes. The head was deeply scarred, and the face—the face was certainly human, but it looked like that of someone who’d been dead for quite some time, buried, and exhumed. The arms looked like a skeleton’s arms, just brittle purplish skin over clear bone. She was among the most repulsive sights he’d even seen, even on a battlefield.

“She’s built into the cozy,” Park told him. “The integration’s the best money can buy. How much of her is machine and how much isn’t it’s impossible to tell, but you got to figure that the horror you can see is all her. Skull and bones infected by pus bags. Makes you puke, huh? Little wonder she goes out only wrapped from head to whatever she uses for feet.”

Harker looked away in disgust. “She said she was over nine hundred years old.”

“Probably true. And probably she’s over two hundred and fifty chrono, which makes her one of the oldest living humans in either measure. You wonder why she hangs on, don’t you? She goes to mass every day, but she sure still hangs on.”

“And she doesn’t care if she’s seen like—that on board?”

“Oh, yeah, she cares. But it’s her ship, as it were. At least, she’s the ranking family member. When the others don’t need it, she goes in, shuts off all access, removes the stuff so that she can plug into a maintenance and rehab port built in under that place in the deck, and gets her blood changed, her organs checked or worse, her biomechanical parts regenerated as needed, and so on. When they’re close to that old, there’s usually so much biomachine in the brain you don’t even have a big personality any more, just a lot of data, but she’s still in there, somewhere. Otherwise she’d never bother listening to the old performances. She has them, after all, entirely recorded as data in her head. No, when she’s there, she’s eighteen or twenty again, on stage at some famous opera hall, singing the role of Carmen, or Desdemona, or whatever. Kind of sad, really.”

“Anything on the others?”

“Yeah. We have to deactivate these microprobes after a little while, which means completely deactivating, when Krill makes her sweeps, but we have plenty of spares. That’s the negative of sitting in one place so long when your opposition owns the dock, the communication lines, the service department, you name it. We can make ’em a lot faster than she can find and kill them. My techs play a little game with her much of the time. Her ego says she outsmarts us; our egos don’t come into play because we either get transmissions or we don’t. Visual—latest briefing, please.”

The scene changed again, less sad, more menacing. There was N’Gana, enormous and mean-looking, blacker than night and in combat fatigues that made him look like he was about to single-handedly overthrow a small planetary government. His aide, or batman as he was called in the services and by the former Ranger colonel, Alan Mogutu, looked far different—light and reflecting his half-Hamitic, half-East Indian heritage. Mogutu didn’t look at all imposing even in the same kind of fatigues, but he was a nasty fighter who stayed with N’Gana not only out of loyalty but because they were complementary parts of one mercenary machine.

In much lighter, more casual wear was Admiral Juanita Krill, a woman who was not only tall, taller than Harker’s one-fifty centimeters, but also large-boned. She wasn’t so much fat as imposing, and the fact that she had a bony crest going from above the eyes back and over the skull and terminating near the back of her neck made her look almost alien. The crest was actually a fairly common effect, as were the tumors, but on her it didn’t look like a deformity. It, well, worked.

She wasn’t known for her brawn or fighting abilities, though. She was known as The Confederacy’s greatest expert on planting and finding eavesdropping and other such devices. In an age when these might be nanomachines created in the food preparation modules and inserted in your morning coffee, this was impressive. So, of course, was Commander Park.

“You worked with her, I believe,” Harker commented.

Park nodded. “I was one of her proteges. She made me an offer when she left the service to do all the things we wouldn’t allow her to do and get better paid for it, but I turned it down. I was impressed that she was here. I actually sent her an open invitation to get together in town or up there or anywhere else to talk about old times but I never got a reply. Of course, she’s prohibited from all service facilities and installations, but there’s plenty of places beyond the Cuch. Too bad.”

“The others?”

“The little twitch who looks like a chicken is van der Voort, you know the good Father Chicanis, the lady who looks like an Oriental bowling ball is Doctor Takamura, our physicist, and the thing slithering in that looks like a furry snake with pop-up eyes and sharp pointy teeth is our Pooka. Last, but not least, the fairly pretty lady with no growths and her own hair is Doctor Katarina Socolov, a recent graduate of Mendelev University who specializes in cultural anthropology of all things. You make any sense of the group?”

“I’ve been trying. You?”

“I think they’re going to attempt a landing on a Titan world. In fact, I’d stake my professional reputation, which is nonexistent for the most part, that they are going to attempt a landing on Helena, the Karas family’s home in the pre-invasion days.”

“But that was two, three generations ago! What could possibly be left there for them now?”

“Something very important. Something that’s so important they’re willing to bet that the impossible can be done, and that they can get in and somehow get out again with it. Something that would have survived the Titan-forming of the planet, which means it’s well underground.”

“Money?”

“Does that family look like it needs money? I don’t think so. And, as you point out, probably not family members, either. So—what? We’ve run through the entire panoply of things that it might be, and some of the best analytical and psychoanalytical computers have combined every piece of information relating to the family or the world, and we’ve come up with nothing likely that’s worth this kind of risk.”

Harker looked over the motley crew. “It’s a device, that’s for sure. One that they can move but aren’t sure how to get working. That’s why there’s a brilliant mathematician and a top physicist along. To figure it out, or make it do what it’s supposed to. The mercenaries are for protection as needed, the anthropologist just in case there is some semblance of humanity that can be contacted, and the priest is there in case divine intervention would help. The old lady knows where it is but won’t be going. She’s bankrolling the operation and overseeing it. God knows what the Pooka’s for, but they have really good vision in near total darkness and can squeeze into holes and crevices we can’t. Ten to one it’s the bag man. How am I doing?”

“Oh, great. As good as our best computers, in fact. Thing is, now tell me how the hell they expect to get back? Once they’re down there, their best automated stuff won’t work. The Titan power grid will drain everything from them in a matter of seconds. That’s why there are no robots or biorobotics in this batch, so they understand that. It’s the old-fashioned way. Fist and kick and knives and the like. Mogutu will be essential there. Black belts in five disciplines, among other capabilities. N’Gana is more the brute force type, but he’s effective. He was accused of strangling an entire squad with his bare hands. Unfortunately, they were on our side.”

“He didn’t know?”

“He knew. He just didn’t care. They screwed up and pissed him off.”

“Sounds like he deserves to be stuck down there.”

“Could be. But how’re he and the others going to get back up? The only way you can do that is to shut down the entire Titan planetary grid. We don’t even precisely know what they are or how they work or how they live, but we do know that the humans they deign to ignore they consider local fauna to be allowed to roam, or maybe be captured and bred for some quality or another. Nobody comes out who goes in. Maybe their genes do, but not them. If we could blow up the power grid, even make a dent in it, we could beat them, but if it drains all power from anything it doesn’t recognize and if we don’t know what it is exactly or how it works and the best minds we have just can’t make a dent in it, then how the hell do they expect to shut it down? Those types aren’t suicidal, and all the money in the universe can’t compensate for being stuck down there living the life of a savage until something, kills you.”

“What are they talking about?” Harker asked, looking at the assemblage and noting that the old diva was there, now again looking like she had in the Cuch, under a hood and veil and baggy dress that made her, well, social again.

“Audio up to normal,” Park commanded. “Begin at briefing start.”

All the people in the lounge now were suddenly seated except for Father Chicanis, interestingly enough, who stood to one side of the screen.

“Isn’t the priest a Karas?” Harker asked. “Maybe he’s more than divine intervention. Maybe he’s the family’s man on the expedition. True faith in God would help on that score here.”

“He is and you’re right.”

The priest was speaking.

“Good day, ladies, gentlemen, others,” he began in his sermonizing voice. Harker had heard that kind of voice before; it seemed to be taught by seminaries throughout The Confederacy and perhaps since the beginning of religion. He’d grown up being hauled to church every Sunday morning to hear that. “I apologize for the lengthy lay-to here, but we have had some coordination problems with the last member of the team. We are now awaiting word on whether to wait longer or to proceed and rendezvous en route. That is beginning to sound like a more practical course. It’s not that our objectives mean anything less if they are accomplished next month or next year rather than now, although word has come that a new force of Titan Ships is incoming, and this will increase our journey through hostile space and possibly get us mixed up with the inevitable refugee flights if we don’t proceed before that begins. It is also boring here, and they are going mad, I think, trying to figure out what we are up to here. Every new day we lay to in this port is one more day they have to compromise us.”

“You got that right,” Park muttered to himself.

“Not to mention the fact that you haven’t told us squat about just what our objective is,” N’Gana commented in his deep and imposing bass.

“You knew that from the start, Colonel. We will reveal nothing more than we must. We had to reveal a bit too much just to get all of you on board, but we dare not discuss that here. While Commander Krill is the best at what she does, she informed you all two weeks ago that her Navy counterpart here is up to the task, too.”

“I just love that part,” Commander Park commented. “I play it over and over.”

“So when do you expect word on this last person?” Takamura asked the priest. “It is not the most pleasant of things to just sit here and dwell upon the odds against us on this mission. I have many research projects I could be working on or returning to. Nothing but something of this enormity, which I must see to believe, would take me from them as it is.”

“A hundred percent funding on all your projects and all those able associates of yours and your students should make what you left behind bearable, Doctor,” the old diva put in. “We’ll have no more of this sort of talk. If you were not here, most of those projects would not have been funded anyway. We are coming to the end of humanity’s road, Doctor. I will do everything in my power, so long as I can hold myself together, to do anything at all that will ensure that, somewhere, sometime, somehow, there will be humans about who are not only capable of appreciating Aida but are able to hear it sung. We all have our crosses to bear, as it were.”

“Well put, Madame Sotoropolis,” Father Chicanis responded. “We’ll have no more division at this point. It’s the price of having sat here too long, I fear. I shall pray that we will get our instructions to move as early as those instructions can reach us. In the meantime, we will use the simulator aboard to hone our skills in a nontechnological environment. Any questions?”

“Yes, one,” Katarina Socolov, the youngest and newest, put in. “Can I, or we, just go down to the port for an afternoon? We train and train, and I’ve even gotten the simulator program running with far more realism than anything you had before, but you can be overtrained. We need a break. Or, at least, I need a break.”

“Audio and visual terminated,” Park commanded, then sat back in his dressing gown and munched on a candy stick. “So, seen and heard enough?”

“They have a simulator up there?”

He nodded. “State of the art. Same corporation that made ours, in fact. Only their program is to drop you on a Titan world wearing nothing but a smile and a machete or similar weapons, no food or water, no nothin’, and set scary but artificial Titan globes after you if you do anything to attract attention. That was the basic program, anyway. You just heard that our cute little anthropologist there has made it a lot more realistic.”

“They’re gonna mutiny if they don’t move soon. I’ve seen that kind of fidgeting among those kind of folks many times before.”

Park agreed. “They’re more than ready. You know, they’ve agreed to let Socolov and Takamura come down and just have dinner in town, relax and unwind. You think you can spend a little time in makeup today and become irresistible? Neither of them saw you before; you might just have a pleasant evening and also learn something. A nice dinner, a few drinks, maybe a neurostim or so, walk by the river under the stars—who knows? Two bored, lonely girls with a good-looking guy like the one we can simulate with you, and maybe they’ll spill their guts out.”

It wasn’t the kind of thing Harker felt all that comfortable doing, but it was worth a try. “If I can get some sleep while they work on me, sure. Why not? Any idea who they’re waiting for?”

Park shrugged. “For all I know it’s the Dutchman. Would you recognize him? Would I? I doubt it. It’s a nasty disguise by somebody who’s really good, that’s all.”

“You don’t think he’s just a code here?”

“Why bother? With the trillions of possible codes they could use, why use one that attracts all this official attention? No, I think the Dutchman is very much involved in this. I just don’t know how or why. Maybe you can get the ladies to tell you.”

“Or maybe the ladies will tell me where to go or give me a judo chop to the groin,” Harker responded pessimistically.

“Ah, you’re such a romantic!” Park sighed.

He got Harker off to makeup not long after that, and then cursed the fact that he was now, and would remain for a few more hours, one hundred percent wide awake. Might as well get dressed and go to work.

At least, Commander Park reflected to himself, he’d gotten Harker’s mind completely off the subject of the original cause for their meeting.

The scars on Harker’s face were minimized, the growths that inspired them gone, and the hair and eyebrows all firmly planted, although nobody had ever figured out a way to keep them from itching in the short term. The neatly trimmed beard, though, was something of a giveaway to anybody who knew much about the Navy, since it was a standard man’s disguise of the scars of repeated space travel. Because of that, he’d decided not to disguise his affiliation or rank at all, but instead wore a standard dress uniform with his warrant insignia on the shoulders and his service stripes and ribbons prominent. It had been so long since he’d put the damned thing on that it surprised him he had so many legitimate decorations. It was another reminder that he was getting old for the kind of active duty he was putting himself back on.

He was instantly glad that he had opted for a more open look when he saw the two women sitting in the restaurant looking over a real printed menu and sipping local wine. He’d spotted Alan Mogutu, wearing casual clothing, lounging on the street just outside the place, clearly keeping an eye on the pair. He wondered if they thought he or, more likely, Park—would have the women kidnapped and debriefed with a hypno and a telepath. He suspected that it was just a precaution. Still, Mogutu would have spotted in an instant any attempts by him to disguise what he was, just as he’d instantly noted the mercenary even though most other people wouldn’t have given him a second glance.

The place wasn’t crowded. In fact, it was almost empty, less a comment on its quality than on the hour, which was early for dinner. They were barely open, and their peak wouldn’t come for something like two or three hours. It was also a routine workday bracketed by more of the same, not the kind of day when large groups decided to splurge on something decent.

He liked the old-fashioned fanciness of restaurants like these, but they were expensive enough that he needed to ensure that the expense account would cover it before he dared enter. In this case, he slipped the mustachioed maitre d’ a small trinket and indicated with his eyes that he wanted to be seated near the ladies. The fellow smiled knowingly and led him to a table one over from the pair.

He’d barely gotten seated and reached out to look over the wine list when he heard the two discussing entrees. This kind of restaurant experience was extremely rare, even for university doctors, and he suspected that they were trying to decide just which of the real, not synthetic dishes on the menu might be palatable.

He glanced over at them and decided to try the quick opening. “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help hearing you trying to figure out the menu. I’m pretty familiar with the local dishes if you’d trust a stranger to make a recommendation or two.”

Takamura didn’t seem all that keen on the intrusion, but Socolov, the young anthropologist who’d wanted to get out anyway, picked right up on it. “Why, thank you—uh? Lieutenant? Captain? What is that rank? Sorry—Navy isn’t my strong suit.”

He grinned. “Warrant officer, ma’am. A kind of ancient rank that’s in and out over the centuries because, like commodore, it’s sometimes useful. Let’s say that I’m higher than a chief petty officer, but I’m outranked by the merest ensign but paid better. They give it to people who have very special skills they’re afraid will quit the service, or, sometimes, to people who win high awards by being stupid and getting themselves blown up and then declared heroes.”

She found that amusing. “And which are you?”

“Urn, well, considering I’m a supervisor of the Shore Patrol, the Navy cops, at the base here, let’s say I’m not on the skill level. I got shot up and survived; few others did during that engagement long ago, and they needed a hero for the press, so that’s me.”

“I’ll bet you’re just being modest. Would you care to join us, by the way? It seems quite silly for us to be calling table to table.”

He looked over at the wan Takamura. “I don’t want to intrude, and three’s company. I’m not sure that your companion likes Navy men.”

“Oh, it is all right,” the physicist responded softly, with a surprising accent. “So long as it is a purely social thing.”

“Understood,” he responded, snapping his fingers for the human waiter to come over. “I’m joining the ladies. Just move a setting over, please.”

The waiter nodded knowingly. They did the illusion of the old days really well here; he suspected that once that waiter vanished into the back, there was nothing but a robotic prep center programmed with the dishes of all the local and a few internationally famous chefs, but, what the heck, illusion was always what fancy restaurants sold even in the old days. Ambience, they called it. That and a menu that inevitably had a lot of stuff in French on it.

“I guess I should introduce myself first,” he said, settling in on a proper chair between the two. “Gene Harker, of the frigate Hucamarea, in port here at the Navy base and getting a refit.”

“Kati Socolov,” the cute anthropologist responded.

“Doctor Takamura,” the physicist added, getting the formal distance down cold. He suspected that she was already sorry she’d come. She was, therefore, the one to work on a bit.

“Well, Doctor, if I recognize your accent and ethnicity, you probably have an appreciation for sushi and sashimi. Unfortunately, nothing much of that sort here, but—” he looked at the starters “—the conami cocktail here is a well-prepared and spicy raw shellfish on a salad bed. We have several officers of Japanese or Korean ancestry aboard and they find it quite tasty.”

Socolov looked at the menu and shook her head. “Not as easy for me. I normally don’t like to eat heavy meals, but it has been a long time between decent restaurant stops and it may be awhile again.”

He nodded. “Well, there’s a mixed tungi plate here, which is fried and broiled local vegetables, all fresh, with a spicy sauce. It’s excellent. If you don’t think you can eat it all and something else, I’ll gladly share with you.”

“Fair enough! And what for the main course, then?”

“If you like fowl, the duck is excellent, and it’s true duck. It was imported here a couple of centuries ago and has become a main protein source. I’ll be stereotypical Navy and order the fillet, so there will be a good representative of local things on the table. The local blush wine might cover us.”

“My! You are the gourmet here!”

“Well, I’ve been stuck here for months, so there’s only so much you can do. The joints near the base are really joints, crawling with bugs and lowlife and with food and drink that makes the stuff on a Navy frigate seem good, and the on-base clubs are very limited. I try and get away once in a while to the city for something decent, even if it costs me an arm and a leg, because it is the only civilization I get, and, like you said, it might be a long time between decent meals.”

“This meat and fish and fowl is all true animal matter?” Takamura asked, dropping a slight bit of reserve. “Yes, the real thing.”

“I did not think they still killed things for people to eat in civilized areas,” she responded, sounding more concerned than chilly. “It seems so—unnecessary. Cruel and unnecessary, considering how perfect synthetics are these days.”

He shrugged. “Some people just think that the real thing has a taste and character that the best synthetics don’t. Sometimes that means all the things you forgot, like gristle, bone, inedible parts, but there’s a mystique to it. You can get natural, all-vegetable dishes here, of course, if that is what you require.”

“No, I—I believe I should not eat here. This is a place of death that pretends to be a place of delight. I cannot support it.”

“Then I won’t eat, either,” Socolov told her, and everybody got up together, much to the consternation of the waiter and maitre d’.

“No, no! Please! This was a mistake! I should have known it! I will get a taxi back. You remain and eat a good dinner and we will speak later.”

“You’re sure?”

“Do not worry! This man will make sure no harm comes to you, I think.”

“But perhaps not to you,” he responded quickly. “Eh? What do you mean?”

“Call for your taxi from inside and remain there until it arrives,” he advised her. “There was a man across the street in the shadows when I came in who only had eyes for this place, and he wasn’t looking for me. This can be a dangerous place, in this day and age, when so many desperate people feel they have no reason to remain civilized.”

It really got to the physicist, and she walked over, ignoring the maitre d’, and peered out. “Where?”

Harker walked over, looked out, and squinted. “There! In the alley over there and to the left of the store. He’s smoking something. You can see the burning ash every so often.”

She frowned. “You see much better than I do, apparently. Oh—yes, I see what you mean, but it would never have occurred to me that it had anything to do with us.”

“I told you, ma’am. I’m a cop. Would you like me to make the call for you, or would you prefer I escorted you to wherever you wanted to go?”

“No, no, that’s all right. Go back and have your dinner. I will take care of myself. The young lady has been under a lot of pressure of late and she can probably use a pleasant evening. I was talked into this but now realize that I do not wish to be here.”

“As you wish,” he responded, and went back over to Katarina Socolov. He was a bit proud of himself for doing that to both the Doc and Mogutu. Now the mercenary would have to decide who to shadow, and Takamura would think she was being menaced. Two birds with one stone.

“Goodness! You don’t think we’re in any danger, do you?” the anthropologist asked him.

“I doubt it. But it’s best to take no chances with things like that. Come, relax! Let’s make our order and at least have a decent meal.”

Over dinner—which she barely picked at—the two exchanged some small talk, he told her some true stories of his early life, the ones that you could still eat while listening to, anyway, and she opened up to him, if only in a generalized fashion.

“You’re a full doctor of anthropology?” he said, trying to sound amazed. “And you’re here?”

She laughed. “It’s not as amazing as all that. I’m fairly new, I’m heavily in debt with no close surviving family, and I’ve just finished a project with my old mentor and publication’s near. There’s not much call for my line of work in the remaining universities right now, and I needed funding for fieldwork, and I got an offer.”

“For a field study? Where? Surely not here? There’s not much anthropology on this dirt ball unless you want to study the dynamics of the common roaches when they reach fertile new planets.”

She laughed. “No, not here. I only found out where `here’ was when I decided to make this little foray. I gather we were all supposed to be off and well on the way, but instead we’ve been stuck here in orbit. Surely you must know that.”

He nodded. “Yes, you’re the talk of the spaceport, really. I’ve even met a couple of your passengers. I assume that they’re not all on your expedition. That ancient opera singer wouldn’t be much good in a fight.”

“Oh! You met Anna Marie! Isn’t she fascinating? Where did you meet her?”

“In a bar inside the spaceport, I’m afraid. She came in and asked whether a fellow who happens to be at the top of the Navy’s ten most wanted criminals list was here. Then she rushed off to the ship. A few others have come through this way, too. I gather you were already aboard?”

“Yes, they picked me up at the previous stop. Interesting about the criminal. What’s he done?”

“He’s a pirate. I know that sounds like an ancient and outdated term, but there’s no other word for it. He attacks and loots transports. He’s not only stolen a great deal. He’s murdered a considerable number as well. The mention of his name is one reason why everybody’s so curious about your ship.”

She seemed to think something over, then nodded. “I can understand your interest, then. So this wasn’t an accidental meeting?”

“Well, yes and no. I’m off duty, nobody assigned me to come and have dinner with you, but I happened to hear that the shuttle was coming down and that the taxi had been hired for here. I decided to see if it was anyone familiar or someone new, and, in the process, get an excellent meal on the expense account all of which has happened. Satisfied?”

“Yes, I suppose so. It’s kind of disappointing that it wasn’t more of a chance thing, at least for an evening. I’ll be off soon and that’ll be that, the way people come out of those holes different ages and such.” Something seemed to strike her suddenly, a thought she hadn’t entertained until now. “You know—I suppose that work I did has been published by now. Probably long ago back at the university. Professor Klashvili was getting on in years when I left him. He’s probably well retired now, unless he’s dead. Strange. It makes me feel so—cut off. He and the department and research assistants back there were the closest thing to family I had. Does it get to you like this?”

He nodded. “It did for a while. Then, over time, you get used to it and you simply don’t factor it in. You try not to establish any long-term relationships with people who aren’t going where you’re going, for one thing. We get to thinking of our ship and company as our family.”

“You don’t have one of your own?”

“No, most career Navy don’t. If you decide on a family, you wind up on a base and on port duty, period. You don’t go into space again unless you take the family with you, and Navy vessels aren’t built for real families. Spacers just don’t have homes except our ships. A lot of us are orphans—of which there’s a ton now that migration has turned to refugees overrunning all creation—or greatly estranged. Just make sure that when you decide to settle down, you settle down in a place you can grow old and die happy in.”

She stared at him with sad big brown eyes. “And where’s that, Mister Harker? Where’s that?”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? If we could just make a jump to another arm, we’d have an escape route, but nobody who’s ever tried it ever came back. I dunno. So, let’s get on a happier note. What is your specialty, anyway?”

“Retrogressed cultures,” she responded. “There’s a ton of them out there even now. Early religious colonies that got themselves deliberately lost and wound up building very primitive societies when they were cut off from The Confederacy, social experimenters, political radicals wanting to build their own colonies, that kind of thing. Mostly they cut themselves off on marginal worlds off the beaten tracks centuries ago, and they all thought, of course, that they could build a higher or better culture with no dependence on the old system. In many cases it’s less anthropology than recent archaeology, since they die out a lot. The ones that succeed can quickly become bizarre, even in a few short generations. They are, however, the finest living laboratories on human behavior and cultural evolution that exist, particularly since it’s unethical to deliberately do it to people or groups.”

“Got an example?”

“Hundreds, but I’ll just be general for now. The one rule we have found to be eighty percent true: people as a group will survive under the most incredible conditions, and sometimes even thrive. There is a significant deviation but primarily as a group dynamic—a charismatic leader or some such who leads the desperate and trapped group to mass ritual suicide or the like. For the most part, however, people find a way, often by doing things that would have been inconceivable to them before. We’ve found cannibalism developing in desperate situations far more than we’d thought, for one thing, and even if they find a way to get around needing it as an emergency food source, it tends to remain as ritual. The general consensus is that the first practitioners are unwilling. They must eat some of their number to get out of a particularly nasty situation or they all die. After that, they have to justify it to themselves or they feel guilty, often consumed by guilt and nightmares. So, to deal with it as a survival practice rather than as a one-time thing, it becomes some kind of religious experience.”

“Seems to me that if you began eating your fellow human beings, you’d soon not have any fellow human beings. The last two survivors would be hunting each other,” he noted.

“No, no! It’s counterproductive if you do that, and you’re right, they’d all die. But suppose you were trapped by a seasonal thing—subzero cold and snow, or a long dormancy before crops appear, or a drought. Then it becomes more of an imperative, and after that it becomes something you have to justify to posterity. You keep it alive in limited form as a ritual—as many early human civilizations did back on our ancestral world—so that if the need arises you won’t have to go through heavy moral judgments or angry fights to do it.”

He considered it. “I often wonder what happened to any survivors who weren’t captured or whatever the Titans do to survivors after one of those worlds gets changed. You think they survive, maybe underground?”

“Oh, I think they survive even on the surface. The Titans’ ultimate objective appears to be, well, gardening.”

“Huh?” He’d been dodging and weaving around the bastards for decades but he’d never heard that before.

She nodded. “The worlds they remake are uniformly in a temperate range that runs from sixteen to forty-eight degrees Celsius. That’s basically subtropical to almost hot-house, but it’s entirely within the life range of our race. Much of it is simply reseeded with Titan variations of local flora that can stand up to this range, lots of trees, lots of nutrient grains and grasses, but in the center of each growing area is a vast swath of, well, gigantic and exotic-looking alien flowers. You’ve certainly seen the photos. That’s what they do. They move in and they start planting and raising exotic flowers. Perhaps they compete at Titan flower shows. Who knows? At any rate, on a majority of worlds they use hybrids we’ve introduced there in the past for fruit and grain, even things like vegetables and sugar cane and the like. It’s possible to sustain a fair population on that.”

“I knew about that. But they’d have to keep their numbers low to avoid attracting attention to themselves, and they’d be limited to totally non-powered tools. Kind of an animal-like existence. I’ve seen surveys of worlds after a few decades that can show life-form densities, and we’ve never picked up anything that might be a significant population of humans. They’re down there, but they’re few and scattered.”

“Yes, but they’re still there. I would love to be able to find out what sort of life they were living down there.”

“You could—but you’d be stuck living it for the rest of yours.”

She sighed. “I know. Well, let’s face it, Mis… Gene. The way things are going, that may be the only place we’ll have to settle down and have families after a while. That and on gypsy ships wandering around space and trying to avoid the shiny new masters.”

It was not a thought he liked to dwell on much.

The evening didn’t end up in any kind of romantic tryst, nor had he expected it to, but he did take her out for a bit of play in a sim arcade—where she proved pretty good at the rather basic scenarios the game companies created—and even a bit of dancing. When it was very late, he took her back to the spaceport personally and called for the shuttle.

“Thank you,” she sighed. “I had a wonderful time, and I really, really needed it.” She paused. The smile and glow faded. “I guess this is goodbye, though, huh? Unless we’re stuck here for another eternity, this is it. I’ll go one way, you’ll eventually go another, and even if we meet we might be fifty years apart in age. I might look like Anna Marie and you might look like my old professor!”

He sighed. “Could be. But, hey, you just never know in a shrinking universe, do you?”

Not when I want to go wherever you’re going—not for your charms and company, nice as they are, but because I’ve got to know. He wondered, for the tenth time that night, whether, at the moment, she knew any more about where they were headed than he did.