Issue 6

© Wyrm Publishing, 2015
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the sixth issue of Forever Magazine!

Over at Clarkesworld this month, I spoke about how July is a month of landmarks for me. In particular, it marks the anniversaries of the founding of Clarkesworld and the heart attack that almost killed me three years ago. Both of those events occured at Readercon (readercon.org), which I’m returning to again this month. With the exception of the heart attack year, I always have a good time there and, as usual, I’ll be set up in the dealer’s room firesaling my long-closed bookstore’s inventory and promotion my magazines. I’ll also be participating in two panels: “The Future of Speculative Fiction Magazines” and “Insider Tips and Tough Truths of the Publishing Business.” If any of you will be in the Burlington, MA area July 9-12, you should definitely check it out. Either way, I hope to recap some of what was said in next month’s editorial.

We’re now six months into Forever and I’m mapping out the next six. I’ve resigned Ron Guyatt (www.ronguyatt.com) for the next six covers and have just started another fiction buying spree. At this point, I’d love to hear from some of you. The feedback would be very useful as I continue to map out the future course of this magazine. Feel free to say hi at Readercon or drop me an email at neil@clarkesworldmagazine.com. You can also make fiction suggestions over at the Forever Magazine website (forever-magazine.com).

As always, thanks for reading! If you enjoy the issue, please tell a friend! Until next month . . .

-Neil

Feral Moon

Alexander Jablokov

The corpses fell from interior of the moon like drops of water from an icicle. The body repatriation team that hung in the open space just outside the blast crater maneuvered back and forth and caught them in a grid of storage modules, one by one. Behind them, the stars moved slowly past.

To Kingsman, the module grid looked disturbingly like an ice cube tray. The repat team filled it in strict order, from one end to the other, then sealed and marked each module.

One body brushed against a twisted length of structural beam and spun slightly as it came down, making the team scramble. If they missed it, the body would float out of the crater and into open space, requiring an embarrassing, and expensive, recovery effort.

Preceptor Dakila Uy muttered in exasperation. “Clumsy. Looks like crap.”

Kingsman thought that was a beamed signal, for him alone, but maybe a member of Uy’s staff was noting it down, for later discipline. They were all hidden somewhere, out of Kingsman’s sight, leaving only Kingsman and Uy on the shelf in the crater torn out of the side of Phobos. From the look of the stretch of tile still left on the wall nearby, it had probably once been part of someone’s bathroom.

The team caught the body and flipped it into its module. These were the bodies of enemy combatants, of course. Defenders of Phobos. Their faces were displayed on the black shrinkwrap that protected the bodies. These were mostly file photos from their dogchips, sometimes cleaned up and reprocessed versions of the dead faces beneath, when no file could be found. Other identifying information appeared on their chests. Kingsman hadn’t been issued the proper codes, so they appeared to him as generic scribbles.

The lack of code access was just another annoyance for Kingsman to work through. More serious was the three days he had been stranded in orbit, within sight of Phobos but without access. The official story had been “safety concerns”.

Kingsman had a specific sort of power. Strictly speaking, he could only exercise it once. After that, he would be a hollow shell, without power to further influence events. He would need to use the weight of his single authority to gain cooperation in other areas. It was going to be a delicate game.

“Technically, you outrank me,” Uy said.

“I suppose all ranks are merely ‘technical’, Preceptor.” Kingsman had expected his encounter with Uy to start with a fight. He supposed he should be glad it was over something so petty. “I have the same rank as you, with three years’ seniority. But I’m not here to—“

“That’s ridiculous. What, they count time in prison as ‘seniority’? You lost all right to anything like that when you were convicted and sentenced.”

“I don’t want to argue about legal details. That’s not my area of expertise. Yours either, I suspect. My seniority might come into play if we’re fighting for spots on a ceremonial dais. Otherwise, it’s pretty much meaningless. I have no rights of command here. I do have the right to demand treatment appropriate to my rank and role. Which does not include being left in the hull of transport vessel for three days after my mission has already started.”

“Oh,” Uy said. “My apologies. We were preparing for a major push. Working every minute, preparing. You remember how that is, don’t you, Tony? Combat? Everything else takes second place. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant.”

The body modules were sealed and marked for chain of custody. Eventually, they would be returned to their families. Some diplomatic relations were still maintained with forces deeper within Phobos, though the political structure had fragmented, and it was sometimes unclear as to the authority of the counterparties.

This crater had been blown out of the side of Phobos during the surprise attack by the Alliance ship. It widened out beneath Uy and Kingsman’s feet, dangling lengths of pipe, shattered transport corridor, and strips of the reinforcing rings that kept the welded-together outer layer of the moon’s regolith stable. Phobos’ rotation was slow, creating just enough gravity for orientation. Every few minutes, the vast face of Mars would scrape past, filling virtually their entire field of view.

No one in the busy crater paid attention to it, any more than they paid attention to parade of enemy bodies. Instead, Kingsman felt himself the focus of interest from everyone working in the busy crater space, which was the ingress point for supplies to the Alliance forces fighting to conquer the moon. Some things could not be kept secret, and who he was was one of them.

“Are you at liberty to reveal the results of your push?” Kingsman said.

“It fully achieved its tactical objectives. Two more levels taken, and a significant pumping node. The Phobs can fight, but they’re doomed. There is no reason for your mission here . . . Preceptor.”

Kingsman had expected a desperate effort preceding his arrival. If a rapid success could be achieved, Kingsman’s mission might become irrelevant. Uy was showing off its fruits now: a parade of enemy dead. Alliance corpses would be moved more discreetly, with dark ceremonial. Three dead, five wounded, two seriously enough to be rotated out. They hadn’t been able to hide that from him. A reasonable cost, if you had a good basis for your mission.

Unsupported hope was not a good basis for anything, least of all military operations. Kingsman was more relevant than ever.

Anthony Kingsman was a tall man with big joints pushing out against his skin, and he knew that his spacesuit emphasized his boiled-and-mounted appearance. He wore his graying hair long, pulled back from his high forehead and tied back in a queue. Both the receding hairline and the gray hair were signs of his time in the prison asteroid, where aesthetic treatments weren’t part of the routine.

Dakila Uy was shorter and stockier, with dark skin and black hair he brushed straight up. He’d even made that hair an element of how his suit displayed him. He had a practiced way of staying absolutely still, as if he was the center around which all else revolved. He was the commander of a five-thousand-troop invading force, a challenging role at this point in a long war, and one that he had to play without a break. He did his best.

Kingsman knew Uy of old, from before his own disgrace, even from before the Rim War had become the disaster it now was. Uy was both brave and smart. More importantly, he was increasingly listened to in higher political circles. So he had maneuvered himself into command of the Phobos Expedition. Victory there would secure his reputation.

But some operations required more than bravery and intelligence. They needed a level of understanding beyond rationality. They needed a kind of twisted genius. They needed what looked a lot like luck. Instead of an easy victory, Phobos had turned out to be a desperate vortex that sucked down soldiers, resources . . . and reputations.

Surely Uy had to see that Kingsman was the only way he could salvage his.

“I’ll need access to all of your tactical records,” Kingsman said. “All pre-op intel as well.”

Uy snorted. “You can’t possibly live long enough to get through all that.”

“I’ll skim.”

“That’s more than I can give you,” Uy said. “At least for an operation that’s still forging toward victory. But I have something better. I’ve assigned a unit commander to put you in touch with what’s going on, right at the face. Full access, Tony. Just like you like. I think you’ll understand things a bit better once you’ve actually seen it. It’ll do you good to get back in combat. Though you probably got more than your share of action in the prison hulk. I hear the place wasn’t well managed for a while.”

Kingsman had seen more than he would ever want to share with anyone. Least of all Uy. “I could cancel this operation right now. You know that.”

Uy was silent for a long moment. “You could. But would it stick? Not with the troops, I can tell you that. And not with your controllers, either. They need you to at least give the appearance of looking things over. All you’d get from a snap recommendation is chaos. Lessened effectiveness. Defeat. Is that really how you want to play it?”

The hell of it was, Uy was right. An order to pull out that could be argued with was worse than no order at all. In addition, Uy knew Kingsman of old too. He knew Kingsman would compel himself to understand everything he could before making a decision. He knew he had a handle on Kingsman’s pride.

It was hard to bluff when you hadn’t been dealt any cards yet.

“She’s my best commander, Tony,” Uy said. “You’ll be in good hands.”

A figure detached itself from some overhead strutwork and dropped slowly down. For a moment, it looked to Kingsman like she would miss. But he had misgauged the Coriolis curve. While the path was straight with reference to the stars, the rotation of the moon made it seem curved relative to where they stood. The officer landed on the ledge next to Kingsman. He saw dark eyes, cheeks with decorative metal implants.

“Preceptor Anthony Kingsman,” Uy said, with forced heartiness. “Sub-Commander Leila Ferhat. SC Ferhat will serve as your guide to the Phobos Expedition.”

The last of the Phob bodies floated past and was packaged up. Kingsman noted that Ferhat kept her eyes averted. She hated this corpse parade. That would have been a possible way to bond with her, if hadn’t been for the fact that she clearly hated Kingsman even more.

Ferhat didn’t talk to him. Instead, she shot him a set of instructional and safety icons: click into the air supply on this reaction sled, make sure the partial pressure of oxygen is between these two bars, at least two of these five points must be secure for you to be considered attached to the sled, keep your hands to yourself.

Kingsman did as he was instructed. The sled dropped out of the crater and into open space. Kingsman felt the pressure as Ferhat activated the drive and they moved away from the spinning potato of Phobos.

The space around was crowded with Alliance vessels, dwelling units, and other gear. A spacecraft vectoring in from a long transfer orbit flared a reaction rocket and readied itself for docking.

None of this was visible to the naked eye, but of course no one used a naked eye in space, any more than anyone had a transparent face plate. Everything that Kingsman saw was intensively processed and information enhanced to interact optimally with his clunky evolved perception modules. The approaching spacecraft was clear in his vision, with its fuel pods gleaming in the light of the distant Sun, its list of combat medals streaming out behind it. Its reaction drive hissed as it slowed.

Every bump in the surface of Phobos was clear. The moon’s surface had once been a loose layer of regolith, which over the centuries had been welded into a thick radiation shield bound with stabilizer hoops, and then honeycombed with support tunnels. Stickney, the disproportionately large crater that had always been its biggest visual feature, was still there, like a beauty mark. The Alliance assault crater was some distance closer to the hub. The Phobs had expected any assault to come at that hub, since the surface was too thick for quick penetration, and so they had armored and reinforced it.

But the supposed tourist vessel had injected itself into the moon’s side, and detonated. Its shielded contents had ripped deep into the regolith, including its encapsulated Alliance troops, who had hatched and dug further in, until they came up through the floors of the lowest inhabited corridors and started their assault.

Even with processing, Mars looked like a plate of corroded metal, broken and crudely rewelded. Phobos had an absurdly low orbit, and moved faster than Mars rotated, so that they seemed to scud above the planet’s rusted surface, pursuing something that would never be caught.

Kingsman gloried in the information access. He now had full clearance, the same as Uy and his staff. He would have to watch carefully, to make sure that he wasn’t subtly cut off from something crucial. But for now, it was like being let out of a box.

Ferhat’s goal out here became clear: a battered vessel that was mostly heavy thrusters pointed in various directions. It was some kind of salvage tug. She maneuvered neatly and linked up to it.

“They really should get this reactivated and operating,” Ferhat said. “If we’re here much longer, neglecting cleanup is going to come around and bite us on the ass.”

She was challenging him. His job was to make sure they weren’t there much longer, no matter what.

His mission was supposedly confidential. Obviously, there was no way to keep a secret like that for long.

“That’s not why you’ve hauled us out here,” he said.

“Oh?” Her suit displayed a lean woman with a burn scar on her ribs. On leave she let her dark hair grow long, while on duty she kept it bristled. Her high cheekbones were made even higher by the metal implants, which she kept buffed to a high gloss. She kept her face display expressive so that her thoughts and moods could be read, as was standard intra-unit practice. What it expressed now was irritation. “Why, then?”

“You need intel,” Kingsman said. “You think you’re missing something. But why would you come out here to find it?”

The question was half to himself. He could see her considering how much was aimed at her. But if she was as smart as she seemed, she knew something: Kingsman might not have been her favorite court-marshaled ex-officer responsible for the unnecessary deaths of fellow soldiers, but he was still a useful resource for her. Would she use him wisely while she had him?

“Look.” She gestured toward Phobos, and it turned semitransparent, revealing a maze of tunnels and open spaces. “Settlement, two hundred years ago.” The tunnels receded to a cup around the north pole. She stepped the display forward by decades. The inhabited volume expanded slowly, going out past the equator just under the regolith, but much less than that along the axis. Then, in three major jumps, it excavated significant portions of the interior, opening out internal seas, high-pressure vacuoles, and dense residential matrices. Kingsman noticed that a lot of the corridors glowed a red that marked them as “dubious intelligence”. Those were Ferhat’s own markings. The general-access map—he called it up and overlaid it on hers—had no error bars around those regions.

“That’s a huge volume of stuff they needed to toss,” Ferhat said. “All asteroid colonies have high-entropic junk to get rid of. But the gravity of Mars and Deimos makes it tricky to really get rid of here, given the cost of reaction mass. Some always seems to come back to become a navigational hazard. They bought this thing from some shipyard. It puts out magnetic filaments hundreds of miles long. They form a field, and herd the debris into sturdier nets that haul it in.”

“But most of the debris must be non-magnetic,” Kingsman said.

“That’s why they hacked up this add-on.” Ferhat pointed and red dots appeared on two massive cylinders. “Seemed to work well enough. Those axial cylinders fire microscopic iron flechettes. No shortage of iron, after all. Radar detects all the debris. Anything that doesn’t respond to the magnetic mesh gets a flechette shot. If it vaporizes, problem solved. If not—now you’ve got a magnetic hook, and the mesh can catch it and drag it in.”

“Are you considering recycling those flechette guns for antipersonnel purposes?”

“You try hauling one of those barrels through the corridors. Might be a hell of a surprise for someone, if you managed to do it. No. Just let me take a look here, and I’ll get you down to the face. Clip in over here.”

She was suddenly brisk. Kingsman figured she felt he’d tricked her into treating him like a regular human being. That was inevitable, though tiresome.

The tug clutched two debris-filled meshes like a cartoon miser with moneybags. It must have just come back from a salvage expedition when the Alliance assault hit. Ferhat loosened one and started going through the chunks of rock it held, scanning each one quickly with several beam generators and sensors she pulled off the sled.

Kingsman allowed himself a few minutes of just letting the stars wash around him. It had been a long time since he’d been able to focus on something farther than ten or fifteen feet away from him. Prison asteroids weren’t much for long vistas.

But now it was time to be useful. She wasn’t sharing the data overlay she was using, mildly rude, though not a clear insult. What she was doing was really a job for half a dozen people with automated equipment. The debris ranged in size from tiny pebbles to head-sized chunks. Some was hundreds of years en route, others might have been excavated the day before the Alliance arrived. And there was several tons of it.

Here and there, amid the rough chondrites and phyllosilicates, bits of inlay glimmered, and a trace of carving caught his eye like a doomed hand reaching from quicksand. He grabbed it. It was part of human face, the cheekbone and the eye, with just a swirl of hair.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t make this take longer. I’m away from my command too long as it is.”

“Look at this. You think it’s from one of the transverse connecting corridors? Down in the Kloen District, maybe.”

“I really can’t rely on details like that.” Still, she took the bit of carving from him, and examined it with her scanner. “Isotopes match. Could be Kloen. Or nearby.”

“They must really have torn that area apart if they destroyed those reliefs to make defensive lines. They sacrificed a lot. Those reliefs were beautiful. At least, I’ve heard they were.”

She spoke to him reluctantly. “Kloen is just beyond our face. It looks like it will be a problem when we get to it. Plus, it’s kind of an independent collective now. Not even part of the same government as other parts of Phobos. Things are different out there.”

She finally shared her overlay. The debris she had checked over already glimmered with information. Each piece had a distinct isotopic signature that marked it as coming from a specific location within Phobos. If he called up a 3D image of the moon, he could see where they originated. She had particularly focused on those that came from the volumes marked in red on her own map.

“How long do you think they were preparing for our attack?” he said.

She shrugged, her suit’s body language amplification making it an elaborate gesture. “All I know is, we’re pressing into a volume that doesn’t match our intel, facing political organizations with their own agendas, and taking casualties doing it. I’m no longer sure that our objective is even valid.”

Uy had given him her tactical objective: a water node that supplied a good chunk of that volume of Phobos. Capturing it would change the balance of combat. But if she was looking for evidence to disconfirm her assumptions, she was a rare commander indeed.

“Could you use help going through this stuff?” Kingsman said.

He could see her struggle with an automatic refusal. Then: “Yes. It would make things go faster. And I think the Preceptor thinks I already have you upstairs, with my unit. I just took advantage of the opportunity to come out here.”

It took another hour, even with his assistance.

There were a couple of pieces of debris that weren’t excavated rock: a ring from a pressurized air pipe that must have blown off a malfunctioning airlock, and a length of shredded safety line marking a rescue attempt that failed at least two centuries before. But amid everything else were pieces newly sliced out of the moon. Given the unlikeliness of any given piece ending up here, they could extrapolate, and see that vast volumes must have been reorganized within Phobos.

“You have thoughts about this,” she said. “You know more than you’re telling me.”

“I don’t have a tactical job,” he said. “I just have—“

“If you have information or understanding, I need it. No matter what it is.”

If the dispositions were a disaster, he should leave them the way they were and order a pull-out. He was supposed to judge the situation and make an up or down decision. It wasn’t his job to fix anything.

“It’s possible your mission is the victim of a fairly extensive deception operation,” Kingsman said. “The main water line may no longer be any such thing.”

“They’ve been defending it fiercely,” she said.

“Well, now. They would, wouldn’t they?”

“That last assault was meaningless,” she said, mostly to herself. “Schorsky and Pandit died—“

“We kill them all the time,” Kingsman said.

“Well,” she said, as if realizing she had been getting too friendly with him, “you would know, wouldn’t you?”

The occupied interior of Phobos was a tangled mass of corridors. You couldn’t see anywhere more than a few hundred meters away. Here gigantic doorways swelled out into the path of traffic, there pits opened beneath your feet, to reveal family compounds with children chasing each other.

Ferhat pushed Kingsman from one security zone to another.

They passed a team of Phobs restoring a string of overhead lights, while groups of their relatives sat on stacks of household possessions and waited for their corridor to be habitable again. Phobs shared no particular physical look, except for the jointless way they moved through their spaces and long hair and loose clothing both sexes favored. No one looked at Ferhat and Kingsman.

Walls were cracked by small-arms fire. An Alliance casualty memorial glowed at a wider area, where a fountain trickled water. Ferhat gave the three dead marked there a discreet salute. The memorial was virtual, coded to their suits, and was tactfully invisible to the natives, though it was clear from the savage graffiti tattooed on the wall behind it that the Phobs knew it was there.

Past the memorial was another Alliance checkpoint, where a cold-eyed soldier examined Kingsman’s record, exactly as if he had not passed through three such points already. Behind the checkpoint was an encampment of occupation troops, installed in a couple of large apartments with open verandas on the corridor. They had their own power, and kept their spaces much more brightly lit than Phobs generally would. Every captured level of Phobos required a detachment of troops to keep it pacified. Discipline looked good, so far. But they had already been here longer than expected.

The soldier had been looking at Kingsman’s records, not at him. “My cousin died at Kalatra.”

Kingsman waited for the soldier to say something else, but the bare fact was apparently enough. So he nodded, as if the man had mentioned they had gone to the same high school, but in different years.

“Not relevant, soldier.” Ferhat suddenly crowded up.

“Sorry, ma’am. Not relevant.”

“We have a job to do here. I do, you do. He does.”

“You’re good to go.” The soldier stepped back, trying to get out of the range of her rage.

“What was your cousin’s name?” Kingsman said.

“You wouldn’t have known her.”

Kingsman waited.

“Murnau. Cassie Murnau.”

“Seventeenth engineers. She was power, running cabling up Big Cliff when it came apart.”

“That’s what we were told. Sir.”

They stared at each other for a moment, then Kingsman moved past. Ferhat followed him onto the elevator to the next level.

“Surely you don’t know everyone who died,” she said.

“In the first months of my imprisonment, my only reading was the personnel records of the casualties at Kalatra. They gave it to me as an additional punishment, not knowing that I would have requested it anyway. I couldn’t go meet their families, so that was the best I could do. So, yes, I do know everyone who died, or was wounded.”

She thought for a moment. “Wait.”

“Yes?”

“If she died during the Big Cliff operation . . . she died in combat.”

“Almost all of them died in combat.”

“You know what I mean! During the assault, before the junta’s surrender. Straight combat. Part of the victory. Not during the . . . repacification.”

“Well, I guess he didn’t see the difference. Most people don’t.”

“You should have explained it to him.”

“Most people don’t like to have me explain things like that to them. It’s really not worth it, Sub-Commander.”

The area above actually had a view, opening out to a high wall. Phobs slid up and down it on cables, passing through big stone doorways that led to yet more corridors. This area was well cleaned up. Plants grow up and down the big wall. People were gathered at tables, eating. One group looked like it was celebrating the wedding anniversary of an older couple. At least, a man and a woman sat together under a kind of canopy. If the Phobs had a family resemblance, it came from the fact that they appeared in Kingsman’s display just as their physical selves, without the extra information all Alliance troops provided. Their eyes were blank, and kept everything deep inside. The flowing gowns that concealed their bodies and the hair that swirled around their faces were just extra.

Two Alliance soldiers stood on top of a dividing wall, crowd hosers held lightly in their hands, and kept an eye on things.

Kingsman couldn’t help but see things tactically, and from that point of view this place was nothing but trap. Dead-end corridors, sudden level changes, sight lines blocked by a shop selling flatbreads grabbed from rotating platters or an emergency health center that was also a neighborhood social spot: Phobos was nothing but places to be slowed down, stopped, killed.

Anything a tourist found attractive, a soldier found a threat.

But now the moon had fragmented, feralized. The top-level political organization hadn’t survived the first demand for surrender. That had to have been planned along with the rest of their subtle defenses. Uy now had to deal with dozens of separate organizations that controlled power generators, transportation centers . . . and water supplies. Each had to be attacked or negotiated with separately.

Phobos was a trap. That was why it had always been the touristic center of the inner Solar System.

Another two checkpoints and Ferhat and Kingsman finally came to the Lower Concourse, one of the biggest open areas in the moon.

The high ceiling hid in mist and light. The open surface was folded up into rocky hills and stable sand dunes, each one placed to conceal how the Concourse curved. Small shops and restaurants nestled in odd nooks.

Most of the owners had just had time to seal up and remove most of their equipment when the Alliance assault broke through. Rubble covered the mosaic dining floors. Multicolored glass bottles lay on the rocks, unbreakable and gleaming. What had once been decorative pools had cracked and drained through into lower levels, leaving dry sockets.

The Lower Concourse had been known for its beauty. People had traveled from all over the Solar System to see it.

Kingsman himself had once looked into taking a vacation here with his wife. He remembered flipping through the images: the steaming turquoise pools, the people tucked into the hot sand baths, the quiet spots where two people could be alone, at last, and figure things out.

It had proved impossible on a sub-Preceptor’s salary, no matter how he worked the numbers. He had never even mentioned that he was thinking about it. A few months after he gave up on the idea, Elise asked him for a divorce, and disappeared on a refugee relief effort among the asteroids.

A nice vacation somewhere other than her parents’ summer house wouldn’t have kept them married. It would just have saddled him with debts.

Still, it would have been something nice to have in his memories, to contrast to the years of combat followed by the years of imprisonment which were now most of the memories he had to work with.

Even in ruins, the Concourse was a comfortable space for surface dwellers, and most of the Alliance troops were from Earth. They’d set up their privacy units, waste recyclers, and mess facilities among the ridges and dunes. No one paid obvious attention as Ferhat led him into the encampment. That showed discipline.

Ferhat was good. Uy had made the wrong choice, putting his smartest subordinate in charge of Kingsman. Elise had understood him, even as she didn’t want to be married to him. She told him that the best weapon against him was stupidity. If Uy had had the sense to see that, he would have put Kingsman into the hands of a bland dullard who did things by the numbers. Kingsman would have been dragged around like a piece of luggage, unable to achieve anything.

Instead, with Ferhat, Uy had put a potential tool into Kingsman’s hands. He just had to figure out how to use it.

 . . . Don’t expect sentiment from an inhabitant of Phobos. To them, practicality is all. Any position can be traded at any time, if the difference in value is greater than the cost of making the transaction. The difficulty for someone who did not grow up running the corridors of Phobos is figuring out what they value, and what they regard as a transaction cost, rather than entertainment. They hold the value of friendship high, and so are unlikely to trade you. But they seem to be capable of living with a structure or work of art for a century, and then, when there is a chance of improving traffic circulation or providing a convenient storage area, of removing it without sentiment. We had come to Gravad to relax in the Ang, a well-known steam meditation cocoon, but found that it had been excavated, and the entire space around it was under some kind of repair. A cheerful old man offered to sell us bits and pieces of the famous curved walls, with their fine intaglio carvings, but we felt that was a bit like coming to see a famous palace, only to be offered a brick as an example of what it had once looked like. He remembered many happy visits there himself, but the fact that it no longer existed seemed of no concern to him.

 . . . we stayed on in Gravad, a zone not much liked even by other citizens of Phobos. It was excavated early in the settlement of the moon, and its vacuole-spoke pattern, once in fashion, is now regarded as hideous. Such distinctions are, of course, invisible to the visitor. After some search, we found a small, uncomfortable room, one that was both hot and noisy. Given our situation, the host didn’t even want to show it to us. He had purchased cubic from some defunct competitor and added it to his volume. He had not yet brought it up to the standards of his establishment, he said. But its location was just what we wanted, and he was persuaded. So we spent the night, sleepless, sweating, feeling the deep vibration of secret excavation in our bones, like a deep fever . . .

 . . . when people heard that were in the process of an initial investigation of the consequences of our wedding, we were recommended Breen Gardens, as appropriate to romance. Its trees grow across the hollow and bury their tops in the opposite wall, where some perverse manipulation of tissue turns them into roots again. It is necessary to bribe the monkeys to leave you in peace. That was not to her taste, she said. Too obvious, perhaps, or unnecessary to our own situation. Instead we visited a spot where romances are best ended. After all, the beginning of anything is inevitably the end of something else. The best spot for ending a relationship is one of the tiny restaurants at the top of Farnum’s Wall, with its eternal waterfall, either Left Phleb or Noricum. We visited both, and, if you are in the final stages of a once-passionate relationship that is now congealing around you, there are some features that may be of interest. Noricum’s pastries, delicious but stimulating a host of mysterious allergies, put you in the mood to do some serious damage to your once loved enemy. Left Phleb specializes in random blasts of air, sometimes freezing, sometimes smelling of decaying flesh. As it happened, some kind of repairs deep in the water system had left the famous waterfall a mere trickle. That was a disappointment. We could hear the well-rehearsed arguments of the couples at the other tables. For a couple in trouble, that might have been a balm: the absurdities of others’ romantic squabbles might lead one to question the significance of your own. As it was, the arguments seemed to indicate the pettiness of the reasons that brought them together in the first place, never an appropriate lesson for a couple who were, after all, on their honeymoon . . .

 . . . we were told to stay away from Demavend. That advice was well meant. Actually, it was the best advice we received on our trip. The reasons to stay away turned out to be legion: sullen shopkeepers, packed restaurants that felt like emergency pods carrying refugees from some great disaster, children who hid under the heavy corridor furniture and jabbed at our behinds with sharpened wires. And most of the reasons for going to Demavend turned out to be less than compelling: a tomb with no body in it; a famous view down a widening corridor that was blocked by netting as some useless cross tunnel was constructed; a concert hall so poorly designed that all we heard were echoes of the performance, echoes that seemed to last long after the performers had left the stage. But Demavend turned out to be the highlight of our trip. In it the sense of secret negotiation, of grim planning, of determination to remain neutral between two great forces, one controlling the resources of the Solar System, the other desperate to use them, seemed clearest and most manifest. It was in Demavend that we realized that we were married for a reason, and that reason might well keep us both alive . . .

“Who the hell wrote this?” Ferhat said. “I don’t think this showed up in the intel stream anywhere. Maybe that’s because no one could stand to read it. How did you get it?”

“Personal communication,” Kingsman said.

“In prison? They would have read it and incorporated it into the stream.”

“No. From before. Just before I went to Kalatra, in fact.”

That dread name gave her pause. “Don’t be coy, Preceptor. Who was it from?”

She’d picked up on his one area of reluctance. “A smart guy. One I respect. He’s married to . . . he’s now married to my ex-wife. He wrote these notes on their honeymoon.”

“He spent his honeymoon writing reports on water supplies and excavations?”

“Nam Lo is the kind of man who gets a lot done every day.”

“All I can say is, if that’s the guy who beat your ass in the husband sweepstakes, you must have been a real prize.”

“I probably could have stood some improvement.”

Ferhat and Kingsman sat together on the floor, leaning against a wall. Business went on all around them, and Ferhat occasionally had to answer a question or approve something. She would always let Kingsman know she was doing that, so he wouldn’t speak while she wasn’t listening. He appreciated the courtesy.

She turned back to him after making some decisions about resupply. “All right. Some of this guy’s observations match what I’ve suspected. But I don’t like my own conclusion.”

“Of course you don’t,” Kingsman said. “No one likes giving up a good working hypothesis. But deceptions do happen. And, if I’m right, this is a particularly good one. But this is just another hypothesis. I could be wrong.”

“Do you think that covers you?”

“What?”

“Saying ‘I could be wrong’.”

No one ever liked his method. When it worked, it seemed as if he had succeeded by accident, and when it didn’t, they blamed Kingsman for the failure.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “I could be wrong. But I’m probably not.”

She examined the exploded diagram of her team’s tactical target, even though she had taken it apart a dozen different ways already. “What if you’re right? What if we’re aiming at a false target? Will you immediately cancel the Phobos expedition?”

“I can’t swear that it won’t,” Kingsman said, after thinking it over. “Will that affect whether you order the recon?”

“Don’t push it.” After looking it over one more time, she closed the image. They were left alone with each other. “I don’t really have a choice. I can’t risk chasing an illusion and losing anyone else. I’ll give you two guys to check it out: Landor and Tutun. Good guys, maybe not quite nailed down around the edges.”

Kingsman checked their records as they flickered past his vision. Exactly as she said: brave men, fast, who exploited ambiguity in orders when it suited them.

“And you picked them because . . . ?”

“Because they’ll listen to the main thing I have to say to them, and act on it. And that’s this: if you get in trouble and saving you puts them at risk, any risk at all, they’re to abandon you. They’ll do that.”

“They might even enjoy following that order,” Kingsman said.

“Don’t worry, Kingsman. They’ll play it straight. If they can get you out, they will. Let me ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Were you surprised when they came to you in prison and offered you freedom in exchange for coming here and making this particular decision?”

Kingsman thought it over. “I don’t know about ‘surprised’. I calculated the odds as a bit less than one in two that someone would come for me within three years of my incarceration. I figured that after any longer my skill set would be outdated, making me significantly less valuable. It was two years and eight months. That meant things were bad.”

Ferhat pushed herself to her feet. “Were you surprised when your wife asked you for a divorce?”

That Kingsman didn’t need to think about. “Yes.”

 . . . I have seen asteroids with wet inner walls and dry heights, their interiors tangled with pipes, lifting buckets, rising columns of humid air condensing on cold sheets in the low-gravity zones, modified tree trunks with swollen xylem and phloem, high-surface-tension globules curving like balls in a some invisible game. At the gravity of a spinning asteroid even crude pumping schemes can lift water a great height. After generations of post-collapse life in such a space, cultural adaptations make it seem like a sensible, even noble proceeding, using muscle and improvisation to build an integrated life. But no one would ever have chosen it freely.

Water brings life, and it brings collapse. The two are linked. The sequence is inescapable. Human life requires water. And water inevitably destroys.

Water dissolves, it erodes, it corrodes, it decays. It is patient and it never stops its work. With it come microbes and other creatures that change pHs, secrete their own solvents, push tiny fibers into supposedly resistant walls, and swell their own fecundity into the cracks.

Water freezes. When it does, its pressure is irresistible. If a water-filled vacuole in rock is allowed to get too cold, its phase transition can split an asteroid wide open.

No matter how careful the inhabitants are, over time, all falls apart, water works its way through the inertial wall, and spurts, freezing, into vacuum. The result is a dead, hollow rock with an oddly high albedo from the ice crystals coating its surface.

Phobos has its secret inner seas. So far they have managed to keep them under control, as servants. That requires constant maintenance and a sophisticated social organization. Social failure would result in environmental failure. In a moon, there is no “state of nature”.

Near New South Corridor lies one of the more interesting attempts to unite water supply with spiritual entertainment . . .

Nam Lo probably didn’t even know that his personal notes had made their way to Kingsman. Elise’s biggest flaw might have been her belief that she had the right to keep or violate secrets based on whether she thought the goal was important enough

Not too long after her divorce from Kingsman, Elise had actually gone to the Concourse, sat down at a table—and sent a message to her ex-husband.

He had never known Elise to be cruel, but if sending your ex-husband a message from your honeymoon with your new husband wasn’t cruel, what was?

Kingsman had been en route to what seemed a routine military operation at Kalatra when he got the message. He tried to delete it without opening it. Then he stored it for a long time. Then, after his gamble had failed, and a lot of people had died, he had wondered how bad the message could be by comparison, and had opened it.

She had sent him an image of herself sitting at a table in the Lower Concourse of Phobos. Her thick dark hair was pulled back from her high forehead. Her protruding eyes, which showed white all around the iris when she was emotional, seemed even larger than he remembered. The fashion that month was for wind, and she was dressed for it, in a dress that seemed to be made entirely of velvet ribbons, and streamed out to the side, clinging to the well-remembered curves of her body. On the table in front of her were two plates, one with a smear of butter. But the chair next to her was empty.

Presumably Nam Lo had been off making some kind of observation, and hadn’t known what she was doing. That would explain how she had managed to code all of Nam Lo’s notes into the image. Despite clues, it had taken Kingsman a while to find them, and then he was just puzzled by them.

Now that he was here in Phobos, they seemed like the most important gift anyone had ever given him.

“This is crazy shit,” Landor muttered. “I ain’t going to lie about that.”

“I appreciate honesty,” Kingsman said. “In situation reports. Personal opinions you can keep to yourself.”

“Jesus!” Tutun’s tone was vicious. “I can’t believe she’s sending us off to get killed like this. I didn’t do anything. You do something?”

“Like what?” Landor rechecked his gear. He was a big man, with pale, pimply skin. His suit displayed his tattoos, and was festooned with way more than the regulation kit. “What could I have done?”

“I don’t know,” Tutun said.”Like not take care of that stupid ventilator, maybe. Did you screw up on the vent again?” Despite his visible irritation, Tutun kept doing his job, scanning forward as the three men scrabbled down the dark hallway, knee-deep in swirling trash. He wasn’t tall, but he was wide, with dark skin and oddly delicate features, like a doll.

“That vent’s just not working right,” Landor said. “Took a hit on the first day, been flapping like it’s dying ever since. That’s not my fault, Tutun. Not my fault at all.”

“You’re supposed to keep that vent working. So we can breathe. That’s kind of fundamental here. Breathing. Not like the Phobs are going to be sending oxygen down our way.”

“It’s not my fault!” Landor was sounding nervous. “Jesus, you think she’d send us out here with the Angle of Death because of a busted ventilator?”

“Commander Ferhat hates stuff that doesn’t work right. Like busted ventilators. Or the people who can’t get off their ass to get them to work. She’ll rip stuff out and rewire if she has to. No sentiment. That’s what I like about her.”

“’Angle of Death’?” Kingsman said.

“But what about you?” Landor said. “Why would she want to kill you?”

“Come on, Landor, you serious? Me? She’d as soon kill me as assign me latrine duty. Of course, those things wouldn’t smell half so bad if that vent was working right . . . ”

“But why, man?” Landor was almost in tears. “What she got against you so bad?”

Tutun slapped Landor on the shoulder. If Landor’s suit was at the regulation setting, he felt it on his skin. “Because I’m friends with you, hump. That’s pretty much the story. She sees that it unfits me for command. Makes me untrustworthy. Poor taste in shithole bros. But you know what? I’m sticking with you. To the end.”

“Screw you, man!” Landor stepped away, as if ready to throw a punch.

“This ‘Angle’ thing is still bugging me,” Kingsman said.

“Typo, for crissakes.” Landor directed his rage at Kingsman. “How else? That’s the first report we got, after Kalatra. So that’s what we stuck with. Like a prophecy, or something. That’s what most prophesies are, right? Typos and ‘what did you say?’ and shit. Like that. So you’re the Angler. We know you.”

“Mistakes can be intel too,” Tutun said. “Are we at the shit face yet?”

“We’re not looking for combat,” Kingsman said. “This is recon. You’ve done recon?”

“Not with you. Never with you. And I didn’t put getting killed on my list of things to do before I die.”

“Good one, Tun!” Landor chortled, wanting to be friends again.

“Come on,” Kingsman said. “We’ve got a specific thing to check out, and we’re done.”

They scrambled over a pile of rubble into a ruined kitchen cubby. Not too far above them started the Phob-occupied areas, where there were other kitchens that still worked, still fed people. Tutun pushed his fingers against a stretch of wall still stained with the remnants of old food.

According to local informants, there were several different political organizations in the area: a communal supply organization, a gang-run territory around a power unit, and a safety group of families that had started dictating personal dress and rules of conscience. Aside from confusing the geography, Phobos’ ruling clique had explicitly dissolved itself into dozens of contradictory and uncooperative political units. No single group had the authority or power to surrender the moon to the invading force. It was self-binding on a vast and deranged scale.

“This way.” Tutun blew a hole in the wall.

Kingsman was on point. He knew the other two could let him get ahead, and then leave him there. But if he kept worrying about things like that, he’d completely lose effectiveness. He went through the wall, and up the narrow access space that kinked up from there. After a moment, he heard the other two behind him. All around them was the whisper of occupied apartments.

From all evidence available to Ferhat, the main water lines through this volume. They supplied the unconquered parts of Phobos. If they could be seized, resistance would have to end.

That assumption had been the cornerstone of Ferhat’s dispositions. But she looked for disconfirming evidence. Kingsman could see that that was her particular gift, a rare one. That she could test and accept his evidence, despite not liking or trusting him, was even rarer.

Kingsman already suspected that the old water channels were no longer in use, that they were now a decoy and a trap. But he hadn’t invested himself and the lives of his troops in another interpretation of the intel. It was easier for him.

The three men came to the separation point. Tutun pushed off down a side passage, leaving Kingsman and Landor curled up like grubs, listening to the sounds of children’s voices, dishes, a rumbling piece of cleaning equipment just below them. They waited in darkness and silence, their very metabolisms slowed to minimize the burble of their blood. They would outwait anyone who might have heard them and raised the threat level.

Several hours later Landor shook himself, tapped Kingsman’s foot, and set off the microdetonations.

They dropped slowly into someone’s living room.

“Lie down, lie down!” Landor was yelling before his feet even reached the floor. “Hands over head. Down, down, down!”

The apartment had a complicated three-dimensional layout, with sleeping and other private areas dropping down below the entertainment/eating area that was their initial target. It hadn’t been chosen because it was an easy tactical problem. It had been chosen because it was the most likely spot for Kingsman to test the new hypothesis.

And because he had information that led him to think Elise might have been around this volume in the days and hours before the Alliance assault on Phobos. That was something he hadn’t shared with Ferhat.

It was a high room with lights shining upward onto a domed ceiling, a ceiling that now had a hole in it. A few fragments floated down after Kingsman and Landor.

The front of the room opened out onto the main corridor for this residential area. Kingsman, as practiced, jumped over and put up the privacy screens, then shot a preliminary defensive net across the openings. He could hear the hum of conversation from the corridor as people went about their business. If things went as planned, the three men would be gone before anyone got suspicious.

A woman and two children had been sitting down to a meal. For a long moment they just sat straight up as the two armored figures dropped through their ceiling and food flew.

Then, as requested, they got on the floor.

Landor secured their wrists and ankles. “This is a temporary occupation.” He quoted the standard message. “You will be informed of what to do. You will not be harmed. You are not the target. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

To Kingsman: “Someone ran. We’ve given them enough head start. Chase them down to the left bottom.”

Kingsman had already launched himself out of the dining area and down the passage to the lower sleeping spaces.

There he was, a boy, maybe early teens, screaming. Why fire a disrupter grenade when you could use a member of the household to do the job for you? He couldn’t convey any information, only panic. Kingsman let him keep his lead.

The apartment was packed with stuff. Clothes, arranged by color and texture, filled shelves. Elaborate hats dangled from hooks. Spherical aquatic environments full of fish and other creatures hung from the ceiling. Scurrying toy animals crunched underfoot. You took your life in your hands moving around a Phobos apartment even in peacetime.

You needed the clothes to catch skin fragments, because otherwise the moon would have filled with piles of dust, but the rest was just for entertainment.

Turning a corner, Kingsman ran into a woman, her black hair wild, wearing only pale-blue sleepsuit.

“Please stop,” Kingsman said. “Stop or be processed.”

Instead, she kicked over a case of decorative plates, which spun slowly into Kingsman’s path.

Two more kids came out, one crying, one sleepily rubbing his eyes. Not in the records—some kind of sleepover or other annoying social event.

There was a lower exit here, one leading to waste disposal and other support functions. If she got out here, she could raise the alarm, and the local militia would be on them. She half ran, half swam, staying ahead of Kingsman.

As she reached the utility room, Tutun punched through the wall, showering her with fragments.

“Please lie down,” he said.

A long moment, and she did so.

“Why is this one part out in the open like this?” Tutun pushed his face up to the braided stream of water that went from one wall to the other in the small room.

Kingsman stopped himself from pointing out that, at the velocity it was moving, the water could rip Tutun’s nose off. Either Tutun knew that, or it wouldn’t make any difference what Kingsman said. “If we’re right, they jury-rigged the whole cycle, fast. Used what they had. This jump makes enough noise that it sounds like a lot more water than it is. Plus it looks cool.”

Human physiology required water, lots of it. Every cell needed it. It brought nutrients into the body and took waste out. And regardless of technical advances, it was just as massive and bulky as it had been when the Sumerians started digging canals. Every society in the solar system spent a lot of time and energy managing it. Supply failures led to a quick and unpleasant death.

Extra clothes hung on the room’s walls. The Phobs seemed to take this pretty casually. But that was part of the plan. There was absolutely no sign from outside that this was here.

“I saw something downstairs.” Tutun pulled his nose safely away from the water. “There’s a big ass bladder down there. Heavy bag bigger than this room. I could support this family for months.”

Those bags were a specialty of Elise’s, Kingsman thought. She’d saved a lot of lives with them in asteroid relief efforts.

Or maybe they were just water bags, like any emergency service would have on hand. He had to be carefully how many hypotheses he was juggling at any one time. He could float away from reality and never get back.

Kingsman pulled out a syringe and put the needle almost parallel to the water. “If this is just a short recirculating loop, like we suspect, the radioactive tracer will come back in a couple of minutes. I’d be happy not to see it.”

“Nah,” Tutun said. “I doubt you’re ever happy being wrong, no matter what you say.”

Landor was in the other room monitoring the family. The two mothers were sullen, sitting cross armed in the kitchen, refusing to answer any questions, or chat about family life, despite Landor’s somewhat ponderous efforts to create a calm situation. The kids, however, saw this as an opportunity to continue this sleepover with their friends. They had piled decorative cushions in a corner of the main family room and were playing a kind of hide and seek game with it.

The makeshift fortress had collapsed again. Giggling, kids were crawling out from under it.

At that moment, the black-haired woman Tutun had captured in the lower hall brightened up. “Where did you say you were from?”

Pleased at any attention, Landor turned to her. “A little town in the Great Plains, called—“

“Count the kids!” Tutun bellowed. “How many kids in there?”

Landor’s head snapped and his eyes wiggled back and forth. The kids chose this moment to run madly around, pretending to play hide and seek. “One . . . hey, there’s one missing, man. That skinny kid. Where—?”

“He’s suffocating!” the other woman said. “Help him!”

It wasn’t remotely persuasive.

“Watch their asses. You guys, stop moving. Now.” Tutun toed through the cushions, weapon at ready, while the kids stood in a row and watched, wide eyed. “Where does this go?” He had found a small opening in the base of the wall, barely large enough even for the child who had gone missing.

“He’s going to die in there!” The woman wasn’t giving up. “No air. Get him out! Please, mister . . . ”

It had gotten silent outside the apartment. Tutun knelt and looked into the hole, which looked like a passage for a pet. “This leads into the corridor. He’s raised the alarm by this point.”

“So let’s get the hell out of here!” Landor glanced up at the ceiling hole, which dangled dust-covered fibers.

“Easy way to get caught, hump,” Tutun said. “These guys are fast.”

“No kidding,” the black-haired woman said. “You better surrender right now. I’ll put in a good word for you.”

“Thanks,” Landor said. “We all appreciate it.”

“You better appreciate it. It’s that, or death.”

Tutun glanced at Kingsman. “How much longer do you need to know you’re wrong?”

“Oh, man.” Landor couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “We gotta move.”

“Just a few seconds more,” Kingsman said, looking at the water, and the radiation sensor he had placed next to it. How long would the longest possible closed loop be? Or what if he was actually wrong, and he’d never see the tracer?

“Let us go!” The black-haired woman was getting agitated. “Otherwise, it’s bad news for all of us.”

“Bad news is something I’m always willing to share, honey.” Tutun’s eyes flicked back and forth as he scanned up through the ceiling. “Yep. Sly, quiet. But they’re there.” He started to bring up his weapon.

Kingsman pushed it down. “Will you do anything but make a lot of noise and let them know we’re on to them?”

“They’ll move on us soon, and that’ll be it.”

They could try to keep these people as hostages and negotiate a way out. But protracted hostage situations seldom turned out well in combat theaters. The opposition didn’t value the hostages as much as you thought they should. Decisions tended to turn brutally pragmatic. People could feel sorry about it later.

But what other options did they have? The route they had taken in was now cut off. There was only the front of the unit, on the main hallway, or the smaller bottom exit, in the utility corridor. The front here was now covered by a mob of angered Phobs. Presumably they’d covered the bottom exit too, but, Kingsman remember, that one had some interesting space constraints that made it hard to surveil thoroughly.

“Tutun,” Kingsman said. “Just down the passage from the utility area—“

“Egress there. We looked at it, if you will remember—“

“I remember, soldier. At that point we rejected it as too risky, but right about now it’s looking pretty good. How would you get down to it? I mean, without getting killed.”

“Thanks for qualifying that, sir.”

The three of them sat and stared at each other. The detector beeped.

Landor looked startled. “So it is . . . ”

“You’re surprised?” Kingsman said. “You thought I was wrong?”

“Sure I did. Sir.”

So, they were calling him “sir”. That either meant they were starting to respect him, or they were starting to be sure they were going to die.

“Um,” Landor said. “The water bag. The bladder.”

Kingsman got it instantly. “Brilliant, Landor. You have hidden depths. Tutun.”

Tutun kept his eyes on the prisoners. “What?”

“Let them go.”

Tutun hesitated.

“We don’t really have a choice. No reason to increase civilian casualties.”

“That it? They get out, we die, like everyone else you command?” Tutun, enraged, stuck a gun in a crying child’s face. “What did they do to earn that?”

Everyone knew what had led to his disastrous decision on Kalatra. Or at least they thought they did.

“They had a sleepover.” Kingsman stayed calm as he unhooked the mesh over the front openings. “They sat down in their PJs to have some breakfast. They built a fort out of pillows. Maybe they wanted to skip a day of school so that they could play with their friends some more. None of us earn life, Tutun. We just get it as a gift. Are you qualified to decide who doesn’t get to open theirs?”

“Yeah, hump.” Landor’s voice was shaking. “We’re getting out. Just . . . he’s got a plan. Don’t you see that? He’s got something that might get us out.”

“It will take those outside a few seconds to process that these are their people,” Kingsman said. “Let’s use that.”

“Run!” Tutun screamed at the family. It was a genuinely terrifying sound. “Before you get killed!”

The kids scattered first, the mothers after them, their toes grabbing the tiny bumps on the sides and bottom of the corridor with the quick reflexes of those who had lived their whole lives in low, spinning gravity.

Their rescuers had concealed themselves at a corner. A couple of them now darted out to gather in and protect the children. Kingsman and Tutun took advantage of the moment of distraction to hang out of their entrance and shoot the Phobs when they exposed themselves. Kingsman got one clean shot, Tutun, younger and faster, two. At least one of their opponents went down and was pulled back out of sight.

Kingsman hoped they would think that was the sole point of the exercise.

Kingsman and Tutun tumbled down the passage to the lower bedrooms. As soon as they were down, Landor hit the microdetonators he had installed in the few seconds he’d had. There was a tiny crack, and the wall of the water storage area crumbled into a side corridor.

There was the big water bladder, a dull red with a rough surface. It had embedded logos but those had been plastered over with stickers from the Coruscating Cooperative: “Water of Life, courtesy of your allies, CC”. A childish bit of advertising, but new entities had to establish legitimacy however they could.

All three men put their shoulders against the floppy water storage bladder.

It rolled into the hallway. They could hear the buzz-snap of fire from the other side, but that amount of water could absorb an incredible amount of energy.

Including kinetic, provided by their muscles. It took a few seconds of maximal effort to get it rolling, a slow few feet per second. Kingsman was gasping for breath. But it was moving faster.

The bladder was well-designed—and it was one of Elise’s. Kingsman was sure it was her design, and the original logo that of Nam Lo’s relief organization, Soft Landing. Presumably it was leaking water from the other side. But it did not give way or explode.

“It’s coming up.” Landor spoke calmly. “Let it roll . . . Just a bit farther . . . go!”

The rolling bladder cleared a side passage. In the few seconds it gave them, Landor dove down it, followed by Tutun and Kingsman. They jumped over the squatting Landor, who placed another set of detonators. Another crack, and the passage crumbled into rubble behind them.

“How did you know to look for that?” Uy looked up at the diagram of the Demavend district as it loomed over him and took a sip of his drink.

“What?” Ferhat said. “You mean this cross passage?” A line appeared in response to her finger gesture, showing where she had taken the unmapped corridors into account.

“Yes. The location of that hit our intel stream . . . when, Servan?”

The young staffer flicked a pale-lashed eyelid to bring up the data. “Eight hours ago, sir. Rumors before, from local informants. Marked unreliable. But a detonation there gave us a nice solid echo.”

“Have you been basing your assault plan on unreliable local rumors?” Uy’s tone sounded joking. He wasn’t joking.

“No sir. I had supporting testimony. Pre-assault. A tourist report.”

“Tourist report. I have to admit, I was never at my most reliable while on vacation.”

Uy’s staff laughed sycophantically. They sat in a rough crescent around the outer rim of the restaurant terrace, with a nice view of the rolling landscape of the Concourse. Ferhat’s troops, obliged to attend this face-to-face, had occupied what had once been the kitchen and support area, and had even meshed some of the rubble into a rough wall, as if expecting an assault from the analysts and administrators up from headquarters.

“This particular tourist’s reports have been extremely reliable,” Ferhat said. ”In fact, they are what helped us scope out the extent of the Phob deception operation around the water supply.”

“Well, great.” Uy put his drink down so roughly that it spilled. The gesture he made to keep a subordinate from jumping to wipe it up was almost a fist.

“Shall I proceed?” Ferhat said.

“I don’t know. Should she, Tony?”

Kingsman had tried to sit unobtrusively. But there was no group with which he fit and he had found himself perched alone between the two forces, his long legs jammed beneath a table that threatened to tip every time he tried to decrease the stress on his knees.

Trying to be unobtrusive was stupid. This ghost wasn’t just an uninvited guest at the feast. He was the caterer.

Everyone knew who Kingsman was. Though the fact was supposedly close-held by senior command, everyone knew why he was there. Everyone knew his authority. Everyone wondered why he wasn’t exercising it.

“It’s an extremely effective disposition of available resources,” Kingsman managed. “Aimed at a potentially high-value target.”

Uy stared at him in disbelief. “It’s a bit late in your life to try to develop a skill for content-free phrasing, Tony. Save it for those of us who have a natural talent for it.”

Kingsman had come back from the recon with Landor and Tutun knowing that the entire Alliance strategy in Phobos was flawed. That was more than enough reason to cut losses and announce a withdrawal. Anything else would be throwing away lives and resources on an unattainable goal.

Ferhat had debriefed the three of them, and had clearly known what Kingsman’s only possible decision was. Still, she had immediately gone to her command shelter and started planning another operation, one that would take advantage of the intel she now had. And she had worked with total focus, calling in whatever members of her team could help her, until just before the meeting where she expected to be told that all of her efforts were completely wasted.

Preceptor Uy had come up here to the Concourse with his staff fully expecting to start organizing the logistics of a withdrawal in the face of a still-active enemy, only to get an operational proposal from a subordinate that involved a complex disengagement, change of face, and high-risk penetration into a previously untouched volume. He was confused, and increasingly furious.

And it was a decent operational plan, Kingsman thought. It would hit Phob operations at a weak point, taking advantage of that same feral lack of top-down organization that had thus far been a strength of the opposition. Backed with enough resources, it would seize control of a decent volume deep in Phobos . . . before inevitably bogging down and failing to make any significant difference in the overall strategic situation. Ferhat was smart, but she wasn’t ready for operational-level command yet. It was another level of complexity.

But as it moved into Demavend and established dominance over the water-filled vacuole there, her proposed operation would encounter something else, something that, if managed properly, really could make a difference. Ferhat had no reason to know it was there. Even Kingsman couldn’t be sure . . . but it was a chance worth taking, he thought.

“Preceptor Uy,” Kingsman said. “May we talk privately?”

“Goddamit!” Uy stood up. “What the hell are you playing at, Kingsman?”

They had moved into a small enclosed shell with a two-person table, once used for romantic dinners. Uy wasn’t as tall as Kingsman, but he was a big man too, and together they packed it full, and were able to feel the heat of each other’s skin.

“You need a chance, Dakila,” Kingsman said. “This can give you one.”

“I don’t need a chance. I need a withdrawal. Every day you wait costs me at least two soldiers. Dead, or desperately injured. Given what you’ve been through, I would think you’d want to avoid even one unnecessary death.”

“If you want to withdraw so badly, why don’t you simply order it yourself?”

This tiny room was a good place for a cage fight. They could do a lot of damage to each other.

Uy’s breath was hot past Kingsman’s ear. “What do you want? I knew you would finally want something from me. I voiced my objections to you coming her, but you have some strong protectors.”

“I don’t want anything from you that I’m not clearly asking for right now,” Kingsman said. “Commander Ferhat’s mission offers a possibility of a better settlement. A better result. Right now, you pull out, you’ll leave chaos. And lose people while disengaging. It will be a mess, probably a long-term mess, years. One way or another you’re leaving Phobos soon. Ferhat will let you get out without ripping your skin off.”

“She’s wondering why the hell you’re leaving her up there, briefing us on a mission no one wants,” Uy said. “Her heart’s not in it.”

“Her heart may or may not be in it,” Kingsman said. “But her head is. It’s not perfect . . . but we can make it the best odds operation possible. It can get us down to Demavend. After that . . . one way or another, you’re out of here. Will you give her the support she needs?”

Kingsman wasn’t even sure if he was right. Could Uy order a withdrawal on his own authority? How much negotiation would that require, and how quickly would it become public knowledge?

Uy still needed his coverage.

“You better give me something other than a rack of corpses,” Uy said.

Elise’s family had owned a vacation cottage in the Adirondacks, an ancient mountain resort area. It was tucked between two folds of a mountain. Several structures had risen and fallen on the same rubble foundation over the centuries.

The first time he had visited, something about the place had made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the precise shabbiness that signaled old family wealth. And it wasn’t even the sense that he was being tested in some way he couldn’t even figure out.

It was the lack of sightlines. Oh, there was one view, very nice, off the porch to the glitter of the lake below. But aside from that, he was blinded. And there were any number of locations in the immediate area that were both more defensible and with better routes of escape in case of disaster.

That wasn’t the point at all. It wasn’t. So he tried to relax. He paddled a canoe on the lake, getting a blister on his finger for his pains. He hiked the trails, surprised at how hard it was to keep up with Elise, who remembered every turn on the way up, every gigantic glacial boulder, and mourned any tree that had been blown over or died of disease since her childhood. One patriarch had fallen just the previous winter. Rounded rocks were embedded in its complex roots, which loomed above them both. She walked back and forth along the trunk, and then they had sat together in the cool shade cast by the roots.

He bought a present for the house, a slightly convex mirror for the end of the upper hallway, just near the door to their bedroom. It had a mosaic of old piece of dinner china around its edge.

“I never knew you had that kind of eye,” Elise said. The beauty of the mirror made her see him a different way. She insisted on standing in front of it with him, resting her head on his shoulder, and looking into each other’s eyes in their reflection.

Behind their heads he could see the window, its curtains blowing in at them, and beyond that the road and the rise of the mountain on the other side of the lake.

They left that cottage a true couple. They came back several times, though not often. His career took him everywhere in the Solar System.

And their last, worst fight took place there, after which nothing had been the same. Two weeks after they last time they went there, she told him their marriage had to be over.

“Mashee, you’re supposed to be buttoned up.” Ferhat’s tone was weary. This was the third soldier she’d had to downcheck for being inadequately armored since they had started out.

Without looking at anyone else in her team, Mashee activated her armor and pulled her faceplate down, so that irritated features were sharply displayed. She exchanged a glance with the rest of her team. Then she knelt, slapped the wall, waited for the detonation and let Landor leap over her into the apartment beyond. A moment later, she followed.

Kingsman was in no way in charge. But he was there. And Kingsman had demonstrated that all of their work, all of their casualties had been futile, a gigantic mistake. They might have hated him before. Now it was more personal. And their commander, Ferhat, was willing to cooperate with him. It somehow tainted her. It had become almost a point of pride to be inadequately buttoned up, as of taking proper precautions during an assault was some kind of statement of sympathy for his insane and pointless objectives.

They had been staying away from any transport corridors or open spaces, busting through walls and hopping through dwelling units on an unpredictable path. It was rough, tedious work, with the risk of resistance behind every apartment wall.

Ferhat and Kingsman had moved up now, because things would be changing just ahead. Once the apartment was checked safe, Kingsman slid in and stayed out of the way, behind a cabinet filled with decorative plates that flickered with their own light. Ferhat settled at the kitchen table and waved her hands as she examined a situation display. Two other troopers, Tutun and Gupta, waited next to her, weapons ready.

Mashee reached through a hole into a bedroom and pulled out a little girl in a frilly dress, as if she had dressed formally for the assault on her home. He had her arms crossed and looked up at the armored soldiers expressionlessly. Mashee reached through to help the next person, but the woman shook off her gauntlet and climbed through on her own, a big packet of clothing and other supplies under her arm. A man followed, also not looking at Mashee.

Ferhat and her soldiers destroyed living spaces just to get from one place to another. It gave them maximum safety and coverage, but it was a brutal way to travel. Mashee slapped identification stickers on the apartment and clicked a confirmation to the couple, who would be notified when they could move back to their home and try to do what they could with what was left of it.

“Other side of the wall,” Ferhat said. “Make it wide.”

Tutun jumped through, knocking over a small cabinet and scattering figurines on the floor, and blew the wall of the bedroom beyond.

There was nothing on the other side. Bright light flared in. They all moved more carefully, as if they could be sucked out by the whistle of wind they could hear. Tutun stuck his head out.

“Wow. Take a look at this.”

Beyond was a vast crack that extended up and down. The other side of it was a hundred meters away. It was the first open space they had come to since leaving the Lower Concourse a few days before. Like many things Phobos, it was bleak and disturbing, hard to get to grips with. Even what should have been pleasant balconies far away on the opposite wall looked more like elements of God’s own cheese grater.

“A good spot for them to make a stand.” Landor said. “They’ve got to be waiting for us over there.”

“A great spot.” Tutun was already taking distance readings across the abyss, finding appropriate adhesion points for their transport cables. “I could hold us here with a . . . ” He paused, not having worked out the right metaphor before getting there.

“A pile of rocks?” Landor suggested

“Yeah. Maybe.” Tutun was reluctant to take the suggestion. “I could maybe do it with that.”

“Tiny rocks. Pebbles. Like . . . sand.”

They both fell silent, contemplating holding the gap by shooting sand, hoping for a more sensible comparison.

“A fart gun?” Gupta had been checking her weapon, as she did obsessively, mostly, Kingsman thought, to try to block out her colleagues’ chattering.

The two men laughed. “What? What’s that?”

Gupta, irritated, looked across the gap to where someone had left a white cup on the curving railing of a balcony. Once you followed her glance, it was impossible to look at anything else.

“It made that noise,” she said. “Like a fart. When you fired it. Little pellets, kind of soft. My brother I and both had them. It was, like, compressed air or something. You didn’t have a toy like that?”

The other two weren’t really listening, just chortling at everything she said, so she shut up.

“Never mind the gun part,” Landor said. “I could hold that wall through the power of farts alone.”

“Go bo!” Tutun faked enthusiasm and the two men tapped weapons.

None of civilians they had been moving out of the area had any useful military information. Oh, they were full of it, of course: a substantial unit was concealed beneath the shielding of a local power node, the troops had all fled in panic and dropped in survival pods to the Martian surface, ambushes could be expected from soldiers with diapaused metabolisms, encapsulated in what looked like bunches of brown fiber sprayed into dark corners. The civilians weren’t worth the effort of interrogating, but it had to be done.

Interior asteroid combat was a battle of sensors. Scouting, as Kingsman had done up toward the water source, was too dangerous and expensive to do often. So they vibrated the rock, they sent out electromagnetic radiation at various frequencies, felt for density variations, and tried to figure out what the hell lay ahead of them. The enemy, meanwhile, spoofed with fake echoes, misleading density profiles, recordings of gossiping troops on R&R. As a result, troopers moved ahead blinder than any troops in human history, blinder than inexperienced colonial troops chopping their way into a dense jungle. They couldn’t see.

They might have been even more resentful if they had known that some of the intel that guided their movements had come from Kingsman’s ex-wife’s current husband. Ferhat hadn’t seen fit to share that information.

But they had their doctrine, and knew how to move and protect each other. At the signal, puffs of impact appeared between the balconies opposite. Lines snapped across, finding adhesion points in the rock of the wall. Reaction-packed soldiers shot across, sometimes hitting balconies, but more often cracking holes in the wall and tumbling through into the spaces beyond.

It was indeed a good place for a stand. Even a moderate force could have imposed heavy casualties on the Alliance forces as they crossed, exposed. But no one responded. And the apartments on the other side were completely empty.

“You did figure there was under a fifty percent chance that they would ambush you by this point,” Kingsman said. “But that the risks go up from here.”

Ferhat looked up from her planning images. “I didn’t consult you on that. Where did you get that number?”

Kingsman shrugged. “I know how a good unit commander thinks. And you’re good.”

“Just not as good as you.”

“I have more experience.” Kingsman wasn’t going to deny it. “Particularly with the way things can go wrong.”

Ferhat had hauled him into an inner room of a balcony apartment while the rest of the crew rotated through their breaks. She had spent a few minutes going over fairly routine tactical issues. That wasn’t fooling either of them.

“Don’t tell me about how things can go wrong,” she said. “You landed me in the shit with my commander by letting me propose this stupid expedition. It’s not what he wants. It’s not what anyone wants. But you let me go ahead with it.”

“It makes the most of the opportunities we have,” Kingsman said. “It uses the space and the resources to their maximum. It’s something to be proud of.”

His praise didn’t interest her. “You know a plan is never completed. There’s always a possible flaw, something I hadn’t considered adequately, or some assumption that needs to get reexamined.”

“And you think the odds don’t add up,” he said.

“You know that. You’ve known it since I proposed it. But you let it go ahead. Instead of doing the one job you had and pulling the Alliance forces out of Phobos, you’ve pulled us into its very heart. You’ve fallen back in love with the idea of victory.”

“I—” He had been prepared to make a defense of the opportunity the expedition to Demavend provided. But this hit him from an unexpected direction. “Not victory. There is no victory possible. Just salvage. We can salvage something from the situation.”

“If you don’t tell me immediately what factors you’re using that you haven’t told me about, I will scrub this mission. Here and now. You might be afraid to do that. I’m not. I’ll pull back, and then we can all wait for you to make the decision you should have already made.”

He believed her. And, whether or not she was telling the truth, his respect for her grew. Just at the point that he was about to lose hers.

“There’s a relief team interned down in Demavend, near the water,” he said. “At least, that is my assumption, based on reasonable evidence. And in charge of that team is someone whose cooperation I might be able to get.”

“I don’t believe it.” Ferhat’s voice was full of disappointment. “Victory was bad enough. But is that really what this is about? Finding your ex-wife?”

“No!” the accusation was so unfair he wasn’t able to say anything coherent. “That’s not it at—”

That was as far as Kingsman managed to get before the air disappeared.

There was a moment while the air rushed out of their suits, and a pain of imbalanced pressure in Kingsman’s ears. Then his mask was down, his emergency connections activated, and his suit inflated. By the time he could turn his attention to something else, Ferhat was not only buttoned up but giving commands.

A kaleidoscope of desegmenting floors rotated beneath them. The stars appeared in the gaps, far away. The black grew larger. Everything between them and outer space had disappeared. The Phobs had sacrificed a segment of their own world to kill them.

And Kingsman was falling free. He had environmental protection, and a small reaction capability, but nothing like you would need for serious maneuvers in freefall.

While still talking on several channels, and watching displays run across her visual field, Ferhat reached down and casually caught his harness. She tossed him up to where Landor was ready for him with a spiderline. Landor clipped him in and was gone.

Several of the soldiers had flown out of reach and were dropping into orbit. And a couple had not had their suits close enough to secure. Kingsman watched one struggling with a balky seal, running air generators at full to maximize supply. Smarter to drop air generation to minimize pressure, seal the suit, and then refill, taking the chance of hypoxia. But panic had taken hold. The suit wouldn’t seal. As the air generation finally gave out, the figure stopped struggling. Medical indications scribbled across the suit. There was a lot a suit could do to preserve physiological function in emergency situations, but complete lack of air pressure was not something it could help. A piece of debris drifted in between them and Kingsman lost sight of whoever it had been.

Kingsman resisted the urge to query Ferhat on whether she had sent the signal they had agreed to in their contingency plans. Either she had or she hadn’t. Still, he found himself worrying, in a way he usually didn’t. He looked down past his dangling feet. Most of the loose blocks had by this point tumbled out of the big crack in the moon, and he had a good view of Mars as it ground past.

An explosion at Kingsman’s left elbow sent a shock through his chest and tossed him free of his support. His spiderline kept him from drifting. The same explosion caught two troops before they could react.

One lost an arm, spurting black crystals of blood before the suit sealed the wound. The other suffered head trauma, with damage indicators growing like crystals across his face. Landor. Nothing to do now. Dealing with them was up to his unit commander, who, sure enough, was shooting a crash cart across space.

Ferhat’s troops adapted quickly to the changed rules of engagement. Those assigned def/off responsibilities were firing, either directly at targets or as cover for medical rescues and tactical redeployments.

It wasn’t enough. Now that he had incorporated the mass of colorful tactical data, whispered force estimates, and freezing prickles across his fingertips and lips, Kingsman had a good idea of the situation.

If he had been in charge he might have arranged dispositions a bit differently—there were a few coverage zones that were a bit sparse—but by and large Ferhat had done a superb job reacting to an unprecedented situation.

Their force just wasn’t big enough to do the job.

The Phob forces had been prepared for this very situation. They knew the locations of every feature down to the millimeter. They had no perceptual ramp-up. They didn’t need to exchange any tactical signals, because they already knew what the situation was.

Their fire was fierce and accurate. The only thing that kept them from killing Ferhat’s entire force within fifteen minutes was simply the high quality of the armor and weaponry of the Alliance forces. Phobos specialized in tourism, not war. They were at least an equipment generation behind, and had to fill gaps with makeshifts.

Three Phobs in a prepared emplacement on the opposite wall found that simply being protected wasn’t enough. They lay down a good field of fire. But they were too concentrated on hitting their targets, and not enough on their own vulnerability.

Two Alliance soldiers deliberately exposed themselves, looking pinned down and helpless. A third waited for a screening of debris from a detonation, swung up, and got enough of an angle to bank projectiles into the protected emplacement. The first one ricocheted and chipped rock far away. The second took an enemy soldier in the shoulder. The third detonated and took the position out.

Kingsman looked for something in addition to what was already happening. There was no room in anyone else’s mind for anything other than the immediate tactical situation. Kingsman, with no assigned fire cover task, had the freedom to consider contingencies. As always, that meant he spent the vast majority of his time thinking about things that never happened, and never would. To everyone else, the things that happened seemed inevitable. To him, they were only tiny slivers of actuality poking through a vast mass of unrealized possibilities, to the extent that sometimes felt unsure of which possible future he had actually ended up in.

The Phobs had gone through a great deal of trouble to make sure their booby trap had been undetectable. But did it make sense that they were done being tricky? Maybe they had not yet detonated every structure that they had mined.

Ferhat’s tactical dispositions were optimal. She was getting the maximum use out of her force, given the situation.

But which as-yet-unexploded wall would flip the situation if it came apart? Kingsman held a complex equation in his head. Any wall detonation decision had been made in the past—they couldn’t change those, and he couldn’t detect where they would be. But he could see which ones they would wish they had, if they wanted to inflict maximum damage at any given point in the fluid combat situation. So he watched those points, which ranged in number from three to almost a dozen at any given time. And waited.

He knew the troops, if they spared him any thought, felt that he was staying out of the way, saving himself. Even though he had been explicitly ordered not to insert himself into tactical operations, since adding new troops into a trained team could only reduce effectiveness, they still resented him for staying out of the fight.

He was moving before he consciously knew why. Tutun and his team had, in coming up against a desperately fighting nest of Phobs in a well-protected corner of the space, had exposed themselves to what looked like an interior wall, still bearing traces of mildew-resistant bathroom material here, elaborate dimensional wallpaper there. They traded protection for speed. Given the known situation, that was a sensible risk.

As the wall collapsed, spilling already firing Phob troops, it proved to be a disaster.

Kingsman accelerated directly at the newly revealed Phobs, at a steep angle along the wall. Just as Tutun’s unit had been focused on taking out their target, the Phobs were focused on their target, Tutun’s combat group. They had crouched there in what had once been someone’s living room, watching and awaiting their moment. They knew they had to take advantage of every instant of surprise, before the encounter turned into a standard firefight, one in which they had the disadvantage.

Kingsman crashed into them like a bowling ball while maintaining a steady fire.

The next few seconds were just flashes of pain and light, combat faces leering at him from glowing faceplates, complete disorientation from arms and legs pointing in all directions.

He had succeeded in disrupting the Phob attack, but numbers told. He was knocked, twisted . . . and felt the sear of freezing cold along his side as some cutting tool ripped his suit open. A forearm at his throat, limited armor giving way . . .

Then, impacts and loosening. Tutun and his troops had responded, taking out his attackers. Gupta was at his side. Without saying anything, she grabbed him and spun him around, spraying sealant as she did so.

“Wounds?” he managed.

“Skin held. You’ll have vacuum bruising. If he’d managed to cut through, the pressure would have made your guts burst out. Don’t worry, I’ll give you a full checkout after.”

Not five seconds later, she spun him again and gave him a kick which drove him back to his original observation position.

The entire event couldn’t have taken forty seconds. Five dead Phobs fell outward behind him.

Kingsman finally risked connecting to Ferhat. “Assume the vessel,” was all he said.

“But that will put us—“

“I know where it will put us. But we need to take advantage of the situation. Surprise won’t last long. We aren’t the only troops who can react to an unexpected tactical reverse.”

This was one of many contingencies they had discussed. It required that she deliberately expose her troops to fire in order to put them in position to take advantage of the arrival of a weapon she had no real control over. For her, that was like a trapped climber letting go to fall off a high cliff because he planned for a condor to fly by and catch him before he hit the ground.

She barely hesitated before sending out the new dispositions.

Everyone could see the danger, and no one knew the reason for it. But they were trained, and moved as directed.

It looked like they were trying to retreat, to pull back into that side of the former abyss that was now a wall behind them. That was what the Phobs had probably originally expected them to do, so they were likely to accept it as making sense.

The Phobs moved to take advantage of the gaps in defense that naturally opened up when a force changed its line of operation.

Kingsman could see past his feet into space. His display amplified all military assets.

And the salvage tug had been reclassified as one, after some frantic negotiations with sullenly resistant officials from Salvage and Reclamation.

He saw the tug slide into view, serenely sailing along in pursuit of vagrant debris. If the Phobs noticed it, they edited it out as a routine part of background maintenance, even though the tug hadn’t been operational since the Alliance assault.

Two Alliance soldiers had been wounded in the redeployment, and there was no way a cart could get to them under the current conditions. One had lost a lot of blood, and was showing slowing heart rate and shock. The other was stabilized, with painkillers allowing her to keep up a steady fire to hold off attackers.

“This better work, or I will kill you,” Ferhat said in his ear.

That wasn’t a standardized tactical message.

The tug’s short-maneuver rockets flared along one side. The programming that kept it from approaching too close to large objects had been altered. It headed forward, into the new gap that had opened up in the Phobos surface by the booby trap.

A couple of Phob troops finally noticed it, but clearly didn’t know what to do, or what it represented.

It fired a flight of metal flechettes, this time into enemy troops rather than non-magnetic debris.

Direction of the flechettes wasn’t perfect. The radar wasn’t designed to show up a target against a solid background. But the number of them was huge. And human bodies, even armored ones, are much softer than interplanetary rubble.

The effect was devastating.

Crystallized blood puffed out of Phobs and vanished. What was left of their bodies fell out past the tug, some bouncing off its smooth curves on the way out. After an initial shock, the Phobs recognized the changed situation. They pulled back from exposed positions. And some of them disappeared, through airlocks built in what had once been an interior wall.

Ferhat waited. The tug was a makeshift weapon. It had no ability to distinguish between enemy and friendly. It detected moving objects in a certain segment of space. As long as those were all Phobs, all was well. Otherwise, her force would suffer friendly fire casualties.

The Phobs weren’t stupid, and quickly found defensive positions where the tug’s flechettes couldn’t hit, or stopped moving against the background rock so that it had trouble detecting them.

Ferhat gave the signal. Kingsman commanded the tug to cease fire, and the Alliance troops switched from defensive to offensive operations, pursuing the now-retreating Phobs and seizing airlocks before they could be used and fused shut. Those Phobs who had frozen to avoid being destroyed by the tug’s flechettes were now easy targets.

Within a few more minutes, firing stopped. Ferhat’s troops held the volume.

“Here’s where feralization puts them at a disadvantage,” Kingsman said. “Phobos as a whole might have decided to blow a larger hole, killing us all without combat. This group had loyalty to only a limited volume. The cost they were willing to pay was much lower. Too low to be effective.”

“A central government would have been willing to pay a higher price,” Ferhat said. “Because they didn’t have to pull it out of their own hearts. The price someone else pays always seems cheaper. But we’re clear now. I’m pretty sure there’s no other force that can threaten us within range.”

The troops were busily checking their weapons and supplies, gathered in small personal groups exchanging observations on the last battle directly through voice, not via data feeds and images.

Kingsman’s suit had been repaired, and Gupta had indeed looked him over, to confirm her initial diagnosis. Bruising and abrasions, but no serious damage. His tough integument had held his innards against the vacuum. His side still burned.

“You earned something from me there,” Ferhat said. “Don’t waste it.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s my ex-wife up there. I don’t know how she managed it, but she and her husband managed to get her and a lot of emergency equipment into Phobos before the Alliance hit. They were ready for a human disaster. What they put in place is now our best hope for avoiding a large-scale disaster.”

He could see that Ferhat could barely stand to talk to him. She felt betrayed, and her troops put at risk, by a man she knew she should never have trusted.

“The possibility of finding her is why you supported this operation,” she said. “The real reason you let me go ahead with it.”

“Yes.”

He wanted to talk more, to tell her how much he respected her, how much she had managed to accomplish . . . he was surprised at himself. Why talk more now? Why did Ferhat matter so much?

“And you’re going to tell me it isn’t personal,” Ferhat said.

“That’s what we always lie to ourselves about. But if it is personal, it’s still the best bet we have going. I want you to send me in.”

“Oh. Because you’re the one person in the world she would be willing to talk to?”

“As an ex-husband, no. She doesn’t want to see that man again. But as someone who can keep Phobos from falling apart, I can guarantee you, there’s no one she would rather see.”

With every victory came loss. And this one came with the knowledge that, when this was over, Ferhat would never speak with him again.

“Six hours,” she said. “There’s no resistance in that direction. But that’s as long as we’re moving.”

“Okay.”

“I wasn’t asking you to agree,” Ferhat said. “I wasn’t asking for you to say anything.”

Once its military forces were crushed, the ruling junta of Kalatra agreed to surrender to Kingsman’s force. His operations were now studied in tactical school, though they gave the commander a nom de guerre. Because of what happened afterward, Kingsman didn’t deserve to have his name attached to his own achievements: they called him Preceptor Zero.

The asteroid had been packed, not just with its own inhabitants, but with refugees from other asteroids that had already been defeated. His own force was at the limits of its resources, and its sanity. Still, Kingsman managed to find a way to arrange for the removal of excess population and their transportation to safer areas. It was perhaps an overcommitment of military resources, though nothing that would have led to discipline.

But his defeat of the junta had been too thorough. Too many of the leadership had been killed, and those that remained had been discredited and were not as firmly in control of their people as they thought. And, more importantly, not as in control as they had persuaded Kingsman. They had been facing internal resistance even before his assault. Now, as food was distributed, and stresses relaxed, a mutiny arose. It flared through the displaced population, and there was a desperate attempt at resistance. That action was insane. That was why Kingsman had not anticipated it.

Assuming rationality in your opponent can be the most irrational position of all.

Kingsman waited too long to respond. He couldn’t accept until almost too late that his brilliant solution had fallen apart. After that, his dispositions minimized Kalatran civilian casualties, even as those civilians were killing his troops. His troops, well trained and loyal, obeyed his commands, and some of them died for his vision of a just solution.

Eventually, he succeeded. The asteroid was pacified thoroughly, and all resistance was crushed. He believed that a more pragmatic-seeming solution, one that killed thousands of Kalatrans, would have been less effective, and left behind it a disaster. But would he have killed those thousands, if he had, in fact thought it would be more “effective” to do so? Sometimes he thought he would have been compelled to do it, other times that even a victory at such cost would have been unacceptable. He found that the Anthony Kingsman of those moments was forever closed off to him. That man was unknowable, even though Kingsman could remember being him.

Hundreds or thousands, he held himself responsible for not deciding to abandon his own previous, rigorously worked out plan, and realizing that the situation had changed too much for it to be applicable. Though when he was particularly honest with himself, he wasn’t sure how much earlier he could possibly have realized it, or what he would have been able to do differently if he had.

As far as everyone else was concerned, the disaster had been the result of pure ego. Kingsman had seen himself as the savior of Kalatra, and had been willing to sacrifice his own troops to maintain that image of himself. No surviving Kalatran saw him as in any way their savior, or course. He was more hated by the people there than by any other Alliance citizen. He had, after all, killed hundreds of civilians with crisp efficiency. Of the several attempts on his life, during his trial and after, at least two had been Kalatran death squads.

Given the calls for his blood, the eventual court martial had been a marvel of by-the-book procedure. He had violated protocols by accepting the surrender of a civilian force without official authorization. Every commander at the Rim had to do things like that, of course. Their actions were regularized afterward. Not this time.

So the charges that sent him to the prison asteroid were not the ones that everyone thought were his real crimes. But even a politically driven Alliance court in the heated atmosphere of the months after Kalatra wasn’t going to officially find him guilty of minimizing enemy civilian casualties.

He suspected that Elise liked to believe that he had been the man who just refused to kill large numbers of people. Maybe he was that man. Or that better man existed when Elise was there to see him. He suspected that, if she did agree to talk to him, it would only be because of what he had tried to do at Kalatra.

And what, he feared, she would want him to do again here on Phobos.

There are beaches in Phobos, yielding spots to lie in the heat and light, water lapping at your feet.

We have not come to one of those places. Where we stand is washed by cold water and scoured by an eternal wind that must have some purpose, like clearing out dust. There seems no real reason for the water vacuole to be quite so unpleasant. But maybe there’s some kind of message in it.

She wades out into the freezing water, challenging me to do the same.

I knew her a long time ago, before . . . almost anything. Then she made a series of choices I still don’t understand. But her choices are not to be argued with. And for a long time she was gone to me.

Now she is back. Everything else in my life I control. This, no.

Did he feel the same when he was with her? Or did he feel he was in control until that last desperate moment? She left him, then he tried to do his duty and keep a private conscience simultaneously, and events went against him.

I strip down, step into the water. It freezes, burns, then settles into a dull ache. Why has she picked this particular challenge for me? One that he had favored? Or simply one she wants me to think he favored? She is oddly defensive of his memory, though I never bring him up. I just feel honored by her choice.

Then, slowly, I understand. We should not underestimate the people who live here, who create the subtle art we admire, who wipe away spills when we are clumsy, who seem to disappear when we aren’t looking directly at them. This is their cold heart. They’ll do what they have to, when the time comes.

As I did when I asked her to join my mission. I’d like to say I had only the lives we could save from pain and premature death in mind. I would. But she was on my mind too. I’m glad she’s with me, even though, if our plans work out, we may never see each other again.

Ferhat and her troops moved fast, this time taking advantage of the open space of the evacuated crack. Below them, Alliance repair teams were sealing the space up, trying to keep Phobos from cracking in half. This had to be giving satisfaction to whoever still clung to an idea of victory in Phobos. Only a beleaguered force close to defeat would ever commit an act that desperate.

If it had succeeded, Kingsman thought, it would have achieved its larger goal. The destruction of Ferhat’s force would have led to negotiations and a withdrawal of Alliance force, leaving the ruined hulk of Phobos behind them. No Kingsman with desperate and unusual powers would have been necessary.

But it hadn’t succeeded.

The dwelling units on either side of the crack were sealed and empty. And the only effective military force in the volume had been the one Ferhat’s force had just defeated. So, when the blew through the final wall and into the volume around the water vacuole, there was no one to stop them.

The team delivered Kingsman to a dark street that ended in a wall of ice with mist spilling off of it. Water sloshed somewhere out of sight. With the exception of a stack of emergency air cocoons, there was no sign that anyone had been here in years.

The cloaked figure sat stirring a pot on a heater, as the freezing mist swirled along the ground.

Elise turned her face up to Kingsman as he approached.

“Hello, Tony.”

“Elise.” He lowered himself and sat across from her.

She smiled. “It’s good to see you.”

“Um. Me too.”

Humans could go through a phenomenal amount of effort to communicate, only to say absolutely nothing at all.

There might have been a few more lines around her eyes. He wasn’t sure. He could see a change in tactical disposition instantly, but he often missed big changes in the way people looked and dressed. He had never managed to make himself care. Then, in the long prison hours, as he looked back over his life, he finally realized that not paying attention to that was missing a very big change in tactical dispositions indeed.

But, really, she hadn’t changed. He hair was thick around her face, so heavy it seemed like it should give her headaches. She still hid her too-large ears under it. And when she stared intently at him, he could see the white all the way around her eyes, and her teeth in her slightly downturned mouth. He knew he did look different, after defeat, after prison, after release. Death and resurrection were hard on the face.

“Want something to eat?” she said. “The soup’s ready. I made it myself.” She paused. “Don’t look so suspicious.”

“Sure,” he said. “That would be just the thing.”

She’d taken that battered travel case with her when she left him. She now reached into it and pulled out two bowls. She spooned soup from the pot and handed him a steaming bowl. It was a hot and sour soup, with insects instead of fish, in the orbital fashion. The hot oil clung to his tongue.

Elise had never been much of a cook. But when she could follow a simple set of instructions if she had to. That is, as long as Kingsman was not the one giving them. She was trying to prove she was somehow different, that she had made progress.

That Kingsman had no reason to think that he knew her at all.

“They brought you out to solve their problems for them,” Elise said. “Have you?”

“That kind of depends on you, now.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“No,” he said. “You were hoping for that.”

She shook her head, but slowly, so he couldn’t be sure if she was denying it, or just reflecting on how stupid everything was. “But why did you agree? What made you do it?”

“They offered me reinstatement, full pension, return to rank. More important, they offered me freedom. They let me out of prison.”

“Is that why?” she said.

“You think I’m immune from wanting things like that? I’m not some kind of saint. Maybe I can’t be bought for a hot shower or two . . . but, after a few years in a prison asteroid, my price actually wasn’t much higher.”

“And what you do with your freedom is fight your way all the way up here, to inner Phobos?”

“I need your help.” Kingsman held out his bowl and she refilled it. “As you need mine. We’re balanced on the edge of a disaster here.”

“Because of an unprovoked Alliance attack.”

“You don’t need to remind me of that. But the road we took to get here is no longer relevant. All that matters is what path we pick to get out.”

“Ah. So simple. The situation itself will blackmail me. I’m supposed to help you, because the Alliance is now the only force that can minimize the problem it itself created.”

Despite himself, Kingsman smiled.

“I’m not your damn student, Tony!” She was furious. “Don’t you dare be pleased at how well I figure things out. I’m not taking any of your tests, and I won’t be happy when you give me a gold star.”

“I didn’t marry you to teach you anything.”

“Oh? Don’t tell me I didn’t spend a few years in the Kingsman School of the Cognitive Arts. Dammit, Tony. Dammit, how are we . . . going to fix this?”

She could openly use what she had learned from him, now that she no longer had to live with him. Despite himself, despite his grief and his sense that nothing in his life would ever be right again, he was pleased. He resolved to hide it better.

“We can make an arrangement,” he said. “You’ll have to help. Fully, voluntarily. I don’t need ‘happily’. You don’t have to pretend to like it. With your contacts and your resources, and our troops, we can tamp down on future death. No full Alliance conquest of Phobos, nothing like that. But a stop that doesn’t lead to mass murder.”

“Militarists overestimate the benefits of war,” she said. “Pacifists underestimate the costs of peace.”

“Once you’ve said that,” Kingsman said, “what else is there to say?”

“Did you know I was here, Tony?”

“Sure. That’s why I made it up here to talk to you.”

“No. Not recently. Before. Long before. I mean, when you sent your message through your channels that you were ready to get the hell out of prison and stick your head into the grinding gears of their disaster to try to stop it.”

No one outside of a couple of people high in Alliance command knew that. No one at the prison had known it. Uy didn’t know it. If Ferhat learned it she would probably shoot him.

Kingsman didn’t even consider denying it.

“I . . . yes. I thought there was a good chance you were here. As soon as the Alliance attacked Phobos, someone got footage in to me. Just so I would be up on the situation, you know. Despite what happened, I had contacts in the Service. People willing to do me favors.”

“Because they knew that you might be more useful in disgrace than you ever had been as an eager-beaver officer with sparkling shoulder tabs.”

He was startled. “Is that really how you saw me?”

“No, Tony.” She reached out and touched his hand. “I just resented it. It’s the only thing you’ve really given your life to. And no matter what they did to you, these are the people whose opinion matters to you. Peace-seeking politicians risked their reputations to get you out of prison—and you still feel contempt for them. You manipulated them, as you manipulated everyone. To get here. What did you see? What made you decide?”

He had hoped that she would never know. “This. Amid all the images of the assault, and all the intelligence reports, there was a tiny fragment that caught my eye. Just this.”

Keeping it had been a risk. An intelligence sweep of his records would have noted it, and someone would eventually have connected it back to what he had seen in the darkness of his cell.

Elise had always had a distinctive style and way of moving. He spotted her in the video right away. She was a tall woman, with a swimmer’s shoulders. She favored backless outfits to show off her delts, but that day she wore a sensible suit of dark plum, with contrasting butter-yellow cuffs, and a wide hat that tilted down over one eye. Three days before the assault, she slid through a partying crowd like an eel, her attention focused on something unseen.

She watched herself. “It was just a chance then. Just a possibility, one of several places the conflict might break out again. I was hoping it wouldn’t be here. Not so much for me, but for this place. This place . . . you never knew Phobos in its greatest time, did you, Tony?”

He’d never told her that he tried to save up for a vacation for the two of them here. “No.”

“There was nowhere else like it.”

“Don’t forget, you sent me Nam Lo’s observations. I may never have seen it myself, but I saw it through the eyes of your husband.”

“Please,” Elise said. “You’ve got to let it go. Whatever it was we had. The past. You talk a good game about sunk costs, about playing the pieces where they are on the board, but . . . you haven’t moved on. Is that really what you want it to say on whatever big memorial they put up to you? ‘He never moved on’. Please, Tony. No matter how this works out. Tell me you’ll do it. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of directions for you to go.”

Elise had certainly moved on, from a husband who wanted to protect her, however clumsily, to one who deliberately put her in an incredibly dangerous situation on the off chance that she might act effectively to further their shared aims.

Kingsman had to face the fact that his wife had left him for a man who was more Kingsman than he was.

“Okay, Elise,” he said. “If you tell me one thing.”

“Just one?”

It was an old game. “I’ll just ask for one. You may feel like giving me more.”

“I doubt it. Shoot.”

“You decided we were through. The last day of our last vacation in the Adirondacks. I was in the bedroom, you were in the hall. We were talking about something. I don’t remember what. Just a normal conversation. Like married people have. And then, in the middle, it was over. I could tell by your voice. I mean, I can tell now, remembering it. Back then, I had no idea.”

She was silent.

“Do you remember?” he said.

“I do.”

“Then why won’t you tell me?”

“Because . . . well, it will seem dumb. Arbitrary. Petty.”

It took all of Kingsman’s self control to not say that he had long been used to all of those things from her. This wasn’t a marital fight. Not anymore. He was going to promise to let it go. To move on. No matter what she told him. He’d already decided.

Why, then, had he asked this? How would it make a difference?

“Try me,” he said.

“I don’t remember what we were talking about either. Stuff about getting ready to go, I think. But then you told me someone was coming up the road.”

“Okay.”

“You were in the bedroom. You couldn’t see that window. So I . . . I asked you how you knew. You said you could see it in the mirror. The one with the broken wedding china set in the frame.”

If she wanted to see those broken decorative plates as wedding china, he supposed he wouldn’t argue with her. “Yes, of course. I picked that spot—“

“So that you could keep an eye on things. See the road, see what was coming up against you. And I realized . . . I said this was dumb. I had been thinking things over a lot. Not sure what was wrong, and what I should do about it. Then I realized: I had no idea of how you thought. I had no idea how you saw the world. All I knew was that it wasn’t my way. I’m surprised you could hear it in my voice, though. I wasn’t really conscious of it.”

“That was the day. After that, there was nothing I could do to change it. It took you a couple of months. I kept waiting for it.”

“Well, you sure seemed surprised when I told you.”

“I was. I reached my conclusions—and then I ignored them. Because I had to. I’d like to say I felt relief that day, but that would be a lie.”

“Did I answer your question?”

“You did,” he said. “And you have my promise. I will move on.”

“Thank you, Tony.”

They were both silent for a moment.

“Now, about the other matter we were discussing . . . ” he said.

“The fate of Phobos? Something separate, I hope. Your agreement with me about what happened at the end of our marriage shouldn’t imply—“

“Don’t play games with me, Elise. You know that you and I are the best hope for this situation.”

“Let’s say ‘least bad’. ‘Best’ is pushing it. All right. The Alliance will get something that looks like a victory. And the inhabitants of Phobos will get something that looks like life. You keep casualties to a minimum. And once you’re done, there will be a hell of a mess to clean up. Dead children, crying mothers, armless young women, old men who have lost three generations of their family. Starvation and howling pain. I’ve seen them all before, I’ll see them all again. I’ll be at work.”

“Thank you, Elise.”

“I’m not doing it for you, and I’m not even doing it because I want to.”

She was doing it because she trusted him. Was it because of the decision he had made at Kalatra? Even then, he had wondered if he had risked himself that way because he thought that Elise would respect him for that decision. He would never ask her.

Because he was going to move on.

The Alliance force did get something that looked very much like victory. Enough so that Preceptor Dakila Uy could return to Earth with honors, receiving a promotion that meant he would not ever have to worry about precedence with Kingsman. Kingsman had heard he was considering a political career.

Even though Leila Ferhat had been largely responsible for Uy’s victory, she got no thanks for it. For Uy, she would always be the one who knew he had wanted to retreat, and had been balked of that goal by Kingsman’s insane ambitions and her own clever tactical plan. She received a minor commendation, and some notes in her fitness report that indicated she had problems understanding the chain of command.

Still, there was a halo around the successful Phobos expedition, and she took advantage of it, before that halo got stained by post-event investigations and news reports of the aftermath. She transferred to a force near Jupiter, and now had a position of some responsibility in the force assaulting Titan. Kingsman knew her commander, and hoped that he understood her value. But he resisted the urge to put in a good word for her. That was the last thing she would want.

Nam Lo was somewhere on Titan. He had not managed to come to join his wife in the reconstruction of Phobos, because he was facing another potential human disaster caused by Alliance military action.

Phobos would never again be what it was. Centuries of culture lay buried in rubble. Elise fed the hungry, bandaged the wounded, comforted the survivors. Once military operations concluded, there was no further disaster.

No one knew that Kingsman had once again risked soldiers to prevent larger death tolls. This time his risks had paid off, and it seemed like things could have come out no other way.

He was once again an active-duty officer, though his actual authority was now several levels below the ability to call off an entire Alliance military expedition. In fact, he only commanded a handful of troops.

Officially, this rock in the Mars’s trailing Lagrange point was uninhabited. It had served as a base for a while, and then had been abandoned in the run up to Phobos. After that, there were no resources to reactivate it.

But it could be reactivated by someone who had reason to do so. If someone from the outer satellites wanted to take advantage of the confusion following Phobos to mount an assault on the Alliance forces around Mars, this would be an excellent staging point.

Kingsman gave that event a possibility of one in three within the next six months. That was high enough that he had had no trouble in persuading command to fund and staff his operation.

“No big water here” Tutun stopped in the middle of one of the endless featureless tunnels. It was a spot as good as any other. “No waterfalls.”

“No,” Kingsman said. “We’ll be running our water through our bodies on the average of once a week.”

“You know, I could do without the statistics once in a while.”

Tutun was one of several of Ferhat’s troops who had decided to go with Kingsman after the end of the Phobos expedition.

“Pick a spot,” Kingsman said. “Pick it carefully. You’re going to be in it for a long time.”

Six months was a long time to spend buttoned up in survival pods. Elise had been right about what he needed. The idea that some of the troops who had served with him in Phobos were willing to undertake the difficult duty under his command, on a one third chance that they might face an immensely superior force far from any possible reinforcement and support, gave him a feeling unlike any other. The most difficult part of the operation would be maintaining total detection discipline. As the weeks went by, and no assault manifested itself, the temptation would be to let small things go, to turn on some light and heat in a small room somewhere deep in the rock. The hardest part of Kingsman’s job would be maintaining morale when that moment came.

Kingsman settled back against the side of the survival pod. Tutun snored to his right. To his left, Gupta watched something on a tiny screen, grunting occasionally. He wanted to tell her to stop. The unpredictable rhythm of her grunts drove him crazy.

Time enough for that later. He was sure that in a few weeks they would all want to kill each other. Meanwhile, it was time for a nap.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October-March 2013.

A Few Words with Alexander Jablokov

What was the inspiration for this story?

The story was the result of a literary competitive urge. I was at a writing workshop, and another writer had submitted a story of asteroid combat. I thought “this is pretty good, but I bet I could write something better.” Competition between writers is productive of more good work than you might expect.

I had been reading a lot about urban combat, combat within structures, and other related topics, some of them on the always-interesting BLDGBLOG.

What are some of your favorite short stories?

I read a fair amount of short fiction, a lot of it not science fiction. Two stories that have particularly struck me in recent years, and both of which I do wish to compete with, are “All Through the House” by Christopher Coake, a reverse-told story of a domestic mass murder, and “Poachers,” by Tom Franklin, about the desperate backwoods struggle between a group of poaching brothers and a superhuman-seeming game warden. Both of these are at a longer length, and I do tend to think that novella length can be the strongest form for science fiction, having room to thoroughly explore a situation without insisting on moving into your house and eating all of your cereal.

You have one wish, you can make one from a story or novel you've written a reality. What would it be?

Live in one of my own stories? The essence of fiction is that the characters are less comfortable in their reality than we would like in our own. A comfortable life is one no one would ever want to read about. There is a diner in my novel Deepdrive, Near Earth Orbit, topped by a giant fiberglass cowgirl riding a rocket. My characters hang out there, I would like to as well.

What are you working on?

I have several projects. One is a novel set in the universe of my novel Deepdrive, about some adventures in the backcountry of a terraformed Venus. Another is a YA novel about a high student who gets thrown into an alternate universe as a consequence of a device his father has invented. I’ve also written a couple of stories in the last couple of months that I am proud of, but neither has found a home as of yet.

Itsy Bitsy Spider

James Patrick Kelly

When I found out that my father was still alive after all these years and living at Strawberry Fields, I thought he’d gotten just what he deserved. Retroburbs are where the old, scared people go to hide. I’d always pictured the people in them as deranged losers. Visiting some fantasy world like the disneys or Carlucci’s Carthage is one thing, moving to one is another. Sure, 2038 is messy, but it’s a hell of a lot better than nineteen-sixty-whatever.

Now that I’d arrived at 144 Bluejay Way, I realized that the place was worse than I had imagined. Strawberry Fields was pretending to be some long-lost suburb of the late twentieth century, except that it had the sterile monotony of cheap VR. It was clean, all right, and neat, but it was everywhere the same. And the scale was wrong. The lots were squeezed together and all the houses had shrunk—like the dreams of their owners. They were about the size of a one-car garage, modular units tarted up at the factory to look like ranches, with old double-hung storm windows and hardened siding of harvest gold, barn red, forest green. Of course, there were no real garages; faux Mustangs and VW buses cruised the quiet streets. Their carbrains were listening for a summons from Barbara Chesley next door at 142, or the Goltzes across the street, who might be headed to Penny Lanes to bowl a few frames, or the hospital to die.

There was a beach chair with blue nylon webbing on the front stoop of 144 Bluejay Way. A brick walk led to it, dividing two patches of carpet moss, green as a dream. There were names and addresses printed in huge lightstick letters on all the doors in the neighborhood; no doubt many Strawberry Fielders were easily confused. The owner of this one was Peter Fancy. He had been born Peter Fanelli, but had legally taken his stage name not long after his first success as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1. I was a Fancy too; the name was one of the few things of my father’s I had kept.

I stopped at the door and let it look me over. “You’re Jen,” it said.

“Yes.” I waited in vain for it to open or to say something else. “I’d like to see Mr. Fancy, please.” The old man’s house had worse manners than he did. “He knows I’m coming,” I said. “I sent him several messages.” Which he had never answered, but I didn’t mention that.

“Just a minute,” said the door. “She’ll be right with you.”

She? The idea that he might be with another woman now hadn’t occurred to me. I’d lost track of my father a long time ago—on purpose. The last time we’d actually visited overnight was when I was twenty. Mom gave me a ticket to Port Gemini, where he was doing the Shakespeare in Space program. The orbital was great, but staying with him was like being under water. I think I must have held my breath for the entire week. After that, there were a few, sporadic calls, a couple of awkward dinners—all at his instigation. Then twenty-three years of nothing.

I never hated him, exactly. When he left, I just decided to show solidarity with Mom and be done with him. If acting was more important than his family, then to hell with Peter Fancy. Mom was horrified when I told her how I felt. She cried and claimed the divorce was as much her fault as his. It was too much for me to handle; I was only eleven years old when they separated. I needed to be on someone’s side and so I had chosen her. She never did stop trying to talk me into finding him again, even though after a while it only made me mad at her. For the past few years, she’d been warning me that I’d developed a warped view of men.

But she was a smart woman, my mom—a winner. Sure, she’d had troubles, but she’d founded three companies, was a millionaire by twenty-five. I missed her.

A lock clicked and the door opened. Standing in the dim interior was a little girl in a gold-and-white checked dress. Her dark, curly hair was tied in a ribbon. She was wearing white ankle socks and black Mary Jane shoes that were so shiny they had to be plastic. There was a Band-Aid on her left knee.

“Hello, Jen. I was hoping you’d really come.” Her voice surprised me. It was resonant, impossibly mature. At first glance I’d guessed she was three, maybe four; I’m not much good at guessing kids’ ages. Now I realized that this must be a bot—a made person.

“You look just like I thought you would.” She smiled, stood on tiptoe and raised a delicate little hand over her head. I had to bend to shake it. The hand was warm, slightly moist, and very realistic. She had to belong to Strawberry Fields; there was no way my father could afford a bot with skin this real.

“Please come in.” She waved on the lights. “We’re so happy you’re here.” The door closed behind me.

The playroom took up almost half of the little house. Against one wall was a miniature kitchen. Toy dishes were drying in a rack next to the sink; the pink refrigerator barely came up to my waist. The table was full-sized; it had two normal chairs and a booster chair. Opposite this was a bed with a ruffled Pumpkin Patty bedspread. About a dozen dolls and stuffed animals were arranged along the far edge of the mattress. I recognized most of them: Pooh, Mr. Moon, Baby Rollypolly, the Sleepums, Big Bird. And the wallpaper was familiar too: Oz figures like Toto and the Wizard and the Cowardly Lion on a field of Munchkin blue.

“We had to make a few changes,” said the bot. “Do you like it?”

The room seemed to tilt then. I took a small, unsteady step and everything righted itself. My dolls, my wallpaper, the chest of drawers from Grandma Fanelli’s cottage in Hyannis. I stared at the bot and recognized her for the first time.

She was me.

“What is this,” I said, “some kind of sick joke?” I felt like I’d just been slapped in the face.

“Is something wrong?” the bot said. “Tell me. Maybe we can fix it.”

I swiped at her and she danced out of reach. I don’t know what I would have done if I had caught her. Maybe smashed her through the picture window onto the patch of front lawn or shaken her until pieces started falling off. But the bot wasn’t responsible, my father was. Mom would never have defended him if she’d known about this. The old bastard. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was, shuddering with anger, after years of feeling nothing for him.

There was an interior door just beyond some shelves filled with old-fashioned paper books. I didn’t take time to look as I went past, but I knew that Dr. Seuss and A. A. Milne and L. Frank Baum would be on those shelves. The door had no knob.

“Open up,” I shouted. It ignored me, so I kicked it. “Hey!”

“Jennifer.” The bot tugged at the back of my jacket. “I must ask you . . . ”

“You can’t have me!” I pressed my ear to the door. Silence. “I’m not this thing you made.” I kicked it again. “You hear?”

Suddenly an announcer was shouting in the next room. “ . . . Into the post to Russell, who kicks it out to Havlicek all alone at the top of the key, he shoots . . . and Baylor with the strong rebound.” The asshole was trying to drown me out.

“If you don’t come away from that door right now,” said the bot, “I’m calling security.”

“What are they going to do?” I said. “I’m the long-lost daughter, here for a visit. And who the hell are you, anyway?”

“I’m bonded to him, Jen. Your father is no longer competent to handle his own affairs. I’m his legal guardian.”

“Shit.” I kicked the door one last time, but my heart wasn’t in it. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he had slipped over the edge. He was almost ninety.

“If you want to sit and talk, I’d like that very much.” The bot gestured toward a banana yellow beanbag chair. “Otherwise, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

It was the shock of seeing the bot, I told myself—I’d reacted like a hurt little girl. But I was a grown woman and it was time to start behaving like one. I wasn’t here to let Peter Fancy worm his way back into my feelings. I had come because of Mom.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m here on business.” I opened my purse. “If you’re running his life now, I guess this is for you.” I passed her the envelope and settled back, tucking my legs beneath me. There is no way for an adult to sit gracefully in a beanbag chair.

She slipped the check out. “It’s from Mother.” She paused, then corrected herself, “Her estate.” She didn’t seem surprised.

“Yes.”

“It’s too generous.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“She must’ve taken care of you too?”

“I’m fine.” I wasn’t about to discuss the terms of Mom’s will with my father’s toy daughter.

“I would’ve liked to have known her,” said the bot. She slid the check back into the envelope and set it aside. “I’ve spent a lot of time imagining Mother.”

I had to work hard not to snap at her. Sure, this bot had at least a human equivalent intelligence and would be a free citizen someday, assuming she didn’t break down first. But she had a cognizor for a brain and a heart fabricated in a vat. How could she possibly imagine my mom, especially when all she had to go on was whatever lies he had told her?

“So how bad is he?”

She gave me a sad smile and shook her head. “Some days are better than others. He has no clue who President Huong is or about the quake, but he can still recite the dagger scene from Macbeth. I haven’t told him that Mother died. He’d just forget it ten minutes later.”

“Does he know what you are?”

“I am many things, Jen.”

“Including me.”

“You’re a role I’m playing, not who I am.” She stood. “Would you like some tea?”

“Okay.” I still wanted to know why Mom had left my father four hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars in her will. If he couldn’t tell me, maybe the bot could.

She went to her kitchen, opened a cupboard, and took out a regular-sized cup. It looked like a bucket in her little hand. “I don’t suppose you still drink Constant Comment?”

His favorite. I had long since switched to rafallo. “That’s fine.” I remembered that when I was a kid my father used to brew cups for the two of us from the same bag because Constant Comment was so expensive. “I thought they went out of business long ago.”

“I mix my own. I’d be interested to hear how accurate you think the recipe is.”

“I suppose you know how I like it?”

She chuckled.

“So, does he need the money?”

The microwave dinged. “Very few actors get rich,” said the bot. I didn’t think there had been microwaves in the sixties, but then strict historical accuracy wasn’t really the point of Strawberry Fields. “Especially when they have a weakness for Shakespeare.”

“Then how come he lives here and not in some flop? And how did he afford you?”

She pinched sugar between her index finger and thumb, then rubbed them together over the cup. It was something I still did, but only when I was by myself. A nasty habit; Mom used to yell at him for teaching it to me. “I was a gift.” She shook a teabag loose from a canister shaped like an acorn and plunged it into the boiling water. “From Mother.”

The bot offered the cup to me; I accepted it nervelessly. “That’s not true.” I could feel the blood draining from my face.

“I can lie if you’d prefer, but I’d rather not.” She pulled the booster chair away from the table and turned it to face me. “There are many things about themselves that they never told us, Jen. I’ve always wondered why that was.”

I felt logy and a little stupid, as if I had just woken from a thirty-year nap. “She just gave you to him?”

“And bought him this house, paid all his bills, yes.”

“But why?”

“You knew her,” said the bot. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

I couldn’t think of what to say or do. Since there was a cup in my hand, I took a sip. For an instant, the scent of tea and dried oranges carried me back to when I was a little girl and I was sitting in Grandma Fanelli’s kitchen in a wet bathing suit, drinking Constant Comment that my father had made to keep my teeth from chattering. There were knots like brown eyes in the pine walls and the green linoleum was slick where I had dripped on it.

“Well?”

“It’s good,” I said absently and raised the cup to her. “No, really, just like I remember.”

She clapped her hands in excitement. “So,” said the bot. “What was Mother like?”

It was an impossible question, so I tried to let it bounce off me. But then neither of us said anything; we just stared at each other across a yawning gulf of time and experience. In the silence, the question stuck. Mom had died three months ago and this was the first time since the funeral that I’d thought of her as she really had been—not the papery ghost in the hospital room. I remembered how, after she divorced my father, she always took my calls when she was at the office, even if it was late, and how she used to step on imaginary brakes whenever I drove her anywhere, and how grateful I was that she didn’t cry when I told her that Rob and I were getting divorced. I thought about Easter eggs and raspberry Pop Tarts and when she sent me to Antibes for a year when I was fourteen and that perfume she wore on my father’s opening nights and the way they used to waltz on the patio at the house in Waltham.

“West is walking the ball upcourt, setting his offense with fifteen seconds to go on the shot clock, nineteen in the half . . . ”

The beanbag chair that I was in faced the picture window. Behind me, I could hear the door next to the bookcase open.

“Jones and Goodrich are in each other’s jerseys down low and now Chamberlain swings over and calls for the ball on the weak side . . . ”

I twisted around to look over my shoulder. The great Peter Fancy was making his entrance.

Mom once told me that when she met my father, he was typecast playing men that women fall hopelessly in love with. He’d had great successes as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar and Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls and the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The years had eroded his good looks but had not obliterated them; from a distance he was still a handsome man. He had a shock of close-cropped white hair. The beautiful cheekbones were still there; the chin was as sharply defined as it had been in his first headshot. His gray eyes were distant and a little dreamy, as if he were preoccupied with the War of the Roses or the problem of evil.

“Jen,” he said, “what’s going on out here?” He still had the big voice that could reach into the second balcony without a mike. I thought for a moment he was talking to me.

“We have company, Daddy,” said the bot, in a four-year-old trill that took me by surprise. “A lady.”

“I can see that it’s a lady, sweetheart.” He took a hand from the pocket of his jeans, stroked the touchpad on his belt and his exolegs walked him stiffly across the room. “I’m Peter Fancy,” he said.

“The lady is from Strawberry Fields.” The bot swung around behind my father. She shot me a look that made the terms and conditions of my continued presence clear: if I broke the illusion, I was out. “She came by to see if everything is all right with our house.” The bot disurbed me even more, now that she sounded like young Jen Fancy.

As I heaved myself out of the beanbag chair, my father gave me one of those lopsided, flirting grins I knew so well. “Does the lady have a name?” He must have shaved just for the company, because now that he had come close I could see that he had a couple of fresh nicks. There was a button-sized patch of gray whiskers by his ear that he had missed altogether.

“Her name is Ms. Johnson,” said the bot. It was my ex, Rob’s, last name. I had never been Jennifer Johnson.

“Well, Ms. Johnson,” he said, hooking thumbs in his pants pockets. “The water in my toilet is brown.”

“I’ll . . . um . . . see that it’s taken care of.” I was at a loss for what to say next, then inspiration struck. “Actually, I had another reason for coming.” I could see the bot stiffen. “I don’t know if you’ve seen Yesterday, our little newsletter? Anyway, I was talking to Mrs. Chesley next door and she told me that you were an actor once. I was wondering if I might interview you. Just a few questions, if you have the time. I think your neighbors might . . . ”

“Were?” he said, drawing himself up. “Once? Madame, I am now an actor and will always be.”

“My daddy’s famous,” said the bot.

I cringed at that; it was something I used to say. My father squinted at me. “What did you say your name was?”

“Johnson,” I said. “Jane Johnson.”

“And you’re a reporter? You’re sure you’re not a critic?”

“Positive.”

He seemed satisfied. “I’m Peter Fancy.” He extended his right hand to shake. The hand was spotted and bony and it trembled like a reflection in a lake. Clearly whatever magic—or surgeon’s skill—it was that had preserved my father’s face had not extended to his extremities. I was so disturbed by his infirmity that I took his cold hand in mine and pumped it three, four times. It was dry as a page of one of the bot’s dead books. When I let go, the hand seemed steadier. He gestured at the beanbag.

“Sit,” he said. “Please.”

After I had settled in, he tapped the touchpad and stumped over to the picture window. “Barbara Chesley is a broken and bitter old woman,” he said, “and I will not have dinner with her under any circumstances, do you understand?” He peered up Bluejay Way and down.

“Yes, Daddy,” said the bot.

“I believe she voted for Nixon, so she has no reason to complain now.” Apparently satisfied that the neighbors weren’t sneaking up on us, he leaned against the windowsill, facing me. “Mrs. Thompson, I think today may well be a happy one for both of us. I have an announcement.” He paused for effect. “I’ve been thinking of Lear again.”

The bot settled onto one of her little chairs. “Oh, Daddy, that’s wonderful.”

“It’s the only one of the big four I haven’t done,” said my father. “I was set for a production in Stratford, Ontario, back in ’99; Polly Matthews was to play Cordelia. Now there was an actor; she could bring tears to a stone. But then my wife Hannah had one of her bad times and I had to withdraw so I could take care of Jen. The two of us stayed down at my mother’s cottage on the Cape; I wasted the entire season tending bar. And when Hannah came out of rehab, she decided that she didn’t want to be married to an underemployed actor anymore, so things were tight for a while. She had all the money, so I had to scramble—spent almost two years on the road. But I think it might have been for the best. I was only forty-eight. Too old for Hamlet, too young for Lear. My Hamlet was very well received, you know. There were overtures from PBS about a taping, but that was when the BBC decided to do the Shakespeare series with that doctor, what was his name? Jonathan Miller. So instead of Peter Fancy, we had Derek Jacobi, whose brilliant idea it was to roll across the stage, frothing his lines like a rabid raccoon. You’d think he’d seen an alien, not his father’s ghost. Well, that was another missed opportunity, except, of course, that I was too young. Ripeness is all, eh? So I still have Lear to do. Unfinished business. My comeback.”

He bowed, then pivoted solemnly so that I saw him in profile, framed by the picture window. “Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?” He held up a trembling hand and blinked at it uncomprehendingly. “I know not what to say. I swear these are not my hands.”

Suddenly the bot was at his feet. “O look upon me, sir,” she said, in her childish voice, “and hold your hand in benediction o’er me.”

“Pray, do not mock me.” My father gathered himself in the flood of morning light. “I am a very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less; and to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”

He stole a look in my direction, as if to gauge my reaction to his impromptu performance. A frown might have stopped him, a word would have crushed him. Maybe I should have, but I was afraid he’d start talking about Mom again, telling me things I didn’t want to know. So I watched instead, transfixed.

“Methinks I should know you . . . ” He rested his hand briefly on the bot’s head. “ . . . and know this stranger.” He fumbled at the controls and the exolegs carried him across the room toward me. As he drew nearer, he seemed to sluff off the years. “Yet I am mainly ignorant what place this is; and all the skill I have remembers not these garments, nor I know not where I did lodge last night.” It was Peter Fancy who stopped before me; his face a mere kiss away from mine. “Do not laugh at me; for, as I am a man, I think this lady to be my child. Cordelia.”

He was staring right at me, into me, knifing through make-believe indifference to the wound I’d nursed all these years, the one that had never healed. He seemed to expect a reply, only I didn’t have the line. A tiny, sad squeaky voice within me was whimpering, You left me and you got exactly what you deserve. But my throat tightened and choked it off.

The bot cried, “And so I am! I am!”

But she had distracted him. I could see confusion begin to deflate him. “Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray . . . weep not. If you have poison for me, I will drink it. I know you do not love me . . . ”

He stopped and his brow wrinkled. “It’s something about the sisters,” he muttered.

“Yes,” said the bot, “‘ . . . for your sisters have done me wrong . . . ’”

“Don’t feed me the fucking lines!” he shouted at her. “I’m Peter Fancy, god damn it!”

After she calmed him down, we had lunch. She let him make the peanut butter and banana sandwiches while she heated up some Campbell’s tomato and rice soup, which she poured from a can made of actual metal. The sandwiches were lumpy because he had hacked the bananas into chunks the size of walnuts. She tried to get him to tell me about the daylilies blooming in the backyard, and the old Boston Garden, and the time he and Mom had had breakfast with Bobby Kennedy. She asked whether he wanted TV dinner or pot pie for supper. He refused all her conversational gambits. He only ate half a bowl of soup.

He pushed back from the table and announced that it was her nap time. The bot put up a perfunctory fuss, although it was clear that it was my father who was tired out. However, the act seemed to perk him up. Another role for his resume: the doting father. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “We’ll play your game, sweetheart. But just once—otherwise you’ll be cranky tonight.”

The two of them perched on the edge of the bot’s bed next to Big Bird and the Sleepums. My father started to sing and the bot immediately joined in.

“The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout.”

Their gestures were almost mirror images, except that his ruined hands actually looked like spiders as they climbed into the air.

“Down came the rain, and washed the spider out.”

The bot beamed at him as if he were the only person in the world.

“Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain.

“And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.”

When his arms were once again raised over his head, she giggled and hugged him. He let them fall around her, returning her embrace. “That’s a good girl,” he said. “That’s my Jenny.”

The look on his face told me that I had been wrong: this was no act. It was as real to him as it was to me. I had tried hard not to, but I still remembered how the two of us always used to play together, Daddy and Jenny, Jen and Dad.

Waiting for Mommy to come home.

He kissed her and she snuggled under the blankets. I felt my eyes stinging.

“But if you do the play,” she said, “when will you be back?”

“What play?”

“That one you were telling me. The king and his daughters.”

“There’s no such play, Jenny.” He sifted her black curls through his hands. “I’ll never leave you, don’t worry now. Never again.” He rose unsteadily and caught himself on the chest of drawers.

“Nighty noodle,” said the bot.

“Pleasant dreams, sweetheart,” said my father. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

I expected him to say something to me, but he didn’t even seem to realize that I was still in the room. He shambled across the playroom, opened the door to his bedroom and went in.

“I’m sorry about that,” said the bot, speaking again as an adult.

“Don’t be,” I said. I coughed—something in my throat. “It was fine. I was very . . . touched.”

“He’s usually a lot happier. Sometimes he works in the garden.” The bot pulled the blankets aside and swung her legs out of the bed. “He likes to vacuum.”

“Yes.”

“I take good care of him.”

I nodded and reached for my purse. “I can see that.” I had to go. “Is it enough?”

She shrugged. “He’s my daddy.”

“I meant the money. Because if it’s not, I’d like to help.”

“Thank you. He’d appreciate that.”

The front door opened for me, but I paused before stepping out into Strawberry Fields. “What about . . . after?”

“When he dies? My bond terminates. He said he’d leave the house to me. I know you could contest that, but I’ll need to sell in order to pay for my twenty-year maintenance.”

“No, no. That’s fine. You deserve it.”

She came to the door and looked up at me, little Jen Fancy and the woman she would never become.

“You know, it’s you he loves,” she said. “I’m just a stand-in.”

“He loves his little girl,” I said. “Doesn’t do me any good—I’m forty-seven.”

“It could if you let it.” She frowned. “I wonder if that’s why Mother did all this. So you’d find out.”

“Or maybe she was just plain sorry.” I shook my head. She was a smart woman, my mom. I would’ve liked to have known her.

“So, Ms. Fancy, maybe you can visit us again sometime.” The bot grinned and shook my hand. “Daddy’s usually in a good mood after his nap. He sits out front on his beach chair and waits for the ice cream truck. He always buys us some. Our favorite is Yellow Submarine. It’s vanilla with fat butterscotch swirls, dipped in white chocolate. I know it sounds kind of odd, but it’s good.”

“Yes,” I said absently, thinking about all the things Mom had told me about my father. I was hearing them now for the first time. “That might be nice.”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1997.

Cracklegrackle

Justina Robson

Many times Mark Bishop read the assignment, but it never made more sense to him. He was to interview the Greenjack Hyperion, make an assessment of the claims made for it, and return his report. That part was simple. But after it, the evidence supplied by the Forged and human witnesses . . . this he couldn’t manage more than a line or two of. Panic rose and the black-and-white print became an unknown language. He could see it hadn’t changed, but simply by moving his eyes across it his mind redshifted and all meaning sped away from him.

He poured the one-too-many scotch from the concession bottle by his elbow just as the hostess was about to whisk it away, and drank it down. The burn was impersonal and direct. It did exactly what it always promised, and shot the pain where it hurt. He rubbed his eyes and tried again.

He disliked the sight of the document on his screen. It struck him suddenly that the paragraphs were too long. The white spaces between them loomed in violent stripes. Missing things were there. All of the unknown inlets holding the truth that the print struggled to express. The punctuation was a taunt, an assault that declared in black-and-white that the subject’s defeat of his reason was absolute. Even the title was loathsome: “Making a Case for the Intuitive Interpretation of Full Spectrum Data in Unique Generative Posthuman Experience.” Usually he had no trouble with jargon, or any scientific melee, but what the hell did that mean? What did it mean to the person it referred to? Had they titled it or was it just the bureaucrat’s pedantic label for something they could read but not comprehend?

A final slug of scotch ended his attempt. He only understood that there was no escape from meeting the Greenjack, as he had promised, as his job demanded: meet, interview, assess, report. That was all. It was easy. He’d done it a hundred times. More. He was an expert. That’s why the government had hired him and kept him on the top payroll all these years. They trusted him to judge rightly, to know truth, to detect mistakes and delusions, to be sure.

Bishop tried to read the document once more. His eyes hurt and finally, after a forced march across the first few paragraphs, he felt a cluster headache come on and halt them with a fierce spasm of pain as if something had decided to drill invisible holes into his head via the back of his eyeballs. He lay back in the recline seat of the lift launcher and closed his eyes. The attendants circled and took away his cup, secured his harness, and spoke pleasantly about the safety of the orbital lift system and the experience of several g’s of force during acceleration—a song-and-dance routine he already knew so well he could have done it himself. He briefly remembered being offered a ride up on one of the Heavy Angels and explaining to the secretary that he didn’t want it. She couldn’t understand his reluctance. Then in the background she heard some colleague whisper, “Mars.” She’d gone red, then white.

But it wasn’t just the difficulty of talking to the Forged now, he’d never liked the idea of being inside a body. It was too much like being eaten, or some form of unwilling sex. So he’d made his economy-excuse, a polite no, a don’t-want-to-be-a-bother smile and now he was waiting for takeoff, no time left, unprepared for the big meeting, his mouth dry with all the things he’d taken to avoid doing anything repulsively human, like being sick.

The lift was moved into position by its waldos, attached to the cable, tested. The slight technicalities passed him in a blur of nauseating detail and then there was the stomach-leaving, spine-shrinking hurl of acceleration in the back of his legs. The headache peaked. Weightlessness came as they soared above the clouds into the blue and then the black. He felt like lead. When the time came to unclip and get out, he half-expected that he’d be set in position, a statue, and surprised himself by seeing his hands reach out and competently move him along the guide rails. He didn’t hit anyone. The other passengers were all busy talking to each other or into their mikes. Then the smell filled his nostrils.

It was a mysterious animal tang that reminded him of the hot hides of horses, a drooling, dozing camel he had once attempted to ride, and, on top of that, the ocean. Bishop gripped on tight, knowing that all his juvenile, ancient spine-root superstitions had caught up with him. His interviewee had come to meet him in an act of unwanted courtesy. He would have to greet and speak to it . . . why had he forgotten its name suddenly? Why did it have to smell like that? But he was now holding up the queue. The stewardess mistook his hesitation for ignorance and started talking about freefall walking. All that remained was to turn himself toward the smooth, white-lit exit chute that led to the Offworld Destinations Lounge, and follow that telltale scent of primeval beast.

The other passengers sniffed curiously as they passed him, “so-sor-rying” their way around his stalled self. He fiddled with his recorder, checking his microphone and switching everything on. It made him feel secure in the same way he imagined Old World spies had once felt secure because of their illicit link to someone, somewhere, who would at least hear their final moments. It wasn’t exactly like being accompanied, but it was enough of a shield to let the prickling under his arms stop and for his headache to recede.

The thought came to him that he hadn’t been himself lately. It was only natural after the conclusion of the inquiry and its open verdict. Too much stress. He ought to stop, beg off, take a holiday. Nobody would be surprised. But the thought of not having his job, the idea of having nothing to do but walk the familiar coast near Pismo Beach or under the tall silence of the redwoods—that made him pull himself along all the faster to escape the hum, the static darkness, the horror that was waiting there for him, that was already here in the notion of that place. He gritted his teeth and pushed that aside. The scotch made it easy. Why the hell hadn’t he thought to bring some more?

He pulled himself forward into the glide that felt graceful even when it wasn’t, and swallowed with difficulty. That smell! It was so curious here, where all the smells were ground out of existence quickly in the filtration of the dry air so that humans and their descendants, the Forged, could meet without the animal startle reflexes scent caused by the humans. But the grace would only last a minute or two here, in the neutral zone of the Lift Center. And why could he smell this one so clearly? It must reek—and as he thought this, he saw it/him, a tall, gangling, ugly creature that resembled a gargoyle from some mighty gothic cathedral whose creator had been keen on all the Old Testament virtues. It could easily have featured in his nightmares. He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that it had been modeled with an artistic eye to that effect. The Pangenesis Tupac, brooder, sculptor, creator in flesh and metal, enjoyed her humor at all levels of creation. The word anathema sat in his head, alone, as he bravely put on a smile of greeting.

“Mark Bishop?” said the gargoyle in an old English gentleman’s voice, as fitting and unexpected as rain in Death Valley.

“I am.” He found conviction, was so glad the other didn’t offer his hand, and glanced down and saw it was a fistful of claws.

“My name is Hyperion. I am pleased to meet you. I have read many of your articles in the more popular academic journals and the ordinary press. Your reputation is well-founded.” It made a slight bow and the harsh interior lights shone off its bony eyelids.

It was shamefully difficult not to marvel at the sight and sound of a talking gryphon-thing, or want to see if those yellow eyes were real. Hyperion’s voice seemed to indicate enjoyment, but who knew, with the Forged? Mark, ashamed of his hatred, gushed, “Forgive me, I’m having a lot of trouble with this assignment. I don’t believe in the supernatural and . . . ”

“ . . . and you are nervous around the Forged. Most humans are, and pretend not to be. You have always been clear about your limitations, in your previous work. I am not deterred. You have come this far. Let us complete the journey.” Feathers rustled on it. Its face was scaled, beaked. How it managed speech was beyond him, and yet it spoke remarkably well. But parrots did too, Bishop reasoned, so why not this?

It took him almost a minute to understand what it’d said, not because it was unclear, but because he was so confused by the storm of feeling inside himself. Repulsion, aggression, fear. The stink, he realized at last with a shock of guilt, was himself.

Hyperion took hold of the guide rails delicately and spun itself away, tail trailing like a kite’s. Its comfort with weightlessness spoke of many years spent there, in the cramped airlocks and crabbed tunnels of the old stations. In its wake, Bishop followed, slipping, and after a too-brief eternity found himself at the entrance hatch that looked entirely machine, though there was no disguising the chitinous interior into which he was able to peer and see seats of the strange kind made for space travel—ball-like concoctions of soft stuff that moved against tethers and into which one had to crawl like a mouse into a nest. He made himself concentrate only on mechanics, move a hand, a foot, that’s all—it was the only thing that kept his control of himself intact.

Of course, it was Forged. The only machines that traveled the length of the system were robotically controlled cargo carriers whose glacial pace was utterly unsuitable for this trip or most any other if you didn’t have half a lifetime to spare. For local traffic to the moon and the various towed-in asteroids that had been clustered nearby to form the awkward mineral suburb of Rolling Rock, all travel was undertaken in the purpose-built, ur-human creatures of the Flight. Every last one of them was a speed freak.

“Ironhorse Alacrity Valhalla has agreed to take us to our location.” Hyperion made the introduction as it waited for Bishop to precede him into the dimly lit interior chitoblast and become a helpless parasite inside a being he couldn’t even see or identify, but which had a mind, apparently rather like his own, only connected by the telepathy of contemporary electronic signaling to every other Forged mind—whereas he was quite alone. He checked his mike and gave Hyperion a sickly smile that he had intended to be professional and cheering. The creature blinked at him slowly, quite relaxed, and he saw that it had extraordinary eyes. They were large, as large as his fist, in its big head, but beyond the clear, wet sclera lay an iris so complex and dazzling . . . another blink brought him to his senses. Yellow eyes. It was demonic. What idiot had made them that color?

He was able to manage quite well, and put himself into the seat sack without any foolish struggling or tangles, even though now he was feeling slightly drunk. Cocooned next to each other, they were able to see one another’s heads easily. Stuck to the side of each sack, a refreshment package waited. Within the slings, toilet apparatus was easy to find. There was a screen in the ceiling, if it was the ceiling—without gravity it hardly mattered—showing some pleasant views of pastoral Earth scenes, like a holiday brochure. Bishop figured it was for his benefit and tried to be comforted as a Hawaiian beach glowed azure at him, surrounded by thick, fleshy webbing that pulsed slightly in erratic measure.

Common lore said it was all right for old humans not to attempt talking to their host carrier at this point. The gargoyle could have been babbling on to the ship all the time, of course, there was no knowing. His mind fussed around what they might say. It blurred hopelessly as he attempted to drag up anything about the task at hand. He couldn’t bring any thought into focus long enough to articulate it.

The door sealed up behind them and was immediately lost in the strange texture of the wall. There were no ports. He wouldn’t be seeing the stars unless the Alacrity wanted to show him images from outside on the holiday channel.

“Where are we going?” he asked, though it had been in the damn notes.

“To the spot you requested,” Hyperion said with some puzzlement. “Don’t you recall?” Bishop flushed hot with embarrassment, started sweating all over again. He didn’t remember. Then there was a vague hint that he might have made a call, no, written a request, a secret note . . . had he? He checked the screen inventory of his mail. Nothing. Inside the cocoon of the webbing, he experienced a stab of shocking acuteness in the region of his guts and heart. He felt that he was losing his mind and that it was paying him back with this lance, this polearm of pure fear. What had he requested?

“No.” He wanted to lie but his mouth wouldn’t do it.

The Greenjack was quiet for a moment. “I think that we should talk a little on the way there, Mr. Bishop, if you don’t mind.” Its voice was gentle now, and had a rounded richness that reminded Bishop of leather chairs, wood paneling, pipe tobacco, twilight, and cognac. Above the line of the cocoon, he could see its feet twitching gently, flexing their strangely padded digits. Dark claws, blunted from walking, were just visible. “I am well aware of the way my claims must appear to scientists such as yourself. Energies beyond human perception existing within our own spacetime perhaps is not too outlandish in itself. But my observations of their behavior, and what it seems to mean for their interactions with us, that is the stuff of late-night stories. Believe me, Mr. Bishop, I have studied them for many years before making these statements. And I would welcome any remarks.”

Charlatan, Bishop thought. Must be. He’d thought it from the get-go, when he first read about it.

Bishop had been in doubt on other assignments, though none of them like this one. Mostly, he wrote for journals about science or current affairs based on Earth. He was one of the more popular and able writers who could turn complicated and difficult notions into the kind of thing that most well-educated people could digest with breakfast. Normally, he avoided all discussions about the Forged and their politics, but, of course, it had caught up with him as it must with everyone in the end, he reasoned. And his expertise had led to him being selected by the government to come and make a judgment out here about this odd person and its extraordinary claims, its illegal and incomprehensible existence. The Greenjack Cylenchar Hyperion was a member of a class created by the Forged themselves, by the motherfather, Tupac, whose vast body had bred all the spacefarers and most of the Gravity Bound. It was a class she claimed was scientifically essential, though he had serious doubts. The Greenjacks were there to confront the boundaries of the perceivable universe, and to try to apprehend what, to ordinary human eyes, was beyond sight. Hyperion, in particular, was said to be able to perceive every frequency there was, and had been given adaptations to allow its mind to be able to cope with the information. Hyperion didn’t just see, it watched. Recently, it’d been making dramatic claims about its visions, which had been in all the papers.

Bishop struggled, but the panic was choking, he wasn’t able to say the sensible thing he had in mind—namely, “Yes, but just because you can detect these things, why aren’t they verified by machines?”

The Greenjack paused, just the length of time it would have taken him to make this reply, and added, “Machine verification has confirmed erratic frequency fluctuations in localized areas, but, obviously, they can’t put an interpretation on these anomalies. We have successfully managed to get some mappings of areas and frequency variations that confirm my own sensory perceptions are accurate.”

This was news. Bishop jerked as his screen recovered the files being zapped across to it and vibrated to alert him—all the data was there, already witnessed and verified by independent bodies . . . He felt himself breathing steadily. The scotch seemed to have made it out of his stomach. The pills he’d taken still worked hard on fooling his head into thinking that it knew which way was up. Better, that was better. Statistics. Facts. Good.

“But if you are too distressed we can delay this,” the Cylenchar said suddenly. “Mr. Bishop?”

“No, we have to go.” He didn’t know where they had to go, though apparently he was determined. His panic returned.

“May I speak frankly?”

Into Bishop’s agonized silence, Hyperion said clearly, “I think you have asked me to go to Mars because of your daughter. You are hoping that I will be able to find her where the inquest has failed. Is that right?”

A cold drench of sweat covered him from head to foot, as memory returned, cold, clear. He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning. Mars. Tabitha. The unsolved mystery of the routine survey expedition vanishing without a trace. Oh a sandstorm, a dust ocean, a flood of sand, a mighty sirocco that blew them away . . . what had it been and where was she? Nobody could answer. Not even the equipment returned a ping. But how? And when the months dragged on and the company pulled out and sent its condolences and added their names to the long list of people who’d gone missing on Mars during the fierce years of its terraforming, and then this assignment came, what else to do? Bring the creature who, above all, had been made to see. No frequency, no signal, no energy that the Greenjacks can’t decipher, right? Of course, if she’s there . . . and if she’s dead, then this one will say so. It claims that some of the things it can sense aren’t people but are what people leave or make somehow in the unseen fields they move in: trails and marks. It says some are like the wizards of story, able to make things with shape, with form, with intent that is almost conscious. Some can leave memories like prints on the empty air. Oh. But a man of strict science does not believe in that.

“Yes,” Bishop said. He was small then, in his mouse nest, hanging, damp and suddenly getting the chills. He was afraid that the ’jack would say no.

“I will be glad to look,” it said instead, and Mark Bishop fell into a deep sleep on the spot.

Sleep was one of the many skills the ’jack had learned in its long years of waiting for things that might not appear. It closed its eyes and shared a warm goodnight with the Valhalla, who was more than curious to know the outcome now, and sang toward the red world with fire and all the winds of the sun.

They joined each other in a shared interior space, a private dreamtime. It was cozy. The Valhalla whispered, “Sometimes I am flying in the sunlight, and there is nothing there, but I feel a cold, a call, a kind of falling. Is that real? Are the monsters from under the bed out at sea too?”

“Wake me if it happens,” Hyperion said. “And we’ll see.”

It cocreated a kind romance with the Valhalla, in which they saw huge floating algal swarms of deep color and shadow populate the fathoms beyond the stars. They named them in whispers, and with childish fingers measured their shapes in the sky, and then pinched them out of existence, snuff, snuff, snuff.

“There,” Hyperion said, “they may be here, but they have no power. They can only hurt you if you let them. They live in the holes of the mind, and eat the spirit. Cracklegrackle. Just pinch them out.” They got back into bed and closed the window, drew the shades. The Valhalla was happy again and drove on all the faster in his sleep.

Bishop was woken by the Valhalla’s cheerful cry, “Mars!” The Ironhorse made orbit and scanned the surface to find the small outpost where the Gaiaform Nikkal Raven, chief developer of Mars, had built human-scale shelter with its Hands in the lee of a high cliff. “Nobody’s there now. If it’s a graveyard or a ghost town, it’s empty for sure, but with a bit of effort there’s probably power and some basics that you could get going.” As a courtesy, they contacted the Gaiaform.

“That’s funny,” the Valhalla said, as Bishop struggled to change his clothes. “She sounds annoyed, or, at least, she doesn’t want to discuss the place.”

The Nikkal’s voice was grumpy on the intercom. It grated on Bishop’s exposed nerves and wore out his fragile strip of patience almost at once. “My Hands got lost there too. Given up sending more. Thought I’d get to it later, after the planting on the south faces was finished. Just a minor space really, full of gullies.”

They all recognized the feeling this rationale covered. “We don’t need your help,” Bishop grated. “Just want to get there and look around. That’s all.”

“But if anything happens it’s on my watch,” the Nikkal countered.

“Tupac knows we’re here,” Hyperion suggested. “We won’t stay long. A day at most.”

“ . . . as long as it takes . . . ” Bishop said. He was in clean clothes. His panics were gone. He felt old and thin and shelterless, and looked around for something he could hold. He found only his small bag and his recorder, and filled his hands with them. A panic would have been welcome. Their fury was better than this deadly flat feeling that had taken their place. It was clear now. He was here, Thorson’s Gullies, the last known location. Every step was a puppet step his body took at the behest of some will named Mark that wouldn’t let it rest, but there was no more struggle between them. He felt that he did not inhabit these arms, these legs. They were his waldos, his servos, they were his method. Only his guts were still his own, a liquid concentration waiting for a mold.

“Come on, Mark,” Hyperion called from the drop capsule.

Since when had they become friends? Bishop didn’t know how, but he climbed inside the small fruit shape of the vehicle. Mars had lift cable, but no system in place. Cargo was simply clipped on and set going under whatever power it was able to muster. They were attached to the line and given a good shove by the Valhalla. The new atmosphere buffeted them, warmed them, cooked them almost, and then they were down, Bishop still surprised, still too frozen to even be sick with either motion nausea or relief at their arrival. The capsule detached, put out its six wheeled legs like a bored insect, and began to trundle the prescribed steady course toward the gullies. Hyperion opened the ventilation system and they sniffed the Martian air. It was thin, and even though it had been filtered a million ways, somehow gritty.

“It’s the names that are part of the trouble,” Bishop said, staring out at the peculiar sight of Mars’s tundra, red ochre studded with the teal-green puffs of growing things in regular patterns. “Good and Evil. Why did you call them that?”

“There are more,” Hyperion said. “There is Eater and Biter and Poison and Power and Luck and Fortune and Beneficence, and the Cracklegrackle. I expect there are many more. But these are the commonest major sorts.”

“But why? Couldn’t you name them Energy #1 and so forth?”

“I could, but that wouldn’t be accurate. Their names are what they are.”

“How they seem to you. The one person who can see them.”

“That’s not exactly right. I think we can all perceive them, but only I can see them as easily as I can see you.”

“And you say they are everywhere.”

“Scattered, but everywhere in known space, I think.”

“And some are spontaneous, but others are man-made?”

“Yes. Few of the major arcana are man-made, like those. It takes a very powerful person to create one. Or a large group of people. There are many man-made minor arcana and many naturally occurring ones like that, but they are very short-lived, a day or two at most.”

“You see my problem is that I can believe in this kind of thing at a symbolic level, within the human world, acting at large and small scales. We’re creatures of symbolic meaning. But you’re saying there’s physical stuff, and that it has a real, external, distinct existence.”

“Yes. I am saying it exists as patterns within the same energy fields that give rise to matter.”

“Consciousness is material?”

“No. It has a material interaction that is more than simply the building of a house from a plan or the singing of a song, is what I am saying.”

“And these things . . . patterns . . . can influence people?”

“Influence them, infect them, live inside them, alter them perhaps. Yes, I think so.” The creature stared at him for the longest time, unblinking. “Yes.”

“And just like that, we are expected to accept this—theory of material mind?”

Hyperion shrugged, as if it didn’t much care either way. “I report what I see, but I say what it is for me. Otherwise, I would report nothing more than machines can report. When you look at a landscape, you don’t list a bunch of coordinates and say they are mid-green, then another list gray, another list white, and so on. You say, I see a hill with some trees, a river, a house in the distance.”

“But you’re making claims about the nature of this stuff, linking it to subjective values. Hills aren’t subjective.”

“They are. True, there is some rock that exists independently of you, some sand, some dust, but without you, it is no hill, and however the hill seems is how all hills seem to you, large or small—not mountains, not flat, perhaps even with traits that are more personal. If your home is among the hills, then they seem well-known; if not, then they provoke suspicion.”

They were trundling at high speed, balanced in their gyrobody between the capsule’s six legs, seeming to float like thistledown between the rocks of this region of Mars; Thorson’s Plot. Plot was something of a misnomer, as the area, already claimed by an Earth corporate, was some fifteen thousand square miles. The gullies, which made it a cheaper piece of real estate, and complicated to sow—hence the surveying team—were near the western edge and ran in a broad scar north-south along the lines of the mapping system. Thorson Corporation had hoped to find watery deposits deep in the gullies, or perhaps some useful mineral, or who knows what down in the cracked gulches where twisting runnels of rock hid large areas from the sun and most of the wind that had scoured the planet for millennia. All around them were hills of varying sizes, some no more than dunes, others rising with rugged defiance in scarps and screes. Occasionally, small pieces of metal flashed the sunlight back at them as they moved between light and the shade of the thin, high cloud that now streaked the sky white.

“The remains of Hands,” the Greenjack said with interest, of course able to tell what everything was at any distance. “How interesting. And there is some debris from attempts to seed here, some markers, some water catchers. All wrecked. And . . . ”

“And?” Bishop leaped on the hesitation.

“What I would call distress residue. A taint in the energy, very slight.”

“What energy?”

“The subtle fields. You will find them referenced a great deal in my submitted thesis. Vibrationary levels where human perception is only infrequently possible at all. When trauma occurs, bursts of energy are thrown off the distressed person into these fields, and although they decay quite rapidly, they leave a trace pattern behind, which is very slow to fade.”

“A disturbance in the Force,” Bishop said bitterly. He felt nothing except the dread that had clutched at him in place of his panic.

“It might be only the natural upset of someone experiencing an unlucky accident,” Hyperion said, unruffled. “It’s hard to say without extreme observation and immersion on the site. You ought to be glad, Mr. Bishop, rather than contemptuous. Why else are you here?”

Mark gripped the arms of his seat. He was furious and full of nervous agitation. He ought to be civil, but he felt the need to destroy this creature’s claims even as he wanted them to be right for his own sake. He didn’t want to know about some spiritual plane, not after all the time it had taken to rid the human race of its destructive superstitions. Even if it existed, what difference did it make to those who were unable to interact with it. He could see no good coming of it. But he longed for it to be true. Somewhere in his fevered mind, where fragments of the shaman’s testimony had lodged in spite of his allergic reaction to reading them, he recalled there being quite specific traces of people and moments stuck in this peculiar ether like flies in amber. Not always, not everywhere, but sometime and somewhere it acted as a recorder for incidents and individuals. It could. It might have.

The capsule lurched to a halt. They had arrived at the last known point of the survey team’s well-being. A couple of waymarkers and a discarded, empty water canister pegged down beside them were the only visible remnants now. Without further talk, Hyperion and Bishop disembarked.

They fitted their facemasks—the air was still too thin for comfort—and Bishop put on his thin wind jacket and new desert boots. Hyperion sank a little in the fine grit, on its four limbs, but otherwise it went as always, naked save for its fur, feathers, scales, and quills.

Wrestling the faceplate straps to get a good fit, Bishop noticed all the strange little fetishes the creature had attached to itself. Necklaces with bits of twig and bone . . . it looked like it had come off the set of a voodoo movie. He recalled now that it had labeled its profession on its passport as “shaman.” He was so exhausted by his nervous disorders, however, that he didn’t have the energy to muster a really negative response anymore. He was deadened to it. At last, the mask was tested and his spare oxygen packs fitted to the bodysuit that went over his clothes. Hyperion wore goggles and a kind of nosebag over his beak. He made a desultory symbol in the dust and smoothed it out again with one forepaw. The capsule, obeying commands from its uplink with the Valhalla, folded up its spider legs and nestled down in a small hollow, lights dimming to a gleam as it moved into standby operation. All around, and as far as he could see in any direction, save for the shaman, Bishop was alone.

“There are very few true disappearances in human history, these days,” Hyperion said after a moment when they both cast about in search of a direction. It moved closer to one of the markers and read the tags left there. “And this is not an unusual place, like those twisty spaces close to black holes for example. It is just a planet with a regular geology. The common assumption about this team’s fate is that they absconded with the help of the Nikkal. From there, a number of possible avenues continue, most leading to the far system frontiers, where they were able to drop off the networks.”

Bishop licked his lips, already starting to crack. The news was full of the asteroid bayous beyond the sphere of Earth’s police influence and the renegade technology that festered there, unregulated. There was a lot of Unity activity. A lot of illegal, unethical, criminal work. “She had no reason to go.”

“Perhaps not, but if the rest of them wanted to go they could hardly leave her behind. What would be easier for you, Mr. Bishop, to have her forcibly made into one of the Frontiersmen, or to have her dead here somewhere?”

How odd, he thought, that the ’jack had no trouble voicing what inhabited his own awareness as a black hum beyond reckoning. Hearing the words aloud was startling, but it diminished the power of the awful feelings that gripped him inside.

“Let’s start looking,” Bishop said, standing still. All around them, their small dip radiated gullies that twisted and wound. The sun was beginning to go down and the high rocky outcrops cast sharp-edged purple shadows.

Hyperion was exacting, its research both instantaneous and meticulous in a way that made Bishop simply envious. “The marker, as the police report indicates, says they started southwest with a view to making a loop trail back here within a six-hour period, the route is marked in the statutory map.” The shaman sniffed and the nosebag huffed. “All the searches have concentrated on following this route and found a scatter of personal belongings and the remains of a Finger of the Terraform, which was carrying the survey equipment. All of that was recovered intact.” It held the two wind-beaten Tags in its paw and rubbed them for a short time, thoughtfully. “But they did not go that way. Only the Finger took the trail.”

“How do you know?”

Hyperion turned. “I can see it. I think it is time I showed you.” It came across to him and held out one large, scaly arm. “Please, your screen viewer. I will adapt it to show some of the details I can see over its normal camera range. This will not be what I see, you understand, as I don’t see it with my eyes. But it is the best I can do for you.”

Reluctantly, Bishop handed over the precious viewer. It was his recorder too. His everything. “Don’t mess up the record settings. It’s on now.”

The Greenjack inclined its head politely and slid one of its broad, claw-like nails into one of the old-style input ports. Bishop felt a chill. He’d never get used to how capable the Forged were with technology. They could interface directly with any machine.

“The signals I use to communicate with the device will cause some interference with my tracking,” Hyperion said calmly. “So I will not use it all the time. If you see nothing, you may assume I am watching and listening. I will also shut the device down if its working interferes with the process, and I may ask you to move away at times.” It handed the screen back, and Bishop checked it, panning it around in front of him. The camera showed whatever he pointed it at, recording diligently; it was really just like holding a picture frame up over the landscape. “I don’t see anything.”

“Look at the markers and the route.”

He turned. From the tag line, he could now see a strange kind of coloration in the air, like points of deep shade. They were small. It was really almost like broken pixelization.

“That is the pattern left by the output of the Finger’s microreactor projecting microbursts of decaying particles into the energy field. Radiation containment is generally good these days, so this is all you can find. It is also in the standard police procedurals. They mistakenly assumed it confirmed that all the travelers took the same path, since the Finger was carrying all the technical equipment and the others had only their masks and gas, their personal refreshments and devices. I would say it is certain that they intended to disappear here, as in fact all their individual communications gear has been accounted for along the Finger’s trail.”

Like a path cut with three-dimensional leaf shadows, the trail wound into the first gully, followed the obvious way along it, and vanished around the first turn.

“We can follow that and verify there was no other person with the Finger if you like,” the shaman suggested.

“Parts of a Forged internal device unit were found,” Bishop said, brain clicking in at last.

Hyperion shrugged.

“Or?” Bishop started to pan around. He soon found patches and bursts of odd color washes everywhere, as if his screen were subject to a random painting class.

“Or we can follow the others and find out what they did, starting here.”

“What is all this?”

“This is energy field debris.”

As he moved around, Bishop could see that there was a huge glut of the stuff where they were, but traces of it were everywhere in fact, even in the distance. “Why so much of it?”

“There was a lot of activity here. The rest is down to regular cosmic interference, or perhaps . . . I am not actually sure what all of it is. The energy fields transect time and space, but they are linked to it, so while some of this is attached to the planet’s energy sphere, some of it, as you see, is moving.”

Streaks shot across the screen. A readout indicated that he was not seeing them in real time, as that would have been too fast for him to notice. The simulation and the reality overlay each other on the image, however, and the difference there was undetectable.

“I believe that the streaks are bonded to the spatial field, and that they are therefore stationary relative to absolute coordinates in space—thus as Mars traverses, so these things pass through.” The creature cocked its head, a model of intellectual speculation.

Bishop relaxed his tired arms so that the screen pointed at the ground, saw the streaks shooting through his feet. “Through us?”

Hyperion nodded. “As with much cosmic ray debris. It moves too fast for me to say anything about it. I would need to move out into deep space and be on a relatively static vessel, in order to discover more about them.”

“No such ship exists.” Bishop snorted. “Well, only . . . ”

“Yes, only a Unity ship perhaps,” the shaman said. “I shall ask for one soon.”

They shared a moment of silence in which the subject of Unity, the newly discovered alien technology, rose and passed without further comment. Bishop would have loved to go into it at any other time. The surge of hysteria it had engendered had almost died down nowadays, with it being limited to off-world use, restricted use, or use far enough away from Earth and her concerns that it wasn’t important to most humans, whatever strange features it possessed. FTL drives, or whatever they were, were only the half of it. It was under review. He’d seen some of the evidence. Now he let it go, and lifted the screen again. If Tabitha had gone on one of those ships, she could be anywhere. It would take years to get into Forged Space by ordinary means. Even an Ironhorse Accelerator couldn’t go faster. She could have been there since the day it happened, almost a year ago. “This is just a mess.”

“No,” Hyperion said. It lowered his head and sniffed again, a hellish kind of hound. “There were four individuals here, all human, and one Forged, Wayfarer Jackalope McKnight.”

“Bread Zee Davis, Bancroft Wan, Kialee Yang . . . ” Bishop said, the names so often in his mind that they came off his tongue like an old catechism.

“ . . . and Tabitha Bishop.”

“I am sure which is the Forged,” Hyperion said, “but the humans are harder to label. They are distinct, however.”

“They’d worked together almost a year,” Bishop said, wishing he’d kept his silence, but it was leaking. “No trouble. She sent me a postcard.”

“May I see it?”

He hesitated, then fiddled the controls and handed over the screen. It had been shown so often during the inquest that he knew every millimeter of it better than he knew the lines in his own hand.

The object was small, almost really postcard-size in the Greenjack’s heavy paw. “Kialee is the Han girl, I am guessing.”

“And Wan is the one with the black Mohawk. Davis is the wannabe soldier in all that ex-military stuff.” He knew every detail of that postcard. What most mystified him about it was how friendly they all seemed, how relaxed, the girls leaning on each other, the guys making silly faces, beer in hand; around them, the dull red of the tenting, and, in the background, a portable generator and a jumble of oxygen tanks. It could have been a snap of two couples on holiday, and not of students on work assignment. He wasn’t sure if they’d been dating, or if dating was a concept that had gone out with dinosaurs like him.

The Greenjack was stock-still. It looked intently and then handed back the screen. “Thank you. In that case, I can now say that there was a struggle here. Bishop and Yang are surprised, but Davis and Wan are both agitated throughout. Only McKnight is calm.”

“He was new. Newish. Their old Wayfarer went to another job.”

The colors illumined as the shaman talked, showing Bishop warped fields of light that were as abstract as any randomly generated image. “McKnight and the men remain close together. There is a conflict with the women. There is a struggle; I think at this point the women are forced to give up their personal devices to Terraform Raven’s Finger. I believe they are tied, at least at the hands. McKnight is armed with explosive charges for the survey. But he’s also more than big enough to overpower and threaten them. I guess this is what happened. Davis and Wan dislike the events a great deal but they are willing participants. That’s what I see. Then there’s another argument, here, the men and McKnight. It’s brief. Blood and flesh scraps from McKnight are found near here.”

Bishop saw the oddest nebula of grays, streaked with black and bright red. “There was some kind of struggle . . . the Wayfarer was defending . . . ” But the gargoyle shaman was shaking its head.

“He cuts out his own external comms unit,” Hyperion said precisely. “In the Wayfarer, this is located at the back of the skull and embedded in the surface beneath a minor chitinous plate. To remove it would be painful and messy, but it is perfectly possible and certainly not lethal. But all communication is cut before this, so there is no official account of how it was removed. The only person who can account for that is Raven, and she claims that there was a local network dropout. I would have to question her directly to be sure of her account.” The implication was stark.

The air, already bitter, felt suddenly colder. “So Davis and Wan made him do it?”

“I cannot say for certain. But he does it. Any other method risks it being hijacked by signals that would give away his position. He’s hidden it somewhere around here, I’d bet. Or given it to the Finger, who lost it in the gullies way before it signaled a breakdown. We should look for it. Then they leave.” Hyperion pointed northwest. “That way.”

Bishop thought of the evidence of the Finger’s call. Raven’s voice said, “They’ve gone. Just gone.” And with that phrase, she’d ushered in an entire cult of people convinced that Mars harbored ghosts, or aliens, or fiends. As if their numbers needed adding to! But Bishop couldn’t keep up his anger. The pictures continued.

There was a faint coloration, like a long tunnel or a tube made of the faintest streaks of yellow, gray, and ashy-white. It was almost pretty against the deepening red of the Martian afternoon. The tunnel down which Tabitha had vanished. So the shaman said.

“I hardly know anything about these people,” Bishop protested with distress. He didn’t understand how the creature drew its conclusions.

“It is all right, Mr. Bishop,” the shaman said calmly, setting off in this new direction. “I know everything about them that I need to know.”

For the first time in the time that he could remember lately, Mark Bishop had enough energy to hurry in the Greenjack’s wake. “But how? Just from some picture?”

“Yes.”

“But you can’t tell anything just from a picture!”

“You can tell everything from a single look. For instance, I know that you, Mr. Bishop, had it in mind that if you found me a fraud here, you might use your gun to shoot me dead. And then yourself. We would be a memorial in this unpleasant spot, the monument of your surrender to despair and your inability to remain rational in the face of my abominable supernatural exploitation of both your grief and reputation.” It continued walking steadily.

Bishop had no answer to that. He’d never verbalized or reified that intent, but he couldn’t entirely dismiss it. His gun was in his holster pocket. Everyone had them. He couldn’t say that the thought hadn’t been his secondary insurance. That and the recorder, of course. It would have told the sad tale to those who came to find out what happened. The notion had been discarded a long time before they even landed though, he realized, and now the recorder was instead preserving this vision of Hyperion’s skinny ass slowly wandering along a trackless gully through soft dirt and Bishop’s labored breathing.

“Anyone can see these things,” Hyperion mumbled as it went. “But they don’t know how to tune in, to refine and translate and know them.”

“Don’t start on the psychic stuff.” What the hell had those boys and that monster done with his little girl? “Tell me about Wan.”

“Bancroft. He is idealistic, practical, yet ordinary. Bread is determined, focused, and he has been somehow thwarted in the past, which has made him bitter, though he hides this with great charm. McKnight is an entrepreneur, comfortable with criminal ways.”

“McKnight is the leader, then?”

“Wan is the leader, Mr. Bishop, whoever’s foot may seem to go first. As for the women, neither of them is involved in this plan except by accident. It is simply unfortunate that they were in this team when Wan met McKnight. I am certain that McKnight was the catalyst for what occurred here. Wan is too poor, too badly connected, and too ignorant to plan this venture alone. Possibly he didn’t think of it until McKnight arrived to put the idea in his head. He isn’t creative.”

“You’re quite the detective.” Bishop didn’t mean it quite as bitter as it sounded.

“I would like to be. But it isn’t my intuition working so much as the patterns that I see.”

Bishop gave a cursory glance at his screen. A twisting tube of colors, some bleeding, others sharp, was all he could see; bad art on a tiresome landscape. “If you say so.” In spite of himself, he had no trouble believing the Greenjack now. “Are the girls all right?”

“They are physically unharmed at this point. They are talking here . . . ” The shaman indicated their way and the stretch ahead. It moved off alone for some distance, then narrated, “I feel terror and anger. I believe they were attempting to bargain an escape or discover the real plans. McKnight is all for telling them. He is enjoying the action. Wan forbids him. McKnight doesn’t mind this, but Davis is getting edgy. He has never liked the involvement of the Terraform. His fear of retaliation is keeping him quiet now.”

Bishop stopped suddenly, rooted in the unmade earth. He had realized that he was walking through time, and his sudden confidence in the shaman’s analysis made him fear where the future led, even though it had already happened. He attempted to rally some criticism, some countermeasure to the rigorous story unfolding, to prove at least to himself that there was a chance that most of it was simply the shaman’s whimsical interpretation of some very dry facts, but he struggled to do so.

Ahead of him, the large creature stopped in its own dusty tracks and turned about. It seemed patient and concerned. Every time he looked into its peculiar yellow eyes, he expected the disturbance of an alien encounter, but instead he felt that he was understood, and the feeling made him desperately uneasy. Who knew what confidence trickery it was capable of, after all? But for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out a motive.

“When we get to the end of this,” Bishop said hoarsely, coughing, “what will we do?”

“That depends on the end.”

“I mean, if she isn’t dead, if she was taken somewhere . . . will you help me? You said you’d ask for a Unity ship. I guess that means you know someone.”

“I will find your daughter, Mr. Bishop,” Hyperion said. “I already promised to. If you prefer I will say no more about the events that passed this way. No doubt you must wonder how I can know, and there is no way to tell you how, any more than you can explain how you do most things you do that are your nature. I expect that some greater analysis will help to detail the process, but I am not interested in doing it myself. I see these people and I feel what they have been feeling, as if I can watch it in a moving storybook. There are other things present, besides the people now. These disruptions in such a quiet area have acted as an attractor, and some of the energies I spoke about earlier are beginning to converge on the scene. As yet, they are only circling. You may see . . . ”

“These stains? I thought they were just bad rendering or the light or something. They’re so faint. Watermarks.”

“They are the ones. You will see them circle and converge, then scatter and reform. They may merge. Ignore them. They are not important.”

“But they . . . ” But the Greenjack was already moving on. The shadows were lengthening into early evening, and a slight cooling was in the air. Bishop kept one eye on the trail and the other on the screen, but the silence was too much for him. “Talk,” he said.

“They are not speaking here,” the shaman replied over its shoulder. “Yang is looking for a way to escape. Bishop is locked in her thoughts. She is angry with McKnight for his betrayal of their friendship, or what she thought was their friendship. She is questioning her assessment of the others. McKnight is leading, he is content. Wan and Davis are in the rear, pushing the women on. Wan is excited. Davis is starting to lose trust in him. Davis has a weak personality. He believes that he ought to be leader and Wan is beginning to annoy him. He is starting to form a strong resentment.”

“What is that cloud?”

“He is forming negative energy vortices. This kind of personality often does. Their energy scatters out from the holes in their energy bodies. It is an interesting feature of humans that they create negative energy attractors much more readily and strongly than positive ones. I am not sure why this is, but I believe it is because damaged individuals are leaky, prone to influence and loss, whereas healthy types do not shed these frequencies without some deliberate effort. They are impervious to wild influence and create almost no disturbances. I must consult with the other Greenjacks when they are done traveling.”

Bishop was silent for a while and they plodded on some quarter-kilometer more as he checked his recordings. It was an ecology he was seeing, if it were true. A psychic kind of ecology. He couldn’t help but notice it, even as it wasn’t part of his concern. Just a peripheral. If the Greenjack had tried to convince him about all this any other way, he could probably have thought of a good hole or two to poke in things, but as it was . . . he shook his head and struggled on. He wasn’t fit, and although gravity was lighter and walking easier, it was a long time since he’d hiked farther than his backyard. He found himself stopped suddenly, almost walking onto Hyperion’s tail. The Forged was still as a statue.

Bishop looked at the screen quickly. A darkening storm of purples and reds like a miniature cyclone was all around him. He waited, then Hyperion said:

“They stop here. McKnight signals off-world. Wan and Davis start arguing again. Yang tries to escape. She just runs. Bishop tries to stop her. McKnight notices. Davis starts to run after her, but Wan says no. He is willing to leave her. He wants to. Davis catches Yang. Wan says to McKnight they should leave them both. He knows Davis is trouble, Yang he doesn’t want anyway; they have some history . . . it’s minor . . . he’d rather leave her for some reason I don’t . . . Anyway. Bishop protests. Yang becomes hysterical. McKnight knocks her unconscious. Now Wan gets angry with McKnight. Davis’s antagonism toward Wan crystallizes. He threatens to turn them all in. McKnight doesn’t like that. McKnight threatens Wan and Davis. Wan tries to calm things down. Bishop is raging. Wan ties up both women, hands and feet. Yang is injured, there is blood here. They wait. Quite a long time. I think an hour must pass or so. Davis is now focused entirely on Wan. Hates him. McKnight is the only calm one. Wan is furious but he’s too smart to let it out. A ship comes. It lands over there . . . ”

Mark Bishop got up and followed the Greenjack over to the place across the long shadows that had nearly covered the whole ground.

There was no sign of a landing, but then, given the weather, there wouldn’t be. He recorded dutifully. The colored waterworld had gone. He watched the Greenjack circle and look, and pause. It returned from a small exploration and said, “This is the end of the trail here. The ship has come. It’s a Forged craft. I don’t know its name, but if I ever meet it, I’ll know it by its energy signatures. It is one of three types of Ironhorse currently operating between the Far System and Earth. Can’t say more. They all embark, except Yang. She’s dead.”

Bishop half-wanted to ask for more, certain it was hiding things, but then he decided that it was enough, he didn’t want to know. Everything inside him had stopped, waiting. What the shaman had just said was a testable claim, unless it meant some kind of spiritual residue. Beneath his coat, he felt the hairs on his neck stand on end. His heart gave an extra beat. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Hyperion paused and then made a brief gesture with its head. Bishop followed the line, recorder in hand first. He saw nothing, just the usual Mars stuff, but then the shaman walked him out another hundred meters to a small mound that Bishop or anyone else would just have taken for one of the billion shifting dunes. “She is here.”

Bishop took measurements, readings. They were still technically well within Thorson’s Gullies. Nobody would have come here for a long, long time. Perhaps never. The land was bad, useless. This zone had already been mapped. There were no deposits of use. Then, with the shaman’s help, he set up his recorder and began the process of moving the sand aside. He used his shoe as a spade. It didn’t take long before he bumped something. Without ceremony, they uncovered a part of a desiccated human body, just enough to see the identifying badges on the suit, and then they covered it up again.

Bishop moved away a short distance and sat for a while, drinking water and watching the sun go down. It got very cold. His feet and hands ached. He wished for the scotch again, fervently, avidly, relentlessly. Hyperion sat beside him like a giant dog.

Bishop’s hand strayed to the machine but he left it alone. He stumbled over the words, “Do you see her?” He was braced for any fool answer. He wanted there to be one, a good one.

“She was here,” it said. “But now she has gone.”

Bishop nodded. He wasn’t going to ask for the details. He wasn’t ready yet. Leave it at the cryptic stage until . . . “We should go.”

“I suggest we walk back to the capsule rather than make any transmissions the Terraform might interpret. Also we must now consider this a murder investigation. What would you like to do? We could report it to the police and let them . . . ”

“No. They got it all wrong the first time.” Bishop was surprised by the force of his own hatred, but the shaman didn’t skip a beat.

“Then we should not discuss this with the Valhalla. We need help from sources that don’t mind being accomplice to criminal acts.”

Belatedly, Mark realized that by this it meant their failure to inform. Anything that wasted time now didn’t matter to him. “Can you track them from here?”

“Not directly, but their intentions are reasonably clear. McKnight is at least guilty of manslaughter and kidnap. Wan and Davis of kidnap, misuse of corporate properties, perversion of the course of justice. The Terraform is on their side. They have every chance to make a good escape, but they couldn’t head sunward—there’s nothing there except Earth and the high-population satellite systems, full of officials and the law. They have gone to the Belt—no Forged ship could take them farther without at least stopping there for supplies. We will find something out that way.” It seemed completely confident, almost resigned to its own cold certainty.

Bishop ignored the bleakness in its tone and waded forward grimly in its wake, a squire to a weird and uncomforting King Wenceslas of the sands.

It was a long, hard, cold, and lonely passage. Bishop struggled all the way not to ask all the questions that were haunting him, but he didn’t ask them, and at last they retraced all the path, and the Valhalla’s Hand opened its thousand eyes and let them in. He couldn’t afford to indulge his fears.

“Where to?” the Valhalla asked as it left orbit, swinging away in an arc that would return it to the sunward side so that it could pick up extra heat.

“Just to the lift station again,” Hyperion said with a sigh, as though the journey had been tiring and a disappointment.

It made some small talk with the Valhalla as Bishop settled himself in. He intended to check his recordings and prepare some method for transmitting them safely in case something happened to him, but before he was able to do any of that, exhaustion took over and he fell asleep. He slept all the way to the port, and woke feeling drained and thin. Hyperion led him through their formalities, and then they were sitting in the cafeteria, Bishop facing a reconstituted dinner with a dry mouth.

“An ordinary journey to the Belt is a three-year stretch,” the shaman said. It was lying like a giant dog on the smooth tiled floor next to Bishop’s table, resting its head on a plastic plant pot beneath the convincing fake fronds of a plastic grass. “The fastest available transport can make it in one year. But Unity ships can make it instantly.”

“Interference,” Bishop croaked. He had managed a mouthful. It wasn’t bad but he was so hungry even cardboard would have seemed delicious. Hungry or not, he was loath to think about Unity travel. They said it interfered with you at a fundamental level. They were not sure what the long-term implications would be.

“I will search here, perhaps they came this way.” It was unconvincing. Nobody in their right mind would come this way if they wanted to get the hell out of Earth’s influence.

Bishop surrendered to his curiosity and need. “You said you could get a Unity ship.” He said it quietly. They weren’t illegal, but they also weren’t allowed this close to Earth space.

“I can ask a favor,” Hyperion agreed. “I feel convinced that they have taken that route. I do not see how any legally operating taxi would be involved, and the illegal ones all come from midspace, and most have Unity drives. The most likely destination is Turbulence, the port on Hygeia. The majority of transfers takes place there and there’s only lip service paid to the law at any level. It is Forged space and mostly rebel Forged at that.”

“You think Wan wanted to remake himself?” Some humans wanted to experience add-ons that were better than just a comms set. It seemed ludicrous to Bishop, insane, an extreme form of self-mutilation beyond tattoos and piercings, some kind of primal denial of one’s self. It frightened him.

“I think there are lots of opportunities for all kinds of profit out there. Especially for those already on the run.”

Bishop crumpled the wrapper his cutlery had come in. Unity technology was infectious. Even passengers aboard craft operating the technology were at risk. So far, in the years it had been around, its effects had proved relatively benign, but theorists guessed that this might be a product of a much more significant infiltration process. To use it was to risk something that could be a living death. Fanatics spoke of puppetry and zombies, aliens operating behind the scenes. He’d heard . . . “Perhaps they’d just abandon her.”

“She was a witness,” the shaman said. “A Terraform is complicit in crimes bringing severe penalties. Murder and human trafficking. The foundation of Mars, no less, is at stake. If they went with Raven’s blessing, then they didn’t go alone.”

“Get your ship.”

The creature got up slowly. “I will be back soon.”

Bishop finished that meal, and then another as he waited, forking up food, watching the news on the cafeteria wall, not thinking now that there was no need to think anymore. When he got there, when something happened, then he’d think.

They took an ordinary ship out to deep Mars orbit again, and were set adrift in a cargo pod with barely enough oxygen to survive. Something picked them up at the allotted minute and second, as displayed on Bishop’s illuminated screen. Something cast them off again. There was rattling and clanking. After a few minutes of struggle, they emerged into the unloading bay of a large port. There was no trace of whoever had brought them there. There was no gravity, just the sickly spin of centrifuge. It was a struggle to keep the dinners inside him, but he did, though they felt as if they’d been in his stomach for the three-year journey he’d skipped. The Greenjack helped him to get his space legs and then went off, sniffing.

Bishop sat in a rented cubic room at the port’s only hotel and watched what Hyperion transmitted to his screen. For a few days, this was their pattern. The shaman didn’t find the ship it was looking for, nor any trace of it, nor traces of the passengers. There were a lot of other things Bishop saw that disturbed him, but he was protected, by his distance, the recorder, and the fact that these troubling things were not his immediate mission. There were many shadows here, like the ink-stained Mars twilight, moving splatters that now and again coagulated around a place or a person. He started to type, wrote “haunted?” He managed to read the report in bits and pieces. He struggled to wash, to shave, to function in between. He drank something called scotch that was alcohol with synthetic flavoring. It was good. It did the job. Beside “haunted?” he copied the most loathsome and mysterious of the names of things that Hyperion had identified. Cracklegrackle. His nerves jangled. He tried turning the screen on himself, but only when the ’jack wasn’t there. He looked old. A fucking wreck, to be honest. He was amazed.

“They only affect those who wish to be affected,” the shaman insisted as they ate together on their last, fruitless night.

“But how?” Bishop pushed his food around the bag it had come in, squashing it between his fingers and thumb.

The answer was so unexpected and ridiculous that it silenced him. “Through the hands and feet, the crown or base of the spine. Never mind that. These rumors of laboratories open in the midstream; any surgery is available there. We should look into that.”

Bishop agreed; what else could he do? They moved to a lesser port, and then a lesser one, the last place that pretended to be commercial operations. There was no hotel, just some rented rooms in a storehouse. Bishop began to run out of money, and sanity. He couldn’t bring himself to contact work and explain his absence. He thought only about Tabitha. He drank to avoid feeling. He took pills for regimented sessions of oblivion. Sometimes he watched the Mars journey again on his screen. Those strange floating films of color absorbed his attention more and more. The more he watched them, the more he saw that their movements seemed sinister and far from random. He saw himself pass through them and tried to remember if they had changed him.

He’d felt nothing. Nothing. Hyperion’s statements about the people seemed more and more unlikely. He felt it was a wild-goose chase. Perhaps he had been paid to lead Bishop out here where he couldn’t make trouble, and strand him. Perhaps the Terraform had bought the Greenjack off. This ran through his mind hourly. Only the transmissions of the ’jack’s travels kept him going.

Then one day, months after they had set out, he got the call.

“I found her.”

“Is she . . . ”

“Alive.”

He scrabbled to get clean clothes, to clean himself, to get sober. He was full of joy, full of terror. The hours passed like eons. The ’jack brought a ship—one he saw this time, an Ironhorse Jackrabbit with barely enough space to fit them aboard. It yawned and they walked into its shark-like mouth. It held them there, one bite from vacuum death, and blinked them to the cloud streams of Jupiter. He barely noticed.

“Are those things here?”

“Everywhere, Mr. Bishop,” Hyperion said.

“What things?” the Jackrabbit asked.

“Energies,” the Greenjack said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

There was some bickering about the return journey. Bishop couldn’t make sense of it.

“Where is she?” He gripped the Greenjack’s thorny arm. Its scaly skin was like a cat’s tongue, strangely abrasive. Around him, floating, the few human visitors to this place looked lost. Tabitha was none of them. They all looked through portholes into the gauzy films of the planet’s outer atmosphere streaming past below their tiny station. It looked like caramel coffee. Outside, various Forged were docked and queued. People had conversations in the odd little cubicles, like airlocks, that dotted the outside of the structure. Sometimes the doors flashed and then opened. People came out, went in, on both sides of the screen wall that separated the two environments—of in-station and freezing space—from one another.

“This way,” the ’jack said. He reached out and laid his tough paw across the back of Bishop’s gripping hand for a second, then led him with a kick and drift through the slight pull of the planet’s gravity well to one of those lit doorways.

Bishop peered inside, looking for her. The shaman followed him in. The room was empty.

He turned. “She’s not here!”

The shaman pointed at the panel in the reinforced floor. Some Jupiterian Forged was on the other side.

Bishop looked at Hyperion, because he didn’t want to look at the window, but he floated toward it, his hands and feet betraying him as they pressed suddenly against the clear portal, and, on the far other side, across six sheets of various carbonates, glass, and vacuum, the Forged pressed its own hands toward his open palms.

Jupiter was no place for a human being. They died there in droves. Even the Forged, who had been engineered before birth to thrive in its vicious atmosphere and live lives as glorified gas farmers fell prey to its merciless storms. The upper cloud layer was never more than minus one twenty Celsius. Large creatures didn’t operate that well at those temperatures, even ones that were mostly made of machine and chemical technologies so far removed from the original human that they were unrecognizable components of life. But Tupac, the motherfather, was able to create children who lived here, even some who dived far down to the place where hydrogen was a metal; scientists with single-minded visions. Tupac’s efforts had advanced human knowledge and experience to the limit of the material universe.

Bishop’s senses didn’t stretch that far. He stared into eyes behind shields of methane ice that were nothing like his own, in a face that was twice the size of his, blue, bony, and metallic and more like the faceplate of a robot fish than anything else. Narrow arms, coated in crablike exoskeletal bone, reached out for him. The hands were five-digit extensions, covered in strange, sucker-like skin that clung easily to the glass. Behind that, the body was willowy, ballooning, tented like clothes in the wind, patterned like a mackerel. Jellyfish and squid were in its history somewhere, micro-precise fiber-engineering and ultracold processor tech its true parents.

“She has a connection to Uluru,” Hyperion said quietly, naming the virtual reality that all the Forged shared. When their bodies could not meet, in mind they could get together anytime. “I can put it to your screen.”

Bishop turned then. “You’re not seriously suggesting this . . . thing . . . is my daughter?”

“There is a market for living bodies of any kind in the Belt. Old humans are particularly preferred for the testing of adaptive medical transformation. Technicians there have a mission to press beyond any restraint and develop their skills to make and remake any living tissues . . . ”

He exploded with a kind of laugh. “But you can’t make Forged. Not like that.”

Hyperion was silent for a moment. “They say it is important to become self-adaptive, that they are the next step beyond Forged. They will be able to remake themselves in any fashion without experiencing discontinuity of consciousness. Any flesh or machine will be incorporated if it is willed. The Actualized . . . ”

“But it can’t be her!” His stare at the shaman was too wide. His eyes hurt. Against his will, he found himself turning, looking through the walls at the creature’s blinkless stare. Its face had no expression. It had no mouth or nose. Gill-like extensions fluttered behind its head like ruffles of voile. Its octopid hands pressed, pressed. Its nose touched the plate. Hyperion was holding the screen out to him.

He took it in nerveless hands. They were so limp he could hardly turn it.

“Davis tried to turn Wan in, once they reached Volatility, the port on Ceres. But the Forged Police there are all sympathizers. Wan and McKnight sold him, split the money . . . ”

On the screen was the standard summer garden that Uluru created for all such meetings, a place for avatars to stand in simulated sunlight amid the shelter of shrubs and trees. Running through it, watermarked, was the background that Bishop could really see, the reality he was standing in. In front of the monstrous creature attached to the window stood Tabitha, in jeans and the yellow T-shirt with the T. rex on it that he bought her at some airport lounge some lifetime ago. Her soft brown hair moved in the nonexistent breeze. He touched the screen to feel the texture of her perfect skin.

“Daddy.” The lips moved to whisper. Through her hazel eyes, the great void eyes of the fish stared.

It was only an avatar. You could make these things easily. The photographs were even in his recorder. The voice was only like hers, it wasn’t really hers. There must be hundreds of standard tracks of her in the archives somewhere. These things were simple to fake.

He thrust the screen back at Hyperion, though it was his, and tried to muster some shred of dignity. “Summon the ship.”

The creature didn’t move from its floating position at his side. “Mr. Bishop . . . ”

“You’ve fooled me long enough with your chat and your lines and your little premade adventure complete with faked body, but I see through it now, if you can stand the irony of that, and I’m going. I find no evidence to confirm any of your ridiculous suggestions.” He was so angry that he could barely speak. Bits of spit flew off him and floated, benign and silly bubbles in the slowly circulating air. “Really, this was one step too far! I bought it hook, line, and sinker until now. I suppose you were trying to see how far I could be drawn. Well, a long way! Perhaps you were going to get some money for bringing the Institute into disrepute and scandal when I made some case with it for your insane claims about good and evil and possession and . . . your goose-chase. Yes. You took advantage of me. I was weak . . . ” There was a sound in his head, that black hum. He could hear something in it. An identifiable noise. Definite. Sure.

“Bishop,” the creature snapped.

“ . . . Daddy!” came the faint call from the screen as it tumbled down past the shaman’s side and clattered against the cabin wall.

The black hum was laughing at him, a dreadful sound. It hurt his chest. It hurt everywhere. He was furious. His skin was red-hot, he couldn’t think of where to go. What a fool he’d been. “How dare you. How dare you . . . ”

Suddenly, the hideous gargoyle hissed, a low, menacing sound. “I have done what I said I would. I have found your daughter. I have no interest in your views . . . ”

Bishop was glaring around wildly. He made a shooing motion. “Get away! You won’t mock me anymore! Stupid, hideous creatures!” He began to thump the glass panels where the Jupiter creature’s hands were stuck. It didn’t move, just stared at him with its hidden, empty eyes. “You!” he turned on Hyperion. “Make it go away!”

The Greenjack looked at him flatly, and even with its expressive handicap, he could feel its disgust. “Mr. Bishop, I urge you to look again, and listen. Your daughter . . . ”

“It’s not even possible!” Bishop kicked strongly for the door. Behind him, the recorder tumbled, ricocheting, out of control, the voice that came out of it growing fainter.

“Daddy!”

The door controls, they were too complicated for him. He couldn’t figure them out. He turned and lashed out wildly, thinking the Greenjack was closer than it was. It caught the recorder easily from its spin and held it out to him, contempt in its every line.

Bishop took the little machine and smashed it against the wall until it stopped making any noise.

Beyond the clear wall, the Jupiterian was letting go slowly, suckers peeling off one by one. Its eyes had frosted over strangely, white cracks visible across the ice surfaces, spreading until they shrouded the whole orbit. Its head moved back from the pane and dipped. At the same moment, the door opened.

Bishop was out in a second. He couldn’t breathe. Not at all. His chest was tight. There was no damn oxygen. There must have been a malfunction. He gripped the handrails, gasping, the blood pounding in his eyes. “Oxygen!” he cried out. “There’s no air!” In his ears was the black hum.

Hyperion passed him, gliding slowly. It was holding the recorder, and ignored Bishop’s outburst. It started talking, and as Bishop had to listen to it, unable to go anywhere, he heard the black sound forming itself into a shape.

“I think that although you have broken the speakers and the screen, the memory is probably unharmed. It will not be possible to locate and arrest Davis as he has been scrapped for parts. Tabitha says that Wan and McKnight disposed of him first, before they went into the Belt proper. Wan wanted her to be rendered as well, but McKnight said there would be a lot more for a whole live subject. They were planning out how to create a trafficking chain and where to get more people for it from. She was taken to some facility about one hundred and twenty degrees off Earth vector. They wanted to make her as far from the original human as possible, to prove their accomplishments, but also because they thought it was fitting for humans to end up like the Forged out here have all ended, as slave workers in the materials industry. She isn’t like the other Forged of course, she’s just a fabrication. Her links to Uluru are very limited. She has no real contact other than voice and some vision with anyone else. And the Forged here are mostly rebel sympathizers. She tried to call you, but the networks out this way are very bad and none of the regular channels would carry her messages anyway, because she is marked as a risk to the survival of the Actualist movement. It took a great deal of trouble to get her to come here. It is dangerous. She risked everything. And she didn’t want to see you. It took days to persuade her that if you came there might be sufficient evidence to reopen the case and bring the Earthside police out here to pursue it.”

Bishop gulped. “You’ve done a very thorough job, I’ll give you that.”

The Greenjack made a clacking noise. It spoke in a calm, reasonable manner, as if Bishop were perfectly lucid. “I have not been able to trace the routes of Davis, Wan, or McKnight yet but I think they will be easy to find. I hope you understand, Mr. Bishop, that I do not require your permission to pursue the investigation or to make my findings known to the authorities. I also advise against your attempting to return to Earth alone. Many of the Forged here who would have you believe that they are honest taxis are pirates like Wan has aspired to become. The going rate for a live Old Monkey human in the Belt is upward of fifty thousand standard dollars. I doubt you have the finances to buy yourself out of trouble, even if they wanted you to.”

The terrible pulse of the black hum wouldn’t let him think. Bishop reeled against the bulkhead, the rail gripped in his slippery fingers. He was heroic. “We must rescue her. We can take her back. Find a way. I can raise the money on Earth. The police can arrest those responsible and the government will . . . ”

“The government is well aware of the situation,” Hyperion said. “Returning Tabitha Earthside and attempting remodeling would be tantamount to a declaration of civil war out here. They will do no such thing. You know it as well as I do. Pull yourself together.” It handed him his screen, which it had repaired somehow. Aside from a cracked screen and broken speakers, it seemed all right. “This is your evidence. It is our only hard evidence, aside from the Uluru recording I have made, but, of course, those involved are Forged, so they are suspect.” This admission of bigotry in the judicial system seemed to make it tired. “If you do not act, there will be no justice of any kind.”

Bishop held the screen without turning beyond the home page. He heard his own voice babbling, “We could kill them. McKnight, you can find him . . . ”

Hyperion waited a few moments. “Tabitha is an extraordinary person, Mr. Bishop. Although it is a mystery how she has sprung from you. She understands your feelings. You have hurt her deeply and this makes me dislike you very much. After what she has been through, your rejection is by far the most damaging thing that has happened here. And now, you are seeking to spread misery further by your stupidity. The energy wells out here are all very dark. A few lights shine. Tabitha Bishop is one of them. You are now claiming that one of the energies is responsible for your weakness. I find that contemptible. Pull yourself together!”

“You! You could find them and kill them and you won’t do it! Just this superstitious, religious babble. You bring me here to show me . . . to show me . . . Here, here!” He tried to get the screen to focus on him. “Show me now. I know it’s there. That thing. Show . . . ” but Bishop could not finish. The words had cannoned into each other behind his tongue and exploded there into an unpronounceable summons for hell. Cracklegrackle.

He wanted very much to be dead. The shame was unbearable. He could not carry it. On Earth, he would have been on his face, on his knees; here he was floating, curled up tight into a ball.

The shaman waited. “You are not possessed, Mark. You are simply hysterical. Your future with your daughter is your own choice. However, we must take the recording back to Earth and submit it to the police there. Then we will have done our part. I, at least, will do so. You must hurry. She has to leave in a moment.”

Behind Bishop’s eyes, the blackness was shot with red. He snarled at Hyperion, silently, and then, inch by inch, he hauled himself to the cubicle door, again with that will that wasn’t his, no it wasn’t.

His joints hurt. His throat was so tight. He couldn’t breathe. Inside. The rails. The flat expanse of glass. The slices of clear shielding. The coffee-colored clouds miles below, as soft and gentle as thistledown. Dirt on the floor. They ought to clean this place. It was so hard to see through the handmarks, the footprints, the wear and tear on the old polycarbonate. It was so hard to see through the glass and the frozen methane that melted and ran to keep her sight clear, then froze, then melted again so that she was always half-blind. It was so hard to see through his tears.

Originally published in The New Space Opera 2,
edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan (2010).

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Alexander Jablokov (ajablokov.com)

Alexander Jablokov is the author of six novels, most recently Brain Thief, a humorous technothriller that includes a rogue AI and a thirty-foot fiberglass cowgirl, as well as Carve the Sky and Deepdrive. He has also written a number of short stories, most recently “Feral Moon” and “Bad Day on Boscobel.” His fans tend to be well-educated if anomic loners with specialized hobbies. He is pretty sure that you qualify. Come visit him at www.ajablokov.com.

James Patrick Kelly (jimkelly.net)

James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. A 250,000 word retrospective of his career is forthcoming in January from Centipede Press in their new Masters of Science Fiction Series. He has recently completed a draft of a new novel; its working title is Mothership.

Justina Robson (justinarobson.blogspot.com)

Justina Robson was born in Yorkshire, England. She sold her first novel, Silver Screen, in 1999. Her books have been variously shortlisted for The British Science Fiction Best Novel Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Philip K Dick Award, and the John W. Campbell Award. A collection of her short fiction, Heliotrope, was published in 2012 and her most recent novel is The Glorious Angels.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series will be launched by Night Shade Books in 2016. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.