Season 3: Esprit de Corps

EPISODE 3-1: The company of wolves

In the present:

“Who the hell are you?” she asked.

Which is funny, because I was about to ask her the same thing.

It’s hard to focus on someone’s face when it’s on the other side of a Core Arms pulse laser pistol, but there was no mistaking hers. So like, and yet so unlike. The same jaw line, same almond eyes, same long wavy black hair. The left side of the face was a mass of scar tissue though, a twisting network of angry red lines.

The hand holding the Core Arms twitched. “YOUR NAME?” she shouted.

“Hey, it’s me: Aric.” I slowly raised my hands. “Reina?” I said, dumbly. Still watching her, but now paying attention to my peripheral vision, too. Every drawer in Reina’s desk had been opened, the contents dumped on the floor. Muffled crashing noises came from the bedroom located adjoining the commander’s office. A 2D picture of Reina and me had fallen on the floor, just by my foot. I shifted slightly, to cover it with my boot.

“She malking stole MY NAME,” the woman hissed, the barrel of the pistol jumping with each word. Nasty-looking piece of business is the Core Arms, a long black tube with a handle halfway down its length, the laser equivalent of a machine pistol. “I’M REINA PARADIS. IT’S MY NAME.”

Jagged, broken pieces of memory were starting to fall into place—the story my ‘Reina’ had told on the DropShip from Poulsbo. Of a rich aristocrat who’d fallen afoul of the New Avalon Triads. I assayed an easy smile. “Hey, look, whoever you are, I’m sure this is all one big silly misunder—”

“Shut up,” she snarled. “Just shut up, shut up. We’ll find out who you are later.” Then, a little louder, “Cutter, Saw, in here.”

A pair of hard-faced men tramped in from the bedroom. Wearing blue-and-grey Commonwealth security uniforms, but I’d never seen either of them: buzz cuts with a lightning bolt shaved into the sides, Core Arms pistols filling their hands. Good money said: Triads. Better money said: This was the original Reina. Best money said: Oh, crap.

They looked hard at me, then at the woman.

“Come on, we’re going,” she told them. “He’s coming with us.”

“Look, much as I love to meet new people, I kind of have a thing—”

“If he talks again, shoot his kneecaps,” the woman said, striding past me. The men grinned evilly, and one waved his pistol to indicate I should follow the woman.

I sighed, turned and followed the woman out the building. There was a ground car there, in Port Moseby government livery, with a crowned, cursive ‘PM’ on the front doors and four silver stripes running down each side. A driver was waiting behind the wheel, evidently produced from the same factory that had churned out Cutter and Saw, the two guys behind me.

The woman climbed into the front seat, while one of the grunts opened the back door. His buddy shoved me in the small of the back and I clambered in. One of them got in either side, sandwiching me between them, each with the muzzle of their pistol pressed firmly against a kidney.

The car was stopped by the security checkpoint at the edge of the base. The guard took the papers the woman thrust under his nose and eyed them suspiciously, then caught sight of me in the back. I nodded, just a fraction. The guard blinked twice, and returned the papers. Banged the car on the roof. “On your way,” he said.

The ride was as silent as it was uncomfortable. Reina—the real one—in the front seat pulled out a long thin white tube, stuck one end in her mouth and lit the other with a match she struck on the dashboard. It filled the cabin with cloying, sickly-sweet smoke that made me feel torpid and drowsy.

They drove into the suburbs of Feintuch, turning towards the neighborhoods that had been shattered when the Dracs fired an asteroid at the Arcturan headquarters, about one month before. Smart-looking glass office towers and neat residential apartments gave way to ruins and deserted, garbage-line streets. Buildings with a thousand shattered windows like jagged, broken teeth, buildings where one wall had collapsed leaving a kind of layer cake slice visible inside, beds or chests teetering at the edge of the gaping hole, buildings that had collapsed in the center like a V, the two sides leaning drunkenly together.

The car stopped in front of one relatively intact apartment complex, squat like a boxer, with thick concrete walls and some of its windows still intact.

Inside the dented front doors, the lobby had been cleared out and a series of long tables set up, lined with a mismatched array of office chairs, armchairs and stools, filled with people who could have passed for my escorts’ extended family—buzz cuts, unsmiling faces, personal artillery stuck in a waistband or left carelessly on one of the tables. Banner in one corner with two Chinese characters, black ink on white: ‘White’ and ‘Tiger.’

The instant we entered all conversation stopped and the men jumped to their feet, watching me with shark-eyed hostility.

“Upstairs, with the doctor,” the real Reina said to my two boon companions. “I’ll see to the other one.”

My eyes followed the chipped and battered steps as they hugged the walls, going up and up in a right-angle cyclone, the top levels lost in shadow. “Can’t we take the elevator?” I asked. A jab in the back with a laser pistol was my answer.

About five levels up, they shoved me into a room off the main staircase. A thin man in a long white coat stood beside something that looked a bit like a dentist’s chair, with cracked green padding and suspicious red-brown stains underneath. The man wheeled a trolley next to the chair, laden with an array of sharp-looking implements I’d bet had never seen the inside of a real hospital.

“Got another case for you, Doc,” said Cutter. Or was it Saw? Whichever.

“Make him comfortable,” said the Doc, waving at the chair.

“Oh jeez, nice of you to offer but I only just had an appoint—oof” I said, as Cutter (or Saw) kicked me in the back of the knees. I staggered, falling against the trolley with all its shiny little toys. “Hey, on second thoughts why not.” I muttered.

Saw (or Cutter) strapped my wrists to the arms of the chair with those plastic zip ties the cops use on criminals. He tested the tightness once, grunted in satisfaction, then went out the door. Cutter (or quite possibly Saw) folded his arms and leaned against the wall next to the door, watching me with grim anticipation.

“Now,” said the Doc suddenly, standing over me. He switched on an overhead light, shining it right into my eyes. He picked up a datapad and stylus. “Let’s start with the basic questions before we get creative. The woman you know as Reina Paradis is a fraud, an imposter who has stolen the identity of the real Reina Paradis.”

“No.” I said. “I’m shocked.”

“This is a serious crime of course, and you would be doing your duty as a law-abiding member of society in helping us bring her to justice.”

“Yes, I can tell being law-abiding means a lot to you people.”

“So let me ask you,” he continued, ignoring my levity. “Where is this woman now?”

“I would shrug, but you know,” I looked down at my wrists meaningfully.

The Doc tapped something on the pad. “Shortly before her disappearance, the imposter placed a hyperpulse message to the planet Galatea. Who would she be trying to contact there?”

Now, that was news to me. I frowned a little in thought. “I dunno Doc, that’s a tough one. Let me ask you something first,” I said. “Where did you get your license Doc? Because frankly, your bedside manner is the pits.”

He smiled thinly. “I got my ‘license’ by studying human nature. For example, when they are brought to me, some men stay silent, some shout insults, some beg, and then some use jokes and sarcasm. In my experience, those in the last group are trying to cover their fear. They don’t last long under torture.”

“Trying to cover their fear?” I asked, raising one eyebrow. He nodded. “You’re sure about that? Not trying to cover the sound of themselves sawing through their restraints with one of your scalpels?”

He frowned. Then eyes widened.

My right arm was free. Brought it over, sliced the left one loose. Then I was out of the chair like a shell from an Imperator, the scalpel I’d palmed when I fell against the trolley in my hand. I grabbed the Doc by the front of his coat, then stabbed him in the throat with the scalpel. Once, twice, three, four times. Blood fountaining down my arm as I bore him backwards, ramming him against the wall. Stabbed him once more in the chest for good measure, twisted the blade and left it there. Left him bubbling and gurgling as he slumped to the floor.

Whirled on Cutter (I’ll just assume it was Cutter), only now getting over his shock and pulling his Core Arms pistol free. Ducked and charged right at him, felt the heat as a burst of laser fire passed right over my head. Grabbed the wrist with the gun, then threw myself backwards onto the floor. Sudden shift in the center of gravity and a foot planted in his abdomen sent Cutter flying over my head, landing with a bone-crunching crash on the floor.

I scrabbled for the Core Arms, now lying on the floor. Saw burst through the door. Found my new pistol jammed against the bottom of his jaw. Fired a burst that went right through Saw’s brain and blasted the top of his head across the wall behind him.

Swung back to Cutter, struggling to his knees, and pointed the Core Arms at his head. “She said there was another prisoner,” I said to him, quietly. Keeping my voice level despite breathing hard. “Where are they?”

He bared his teeth. “I’m not telling you a damn thing.”

“Okay,” I said. And shot him twice, once in the head, one through the chest.

The room was silent, except for the feeble gasping and flopping from the Doc, lying in an expanding pool of his own blood. Should’ve stuck to medicine, Doc; far safer than the company of wolves.

From outside, I heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

I peeked through the crack in the door. There were four men on the landing outside, just coming out of a room on the next landing up. Two more thugs, with a bloodied white-clad man held by the armpits between them. A fourth man, armed with a Cudazzo revolver like the one Reina had on Poulsbo, was squinting suspiciously at my doorway.

I ducked back around the side of the doorway just as he fired, splinters of wood fountaining from the door as the bullets punched through. Then I went through the door in a roll, came up firing, three shots taking the gunman full in the chest. The other two dropped the man in white, reached for their own guns. Too slow, far too slow. The Core Arms punched right through them, leaving scorch marks and sprays of blood on the walls.

I raced up the steps and bent over the man on the ground. Turned him over: A face I didn’t recognize. The uniform, however, I did. ComStar. “Acolyte,” I said. “Acolyte, can you stand? We’ve got to get you out of here.”

The man only moaned. “Galatea…” he whispered.

What had the Doc said earlier? Something about my Reina sending a message to Galatea. “Yes, Galatea,” I leaned down to hear him better. “Who did she contact on Galatea?”

His next words were a shock. “Brett Anderson,” he said.

“Okay,” I blinked. Put one of his arms over my shoulder, levered him to his feet. “Okay. Okay. Okay. Sure. Why not.”

He smiled and nodded. “Brett Anderson,” he said again.

A burst of laser fire stitched into him. One shot went into my arm. Now, lasers don’t have the kinetic impact that bullets do, but your nervous system does tend to react a little to being suddenly stung with what feels like a 1,000-degree needle. I dropped the gun and ComStar Acolyte, clutching my arm.

The real Reina strode from the interrogation room, Core Arms held in both hands. Oh right, should have remembered she’d said she’d be in the interrogation room, too. “You knew,” she said, accusingly. “You knew she took my name and YOU DIDN’T CARE. YOU LET HER GET AWAY WITH IT.”

“No hard feelings, huh?” I gasped. Which would have been pretty pathetic as far as last words go.

There was a detonation from the ground floor, followed by the unmistakable thudding of a heavy-barrel machinegun opening fire. A blast of hot air boiled up the staircase, followed by a cloud of dirt and soot. There were screams now, coming from below, mixed with the whipcrack of gunfire and the sizzle of lasers.

Reina-the-original looked down in horror. Then spun and ran back into the interrogation room. I staggered after her, but found the room deserted, a window open. Ducked my head outside but jerked it back in as she fired a spray of shots at window, slagging parts of the frame. She’d gone down the fire escape, where a ground car was parked.

I cursed, ran back for one of the dropped guns, but by the time I got back the car was already gone.

I threw the gun aside, sat down and waited. Didn’t have to wait long. Commonwealth security forces came pounding up the staircase, led by the guard who’d been on duty at the Black Arrows base. The cavalry had arrived.

“Tracking bug on the roof of the car?” I asked him, remembering how he’d banged the car as we left.

He nodded happily, then his smile disappeared. “The woman?”

I aimed at thumb at the window. “Got away,” I said, tiredly. “S’Okay, though. Got an idea where she’s going.”

Galatea. Brett Anderson.

Not much of a start, but maybe there was an old favor I could call in.

EPISODE 3-2: The firing squad

Yeah, a favor. It actually started with me asking him for something, funnily enough. When I first started down the path that ended with a surprise guest in Baz Vukovic’s office.

In the past:

He didn’t look like much. Sitting in the back office of a dingy, grungy, cluttered, foul-smelling auto shop. Overflowing ashtray on his desk. Oil-stained overalls, oil-stained hands holding a cigarette to nicotine-stained teeth. The air pierced by the metallic squeal of power drills and the hissing whine of saws cutting through metal.

All the workers bent over the dissected bodies of ground cars and custom-built bikes, hover buses and ATVs. Not tattoos, no missing pinky fingers, too easy for the law to spot in that case, but no mistaking the muted sense of threat they kind of threw off in waves like cheap tobacco smoke. All of them kind of watching me without watching me, you know, corner-of-the-eye stuff. Ready to turn those saws on me if the order came. If the oyabun gave the word.

“Gaijin,” he muttered, which was rich. I’m about as Japanese as Hanse Davion, but he still had me beat in the paleness department. I held my tongue, though. This white-faced, white-haired weathered old man was Tadamasa Shibata, the head of the Shibata-kai—a branch of the local yakuza syndicate—and my ticket off the miserable sand trap that was Altair V.

Dealing with the yakuza is a tricky thing. They’re loyal to the Coordinator but not to the Combine. To the culture but not the government. Does that make sense? Probably not, but I’ve noticed if there’s one thing human beings excel at, it’s at holding two mutually contradictory opinions at the same time without batting an eyelid. They revered Kurita as the figurehead and symbol of their way of life, then cheerfully ignored and subverted every law and dictum he tried to enforce. They fiercely believed in the superiority of Combine language and food and fashion and music and morals and behavior, but wouldn’t hesitate to murder a Combine bureaucrat who got in their way.

A bit like your relationship with your family, maybe: The only people allowed to insult family members are family members. Any outsider tries it and you all close ranks.

So there I was, standing in this blue-smoke haze, feeling the tobacco-stink seeping into my clothes and skin and hair, asking this oyabun to help an enemy of the state escape off-planet. Would he see this as a cultural issue, and turn me in, or a legal one, and help me out?

“Gaijin,” Shibata said again. “You’ve offered us money, gaijin, because you gaijin understand nothing of honor or responsibility. You do everything for yourselves, never for the benefit of others. We Draconians are different. We understand that without society, one man alone can do nothing.”

Internally, I breathed a sigh of relief. If I was getting a lecture, it meant Shibata would help. Just to assuage his sense of propriety, he’d have to frame it so he was the wise and benevolent teacher helping the ignorant and mannerless barbarian.

“I’m sorry if I have offended you,” I said. “Money is all I have.” I’d stolen a couple of things from the landing ship—medical supplies mostly—and sold them to black market dealers. That’s how I’d come to the yakuza’s attention.

Shibata looked at me shrewdly, dropped his cigarette into a half-full coffee cup to extinguish it. He leaned forward slightly. “Not so,” he said. “A man in my position hears things. Many things. About a pirate attack on the Izumi Shipyards, for example, and the miraculous escape of the crew and their families. Funny that, considering none of them are qualified pilots.” His jaundiced smile appeared again. “As I said, for Draconians, society is a web of obligations and favors. A man of military talent could earn a favor, perhaps one large enough to earn passage off Altair.”

The next morning I was out over the Herbert Desert at the controls of a DRACO-3 light observation helicopter. Basically an egg-shaped bubble of glass with a rotor blade glued on top, a Y-shaped boom sticking out the back and two landing skids instead of wheels, the little one-ton craft bounced about the sky with every gust of wind, dropping a couple of meters whenever we hit a patch of turbulence.

“Ah,” said the passenger beside me as we bucked up and down. “Ooh. Er. Huh.” Instead of a seat harness, he had a cord clipped to the roof, which would allow him to lean out the doorway, when the time came. He clutched the lead with one hand, a Kiltek laser sniper rifle with the other—Kiltek is a modified Intek, great for amateur snipers since you don’t have to worry about wind or bullet drop or time to target. Just point and shoot. Over a thousand meter effective range before atmospheric diffusion means you’re only tickling the target. Beam is tuned to the x-ray band, so it’s invisible to the naked eye.

His name was Kamo, and he was Shibata’s wakagashira, his first lieutenant. He’d tried to explain the mission on the flight up, but it was just a tsunami wave of Japanese names to me.

“Altair is run by the—ulp—Hashiba-gumi, but there are a lot of—woohee—factions. There’s us, the Shibata-kai then there’s the Uesugi-kai, the Takeda-kai, the Shimazu-kai—whoah—and lots of others. Each faction has their own oyabun. We’re all under the Hashiba kumicho—what’s that light on the control panel? Nothing? Okay—all under the Hashiba kumicho. Hashiba’s an evil little man, to be honest, as devious as a BattleMaster’s back side, he’ll smack down anyone he thinks is getting too big for their britches, but he basically lets each faction run its own turf the way it—hey, hey, HEY, oh thank god—the way it likes. Problem is the Takeda-kai has been moving in on our turf, so we’re going to send a message.” He patted the Kiltek.

The oyabun of the Takeda-kai must have known he’d stepped on some toes, because he’d holed himself up in a retreat deep in the Shaddam Mountains, surrounded by sheer cliffs on three sides and accessible only by a single, winding mountain road. Or, as it turned out, by air.

The plan was for a ‘peace’ delegation from Kamo’s Shibata-kai to drive up to the complex, ostensibly to negotiate a truce. When Takeda himself stuck his head out to greet them, we’d pop up and Kamo would drill him through the head. With the Kiltek’s invisible beam, it would take a few seconds for his lieutenants to figure out what had happened, allowing the ‘peace’ party to escape. For the plan to work, they needed a pilot. Enter yours truly.

For my perspective, the plan did have one major weak point. Once the job was done, I’d have to trust that old Shibata felt honor-bound to keep his word to a gaijin; in other words to someone who wasn’t a part of his web of responsibilities and favors. Instead of just seeing me as a loose end, to be quickly and fatally tied off.

I kept the DRACO-3 behind a hill while the dark blue Toyo-Matsu sedan bounced up the mountain road towards the complex gate. One of the guys down there was bugged, letting us listen in on their conversation. Once they’d confirmed Takeda himself was in the open, we’d move.

Our earpieces crackled with the man’s voice now. “Ohayo gozaimasu, Takeda-sama. Gobusata shite orimasu.”

“Ike, ike, ike,” said Kamo, bringing the butt of the Kiltek up against his shoulder and shifting to the edge of his seat, straining at the end of his safety lead attached to the cockpit roof. “Go, go, go.”

I hauled on the control column, bringing us up over the crest of the hill we’d been hiding behind, tilting forward and catapulting us towards the compound. High-walled, ferrocrete dusted orange-brown to match the rocks of the cliff on whose edge it sat. Series of low, narrow-windowed buildings inside, with a helipad jutting out over the cliff’s edge. The blue Toyo-Matsu just inside the gates, the four Shibata envoys standing in front of it, surrounded by a ring of Takeda’s men. Little pink circles as faces turned up in surprise as the helicopter appeared overhead.

“Got you know, you bastard,” Kamo hissed. Leaning out of the side door, focused on the Kiltek’s sight.

Which made it easy for me to reach over, unhook his safety lead, and kick him in the small of the back with one foot. A startled shriek and he was falling, one foot caught the landing skid and he tumbled, head over feet, somersaulting over and over until he slammed into the ground just behind the Toyo-Matsu, and his body splattered like a dropped watermelon.

The four Shibata-kai men were shocked, but not for long. Takeda’s guards opened fire. The envoys’ bodies jerked and writhed and fell in untidy heaps.

The old man was waiting as I set the helicopter down on the helipad, along with a couple of his lieutenants. They watched impassively as the rotors slowed down and drifted to a stop. I tucked my flight helmet under one arm and went to meet them.

“I kept my end of the deal,” I said to Takeda.

See, Kamo—my ex-passenger and amateur skydiver—was Shibata’s first lieutenant. Turned out, Shibata’s shateigashira (second lieutenant) and my initial contact, a guy named Uragiri, had made a deal with Takeda to bump off his boss and chief rival in one little move—two birds with one bullet. Uragiri would be head of his own faction, Takeda would gain an ally, win-win, chilled sake all around.

Takeda was Shibata’s mirror image, heavyset where Shibata had been slim, bearded instead of clean-shaven, immaculately dressed in a white suit instead of dirty overalls. “Half of it,” he allowed. He waved one of his lieutenants—same general height and build as Kamo had been, wearing the same clothes, carrying an identical Kiltek rifle. “Shibata will come out to meet you when you get back.” Takeda patted the man on the arm. “You know what to do then.”

I held up a hand. “My ID and travel papers?”

“When Shibata is dead.”

I shook my head. “Not the deal.”

“You question my honor?” Takeda’s lieutenants all looked fit to burst. How dare I question the honor of a man who’d just gunned down a peace delegation in cold blood? Guess I’m just funny that way.

“Sorry chum,” I gave him a big false grin. “You know how we gaijin have no concept of honor. Goes with the territory.”

That’s the real risk of ethno-centrism folks: Not that people will disagree when you say that you’re different from them, but that they’ll agree with you, and decide that means they don’t have to play by your rules. If your attitude is ‘You will never be one of us,’ then boom, there goes any incentive to try.

Old Takeda gave me the silent cold-eyed glare treatment for a bit, just to save face, but he produced the papers in the end. “Pleasure doing business with you,” I said, and knew if I ever saw him again I was a dead man.

An hour later, I hovered the helicopter over Shibata’s body shop. Slowly brought her down as if to land in the car park outside. Couple of workers came strolling out of the shop, hands raised to shield their eyes against the sun or keep their caps on in the wash of the rotor blades. The fake-Kamo beside me sat, rigid and tense.

Then he was walking out across the asphalt, old Shibata himself. Big grin, thinking his lieutenant was back from the hit on his worst rival. The sniper in my passenger seat raised his Kiltek, sighted and fired. An invisible beam struck Shibata square in the forehead. He staggered a step, then collapsed.

The sniper was grinning beside me. Shifted his aim and fired, and fired again. The two workers closest to Shibata’s body dropped slackly to the ground. Some of the men were running now, others staring about in confusion, a few more were pointing at the copter. The sniper laughed, fired again.

A storage shed at the edge of the car park exploded outwards in a shower of shattered roof tiles and wooden beams. From the explosion strode a six-meter high monstrosity: tree-trunk wide, whirring metal legs, gorilla arms under which multi-barreled machineguns had been strapped, a barrel torso topped with an open-air cockpit. A WorkMech. It raised the two arms towards the copter and fired a double burst—barrels blurring as they spun, giving a high-pitched whine like a runaway sowing machine, spent brass fountaining out the back.

The bullets slammed into the passenger side of the DRACO-3, cracking the glass into a frosted white sheet, tearing silver-rimmed holes through the boom, the engine, the fuel tank. Tearing into my passenger, throwing him against me with a started squawk before he pitched headfirst against the control panel. Might have saved my life, suddenly jerking the control stick as he fell against me so most of the burst missed.

The helicopter was mortally wounded though, slewing about the sky even though I had both hands on the stick, dropping like a stone, thick oily black smoke belching from the engine.

As I dropped, I got a good look at the WorkMech pilot: Uragiri, the second lieutenant who’d hired me to betray his own boss. Looked like I wasn’t the only one doing a bit of double-crossing that day.

Uragiri fired another knitting-needle burst, but the bullets zipped overhead as the smoke I was dumping obscured his vision.

I had one weapon, and one way to use it.

Jammed the stick forward, using both hands, then adding a foot to keep it there, angling the rotor blades downward and forward. The helicopter burst through its own smokescreen meters away from the WorkMech, giving Uragiri a split-second to look up before the two machines crashed together.

The whirring rotor blades sliced him in half, fanning blood and gore across the car park like rain. Then one blade hit the WorkMech metal, snapped and sent the copter pirouetting away, spinning around and around until it crashed into one of the body shop work bays with the scream of tearing metal, throwing me brutally hard against the control panel before finally skidding to a halt.

I think I passed out then. Next thing I knew, the copter was surrounded by dozens of black-suited men, forming an arc with a short, thin, smiling, grey-haired man at its apex, a white coat thrown over his shoulders. Two men hauled me out of the smoking ruin of the helicopter and dragged me before him.

“Glass-sama,” he said, smiling.

“Hashiba kumicho,” I said. This was the man himself: leader of the entire yakuza syndicate on Altair. Probably the most feared man on the planet.

“I see my subordinates have been … overzealous,” he sighed, rubbing at the back of his neck ruefully. “Didn’t know Uragiri had an armed WorkMech. I suspect he harbored ambitions above leadership of the Shibata-kai. My own fault, of course. If the student learns nothing, then the teacher is to blame. I will have words with Takeda.”

I felt sorry for Takeda, then. Just a little.

“But thank you for bringing this to my attention,” Hashiba said. Yup, triple-cross on my part. As soon as Uragiri came to me with his plan to betray his leader, I’d found someone in Hashiba’s inner circle and warned them. They’d had me play along—and intended to catch Uragiri in the act. My impromptu rotating guillotine had saved them the bother. “And you seem to have tied up all the loose ends for me. Very neat, Glass-sama. Now, I feel you will be anxious to leave our little colony on Altair, and given the way dead bodies seem to multiply when you are around, I can’t say I will be sorry to see you go.”

He snapped his fingers and a lieutenant stepped forward. “Take Glass-sama to the spaceport. I believe Takeda-oyabun has already provided him with the necessary documentation.” To me, he said: “Thank you again, Glass sama. I am in your debt.”

Now that’s real power. Shibata or Takeda, they would rather have killed me that owe me anything. Hashiba could acknowledge his debt to me without any cost to himself. Any favor I might ask would be trivial for him to fulfill. “Whatever we can do for you.”

I nodded. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Then, as now, I had a DropShip to catch.

EPISODE 3-3: Nosebleed section

In the present:

I’d left the Black Arrows (or what was left of them) in the care of Irina “Nova” Desiderata, under the cover that I was going to Galatea to recruit replacements to fill out our ranks. After the bruising fight on Port Moseby, the Commonwealth had agreed to rotate them back to Summer to rest and refit. Summer was Duke Aldo Lestrade’s personal fief, so I figured they’d be safe there.

Couple of jumps later I was on Galatea.

From a distance, the Circumpolar Star looked more like a cruise ship than a train. Twenty cars long, each car four floors and twenty meters high, a hundred meters long, making the whole train stretch for two kilometers. It ran in the flat, shallow U of a maglev bed, itself supported on titanic ferrocrete pillars 100 meters off the ground.

The line ran arrow-straight from Galatea’s north pole to its south, crossing Galatea’s wide band of equatorial desert at a stately 40 kilometers an hour, taking three weeks to complete its journey, then reversing and following its own path back again (Once the loop had extended right around the planet, until fighting between the SLDF and Amaris forces had left a two-kilometer gap in the loop on the Western Hemisphere that had never been repaired).

It was the plaything of the Inner Sphere’s aristocrats and military nobility, a kind of mobile casino, nightclub, resort spa and desert safari all rolled into one. The lead car was three-quarters covered in gold-tinted glass, with four-story windows that let Great House recruiters and their mercenary clients sip cocktails while being serenaded by classical musicians, watching the great desert dunes slip by in supreme comfort as they negotiated the cost of destruction, the price of death.

Behind the observation car were two flat-topped heliport cars, allowing passengers to board or leave at any time, or to participate in excursions in helicopter or tiltrotor aircraft stored in hangars underneath.

Next were the four dining and entertainment cars, packed with restaurants, casinos, dance halls, karaoke parlors, sports gyms, even an open-air swimming pool at the top of one car. Then ten cars of luxury suites, and finally bringing up the rear were three cars for cargo and storage, as well as the quarters for the crew and staff.

Somewhere on the Circumpolar Star, like a lump of black carbon amid all those glittering diamonds, was Federated Suns recruiter Brett Anderson. The last person my Reina Paradis had contacted before she disappeared.

I’d placed a message with my yakuza acquaintance before hopping the DropShip for Galatea. Old Hashiba had come through, and arranged for a guest invitation and transportation. The former was a thin, business-card sized wafer of platinum with a built-in holo emitter that would display my host’s credentials as well as my own. The latter was a LoCBM Turmfalke tiltrotor aircraft, sort of a narrow pencil suspended between two huge engine nacelles and rotors like windmill blades.

The pilot, a pixie-ish Asian woman with bug-eyed black sunglasses, had noticed my interest in the cockpit and jokingly offered to let me fly. She spent the rest of the flight clutching the arm rests of the co-pilot’s chair as I dove under and around the maglev line, weaving among the ferrocrete pillars, standing the plane on one wing, then the other. Been ages since I’d had so much fun.

At the helipad I was met by a security detail that scanned my invitation, as well as me for any weapons. Dressed only in a grey three-piece suit and tie, I felt strangely naked. “Welcome, Mister Glass,” said the guard. “Your host, Miss Graves, is currently in the observation car. Please carry your invitation with you at all times: It functions as a key to all electronic doors to which you’ve been granted access, and allows us to locate you in an emergency.”

The guard extended his hand as if to shake mine. When I clasped his hand, I felt something hard pressed into my palm. “A pleasure to have you with us, Glass-sama,” the guard said, very quietly, though his face remained in a rigid smile. “There have been a number of other unusual visitors to the Circumpolar Star today. Hashiba-sama would be most … disappointed if anything were to happen to you.” He withdrew his hand, leaving the whatever-it-was in my palm. “The observation car is that way.”

Figured the yakuza would have somebody on board. Crime knows no boundaries. That’s why you find yakuza on Galatea, the triads on Port Moseby or New Avalon, the Bratski Krug on Tharkad and Atreus, the Cosa Nostra everywhere there’s gambling, the Zetas everywhere there’s drugs.

I nodded my thanks, and headed to the exit he’d indicated. Casually put my hand in my inside jacket pocket, which gave me the chance to see what he’d given me: a Nambu Toge hold-out needler, a five-shot flechette gun only effective up to about 10 meters but would puree the insides of anyone at less than that. A thoughtful little gift.

My contact, Laetitia Graves, had skin like burnished mahogany and a dress like molten gold. Her close-cut hair was shaved into abstract whorls and spikes across the back of her skull. “Ah, my foreign guest,” she said as I found my way through the chattering crowd of cocktail-swilling people in the observation car.

She shimmered like flame as she turned towards me. “That old coot Hashiba has been holding out on me. If I’d known his boys looked so delicious, I’d have ordered room service.” She winked and took a sip of something the same ice blue as her eyes, then slowly licked the moisture from her lips.

I shrugged apologetically. “I’m the surprise ingredient,” I said. “Since we’re here, think you can serve up Brett Anderson for me?”

“Ah well, guess there’ll be time for desert later.” Her lips pursed in disappointment. She tilted her head upwards towards the roof. “Balcony, fourth floor. You’re not the only one interested in Anderson today, you know. Mind you don’t bite off more than you can chew.” With a wink and a wave, she disappeared back into the crowd.

Anderson was leaning against the railing of the exterior balcony, as promised, looking much as I remembered him: designer suit, designer stubble, designer smile. A mirror-shaded bodyguard, easily over two meters of swollen muscle that suggested a daily diet of protein and steroids, stood a few paces away, glowering at everyone.

My invitation card unlocked the sliding doors and I stepped outside, feeling the faint rustle of air as the train trundled along. Anderson looked up as I approached.

“Oh hey,” he frowned a little, reaching for a memory. “Eric, my guy, so good to see you again. So nice of you to stop by and say hi. What can I get you?”

I smiled tightly. “I’m looking for Reina Paradis.”

“Fantastic, fantastic,” he beamed at me. “Popular girl, got a lot of people looking for her. Folks from New Avalon. Even got folks from the Combine asking about her, something about a war crime. As it turns out, you’re in luck. I know just where she is. Nothing simpler, my guy. Anything for an old friend.” He waved a casual arm, elegantly vague. “She’s right behind you.”

I slid to one side so I could keep him in my field of view, and glanced back.

“I told you once, I’m Reina Paradis.” She wore a red evening gown that matched the livid red scars crisscrossing the side of her face. Held her fists clenched tightly at her sides, and looked at me with murderous intent. I guess the ComStar Acolyte back on Moseby had cracked and let Anderson’s name slip before I got to him.

“Oh, you two know each other?” Anderson clapped his hands, once, twice, exaggerated. “Oh that is just too precious. Old friends, huh?”

“Well, she’s taken a great interest in my health,” I allowed. “Tried to do a pre-mortem autopsy on me last time we met.”

“Just stay out of my way and you can keep your liver where it is now,” she shot back, then looked at Anderson. “All I want is a location, a location we’re prepared to pay you well for. We had a deal, Anderson.”

“Sure, sure, sure,” Anderson nodded. “Of course we do, doll. And I want you to know how much that means to me, really it does. But doll, thing is, information’s like any other product, supply and demand, am I right? The higher the demand, the higher the price. And looks like we just got a bit more demand right now.” He tilted his head towards me.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Oh, jeez, I dunno,” he tapped his chin in mock thought, then snapped his fingers. “How about my own private aerospace force?”

“You want the Black Arrows?” Knowing I would say yes, I’d give it to him if it meant getting my Reina back.

“Black Arrows? Great name, really great,” he nodded. “Maybe Anderson’s Arrows? Has a ring to it, doesn’t it?”

The real Reina stepped forward. “Let’s not be hasty,” she said, one leg sliding out the slit of her dress suggestively. She hiked it up a little higher. “There are other ways I can reward you.”

Anderson threw his head back and laughed. “No offense doll, but I can have the real thing any time I want.”

Her face contorted hideously. “I’M THE REAL THING YOU MALKING BASTARD!” Her hand running up her leg came up, holding something cold and glittering that burned along its edge with white fire. A vibro-blade.

With a roar Anderson’s bodyguard lumbered forward, pulling out a small black baton that telescoped out into a nightstick with the flick of his wrist. He swung, Reina ducked under it, knife slashing a red line across the guard’s abdomen. He grunted, reversed his swing, caught her right on the elbow. A jarring blow that made her drop the knife, sending it skittering across the balcony floor.

She glared up at the man, teeth bared in rage. The guard grinned, raised his nightstick over her head. Then glass behind him shattered. Red spots appeared across his chest. The nightclub fell from his nerveless fingers.

Reina wasn’t the only Triad on board. A dozen other guys had also snuck on board, some as guests, some as crew. One of those emptied his Cudazzo revolver into the bodyguard’s back.

The effect on the crowd inside the car was unexpected. For the triads. Half the people, the recruiters, aristocrats, socialites and hangers-on did the expected things: screamed, cried, pleaded, begged, threw themselves on the floor. Looked terrified. The other half, however, were the most ruthless, brutal killers humanity had produced in three centuries of warfare. Some of them, I realize now, didn’t look terrified. They looked, well. Happy. They grabbed anything that came to hand—bottles, knives, corkscrews—and fell upon the triad gunmen like they were a Star League cache.

One triad made it through the crowd, out onto the balcony. I saw Anderson lean back over the railing, grab the lip of the roof and haul himself up, out of sight.

Then the Nambu was in my hand and I was firing. Needler pistols are really quiet, until they’re really noisy. The quiet part comes when you pull the trigger: compressed gas hisses like a spitting snake, ejecting a cloud of ceramic needles out the barrel. The noisy part comes with the screaming, when those needles rip right through some triad gunman’s face. The gunman took a few more steps forward, his face turned into a red and white pulpy mass. I put out a hand and the body thumped blindly into it, then fell backwards.

Quick glance around. Inside the observation car, it was chaos, fighting everywhere. Reina was on her knees. Her vibro-blade was by my foot. No time for revenge; Anderson was up on the roof of the train—if he went, there went my only lead to my Reina. I grabbed the blade, stowed the Nambu, took hold of the roof and pulled.

The roof of the Circumpolar Star was a smooth, gently convex arc, broken by a few bumps of sensor clusters and power cables. Forty kilometers doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re on a slippery, sloping metal roof with no guardrail, it feels plenty fast enough. I staggered cautiously to my feet, and saw Anderson’s silhouette just reaching the far end of the car, near the edge with the next car, the helipads.

“Anderson!” I shouted, and the figure spun around. Raised one hand. There was a sizzle of superheated air. I threw myself down on the roof. Idiot was shooting at me with some sort of pocket laser pistol. I crawled behind a sensor blister. “Anderson, it’s me, Aric!” His next shot scorched the blister casing. Damn, should have said Eric.

I looked back, towards the front of the train. Two triad men were just levering their heads and shoulders onto the roof. Looked back towards Anderson. The fool was still looking my way, pistol held outstretched. Not seeing another two triads coming up behind him.

I found my feet, started charging towards him. “Down, get down!” I shouted. Fired, deliberately high, even though it was well out of range—just wanted to scare him into taking cover. Worked well enough—he ducked down, giving me a clear field of fire at the two men behind him. Hiss, hiss, hiss. Three shots from the Nambu before it clicked empty.

Hit one guy in the leg, made him scream and drop his gun, then he lost his footing and went sliding off the edge of the roof. Cracked his head on the maglev bed ferrocrete before he went falling 100 meters down to the desert floor.

Other guy just smiled, took his Cudazzo in both hands, and aimed. Footsteps from behind me too, the other two approaching. Anderson crouched down low, hands over his head, shouting “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” over and over.

There was an ear-shattering squeal. Starting off loud, progressing to painful before moving straight on to being mind-numbing. The brakes. Belatedly, someone had reacted to the bloodshed in the observation car and slammed on the emergency brakes. The sudden deceleration knocked us all off our feet, sent us sliding, scrabbling across the roof.

One chance.

Grabbed Anderson by the collar as he slid past. Vibro-blade in my other hand. Hit the stud, brought the blade down. Into the roof of the train. Then kicked us both off the side. Blade tearing through the metal skin like butter, but slowing our fall even though I felt like my arm would tear out of its socket. Hit the edge of the ferrocrete bed beside the now-stopped train.

Looked up. Faces appearing over the edge. A whine as a bullet smacked into the ferrocrete beside us. Looked down. A hundred meters of nothing. And something else.

“What now, man?” Anderson looked desperate. “What now?”

“Jump,” I said. And pushed him.

He screamed, but only briefly.

I jumped after. And landed next to him on the roof of the hovering LoCBM Turmfalke. Dorsal hatch was open, Laetitia Graves’ standing there, visible from the waist up, a Zeus rifle held at high port. “I don’t normally pick up my orders,” she shouted over the whine of the tiltrotor blades, then fired a burst towards the train. “In your case I’ll make an exception.”

Locator in the invitation card, you see, let her know where I was.

I just grinned, crawl-dragged Anderson to the hatch and stuffed him head-first past Graves into the plane. “Variety is the spice of life,” I agreed.

EPISODE 3-4: Winging it

In the present:

The inside of the LoCBM Turmfalke was done up like an executive transport: Plush beige-and-chocolate sofa with a scattering of yarcat-skin cushions on one side, a pair of oversized reclining swivel armchairs on the other. Bit of classical 26^th century music piped in, Tourmaline’s “Ode to Oleg Tikonov.”

Brett Anderson sprawled in the middle of the sofa, his multi-million C-Bill hairstyle in disarray and his gigawatt smile lost somewhere over the desert. I sat in one of the armchairs, leaning forward, elbows on my knees.

Laetitia Graves climbed down from the dorsal hatch, strode over to a weapons rack on the back wall and deposited the Zeus rifle there. I noticed there were also—in order of increasing illegality—half a dozen handguns of various shapes and sizes, a laser sniper rifle, and a shoulder-fired recoilless rifle mounted there.

Graves poured three drinks from a bar under the weapons rack, a clear, chilled sake, handed one to me and the other to a numb, unseeing Anderson, before sitting with the last in the other armchair. “Now that we’ve had the appetizer,” she smiled into her sake. “Perhaps it’s time for the main course?”

I cocked my head at Anderson. “How about it Brett? What say you cut the games for once and just tell us where Reina Paradis is? And don’t ask me which one, or I might get annoyed.”

He blinked up at the ceiling a couple of times, slowly seemed to realize where he was. Looked down, and locked gazes with Graves. “You know who I am? Do you? I’m Brett Anderson, chief recruiter for the Federated Suns on Galatea. That’s right, of the Federated-largest realm in the Inner Sphere-Suns. You do not want to mess with me.”

Should have known asking Anderson to play straight was like asking Max Liao to stop being devious or Takashi Kurita to take the stick out of his arse.

Graves sighed. “Oh dear, he’s a bit dull, this one,” she said to me. To Anderson: “We know exactly who you are, Mister Anderson, we know about your wife on Argyle and your mistress in Galatea Hills, and the other mistress at your vacation house. We know about your smuggler friends on Galatea V. We know to the last C-Bill how much you lost at the casinos last month, and how much you embezzled from mercenary contracts to cover it up. Do not think to threaten us, Mister Anderson.”

He swallowed noisily, flashed a forced smile as he rapidly reevaluated the situation. “Hey, hey, of course. You’re business people, right? Always pays to know the competition. I can respect that. Really, I can. Absolutely. So let’s talk like business people, okay? Let’s talk about profit. You know how much this woman is worth? What the triads are willing to pay for her? What the Combine is willing to pay for her after that nuke on Moseby? You get where I’m going here? Fifty-fifty split.” He flapped a disparaging hand in my direction. “Got to be way more than whatever this little guy from a nobody unit can offer you.”

Graves laughed throatily. “The triads are something of competitors, while the people I represent are not exactly. Hm. On speaking terms with the DCMS. Our arrangement with Mister Glass is of a personal nature, not a business one.”

The plane was buffeted by wind, shaking the inside of the cabin. The glasses rattled in their cup holders. Brett stared at Graves a moment, jaw visibly clenched in frustration. Bit of a shock to find there were still things that money can’t buy.

“She contacted you?” I pressed.

He nodded once, reluctantly. “Yeah. Yeah, she did.”

“Why?”

“Said someone was after her. And she wanted. Passage. Back to the Federated Suns.”

“And did you give it to her?”

He was silent, staring at his feet.

“You didn’t.” I said slowly. “You sold her out. Or you’re holding her somewhere. Where?”

In the silence, I reached into my pocket, and took out the vibro-blade I’d picked up on the train. Tossed it up and down in my hand a couple of times without switching it on. “Brett, my old chum, I’m a patient man.” I stopped tossing the knife, held it point towards him at eye level. “Why, I’ve only stabbed or shot six or seven men so far to find Reina. So rather than make it eight, why don’t you. Just. Tell. Me. Where. She. Malking. Is.” I pressed the stud on the blade, feeling it hum to vicious, thirsty life.

“If you kill me, you’ll never find her.”

“Oh don’t you worry about that,” I smiled, weaving the knife in slow, lazy loops, watching his eyes follow it, spell-bound. “I won’t kill you. No matter how much you beg me before the end.”

The pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Hate to spoil the party back there but I’m going to put on a bit of speed. There’s an aircraft out there that’s been trailing us since we left the train. Strap yourselves in, this could get uncomfortable.”

Brett immediately grabbed for the seatbelt underneath the sofa cushions, and cinched it hard against his waist. Graves too, although a little more slowly.

I switched off and pocketed the blade, then pounded up to the cockpit, looked over the pilot’s shoulder at the sensor display. “What is it?” I asked.

She shrugged, pointed at the readout. “Damnest thing. Never seen anything like it.”

I squinted at the icon, scanned the mass, speed and altitude data. Then felt cold. The pilot might never have seen it before, but I had. Half-fighter, half-BattleMech. A Stinger Land-Air ’Mech, LAM for short. About as rare as Takashi Kurita’s smiles, and still produced at exactly one factory in the entire Inner Sphere: Irece. In the Draconis Combine.

“Anderson,” I shouted back into the lounge. “Please tell me you weren’t actually stupid enough to let on to the Combine that you know where Reina is?”

He gave a sickly grin. “Maybe.”

I swore. In fighter mode, the jet-powered LAM could easily catch up to a tiltrotor aircraft like the Turmfalke, then switch to AirMech and blow us to pieces with its triple lasers. “Head for the maglev line,” I told the pilot. “Keep it between us and the LAM so he can’t hit us.”

The pitch of the engines scaled higher as the pilot jammed the stick down, making the aircraft tilt and lurch nose-down, sending my stomach up into my chest. My eyes bounced back and forth between the view out the cockpit and the growing contact on the sensor screen.

The maglev line appeared, a solid line of grey among the undulating ochre of the desert. We were skimming along at maybe 20-30 meters now, kicking up a double fantail of sand as we roared over the dunes. The LAM was almost in range. “We’ll make it,” grunted the pilot between clenched teeth.

She hit the rudder pedals, skidding us from side to side to throw off the LAM’s aim. The maglev’s ferrocrete pillars grew bigger, from toothpicks to solid bars. “We’ll make it.”

Red fire lanced down in front of the cockpit, blowing geysers of sand into the air. The pilot banked instinctively. The LAM flashed overhead, bare meters overhead, then seemed to come apart. The rear of its fuselage hinged down. The sides seemed to bulge and distend, birthing two spindly arms. The fuselage split into legs, thruster jets firing downward, bringing it to a hovering halt.

“Ram it!” I shouted to the pilot. Knew the LAM could avoid us, but hoped making him flinch would buy us time. The LAM went from small dot to looming monstrosity in a split second. It pirouetted back towards us, and fired again. Then skidded almost lazily aside as we blew past.

A kick, one wing hammered down. Looked out the port side, saw a torn red line in its side, guttering orange flames within. “Shut off the fuel line to the port engine!”

The pilot shook her head, both hands clamped to the stick. “We’ll crash on only one prop.”

“We’ll explode if the fuel catches. Bring us down!”

The grainy ocean surface of the desert was coming up alarmingly fast. “I’ll try,” gritted the pilot. “Hold on.”

Just got myself strapped into the co-pilot seat when the belly smacked into the top of a dune. Like being kicked by a giant. We bounced up again. Brief sensation of weightlessness. The horizon disappeared for the cockpit window, then rushed back up again like we were in a diving submarine. Smacked down again with vicious force. There was a tearing, screaming metallic sound from the aft compartment. Sand was clawing at our belly with a million diamond spikes, shaking the whole craft like we were dice in the palm of an Atlas.

And then the noise slowed, dropped in volume. With a final jerk, petered to a stop.

I hit the harness release, fighting the urge just to sit in stunned relief, staggered out the back, the pilot right behind me.

What a sight. Tail of the plane had torn right off, leaving a massive, empty round O of surprise in the back. Anderson was still strapped to the sofa, face white, bleeding from the abdomen. Looked like a shard of glass stuck there.

Graves’ chair had torn loose and was lying a few dozen meters behind us. Couldn’t see if Graves was there or not.

Sauroid, reverberating footfalls from outside. Two legs appeared out the gaping hole in the back of the plane: the LAM, now in BattleMech mode. “Surrender Anderson and the rest of you will not be harmed,” boomed the pilot on the external speakers. I believe this was what’s known—in the mystical and ancient traditions of the Draconis Combine—as “A Lie.”

“You’re not Anderson,” the pilot continued mildly. One arm pointed at something wriggling in the desert. Graves, trying to haul herself up on one broken leg. A laser fired, her scream cut short, body blackening and crumbling in seconds.

The mouth of the laser cannon swung towards us. “Now if the rest of you could just cooperate—augh!”

The first shell from the recoilless rifle dented the side of the head armor. Aside from the weight, the shoulder-fired ones are fairly straightforward to use; as the name suggests, there’s no recoil. Put the back end on your shoulder, grab the trigger, aim and fire. Just make sure there’s nobody standing behind you.

The Turmfalke pilot rammed another shell in, slapped me on the back. Ready. Aimed and fired. Full-throated roar as the shell’s rocket fired, blowing a torch of flame two meters behind me. The shell screamed through the air, blasting a hole in the front of the LAM’s head as it turned in surprise. The ’Mech staggered to one side.

Reloaded. Fired. Hit just above the last shell, ferroglass cracked and crumbling. LAM pilot fired reflexively, unaimed. Too high, just sliced through the top of the plane. Reloaded. Fired. Round black hole punched into the cockpit. Inside of the ferroglass splattered in red.

The LAM remained locked in position, like one of Medusa’s petrified statues.

I dropped the recoilless rifle, let it thump to the desert floor. Followed the pilot back into the wreck of the aircraft. The pilot bent over Anderson’s still form on the sofa, feeling for a pulse. Shook her head grimly.

“He’s dead.”

EPISODE 3-5: A regimented lifestyle

Moons and smugglers and pirates. My life would have been so much simpler, if it hadn’t been for moons and smugglers and pirates.

In the past:

The old man on the bench by the canal was nothing much to look at. Short, neat man, evidently aged and worn clothes carefully mended with close-spaced stitching, thinning grey hair brushed back arrow-straight from his balding pate. Magazine tucked under one arm. Chin fallen on his chest, rising and falling in gentle, wheezing snores.

You’d never look at him twice, thinking him some history teacher perhaps, or else an accountant, a tour guide at one the less well-known museums. You’d never think this was one of the deadliest assassins ever produced by the Free Worlds League, but that was precisely because he was so nondescript. He could become invisible just by standing there, could be holding a man-pack particle cannon and your brain would still tell you to ignore him and look for the real killer.

Only thing out of place in this image was two bottles of ouzo lying on the bench beside him, one empty, one full.

“Major Kucera,” I said, and nudged him with my foot. Then louder: “Major Anton Kucera.”

The old man woke with a start, a lifetime of training coming online in a flash, causing him to lash out with deadly speed and precision. If he’d been armed with a knife, I’d have been maimed, quite possibly killed. As he was armed with a copy of the previous month’s Bird Fancier magazine, so my injuries after his slash across the ribs were a touch more survivable.

“Relax, old man. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” I threw myself into the bench next to him. Put my arms up on the backrest.

“Haven’t I?” Kucera stared at me for a few moments, then reached out with a tentative finger, and poked me in the arm, once, then again slightly more firmly. “Feel pretty solid for a dead guy,” he grunted. Balled his hands into fists and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Time you stopped drinking.”

“I’m not drinking,” he said huffily, picking up and inspecting the empty ouzo bottle with owlish wisdom. Let it fall back on the bench with a disappointed clink. “I’m enjoying my retirement.”

“How’s that working out?”

“Fine until you showed up,” he grumbled. Made the sign of the cross at me, then shrugged. “Just checking,” he mumbled.

Together we watched the tourist boats and barges putter slowly up and down the canal, pursued by flocks of multicolored birds cawing to one another in aerial excitement. Sunlight outlined each gentle wave in a sparkling halo, and the trees looked down and nodded and rustled their approval.

A cyclist went by, following the path along the side of the canal. Then two women, joggers, in marvelously form-fitting athletic wear going the other way. One threw me a wink and a wave as she bounced past. Lifted a hand in a half-wave reply.

It was. Peaceful.

Time was, this seemed like the worst life to me. To spend all your days in one little corner of the galaxy, going through your daily routine with same people, day in, day out. But this wasn’t so bad. Give it time, maybe I could have forgotten.

Almost gave it up right there. Leave the vendetta, let the dead lie. But there were ghosts that day, of Morgana and Merlin, of Guinevere and Lancelot, even Tristan and Gawain. Driving me forward, tearing me out of the soma haze the landscape tried so desperately to wrap around me.

“Figured you were in for life,” I said at last.

“Me too,” he admitted. “The Corps had different ideas.” Kucera had been an instructor when I joined the Eagle Corps. He tilted his head up, where the faint, almost transparent outline of Atreus’s moon Wendigo was visible, even in the daytime sky. “New man upstairs, cleaning house. Most of the old hands are gone now.”

“Colonel Yildiz?”

“Shuttle accident.”

I watched him carefully. “Accident?”

He nodded, still watching the moon. “Accident,” he repeated. “They do happen, you know. New guy, Vukovic, local lad. Wanted a fresh start, in with the new, out with the old. And here I am.” He kept his head tilted up, but his eyes slid to find mine. “And here you are, Alexander.”

Oh, yeah, well. That’s my real name. My little brother couldn’t say it when he was younger, so Alexander became Sandy, glass is made from sand, and voila: My new name.

“Here I am,” I agreed.

“Heard you were in for life, too. Emphasis on the past tense.”

“Reports of my death etcetera.”

“Gawain? Guinevere? Lancelot?” A long pause. Then, slightly more quietly. “Morgana?”

I shook my head.

He looked away for a long moment, so I couldn’t see his face, shaking his head. His voice took on the rough, coarse edge of emotion harshly bitten off. “Then why are you reporting to a drunken old bum, instead of your new commanding officer?”

“Oh, the usual ghost things. Haunting old acquaintances. Thirsting for the blood of those who wronged me.”

Kucera turned back and squinted at me. “There many of them, are there?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.” Closed my eyes a moment. Seeing Morgana there, like a fool I’d been in love with her, so utterly out of my league. Merlin, like a brother. Gawain, cold and stern as a father. Opened my eyes again. “Someone tipped off the Combine though, Major. There’s a mole in the Corps. Someone who knew we were going to Altair, someone who could send a message to the Combine before we arrived. That’s a fairly short list.”

“Very,” he nodded, sadly. “At a rough estimate I’d say it’s got about, oh, I dunno, roughly … one name on it.” Sucked his teeth. “Timing fits too well, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” I agreed. “In with the new, out with the old.” Crystallized a suspicion that had been growing inside me, ever since that day. At first, I’d thought it had to be Colonel Yildiz, impossible as that had seemed, but now learning of his death, of his replacement, that crystal became hard-edged certainty.

Kucera nodded toward the moon. “Up there?”

“Still have connections? Can you help me? Get me in there?”

“Alex,” said Major Kucera, suddenly sounding all of his 60 years. He slapped the Bird Fancier magazine onto my lap. “Alex, don’t do this. Maybe Vukovic did betray your mission, maybe he didn’t. Doesn’t matter. You’re alive now, son, that’s all that counts. In 100 years, there’s nobody in the Inner Sphere who’ll remember this, one way or the other. So sit a while. Read up on birds. Or run after that girl just now, and tell her you realized you absolutely had to get her name or you knew you’d regret it for the rest of your life. Choose life. Cause all that’s waiting for you up there is death.”

I shrugged. “Death is waiting for us down here as much as up there. That’s one of life’s few certainties.”

“Look, Alex.” Kucera shifted around on the bench so he could face me directly. “Humanity is a bit like a solar system, you know? Here, in the center, that’s our House leader, around whom everyone revolves.” Kucera pointed towards Atreus’s star. “In orbit around him—or her—are the nobles, some lesser, others greater. Each with their own retinues of satellites, rings, moonlets and cosmic dust, dragging us all along in their wake, locked into these ever-repeating patterns by the pull of money and power. What to do? Learn to live happily in the orbit assigned to you. What else can you do? Escape gravity’s pull like some Periphery lordling, cast off into the cold emptiness of the void between stars, or be pulled down into the gravity well and be crushed into nothing.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I nodded. “Maybe it’s just a matter of accepting what life hands you. Or maybe. You can fall, a shooting star, and know that if nothing else, at least your passing has been marked. Or. If you hit the right place, at the right angle, at the right speed, maybe more than that. It was an asteroid—a flyspeck of dust on the cosmic scale—that killed the dinosaurs.”

Kucera looked at me grimly. “That what you are, son?” he asked. “You the flying space rock that’s going to shatter the moon? How many more will die if that happens? I won’t do anything that weakens the League.”

“Weakens the League?” I laughed bitterly. “More than sending six men and women, men and women you trained, sending them to lonely, cold, useless deaths?” I threw up my hands. Gave up. Handed him back his magazine. Stood, slowly. “You’re right, forget it Major. You’re right. Maybe I’ll go find that woman, tell her, like what you said. Might make her day, if nothing else. Add a bit of sunshine to the world, instead of darkness. Truth is, she reminds me a little of Morgana.”

Kucera was blinking up at me, at first I thought because it was so bright. Then saw him wipe away a tear. “She was one of the best.”

“She was.”

“I trained her, you know, taught her everything I knew. Knew she was something special.”

“She was.” Stuck my hands in my pockets. “Something special.”

“You were in love with her, weren’t you?”

“Think we all were, Major.” Gave him a wry smile. “Even you?”

“Like a father.” He nodded once, slapped his knee, hard. “Like a father.”

I sighed. “Just another comet, huh? Wandered too close to a star, got burned. But hey, like you said, in a century this’ll all be forgotten.” Looked down at him, then around at the canal, the boats, the oblivious birds. “Enjoy your retirement, Major.”

“Hold on a minute, Alex, one thing before you go.” He put old a hand to stop me, still surprisingly strong. He lifted up the second bottle of ouzo. Unscrewed the cap and raised it towards me. “To Morgana, and the rest.” He took a long swig, coughed into the back of his hand, then handed it to me.

“To Morgana,” I said, tipping the bottle to the sun, then the moon. “And all the other shooting stars.” Felt the alcohol burn its way down, like a hurt, like a memory.

Kucera took the bottle back. Slowly screwed the lid back on. “A shuttle called the Coriolis Comet, landing pad six, five o’clock. I know the pilot.” Looked like he was going to say more, then just shook his head. “He used to be a smuggler. He’ll get you in.”

EPISODE 3-6: A division of labor

Part I

In the present:

There are times in one’s life, times when one is beset by failures and setbacks, when the galaxy itself seems to fold space and time like a rug, just to catch your foot and trip you up, those are those times when you just have to take a deep breath, hold it in a few seconds, let it out slow.

And then scream “GOD. DAMMIT.” Up at the sky, as loud as your lungs can manage. I highly recommend also falling to your knees and pounding the sand in frustration. Doesn’t help none, but does convey your displeasure with the universe in convincing style.

Those times are blessedly few and far between, but there was one, right there, in the middle of the deserts of Galatea, standing in a ragged hole torn in a wrecked aircraft, at the foot of a disabled LAM, next to a man—perhaps one of the only people who’d known where one of the few human beings I still cared about was—staring sightlessly up at the clear, turquoise sky. A slightly, I don’t know, disappointed look on his face.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I told the corpse. “Your own damned fault.”

The pilot gave me a strange look, then clambered back up into the cockpit. I could hear her voice, talking indistinctly, someone replying with crackling, digitized distance.

I levered myself back to my feet. Two deep breaths. There had to be some clue, some trace, some trail we could follow to find Reina again. If Anderson had trapped or imprisoned her, he hadn’t done it alone. Find the accomplices, find Reina.

I emptied his pockets—yes, I know, no respect for the dead, add that to my long list of crimes—found his handheld communicator, a timepiece, his Circumpolar Star invite, his biometric ID and credit card. I used my stolen vibro-blade to hack the invite to pieces and destroy its GPS tracker. The ID said nothing I didn’t already know: name, address, nationality and occupation, age, height and weight and hair and eye color, fingerprint, retinal scan, blood type.

Tried the communicator next, flipped through its address book. Evidently this was the one he used for pleasure, not business. Long list of names, almost all of them female, with numbers next to them: Adrienne 3.5, Ayalee 4, Batira 3, Becky 1.5 (ouch, sorry Becky), Caroline 3.5, Charlize 4.5, Dizzy 3, Evangeline 4.5, Fiona 4, Five—that was a weird one, maybe the name was the score—Gina 2.5, Helena 3, Imogen 3, Kaori 4, Khaleesi 4, Marlene 4.5. Anderson was a busy man. No Reina though.

I tossed the communicator back on the body, disgusted.

The pilot wandered back from the cockpit. “Made a call,” she said, and went over to stand at the foot of the immobile LAM. Shading her eyes and looking up at it, in wonder maybe, or just wondering how they’d get it back to Galatea City.

“What now then?”

The pilot turned around and shrugged. “Sit tight and wait. Hashiba’s crew is sending someone to get us. Shouldn’t be too long. We’ll be fine as long as smugglers don’t find us first.”

“They dangerous?” I asked, thinking of the armory the plane still had tacked up to the wall.

“Only if they think they can get away with it,” she said, reaching out to pat the LAM’s leg. “They’ll steal this, if they can, and whatever else they can carry from the plane. Sell it to black market traders. Kidnap you for ransom too, if you’re rich and famous. You famous?”

I indicated the suit I was still wearing. “This is a rental.”

“Ah, well then,” the pilot nodded. “No need to worry; they won’t kidnap you then.” She winked. “Only kill you.”

Something itched there, a memory, and how it connected with the present.

In the past:

The Coriolis Comet looked like your standard ST-46, though its belly was a patchwork of black and grey where worn heat tiles had been replaced, and its once-purple paintwork had faded to a smudge-stained lavender. It ran one of the milk runs to Wendigo, carrying up food, water and other essentials, taking down waste on the return leg: not to the Eyrie itself, of course, but to the zero-G marine training base.

Her captain was named Hal Vinewood. Big guy, with the wild-eyed stare of a man who’d probably spent too much of his youth being a little too experimental with his own brain chemistry. Disconcertingly twitchy smile. “Any friend of Anton,” he said, smile appearing and vanishing like a broken LED. “Used to be a small-time crook ‘til he found me and hired me to run guns for Liberation units on places like Pencader. Owe him this much.”

I recognized his accent. “You’re from Andurien?”

That got another gap-toothed smile. “Hey man, home isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind, a feeling. Home is family and people.” He nodded towards the cockpit where his co-pilot, a woman named Ivy, was running through a pre-flight check and studiously pretending I didn’t exist. “People like Anton and Ivy, you know?”

I nodded, thinking of the people who’d brought me to this point, whose memories stuck their spurs in me every time I felt like giving up. “You know why I’m going?”

“I can guess. Morgana was my niece.” He ambled over to a storage box while I stood there, stunned. “Home is family,” he told the box, then turned around. “Here, put this on.”

He tossed me a large, heavy package. Inside there was a body suit, more shadow than physical thing, weirdly frictionless beneath my fingers. Touch-activated fasteners at the throat and either wrist, with a hood that covered the entire face except the eyes. Matching boots and gloves. Finally, a face-covering mask with cyclopean visor, offering three-sixty low-light and IR vision, air filtration and even its own internal air supply.

“You want me to put this on now?” I asked him.

“Naw. But I would put it on before we land,” he grinned lop-sidedly, then giggled a little, high-pitched. “Unless you’re real good at holding your breath.”

I stopped with the mask halfway up to my face. “Why? Where am I going to be hiding?”

He pointed behind me. I turned, saw a stenciled label on the bulkhead: Waste Water.

“Is that…”

He nodded, shoulders shaking a little with laughter. “Sure is. IR/ECM sneak suit keeps you off the scanners, and they’ll never look for you there themselves. Hell, you’d have to be crazy to go in there.”

Well. Quite.

In the present:

“Smugglers?” I repeated, and the pilot nodded. “What is there to smuggle around here?” I waved my hand towards the endless sand dunes, the endless acres of nothing that there were to smuggle.

The pilot sat down on the foot of the LAM, leaning back against the leg. “Ah, you’d be surprised,” she said. “Galatea’s a mercenary hub, so there’s a huge market for black market military tech. Some of it they smuggle in from other systems, some of it they just straight up steal. Plenty of merc units come out to the desert to train, to test new equipment, even to settle their differences, and some of their stuff always goes missing.” She patted the ’Mech foot under her. “Like Land-Air ’Mechs. Plus there’s all the old favorites: drugs, guns. People, either willing or unwilling.”

I remembered my own trip as human cargo on the Coriolis Comet, back on Atreus. The waste tank on your standard shuttle was tiny—not much waste water with only a dozen passengers and crew, and flight times of 10-20 hours, tops. Curled in the fetal position, in total darkness, aware only of the distant rumble of the drives and the press of deceleration as we’d come into land. Hoping we’d arrive before my air supply ran out.

“Willing or unwilling?”

“Yep. Kidnapping and extortion are quite a racket. Slipping people across the borders to the League or Combine, even to the Fed Suns, is another.”

The itch was back, that prickling at my scalp that said I was on to something. “What about the yakuza? Are you on friendly terms with the smugglers too?”

“Nah, not really. They don’t take well to organization, and we’re all about the hierarchy. Most of them work in small, independent bands, extended families sometimes. Though there’s rumored to be a big gang based out on Galatea V.”

That was the second time I’d heard about that planet today. Who’d said something? Anderson? Graves? Hadn’t seemed important at the time. And something else. More recent.

I bent back over Anderson, picked his communicator up again. Flicked through the address book.

Dizzy, Evangeline, Fiona.

Five.

Pressed the number. Listened to it ring. Click.

A voice at the other end. “Yeah, Anderson?” Unfamiliar, but male, impatient. “You make a deal for the woman yet?”

Cut the connection. Five. Galatea V—Galatea Five. What had Graves said? ‘We know about your smuggler friends on Galatea V.’

Loosened my tie, threw it onto the fuselage floor. My jacket followed. Rolled up my sleeves. Went to the weapons rack in the aircraft fuselage, moving fast, grabbed the first gun I found. Sunbeam, my old favorite. Tapped the charge indicator, confirmed it was green. Strapped it to one hip: good to go. Next one: Nambu auto pistol. Slid the magazine out, checked it was loaded, slapped it back home again. Felt the weight of it, the balance, tried looking down the sights. Slid back the receiver. Other hip.

“So, hey,” I called over my shoulder, wrestling down the sniper laser. A Kiltek, just like the ones on Altair. Slung it by the strap, over my shoulder. “Just supposing I did want to meet some smugglers, what would be the quickest way of doing it?”

Part II

In the present:

Turned out the fastest way to meet smugglers was to sit right where I was. Our crashed tiltrotor and its friendly neighborhood Stinger LAM were the biggest bits of debris for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. As Galatea’s sun began to set and the sky elided from turquoise into indigo, a small convoy of one-man ATVs, dirt bikes, jeeps and armored cars appeared at the top of a nearby ridge.

I’d climbed up to the top of the LAM, and from my perch on its shoulder watched them cautiously edge closer through the Kiltek’s scope. One man standing in the roof hatch of one of the armored cars seemed to be the leader, a wiry little guy with pencil-thin moustache, in a poncho and dusty goggles pushed up onto his forehead, where they held back a wild tangle of curly hair. His face filled the scope, seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. I shifted my aim slightly, putting the scope crosshairs over a pair of binoculars the man held in one hand, and pulled the trigger.

The binoculars went spiraling away into the night sky, a neat orange hole drilled through the center, and the car jerked to a sand-slide halt. The man lost his balance, flipped out of the cupola, rolled down the car’s windscreen and landed in a heap on the sand dune in front of the radiator grille.

“That’s far enough,” I shouted. “Who are you?”

“Mighty fallen,” he man shouted back, voice muffled by the poncho that had fallen over his head.

“Yes, I can see that,” I said testily. “Now, who are you?”

The man sat up, pulling his poncho down to more or less the right place. “No, that’s our name: Red Savage’s company, The Mighty Fallen. Has kind of a double meaning, see?”

“Smugglers?”

“Free agents,” he said, offended. Slowly he stood up, brushing dust from his trousers and poncho. He’d lost his goggles in the fall, and peered around in the ground for them.

“In that case, I’ve got a proposition for you,” I shouted. In the scope, the man was still turning in searching circles. “Behind you, two paces. No, little more to the right. That’s it.”

“Ta,” said the man, scooping up the googles, shaking the sand from them. “A proposition?”

“Yeah. I want to know where the base on Galatea V is.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Well. How about I don’t kill you?” I fired again, blowing out one of the armored car’s headlights, perhaps three centimeters beside the man’s arm.

The man jumped a little, and replied in half a heartbeat. “Y-y-y-okay.”

“And what security measures there are.”

“Sure.”

“And a floor plan of the base.”

“Gotcha.”

“And how many men there are, what weapons they have, and where prisoners are kept.”

“You got it.”

“And the hand of Romano Liao in marriage.”

“No pro … what?”

“Just checking.” I lifted up the barrel of the Kiltek, butt braced against my hip. “You know, I thought you’d take more convincing.”

“Are you kidding?” the man laughed. “Been hoping someone would take out that old bastard Savage for years.”

Machiavelli might have said it was better to be feared than loved, but trust me, being feared isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There is, for example, the incentive it gives your people to either side with your enemies, or at least stand aside when they come knocking. Or, if you’ve been especially naughty, come after you themselves. Eh Vukovic?

“Fair enough,” I said. “The boys will be disappointed though.” I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled. As I slug the sniper rifle over my shoulder and slip down a chain-link ladder from the LAM’s head to the ground, a dozen heavily-armed yakuza emerged from the aircraft fuselage and rose like phantoms from hidden pits surrounding the smugglers.

“Oh, whoah, hey, how’s it going guys. Nice to see you.” The leader turned in a circle, taking in the laser rifles, auto grenade launchers and recoilless rifles being held in his general direction. He looked up as I approached him, and whispered “Who are these guys?”

“Think of them as potential business partners,” I said, and slapped him on the back, then held out my hand. “Aric Glass.”

“Derek Forrest,” he replied, shaking my hand. Up close, I could see he had a short-circuit smile and bright, blue-eyed stare that reminded me a lot of Vinewood.

I swept my arm in the direction of the fuselage. “Won’t you come into my office?” I said grandly. “Oh, and one more thing.”

He took a step towards the aircraft, stopped mid-stride. The smile flickered off, then returned. “Yeah?”

“You got anyone who can fix a hole in a LAM’s head?”

In the past:

“Who the hell are you?” asked Vukovic.

Alarmed, but not scared. Not yet. The black sneak suit and pistol leveled at his head were fairly strong signs I wasn’t friendly, but then I hadn’t shot him. Not yet.

“Former member of the club,” I told him, with a tight smile. “Before your time, if only just.”

It had taken hours of crawling after I’d unscrewed the waste water tank lid and slithered off the Coriolis Comet, thankfully dry (sneak suits are hydrophobic—not much use in having a stealth suit you can’t use anytime it rains), through the marine base armory (found a rack of Sunbeams—first one with a depleted power pack, but the charge on the second was green), through Eyrie maintenance tunnels and ventilation shafts, until finally, I’d reached the commander’s quarters.

He set his drink down slowly on the desk. “If you’re an assassin, you’re either incompetent or an idiot,” he said. “The longer you sit and talk, the more chance there is you’ll be discovered. So what is it you want?”

Like Anton had said, we were all prisoners of power’s gravitational pull. By that logic, Vukovic’s betrayal had been as inevitable and blameless as an avalanche, just what was necessary to maintain the trajectory of his career.

More than anything, I wanted to defy that certainty.

“Sit down. I want to tell you a story.”

If society was just the mathematical product of people’s mass and motion, then my presence there was just as inevitable as Vukovic’s betrayal, the equal and opposite reaction demanded by power’s peculiar physics. A distorted and distended military snapping back into its rightful shape.

For while Generals and Colonels get to kill their own men as readily as the enemy’s—a necessary feint, a useful diversion, a time-winning last stand—they do so based on the promise that the lives they’re spending are bought with the currency of victory, security, the safety of one’s comrades and fellow citizens. Betray that promise, and your rank no longer protects you.

“A story.” He slowly sank into one of the chairs on the opposite side of the desk. “You are mad.”

“In the sense of ‘very upset,’ sure,” I agreed. “In the sense of ‘crazy,’ well I guess that’s a matter of perspective. Consider this krvna osveta, a blood vendetta. Some people might call that crazy, I guess.”

“Krvna osveta?” he sneered, but in our neo-feudal times vendetta among noble houses was something of a tradition (of course, it didn’t apply to commoners like me, but hush). I’d deliberately used the Serbian word for it, playing on Vukovic’s own heritage. “You won’t get away—”

“Can we skip the empty, formulaic threats?” I interrupted. “As I said, I’d like you to listen to a story. It’s an unfinished one, and the ending depends largely on how closely you listen.”

“Go to hell.”

“Now, now, Colonel,” I got up and walked around to his side of the desk, and sat at the corner. “It’s not a long story, and I think you’ll find it’s quite familiar. You see, there once were seven eagles who were sent to steal something from their enemies, only when they arrived they found the enemy had been told that they were coming, and all but one of them died. Ring any bells?”

Vukovic shifted slightly in his seat, his eyes narrowing. “Altair?”

I nodded encouragingly.

He drew breath. “Captain Ezekiel Juhasz was a fine soldier, and I know he would have gladly sacrificed—”

“The three last things Juhasz did were shoot Merlin, murder a child, and try to kill me,” I snapped. “He didn’t sacrifice anything, and while I hated him for it at the time, I realize now he was a victim of circumstance. He should never have been put in that position.”

Vukovic scoffed. “If he cracked under pressure, that is hardly my fault. What do you want me to do about it?”

“You tipped off the Combine.”
“Nonsense. The mission failed, these things happen son. I repeat: What do you want me to do about it?”

“I want them remembered,” I said, leaning towards him. “I want them recognized. Give them all medals. Look after their families. I want you to take responsibility for what you did.”

His smile was steel. “What I did was nothing more than—”

He exploded out of the chair, grabbing the barrel of the Sunbeam while chopping down on my wrist with his other hand. Twisted the Sunbeam free, in the same motion his elbow caught me in the chest, knocking me back off the desk and onto the floor.

He stood over me, panting, Sunbeam aimed at my head.

“You little idiot,” he smiled. “Krvna osveta? Revenge, for your poor dead friends? You idiot. Death is part of the Corps, son, and the only way an eagle learns to fly is being thrown from the nest.”

“You admit it, then? You betrayed the mission?”

“I did. I did what I had to. It was a stupid, futile mission and I minimized the risk to the Corps and the League.”

“You killed them, sure as you pulled the trigger yourself.”

“I killed them. And speaking of pulling the trigger.” He squeezed the Sunbeam. It beeped dully at him. He squeezed again, again.

“Just wanted to hear you say it yourself,” I admitted, and took the other, loaded Sunbeam out of its holster in the small of my back.

Vukovic was drawing breath to shout for help when I fired, so the wide beam blasted his lower jaw into two large fragments that blew away from his face and ricocheted against either wall of the office, before punching out the top of his skull and pasting most of its contents across the ceiling.

I stood up, took the recording device clipped to my belt and extracted the data crystal, and placed it carefully in the middle of the desk.

They say revenge is an empty endeavor, for it does not restore the dead nor heal the living, but let me be honest, in that instant I felt only satisfaction. If revenge was such a hollow pursuit, we would not love it so—but instead it’s coded into us, that red-jawed atavistic urge to take an eye for an eye. It was done, and I did not feel sorry.

The door to the office crashed open. Two guards stood there, submachineguns held to their shoulders. I slowly raised my hands.

“Alex?” said one of the guards, looking from me to the body on the floor. Anger and confusion warring on his features. “Why?”

“A blood feud,” I said, simply. “The crystal explains.” I indicated it with my eyes, keeping still, my hands where they were.

The guard plugged the crystal into the noteputer on Vukovic’s desk while the other covered me. Listened to the recording, to Vukovic’s voice. He nodded. “Gdikiomos,” he said. Greek, means the same as krvna osveta, a vendetta. “We’ll give you five minutes. Go.”

As Red Savage would find out too, Machiavelli was wrong: it is better to be loved than feared, because it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you’re in any position of authority people are going to fear and hate you just on basic principle, while there is zero guarantee that anyone will love you enough to lift a finger when those people come calling.

Part III

In the present:

Planets come in an astounding variety of sizes, compositions and colors, but when you get down to it, really there’re just five types: hot dry ball, cold dry ball, wet, frozen or gassy. Venus is a hot ball, Mars is a cold one, Earth is wet, Europa is frozen, Jupiter is gassy. You get the picture.

Galatea V was as dry as a Kurita’s sense of humor, as cold as a Katrina’s husband, as big as Hanse Davion’s ego, as full of holes as Liao’s claim to be First Lord, and at 0.7G had all the gravity of a Marik threat. The whole package was wrapped in a thick haze of carbon dioxide and nitrogen that made flying interesting and breathing impossible. However, what made pilots weep was what made smugglers smile, for it was those very clouds that kept prying eyes away from whatever they did down on the surface.

So there was nobody to see when a deep fissure off the planet’s Polar Depression was suddenly illuminated in staccato flashes of light. The snug blanket of atmosphere didn’t carry sound very well, but if you’d listened carefully, what you would have heard was this: Crash. Bang. The howl of a jet engine. Some screaming, followed by a lot of choking. The crackle of laser fire. Bit more screaming, followed by more crashing, gradually growing in volume and frequency until it was more or less constant, before abruptly cutting off.

I can’t claim to be an expert on Land-Air ’Mech pilot training, save to say that I’m fairly sure most manuals do not recommend becoming self-taught while flying a hastily-patched LAM through subterranean tunnels. This method, however, does have the wonderful effect of focusing your attention.

My lessons had started out unpromisingly, as I did my level best to kill myself switching from aerospace to AirMech configuration on approach to the Mighty Fallen’s base. Only the planet’s low gravity had saved me from decorating the Polar Depression with bits of Glass, but after a short but sharp bit of plummeting, the LAM switched configurations and I had things more or less under control.

The AirMech handled a bit like a wing in ground effect vehicle, which was handy to know if you’d ever flown one of those. I hadn’t, so. Yeah.

Flew down the fissure with only a few minor bumps into various rocky obstructions. Gained entry by the simple expedient of lasering a circle in their front door and kicking it in. The interior had mostly been built to ’Mech scale, so I roared down corridors, following the map Forrest had given me, pausing only to incinerate the odd pirate who objected to my presence.

The prisoner cell block was human-scale, so I parked the LAM in the tunnel outside, exchanged my flight helmet for an oxygen mask and slid from the cockpit. Blasted the door hinges off with my Sunbeam. Inside was a guard room, bathed in jumpy shadows and yellow-orange light as oxygen warnings blared (I’m afraid blowing open the front door had not helped the atmospheric integrity of the place).

The prison guard was still trying to fit on his oxygen mask. He froze and looked up in panic as I walked through the smoking doorway, tossing the now-depleted Sunbeam aside and drawing the Nambu. “Open the cell doors,” I told him over the keening alarms.

He clawed for his sidearm. “Nev—”

I emptied all 12 rounds of the Nambu’s clip into him. I was done screwing around. Kicked his body sliding off the console and took stock. The door controls were easy enough to find—a row of numbered, green-lit buttons controlling the electronic locks on each cell. I shrugged, hit them each in sequence so they all glowed red.

Reina’s cell was at the end. Bed carved right out of the rock with a thin mattress, single feeble light in the middle of the ceiling. She had her bed sheet wrapped around one arm as a shield, held a plastic eating knife in the other, crouched and ready when I entered the room. Her head drooped in relief when she saw me, shoulders shaking. She dropped the sheet and knife before looking up, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands.

“Hello stranger,” she said. In the background, lights flashed, alarms blared. “I see you’ve opted for the subtle approach.”

“I was in a hurry.” I threw her the oxygen mask I’d taken from the prison guard. “Good to see you, too.”

“Yes, yes, oh thank you my brave gallant knight.” She braced one hand on the rock bed and pushed herself to her feet. Instead of pulling the mask down over her head she left it hanging from her neck, then stepped forward and pushed mine up onto my forehead, grabbed my head in both hands and pulled it down towards hers. We kissed long, brusingly, like we were trying to push ourselves into each other’s skin.

She drew back. “That do for now?”

“For now,” I agreed. “You, me, explain later, much talk. Ride’s this way.”

She stopped when she saw the battered Stinger LAM, braced on its two stubby legs, parked in front of the prison door. “You know how to fly one of those things?”

“Nah. Not really.” I climbed up, then offered her my hand.

She clasped it, and hauled herself up to the cockpit. “What stopped you from crashing?”

“Um, sense of self-preservation?” I offered, strapping myself into the pilot’s chair, shucking the oxygen mask and pulling the helmet down over my head.

“Says the man who single-handedly attacked an entire planetoid filled with ’Mech-armed pirates.” There was a fold-down jump seat behind the pilot’s, where she pulled on her own harness and fitted a spare helmet.

“Yeah,” I agreed, powering up the LAM. “Wait. The what-armed?”

Her voice was distorted by the helmet’s mic. “Didn’t you wonder why all the tunnels are ’Mech-sized?”

The AirMech’s ground-effect jets roared to life, jerking us up off the cavern surface in a billowing cloud of dust, idling about two meters off the ground. “Think I was too busy not crashing to think about it,” I admitted. “How many?”

“No idea. Let’s not find out.”

“Let’s not,” I agreed, and pushed forward the throttle.

The LAM roared down the cavern, back the way I’d come, twisting through tunnels, flying around corners. Then I slammed it to a stop. The tunnel in front of us had collapsed—either from damage or deliberately sabotaged by the pirates—leaving me faced with a sloping wall of scree and boulders.

“There a problem?” Reina asked from the back seat.

“Shortcut,” I said, spinning the LAM around and racing back the way we’d come. Down a side tunnel. T-junction: left or right?

Right.

Massive metal doorway blocked the tunnel. “Hold on,” I said, and fired the lasers, burning three molten lines the top and sides of the door. It held firm. “Ah,” I said, yanking shut the throttle and firing as the door loomed larger and larger, filling the cockpit view. The lasers lanced out again, carving deeper in to the metal, making the door sag, not falling yet, but our inertia was carrying us forward. I slewed us sideways so an arm hit the doorway first, echoing like a gargantuan bell, and the door fell inwards.

In the HUD display, the side armor flashed yellow and a brief message displayed. Didn’t have time to read it, but pretty sure it was something to the effect of, ‘please do not do that again.’

Beyond the caved-in door was a short, brightly-lit cavern. Twenty-meter high metal scaffolding and cranes on either side. Three held BattleMechs, a Javelin, a Valkyrie and an Assassin. The fourth was empty—mainly because the blood-red Spider it had held was just stepping free. The heads of four ’Mechs turned toward us.

“There he is. Stop him!”

Left, definitely left.

I slammed the throttle all the way out and kicked us back out of the Mech bay on twin pillars of superheated air and a thunderclap of noise, careening down the tunnel outside. Lasers belatedly chased after us, slamming into the cavern ceiling and walls, fragments of rock rattling off the armor. Thunderous footfalls echoed behind as the smugglers gave chase.

The tunnel opened up into another cavern. Like a medieval torture chamber for BattleMechs. The arms and upper torso of a Commado leaned against one wall. Dismembered arms and legs littered the cavern floor. A series of massive pedestals held a mournful Trebuchet head, a pair of derringer forearms from a Marauder, the axe of one of those spanking-new Hatchetmen. The smugglers’ storehouse of salvaged, stolen or black market ’Mech parts.

I weaved among the vivisected machinery, under a leering Banshee head suspended from the cavern ceiling, around a clutching Archer arm, keeping them between us and our pursuers. The arm rang like a bell as four missiles struck it, toppling it over.

Another cavern, this time lined with a forest of pillar-like liquid storage tanks. “Ugh, not waste water again,” I muttered, remembering my trip in the Coriolis Comet.

“Aric, that isn’t water,” said Reina. “That’s liquid hydrogen fuel!”

“Oh, great.” Hydrogen is a wonderful propellant, because it’s light, non-toxic to humans, and burns very, very hot. “Perfect.” There was enough explosive material here to bring down the entire complex, and reduce the Stinger to very, very fine dust.

“An elevator or lift shaft,” shouted Reina. “We need to get vertical.”

“See what I can dooooooo—”

On the other side of the tank farm: darkness. And we were falling. In AirMech mode, the LAM’s jets fire downwards, creating a cushion of hot air between it and the ground, much like a hovercraft. That does, however, required you to have some ground on which to cushion.

We were over a sloping cargo lift shaft, hundreds of meters deep. Our air cushion vanished, and the AIrMech promptly nosed down and dropped like a stone. Wind screamed around us. At the bottom of the shaft was an open cargo lift, racing up towards us a breakneck speed as we fell. I slewed us around in the buffeting, shaking air, got the Stinger’s legs pointed at the sloping side of the shaft, and fired the jets again.

Got us under control. Jets pointed the right way, but still falling, still hurtling towards the cargo lift..

Fired the jets again, towards the lift this time, flinging boxes and machinery that had been stacked there around in a furious vortex, the metal of the lift turning orange, then red under the heat. We slowed. Stopped. Hung there.

Reina pointed over my shoulder, towards a pinpoint of light just visible at the top of the shaft. “Launch bay,” she said. “The way out.”

We shot back up the shaft like a bullet down a gun barrel, keeping the jets aimed at the shaft sides now to give us lift, back up towards the cavern holding the hydrogen fuel. Three Mechs stood at the ledge, firing downwards at us—the Assassin, Valkyrie and Javelin.

The LAM shuddered as laser pulses tore into the nose and wing armor. I fired back wildly as we hurled past them, laser tracing fiery lines across the shaft walls. We drew level with them. I fired the arm laser as we flashed by—missed. Hit a fuel tank instead.

Liquid hydrogen sloshed around. Met the oxygen of the air inside the complex. Was gently warmed by the lingering 5,000-degree heat of the slash the laser had carved in the tank. Exploded.

The hydrogen in tanks on either side caught the full force of the blast, and they too, went up in balls of flame. There were a string of massive claps of sound as the remaining tanks blew like dominos, incinerating the entire level, including the three ‘Mechs still firing at our rear as we zoomed up the shaft, before a billowing wall of flame burst out into the tunnel behind us and began racing up the shaft.

At the top of the shaft was a domed DropShip landing pad, with a round launch bay door irised shut about it. I kept my trigger finger jammed down on the laser trigger, blasting away at the doors. Blew a hole right in the center. A rain of metal fragments fell around us, rattling off the armor, shaking the LAM like a tornado.

Was the hole big enough? I aimed for the center, and prayed.

Then we were through, out into the atmosphere. My shoulders relaxed. “Oh thank—”

There was a flash of something huge and red just as we cleared the doors. The LAM suddenly dropped a wing, flying nearly sideways. An engine overload alarm blared. My eyes flashed to the external sensors: there, hanging from the leg, both arms wrapped around the foot, was the last ’Mech, the blood-red Spider.

“That’s Red Savage,” Reina spat. “Bastard who’s been keeping me prisoner.”

“It could be Blessed bleedin’ Blake for all I care! We’re overweight,” I shouted over my shoulder. “We’re going down!”

“Fighter mode,” Reina shouted back.

I slapped the controls to shift us back. First thing the LAM does when switching to fighter mode is stow its arms and legs. Arms folded into the sides. Feet retracted. The Spider clawed desperately as its handhold disappeared, clutched futilely at the leg as it was drawn up and slid into the back of the fuselage.

It fell. Not far, maybe 30 meters or so. Trivial for a BattleMech to survive. Unless you fall right into the path of a volcanic eruption of exploding hydrogen fuel. The Spider disappeared into the middle of a rising mushroom cloud of fire as the LAM’s engines kicked in and we soared away.

EPISODE 3-7: Flight of imagination

In the present:

The LAM landed in the center of the Tabula Rasa salt flat, high in Galatea’s equatorial mountains.

It was night when we climbed down, and out here, in the cooling desert far from the busy heat of the cities, the icy crystals of evening stars revealed themselves in a slow and sinuous arch scattered from horizon to horizon.

The smooth surface of the salt flat, covered in a thin film of rainwater, perfectly reflected the sky, so the ground itself disappeared, and we stood suspended among the mirrored stars—no forward, no back, no up or down—in all the universe, there were only us, only her head beside the heartbeat in my chest, only my arms around the impossible reality of her, only the ticking of time like the long, slow exhalation of a galaxy already tired of existence.

I closed my eyes as I held her, and told her about a woman without a name, about a doctor who healed no one, about a train that went nowhere, about a people-person who’d died alone. And then, because it seemed part of the same story, about a broken shipyard, a broken moon, a broken man.

The was symmetry there, I had been the one seeking vengeance, now I would help the one on whom vengeance was sought. A vendetta begun, another ended.

I talked and held her.

She listened. She listened and said just enough to keep the story going until the end, which was its beginning. She held me back.

“Your turn,” I said.

For a while, she didn’t answer, and I didn’t rush. Finally, she said: “I’m going to New Avalon.”

“What’s on New Avalon?”

“The White Tigers, the ones backing Reina. The real Reina.”

“Okay.”

She drew back from our embrace, titled her face up to me. “Just like that, okay?”

“Just like that,” I nodded. “Look, I am disappointed. That you didn’t come to me for help, that you didn’t trust me enough. But I’ve been alone and hunted, too, so I’m trying to understand what I can, and taking the rest on faith. If you need to do this, that’s good enough for me.”

“I think it is,” she said, and put her head back on my chest. “Problem is how to get there. Anderson’s really dead?”

“’Fraid so. Glass.”

“I knew you didn’t like him.”

“Na, not me, the clear transparent stuff. Not to worry though—got a good feeling about this Forrest guy. Reminds me of someone I used to know. Crazy as all hell, but a good guy deep down.”

“Mmhmm, reminds me of someone, too,” I felt her head tip up again form where it lay. “Can’t think who.”

EPISODE 3-8: Not single spies, but in battalions

In the past:

After Vukovic’s death, I wandered, lost, for many months. Vinewood put me on a freighter headed for the Rim. I paid my way by working as a shuttle pilot or DropShip crew. A storm-blown cloud, I went wherever the currents of intergalactic commerce carried me. Days and nights smudged and ran together, as though a great hand was pressing me down and spreading me across a sheet of time like paint across a canvas.

My vendetta was done, but once you achieve your life’s goal, how then to go on living?

My dreams of flying for the League were dead. My squad was dead. My family might as well have been—no way I could return to them now. I didn’t even have revenge to keep me going any more.

I wound up on Lesnovo, way out in the Rim Commonality, the world Colonel Yildiz—Arthur—had come from. Don’t know what I was planning, don’t think I even had a plan, just some weird notion of finding his family and, and, and what? Telling them what he’d meant to me? I knew any such pilgrimage would be about me, not him, not his family, so. No.

I’d taken a place in the City of Atropos, little one-bedroom place above a coffee shop. I’d sit outside with a thimble of black espresso, watching the people flow past like raindrops. You know how you can’t see each individual drop, just blurred streaks? That was crowds to me—streaks of humanity, falling past my table outside.

The owner would smile behind the counter and nod as I came down each morning, and hand me my coffee, unasked. A slim young girl, his daughter I think—a pretty face, but eyes always downcast, shy—wiped the tables with a pink and white cloth. The music was almost always something bluesy with a slide guitar, over which a woman with a whiskey voice crooned patriotic ballads: ‘It’s cold in space, my love, but I have heat enough for two.’ The man would hum along as he poured the coffee, “Heat enough for two,” and set it on the waarwood counter. I think I envied him, more than a little, maybe even hated him, for the easy comfort he seemed to take in each day’s rhythm and routine.

“Not from around here?” he’s asked me one of those mornings as he poured.

“No.”

“Oh? Where then?”

“Somewhere else.”

“Come a long way?”

“Yeah. Too far, maybe.”

Atropos was a university town, its streets filled with cetacean-slow pods of students, nobody ever in a hurry to go anywhere or do anything, unless it was to get drunk at parties.

It was wedged tight in a high river valley, and I’d spend the day wandering blind streets and forgotten paths, or just leaning on the railing of one of the iron-filigree arches over the river, watching boats float their inevitable way down towards the sea. It was startlingly beautiful and peaceful, cupped between snow-capped mountains, quiet but for the rhythmic slap of waves against the river banks.

Even in this Eden though, you couldn’t escape the shadow of war.

There were a lot of statues—Atropos University was famous for its visual and performing arts programs—displayed on either side of bridges like bookends, or sprinkled like confetti across the city’s plazas and parks. BattleMechs were a favorite subject, as were birds of prey, the Selaj family (Lesnovo had once been part of the Principality of Regulus), and suffering soldiers atop plinths listing the names of the glorious, fallen dead. There were a lot of those.

It struck me as sad how deep it had wormed its way into our souls, this love affair with death and battle, that when we thought of beauty now, we pictured engines of destruction, the terrible majesty of war machines, Like every moment of peace was just a squalid refractory period while we prepared to plunge in again.

One morning: The man, humming, holding out my espresso (“Heat enough for two”).

“You said you were a pilot?”

I had. Nodded.

“If you need a job, an outfit called the ACES is hiring up in Zletovo, the capital.”

“Huh.” Took the espresso. “Keep it in mind.” I wouldn’t though, I swore. Leave war to its other admirers, those who would sell themselves to with a light conscience and heavy wallet.

The waitress cleaned the table next to mine, met my eyes and smiled, before blushing and looking down. Scrubbing a little harder. I said I had to go, and left my coffee half-finished.

Not strictly a lie—I wanted to do some climbing up in the hills about the city, try to keep in shape. Atropos sits in a narrow V of land, so after just two hours walking I was out of the city and found a hiking trail, a narrow dirt path that scissored its way up the hills and vanished among the thickly-clustered trees.

I’d just reached the tree line when the sirens began to wail all across the city. A screeching caterwaul that rose and fell and echoed down the valley.

I stopped just inside the tree line, shielded my eyes with the flat of my hand and watched the valley below. Nothing. A few scattered ground cars along the main highway had pulled over, tiny dots of passengers standing around in confusion. Someone was making an announcement, some muffled and distorted warning that came to me only as a bass counterpoint to the shrill alarm. The dots scattered, running under bridges or into buildings.

Then I heard it, that familiar rolling boom of aerospace fighter jet engines. Black shadows against the underside of the clouds—squinting, I figured them for F-90s by their V silhouettes. Probably from the garrison, the 8^th Orloff Grenadiers.

There was a blinding flash of blue lightning from the clouds that struck one of the fighters. When I could see again, the two dots were twisting, turning, now joined by two more. Pulses of light flickered back and forth as they circled, slashed, and fell apart again.

“Break left, break left, towards him … left you idiot … “ I found myself urging the Grenadiers on. “Wait, hold your fire, wait until you’re on top of him. Damn.” I punched a tree, then shook my hand ruefully. “Yes, hit him again, again!” My depressed detachment completely forgotten.

The two enemy fighters had taken enough, and dove for the ground, one trailing streaks of grey-white smoke. The Grenadiers tore through the skies close behind. Two more bolts of crackling light, booming like thunder, and the second enemy fighter shattered. An angry red sun blossomed in the sky, a wing came spiraling off, then the plane itself was falling, falling in a drunken helix, plunging down, down. Towards the city. Towards Atropos.

It was a 60-ton fighter, a Hellcat, part of a pirate raiding force. It crashed through three houses—shearing the roof off one, obliterating the second floor of the second before its remaining wing bisected the living room of a third—then plowed on its belly through a convenience store and an Italian restaurant before smashing into the front wall of a shop. The wreck sat for a second, almost like it was thinking, then exploded, a thunderous detonation that shattered every window on the street and reduced the store to a broken, burning tangle. The pilot and two people inside were killed instantly.

From my vantage point on the hill above, all I could see was the line of destruction it carved through the city, and then the night-black mushroom cloud of smoke rising from its final resting place.

I knew I wouldn’t be doing any climbing that day. So I started walking back into the city, back to my room above the coffee shop. Lost sight of the roiling cloud of smoke once or twice with all the buildings around me, but every time I spotted it again it always seemed to grow bigger, nearer.

Couple of blocks away there were clumps of people standing in the road, some with their hands to their mouths, others with them on their hips, talking over each other in random bursts of shock and confusion. Debris was scattered across the streets from damaged houses—roof tiles, broken brick, shattered glass. The smoke almost filled the sky now, blocking out the sun.

Must have hit really close, I thought. Hoped the old man and his daughter were okay.

And then I turned the last corner and saw where the Hellcat had crashed. There was an overturned table in the middle of the road, blown clear by the explosion. A shredded scrap of pink and white cloth hung from one of its legs.

There was a police cordon across the street, a dozen cops with their backs to the crowd, watching the blaze, and a ring of firemen hosing water onto the shattered building. Even at this distance, the fire was intensely hot.

I tugged the arm of one of the policemen, pointing at the inferno. “Was anyone inside?” Knowing the answer already.

The cop turned away from the fire and looked at me. “You family?”

“No, a tenant. I rented a room there.”

“Oh,” he turned back to the fire. “Yeah, two people. Owner and his daughter. Tragic.” (Heat enough for two). A thought occurred and he looked at me again. “You got a place to go?”

War finds us, wherever we go. Like a jealous lover, striking out when it is rejected, finding a new victim. Easier to sink into its embrace, worship its cold and demanding beauty.

I remembered the morning’s conversation. “Yeah. Maybe. Maybe I do.”

EPISODE 3-9: A legion of demons (angels)

Part I

In the present:

If you thought the Steiner-Davion alliance disrupted the political map of the Inner Sphere, spare a thought for what it did to the criminal one. Organized crime follows the paths of people and power, latches onto the veins of influence and money like a leech. Suddenly, new paths were opening between the Commonwealth and the Suns, people and money began moving in new ways, and the New Avalon triads and families, the Tharkad brotherhoods, and every gang in between slashed and clawed at each other in a scramble to the top of the new heap.

In our conflict-addicted times, the heat map of organized crime is nearly identical to one showing military deployments—just as money and power accrete around military commands and contracts, so too does the underworld.

Take either one of those maps (like I said, they are much the same). Zoom in here, in the system of New Avalon: one such point, glaringly white, incandescent even. Zoom in further, until individual grains of power become visible like salt crystals—the capital, the NAIS campus, the Guards Brigade HQ—but look now to the opposite side of the system. There, about the L3 Lagrangian point, on the opposite side of the system’s star from New Avalon.

It was called a SHEL—Space Habitat: Ecliptic/Langrangian—a 24-kilometer long, 6-kilometer diameter rotating cylinder of inhabitable atmosphere, attached to a great bowl of solar sail, and the unofficial black market capital of the New Avalon system.

Our DropShip—Derek Forrest’s Buccaneer—docked with one of the rings around the long tube’s center. Three of us stood in front of the airlock, waiting for it to cycle: Derek, myself, and Reina.

“And the government knows about this place?” Derek was asking.

“Yes, and yet they tolerate it,” said Reina. “Politicians, allowing crime to go unpunished? Shock horror, I know.”

“Some of them are regulars here?” I guessed.

“Those that have … interests you can’t indulge back on NA,” Reina nodded grimly.

“You grew up here?” Derek looked at Reina.

She nodded again.

“No place like home, huh?”

“Thank god.”

The airlock hissed slowly open. On the other side was a small antechamber, filled with about a dozen men. Most were dressed in black fatigues and combat boots, with light impact armor over their chests and upper arms, with stun sticks on one hip and pistols on the other. In the center was a tall, slim man, dressed in a grey suit and black turtleneck, leaning on a cane despite his youthful face. The face was familiar: narrow, angular jaw, aquiline nose, wavy black hair. Very familiar.

I felt Reina beside me suck a sudden breath and go completely rigid.

That man’s familiar face broke into a wide, toothy smile when he saw us. “Sister!” he said, and raised his arms as if to embrace Reina.

Reina stood statue-still. “Lucien,” she said icily.

“Come now, Alys, is that any way to greet family?” He kept his arms raised. “Come on, come on, step aboard, don’t wait for a formal invitation or we’ll all die of old age here. We’re not big on ceremony. So good to see you again. I see you brought your attack dog as well.” This last directed at me.

“Woof,” I agreed, following Reina/Alys through the airlock into the antechamber. “Alys?” I mouthed silently at her. She grimaced and shrugged.

The man named Lucien hobbled forward and enfolded Reina in a hug that she didn’t return. When he broke away, she asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Well, damndest thing, sis,” he grinned at her. “While you’ve been away, I seem to have become boss of the White Tigers. Isn’t that something?” He laughed as if this was quite the strangest coincidence he’d ever heard of. “But let’s not stand here jawing. Travel tubes are up in the hub, I’ll take you to my office and we can do all our catching up there. Oh, but first, your weapons.” Looking pointedly at me again.

A guard stepped forward, metal detector baton in one hand, which he ran up and down me with practiced precision. I slowly handed him my pistol, barrel up—a holdout Nambu needler, like the one I’d used on Galatea—as well as the vibro blade I’d taken from the real Reina. He placed both in a black pouch, which he fitted to his belt at the small of his back.

Lucien led the way, flanked on either side by black-clad guards. Another four fell in behind us, with the other six remaining in the airlock antechamber. From the airlock we went ‘up,’ away from the hull and towards the center of the habitat, climbing in zero gravity through a two-meter wide transparent tube. Looking down, we could see the curve of the habitat’s interior surface, cluttered with ramshackle buildings that seemed to roll endlessly beneath us. Near as I could tell, the landscape seemed to cycle around about once every two minutes or so.

“About 30,000 people, living in a simulated 0.9G down on the hull,” said Lucien, noticing my gaze. “Front and back halves rotate in opposite directions to cancel each other’s gyroscopic forces out. Ah, here we are.”

At the center of the hollow tube of the habitat were the travel tubes, a cluster of eight elevator-like shafts traversing the length of the station from top to bottom. Lucien led us to one labeled “EXECUTIVE,” inserted a card and pressed the button, and waved us inside with a bow and a flourish.

The elevator car was cylindrical, carpeted, with semicircular plush leather sofas arranged about the rim. Looking up at the ceiling, I could see an identical arrangement of furniture there, for when the car accelerated in the other direction. Lucien floated over to one, waved us to another. “We’ll get a touch of gravity when we get underway. Make yourselves comfortable.” Two guards stood by the elevator control panel, two more on either side of Lucien.

Sure enough, acceleration pressed lightly down on us as the car jetted away from the boarding platform, and Lucien crossed his legs with a sigh.

“Nice place you have here,” I offered.

He smiled coldly. “It’s not all drug dens and hitmen—”

“Those are just kind of a hobby, are they?”

“—we have a number of legitimate enterprises run through, aha, ‘shell’ companies.” His mouth quirked in amusement at his own joke.

“Shell companies? SHEL companies? Reina, are you sure you’re related to this guy?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“Oh, between us we can drop that ‘Reina’ nonsense,” he sniffed. “How’ve you been Alys?”

Reina-who-was-Alys sat ramrod straight at the edge of the sofa. “On the run from my murderous doppelganger,” she said. “That was your work?”

He smiled and nodded. “Guilty!”

“You let her off the leash. Why?”

“Why, to bring you back to us, of course, little sister. I knew you’d come back when threatened.”

“Most people just send a postcard,” I offered. He didn’t even glance at me.

“After our late, dearly departed leader accidentally shot himself—such tragedy—I knew I wanted to make some changes,” he explained. “The times are changing, the triads must change with them. This business with the Commonwealth, for instance. We need a toehold on their side of the border. We need muscle to protect it.”

“After what we survived, what we endured as kids under these people,” Reina/Alys shook her head. “After all that, when you climbed to the top you just, what, decided to keep on doing exactly what they had before?”

“Well, now that I’m here, I can see what good sense it all made. Including keeping the real Reina around—always useful to have someone you can wield as a weapon, eh?” he winked at her.

“I think he might be talking about me again,” I put in helpfully.

Reina/Alys sighed and put her fingers to her temples. “What do you want, brother?”

“What do I want?” he repeated. “I want to have my cake, and eat it too. I want stability and continuity, but at the same time I want the Tigers to grow and expand. I want to maintain my position amid the reshuffling and reordering of the landscape that the Federated-Commonwealth alliance will bring. I want an army to enforce and defend that position.”

“And what, you thought she would scare me into joining you? Into agreeing to let you use the Black Arrows?”

Lucien’s smile faded, and he gripped the top of his cane with both hands. “We gave you the best education any human can aspire to, opportunities not one millionth of a percent of people ever experience, dear sister.” Those last words came out between bared teeth. “And how did you repay us? By turning your back on us, by suddenly vanishing into the cosmic night. You owe us, Alys, but more than that, you belong with us.”

“Not anymore.”

“No? Who do you belong with then? This ravening dog you call a lieutenant?” He took one hand from the cane, and waved it in my direction. “Have you seen what he’s been up to in your absence? Have you seen the scores of broken and mutilated bodies he’s used to pave his trail after you? You may think me cruel, little sister, but at least I’m human—he is a monster, a wolf in human skin. Violence follows him like a shadow.”

I shrugged modestly. “Hey, I don’t like to brag.”

The elevator car slowed as it approached the ‘nose’ end of the habitat, opposite the station-keeping thrusters and solar sail. “End of the road,” Lucien said, standing. “Don’t be stubborn now, Alys. Before you said ‘No’ definitively, there’s someone I think you should talk to.”

Reina/Alys reluctantly stood, and I followed. Aware of the guards now standing uncomfortably close.

The elevator doors slid open, revealing another landing platform, two guards. And the grim, red-scarred face of Reina Paradis.

“What the hell is she doing here Lucien?” Reina/Alys gasped, one foot still inside the elevator.

“That depends very much on how our conversation goes. Sister.” Lucien was no longer smiling.

“Aric,” Reina/Alys twisted towards me. “Come on, we’re going back.”

“Oh, I’m afraid your dog isn’t going anywhere,” said Lucien, and nodded to the guards.

Two grabbed Reina/Alys as she howled, stamping down on the foot of one that tried to grab her from behind, twisting under the arm of the other charging from the front, striking him under the chin and sending him reeling back.

And the elevator doors slammed shut, leaving me inside the car with four armed guards. The car pinged politely and dropped away, heading back towards the center of the habitat, and the five of us gently sank towards what had been the ceiling.

“Going down, huh?” I asked, mildly.

“Going to hell.” One of the guards growled, and then the two behind me had each taken hold of one arm and the two in front were drawing their stun sticks.

I threw myself backwards, ramming the two behind me against the elevator glass as the other two charged forward, used the leverage to flip up from the shoulders, one of my feet connecting with a charging guard’s head with a crack, the stun baton from the other whistling beneath me and into the abdomen of the one who’d grabbed my right arm.

The stun stick crackled and spat electricity, jolting the guard into a twitching seizure, letting me wrench one arm free, pivot and slam the heel of my hand against the underside of the jaw of the man still holding my other arm.

The guard I’d kicked was the one who’d taken my gun and knife. They were there, in a pouch on his back as he sat up on the floor, shaking his head woozily. I grabbed it, tearing it away. Then the one who still had his stick was swinging at me again. I ducked, the baton connected with the elevator controls. There was a flash, an electronic shriek and the elevator suddenly juddered to a halt.

Deceleration flung us all into the air. Lost my grip on the bag, watched it go spinning. Tried to swim after it in zero G. It tumbled just beyond my fingertips.

Impact as two guards launched themselves at me from the floor, one catching my legs, the other getting an arm around my chest. Caught a glancing punch along the side of my face. The three of us went whirling, tumbling against the roof, hit, bounced back down into the middle of the elevator car. Back down towards the two with drawn stun sticks, who grinned in anticipation.

Back-up motors kicked in, and the elevator lurched into motion again.

The three of us slammed back down, the guards on my legs and chest underneath, me on top. The impact stunned both of them, let me flip back onto my feet. Something falling—the gun bag. Grabbed it as the other two guards came forward again. No time to open the zipper—just felt for the shape of the vibro-blade inside, hit the power switch. White-hot blade slashed straight through the black material, right into the stomach of the guard nearest guard.

As he blinked, unbelieving, feeling the wound, I got a grip on the knife, stabbed him in the chest, the throat, through the eye. Used the body as a shield as the other one swung at me, let the gasping, dying man take the stun stick blow, then kicked the body away, the two going down in a tangle of limbs.

The other two had drawn their guns, murderous-looking needler pistols. I dropped to the floor as both fired, lips peeled back in pain as three flechettes found my shoulder, hearing the staccato crack as hundreds more quills struck the elevator glass and stuck there, leaving it bristling like a startled porcupine.

My own holdout needler was there on the floor, where it had fallen from the bag. I grabbed it, rolled, fired once from the prone position, tearing one guard’s legs to ribbons. As he dropped I was up, firing, hitting the other in the chest—where the needles simply stuck into the armor without effect—then the head.

One still moaning on the floor, clutching at his knees. I stood over him, fired once, downwards. He stopped moaning. The last one staggered to his feet from under the body of his companion, fumbling at his waist for his gun. Let him look up, see the barrel of the pistol I had pointed at his head. Then pulled the trigger.

The spikes went right through him, pinning the body against the side of the elevator car, left him hanging there like a ragged, blood-drenched scarecrow.

I tossed the now-empty holdout needler away, and then reached up to pluck the three needles from my shoulder, like pulling shards of glass, each coming free with a tiny cloud of blood. Picked up two of the guards’ pistols, stuck one in my waistband, kept the other in my hand.

The emergency system that had activated the back-up motors brought us coasting to a stop at the next travel tube station.

A recorded, feminine voice said, “This car is out of service. Please debark here and change to another tube.” The doors chimed gently open.

I swam out of the car into the micro-gravity of the station, leaving a bubbly wake of blood as I went. A crowd of people looking at me first in puzzlement, then growing horror. Someone screamed, and they began to claw past each other to escape.

I hit the ‘up’ button, then smiled at waved my needler at the three people inside when the doors swished open. “Your stop, I think,” I told them. They scrambled off. The inside was a lot less plush that the executive transit tube, bare floor and ceiling and stirrup-shaped straps around the edge rather than sofas. I punched the button for the top floor.

The station where Reina/Alys and her brother had gotten off was empty. One wall was marked with the distinctive comet-shaped burns left by laser fire. A thin trail of blood led to one of the spoke tunnels connecting the central transit tubes to the outer rim of the station. I floated down cautiously, keeping the needler out in front of me, hauling myself along by my other hand.

Something bumped against the edge of the tunnel up ahead. I made out a foot, black-booted. One of the guards. As I passed him, I saw his throat had been cut. His partner was at the bottom of the tunnel, looking like he’d been attacked by a bear, every inch of exposed skin torn and gashed.

The corridor at the bottom was under gravity, and at the end of it a door. I flattened myself on the bulkhead beside it and pushed it open. An expensive office, waarwood desk, black leather furniture, a rug of something large and tawny. Two feet stuck from behind the desk.

I snapped around the door, covered the corners. Empty. Walked in a wide circle around the desk without getting too close, and saw who lay there.

I sighed, and crouched down beside them. “The conversation went well, I take it?”

Part II

Lucien’s face was grey, his breathing quick and shallow. His stomach and thighs were drenched in blood, which had seeped into the carpet beneath him. The silver handle of a knife still jutted from his chest.

He opened his eyes a crack. “Ah, the attack dog.” His whispered voice came through clenched teeth and panting breaths. “I seem to … have … misjudged how to handle … your breed.” One hand twitched feebly towards the blade in his chest.

“Reina did this, huh?” His only reply was a grimace. “No offense buddy, but I was tempted to do the same thing myself, and I’ve only just met you. I’m guessing she didn’t like your plan to bring your sister back into the fold none. Perhaps a gentler approach?”

He coughed, tried to spit, but all that came out was a thin line of blood, tricking from the side of his mouth and down his cheek. “If you are alive … then you’ve just murdered four men … do not lecture me on gentleness.” He coughed again. “Yes, I used Reina, I used Alys … just as she uses you … Power, winning, those are the only things that matter … the way the world is … I don’t expect a fool like you to understand.”

I sat on my haunches by his side. “Hey look, we could swap insults all day,” I eyed his wounds critically. “Well, I could, maybe not you. So how about we skip all that and you just tell me where they went?”

A flicker of a smile passed across his face. “No, I don’t think so, dog,” he wheezed. “I may have to spend my last minutes talking with an animal … I’ll take the small satisfaction of thwarting you to my grave … after all, you can hardly make things worse.”

I sighed, reached over to the hilt of the knife, and twisted it. Lucien gave a shocked, outraged shriek, his legs kicking feebly on the floor. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this funny old galaxy of ours,” I told him, giving the knife another twist before letting it go. “It’s that things can always be worse. Now: Which. Way. Did. They. Go?”

He cursed me inventively and at length in a number of languages. I reached out for the knife again. “All right, all right,” he hissed. “Reina said she would … destroy the station … something about the engines … Alys went after her.”

Back the way I’d come. Of course. I stood up. Lucien was fumbling for his cane, raising it trembling towards me. I kicked it away irritably, just as he pressed a catch in the handle, firing a beam of brilliant red light from its tip into the ceiling. I pointed my needler at him, but saw the look of eager anticipation on his face. “Sorry, Luce.” Let my arm fall, turned and walked out the office. “Just the way the world is.”

I hadn’t seen Reina—either of them—coming down through the office’s private hub access, so they must have gone out the main entrance. Outside the office were smooth, black-tiled corridors, now filled with knots of people looking at one another in dazed bewilderment. Knew the feeling. Must be on the right track. The few who spared a glance for the bloody-shouldered man carrying a needler quickly dove back into their offices, amid sounds of locks being turned and furniture being piled against the doors.

At the end of the corridor was a wall of glass windows, one of while lay in frosted shards across the floor. One the other side was a wide pedestrian walkway, perhaps two floors above the curving ‘ground’ floor of the habitat on the inside hull surface. Someone was on the ground out there, half-hidden by a forest of legs of passers-by standing uselessly around.

I stepped through the broken window and shouldered my way through the crowd. People pushed back until they saw my face, then parted like the sea. The figure on the ground was a man—thank Unity—one hand clasped to his neck, blood feebly pumping from between his fingers.

I ran on, following in the chaos wake the two women had left, clear as any trail. I dashed across walkways suspended above crowded streets. Ducked and wove among the slow-moving shoppers, locals and tourists. Past neon-lit strip bars and smoky Evoke or Racer dens, dead-eyed users sprawled against the walls outside. The SHEL habitat was a rough place, but luckily this meant most inhabitants had a live-and-let-live policy, and I got dirty looks but little else. Only one man, emboldened by four of his friends backing him up, was brave or foolish enough to put out an arm to stop me.

“Where you going in such a hurrrk!” he said, as he found the muzzle of my needler jammed against his forehead. “Easy now buddy.”

Our little conversation was interrupted by a muffled crackle of laser fire from somewhere up ahead. I just shook my head at the man, withdrew the needler and sprinted on. Across another bridge, around a corner, through an open shopping arcade.

People were streaming back towards me, some flat-out panic-running, others glancing over their shoulders, running because everyone else was, others just shuffling back nervously, unsure if they should be running or not.

“Police!” I tried shouting, but people just looked at me strangely. Right, probably not the best place to try that trick.

Nearly tripped over a man sprawled across the walkway, another black-clad guard, trying feebly to crawl away on his elbows, leaving a red-slick trail behind him. Saw his holster was empty. He might’ve been the one I heard firing, but now someone up there had his gun.

Two figures were on the bridge ahead, kicking, striking at one another. Couldn’t tell who was who, but that was kind of what started this whole thing, wasn’t it? Not like the needler is exactly a sniper’s weapon in any case. I tried to put on a last burst of speed. Watched a kick lash out, get blocked and turned aside. The counterattack caught the other off-guard, drove them to the edge of the bridge, and then over. Clinging to the edge of the bridge by two hands, dangling twenty meters above the ground.

I was close enough now to see the one hanging from the bridge wore Alys’s red jumpsuit, the one standing above her, real-Reina’s black dress. I must have shouted something, because Reina looked up, snarled and raised one foot over Alys’s hands. “No closer,” she yelled. “Shoot me and she dies.”

I halted, needler held outstretched in both hands. “Works both ways,” I shouted back. “If she dies, you’re next.”

“She deserves to die!” the woman screamed. “She stole my name, she stole my life. She left me with these animals! Killing her would be justice.”

I caught Alys’s desperate glance at me. Saw her swing her legs a little from side to side. I took a step forward. Keep Reina focused on me. “Justice?” I repeated, taking another step. “Way I heard it, you did this to yourself. Not her fault you threw your life and privileges away.” Alys swinging her legs in bigger arcs now.

“They were mine to throw away,” she shouted back. “Not another step! Not one more.”

Too soon. We needed more time. I raised my hands slowly, let the needler clatter to the ground. “All right,” I said. “You win. Just let her go.”

Reina’s face split into a wide grin. She reached into her dress—and pulled out a slim, shiny laser pistol. She shot me—

—Alys swinging her legs, hooking one up over the ledge of the bridge—

—ducking, twisting away from the beam, but it still gazed me along the temple, a white-hot line of pain—

—Alys finding her feet—

—me falling, one hand held against my temple, the other finding the second needler in my waistband and throwing it—

—Reina turning, shocked to find Alys behind her—

—Alys catching the needler, turning and firing it right into Reina’s chest—

—hit the ground, half-blinded with pain, seeing only the back of Reina’s dress suddenly balloon out as dozens of ceramic shards tore right through her—

Reina staggered back a step. Tried to bring up her laser pistol, but her arm didn’t seem to work. And then she lost her footing at the edge of the bridge, pitched over, and was gone.

EPISODE 3-10: A fleeting moment in time

In the present:

The trip back to the DropShip is a bit of a haze, on account of the ‘nearly getting my brain laser-fried’ thing. I’m not sure how I managed to put one foot in front of the other, just kept moving forward blindly, like a stone rolling down a hill.

In my nauseous state I thought I could feel every millimeter of motion, the rotation of the grav deck inside the habitat, the orbit of the habitat around New Avalon’s sun, the sun around the galaxy, everything in terribly, unstoppably accelerating, an avalanche of movement. In a weird way that made walking easier—my own tiny vector added next to nothing to the hurtling speed I was already under.

I think Alys had one arm around my shoulder, her head under one arm, and that was the only thing keeping me anchored to the ground, and I clung to her as if I might be torn flying away by the terrific forces clutching at me. I was in awe of her, then. Her arm was around me, which meant she must be moving, tumbling through space just as I was, yet she could walk, seemed miraculously unaffected by the twirling, the rushing of the cosmos.

Alys, I thought, Alys. Focused on that, that tether, that connection. Alys. It was still strange to think of her that way. Must have been saying it out loud.

“Well, what’s your name then?” she asked as we lurched through spinning, fearful crowds. The needler in her hand stopped anyone from asking questions.

“Alex,” I told her.

“Oh, how dull. And far too similar to mine.”

“You can see why I stuck with Aric Glass,” I said, as the deck revolved, revolved, around and around again, unnoticed by everyone. “Little brother couldn’t say Alex, called me Sandy. Sand. Glass.”

“Brother, huh?” she asked.

I nodded and immediately regretted it, each bounce of my neck causing my vision to white out in a blinding flash of pain. The habitat hurtled heedlessly through space at over 100,000 kph, taking me with it.

“He’s not, um, the leader of any organized crime syndicates is he?”

I blinked a couple of times, until my vision focused again. “He was 15 last time I saw him. So unless he was amazingly precocious, no.”

“That’s a relief.” We walked in silence for a few minutes. “Did you … was Lucien …”

“I’ve seen people who looked healthier.” I winced as a step sent a jarring crackle of pain up the side of my face. New Avalon’s sun corkscrewed through the void, uncaring. “Been to better family reunions, too.”

“Ah, but have you been to any worse?”

“Not that I can recall,” I admitted. “Look, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be,” she said wearily. “Lucien took lessons in brotherly affection from Anton Marik and learned everything he knew about serenity and calmness from Redjack Ryan. Would be nice if everyone’s family was a haven, but we can’t all be so lucky.”

“You still have the unit.”

“I still have the unit,” she agreed. “It’ll be a relief to have everyone who is trying to kill me armed only with 100-ton death machines. Hope Nova’s taken good care of them.”

“Summer is Duke Lestrade’s personal fief,” I said. “How much trouble could they get themselves into?”

Alys just cocked her head and looked at me.

“Right. Better get back soon.”

That feeling again, of dreaded, unstoppable movement, of floating at the edge of a vast, inescapable maelstorm. Some monolithic force dipped a finger in the fabric of the universe and stirred, whirling us all about in its wake, and nobody seemed to mind. Somebody stop the universe, I want to get off.

Derek Forrest was waiting for us in the airlock antechamber, wearing his perpetual look of mild distress, a laser rifle held casually in his arms and four dead guards at his feet.

“Thank Unity,” Alys smiled. “Thought you might have left without us.”

“Are you kidding me?” Forrest grinned back. “You guys are practically family now.”

Alys’s smile disappeared and Forrest looked at me in confusion.

“What? What did I say?”