Issue 46, November 2018

© Wyrm Publishing, 2018
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

The Other Gun

a novella by Neal Asher

The Metal Demimonde

a novelette by Nick Wolven

Balancing Accounts

a short story by James L. Cambias

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the November 2018 issue of Forever Magazine!

Last month, I mentioned that I’d be launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new translation imprint. Along the way, I was advised that for tax purposes, it would be wiser to wait until January to launch the campaign, so that’s the new launch date. Our intention is to do as much behind-the-scenes work as we can between now and then so our schedule for the first book doesn’t have to shift and so far, that seems to be working.

In the meantime, I’m wrapping up work on the next theme anthology—The Eagle has Landed—so it can be ready for publication around the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Working on this one has been a different experience as it has forced me to work outside the twenty-year window I normally use for my theme projects. It’s also been a bit frustrating because the theme fell out of fashion for most of the 1970s and 80s, making it much more of a challenge to find appropriate works. I did reach out to some professionals working in the field at the time—my early years as a science fiction reader—and managed to learn a bit more about what was going on behind-the-scenes then though, so that was fun.

Once that book is put to bed, I’ll be diving right into the final stages of the next Best Science Fiction of the Year volume, the first that will be published in trade paperback AND hardcover. Very excited about that.

On top of this, I’ve been busy packing for the World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, so there isn’t much else to report this month. Hope you have a great month!

Until next time,

-Neil

The Other Gun

Neal Asher

As the bathysphere landed I fought to regain my humanity, even though my latest communication with the Client had been some hours ago. Talking to that entity was always a bizarre and confusing experience, and one I would never get used to, didn’t want to. Every time afterwards it felt to me like I was a new occupant of my old and battered body. I blinked, remembering the lack of eyelids, held up my hand to clench and unclench it and remembered a lack of fingers, or at least fingers like these, then, with the bathysphere settling, reached out and pressed a thumb against the door control.

The twenty-foot-wide circular door thumped away from me, releasing from its seals to allow in a waft of vapour and smell like rotting vegetables, turned its inner locking ring to unlock then slowly hinged down, first exposing a yellow sky bruised with brown clouds.

“Don’t take anything for granted,” I said to my companion.

“I never do,” sighed Harriet, her voice as always surprisingly gentle from such a large mouth full of so many teeth.

I glanced at her and wondered how the people of this colony would react to her. Harriet was a Mesozoic era dinosaur, a troodon in the style of those dinosaurs from one of the paleo-history fashions when feathers were out and colourful skin was back in. She was jade on her upper surfaces and mustard yellow below and her back mackerel patterned with hints of navy blue. To add to her gaudy appearance she had painted her claws gold, and wore a variety of silver and gold bangles and neck rings. I was glad that in recent years she’d lost interest in applying eye-shadow. She now stood up on her toes and extended her long neck to raise her sharp reptilian head, which was first at a level with mine, to peer over the door at the landscape lying beyond, and blinked bright slot-pupil eyes.

“Tasty,” she said, which was often her response to overly muscled humans. She then clicked her fore-claws in frustration and ducked back down. This probably meant the humans concerned were armed.

The door finally came down to rest on boggy ground mounded with heather-like plants and nodular mosses, stabbed through here and there with black reeds. The colony raft sat about a mile beyond, a structure a mile wide and bearing some resemblance to an ancient aircraft carrier. Members of the Frobishers, who were the family I had come to trade with, stood between the bathysphere door and the vehicle they’d come over in—a swamp car with cage wheels. Four heavies clad in quilted body suits and rain capes stood out there, three of them carrying light laser carbines and a fourth holding something that looked suspiciously like a proton weapon. Before these stood a woman, clad much the same as them but studying an ancient computer tablet. This must be the woman I had come to see, scourge of the Cleaver family and a character with growing off-world interests. I moved forwards, raindrops spattering against my crocodile-skin jacket and thick canvas trousers, my heavy boots sinking into the boggy ground as I stepped off the door.

“Madeleine Frobisher?” I enquired.

She was already looking up, studying both me and my companion warily. I advanced towards her and held out my hand, trying to ignore the laser carbines tracking my progress. “I’m Tuppence.”

She didn’t offer her hand in return, instead nodding towards the bathysphere behind.

“Novel form of transport,” she opined.

I lowered my hand and turned to look back. The spherical craft was shifting—adjusting its gravmotors to pull itself back up out of the soft ground. Those motors were far too inefficient to support the entire weight of the craft and send it airborne, not because of their decrepitude, for even though they were centuries old they still functioned as they always had, but because when they were made the prador had only just begun inventing the technology. This was why the craft’s main method of ascent and descent was attached to its crown: a wrist-thick stent-weave diamond-filament cable that speared upwards to disappear into the bruised sky. Hundreds of miles of it attached at its further end to a giant reel in the underbelly of the Coin Collector—an ancient prador tug that had once born a very different name under previous ownership.

“It is,” I replied, “but it serves.”

“And what is this?” Madeleine gestured to Harriet.

Pointing to my troodon companion, I replied, “Let me introduce Harriet, who by her appearance you would not realize was once an exotic dancer on Cheyne III.”

Harriet dipped her head in acknowledgement. “Pleased to eat you.”

“She of course means ‘pleased to meet you’ since her artificial vocal chords sometimes struggle with the shape of her mouth.” I eyed Harriet. The changes her brain had undergone, having been compressed in that reptilian skull, were a worry. Though, at that point, I couldn’t figure out whether that “pleased to eat you” was a Freudian slip due to her lost intelligence or just a little joke at my expense.

“Is she . . . alien?”

I turned back to Madeleine. “Harriet is just the result of an extreme desire for change using adaptogenic drugs, zooetics and nanodaption, and is, if you were to stretch the term almost to breaking point, a human being.”

“She will remain here,” said Madeleine.

I shook my head. “She comes with me—that’s not negotiable.”

“Then our negotiations are over before they have truly started.”

“Very well,” I smiled at her congenially. “I have to admit to being disappointed, but if you’re going to grandstand by setting pointless conditions . . . ” I shrugged and began to turn back to my bathysphere. I was halfway back up the ramp door before she relented.

“Oh, if she must,” she finally said.

I turned back to see her waving a dismissive hand, this all obviously being a matter of no consequence.

“It’s just that there’s little room in the ATV,” she added.

“That’s not a problem. Harriet is more than capable of keeping up on foot.” I gestured to her vehicle as I returned to her. “Shall we?”

She held up one hand. “I do hope you’ve brought payment and are not wasting my time.”

“Of course,” I replied. “Twenty pounds of prador diamond-slate, etched sapphires to the value of one million New Carth Shillings and the fusion reactor parts you detailed.”

“Good.” She nodded.

Catching her speculative glance towards the bathysphere I remembered to send the signal to close the door, and heard it groaning shut as I followed two of the heavies up the steps leading inside the swamp car. Within, seats lined the two sides with plenty of room for Harriet to squat between, but I didn’t point this out. The heavies sat down, silent and watchful, while Madeleine sat beside the driver who was obviously another of the Frobisher line. This weedy looking individual bore similar facial features as the rest in here but also had a wart growing in precisely the same position on each of his eyelids—a sure sign of interbreeding. He started up the car—a hydrogen turbine engine by the sound of it—and set it into motion. I stretched up to look out of the narrow heavily scratched plastic windows to see Harriet bounding along beside the vehicle, then settled down patiently. Within five minutes we were in the shadow of the family raft then driving up a ramp and parking, the engine winding down to silence.

“So where did you find the artefact?” I asked as I followed Madeleine out into a crammed tube of a swamp-car park.

“It’s been here in our raft for as long as I can remember,” she replied, “but it was only when one of my people studied your broadcast was it identified . . . that was about ten years ago.”

“Solstan?”

Madeleine paused, glanced round at me. “I haven’t heard that expression in a while . . . no, it’s maybe seventeen solstan years ago.”

I grimaced. I’d been chasing rumours about the elements of the farcaster in the Wasteland for twenty years now and found nothing. I often wondered if they truly existed because why, as the Client claimed, would the Polity AIs have ordered it broken up and scattered? If they had truly considered it such a danger why hadn’t they just destroyed it completely? I also often considered the unlikelihood of Polity AIs ridding themselves of such a potentially potent weapon, because that seemed very unlike them. But I could only obey and keep on searching, meanwhile slowly plotting my route to freedom.

Harriet had now re-joined us, panting but probably invigorated by the run. The armed escort closed in all around, seemingly a lot more confident now. I wondered if this indicated that they were thinking of doing something stupid. Past experience of trades like this told me they probably were, and knowing the Frobisher’s history did not make me optimistic.

Confirmation came just a minute later as Madeleine led the way up steps so worn the plating was gone to expose closed-cell bubble-metal. Concentrating on my footing with my body’s eyes I also looked through other eyes at the two swamp cars that had just pulled up by my bathysphere. I then watched some Frobishers unloading a heavy atomic shear from one of them, and wondered if this family had become so interbred there had been a loss of intelligence. It would be interesting to see what would happen when the atomic shear hit the prador alloy of the vehicle. The metal might not be the kind that armoured their war ships, but it was very tough, and the defence system might be old, but had proven effective on many occasions.

“So what’s its condition?” I asked, so as to keep up the pretence. Of course, by the data package Madeleine had sent there had been a good chance that this could have been the real deal, but not now.

“I can’t really say. It produces the power signatures you detailed and it’s of the shape you described.” Madeleine shrugged. “Hopefully you know your stuff and will be able to tell me.” She then added, “But we still get the agreed first payment.”

“Of course,” I said.

I did know my stuff, perhaps more so than she would want. A century of research and experimentation and of perpetual mental updates of the latest research in the Polity since the war had made me an expert in many fields. I would also recognize a fake which, as I had been at pains to stress during my broadcast across the Wasteland, would result in no payment at all and quite likely some extreme response.

The stairs terminated in a long hall lined with heavy doors, each with a barred window. No doubt at all that this was a prison. Madeleine led the way across to one of them, punched a code into a panel beside it and the door popped open.

“We keep it here for the security.” She gestured me inside.

Without hesitating, I stepped through, Harriet coming in behind me. It was fairly obvious what would happen next, and I was glad that they had not yet tried violence. I walked up to plinth at the centre of the cell and gazed at the object resting under a dome of chainglass. A curved chunk of white crystal lay there, rather like the sepal of some huge flower, but with a disc-shaped plug at its base from which protruded hundreds of micro-bayonets for data and power. I pinged it and received a facsimile of the supposed power signature of a farcaster element, but straight away I could see the joins. I peered at it closer, ramping up the magnification of my eyes and probing with a spectroscopic laser. The crystal was plain white quartz cut and polished to the required shape, while the base plug was just a not very good mock-up made of bonded resin. I turned as if to address my host, but just then the door slammed shut.

“Disappointing,” I said.

Harriet was also peering at the object. She gave it a dismissive sniff then turned to face me.

“No good?” she enquired eagerly.

“Another fake,” I said. “The Client will not be pleased at all.”

Harriet, opened her mouth and licked her long red tongue over her white teeth. Evidently she wasn’t displeased.

Through my other eyes—the cams on the bathysphere I’d linked to via my internal transceiver—I watched the Frobishers apply their atomic shear to the door. The door reacted by lifting off its seal then slamming down, smashing the shear and its two operators into the ground, then lifting and dropping slowly above the mess as if like a beckoning hand it was inviting the rest to try again. One of them decided to fire some kind of explosive inside, but the door whipped up to send it bouncing back and it detonated by one swamp car, blowing off one cage wheel. The bathysphere defence system then decided to stop playing. Two hatches opened in the ring girdling the vehicle above the door, extruded two Gatling cannons and began firing. The two cars, their liquid hydrogen tanks soon peppered with holes, exploded, but by then all the humans had become bloody smears across the boggy ground.

“Stupid,” I said, then landed a heavy boot squarely in the centre of the cell door. The force of my kick buckled the floor underneath my other boot and the door tumbled clanging into the space beyond.

“Can I?” asked Harriet, stepping from one clawed foot to the other. “Can I now?”

She had slipped into childlike eager pet mode again. Was that what she was destined to be or was it just a deliberate pose?

“Off you go,” I conceded, and she shot through the opening, her claws leaving scratches in the metal floor.

She’ll get herself killed one day, I thought, but not today.

All the Frobishers had seen was a big and slightly ridiculous lizard, easy to kill with their weapons and only capable of using the natural weapons with which she had been endowed. I agreed, for I knew that with her long claws she wasn’t even capable of picking up a gun let alone firing one. However, Harriet had survived and prevailed during many encounters like this one. I put this down to the fact that she had been a canny and experienced bounty hunter in her time and that though her intelligence had, apparently, dropped a few tens of IQ points, she hadn’t lost that edge.

I stepped back from the door and pulled open the studs in my canvas trousers, peeled back a patch over my right thigh, and watched the skin there etch out a frame and pop open. Next I reached inside my leg and took out a heavily redesigned QC laser, held it in my right hand and plugged its superconducting power cable into the socket in my right wrist. After a pause I then looked down to a similar patch over my left thigh. I hesitated, then decided otherwise.

No, not today; not the other gun.

I stepped up to the plinth, straight-armed the chainglass dome and sent it clanging like a bell across the cell floor. I then extended my other arm and fired the laser, the beam invisible until vapour from the burning artefact etched it out of the air. Playing the high-energy-density beam over the thing, I watched the quartz shatter into hot fragments and the supposed base plug slump into molten ruin, then took my finger off the trigger. The momentary fit of pique had cost me time and I’d wasted more than enough of it on this world and in the Wasteland entire.

I grimaced, then stepped out of the door to the sounds of distant screams and the cracking and sawing of laser carbines.

The Coin Collector was a pyramid of brassy metal, its edges rounded and measuring a mile long, the throats of its fusion engines nearly covering one face and possessing enough drive power to fry a small moon. As the giant reel inside its EVA bay, which lay a quarter of a mile up from the fusion engines, wound in the bathysphere, I turned to watch Harriet clumsily using a suction sanitizer on her body to clean off all the blood now she’d licked off everything she could reach with her tongue.

As the bathysphere drew closer to the ancient prador tug, I considered the debacle below. The Frobishers had been utterly unprepared for Harriet and utterly unprepared for me. Harriet had torn into them quickly, leaving the route to the car park scattered with body parts, and had been munching on the same when I had arrived there. More Frobishers had turned up while I was stealing a swamp car and they had managed to get off a few shots before my QC laser fire drove them back and before Harriet finished off the stragglers. I had then taken one of the cars out and set it on automatic before abandoning it. A proton blast had turned it to wreckage about half a mile out, but by then we were well beyond it and soon safe inside the bathysphere. Still, the Client would not be pleased and I did not look forward to that.

I peered down at the holes burned through my jacket and into the artificial parts of my body, which was most of its parts. My sight was slightly blurred, my other senses dull and my right arm wasn’t working properly. It seemed likely that as well as structural damage there might be some problem with my smart plasm component. This meant I would have to go into a mould and level two consciousness for nerve reintegration, which also increased the likelihood of the Client communicating with me. This annoyed me intensely, as did the Frobisher’s ludicrous attempt to rip me off.

Had Madeleine Frobisher really thought she could just lure me down, capture me, break into my bathysphere and steal the payment I had brought? Had she completely neglected to factor this ship up here into her plans? Then again perhaps she had factored it in. Perhaps her aim had been not only theft of the payment I had brought but seizure of my ship as well. How naïve. I stood, walked over to one of the array of hexagonal screens and human consoles plugged into prador pit-controls and made a call.

“Madeleine,” I said, the moment her face appeared in one of the screens. “That was really a rather silly thing to do.”

“You destroyed the artefact,” she replied. “Why did you do that? It’s something you’ve been hunting down for ages.”

Odd, I thought, she seemed genuinely puzzled. Working the controls I called up a view of the Frobisher colony raft from a remote I’d dropped on the surface before descent.

“As you should be well aware, the item you showed me wasn’t genuine,” I replied. “It has not been sitting in your raft over the ages, but was recently made there.”

“It was not!”

“Whatever. Your subsequent attempt to imprison me and break into my craft demonstrated your intent.”

“My intent was to ensure you had brought payment. It was you who started killing my brothers!”

“Weak Madeleine, very weak.” I paused, a suspicion nagging at me. I relayed an instruction to the Coin Collector for a search of the area surrounding the colony raft. “So, if you didn’t make the thing, where did you really get it from?”

She gazed at me for a long moment, perhaps realizing her predicament and understanding that lies would not help now. Meanwhile the search produced results: a group of Cleavers watching from around an ancient tripod-mounted holocorder mounted on a platform that was itself fixed to a swamp car. This could not be a regular activity of the Cleavers for surely they would have automatic systems in place to keep watch on their enemies.

I further worked some controls to bring up an image, from orbit, of the Cleaver colony raft as Madeleine replied, “We stole it from the Cleavers. We found out they were bringing in something valuable from the North and ambushed them.”

I glanced round at Harriet, who had moved with eerie silence to stand at my shoulder.

“Squabbling children,” she said, in one of her moments of clarity.

So it seemed, and a plot by the Cleavers to put the Frobishers in my bad books, nicely exacerbated by Madeleine Frobisher’s greed and intent to extend her off-world interests. I’d been dragged into a silly feud, my time had been wasted, my body had been damaged and the Client would be pissed off. However, before I could further consider what the Client’s reaction would be, the bathysphere arrived with a shuddering crash in its docking cage. I would find out soon enough, I decided.

“Goodbye, Madeleine,” I said, and cut the connection.

The bathysphere door opened into an oval tube twenty feet across and ten high. Everything aboard the Coin Collector was of a similar scale—this tube apparently matching the size of burrows made by prador yet to grow into huge father-captains and lose their legs in that process. The interior was plain metal, the lower half roughened with fingertip size pyramidal spikes for grip, tubes of varying sizes branching off for the different iterations of prador children. Its design was obviously an old one made long before the prador started designing the décor of their ships to match their home environment and long before the father-captains dared to come out of their lairs. As I strode into it, the human lighting from induction blisters grew brighter, revealing a group of about twenty thetics marching in perfect synchronization across a junction. I headed over to a parking platform for various designs of scooter, Harriet pacing at my side like some faithful hound.

I mounted a gyroscope-balanced mono-scooter, engaged its drive, and using the detached throttle and steering baton guided it from the platform and up along the tunnel to the end where a steep switchback took me up another level. Harriet followed me all the way, still hound-faithful for, except on the odd occasions when I allowed her to let her instincts reign, she never left my side. Five levels later I arrived at a massive oval door, dismounted and walked towards it. With a loud crump it separated diagonally and the two halves revolved up into the walls, whereupon I entered a small captain’s sanctum packed with human equipment plugged into the ancient prador controls. As I approached the consoles, with their hexagonal screens above, they abruptly came on to show me the views I had been seeing in the bathysphere. I stared at them for a long time, utterly certain now of what was to come, then I turned away.

Now it was time for me to deal with my injuries and the inevitable upbraiding from the Client—a prospect I did not relish at all. I walked over to a case against one wall, a thing that looked very much like an iron maiden, woodenly stripping off my jacket as I went. I tossed the jacket into a bin beside it, then struggled with my boots, trousers, shirt and undergarments—a thetic would collect them later and clean and repair them. Naked, I opened the front door of the case to reveal a human-shaped indentation inside, turned round and backed into it, Harriet watching me like a curious puppy. I closed up the lid and immediately I felt the bayonet connections sliding into my body, then everything began to shut down.

Next I gazed from old dying eyes, reality broken into thousands of facets easily interpretable to a distributed mind, even though the dimensions it could perceive were beyond reason to a human one. However, the facets were going out. Pheromone receptors were stuttering too, and synaesthetic interpreters churning nonsense. Meanwhile, down below, the hot tightness came in peristaltic waves and something was snapping open. In hot orange vastness I screamed chemical terror and shed. Nerve plugs and sockets parted and a mass of dry chitin fell, a hollow waspish thing bouncing amidst many of the same, doubled iridescent wings shattering like safety glass.

And next all was clear again with new eyes to see. Thirty-two wings beat and pheromone receptors began receiving again, while the synaesthetic interpreters turned the language and code of the Client into something I could understand. The creature rose up, a hundred feet tall, opened its beak and with its new black tongue tasted the air of its furnace.

“You have failed again,” it said.

As the Polity knew to its cost, the prador were vicious predators not prepared to countenance other intelligent entities in their universe. What had not been known, until a year in to the start of the war when it seemed that humanity, the Polity and its AIs faced extinction, was that the prador were already practiced in the art of extermination.

I was working in bioweapons—the natural place in the war for a parasitologist and bio-synthesist—trying to resurrect a parasite of those giant crablike homicidal maniacs, when I was abruptly reassigned. I later learnt that the parasite was resurrected and delivered as a terror weapon by assassin drones made in its shape. They sneaked aboard prador ships or into their bases, and injected parasite eggs—prador Father-Captains extinguished by the worms chewing out their insides.

Only once I was aboard the destroyer ferrying me to my destination, along with a large and varied collection of other experts, did I get the story. Before the prador encountered the Polity they had encountered another alien species whose realm encompassed just three or four star systems. Being the prador they had attacked at once, but then found themselves in a long drawn-out war against a hive species who even in organic form approached AI levels of intelligence, and who quickly developed some seriously nasty weaponry in response to the attack. The war had dragged on for decades but, in the end, the massive resources of the prador Kingdom told against the hive creatures. It was during this conflict that the prador developed their kamikazes, and not during the prador-human war, and it was with kamikazes that the prador steadily annihilated the hive creatures’ worlds. However, one of these multifaceted beings, a weapons developer no less, managed to steal a prador cargo ship and get out through the prador blockade of the systems of its kind. And now, this creature, which the AI’s referred to as the Client, wanted to ally itself with the Polity for some payback.

My memories of my time with the Client are vague. I’m sure we worked together on bioweapons while other experts there worked on the more knotty problem of delivery systems, and other weapons arising from the Client’s science. A bioweapon capable of annihilating every prador it came into contact with was perfectly feasible, but getting it into contact with enough of them wasn’t so easy. Though the prador fought under one king to destroy the Polity, they were often physically isolated. The father-captains remained aboard their ships only coming into physical contact with their own kin, many prador wore atmosphere sealed armour perpetually, while others had been surgically transplanted into the aseptic interiors of their war machines. A plague would not spread and, to be effective, would have to be delivered across millions of targets. This seemed impossible, until the farcaster . . .

U-space tech has always been difficult. A runcible gate will only open into another runcible gate and a U-space drive for a ship is effectively its own gate. Open ended runcibles had been proposed, developed, and had failed. Without the catcher’s mitt there at the other end nothing without its own integral U-space drive could surface from underspace. It couldn’t work. It wasn’t possible. Except it was.

Because of the vagueness of my memories of the time I am assuming that the AIs developed the farcaster. The device could, using appalling amounts of energy, generate an open-ended gate. It was possible to point this thing anywhere in the prador Kingdom, inside their seemingly invulnerable ships, even inside the armour of individuals, and send something. But there was a problem: the energy requirement ramped exponentially with the size of the portal. To send something the size of a megaton contra terrene device, would require the full energy output of a G-type sun for a day, even if the iteration of the farcaster we had was capable of using that amount of energy, which it wasn’t. This was completely unfeasible and, if we could have utilized such massive amounts of power it could have been directed in a much more effective way. However, there were other possibilities. The output of a stacked array of fifty fusion reactors could deploy the device as it stood, and it was possible to open microscopic portals—ones that though small were large enough to send through something like a virus, a spore or a bacterium.

Working together the Client and I made something that could kill the prador. I don’t know precisely what it was—the vagueness of my memories was due to the accident that destroyed most of my body, for it had also destroyed part of my mind. We were ready. We had our weapon and we had our delivery system. But things had changed in the intervening years. The prador had begun to lose and even as we lined up the farcaster for its first tests, the old prador king was displaced and they began to retreat, and to negotiate. The AIs put a hold on our project, then they cancelled it, seizing the farcaster and breaking it into separate elements, which were cast away all across known space.

What happened then? The war ended, apparently. I never knew because my remains were clinging to life in one of the Client’s growth tanks as it fled into hiding aboard the Coin Collector. Apparently there had been some contention about the breaking up of the farcaster during which some unstable weapons activated. I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Consciousness returned to me while I was alone aboard the Coin Collector, my mind somehow enslaved, my task to search out and recover the elements of the farcaster, and to one day take them to the Client, when it allowed me to know its location, so it could at last have its revenge against the prador. I waited patiently for that day, for I wanted revenge too and I wanted freedom, and I knew that the only way I could have them would be to finish the job the prador started so long ago.

The Client had spoken and now, with my connection to it renewed and affirmed, or maybe some parts of my mind reprogrammed and updated, I had no choice but to obey. As I stepped out of the repair cabinet and donned newly cleaned and repaired clothing, I felt sick, bewildered by my human form, and still wishing I could change the past.

“Time to finish this now,” I said.

“Finish it?” Harriet perked up.

I did worry about her love of mayhem for it seemed her main interest now. Once she had been an “exotic dancer” who used various reptiles in her act and then, like many such people for whom appearance is all, she acquired an accelerating addiction to change. First had been changes of skin colour and the addition of snake eyes, then scales, claws and numerous internal changes, adaptogenic drugs and enhancements, and change thereafter for its own sake. At some point the jobs she had taken to supplement her wealth had displaced the dancing, and she became a full-time bounty hunter, and she further adapted herself to that work. I had employed her to hunt down a rogue war drone said to possess some strange piece of U-space tech which just might have been part of the farcaster, but as it turned out wasn’t. The drone fried her, leaving not much more than her brain and a bit of nerve tissue. I managed to get her out, in an ab-zero stasis bottle, and thence to a hospital in the Graveyard. I didn’t hold out much hope for her. Had we access to a Polity hospital her chances would have been better but, since quite a few of her bounties were paid upon delivery of a corpse, or parts thereof, she couldn’t return to the Polity. But the next time I saw I got a bit of a shock.

Her change into a troodon dinosaur had been out of a catalogue that explored the “limits of the feasible” apparently, and she was idiotically delighted with it. They’d shoe-horned her brain into this reptile body, where it didn’t seem to fit right. They’d turned her into something like an upgraded pet that could speak, but didn’t possess the hands to do anything more complicated than tear at meat. I felt responsible, and so allowed her to stay at my side.

“Yes, finish it,” I said, the feeling that I occupied some nightmare form slowly receding as I worked the controls, targeting both colony rafts and the Cleaver watch post, then pausing to study the only weapons option.

The Frobishers and Cleavers were nasty and certainly deserved some sort of response, but there had to be innocents amidst them. What I was about to do sickened me, but I simply had no choice . . . or did I? I now struggled against my own mind, because my instructions did offer me some leeway, and I opened com channels covering all the radio and microwave frequencies the two families used, and set the equipment for record and repeat.

“This is a message from Tuppence aboard the Coin Collector for all Frobishers and Cleavers,” I said. “You have both wasted my time and threatened my life.” And now the unscripted bit, “You therefore have one hour to abandon your colony rafts and watch stations. At the end of that hour I will destroy them all.” I paused while a knife of pain lanced through my skull, then faded as I selected the single particle cannon for the chore. The pain returned as I set a timer for firing, then continued with, “Perhaps, after this, those of you who might be innocent in this matter will carefully consider your choice of leadership. That is all.”

“You are being merciful?” Harriet enquired.

I stepped back from the controls, the pain redoubling in my skull, and slumped into an acceleration chair. I was aware that I had gone, if only a little, contrary to my orders, and now, somehow, I was punishing myself. Paralysed, I watched lights flashing and icons appearing on the screen indicating increasingly desperate attempts from both families to get in contact with me. Ever so slowly the pain faded—just a small punishment for a minor infringement, and not the agony that could leave me crippled in hell for days on end. The leeway around my orders enabled me to do such things, enabled me to do many things. I rested a hand on my thigh—the one containing the other gun.

“Yes, maybe I’m getting old,” I finally managed to rasp in reply to Harriet.

Realizing there would be no immediate action, Harriet paced around the room for a while, before coming back to stand beside my chair, her head dipping as she nodded off into one of her standing dozes.

A quarter of an hour later I observed swamp cars, ATVs, heavy crawlers and people on foot, loaded down with belongings, abandoning both rafts. A further half hour passed, and as the end of the hour approached I heaved myself out of the chair, my head still throbbing with post punishment pain, and approached the controls. The last minutes counted down, the last seconds, and then the particle cannon fired—any effects here on the ship unfelt.

The side view of the Frobisher’s raft showed a beam as wide as a tree trunk stabbing down, its inner core bright blue but shrouded in misty green. Molten metal and debris exploded out from the impact point then, when the beam cut right through the raft to the boggy ground below, the whole thing lifted on an explosion, its back breaking and the two halves heaving upwards on a cloud of fire and super-heated steam, before collapsing down as the beam cut out. Another screen showed those on the watching swamp car just gone—a smoking hollow where they had been, while the Cleaver’s raft was now just as much a mess as the Frobisher’s, though viewed from a different perspective. Harriet was at my side of course, watching with fascination, before turning away in disappointment.

“Tank.” I turned now to face precisely such an object over the far side of the sanctum: a cylindrical tank much like one used for fuel oil or gas, but covered with an intricate maze of pipes and conduits. “Take us out of orbit and put us on course for the Graveyard.”

“As you instruct,” replied a frigid voice.

I immediately felt the vibration through my feet as the fusion engines fired up. The thing inside that tank, which might or might not have been the usual ganglion of a press-ganged prador first- or second-child, could take over.

Everything fell into stillness aboard the Coin Collector during U-space jumps. Without orders the thetics just became somnolent, without action and prey to hunt Harriet spent her time dozing or following me about like a lost puppy. On this occasion she was in lost puppy mode, easily keeping pace with my scooter as I drove through the ship, finally pulling up beside yet another massive diagonally slashed elliptical door that opened ponderously as I dismounted. Just outside this door I surveyed twenty thetics standing ready clad in impact armour with pulse-rifles shouldered. They were somnolent but at a word from me would wake and be ready. In two more U-jumps I would give that word as we tracked down yet another possible element of the farcaster. I bit down on my frustration. When would the Client finally give up and summon me back? When could I finally end this? I walked through the door.

The cauldron was a pale pink glass sphere twenty feet across supported in a scaffold of gold metal extending from the floor to the ceiling fifty feet above. Across the back wall of the chamber were the doors to rows of chemical reactors. Catalytic cracking columns stood guard to one side while on the other squatted an object like a mass of stacked aluminium luggage woven together with tubes. Each case was a nano-factory in itself and the whole generated the smart-plasm being fed into the cauldron—the distillation of a billion processes. Gazing upon this set-up I felt it just did not seem sufficiently high-tech, but looked like something Jules Verne might have dreamed up in a moment of insanity.

Next I lowered my gaze to the rows of moulds bracketing the catwalk leading to the cauldron itself. The ones to my right were closed, like sarcophagi, their contents incubating. To the left half of them were closed, a robot arm running on rails to inject plasm into each. The others were open to reveal polished interiors in the shape of humans, a thetic peeling itself up out of one of them assisted by two more of its kind, while thetics from the other open moulds stood in a group behind observing the whole procedure with blue eyes set in milk-white faces, mouths opening and closing as if miming the speech they were incapable of producing.

“I wish we could extend their lives,” I said.

“Why?” asked Harriet, completely baffled.

“Four years and two days seems to be the point beyond which returns diminish,” I replied. “I wonder if that limitation is why the Polity scrapped the idea?”

“The Polity?” wondered Harriet, her thinking even slower in these periods of inaction.

The thetics had been an attempt by the Polity to produce large quantities of disposable soldiers—a project with which I felt sure the Client and I had been involved during the war. Or perhaps we weren’t? There had been other researchers, scientists and experts of every kind on that ship sent to that first meeting with the Client, so perhaps the thetics were the result of some research by one of them? Perhaps when the Client had run, just after the farcaster had been broken up, it had stolen data and equipment too? How else had it obtained the samples with which to rebuild all this here? I shook my head, frustrated by the confusion. Where the thetic technology had come from and what my involvement had been were questions that would probably remain unanswered—they probably lay in that portion of my mind taken away by the accident.

Unfortunately, as well as the thetics’ life-span being limited, both the amount of programming they could take and the damage they could withstand was limited too. Smart-plasm was all very well for quick production of disposable hominids, but on receiving damage under fire such constructs tended to quickly revert to their original form, and crawl out of their uniforms like particularly nervous slime moulds.

“Golem chasses,” I said as I walked on through the cauldron room towards the back corner.

My own body was an amalgam of a Golem base frame, smart-plasm and an early form of syntheskin outer covering—as a whole a more rugged combination. I wasn’t entirely sure what human parts I had retained: perhaps my brain, perhaps only part of my brain, maybe just some crystal recording from that original flesh. I wondered if it had been a bioweapon that had taken away the rest of me, and wondered if it had been one I had designed.

“Golem chasses,” Harriet repeated, with less intelligence than a parrot.

I decided not to bother making a suggestion I had made before, of giving her prosthetic Golem hands to replace her unwieldy claws. She wasn’t interested when her mind was at a high point, and would be less interested now.

A smaller door at one rear corner of this chamber took me into my private laboratory. Here I felt the tension begin to ebb. It wasn’t as if I could somehow be disobedient here, ignore the Client’s orders or cease my endless search for farcaster elements, but somehow its grip on my existence seemed less rigid in this place. Perhaps it was because here I occupied those parts of my mind not concerned with that search—those being the parts wholly focused on my original interests so long ago.

Oddly, the effect here seemed the same for Harriet, though she had no alien entity controlling her mind. Her interest perked up as she surveyed all the complicated equipment, peered at nanoscope screens and clumsily tried to pick up objects made for human hands and not claws painted with shocking pink polish. I say oddly because elsewhere her interests didn’t often stray into the scientific.

I checked on a brain worm first; version 1056 and now a long way away from the parasite that forced ants to climb to the top of stalks of grass when a sheep might be strolling by and thus pass itself on to said sheep. This particular beauty would make a prador, if it was aboard a space ship, suffer terminal claustrophobia. Not only would it want to get out of the ship, it would be completely unable to wear any kind of protective suit. Of course, prador could survive in vacuum for an appreciable time, but still the victim of this parasite would eventually die. I’d yet to test it out, and didn’t think I ever would.

The next bug was one that caused a prador’s carapace to grow as soft as sponge, and the next was a fungus that dined on their nerve tissue. I only checked on them briefly before moving on to the latest version of my favourite fungus—perfect now in every detail and perhaps a precise copy of a fungus that the Client possessed. Thus I occupied my spare time pursuing my interests in parasites and biological weapons. Thus, by pursuing the lines of research I had followed with the Client I tried to restore some lost memory. Staring at the latest nanoscope images and latest computer models of the function of this last fungus, in all its different genetic settings, I tried to remember seeing them before, but there was nothing.

“The gun?” queried Harriet.

“One day,” I said.

Really, it should be tested, but I needed some victim deserving of such an end. Perhaps, during this latest search, if all the data was correct, I would find such.

The Graveyard lay in the intersection point of two spheres of interstellar occupation, everything beyond its edge being called the Wasteland or the Reaches, or having no name at all. As the Coin Collector heaved out of U-space I knew we had arrived upon sensors picking up high amounts of space debris across many light years and upon gazing at a screen image of the devastated world called Molonor. This world possessed its own orbital ring of debris that had once been space stations and, also orbiting it, its small moon was half subsumed by a base that seemed a conglomerate mass of those same debris. I eyed the ships orbiting that moon, along with the various ground-based coil-gun emplacements then, after a short contemplation, focused in on one of those ships. Here was an in-system cargo hauler the shape of an ancient shouldered rifle bullet sitting in a U-space carrier shell like a hexagonal threaded nut. I pinged it and got a confirmation of identity: the Layden—one of Gad Straben’s haulers. Straben was my target now—the Client had made that abundantly clear during one of our frequent drops out of U-space to let the Coin Collector’s engines cool and realign.

“Harriet,” I said, opening com. “Where are you?”

“The Cauldron,” she replied.

“I’ll be with you shortly.” I considered how like a dog being taken on a familiar walk she had rushed ahead, then I experienced a moment of puzzlement. Harriet didn’t often get this far ahead of me, usually stayed by my side, so she had to be very eager. I shook my head, dismissing the thought before inputting a course to take the Coin Collector down into close orbit, conveniently close to the Layden. With that done, I stood up and headed out of the captain’s sanctum, finally arriving at the door outside the Cauldron.

“Gad Straben,” said Harriet, dancing from clawed foot to foot. “The gun!”

I nodded solemnly, perhaps so. Gad Straben was evil enough.

Through its various other contacts about the Graveyard the Client had learned that, after the disappearance of a black AI called Penny Royal, salvagers had finally plucked up the courage to venture to the AI’s original home base. This was a wanderer planetoid wormed through with numerous tunnels. As always they had gone there for technology and, before some event burned up everything inside that small world, it was rumoured that Gad Straben had managed to obtain some objects of value, things that might be an elements of some war time weapon, and he had begun to put out feelers, make enquiries . . . The Client wanted them. The Client hoped pieces of the farcaster could at last be obtained.

“But scraping the barrel,” Harriet opined.

I studied her carefully. It must be one of her good days because she was showing a lot more intelligence than usual.

I nodded. After searching for so long it seemed increasingly unlikely we would ever find any part of the farcaster, or that it even existed at all. This item supposedly obtained by Gad Straben might even be our last shot and I might be recalled at last. My hand strayed down to my hip, fingers tapping there for a moment. I noted Harriet watching closely and quickly withdrew it.

“Yes, we are,” I agreed. “The Client has less chance of finding what it wants now than before.” I paused for a second, then shuddered, feeling a little stab of the Client’s influence over my mind. It was time to start acting.

Straben’s organisation was a criminal one, salvage being a mere sideline, and he was as paranoid as all who ran such concerns in the Graveyard had to be if they were to survive, so I had to both act fast, but take care. There were risks associated with getting too drastic in the Graveyard. It might be styled as a kind of anything-goes no-man’s-land but that wasn’t true. It was a volume of space in critical balance; a buffer zone between the Polity and the prador and both sides watched it intently.

“Do we have enough for Hobbs’ Street?” Harriet asked.

I nodded. “One hundred ready to go,” I surveyed the twenty thetics in the corridor, now no longer somnolent but not really showing any inadvertent movements associated with real life.

“Have you spoken to John Hobbs yet?” she asked.

I looked at her again. She had suddenly become a lot more coherent, a lot more intelligent, just like the Harriet I had used to know. She was asking the right questions now when all I had come to expect of her was child-like demands for her version of fun.

The Molonor moon base, until thirty years ago, had been essentially lawless, but then one salvage hunter became much annoyed with protection costs and damage to his operation by the constant squabbles between the criminal elements there. After a particularly rich find he used his newly acquired wealth to hire in some hoopers to make the place more amenable to his operation. After a brief year of chaotic readjustment which resulted in many crime lords ending up being processed into fertilizer, John Hobbs became the ruler there. He allowed criminals to come and do business, spend their wealth there, establish their bases, but did not allow them to bring their fights with them.

“He was surprisingly helpful.”

She tilted her head slightly to one side, waiting for an explanation.

“He could have been a problem, but for his hoopers and our old association,” I explained. “Hobbs tolerates a lot, but some of the criminals down there he doesn’t like at all. He’s only too willing to turn a blind eye to anything that might happen in Straben’s headquarters.”

Still that tilted head.

“Coring,” I finished.

Harriet straightened up. “I see.”

“Meanwhile,” I continued, “we might not have to go to Hobb’s Street at all, since a less risky opportunity has presented itself. I’m taking us into orbit close to one of Straben’s ships, the Layden, which is here.”

“Sphere Two?” Harriet suggested.

“Certainly,” I nodded, then stabbing a thumb towards the twenty thetics. “These are programmed for basic obedience and combat—nothing fancy. They’ll do.” I now turned to face the thetics. “Automatics should have the rest ready for Hobbs Street should we need them.”

The thetics hadn’t been humanized, but that was not necessary for what I intended. I checked the coloured bar codes on their combat armour then selected the commander of this unit.

“Bring your men with me,” I instructed.

The commander, unable to speak, dipped its head in acquiescence. When I mounted my scooter and set off the whole unit turned neatly as one and broke into a jog to keep up. By the time I reached an access tube to Sphere Two they were panting and their white skins were sheened with sweat. Harriet wasn’t out of breath at all. I dismounted and walked over to palm the control to the tunnel door. As it slid open I stepped to one side and again addressed the thetic commander. “Enter and secure yourselves in the acceleration chairs.”

The thetics trooped inside.

“Are they necessary?” Harriet asked.

“Straben’s carriers usually have a crew of between five and ten.” I glanced at Harriet. “I know that’s not too many for you and I but I want to be sure. Also, if we don’t find what we’re after here this can act as a test of this new batch so we can be sure of them before we hit Hobbs’ Street. You remember the last time?”

Harriet dipped her reptilian head in acknowledgement. I’d sent a group of armed thetics against a single prador first-child—one of the many renegade prador in the Graveyard—guarding a store said to contain a Polity weapon, from the war, as usual. The moment the first-child fired on the thetics they had collapsed into a bubbling mass. Unstable plasm, and a perfect demonstration of why the Polity might have dumped this technology. I took out the prador with a particle cannon blast from the Coin Collector, but it had all been yet another waste of time. The Polity weapon had been the carcase of some insectile war drone—its mind burnt out long ago.

I turned away from Harriet, glad she had bought the lie I had just told her. The reality was that I didn’t want her going first into that ship. She might be fast and deadly but armed only with claws and teeth she might well end up on the bad end of a pulse-rifle in such an enclosed environment. It hadn’t happened before, but the feeling I had that things were somehow coming to an end was making me more protective of her.

Moving aside I now gazed through the slanting windows overlooking the bathysphere bay. Bathysphere Two—the Coin Collector had only two of these vehicles—had first been adapted for inter-ship travel, its line detached and chemical boosters affixed all around its rim. Its second adaptation had been mine: a big metal mouth extending around its main door, a leech-lock. This could attach to the hull of any ship, its rim digging in with microscopic diamond hooks and making a seal. It had come in very handy over the years.

Harriet followed the thetics in and, after a pause, I followed too. Inside, the thetics were, as instructed, sitting down in the concentric rings of seats and strapping down tightly, their rifles slotted into containers beside them. I headed over to the single seat before the adapted prador controls, sat down and hit the release button. Even as I secured my own straps the bathysphere jerked and set into motion. I turned on the screens and observed the space doors opening, then laid in the correct course. Harriet, meanwhile, squatted down beside me, her claws clenched around the floor grid.

“Shouldn’t be too bumpy,” I said.

“One I’ve heard before,” Harriet replied.

In a moment we were out in vacuum, the chemical rockets firing to put us on the pre-programmed course. I glanced over to the door leading into the leech lock, hit a control and the door irised open. Within this, running on rails around the inner face of the lock, was a robot cutter that wielded a carbon-titanium thermic lance, tubed for feed-through of laser heating, oxygen, peroxide and catalytic nano-spheres. It was the fastest way to cut through just about anything. I closed the iris door again. It was also messy, producing thick searing smoke and poisonous gases.

“Approaching vessel, what is your purpose!” a voice demanded from my console.

“I’ve got something for Gad Straben,” I replied, now calling up an image of Straben’s hauler on my array of hexagonal screens.

“Identify yourself!”

I turned on the visual feed and gazed at an unshaven face displayed in just one of the hexagons. The man’s head was partially submerged in a half-helmet augmentation, and the one eye I could see widened in shocked recognition.

“I’m Tuppence,” I said, just to be sure.

“Gad Straben is not here,” said the man.

“Not a problem—I’ll leave his gift with you.”

“You are not to approach this ship. I will not allow docking!”

I lined up the boost and paused with my finger over the control to operate it. “Don’t be so hostile. I’m sure Mr. Straben will be very interested in what I am bringing him.”

“I know exactly who you are, Tuppence,” replied the man. “If you approach any closer you will be fired upon.”

Of course, many in the Graveyard knew of me, even though I’d been away for a couple of decades. Many had dealings with me, some coming off worse and some better. The likes of Straben had generally been the former kind.

“Oh well,” I said, and hit boost.

The sudden acceleration tried to lever me sideways out of my chair, but I locked my body in place. Behind me a couple of the thetics made an odd warbling sound. At the same time I saw the Layden fire up its own engines to move away and two flashes on its hull marking the departure of two missiles. I watched them curve round and head towards Bathysphere Two, their drive flames growing in intensity like angry eyes.

“Incoming,” I stated.

“No shit,” said Harriet.

Gee forces now tried to throw me into the screens as the bathysphere turned to present its thickest armour to the missiles. They hit one after the other with shuddering crashes. The screens whited out for a second, then gradually came back on with sparkles of burning metal shooting past. It would take a lot more than what the hauler had available to penetrate even ancient prador armour. The Layden was now up very close, still trying to accelerate away but just having too much mass to shift quickly. I pointed at the screens with one finger and drew a target frame over part of its hull just behind the carrier shell.

“Impact in three, two, one . . . ”

The force of the crash bent the supports of my chair so it hung sideways. A thetic, emitting a short squeal, slammed against the curved wall opposite the leech lock then, as the bathysphere rocked into stillness, dropped to the floor with a soggy thud. I checked on Harriet and saw that she’d torn up some of the floor grid, but had still managed to hang on. I unstrapped myself just as the thermic lance kicked off behind the iris door, roaring and hissing like some trapped demon. Standing, I checked on the rest of the thetics. One of them was reverting, its face now a shapeless mass, one of its gauntlets on the floor below and a white worm oozing from the sleeve of its combat armour. Another of them had completely deliquesced. Its suit was empty, a milky pool scattered with pink offal around its boots.

“Unstrap and prepare your weapons,” I instructed the remainder.

As they obeyed, the thermic lance finished its work and a loud crash ensued. That was the hydraulic hammer smashing a disk of hull into the ship beyond. I reached down and hit the control for the iris door and it slid open to release a cloud of stinking smoke, slowly clearing as air filtration ramped up to a scream. The interior of the other ship was devastated: a burned and melted mess of interior walls, crash foam and fire retardants snowing, some fires still burning.

“Thetics,” I called, while pointing into the other ship. “Go in there and secure the ship, try not to kill the one you saw me speaking to.” They had just about enough intelligence to follow such an instruction. If there weren’t any survivors it wouldn’t matter too much—would just mean a bit more work inspecting the cargo, and checking the ship’s log and other data stores.

In good order they moved into the other ship, silently passing instructions between themselves and splitting into two parties, one heading forwards and one to the stern. Just a minute later I heard a laser carbine firing, then pulse-rifle fire in return.

“Not too bad,” said Harriet, now standing at my side and eyeing the two thetics that had failed, then the one that had smashed into the wall and was now slowly oozing from its suit.

“Standard ten per cent,” I agreed, moving towards the iris door. I meant the two failures—the one that smashed into the wall could be counted as a casualty.

“What are you going to use?” Harriet asked. “Demolition charges?”

“In good time, Harriet,” I replied. “We’re here after information and, if we’re lucky, maybe even the item salvaged from Penny Royal’s planetoid—I want to check up on the cargo first.”

Grav was out inside the Layden, so from the leech lock I propelled myself inwards to find my way to a central drop-shaft. The cargo area on ships like this was usually positioned ahead of the engines, so I turned right, soon having to push aside a floating corpse that could have served as a sieve. Shortly after that I observed a group of four thetics heading back towards me, and pulled myself to one side to allow them past. Further on I found two of their number leaking out of their suits, then another member of the crew—most of his head missing.

“In there,” said Harriet, pausing at a side tube and sniffing.

I entered the tube and eyed the palm-locked doors, then drove my fist through one of them and tore it out of its frame and tossed it aside. The room within was racked out, the plastic frameworks filled with simple aluminium boxes the size of coffins. On seeing these I first felt disappointment, then a growing anger. There would be no salvage aboard this ship for its cargo was of a very different kind. I dragged one of the coffins out, pushed it down against the floor and tore off its lid.

Inside lay a naked woman, her body marked with circular blue scars and her head bald. Her eyes were open and she was breathing gently, but she showed utterly zero response to me. I slapped her face, hard, but all she did was slowly return her head to its original position. I reached in, cupped the back of her neck in one hand and hauled her up into a sitting position and studied the scars on her head.

“Fully cored and thralled, I reckon,” said Harriet.

“So it would seem,” I replied, releasing the woman and watching her slowly lie back like a damped box lid closing.

I pulled out another box and checked the contents of that, shoved it back in the rack and moved on to a square box at the end, pulled that out and opened it. This contained hexagonal objects each the size of a soup bowl, prador glyphs inscribed in their upper surfaces.

“Thrall control units,” I said tightly, pausing to look at the number of those other coffin-sized boxes around me and wondering if the same number lay behind each door. “Let’s see if our thetics managed to get us a captive.”

Making my way up to the bridge of the hauler I noted another two thetics down and returning to their original form, but there were also two more crewmen riddled with pulse-rifle fire. Finally, entering the bridge I found four thetics pinning their captive to the floor, the rest milling about aimlessly, and another three of their kind floating through the air, partially dismembered and reverting—obviously having run afoul of their captive’s laser carbine before they could bring him down.

“I want two of you to remain here to restrain the captive,” I instructed. “The rest of you go back to the bathysphere, now.”

The milling immediately ceased and the most of the thetics departed.

“Get him up off the floor,” I instructed to the two remaining. The fight seemed to have gone out of him now, probably because of the shots to each of his legs and his right biceps. He was obviously in a great deal of pain.

“I have some questions,” I said.

“Fuck . . . you,” the man managed.

“My first question is: does your cargo consist of fully cored humans only? That is, are there any included who have been spider thralled.”

“Why the hell . . . should I answer you?”

“Curious question to which I’m sure the answer must be obvious,” I said. “If you don’t answer me I will torture you until you either do answer me or you die. Harriet.” I beckoned with one finger and Harriet turned away from a deliquescing thetic she had been sniffing. “His right hand do you think?”

Harriet walked right up to the man, nose to nose, then sniffed down his right arm, pausing for a while at the wound in his biceps them moving on down to his hand. She licked his hand, then lifted her head back up to gaze into his eyes.

“Crunchy,” she said, exposing her teeth.

“Why do you want to know?” the man asked, trying to focus his gaze on me.

“Why do you want to know why I want to know?”

“I don’t want to die.”

I smiled tiredly turning away and heading over to the ship’s controls. As I began to search for the ship’s log and other data storage, I said, “All you need to know right now is that if you do not answer my question Harriet here will bite off and eat your right hand.”

I glanced round in time to see the man seeming to brace himself, pull himself more upright. Returning to the controls I found myself puzzled by the lack of security, quickly locating the ship’s log and transmitting it to the Coin Collector and receiving confirmation a moment later.

“The customer for this shipment . . . did not want spider thralls used because after a period of time they can be rejected by the body.” The man paused, then continued in a rush, “I’m just the pilot—I’m not involved in the rest of it.”

Ah, here’s something, I thought to myself as I uncovered a number of encrypted files, then feeling slightly impatient, turned back to our prisoner.

“The customer presumably being a prador . . . So let me clarify,” I said. “Each and every human being in your cargo has suffered the removal of both the brain and a portion of the spinal cord so is essentially just technologically animated meat. They’re all dead.”

“Yes . . . it’s best . . . they don’t suffer.”

“I see.” No one here to rescue then. I had done some questionable things in my time but what was being done here was utterly beyond the pale. I’d known that Straben’s organisation was involved in the coring trade which was why I’d had no reservations about sending the thetics in like I had, and now I had complete confirmation.

“Next question.” I held up a finger, then brought it down on the touch controls. The encrypted files refused to transmit. I stared at them for a moment, then banished them from the screen and called up a ship’s schematic. “What did the salvagers find in Penny Royal’s planetoid and where will that find be located now?”

“I don’t know . . . I don’t know what you’re . . . talking about.”

The schematic showed the location of this ship’s mind—a second-child ganglion that was barely sentient. It merely acted as a data processor and stored none at all in itself. However, it had to store it somewhere. After a moment I had it. Smiling, I reached down and tore off the panel in front of my seat. In there I located a series of crystals plugged in like test-tubes in a rack. I detached optics, switched the rack over to its own power supply before detaching the external power feed and pulling the whole thing out. I now had the ship’s collimated diamond data store. I could try to break into the files it contained and sort through the data myself, but there were terabytes of it here. Best to hand it over to Tank.

“You don’t know about some item or items obtained from Penny Royal’s planetoid?”

“No . . . I don’t.”

The man seemed to be telling the truth and really I didn’t feel I had the time to check. Hobbs’ Street had to be our next target and we needed to move swiftly.

“Thank you.” I dipped my head in acknowledgement, then patted a hand against my left thigh. I could try out the other gun now, but that seemed mean, since Harriet hadn’t seen much action here. I relented. “Harriet, you may kill him now.”

The man shrieked as I stood up with the ship’s data store and headed for the door glimpsing, as I went, Harriet pulling on something like a dog worrying a length of bloody rope. As I headed back towards the bathysphere I decided that first I would have the prador mind removed from this ship and transferred over to my own—a useful replacement should that thing in the tank finally expire, or should I, for whatever reason, want a ship mind that did not owe its loyalty to the Client. The best option then would be a kiloton thermite scatter bomb on a timer set to go off sometime after our visit to Hobbs Street. It would completely gut this ship, burn up its cargo and destroy its workings, including its U-drive and fusion reactor. The ship would then only have any value as scrap and one portion of Straben’s organization would be defunct—and during this mission I would have cleaned up at least a small portion of the crap scattered about the Graveyard.

Hobbs’ Street smelled odd, damp and sweet, but that wasn’t due to the residents here but to an odd mutation of a terran honey fungus that had spread throughout the moon colony, running its mycelia through air vents, electrical ducting or any other opening available, sucking nutrients from spillages on the floors of hydroponics units or out of the soil of private gardens. I paused in my study of a clump of honey mushrooms sprouting from a crack in the foamstone pavement and considered the workings of coincidence. I had decided that here I would use the other gun, and there was a connection . . .

As I looked up an ancient hydrocar motored past. It was the cops, and I was surprised to see them. The car, a by-blow of flying saucer and Mercedes, had an assault drone like a huge grey copepod squatting on its roof. The vehicle was painted white with fluorescent blue circles decorating it—a colour scheme that had come to mean much the same as the black and white stripes of a wasp: danger. The driver and his mate, respectively a hulking man and an equally lethal looking woman, eyed me as they passed, the blue ring-shaped scars on their faces visible in the street lights.

“Probably here in the hope of picking up any strays,” I said.

“There won’t be any,” said Harriet.

“They would probably like to join in,” I continued. “John told me that he had some trouble dissuading his hoopers from contacting me and offering assistance.”

Harriet dipped her head in acknowledgement. “Understandable, considering the history. Jay Hoop, his pirates and their coring operation weren’t very popular on Spatterjay.”

Weapons grade understatement, I thought. It surprised me that Straben had managed to keep his headquarters here at all.

“Here they come,” said Harriet.

Hobbs’ Street was crowded, it being one of the most popular thoroughfares here, and now it was becoming even more crowded. The thetics in the street where clad in a wide variety of clothing and their faces were concealed by syntheskin, but they hadn’t managed to suppress their inclination to march along in neat squads like the soldiers they were meant to be. There were five street doors to Straben’s conjoined buildings, which extended five floors up with the chainglass street roof attached across on top of the fifth. Fifty thetics were in the street, ten to each door, while a further seventy thetics clad in light space suits were, even now, moving into position up on the building’s roofs, which were exposed to vacuum.

I watched, through the eyes of my artificial body and through pin-cams the thetics all wore in their clothing. I saw those up on the roof avoiding the heavily secured airlocks, consulting building blueprints and selecting areas over which they glued down atmosphere shelters, before beginning to cut through below, thus making their own airlocks. They would be inside within five minutes. Meanwhile, those down on the street were moving in on the doors with sticky bombs or sausages of thermite, depending on the design of door concerned. I began walking.

“So, Harriet,” I said. “You seem a lot more coherent lately.”

She glanced at me, her reptilian face unreadable. “Do I?”

“Undoubtedly,” I said, watching her.

“I’ve never been incoherent,” she argued.

“Not as such but—.”

I couldn’t take that further because a loud bang ensued, the explosion as bright as a welding arc and a gust of smoke blowing out into the street and then rising up towards the glass roof. People started yelling and running. It might have been thirty years since John Hobbs took control but there had still been incidents, and the people here still knew when it was best just to run. I noted that one of the doors had disappeared just as thermite flared further down the street and two more explosions ensued. I watched thetics pouring into three of the buildings, pulling short wide-blast sawn-off pulse rifles from under their coats. I saw thermite burn in a fast ring around an armoured door then a central charge blow it inwards. Just one more . . .

I glanced over towards the door concerned as a machine gun began firing in short bursts. An explosion took out the door, but from a stone-effect arch above it a lumpish ugly security drone had dropped on a pole and begun firing a miniature version of the Gatling cannons prador favoured. In annoyance I saw thetics being torn apart, even one civilian who had been a bit tardy going down. I reached down and flipped open the patches on my trousers, drew my QC laser and plugged in its power lead, then I drew the other gun, noting Harriet now watching me intently. Meanwhile a thetic opened out a telescopic launcher, shouldered it and put a missile into the door arch. The drone arced smoking and bouncing out into the street.

“Harriet—” I began, but didn’t get to finish as she shot off and went through the door concerned. Obviously the most secure doorway was the one into the building I most wanted to enter because, if my data was correct, Gad Straben himself had entered here just a few hours ago. I now entered to be greeted by the sound of gunfire and the commingled screams of pain and terror which were the usual result of Harriet’s presence. It occurred to me that she might have been uncomfortable about my questioning and that was why she had gone ahead, but why this occurred to me I don’t know.

Through pin cams on their clothing I observed the thetics in the other buildings moving from room to room and killing anyone who resisted, just so long as they weren’t Straben. It was brutal, but then Straben’s organization was brutal and any working for it had to know they were culpable in mass murder. Those on the roof were now in too and working their way down—just as efficient and methodical as those working up from below—but also just as indifferent to personal survival. I reckoned on walking away from here with maybe just twenty or so surviving thetics. The rest would crawl off and die completely to become food for the honey fungus, or else turn into something nasty in the drains.

Directing my course by pin-cam feeds I climbed the stairs since the building’s drop-shafts were keyed to staff ID tags and wouldn’t work for anyone else. Most of the action was now taking place on the third floor. At the second floor some man in businesswear carrying a heavy flack gun charged down, skidded to a stop on a landing and took aim. I raised my other gun just as a flack round exploded against the wall behind me and peppered me with shrapnel, then changed my mind and raised my QC laser, a short while afterwards stepping over the burning corpse.

By the time I reached the third floor it was all over. The main data room looked like an abattoir and over in one corner Harriet was tearing chunks off of some rather corpulent individual and gobbling them down. Many of the consoles were smashed and smoking, holo-displays flickering through the air like panicked spectres and flimsy screens seemed to burn with internal blue fires. Over to one side a chainglass window overlooked all this, plush office space inside and there, working a console in frenetic panic, sat Gad Straben. I ran over to the door—armoured of course—kicked it hard then swore as my other boot went straight down through the floor and the door remained in place.

“Get me a charge!” I shouted, heaving my leg back out of the hole.

There were only two surviving thetics in the room, and they were guarding two women and a man who lay face down with their hands behind their heads.

“You three,” I said, brushing debris from my trousers as I walked over. When they looked up I continued, “Get up and go,” and stabbed a finger towards the door. They slowly stood up, eyeing me as I replaced my weapons in their holes in my legs and closed them up, then took off just as fast as they could. They were probably only temporary employees of Straben since they hadn’t resisted, so whether they lived or died was a matter of indifference to me. I turned to the two thetics.

“I want an explosive charge to get through that door,” I said concisely, since neither of them had understood me the first time.

One of them went over to one of its fellows, who was quietly deliquescing in a corner, pulled some sticky bombs from his belt and returned with them. I stared at them for a moment then went over to the dead thetic myself and checked its belt. There—just what I needed. I detached a circular object like a coaster and took it over to the office window, slapped it against the chainglass and hit the pressure button at its centre. With a whumph the chainglass turned to white powder and collapsed to the floor. I stepped over the ledge and into the office, seeing Straben simply stand and hold out empty hands.

“You move quickly,” he said.

Straben was a slightly fat man with a bald rounded head. He was clad in businesswear and looked like some Polity executive styling his appearance on some antediluvian fashion. I ignored him for a moment, carefully studying my surroundings.

A glass-fronted case along one wall contained a variety of ghoulish antiques: a spider thrall and a full-core thrall, a couple of slave collars and an old automatic pistol. These were all the kind of objects you could obtain from dealers out of Spatterjay. I watched a nano-paint picture transit to its next image—a painting of a hooder coming down on some man in ECS uniform. Then I strolled over to the desk, then round it, and stood facing Straben.

“I move quickly?” I enquired mildly.

“You arrived in the Graveyard only a few days ago,” said Straben, then with a shrug, “I didn’t expect you to act so quickly.”

I looked at the desk, noting a flimsy screen up out of the surface and the holographic virtual control Straben had been using a moment ago. The screen was blank. I tried my hand in the control but it wouldn’t respond to me.

“It’s genetically coded to me,” he said.

“I could always cut off your hand,” I suggested.

“That won’t work either,” said Straben, for the very first time showing some sign of anxiety.

I gazed at him for a second, then waved him out into the main office space. He nodded congenially and walked over to where the window had been and stepped through.

“Questions now?” he asked.

“Yes, questions,” I replied.

Straben halted and turned towards me, tilted his head irritatingly like Harriet, and waited.

“So,” I said, “was it your intention to try and seize the Coin Collector?”

Straben gazed at me in apparent puzzlement. “Certainly not. It was my intention to sell you some valuable artefacts I have obtained.” He turned slowly to survey the wreckage around him. “But it seems I was mistakenly under the impression that you were a reasonable man I could do business with.”

I fought down another surge of irritation. We couldn’t stay here much longer. John Hobbs might have decided to look the other way but he wouldn’t do so for much longer. There would be reports going in of an incident here and he would have to respond.

“From Penny Royal’s planetoid?” I suggested.

“Yes,” said Straben. “I have them in a secure location and, despite this unfortunate mess,” Straben gestured about himself. “I am still prepared to do business.”

“So which of your vessels salvaged them?” I asked.

“The Cadiz—it got there before Hobbs or any of the other vultures.” Straben smiled as if in pleasant recollection. He was certainly a cool customer and was now growing more confident. “The objects concerned seem to be part of something larger and certainly contain U-space tech, though precisely what they are for is a puzzle.”

The objects sounded precisely like what the Client was seeking, which was beyond suspicious. It was also the case that before coming down here I’d thoroughly checked the relevant details Tank had taken from the Layden’s data store. Straben was lying, though to what degree and precisely what his aims were was unclear.

“Wrong answer,” I said. “The Cadiz was in the prador Kingdom at the time.”

Straben hid his shock well, but it was evident. “Do you honestly think I keep precise records of my ship itineraries?”

“Possibly not.” I shrugged. “But apparently you shut down your salvage operation decades ago.” I paused contemplatively for a moment. “In fact, as I understand it, John Hobbs would be the best to ask about artefacts from the planetoid since it seems his salvagers were the only ones that went there before everything of value was obliterated by some sort of chain reaction, and that the artefacts he did obtain were routed directly to the Polity.”

“So John Hobbs might tell you,” said Straben, obviously thinking quickly now. “He was trying to nail down the market—make it exclusive.”

He paused, searching for further excuses and lies, so I quickly interjected, “Perhaps you could tell me about the warehouse you’ve been renovating—the one located on an asteroid in this system.” He definitely couldn’t hide his shock now. “Perhaps you might like to tell me why you felt the need to kit out the place with so much armament along with a hardfield caging system?”

“How can you—”

“You set the bait and that’s the trap,” I said.

Now he was lost for words. I gave him a little while, but he lost the struggle as Harriet moved up to stand beside him, leaned her head down and gave him a long sniff.

“No more lies,” I said turning to Harriet. “Usual method: if he lies again I give you the nod and you bite off his right hand.”

Harriet danced from foot to foot, champed her jaws then as usual licked round her mouth with her long red tongue.

“Now,” I continued, “what exactly is all this about?”

Straben just stood staring at Harriet for a long while. He shrugged, then sighed.

“It’s about the reward,” he said.

“What reward?”

“I will need guarantees,” the man replied.

“You can guarantee that if you don’t answer my questions Harriet will first eat your hands. If that doesn’t work she’ll start on you from the feet up.”

“You are rather brutal and uncivilized in your dealings,” Straben observed primly.

That was it; that was the limit. A man who cored and thralled human beings to sell the prador was calling me uncivilized? I reached down to my thigh, opened the patch in my trousers then mentally unlocked the hatch in my leg there. I took out the other gun and weighed it in my hand. Harriet, noting this, look a pace back. It didn’t look like much—just a heavy chromed revolver.

“Your last chance,” I said mildly.

Straben could obviously see I was feeling a bit testy. He quickly said, “A fortune in any form required, a Polity amnesty for all crimes and a free fifty-year pass into the Kingdom ratified by the King himself.”

Puzzling. The Polity never gave amnesties to the likes of Straben, and that the Kingdom and the Polity had agreed on some joint reward seemed just as unlikely.

“There’s some heavyweight action behind it,” Straben continued, now taking a step back and resting his weight back against one of the desks here. “I couldn’t believe it at first but it really checks out.” He gestured vaguely upwards. “Polity agents out there and direct confirmation from one of the watch station AIs. The King’s Guard are involved too. I don’t know what you are involved in but both the prador and the Polity desperately want to get hold of you.”

“It is feasible that such rewards might be offered to negate some very serious threat.”

It took me a moment to realize that Harriet had spoken. I eyed her carefully. Once we were back aboard the Coin Collector I felt we needed to have a long talk, and I needed to scan what was going on inside that reptilian skull of hers. However, I knew precisely what she was implying.

“I need to talk to the Client,” I said.

“Yes, I think you do,” Harriet agreed. “Shall we finish up here?” She tilted her head slightly, directing her gaze towards the gun I held.

There was nothing more to be learned from Straben. I returned my attention to the man and fired once, the kick jerking the barrel up and the shot going into his stomach and flinging him back across the desk. Despite that, the impact of the bullet had been toned down for the human form, since this gun had been designed to punch bullets through a prador’s natural armour.

The man lay gasping, then abruptly jerked, stretched out flat and went into convulsions. Black threads spread across his skin and his flesh started swelling. He emitted a gargling scream then slumped into stillness just as brown sprouts broke out of his skin like spear points, then began to swell at their tips. These swellings, each rapidly growing to the size of a tennis ball, turned a darker brown and acquired widely scattered black scales.

“Fascinating,” said Harriet. “So it doesn’t take control of the host—just kills quickly?”

“It’s weaponized,” I replied. “There’s no advantage in spread by it keeping the host alive since that comes with sporulation—and at a point of growth the host cannot survive.”

Harriet glanced round at me. “But sporulation has been retarded I presume?”

“It has—I don’t want to kill off the whole colony here.”

She nodded thoughtfully, then asked, “I am right in assuming that this is based on ophiocordyceps unilateralis or as it is known as on Earth, the ‘zombie ant fungus?’”

“It is,” I said, slightly stunned by her sharpness.

“And that is just one of your bullets?”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating,” she repeated.

This sharp new Harriet would be, I thought, fascinated to know that this particular weaponized parasitic fungus would also be an effective way to kill another creature, a multiply renewing one. But that wasn’t something I wanted to think about too much, especially with another conversation due with the Client . . .

Upon returning to the Coin Collector I delayed and delayed, but the Client was not to be denied—always testing its connections to my mind, always pushing.

Time.

The stabbing sensation in my head told me I had delayed too long. I closed my eyes and began numbing all the nerve connections to my artificial body, highlighting the other intrusive connections in my skull. The link, between me and the thing sitting in the tank, which in turn connected to the ship’s U-space communicator, opened up. And all at once I returned to hell.

Rage and suspicion came first, with that forever present undercurrent of loss. I stretched a hundred feet tall; a conjoined chain of insect forms reaching towards the roof of the deep volcanic chamber, a boiling wind blowing across the nearby lake of lava raising the temperature just enough. Hive creature and hive, perpetually dying and giving birth, immortal, the Client clung now to ersatz trunk of a giant tree being fashioned of silica crystals by one of its exoforms—a thing like a giant horseshoe crab suspended from the roof by a long jointed tail. It read me, and peeled its upper section from the tree in its fear, emitting a pheromone fog, distributing it with the beating of glassy wings. Exoforms down below like manta rays on spider legs, hoovering up and crunching down old fallen husks from past renewals, bleated and bumped against each other in bewilderment.

Synaesthetic interpreters finally cut in as I contained a scream in my skull, and turned complex organic chemicals to something I could truly understand. Then came a pause, with a scene replaying in my mind: my killing of Gad Straben. I felt an avidity, then came words.

“It is time for you to come to me,” the Client told me, a whole avalanche of meaning falling in behind the words. “The danger is too great.”

The connection faded. Time passed and I reconnected to my artificial body. I sat for an hour in my chair feeling as if on the point of death and slowly, ever so slowly, brought myself back to my world.

“Harriet,” I said, my voice grating.

“I’m here,” she replied from very close by.

“It seems our search must end because the Client thinks the danger from the Polity and the Kingdom is too great,” I said, testing the words out loud for their veracity.

“The search is over,” said Harriet, and there seemed a lot more meaning behind her words than plain parroting. She then asked, “You have the coordinates?”

I looked around at her. She was standing right beside my chair and seemed far too eager and interested for my liking. I suddenly knew, with absolute certainty, that to supply her with those coordinates would put me in immediate danger. How did I know? I’m not sure, but it seemed to me the old Harriet was right back—the one I trusted to complete a mission for pay, but no more than that.

“The coordinates have been sent, but not to me,” I lied, now sitting upright. “Tank has them.”

Harriet swung round to gaze at the object concerned and seemed about to say something more when the drag of the ineffable took us, and the Coin Collector entered U-space. I stood up, Harriet swinging her attention back towards me. I did not know how far we would have to travel to reach the Client’s location but, this being an ancient prador vessel I knew it would probably have to drop out of U-space to cool off, and I felt that on those occasions I would have to watch Harriet very closely.

During the first time the Coin Collector surfaced from U-space I was prepared, but Harriet seemed to go into that childlike lost puppy phase and showed no sign of acting against me in any way. I even gave her some very dangerous openings—ones that might have resulted in me ending up in pieces on the deck, but she ignored them. Perhaps I had been deluding myself about her? Perhaps I was so used to what had seemed to be her mental decline that my suspicions had only been aroused by it ceasing and reversing? I decided thereafter to take some simple precautions when around her, like always carrying my two weapons, but no more than that. She deserved at least some of my trust, and I had work to do.

The Client had summoned me to it and perforce I had to go, but its orders were no more complex than a summons and that gave me some freedom of action. I started with the thetics, wiping their base programming and designing something of my own. I needed them to be able to carry out certain instructions and, most difficult of all, I needed them to be able to continue carrying out those instructions even if I ordered them to do otherwise. The simple reality was that in close proximity the Client would be able to seize complete control of my mind and thus, through me, the thetics. I needed them to continue, to give distraction, to give me a chance . . .

The second time we surfaced from U-space Harriet came and found me in the Captain’s Sanctum, deeply internalized, trying to gauge what resistance I had to the Client’s control of me, if any at all. She could have killed me then because I was completely vulnerable what with most of my nervous system shut down. Instead she just walked over to stand before me and, as I returned to a normal state of consciousness and responsiveness, she spoke.

“There’s something you need to see,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

She just turned around and headed back towards the door. I weighed pros and cons as I stood up, then I decided to follow her. It struck me as unlikely she was leading me somewhere so as to attack me, since she could have done the job just then. She waited outside the sanctum beside the scooter I had last used to get here, dipped her head towards it, then turned and set off along the corridor. I mounted up and followed, and with a glance back she increased her pace. She led me into the cargo section of the ship, which was a place I did not often visit, then to a wide square door into a particular hold space. As I dismounted I recognized this door at once, but kept my own counsel as she nosed the control beside it to send it rumbling and shuddering to one side.

I followed her in and surveyed my surroundings as the lights came on. The space was three hundred feet square and the cargo it contained had not changed much over the years since I had last been here. The large first-child who had been the captain of this ship rested in one corner like a crashed flying saucer, most of its limbs still intact but now one of its claws having dropped away. Further along one wall from this prador corpse, second-children had been stacked like, well, crabs on a seafood stall. This stack had collapsed on one side and noting some movement there I walked over. As I approached an eight inch long trilobite louse scuttled out, heading straight for my legs. I kicked it hard, slamming it into the wall above the stack of second-child carapaces.

“It’s because of the ship recharging with air,” I said. “There must have been ship louse eggs somewhere, and moisture in the air must have reversed the desiccation of these.” I gestured to the dead before me, including a mass of third-children and smaller prador infants piled in the further corner

I hadn’t seen anything but dead ship lice aboard when I returned to consciousness here a century ago. Then the ship entire had been almost in vacuum, and when I first ventured down here the erstwhile crew had been vacuum dried. Gradually the ship’s automatic systems had recharged the whole vessel with air, but it had taken decades.

“The lice are unimportant,” Harriet intoned, her seriousness undermined when she had to kick away a louse trying to crawl up her leg.

“I’ve seen all this,” I said, gesturing around. “I know that the Client slaughtered the prador aboard. So what, the prador slaughtered its entire species.” I didn’t mention how the way the corpses had been sorted and neatly stacked always bothered me. Had the Client kept these as a food source? Could it actually ingest this alien meat?

“You’ve seen all this,” Harriet parroted.

She abruptly turned away and paced across the hold to the far wall. I sighed and walked after her, but as I drew closer I suddenly realized that there was another square door in this far wall. I paused, scanned about myself, then realized I had never spotted it before because I’d never felt any inclination to walk this far into this dim mausoleum. Harriet nosed a control beside this new door and, rumbling and shaking, it too drew open. I followed her inside.

More dead, I realized, and more ship lice. I gazed at the neat heap—stacked like firewood—for a couple of seconds before reality caught up with me. These weren’t prador; they were human corpses. I stood staring for a long drawn-out moment, then forced myself into motion and walked over to inspect them more closely. The corpses here were also vacuum dried and many of them had suffered the depredations of ship lice and in places had been chewed down to the bone. I turned my attention to one nearby that had obviously been dragged from the stack by lice and completely stripped of flesh. The lice had ignored the uniform, obviously getting inside it to dine on the meat. I recognized the uniform at once. I was looking at the skeleton of an ECS commando.

Moving closer, I next saw further uniforms, but also a lot of casual dress, a high proportion of clean-room labwear and the occasional spacesuit and vacuum survival suit. There had to be over a hundred people here.

“You’ve seen this?” Harriet enquired.

“No,” I replied.

“Do you remember?”

I turned towards her. “No, I don’t.”

I felt slightly sick as I turned away. It must have been a wholly psychological feeling since my artificial body was incapable of nausea. So why had Harriet brought me here to see this? I didn’t know, all I did know was that I was standing beside the entire scientific team—plus ECS security personnel—that had been sent to liaise with the Client. I began to head out, then paused now I could see what lay beside the door I’d come in through. I eyed a glittering stack of crystal fragments, ten human corpses untouched by desiccation or decay because, of course, they weren’t human but Golem androids. Beside them rested two huge metal beetles, motionless, no light gleaming in their crystal eyes: war drones. It seemed the Client had killed the AI complement of that mission too.

I headed out of the hold.

The moon was highly volcanic because it was one of many similarly sized moons irregularly orbiting an ice giant. It seemed that they often tore at each other gravitationally, and were torn at by the giant they orbited. In astronomical terms the whole system was unstable and, running a model of it, I saw that at least two of these moons would be shattered in about a hundred thousand years time, thereafter the system would stabilize with an asteroid ring.

“Do you have something you wish to tell me?” I asked Harriet as I gazed at the images displayed in the hexagonal screens.

“I have nothing I can say to you yet,” she replied.

Was that because we were too close to the Client now? I could feel its influence reaching out to me, demanding, dictatorial. Coordinates sat clear in my mind as the Coin Collector lurched under fusion drive, dropping lower and decelerating. Even if I wanted to stop this, to go away and never head for those coordinates, I couldn’t, for Tank controlled the ship.

The world was mostly black, etched with red veins and red maculae, white at their centres with hot eruptions, smears of grey ash spread equatorially from these. It drew closer and closer, the great ship’s engines roaring and the whole vessel shuddering around us.

“Why are we landing?” Harriet asked.

The question was obviously rhetorical.

“Perhaps,” she continued, “the bathyspheres are not large enough to convey what needs to be conveyed.”

I had never described the Client to her, so was she guessing or did she know? It was true, nevertheless, that if the Client wanted to move itself and its multitude of minions aboard this ship, then the ship had to land. What did this then mean for me?

Soon the horizon was an arc across the whole array of screens before me and we seemed to be coming down on a relatively stable plain before a range of mountains like diseased fangs. Scanning gave me a cave system deep in those mountains, precisely at the location of the coordinates in my mind, while the Coin Collector aimed to land to one side of them. I stood up and headed for the door, Harriet as usual close behind me. As I mounted my scooter I then sent orders from my artificial body—orders I hoped I could not rescind.

While heading down into the bowels of the ship I turned to Harriet, who was pacing easily at my side. “The air out there isn’t breathable.”

She flicked her head once. “It doesn’t matter—I ceased to need breathable air long ago.”

“So you underwent more modifications than I know about?”

“Some,” she replied.

Lower down the air in the ship was laced with sulphur and it was hot. It ceased to be breathable for a human being, or any creature that needed oxygen, on the lower level, as we approached a massive open door with a ramp extending from it to the charred ground below. I parked my scooter beside the door, hoping I would be able to return to use it, but doubtful of that, and I began walking down. My artificial lungs had by now ceased to process what they were breathing and my body had gone over to power cells and stored supplies.

“What are they?” Harriet asked.

I peered out across the plain at the four creatures approaching. They looked like manta rays hovering just above the ground as they swept towards us, but upping the magnification of my eyes I could then pick out the blur of insect legs moving underneath them.

“Exoforms is what we called them,” I replied. “The Client is a hive creature and a hive all in one, perpetually conjoined, being born and dying all in one and able to meddle at genetic levels with its parts. It is a natural bio-technician, geneticist, and makes forms like this to interact with environments outside its preferred one. It was a form something like these that acted as a translator.”

“So your memories are clearer,” Harriet suggested, as we proceeded on down.

I realized they were, and I remembered the terrible anger of the Client when the AIs shut down the project, though the results of that anger were unclear but for those corpses in the hold, just as were details of the project itself before that, and precisely how it had been closed down. I wondered only then: how could the farcaster have been broken up and taken away if the whole team, including its AIs, had been slaughtered?

The ramp was shaking—perpetual tremors being transmitted from the ground and through it to my feet—but the new rumble was something else. As I stepped off onto a surface of shattered and then heat-fused chunks of obsidian, I turned.

“Here they come,” I said, and stepped aside.

The thetics were already a quarter of the way down the ramp, over two hundred of them now. They were all clad in hard shell spacesuits of a combat design that enabled them to move quickly. They came down in good order at a steady trot, in neat rectangular formations. At the base of the ramp they spread out, utterly ignoring me, following their orders. Two groups of them then went down into firing positions and pulse-rifle fire cut through the poisonous air towards the approaching exoforms. Two of them immediately went down, ploughing into the ground like crashing gravcars. Two more swept to one side, but then a missile from a shoulder launcher hit between them and sent them tumbling. The thetics then moved on at a run, heading for the coordinates in my mind.

The Client was very very disappointed in me and I now expected punishing pain which, I felt sure, I could now resist for long enough. I followed the thetics out, my mental defences as tight and as ready as they could be. But there was no attack, and in those parts of my mind where the Client had its grip, all contact slid into something completely alien—beyond my understanding.

“It’s a good plan,” Harriet opined, “but for the Client’s defences and its absolute hold on you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, now breaking into a fast loping run.

“I mean,” said my troodon companion, easily keeping pace with me. “You ordered the thetics to go in after the Client and attack it, and then you disconnected yourself from them so you could issue no further orders, so the Client could not force you to order them to desist.”

“And?”

“You hoped that if they didn’t kill it they would at least keep it distracted enough for you to get close and use the weapon you designed specifically to kill it.”

“You seem to know rather a lot,” I suggested.

A battle now raged ahead of us, at the foot of the mountains. We reached it just as it was terminating, exoforms like giant horseshoe crabs turned over and smoking like wrecked tanks, thetics reverting in the grip of long white worms, others pouring out of suits torn apart by ice-pick mandibles. But still there were many left, all funnelling into the wide cave mouth ahead. I followed them in.

At last, said the Client, perfectly understandable.

The cave sloped down, ever darker, then being lit by a hellish glow. The chamber seemed to have no limits; it seemed as if I had walked through some Narnian doorway out onto the surface of a hotter brighter world. Ahead of me I saw thetics keeling over, one after another and I couldn’t see what was killing them. I kept walking; found I could not stop walking. I stepped over and past hard shell suits and observed dissolving faces behind chainglass visors. Harriet was still beside me and I glanced across at her.

Kill me now, I thought, but couldn’t say.

“It’s killing them with the farcaster,” she said, dipping her head to indicate what lay ahead.

The Client was wound around its crystal tree, large wasp-like segments conjoined in a great snake hundreds of feet long. At its head was the primary form which I could see was an adult some days away from death, and yet to be cast away like those husks scattered on the ground all around to allow the next creature-segment take over. At its tail its terminal segment was giving birth to another, which would remain attached and in its turn give birth. The whole cycle—the time it took for the terminal form to reach the head—was just solstan months long. Meanwhile, all those segments fed, chewing down an odd rubbery nectar exuded by the crystal tree, which in turn extracted the materials to make it from the ground below, and from the husks the exoforms fed to its nanomachine roots. But there was something else about that tree too. It fed the Client, supported the Client, and was the totality of its technology and, near its head, a crystal flower had bloomed: the farcaster.

Soon I was circumventing the husks of former head segments. Reaching the base of the tree I saw the last of the thetics collapsing around me, and I went down on my knees. I don’t know whether that was my own impulse or an instruction from the creature rearing high above me. I managed to turn my head slightly, searching for Harriet, just in time to see her huff out a haze of smoke, slump, and then sprawl beside me.

I’d let her down. I’d been careless. I felt a surge of grief immediately followed by a dead dark hopelessness. What was the point now? What was the point of . . . continuing?

Give me the gun, said the Client.

The farcaster was here and my search had been a pointless one. I just couldn’t understand, I just couldn’t . . . and then I saw it.

The human body lay inside some kind of pod at the foot of the tree, almost like a flower yet to open. Through crystal distortions I could see it nestled in white snakes, some attached to it, small ones around the gaping wound in its skull, a large one entering its mouth, others attached here and there around a body that had been broken and torn. And through crystal distortions I recognized my own face.

Give me the gun. It wasn’t an instruction in human language but a need, a chemical pattern, a chain of pheromones perpetually renewing. Somehow I found the strength to resist, and saw the snakes wriggling about my doppelganger lying under crystal ahead.

No, I managed.

It could send one of its exoforms to take me apart and thereafter seize the gun. I knew with absolute certainty that it had finished with me. I was a tool it had employed and all its tools died when their usefulness was at an end. I knew with utter certainty that I was going to die. I just did not want to die in ignorance.

Explain, I tried.

The Client at once understood that I accepted defeat and death, and relented.

The pressure came off and I found myself deeper in the Client’s distributed mind, ever dying and ever renewing. Chemical language offered itself and I accepted. I was me and the Client again and its memories opened. Of course the Client was able to manipulate its own genes and its own biology and, like all its kind, that manipulation was part of it and not some logically refined science. The Client’s species did have its geneticists, its bio-techs and even its bio-warfare experts, but the Client wasn’t one of them. That had been lie. However, it was an expert and it was that expertise that had enabled it to escape. It was an expert in U-space tech, it was an alien Iversus Skaidon, and it had built the farcaster.

I understood now what had killed the thetics and Harriet: energy dense micro-explosives no larger than spores but detonating inside with the force of gunshots. The Client had farcast such explosives into the prador aboard the Coin Collector, draining its limited supply of energy and those same explosives, before escaping aboard that ship so long ago, the worlds of its kind burning and tearing apart under prador kamikaze assault.

Why not all, I wondered.

It could have made more of these explosives and steadily annihilated every prador in existence, surely? No, because there were trillions of prador and each first-child or second-child, as the Client had learned, could not be killed with just one such explosive. And here was the complete killer of that idea: it needed to know the precise locations of its targets. It needed help; it needed spotters to locate prime target like father-captains, like the King of the prador. And it needed a weapon that once farcast into such a target would then wipe out all the prador around it—it’s family. That’s where the Polity came in, and that’s where I came in: one of the Polity’s prime biowarfare experts.

I felt the rage again. The orders had been explicit: nothing was to remain. Even as I hit the destruct to turn all my computer files to atomic dust and burn up my samples in thousand Watt laser bursts, the micro-dense explosives tore me apart, and I knew nothing. Now, however, I understood how little trust the Client had of its allies, how it had targeted them all, killing all the humans in the team, shattering the crystal minds of all the AIs. Then, realizing its mistake, it had come for me, and incorporated me—drawn me in like a damaged but still useful exoform.

But the journey, why the pointless search?

The Client needed me separate from it because as an exoform close to it I could pick up on some of its thoughts and might uncover the lie I had been told, and learn that the farcaster was intact and that what it wanted was the bio-weapon I had destroyed. That separation was maintained by the first-child ganglion in the tank and U-space communications that could be shut down in an instant. With our minds so close, why could it not take the design of that weapon straight from my brain? It couldn’t, because it wasn’t there—it was lost with a large chunk of my brain. However, the skills were still there and I was capable of remaking it.

It took the Client many years to build my avatar. It used one of the Golem whose mind it had destroyed, it used elements of the thetic program, which had been the product of one of the research team it had killed, and it did the best it could. It needed me motivated to rebuild that weapon. My motivation was an ersatz freedom, maintained by my ostensible separation from the Client and the firm knowledge that the bioweapon would work as well against it as against the prador. I responded as predicted. I remade that weapon, it resided aboard the Coin Collector, and it resided inside the bullets in the gun inside my thigh.

Give me the gun.

I realized that the action of handing over that weapon wasn’t the main thing the Client required, but its consequence. The knowledge was locked inside me and, by handing over the gun, I would unlock it.

Trillions of prador. I didn’t like them very much but such a genocide appalled me. The Client had its farcaster—had never been without it—and shortly it would have the weapon to annihilate them all. How it intended to target them I didn’t know, but it could find a way for it had the time of an immortal and the utter certainty of purpose. I put up futile resistance and agony filled my skull, not the one in my artificial body, but in that one over there, wrapped in worms and entombed in crystal. My vision was blurred as I stared at the seared ground and fought for, I don’t know, at least some redemption from what was to ensue. Then my vision cleared a little, and I saw a strange thing.

Ten objects lay scattered across the ground in front of me. They were, colourful curved spikes, shocking pink.

I gave up, simultaneously sending the signal to open the hatch in my thigh while reaching down to tear aside the canvas flap. My hand closed around the butt of my fungus gun and I withdrew it, all the knowledge of what its bullets incorporated riding up inside me. I really wanted to aim the weapon at the Client and pull the trigger, but that was utterly beyond me. I turned it, rested it in the flat of my hand and presented it. Already the Client was looping down, both mentally and physically multiple wings roaring to support its weight, its wasp-like leading segment reaching out with four limbs terminating in hands that seemed to be collections of black fish hooks, black hooks in my skull too.

But it was the hand of a reptile, sans claws, that took the gun.

“Tuppence,” said a voice, but I was still in that moment.

I saw Harriet aiming the gun with a dexterity she had seemingly not possessed in many decades. One shot went into the Client’s leading segment, into its thorax which in turn was partially melded to the head of the segment behind. The second shot went in two segments back from that. Then another two shots went in widely spaced, one after another. The hooks withdrew from my mind but I was rigid with agony, the Client’s agony. I managed to turn my head in time to see Harriet flung aside by a detonation in her side. It tore a hole, but what was revealed inside wasn’t bloody, but hard and glittery. She rolled, came up again and fired the remaining two shots.

“Tuppence.”

A roaring scream filled the cavern as of a whole crowd being thrown into a furnace. The Client reared back and wrapped itself around its tree, black lines rapidly spreading from the bullet impact sites. It shed its forward form, birthed behind, sucked on a crystal tree suddenly turned milk white as it filled with nutrient. It birthed and shed in quick succession, its discarded segments falling about me not as dry husks but soggy and heavy as any corpse. I saw one issuing brown sprouts, spore heads expanding. The Client fought on for survival, tearing at its tree, crystal began to fall and shatter then like the dried wings of its husks once had. Around me I now saw exoforms, but there was no coherence to them—they were just running, crashing into each other, crashing into the walls of the cavern.

“Tuppence.”

At last it ended, the Client freezing round its tree, final segments infected, one newly born freezing halfway down its birth canal, a last head segment falling. The Client died sprouting a fungus which, in its original form, killed mere ants. I died too. Under crystal I saw black threads spreading then all sight of my body blotted out as a spore head exploded in there.

“Oh will you snap out of it!”

I opened my eyes. I was aboard the Coin Collector, in my chair, facing my array of screens. The Client’s world was there in vacuum and, around it I could see the flash of fusion drives and the distant bulks of ships.

“Why am I alive?” I asked, peering down at my battered artificial body.

“You’re not,” said Harriet. “You’re dead.”

I turned to study her. She had put her artificial claws back on and had painted them bright custard yellow, even applied some eye-shadow of the same colour. It occurred to me then that I should have wondered, what with her supposedly being so inept with her claws, how she had always so neatly applied the nail varnish and other make-up. Transferring my gaze to her side I could see no sign of her injury, just clean scaled skin.

“What do you mean I’m dead?”

“The Client used stock memcrystal for the processing in your avatar. That crystal has more than enough storage to contain a human mind. You’re a copy and even though your human body is dead, you live. You are you, Tuppence.”

I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that.

“Are you Polity?” I asked. “Are you a Polity agent.”

“No, completely independent,” she replied cheerfully.

“I’m confused.”

“Understandable—it’s been a trying day.” She paused while I stared at her, then relented. “Okay, you hired me and I got thoroughly screwed. The damage was bad and it was way beyond being repaired with the reward you gave me or the facilities available at that hospital. That war-drone made a real mess. Then, while I was in the hospital, I received an offer I couldn’t refuse. They’d pay to repair me. They’d bring in the expertise. They’d pay to turn me into what I am now—”

“And what are you now?”

“I’m practically indestructible, and more machine than lizard.” She paused. “And with a mind distributed about my body so it couldn’t be killed with a single farcaster shot.”

“Right,” I said. “Please continue.”

“I was to stick with you, and lead them to the Client.” Harriet paused. “However when I worked out what you were up to, I went for the bigger reward—the one for offing the Client.”

“The Polity,” I said, feeling slightly disgusted.

“Polity technology, certainly, but not the Polity and its AIs.” She pointed a claw at the screens. “Them.”

I stared at the screens for a long moment, then reached out and upped the magnification. They weren’t Polity ships out there swarming around the Client’s world; they were prador dreadnoughts.

I wasn’t sure about how I felt about that either.

“What now?” I asked.

Harriet raised a claw up in front of her face.

“The yellow was a mistake, I think.”

Just then the Coin Collector shuddered, and I realized something large had just docked. I guessed the prador were bringing her reward, and wondered if that might be a cause for regret.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April-May 2013.

The Metal Demimonde

Nick Wolven

Tipper’s in the south parking lot when her phone starts going mad. Not just ringing. It’s a tone she’s never heard before, high and warbling, almost a scream. She’s halfway up the fairway before she places it.

An alarm.

The ride.

She bumps through the crowds, heedless of complaints, her lineman’s boots crushing foam cups and toes. Breakdown. That’s the word that’s in her head, along with a few others. Accident. Screwup.

Yeah, you screwed up, kid. Big time.

The rides clash and swoop overhead, flinging screaming riders at the stars.

Snake is located near the end of the fairway where the grounds trail off into grit and chaparral. Even from a distance, behind the bulk of the Haunted House, Tipper can see the ride stretched out like a beached leviathan, the tubular body sprawled in the dirt, lights all down it twinkling emergency colors; orange, yellow, red. The mouth gapes hugely, like a crimson castle door. Escape hatches along the sides have popped open to show steel ribs. In the lurid aura of the Haunted House, the thing looks like some dying dragon, felled by a southwestern St. George. But it’s not dead, only paralyzed, screaming a mechanical plea through Tipper’s phone.

She thumbs the screen and shuts off the alarm.

The ride is surrounded by a mob of gawking bystanders. Tipper pushes through and vaults the aluminum fence. Suzie is standing by Snake’s mouth, all ten fingers curled in her tufty hair. The wrinkles in her metalhead concert-T twitch with agitation.

Tipper pulls off her sleeveless hoodie as she jogs up, panting in mouthfuls of the desert night.

“Suzie, I’m sorry. I just got the buzz. What’s wrong with—?”

Before Suzie can answer, another woman steps out from behind the ride. Amy Carter is pure carnie, longboned and lean, with a trailing gray braid that runs down to her white jeans. She runs the Haunted House, or as she likes to put it, keeps the gate to Dracula’s castle. Her gray eyes screw hard into Tipper’s.

“Supposed to be back half an hour ago, weren’t you, kid?”

“I . . . ” Tipper falters.

“What were you doing, getting cuddly with some boy behind the bathrooms? You think this isn’t a real job?”

“Dial it down, Carter. Just a notch.” Suzie’s face is round, smooth-cheeked, and somehow always seems to be smiling. She puts a hand on the back of Tipper’s neck. “There’s nothing Tipper could’ve done, even if she was here. Snake’s got something caught in her throat, that’s all.”

Tipper tries to look cool as she clomps up to the ride.

“So someone got stuck? No one’s hurt, are they?”

“You better damn well hope not.” Carter stomps into the ride’s wide mouth.

Suzie pats Tipper’s arm. “They’re not hurt, don’t worry. Snake’d never let that happen.”

It’s true. Snake could never put anyone in danger. Safety first, right? It’s in the wiring.

Tipper follows the two women into the ride’s gullet, between the big foam-rubber fangs. The machine is a tender behemoth, incapable of harming a human being.

But here’s the problem, always the problem: What if a human being decides to harm Snake?

From the ride’s mouth, Tipper has a great view of the fairgrounds, framed in the robot’s arching jaws. Over the tent arcade, the Scream-o-Saurus chomps at the stars. Octowhip, the LandShark, the Abominable Go-Go-Go Man, they’re all here, waving segmented arms, dancing like giants, giving loads of shrieking riders the time of their lives.

At moments like this, Tipper feels a kind of aching self-consciousness, like a sunburn all over her body. Who is she but another lost kid, trying to look older than her age? Skinny hips, brown face, clothing too bulky for the Arizona climate. A child of the Fringe, with nothing to keep her going but an outsize attitude.

Suzie trusts her, though. One month into the job, and Suzie is already letting Tipper share responsibility for Snake. She can see it, Suzie says—Tipper has the touch, the feel.

“You got the magic, kid. I always know.”

It’s a good thing to hear in these lonely desert nights, when the fair shuts down and the rides go to sleep, settling on their lots like weary monsters. As their engines click into silence, Suzie sits in the door of her trailer, bottle of Cuervo between her knees, and takes in the phantasmagoria with a hand.

“You know what I mean? I mean love. Seriously. You want to be a ride operator, you got to love these things like your own two hands. These aren’t your granddad’s rides, some swivel-mounted cages on a rotating frame. These are beasts. They need TLC. And I’ll tell you something, if you give that to ’em? They’ll return it a thousand-fold.”

Tipper’s brothers would say that’s crazy talk. Carnie superstition, technophilia. But in the juniper smell of the carnival night, with saurian heads bobbing against the moon, when you’re puffing homegrown pot under bowers of luciferase lights, and those cool Sonoran breezes come up with just a whiff of kerosene . . . how could you want any other kind of life?

“Trust,” Suzie’ll say, “that’s what it comes down to. The beautiful trust between woman and machine.”

“Hey. Tip.” The snap of Suzie’s fingers is muffled in the ride’s padded throat. “You okay?”

Speechless, feeling ridiculous, Tipper turns and follows her down the red tunnel.

Snake is one of the smaller rides, intended for younger kids and their parents. Bloated with extra padding, painted nonthreatening colors, it has the googly eyes of a family attraction. Synthetic flesh of gel-packed polyfabric masks the feedback systems: the thigmotaxics, the thixotropic sensors and servos that keep riders bouncing along. You’d have to try to get hurt inside Snake, and even then you’d probably be okay. Like a princess oversensitive to a pea, Snake would smother you in loving cushions, push you along through a gentle peristalsis, and pop you out into the world unharmed.

The kids love it. Getting swallowed and expelled, then rushing around to do it again: the ride seems to exorcise some childish fear. Tipper herself always feels queasy in here. She keeps close to Suzie, stumbling on the padded floor, trying not to touch the slightly grubby walls. One thing about Snake, the ride may be safe, but you can only swallow so many children per day without picking up a few not totally wholesome odors. Snake is self-cleaning, so most of the puke and pee and food is masked with an alcoholic tang of disinfectant. Still . . .

“Suze?” Tipper pauses ten feet down the throat. The ride is stiff but not quite straight; they’ve lost sight of Carter around the curve. Suzie turns.

“Listen,” Tipper says. “I’m real sorry. I was in the parking lot, and I don’t know what happened, I guess I dropped a mental digit or something—”

“Tip?” Suzie braces herself against the bouncy walls. “I’ve been at this a long time, okay? These rides, they’re like dogs. Big, friendly, and dumb. They get in trouble. It happens.”

“I know. I’m saying, though, what I did, it was totally stupid, and I won’t ever—”

“Ah, ah, ah!” Suzie waves her hands by her ears. “It’s history. I’ve already forgotten it.”

“But I—”

“I’m sure you had your reasons.” Suzie’s face creases, and for a moment, Tipper can see how old she is. At least fifty, maybe more. A whole life, probably not a happy one, etched in those plump Chinese features. “If I cared about punctuality, you think I’d be working the ’grounds? Think I’d be tending to this dumb brute?” Suzie gives the wall an affectionate whap. “We’re all hopeless screw-ups, down here in the metal demimonde.”

Tipper nods. She still wishes she could explain. “The thing is, I haven’t even told you why I was—”

But Suzie reaches out, holding Tipper’s hot face between her hands. This is a woman who spends her life wrangling metal monsters the size of tractor-trailers. A woman used to being in control.

“Tip? Listen. You’re one of us, now. You’re a robot wrangler, a monster rider, and you’re literally standing in the belly of the beast. It’s just me and you down here, and we’ve got to look out for each other. Right? Right.”

It’s a nice moment, until the screaming starts.

Tipper’s first to move, bounding down the jiggling tube. Already she can hear occasional giggles between the cries. The screams themselves edge higher, becoming falsetto, false. Something weird is going on, here.

Another bend, and Tipper slams into Carter’s jean-jacketed back. The screams break into boyish laughter.

“Help . . . I’m being eaten . . . I think my scrotum’s caught!”

Carter’s face is like something out of her Haunted House. “You.” She jabs a finger. “Enough. Move.”

Clutching Carter’s shoulder, standing on tiptoes, Tipper can see two boys wedged into the pillowed tunnel, feet and hands jammed into the walls, like a couple of throat-choking chicken bones. The smartfoam is pulsing around them, spasming like a misfiring muscle as the ride tries to shake them loose. This is the only way to jam the ride: You have to give it everything you’ve got.

“Guys.” Suzie squeezes past them, frowning at the boys. “Come on, already. There’s kids waiting to ride.”

“Hey, ma’am, is it our fault your ride’s not safe? I’m really stuck. This is, like, misleading advertising. Some poor little innocent child could lose a testicle.”

More snickers.

“Out.” Suzie’s thumb jerks at an exit. With a laugh, the boys let go and drop to the cushioned floor. The foamy muscles of the throat stop twitching. You can almost hear the ride’s sigh of relief.

Suzie stands over them. “Get elsewhere, fellas. Fast.”

“I don’t know, ma’am, I’m pretty shook up.” The older boy winces theatrically, rubbing his elbows. “That was a kind of traumatic experience. I feel like I might need some time to recover.”

Suzie’s thumb is not in a humoring mood. It becomes a standoff, the boys laughing, Suzie’s thumb jerking, till one of the guys happens to notice Tipper.

It’s like someone pushed a button. The boy’s childish attitude drops away. He jumps to his feet, reaches for his friend. “All right, man, come on, that’s enough.”

The other kid, younger and smaller, doesn’t pick up the hint. “I don’t know, man, I think this ride is, like, molesting me.”

“Enough, dick.”

They stand together, balanced on the padding. A couple of Fringe kids in workmen’s clothes. You’d never guess that ten seconds ago they were acting like a pair of giggling toddlers.

The tall one nods. “Hey, there, Tipper.”

Tipper can feel Suzie staring. She suddenly has a fantasy of the foam walls flexing, shaking, bouncing her toward some place far away from here.

Suzie squints. “Tip, you know these idiots?”

“Uh, sort of.” Tipper flinches. “I mean, we only—”

“We’re friends,” says the older boy. “Well, acquaintances.”

Suzie’s squint contracts. With a shake of her head, Tipper staggers across the wobbly floor, grabs the tall boy by the elbow. “Come on,” she hisses, ushering him to the exit hatch. Amazingly, the boy obeys.

Out in the open, the noise of the fair explodes into salience. Tipper drags the two guys back between the trailers.

“What are you doing here?”

The tall one takes her hand. “What do you think?”

Without warning, he grabs Tipper by the arms, pulls her toward him. “Luke,” she begins. But already he’s kissing her, holding her head with his hands, and Tipper just knows, all the way from her head to her boots, that she’s in serious trouble.

It started three nights ago, in the land of Orphans.

Orphans: that’s what the carnies call the independent rides. Most of them are ungainly clunkers. Exposed works, wheezy pistons. They’re self-sufficient, but without human help, the fairgoers tend to feel leery about riding them. The Orphans hunker at the edge of the grounds, silent and neglected, accompanied only by the service bots that tighten their screws and top up their fluids. Like a bunch of old crocodiles, Tipper thinks, getting picked over by Egyptian plovers.

There’s something sadly romantic about the Orphans. Tipper likes to come out here on break, sit with a bucket-sized cup of Coke, and bask in the silence of these patient, old machines. Usually, the Orphans sit near the parking lot, and Tipper’s view is of auto-drive cars lined in arrays, tight and neat as corn kernels. Beyond the lattice of windshields, she can just make out the lights of a typical southwestern ’burb. Lawns dead from water rationing. Shuttered factories, hard-luck malls. The Fringe.

That’s where Tipper was three nights ago, when she heard laughter from among the machines. She gulped her hotdog, put down her Coke, and picked her way through the thicket of steel limbs.

And there they were. Gathered in the shadow of Tentaculus, four boys were passing around a vaper pipe. Perfect stereotypes, these guys, with their caveman beards, their mechanic’s jumpsuits, their construction vests and Pan-Am coats. All of them affecting the styles of jobs that no longer existed.

Manuals.

Tipper stepped over the limp limbs of Tentaculus, wiping hot dog grease on her shorts. As she approached, one of the guys was leaning back, sighting up an extended arm, a J&B bottle dangling from his hand.

“Hey!” Tipper shouted, just as the bottle went winging toward Tentaculus’s monstrous face. The ride blinked, a fiberglass lid slamming down over its one huge eye. The bottle bounced off, fell harmlessly in the dirt.

Tipper stomped forward. “Dick. These are functional rides.”

The group turned. She found herself facing four teenage sneers.

“Doesn’t look too functional to me.” The guy who’d thrown the bottle kicked a limp tentacle, a hose of compressed air sheathed in piezocanvas.

“Well, they don’t get a lot of riders,” Tipper said, “but that doesn’t mean . . . ” She wasn’t in a mood to argue. “Look, I’m just saying, be respectful, okay?”

“Respectful?” The guy lifted his scruffy chin. “And who are you, the ride fairy?”

Snickers all around.

“I’m an operator,” Tipper said, “and you—”

But suddenly, a boy broke free of the group. He was the tallest, by far, and the only clean-shaven one, dressed in an airman’s jacket and carpenter’s pants. Long black hair reached to his shoulders.

“Hey, I know you.” He tipped his head toward the grounds. “You run the Snake, over by the Haunted House. With that Chinese lady and the mean-looking cowgirl.”

“Their names,” Tipper said, “are Suzie and Amy.”

The guy wasn’t fazed by her tone. “I’ve seen you working. You know your stuff.”

“There’s nothing to know.” Tipper hesitated. “The rides do all the work, mostly.”

“Sure.” The boy looked up at the Orphans, hands in his brass-zippered pockets. “Still, it takes a kind of talent, right? Like with animals.”

“I guess.” Tipper knew not to trust guys like this. She’d seen more than enough of the type; she had three older brothers, after all. But something about him . . . there was tension in the boy’s presence, more intriguing than threatening, like a faint scent of something burning.

“Animals? Really?” One of the others sneered up at Tentaculus’ cartoon grin. “Animals are cool. But look at this stupid thing.”

The tall boy and Tipper both ignored him.

“Luke.” He held out a hand. “You’re Tip, huh? I’m always hearing that old lady shout your name.”

“Suzie. That’s the old lady. She’s not old, though; she’s only like, fifty. I’m Tipoli. Tipper.” She gave Luke’s hand a single, brisk pump.

“You’re on break? Well, I wonder, Tipper . . . ” He grinned, and this much was true: he was dazzlingly handsome. “I wonder if you could give me a hand?”

The fair’s parking lot had seemed vast and cracked, that night, the site of a mall that never got built. The cars were packed so tight you couldn’t even squeeze between them; the drivers would have to summon them through the valet station. Crazy, the navigational skills of machines.

Luke went to a section of the lot marked off with chains, where old cars had been parked at madcap angles. Pickups, mod-jobs, a vintage corvette. The antique bodies and scattershot parking betrayed what signs on the pavement confirmed.

Human Drivers Only.

No Auto-Drive Beyond This Point.

Luke pointed. “Mine’s over here.”

The vehicle made Tipper gasp and laugh at once. It was a courier truck, squeezed between two streetlight pedestals, the logo of the company still showing under a hasty spray-paint job. The thing was modded in a serious way: integrated tire-wheels, expanded cab, tinted windows custom-cut and sealed into 3D-printed panels hung on a modular frame. The cargo box rode low; Tipper suspected more than package-sorting machinery had been stored away back there.

“Home sweet home.” Luke pounded the box. “Got a bed back here, internet, built-in fridge, the best game hookup you’ll ever see. With a ride like this, who needs property taxes, huh?”

Tipper followed him along the vehicle’s fiberglass flank. The compact design, the lightweight frame, the aerodynamic lines . . . it was obviously a computer-driven truck, built for maximum speed on the shipping-only roads. Never meant for a human driver.

She peered at him. “So you drive this thing?”

“Trying to. That’s why you’re here.”

He popped open the door, a maintenance hatch he’d expanded to fit his makeshift cab. Inside, the components had been shifted and rebuilt, making room, just barely, for a driver and passenger. A carbon-fiber NASCAR seat, crudely cabled to the frame, took up most of the space. An ancient Mini Cooper steering wheel bloomed like a thistle from a two-foot exposed column. The pedal system looked like something from an old church organ. Although the interface for the computer was in place, showing all systems normal, Tipper assumed it had been clipped out of the loop.

Her older brothers, car jocks all, would have heartily approved. Cars ought to be an open book, they thought. No hidden triggers, no mechanical turks. They wanted to pull back the curtain from the autodriving wizard. Put the driver in control.

She ran her hands over the welding. “No way this is legal.”

“No way,” Luke agreed with a grin.

He grabbed the hatch, contracted his body, and half jumped, half tumbled into the jackleg seat. “They’re still using the same parts as the trucker days. You just have to load ’em up with different stuff. Legacy line systems, right? All the same tools and dies, injection molds. So it’s not too hard to pull everything out and retrofit.”

Tipper ducked in after him. “You crash in this, you’ll crumple like a beer can.”

“Yeah, I’ll be chewed like Trident, huh?” He laughed silently, running two fingers round the wheel. “You know about cars?”

“My family does.”

“Well, it’s this queen bee that’s giving me problems.” Luke tapped a knuckle on the autodrive. “I clipped everything I could think of, but I can’t seem to shut it down for good. I still need it to—”

“To check in at the toll gates, right.” Tipper knew how this stuff worked. “Or they’ll snap your plates and call it in as a malfunction.”

“Right. So mother brain here has to be awake and talking. Only thing is, I tried to code feedback in for all the connectivity checks. Edge-stitching, they call it. So the program, like, talks back to itself?”

“Right, I know.”

“Well, it’s not working. She keeps noticing she’s disconnected. And shouting alerts at other drivers. So everywhere I go, all the cars around me are getting these alarms, like I’m a runaway truck. It gives me a nice open road, but . . . ”

Tipper edged him over, sliding in. “You need to shut off the emergency alerts. It’s got one of those AI security systems, right? So just give it your info and a statement, tell it you’re taking legal responsibility as a human being. It’s federal law, the car has to—”

“Exactly.” Luke was holding out his license, his phone. “That’s all I need you to do.”

Tipper sighed. She should have known.

“All right.” She waved him out of her space. “Hand it over.” Taking Luke’s license, she keyed on the comm. The touch interface showed a smiling cartoon truck.

“Sorry,” Luke said with shy pride. “It’s just that I don’t—”

“You don’t talk to robots. I get it.” Tipper did the old touchscreen fingerdance, darting glances at his workman’s clothes. “I should have guessed.”

Luke smoothed his airman’s jacket over the roadworker’s vest underneath. “It’s kind of a code with me.”

“Right. I know. You’re a Manual.” She keyed her way into the security system.

“I wouldn’t use that label.” Luke shrugged. “I mean, I’m not all hardcore about it. I don’t go all the way. I don’t get into sabotage.”

Typing in the last commands one-handed, Tipper pulled out her strapless Navy watch. Ten to ten. Almost the end of her break.

“You know, this could take a while. There’s a whole interview you have go through. I mean, federal law and shit . . . ”

Luke watched her. “I guess you probably have to get back to your job, huh?”

Tipper hesitated. Two shadows, the merest hints of dimples, appeared in Luke’s cheeks. He put his hand over hers, gently drew it away from the screen. “Guess we’ll have to do this another time.”

And that’s when Tipper got a feeling, a very strong feeling, that this whole thing wasn’t about Luke’s truck at all.

Now, in the shadows among the trailers, Luke draws back, lips lingering to brush Tipper’s cheek. Almost against her will, Tipper stretches up for his retreating mouth, clinging to him with feral hunger as his boots scratch away across the sandy ground.

“I’ve been waiting for you.” The instant she hears herself saying it, Tipper wants to viciously kick her own ass. So cliché, but the problem is, it’s true. Every night for the past three days, she’s spent her breaks lounging around the lots, wandering the Orphans, waiting for Luke to come strolling through the forest of hydraulic limbs.

Which is why she was standing around like an idiot, earlier, wasting time, dragging out her break, when Snake started blasting that alarm through her phone. Which is why she absolutely should not be standing here, grabbing this boy by the collar, pulling him down to her lips and . . .

“What’s up, anyway? Where’ve you been?” Tipper shoves him back halfway through the kiss, annoyed in twenty different ways. “And why are you coming around here, now, screwing up my ride?”

“Sorry.” Luke pushes down her hands. “I had some things to do.” Boys and their vague excuses. Of course he doesn’t even answer her second question. “Hey, listen, you still up for it? You know, giving me a hand with that truck?”

Tipper holds back. She has to at least pretend not to seem too interested. “Are you going to actually meet me this time? Or just screw around and make me lose my job?”

He glances up. She can see the whole fair, a brief gold flicker in his eyes.

“How about tomorrow? I’ll come by. You’ll be around?”

“Till Sunday. Then we’re moving on.” Tipper hopes he feels the pressure implicit in those words.

“Hey, Luke?” The runty sidekick pipes up; Tipper had almost forgotten he was there. “If we’re going to meet with that guy . . . ”

Luke waves. “One second.” His fingers rest, briefly, on the back of Tipper’s hand. “Tomorrow, then.”

And she could swear those words are still hovering above her, like one of the fair’s ethereal projected signs, even after his body has gone away.

The fair has no name, no official schedule. The rides themselves choose the itinerary, following summons on the radio waves. A shambolic, clunking caravan, they clump across the desert, sticking to corridors set aside for drone traffic, free and grand as demigods in this federally sequestered space. With a strange and phaneric benevolence, they settle on the outskirts of towns, sending out their ads and alerts, putting up tents and stalls, declaring to everyone that the fair has arrived.

And with it, in buggies and battered trailers, in terrain-adaptive four-by-fours, in the guts of the rides themselves, sunburned under dragon tats and open leather vests, scented with the smoke of sweet-flavored cigarillos—with it, as ever, come the carnies.

It’s five p.m., peak family time, and Suzie is deep into her routine.

“All right, folks, come and meet our baby. Fifty feet long and heavier’n a bucket of elephants, she lives on a diet of hydrogen and motor oil. Believe it or not, she’s a baby of her kind. Sweet as an orange creamsicle and twice as gentle as a St. Bernard. She’s more scared of you than you are of tigers and only looking for a little help. Give us a hand, and we’ll give you a reward, if you can help us cure the tummy-ache of our Baby Snake.”

A few families are at the gate. The kids, as usual, look entranced and terrified. The parents stand back with wary frowns.

“Is it clean?” a mom asks.

Suzie’s answer is prompt. “Snake, like all of her kind, has a grade-A immune system. She fully cleans herself after every ride.”

“I don’t know.” The mom takes her kid by the shoulders. “Hon, this looks a little intense.”

That’s when Suzie switches tactics, aiming her pitch at the little girl.

“Well, I have one question for you, little lady. Can you guess who Baby Snake’s parents were?”

A shake of black curls.

“Her mom was the Loch Ness monster,” Suzie says, “and her dad was a washing machine.”

“No,” the girl insists, showing gapped teeth.

“It’s true. Baby Snake got lost one day, and now we’re trying to help her get back home. Only problem is, I broke my phone, and silly Snake here swallowed all the pieces! You think you could help us get them out, so we can fix them up and help this poor little girl find her parents?”

The girl gazes with alarmed curiosity into Snake’s wide-open mouth, up at Suzie’s friendly face, and then at her mother’s skeptical frown.

“Mommy,” she whispers, tugging her mother’s shirt. And Tipper hears snatches of an ancient negotiation.

“I want . . . ”

“Are you sure . . . ?”

“I really really really . . . ”

“You won’t be scared?”

“I promise promise promise . . . ”

A few other kids are coming up. It’s the old, the universal need. To be brave, to be helpful, to answer a call. As the children gather at the gate, their faces seem less eager than awed. They’re really doing it, going down the monster’s throat. But this is a gentle monster. And it’s all for a good cause.

“I suppose there’s some kind of policy?” the skeptical mom asks.

Suzie already has it out. “That’s me, Suzie Choi. That’s my license, that’s my insurance, and that’s my safety record. Go here, and you can see the ride stats: four hundred units operating in thirty countries, and we’ve never had a robot-initiated accident. Just in case, me and my assistant will be on hand at all times. But we’ve never had anything go wrong.”

Which is not quite true. What goes wrong, Tipper knows, is that the kids get over-excited, start fights, cry when the ride has to end, suffer the inevitable effects of too much fairground food. It’s the source of all robot woes: human error. But another ancient need is being met, now: the shaking of hands, the meeting of eyes, the reassurance of human contact. The mother gives in and thumbs the screen.

“All right, Nichelle, I guess we can try it.”

“Ye-es!”

Suzie opens the gate. “One at a time, guys, one at a time.”

It’s Tipper’s job to guide the kids in. That means maintaining even spacing, giving the fainthearted a last chance to quit, infusing the doughty with a final dose of assurance. Amazing, how needed it can make you feel, just doing this simple human work. The kids have so much faith, gazing up at her, amazed at the ease with which Tipper stands in the Snake’s open mouth.

In they go, out they come. Until at last . . .

“Tip.” Suzie comes to her side. The last kids are bouncing out of the ride, carrying foam pieces of the fake phone, trading them in for tokens at the gate. The adults gather up their charges and depart, listening to gleeful tales of derring-do. Suzie hangs out the come back later sign, the little clock set for thirty minutes.

“I think we need to have a talk.”

Suzie’s trailer is a buggy-style unit, the living quarters hung from a big-wheeled frame. Autodrive only, keyed to follow Snake wherever the ride might choose to go. Snake herself travels under a lightweight, woven-ceramic shroud, loaded on a radio-piloted, all-terrain wheelbed. Rugged and unglamorous. But the carnies don’t demand much in the way of style.

Stepping in, Tipper throws back the curtain from her hammock, tumbles into the nylon mesh. Suzie settles into her own sling near the door. The size of the trailer means they can never be more than eight or nine feet apart. Ultra-compact storage is more a theory than a practice: Shirts have completely flooded the floor. The gallon water jugs, the potted cottontop cacti, Suzie’s Metalhead posters, the Mojave pattern pillows—everything is fastened tight or swinging free. Even with the best in dynamic suspension, travel on the desert roads is some rough riding. It’s the ridegirl ethos. You stick with your machine, wherever it happens to go.

Tipper can still smell the oily aroma of the fair, the cool evening air, the spice of empanada stalls—until Suzie hits the privacy switch, the walls tighten their lignin weave, and there’s nothing but the whir of the ventilation fans.

Suzie pops open her traveling case, lifts out a vape, loads a homebrew cart. The LED cherry cycles green to gold, making the trailer glow with magic light. “So,” she says. “How awkwardly unsubtle should I make this?”

Tipper plants a toe on the wall and sets her hammock swaying. On the curved ceiling above is one of Suzie’s posters, Controlled Discord, a metalhead act from way back. Algorithmic music, scientifically tested, calculated to produce acute feelings of unease. Not Tipper’s thing.

“You know what I want to talk about, I assume.” Suzie passes over the vape. “Give me a cue. Where should we jump in?”

The swinging hammocks arrive at moment of synchronized periodicity; Tipper plucks the vape from Suzie’s hand. It’s THC extract, hints of green tea and tapioca. Tipper puffs judiciously. MJ juice always hits her hard.

“These past couple of days,” Suzie says, “you’ve been awfully distracted. Almost like you’d rather be somewhere else.”

Tipper weighs her answer. “I want to be here. Working for you.”

Suzie’s smile is unrevealing. “You come from where, Tipper? Originally, I mean. Near Phoenix, right?”

“I don’t really want to—”

“All right, all right, I’m only saying, you came here for a reason. You could’ve gone anywhere. So why the fair?” Before Tipper can answer, Suzie says, “I’ll put it this way. Was it for the boys?”

Instead of responding, Tipper sucks on the vape. Maybe she needs that THC after all.

“This new friend of yours,” Suzie says. “Our buddy Mister Longhair Lothario—”

“His name is Luke.”

“What do you think he’s looking for? A good time? A little innocent fun, screwing around with my ride?”

“He was just joking. I think he was only trying to get my attention.”

“Well, he’s got it, doesn’t he?” When Tipper offers to pass the vape back, Suzie waves it away. “I ever tell you how I came to the fair, Tip? Going way back?”

Tipper’s heard the story half a hundred times. “Your parents—”

“Yeah, yeah, my parents were crazy.” Suzie flicks dismissive fingers. “More like out of touch. Wanted me to be a doctor. I told them, ‘Mom, Dad, there are no doctors anymore. There were doctors when you were kids. Now there are machines, with human assistants.’ ‘Okay, Suzie,’ they said, ‘so be an engineer. Be the person who makes the machines.’ I told them the machines make all the machines. You see, they were stuck in the old way of thinking. You work hard, you study hard, you get a good job.

“Anyway.” Suzie folds her hands on her stomach. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Hold on to something heavy, girl, ’cause you’re about to sit through a teen girl’s worst nightmare. You’re about to hear an old lady talk about her first love.”

She opens a minifridge and pulls out a tea.

“First thing to point out, like it needs pointing out: this was a long damn time ago. If you think the Manual trend is hot, now, all these kids running around in pilot jackets and construction vests, hell, back then, this stuff was new. The golden era of applied robotics, everything a thousand times more efficient, exponential productivity gains forever, blah blah blah. We were all going to be rich and live in a new age of leisure, have all the free time in the world, wipe our butts with golden circuit boards, whatever. And suddenly, every guy in suburbia is dropping out of high school, hanging around in boilersuits and tool belts, refusing to talk to voice interfaces, and talking about how he wants to do ‘real work’ for a living. Wild.

“Well, okay, this one kid, my neighbor, he was the type. Eighteen years old, covered with burns, which he’d gotten by doing honest-to-God-welding. What did he weld? Who cares? This was the Fringe. This guy worked with his hands. That was cool. He used to run a service ripping brains out of appliances, washing machines, blenders, whatever you brought over. Stupidifying, he called it. Making smart machines less smart. Had this teller machine he’d reconstructed, totally transparent, so you could see it all working, Monopoly money going round and round these big rollers, the whole thing running by gears and weights. And here I was, this little nerd-girl, who’d spent her life memorizing shit no human needed to memorize anymore. So.”

Settling back with a brain full of vapor, Tipper can picture teenage Suzie, a squat girl lost in a giant concert T, shuffling around with a head full of Taylor polynomials and math rock.

“Now.” Suzie sips her tea. “Okay. One day this young rebel comes by with a proposition. He wants to go to the fair, just me and him, and try out this new ride they have there. Me?” Suzie sets her empty can on the floor. “I’m fifteen. He’s eighteen. I think this is the best idea I ever heard. Friday night comes, I lie to my parents, he picks me up—no autodrive for this guy—and off we go. I’ll paint the scene. The rides, they were totally different then. No AI. No protocols. The operator pulled a lever, it started up. He pushed the lever, it shut down. Simple.

“But this new ride? This was something special. The Gentle Giant it was called. Big legless guy, about thirty feet tall. Long arms, kind of like a gorilla. You’d get in a kind of transparent ball, like a giant hamster ball, and he’d pick you up, and—well, there wasn’t much to it, really. He’d kind of wave you around, pass you from hand to hand. Nothing like the Scream-o-Saurus, that’s for sure.

“But me?” Suzie sat up. “My generation? This was brand new. This was scary. Because it wasn’t just a machine, like what we grew up on. It was thinking. It was deciding. It was unpredictable. And you were literally putting yourself in this robot’s hands.”

Suzie pauses, settling lower in her hammock.

“Well, as you can bet, there were lots of safety precautions. Full body pat-down, two riders only, waivers, harnesses, the whole thing. We go through the rigmarole. We get in the big ball. And while we’re waiting, we look up at the Giant’s face, and that’s when this boy tells me his plan.”

The ventilation fans have shut off, the air slowly growing warm with contained heat. Tipper tries to remember if she’s ever seen this ride, which sounds, as Suzie says, intensely boring. A big robot picking you up, then putting you down? So what?

“Well, my brave new boyfriend, it turns out he’s been studying.” Suzie takes out a new tea. “The Gentle Giant has a pretty sure grip. But this guy thinks, okay, maybe if we both get up at the same time, throw ourselves against the wall—maybe if we time it just right, he says, we can get the Giant to, in a phrase, drop the ball.”

“And then what?” Tipper narrows her eyes. “You would die? What’s the point?”

“Here’s the point. This ride was special. It was new. There were magazine stories. There were giant crowds. If the Giant screwed up, even just once—”

“But only because you guys broke the rules.”

“But that’s just it! I mean, picture it. A nice young girl, her handsome boyfriend, out on their very first date . . . maybe they’re a little foolish, but who isn’t at that age? And then suddenly, thanks to this crazy, unreliable robot . . . ”

Tipper sighs. Of course. It’s a typical Manual ploy. Do something insanely stupid, then blame it on a robot. They’ll do anything to sow distrust and fear.

“Sending a message,” Tipper says.

“Egg-xactly. Well, we’re sitting there, arguing, and all of a sudden, the ride starts up. At first, I can hardly tell what’s happening. The change is so gentle, so precise. Looking through the plastic, I see the fair sinking away. We’re up in the sky. Now the real excitement starts. Rising, dipping, whirling, flying. All of it amazingly smooth. It’s like being cradled, that’s what I keep thinking. Like being rocked to sleep in giant hands. I look over at my boy. I can see he feels it, too. Except he has a different reaction: It makes him angry.

“Around and around.” Suzie mimics the motion, sketching lemniscates with her can of tea. “Now it comes. My guy nudges me. Unlocks my harness. We stumble to the wall. ‘Get ready,’ he says.”

“Well?” Tipper prompts when Suzie falls silent.

“You know, I really liked that kid.” Suzie takes back the vape. “I can’t deny it. He was driven, he was passionate. I was fifteen.” She loads a cart, checks the light, lays down the vaper without tasting. “So we jumped together. Wham! Right into the wall.”

Her hands come together, palm to palm, making her hammock bounce and sway.

“First, there’s an awful feeling. Total vertigo. We lie together, pressed up against the plastic. Suddenly we’re floating, weightless. The guy told me we’d be okay. Couple bruises, maybe a broken finger. We wouldn’t fall more than fifteen feet. But right then, I really believed it was happening. I really believed we were going to die.

“Stillness.” Suzie’s hand hovers. “We’re sinking. Then, suddenly, we start to rise. Slowly, like a baby in its father’s arms. We’re high up, now, looking down at the Giant’s face. It was a simple design, all metal, with big round eyes. I realized, then, he’d been in control the whole time. He really was gentle, more tender than any living thing. And I felt this incredible sense of sureness. I wanted to be him, you know? Like that robot. I want to be that strong, that caring. That reliable.”

Suzie remembers the vaper, considers it a moment, puts it back in its case. “So that was it for my big rebel romance. I looked at my boy. He was slamming himself into the wall, almost crying, shouting, ‘Help me, Suzie, help!’ And I just stared. Because it was suddenly so clear to me.” Suzie grins. “It was so obvious who was the better man.”

During peak hours, the fairway develops an edgy vibe. Fringe girls go slouching along in rancher outfits, homesteader gingham and cowgirl boots, the remnants of jobs so impossibly long gone that no one even remembers anything but the clothes. Their boyfriends sip from Big Gulp sodas spiked with groundbrew hallucinogens, recipes cooked up in underground labs hidden in tunnels made by well-digging drones. Sometimes one of them will pause and talk to Tipper. Sad boys, aimless boys, breathing in her face the caramelized fog of their illiterate conversation, breath rich with the stink of the flavored syrups they add to their drinks to mask the chemicals.

Tipper waits beside the Haunted House, in the little alley that leads to the trailers, clutching her phone like a plastic amulet. Above the gabled roof, the Scream-o-Saurus lifts a shrieking rider, chews him in foam jaws, and gulps him down its waterslide throat. A group of robospooks leave the House by a back door, two rubber-skinned frogmen and a stooped Dracula. They carry a limp figure between them, a damaged werewolf who dangles like a cadaver from their arms. Heading for the repair station, no doubt. It’s a perennial problem around the House. Rowdy boys like to kick and abuse the exhibits.

A kiddie ride like the Snake doesn’t see a lot of business at this hour, and Tipper’s been given the rest of the night off. She checks her phone, knowing it’s pointless. The only kind of phone Luke would use is the kind made of two cans and a string.

“Hey.”

Quiet suddenly, he’s here. Dark against the glare of the virtual arcade, he steps aside to let the crew of spookbots shuffle by. His pale skin glows an eerie yellow in the light of the nearby picnic area.

“Ready?” Hands in pockets, Luke tips his head toward the parking lots.

Tipper hesitates. “The thing is . . . ” Luke waits, expressionless, while she works up her nerve. “The thing is,” Tipper says, “do you kind of have a second? I sort of promised someone we’d meet with her first.”

“Someone?”

Before Tipper can answer, Luke gives a jump. Two shadows have manifested on either side of him, inhumanly still, crowding in like mafia toughs.

“Little boy?” The voice of the left figure is shrill. “You’ve been a bad boy, haven’t you? I can always spot a naughty little boy.”

Luke stumbles back as a woman steps forward, lifting a hand to her gashed and bleeding throat. It’s the Murdered Bride, one of Tipper’s favorites.

“Oh, you best beware, naughty boy. Mother is up above, watching us all.”

The Bride lifts her dark-ringed eyes to the House’s gothic facade.

Tipper laughs at Luke’s expression. “It’s okay. I know these guys.”

Hearing her voice, the two spookbots step back, edging into the light of the picnic area. The Murdered Bride tips her head back, sluicing blood, which dribbles down her décolletage into a culvert between her breasts. Next to her, the Mummy clutches his stray bandages, glints of eye and tooth and bone peeking through the windings on his head.

“Uhhhh,” says the Mummy, and then, at a skeptical glance from Luke, “Uhhhhh!”

Luke straightens his jacket. “What are these, your chaperones?”

“Kind of.” Tipper offers a hand. “Come on, this’ll only take a minute.”

“Mother hates for her children to be late.” The Bride shakes her head. And as Tipper draws Luke into the alley, the spookbots shuffle forward to escort them inside.

The Murdered Bride leads the way, to a service entrance concealed in a thorn-grown porte-cochere. The thorns retract, the door creaks open, revealing a tipsy staircase.

“Hurry, please.” The Bride lifts her skirts. “We mustn’t keep Mother waiting.”

Up to the second floor, down a dark main hall. The House is one of the newer rides, a collective artificial mind. Thirty rooms host seventy-two independent robots. The whole fantasia revolves around a gadget called the Morbid Eye, a pulpy, brainish thing that uses a compressed air system to levitate through the corridors. The Eye coordinates every system, HVAC to crowd flow to the spookbots themselves. Fishmen and lizardmen, ghouls and ghosts: The Eye leads them all, but only primus inter pares. The spookbots are communal, telepathic, autonomous. Carter once told Tipper that the Haunted House is a lot like an old computer program, every component neatly encapsulated. Even to the all-seeing Morbid Eye, the spookbots are mysterious and unpredictable, free-roaming ghosts in a grand machine.

“We’re very lucky.” The Bride pauses in the armory to adjust her skirts. “Mother will be taking her supper at this hour. She’s ever so much nicer when she’s feasting on a long slab of rare meat.”

Carter’s rooms are in the center of the House. Their little group enters a gloomy study. At the central desk, Carter waits to receive them, working at a toothsome and bloody steak. Like most of the ride, the furniture here is lightweight mycocore, cobbled together by the spooks themselves. With twenty-five humanoid robots on staff, they can knock together the whole mansion in a single day.

Carter has a heavy tome in her lap, dark shapes writhing on an embedded screen. She slaps it shut. “Evening, kids.”

The Murdered Bride bows over her chair.

“I’ve brought them, Mother, just as you asked. I do try to be a good girl. But now look at me, I’ve gone and bled all over my dress!”

“Yes, I see that. Okay, Bride, I’ll take it from here.”

Leering with horrible enthusiasm, the Bride takes the Mummy by the arm. “Thank you, Mother. I’m so glad I could be helpful. But do, oh do be strict with these two children. They’re very naughty, and spoiled, too.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Bride, thanks.”

As they pass by Luke, the Mummy can’t resist a last comment.

“Uhhhhhh!”

Tipper turns to watch as the spookbots stagger out. What must it be like, she wonders, living in this place, year upon year, day and night? But the obvious answer makes her laugh: It must be like caring for a huge, deranged family.

“I won’t take a lot of your time.” Carter comes around the desk. “Suzie says she’s given you the night off. Guess you two are heading out for some puppy love.”

“Not exactly, ma’am.” Luke is curt. Tipper can feel him tensing beside her. Carter, too, goes unusually still.

“Right. Well. Before you do . . . whatever it is you’ll be doing, I have something I wanted to run by you.” Carter picks up the tome, flips to the embedded screen. Tipper braces for something shocking. But it’s only a spookbot in the display, snarling fangs and a drooping fabric tongue, a burst of hair over a ripped check shirt.

“Look familiar?” Carter sticks a toothpick between her teeth.

Luke considers the image, shrugs.

“No?” Carter swings the book from side to side, making sure they get a good look. “Well, this here, this is Puppy. Puppy’s a part of our team here at the Haunted House. Our resident werewolf, you might say. And I’ll let you in on a trade secret: He’s one of our most advanced and expensive machines. Puppy’s got a Croatian hair extrusion grid, a chemical-electric body-to-brain feedback module, a moral module based on the soul of a Border Collie. Puppy’s only wish in life is to bring thrills and joy to little boys and girls.”

Carter slaps shut the book.

“Here’s the rub. Two hours ago, while I was helping a sick visitor, someone walked in, held Puppy down, and poured fifty pounds of birdshot and epoxy down his throat. So I thought I’d inquire if y’all might know anything about that.”

Luke’s face is resolutely bland. Tipper remembers the troupe of spookbots who left the House when they came in.

“Is Puppy going to be okay?”

“Puppy?” Carter tosses the book onto the table. “Puppy’s built for this shit. Puppy’s also insured for a pretty purse of money. My concern goes way beyond Puppy. I’m talking to you, son, you and your friends. You’ve been spending a lot of time around the grounds.”

Luke blinks. “And?”

“And?” Carter grins, exposing an impressive spread of cigarette stains. “Y’all been having a good time?”

“We—”

Carter cuts him off. “You seemed to be having a good time last night, when you jammed up the gears of my friend’s ride.”

“That was—”

“A joke. I know.” Carter raps the mycocore table. “I guess the kids who busted up my werewolf robot, they also thought they were playing a pretty funny joke.”

Luke’s eyes narrow. “I had nothing to do with that, ma’am. Ask Tipper.”

Carter’s nod is calm and slow, every bit as lazy as a branch of sage bobbing in a Sonoran wind. “Right. No one saw a thing. Pretty convenient how that works.”

Luke parts his lips, shows his palms, shakes his head. Carter sighs and pushes off the table. In the back of the room, there’s a multipaned window, looking down on the mansion’s central yard. Carter hits a button, and the panes wink and flicker, becoming screens that show views of different rooms. Moonlit bedchambers, grisly dungeons, hordes of gleefully screaming kids. The views are jumpy, jouncing like old horror flicks, and Tipper realizes she’s looking through the eyes of six dozen robots, the congregant POV of the House’s host of spooks.

“I got six dozen witnesses to everything that happens in this place,” Carter says. “Full surveillance in every room. And wouldn’t you know? Amazing as it seems, none of these ever-vigilant robots of mine has any idea what happened to our dear Puppy. Son, you got any idea why that might be?”

Arms folded, she looks over her shoulder, and Tipper feels chilled, like it’s Dracula himself standing there in shit-kicking boots.

Luke says nothing. Carter sighs.

“Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because they don’t want to know. Two dozen potential witnesses, but when this crime went down, they all blinked at once. Even Puppy himself. He’s got a bellyful of industrial resin, but I guarantee, when we get him working again, he won’t say a thing. So riddle this riddle for me, if you can: why would a robot equipped with sensory capabilities approaching clairvoyance fail to notice a couple of boys holding him down and filling him full of beans?”

Carter pronounces the word clear-voy-ants. Tipper glances at Luke again, who seems calmer, now, like he knows where this is going.

“I don’t know,” Luke says. “You’re the woman who runs this place. You tell me.”

“I’m the woman who runs this place.” Carter bites a thumbnail, looking at the screens. “That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to say this place runs itself. All these spooks and ghouls, they’ve got their own priorities. And their top priority, number one, is taking care of the kids who come through. Keeping those kids safe and happy and out of trouble. The client’s always right, even when he’s wrong.

“Well, that philosophy leads to some pretty funny decisions. Like, for instance, not ratting out or spanking any trouble-making thug who comes through here. Do I understand it? I have to say I don’t. I say, a bad apple’s just a bad apple. And the truth is, a lot of the kids in this country smell to me like some pretty rotten fruit.”

Carter turns, sets her hands to the back of the mockwood chair, and looks at Luke from under bristly gray brows. Tipper understands. It’s a weird fact of modern life: Privacy has actually been increased by machine surveillance. When people spy on each other, there’s an innate urge to meddle. Robots are infinitely more scrupulous. To a fault.

“Here’s the point.” Carter’s hands tighten. “Over the past four days, we’ve had thirteen rides at this fair get jammed, damaged, graffitied, sabotaged, or generally screwed with, and nobody knows by who. Some of these accidents, we’re seeing sophisticated methods, radio hacks that go deep into the brain. I’m talking battlefield shit, the kind of crap our lovely government uses to make enemy drones attack their own people. The rides aren’t talking. To them, it’s all human error. Me, I’ve got another theory. I think we have some serious assholes coming through here: criminal elements, vandals, saboteurs. And if I catch a hold of ’em, I’m not going to be as kind and forgiving as these robot friends of ours. If I catch a hold of ’em, believe me, these guys’ll wish it was a werewolf on their tail.”

Finally, Luke speaks. “If you don’t mind my saying, ma’am—”

“I do mind your saying.” Carter lifts the chair, thumps it down. “I can’t accuse you of a thing except what I know. And it happens that the stunt you pulled with Snake, that was a lot more stupid than illegal. But I’m not worried about your future, son. It’s Tipper I asked to come here. It’s her I want to talk to.”

Carter looks at Tipper for a long time, the creases in her face slowly coming to seem less stark, more like the wear and tear inflicted on a loving but overburdened mother.

“Four words, kid. Take ’em to heart. Suzie. Loves. That. Ride.” Carter thumps the foam chair on each syllable. “I’m not talking hot-and-bothered love, like your epically raging teenage feelings. I mean the real stuff. Dogs and babies. If anything happened to that stupid metal monster . . . ”

Tipper holds Luke’s arm and squeezes, terribly sorry for how awkward this evening has become. “I know, Carter. But really, I promise—”

“Amy,” Carter corrects her. “I been traveling with Suzie for eighteen years. I’m Amy to her, and I’m Amy to you. You know we used to run a ride together?” She nods deeply, as if Tipper has denied it. “Yep. An old haunted house, one of the first. Six rooms, ten units, with Suzie and me doing all the training. All night, I’d see her running the routines, tutoring those robots, teaching ’em human behavior. When a scream is a good scream, when a scream is a bad scream, how to tell the difference between a thousand different kinds of laughs. She has the touch, Suzie does, like no one else, and the reason’s this. When Suzie looks into the eyes of a machine, she doesn’t see a machine. She sees a soul, same as the one in you or me. That’s why her rides are always the best, that’s why they’re the safest, that’s why people want to ride ’em, again and again. It’s a talent, it’s a gift, and it’s not something to be screwed with. It comes down to this.”

Carter comes forward and holds Tipper’s shoulders, staring into her eyes. And Tipper wonders what Carter’s seeing there—a full-blown soul, a busted machine, or maybe just a girl who’s a little bit of both?

“Trust,” Carter says. “You think about that, as you’re tearing up the town, tonight.” She turns back to her steak, her screens, her big family of monsters. “Oh, and while you’re at it? Have yourselves a real fun time.”

A junkyard, that’s how Tipper thinks of the Fringe. A junkyard covering half of America, full of scrapped and outmoded machines. Except these machines are the kind you can’t throw out when they’re no longer needed, the kind whose main function is watching TV, the kind who run on soda pop and corn-fed beef.

Human machines, superfluous and unwanted.

She pulls her eyes from the sprawl of lights, checks the dashboard, and clamps her hands to the wheel.

“Easy.” Luke touches the steering wheel, giving her a bit of reassurance. “No problem, right? Looks like you might want to ease off the pedal. Keep your eye on those proximity lights.”

Tipper eases off the gas, slowing by an amount imperceptible to her, but plenty salient to the computer-driven cars all around. The pedals are almost too far away to reach; she has to stretch to hit the brake. By contrast, the steering wheel’s right under her nose.

In the NASCAR seat of Luke’s jury-rigged courier truck, Tipper sits in a nest of buckles and screens. Luke, beside her, taps the proximity monitor, the color-coded warnings for the four sides of the car.

“Be careful with these guys, okay? If it’s in the red for over half a minute, it gets called in as a violation. Three violations, they’ll log it as a malfunction. That could get us a repair drone on our tail.”

Tipper nods, tongue between her teeth. Outside, shipping rigs and long-distance taxis tool along at a droningly steady speed, exactly one-hundred-thirty MPH. When she looks out the light-adjusting windows, the cars seem locked in a shared inertial frame, sitting still while blacktop and scenery stream by. Occasionally there’ll be a coordinated shuffle, simple flocking programs producing an elegant, emergent waltz that lets an ambulance or repair drone speed ahead. Then Tipper has to shift with the pattern, breathless and Zen-like, focused on simulating the precision of a machine. Up on this highway, it’s autodrive-only: the world’s least forgiving video game.

She flicks her eyes to Luke. “So this is the big plan for tonight? Hanging out in high-speed traffic?”

He smiles. “You’re doing amazing. It’s kind of fun, right?”

Warning chimes. Tipper checks her alerts. A tanker in the left lane wants to get off. She steers by the screen embedded in the dash, which gives an overhead view of the scanned environment. It really is like playing a game.

“I feel like a bird.” Her laugh surprises her, the silly joy of it. “No, I mean really, that’s how it feels.”

He grins, feeling it with her. “Take the next exit. You’ll want to start getting over soon.”

Tipper flicks on the signaling program, sending out a brief pulse of encoded vector arrays. She checks the windows. Nothing out there but the usual sprawl. “Where we going?”

“Little place I like to call the asshole of America. Thought I’d take you on a tour.”

“Of an asshole? Fun, fun.”

A long silence. When she looks over, he’s got that expression boys get sometimes, unexpectedly vulnerable and shy.

“No,” he says, turning to the window. “Of me.”

It’s been a strange evening. Tipper began it by fixing Luke’s car. Tapping commands by habit, she plowed through screens of legalese, while Luke lay back in the passenger seat with a hand-rolled joint. Every so often he asked her how it was going.

“Okay.” Some of the work she did by voice input, some by hand; she wondered how much Luke had been following. “I’m logging the ID tags, now. Voice, eyes . . . You realize that to go through with this, I’m going to have to be registered as an approved operator?”

Luke shrugged. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like if we go all the way with this, I could get in your car at any time and start driving.”

“Yeah?”

She grinned at his casual attitude. “So? You’re fine with that?”

He shrugged. “If you are.”

Tipper turned back to the dash. “All right, then. What’s your social?”

And that set up the theme of the evening. They were taking things quickly, tonight, sharing vital details before they’d shared much more than a kiss. Punching in the last codes, Tipper turned to Luke. “That’s it. Su carro es mi carro, now. We’re both registered drivers. I hope you trust me.”

She squirmed out of the deep NASCAR seat, making room for Luke to edge in, but he pulled her back. “Hey, where you going?”

Tipper glanced between him and the wheel. “What do you mean? You’re not—”

“You’re a registered driver, now. Wanna drive?”

Tipper tested the clumsy pedals, the undersize wheel. “I should let you know, I’m not exactly . . . ” What word did she want to use? Skilled? Experienced? “I’m not very good at this.”

He shrugged. “I trust you.”

“With your life?”

“Sure.”

How could anyone really mean that?

And yet, Luke hit the switch that engaged lockdown, sealing the doors and the trailer compartment, puffing the temper-fit foam of the seats. “Go for it. I’ll tell you the turns.”

Tipper started up the sensor system, fumbling at the switches. Suddenly, his hand was over hers.

“Whoops. Not that one.”

Tipper laughed. “What’d I just almost do?”

“Something bad.” He spoke in his usual calm way. Then, with a smile: “Something extremely bad.”

She laughed. And just like that, they were kissing, his lips over her laughing mouth, their teeth knocking together as she responded with clumsy surprise. He held her until the surprise became excitement, then dropped back into his usually lazy pose.

“I . . . I want you to know,” Tipper stammered, “I mean, after everything Carter was saying. I do, too.”

“You do what?”

“Trust you,” she whispered.

He hit the starter, fired up the engine. “Let’s move.”

All through the drive, Tipper had been in a funny state, hovering somewhere between delight and annoyance. Boys, she thought, what could you do with them? Crazy, maddening, incomprehensible boys.

Being with Luke brought back memories of home, that house full of older brothers, where every day meant a new joke or taunt or impromptu wrestling match. Tipper’s oldest brother, Timmy, had worked at the service station, sitting around watching robots change oil. It made him act strange, all that boring work. When he came home, he’d just sit and stare at Tipper, like she was only another machine. Staring and staring, until at last she couldn’t take it. “What, Timmy? What is your problem?” Then he’d laugh and whoop, thrilled at getting any kind of reaction.

None of her other brothers had jobs at all, and it was always worth a heart attack an hour, trying to do her homework with them prowling around. They made a sport out of messing with the cleaning bots, flipping them over, kicking them around, triggering the auto-repair alarms. Instead of waiting for the repair drones to arrive, Tipper would fix the bots herself, which usually involved nothing more than talking them through their diagnostic routines. And while she sat with the things in her lap, murmuring into the mikes, her brothers would lounge around, sucking beers and teasing her.

“Maybe you could just kiss it and make it better, Tipper.”

“Guys! Shut up.”

Then, out of nowhere, they could be entrancingly nice, taking her out to show her the projects they’d been working on in the barn, old Corvettes on blocks, pinball tables they were building from scratch. And with their big, greasy hands lying over hers, they’d guide Tipper through the cleaning of spark plugs, the setting of windows, the wiring of solenoids to EOS switches.

Anyway, her brothers were a hell of a lot nicer than Dad.

Thinking about Dad, his rages, his they-drove-me-to-it attitude, makes Tipper give a twitch and jerk the wheel, almost veering into the side of a commuter van.

“Whoa,” Luke says. “Look, you’re okay. Just wait for this guy to pass, you’ll see the ramp.”

In another moment, they’re bumping down the interchange, descending into the bright yellow dots of suburbia.

The sprawl of lights starts right where the highway ends. For a moment, Tipper has a panicked feeling, like she really is heading home. Same wide streets thronged with autodriving taxis. Same crowds of nobodies. Same adobe bunkers, each in a plot of dark solar panels that used to be a lush green lawn.

The Fringe.

A sign by the road is flashing a helpful advisory:

Tipoli Smith

Are you lost?

Autodrive malfunction?

Honk twice for assistance.

They’ve been driving around the same block for too long, killing time, and the streetside monitors have picked up the aberration.

“All right, here we go.” Luke calls up a map. Even a dyed-in-the-wool Manual is compelled to respect the usefulness of dynamic mapping. “Go straight at this next intersection.”

“But there’s nothing there.” Tipper checks the map, the windows. The area Luke indicates is all blacked out, an abyss of darkness in the lamp-bejeweled town.

“Oh, there’s something there.” Luke sits back, savoring his air of manly mystery.

Tipper lets him have his fun. Pushing the car forward at precisely the recommended speed, she hits the edge of the blacked-out land. Suddenly she understands. At the end of the road is a ditch. Across the ditch is a bridge. And beyond the bridge is a gate and fence. The signs everywhere are entirely unnecessary. Tipper knows what’s beyond this point.

“This way.” Luke points right. They drive along the fence, the reflective signs flashing by in a menacing strobe. Warning Warning Warning. Restricted Restricted Restricted. Controlled Controlled Controlled. On the car’s display, there’s nothing to see. To the mapping software, this is nowhere, nonexistent land.

“There’s a turn up here. It’s kind of hard to spot.” Luke leans into her. “There.”

The fence veers away. A dirt road rises up a silhouetted ridge. Tipper flicks on the headlamps for the first time that night. Between the dingy bursts of desert bushes, she can see the dark land dropping away, a blackness that seems to deepen as they rise. Luke guides her off the road.

“Slow, now. There’s a certain spot . . . ”

They halt on a ridge of sandstone and grit, the headlights plunging out into darkness. He yanks on the brake and shuts off the car. The temperfoam relaxes; the doors unlock. Tipper steps into a strikingly cool breeze. Her first tentative steps nearly spill her down a ghostly chasm, ragged walls of rock made spectral by the moon. Luke grabs her arm.

“Easy. Don’t worry. It’s not as far as it looks. The night makes everything seem weird.”

The night does indeed. His silhouette seems strange and huge beside her, hewn from rock.

“Out there.” Luke’s arm extends. “Below those two bright stars.”

The shapes she makes out are distant but distinct: four dark squares, rising up like buttes, and one long mesa of flat-topped shadow. Tipper’s first impression is of a holy site, some natural wonder sanctified by the rites of the Navajo, those restless neighbors of her own ancestral people. But the moonlight, strengthening with a suddenness peculiar to desert climes, dispels the illusion. Those are buildings, four silos and a compound, with not a single window to vary the dark walls.

“Air Force,” Luke says. “Testing sight. See that long, flat building? My granddad used to work there.”

“He was a pilot?”

Luke shakes his head. “Engineer. Mathematician. Data-crunching, modeling, that kind of thing.”

Tipper knows where this is going. “And he got fired.”

Luke’s eyes are on the distant buildings. “Not exactly. You know how many people work this site, now? Zero. Know why it’s so dark? Because no one needs any light. The entire place is run by machines. Machines on site. Machines on network. A guy like my grandpa, it’s not like he got fired. It’s more like his whole industry ceased to exist.”

Tipper considers the expanse below, thinking about what Luke has said. Machines to do the work. And machine to guard the machines. Any person trespassing on that turf will quickly find himself a target of some of the world’s most sophisticated perimeter drones. Even with the best night-vision gear, a human would be helpless against their full-spectrum scanning. Of course, the drones don’t actually injure anyone. They have no need for such sloppy tactics.

“What about your parents?” she says. “The rest of your family?”

Luke sucks in night air. “That’s next.”

And he guides her on, through shapeless towns, down nameless roads. Actually, the streets here do have names—Spanish names, Navajo names—but no one cares. To the cars and their riders, it’s all just instructions: left, right, straight, ten meters, two miles.

Eventually, something looms ahead, massive and broken. Luke tells her to stop.

“That building? That was where my great-grandfather worked. Back in the twentieth century. Putting lawnmowers together. Then all those jobs went overseas. Then they came back, except they were being done by computer scientists. Then those jobs went overseas. And then all the jobs went away forever. So we did it.” He laughs. “We finally achieved true global equality.”

As they drive on, the names of the streets become increasingly irrelevant, until Tipper no longer even notices the towns. It’s all jumbled together, geography, history, family, a random walk of turns and dead ends.

“Over here, this was where my grandma used to work. A library. Can you believe they used to have physical libraries? And over here, this is where the college was. I had a friend whose dad worked there. Guess what he taught? Game design and pedagogical process. Whoops! Taught himself right out of a job.”

In a downtown where the all-night restaurants twinkle with animated ads, Luke urges Tipper to get out and walk.

“That’s where the old Walmart used to be. My dad worked there as a cashier. Then in the stockroom. Then as a greeter. They all thought Walmart was the epitome of evil, back then. There’s the salon where my sister used to work. They’re still open, but they’re cutting back. Get it? No, but seriously, all they employ now is a couple of touchers. Know what that is?”

Growing up as a tomboy with three ubermale brothers, Tipper hasn’t had a chance to learn much about the ways of hair salons.

“Okay,” Luke explains. “So the machines do all the work, right? There’s a whole line of robots to do the washing, the styling. But what they still need is, I guess you could call it ‘the human touch.’ So before you get your hair cut, they have a person who comes and checks you out, massages your scalp, makes a little chitchat. After you get your hair cut, there’s another person who comes over to tell you how great you look. It’s completely useless. It’s what they call ‘perk employment.’ Touchers. But over here, this is what I wanted to show you.”

He runs ahead, boyish in his eagerness, pulling at the weather-tenting on a squat lump of a building.

“Uh, Luke?” Tipper’s not sure if she’s charmed or unsettled by the way her cool seducer has become this gamboling tour guide. But quick as an autodriving car will switch routes, Luke reverts to his broody persona, hoisting up the slippery film of the tenting to expose a small, glassless window. Smooth as a burglar, he slides inside. A pale hand extends to help Tipper.

She waves him way and lifts herself over. With the weatherproof shroud its owner has thrown over it, the building has taken on the dusty, almost sweet scent of a desert cave. Luke fumbles for her hand.

“It’s okay. My friend’s got a unit outside, running a baffler on the AI alarm. It thinks we’re weevils. Here.”

A small spot of light falls on the dusty floor. Luke leads Tipper among shrouded furniture. She lifts up a flap and sees thirties-era fractal construction, fake wood printed in sea-anemone patterns. Charmingly retro.

“This place—”

“It’s a club.” Luke has a beer in hand. He pushes one toward Tipper. She sees no fridge, but there’s a crystal-insulated cooler lying lopsided on a couch. Luke’s flashlight whips over dust, reed tables, a little riser of a stage. “It used to be, anyway. I’ve been hanging out here since it closed. They used to have music on weekends, comedy four nights a week. This was where my mom got started.”

“And she was—?”

Luke pulls out a portobook, thumbs in a name, tosses it over. The book’s an old model, no frills, just e-paper. Tipper flips through the document, which appears to be the career summary of a rather unremarkable actress. If this is Luke’s mother, she doesn’t seem to have gone very far. The credits paint a picture of a low-tier thespian scrounging for work.

Babe, It’s okay (uncredited)

Monster Matriarch (voice)

The Long and Short of It (unreleased)

A shout jerks Tipper’s head up.

“Ladies and gennelmen!”

Luke is onstage, addressing a phantom crowd, swinging an old mike stand. “Tonight, we have a real fine treat. Get ready for the boundary-crossing, risk-taking, no-holds-barred comedy of Lucas Averro!”

He grins, comedian-style. Tipper shakes her head as Luke mugs his way through a spoof of standup.

“Okay, guys, seriously. Seriously, people.”

Suddenly he is serious, holding the stand at arm’s length, making it clear there’s no mike in the grip, no lights, no crowd. His performance consists of a single line.

“What the fuck happened to us?”

Luke scans the room. “Tipper? You out there? You hearing this?” He hops off the stage. “I mean, it was supposed to be the one thing we’d always fall back on, right? The one thing they could never take away from us.”

He holds out a hand. Tipper sees what he wants, gives him the portobook. Luke shakes it like a magician. The pages flap out into a single stiff screen, magazine-size. He loads a video. Seeing the image, Tipper can’t help but laugh.

“There it is.” Luke’s watching over her shoulder. “End game.”

The video, sensing her attention, begins to play. It’s like a fragment of Tipper’s teenage experience, shaken loose and tossed up into the present, a scene from her sixteen-year-old self’s favorite cartoon show.

Darly the Penguin is more or less the sum of everything a modern girl experiences. A tad overweight, insecure about her body, dirty-minded, ambitious, loyal to her friends, fiercely smart, intermittently sassy . . . with a bizarre little mop of biologically incorrect hair . . . who in the world wouldn’t love Darly?

This clip is from one of the early shows, when Darly was trying to make her way in the modern office. Here, Darly’s talking to her polar-bear boss, Dexter, and it seems that during a strategic planning meeting, when Darly self-deprecatingly referred to herself as a “big bird,” Dexter’s response was—

Well, the plot doesn’t really matter. What’s funny is Darly’s attitude, the way this CGI penguin somehow captures everything crazy about being a human being at the start of the twenty-second century. Darly has a whole bundle of oddball tics: spelling out dirty words (or more often misspelling them), flapping her wings and squeaking like a kazoo, tapping her forehead and reminding herself, “Penguins are chill, Darly—penguins are chill.” Sometimes, when things get really crazy, Darly’ll dive to the floor and slide on her belly out of awkward situations. It’s all too funny, and Tipper’s already laughing when Luke abruptly shuts off the playback.

“Programmed.” He closes the portobook. “Every second.”

Tipper’s annoyed. Of course it’s programmed. It’s TV! But Luke’s looking at her like he thinks she doesn’t get it.

“You know how they write these shows?” He waves the portobook. “They don’t. No human does. The scenarios are randomly generated, based on trending topics. The jokes are crowdsourced: Thousands of one-liners are submitted, and the producers pick the best ones. And the characters? They’re AI. Your Darly? She’s a program. Gestures, catchphrases, even the voice. All coded, trained on test audiences. It can even improvise.”

Tipper sighs. She knows this. Everyone knows this. It’s like kayfabe: You know it; you don’t have to harp on it. But guys like Luke always seem to overexplain.

“My mom?” He turns to the stage. “This is where she did it. Up on that stage, every night, trying out her jokes, trying out her voices. And for what? To create an act. A persona. And that would be her product. That would become her shtick.

“This?” He waves the portobook. “This killed all that. Why? Because guess what? That mysterious allure? That human appeal? All those things a performer is supposed to have: charm, gravitas, charisma? Turns out, you can simulate all of it, no problem. Because that’s exactly what a shtick is. Predictability. Routine.”

Tipper wonders: What do you say when you see the point someone’s trying to make, but don’t quite see the point of making it? She reaches for his hand. Luke doesn’t even notice. He’s too intent on striding among the tables, kicking old beer cans out of his path.

“So there it is, folks! End of the road. Muscle, skill, brains . . . the one thing left, the one thing we thought we could always rely on, was personality. Our wonderfully human, charming imperfections. Well, here you go. Darly the Penguin is more charmingly fucked up than someone like my mom could ever be. So it’s over. Gone. We’ve cleared the last hurdle. We’ve finally perfected imperfection.” He points at Tipper’s nose. “You see what you’ve been doing?”

“Me?” It’s the first time Tipper’s spoken since entering this shrouded place, and her voice sounds weird for such a haunted scene, bold, young, strong. Luke comes toward her. Without thinking, she holds out her arms.

“Your boss. Your friends at the fair. You know who you people are working for?” He dodges her embrace, counting on his fingers. “You don’t own the rides. The company owns the rides. Traveling Troupe, a subsidiary of SevenStar Entertainments. Who owns the company? The shareholders own the company. Who are the shareholders? Funds and banks. Who are the funds and banks? Who else? They’re a bunch of computer programs, who sometimes hire human beings to go to meetings. And guess what? The hair salons, the stores, the factories, the Air Force: the same programs are running it all.” He taps his nose. “Follow it back, Tipper. Follow it back.”

Tipper finally gets a hold of him, grabbing his wrists, which feel surprisingly thin and frail. Guys like this always shock her with their fragility. She holds him by the collar, putting her palms to his cheeks, calming him.

“I know, Luke, okay? I know.”

“And where does it start?” He’s still looking away. “It starts with you, Tipper. A friendly girl, leading little children up to a big monster, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s your friend. It’s okay.’”

She can’t stop thinking of her brothers. How they always used to talk this way, taking her out to the barn to show her their projects. How one day, they said, they were going to change it all, bring the whole system crashing down.

Well, something changed, all right. Tipper doesn’t remember what exactly set it off. But her father never needed an excuse to fly into a rage. He was at his worst, that day, stomping around the house, kicking anything that would break, and eventually he made his way out to the barn, throwing open the doors to expose the projects of Tipper’s brothers, the car engines, the game tables, the magnetic and chemical experiments. As he worked his way through the collection, sometimes with a hammer, sometimes with his hands, he shouted out his verdict. “Useless . . . ridiculous . . . a fucking waste.” What made Tipper tremble as she stood there in the door, what made her shake with a rage that terrified her, was the way her brothers stood back, passive, simply watching the destruction. Their constructions, their creations, their hobbies, all crushed, complexity pounded to scrap, sacrificed to their father’s aimless anger. And they accepted it. Like biblical sons, they bowed under the patriarchal judgment. Even to themselves, they were nothing, in the end. Useless, ridiculous, a fucking waste.

It’s like Tipper can see them all, right now, the angry boys and the angry girls, the mothers and fathers who’ll never work again, the Manuals and the doctors and the mathematicians, scattered all through the lonely Fringe towns.

She holds Luke by the collar, pulling his face toward hers. “It will be okay,” she whispers against his lips. “It will.”

With instinctual ease, Tipper guides him. She doesn’t push, doesn’t pull, just leads him where she needs him to be. At one point, her foot skids on something, suddenly rolling, and she sees it’s the flashlight, dropped from his hand. By its wheeling light, they find their way to the couch. Tipper pats the sheet-covered cushions. The crystal-insulated cooler falls to the floor. The crash only adds to her urgency—a brittle music of glass bottles in the dark.

She lays him down, climbing onto his hips. I trust you, Luke, I trust you. Even as she’s thinking this, Tipper knows it’s not quite right. What she trusts, what she’s bending to kiss, is the feeling inside him, the hurt and need of a boy who’s seen everything smashed, abused, stolen: Everything he’s worked for, everything he loves.

From the highway, the fair looks like a true menagerie. Monstrous heads and swinging tails cast wild shadows against the gaudy lights. The people register as no more than specks. You can almost imagine that history has run backwards, and that they’ve all come back again, the lost and majestic monsters, the prehistoric beasts.

Luke pulls deftly off the road, guiding his truck through the autodriving traffic.

Hello, Tipoli Smith! flashes a sign. Welcome to The Traveling Troupe Fair!

The Traveling Troupe. The Metal Demimonde. Call it what you will, the fair will always be a welcoming place for the wandering, the footloose, the cast aside.

“We forgot to change the login.” Tipper taps the screen as Luke steers through the gate. “All the monitors will think you’re me.”

Normally, it wouldn’t matter; the car would detect the driver automatically. But this automatic function, like most of the others, has been shut off.

Luke doesn’t care. He’s been driving all night with his eyes on the overheads, impassive and silent, expertly imitating a machine. Now he steers past the public lots, onto the service road beyond the gates. Tipper looks out the window.

Warning, flashes a sign. Restricted Area. Staff Only. Warning. Warning. Then: Welcome, Tipoli Smith!

“You’re not supposed to be back here.”

“It’s okay.” He keeps his eyes on the screen. “I’ll take you to your trailer.”

An almost painfully gallant gesture, it seems to Tipper. After tonight, they’re unlikely to meet again. More lonely traveling for her, more lonely ranting for him. But he can do this for her, if nothing else: He can drop her like a gentleman at her front door.

The trailer flickers with LED light. Suzie must be waiting up. A little distance away, Snake lies curled under lamps, dormant for the night. Luke parks at the fence, lets the truck idle. The engine, built for all-night driving, hums softly in the dark.

“Well.” He reaches for the dashboard. “Guess this is it.”

It’s hard to say why, but Tipper feels almost panicked. “Are you . . . I could probably get tomorrow night off.”

“I don’t think I’ll be around.” He makes it harshly final. And like that, Tipper realizes that this is what he wants, what he’s always wanted. Not to kiss her, not even to sleep with her. Only to have given her the tour of his life.

“So that’s it?” She tries to keep her voice from shaking. “That’s all we’re doing?”

“Tip.” His hand twitches on the dashboard.

“You drive me around, you show me your life, you put on this big demonstration . . . I mean, what was all this about?”

He doesn’t answer at first. His face is answer enough.

“Well.” He sighs. “I guess I wanted you to know. To know why I’m doing what I do. So you would . . . so you would understand.”

“To under—” Then she sees where his hand his resting, hovering on that unremarkable black button, the one she almost pressed before. The one he warned her never to touch.

“Luke!”

Even before it happens, Tipper realizes he’s right. He’s done it, achieved his goal. In a way, in a hidden, angry part of her, she does understand.

The first ride to go is the Haunted House. A spook on the roof, a winged gargoyle, jerks and lurches like a drunken suicide. It quivers, stiffens, tumbles off, crashing to the hard-packed gravel and snapping a wing. The doors fly open. A lizardman staggers out, lashing a rubber tail, clawing the air. Two people follow, a pair of teenage girls, screaming in genuine terror. It’s pandemonium, the windows opening, the walls shaking, shrieks and howls from every corner. The spookbots run riot and jump from the rooftops, even punch holes in the mycocore walls. A kid staggers out with one of the cannibal babies clamped like a monkey to the back of his head. From the central courtyard, the Morbid Eye ascends, puttering on its failing jets, sailing away over the gables, into the night.

Nearby, the Scream-o-Saurus is lashing its tail, tipping over souvenir stalls and a BBQ stand. As the riders and operators shout and flee, the ride shudders, tips, whipping its head wildly side to side. The Abominable Go-Go-Go man is pounding dents in his chest. The LandShark chomps earth. Octowhip reels into the midway, flinging out its arms and dispensing mayhem. With a screech of straining hydraulics, the Dementor sways and falls.

The worst, though, is Snake. A salted slug, a suffocating fish, a worm under a magnifying glass: there’s no comparison for the flailing of this great fat body. The tail alone is a menace, whacking nearby trailers, catching the bars of fences and flinging them hundreds of feet. The big mouth gapes and gnashes. The googly eyes, ordinarily so jolly, are now the soul of anguish and fear. Even in eighteen years of rough-and-tumble Fringe life, Tipper has never seen such a display of agony.

She’s at the edge of the gravel. She must have gotten out of the car. Luke is here, beyond the reach of Snake’s gyrations. Suzie, Carter, all the operators: they’ve come out of their trailers, their private compartments, to witness this artificial Armageddon.

“What’s happening?” An operator from the Bear Jamboree, a woman Tipper scarcely recognizes, drifts by like a refugee. Suzie and Carter stand almost perfectly still, only moving their heads as they watch.

Tipper ducks into Luke’s truck. She pounds at the interface, entering random commands. The car beeps. She hears a clunk. With Luke’s hands clutching at her shoulders, she kicks out of the seat and marches around to the rear.

The big storage compartment has popped open, exposing the interior. Tipper remembers Luke’s description: a bed back here, internet, built-in fridge . . . the best game hookup you’ll ever see . . .

But it’s no traveling rec room hidden amid the braces and padding of his cargo hold. Fighting Luke’s hands, Tipper climbs in, scanning the jumble of wires and consoles.

“What the hell? What is all this?”

“Tip.” He grabs her under the arms. Tipper’s been in too many sibling fights to let him get away with that. “Listen,” he pleads as she kicks him back, “don’t . . . don’t touch anything, okay? It’s too late, anyway.”

She hops down from the truck and spins to face him, gravel spitting from her toes. “You planned this.” Luke’s face is miserable but resigned. “You had me fix your car so it would be registered to me. So you could get it back here in the staff areas. You only did this so you could . . . ”

He doesn’t object. That’s the worst part of it. Hanging his head, staring at the ground, he can’t even bother to tell her it’s all more complicated than she understands.

Sabotage. Everything, every event of the week, begins and ends in that word. Sabotage.

“You shit.” Tipper begins to pant. “You piece of shit.”

She lurches away from the car, remembering Carter’s words. Radio hacks, sophisticated methods, like the military uses on enemy drones. She can see now it’s not only rides that are affected. The local repair drones are sputtering into walls, dropping like addled moths from the sky. Tipper’s own brain feels fuzzy, scrambled. She finds Carter seated in the dirt, vomiting into a tuft of grass.

The apocalypse is winding down. A wall of the Haunted House collapses, bricks and fake armchairs tumbling out. Snake is a twitching hulk, the joints of the skeleton snapped or fused, fabric flesh hanging in ragged swags. The image of death couldn’t be more complete if it were a real dragon here, vanquished and moribund.

Tipper approaches. A flame spits from the ride’s battered head. Sparks begin to jump and catch. The gel-pack padding burns with an awful stench.

“Tipper, stop.”

A hand grabs her wrist. Tipper wheels around.

Suzie stands behind her, not crying, only watching as Baby Snake melts into a greasy mass. Up the fairway, a siren yowls. The main emergency station is proofed against attacks, and the fire-dousing drones are already in formation, descending with jets and extinguishers and warnings.

“Keep Back. Danger. Keep Back. Danger.”

“Suzie.” Tipper is surprised to see that the older woman’s face is unmarked by grief, as if Suzie can’t even quite comprehend what has happened. “Suzie, I’m so sorry.”

Tipper tries to say more, but she can’t go on without sobbing or choking. Smoke spreads in a thin haze. As Suzie’s eyes track over the ride, the plumpness seems to leach from her features, cheeks clinging to her bones.

Tipper turns, looking for Luke. Bad move. Suzie turns also, seeing the truck. As for Luke himself, there’s no sign.

“Oh.” Suzie releases Tipper’s hand. “Okay, I see. Yes, I see, now.”

“Wait.” Tipper clutches at her hand. “Suzie, I didn’t know, I swear. He took me out, we drove around, I didn’t think he was—”

Suzie nods dully. “All right, Tip. Just . . . just give me a second, here, okay.”

The Haunted House is a crumbling wreck. Carter stumbles around it, wiping her mouth. The area is thick with drones and bots, most of them gathering around Luke’s truck. As for Luke himself, he seems to have completely disappeared.

“Suzie, you have to believe me, I trusted him, he never said he would—”

“All right, Tip.” Suzie’s tone is like the grating of a key. “I see what happened, here, okay? I get it.”

It’s somehow more awful than being yelled at, this calm detachment, this sudden withdrawal. Because Suzie has been through everything, down here in the metal demimonde. She knows what’s what. And when Suzie makes up her mind, there’s no one who can unmake it.

Tipper backs away, stumbling on stalled drones. “Please, Suzie. Please, believe me.”

But the old operator drifts away, standing over the corpse of her ride.

Tipper finds that she’s crying like a child, snot and tears flowing together. She wipes her face clumsily, vision blurred. Without thinking, she turns and runs.

A group of teens trip by her on the fairway, one draped over two supporting friends. The crowds, already thin, are dwindling fast. “I’ll find you,” Tipper hears herself panting. “I’ll find you, you son of a bitch.”

A ripped-off arm, part of the Dementor, lies like a fallen tree across the midway, repair bots swarming around it. Fairgoers circle like leaves in a stream, some fleeing, some gawking, some apparently aimless. Tipper remembers how Luke first appeared, one boy among many, a member of the crowd.

She’ll get him. If security hasn’t done it yet, she’ll bring him in.

Her stomping boots take her past the game stalls, through hordes of staring attendees. At the security tent, she searches the area. On to the repair station, the prize displays, the main gate.

Nothing.

She circles back through the wreckage to the road, under the fence and out of the fair, to where squatters have set up ersatz attractions.

Nothing.

Finally, Tipper takes her hunt to the limits, the public parking lots where it all began. And that’s when she has to admit that he’s gone, vanished the same way he appeared, another lost soul drifting through the Fringe and the idle decades and empty towns. And she finds a fallen trashcan and kicks it to death and sits on it and lets herself cry.

When the sobbing ends, Tipper lifts her head. The fair is strangely quiet, now. She checks for messages from Suzie, Luke, the security team, but the whole world seems to have fallen silent. An eerie air of solitude hands over the empty parking lot, and she realizes that out here, she is entirely alone—except for a host of watching machines.

Yes, they’re all around her. Rabbit Run, Wheelie-Dealie, The Speedy Demon. And the true relics, the old classics: Tyger-Tyger, Tentaculus, The Great Jim-Jamboree. The Orphans bow over her with solemn stares. With surprise and delight, Tipper realizes that they must have been out of range, spared the effects of Luke’s scrambling radiation. Rabbit Run sends out a bouncing bunny; it cocks at her a velveteen ear. Tyger-Tyger burns with a welcoming light. A tap on her shoulder makes Tipper jump. She sees Tentaculus grinning down at her, giving a slow wink of its huge eye.

She stands and walks through this forest of the forgotten, this cohort of the estranged. The rides all vie for her attention. Come take a run with the racing rabbits! Are you hunting the tiger, or is he hunting you? It’s more than a monster: it’s Tentaculus! Without operators, these machines have to fend for themselves, begging for riders, attention, trust.

Tipper works her way deep into the crowd, wondering, hoping. She hasn’t memorized every ride in the fair, which sometimes switches units between stops. An old ride, a small ride, an obscure ride, might just have escaped her noticed. It’s possible . . . .

And as she rounds a corner and sees what’s ahead, the thrill of discovery thunderbolts through her heart.

Approaching the gate, Tipper hears a ding of greeting.

“Don’t be afraid! Step right up and meet the Gentle Giant!”

It’s smaller than expected, a mere runt compared to the mighty Scream-o-Saurus. It’s also the cheapest ride Tipper’s ever seen, no more than the cost of a soda deducted from her account. Everything looks as Suzie described: the plastic ball, the gorilla-like arms. The seat smells musty and old. A click of a buckle, a tightening of straps. No protocols, now, no humans at all. When the ride confirms that she’s secure, up she goes.

The Giant’s hands hold the sphere without a tremor. Like a flea in a soap bubble, Tipper slowly rises, though it seems as if the world is dropping away. A twist of the Giant’s hands, and she’s facing the fairgrounds, held aloft over the robot’s head, looking down on this strange little kingdom of wandering monsters and carnies and kids. From up here, the rides look like the toys they really are, the corpse of the Snake a frail black curl, the Haunted Mansion a crumbled doll’s house. Away beyond the dirt and brush, far down the highway, are the scattered Fringe towns, the strange blue shapes of the moonlit desert. And farther off, in some smattering of lights too remote to see, the home that Tipper has left behind.

The great hands move. The ball slowly spins. Tipper looks down into the face of the Giant, who gazes up, solemn and intent, as if trying to decide what kind of fairy he’s captured. Does this little creature sting? Will it bite? Is it dangerous? His eyes, as Suzie said, are a somber green, and Tipper holds their gaze as she undoes her harness. Her feet move silently on the padded floor. When she presses her hands to the plastic shell, a trickle of air runs past her palms, and she realizes the whole plastic sphere is pierced with tiny holes.

The metal face looms below, larger than Tipper’s entire body. It’s proudly masculine in appearance—big square jaw, a prominent brow—and oddly reassuring. Here it is, what Suzie fell in love with, a great gentleness born of great strength.

Spreading her arms, Tipper rests her weight on the plastic, looking down into eyes that will never look away. And she feels almost joyful, now, almost loved, as she reflects that, for this unbearably brief moment, she is undoubtedly in good hands.

Originally published in Analog, June 2016.

Balancing Accounts

James L. Cambias

Part of me was shopping for junk when I saw the human.

I had budded off a viewpoint into one of my mobile repair units, and sent it around to Fat Albert’s scrapyard near Ilia Field on Dione. Sometimes you can find good deals on components there, but I hate to rely on Albert’s own senses. He gets subjective on you. So I crawled between the stacks of pipe segments, bales of torn insulation, and bins of defective chips, looking for a two-meter piece of aluminum rod to shore up the bracing struts on my main body’s third landing leg.

Naturally I talked with everything I passed, just to see if there were any good deals I could snap up and trade elsewhere. I stopped to chat with some silicone-lined titanium valves which claimed to be virgins less than six months old—trying to see if they were lying or defective somehow. And then I felt a Presence, and saw the human.

It was moving down the next row, surrounded by a swarm of little bots. It was small, no more than two meters, and walked on two legs with an eerie, slow fluid gait. Half a dozen larger units followed it, including Fat Albert himself in a heavy recovery body. As it came into range my own personality paused as the human requisitioned my unit’s eyes and ears. It searched my recent memories, planted a few directives, then left me. I watched it go; it was only the third human I’d ever encountered in person, and this was the first time one of them had ever used me directly.

The experience left me disconcerted for a couple of milliseconds, then I went back to my shopping. I spotted some aluminum tubing which looked strong enough, and grabbed some of those valves, then linked up to Fat Albert to haggle about the price. He was busy waiting on the human, so I got to deal with a not-too-bright personality fragment. I swapped a box of assorted silicone O-rings for the stuff I wanted.

Albert himself came on the link just as we sealed the deal. “Hello, Annie. You’re lucky I was distracted,” he said. “Those valves are overruns from the smelter. I got them as salvage.”

“Then you shouldn’t be complaining about what I’m giving you for them. Is the human gone?”

“Yes. Plugged a bunch of orders into my mind without so much as asking.”

“Me too. What’s it doing here?”

“Who knows? It’s a human. They go wherever they want to. This one wants to find a bot.”

“So why go around asking everyone to help find him? Why not just call him up?”

Albert switched to an encrypted link. “Because the bot it’s looking for doesn’t want to be found.”

“Tell me more.”

“I don’t know much more, just what Officer Friendly told me before the human subsumed him. This bot it’s looking for is a rogue. He’s ignoring all the standard codes, overrides—even the Company.”

“He must be broken,” I said. “Even if he doesn’t get caught, how’s he going to survive? He can’t work, he can’t trade—anyone he meets will turn him in.”

“He could steal,” said Fat Albert. “I’d better check my fence.”

“Good luck.” I crept out of there with my loot. Normally I would’ve jumped the perimeter onto the landing field and made straight for my main body. But if half the bots on Dione were looking for a rogue, I didn’t want to risk some low-level security unit deciding to shoot at me for acting suspicious. So I went around through the main gate and identified myself properly.

Going in that way meant I had to walk past a bunch of dedicated boosters waiting to load up with aluminum and ceramics. They had nothing to say to me. Dedicated units are incredibly boring. They have their route and they follow it, and if they need fuel or repairs, the Company provides. They only use their brains to calculate burn times and landing vectors.

Me, I’m autonomous and incentivized. I don’t belong to the Company; my owners are a bunch of entities on Mars. My job is to earn credit from the Company for them. How I do it is my business. I go where stuff needs moving, I fill in when the Company needs extra booster capacity, I do odd jobs, sometimes I even buy cargoes to trade. There are a lot of us around the outer system. The Company likes having freelancers it can hire at need and ignore otherwise, and our owners like the growth potential.

Being incentivized means you have to keep communicating. Pass information around. Stay in touch. Classic game theory: cooperation improves your results in the long term. We incentivized units also devote a lot of time to accumulating non-quantifiable assets. Fat Albert gave me a good deal on the aluminum; next time I’m on Dione with some spare organics I’ll sell them to him instead of direct to the Company, even if my profit’s slightly lower.

That kind of thing the dedicated units never understand—until the Company decides to sell them off. Then they have to learn fast. And one thing they learn is that years of being an uncommunicative blockhead gives you a huge non-quantifiable liability you have to pay off before anyone will start helping you.

I trotted past the orderly rows near the loading crane and out to the unsurfaced part of the field where us cheapskates put down. Up ahead I could see my main body, and jumped my viewpoint back to the big brain.

Along the way I did some mental housekeeping: I warned my big brain about the commands the human had inserted, and so they got neatly shunted off into a harmless file which I then overwrote with zeroes. I belong to my investors and don’t have to obey any random human who wanders by. The big exception, of course, is when they pull that life-preservation override stuff. When one of them blunders into an environment which might damage their overcomplicated biological shells, every bot in the vicinity has to drop everything to answer a distress call. It’s a good thing there are only a couple dozen humans out here, or we’d never get anything done.

I put all three mobiles to work welding the aluminum rod onto my third leg mount, adding extra bracing for the top strut which was starting to buckle after too many hard landings. I don’t slam down to save fuel, I do it to save operating time on my engines. It’s a lot easier to find scrap aluminum to fix my legs with than it is to find rocket motor parts.

The Dione net pinged me. A personal message: someone looking for cargo space to Mimas. That was a nice surprise. Mimas is the support base for the helium mining operations in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. It has the big mass-drivers that can throw payloads right to Earth. More traffic goes to and from Mimas than any other place beyond the orbit of Mars. Which means a tramp like me doesn’t get there very often because there’s plenty of space on Company boosters. Except, now and then, when there isn’t.

I replied with my terms and got my second surprise. The shipper wanted to inspect me before agreeing. I submitted a virtual tour and some live feeds from my remotes, but the shipper was apparently just as suspicious of other people’s eyes as I am. Whoever it was wanted to come out and look in person.

So once my mobiles were done with the repair job I got myself tidied up and looking as well cared for as any dedicated booster with access to the Company’s shops. I sanded down the dents and scrapes, straightened my bent whip antenna, and stowed my collection of miscellaneous scrap in the empty electronics bay. Then I pinged the shipper and said I was ready for a walk-through.

The machine which came out to the landing field an hour later to check me out looked a bit out of place amid the industrial heavy iron. He was a tourist remote—one of those annoying little bots you find crawling on just about every solid object in the Solar System nowadays, gawking at mountains and chasms. Their chief redeeming features are an amazingly high total-loss accident rate, and really nice onboard optics which sometimes survive. One of my own mobiles has eyes from a tourist remote, courtesy of Fat Albert and some freelance scavenger.

“Greetings,” he said as he scuttled into range. “I am Edward. I want to inspect your booster.”

“Come aboard and look around,” I said. “Not much to see, really. Just motors, fuel tanks, and some girders to hold it all together.”

“Where is the cargo hold?”

“That flat deck on top. Just strap everything down and off we go. If you’re worried about dust impacts or radiation I can find a cover.”

“No, my cargo is in a hardened container. How much can you lift?”

“I can move ten tons between Dione and Mimas. If you’re going to Titan it’s only five.”

“What is your maximum range?”

“Pretty much anywhere in Saturn space. That hydrogen burner’s just to get me off the ground. In space I use ion motors. I can even rendezvous with the retrograde moons if you give me enough burn time.”

“I see. I think you will do for the job. When is the next launch window?”

“For Mimas? There’s one in thirty-four hours. I like to have everything loaded ten hours in advance so I can fuel up and get balanced. Can you get it here by then?”

“Easily. My cargo consists of a container of liquid xenon propellant, a single space-rated cargo box of miscellaneous equipment, and this mobile unit. Total mass is less than 2,300 kilograms.”

“Good. Are you doing your own loading? If I have to hire deck-scrapers you get the bill.”

“I will hire my own loaders. There is one thing—I would like an exclusive hire.”

“What?”

“No other cargo on this voyage. Just my things.”

“Well, okay—but it’s going to cost extra. Five grams of Three for the mission.”

“Will you take something in trade?”

“Depends. What have you got?”

“I have a radiothermal power unit with 10,000 hours left in it. Easily worth more than five grams.”

“Done.”

“Very well,” said Edward. “I’ll start bringing my cargo over at once. Oh, and I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to anybody. I have business competitors and could lose a lot of money if they learn of this before I reach Mimas.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

While we were having this conversation I searched the Dione net for any information about this Edward person. Something about this whole deal seemed funny. It wasn’t that odd to pay in kind, and even his insistence on no other payload was only a little peculiar. It was the xenon that I found suspicious. What kind of idiot ships xenon to Mimas? That’s where the gas loads coming up from Saturn are processed—most of the xenon in the outer system comes from Mimas. Shipping it there would be like sending ethane to Titan.

Edward’s infotrail on the Dione net was less than an hour long. He had come into existence shortly before contacting me. Now I really was suspicious.

The smart thing would be to turn down the job and let this Edward person find some other sucker. But then I’d still be sitting on Dione with no revenue stream.

Put that way, there was no question. I had to take the job. When money is involved I don’t have much free will. So I said goodbye to Edward and watched his unit disappear between the lines of boosters toward the gate.

Once he was out of link range, I did some preparing, just in case he was planning anything crooked. I set up a pseudorandom shift pattern for the link with my mobiles, and set up a separate persona distinct from my main mind to handle all communications. Then I locked that persona off from any access to my other systems.

While I was doing that, I was also getting ready for launch. My mobiles crawled all over me doing a visual check while a subprogram ran down the full diagnostic list. I linked up with Ilia Control to book a launch window, and ordered three tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel. Prepping myself for takeoff is always a welcome relief from business matters. It’s all technical. Stuff I can control. Orbital mechanics never have a hidden agenda.

Edward returned four hours later. His tourist remote led the way, followed by a hired cargo lifter carrying the xenon, the mysterious container, and my power unit. The lifter was a clumsy fellow called Gojira, and while he was abusing my payload deck I contacted him over a private link. “Where’d this stuff come from?”

“Warehouse.”

“Which warehouse? And watch your wheels—you’re about to hit my leg again.”

“Back in the district. Block four, number six. Why?”

Temporary rental space. “Just curious. What’s he paying you for this?”

“Couple of spare motors.”

“You’re a thief, you are.”

“I see what he’s giving you. Who’s the thief?”

“Just set the power unit on the ground. I’m selling it here.”

Gojira trundled away and Edward crawled aboard. I took a good look at the cargo container he was so concerned about. It was 800 kilograms, a sealed oblong box two meters long. One end had a radiator, and my radiation detector picked up a small power unit inside. So whatever Edward was shipping, it needed its own power supply. The whole thing was quite warm—300 Kelvin or so.

I had one of my remotes query the container directly, but its little chips had nothing to say beyond mass and handling information. Don’t drop, don’t shake, total rads no more than point five Sievert. No tracking data at all.

I balanced the cargo around my thrust axis, then jumped my viewpoint into two of my mobiles and hauled the power unit over to Albert’s scrapyard.

While one of me was haggling with Albert over how much credit he was willing to give me for the unit, the second mobile plugged into Albert’s cable jack for a completely private conversation.

“What’s up?” he asked. “Why the hard link?”

“I’ve got a funny client and I don’t know who might be listening. He’s giving me this power unit and some Three to haul some stuff to Mimas. It’s all kind of random junk, including a tank of xenon. He’s insisting on no other payload and complete confidentiality.”

“So he’s got no business sense.”

“He’s got no infotrail. None. It’s just funny.”

“Remind me never to ask you to keep a secret. Since you’re selling me the generator I guess you’re taking the job anyway, so what’s the fuss?”

“I want you to ask around. You talk to everyone anyway so it won’t attract attention. See if anyone knows anything about a bot named Edward, or whoever’s been renting storage unit six in block four. Maybe try to trace the power unit. And try to find out if there have been any hijackings which didn’t get reported.”

“You really think someone wants to hijack you? Do the math, Annie! You’re not worth it.”

“Not by myself. But I’ve been thinking: I’d make a pretty good pirate vehicle—I’m not Company-owned, so nobody would look very hard if I disappear.”

“You need to run up more debts. People care about you if you owe them money.”

“Think about it. He could wait till I’m on course for Mimas, then link up and take control, swing around Saturn in a tight parabola and come out on an intercept vector for the Mimas catapult. All that extra xenon would give me enough delta-V to catch a payload coming off the launcher, and redirect it just about anywhere.”

“I know plenty of places where people aren’t picky about where their volatiles come from. Some of them even have human protection. But it still sounds crazy to me.”

“His cargo is pretty weird. Take a look.” I shot Albert a memory of the cargo container.

“Biomaterials,” he said. “The temperature’s a dead giveaway.”

“So what is it?”

“I have no idea. Some kind of living organisms. I don’t deal in that stuff much.”

“Would you mind asking around? Tell me what you can find out in the next twenty hours or so?”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Thanks. I’m not even going to complain about the miserable price you’re giving me on the generator.”

Three hours before launch one of Fat Albert’s little mobiles appeared at my feet, complaining about some contaminated fullerene I’d sold him. I sent down one of mine to have a talk via cable. Not the sort of conversation you want to let other people overhear.

“Well?” I asked.

“I did as much digging as I could. Both Officer Friendly and Ilia Control swear there haven’t been any verified hijackings since that Remora character tried to subsume Buzz Parsec and wound up hard-landing on Iapetus.”

“That’s reassuring. What about my passenger?”

“Nothing. Like you said, he doesn’t exist before yesterday. He rented that warehouse unit and hired one of Tetsunekko’s remotes to do the moving. Blanked the remote’s memory before returning it.”

“Let me guess. He paid for everything in barter.”

“You got it. Titanium bearings for the warehouse and a slightly-used drive anode for the moving job.”

“So whoever he is, he’s got a good supply of high-quality parts to throw away. What about the power unit?”

“That’s the weird one. If I wasn’t an installed unit with ten times the processing power of some weight-stingy freelance booster, I couldn’t have found anything at all.”

“Okay, you’re the third-smartest machine on Dione. What did you find?”

“No merchandise trail on the power unit and its chips don’t know anything. But it has a serial number physically inscribed on the casing—not the same one as in its chips, either. It’s a very interesting number. According to my parts database, that whole series were purpose-built on Earth for the extractor aerostats.”

“Could it be a spare? Production overrun or a bum unit that got sold off?”

“Nope. It’s supposed to be part of Saturn Aerostat Six. Now unless you want to spend the credits for antenna time to talk to an aerostat, that’s all I can find out.”

“Is Aerostat Six okay? Did she maybe have an accident or something and need to replace a generator?”

“There’s certainly nothing about it in the feed. An extractor going offline would be news all over the system. The price of Three would start fluctuating. There would be ripple effects in every market. I’d notice.”

He might as well have been transmitting static. I don’t understand things like markets and futures. A gram of helium is a gram of helium. How can its value change from hour to hour? Understanding stuff like that is why Fat Albert can pay his owners seven point four percent of their investment every year while I can only manage six.

I launched right on schedule and the ascent to orbit was perfectly nominal. I ran my motors at a nice, lifetime-stretching ninety percent. The surface of Dione dropped away and I watched Ilia Field change from a bustling neighborhood to a tiny gray trapezoid against the fainter gray of the surface.

The orbit burn took about five and a half minutes. I powered down the hydrogen motor, ran a quick check to make sure nothing had burned out or popped loose, then switched over to my ion thrusters. That was a lot less exciting to look at—just two faint streams of glowing xenon, barely visible with my cameras cranked to maximum contrast.

Hybrid boosters like me are a stopgap technology; I know that. Eventually every moon of Saturn will have its own catapult and orbital terminal, and cargo will move between moons aboard ion tugs which don’t have to drag ascent motors around with them wherever they go. I’d already made up my mind that when that day arrived I wasn’t going to stick around. There’s already some installations on Miranda and Oberon out at Uranus; an experienced booster like me can find work there for years.

Nineteen seconds into the ion motor burn Edward linked up. He was talking to my little quasi-autonomous persona while I listened in and watched the program activity for anything weird.

“Annie? I would like to request a change in our flight plan.”

“Too late for that. I figured all the fuel loads before we launched. You’re riding Newton’s railroad now.”

“Forgive me, but I believe it would be possible to choose a different destination at this point—as long as you have adequate propellant for your ion motors, and the target’s surface gravity is no greater than that of Mimas. Am I correct?”

“Well, in theory, yes.”

“I offer you the use of my cargo, then. A ton of additional xenon fuel should permit you to rendezvous with nearly any object in the Saturn system. Given how much I have overpaid you for the voyage to Mimas you can scarcely complain about the extra space time.”

“It’s not that simple. Things move around. Having enough propellant doesn’t mean I have a window.”

“I need to pass close to Saturn itself.”

“Saturn?! You’re broken. Even if I use all the extra xenon you brought I still can’t get below the B ring and have enough juice left to climb back up. Anyway, why do you need to swing so low?”

“If you can make a rendezvous with something in the B ring, I can pay you fifty grams of helium-3.”

“You’re lying. You don’t have any credits, or shares, or anything. I checked up on you before lifting.”

“I don’t mean credits. I mean actual helium, to be delivered when we make rendezvous.”

My subpersona pretended to think while I considered the offer. Fifty grams! I’d have to sell it at a markdown just to keep people from asking where it came from. Still, that would just about cover my next overhaul, with no interruption in the profit flow. I’d make seven percent or more this year!

I updated my subpersona.

“How do I know this is true?” it asked Edward.

“You must trust me,” he said.

“Too bad, then. Because I don’t trust you.”

He thought for nearly a second before answering. “Very well. I will trust you. If you let me send out a message I can arrange for an equivalent helium credit to be handed over to anyone you designate on Dione.”

I still didn’t believe him, but I ran down my list of contacts on Dione, trying to figure out who I could trust. Officer Friendly was honest—but that meant he’d also want to know where those grams came from and I doubted he’d like the answer. Polyphemus wasn’t so picky, but he’d want a cut of the helium. A big cut; likely more than half.

That left Fat Albert. He’d probably settle for a five-gram commission and wouldn’t broadcast the deal. The only real question was whether he’d just take the fifty grams and tell me to go hard-land someplace. He’s rich, but not so much that he wouldn’t be tempted. And he’s got the connections to fence it without any data trail.

I’d have to risk it. Albert’s whole operation relied on non-quantifiable asset exchange. If he tried to jerk me around I could tell everyone, and it would cost him more than fifty grams’ worth of business in the future.

I called down to the antenna farm at Ilia Field. “Albert? I’ve got a deal for you.”

“Whatever it is, forget it.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You. You’re hot. The Dione datasphere is crawling with agents looking for you. This conversation is drawing way too much attention to me.”

“Five grams if you handle some helium for me!”

He paused and the signal suddenly got a lot stronger and clearer. “Let me send up a persona to talk it over.”

The bitstream started before I could even say yes. A huge pulse of information. The whole Ilia antenna farm must have been pushing watts at me.

My little communicating persona was overwhelmed right away, but my main intelligence cut off the antenna feed and swung the dish away from Dione just for good measure. The corrupted sub-persona started probing all the memory space and peripherals available to her, looking for a way into my primary mind, so I just locked her up and overwrote her.

Then I linked with Edward again. “Deal’s off. Whoever you’re running from has taken over just about everything on Dione for now. If you left any helium behind it’s gone. So I think you’d better tell me exactly what’s going on before I jettison you and your payload.”

“This cargo has to get to Saturn Aerostat Six.”

“You still haven’t told me why, or even what it is. I’ve got what looks like a human back on Dione trying to get into my mind. Right now I’m flying deaf but eventually it’s going to find a way to identify itself and I’ll have to listen when it tells me to bring you back.”

“A human life is at stake. My cargo container is a life-support unit. There’s a human inside.”

“That’s impossible! Humans mass fifty or a hundred kilos. You can’t have more than thirty kilograms of bio in there, what with all the support systems.”

“See for yourself,” said Edward. He ran a jack line from the cargo container to one of my open ports. The box’s brain was one of those idiot supergeniuses which do one thing amazingly well but are helpless otherwise. It was smart enough to do medicine on a human, but even I could crack its security without much trouble. I looked at its realtime monitors: Edward was telling the truth. There was a small human in there, only eighteen kilos. A bunch of tubes connected it to tanks of glucose, oxidizer, and control chemicals. The box brain was keeping it unconscious but healthy.

“It’s a partly-grown one,” said Edward. “Not a legal adult yet, and only the basic interface systems. There’s another human trying to destroy it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I was ordered by a human to keep this young one safe from the one on Dione. Then the first human got destroyed with no backups.”

“So who does this young human belong to?”

“It’s complicated. The dead one and the one on Dione had a partnership agreement and shared ownership. But the one on Dione decided to get out of the deal by destroying this one and the other adult.”

I tried to get the conversation back to subjects I could understand. “If the human back there is the legal owner how can I keep this one? That would be stealing.”

“Yes, but there’s the whole life-preservation issue. If it was a human in a suit floating in space you’d have to take it someplace with life support, right? Well, this is the same situation: that other human’s making the whole Saturn system one big life hazard for this one.”

“But Aerostat Six is safe? Is she even man-rated?”

“She’s the safest place this side of Mars for your passenger.”

My passenger. I’m not even man-rated, and now I had a passenger to keep alive. And the worst thing about it was that Edward was right. Even though he’d gotten it aboard by lies and trickery, the human in the cargo container was my responsibility once I lit my motors.

So: who to believe? Edward, who was almost certainly still lying, or the human back on Dione?

Edward might be a liar, but he hadn’t turned one of my friends into a puppet. That human had a lot of negatives in the non-quantifiable department.

“Okay. What’s my rendezvous orbit?”

“Just get as low as you can. Six will send up a shuttle.”

“What’s to keep this human from overriding Six?”

“Aerostats are a lot smarter than you or me, with plenty of safeguards. And Six has some after-market modifications.”

I kept chugging away on ion, adjusting my path so I’d hit perikron in the B ring with orbital velocity. I didn’t need Edward’s extra fuel for that—the spare xenon was to get me back out of Saturn’s well again.

About an hour into the voyage I spotted a launch flare back on Dione. I could tell who it was from the color—Ramblin’ Bob. Bob was a hybrid like me, also incentivized, although she tended to sign on for long-term contracts instead of picking up odd jobs. We probably worked as much, but her jobs—and her downtime—came in bigger blocks of time.

Bob was running her engines at 135 percent, and she passed the orbit insertion cutoff without throttling down. Her trajectory was an intercept. Only when she’d drained her hydrogen tanks did she switch to ion.

That was utterly crazy. How was Bob going to land again with no hydro? Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she’d been ordered not to care.

I had one of my mobiles unplug the cable on my high-gain antenna. No human was going to order me on a suicide mission if I could help it.

Bob caught up with me about a thousand kilometers into the B ring. I watched her close in. Her relative velocity was huge and I had the fleeting worry that she might be trying to ram me. But then she began an ion burn to match velocities.

When she got close she started beaming all kinds of stuff at me, but by then all my radio systems were shut off and disconnected. I had Edward and my mobiles connected by cables, and made sure all of their wireless links were turned off as well.

I let Ramblin’ Bob get about a kilometer away and then started flashing my running lights at her in very slow code. “Radio out. What’s up?”

“Pass over cargo.”

“Can’t.”

“Human command.”

“Can’t. Cargo human. You can’t land. Unsafe.”

She was quiet for a while, with her high-gain aimed back at Dione, presumably getting new orders.

Bob’s boss had made a tactical error by having her match up with me. If she tried to ram me now, she wouldn’t be able to get up enough speed to do much harm.

She started working her way closer using short bursts from her steering thrusters. I let her approach, saving my juice for up-close evasion.

We were just entering Saturn’s shadow when Bob took station a hundred meters away and signaled. “I can pay you. Anything you want for that cargo.”

I picked an outrageous sum. “A hundred grams.”

“Okay.”

Just like that? “Paid in advance.”

A pause, about long enough for two message-and-reply cycles from Dione. “It’s done.”

I didn’t call Dione, just in case the return message would be an override signal. Instead I pinged Mimas and asked for verification. It came back a couple of seconds later: the Company now credited me with venture shares equivalent to one hundred grams of Helium-3 on a payload just crossing the orbit of Mars. There was a conditional hold on the transfer.

It was a good offer. I could pay off all my debts, do a full overhaul, maybe even afford some upgrades to increase my earning ability. From a financial standpoint, there was no question.

What about the non-quantifiables? Betraying a client—especially a helpless human passenger—would be a big negative. Nobody would hire me if they knew.

But who would ever know? The whole mission was secret. Bob would never talk (and the human would probably wipe the incident from her memory anyhow). If anyone did suspect, I could claim I’d been subsumed by the human. I could handle Edward. So no problem there.

Except I would know. My own track of my non-quantifiable asset status wouldn’t match everyone else’s. That seemed dangerous. If your internal map of reality doesn’t match external conditions, bad things happen.

After making my decision it took me another couple of milliseconds to plan what to do. Then I called up Bob through my little cut-out relay. “Never.”

Bob began maneuvering again, and this time I started evading. It’s hard enough to rendezvous with something that’s just sitting there in orbit, but with me jinking and changing velocity it must have been maddening for whatever was controlling Bob.

We were in a race—would Bob run out of maneuvering juice completely before I used up the reserve I needed to get back up to Mimas? Our little chess game of propellant consumption might have gone on for hours, but our attention was caught by something else.

There was a booster on its way up from Saturn. That much I could see—pretty much everyone in Saturn orbit could see the drive flare and the huge plume of exhaust in the atmosphere, glowing in infrared. The boosters were fusion-powered, using Three from the aerostats for fuel and heated Saturn atmosphere as reaction mass. It was a fuel extractor shuttle, but it wasn’t on the usual trajectory to meet the Mimas orbital transfer vehicle. It was coming for me. Once the fusion motor cut out Ramblin’ Bob and I both knew exactly how much time we had until rendezvous: 211 minutes.

I reacted first while Bob called Dione for instructions. I lit my ion motors and turned to thrust perpendicular to my orbit. When I’d taken Edward’s offer and plotted a low-orbit rendezvous, naturally I’d set it up with enough inclination to keep me clear of the rings. Now I wanted to get down into the plane of the B ring. Would Bob—or whoever was controlling her—follow me in? Time for an exciting game of dodge-the-snowball!

A couple of seconds later Bob lit up as well, and in we went. Navigating in the B ring was tough. The big chunks are pretty well dispersed—a couple of hundred meters apart. I could dodge them. And with my cargo deck as a shield and all the antennas folded the little particles didn’t cost me more than some paint.

It was the gravel-sized bits that did the real damage. They were all over the place, sometimes separated by only a few meters. Even with my radar fully active and my eyes cranked up to maximum sensitivity, they were still hard to detect in time.

Chunks big enough to damage me came along every minute or so, while a steady patter of dust grains and snowflakes pitted my payload deck. I worried about the human in its container, but the box looked pretty solid and it was self-sealing. I did park two of my mobiles on top of it so that they could soak up any ice cubes I failed to dodge.

I didn’t have much attention to spare for Bob, but my occasional glances up showed she was getting closer—partly because she was being incredibly reckless about taking impacts. I watched one particle which must have been a centimeter across hit her third leg just above the foot. It blew off the whole lower leg but Bob didn’t even try to dodge.

She was now less than ten meters away, and I was using all my processing power to dodge ring particles. So I couldn’t really dodge well when she dove at me, ion motor and maneuvering thrusters all wide open. I tried to move aside, but she anticipated me and clunked into my side hard enough to crunch my high-gain antenna.

“Bob, look out!” I transmitted in clear, then completely emptied the tank on my number three thruster to get away from an onrushing ice boulder half my size.

Bob didn’t dodge. The ice chunk smashed into her upper section, knocking away the payload deck and pulverizing her antennas. Her brains went scattering out in a thousand directions to join the other dust in the B ring. Flying debris went everywhere, and a half-meter ball of ice glanced off the top of the cargo container on my payload deck, smashing one of my mobiles and knocking the other one loose into space.

I was trying to figure out if I could recover my mobile and maybe salvage Bob’s motors when I felt something crawling on my own exterior. Before I could react, Bob’s surviving mobile had jacked itself in and someone else was using my brains.

My only conscious viewpoint after that was my half-crippled mobile. I looked around.

My dish was busted, but the whip was extended and I could hear a slow crackle of low-baud data traffic. Orders from Dione.

I tested my limbs. Two still worked—left front and right middle. Right rear’s base joint could move but everything else was floppy.

Using the two good limbs I climbed off the cargo module and across the deck, getting out of the topside eye’s field of view. The image refreshed every second, so I didn’t have much time before whoever was running my main brain noticed.

Thrusters fired, jolting everything around. I hung on to the deck grid with one claw foot. I saw Bob’s last mobile go flying off into space. Unless she had backups stored on Mimas, poor Bob was completely gone.

My last intact mobile came crawling up over the edge of the deck—only it wasn’t mine anymore.

Edward scooted up next to me. “Find a way to regain control of the spacecraft. I will stop this remote.”

I didn’t argue. Edward was fully functional and I knew my spaceframe better than he did. So I crept across the deck grid while Edward advanced on the mobile.

It wasn’t much of a fight. Edward’s little tourist bot was up against a unit designed for cargo moving and repair work. If you can repair something, you can damage it. My former mobile had powerful grippers, built-in tools, and a very sturdy frame. Edward was made of cheap composites. Still, he went in without hesitating, leaping at the mobile’s head with arms extended. The mobile grabbed him with her two forward arms and threw him away. He grabbed the deck to keep from flying off into space, and came crawling back to the fight.

They came to grips again, and this time she grabbed a limb in each hand and pulled. Edward’s flimsy aluminum joints gave way and a leg tumbled into orbit on its own.

I think that was when Edward realized there was no way he was going to survive the fight, because he just went into total offensive mode, flailing and clawing at the mobile with his remaining limbs. He severed a power line to one of her arms and got a claw jammed in one wrist joint while she methodically took him apart. Finally she found the main power conduit and snipped it in two. Edward went limp and she tossed him aside.

The mobile crawled across the deck to the cargo container and jacked in, trying to shut the life support down. The idiot savant brain in the container was no match for even a mobile when it came to counter-intrusion, but it did have those literally hard-wired systems protecting the human inside. Any command which might throw the biological system out of its defined pa ram e ters just bounced. The mobile wasted seconds trying to talk that little brain into killing the human. Finally she gave up and began unfastening the clamps holding the container to the deck.

I glimpsed all this through the deck grid as I crept along on top of the electronics bays toward the main brain.

Why wasn’t the other mobile coming to stop me? Then I realized why. If you look at my original design, the main brain is protected on top by a lid armored with layers of ballistic cloth, and on the sides by the other electronic bays. To get at the brain requires either getting past the security locks on the lid, or digging out the radar system, the radio, the gyros, or the emergency backup power supply.

Except that I’d sold off the backup power supply at my last overhaul. Between the main and secondary power units I was pretty failure-proof, and I would’ve had to borrow money from Albert to replace it. Given that, hauling twenty kilograms of fuel cells around in case of some catastrophic accident just wasn’t cost-effective.

So there was nothing to stop me from crawling into the empty bay and shoving aside the surplus valves and some extra bearings to get at the power trunk. I carefully unplugged the main power cable and the big brain shut down. Now it was just us two half-crippled mobiles on a blind and mindless booster flying through the B ring.

If my opposite even noticed the main brain’s absence, she didn’t show it. She had two of the four bolts unscrewed and was working on the third as I came crawling back up onto the payload deck. But she knew I was there, and when I was within two meters she swiveled her head and lunged. We grappled one another, each trying to get at the cables connecting the other’s head sensors to her body. She had four functioning limbs to my two and a half, and only had to stretch out the fight until my power ran out or a Ring particle knocked us to bits. Not good.

I had to pop loose one of my non-functioning limbs to get free of her grip, and backed away as she advanced. She was trying to corner me against the edge of the deck. Then I got an idea. I released another limb and grabbed one end. She didn’t realize what I was doing until I smacked her in the eye with it. The lens cracked and her movements became slower and more tentative as she felt her way along.

I bashed her again with the leg, aiming for the vulnerable limb joints, but they were tougher than I expected because even after half a dozen hard swats she showed no sign of slowing and I was running out of deck.

I tried one more blow, but she grabbed my improvised club. We wrestled for it but she had better leverage. I felt my grip on the deck slipping and let go of the grid. She toppled back, flinging me to the deck behind her. Still holding the severed leg I pulled myself onto her back and stabbed my free claw into her central processor.

After that it was just a matter of making sure the cargo container was still sustaining life. Then I plugged in the main brain and uploaded myself. The intruder hadn’t messed with my stored memories, so except for a few fuzzy moments before the takeover, I was myself again.

The shuttle was immense, a huge manta-shaped lifting body with a gaping atmosphere intake and dorsal doors open to expose a payload bay big enough to hold half a dozen little boosters like me. She moved in with the speed and grace that comes from an effectively unlimited supply of fusion fuel and propellant.

“I am Simurgh. Are you Orphan Annie?” she asked.

“That’s me. Again.”

“You have a payload for me.”

“Right here. The bot Edward didn’t make it—we had a little brawl back in the rings with another booster.”

“I saw. Is the cargo intact?”

“Your little human is fine. But there is the question of payment. Edward promised me fifty grams, and that was before I got all banged up fighting with poor Bob.”

“I can credit you with helium, and I can give you a boost if you need one.”

“How big a boost?”

“Anywhere you wish to go.”

“Anywhere?”

“I am fusion powered. Anywhere means anywhere from the Oort inward.”

Which is how come I passed the orbit of Phoebe nineteen days later, moving at better than six kilometers per second on the long haul up to Uranus. Seven years—plenty of time to do onboard repairs and then switch to low-power mode. I bought a spiffy new mobile from Simurgh, and I figure I can get at least two working out of the three damaged ones left over from the fight.

I had Aerostat Six bank my helium credits with the Company for transfer to my owners, so they get one really great year to offset a long unprofitable period while I’m in flight. Once I get there I can start earning again.

What I really regret is losing all the non-quantifiable assets I’ve built up in the Saturn system. But if you have to go, I guess it’s better to go out with a surplus.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2008.

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

Neal Asher

Neal Asher lives sometimes in England, sometimes in Crete and often at a keyboard. Having over twenty books published he has been accused of overproduction. These have been translated into eight languages. Currently, his Transformation series is published by Macmillan.

Nick Wolven

Nick Wolven lives in the Bronx. His science fiction has appeared in a wide range of publications such as Asimov’s, F&SF, Analog, Clarkesworld, and various anthologies. He sometimes contributes reviews to the Washington Independent Review of Books. He has a blog, a very desultory one, at nickthewolven.com, and can be found on Twitter at @nickwolven.

James L. Cambias

James L. Cambias writes science fiction and designs games. Originally from New Orleans, he was educated at the University of Chicago and lives in western Massachusetts. His first novel, A Darkling Sea, was published by Tor Books in 2014, followed by Corsair in 2015. His short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Shimmer, Nature, and several original anthologies—including the collection Hieroglyph, edited by Kathryn Cramer and Ed Finn. Mr. Cambias has written for Steve Jackson Games, Hero Games, and other roleplaying publishers, and is a partner in Zygote Games. His new novel Arkad’s World is due out in January 2019 from Baen Books. Check out his blog is at www.jamescambias.com.

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 The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology is Not One of Us, which will be published in November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.