Baen Books

Free Stories 2019

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

The Testimony of the Traitor Ratul © 2019 by Larry Correia

Today I Remember © 2019 by Martin L. Shoemaker

Extracurricular © 2019 by Wm. Mark Simmons

Waiting for the Talisman © 2019 by P.C. Hodgell

Voodoo Magic © 2019 by Robert Buettner

Burners © 2019 by Matt McHugh

Treason Properly © 2019 by J.J. Cragun

Talk Girl © 2019 by Wil McCarthy

Weeping Willikers © 2019 by Aaron Michael Ritchey

A Visit to the Galaxy Ballroom © 2019 by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Next Giant Leap © 2019 by Patrick Chiles

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The Testimony of the Traitor Ratul

Larry Correia

I have been called many things, like Ratul the Swift, or Ratul Without Mercy, and much later I was known as Ratul the Mad, or Ratul the Traitor. I have held many offices, most notably the rank of Master within the Protector Order, a title reserved for only the fiercest defenders of the Law. Yet that mighty office paled in importance to my illicit calling, when the Forgotten appointed me the Keeper of Names. I gave up one of the mightiest stations in the land to become a fugitive, and did so gladly, for I truly believe the gods are real.

Some say I am a fool, and all say that I am a criminal. Religion is illegal, preaching, as I have done, is punishable by death. My time will come. I embrace my fate, for they are the fools, not I. It is the world which has forgotten the truth. Soon they will be forced to remember, and it will be a most painful event.

Yes, I have been called a great many things, from heroic leader and master swordsman to fanatical rebel and despicable murderer, but young Ratul Memon dar Sarnobat was a kind-hearted child, nothing at all like the jaded killer I would become.

Those years are long distant now. I was born on the moors south of Warun, second son of a vassal house, and second sons of the first caste are commonly obligated to serve the Capitol for a period of time. It is said the houses keep their eldest close to prepare them to inherit and rule, but offer the rest of their children to the Capitol to demonstrate their total commitment to the Law. In truth, it is in the hope we can secure offices of importance within the various orders to siphon wealth and favors back to our families, but I was naïve then, and did not yet understand the hypocrisy and rot within our system.

Young Ratul dreamed of being obligated to the Historians Order to maintain the relics in the Capitol Museum, or perhaps the Archivists Order, to spend my days organizing the stacks of the Great Library, for young Ratul loved stories and books. I also had a great talent for music and dance, as did all in my house, but I was the most graceful child. Perhaps I would be best obligated to an artisan’s school, and go on to compose great plays? Maybe I would be an Architect, raising mighty monuments to the Law, or something odd and secretive like the Astronomer, tracking the moons and cataloging the sky? Regardless of where I was obligated, I looked forward to living in the magnificent Capitol, where it was said all the women were beautiful, the food was rich, and the waters pure and free of demons.

As a gangly boy with thin arms, a narrow chest, and a sensitive disposition, it never even entered my mind that I might be obligated to one of the militant orders. Only upon the flag of Great House Sarnobat is the wolf, and such a cunning predator is a fitting symbol for the family which mine was vassal to. I shall not delve into the petty house politics which resulted in my obligation going to the Protector Order, but basically, my father had given some inadvertent insult to our Thakoor. Thus it amused our leader to give me to the most infamous order of all, the brutal enforcers of the Law, where it was common for their young obligations to die in their unforgiving training program.

I recall my mother sobbing as I left our house, because she knew in her heart that her soft summer born child would fail and die miserably.

At fourteen years old—which by the way, is a little old to become a Protector acolyte—I traveled, not to the glorious and wealthy Capitol, but to the austere and miserable Hall of the Protectors, near the top of the world, high in the unforgiving mountains of Devakula, in the distant frozen south. I was despondent the entire journey there. All I knew of the Protectors were that they did nothing but pursue and execute lawbreakers. . . . That, and they were one of the few orders whose members were not allowed to wed until their obligation was fulfilled, so they lived a life of stoic solitude. At that age I was a silly romantic, so the idea of being bereft of female companionship until my obligation was done filled me with dread. My service was to last for a period of no less than ten years. And let us be honest, the odds of me surviving ten years of murderous village-burning butchery were slim as my waist.

We crossed a great many narrow bridges over deep chasms on the way to the Hall in Devakula, and I contemplated hurling myself off of every single one. Those I travelled with would surely tell my family it was an accident, for slipping on ice and falling to your doom—though ignominious—was a more honorable end that suicide. Hitting the sharp rocks would’ve been a much faster end . . .

Except it was during this journey that I found I possessed a great stubbornness, for I would not give my Thakoor the satisfaction of expiring so quickly. To the ocean with him.

Though he was the focus of my great hate at the time, honestly, I can no longer even remember my Thakoor’s face—he is as forgotten by me as the gods are to man—but that initial spark of defiance which flickered into being on a swaying bridge high in those mountains has remained with me ever since.

Decades later, that tiny spark would grow into a great roaring fire.

Later that fire would help ignite a conflagration which would threaten to burn the entire world . . . But I get ahead of myself. Gather close my children. I must tell you how I believed in those days, for I still had much to learn.

The Law required there to be three great divisions within our society, the caste that rules, the caste that wars, and the caste that works. Every man has a place. Some said that there was a fourth division, meaning those without caste, but such speech could be considered subversive, for the Law declares that the casteless are not really people at all.

The first caste is the smallest, yet obviously the most important of all whole men. They are the judges and the arbiters of the Law, the members of the various Orders of the Capitol, and the Great House families.

Each Great House has an army to defend its interests. These are the warrior caste. They are more numerous than the first, yet far fewer than the third. I thought of them as a bloodthirsty, boisterous lot, with their own odd customs and a peculiar code of honor, but they were kept in check by the Law and the will of their Great House.

The worker caste was the greatest in number, yet the simplest in direction. They exist to labor. The structure provided by the Law and the wisdom of my caste had shaped Lok into a land of industry and wealth. It was the worker who dug the coal, weaved the cloth, and grew the crops. They paid taxes to the first caste, and paid again for the warriors to defend them, but in turn they required payment for their toil and their goods, for the callous worker is often more motivated by greed than allegiance to the Law.

The castes are the great division, but there are many—perhaps innumerable—lesser divisions beyond that, for each caste had a multitude of offices and ranks, and only members of that particular caste could hope to decipher where they all stood in relation to each other. Every duty or achievement bestowed status upon the individual who held it, and status determined everything else. A miner and a banker were of the same caste, only one could sleep in a mansion and the other in a hovel, yet both would bow their head in deference to the lowliest vassal house arbiter, for he was closer to the Law.

Usually caste was determined by birth, but on rare occasions the Law might require a man to be assigned to a new caste. I’d heard of a particular worker who’d shown great strength, who the warriors had claimed, and in the opposite direction, of an inept and cowardly warrior who’d been ordered to trade his sword for a shovel. A particularly brilliant man could be promoted into the first, but a member of the first would cut his wrists in shame rather than accept the humiliation of leaving his caste.

It turned out my new order was one such place where warriors could become members of the first, albeit temporarily, for when their obligations ended they would return to their place. It was during my induction ceremony that I stood among children of the warrior caste for the first time. Every one of them, even the ones who were two or more years younger, were far bigger and stronger than I. To the Protectors, the new acolytes were all equally nothing. For the first time in my life, the status I had been born with had become utterly meaningless.

Our training began. Previously I had thought that I understood what hardship was. That had been a delusion. The Hall was as grey and stark as my house was bright and colorful. I’d lived in a land of song, but our only song in the Hall was groans of weariness and cries of sudden pain. Our instruments were wooden swords. Our drums were our sparring partner’s helms.

Over and over we were broken, physically and mentally, and constantly remade, not just with muscle and brain, but also with magic. It is said Protectors are more than man. This is true. I shall speak no further about this, for there are some vows which even the vilest traitor still holds dear.

I know now that the program is a thing of beauty. It is so cruel not because the Protectors hate their acolytes, but because we love them. Great suffering prepared us to overcome any obstacle, to face any challenge without flinching, even unto death.

The Order is not so different from the gods in that respect.

As I’d been warned, many of the acolytes perished. However, I would not be among them. For despite being the weakest of the acolytes, I was also the angriest, and in my heart was a great capacity for hate. Hate fueled me. It kept me warm through the cold nights, and every night in Devakula is cold.

At first my hate was directed at that now forgotten Thakoor, who had robbed me of my dreams of idle comfort. Then my hate shifted to the few acolytes who saw in my frail form a victim to be bullied. Tormenting me provided them a temporary distraction from their own torment. But the stupid and morally weak do not last long in the program, so after I outlived those, I needed a new outlet for my hate.

Thus I began to hate the enemies of the Law.

It was the reasoning of a bitter young man. If criminals did not exist, then there would be no need for the Protector Order. If every man kept to his assigned place and did as he was told, then those of us obligated to the militant orders would be free. When it came time for the acolytes to be given lessons in the application of the Law, I excelled, as I always pronounced unhesitating condemnation upon every infraction, and I unfailingly recommended the harshest sentence allowed.

My teachers thought it was because I was smart enough to grasp the nuances of the Law, that I was impartial and calculating as a Protector should be. This was not the case. I was filled with hate. Luckily for me, so was the Law.

It is curious that it is the softest ore which can be forged into the hardest steel. After three years of training my long limbs had turned wiry strong and my already quick mind became sharper. Most beneficially I discovered that the unconscious rhythm and grace of the dancer was not so different from the timing and agility required to master the sword.

Upon obtaining the rank of Senior Protector I went forth into the world to dispense cruel justice.

It turned out that I was rather good at it.

This was the era in which I became widely known as Ratul Without Mercy. None were as devoted as I. Wherever I was assigned, criminals became afraid. From the jungles of Gujara to the plains of Akershan, I spilled blood. I shall spare you the litany of the many sins I committed in the name of the Law. It is a long list, and we have not the hours left before dawn.

Upon my tenth year, my mandatory obligation expired. I had the choice, retire and return to the house where my service had brought them great honor, to do any of the many artistic or intellectual things I had once aspired to, have a marriage arranged for me, create my own house, and raise my heirs . . . or voluntarily continue as a Protector.

Strangely enough, this was not a difficult decision, and I remained with the Order. I’d never have a wife to love me. I would make do with the loveless company of vapid pleasure women whose names and faces were forgotten the next day. I would never have heirs. There would be no sons to carry my name. I would never have a house of my own. The only symphonies I composed were the sounds of battle and my instrument was my sword. I had forgotten how to dream, but I had not forgotten how to hate. I knew that for every criminal I’d executed there was another still in hiding, and I would not be able to rest until every last lawbreaker was dead.

For a righteous hate can be addictive as the poppy.

It was as Protector of the Law, Eleventh Year Senior, that I Ratul encountered the lawbreaker who would start me on my path of rebellion. Of the many types of criminals Protectors hunted—rebels, rapists, murderers, unlicensed wizards, smugglers of bone and black steel, and so forth—none were more hated than religious fanatics, for it was those who practiced illegal religions who were the most nefarious. The others were motivated by things most of us could understand because we’d felt glimmerings of them in our weakest moments, like greed, lust, or jealousy. But the fanatic was motivated by something inscrutable, a belief in invisible forces and imaginary beings. Such foolishness was infuriating to the Law-abiding man.

For many weeks I had searched for this particular fanatic in the hill country of Harban. There had been reports of a nameless man—probably of the worker caste—going about and preaching of gods and prophecies, trying to rouse the people to rebel. As was usual with these types he’d found some success among the casteless. I thought of the non-people as gullible, and a few of them had risen up and struck down their overseer, proclaiming their actions as “the will of the Forgotten” even as the hangman’s noose had been put around their neck.

I’d killed many such fanatics. I expected this one to be cut from the same cloth. A raving lunatic, bug eyed and foaming at the mouth, filthy and unkempt, leaping about and cursing me with the wrath of his unseen gods, but when I finally tracked down my prey, I found a calm, soft-spoken scholar instead. Not of the worker caste as alleged, but like me, born of the first. He didn’t live in a muddy cave, or a hollowed-out tree. He lived in a small but sturdy cottage, on a hill overlooking the city of Lahkshan.

Unlike most—guilty or innocent—who answer a knock at their door and discover a Protector waiting this man showed no fear. If anything, he seemed resigned, as if weary from his labor. He was just old enough to be a grandfather, no more. There was a sadness in his eyes. I remember this clearly.

“Come in, Protector,” said he without preamble.

I had no time for foolishness or a fanatic’s tricks. The cottage was humble, but big enough to conceal several enemies. He made no comment upon my drawing my sword as I followed him inside.

There was no rebel ambush waiting therein, just a cot, a pair of comfortable looking chairs, a kettle warming on the small stove, and a shelf full of actual books. That, I marveled at, because it would still be another year before the Order of Technology and Innovation approved the sale of printing presses. Only men of the wealth and status could obtain such a library in those days, and those were usually prominently displayed in a Great House, not a one room abode in the hills.

I had not even declared the charges against him, when the fanatic declared, “I am guilty of all the crimes you suspect, and probably more. I will not resist, and I accept my punishment without protest.”

“The penalty for proselytizing is death.”

He simply nodded. Even though I was about to slay him, this fanatic was so polite that I almost felt bad for not taking off my shoes before entering his home.

Curious, I went to the shelf and started checking the books. Some of them were new, approved volumes purchased from the Great Library of the Capitol, but others appeared to be ancient. I opened one of those, gently, for its binding felt as if it might crumble to dust. I skimmed a few pages, at first thinking it was a history of some kind, and instead discovered the most heinous of crimes. These were religious tomes.

They were scriptures. There was nothing more illegal in the world.

I dropped the book as if it had burned my fingers. “Saltwater!”

“Though still forbidden, these are not originals, Protector. Those rotted away long ago. These are copies of copies, handed down in secret.”

“Why would you keep such terrible things?”

“To learn about our past and our nature. The people of Lok had many different religions before the demons fell from the sky, each believing different things. I have gathered the holy books of several of those over my travels. The books disagree on more things than they agree, but all are fascinating in their own way.”

I’d seen the various rough-hewn idols of the fanatics scattered about Lok; the four-armed man, the elephant headed man and his mouse, the smiling fat man, and I’d broken each one I’d found, but I’d never before seen one of their books, because the Order of Inquisition had burned most of them long ago.

“I am curious, Protector. You’ve not yet set my home to the torch.”

“Oh, I will.”

“I know, but you hesitate. I have a feeling that you are a student of history.”

He had guessed well. “As much as the Law allows.”

“Then that is why you wait. May I ask of what house you were before joining your Order?”

I do not know why I answered truthfully, but I had never before engaged a madman in a conversation. “Sarnobat. Of the vassal house Memon.”

“Ah!” The fanatic went to the shelf and picked out a particular book. “Your people were a rare minority in old Lok. This was the holy book your ancestors used.” Upon its cover was a crescent moon and a star. I’d seen such a symbol before, in my childhood, when a farmer had unearthed an old stone, and the Inquisitors had come and smashed it to dust with hammers. He held the book out to me, like he was offering a gift, but I did not take it. Seemingly disappointed, he put the illegal tome back on the shelf. “Of course, you would not want that one anyway, Protector. That is not why you are here.”

“I’m here to execute you for violations of the Law.”

“You are here because the Forgotten wanted you to be. There were many religions before, but only one that mattered after the demons came.” He picked out a different book, bound in grey, narrower than the others. I did not accept it either, but he left it standing alone. “This one is a copy of a book written during the Age of Kings, from after the demons were driven back into the sea. The Forgotten wants you to have it.”

Genuinely baffled, I asked, “All these gods are forgotten now, so why speak of this one as it its special?”

“I did not choose him. He chose me. And now he has chosen you.”

I grew tired of this talk. The time had come. He did not so much as cringe as I raised my sword.

I could not help but ask, “Why are you not afraid?”

“Because in a dream the Forgotten showed me the man who would claim my burden and my life. Farewell, Ratul.”

I had never told the fanatic my name.

Strangely enough, I did not hate this man. I stabbed him in the heart because it was expected of me, but I did not hate him.

I would have returned quickly to my duties, but the hour was late, and a cold rain had begun to fall, so I decided to spend the night in the fanatic’s cottage and return to Lahkshan in the morning. I ate the fanatic’s dinner of curried goat, and sat in his comfortable chair, as he lay dead on his floor.

My sleep was plagued with strange dreams. I awoke with a great unease.

My eyes kept drifting back to the shelf, and that book. Not the one of my ancestors, but the strange grey one which had come after. A sick curiosity gnawed at the back of my mind. Part of me desired to read this lurid tale from the Age of Kings, an era whose records were declared mostly off limits to us. The Law was clear that I should not so much as let my eyes touch those pages, but I have already established that I was not a being of Law, but rather a being of hate.

I’d dealt with fanatics before, but I had never once been tempted to understand their superstitions beyond what I needed to know to better kill them. The Law said I should not, but my defiance said I should. I’ve fought many battles, but none were more difficult than the one I faced that night as I tried to decide between looking inside and placing it in the stove. Eventually I decided I would look briefly, and then I would burn it, so it could tempt me no more.

I lit an oil lamp and retrieved the book.

The brief glance I allowed myself stretched into hours as I read all through the night.

It was the forbidden history of our people, and all that came before. It did not read like the ramblings of madmen, or the lies of charlatans. I was pulled along, seemingly against my will, as I read of things strange, yet somehow familiar.

It struck me as true, and that was troublesome.

The book told of what had been, what was, and what would be. How we would rise, and fall, and rise, and fall again. It was in that last section, filled with dire prophecies, that I stopped, suddenly afraid, as I realized that centuries ago, this writer had been writing about me.

I speak not of generalities, or vague mumbling that could be about anyone if you squinted hard enough, but of a man without mercy, enforcer of an unjust code. Who would stab a faithful servant in the heart and then read this very book while sitting next to his cooling corpse.

Suddenly furious, I threw the book on the floor. Then I dashed the oil lamp against the wall, setting the cottage ablaze. I stormed outside . . . Only to be tempted to rush back in to try and save that damnable book. But I did not, and instead watched the cottage burn to the ground. Once I was satisfied all was ash, I walked back to Lahkshan in the dark and rain.

In the days that followed I devoted myself to the Law, and did my best to forget all that I had read. Ratul Without Mercy was the scourge of criminals everywhere. Rebels and fanatics fell to my sword.

Yet no matter how hard I worked, or how many criminals I killed, I could not shake the feeling that book had imparted to me. My dreams were haunted. If they were visions from forgotten gods, or figments of my imagination, I could not tell. I told no one, not even my closest friends in the Order, about what was troubling me.

As the years went on, I saw more distressing things, events which could be taken as signs of dire prophecies, indicators of a looming apocalypse. If the book was true, and if the prophecies were true, then drastic action had to be taken soon or man was doomed.

I had been taught that before the Law, there was only madness. That it had been created by the first judges to save Lok from the chaos that was the Age of Kings. The Law was all encompassing. All things are subject to the Law. Even the demons of hell must obey. They remain in the sea and man stays upon the land. Those who violate are guilty of trespass and will be punished.

But the Law could give me no answer. Merely voicing my concerns would have resulted in me being hung upon the Inquisitor’s Dome to cook to death beneath the sun, my flesh devoured by vultures, and my bones swept into a hole. Though my faith in the Law was shaken, my loyalty to my Order remained strong, for I loved my brothers. There is a kinship that can only be found in hardship. Yet even among them, there was none who I could confide in. To do so was to condemn them as I was condemned.

I began to question my assumptions and everything I believed. I required knowledge. Using my status as a Protector I was able to access parts of the Museum and the Great Library which were off limits to all but a select few. In secret I studied the black steel artifacts which had survived the Age of Kings. I consulted with the Historians. I learned what the Astronomers were really watching for. My desperate search across the Capitol was a grotesque version of the dreams once held by Young Ratul.

My sustaining hatred did not die, but once again shifted its aim. My fixation became the judges who had kept us from the truth for hundreds of years. I began to despise the Capitol for the things it had me and my brothers do. As I lost respect for those who wrote and interpreted the Laws, I began to delve into more forbidden areas of research.

It was in a cavern, deep beneath the world, that I met a giant. I speak not of a large man, like Protector Karno who stands a head above most, but of a true giant. Ten feet tall, with skin blue as a Dasa, who’d slept through the centuries, but had been born when kings still ruled.

The giant told me of a place in the steaming jungles of Gujara. There I sought out a legendary temple with carvings upon the wall where the last oracle of the Forgotten had prophesied of those who would be gathered to once again lead the Sons of Ramrowan in the final battle against the demons. There were three old symbols—the Priest, the Voice, and the General—representing those who must be found. Then more symbols, vague warning of some of those who would stand against the Forgotten’s chosen, such as the Crown, and the Mask, and then the Demon, the last of which surely represented the entire host of hell.

In the distant south, in the coldest winter, I waited until the ice froze enough for me to walk across the ocean without being eaten by sea demons, so that I could knock upon the impenetrable gates of Fortress. They tried to blast me to pieces with their terrible magic before I convinced them that I too was a seeker of truth. I spoke with the guru and discovered that I was not alone in preparing for the end.

Yet, doubts remained.

Despite all my quests for forbidden wisdom into the darkest corners of Lok, the truth was finally revealed to me, not by a wall in a distant jungle temple or a fantastical being, but by one of my fellow Protectors. For it was I, Ratul, twenty-five-year master of the Protector Order, who discovered the secret identify of one of our acolytes. A secret which would shake the very foundations of our society should it be revealed, for a lowly casteless had been chosen to bear the most powerful magic in the world.

It took this clear fulfillment of prophecy to finally convince me, and through conviction at last came my conversion.

The prophecies were real. The gods were real.

It took more research before I was certain that this boy was meant to be the Forgotten’s warrior. I could never tell him who he really was. To do so would be to destroy him. And selfishly, in the meantime, I did not wish to deprive the Protectors of this powerful weapon which had revitalized and strengthened our waning order.

As I tell you that tonight, I know it seems senseless that even after being converted I would still try to help the very order which has done so much harm to the faithful. They may be misguided by the Law, but the Protectors are the best of men. They do more good than harm. Though they despise me now, and they will surely take my life soon, they remain my brothers.

After that I lived two lives simultaneously, Lord Protector beneath the eyes of the Law, and rebellious criminal in the shadows. While I still have faith the gods would show the General his path, it was my duty to search for the Voice and the Priest. I carefully checked every report from my Protectors involving religious fanatics. I did everything I could short of revealing my treachery to save what worshippers I could, ordering my men elsewhere, giving faulty intelligence, or even sneaking messages to the faithful to run.

That was how I found the genealogy and secretly became the Keeper of Names.

It was twelve long years after my conversion before I found the Voice in Makao. Yes, children, a true prophet walks amongst us once again. For their safety, I will not speak here of this person’s identity, but the Voice lives, and I give you my word that the Voice is real. The Forgotten speaks to us, and he requires great things of us before we may have our reward.

Unfortunately there were witnesses to my discovery. Word of that event spread to my Order. I was required to explain my actions. Why had Ratul Without Mercy spared the life of an illegal wizard? I told the closest friend I’ve ever had the truth.

He turned his back on me.

My treachery was at last revealed, and I had to flee.

My name is worth saltwater. I am the most hated man in the history of the Protectors . . . for now.

I have hidden among the casteless and continued my search. It is here, in the borders of Great House Uttara, that I believe I have finally found the Forgotten’s High Priest. He is clever, but driven by anger and bitterness, like I once was. Yet it is his ambition which will finally free our people.

We are out of time.

##

Ratul had suddenly looked to the south, eyes narrowed dangerously. She knew that Ratul’s senses—augmented by the magic of the Protector Order—were far superior to anyone else present. Maybe he had smelled the smoke of the burning barracks, or the blood of warriors being shed. Perhaps he heard the screams of the dying as the casteless attacked the warriors.

“That damned fool,” Ratul muttered, sounding now like the tired old man that he was. “I must go and save his life. Farewell.”

He said that not to the mob of dirty casteless who had been clustered around him, listening intently to his story, but to her. His testimony was really intended for her alone. These casteless did not know it yet, but they would probably all be dead by morning, caught up in the bloody purge which would follow Keta’s inevitably failed rebellion.

She would live, as she always did.

Ratul rushed out the door of the shack. She got up and followed. There was a faint orange glow in the distance as the arson fires spread.

“There is a Protector there,” she warned him.

“I know. I can sense the magic in his blood.”

“Does it tell you which one?”

“No, but I suspect who it will be . . .” Ratul turned back to face her, grim. “Since my treachery was revealed, each night as I have dreamed, the Forgotten has shown me the same vision. I am wading through waist deep snow, in the mountains of Devakula, and I know that I am being pursued by a mighty predator. It is one of the great southern bears, white as the snow, powerful and proud. In the dream, there is no escape. And every night, the bear gets closer and closer. Last night, it was so near I could feel the hot breath upon my neck, and when I looked up, it had a bloody scar across its face.”

“Devedas.” She knew of him, but she knew a great many things, more even than Ratul. “Then if you go, you will surely die.”

“There was one thing I did not speak of tonight. The last prophecy in that book I read in that dead man’s cottage all those years ago, that enraged me so. It foretold my death, cut down by a man I’d love as a son, who would love me more than his own father . . . That knowledge . . . comforts me.” The condemned man smiled. “I have no hate left.”

“May the gods lift you, Ratul of many names.”

“Thank you for all of your help, Mother Dawn.”

Then Ratul went to seal his testimony with his blood.

* * *

This story is set in the world of Larry Correia's high fantasy The Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series. Larry Correia is an avid gun user and advocate, and shot on a competitive level for many years. Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a military contract accountant, and a small business accountant and manager. He is the creator of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times best-selling Monster Hunter series, with first entry Monster Hunter International, as well as urban fantasy hardboiled adventure saga the Grimnoir Chronicles, with first entry Hard Magic, and epic fantasy series The Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, with first entry Son of the Black Sword and latest entry, House of Assassins. Correia lives in Utah with his wife and family.

Today I Remember

Martin L. Shoemaker

Today I remember. I hate days like this.

But the show must go on. What would old Greasy Pete think if I sat around wallowing in my memory? Memory’s a gift. The reason why I got the damn implant.

But it’s experimental, they say. It only does so much, and some days it doesn't do much at all. Some days I forget more than I remember. Forget . . . what I've lost.

But good day or bad, you gotta do your act, Pete says in my head. That I almost never forget, not even before the implant. The doctors can never explain why some memories are stronger than others, even on the bad days. They say it’s just part of how things are stored, whatever the hell that means.

And they also said it was getting worse, that I was forgetting more and more. And that the implant might help with that. They said that without it, I was going to lose . . . everything. All the older memories, everything I'd grown up with. I was going to lose Pete. Lose . . . Eric, and Anna. Lose the show.

And that was why I’d agreed to be a trial subject for the implant. Somebody has to remember the circus.

No wallowing! I get out of bed, throwing off the thin white covering. I’m still competent enough to take care of myself, damn it. I'm not like some of the other folks in Creekside Home. I can dress myself and feed myself.

And take care of myself. Gotta keep in shape. I turn to the battered old dresser next to the curtain. On the other side of that curtain Bo lies snoring. He sleeps most of the time these days, and I worry about him. How long will he be around?

That’s one problem with remembering: I can't forget my roommates, none of them. Bo, and before him Leon, and before him . . . Curtis. That's right, Curtis. He was one of the good ones. Curtis got better, good enough to move out of Creekside Home and into assisted living across the street. He still comes to visit, some days. Which is more than I can say for Eric.

Damn it. Don't remember Eric. Don't remember how many months it's been since he's visited. It's work, Papa, he says. I have to go where the job is. And besides . . . the home can take care of you. Better than . . . better than I can.

I remember the shame on his face. I miss my boy, but I don't miss making him sad like that.

I pull out clean clothes, and I start to change. I'm standing there, bent over, bare ass in the air, when the door opens. Nurse Cindy says, “Excuse me, Luke!” and she shuts the door.

I chuckle at that. She’s still new, still embarrassed at a patient running around naked. What kind of nurse gets embarrassed by that? Not like old Nurse Ratched, who doesn't even blink when she walks in on me. Nor when I make a joke about it.

I put on my shorts, and then I sit on the bed to pull on my socks. I don't have to. My body's as good as ever, my reflexes almost still good enough for the show. But I make the nurses twitch. So many of the folks here in the home are fall risks, and they treat us like we all are. They give us these damn socks with the no-slip bubbles on the bottom; and they watch like hawks, waiting for us to do something dangerous.

I pull on my sweatpants and a T-shirt, and I open the top drawer and look inside.

The sack is missing.

“Nurse Ratched!” I storm out the door. “Nurse Ratched, where are my damn balls?”

Nurse Cindy rushes out from Mrs. Carruthers’s room next door. “Mr. Lucas—”

“I want my balls! Nurse Ratched said I could keep my balls, keep juggling, if I didn't try to do any acrobatics. I haven't done a single handstand! Where is Nurse Ratched?”

“It's Nurse Rayburn, Mr. Lucas,” a voice says behind me, “and I have your balls.”

I turn and look at the senior nurse, young and kinda pretty, with that white uniform and the blue sweater and the dark hair tucked under the cap. Today I remember her real name; but I also remember how much it annoys her when I call her Nurse Ratched. And annoying her is some of the only amusement I get around here.

“May I have my balls, please?” I hold out my hand, and she hands over the old burlap sack.

“Carlos was washing them,” she says. “They were pretty muddy after last time. You really shouldn't go outside when it's wet.”

I look at the bright sunlight shining in through the window at the far end of the hall. “It’s dry today,” I say with a grin. “Oh please, Nurse Ratched, pretty please, may I go out and juggle today?”

She grins. She’s in a good mood today. “Yes, Mr. Lucas, go ahead and juggle. But be careful!”

I feel the three hard plastic balls through the fabric of the sack. Geez, they're too light to hurt anybody; but I suspect that I pushed her too far for today. “I'll be careful, I promise.”

Then a small, fragile voice speaks from the door beside mine. “Luke, can I come watch?”

“You'll have to ask Nurse Ratched, Mrs. Carruthers,” I say.

Nurse Ratched turns to Nurse Cindy, who answers, “She's finished her breakfast.”

From the room, Mrs. Carruthers adds, “I ate in my chair today, Nurse Rayburn!”

“Is she dressed?” Nurse Ratched asks.

“Yes, I am.”

Cindy nods in agreement. Nurse Ratched nods in response. “All right, when Cindy's done with her rounds, she'll wheel you out to watch Mr. Lucas rehearse.”

“To hell with that,” I reply. I tuck the neck of the sack in my waistband, and I squeeze past Cindy and into the room. Mrs. Carruthers cackles as I grab the controls of her wheelchair, spin it around, and wheel her towards the door.

“Beep, beep!” Mrs. Carruthers says, and Cindy bolts out of the way. I wheel the chair out into the hall as fast as it will move.

Behind me, Nurse Ratched shouts, “Not so fast!” But Mrs. Carruthers laughs, and I join her.

Maybe not such a bad day after all.

I don't really have to push the chair, of course. Even a bargain-basement facility like Creekside can afford chairs that run themselves, on voice control or a little stick thing you push. They’re smooth, and can travel over bumps and curbs in just about any terrain.

But Mrs. Carruthers is rated as a high fall risk. Her chair will go anywhere she wants in the home, but not outside. Not unattended. So when I take the handles, it knows she's got company, and it won't stop at the door. And it'll let me override the speed controls: an attendant sometimes has to get a patient someplace in an emergency, after all.

The parking lot is empty. I remember that today; but on my bad days it's a surprise that the lot is always empty, that few of us ever get visitors. The temporary cases get them a lot, the folks with head injuries who will be in here for a couple of days, a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two. Their families come all the time, sometimes every day. Sometimes a whole batch. Patients even bring them to dinner, joining everyone in the big dining hall. That delights the rest of us, giving us new people to talk to—when they’ll talk to us.

But most of them stop attending dinner, eventually, when they realize we tell the same old stories, over and over. Some leave because their loved ones have gone home. And some stop showing up when they realize that their loved ones aren't leaving. That their loved ones . . . that we are what their loved ones are going to become eventually. Memory patients, forgetting most stories, and constantly retelling the ones we do remember.

That's when they get discouraged. That's when the visits get farther and farther apart.

That was when Eric stopped coming. I remember now. That last fight, he felt so awful, so guilty. And I . . . I was in no mood to make it easier on him. If I had . . . If I had gotten mad, too, I could have . . . driven him away. He would’ve had that as an excuse, that we just didn't get along anymore.

But I was cruel. I hadn't realized it then, only later. I was quiet, understanding, accepting. Eric was moving away, he had to. I . . . I made him. Well, not me, but the cost of my care. The home . . . Even with Medicare, even with my small policy that Anna had scrounged and saved for . . .

Anna. I miss her. She'd always been the smarter one of us. She'd had to remember things like finances and planning. Show folk didn't often have insurance. Oh, I know what the law says; and if anybody checked our books, it would say we were in compliance. But the show takes care of our own. We don't rely on the rubes and the grifters and the slick gentlemen to tell us how to run things. We take care of our own.

And they do, a little. I still get a check every month. The show folded long ago, not many years after my accident. Oh, not because they lost me. I was always a minor act between the big draws. The show must go on, even when it loses an acrobat. And while the show was a going concern, the checks had been bigger.

But even today, the checks arrive, every month. A small amount from Governor Kilgore. He's gotta be paying that out of his own pocket, bless him.

And bless Eric. He had a chance for a job in Dallas, for more than twice the money he could make here in Michigan. He had to take it to pay for my care. And he works so hard, so many hours, and has so few days off. So he comes here when he can—but that’s not often.

I look around the parking lot at all the cars that aren't there. Every one of those has their own reasons. It's not that they’ve forgotten us, not most them. I'm sure that every one of them has realized that the show must go on. That they have to keep going with their lives, that they can't be stuck here just because we are. That they can visit, but they can't be trapped with us.

Understanding doesn't make me any less sad. Maybe more so. Our damn injuries and diseases, they afflict our whole families.

Damn. On days like this, I regret getting the implant. I almost hope the experiment’s declared a failure, and they turn the damn thing off. Memory’s a gift . . . and a curse.

I wheel Mrs. Carruthers under the big maple tree. The leaves have just started to bud, so there's not a lot of shade; but she likes the warmth of the sun on her skin. Anyway, it’s too early in the year to worry about sunburn.

Then I estimate a safe distance away. She's not likely to get out of that chair, and it's going nowhere out here without someone to guide it. So I only have to worry about me and the balls; and I trust that I still know what I'm doing, that I won’t hurt her. So I move three steps away, close enough that she can see well even with her weak eyes.

Nurse Ratched would not approve. Screw her.

I set the old burlap down at my feet. In the show, I had a fine silk sack to carry my pins and balls; but I lost track of that years ago. Even with the implant, I might never remember where. Almost, but . . .

Nurse Ratched wouldn't let me have pins, anyway. But I still have light practice balls in the old brown sack.

I start stretching out, chatting with Mrs. Carruthers as I go. We speak of the nice weather, and of the birds coming back and singing in the trees. She tells me stories of spring on her farm, so far back. She isn't regressing, not like some of the residents. She knows exactly how old she was. She just has long gaps in her memory, stretches that will never come back. Like many of us, she remembers the oldest years best. “We had two dogs,” she says. “Well, we had lots of dogs through the years, but two were the best shepherds you ever did see. Those two could work together as if they were talking and planning. They could herd the sheep anywhere you wanted, and they seemed to know. Yes, they took commands, but often they . . .”

I wait. She has lost the word. I can guess what it is, but filling it in can upset the patient. So I wait.

Finally, she says, “. . . anticipated. As if they anticipated what you wanted.”

“I suppose they did,” I say. “If they had the same routine, day after day, they could learn it. We had dogs in the show that knew their act as well as their trainers did. Horses, too.”

“You're right, Luke,” she says. She has a faint smile as she remembers. “Those dogs learned the routine, figured out what to do, kept those sheep in line. They learned really well.”

But then her face falls bit. “They sure were smart. I wish . . .”

I don't want her thinking about what she wishes. It might be to have the dogs back, and they were surely dead thirty years now. Or it might be that she could learn like they did. Neither was going to happen. I really could use more stretching, but Mrs. Carruthers needs a distraction.

So I bend down again, dump the red and green and blue balls onto the grass, pick them up, and straighten up. “Here we go!”

Mrs. Carruthers focuses on me, and I start the routine. First the simple toss, all three balls in the loop. The day I can't do this routine in my sleep, well, call the undertaker. I'd learned this from my papa so long ago.

Thanks to the implant, I still remember details of those lessons. Or maybe it's just an old memory, one of the ones we keep. I was . . . Six? Seven? Yes, seven. Before that, I had just done tumbling. I'd taken to that right away, and I was part of the kids' act before I turned five. The natural flexibility of youth, plus blood will tell. Tumbling and acrobatics always came easy to me. I wish I could do a few rolls and leaps and cartwheels now, just for the pleasure. Maybe make Mrs. Carruthers smile. But Nurse Ratched would restrict me if she caught me at it. Take away my balls.

In my teens I would return to acrobatics, ever more elaborate acts. I even mastered the Wheel of Death, a giant spinning wheel that rotated on a long axis, driven only by my own momentum and balance. But that day, at six years old, I had begged Papa to teach me to juggle. And so I had started with the red and green and blue plastic balls. Not these ones I toss lightly in the air today, but close enough. He started me with one and spent that whole first day getting me so I could toss it and catch it without having to even look at it. I had been impatient, of course. I was only six. But Papa had been firm: Three is easy, Lucas. One is hard. When you can throw one and catch it with your eyes closed, you can juggle three. You must do one until it is part of yourself.

And that skill I remember, even when I can't remember the lesson itself. Even before the implant, it was . . . a different kind of memory, in a different place. A place not broken in my injury. Muscle memory, but more, integrating my senses into one grand sense. On my skin, I feel the motion of the air, reading where wind comes from. With my ears, I hear how strong it is, so I know what to compensate for. In my muscle sense, my awareness, my body tells me exactly how fast and hard to throw each ball, closer than any computer could calculate. And my experience tells me how fast and how far it will rise, and how far it will travel as it rises and falls. So my left hand throws it up, and my right hand is there to catch it. I don't have to look, sometimes not even with peripheral vision. It's as if I feel where the ball is.

And Papa was right: once I know where one ball is, knowing where three are is not much more difficult. I’ve done four, sometimes five. When I was young and prideful, I'd occasionally done six.

But three is the magic number. When I have all three balls in the air, there's a natural rhythm. Throw in time to catch in time to pass in time to throw in time to catch in time to pass in time to throw in time to . . . I almost think I could do this in my sleep. It's relaxing, familiar. As if I were back in the show. Back in the day . . .

Back in that day . . .

And suddenly I am. It’s that day. Even with the implant, up until this moment, that day has been lost to me. The doctors had said that I would never get it back, that the injury had prevented . . . What did they say? Prevented transfer into long-term memory. That I had experienced it, but never processed it. So there was nothing to recover.

But they were wrong. Somewhere, the memory has been buried. Or . . . the implant has reassembled it somehow. I'm on the lot. Greasy Pete is beside me, in full costume: the orange wig, the white greasepaint with the big black brows and the giant nose and the red lips. The fright mask he calls it, and he laughs when he does. Pete is my best friend, but sometimes he's a sadistic bastard. He loves to make the little kids laugh; but he also loves that some people, even some grown-ups, are afraid of clowns. And he gets a kick out of trying to draw those folks into the act. I love him like a brother, but sometimes his sense of humor is low. There's no art in practical jokes, if you ask me.

We walk through the lot. It's a slow night, like too many of them recently. Sideshow Lane is half empty, and even Main Street is looking sparse. The only serious noise and activity comes from Robot Row.

“Damn VR,” Pete says.

I don't answer. It's an old conversation, so there's really nothing more to add. Governor Kilgore had added Robot Row, a bunch of carny games and VR sets and such, in what he'd said was simple self-defense. Kids these days aren't interested in watching, they want to do. Their parents still have nostalgia for the show, but the kids are harder to drag away from their video games. So we gave them more things to play.

That wasn’t proper. A show might have a few games, but shows are acts. They’re performance. Art. Not that carnivals aren’t . . . you know, respectable . . . but they're not the same.

But a show that can't make its nut isn’t a show for long. A circus needs money. And like it or not, Robot Row seems to be working. The Row is crowded, and the other two lanes are busier than they've been in months. We have more butts in seats now with Robot Row there. We can't deny the gadgets are working: wheels and carousels, the old reliable rides; and now laser galleries and arcades and headset games. They draw crowds.

But they make us feel . . . dispensable, you know? Like we need the robots, but do they need us? Do robots need anything?

I glance at Pete's face. Beneath the greasepaint, I see a frown. That won't do! How's a clown supposed to cheer somebody up when he’s sad?

In an effort to lighten the mood, I throw him a punchline. “You don't understand . . . I am the great Pagliacci.”

Pete knows the old joke, and he chuckles. “Leave the jokes to me. You tell it poorly.”

“Better than you juggle,” I reply. “Show me how, Pete. Let's entertain some rubes.” I grab Pete's baggy sleeve and pull him over to a knot of people: five children, two men, and a woman. They talk animatedly, and Pete falls easily into the old shadow routine, standing behind a tall, heavyset man in a brown T-shirt. The man talks with his hands, big motions, a perfect target. Pete stands behind the man, imitating and exaggerating every gesture, every wave of the hands, every nod. The children watch and start to laugh. Soon the man stops, looks at them, realizes that they’re looking behind him, and turns to look.

Pete immediately falls into his pose: one hand on his chin, tapping as he stares at the sky, the other arm across his chest, lips pursed in a silent whisper. He’s the picture of white-faced innocence. The man glares, and Pete looks at him and raises his greasy eyebrows. The children laugh—especially the youngest, a blond-haired little boy in coveralls as blue as his eyes. That one rolls on the ground, holding his sides.

I can see that the act will continue for a while, and that the children's laughter is cheering Pete up. He doesn't need a juggler, so I fade back.

And I back right into a RoustaBot, one of our labor robots. A recorded voice comes from the robot: “Excuse me.” It pauses until I step out of the way, and then it continues on its path.

I watch it go. I suppose having robots keeping the lot clean is a good thing. They have their place. But I can't imagine a robot ever telling jokes and doing mime like Pete. Or juggling. I smile at the thought of a robot learning to juggle.

I continue down Robot Row—although the Governor has dressed it up in fancy lights and music and dubbed it the Galactic Zoomway. The barkers call from the ticket stands, pointing out different attractions. “Come enter the Laser Legion!” “Can you solve Mystery of the VR Bandits?” “Come ride the Sky Cycles!” That last, positioned outside the main Robot Row to give it some space, is a combination of VR and robotics: enclosed “cycles” zip up and down a wall draped to look like a mountainside. They’re safe, with passengers closed inside, but they move fast enough to give the feel of real loops and climbs; and in the closed interior, simulator screens show the riders that they’re in a star fighter flying high into space and then zooming down among asteroids at insane speeds.

I've ridden it. We all have. I wasn't that impressed, but I understand. In a way, it's just another act, a very mechanical artiste. And half the secret to an act is that the rube wants to believe, wants to see a miracle. Wants you to show them something they've never seen anywhere else. They do half the work. After you’ve got your routine down, even something like the Wheel of Death becomes second nature to you. Almost effortless. Boring. But put on just a little razzle-dazzle, add some music and lights, and finally add an audience, and then the magic happens. The audience is the key. They don't understand how routine it is, and so they see magic.

And in those moments, it’s still magic for me. I remember six-year-old me, watching Papa and Mama up on the Wheel, and how my mouth dropped open and I gaped. They were so beautiful, flying through the air as if gravity were optional. They taught me how, eventually, to the point where I forgot the magic. But through the audience, I remember.

And speaking of six-year-olds . . . A blond blur in blue coveralls staggers into me and bounces off. Behind, exhausted, runs his mother. “Danny, slow down,” she gasps. But he shows no sign of hearing as he veers around me and heads toward Clownapalooza, a holographic clown game. He slides right under the safety rope as his mother hurries behind, apologizing and handing a ticket to Ripper Ripatti. Ripper smiles and takes the ticket, and the virtual clowns appear and start dancing with the kid.

I look back to the entrance to the Row. The remaining four kids are running in, the two men in tow. Pete stands behind them. I catch his eye, and he shrugs.

Pete turns away. I amble out, come up behind him, and clap my hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Pete.”

He sighs. “What are ya gonna do? Kids these days . . .”

“Kids these days . . .” I reply. “Hey, you know what Eric wants to be when he grows up?”

“Huh?”

“A computer programmer.” I half turn and wave at Robot Row. “He wants to make those things.”

Pete’s mouth narrows. He pauses in thought. “It’s a good career, Luke.”

“I know, but . . . He’s his mother’s son. She always . . .” I choke back a sob. “She always understood numbers and stuff.”

“I know.” Suddenly it’s Pete’s hand on my shoulder. “And she’d be proud of him.”

I take a breath. “She would. But he and I . . . With her gone, we have less in common every day. He’s not interested in the act anymore. At all. If I try to get him to rehearse . . . it always ends up in a fight.”

Pete smiles. “Sons fight with fathers. You think my dad was happy I joined the clowns? ‘We’re an animal act,’ he said. ‘We’ve always been an animal act.’ But here I am.”

“I know.” And I do. Eric’s smart. I am proud of him, even if I can’t understand half of what he says. So what’s wrong with me?

As if reading my mind, Pete answers. “But even as a clown, I was still in the show. You’re afraid Eric will leave, join the rubes.”

“I am,” I admitted. “No, more than afraid. I know he will. It’s his dream. He likes you all, but . . . he doesn’t like this life. I’ve always known it. He wants to leave it behind. Forget it.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“He does! Just like . . .” I wave my arm toward the main gate. “Just like the rest of the world. We’re just a nostalgia trip today. The world’s gonna forget us. Forget the circus.”

Pete has no answer. He just walks beside me. It’s an old discussion, and with no new answers, just the same conviction: Somebody has to remember the circus. So we just wander toward the back lot. Soon the show will wind down for the night, and we can have a few beers and get some sleep. Tomorrow the show must go on.

But before we can go a hundred feet, I hear a woman scream, “Danny!” I turn back, looking for trouble.

It takes several seconds for me to make sense of the scene. The woman is running across the lot, panic-stricken. So that tells me where to look for the kid.

I turn toward the Sky Cycles. “Damn!” I hear Pete say; but he’s far behind me, I’m already running. Somehow the damned squirt must’ve snuck under another guard rope, straight into the ride itself. My juggling sack slips from my waistband and rattles on the hard pavement of the lot; but I don’t have time to worry about it.

I don’t have time to think, just run. I don’t have time to wonder how the kid got tangled up in the machinery and lifted into the air, just tumble over the safety rope. I don’t have time to plan, just bound into the air and onto the nearest cycle. It’s just routine, just my act. Just like climbing into the Wheel.

If the Wheel of Death were a damn robot, climbing and diving and doing its best to buck me off.

It’s just an act. I steady myself, refusing to fall. Just an act. I spot the kid on a cycle nearing the top, and I leap to the rail supporting the cycle above me. Just an act. I grab the rail, flip, and land on my feet on the next cycle. Just an act. One more bound, and I alight on his cycle—in time to see his coveralls rip during an upswing.

Just an act. He tumbles upward.

Just an act. I leap for him.

Just an act. I catch him in midair.

Just an act. I look down. Nothing to stop my fall; but I’ve taken worse. I know how to fall.

But the kid doesn’t.

I have to twist, get under him, cradle him loosely in my arms, cushion the impact, take the fall on me, not on him.

Just—

Some clouds in the sky. When did those get there? And why am I . . . laying on the grass?

“Is he all right, Daniel?”

“Another seizure, Mrs. Carruthers. I don’t think it’s worse than the last one.”

My eyes turn from the clouds to the face that hovers over me. With the light behind him, I can’t make out details. Blond hair hanging down. Not Eric, wrong hair color. The worry lines are too deep for such a young man . . . Maybe in his twenties? Who is he?

And . . . “Why am I laying here?”

“You’re all right, Luke. Just a seizure, but it’s passed.”

“A . . .” I lift myself onto my elbows, and the young man supports my back. “A seizure. I’ve had them since . . .”

“Since the accident,” he says.

I nod as if I remember. Accident? “Help me up.” Then I shake my head. “No, I can get up myself. Don’t want Nurse Ratched to see me down here. She might take my balls away.”

I grin at the kid, and he grins back, as if sharing an old joke. “Can’t have that,” he says. He stands beside me.

If I felt better, I would spring to my feet, just like always. But I’m shaky. Uncertain. So I carefully kneel, and then test my left foot. When it seems steady, I rise and try my right.

I’m standing. From her wheelchair Mrs. Carruthers looks at me, her forehead furrowed.

Then Nurse Ratched calls from the main entrance. “Oh, Daniel, you’re here! Is everything all right?”

The young man looks over and nods. “Yes, Nurse Rayburn. Everything’s fine. Luke’s giving us a show.” He turns to me and hands me my juggling balls. “Aren’t you, Luke?”

I look deep into his blue eyes. “Do I know—” But then I shake my head. Doesn’t matter. “Sure thing, son. Pull up a patch of grass.”

He sits on the lawn beside Mrs. Carruthers’s chair, and they both look up at me, smiling in encouragement. I start tossing the balls into the air.

The show must go on.

* * *

Martin L. Shoemaker is the author of debut science fiction novel Today I Am Carey. This story is set in the world of that book. “Today I Am Paul,” the story from which the novel developed, received the Washington Science Fiction Society's Small Press Award, and was nominated for a Nebula Award. It has been reprinted in multiple year's best anthologies and has been translated into eight languages. His novelette “Racing to Mars” received the Analog Analytical Laboratory Award. Shoemaker’s other stories have appeared in Analog, Writers of the Future Volume 31, and elsewhere, including Baen anthologies The Year's Best Military and Adventure SF, Volume 4, and Man-Kzin Wars XV. Shoemaker lives in Michigan.

Extracurricular

Wm. Mark Simmons

I see dead people.

Not like that kid in The Sixth Sense, where the departed are all noncorporeal and invisible to the rest of the living.

No, when I see the dead, they’ve crawled back out of their graves and show up in all of their decomposed, cadaverous glory.

When I say “glory” in this instance, I mean it ironically.

Over the years they’ve crossed—or shambled across—my path so frequently that I’ve practically developed my own sixth sense that alerts me when they’re nearby. And, when I awoke, my Spidey-sense was providing the backbeat to Ezra Furman’s “Restless Year” on my clock radio.

“Death!” Furman shouted. “Is my former employer!”

I fumbled for the clock. The snooze button and the off buttons seemed to have migrated to unknown destinations. I found the power cord, instead, and gave it a tug.

“I never wanna die and I’ll never grow older . . .”

A second tug killed the indie rock anthem and I heard the shower running, off down the hall.

I glanced at the Fitbit twisted around on my wrist.

Heartrate: 7 beats per minute.

Time: 6:30 p.m.

The sun was officially down and I was officially up.

#

Here’s the thing: I sleep by day and manage the day-to-day stuff, night-by-night. It’s sort of a requirement when you have a problematic relationship with sunlight.

The sound of the shower running was also problematic as I live alone.

I slipped out of bed and I grabbed a handgun out of the bedside drawer. I eased the magazine into the Glock 19 as softly as I could and chambered a round as I crept to my bedroom door. The locks—plural—were well oiled: I slipped the heavy security bolts with the barest of whispers as the mechanisms shifted within the steel-reinforced, solid core door. The hinges, also regularly lubricated, were even quieter as I eased it open a few inches and considered the evidence.

The hallway light was on.

It had been off when I’d retired, just before sunrise.

The bathroom door, halfway down on the right, was now closed.

I always leave it open when it’s not in use.

In addition to the sound of the shower running, there was a line of light under the door. Which was also burping lazy tendrils of steamy water vapor.

I almost missed all of these details as my attention was, more immediately, drawn to the crumpled dress a foot or so from the door. And the dirt. Mostly the dirt.

A trail of fresh, dark earth traced a path from the back door and the den, down the hall, and up to the bathroom door. Given the amount of muck, stealth-ninjas were off the list of tonight’s home invasion suspects. Ditto werewolves, based on the general configuration of the blurry footprints along the mud path.

Yeah, I said: “werewolves.”

On the Who’s Who of unwelcome visitors in my sad excuse for a life, normal human beings are pretty far down the default list. But, as I was saying, not werewolves this particular night.

There had been no rain for the past week—which is the equivalent of a drought in Louisiana this time of the year. So, the volume of mud and dirt on the carpet suggested whoever was treating my domicile as an Airbnb was most likely one of the dead.

Yeah, I said: “the dead.” We’re back to them.

I used to live just outside of West Monroe in a house on a bluff, overlooking the Ouachita River. It was surrounded on three sides by cemeteries. Maybe a little too goth for your tastes but there was a time I had found the proximity of the dead . . . companionable. Not to mention a handy early-warning system. When the dead are partial to you, their tombstones can be the equivalent of an arcane minefield to forces aligned with the Powers of Darkness.

And yeah, I said: “Powers of Darkness.”

By and large, I get along with most of the dead just fine—aside from their oblivious lack of boundaries, which I’ve detailed elsewhere. Interacting with the living is kind of a big no-no for them. Me? I’m kind of an exemption to the rule. A lot of rules, in fact. So, when the dead go a-walkin’, it’s my door where they’re a-knockin’.

Sorry.

If I’m a little flip on the subject, it’s because ambulatory corpses still tend to unnerve me. My defense mechanism is inappropriate humor.

The Glock is my defense mechanism against the undead and predatory humans. Which have proven to be far more problematic than the occasional zombie needing Yours Truly to assist in adjusting its karma.

I took another look at the trail of dirt and detritus leading to the bathroom door.

Ditto the dress.

Probably not the fanged folk, I decided: my past experiences with their ilk leaned more toward broken down bedroom doors and bloody violence than detours for personal ablutions. Unless I was dealing with a particularly fastidious vampire, the fifteen silver-frag rounds in the Glock’s magazine would be next to useless. I quietly reclosed the door, retraced my steps, returned the handgun to the bedside drawer—there was no way I was tucking that into the elasticized waistband of my boxer briefs. Then I retrieved the baseball bat next to the nightstand.

There are various spells and stratagems for the dis-corporation of the animated dead but I’ve found—by no little trial and error—that the Louisville Slugger tops the list. As I said, I tend to get along with most of your run-of-the-mill zombies just fine. But every so often the dead, just like the living, are going to present you with that statistical anomaly that requires your capacity for violence to be greater than theirs. And killing something that is already dead comes with a built-in set of challenges . . .

I propped the bat on my right shoulder, moved back to the bedroom door, and eased it open all the way.

A pale, ghostly light flickered in the den at the far end of the hallway, suggesting a gathering of spooks and specters. I say “suggesting” because my previous experiences with the departed—outside of one invisible poltergeist—have been limited to the non-glowy, corporeal deceased. My best anticipation of a spectral lightshow would be mostly informed by ancient, Caspar the Friendly Ghost cartoons and the craptastic, horror fare on cable hosted by Svengoolie on Saturday nights.

Don’t give me that look. Snopes.com has been strangely reticent about weighing in on topics like this.

I took a deep breath and began an awkward advance, carefully placing each foot against the opposite wall so as to avoid stepping in the muddy filth taking up the center of the hall. Straddling the trail of dirt, I waddled carefully toward the uncertain light show, easing the bat off of my shoulder and gauging how much swinging room I would actually have if I was braced in the narrow confines of the corridor. At the same time, I was trying to calculate all of the potential variables—numbers, corporeal versus noncorporeal opponents—and psyching myself up for the potential horror show that was about to come into view. Physically, mentally, I wanted to be prepared.

I wasn’t.

There was a corpse in the den, barely illuminated by the flickering glow of the flat screen TV. A woman, I decided after a moment’s consideration. She was plastered in dirt and decay from head to toe, obscuring features, flesh, and garments. Only her deep-set eyes glittered in the reflected light of the television; everything else was a vague camouflage coating of beige, umber, coffee, russet, charcoal, and burnt sienna. She looked like an amalgamation of all of the crayons in the “brown” section of the Crayola 64-pack.

She swayed hypnotically, comfortably ensconced in my glider-rocking chair. When she didn’t look up, I followed her gaze to the screen where a rerun of Keeping Up with the Kardashians was suggesting that true happiness was somehow connected to unfathomable fashion trends.

Horror takes many forms.

Repressing a shudder, I worked my way back down the hallway to turn off the shower. When the dead come calling, and they’re not hostile, I’ve found it’s best to police the perimeter and make coffee. Revenants, zombies, and animated corpses typically don’t just “pop in for a moment.” I had the feeling I was in for a long night.

The bathroom was foggy with warm vapor from the shower. Which was still occupied. By a blonde. Also, dead. But very attractive—aside from the Y-incision of her autopsy scar. Averting my eyes, I rummaged through the cabinet and left her a big, fluffy towel. Added another to the stack for her hair. My late wife had trained me well.

Next, I vacuumed the carpet before the cemetery earth could settle in any deeper. And picked up the once lovely, backless dress that had been dropped on the way to shower.

Now when I say backless dress, you might imagine a swank piece of couture that would be right at home at some penthouse cocktail party.

No.

Here’s just one of the many things that zombie movies get wrong about the reanimation logistics. Aside from the logistics of rigor mortis—which can kick in four to six hours after death and last another forty-eight to sixty hours post mortem—dressing an unresponsive human body can be challenging. If, as a parent, you’ve ever had to dress an uncooperative five-year-old on a school morning, imagine super-sizing that into a corpse that outweighs you. And you know what they say about dead weight.

It’s very time/labor intensive for just a combined three hours of limited and partial display.

So, the mortician typically cuts a section out of the back of the garment. Sometimes a straight, vertical slit, sometimes removing up to a sizable panel of the material, essentially turning any and all sartorial ensembles into the equivalent of a sleeved blanket. Depending on where you live or shop, they’re marketed under such various identities as the Snuggie, Snuggler, Toasty Wrap, or Slanket. In much the same principle, the mortician’s assistant puts the deceased’s arms through the sleeves of the backless ensemble, tucking the sides around the torso, giving them the appearance of being properly dressed and not actually missing up to a quarter of the original material in the back. It’s a practical approach to dressing the one-and-done who leave this life, never to return.

Not so practical for the occasional escapee from the grave. Just once I’d like to see a zombie movie where the shambling corpses are stumbling about, tangled up in their three-quarter attire.

Or, ew, maybe not.

I was surprised that blondie had been able to retain her dress all the way to my house as the nearest cemetery was a couple of miles away.

While the alterations to the back of her little white, tulle number seemed carefully done, the same could not be said for the hem. It looked like someone had taken a conservatively cut bridal gown and hacked it off at the knees with a butcher knife.

Neither alteration particularly required a professional approach as the back and anything below the waist would be unseen during the viewing. The question was: why would someone take a professional approach to the cut-out in the back and then massacre the lower third of the dress? The latter suggested that either someone had suddenly misplaced their fabric shears or had suddenly given vent to some serious anger issues . . .

I filed that away as food for thought as I returned to my bedroom and picked up my phone. I called the office while rummaging around for two sets of clothing.

“After Dark Investigations,” my former secretary-turned-partner answered on the third ring.

“Olive?” I put her on speaker as I threw on a pair of black jeans and a forest green button-up shirt.

“Mister Chris?” Her voice was soft and surprised; almost a sigh. “How you doin’, baby?”

“Fine . . . fine . . . .” We both knew I wasn’t fine. Hadn’t been fine for a long time. Not likely to ever be fine again.

“What can I do for you?” she asked softly. The kindness in her voice was almost hurtful. I started to feel something after all this time of trying to not feel anything at all. “Any chance you’ll be coming in for a visit?”

“No!” It came out harsher than I meant.” “No,” I repeated, trying for mellow while I was feeling anything but. “Something’s come up.” Yeah, like that covered all the weeks turned into months, turned into something longer, that I had absented myself from work, from friends . . .

From life.

“Listen,” I said after an awkward pause. “Can you check the papers? News, internet, any of your sources, and see if there’s some sort of . . .” What? Some sort of what? “Voodoo convention?” Socks were next, then shoes.

“Voodoo convention?” she echoed.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Like anything on the radar that might be dead related?”

“Dead related,” she echoed again.

Come on, Olive: work with me here. “Uh, anything that might stir up the deceased? Open graves? Animate corpses?”

“Abra-cadaver?” The arch of her left eyebrow was palpable in her voice. She knew exactly whereof I spoke. Or was familiar with the zip code, anyway.

“Yep.”

“Mister Chris, is you all right? Need some intervention?”

I glanced back at the flickering light at the other end of the hall. “No. Not yet, anyway.”

“You certain?” The eyebrow arch had lessened but it was still there.

“Not my first rodeo.”

“Sure,” she said, sounding anything but. “Just the same, you will call me in an hour. If you do not, I will be on your front porch and I will bring reinforcements.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, baby,” she said, relenting and slipping back into that tone that conjured memories of a mother that loved me and a life once lived where the only creatures under the bed were dust bunnies. “You be careful now. Don’t get in over your head and try to go it alone.”

I swallowed. “I . . . sure.”

“And call me back or I will make you sorry that you di’nt.”

“Thanks, Olive.” I heard the bathroom door open. “Gotta go. Talk soon.”

She let me hang up first, reminding me that there were people out there that were worried about me. And that I had spent the last couple of years giving them cause to.

#

The blonde dropped her towel and put on the proffered T-shirt and sweatpants without a word. Right in front of me. I would have averted my eyes a little sooner but something about her torso caught my attention.

No, not that. Or those.

It was her autopsy scars.

The dead don’t heal. The coroner will close the torso, stitching the incisions back up so that things don’t come tumbling out when the body is moved or prepared for the final dispositions. But the Y-shaped autopsy scar is merely the demarcation of parted flesh held in close proximity by the five-cord, waxed polyester, postmortem thread. It’s not a scar like the pale cicatrix of granulated tissue where the flesh has healed together.

Except hers was. Or looked like it. The pale pink lines marking her abnormally white skin looked like freshly healed cuts. Or even scratches. Autopsy incisions tend to be deep and not the least bit cosmetic but these lines were . . .

What?

I looked up at the impossibly blue eyes that were staring back at me.

I say impossibly blue because, after death, the human eyeball—you know what? Let’s just say that there’s a reason why the eyes of the deceased, at all of the funerals you’ve ever attended, are closed. And leave it at that.

But her eyes were clear and bright and far more “alive” than some of the living I’d encountered on my midnight supply runs to Walmart. And her scars looked like the aftermath of a fingernail scratch rather than a number twenty-two scalpel blade.

I turned and marched back into the den, flipped on the lights and turned off the TV. The corpse in the chair was a stark contrast to one down the hall. Whereas Blondie looked like one of those sugar-spun brides atop a confectioner’s wedding cake, fresh scrubbed and almost glowing with youthful health, the brunette was wearing a layer of dirt and detritus like a second skin. That same coating of soil seemed to be keeping her grime encrusted garments more or less in place. It also seemed to mitigate some of the external signs of decomp that set her apart from the not-yet-deceased.

Her sunken eyes glittered up at me. “You are Christopher Cséjthe?” she rasped through atrophied vocal cords.

This is what my reputation had gotten me: nocturnal buttinskis with boundary issues. As usual.

I nodded and she leaned forward in the rocking chair. She gestured at the recliner a few feet away. “Sit,” she said.

I sat. Like a good boy.

#

Her name was Gwendolyn Hahn. The blonde, that is. The talkative one was Gena Mantz. Gwen had joined us within a few minutes, perching on the settee, and continuing her Marcel Marceau impersonation so Gina just seemed loquacious by comparison.

After a few minutes and a couple of questions I got back up and gestured for her to keep talking while I went on the hunt for a pair of scissors.

The issue, it seemed, was something—and maybe “Something” should be capitalized—was messing around in Beausoleil Cemetery. “Messing with” was the more precise phrase and It—or They—were stirring up the dead. Gwendolyn specifically, Gina and other nearby gravesites tangentially.

“You’re sure Gwen here is the focus?” I yelled, digging through the upstairs kitchen junk drawers.

That’s right, I said: “junk drawers.” Plural.

“Area of effect around sixty feet in a circle with her grave at the epicenter. Whatever it is, drew her up, out of the ground . . .”

“You’re up and out of the ground,” I countered.

“Look at her,” Gina said.

I came halfway down the stairs and leaned down to look at the blonde.

“Now look at me.”

I looked at the brunette.

“According to her grave stone, Gwennie started her dirt nap a couple of months before me,” she continued. So . . .”

“Gotcha.” I went back up the stairs and started fishing around under the kitchen sink. “So, her grave is at the center of what? A circle?”

“Apparently. Various degrees of arousal emanating out from her plot.”

“So how many zombies are on the loose, now?” Shifting a tray of plumbing tools beneath the garbage disposal, I finally managed to find my aquarium scissors.

“Zombies?” she rasped unpleasantly. “That’s offensive. We may be dead, we may be vulnerable to the natural decay that flesh is heir to. But we’re not some horror, sideshow freaks shambling around like somnambulant fiends in search of brains because we don’t have any of our own!”

“Sorry,” I called, rinsing the shears under a stream of hot water. “What appellation would you prefer? Revenant? Visitant?”

“Let’s go with Animate. And, no; we’re the only two up and out of the ground.”

I grabbed a paper towel and wiped down the blades as I came back down the stairs and back into the den.

“Before you ask, she was actually pulled out of the ground against her will. I was awakened but had no such compulsion. I just stuck my head out to see what was going on. I am—or was—wiccan and am a little more sensitive to magical forces . . .”

Uh huh.

Over the years I had made my peace with the physics and biologics that produced vampires and lycanthropes. The concept of “magic” was still pretty much the equivalent of a bridge too far in my metaphysical journey. But you can’t exactly argue religion with the reanimated dead. In their case, the power of belief trumps logic as soon as that first hand comes thrusting up, out of the ground.

“Well, let’s see what Gwen can tell us,” I said as I sat next to her on the divan. “Hold still, dear.” I raised the scissors. “Let’s see if we can get you your voice back . . .”

Another thing zombie cinema skips over is the undertaker’s artifice in keeping the deceased’s mouth from gaping open. This is achieved by placing a few stitches through the gums and soft palette. Works great for open caskets, not so great for the freshly resurrected who might have something to say. Gina’s oral tissues had apparently liquefied sufficiently to allow her stitches to pop through. Gwen was still mute.

I gently slipped the elongated and very sharp blades of my old aquarium scissors between the blonde’s pillowy lips and freed her tongue with a few careful snips.

“Better?” I asked.

She nodded wordlessly, as if afraid to try to talk.

I turned to Gina. “So, why me?”

She looked thoughtful. “You’re not afraid of us.”

I snorted. “That’s not true. I’m going to have to rent a Rug Doctor tomorrow. And, no offense,” I added, nodding at the chair she was in, “I’m going to need to get the upholstery attachment, as well.”

“You’ve helped others like us.”

“The water heater has had time to recycle and I have more towels, if that’s what you’re hoping for.”

They stared at me like I was some kind of moron.

I really hate that look.

“Look,” Gina said, speaking with an exaggerated air of patience, suggesting that she was dangerously close to running out of same. “Something is messing with the Laws of God and Man. Over the past two nights, some kind of power is being focused on her grave and it’s stirring up the dead in the plots surrounding hers. She needs your help!”

I raised my hands. “What kind of help? Filing a police report?”

Both zom—animates—shook their heads.

“The police can’t do anything,” Gina said. “She’s already dead. And the forces at work here are beyond their understanding. They can’t protect her! It would just complicate things.”

“I don’t do ‘protection,’” I said. “I’m a private investigator.” Was a private investigator. Half owner of After Dark Investigations now where Olive Perdue did all the work and I just stayed all bunkered up in my house and did as little as possible while waiting for . . .

What?

One of New York’s vampire hit squads to finally put me out of my . . . ennui?

“Well, then,” Gina said, “investigate! Find out what’s going on and put a stop to it!”

“You said something about magic. I don’t do magic,” I said stubbornly. “You’re the wiccan.”

“Was the wiccan,” she snapped. “And I have no experience with this kind of thaumaturgy. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole!”

“But you want me to?” I sighed and we all spent a minute looking anywhere but at each other.

I was so busy trying to act like I didn’t know what they really wanted that I’d missed a couple of cues. “Hold on! It sounds like you actually know what this is.” I gave her my best and most intimidating side-eye. “What is it?”

She looked at Gwen who was still silent but her agitation was practically a shout. Finally, she whispered: “Necromancy.”

#

My first impulse was to call Kurt in New York. But I’d changed phones and phone numbers, not to mention houses, trying to cut myself off from the presumed responsibilities that I owed the East Coast Demesne. Oh, I knew that they would have no trouble tracking me down if they really wanted to find me. But I’d made the token gestures of severing ties so ringing them up for information or favors was not going to play well. Not if I were to continue living at some remove.

I stepped back down the hall and dialed Mama Samm D’Arbonne, juju woman extraordinaire.

She answered on the sixth ring.

“Mister Chris. Why you interrupting my beauty sleep at dis hour?” Her voice wasn’t cranky but I stood up a little straighter, anyway.

“How are you—” I started. I hadn’t seen her since the whole Cthulhu business with Marie Laveau, Rasputin, and Captain Nemo in the underwater battle for New Orleans.

She cut me off. “I don’ think it’s a good idea for me be talking to you, even over de phone. Dose pheromones of yours—”

“What?” I yelped. “No! No pheromones! The pheromones are gone. For a long time now. Likewise, the nanobots. The EMP from Squidley’s pandimensional translocation nuked their teeny asses!”

“Make it short, den,” she grumped. “If I even tink I might feel some kind of subharmonic coming tru de speaker, I’m hanging up an’ treating dis number like a robo-spammer.”

I couldn’t believe she could still carry a grudge after all this time. Especially since it wasn’t even my fau—

“Tick tock, Cséjthe.”

“I’ve got a little problem,” I started.

“Are you still traveling all over de world trying to rebuild a lifetime’s accumulation of mana that you spent all in one day battling de forces of evil?”

“Well . . . no . . . but . . .”

“Good. Den you really just have a leetle problem, unlike some of de rest of us . . .”

“I may have a rogue necromancer in my back yard,” I said hurriedly.

“A . . . necromancer?” she asked.

“Looks like.”

“Mister Chris, what you know about necromancy?”

“Nothing, really. Something to do with raising the dead?”

“Necromancy is death magic, cher! You say anything about dis to your pet vampires, yet?”

I swallowed. “You know that they’d kill me if they heard you say that. And then kill you.”

“Pfft! You say necromancer to any of de undead an’ dey’ll cut you a wide berth. Though dey might hire human assassins to kill you so you’re no longer a conduit to any of dey bidness. Lissen to me, necromancers don’ just raise de dead, dey have de power to control dem. To make dem do things against deir will. A necromancer could make an undead kill deir sire. Or walk out into de sunlight. Sort of like when you bloodwalk only necromancers do it by remote control. I don’t know if necromancy would work on you, being what you is, but you do not want to go anywhere near dat.”

“Well,” I said, “some of that is already in my house as we’re speaking.”

“Putain!” she hissed. Followed by something, something, and ending in: “être dans la merde jusqu’au cou!”

“No,” I said. “The necromancer isn’t here.” At least I hoped he wasn’t. “Just one of his victims.” A thought occurred. “Can he trace his victims if they leave the graveyard?”

“Necromancy is not one of my disciplines.” Her voice was subdued. That frightened me more than anything. “I don’ know de answer to dat. Probably not right away. It depend on how powerful your sorcerer is. You may have a day or maybe two. Longer if you’re dealing wit’ a novice. But you shouldn’t take any chances. Arm yourself. An’ get out of town. Take a long vacation, far away. If your necromancer show up before you can get away, kill him. Tell de police it was self-defense.”

“What about his target? I can’t abandon her.”

“Ah coo-yon! Of course it be a woman! Lissen to me, Mister Chris! I would come an’ help you with dis if I could but I’m at de Grotto of Lourdes.”

“You’re in France?”

“No. South America. De grotto is outside Puerto Deseado. It’s all de way down in de Santa Cruz Province of Argentina. Dere’s no way I could get to an airport an’ den to you in time to be of any help.”’

“Just looking for advice. Anything you might know that could be helpful.”

She sighed. “Okay. Here is my advice based on the circumstances an’ all of my years of study an’ experiences in dealing with death magic an’ dese kinds of t’ings. Lissen very carefully.” She paused.

I waited. There was a distant, high-pitched “singing” as if the sound of a strong wind blowing against tautly stretched telephone lines.

“Are you paying close attention?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.” I half meant it to sound a little snarky but I sounded sincere. And was more than a little surprised to find that I was.

“Listen to me, cher; whoever dis woman is, she is already dead. She has lived her life. Maybe things did not turn out de way she hoped. Or wanted. Whose life does? You hear me, mon ange? What happens next is not de same t’ing as trying to help de living. You need to t’ink about you, now, you. Get out as fast as you can!” She paused. “You are not lissning to a word I’m saying, now are you?”

I was listening. But I was also thinking about Lupe and Deirdre and my extended family who were beyond my reach in the Realm of the Fae. There were worse things than going down swinging. And everything I’d done since Hurricane Eibon and the resetting of Eternity’s clock was nothing more than marking time. With no discernable goal before me other than waiting . . .

For something.

Maybe this.

“Gotta go,” I said. And broke the connection.

#

Gena was gone when I returned.

Gwen sat in a sturdy kitchen chair in the middle of the den, numerous coils of rope and bungee cords from the garage looped tightly around her torso and the chair’s seat and back. Her legs were pulled back and bound to the outside of the back legs of the chair and her arms tied behind the seat and lower support in a manner to deny her any leverage in moving about.

Every time I think my dealings with the dead can’t get any weirder . . .

There was a note (of course there was) with a corner tucked under the top loop of cord that encompassed my new client’s upper chest.

Chaytay

(people misspell my name almost as often as they mispronounce it),

No one else knows I brought her here. Which is not to say that others in Beausoleil might make an educated guess if questioned. I’ll be somewhere off in the woods until this is resolved. Good luck.

Gina

BTW: I’ll leave the sleuthing to you but you might ask yourself this: Do you think Gwen’s ex was too old for her?

Huh.

Okay.

“How about we get you out of those ropes?” I asked, moving around behind her.

“No!” she practically shrieked. “I mean . . . not until sunrise.”

A light went on in the broom closet of my brain. “You were drawn out of your grave by some kind of power that you were helpless to resist.”

She nodded.

“That same power could compel you against your will now that you’re out of the ground.”

Another nod.

“And the compulsion only comes at night?”

“Around midnight,” she said in a small voice.

Of course, it does. “Okay, Ms. Hahn . . .”

Ms. Hahn.

I had a nubile blonde tied to a chair in my den. Willing and even desperate to be tied up, alone, with a perfect stranger. Yeah, let’s keep the tone as professional as possible.

“I’m going to ask you a series of questions,” I continued, “some of them personal. I need you to be completely honest in your answers if you want me to help you. Anything you tell me will be held in the strictest confidence. Client privilege, if you will.”

“Okay,” she said. In a little girl voice.

Cliché, I asked myself, or trope?

“Have you ever had any dealings with covens, cults, religious-type organizations that would practice any type of thaumaturgy—”

“Thaumaturgy?”

“Magic. Black magic or any other color of the supernatural spectrum?”

“No. I stopped going to church a long time ago.”

“’Kay. Do you know of anyone who would wish you harm?”

She hesitated and I was reminded of the first axiom of the P.I. playbook: clients always lie. Or, at the very least, hedge.

Everyone has secrets. They don’t have to be deep and dark or sinister. But everyone has them. And hiring someone to look into anything that even borders on one’s affairs is an uncomfortable violation of one’s perceived boundaries.

Unfortunately, I was not any kind of an expert on the sort of things that reanimate the dead and pull them out of their graves. Beyond the fact that they seemed to turn up on my doorstep far more often than was reasonable, that is. What I could do, however, was dig down for the identity of our presumed necromancer and what might motivate him. Or her, as I had no real evidence to determine gender, yet, and didn’t want to be sexist.

“My . . . ex . . .” she said reluctantly.

“Ex . . . husband? Ex . . . boyfriend?” Ex . . . girlfriend? Cséjthe, you old-fashioned, sexist prig . . .

“Husband,” she answered.

“Separated? Divorced?”

“Divorced?” She sounded unsure. “We were separated. Maybe six months. The divorce was in the works but wasn’t finalized before I . . .”

“Before you died?”

“Yes,” she said softly. A tear whispered down her cheek.

“Was he ever violent?”

She stared out at the darkness beyond the sliding glass door to the back yard. “A . . . couple . . . of times.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“Not in any way that I didn’t deserve,” she said, her voice stronger now.

“Ms. Hahn. Gwendolyn. You are . . .” Were? “ . . . a young woman. May I ask how you died?”

She stared at the floor now. “Are you asking me if I was murdered?” Now the tears dropped with a disconcerting regularity. “I was turned out of my home. I had lost my job. All of my friends were his so, of course, I ended up having no friends. I was weak, I suppose. I died by my own hand. Pills.”

I understood her reticence now. For someone seeking refuge and protection she seemed pretty closemouthed about her former life. But a nasty divorce that led to suicide meant she barely had time to process her grief, anger, and shame before reawakening to an existence of terror.

The dead don’t like to talk about death. I’d learned that much in all of my half-assed dealings with the revenants that turned up on my doorstep over the years. With all the resources that had accumulated since my own demise—or demises, plural, as there was some debate over my actual post-mortem status—I still knew very little about the veracity of religious accounts of the afterlife. Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Limbo? Sartre’s sitting room? I don’t know if the dead came back with selective amnesia or they just didn’t want to talk about it. As a suicide, Gwendolyn Hahn might have spent the past six months in a special level of Perdition, suffering the tortures of the damned—as suggested by certain sects that worshipped a supposedly benevolent deity. I could see why anything around this particular subject and/or timeline would be a touchy subject for her.

“I’m sorry to ask these questions,” I told her. “But I’m not some sort of magic savant. I’m pretty much agnostic on the subject. What I am—” was, my inner voice corrected “—is a private investigator. I look for clues, patterns, motives. I ask questions. Facts are important. You may not think that a piece of information is important but you need to let me decide whether it is or isn’t. Do not filter or hold back. I apologize if my snooping around makes you uncomfortable but this is how it works.” I reached out and cupped her cheek. “No judgement. All right?”

Her cheek was still warm from the shower and her eyes, bright and luminous from her recent storm of tears, gazed up at me with a mix of sorrow and heartbreaking hope.

“Thank you, Mr. Cséjthe.”

“Chris,” I said.

She smiled. “Gwen.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now, what is your husband’s name and where does he live?”

#

I didn’t like leaving her tied up and alone in my house but I had a limited amount of time before the next sunrise. And, unless I wanted to ask Olive to interview the primary suspect, I needed to catch him before the hour grew late.

But first I made a detour to the public library.

I’d run a quick check on my Amazon app for books on the subject of death magic—serious reference works as opposed to New Age twaddle or so-called fictional entertainments. Sadly, there was nothing of any import available for immediate download in the Kindle format. Not even a Necromancy for Dummies—which was surprising given the lucrative nature of the “Dummy” demographic.

Various versions of the Necronomicon ranged from “serious” attempts to recreate Lovecraft’s fictional monograph to fannish spoofs of the iconic Book of the Dead.

And then there were a few, antiquated, out-of-print, dead-tree tomes purporting to be actual grimoires available from third-party sellers. Legitimate or not, the delivery times ranged from a week to a month for the more promising ones.

Driving down to New Orleans to browse some of their more “interesting” used bookstores would involve some serious prep-work, including high-powered ordnance and body-armor.

So, the local library was probably my best bet for the moment. I just had to get there before closing time. I made it with twenty minutes to spare. But, as it turned out, I was a month too late.

Someone had checked out the four most promising tomes: Necromantic Sorcery: the Forbidden Rites of Death Magick, An Encyclopædia of Occultism, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds—A Collection of Ancient Texts (2nd edition), Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe (New edition), and De Nigromancia.

If you think that kind of esoterica is surprising in a public library, you should see how many Louisiana library shelves are dedicated to just Voodoo, alone.

It was closing time and the librarian would only tell me that the books had been checked out a month ago, had all been renewed a week ago, and that the patron could renew them in another two weeks for three weeks beyond that, if they wished. I could be waiting another five weeks if our dark arts enthusiast was so motivated.

So, who had decided to take a crash course on raising the dead? I was standing in an institution that believed in making vast amounts of information open and available to the general public. They just didn’t believe in making that specific piece of information available to me.

I leaned across the check-out desk and asked my obstinate bibliothecary to look deep into my eyes . . .

I’ve never been very good at the mind-control, bend-you-to-my-will, power that all the Dracula movies like to unpack before the first commercial break. Chalk it up to me not being fully undead. Almost, but not quite, the vampire. Never grew the obligatory fangs. Don’t sparkle . . . but then I never met a vampire that did. Except for that one time at La Cage aux Folles down in New Orleans during Mardi Gras . . .

Anyway, a couple of minutes and three “shushes” later I was headed back out to my car with the name “Michael Guidry” on a slip of paper in my pocket. In the parking lot I started my car and pulled out my phone. I ran Guidry’s name through a couple of directory search engines. Guidry was not an uncommon name for the Ouachita Parish area. But there were no street addresses for a Michael Guidry listed in a one-hundred-mile radius.

The name yielded one cell phone number with the same area code but, when I called, it was no longer in service.

So. Was Michael Guidry a fake identity? The cell number a burner phone that had since been discarded? Was Michael Guidry actually Harold Hahn, Gwendolyn’s ex-husband?

I didn’t know that and I didn’t know what time he turned in for the night so I put my car in gear and drove across town.

Harold Hahn lived in a Craftsman-style house nearing the century mark. Its squat silhouette, wide eaves and triangular brackets matched most of the architecture on the block with only the unfinished wood planks of a fairly new privacy fence setting it apart from the neighbors. The porch was roomy with stone supports, a pair of square columns holding up the extended roof with a row of exposed beams. The streetlight was old and at some remove and the porchlight was off. A dim lamp in the living room gave the impression that no one was home. The driveway was empty but the car could have been inside the detached garage.

The area was mostly dark with only a couple of porchlights glimmering down the street. It was 9:28 so either the neighbors were elderly and turned in for the night or young, still out-and-about. A waxing, crescent moon was on the rise, giving me just enough illumination to see that the yard was a bit unkempt and neglected. What did that tell me? That the man who had physically abused his wife and kicked her out of the house, got his friends to shun her and may have driven her to take her own life . . . was what? A brute and a slob? I really didn’t have enough info to build much of a profile, yet. And, to be fair, this time of the year you almost had to mow your lawn twice a week to keep up with the overgrowth. I swear, you can sit out on the patio and watch the grass grow like some kind of botany film that utilizes time-lapse motion-capture.

And clients always lie, whispered that voice in the back of my head.

I shook my head as I walked up to the front porch. It was too early to get a read on anything, yet. Everything felt hinky so far because, well . . . necromancer. Right?

I tiptoed up the three steps to the concrete porch. A peek through the windows, I thought. No old, creaky wood to alert anyone inside. But maybe Mr. Hahn was curled up on the sofa with an ex-mistress/new fiancée. Wouldn’t hurt to see what anyone walking up to the front door would see anyway. No sneaking around the back of the house or peeking in a bedroom window. Just an innocuous glimpse and maybe there’s something to give me a better idea of Harry Hahn before I dug into his background for any anomalies.

A few steps from the front door I leaned to my right and craned my neck to get a better look through the large picture window. The interior of the house was quiet.

Until, suddenly, it wasn’t: a dun colored pit bull suddenly attacked the window from the inside, barking furiously and scrabbling at the glass as if he had been starved for a week and I was a choice cut of sirloin.

I ducked to the left but the porchlight was suddenly on. I quickly raised my right fist as if I were about to knock. The inner door flew open. Magically, the pit bull seemed to teleport to the front entrance and was now trying to tear through the glass of the storm door to get to me. A hand grabbed the dog’s studded collar, pulling him back from the door and holding him in place. The animal calmed somewhat but continued to bark at me: more professional guard dog, less unhinged, furry buzz saw.

“What do you want?” asked a surly voice.

I looked up at a slender man who couldn’t have seen his thirtieth birthday, yet. So much for the older husband, younger trophy-wife cliché. He had unkept brown hair that was just beginning to thin in conformance with emerging male pattern baldness. He was slight of build, though wiry looking. His face was unremarkable but for the bruised look around his eyes and a tightening of his lips that exuded a sour vibe that matched his voice.

I pulled out my wallet with my P.I license. “Christopher L. Cséjthe,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”

Something seemed to move behind his eyes but the light was too uncertain for more than the barest of impressions.

“What’s this about?” he asked suspiciously.

The dog continued to bark reflexively and he made no effort to quiet it.

“May I come in?” I asked.

He gave it all the thought contained in a single eyeblink.

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m looking into the possibility that your wife—”

“Ex-wife,” he snapped. “Deceased.”

“Yes,” I said, “well . . . there may be an insurance policy—”

“Not mine,” he said, edging toward a dangerous unpleasantness as he kept cutting me off. “If it’s hers, I’m not interested.”

“Well, I don’t know if your ex-wife is the Gwendolyn Hahn on this particular policy. That’s what I’ve been hired to find out.”

“Not my problem.”

“I don’t know all of the particulars, Mr. Hahn, but there could be a great deal of money in it for you.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want it.”

I opened my mouth again but he opened the outer door first and leaned toward me. The dog lunged forward but he managed to keep it under control for the moment.

“Look,” he snarled, a slow-rolling wave of beer fumes breaking over my face. “I thought I was done talking to you people after the inquest. Let me say this just one . . . more . . . time. I want nothing to do with anything regarding my ex-wife. I didn’t then. And I certainly don’t now. She’s dead. And we were done well before that happened. The only money related to her that I care about now is the money I’m going to spend to have my last name chiseled off of her headstone. Once her mother is dead and can’t interfere, I’ll pay to put her maiden name on her grave and that truly will be the end of it. Now get off of my property!”

I caught the outer door before he could close it completely. “One last question, Mr. Hahn. Do you know a Michael Guidry?”

He froze for a long moment and the color literally drained out of his face.

And then both doors were slammed in my face in quick succession and the porchlight flicked off. I stood there in the dark for another fifteen seconds and pulled my phone out and called Olive as I turned and walked back to my car. I asked her to get me a copy of the divorce filing tomorrow if it wasn’t sealed and to try to get it even if it was.

Even better than her courthouse connections, I asked her to reach out to her social network for any juicy gossip that had to be out there, somewhere, for a divorce/suicide that had so much acrimony trumping alimony.

I had parked four houses up from the Hahn residence so I sat there in the dark and considered what I knew, so far.

Gwendolyn Hahn had committed suicide after the failure of her marriage and the loss of her friends. Her husband clearly had anger issues and seemed to bear her great enmity. She had confirmed to me that the white dress she “woke up” wearing was, indeed, her wedding dress—minus the lower half of her skirt and train. Who provides the funeral home with the outfits worn by the deceased? The family or spouse. My money was on Harry handing over the wedding dress after he’d hacked off the bottom third.

Definitely anger issues . . .

The man had been drinking—which might have meant nothing in itself other than to exaggerate his anger issues—but he said he was about to go back out, late in the evening. Given that his oral cologne would probably blow a breathalyzer’s internal circuitry, it suggested judgement issues, as well.

All of these little things, along with the lazy lawncare issues, didn’t necessarily add up anything particularly sinister. And nothing specifically suggested that I had been in the presence of a man capable of raising the dead. But, then maybe he had changed out of his sorcerer’s robes before answering the door.

I say that with only a modicum of irony.

Another quarter of an hour passed before Hahn emerged from his house. He was going out but he wasn’t driving. A car had pulled up to the curb in front of his house. Not a cab. Uber? Lyft? Lover? Co-conspirator? Necromancing ride-share service? I picked up my binoculars from the passenger seat and made a note of the license plate and then the car. It was a late model Toyota Prius. Probably powder blue but the darkness flattened its daytime color out into a nocturnal gray. The oddly configured taillights looked like a “Z” morphing into a boomerang. Or vice-versa. This was a lucky break as they would stand out in a veritable sea of taillights, enabling me to follow at some remove without losing them. Or so I hoped.

I waited until Harry’s wheels made a right turn at the end of the block before starting my car and giving “chase.”

Traffic was relatively sparse so I had to hang back for a few blocks until they pulled onto I-20, headed west. A few bypassed exits indicated that Beausoleil Cemetery was not on the immediate destination list.

We left the environs of Monroe, Louisiana, behind but traffic on the interstate was robust enough that I could close the gap a little bit without standing out in the rearview mirror. As I drove, I had to remind myself that my sleuthing skills had grown decidedly rusty over the past several years.

If I were being honest, I’d say that all of my life skills were in need of a generous application of WD-40.

Around ten miles out we left the Interstate and took a parallel route on US 80. Now the traffic dropped off and things got trickier. Had I been made? Before I knew it, we were slowing down and entering Calhoun, a town whose population fluctuated around the two-thousand mark. Easier to stand out now, but the darkness could continue to be my friend if I played my cards right.

While not as strong or as fast or as preternaturally enhanced as an actual vampire, one of the dark gifts that I “enjoyed” was the ability to see into the infra-red spectrum.

And, yes, I said “vampire.”

If we moved any deeper onto the back roads, I could flip a switch, killing all of the car’s running lights, interior and exterior, and continue driving in dark mode, the road still visible as a ribbon of darkening red, its cooling heat signature still a high contrast to the vegetative matter bordering its asphalt lanes and gravel roughened shoulders. Anything warm-blooded would be more clearly seen than if I drove with my high-beams on.

But the Prius continued through downtown Calhoun, which meant keeping the headlights on rather than draw the unwanted attention of the local constabulary. Meandering down the main drag, now, I had to drop even further back as each successive streetlight painted my Chevy Equinox like an aiming laser acquiring a target. A sheriff’s patrol car suddenly merged onto main street ahead of me. I focused on being extra-uninteresting to the authorities who probably had a mental database of all of the resident vehicles that would be out this time of night.

So, I almost missed the Toyota’s turn up Calhoun Road. They were headed north now, up past an Exxon station and the Kuntry Korner Market.

And then they pulled into the parking lot of a local bar.

I drove past as unobtrusively as possible, observing Mr. Hahn exiting the car in my rearview mirror as I continued on down the road. My first, best chance came a little way ahead, where Easy Street to my left became LA-151 to my right. A little maneuvering and I was back around to the bar, again.

The parking lot was half full and a neon-lined sign said: “Deriso’s.” No sign of Hahn or the Prius.

The natural assumption was that Gwen’s ex had continued on into the bar and his Uber/Lyft/ride-share had dropped him off and continued on its merry way.

There was no way to be sure without getting out of my car and going in to check. Which was risky in that it increased the chance that he would see me and then I’d be on his radar for the foreseeable future. I did not fancy conducting future surveillance by wearing wigs and fake beards while driving rental cars. I could just sit in my car, in the parking lot, until he came out. But unless he came back out with his arm thrown around the shoulders of a potential co-conspirator/necromancer-for-hire type, I might only assume he had come all the way out here to drink. Alone.

Unless he was meeting his girlfriend/lover/fiancée here so no one he knew would know that he . . . what? Had moved on from a bad marriage? Maybe his girlfriend/lover/fiancée lived in Calhoun and it was just easier for him to come out here to hook up . . .

Maybe the marriage had collapsed because he had a mid-life epiphany and realized that he was gay. Or bi. And that he wasn’t ready to come out to his family, friends, and/or co-workers yet so he came out here to meet his boyfriend/lover/fiancé . . .

I felt like I was grasping at straws.

I got out of my car and walked across the graveled lot to the doors on a route that would take me out of the sight-lines of the front windows.

The main entrance consisted of a pair of matched, wooden doors. A square pane of glass in each, tilted point-down, diamond-like allowed a limited view of the bar’s interior without actually entering. I did a cursory scan of the layout and immediately picked out Harold Hahn. He was sitting at the bar. Alone. Check that: the stools on either side of him were occupied. But the occupants were clearly engaged with other patrons seated on their adjacent stools.

In the midst of the crowd, Hahn looked very much alone.

And he still wasn’t wearing his necromancy robes.

See what I did there? Still being cautiously ironical.

But while Hahn was still a riddle trapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, while not wrapped in the sartorial trappings of a mage who raised the dead . . . he didn’t feel quite right for the part. His head came up from his drink to stare at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. I ducked back from the door’s glass insert and retreated back to my vehicle before he could catch a reflected glimpse of me.

If he could catch a reflected glimpse of me. The whole “not seeing myself in mirrors” issue was theoretically a subconscious projection that took place within an area of effect. But I didn’t know the range and I hadn’t looked at my own reflection in years. Discretion was the better part of valor. Or stupidity.

Now what?

I didn’t get the vibe that he was actually expecting to meet someone here. Michael Guidry or anyone else. And it was unlikely that he would be performing any arcane rituals in Deriso’s. Unless the bar was a cover for an actual coven. Sounds stupid, right? But I was pretty sure I’d seen a movie with this very plotline on the USA Network. Or maybe the SyFy Channel.

Maybe I should just burn my P.I. license.

I started my car and headed back to West Monroe and home.

Maybe I could task one of our independent contractors to tail Hahn tomorrow. Right now, it was getting close to midnight and I had to decide whether to check on my BDSM houseguest or stake out the cemetery.

I opted for the third choice. I was able to push the speed limit on the return trip and I was back at Hahn’s house in less than twenty minutes. I parked around the corner and grabbed a navy-blue hoodie out of the back seat. My cellphone was in my pocket if I needed any additional light but my enhanced night vision was more than serviceable as I exited the car and made my way up the back alleyway to the rear of Hahn’s property.

Again, not as strong nor as fast as a vampire but I was still able to pull a standing high jump to the top of my suspect’s privacy fence—even though it felt like a bit more than the six-foot height limit mandated by the zoning ordinances. As graceful as my ascent was, I caught the hem of my hoodie on a bush as I jumped down into the back yard. Stumbling to my knees, I was suddenly confronted by the pit bull that had tried to claw his way through a window and a door to get to me on my prior visit.

In the eight seconds it had taken the beast to awaken to my intrusion, spring to his feet, and come rushing across the grass to presumably bite my face off, several things happened. First, my augmented hypothalamus boosted a series combat messages to my adrenal glands (and maybe some glands not in the anatomy books thanks to the mutagenic virus in my body). Which fired up all of my serosanguinous chemistry sets. Tyrosine amino acids blasted out a sequence of dopamine in oxygenated combinates that yielded noradrenaline, epinephrine, and cortisol. These are the ordinary building blocks of adrenaline and mine had been weaponized, thanks to a sloppy blood transfusion with a centuries-old hemovore awhile back. I didn’t know what other chemicals might have been introduced to my still transforming physiology but it was like getting a dose of Captain America’s super soldier serum.

So, maybe two seconds in, I have the adrenaline analogs binding to the receptors on my heart, arteries, pancreas, liver, muscles and fatty tissue. In the meantime, my brain was dealing with stress hormones which were causing my hippocampus to contract and stimulating the production of IL-1 beta, a signaling molecule, that was simultaneously binding to sites in my hypothalamus, pituitary, and hippocampus. My whole limbic system was flipping switches on my neurotransmitters, kicking them up to warp speed and performing complex juggling acts with adrenergic and noradrenergic neurons. And my amygdala was adapting previous threat templates to match my new circumstance.

By the time Fido arrived I had little difficulty in overmatching his speed and canine strength. I grabbed him by the throat and carefully delivered a punch that sent him to doggie dreamland rather than fully euthanizing him.

I got to my feet and brushed myself off. Unharmed but now in need of a drink. Unfortunately, the blood banks were closed and my own, private supply was back home in the fridge.

I made my way over to the back door, bent at the waist, and listened for any sound of a busybody or the neighborhood watch. Nothing, so far: maybe Lady Luck was in my corner.

I tried the back door. I wasn’t really up for a B & E, just whatever I could peep at through the available windows. Even second floor if necessary, though that would put me in the sight lines of the neighbors.

The back door was unlocked.

I guess Hahn wasn’t worried about back yard security with a two-meter privacy perimeter and a slavering hellhound on patrol. I checked the door for alarms or a security system but it was just old-school Schlage deadbolts and single-cylinder knob set. I didn’t have to pick either lock to be stealthy. Lady Luck wasn’t just smiling, she was blowing kisses and giving me come-hither glances.

“What’s that?” I murmured. “Did I hear the sounds of someone in distress?”

I crossed the threshold.

#

I did a quick, cursory search of the house, careful to not disturb anything. If Hahn returned or the neighbors called the cops, saying I found the back door open or thought someone inside had—er—fallen and couldn’t get up, well that wasn’t going to cut any ice on Trespassing charges. And opening an unlocked door was still considered Breaking and Entering. At least the latter of the two.

So, I conducted a fairly quick walk-through. No hidden dungeons in the basement. No ceremonial robes in the closets. No arcane paraphernalia in the attic. No pictures of the Ex anywhere in the house.

If he harbored the slightest fondness for his former spouse, he was hiding it well.

But there were no overt signs of hostility or “deathless” obsession, either.

I finally found the paperwork for the Hahn’s divorce tucked away in a desk drawer on the second floor. I had to read it by the light of my phone as documents read like paint swatches in the infra-red spectrum.

I was tempted to take pictures of each page but, again: second floor, clear sightlines for the neighbors. Taking pictures with a flash in a dark room was way more of an attention getter than the soft glow of a hand-shielded phone screen to skim a document.

Despite the legalese, the gist was rather succinct. It was a No-Fault divorce. Or, at least Hahn anticipated no resistance from his wife. No specifics, just the boilerplate triad: Irreconcilable Differences . . . Incompatibility . . . Irretrievable Breakdown.

Wow, that really helped. Again, note ironical tone, here.

I replaced the papers and slipped back out of the house before that fickle Fräulein, Lady Luck, decided to Bobbitt me.

Fido was starting to rouse so I figured everything might look pretty normal by the time his lord and master returned from his presumed pub crawl. I sailed back over the fence and tried to walk unobtrusively back down the alleyway to my car. As far as I could see, no one was out and about.

Still.

Maybe I should move back across the river to this neighborhood . . .

#

I considered a trip to the cemetery next but it was after midnight and I was getting really thirsty now.

That could be problematic. Not because being thirsty makes me dangerous. But because being thirsty makes me stupid.

And that’s dangerous.

I was beginning to realize how much my detecting skills had eroded from lack of use over the past couple of years. Throw an unexpected case into my lap with an unsub that spooks a dead wiccan, a battle-tested voudoun mambo, and makes vampires crap their pants? I was already in over my head so being stupid would make “dangerous” look like a walk in the park.

Exhibit Number One: I returned to my house to discover that Gwen had destroyed half of my den in trying to respond to her latest summons.

She lay on the floor, still bound to the remains of the formerly sturdy chair. It had been snapped in half where the back met the seat and the legs were a bundle of kindling wrapped in the remains of the bungee cord. The curtains next to the sliding back-door to the patio had been torn down and half-shredded. The rocker was overturned and an armrest broken off. The couch was where I’d left it but its cushions were scattered across the room. The wall-mounted flat-screen now hung from its moorings at a canted angle.

As for the person at the center of this wheel of destruction? The T-shirt and sweatpants she wore were now ripped and torn where she had twisted and writhed against the ropes and the material bore additional evidence of dried sweat and not-quite-dry heaves. She was wild-eyed and still panting, though the fury of the compulsion seemed to have left her.

She shrieked and struggled anew when I started to untie her. Then she clung to me like a drowning woman in the middle of the ocean, weeping incoherently until she was exhausted once more.

I held her trembling body next to mine, distracted by her warmth. While not human-normal, she was warmer than me, now. All of my previous encounters with the animated dead were with bodies that retained the cold and lifeless sensations of a corpse, indistinguishable from the bodies down at the morgue save for their ability to move and speak. Maybe I was seeing the difference between an Animate and a truly resurrected human body.

Distracted as I was, I didn’t realize she was pulling my face down to hers until I felt her lips on mine. The kiss was tentative, uncertain, and I started to pull away but then her mouth became insistent. Desperate.

Hungry.

My body wanted to respond. It had been such a long time and my mind was slow to come out of the fog of thirst and need and forgetfulness. She was traumatized. Was it worse to permit a modicum of affection? Or push her away when she had already lost everything. Including her life and the right to her own body after death?

I kissed her back. Tenderly. Resisting the demands that her mouth was making on mine. I thought of my own moral compass and tried to parse the difference between what was being right and what was being kind. Were they incompatible?

And I thought of Lupe. And Deirdre. And how they were not dead and gone like my wife and daughter but were merely out of reach on this plane. For now. When I was finally able to figure out a way to cross the barrier and get to them, I couldn’t in all good conscience treat our forced parting as a “time-out” for seeing others. I owed them everything.

Gwen was just a client.

A frightened and vulnerable woman but I owed her nothing beyond the truth and my best efforts to free her from the malevolence that was stalking her.

As if she were reading my mind, she pulled back and gave me a tremulous smile.

“I think I’m going to need another shower,” she said softly.

#

While she was in the bathroom, freshening up, I went to the refrigerator inside my safe room and quickly consumed a couple of blood bags, taking the edge off. Then I called Olive back and tasked her with running down the Michael Guidry connection from the library. I wasn’t totally passing the buck. I’d still look into what I could from my end but I felt it best to have two pairs of eyes on this. I still felt off-balance about this whole case and wondered if there wasn’t something to the idea that a necromancer’s power over dead flesh might have some effect on mine, as well.

I felt underslept.

Ever since Hurricane Eibon and the loss of everyone I’d held dear through an interdimensional escape hatch to the Realm of the Fae, I’d been plagued by dreams. Dreams of my extended family. Dreams of the people I loved.

At first, they were nightmarish in that I could see them and hear them but not actually touch them. I would sleep fitfully and rise, physically and emotionally drained, haunted by my inability to cross the divide that separated us. Every plan, every effort since then had been thwarted and I had lived each night since with the taste of ashes in my mouth.

More recently my dreams had become increasingly disturbing. Not in their frequency or intensity but for the very opposite reasons.

They were starting to fade.

Not just my psychic connection to the others. But, in those declining phantasms between sleep and wakefulness, I could sense their withdrawal, as well. Human memory, it is said, retreats as one dwells among the Faerie. Trapped by forces beyond their powers to overcome, they were starting to forget me.

And absence—as the old saying doesn’t go, but maybe should—makes the heart go wander.

I shook off my woolgathering and tried to think back to my activities around midnight. Had I noticed any odd sensations or thoughts while Gwen was under tonight’s compulsory attack? I didn’t think so. But, again, I had underslept.

Case in point: I hadn’t heard the shower turn off and wasn’t aware that Gwen had entered the bedroom until I looked up and saw her standing in front of me. I was sitting on the bed, next to a pile of T-shirts and an assortment of old running shorts. I didn’t get out much these days and couldn’t remember the last time I had bothered to do a load of laundry. I had recently discovered that it was actually easier to order new clothes over the internet rather than go to all of the trouble to separate my hot and cold cycle fabrics. I had just picked up one of the shirts to give it the sniff test and there she was standing in front of me.

She dropped the towel she was using to dry her hair. Blonde tendrils brushed her still damp shoulders, wicking moisture back up into her expanding mane that fairly crackled with static electricity. Her blue eyes seemed to glow in the dimness of the room, as if lit by arcane energies from within. She stared down at me. Glanced at the shirt in my hands. Then looked back at me.

She dropped the other towel.

I almost laughed.

“This is a cliché,” I said. “Nearly every P.I. book and all of the movies . . .”

“I don’t care,” she said.

I broke her gaze, glancing again at her autopsy scars. They were nearly gone now!

“What—” I said.

“I don’t care,” she repeated.

“You’re . . . becoming human . . .” I said.

Her breath caught in her throat. That was another thing: the dead don’t draw breath except to talk. But she had been breathing for a while now.

“I haven’t felt human for a long time now,” she said. “Since long before I took all of those pills.”

She waited for me to do something. I didn’t.

She fell against me, riding me back down to the mattress. I caught her upper arms and created space between us, holding her above me as if she were hovering.

“I have someone,” I said. Someones? “This isn’t going to happen.”

She wept again, another storm of tears and fear. This was different, though. Instead of the terror of what was stalking her, she cried, feeling the dread of her loneliness. “What will I do?” she sobbed. “Where can I go?”

And the unspoken: Who will have me?

“One thing at a time,” I told her, lifting her so I could sit up. “We’ll figure the rest out later.”

She shook her head sadly, retreating back into her frightened little girl persona. “Tired . . .” she said. “I’m just so tired . . .”

Perhaps she had come out of the ground like most revenants, her dead flesh proof against the weaknesses of the living. But her body was transitioning back to the biological infirmities that plague the human condition. Her previous terror and thrashing about had doubtless released the metabolites—chloride, potassium, lactic acid, ADP—that interfered with her awakening body’s release of calcium in the muscle fibers. Plus, there was only so much stress the mind, itself, could take without a little timeout.

I handed her the T-shirt. “I’m going to put you to bed.”

#

If I hadn’t visited the laundry room in recent memory, the guest bedroom was closer to an archeological site untouched by eons of time. The bedding hadn’t been changed in at least a couple of years and a thick coating of dust was everywhere. Just fluffing a pillow produced a cirrocumulus formation of particulates that hovered over a quarter of the room like an ominous weather system.

So, I tucked her into my bed.

It was after one in the morning—closer to two a.m., actually. I wanted to go out to the cemetery to perform a cursory canvass of the area. There wasn’t anything human-related that I could do at this time of the night so I figured that I might as well get the lay of the land in planning tomorrow night’s stake-out.

She nearly freaked out again.

Didn’t want to be left alone.

Didn’t want to be tied to my bed. (Boy, if I had a quarter for every girl who . . . never mind.)

I pulled the Glock back out of the drawer in the nightstand and placed it next to the bedside lamp. I kicked off my shoes and slid under the sheets beside her. Promised to stay with her until she woke again. Told her to go to sleep and I would watch over her.

She snuggled up against me wearing nothing but the frayed, cotton top. Her body was still a little damp and offered a veritable peep-show where the fabric made sustained contact with her contours.

On the other hand, I remained dry and fully clothed so there was that as she nestled against me and breathed heavily on my throat. But she behaved herself and slowly began to relax.

What was the old saying? Lie back and think of England? I lay there and thought of Lupe.

And Deirdre.

Then, at some remove, I saw my wife and daughter, who died with me the first time and were now beyond any hope of my ever seeing again . . .

I slept.

#

I awoke to a sense of wrongness.

It was the wrong time of the solar cycle for me to be in bed. To be sleeping.

I was still dressed, tangled in sheets.

My head was muddy.

I was alone.

I sat up so quickly my head began to spin.

I closed my eyes until the vertigo subsided. Opened them and looked around the room.

She was gone.

Fighting free of the bedding, I put my shoes back on and reached for the Glock on the nightstand.

It wasn’t there.

There was a gun safe in the safe room but I suddenly couldn’t remember the combination. Probably a short-time memory lapse induced by the stress of the past few hours. I’d probably remember it in a few minutes.

But the cemetery was within walking distance and I didn’t know how much of a head start the summoning had given her.

Screw it: I grabbed my car keys and the Louisville Slugger and headed out the door.

Beausoleil Cemetery was just a ten-minute drive. It would have been less if I could have driven in a straight line and avoided all the intersections and sheriff patrols who were undistracted by the paucity of early morning traffic.

Early morning.

I looked at my Fitbit and saw that I still had a couple of hours to go before sunrise.

I felt a ribbon of rage rise from my stomach and spread through my chest as I drove. I wasn’t absolutely sure that the cemetery was where she was headed but where else could she go? Her husband’s house was across the river and miles away. She had no home now, outside of a box-sized basement under a two-and-a-half by eight-foot plot of ground.

My hands clenched the steering wheel impotently. This poor, tormented woman had been stripped of everything—her marriage, her friends, her job, and then her life, itself. Now she couldn’t even be afforded the final dignity of death. A monster had ripped her from her eternal sleep. Forced her up out of the resting place for her remains.

The “why” seemed increasingly obvious.

She was pretty.

And whatever sorceries the necromancer had employed, her flesh had been restored to near perfection. No hint of corruption remained. By now her flawless skin would be unmarred by even the hint of a scar. And that flesh would be his . . .

 . . . or hers . . . no need to be unconsciously sexist, Cséjthe . . .

 . . . to do with whatever he/she wanted. Gwen had already proved that she was powerless to resist. She would be nothing more than a meat puppet for her new master’s unholy lusts.

The fury continued to build in me, the hot flush suffusing every muscle fiber as it spread through my extremities. At the same time, my mind was going cold. Clear. And I considered my options as I killed my headlights rolling up through the cemetery gates.

I parked the car and grabbed the bat.

I didn’t have a ranged weapon. I would have to close with my target before he (or she) could do something to me. That meant the element of surprise. So, I hunched over, presenting a low profile as I worked my way through a maze of monuments, toward the far end of the graveyard.

My sneakiness was suddenly derailed as my cell phone buzzed. Fortunately, the only sound it made was from the “vibrate” setting: the ringtone was still switched off from my previous reconnoitering. Still, the damn thing was buzzing rather robustly. I turned the volume down as I crouched behind a mausoleum.

“Hello?” I whispered.

“Mister Chris? Is that you?” Olive Perdue’s voice answered faintly.

“Kind of busy right now,” I said softly. “Can this wait?”

“Sure,” she said. “I just got that divorce information you were asking about.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but I’ve already seen the paperwork.”

“Then you know . . .” she said quietly.

“No Fault Divorce. Not much there.”

“No fault . . .” she sounded bemused. “Huh. I can see why she didn’t fight it . . .”

Something in her voice and words stopped me from hanging up. “Sounds like there’s more to the story,” I said.

“Well, there was something about the name that nagged at me. I couldn’t remember until you called back with that second name . . .”

“Michael Guidry.”

“Yes. And even then, it took me awhile to put the two together.”

“Harold Hahn and Michael Guidry.”

“No. Gwendolyn Hahn and Michael Guidry. He was her student.”

“Her student,” I repeated dumbly, a sick feeling starting to flush the heat out of my system.

“She was his ninth grade Biology teacher. Taught him a lot, according to all the news stories about a year back. It was in all of the papers. Local channels. Even went national for a week or so.”

“Yuh,” I said, feeling gut-punched. “I gotta go. I’ll call you soon.” I dropped the call and began to run now, all stealth forgotten.

I tripped twice, went down once.

The temperature differential between the headstones and the terrain was still sufficient for me to see in the infrared spectrum and navigate safely. But I wasn’t being careful now. I was running toward Gwen Hahn’s gravesite, hoping I wasn’t too late.

#

“But I love you!” the tenth grader said.

Dressed in black with pale skin, eye-shadow, and emo haircut, he was kneeling inside a circle of white residue. The ring also encompassed the churned earth above Gwen’s grave site. A shovel lay by her headstone and a scattering of votive candles guttered around the perimeter. Some sat on symbols placed at the cardinal, compass points of the summoning area, others had a more random arrangement. A few cast their uncertain light on a spread of what appeared to be ancient library reference books.

Gwen stood a few feet away, across the circle from him. Her blonde hair and white T-shirt a dramatic contrast to her summoner in his black shirt and dark jeans: opposing forces of light and darkness.

An illusion of facades.

She clutched my gun in a two-handed shooter’s stance. It might have lent her some stability but she was trembling like a leaf.

“You can’t do this!” she hissed at him through clenched teeth.

“But I brought you back!” he whinged in a voice that set even my teeth on edge.

“We can’t be together!” she insisted, using the Glock to draw an exclamation point. “Let me go!”

“Why?” he pleaded. “I don’t care what my parents say. I’ll get a job. Join the army if I have to. We can run away. Start over. You’re not married anymore . . .” A flicker of doubt crossed his adolescent features. “ . . . are you?”

“It won’t work!” she said.

And the disdain in her voice should have been withering but the kid was having trouble hearing it.

“Why not? I have power now.” He gestured at the scatter of arcana all around them. “I researched this all summer. With a little more time and study, I—I could probably make money from this. People might pay for me to bring other people back!”

His expression shifted. Maybe it was the flicker of the candles at his knees. Maybe it was a branch of rustling leaves filtering the soft play of moonlight on his face.

Maybe it was the blowback of arcane energies that had touched corruption and were a conduit for the darkness it sought to excavate.

“I—I could bring back rich people. Make them tell me their passwords and bank account numbers . . .”

“And then what, Michael?” she asked in a voice she had probably used in countless classroom lectures for young, impressionable minds. “Maybe some sex slaves? Watch the obituaries for hot, young women? Cheerleaders? Beauty pageant queens?”

“I only want you!” But there was something in his face, now, that suggested the thought was not entirely alien to him.

“But I don’t want you,” she bit back. “Let me go.”

“I won’t,” he said stubbornly. “I love you and I worked too hard for this. You don’t know what I had to do to make this happen. What I—” He broke off as if he were about to share a shameful or possibly terrifying secret. His face closed down. “I’ll make you love me.”

“You’ll make me?” her voice went up to a notch below the hysterical register. The gun was moving around a bit now and I didn’t know who was the greater threat here. I clutched the bat, looking back and forth, trying to think of a way to resolve this where one or more of us didn’t end up dead or magically enslaved.

“I just want what we had before,” he said softly. “Before it all got crazy and turned to shit.”

Hahn dropped her head. “I can’t go back. I destroyed my marriage. My poor, sweet husband—I ruined him!” Her eyes began to overflow again. Whatever the necromantic energies had been doing to her body, they hadn’t stinted on her lacrimal glands and ducts. “My education degree, my career as a teacher—no school system will ever hire me again. I might as well be a sex slave, I’m no good for anything else!”

I saw the hope flare in his eyes.

She saw it, too. And brought the gun up.

Before I could take two steps, she placed the muzzle under her own jaw and pulled the trigger.

He screamed. It was raw and primal, full of horror and heartbreak and loss. He half rose from the ground and then collapsed back into himself. And began to dry heave.

I stared at the newly minted corpse of the child molester I had sought to defend. Gazed at the plump, pink lips that had kissed mine just hours ago. I did not look at her eyes. The Glock had made a mess of everything above the nose.

The nose.

Not . . . her . . . nose . . .

Impersonal now. Death had returned and was in charge once more. She was gone. And by her own hand for the second time. Maybe she wasn’t completely a monster.

Maybe.

I walked toward the kid. Saw his hand reach blindly for one of the books at his side. I put my foot on the page.

He looked up.

“No,” I said implacably. And: “Go home.”

He had trouble getting to his feet and I reached down to pull him up.

“Go home,” I said again. “Don’t look back. Put this behind you.”

“We’re supposed to be together,” he said in a shaky voice.

“No,” I said. “No, you’re not. You never were.”

He reached down for something and I placed the Louisville Slugger in his way.

“Leave it,” I said. “Go home. You’re young. You have your whole life ahead of you. You’ll find someone who is right for you and they’ll love you and you’ll love them. And it will be right. This . . .” I gestured with the bat. “ . . . wasn’t right. It couldn’t ever be right.”

“We’re supposed to be together,” he mumbled.

I hoped it was the rambling of a shock-numbed mind.

Not the promise of a Resurrection 2.0.

“Go home,” I told him again. “I’ll clean up here.”

He didn’t so much leave as drift away among the tombstones. For one crazy moment I wondered if he was already a ghost, doomed to haunt this graveyard as if his body was already entombed here, too.

Then I picked up the shovel and began to excavate the earth above her coffin.

Whatever spells had been at work over the past two nights had loosed the ground so that the work was surprisingly easy.

Or maybe it was just nice to do something that allowed me to turn my brain off for a little while.

#

I made it back home with time to spare before the murderous sun could peek back over the horizon.

The candles and paraphernalia joined Gwen’s remains back in her coffin. I tucked her in as best I could given the time constraints.

The books and more than a little cemetery earth came home with me.

I took three blood bags into the shower with me and stood there until the hot water ran out and the tub filled up past my ankles. As I dried off with the last clean towel in the cupboard, I stared at the standing water and wondered whether Drano or Liquid Plumr was better at dissolving stubborn cemetery dirt clogs.

I stripped my bed of its sheets. I started to carry them toward the laundry room then detoured up the stairs to the fireplace in the living room. I pulled the library books up off of the grate and folded the sheets to form a compressed base for tonight’s funeral pyre. The library books went back on top. Maybe Guidry was a victim but, considering the chaos he’d caused, some overdue book fines were a small price to pay. And there was no way I was putting these volumes back in local circulation. I could only hope that he would come to his senses before taking that left-hand path again.

I went back downstairs and rummaged around for a pair of clean sheets. There weren’t any. I opened the Amazon app on my phone and ordered more. Extra towels, too. Paid the extra costs for one-day shipping.

Then I crawled onto the bare mattress. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d slept like this.

A former therapist once told me that I presented clear signs of major depressive disorder. He had written out the signs and symptoms for me. Feelings of sadness, emptiness or hopelessness. Loss of interest or pleasure in most or all normal activities, such as sex, hobbies or sports. Tiredness and lack of energy, so even small tasks take extra effort. Slowed thinking, speaking or body movements. Trouble thinking, concentrating, making decisions and remembering things.

There are other things but these were the things he said that I ticked on the list. He didn’t believe in a pharmaceutical solution. He suggested cognitive therapy.

I didn’t tell him that I see dead people.

I tried to think of how cognitive therapy could have been applied over the past eleven hours of my life but I drifted off into a disturbingly dreamless sleep, first.

When I awoke, it was after sunset once more. My clock radio was still unplugged but I could sense the change in the upper atmosphere as the ionization activity in the mesosphere layer had calmed down.

It was increasingly scary as I discovered new and disturbing ways in which my body and my extended senses were continuing to mutate.

When I was a child, I thought monsters were birthed in mad scientists’ labs, cursed Egyptian tombs, Transylvanian castles and black lagoons. They lumbered in the night, along lonely roads and deserted crypts. You were supposed to be safe in the daylight. And, aside from the occasional bully looking to nick your lunch money, you were supposed to be safe in your school.

Not anymore.

Now the monsters might be your classmate with access to their parent’s gun cabinet.

Now the monster might be the attractive adult at the front of the classroom who wants you to stay after school.

It used to be easy. You kept an eye out for the bolts in their neck, the fangs, the ancient funeral bindings, the claws and gills . . .

Not anymore.

As I sat up, my phone buzzed indicating a waiting text.

I picked it up and opened the message queue.

It was from Olive.

Michael Guidry had gone home like I told him to.

And then he had gotten ahold of his father’s gun and used it to take his own life.

True horror takes many forms.

* * *

This story is set in the world of Wm. Mark Simmons’s Halflife Chronicles dealing with the adventures and misadventures of semi-vampire private eye Christopher Cséjthe. The latest entry in that series is April’s A Witch in Time. Before he turned his attention to science fiction, Simmons was winning awards for his writing, first as a newspaper journalist and later as a broadcast copywriter. His first book was a finalist for the Compton Crook Award and made the Locus Magazine Best List in 1991. When he isn't writing, Mark is in front of the camera or microphone, having worked in television and now radio where his is the morning voice for Radio Kansas and can be heard throughout half of the Sunflower State.

Waiting for the Talisman

P.C. Hodgell

Every morning cook and housekeeper Cleppetania (“Call-me-Cleppetty”) scrubbed the kitchen floor of the Res aB’tyrr, then the tiles of the great hall, then the floor of the side room where those too drunk to leave the night before had been dragged. These latter she also rousted.

“Is it really safe to go out?” one old regular quavered, glancing in apprehension at the side windows through which, indeed, early sun light streamed.

“All safe, Gunter,” said Cleppetty, propelling him toward the front door. “Nothing will eat you on the way home.”

“Promise?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, these days, but better you leave before your wife comes looking for you.”

Alarmed, he scurried out.

Every seventh day, Cleppetty did the laundry. Every third day, she baked. Today was the latter.

Consequently, water and salt were dumped into flour but not yeast which, of late, had proved unpredictable. Shortly thereafter the air blurred with powder as Cleppetty ruthlessly pummeled the dough, in the process making the kitchen table stagger and jump. A spell from her well-worn book of kitchen charms set the loaves to rise. Here memory made her smile: Once she had asked Jame to do this task. The bread had certainly risen—due, as it turned out, to the growth of rudimentary internal organs. Always good for a laugh, that girl, when she didn’t make one want to scream.

Leaving the charm to work, Cleppetty seized her shopping basket and left the inn, her angular, active figure bristling in all directions. Neighbors called out greetings to her as she passed but none dared to impede her. Here was the local market, one of many such set up in Tai-tastigon’s squares. The vendors were already in full cry:

“Fresh fruit, in just this morning from the countryside!”

“A haunch of mutton, madam? See, it barely twitches!”

“Vegetables, the best, the best . . .”

Cleppetty paused before a cart on which were piled leeks, cucumbers, eggplants, and much more beside in colorful heaps. She picked up a tomato and frowned at it. It was admirably red, but odd pustules garnished it and it seemed to pulse in her hand.

“Too ripe,” she said.

“No, no, madam, just right! Or here: look at these radishes.”

“Too soft,” said Cleppetty fingering one. “If I squeeze this, it will spurt in my face, or explode in the pot. And what about those cabbage heads you sold me last week, eh? D’you know what was inside them?”

The man winced.

“The potatoes were all right, weren’t they?” he almost pleaded.

“Oh yes, if you could bear to gouge out all of those reproachful, blinking eyes.”

“… last night,” a nearby matron was saying, “it came down the street, fumbling at the balconies, tearing some of them off. What did it look like? Oh, mostly transparent, I hear, but with lots of nasty tentacles, and its weight shattered the paving stones as it passed.”

“What do you suppose . . .”

“I don’t know! What are any of them? Dead gods? Demons? Worse? This only used to happen once a year, on the Feast of Dead Gods, and then we could shelter from them, families gathered together. It was almost like a holiday. Now . . . oh, what is our dear city coming to?”

“Something like that happens every night,” the merchant said to Cleppetty, his voice dropping to a murmur. “And that’s not the worst of it.”

“I know,” said Cleppetty. “I listen.

Someone toward the edge of the square shouted. Heads turned. Shoulders tensed.

“Here, here, here! Another harrowing of them!”

People gathered around a stairwell, some with stones, others drawn as if despite themselves. Shabby figures were routed from the shadows and came, shambling, blinking, into the morning sun. Their clothes hung about them in stinking rags. Their faces were slack, their eyes lit only with dumb fear and hunger.

“Oh no!” cried the matron, aghast. “That’s my grandson!”

Others turned on her.

“What did you do, to bring him to this?”

“Nothing, nothing! He slipped out one night to serve his god. They caught him in the streets. He came home without his shadow and . . . and died by morning. After that, we couldn’t restrain him!”

The merchant beside Cleppetty drew back an arm to throw a hefty rutabaga. She stopped him.

“Don’t. Just . . . don’t.”

The haunts scuttled off to another hiding place. Whatever they had been before, they were now creatures of the night, and this was the day.

“We never thought before about what separates life from death,” the vendor said, “or animate from inanimate.”

As Cleppetty turned away, he sadly tipped an entire tray of vegetables into the gutter where they split open on impact, disgorging watery blood and suspicious, fibrous bundles.

On her way back to the Res aB’tyrr, beside the remains of the Skyrrman, Cleppetty was stopped by Kithra.

“Has Uncle Tubain come out of his bedroom yet?” the former maid demanded.

“His wife Abernia was kidnapped by the Sirdan of the Thieves’ Guild,” said Cleppetty, perforce stopping. “Of course he’s upset.”

“For months?”

“Very upset.”

Kithra pouted. “I know, if I could talk to him, that he would let us come back to live in the Res aB’tyrr. Yes, it was kind of him to buy the Skyrrman for me and Rothan as a wedding gift, but it’s a ruin!”

“Yes, it is,” said Cleppetty with a sidelong glance at the moldering hulk beside them. “After all of this time, too. Is that Tubain’s fault?”

“Rothie does his best.”

“I’m sure that he does.”

“When is Aunt Abernia coming back?” Kithra cried after her as she pressed on to the Res aB’tyrr’s door where the cat Boo waited for her impatiently on the step. “When will Uncle Tubain leave his apartment? When will everything be normal again? Are you going to see the Council of Five again? Or the Sirdan? Oh, if you do, take me with you! He’s so divine!”

Cleppetty put the risen loaves in the oven and turned to the evening’s meal. Perhaps the inn depended most on its legendary cellar, but patrons also needed to be fed, and they would call for food earlier than in days gone by, wanting to be home by dark.

Soup today was lentil, barley, and bean favored with the bones of a joint left over from yesterday.

Dried vegetables were usually safe.

As for the joint, “Cook anything long enough,” Cleppetty would say with a snort to anyone who dared to ask, “and it gives in.”

The same went for the bustard and the roast currently turning on spits, although it made her culinary heart ache to half-ruin them.

As she turned to the makings of a sparse salad (lettuce couldn’t get up to much mischief on the worst of days), the new dancer flounced in. As usual, Na’bim wore barely more than a discontented expression. Her charms, thus revealed, were less than she supposed them to be.

“Is Master Tubain coming out tonight?” she asked, as she had every day for the past month. “How can he spread the word about how good I am if he hasn’t even seen me perform?”

Cleppetty had seen her. If Tubain ever did, the girl would be out on her ear.

“Honestly!” she pouted, plump fists jammed on plump hips. “Don’t tell me he didn’t promote your precious B’tyrr when she was here.”

“The B’tyrr didn’t need any such help,” said Cleppetty tartly.

Nor had she. When Jame danced, eager crowds had spilled out into the square. Tell them that they risked their souls thereby and they would only have laughed:

“Cheap at the price!”

“Tubain will come out when his wife returns home,” she said. “Now, unless you want to lend a hand here. . . .”

Na’bim turned up her nose and flounced out. Jame would have stayed, not that Cleppetty had ever let her near bread dough again.

Cleppetty put food on a tray—scraps from last night, a bowl of milk—and climbed the stairs. To the back of the inn on the second story was the apartment of Tubain and, in better days, his wife. The cat Boo went with her, meowing at her heels. She knocked, waited as if for an answer, and went in.

No one was there.

The rooms felt deserted and stale, but she didn’t dare open a window. Where had that nosy Na’bim gone? A glance back through the door reassured her: Not to the dancer’s nearby room, at least.

Cleppetty put the tray down on the floor and uncovered it. Boo, already obese, waddled over and proceeded to make a glutton of himself. While he gorged, making “yumm, yumm, yumm” noises, she opened a closet and regarded the garments hung on hooks within. To the right were a woman’s clothes; to the left, a man’s.

The entire apartment seemed as rigorously separated, down to fussy ornaments on one side and austere walls on the other. The mattress sported two parallel grooves. Two tables flanked the bed. On one rested a man’s comb, on the other a woman’s brush, both with short, graying hair wound around their prongs.

Still in the closet, Cleppetty fingered a pair of trousers, sighed, and took down instead a gown embroidered with blue flowers across the bodice.

Picking up the now empty tray, followed by Boo begging for more, she left.

Shortly thereafter she put on her own most respectable dress, packed more food—this time, the best at hand—and left the inn. Kithra saw her pass from an upstairs window of the Skyrrman and called for her to wait. She didn’t follow, however, as the housekeeper hurried on into the labyrinth of the city.

By now it was late afternoon with people hurrying through the streets to complete the day’s errands. Merchants hawked their wares, many aware that whatever they didn’t sell today would have to be thrown out tomorrow. Chanting in cadence, acolytes ran through the streets exhorting followers to gather in the Temple District to protect their gods against the threat of nightfall. Some doors were already shut, their cracks stuffed with strips of cloth. It might have been the Feast of Dead Gods come again, disastrously out of season.

The sky growled. Clouds banked there, their tops still sun-lit, their foundations already sunk in shadow. One might have thought that a host of windows and gables loomed over the city, limed with spectral light. The wind shifted, then shifted back, bringing a carrion stench on its breath.

Here was Ship Island, home of the Thieves’ Guild. The River Tone surged around its prow, icy water from the Ebonbane lapping the toes of its figurehead, a female holding aloft, one in each hand, the severed heads of two men. That was her, Jame had once said, according to that smiling monster Bane. He had also said that one of the heads was his own. The other belonged to the former Sirdan, Theocandi, whom the Guild believed Jame to have assassinated. The Guild was being idiotic.

Cleppetty stumped across the stone draw-bridge, across the foredeck, to the entrance of the palace proper.

“I’ve come to see the Sirdan Men-dalis,” she snarled at the guard whom she met there. “Better yet, one of his prisoners. Here is her dinner, also a fresh dress.”

The man blinked at her, then grinned.

“I was told to watch for you,” he said. “Leave your baggage here.”

He led her deeper into the palace, along a route that she had never taken before. Odd, that the Guild had chosen such a nautically themed headquarters, or perhaps not: here, they had an entire island to themselves in which to be virtually a law unto themselves. Moreover, it was close to the rich Gold Ringing District. Tai-tastigon’s thieves were nothing if not pretentious. Jame had really gotten under their skin when the legendary thief Penari had taken her on as an apprentice, and then she had chosen as the Talisman only to steal trinkets.

“The craft is all,” she had said, with that lop-sided smile of hers. “That, and friendship.”

Such an unusual thief. Such a loyal friend.

The hall in which Cleppetty found herself was high and elegantly attired—too much so, for her tastes. Men-dalis lived like a prince but one newly come to power and overly proud of it. How long had it been? Five-some years? What did he still have to prove?

Jame had been gone that long too, driven out by the Guild. Where was she now? What was she doing? Her people lived west of the Ebonbane, she had said, in some place called the Riverland. She had gone to join them. Had they found her as unnerving as Tai-tastigon had?

Perfume invaded the air, a heady, evocative scent, and the light shifted. Cleppetty knew without turning that Men-Dalis had entered the hall. Kithra had called him divine. He was, at least, the son of a New Pantheon sun god, and infamous in his own right for his charming manner. All the less reason to bend to him, Cleppetty thought, her straight back becoming even more stiff. Arrogant, self-righteous pup.

Oh, but that scent. . . .

It reminded her of her first courtship, so many years ago. She had thought then that love was forever. Well, so it was, but so were her new vows.

Ah, Sart, on guard duty tonight. You support me when you can and I am no longer a widow. Otherwise, always, I support myself and those whom I love.

“You come bearing gifts to your mistress Abernia. Your master Tubain only has to present himself to reclaim her.”

Oh, that smug, laughing voice. Did he know the truth? Abernia had been his prisoner for months. He must.

“Some people are naturally fragile.” Now he was playing with her. “Or perhaps unnaturally.”

“That doesn’t apply to Mistress Abernia,” she said sharply.

“True, true.”

Was that a note of irritation in his voice? Tubain was, in many ways, a coward. Abernia was not. That was why they complemented each other so well, and why Men-dalis was now finding the latter such a tough nut to crack.

“My master is a good man,” she said, glowering, defiant. “And my mistress is a good woman.”

Men-dalis could be heard to pout, although he stood behind her. “Is it enough to be good, though? My brother Dallen . . .”

She interrupted. Why should the sound of that name in his mouth offend her? “Dally was a sweet boy. An honorable boy. A friend. What of him?”

“Nothing. Nothing. Was he so good, though? After all, he betrayed me to that strumpet Talisman.”

“He did not!”

“A-ha, ha, ha. Then he fooled you too. Did she as well?”

“She was and still is a Kencyr. They never lie.”

“So people say. They also say that the dead are coming back.”

Was that hesitancy in his voice, even sudden fear? Of what was he afraid? Everyone said that Bane had killed Dally, flayed him alive on the Mercy Seat the same night that Jame had supposedly killed Theocandi. But what if he hadn’t any more than she had?

Cleppetty shivered. “What shadow walks behind you?” she demanded, still not turning, now almost scared to.

“What? Where?” He had turned quickly; she heard it in his voice, also in his dread. “Nothing. I have sent for the Talisman, in this place called the Riverland. If she doesn’t return to sort out this mess, I have promised to burn your precious inn to the ground and slay you all on its threshold. Tell me: will she come? Is she that loyal?”

“To her friends, yes.”

The memory came to her of those silver-gray eyes, that flickering, deadly smile.

And to her enemies, implacable, she thought. Be careful what you wish for, guild lord.

Cleppetty took a deep breath. “If she does, will you release my mistress?”

He laughed, light hearted again. “We will see.”

Then he was gone.

Cleppetty found her own way out. In the entry hall, the guard was finishing the food that she had brought for Abernia. “Very tasty,” he said, smiling at her. “My wife will appreciate the dress.”

Cleppetty snarled at him and departed, worried anew about Abernia. The palace’s dungeon, known as the Brig, was said to be a dank, often flooded place, hard on middle-aged bones. Moreover, did everyone here know the truth about its current inmate?

The sun had set behind the Ebonbane and shadows stretched long fingers across the streets. People were hurrying home, clutching last minute purchases, the ways nearly empty. In the distance, something boomed, and someone screamed. Nearer at hand, shapes stirred in stairwells, in doorways, restless, eager.

Overhead, the impression of a monstrous house had grown. The fretful wind tipped it so that one felt dizzy looking up. It appeared about to spill darkness out of its doors and windows on the city beneath, and thunder grumbled in its depths.

Cleppetty pulled her hood down over her head and picked up her pace. Although every noise made her heart pound, she couldn’t help but smile.

Jame was coming back. At last.

* * *

This story is set within the world of P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath Saga, with latest entry in the series By Demons Possessed out in May, 2019. P.C. Hodgell earned her doctorate at the University of Minnesota with a dissertation on Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, and is a graduate of both the Clarion and the Milford Writers Workshops. Now retired, she was a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in modern British literature and composition, and taught an on-line course on science fiction and fantasy for the University of Minnesota. Hodgell lives in her family’s ancestral nineteenth-century wood-framed house in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Voodoo Magic

Robert Buettner

When Cass Gooding’s flight landed, local time and temperature were ten a.m. and eighty-six humid degrees Fahrenheit, so sweat already dampened her forehead. She cleared Cayman Islands immigration and customs then, passport in hand, hoisted the backpack she had checked and spun toward the exit.

A cocoa-skinned man blocked her. He wore a sport coat despite the heat, showed his ID, and said, “Detective Constable Mechem. Royal Cayman Islands Police Service. May I ask you a few questions, miss?”

Cass glanced around. Other exiting passengers streamed past her. Hair rose on her neck. “Why?”

He pointed to an empty conference room. “We can talk in there.”

Cass didn’t budge. “My connecting flight leaves from another building. I have to run.”

He shrugged. “The sooner we talk, the sooner you may be able to run.”

* * *

In the small room, he pointed at Cass’s passport. “May I?”

She handed it across and he read aloud, “Cassidy Gooding.” He flicked his eyes from her face to her photo then back. “Where have your neck tattoo and eyebrow ring gone?”

“The way of my misspent youth.”

“Ah.” He turned to her passport’s personal data page and read, “Chantilly?”

“Virginia. Outside Washington D.C. It’s my business address.”

“And what is your business?”

“I curate airplanes at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum Annex in Chantilly. The Smithsonian.”

He lifted her pack from the floor beside her and laid it on the conference table. “Would you be offended if I asked you to open this?”

“I’m already offended. There’s nothing in it but my perfectly legal private property.” She eyed her watch, sighed, then unzipped her pack. “I need to make my flight. But touch my panties and I’ll slug you.”

Atop her pack’s contents rested a three inch thick business envelope. The envelope’s ends drooped over the detective’s upturned palm as he hefted it.

He raised his eyebrows. “Do you acknowledge this packet was placed here by yourself and is your property?”

“Yes, it’s mine. It’s not drugs, you dick.”

He smiled. “Agreed. But it is an extraordinary volume of paper.”

“It’s not drug money either. Open it.”

He tugged out the monograph’s unbound pages, then cocked his head as he read their top sheet. “Voodoo Magic by Dr. Cassidy Gooding.”

“Copy edited manuscript. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press sent it for corrections. I’m a doctor of aeronautical history. The F-101 Voodoo was a Cold War U.S. airplane.”

The detective replaced the envelope and zipped Cass’s pack shut. Then he threw back his head and laughed.

Cass said, “What?

He waved her to follow him. “Dr. Gooding, I have indeed been a dick. To make amends allow me to drive you to your connecting flight.”

* * *

In his sedan parked at the curb the detective asked, “Where to?”

“Island Air FBO. Should be close.”

“Quite close.” He looked over his shoulder then merged into traffic. “But Island Air only serves private planes and charters. What is your airline?”

“Chance Airlines. It operates one flight a week from Georgetown to Last Chance Key.”

Again the detective laughed. “An imitation airline to an imitation island.”

“What?”

“Chance Airlines is one small plane chartered once each week to one destination. Last Chance Key’s official name is ‘Last Rock.’”

“Official?”

“Last Rock first appeared on charts in 1670 as an uninhabited navigation hazard. It’s three miles long, one mile wide, as low and flat as all the Caymans, and forty miles northeast of Cayman Brac, our easternmost island.”

“Why uninhabited?”

“Cayman rainfall supports only our islands’ natural ecosystems. Human habitation requires supplemental desalinated well water. During the 1960s, a well and desalination plant were completed on Last Rock. Today perhaps two hundred people live there. They call it Last Chance Key.”

“Why?”

“Key means island of course. 'Last' because going east from the Caymans it’s the final dab of land until Cuba or Jamaica. Chance because the gentleman who built the desalination plant takes in unfortunates who are down to their last chance.”

“It’s part of the Caymans?”

The detective shrugged. “Geographically, perhaps. But if our politicians claimed those unfortunates they would assume responsibility for their health care and such. Souls who are down to their last chance can’t pay much tax to cover the bill.” He stopped his car in front of Island Air’s building, thirty minutes before Cass’s scheduled departure.

Cass tugged her backpack from his car’s trunk and said, “Thanks for the lift. But why did you pull me over in the first place?”

“Gossip.”

“Huh?”

“Caymanians love it. We say one day a lady sneezed here in Georgetown. Thirty minutes later the story that reached Bodden Town was that she had the plague. RCIPS received an anonymous phone tip an hour before your flight landed, to beware of an American girl with short red hair arriving from Miami.”

“Beware why?”

The detective shrugged again. “Unspecified. Usually such tips involve drug or currency couriers.” He grinned. “You are our first-ever sorceress.”

“I don’t understand the joke.”

“Belief systems like Voodoo remain unlawful in the Caymans. At least those parts are unlawful that involve extortion by pretending to cast spells, or involve poisoning.”

“Spells? Seriously?”

“Not seriously to you or to me. But to Caymanians of my parents’ generation, most seriously. Obviously someone who takes Voodoo seriously glimpsed your title page while you were working en route. The story grew until you became a witch doctor. Our normal procedure would have caused you to miss your flight.”

The detective left as Cass wrinkled her forehead. No superstitious departure lounge tipster had fingered her, because her manuscript hadn’t left her pack since she had left her apartment. But someone had tried to delay, but not prevent, her arrival at Last Chance Key. Frowning, she jogged toward the Turboprop DeHavilland Twin Otter waiting on the tarmac.

* * *

“Welcome aboard, Dr. Gooding.” The shirt-sleeved pilot sweated in bright sun alongside the Otter’s open cabin door. He took Cass’s backpack to stow in the nose luggage compartment and smiled. “Choose any row you want today. As long as it’s number one. Also—”

Cass smiled back. “I know Otters. Everybody gets a window seat, everybody gets an aisle seat.”

She climbed up and through the door, then paused, head down beneath the stifling cabin’s low ceiling. Through the open forward bulkhead door she saw the copilot seated. The cabin smelled of bananas, and of something else that suggested prior passengers had included livestock.

The pilot climbed in behind her, closed and latched the door, then squeezed past her and walked forward.

Twin Otters were Short Takeoff and Landing wonders. They could land on a dime and take off from a nickel while carrying nineteen passengers with luggage, or cargo from jet skis to goats, or any combination in between. Today this cabin’s rear seats had been removed and the space crammed with ratchet-tied cargo.

Cass picked her way forward through crated bananas, camping equipment, and plastic fifty-five gallon drums until she reached the two spartan passenger seats immediately aft of the forward bulkhead.

She buckled herself into the right seat while the pilot knelt in the aisle that separated her from the other passenger, who was already buckled into the left seat. He signed, then returned to the pilot, a cargo manifest on a clipboard.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, the Otter had climbed out from Grand Cayman Island and droned toward Last Chance Key, one hundred thirty miles northeast.

Cass’s view, unobstructed by the Otter’s high wing, was of empty sea. The Caymans were flat specks that barely peeked above the central Caribbean’s azure surface, and were the only land for seven-hundred-forty-miles north from the Panama Canal and for nearly five hundred miles east from the Yucatan Peninsula’s tip. The Caymans also lay two-hundred-forty-miles northwest of Jamaica. Even the closest land, Cabo de Cruz, the barbed tip of the elongate fishhook that was Cuba, lay a hundred miles northeast of Last Chance Key.

The Caymans’ isolation blessed them with gin-clear water that lured divers from around the world. The Caymans’ discreet banks lured a different clientele, from money-laundering drug lords to deadbeat dads. But Last Chance Key lured Cass Gooding for neither of those reasons.

She stretched tall in her seat to glimpse the Caymans’ eastern islands out the Otter’s left side window, but the other passenger blocked her view. He looked to be Cass’s age, which her mother defined as north of stupid and barely south of unmarriageable.

Cass tapped his muscled shoulder. “Can you see Cayman Brac out there yet?”

He stared straight forward at the bulkhead, back stiff. His big hands clenched his seat’s spindly arms so tight that his own forearms’ muscles bulged, and their veins stood out.

Cass said, “Don’t like flying?”

He shook his head, then muttered through clenched teeth, “Like flying. Don’t like crashing.”

Cass said, “If it helps, I feel as safe in a Twin Otter like this as probably any fixed wing aircraft I know. And I know lots of them.”

He turned his head slightly toward her. “You’re a pilot?”

“Not these. I have my rotorcraft license.”

“Especially don’t like helicopters crashing. You ever crash one?”

Cass paused, then said, “No.” She blinked.

He exhaled then stared at her. His eyes were Caribbean blue.

He said, “You’re lying.” Then he smiled. “But I appreciate the sympathetic gesture.”

He turned his torso toward her as stiffly as if he were wearing a neck brace and mini-waved his hand four inches off the seat arm. “Steve Hunter.”

“Cass Gooding. I wasn’t lying about the Otter. It’s a simple aircraft. Safe as houses. That’s the opinion of a Ph.D. in aeronautical history.”

“You too?”

“Me too what?”

“Ph.D. in a field with the earning potential of dry rot.”

“You’re an invertebrate paleontologist.”

His jaw dropped. “How . . .?”

Cass pointed at his chest, “Your T-shirt reads ‘I dig blastoids.’”

He raised his eyebrows. “Wow. Most people guess death rays or colon polyps. Did you come to the Caymans for the diving?”

Again she hesitated then blinked. “Yes.”

“That’s your second lie. At three I shut down conversations. So. Did you come to launder money, for a vacation, or for something else you don’t want to talk about?”

“I didn’t come to launder money or for a vacation.”

He smiled. “Smart answer.”

“Smart question. My turn.” Cass flicked her eyes to the jagged scar that ran from his left elbow to wrist, then rethought.

She jerked her thumb at the cargo behind them. “You vacation with drums of concentrated hydrochloric acid, a pickaxe, and a life raft?”

“Business trip, not vacation. It’s an inflatable boat, not a life raft. They say down here catching dinner is cheaper than groceries. Acid can dissolve some invertebrate fossils like seashells out of limestone, which is what the Caymans are made of. You may have seen paperweights or jewelry made that way.”

“You manufacture trinkets?”

“No. My business is the same as every other untenured paleo nerd’s business. Find cheap groceries. As a joke I started a go-fund-me page about it. I got back a snail mail letter proposing a pilot program. Apparently Last Chance Key’s a sharing economy and the only natural resources its residents have to share are fish and fossiliferous limestone. There was a plane ticket and a check in the envelope.”

The copilot stuck his head back through the cockpit door. “We’re starting our descent into Last Chance Key. Touchdown in ten minutes.”

The Otter banked as its nose dipped.

Dr. Steve Hunter, untenured paleo nerd, cottage industry entrepreneur, and severe aerophobe, again froze solid.

* * *

The loaded Otter stopped four hundred feet after touchdown with easily a thousand feet of runway left. Cass and Hunter jumped down onto the runway as a rust perforated pickup that had once been red stopped alongside the plane.

The airstrip, barely above sea level, was crushed white limestone bordered by knee-high green scrub. Beyond, similar scrub punctuated by stunted trees alternated with white rock and sand patches. There was no terminal, just a fuel trailer with one flat tire and a flapping windsock.

The pickup’s driver, whose biceps and shoulders bulged like dark, tattooed grapefruit, laid Cass’s pack and Hunter’s in the pickup’s bed, loaded the crated bananas, then motioned the two of them to squeeze beside him in the front seat.

As the pilots unloaded the rest of the cargo the driver accelerated then said, “Dr. Hunter, Miss Gooding, I’m Cedric. Pleased to make your acquaintance. I drive you anyplace you need to go as long as you’re here. Dr. Hunter, I come back for the rest of your cargo and deliver it to the campsite where you asked for. I cleared the brush there this morning.”

Hunter pointed at the greenery. “Does this brush ever grow taller than it is now?”

Cedric shrugged. “Cayman brush is the same as me. Before I came here I was a prizefighter in Jamaica. Standup Cedric they called me. When I got knocked down I always stood up again. Brush here stands up too. It covers everything nice and green. But before it stands up for too long hurricanes always come and knock it down. Then the rock is bald as my grandfather’s head. But soon the brush stands up again.”

Cass said, “Cedric, why would a prizefighter live here?”

He shrugged his big shoulders again as he drove. “One fight I got knocked down. I was supposed to stay down.”

Cass said, “To cheat?”

Standup Cedric nodded. “But I never cheat, miss. I stood up. So the cheaters who lost money came looking for me. To put me down for the long count. But Billy found me first. He got me out of Jamaica and offered me one last chance to come here and disappear. I took it.”

“Billy?” Cass said, “The room I reserved is at a place called ‘Billy’s.’ I hope you know it because I don’t have an address.”

The driver grinned. “Neither does Billy’s, miss.”

* * *

A half mile later Cedric dropped Cass, Hunter, their packs, and the banana crates in front of a free-standing wood plank porch that measured perhaps forty feet by forty feet. Railings surrounded the porch, and timber pilings elevated it two feet above the ground, then continued upward and supported a woven grass roof that shaded the porch. On the porch a half dozen tables were arranged along the rail so they overlooked the sea, fifty yards away.

Hunter carried both their packs onto the porch, past a hand painted wooden sign hung from the porch’s front rail:

BILLY’S LAST RESORT

Order what you want. Eat what you get.

Ten feet behind the porch stood two tiny limestone block cottages. Smoke drifted from the nearer cottage’s chimney.

A gray haired, heavy white woman wearing a long cotton dress carried a metal coffee pot from the cottage to the porch, set it on a sideboard, then smiled at them. “Ah. The Yanks. Welcome.”

Cass stood alongside Hunter and said to the woman, “I’m Cassidy Gooding. I reserved a room here. Are you Billy?”

The old woman shook her head. “I’m Millicent. This place is named for Billy because he started it. Billy started everything here.”

Cass said to the old woman, “So it’s a memorial?”

“Memorial? Hardly. Billy’s quite alive.” She paused, peered out to sea, then leaned forward and raised her wire rimmed glasses onto her forehead. “What the devil?”

She turned to the sideboard, snatched up binoculars, then stared while she focused them.

Cass and Hunter turned and also stared as a ship, painted gold from stem to stern, moved toward the island.

The old woman frowned. “Cruise ships don’t stop here.”

Cass groaned. “It’s no cruise ship.”

Hunter pointed seaward as he turned to Cass. “You know this ship?”

Cass sighed, “Yep. And this explains a lot. The Kraken is the world’s ninth biggest private yacht. Also the world’s second most sophisticated underwater exploration and recovery vessel. And its owner is the world’s first biggest asshole.”

The gold ship slowed, turned broadside, and Millicent sniffed. “Two miles out. That ship draws too much water to cross the reef. That’s as close as your asshole can get, Dear.”

Cass shook her head. “Never underestimate an asshole.”

A gold painted helicopter lifted off the pad near the ship’s stern and sped toward them.

Millicent whispered, “Bugger! Will you look at that?”

Cass closed her eyes. “I don’t need to. It’s an Airbus H155 with lizard skin seats and a minibar.”

A minute later the helo settled in the middle of the road and sat while both engines whistled down to silence. Its pilot hopped out his door, then opened the passenger compartment door.

Parkman Silver stepped down, visored one hand above his eyes, then strode toward the trio who stood in the grass roof’s shadow. The breeze ruffled his tight-curled graying hair, his untucked shirt, and his linen slacks. Already lime dust kicked up by his helo settled on his hand-sewn deck slip-ons.

He called, “I’m looking for Billy.”

The old woman called back. “He’s expected shortly.”

Silver shouted, “When’s shortly?”

“Two days.”

Silver paused when he got close enough to read the restaurant’s sign. Then he cocked his head, jerked his aviators up, and stared at Cass. “Gooding?”

Cass smiled. “It’s refreshing when you look shocked and actually are.”

Silver stepped into the shade, then looked her up and down from her ball cap to her trainers.

He nodded. “I prefer this new look. The tattoos and face hardware were too crack whore.”

Cass clenched her fists behind her back while she stretched a smile. “Nobody compliments a woman quite like you do Silver.”

“No hard feelings about the Desert One business, then?”

“I’ll leave those to the crew’s families.”

“Gooding, the artifacts were tastefully displayed.”

“Between the nickel slots and the tittie bar.”

“The Las Vegas Municipal Court ruled for me.”

“Funny how in Las Vegas the house always wins.”

“That’s the American way, Gooding.”

“Not my America.”

Silver sighed. “Give it up, Gooding.” He pointed out at his yacht. “Join me for dinner tonight. You tell me what you’re here after. I’ll tell you why you should just give it up to me without a struggle. My chef is doing a bisque with locally harvested conch.”

“I’m busy.”

“I’ll pair it with my last 1841 Veuve Cliquot.”

“Busier still.”

“You know conch is an aphrodisiac.”

“Silver, there is not enough conch in the ocean.”

Silver sighed. “Game on then.” He spun his finger to his pilot, the helo’s engines whined and its rotor spun. As Silver reboarded, he shouted back to Cass, “Remember, Gooding, the house always wins.”

Cass stared, arms crossed and eyes narrowed, as the golden helicopter hovered five hundred feet above them.

She whispered, “At this moment I would sell my soul for one lousy RPG.”

Hunter stared at Cass, mouth agape. “Who the hell is that? More importantly, who the hell are you?”

Cass sat at a shaded table looking out across the azure sea then nodded to Hunter to join her. She said to the old woman, “Millicent, if we order, what will we get?”

“Conch chowder this evening.”

“What can we get in the meantime?”

“Hot coffee. Cool water. Green bananas that flew in with you.”

Hunter said to Millicent, “Any chance of a couple beers?”

“On Billy’s island there is no beer. Also no rum, no drugs, no guns, no bombs, no temptation, and no one looking down on you for what you did before. All we have is two lorries, thirty goats, two boats, all of which we share, and one last chance to share a simple life with others like us.”

Millicent set their coffees and waters in front of them then said to Cass, “I used to have a lovely thin body just your size. Also a good man, a beautiful daughter, and I captained the finest dive boat on The Brac.”

She turned up one forearm and pointed at heroin tracks. “I threw Paradise away for this shit. Until I thought this,” she pointed at scars on her wrists, “was my only way out. But Billy found me in an alley, bandaged me up, and gave me one last chance.” She breathed deep as she stared out across the sea at the big gold ship. “I must see to the chowder. Coffee’s in the pot, bananas are in the crate. Stay as long as you please.”

Cass swallowed a lump in her throat. “Makes my issues with Silver look insignificant.”

Hunter wiped his eyes. “Makes this Billy look damn significant. I had no idea. Before I came I could find zero about this place on the Internet. It doesn’t even have Internet service. Or cell service. I expected some sketchy fishing camp.”

“Me too.” She stared out at the Kraken. “Silver I didn’t expect.”

“Which brings me back to my question. Who is Silver and what’s your mutual beef?”

“Parkman Silver inherited ten billion dollars. To date, he has mismanaged that down to four billion. On which, as you see, he still squeaks by. He uses the Kraken to find historic wreckage, mostly ships, sometimes aircraft, even rare wine recovered from shipwrecks. He uses his loot in his only successful businesses, which are touring circuses masquerading as cultural exhibitions, and casinos.”

Hunter’s eyes widened. “Long John Silver’s Las Vegas? With the restored Spanish galleon in the pool and the world-renowned Pirate Wenches?”

“Yep.”

“How are you crossways with him?”

Cass pointed out over the water at a large black bird that drifted in the sky parallel to the shoreline. As they watched the big bird dove on a smaller one inbound from the sea, from whose beak a limp object dangled. The small one dove and twisted, but eventually the bigger bird snatched the object away.

Cass said, “That small bird’s called a booby. The big one’s a frigate bird.”

Hunter said, “Historian, international woman of mystery, and . . . bird watcher?”

Cass smiled. “Sort of. The history of flight began with humans watching birds and wondering what if. The point is boobys fly out to sea, dive for squid all day, then bring home their catch to feed their chicks. Frigate birds are opportunistic jerks. They watch the boobys do the work then steal their squid.”

“Silver stole your squid? How?”

“He’s stolen several. But most recently? Do you know what Silver meant by ‘Desert One’?”

“Probably. In 1980 the U.S. tried to fly into Iran and rescue hostages. At a ground refueling point in the Iranian desert, code named Desert One, two aircraft collided in a sandstorm. The mission failed. It was Jimmy Carter’s Waterloo.”

Cass nodded. “Yep. Eight U.S. service personnel died in that collision. Iran repatriated their remains, but kept the wreckage and collateral objects left behind. They still display some of the wreckage as trophies from their ‘great military victory.’ Even though the Iranians had no idea the rescuers were even in their country, and the Iranians had fuck-all to do with the collision.”

“The objects were your squid?”

“The objects were never for me. I was compiling the subsequent histories of the aircraft that survived Desert One. I came across a German magazine ad claiming to offer for sale personal effects smuggled out of Iran by a Pakistani. I passed the lead on to the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. The Agency’s mission is remains recovery, but some decedents’ family members funded an on-site attempt to negotiate for repatriation of the effects. I accompanied the negotiators to Dubai, on my own dime, to authenticate the stuff.”

“So you really are an international woman of mystery.”

“Hardly. The seller met us at the Dubai airport McDonalds. He told us he had sold the stuff a half hour earlier, then stuck us with the check for his Chicken McArabia to go.”

“Oh.”

“It sounds funny. But the successful buyer was Silver. So it’s my fault that I had to tell a dead service man’s daughter that if she wanted to see her father’s wedding ring, watch, and wallet photos of her and her mother she would find them displayed alongside a photo of the wreck he burned to death in. All behind glass in a topless bar masquerading as a museum.”

“How is that your fault?”

“Silver tracks researchers like me because he’s too lazy to figure out where the good stuff is himself. And because I’m not a spy I can’t really travel without leaving electronic footprints that Silver’s hackers follow. I thought I had my tracks covered this trip because I reserved and paid cash by snail mail for my Last Chance Air ticket.”

“So what’s this trip’s good stuff?”

Cass stared at the sea. “Probably nothing. Chasing history means leaving lots of footprints for no reward but sore feet.”

Standup Cedric returned in his formerly red pickup, stopped, and called to Hunter, “Dr. Hunter I take you out to your place now.”

Steve stood and said to Cass, “It won’t take me long to make camp. Maybe Cedric could drive you out later. I’ll show you around. Maybe cook you dinner?”

Cass smiled and shook her head. “Unfortunately I’m busy.”

His face fell. “Oh. Got it.”

“No. No, you haven’t. Not busy like I told Silver. Steve, I really have something to do that can’t wait. When I finish I’ll come see you.” She asked Cedric, “You could give me a lift then?”

As Cedric drove Hunter south he called back, “I give you a lift anytime you ask, miss.”

Cass turned to Millicent. “Where would I find boats for hire?”

“You wouldn’t, Dear. We have two boats. One is under repair.”

“Okay. Where would I find the boat for hire?”

Millicent pointed north. “Today Lucky Derek is using it. He generally cleans his catch just up the road.”

* * *

Twenty minutes’ walk brought Cass to the boat. A weathered, open outboard, twenty feet long, its bow had been pulled out of the water onto a crescent shaped beach fifteen feet wide. It would do nicely.

A barefoot black man wearing just long trunks stood alongside the boat. He lifted a single small fish from a well in the boat and chucked it into a plastic cooler on the sand. Evidently Lucky Derek’s fishing skill hadn’t earned him his nickname.

Cass recognized two scars left of his breastbone, where his heart would be. Bullet wounds. Another apparent Billy rescue, and lucky indeed.

Cass called, “Derek?”

“Yes, Miss Gooding.”

“You know my name.”

“Everybody on the island know your name. Caymanians love the gossip.”

“So I’ve heard. I’d like to hire this boat.”

Derek grinned. “Today everybody like to hire this boat.”

Cass closed her eyes. “Don’t tell me.”

She opened them as Derek tugged the boat further onto the beach.

“Derek, somebody from the big gold ship beat me to it, didn’t they?”

“You said not to tell you, miss.”

“Derek, I really need this boat. They need your boat like this island needs more limestone.”

“But I have already accepted the payment.”

“I’ll double it. Derek, I’m the good guy here.”

Lucky Derek shook his head. “Miss, last time I backed out of a deal to help a good guy the bad guys shot me. This fella today came in a small boat. I bet on the big ship they have plenty more small boats. Maybe you could hire one of theirs.”

“Sure. That’ll work.”

Cass had walked halfway back to Billy’s when she saw a golden motor launch inching along the shore while a crewman in its bow peered at every square meter of land through field glasses. Silver not only had plenty of boats. He had plenty of everything he needed to find and exploit what Cass was looking for before she could, from boats she could see to drones she couldn’t see, to heavy lift equipment. It wasn’t just game on. It was almost game over already.

She ran the rest of the way back to Billy’s while she thought.

* * *

At sunset Cass sat in her room, which turned out to be the one room limestone block cottage beside Millicent’s. Cass’s on-time arrival had probably foiled Silver’s minions, but she still scoured the place for bugs and cameras before she studied her satellite photos.

A half hour later Cass carried one photo to Billy’s porch.

Cedric and three other locals sat at candlelit tables, while Millicent placed and lit candles on the unoccupied ones.

Cass laid out the photo on the table furthest from a customer, then asked Millicent, “Do you recognize this?”

Millicent nodded and pointed. “Here is where we stand now. Here is the airstrip.”

“Yep.” Cass pointed on the photo to a tiny, three hundred feet by three hundred feet islet just off Last Chance Key’s northeast shore. “This channel here, that separates this islet from this island. Could I wade across it?”

Millicent stuck out her lower lip. “No. It’s fifteen feet deep even at low tide. But don’t bother. No one visits that miserable little bump.”

“But if I wanted to, I could swim?”

“No.”

“You don’t understand. I swim open water in triathlons twice a year. This channel’s only eight hundred yards wide. I swim longer distance than that in a pool twice a week.”

Millicent sighed. “That’s not the problem. The densest bloom of Portuguese man ‘o war I’ve ever seen is adrift in that channel now.”

“For how long?”

Millicent shrugged. “Until a storm blows them out. At least ten days.”

Cass scowled. “I can’t wait two days.”

Millicent shrugged. “I’m afraid you’ll have to, Dear. Have some chowder. You’ll feel better.”

Cass shook her head. “I’m sure it’s great, but I’m vegan. I’ll just take a couple bananas back to my room.”

Millicent sighed again. “When I was your age I was keen to stay thin, too.”

* * *

The sun rose behind the islet off Last Chance Key’s north eastern shore and Cass pulled her ball cap’s bill down so it shaded her eyes. She tugged the old neoprene wetsuit pants, that she had cajoled from Millicent, over her bikini as she sat in the sand. The narrow beach bordered the eight hundred yard wide channel that she had to swim to reach her objective.

By the time Cass had added the suit’s jacket, hood, booties, and gloves the sun lit the channel’s surface.

She squinted into the reflected glare and whispered, “Crap.”

The floats of Portuguese man o’ wars glistened on the still blue water like a vast fleet of inflated violet sandwich bags crimped at their crests. Cass stopped counting at one hundred. The bloom easily numbered thousands.

The organisms’ stinger studded tentacles dangled and drifted beneath and around them, as thin and invisible as fishing line. In deep water a man o’ war’s tentacles dangled a hundred feet or longer below the float. But this channel’s shallow bottom would already have scraped off and set adrift thousands of long, but still potent, tentacle fragments that turned the water she had to cross into stinging noodle soup.

Cass belted the waterproof equipment bag around her waist, snugged the full face snorkel mask over the neoprene hood’s edges, then picked her way across the beach. She avoided the floats already stranded there, and their tentacles hidden in the sand, lest they stick to her boots’ outer surface, and sting her when she removed the suit.

Heart pounding, she waded out waist deep, then swam.

* * *

Eleven minutes later, Cass emerged, elated and unstung, in the shallows on the channel’s far shore.

She did her best to rinse the suit’s outer skin clean of tentacles, tucked the hood, gloves and mask beneath a bush, oriented herself using the satellite photo from the bag, then struck out through the knee-high brush. Branches caught and tugged the neoprene, and within fifty yards the sun so baked her that she stripped off the jacket, carried it, and pressed ahead in her bikini top, the wet suit pants, and booties.

Moments later a rapidly worsening burn seared her right forearm. She realized that the spreading red welt radiated from a tentacle fragment, barely longer than her little finger, that must have transferred from the wetsuit jacket’s outer skin to her forearm when she had removed the jacket.

With a twig she plucked off the fragment and discarded it, but her forearm felt as though a half dozen wasps had lined up on it and stung her simultaneously.

But she had to be close now. Like a lioness scenting prey she shrugged off her pain and crept ahead.

Minutes later her pain had faded a little. Her shin thunked against a hollow object overgrown by brush. She breathed faster, more from excitement than exertion, as she felt her way along the object until she was sure she had located her quarry. It rested within two yards of where she had expected to find it.

Cass tugged the bush knife from her bag and started hacking. A sweaty hour later she had exposed enough to confirm both completeness and condition. With her knife she pried loose a misshapen steel cylinder larger than a big man’s thumb, then tucked it into her bag.

Using her phone she photographed most of what she needed. The last few shots required her to lie on her back and wriggle into the shade. What she found there confirmed some of her suspicions. But it also raised startling new ones. And her work had exposed the find. Within hours at most Silver’s minions would find it too.

She ran, thrashing high-kneed through the brush, back to the channel’s shore, tugged on the jacket, hood, and mask, plunged in and swam back toward Last Chance Key proper.

She had covered one hundred yards when she felt the first sting. It lashed her left cheek, where she had failed to overlap her mask atop the neoprene hood that protected her head and neck.

After that a new sting seemed to explode somewhere on her skin with every stroke she swam. In her haste she had failed to assure the suit’s pieces overlapped at her wrists, ankles, and waist. Worse, brush and rocks had torn the suit and exposed even more flesh.

By the time she crawled, quivering and spent, through the lapping surf to the main island’s shore she swore through clenched teeth at the pain, and even more at her own impatient stupidity.

She struggled out of the wetsuit and was stung again and again, in newly exposed spots, by tentacle fragments stuck to the neoprene. She rinsed her skin as well as she dared, then finally slipped into her cutoffs and trainers and walked, breathing through clenched teeth.

Cedric waited for her, where she had asked him to the night before. His legs dangled over the truck’s lowered tailgate, and when he saw her he stood. “Miss Cass, what has happened to you?”

She didn’t think Cedric would deliberately squeal. But if he was as fond of The Gossip as Caymanians all claimed to be, she couldn’t chance it.

She spoke, and realized that a stray fragment had swollen her upper lip. “I went for a morning jog and tripped. I fell into some brush.”

Cedric frowned. “I have never seen such bad brush. You must visit Dr. Reid.”

“There’s a doctor here?”

“He treats everyone on the island for free.”

“Where?”

“Most everyone lives on the south side. So he ties up at the pier there.”

“Pier?”

“He comes by boat from his clinic on The Brac.”

“When?”

“Two p.m., miss.”

Cass looked reflexively at her red, swollen wrist, then tugged her smartwatch from her cutoffs’ pocket. “1:03 pm! Fantastic! Let’s go.”

“Two p.m. next Tuesday.”

“Crap.” Cass heard a muffled boat motor, looked out to sea, and watched another Kraken launch purr past.

Cedric said, “I bet they got a doctor on the big gold ship. Shall I hail that small boat?”

“They do. But don’t.” If they were still looking here, they hadn’t found it yet. She had heard that man o’ war stings didn’t kill you, they just made you wish somebody else would. Of that second part she was now certain. But for the plan shaping up in her mind, time was too short to baby herself.

Cass climbed into Cedric’s passenger seat and sat sidesaddle on her unstung cheek. “Cedric, could you just drive me to Dr. Hunter’s camp?”

“Yes, miss.” Cedric started the truck. “But I don’t think he’s that kind of doctor.”

* * *

Hunter’s campsite was thirty yards inland from the island’s south shore and consisted of a clearing that contained a pop-up tent, a pit containing what looked to be last night’s cooking fire ashes, a pair of plastic tubs as long as bathtubs but half as deep, stockpiled acid barrels, and bottled water jugs.

Closer to the water, the ground dropped away and formed a cliff so shallow that a pickaxe’s head rose above the cliff’s edge, then disappeared as it swung down and clanged against stone.

Cass called, “Hunter? Am I too late for dinner?”

“Cass? Cass! I’ll be right up.”

He clambered into view, pickaxe in one gloved hand. He wore just khaki shorts and the tan faux suede boots that soldiers wore. His lean, bare, torso glistened with sweat and he peered down at it as he brushed lime dust off his pecs.

Cass said, “That’s a good look for you, Hunter.”

“You only say that because you’re upwind. I wish I had known you were—” He looked up, saw her, dropped his pick and ran to her. “What happened?”

“I got stung by a Portuguese man o’ war.”

“A man o’ war? You look like a walking peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Did you wrestle it?”

“I went swimming. But I wore a wetsuit, a mask, and a snorkel. Hunter, they didn’t kill me.”

“They? Jesus!” Hunter peeled off his gloves and threw them. “That may be the stupidest . . .” He looked away, then said, “If you had aspirated a tentacle down your snorkel the swelling in your windpipe might have killed you.”

Crap. She hadn’t thought of that.

He said, “Okay, let’s see what we got.” He stared into her face, gently took it in his hands and turned her head. “This lesion along your upper lip hurts the worst, doesn’t it?”

“How did you know?”

“The upper lip is some of the body’s most heavily innervated skin.” He took her hands in his and slowly turned them, then knelt, peered at the welts around her ankles, and stood again. “You have welts on the backs of your hands and all around your ankles, but almost none on your fingertips and palms. That’s because fingertip and palm skin is too thick for the nematocysts’ barbs to penetrate. Does the pain radiate up the appendage from your wrists or ankles?”

“No.”

“Difficulty breathing, muscle cramps, nausea, vomiting, dizziness? Anyone in your family ever experience anaphylactic reactions to bee or wasp stings?”

“No.”

With his fingertips he pressed her neck below her ears. “Lymph nodes don’t feel swollen. Your reactions seem localized, not systemic. That’s good. Any lesions I haven’t examined?”

“None I’d care to have you examine.”

“Cass, failure to examine the entire casualty results in fatally flawed field diagnosis. Ronald Reagan almost died because doctors who were told he had a broken rib nearly missed his bullet wound.”

“Hunter, where did you learn all this shit?”

“I studied before I came. The rest I learned from the senior medic who taught me the ropes in Afghanistan.”

“The Army? I didn’t expect you liked breaking things and hurting people.”

“I don’t. That’s why I was a medic.”

“Army medics carry guns. Did you shoot anybody?”

“Only if they shot first. Especially if they shot while I was treating a casualty. Sometimes a person has to choose the lesser of two evils. Cass, quit stalling. Where else are you stung?”

“If I’m already stung why does it matter?”

“Unfired nematocysts remaining on your skin may fire when any tentacles still on the skin get rubbed the wrong way. Do you really want to see this movie again?”

“On my ass.”

“Bad?”

“Excruciating.”

* * *

Thirty minutes later Hunter used an empty water jug as a stool and sat with his back to Cass as she stepped naked into one of Hunter’s plastic tubs. He had filled the tub with bottled water he had heated over a fire fueled by brush he cut.

He said, “Can you stand the temperature?”

She knelt, then lay on her back and pulled a tarp across the tub, and beneath her chin like a blanket. “Barely.”

Hunter turned and faced her. “Perfect. The only treatments the authorities agree on are removing all visible nematocysts, then soaking the wounds in hot, fresh still water.”

“Did you enjoy the removing?”

“No. I kept my eyes closed.”

“That’s two lies in one. Why the hot bath?”

“Evolution. Marine organisms’ toxins are optimized for cold salt water. Heat breaks down the molecules into harmless compounds. The moist heat palliates the patient, too.”

“The patient needs more palliating.”

Hunter walked to his tent, then returned and handed her two airline miniature rum bottles. “Anesthetic.”

“Hunter, liquor’s contraband here.”

“I didn’t know that ‘til we got here. The airline messed up my flight from the States so they opened the bar.”

Cass handed back one bottle, then unscrewed the top from hers. “I never anesthetize alone.”

Hunter unscrewed his bottle then lifted it. “Cheers.”

Cass knocked hers back, then said, “Now that you’ve gotten me drunk and naked what’s next?”

“Questions. What the hell is worth the chance you just took?”

“I found my squid.”

Hunter raised his eyebrows. “The good stuff?”

“Scary good.” Cass frowned. “Really, more scary than good. You recognized Desert One. Do you recognize October 28, 1962?”

“Uh. Cuban missile crisis ends. With global nuclear war hours away Khrushchev announces the Soviet Union will remove all its nuclear ballistic missiles from Cuba. In return, under the table, the U.S. agrees it will remove all its similar missiles from Turkey and Italy and never invade Cuba. Both sides declare victory and go home. Mankind was down to its last chance, and took it.” Hunter cocked his head. “Like the people who live on this island. Funny coincidence.”

Cass smiled. “Isn’t it?” She poked her arm out from under her tarp blanket and pointed. “Hand me my waterproof bag.”

She removed a folded page from the bag and handed it across. “This is from a monograph I’m writing.”

He eyed the photograph then whistled, “Pretty airplane.”

“Some people think the F-101 Voodoo was the prettiest fighter ever built. And wicked fast, even by today’s standards. It set a record by outrunning the sun from New York to L.A., which was a huge deal in 1957.” Cass handed over a second page. “The variant that set the record was this, the RF-101C. R for Reconnaissance. The ugly nose job housed cameras. The museum’s collections include one of those ugly nose cones, but not a whole Voodoo.”

“There are no Voodoos left?”

“There are plenty. What makes aircraft Smithsonian-worthy is their historic provenance. We didn’t just restore a B-29, we restored the B-29 that dropped the Hiroshima bomb.”

Hunter said, “But the planes that took the aerial photos that tipped the U.S. to Russian missiles in Cuba were U-2 spy planes.”

“Right. Also wrong. Beginning about October 15, U-2’s took the first photos from thirteen miles high that confirmed Russian nuclear ballistic missiles. That triggered the crisis. On October 27 the Russian shootdown of a U-2 was ordered by a Russian deputy commander on the ground in Cuba on his own initiative. That shocked both Khrushchev and Kennedy into compromising. Because either side’s subordinates down the line might accidentally start a nuclear war on their own.”

“Okay. Why am I wrong?”

“The U.S. also wanted detailed low altitude photos. So RF-101C’s and other recon aircraft ripped across Cuba too low and too fast for the missiles, and returned closeups from five hundred feet above their targets. The low-level missions took ground fire from Cuban and possibly Russian anti-aircraft gunners, but no aircraft were lost. Officially.” Cass sat up, holding the tarp against her body. “Turn around. I’m getting out.”

“Why?”

“First, because I feel much better.”

Hunter eyed his watch as he turned away. “You should. The worst pain subsides after three hours. The welts will stay tender and discolored for weeks.”

“Second, because I want to show you my squid.”

“I hope that’s a euphemism.”

“It is. But not for what you hope. Hand me my clothes.”

“You’re leaving?”

Cass slipped back into her bikini, cutoffs, and trainers. “Not alone I hope. Does your boat have a motor?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Hunter you’ve been wonderful. I’m impressed and grateful. But I came to ask for a different kind of help.”

“Ask away.”

“Part of writing an aircraft type’s history is tracking where each example went and what was done to it from the day the airframe’s serial number is assigned until its final crash or retirement.”

“Like ‘Show me the Carfax.’”

“Right. But last-century paper trails are less complete and accurate than contemporary computerized VIN number data. Still, my monograph describes all one hundred sixty-six RF-101C Voodoos built. It follows one hundred sixty-five of them from cradle to grave. But one aircraft’s paper trail simply stops at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina on November 2, 1962.”

Hunter cocked his head. “Four days after both sides declared victory and went home?”

Cass nodded. “Most of the Voodoo missions over Cuba originated from Shaw, overflew their Cuban surveillance targets, then returned over the sea to avoid contact. After the Soviets agreed to remove their ballistic missiles the U.S. continued low level reconnaissance flights that verified the Soviets really were shipping their ballistic missiles out. But the Cubans, who had counted on Soviet weapons to deter a U.S. invasion of Cuba, not on some sketchy U.S. promise to the Russians, were fighting mad. The gung-ho Russians in Cuba, who had already been trigger happy enough to shoot down one U.S. plane, were still there.”

Hunter nodded back. “You think somebody shot down your missing Voodoo. The Soviets and the U.S. looked the other way rather than re-escalate the crisis. Like they did with the U-2.”

Cass nodded again. “But if the Voodoo had crashed in Cuba, Castro would have hoisted the wreckage over Revolution Square in Havana, the way the Iranians display Desert One helicopter parts. So, I thought, what if ground fire hit the Voodoo? But it limped away, like earlier low level flights had?”

“But it didn’t make it home?”

Cass nodded. “The average depth of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico is six thousand feet. Their combined area is two thirds the size of the Continental U.S.”

Hunter smiled. “But what if it crashed on land other than Cuba? The closest land to Cuba is here. So you came here to look.”

Cass nodded. “But not until I had more proof.” She spread a satellite photo from her bag atop Hunter’s water jug. “In the early two thousands fine-resolution color satellite imagery became available. This image shows Last Chance Key in 2007.” She pointed. “Look at this even smaller islet just to the northeast.”

Hunter bent, squinted, then said, “I don’t see anything but white limestone. Mostly covered by green scrub. Just like here.”

“Exactly. In 2004 Hurricane Ivan hit the Caymans and scrubbed them clean. But by the time this 2007 photo was taken the vegetation had grown back.”

Cass laid a second photo atop the 2007 image. “Same shot. 2009. Just after Hurricane Paloma in 2008.”

Hunter pointed. “This darker-colored cruciform patch wasn’t there in the 2007 photo.”

Cass shook her head. “The patch was there. But in 2007 it was overgrown. It was just overgrown in 2007. The short axis of this patch measures, within the image resolution margin of error, between thirty-eight feet and forty-two feet wide. The long axis measures between sixty-five feet and sixty-nine feet long. The Voodoo’s wingspan measured thirty-nine point eight feet and it was sixty-seven point five feet long. So my historically significant missing Voodoo crashed on what was in 1962 an isolated, uninhabited island. Then its wreckage wasn’t visible for most of the next sixty years.”

Hunter said, “Nice job, Doc.” He pointed again. “So this channel, that separates this islet from this island, is where you swam and got stung. You prefer to revisit by boat?”

Cass frowned. “Partly. Steve, now that I’ve actually seen the wreckage, there’s more to this story. Much more. Now I realize that what I need from you may jeopardize your project. I just can’t ask you.”

“Will whatever you need annoy that guy who called you a crack whore?”

“Immeasurably.”

“Then screw my jeopardy. I’m in.”

* * *

Two hours later Cass rolled one of Hunter’s fifty-five gallon hydrochloric acid drums down to the water in which he stood knee deep. He tied two other drums to cleats on his inflatable boat’s stern, so they floated behind it.

Cass rested, panting, with her palms atop the last barrel. “Let me understand. You load limestone, that you chop off this little cliff, into my hot tub back at camp. You add acid. The limestone dissolves into calcium chloride, carbon dioxide, and water, and leaves behind fossils the Last Chancers can make into jewelry?”

“Yep. With this work force and no infrastructure it has to be simple and cheap. If it works. Very possibly no acid concentration will dissolve the rock but leave behind marketable fossils. And it’s because the return on investment sucks, and because this island lacks supporting infrastructure, that the process has to be cheap and simple.’

“Even so, it won’t make much money.”

“Any money should improve the self-image and welfare of a population that survives by fishing and relies on charity health care delivered by boat.”

“You’re altruistic for a soldier.”

“Most soldiers are more altruistic than the ninety-nine percent who don’t serve think. I enlisted five percent because the year I got my doctorate I didn’t get one of the English speaking world’s eight available tenure-track invertebrate paleo jobs. Ninety-five percent because I wanted to offer the blessings of liberty to the world’s less fortunate.”

Cass pointed to Hunter’s left forearm. “The scar?”

“Some of the less fortunate declined the offer. A scratch compared to what others got. Long story.”

He tied on the last barrel then waded toward her. “Why do you chase historic airplanes?”

Cass shrugged. “I started because I liked airplanes. The better I got to know jerks who chase airplanes for the wrong reasons the more I wanted to beat them.”

Hunter rolled the last barrel into the blue shallows. “So when do we start?”

“Dusk. Billionaires who have chefs and wine cellars don’t work nights.”

* * *

A full moon had risen over the calm sea by the time Cass and Hunter had circumnavigated the island’s backside, away from the Kraken.

Hunter cut the engine and let the inflatable’s momentum carry its bow until it grounded on sand. The towed barrels drifted into a cluster at the boat’s stern and thunked together in the silent night. The Voodoo’s tail rested barely fifteen feet from the inflatable’s bow.

Cass whispered, “I swear the empennage was farther ashore this morning.”

Hunter said, “Tide’s in now.” He pointed at a translucent man o’ war float. “And it brought a few stray friends of yours from the channel. Watch your step.”

He hopped out into ankle deep water and pulled the barrels in, hand over hand, while Cass clambered over the bow onto the sand.

Hunter peered up and down the crashed Voodoo’s mostly intact fuselage and wings. “This has been here sixty years? It’s upside down. It’s broken. But it looks nearly new. If my grandfather’s Oldsmobile had been in this humidity for sixty years it would be a rust pile.”

“That’s because Oldsmobiles were steel. Steel oxidizes–rusts through-fast. Aircraft aluminum oxidizes on its surface, but the oxide layer protects the rest of the metal underneath.” Cass ran her hand across the left wing’s faded bars-and-roundel U.S. Air Force insignia. “But that doesn’t mean this thing’s indestructible. Come on. We’ve got work to do.”

Hunter grasped her elbow. “Wait. What about human remains? You’re the expert, but aren’t there rules about disturbing a site like this?”

“You’re right, I’m the expert. So trust me. There are no human remains at this site.”

* * *

An hour later Cass screwed Hunter’s hose to his hand pump then carried the assembly to one of his barrels. She pointed at one of the two bungs on the barrel’s round top and called, “Which one of these do I screw the pump into?”

Hunter returned from his boat wearing gloves and safety glasses.

He said. “Neither. Concentrated hydrochloric acid isn’t high school science. You’ve been burned enough chasing this wreck already. Just tell me which good bits you want to cut out and take home before we leave Silver the carcass.”

“Bits? Just hose it down nose to tail. Turn the whole wreck into mush.”

“What? I thought you were all about preserving historic aircraft.”

Cass kicked the acid drum beside her. “I am. But sometimes a person has to choose the lesser of two evils. Like you said.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ll explain later. Trust me?”

Hunter shook his head. “My problem’s not trust, Cass. In a high school science class dilute hydrochloric acid poured into a beaker turns aluminum foil into aluminum chloride mush plus free hydrogen. Yes, in theory concentrated HCl will do that even better. So you can cut away rivets and remove some choice sheet metal before Silver gets it. I thought that was your plan.”

“No! Silver can’t get any of this aircraft. But neither can the Smithsonian.”

Hunter kept shaking his head. “No matter how bad you want to, we can’t dissolve this airplane overnight. Too few gallons of acid. Too many tons of aluminum.”

Cass grabbed a rock and began pounding the wing. “Goddamit.”

Hunter grabbed her arm. “Stop!”

“Why?”

Hunter stared at the Voodoo, then at the drums of acid, then said, “When the Army wanted to make our equipment disappear, so the bad guys wouldn’t get it, we just blew it up.”

* * *

As the moon set Cass lay on her stomach alongside Hunter, fifty yards from the Voodoo. The now-empty acid drums lay alongside the fuselage, and hisses and rumbles echoed throughout the old jet’s belly and wings.

Cass said, “You really think this will work?”

“How the hell do I know? Twenty tons of aluminum plus one hundred sixty-five gallons of concentrated HCL will yield lots of free hydrogen. If parts of the fuselage are tight enough to contain the gas, this thing could go up like the Hindenburg.”

He stood, holding waterproof matches and a torch fashioned from brush.

Cass grabbed for his arm. “I should go, not you.”

Hunter pulled away, then ran toward the plane. “Cass, I got this.”

Cass watched as Hunter stopped five yards from the rumbling Voodoo, struck one match, swore as it flamed out, lit another then lit his makeshift torch with it.

He lobbed the torch underhand, then dashed backward ten paces.

Cass squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth.

Silence.

Hunter’s voice echoed across the night. “Well . . . shit!”

Cass opened her eyes. Atop the fuselage Hunter’s improvised torch lay burning without effect.

He took two steps toward the Voodoo.

Cass shouted. “Hunter! No!”

The blast began as a yellow flash, bloomed orange as the Voodoo creaked, then seemed to swell, then exploded.

Silhouetted against the fireball Hunter tumbled feet over head through the air, surrounded by flying debris.

The explosion’s roar and heat rolled across her a heartbeat later.

Then she lay flat on her back, blinking up at the night sky. Her ears rang but still she heard muffled rattles as aluminum bits rained into the brush all around her.

She stood and screamed, “Hunter!”

Nothing.

She limped toward the Voodoo, but it was gone. Simply gone. Here and there, a bush burned.

“Hunter!” Again nothing.

He was simply gone too. She felt tears start.

Then she saw an object in the shallows, ran, then splashed, until she reached it.

The sea lapped around him, only six inches deep. Steve Hunter lay on his back, still and serene.

As she touched his cheek she sobbed.

He opened his eyes. “Cass? Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“Thank God. How bad—”

“I’m fine.” He frowned, then clenched his teeth and hissed, “Except I think I’m sitting on a man o’ war. Jeez that stings. What about the plane?”

“It’s as gone as if it sank five miles deep in the Cayman Trench sixty years ago.” She grasped his elbow as she looked toward his boat, which drifted intact ten feet from them. “Come on. We need to get back to your place fast.”

“Before Silver retaliates?”

Cass shook her head as she helped Hunter to his feet. “No. He’s a jerk, but a nonviolent jerk. We need to get back because it’s my turn to get you naked in a hot tub.”

* * *

The next morning Cass sat drinking coffee with Hunter on Billy’s porch.

Out at sea Silver’s helicopter lifted from the Kraken, landed again in the road, and Silver stalked to their table. “Gooding, how did you remove that airplane?”

Cass turned her palms up. “Airplane?”

“One of my drones spotted airplane wreckage yesterday afternoon. This morning it’s gone.”

“Maybe you need better drones.” Cass looked out at Silver’s ship. “Long trip for nothing, huh, Silver? This time the house lost.”

Silver turned on his heel, reboarded his helicopter, and left.

Hunter said, “I understand you wanted to stick it to Silver. But destroying that plane destroyed history.”

“No. The history is still there. I just haven’t had a chance to tell you all of it yet.”

“Meaning what?”

“I told you that in 1962 the Russians agreed to remove forty-eight ballistic missiles, and their nuclear warheads. And they did.”

“Sure.”

“But at a Cuban Missile Crisis Conference in Havana in 1992, a Russian general revealed that the Soviets had kept a hundred shorter range tactical nuclear rockets and cruise missiles in Cuba. Those could have destroyed the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay and maybe reached targets in South Florida.

“Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the crisis, attended that conference. When he heard about the tactical nukes witnesses say he almost fainted. Because McNamara realized that if U.S. hard liners in 1962 had learned that the Soviets had misled us, and kept nuclear weapons in Cuba, it would have pushed us into war. In December 1962 the Russians decided Castro was too nuts to have nukes in his backyard so they secretly pulled out their tactical nukes. But by December 1962 the war would have already started.”

“So you think this Voodoo photographed those nukes? And if its pictures had made it back to the U.S. World War III would have started?”

Cass tugged from her pocket the misshapen steel cylinder that she had pried loose from the Voodoo and displayed it between her thumb and forefinger. “Those undisclosed nuclear warheads and launchers would have been aggressively defended by anti-aircraft guns like the one that fired this 23 mm slug. I dug it out of the Voodoo’s belly yesterday.”

“A random plane crash saved the world?”

“Saved the world? Probably. Random? No way.”

Millicent came to their table with two plates. She eyed Cass’s discolored face and arms, then snorted. “Next time someone tells you where not to swim, listen.” She set the plates on the table.

Hunter asked Millicent, “What’s this?”

As Millicent turned away she said, “Banana bread. We always celebrate election day with banana bread.”

“Election day?” Cass looked around. Billy’s was more crowded than the day before, and more island residents approached from both ends of the road.

Hunter tapped Cass’s forearm. “What do you mean the Voodoo crash wasn’t random?”

Cass said, “One particular RF-101 pilot’s records end abruptly the same day the Voodoo’s records end.”

“Obviously. The plane didn’t fly itself.”

“But he was no ordinary pilot. He shot down five MIGs in Korea and his Air Command and Staff College classmates voted him most likely to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But his thesis at the College advocated for troops in the field to exercise initiative, even if that meant disobeying lawful orders.”

Hunter frowned. “That sounds like a career bender.”

“Yep. The higher up the ladder an officer climbs the more the ultimate primacy of civilian authority and the unbreakability of the chain of command becomes. That principle separates the U.S. military from banana republics where coup d’états are routine. Disobedience to that principle is what almost escalated the Cuban Missile Crisis to nuclear war, when that Soviet field commander shot down that U-2.

“But that pilot’s maverick thesis was only the beginning. He skated along the edge of taking too much initiative until he got busted from full colonel headed for his first star to a major lucky to still be flying recon jets. Depression, alcohol, and an ugly divorce followed.”

“Cass, that doesn’t mean he deserted and crashed to hide those pictures. He wouldn’t have known what he flew over.”

“I think he knew. Most of his career was spent in air recon. Soviet shockproof nuclear warhead storage bunkers were distinctive to sophisticated observers like him. So were the launch vehicles that carried those FROG 7 and Salish nuclear-capable tactical rockets. Recognizing evidence of clandestine nukes, then deciding on his own to bury that evidence was totally his style.”

“Or . . . the plane was damaged and just crashed here.”

“On the only speck of land in the central Caribbean south of Cuba? No. When I crawled under the wreck yesterday I saw that the Voodoo’s ejection seat and canopy were gone. And the cameras had been removed from the nose.

“My hypothesis is that he realized what he had photographed, recognized the consequences of revealing what he had seen, flew to the nearest, most isolated land he could reach, then ejected. When he realized his plane hadn’t exploded, or sunk, he returned to the wreck and destroyed the cameras that held the evidence that could have started a nuclear war and end human civilization. Then, realizing he was a deserter, he vanished.”

“Sensational story. Why destroy the plane that could prove it?”

“Precisely because whether the Smithsonian or Silver wound up with the wreck the story would be too sensational to hide. Pilot goes AWOL. Risks nuclear war by hiding evidence from his superiors then vanishes. The U.S. would be forced to make an example of him.”

“Even though his misconduct probably prevented nuclear war?”

“Especially because what he did probably prevented nuclear war. That would reinforce others’ belief that they really did know better than the chain of command, better than the civilian representatives of the people who they were sworn to protect.”

“Cass, it happened sixty years ago. The statute of limitations—”

“Can be circumvented when the military wants to make an example about a crime like desertion. In 2017 the Air Force arrested a private who went AWOL in 1977. And that guy didn’t desert in the face of the enemy. He just didn’t want to be stationed in South Dakota. Even if this pilot got off, it would take years to resolve.”

“But Cass, this pilot’s not around to be made an example of.”

In the distance Cedric’s pickup approached, its horn blaring.

The truck stopped in front of Cass and Hunter as Millicent returned and refilled their coffee cups. Last Chance Key’s residents, white, black, brown, and yellow surrounded the truck chanting and waving. In the pickup’s bed an old white man sat in a kitchen chair, upholstered in purple fabric. A swatch of the fabric hung on his stooped shoulders like a robe. Smiling, he waved a toilet plunger at the crowd like a scepter.

Hunter turned to Millicent. “Election day?”

The old woman smiled. “It’s really just a party. Once a year we all assemble and thank Billy for the chances he gave all of us by unanimously reelecting him king.”

The old man climbed down from the pickup.

Hunter stared at him. “Cass, this old guy?”

Cass shrugged. “The pilot’s divorce got ugly because he was accused of hiding assets. Assets hidden in a Cayman Islands bank account for a bad reason might later be used for a good reason, when it came time to finance a desalination plant. The pilot’s name was John William Myers. But everybody called him Billy. You do the math.”

Hunter nodded. “You’re saying that someone who made a lot of mistakes, but spent the rest of his life giving others like him a last chance—”

Cass nodded. “Deserves a last chance too.”

* * *

Cassidy Gooding is also a main character in Robert Buettner’s latest novel My Enemy’s Enemy, which is out in June. Buettner has been general counsel of a unit of one of the United States’ largest private multinational companies, served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer, prospected for minerals in Alaska and the Sonoran Desert, and was a National Science Foundation Fellow in paleontology. A Quill Award nominee for Best New Writer of 2005, his best-selling debut novel, Orphanage, was a Quill nominee for Best SF/Fantasy/Horror novel of 2004 and has been called a classic of modern military science fiction. He lives in Georgia with his family and more bicycles than a grownup needs.

Burners

Matt McHugh

Winner of the 2019 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award

Given in Partnership with the National Space Society

"So how'd that happen?"

From the cockpit of her runner, in orbit two-hundred kilometers over a blue-white swizzled Earth, Linda Ballard aimed her exterior cameras downward. She focused on Maureen's runner, drifting just a few meters below. The runner was a single-pilot spacecraft, shaped like a flattened diamond, resembling a kite—or some said a stingray, an image reinforced by the long, trailing tail. The two vehicles were identical, except Maureen's had a seventy-year-old Russian weather satellite the size of a minivan stuck to its nose.

"You know me," came Maureen's voice over Linda's headset. "Sometimes I have trouble letting go of the past."

Linda zoomed in. Runners were designed to push orbiting debris to re-entry burnup over the ocean, and had the equivalent of a bulldozer scoop on the front with manipulator claws to grip and release payloads. Maureen had opened her claws, but the defunct satellite refused to budge.

"Ah," said Linda. "I see your problem. Take a look at my video feed."

Linda panned along a solar panel strut extending from the satellite that had poked through the mesh of Maureen's scoop and wedged itself in the runner's body framework, between two spherical nitrogen tanks. It was behind the reach of the craft's manipulator claws—like trying to scratch your wrist with the fingers of the same hand.

"How's your propellant?"

"The port forward connector was ruptured," said Maureen. "The pressure release pushed me into a spin and I used a lot to stabilize."

"Do you have enough to get back to parking orbit?"

"Barely. But I have to get this thing off first."

"You let me worry about that," said Linda.

A green light winked on Linda's com panel as an alert chimed in her headset.

"This is Calypso orbital base," came the voice of operational director Mitch Coolidge. "Ladies, we are tracking you to hit the Kármán Line in eight minutes. Ground thinks it may be necessary to sacrifice Number Six."

"Come again, Base?" Linda asked. "You want to sacrifice what?"

"Runner Number Six."

"What?"

She heard the sigh, then, "The Brad Pitt."

"Oh no! Not Brad!" shouted Linda. "We have to save Brad!"

"Ground is considering a plan to eject, unless you have any counter arguments."

"I remind Ground that Brad is worth twenty million dollars."

"I'd rather not have to ditch," said Maureen from the seemingly doomed Brad.

"Don't worry, Brad. The Chris Hemsworth will save you!" said Linda. "I'm going E.V.A. to cut loose the load."

Mitch's voice took on uncharacteristic panic. "That's negative, Number Two. I repeat negative. Suit prep is four minutes alone. That leaves you no margin. You keep your ass in Chris Hemsworth, Linda."

"My claw's too big. I can't reach the entanglement through the frame, but I can reach it with a hand cutter."

"That's negative. You stay in your vehicle."

"Fine," said Linda. "I'll melt it with the stinger."

"Come again?"

"I'm going to get under Six, and jam my stinger against the tangled strut. When we start to hit atmosphere, the stinger will heat up. It's a dense alloy, the strut's thin aluminum. A thousand degrees will melt it. Well within runner tolerance."

Mitch's line went quiet, then, "Hold your position. Ground wants to confirm."

"Holding," replied Linda, as she began to nudge the thrusters to put her runner between the descent path of Six/Brad and the looming wall of Earth. It was a tricky maneuver, meticulous and foolhardy, calling to her mind visions of airshow wingwalkers and barnstormers. Oh, sure . . . being on a Burner crew sounded cool (Hero pilots saving the world from space junk!), but like a little kid who dreamed of driving a bulldozer, after a few hours on the job it was just moving dirt.

She raised the rear stinger—a five-meter copper-tungsten lance designed to radiate heat away from the ship's underside during atmosphere contact—and angled the point under the scoop of the Brad Pitt (naming the runners for classic movie stars had been her idea, a convention everyone but the Base director happily embraced). Watching the camera views and schematic overlays, she tapped out little pufts of thrust until the lance slid in, right to the knot of metal wedged in the body frame of the Brad.

"Damn. That was pretty," said Maureen's voice.

"You ain't seen nothin' yet, sweetheart," replied Linda. "Be sure to clamp on to my central supports with both your docking claws. We need to be a stable unit when the turbulence hits."

"On it."

Mitch over the com: "Ground confirms your plan to melt the obstruction with the stinger. I'm sending through their trajectory with absolute no-return point." A red light indicated Mitch had switched to a private channel. "I know you're in position already, Linda. Do not fuck with that ditch-point, you hear me?"

"Yes, sir," she replied, not a touch of sarcasm.

Mitch went back on green light open channel. "All right, everyone hold on. The ride's going to get bumpy."

Linda and Maureen answered in simultaneous sing-song: "That's-what-she-said."

Linda watched the trajectory map on her main display. After a while, the image started to vibrate. Little tremors rose to her fingers through the controls as the ship shuddered against the thickening atmosphere.

Within a minute, the craft was bucking like she'd never felt.

Atmosphere skipping was a big part of training—runner pilots did it just for fun sometimes—but with another runner piggyback and four tons of satellite between them, this was very different. She was on the stabilizers constantly, checking the temperature and horizon displays moment by moment. On Earth, Linda Ballard had flown everything from stealth jets to ultralights, and even the smoothest little Cessna was more thrilling than the slow, weightless corkscrews of spaceflight. But now . . . now she felt like she was surfing down the flow of a volcano in a pair of out-of-control garbage trucks, terror and adrenaline sizzling in every nerve.

God, this feels good! she thought.

You basically piloted a runner flat on your back, prone in a padded cockpit on top of the craft, head to bow, feet to stern. You watched everything on wraparound displays fed by cameras and sensors. Not that it mattered in space, but Linda always wondered why the engineers chose that orientation. Until now. Now, as jolts of compression slammed her into the seat over and over, she was grateful for the position.

"Stinger at eight-hundred," she said, reading the temperature.

"Nothing yet," said Maureen, her voice shaking with more than turbulence.

"Ditch point in one-hundred and twenty seconds," said Mitch.

A titanic heave hit the Hemsworth and Linda felt her head snap back into the dense foam.

"This . . . is the part . . . where . . . I yell . . . yee-haw," she coughed out as her body rattled.

"This is when I wet myself," said Maureen.

"One-ten to ditch," said Mitch.

"Stinger at eleven-hundred."

"I can see it glowing," said Maureen. "But still nothing."

"Ditch in one-hundred seconds. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven."

Fighting the pitch and yaw, Linda tickled the thirty-two thrust-nozzle keys like a ragtime pianist.

"Thirteen-hundred!" she yelled over the thunder of re-entry vibrating through the hull. "Now?"

"No! It's still caught. Wait! Yes! Yes! It's clear!"

"Go! Go! Go!"

The Chris Hemsworth bucked as four tons of satellite rolled onto it. Linda saw the Brad Pitt release and rocket up like a kite caught in a hurricane, outlined by its vapor trails against the black of space. Linda spread her fingers and slammed every forward thrust key, as if blaring a major chord on a cathedral organ, and her runner squirted out from between the satellite bulk and the dome of air. It skimmed over the thermosphere like a pebble on a pond then lifted with her up-thrusters until it once more sailed still and silent. Her rear cameras caught the moment the satellite below burst into molten chunks, leaving claw marks of flame slicing the sky.

"If you know anybody in Greenland," she said over the com, "Tell them to look Southwest for an awesome light show. Maureen, you okay?"

"Affirmative. I'm in a decent parking orbit, but I don't have enough propellant to get back to Base."

"I'm joining you in a minute. I've got plenty to help push."

"We're tracking your position," said Mitch's voice. "Prepping Number Three and Five to get you. You two just sit back. Betty Grable and Cary Grant will come and tow you home."

#

Back in the common room of the Calypso orbital base, Maureen and Linda dangled from toeholds as Mitch sat bungeed to his chair at the operations console.

"This is the part where I yell at you," he said.

"And I put on my sunglasses and pop my gum," said Linda. "If I had either."

"I remind you both of the priority. An equipment loss we can absorb," he said. "A casualty will get us shut down. I'm grateful to have neither. As it stands now, there's one runner with minor damage and all pilots intact, so good job, ladies."

"Don't forget four tons of Ruskie Nimbus successfully splashed into the North Atlantic," said Linda. "That's a million bucks a ton."

"Duly noted," replied Mitch. "And reflected in your bonuses."

"Suh-weet."

"You up for a new job?"

"Always."

"Born ready, chief."

"There's a Chinese geostationary that was never set right. It's on an eccentric that crosses a few lanes. The Chinese government offered double rate if it can be fixed."

"We've never done an orbital correction," said Maureen. "Do we have the fuel for that?"

"It's going to take three days to lift Calypso to a matching orbit. In that time, we're maxing all nitrogen compressors to get the runner tanks to eight-thousand."

"Eight-thousand P.S.I.!" cried Linda. "That's double normal pressure."

"Don't tell me you're going all safety manual on me now?"

"No, I'm just thinking how those suckers will move. Ooh, baby."

"It's not speed we need," explained Mitch. "It's power. That Chinese bogey is over ninety tons."

Maureen and Linda gasped.

"What the—! What is it?"

"They won't say."

"Is it military?"

"They won't say."

"It's military."

Mitch shrugged. "All I know is it's the biggest contract job we've been offered and Ground wants to take it, no questions asked."

"I thought the whole purpose of this enterprise was to clean up space junk," said Linda. "Not help Red China revive the Cold War glory days."

"I'll forgive that because I know you're an Air Force brat," replied Mitch. "But you're working for a private, internationally funded operation now. We don't take sides. We try to keep man-made meteorites from putting people in danger—and a ninety ton satellite on an unstable ellipse is plenty dangerous."

"Oh yeah. Especially if it's got nukes."

#

Despite a few more barbs, Linda failed to draw Mitch into an argument and she kicked off in something as close to a huff as her disposition allowed. She sailed through the habitat cylinder, a space about the size of a passenger jet fuselage—ringed with sleeping and storage compartments fairly resembling overhead luggage bins—and hooked a turn into a connector tube to the maintenance cylinder. It was identical in size and volume to the habitat, but vastly more cluttered, with mesh nets holding tools and equipment against every square inch. Gary, the lead engineer, was hooked to a console at one end of the cylinder.

"How bad is it?" she asked, gliding over to watch his remote camera inspection of the Brad Pitt.

"Not bad," he answered. He pointed to the screen. "The main issue is that sheared pressure coupling. That we need to fix. Otherwise, really, there's just some cosmetic damage. Hell of a trick you pulled off."

Linda was hanging from a toehold above his console, her face parallel to his but inverted—something the crew had come to call "spidermanning." Gary looked at her but his expression betrayed no surprise. In a place with zero gravity and zero privacy, people learned to ignore one another's oddities, including whether or not they were upside-down.

"So did you hear about the Chinese thing?" she asked.

"I heard there's a job to correct a Chinese satellite. What else is there to it?"

"Nothing specific. I was just wondering, before we get there, if you could fit me with some special equipment.

"What kind of equipment?"

Linda shrugged, wondering if the gesture had any impact when upside-down. "Nothing much. Optical spectrometer. Contact metallurgic ultrasound. Geiger counter."

Gary narrowed his eyes. "What are you looking for?"

"I just want to know what we're dealing with before we start shoving it around."

"I assume you don't want me to mention anything to Mitch."

"He's a busy guy," said Linda. "No need to bother him with every little detail."

"Uh-huh," said Gary, his voice trailing skeptically.

#

After twenty minutes of careful nudging, the Calypso was a perfect shadow of the Chinese satellite, following a few hundred meters behind its East-West vector. Linda watched on the common room screen as drone cameras circled the object, revealing a surprisingly elongated side view. It reminded Linda of the cardboard delivery box for long-stem roses.

"Is this where you say 'I have a bad feeling about this'?" asked Maureen.

Linda grunted. "What do you say that is?"

"Radio telescope. Monsoon tracking. Pirate porn broadcasting. Take your pick."

"Or missiles?"

"Determined to spread your bad feeling around, aren't you?" said Maureen.

"I don't trust it. The Chinese haven't said a word about its equipment or function."

"They don't have to. By I.S.A. agreement, all they have to document is tonnage and path. We've been launching classified satellites for eighty years, since at least the Sixties. Lord knows what damn-the-treaties weaponry we've snuck up."

"Doesn't mean I want anyone else to get away with it."

"What are you suggesting?"

"For the moment, nothing but a little fact-finding," said Linda.

"And if you find something you don't like?" asked Maureen.

"We'll disarm that nuke when we get there."

#

Runners Two and Three—Chris Hemsworth and Betty Grable—slowly skimmed the length of the Chinese mystery box. The two craft moved in perfect opposing sync, mirror images above and below, snapping high-res images as they inched along at ten-centimeters-per-second. Linda watched the surface of the satellite roll by like a glacial landscape.

"Number Two, you're getting close," said Mitch over the com. "Back off a bit."

"Right, chief," replied Linda. She tapped a thruster. The Chris Hemsworth lowered its nose toward the satellite.

"Number Two, I need you to stay at least two meters from the surface—whoa! Did you just bump it?"

"Oops, sorry, chief," said Linda. "I confused up and down for a moment."

"Linda, back off! Get to two meters."

She tickled the thrusters and Chris Hemsworth widened the gap.

"That's better," said Mitch. "Okay, Two and Three, when you reach the end, I want you to do one-eighties and retrace your path in the opposite direction. Re-angling your front cameras to thirty-degrees and set your infrareds to—what the . . .! Linda! Did you just bump again?"

"Wow, I am really off today. Sorry about that, chief."

Mitch's voice went cold.

"Finish your sweep and get back to Base."

"Roger that."

#

Back in the common room, Mitch hovered by the big screen and pulled up images of the satellite overlaid with grids and vectors.

"The plan is to have three runners clamp on to these support beams and begin a synchronized series of thrusts. Short bursts to start, then after we get course confirmation, we'll go to a steady push. We've allowed for forty minutes of sustained thrust. After that, the three runners will detach and return for refueling, and the other three will deploy and lock on. Then they refuel and the originals resume. We should have the orbit corrected within six cycles."

"How are we going to refuel if we keep pushing away from Base like that?"

"Base will advance to a rendezvous point each time," said Mitch. "We're going to lead, and you're going to catch up to us."

Murmurs went through the assembled crew.

"If we're using all that propellant for the runners, how will there be enough to push Base ahead?"

"We've been authorized to use the solid rocket boosters," answered Mitch.

Now a wave of indignation erupted.

"Those are supposed to be for emergencies!"

"If they're depleted, that leaves us drifting."

"What about the slag?"

Mitch waved the objections down patiently.

"We've worked out a plan with Ground for minimal consumption," he said. "And we'll keep an emergency reserve."

"I thought we were supposed to avoid putting waste in orbit," said Maureen. "Isn't that why we use pressurized nitrogen only? Solid rockets disperse particles."

"That's true," replied Mitch. "But it's the only way we can move something as massive as Calypso and still have enough nitrogen for the runners. Yes, there will be some ash and slag from the burn, but Ground has determined that it will pose essentially zero threat at this higher orbit. We're going to start with the first phase in about twelve hours, so everyone get some rest and look over your assignments."

The small group began to break up, grumbling solo or muttering in pairs as they drifted along the habitat. When Linda turned to go, Mitch called her back.

"Yes, sir?" she said, with a smile.

Mitch leaned close and whispered, "What are you playing at?"

"Whatever do you mean, sir?"

"Cut the act, Linda. I know you placed something on the satellite. What is it?"

"Just a little research. I'll let you know if anything comes up."

She continued to smile as she watched Mitch's face tighten, tension around the eyes, stiffness in the jaw. She thought she heard a tiny growl as he turned back to his console. Linda tucked into a half-gainer and nudged off, spreading her arms wide before hugging herself close, like a spinning skater, to pull a barrel roll just for fun.

#

All crew members were ordered to their compartments as the first rocket burn began. The acceleration was subtle—barely five percent of one G—but it felt surreal to Linda to experience any sense of weight in the habitat. She lifted her hand and, bizarrely, it wanted to fall back down. At first, she thought it might be an imaginary sensation, but a symphony of tiny plinks from forgotten loose objects tumbling along the habit cylinder confirmed the reality. When the all-clear sounded, Linda double-checked by placing a pen mid-air and watched as it hung motionless. She unlatched her compartment and rolled out.

In the movies, people in space always moved in slow-motion like they were underwater. In reality, a seasoned crew at zero-G zipped around, weaving through each other like waiters in a busy restaurant. Linda glided to a monitor station to join a group watching data from the first wave of runners, left behind with the satellite some five degrees along the orbital arc. As each successive thrust test rolled by without incident, pilots began to drift away from the non-events while engineers remained transfixed.

Bored, Linda returned to her compartment. She skimmed through the assignment protocols on her tablet, until she got bored with those as well, then fiddled half-heartedly with a crossword puzzle. At an Air Force base, being on call was every bit as tedious, but somehow still felt important, necessary. Here, waiting around to drive a truck for money, sometimes it seemed . . . well, kind of like seventeen-across: T A W D R Y. Or maybe twelve-down: I N A N E. Even the romance of space wore thin after a few months stuck in a 747, showering twice a week with a spray bottle.

She was dozing when the alert to prep for her wave came. In the maintenance cylinder, her spacesuit was mounted by the runner hatches like a magician's assistant sawed in half and split at the waist. She tucked into a cannonball and backed into the belly gap, then blossomed into a jumping jack, her arms and legs filling the suit above and below, as the belt ring closed and locked. As she pulled free of the suit mounts, she called to Gary.

"Anything?"

"Still analyzing," he answered, not glancing from his monitor.

"Hurry it up, would you."

"Bite me."

"If that's what you're into," she said, then jackknifed into the docking tube of Chris Hemsworth.

#

The hour-long trip to the satellite was more tedium, with Phil Bledsoe—pilot of the John Wayne—appointing himself entertainment director and monopolizing ship-to-ship com with an essay on why Doctor Who was the greatest science-fiction show of all time precisely because the science made no sense ("That way, unburdened by realism, they're free to explore ideas in their purest form!"). Philosophically, Linda was opposed to all manner of gender stereotyping, but, jeez, men did love their crackpot theories.

Bucking an Earthbound trend, four of the six runner pilots were female. As a rule, women tended to be more susceptible to motion-sickness than men but, in a biological quirk that baffled the flight surgeons, Linda was among a tiny contrarian percentage of women who simply did not experience it. At all. You could put Linda Ballard in a three-axis centrifuge and she could do trigonometry while eating tempura. As a child, she reported kids to the school nurse for getting dizzy on the playground spinner. She was well into her teens before she accepted that vertigo wasn't a contagious disease, and a second-year cadet before reluctantly conceding it wasn't a moral weakness.

That anomalous advantage bolstered something she'd been told throughout her life: that she was exceptional. Not merely in lineage, descended from generations of military aviators, but also innate talent. Gifts, such as her ironclad constitution, were not to be squandered—as her father reminded her ad nauseam—and she was obliged to reach her highest potential. Linda decided that meant she was destined for space. So she graduated the Academy, completed her required service, and resigned her commission at the first private sector offer to slip the surly bonds of Earth. The favored daughter ran away with the space circus, to the obvious but unspoken dismay of Lieutenant Colonel Gregory T. Ballard.

Upon reaching the satellite, the alignment and latching maneuvers were mildly challenging, but as soon as the runners were attached, the tedium resumed. The thrust sequences were remotely automated, so the pilots were obliged to lock their controls and twiddle their thumbs until it was time to head back to Base. As Linda emerged from her space suit, drifting in the fetal position from its split midriff, Gary tugged her ankle and said,

"Let's talk."

#

"It's a satellite killer," said Gary.

He floated before the common room monitor, pointing to series of grainy black-and-white images, as the entire Calypso crew hung in formation before him.

"What am I looking at?" asked Mitch, all grumbly skepticism.

"That's a structural ultrasound," said Linda. "Taken by a pair of transceivers I placed during my recon pass."

"It was the only non-invasive way to get a look at the interior," continued Gary. "It takes a while to interpret the data—and I know it doesn't look like much—but I'm pretty confident in the results. Three-quarters of the object consists of tubes filled with layers of honeycombed metallic chaff. The back of each tube is packed with some kind of dense gel. There's no radiation, so it's not nuclear material, but it's certainly a high-energy combustible. The openings point West, straight into the Eastward direction of anything tracking the Earth's rotation."

"This is designed for one purpose" said Linda. "To fire a wall of shrapnel into the path of oncoming satellites. Millions of particles, each the size of a toenail clipping, moving at the equivalent of fifteen kilometers a second. At that speed even a few hits will shred any object, creating a cone of debris that helps take out the next. Over and over. Until there's a man-made Saturn ring of rubble around the Earth."

"This single device," said Gary, "Could destroy dozens of imaging and communications satellites in twenty-four hours. It's an information age doomsday weapon."

"It's a shotgun," said Linda. "And we're helping the Chinese point it at our heads."

Mitch spoke through the tense silence. "Assuming everything you've said is true, what do you want to do about it?"

"Burn it," said Linda.

"Come again?"

"That's what we're supposed to do, right? Remove hazards from orbit? Let's push this thing to the bottom of the Pacific."

"That's Chinese government property," said Mitch. "We're not authorized to do anything but nudge it. Even your peeking under the hood is an act of trespassing."

"An indiscriminate weapon like this violates all sorts of international agreements," said Gary. "It should not exist."

"Are you actually agreeing we should splash this?" asked Mitch.

"Yes!" blurted Linda.

"No," said Gary, then teetered his hand equivocally. "Not quite. But we could neutralize it. There's only a few ways it could receive a command to fire. Radio. Laser or optical signal. Autonomous computer control. We could disable those systems, make it deaf, dumb, and blind."

"That's not good enough," snarled Linda.

"It's the most efficient way."

"It's the coward's way!"

"Enough," said Mitch. "Nobody does anything until I confer with Ground. Gary, I need your data."

"You got it."

"And the rest of you: I need your silence. Don't gossip about this with anyone planetside. I could suspend communication privileges with a word. But I won't." He stared down Linda. "I'm trusting you to not do anything stupid."

"Ditto, chief."

#

Linda lay rigid, arms folded, hovering in her compartment like a grumpy mummy levitating in an oversized sarcophagus. She had abandoned her crossword puzzle, but was trying decide on the proper word for her mood. Sulking? Stewing? Brooding? None seemed right. She considered inventing one.

Moping furiously. Furioping? No.

Cogitating and fuming. Fumitating. Better, but still not right.

There was tap on her wall. She rolled up the privacy screen and Maureen sidled in next to her.

"Move over," she said.

Linda readjusted. "People will talk."

"Like they haven't speculated about that already." Maureen elbowed around in the tight space and held up a tablet before Linda's face.

"My account," she said.

Linda took the tablet and scanned down a column of numbers until her eyes popped on a six-digit figure.

"Transfer routed through the People's Bank of China within the last hour," said Maureen. "Personal incentive payments set to clear in thirty days, conditional on successful orbital correction. Engineering crew got over two-hundred thousand each. Pilots got half a million. I can only guess what directors got."

"Shit."

"And a whole lot of it. Anyway, the word is we're going ahead with the correction."

"It's a bribe," said Linda. "A bribe from a foreign government."

"See, it's only called that if you're a public official. In the private sector, it's just called 'money.'"

"I'm military."

"Ex-military," said Maureen. "Just like me, though I was a lowly transport pilot. I don't have your warrior caste pedigree or Colorado Springs bona fides."

Linda shook her head. "I won't accept it. Are you actually going to?"

"The bigger question is are you going to let anyone accept it."

"I have some friends in the D.O.D. that would love to know about this."

"I hope they're good friends," Maureen said. "Because you may lose a few here."

"I don't do this to make friends."

Maureen slid up Linda's privacy screen and nudged off. "Well, mission accomplished, then."

Now Linda needed a new word, one that mixed outrage and righteousness. Rightrage. Perfect. It was in a spirit of percolating rightrage she seized her tablet and began drumming out a message to the Department of Defense, Strategic Space Division.

#

"Linda!"

Mitch's voice echoed through the habitat. He drew out the name, making it sound to Linda like Fred Flintstone pounding on a door.

"LIN-DA!"

Linda rolled out of her compartment.

"Yes, chief?"

From all sides, like meerkats in a wraparound savanna, heads poked out of compartments.

"You had no right," Mitch said, his voice calm and cold once more.

Now Linda began to heat up. She pushed off and torpedoed toward Mitch's station.

"I had no right?" she bellowed. "You put us all—the whole world!—in a compromised position. And for what? Money!"

Mitch pushed off and streamed straight at Linda. They each grabbed a rubbery handhold and bounced to a stop before colliding.

"You think this is Top Gun?" he yelled. "You think you're the badass maverick sticking it to the stuffed shirts? This is the real world, Linda. Grow up."

"So I can join the big boys' sellout club? Fuck you, Mitch!"

"Ms. Ballard, you are, as they say, relieved of duty."

"Get real, Mitch. You need me."

"No." He shook his head. "No, I really don't. Anything we need you for can be done better with automation at this point, and without the hotshot nonsense. Pilots are a contingency plan. Congratulations. You've finally made yourself more trouble than you're worth."

Linda held out her wrists. "So, time to clap me in irons, is it?"

"In a manner of speaking," answered Mitch. He raised his voice slightly. "Calypso data systems, this is Mitchell Selwyn Coolidge, Base Director. Executive command: suspend personal and operational logins for flight specialist Linda G. Ballard."

"Command acknowledged," replied a disembodied voice. "Linda G. Ballard, logins suspended."

"We'll have you Earthbound in a week or so," said Mitch as he drifted back to his console.

#

Slinking back to her compartment just didn't seem right, so Linda took the flight-of-shame through the habitat and tucked herself in the rear observation room by the rose window. It was her favorite place on Calypso, usually filled with surreal vistas of Earthscapes rolling by like abstract paintings. But now, at high orbit and angled ass-end to space, all it showed was blackness, the cabin lights too bright to let her eyes even find the Milky Way. She crouched by the window, brood-sulk-shame-fuming. After a while, Gary cruised in and bobbed beside her.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"For the record, I agree with you. This is too dangerous a thing to leave unchecked."

"What can we do about it?"

"Do you know the Chinese gave us access to the attitude jets?"

Linda looked up, lifting her chin from her knees.

"It's not enough thrust to move it," continued Gary. "But enough to turn it. Like you said, it's a shotgun. We can point the barrel at the ground. If we aim that thing planetside, were it ever fired, all those little metal shards would burn up in spectacular uselessness."

"What do you need me to do?"

"I need to get to Mitch's console to mirror his access on mine so I can use the thrust controls."

"Leave it to me," said Linda. "I'll get him away from it."

Gary shook his head. "Linda, I have great confidence in your abilities in all areas but one. Subtlety. He can't know what's going on. He can override anything by voice command."

"So we gag him."

"Again, there's your problem with the whole subtlety thing. All I need is a few minutes where everyone's attention is—"

Gary was interrupted by an alert tone and an edgy digital voice summoning the crew to the common room. They found Mitch in his console chair rotated toward the habitat.

"The assignment's been scrubbed," he said. "There seems to be something of a diplomatic crisis brewing below and we've been ordered to cease and desist."

"We're not finished the correction," said Gary. "That satellite's still eccentric."

Mitch looked sheepish. "The Chinese have said they will, uh, complete the operation themselves with an unmanned rocket."

"If they can correct the orbit with an unmanned rocket, why haven't they done it already?"

"They didn't exactly say the rocket was to correct the orbit."

Silence hung among the drifting bodies as a realization gradually congealed.

"Right now," continued Mitch, "There's only a few sketchy ultrasounds and unofficial speculation on what that object actually is. It seems Beijing would prefer to avoid giving any foreign government the chance to confirm the existence of a treaty-violating space weapon."

"Are you saying they're going to destroy it?"

"We have reports of a launch from the Wenchang Center just a few minutes ago. We've been given less than six hours to, um, as they say, clear the area."

Panic rippled through the group.

"We can't move to a new orbit that quickly!"

"Our rockets are at sixty-percent! This would leave us nothing."

"If they destroy that, think of the debris it creates!"

"Look, we've been ordered to move," said Mitch. "I don't like it either but my hands are tied. There's nothing we can do."

"We can do what Gary wanted," said Linda. "We can disable any means that weapon has to get a firing signal. Leave it derelict in space."

"I can't authorize that," answered Mitch. "I am legally accountable to an international conglomerate and obliged to follow their directives. I told you, my hands are tied."

"I'm with Linda on this," said Gary. "They're putting us in danger. I don't know how far we can get in six hours compared to the fragmentation radius of whatever they're sending up. And they'll be creating orbital pollution for generations. That's exactly what I signed on to prevent."

"Look, from my console, I can lock out every runner or drone launch. That's my job."

"This isn't a job anymore! This is an act of international aggression. You can't sit this out!"

"I told you, my hands are tied. I just have to reach out and touch that console to shut you down. To keep me from fulfilling my legal obligations, you'd have physically restrain me. Say, with a cargo net."

Again, silence hung over the group until someone said, "Oh."

Within a minute, Mitch was webbed to his chair, his arms pinned to his side by an elastic mesh ratcheted tight.

"Calypso data systems," Mitch called out. "Please note that at zero-eight-fifty-three, relative habitat time, I was inhibited from performing my duties as director by several unidentified crew members."

"Your situation is noted, Director Coolidge."

"Did he just log a mutiny?" Maureen asked Linda.

"I think this is where I say, 'Argh, matey.'"

"I remind you we're a private operation," said Gary, tapping commands onto Mitch's console. "So I believe the correct term is 'hostile takeover.' I'm going to need volunteers to go E.V.A. for some creative cable-snipping."

"Avast there, ye Hung-Dong Frigate! Prepare to be castrated!"

Mitch shook his head and sighed.

#

Linda watched as Gary pointed the business end of the Chinese shotgun perpendicular to the great disk of Earth. Once the position was stable, runner pilots lifted engineers up and down the length of the satellite as they severed fiber-optic lines and gold-shielded copper wires. They blinded photoreceptors and performed lobotomies on processor brains. In the end, the elongated box seemed to hang sadly over the blue planet, like a withered branch dangling over a pond.

"So that's it?" asked Linda.

"Dead as the proverbial doornail," replied Gary.

"What about the launch from Wenchang?"

"I don't have access to tracking data from Ground," answered Gary. "Only Mitch does."

"Oh yeah," said Linda. "I forgot about him."

#

"Well, well," said Mitch. "Me and my bladder were wondering when you'd come back."

"Do you know if the Chinese are still on target?" asked Gary.

"I've seen a bunch of notices come up on my console," he answered, nodding, "But I can't reach to open them."

"I'll get you loose," said Linda.

"Hold on," said Mitch. "Are you two saying you've already sabotaged the property of a sovereign nation and there's nothing I can do to reverse that?"

"In the bag," answered Gary.

"Calypso data systems. Please note that at ten-twenty-seven, Director Coolidge was able to disentangle himself from restraints placed erroneously upon him by unidentified crew members."

"Noted, Director Coolidge."

Mitch snaked an arm along his body and out near the neckline of the mesh. He pulled the remnant of it easily to his waist, freeing the other arm.

"Friggin' elastic," he said. "We also have indestructible carbon-fiber nets, you know."

He tapped his console, flipped through a series of screens.

"Yep. Three-stage rocket, with the first two spent. Ground predicts they'll execute a single Hohmann ellipse, then when they hit apogee the second time, they'll fire the third stage and lift the payload to our position.

"How can they achieve orbit with only one transfer loop?" asked Gary.

"They're not trying to achieve orbit," replied Mitch. "Only impact. They're whipping a rock from a sling straight up to hit a passing bird. We now have less than four hours to get clear."

"Can we do it?"

"Ground's plotted the detonation point and cone of debris. If we maintain our altitude and shadow the satellite's current path by enough margin, we should be okay. But, ironically, this may create too much orbital junk for us to stay in business safely. This may be the end of the Burners. For now, we need to batten down and strap in for an emergency repositioning."

"There's another way," said Linda. "Intercept."

"Intercept with . . . what?"

"A runner," said Linda. "Right now, the Chinese are looping around Earth, picking up speed. I can match the orbit. I'll use planetary gravity to accelerate, like a bicycle going downhill to catch up to a car, and rendezvous with the missile at perigee as it makes its closet turn around Earth."

"This is a missile targeting high orbit," said Gary. "It's going its fastest at perigee. That makes you a bicycle trying to catch up to a Formula One car. There's not enough downhill."

"So give me a booster rocket."

Mitch and Gary exchanged a look.

"Assuming that's even possible," said Mitch. "How, exactly, do you intend to intercept?"

Linda held out her forearm, clasped it midpoint with the fingers of her other hand.

"The manipulators on the front scoop of the runner," she answered. "That's exactly what they're designed to do: grab on to a cylinder."

"Not when that cylinder is a live missile with an unfired chemical booster engine transiting low Earth orbit at seven kilometers per second."

"That just makes it more interesting."

Mitch turned to Gary. "Could you even attach a rocket to a runner?"

Gary looked up, his eyes focused on nothing as he traced his fingers in the air. "Maybe. Calypso's emergency boosters are designed to slide out in one piece, like a battery from a flashlight. If we pull an engine and have a runner grab it—the front scoop's definitely the strongest part of a runner—we can unbolt the scoop, strip the heat shield, then spot-weld the scoop-engine to the belly frame—"

Mitch interrupted. "You kids take this outside. Right now, I'm sending everyone instructions to prep for an emergency repositioning. You have an hour until we start to move."

#

Gary, in full spacesuit with two other engineers, secured a socket wrench then eased out what looked like a giant tin can from a tube the size of sewer pipe.

"Okay, here comes the engine. When it's clear of the cowling, I want you to belly up so we can drill into your shield and figure out where to put the welds."

"I've got a better idea," said Linda from her cockpit.

The Chris Hemsworth twisted like a three-storey windmill until the open maw of her scoop and manipulators gaped at the engine cylinder.

"What are you doing?" demanded Gary.

"Like hell I'm letting you put holes in my heat shield," said Linda. She squeezed her fingers and the maw bit down on the rocket. "You said yourself the scoop's the strongest part of a runner. So I'm going to hold on with mine."

Gary sputtered. "But . . . but you'll be sideways when the rocket fires!"

"It's space. There's no up, down, or sideways. No air resistance. Get with the program, Gary."

"I . . . um . . . I. . . ."

"I'm with Linda on this," said Maureen over the com. "It saves time. Avoids modification. But it will be hard to control. It's going to want to spiral—or worse, pinwheel. You're going to have push against it, compensate moment by moment. You ready for that?"

"Just you watch me, lady."

"That's the spirit," said Maureen. "You should see yourself right now. You look like a cartoon Chihuahua carrying a stick of dynamite. I vote we rename your runner."

"To what?" asked Linda.

"Wile E. Coyote. Super Genius."

"Oh, I like the sound of that. Linda G. Ballard. Soop-per. Jeen-yus."

#

When Chris Hemsworth was in position, Calypso triggered the rocket burn. The solid fuel had been premeasured to bring the runner to the missile's velocity and arc, but it was up to Linda to keep it on course. The sideways acceleration didn't bother Linda's impervious inner ear a jot, but it did her neck muscles no good. Keeping the whole assembly from spiraling took a lot more effort than she let on, her heart thundering as she calmly reported each moment-by-moment adjustment in her best Lauren Bacall/Chuck Yeager voice. But Linda knew Base and Ground both remotely monitored every force she experienced, every counterthrust she made.

And you're all in total awe of me right about now!

Within the hour, the Hemsworth-Coyote began to turn in the sling of gravity, coming to line of sight with the Chinese missile on its final Earthbound loop. Linda spat out the Calypso's engine—commending it to a fiery funeral over the Indian Ocean—and opened her manipulators wide. South Pacific islands reeled by at twenty times the speed of sound as she caressed her thrusters, nudging the scoop-mouth closer and closer until at last, it closed on the missile body. Now the Chihuahua had bitten onto a torpedo.

"Push it down, Linda!" she heard Gary's voice over the headset. "Burn it!"

"I don't think so," she replied. "I'm moving way too fast. I have no idea where it will land. I'm not going down in history for dropping a commie boom-stick on the planet."

"Linda, you have to get rid of it." said Maureen.

"The third stage is still live," said Mitch. "If they ignite, it could blow up in your face. You need to let go."

"Yeah, well, it may be a little out of character for me, but in this case I'm going to rely on the kindness of strangers. Besides, there's only one surefire way to get rid of this safely."

"What?"

"Escape velocity. Just before I pass the geocentric ellipse focus, I'll be going fast enough—with the added thrust of my eight-thousand P.S.I. hot rod—to push this thing to the moon. But I need to hang on until I'm sure it's beyond orbital return. Seriously, did you think I'd pass up the chance for heroic self-sacrifice? No way, José."

There was an eruption in her headset—voices she knew from Calypso, voices she didn't from Ground—all clashing in protest.

"This is when one of you confesses your secret love for me," said Linda over the chaos. "I know who I want it to be. You'll just have to work it out."

She cut off her com. Further conversation could serve no purpose.

The missile-cum-runner contraption swung past Earth and curved toward open space. In about forty minutes, Linda Ballard and the folks at Chinese mission control would have a decision to make.

#

"Where is she?" asked Gary.

Mitch pointed to a tracking dot on his console.

"She went beyond the insertion ellipse four minutes ago," he said.

"Can she get back?" asked Maureen.

"She used most of her propellant for the acceleration," said Mitch. "Ground calculates she's past no-return."

"We have to try. What about remote automation?"

"She disabled it," said Mitch. "I should not have made that crack about pilots as a contingency plan. Besides, she doesn't have the thrust to reverse course."

"Are you saying she's gone?" asked Gary.

Mitch looked away, said nothing. Gary repeated the question, struggling with the words.

"Are . . . you saying . . . she's gone?"

"I'm sorry."

"No."

"I . . . I'm . . ."

"Oh no. Damn it. No."

"Guys, what's that mean?" asked Maureen, pointing to Mitch's console.

The three watched a series of vector lines readjust over Linda's tracking dot, tangents on a shifting arc.

"Is she changing direction?" asked Gary.

"It appears so," replied Mitch. "The monitoring systems are showing significant acceleration."

"You said she was out of propellant?"

"She has some," said Mitch. "But nowhere near enough to be doing that."

"Then where's she getting all that thrust?"

"More important," said Maureen. "Where she's going?"

Mitch tapped his console, swiped a series of commands, and overlaid a trajectory.

"If she keeps accelerating," he said. "She'll return to orbit."

"Are you kidding?"

"It's a crazy wide orbit, but—yes—she's on a path for reinsertion."

"How?"

"I have no idea," said Mitch. "But—even more important—how do we intercept her?"

#

"Calypso base, this is Linda Ballard," said Linda as she reactivated her com. "Please respond, Calypso. This is Linda Ballard."

"Linda? Jesus! Is that you?" said Mitch's voice.

"Right on both accounts," she replied. "Since He is, after all, my copilot. Do you folks know where the heck I am?"

"That's affirmative. We are tracking you on a wide return orbit. But . . . how . . . how did you manage to . . . .?"

"The third stage, of course."

"Come again?"

"The third stage of that missile was never fired," she said. "When it was clear I had on a hold on their firecracker, the Chinese, very thoughtfully, chose not to melt my face. After my big push, they had to realize they couldn't possibly put it back on course. So, hoping they'd get the message, I turned it around and pointed it the way I wanted to go. And, again very thoughtfully, rather than let me drift to the Kuiper belt, they finally fired the stage to bring me home. Or, more or less in the neighborhood."

"Are you saying you hung on to a high orbit booster during ignition?" asked Maureen's voice.

"I did indeed," said Linda.

"And you kept it stable? It didn't spiral?"

"I did and it did, with a little help from me. As any quarterback will tell you, putting on a spiral creates stability. And, believe you me, yee-haw doesn't even begin to cut it."

"Linda!" said Gary's voice. "You're on way too wide an orbit! We won't be able to get anywhere near you."

"Well, my air scrubbers and reserve batteries should last about sixty hours. With the triple back ups, you've got a week to figure out how to grab me."

"We're already conferring with Ground on options," said Mitch. "Sit tight, and we'll work something out."

"Roger that, chief. Oh, and I still have a hold on that spent third stage, with the original payload. I bet Beijing would pay handsomely for its discrete return. A whole new potential business model for us."

"We'll take it under advisement."

"I'll expect a bonus, of course," said Linda.

"We'll it take out of the six million in incentive payments the Chinese rescinded from our personal accounts."

"Fine. Be that way."

"One more thing," said Maureen. "Which one of us do you think is in love with you?"

"This is the part where I say, 'What's that, Base? You're starting to break up.'"

* * *

Matt McHugh, the winner of the 2019 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award for “Burners,” was born in suburban Pennsylvania, attended LaSalle University in Philadelphia, and after a few years as a Manhattanite, now calls New Jersey home. Find his website here. The National Space Society and Baen Books applaud the role that science fiction plays in advancing real science and have teamed up to sponsor this short fiction contest in memory of Jim Baen. The contest occurs annually and looks for stories that demonstrate the positive aspects of space exploration and discovery. Over the years, the contest has developed an international character. In addition to the United States, entrants have hailed from Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Argentina, Algeria, Spain, and Morocco. "Moon bases, Mars colonies, orbital habitats, space elevators, asteroid mining, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, realistic spacecraft, heroics, sacrifice, adventure—that's what we're looking for," says Contest Administrator William Ledbetter. "And once again we believe we've found writers, and an ultimate winner, who deliver just that." Find more information on the JBM here.

Treason Properly

J.J. Cragun

The rifle in my hands bucked as I pulled the trigger, spewing fire and death. The crack of the bullet splitting the air echoed eerily across the small mountain valley. The beast looming in front of me was easily eight feet tall. With curling horns atop its head, mottled black fur, and a face more human than beast, the monstrous creature roared as the bullet tore through its chest. The terrifying brute fell, but it wasn't alone. The second beastman, even larger than the first, looked my way. Those eyes, which were once intelligent and full of life, were now dead. There was no rational thought behind those dead eyes. Just lifeless, unfeeling hate, and a mindless drive to destroy the living. And, unlike so many of my comrades, I was still among the living. If I wanted to stay that way, there was more killing to be done.

“Aeric!” I cried out, stumbling back and away from the brute. The beast started for me with lumbering steps.

Aeric wasn't old enough to grow a proper beard, but that hadn't prevented him from being conscripted into the Royal Fusiliers Brigade. He knew death was coming for us, but he never faltered. Without a word, he accepted the carbine I thrust at him, then handed me a freshly loaded rifle.

Every instinct in my body screamed at me to shoot. The towering beast was almost on me. But I knew better than to give in to the urge to panic fire. Though the lumbering monstrosity was so close I could hardly miss, I only had one shot to kill the beast. A less-than-perfect shot meant we were both dead. Instead of firing wildly, I forced myself to concentrate. With practiced motion, I raised the gun and aimed directly at one of the beast's dead, lifeless eyes.

It was close enough to strike now, one powerful arm raising a club high in the air, an instant from smashing the life out of me.

Sucking in a breath, I kept focus on the front sight, then pulled the trigger. Again, the crack of the carbine echoed across the valley and through the trees. There was no other sound. Just the distant echoes of a gunshot. Then the towering beastman swayed ponderously before finally toppling over, dead.

Aeric handed me a fresh carbine. I surveyed the landscape, looking for another target. We were up on a hillside in a narrow draw. The entire battalion had been stationed up on this hill, overlooking the small river valley down below. Four hundred armsmen and one hundred riflemen had been stationed here. It was thought a battalion could easily hold this narrow valley. But as I swept my gaze across the hillside, it was clear that estimation had been disastrously optimistic. Smoke floated eerily through the trees, blanketing the hillside in a noxious fog. The gunsmoke was thick in places, but from my vantage point I could see most of the valley. Nothing moved in the lazily drifting smoke.

Five hundred men lay dead on the hillside. An even larger number of enemy corpses littered the ground. But that was scant consolation as I surveyed the carnage, realization slowly dawning that all the men that I had lived with, trained with, joked and drank with, were now dead. Of the entire five-hundred-man battalion, only Aeric and I had survived.

For the last twenty minutes this hillside had been a living hell, drowning in the cacophony of violent battle, awash with deafening explosions of gunfire and the screams of the dying. Now, the contrasting silence was downright chilling. We were alone out here. But the deathless forces of the Betrayer would keep coming. More undead would come. They always did.

Aeric turned to me for instruction. The boy was bloodied and hurt, but the brave young man still had fight in him. During the battle, undead vulturelike beasts had swooped down on the battalion, killing dozens. One of the deadly creatures had raked him with vicious claws, leaving bloody furrows across his head and face before I shot it out of the air. A hastily applied bandage got the worst of the bleeding stopped. But the bandage covered his right eye, his dominant eye, which prevented him from accurately firing a rifle. Unable to shoot, he had courageously insisted on reloading for me instead. And the young man had certainly saved both our lives as he methodically, efficiently reloaded rifle after rifle, despite the chaotic violence that had engulfed the hillside around us.

Both of us slumped to the ground in exhaustion, taking a moment to catch our breath as we considered the hundreds of bodies, both human and beastman, that now covered the ground.

The beastmen tribes had once ruled the lands to the west of Shayne. The rolling hills and forests of the Western Marches had been their undisputed territory for generations. Shayne had even opened trade with several of the more peaceful tribes. But the beastmen had been too fragmented, too tribal, to stand against the undead army of Tetrax the Betrayer. They had been unable to unite in the face of a greater threat. Now they served Tetrax, united in death.

“What do we do now, Briggs?” Aeric asked, his good eye scanning the hillside as he took in the carnage all around us.

“We need to fall back to the command outpost at Fort Montoya. They need to know the pass is lost. Command thought we would hold this valley easily. They will be caught flat-footed if we don't warn them.”

Aeric nodded his head. “It's two days walk to reach the fort. And these beastmen move faster than we do.”

He wasn't wrong. We had no hope of outrunning these creatures. They could run faster than a man, and they didn’t seem to tire. But we didn't know how far away the next wave was. Maybe we could reach the fort first. Maybe we couldn't. But we weren't going to find out if we stayed here.

“Find yourself an extra rifle or two. If we run into any more beastmen, we won't outrun them. We'll have to fight them. But be quick about it. We need to get moving.”

The younger man nodded grimly, and both of us set about scavenging from the corpses of our fallen comrades. I picked the three cleanest carbines I could find, in addition to extra powder, ammunition, and water skins. I tried not to look at the faces of the men as I coldly stripped useful gear from dead bodies. Forgetting the horrors of this day would be bad enough. Remembering the faces and accusing, dead stares of fallen friends wouldn't help me sleep at night.

Aeric geared himself up as well, and the two of us set off. Speed was of the essence, but we were both exhausted from the battle. I set the quickest pace that I thought we might be able to maintain, and we headed for the narrow strip of dirt road that would lead us through the pass and on to Fort Montoya on the other side of the mountains.

Neither of us spoke as we trudged across the battlefield and up the grassy slope, avoiding the bodies of fallen friends and comrades. Aeric kept glancing over his shoulder, back down the hill, as if he were expecting the beasts to come charging out of the trees at any moment. And perhaps they would. It was impossible to know how far away they were. Gunsmoke from a hundred carbines rolled lazily through the air of the narrow valley, partially obscuring the view. But all was silent, with nothing but the gentle breeze rustling through the leaves to keep us company.

We soon left the veritable carpet of dead bodies behind as we crested the hill and made the road. Then both of us jumped as a clump of tall bushes on the opposite side of the narrow road suddenly started shaking. Both our rifles were up and at the ready in an instant. My heart was beating hard enough that I could feel it in my temples, but I fought back the fear and steadied my aim. We waited, but nothing came rushing out at us. The bushes rustled again, followed by a bestial snort. Aeric flinched at the noise, but his gun was steady.

“Should we shoot?” he whispered.

“No, hold your fire. I'm going to get a bit closer. If anything jumps out and tries to tear my face off, then you shoot.” I took a step closer, then turned back to the young man. “And don’t you miss.”

Aeric nodded, returning his full attention to the thicket of bushes in front of us.

I cautiously made my way forward, one ginger step at a time, carbine raised and at the ready. There was another snort from inside the thicket, but this time I was more hopeful than afraid. Using the barrel of my rifle, I pushed some branches aside. Hope welled in me as I spotted a horse in the thicket, her bridle tangled up in the branches.

I turned back to Aeric, a smile on my face. “It's one of the battalion horses. She must have bolted during the fight and got herself tangled in the thicket.”

Aeric brightened immediately. He knew what this meant as well as I did. A man couldn't outrun the beastmen, but a horse could. And the big chargers used by the battalion officers could support both of us for leagues, if we didn't push her. This was a fine stroke of luck. More than that, really. This was salvation.

“I'll get her untangled from the brush. Stay here and keep an eye out.”

“You sure leaving a one-eyed scout to watch for trouble is a good idea?”

I grunted a laugh. It was nice to see the young man still retained something of his sense of humor, despite what he had just been through. I waded into the bushes and set about calming the animal as I unwrapped the lead from the tangle of branches.

I freed the horse and led it from the thicket. Aeric wasn’t waiting for me where I had left him. Instead, he was crouched down on the far side of the road, peering down the hill at something. He turned back to me, a look of dread on his face. Whatever he had seen had scared him, but he wasn’t running for the horse. Instead, he was waving me over to join him.

With a growing sense of dread creeping through me, I secured the horse's lead to a thick branch and darted across the road, lying down next to Aeric behind a dead log. Then I looked down the hill. Not sixty yards away, two men were struggling up the hillside. Neither of the men were riflemen, nor were they armsmen from the battalion. They were both dressed in heavy plate, armed for melee combat with sword and shield. These men were obviously knights of Shayne, but I didn't know who they were or why they were here. Then, my attention was drawn to what was clambering up the hill behind the two men, in hot pursuit.

A pack of the undead, at least twelve strong, was steadily gaining on the two knights. Their dead, lifeless eyes were fixated on the men as they sprinted up the hill after them. But though the beastmen were fast, and uniform in their desire to kill, they were undisciplined. The undead brutes were spread out in a ragged line, the quickest of them already closing on the two fleeing knights. The slower creatures were still some distance off.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Bringing up the rear, astride an undead nightmare horse, was the last thing I wanted to see. I was looking at one of The Eleven.

I couldn’t stop myself from shivering at the sight of the fell creature.

In life, The Eleven had been the personal guard of King Sirius Shayne, father of the current king. But the eleven brave knights had all been slaughtered during the Battle of the Betrayer. Then Tetrax used his fell magics to bring the Eleven back from the dead to serve as the leaders of his cursed army. The eleven brave knights that had dedicated their lives to protecting the Shayne family now fought to destroy the Kingdom of Shayne.

The dread knight was clad in ornate mail armor, filigreed with gold and black trim. He held a long lance in one hand, and a brutal long sword was strapped across his back. And though the fearsome creature could have easily run down the two fleeing humans, he seemed content to hang back and let his minions do the dirty work. The skeletal steed of the knight cantered at an easy pace behind the pack of undead as the beasts closed on the two fleeing men.

When this particular Dread Knight had been alive, in the service of the King, he had been known as Oneal Sharps, Master of the Lance. But upon undeath, the Betrayer had renamed him Rictus. And Rictus was feared by the soldiers of Shayne for good reason. This horrific creature had killed many brave men.

The fastest of the beastmen was a hulking simian brute, with hugely muscled arms and long canine teeth jutting from savage jaws. The monster closed the distance with loping strides, on all fours, then threw itself into the air, leaping towards the trailing human. The man whirled around, raised his shield, and braced himself for the impact. The gorillalike beast smashed a huge forearm into the shield with such force that the sturdy warrior buckled, falling to the ground under the strength of the blow. But his companion hadn't abandoned him. A gleaming sword flashed through the air, taking the brute's arm off at the elbow, then flashed again, cutting deeply through the beast's neck. The simian creature tried to lash out with its remaining arm, the mindless fury and focus of undeath driving it on, but the man sheltering under the shield sprang back up, slamming his shield into the beast and sending it tumbling back down the grassy hillside.

Other undead were on them now. The two humans, understanding they could flee no further, grimly turned to face their pursuers. It was unlikely they would survive, but you don't become a Knight of Shayne if you’re the type of man that lies down and dies quietly. Side-by-side, the two men set themselves, ready to fight to the end.

I faced a dilemma, in that moment. These two men looked capable and determined, but they stood no chance against Rictus and his undead beastmen. But they would likely keep the enemy occupied long enough for Aeric and me to flee on our horse. Honestly, it was probably our duty to run. We had to warn command at Fort Montoya that the pass had fallen. That was far more important than the lives of two knights. If command didn't reinforce the pass in time, The Betrayer's forces would sweep down into the vale and slaughter hundreds, maybe thousands. Alerting the fort had to be our first priority.

Right . . . That's what I would tell myself as I tried to fall asleep at night, racked by guilt for being a coward. In that moment, Janey's face flashed into my mind. My beautiful wife. What would she say if she knew I had left two of my countrymen to die?

I knew exactly what she would say. I knew just how her pert little nose would crinkle up as she said it, too. She wouldn't yell, or scream. She wouldn't try to reason with me. She would shake her head, once, then ask me if I felt good about my decision. That's all she would do. She always knew how to see right to the heart of a matter.

“Curse the moon,” I swore. I wouldn't feel good about abandoning these men. That's what it came down too, despite the very, very bad odds. “That woman is going to get me killed,” I muttered. Then I raised the carbine, steadied the barrel on the log in front of me, and announced to the terrifying creatures below that I was present, and that they should probably come and kill me.

Both knights were fighting for their lives. A stout beastman with tusks and claws was slashing wildly at the shorter man. If not for the gleaming plate mail and shield, that knight would have been shredded. But as it was, the valiant fellow was standing his ground, warding the boarlike beast off with his shield as he fenced with another creature carrying a spear. The knight was incredibly skilled, holding his own against two foes at the same time.

The other knight, a head taller than his companion and wearing a sky-blue cape that marked him a Royal Guardsmen, wasn't faring much better. He was fending off a pair of beastmen himself, but a third, pantherlike creature was slinking off to the side, scrambling higher up the hill to come in behind the guardsmen.

The carbine bucked, and the air rang out with my shot. None of the combatants had been expecting the jolting retort of the gun, and the two men visibly flinched at the loud noise that echoed repeatedly off the narrow walls of the valley. But the pantherlike beastman did more than flinch. The bullet fired from my carbine caught the creature in the side, tore through both lungs, and sent the beast toppling down the hill.

The big Royal Guardsmen used the distraction to his advantage, knocking aside the club of one of his attackers. Then he lashed out with his gleaming sword, skewering the rat-faced beast in front of him right through the chest.

The shorter knight wasn't faring so well, however. The boarlike beast managed to get a hand under the knight's shield and grabbed his boot, yanking the unfortunate fellow right off his feet. He landed hard on his back, stunned for the briefest of seconds by the fall. With my second carbine already at hand, I sighted in on the boar man's tusked face. The piglike beast jumped, landing on top of the knight, then reared back with one claw-tipped hand to slice at the man’s face. I focused in on one of the monster’s beady, undead eyes, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet punched through the thick skull of the creature, killing it instantly. The beast collapsed heavily atop the fallen man, its full weight settling on his chest. The knight seemed to be in quite the unfortunate position, trapped as he was, but the spear-wielding beastman was too eager, and lunged for the kill. The knight shifted slightly, interposing the dead body atop him in between himself and the spear, trapping the weapon as it skewered the dead boar man. The knight lashed out with his brilliant sword, cutting the legs out from under his attacker, then used the brief reprieve to roll the dead creature off his body and spring back to his feet.

I dropped the spent carbine, reaching for my third rifle. Aeric snatched it up and began reloading. “We're fighting instead of running, then?” he asked, beginning to reload with practiced motion.

I glanced at the young man, knowing the brave lad would follow my lead instead of running, even if it would likely get us both killed. I didn’t know what I could possibly say that would prove worthy of that kind of trust. So I didn't even try.

“One of those knights down there owes me money.”

He snorted a laugh as I returned my attention to the fight.

The tall Royal Guardsman had fought the club-wielding beastman to a standstill, but the second, slower group of undead had arrived, swinging the odds back into the favor of the undead. Now each of the knights was outnumbered almost four to one. The situation was dire.

The shorter of the knights finished off the beast that had fallen to the ground, but several undead moved to surround him. A burly goat-faced beast with an axe charged forward, swinging wildly. The short knight skillfully parried the blow with his shield, then managed a slash in reply, slicing his foe across the chest. But the monster ignored the grievous wound and attacked again.

Engaged as he was with the goat beast, the knight was hard-pressed to turn and face a thin, catlike female coming at him from his right. She clutched wicked daggers in either hand. I didn't know if those knives were sturdy enough to pierce the knight's tough plate armor; it wouldn't do to find out the hard way. Sighting in on the feline creature, and leading her ever-so-slightly to compensate for her lateral movement, I pulled the trigger.

In the split second before I fired, the knight whirled on her, throwing his shield up to slam her away. “Curse the moon!” I swore. The bullet hurtled towards the undead woman, but was intercepted by the knight's shield, and the loud report of the bullet ricocheting off the thick metal made me cringe. The thump of the ricochet bouncing off his shield startled the knight, as did the bright sparks that suddenly leapt from the metal near his face. The moment's distraction caused him to falter, and the goat-faced beast slammed that heavy axe into his side, blasting the knight off his feet. His magnificent breastplate saved him, but it must have been a terribly painful blow. The stout knight was smart enough to keep moving, so he let the momentum of the fall carry him down the hill as he rolled a couple of times. He came back to his feet, sword now clutched in two hands, his shield lost in the fall.

Cursing violently, I dropped the carbine and reached for one of Aeric's loaded rifles, hoping I hadn't just doomed the knight with that errant shot.

When I turned back to the battle, I noted the large guardsman was down, lying on his back, swinging his sword frantically as the encroaching group of undead drew closer, mobbing the fallen man. His brilliant armor deflected most of the damage, but I knew some of the blows got through. He kept fighting, desperately trying to keep them at bay.

Another goatlike beastman grabbed the knight's shield, attempting to pry it out of his grasp. The creature's head imploded as my next shot caught it squarely in the ear. The prone knight tried to roll to the side, to create space to rise back to his feet, but he was still surrounded by three undead foes. A brute with a spear lunged, catching him in the back. That breastplate saved him from instant death, but the powerful blow cracked his armor, and the tip of the spear pierced the brave man's flesh. He screamed in agony, but never stopped fighting. He desperately struggled to pull free of the spear in his back. The pain must have been terrible, but he spun away, breaking the haft of the spear, then rose to one knee and struck out with his sword, felling a foe with a powerful blow that nearly split the creature in half.

Again I fired, this time taking the undead monster holding half of a broken spear in the chest. The brute grunted in surprise, toppling off his feet and tumbling down the hill. I had one more carbine at hand. Aeric was busily reloading, but it would be at least twenty seconds before the rifle he was working on was ready to fire. The shorter knight farther down the hill still faced three foes. He was giving ground to keep from being surrounded. The larger knight, wounded and bleeding, was facing two opponents. He still had his sword and shield, and was back on his feet, but was moving slowly now.

Deciding the knight trying to dodge three opponents was in graver peril, I sighted in on the large axe-wielding goatman and fired. Hitting a moving opponent in the midst of a melee, while being careful not to accidentally hit allies, is much easier said than done. The bullet whistled towards the brute, but only caught him a grazing blow to the back of one meaty thigh. The undead beast faltered a step, but didn't so much as glance down at the wound. The creature's attention was unerringly fixed on the knight.

“Not good,” I muttered, angry at myself “Aeric . . . ?” I implored, willing him to load faster.

Aeric grunted something in reply that didn't warrant repeating as he finished loading the carbine, then veritably threw the rifle at me as he began loading the next one.

In the brief moment I had taken my eyes off the battle, the shorter of the two knights had managed to fell another beastman, chopping it down with brutal efficiency, but the axe-wielding brute made him pay for it, hitting him yet again. The knight was expecting the blow, and managed to roll with it. He fell even farther down the hill, but didn't suffer serious damage. His partner wasn't so lucky. The guardsman batted one of the undead monsters aside with his shield, and lunged at the other, skewering an antlered beastman through the stomach with his razor-sharp blade. But his attack was too low. His strike certainly hurt the creature, but he hadn't hit anything vital. The beastman screamed in defiance, then lashed out with a large, furry fist, punching the knight in the face. His helmet served to protect him from some of the blow, but the beast followed the punch with another, then another. By the time the fourth blow fell, the knight's gleaming, dented helmet flew from his head, and he was falling again. The valiant man yanked the beastman with him, sending the wounded creature tumbling down the hill, but he had no defense against his last attacker. A rat-faced female with a sickle loomed over him, weapon raised for a killing blow.

My bullet took her in the shoulder, shattering bones as it tore through the upper part of her body. The un-thinking beastwoman tried to use her weapon anyway, but there wasn't enough left of her shoulder to hold the sickle. She tried to swing, but ended up sort of just twirling down to the ground, off balance and sorely damaged.

Turning my attention back to the other knight, I let out a breath of relief. He was holding his own against two foes. And the injured man was out of harm's way, at least for a moment. The longer the two valiant knights could drag this out, the better. It gave us more time to reload.

I began turning towards Aeric, ready to tell him we had turned the tide of the battle, and that we might just survive this. But that's when I spotted the forgotten Dread Knight, sitting atop his fell steed. He had finally decided to join the battle. Spurring his undead mount to a full gallop, he charged, iron-shod hooves tearing at the grass as the great beast hurtled towards the shorter knight.

Rictus had angled his charge to come in right behind the knight. He had cleverly waited until the desperate man was looking in the wrong direction, his full attention on the two foes in front of him. The knight had no idea that death was fast approaching from behind.

The full weight of futility fell on me as I dropped the empty carbine in my hands. I screamed, hoping to draw the knight's attention to the horrific being charging from behind, but he was at least seventy yards away now, and fighting for his life. Aeric was just picking up the rod to charge the carbine in his hands. Seven seconds, at least. Far too long to take a shot to save the knight. I could only watch in horror as the fell-steed ate up the ground with terrible speed. The Dread Knight lowered his lance, sighting in on the back of the embattled knight.

From seemingly out of nowhere, the other knight, the one that had been so grievously wounded, shot down the hill like a madman, letting gravity do most of the work as he miraculously kept his feet. His brilliant blue cape fluttered behind him as he picked up speed. The guardsman threw himself at the other knight, knocking the smaller man clean off his feet, sending him bouncing painfully down the hill. Saving him from certain death.

And taking his companion's place at the tip of the lance.

Rictus spitted the valiant man with the lance. The guardsman's limp body tumbled lifeless to the ground.

Anger and revulsion welled up inside of me. That brave knight had just given his life to save a brother-in-arms. Aeric handed me a primed and ready rifle, and instinctively I aimed at the Dread Knight. But out of the corner of my eye I noticed the axe-toting beastman, now charging down the hill to where the other knight had finally stopped rolling. That knight, though disoriented and bruised, was struggling back to his feet. He was still alive, but wouldn't be for long. Switching my aim to the beastman, I fired.

The bullet smashed through the brute's spine, dropping it instantly, right at the feet of the remaining knight. He must have still been a bit addled from the fall. He seemed to notice the creature for the first time as it came to a stop at his feet, then he looked back up the hill in my direction.

“Don't look at me, idiot,” I muttered, though I knew he couldn't hear me. The man was nearly one hundred yards away at this point, having tumbled all the way down to the base of the hill. “You're not out of the woods yet.”

In a seeming stroke of luck, I realized Rictus had carelessly trampled the knife-wielding beastwoman with his horse. Both her legs appeared to be broken. She wasn't completely dead, but she was no longer an immediate threat. That just left Rictus to deal with. The Dread Knight had wheeled his horse around, drawn the massive longsword from his back, and was bearing down on the remaining knight, who had lost his sword in the fall. The man was completely unarmed.

Aeric handed me a carbine. I would have one shot at this. If I missed, the knight was a dead man.

Leading the charging steed, I compensated for the speed of the horse, then took into account the distance. I said a silent prayer that my aim would be true.

Then I fired.

* * *

It is said that The Eleven are very hard to kill. There were different theories about how one might dispatch one of the Dread Knights. Some said you had to take the head off. Others said fire was the only way to do the deed. Over the past year, since this war with Tetrax the Betrayer had started, I had heard a dozen theories and rumors about how one might kill one of the Eleven. I had no idea which, if any, of the theories was true. But I had a very real concern that shooting one, at a hundred yards, might not do the trick.

So, I shot the bastard's horse instead.

The bullet shattered the hip joint of the rear leg. Mid-stride, the beast's leg buckled, and it toppled heavily to the ground, sending the Dread Knight tumbling violently through the grass. Such a fall would have taken most any man out of the fight, but Rictus smoothly rose back to his feet. He glanced first at the thrashing, undead horse, then at the sword in his hands. The fall had broken the weapon near the hilt. He was left holding nothing more than a handle and a few inches of blade. Furious, he looked up the hill, directly at me. Despite the distance of some ninety yards, I could feel the hate of that baleful glare all the way from there. But the Dread Knight had prey closer at hand, and it turned to look for the knight. To his credit, the man hadn't been idle while I shot the horse out from under Rictus. He knew the reputation of the creature hunting him, and he wasn't going to hang around waiting for me to kill it. Instead, he was hustling back up the hill, searching frantically for his fallen sword. He found the blade in nearly the same moment that the Rictus rounded on him. Not more than a breath later, Aeric handed me a fresh rifle. The stalwart young man was still loading carbines with quick, smooth precision.

Rictus regarded the short, powerfully built knight. Then the creature turned its terrible eyes towards me once again. Just as before, the gaze of the powerful creature was a palpable thing. I could feel the monster appraising me, hating me. I could sense its desire to tear the life from my body. Despite myself, I let out an involuntary shudder. The wrongness of this creature tore at my sensibilities. But I didn't turn away. I didn't run and hide in terror. Steeling my resolve, I turned my focus to the front site of the rifle, and hoped a bullet would hurt this creature.

But I didn't get to find out. Rictus tossed the handle of his broken sword to the ground in disgust. Then he spoke. His sibilant, raspy voice carried all the way up the hill to me, despite the fact that the Dread Knight used nothing more than a whisper.

“Well fought,” the creature hissed, his eerie voice seeming to carry like the wind itself. “You prove to be worthy foes. I am most pleased. I will return with a new hunting party. Then I shall drink your blood.”

With that, the undead knight whirled away and fled back the way he had come, seeming to float over the grass as he moved. Within moments, he was gone, fading into the trees.

“What . . .” Aeric asked, breathing heavily, “. . . was that?” The young man, stalwart as he was, had clearly been unnerved by the voice of the undead knight.

I turned to him, a smile on my face as relief washed over me. “That, my young friend, was one of The Eleven.” Aeric paled noticeably, but I continued speaking before he could panic. “When it found out Aeric of the Royal Fusiliers was up on this hill, it fled in terror.”

The young man grunted, but he seemed to be at a loss for words. “Aeric, load the rest of these rifles, and keep your eyes peeled for trouble. Er . . . your eye, at least. And make sure the horse doesn’t bolt. It's still our ticket out of here. I'm going to go check on the knight.”

Rifle at the ready, I moved out from behind the log we had been using for cover and made my way down the steep slope. The knight finished off the few undead that were still twitching on the ground, then walked over to the fallen body of his companion. I reached him about that same time. The young knight was visibly shaken.

“I'm sorry about your friend,” I offered weakly.

The knight shook his head sadly as he gazed down at the guardsman. “I've known this man since I was a boy. He saved my skin more than once. I always knew he might die protecting me. But I never really believed it would come to that.”

“He died a hero's death,” I observed. “That was quite a selfless thing he did. I'm sorry we couldn't save him. I missed too many shots.” It was my turn to shake my head. I hadn't known the dead man, but the sting of his death hit me, too. If my shooting had been more precise, if I had prioritized targets better, maybe he wouldn't be dead now.

The knight stood up, then clapped a heavy, mailed hand to my shoulder. “I'm sure you did all you could, soldier. We're at war. Part of surviving war means learning to live with what you have lost.”

I gave the man a nod, and together we trudged up the grassy slope. The knight spoke as we reached the top. “It was a good thing your company still held this hill. I was afraid the entire battalion had been wiped out. Tell me, how many men do you have left in your command?”

We crested the hill in that moment, and the knight seemed stunned when he didn't see a company of fusiliers waiting for us. “Behold, my command,” I said, pointing to the bloodied young man sitting on the log. “A one-eyed boy, and a scared horse. In all honesty, it isn't my command. The boy and I both hold the rank of private third class, which is the lowest rank in the army. The horse probably outranks both of us, by seniority. Technically, this is probably her command.”

I looked to the knight, to see if he appreciated the absurdity of this situation as much as I did, when I noticed Aeric jump off the log and throw himself down on one knee. “My lord,” the young man hastily blurted out, his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him.

It took me several seconds to figure out what Aeric was doing. I looked at the young man, then at the knight, then back at the young man. I finally noticed the royal crest on the knight's breastplate. A lightning bolt clutched in the mouth of a warhound. The emblem of House Shayne.

“Oh,” I finally muttered, realization dawning on me like a wagon full of rocks. “You’re Prince Gegard.” It was half a statement, half a question. I had just been having a casual conversation with the Crown Prince of Shayne, heir to the throne. Stating I felt like an idiot doesn't do the sentiment justice. Immediately, I moved to kneel in front of the prince, but halfway down I thought better of it. I was in uniform, so I rose and began to salute, slapping my right hand over my breast. But then I thought better of that, too. I had no idea what decorum dictated I do for the crown prince. I froze, panic setting in, though that was hardly a first for today. I was getting used to the sensation. “I'm sorry, sir. Do I salute you, or kneel? Or maybe both?”

Prince Gegard grunted in amusement. “Relax, soldier. You two just saved my life. I should be saluting you.” He turned to Aeric. “On your feet, lad. The two of you just did the kingdom a great service. You just saved the crown prince. I’m certain you don't get to say that every day.” Gegard took a moment to look around, as if to assure himself that it was, in fact, just the three of us up here. “And, might I add, that was some damned fine shooting. I figured at least half-a-dozen fusiliers were up here firing away. You two should be proud of yourselves.”

“Just doing our job, sir,” I mumbled, giving the prince a nod.

Aeric seemed just as uncomfortable with the praise as I did. He mumbled something incoherent about getting the horse and walked away.

The prince turned towards me. “You two are really all that are left of the battalion?”

“Afraid so, sir. I figure we're done here. Two men with rifles aren't going to hold this valley. We were making for the pass, heading towards Fort Montoya to warn command that the battalion has been wiped out.”

Prince Gegard nodded his helmed head. “I concur. We three can't hold this position. We need to warn command immediately.”

Aeric returned with the horse. The expression on his young face was grave. Once again, he had been thinking ahead, and had figured out something that was just now occurring to me. He walked right up to the prince and held out the horse's lead, offering it to Gegard. “Lucky we found this horse, sir,” Aeric said, fighting to keep his face steady. Only then did the obvious dawn on me. This horse couldn't hold three men. By saving the prince, we had just doomed ourselves. We couldn't very well ride off on the charger and leave the crown prince and heir to the kingdom to die.

“Curse the moon,” I swore under my breath. Saving the prince had probably just cost both of us our lives.

Prince Gegard accepted the lead automatically, then paused as he too did the math. He realized what it meant that Aeric was offering him our horse. Despite the gravity of the situation, Aeric's next words did me proud. He didn't even hesitate. “Best be on your way, my lord. We have no way of knowing how soon the enemy will return. They could be back any moment. You should get yourself to safety, sir. And warn command that the pass has fallen.”

Prince Gegard nodded his head solemnly as the young man spoke. Then he let out a short, sardonic laugh. He paused, then laughed again, this time a little more emphatically. Then he turned back to Aeric. “You're not wrong, Private. We need to warn command. But do you know what will happen if I ride out of this valley, all alone. The lone survivor of an entire battalion of men? Do you understand what would happen if the prince was the only man to leave this valley alive?”

That caught both of us off guard. Aeric shook his head in confusion. The prince laughed yet again, shaking his head slowly. “If I ride out of here alone, we lose the war. End of story.” He paused, letting his words sink in.

“I would think, sir, that everyone would be relieved you survived,” I interjected.

Gegard shook his head in disagreement. “My mother would be relieved. My father, and indeed, every other man, woman, and child of Shayne would think me a coward. To have been the sole survivor of this battle, they would all assume I had fled, leaving my men to be butchered.”

“But that's not the case,” I protested. “I saw you fighting down there. You slew half-a-dozen of those creatures with your own sword.”

“And at least a dozen more before that,” the prince affirmed. “But the truth wouldn't matter. There would be no way to corroborate that story. There would be no evidence other than my own testimony of how heroically I fought as the men all around me died. No one would believe the tale. They would think I had run at the first sign of battle, leaving the battalion to be butchered to cover my retreat. No man would ever willingly follow me into battle again. The morale of the nation would be shattered. The Kingdom of Shayne would never recover.”

He looked at both of us in turn. “I admit, it is a tempting offer. But if I ride out of here on that horse, the war is lost.” Then he smiled sadly as he continued. “You two climb up there and ride for the fort. I'll make my way on foot. If you're quick, maybe the reinforcements from the fort will find me before that Dread Knight does.”

Aeric and I exchanged bewildered looks. This day had taken one-too many strange turns. Neither of us knew what to make of this development. But the prince wasn't going to let us worry over it. “I know what both of you are thinking, so let me make this easy for you. Both of you get up on that horse and get moving. Now. That's an order!”

Aeric seemed to be in shock. He tore his gaze from the prince, looking to me for guidance. I shrugged. “The crown prince gave you an order, Private. Mount up.” Still seemingly in shock, the young man clambered up into the saddle.

“Your turn,” the prince said to me, pointing at the horse. “Ride hard for the fort. I don't relish the jog ahead of me. This armor looks pretty, but after a few leagues it's like walking around with an anvil on my shoulders.”

I walked over to the horse. Was I really about to abandon the prince here, with a horde of enemies on the way?

Janey's beautiful face appeared in my mind's eye again. Her nose was crinkled as I imagined her looking at me. Do you feel good about that decision, she seemed to say to me again. She was always asking me that, even when she was leagues away. She really was something, my Janey.

“Curse the moon,” I swore out loud. “You're going to get me killed, woman.” Both of my companions were looking at me oddly. I didn't care. It was my turn to chuckle. I reached up and grabbed Aeric by the arm. “You did good today, Aeric. I'll fight by your side anytime. Now ride hard for the fort. Command needs to know what happened here.”

Aeric peered down at me with his good eye, the intelligent young man fully realizing what I meant to do. “You can count on it.”

The prince interrupted us, stepping forward as he realized something was amiss. “What are you doing, Private? I gave you an order. Get on that horse and get out of here.”

I rounded on the prince, putting one hand to my ear as I spoke. “I'm sorry sir, but I've done an awful lot of shooting today. Riflemen are often hard of hearing. Firearms are uncommonly noisy.”

Before the prince could react, I turned back to injured young man on the horse. “Ride hard, ride fast, and get yourself safe, Aeric.” Then I slapped the horse hard on the flank, sending the charger off at a gallop.

The two of us watched the young man ride away for a moment before the prince spoke. “Private, you just disobeyed a direct order from the Crown Prince of Shayne, in a time of war. You've just committed high treason, soldier.”

“What's the punishment for something like that?”

“Hanging, as I understand it,” he said, with mock gravity in his voice.

“Do you have a length of rope, my lord?” The prince shook his head. “Then you'll just have to hang me after we get your royal ass off this mountain.”

The prince stared at me in shock for a brief moment before a wry smile crept onto his face. Then he began laughing as the two of us started walking. “It's a long road back to Fort Montoya. Are you going to be flippant with me the entire journey?”

“I'm afraid so, sir. If I'm to hang for treason, I feel I should make the most of it. General flippancy, disobeying orders, and insulting your royal person are all well within the realm of possibility. I figure on committing this treason properly.”

The two of us were smiling as we entered the pass, enjoying the moment of levity. We both knew it wouldn't last.

* * *

J.J. Cragun is the grand prize winner of the sixth annual Baen Fantasy Adventure Award. The award recognizes the best original adventure fantasy short story in the style of fantasy greats like Larry Correia, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, Andre Norton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and David Weber. For more information on the BFAA, including formation on past winners, and now to enter, click here.

Talk Girl

Wil McCarthy

My machine was different than Harv Leonel's. Extracting the quantum memories that cling to highly conserved biological structures . . . well, it's a dicey business under the best of circumstances, and Leonel was plucking the very lowest-hanging fruit from that tree. For the rest of us, he left either scraps beneath the table or luscious morsels far out of reach. Not that his journey was an easy one, or free of costs. Certainly not. And yet, in being first he was, in many ways, the mnemochronnaut with the least to prove. Which is a funny thing, if you think about what happened afterward.

The Ice Age he claims to have traveled back to is corroborated here and there by archeological or linguistic or genetic evidence, and our very cultural notions of those time periods are increasingly shaped by his experience. Who hasn't seen the CGI landscape reconstructions from National Geographic? Heard the lilt and jabber of the ancient languages he claims to have spoken? Who hasn't watched the movie, with Sidney Smith playing all five title roles?

And yet, nearly half of Real Scientists consider Leonel a crank, and his staff a team of either world-class chumps or third-rate charlatans.

"Are you ready, Beth?" Shirley asked me as I leaned back in the seizure chair. We were in my garage, heaped high with second-hand and scratch-built equipment. Was I ready?

What a question.

Like the Y-chromosome, mitochondrial DNA is handed down intact from one generation to the next, and so on, and so on, except that instead of following the male lineage, it's handed down from mother to daughter. My time machine was different from Leonel's because I was tracing back the past's other half. Its female half.

Are you ready?

Ready for what? For brain-damaging seizures, as the machine stuffs whole filing cabinets of ancient information through the narrow channel of my hippocampus? Ready for the incredulity of colleagues, and for a burden of proof that can never be fully and properly met? Regression science was a dicey business at the best of times, yes. With its track record of results that managed to be both unfalsifiable and trivial, and also yes a record of fraud and abuse and charlatanism, with a lunatic fringe trailing off into crystal-hugging nonsense, it was a field that could kill careers by mere association. It had arguably killed mine already; as I edged away from the pure study of mitochondrial genetic inheritance—as I began to wonder what quantum information might be clinging to that DNA, also handed down intact from one generation to the next—I found my funding sources drying up, job offers drying up, refereed journals increasingly refusing to publish my papers, even when they did stick to pure genetics.

All it took was a sentence here and there, in the closing remarks of otherwise sober scholarly articles: "Whether Harv Leonel’s findings can be generalized to other structures within the human genome is an open question, and merits further study." Just that! Science can be a jealous business, with far too many would-be practitioners and not nearly enough jobs in which to practice. A Ph.D. is a costly degree—seven years in my case, and some said I got off easy—and what it buys you are shitty postdoc assignments that lead, if you’re lucky, to shitty adjunct faculty positions. It doesn’t take much to push you to the fringes of the battle, put you out of the running for anything serious, or in some cases anything at all. Oh, that Beth Remert! Not very rigorous, that one.

And so I began to think, I might as well have the benefit of actually pressing the trigger switch on a time machine and finding out the truth for myself.

For myself. Funded mostly by myself, with just a pittance from the Mnemochronnautics Society, in exchange for the most detailed (and dare I say brilliant) proposal I’d ever penned.

Are you ready? She should be asking herself that question. I thought: Why are you here, Shirley Doaks? The pay is shit, and the benefits could be career suicide.

And yet, damn it, my machine was harder to build than Harv Leonel's. The Y-chromosome's three arms are close enough together to maintain near-field effects from tip to tip, and without a fourth arm to permit stable resonances that destroy the delicately entangled states of the human quantome. Mitochondrial DNA? Not so much. It forms a tiny ring through which vibrations can echo round and round, with no ends to stop at and no floppy joints to damp them. To stave off decoherence I needed to pull the information off ten times faster than Leonel had. Ten times. Think about that, yes: everything in science is harder for women. Thanks, nature.

My machine was more difficult, and yet in its own way a lot more elegant. I had the shoulders of giants to stand on, plus the benefit of ten years’ progress in quantum computing technology. And the benefit of Shirley, without whom I certainly could not have built even half of this equipment. Perhaps that's why she took the job—a challenging assignment in all respects. Fail big or win small; perfect for a black-lipstick-wearing contrarian.

"I'm ready," I told her. I meant something more complicated than that—something almost wordless—about fear of failure and fear of never trying anything at all, or never anything important or risky. Or of having taken the risk without ever really meaning to, and never even making the steep cost of it worthwhile. I wanted to tell her something about truth, and the yearning for truth that seduces so many of us into lives of humdrum, workaday science and then abandons us, with no money and no real accomplishments to show. No, that fate was not for me. Not this girl.

I wanted the Ice Age—I wanted the truth about it—and I wished I could communicate all of that in those two little words. I’m ready. Why does language fail us at the moments we need it most?

Whatever. At a loss for anything more meaningful to say, I pressed the trigger.

#

Harv Leonel described sensations of movement, of translocation, of plurality in space and time. I didn't feel any of that. One moment I was myself, in the seizure chair of a home-built time machine, and the next I was . . .

A little girl holding a piece of fruit, still chewing on the bite I'd taken out of it. My mother standing next to me.

"This girl likes this taste of this fruit," I said to her, and she gasped, and then laughed.

"Like?" she asked. "Like fruit?"

"This girl likes this taste of this fruit," I said again, then added, "This fruit tastes sweet!"

My mother's laugh was fearful, as if I'd said something disconcerting, perhaps even a little bit obscene.

"Baby . . . speaks," said Mother.

"This girl speaks," I agreed, wondering why she found it strange. I had spoken before. I'd made the noises that correlated to things and actions in the world. Never perhaps so many at once, but the words fit together. They said something.

"Girl speaks?" Mother asked, looking as if she’d swallowed a spider.

"Yes," I told her. "This girl is not baby." The word "baby" did not apply to girls who could speak.

Mother didn't like that. She snatched the fruit from my hand, staring at it suspiciously. She sniffed it, then cast it aside into the bushes.

"Bad," she said, emphasizing the word with a gesture of negation. She pointed to the tree from which the fruit had come. "No."

"Why?" I asked her. She'd plucked the fruit herself, eaten one and then, satisfied, handed another to me. I'd broken no rule, disobeyed no command.

"No!" she said, more forcefully. I’d never seen her like this before: distressed and vaguely fearful, but also confused.

"Why?"

"Baby, no. Fruit bad."

"Not baby," I corrected. Then I asked her, "What is this girl's name?"

Again, she gasped. I understood in that moment that I didn't have a name. Babies didn't have names; only girls and boys and men and women had names. This made me angry.

"This girl is not baby!" I screeched at her.

"No!" she said again. And slapped me across the face.

I shrieked at that, turning and running away into the bushes. She followed, scooping me up, and said, "No run! Danger! Home now."

I howled, struggling against her grasp, but she was strong—much stronger than I was. I could not get away from her. She had slapped me and grabbed me and taken my fruit, and I could not get away. I began to cry.

"Hush," she said angrily. Then, more kindly, "Hush, baby. Home now."

I remained silent after that, unsure how or why my words had upset her.

#

I didn't speak again for several days, and when I did, it was among fellow young children. Two boys and I were throwing pebbles at a beetle, and I said to them, "This girl likes throwing pebbles."

The boys stopped what they were doing, gawked at me, and then laughed. Not cruelly or nervously, but simply as though I'd said something amusing.

"Throw!" one of them said.

"Like pebbles," said the other.

I didn't know what to make of this. Did they not also like throwing pebbles? They certainly seemed to. Why would it be strange to say so?

"Do these boys like to throw pebbles?" I asked them, for they had no names that I'd ever heard.

Again, they laughed.

"Throw pebbles!" one of the them said.

I stopped talking then, unsure what to make of any of this.

#

The next time I spoke, I sang. It was a few nights later, around the communal fire near the center of the village, and one of the men—not my father—sang a song that went, "Love, love, love. Love love love. Love love love. Love, love, LOVE!"

I liked the song, so without really thinking about it I added a verse of my own: "Love is in this girl's tummy. Love is in this girl's TUMMY!"

The tummy, it seemed to me, was where love and other emotions were felt.

The campfire chatter of the village fell silent. All eyes were on me. I shrank.

Then someone laughed, and someone joined her, and in another moment, everyone was happy. Was that me? Had I had made everyone happy? How? Why? It didn’t make sense to me.

"Talk girl," someone said, and everyone laughed at that, too. They pointed to me and said it again. Talk girl, talk girl. Not a taunt, but a name. They were naming me. But what a strange name! I knew my mother’s name was Nik-Nik, and my father was Brog. These were not words, they were names. Could a name be made of words? I shook with strange emotions, saying nothing, but taking in the sensation of the people’s joy, which I had somehow brought about.

#

It was several more days before I spoke again, and several weeks before I sang. And yet, it became increasingly normal for me to do both things—sometimes in the same breath. Over a period of many days the people of my village came not only to accept this about me, but to celebrate it. I was Talk Girl—of course I should talk!

But.

Even at such a young age (I must have been about three years old, certainly no older than just-barely four), I soon became aware, and then frustrated, that no one else in the village ever seemed to talk or sing back to me. Not really. They knew all the same words I did, and indeed for a time, many of the adults knew more words than I did. But they seemed unable to string them together except by twos and, rarely, threes.

And here it occurred to me, as Beth Remert, the neurogeneticist and mnemochronnaut, that these people seemed to think in nouns and verbs and (more rarely) adjectives, rather than in thoughts per se. I, alone, could give voice to all the nuanced relationships between the objects and actions of the world, which seemed so evident to me. All the things worth talking and singing about! The people around me seemed to understand speech, to nod appreciatively when my words correctly described what they wanted or hoped, or when I helped them tell a story about what had happened to them that day.

"You walked to the river and caught some frogs? Yes? Did you cook them? Were they delicious?"

Even if they couldn’t tell their own stories, they could, with scattered words and gestures, supply me with enough information to tell it all for them, and this seemed to please everyone—even Mother.

It occurred to me (or rather, to Beth Remert) that I would grow up to be Talking Woman, Harv Leonel's mythical first human. Or rather, the first neurologically modern human. This thought amazed me, but fleetingly, for a fraction of a moment, and then Beth Remert was gone, and only Talk Girl remained.

And as Talk Girl, I found myself growing increasingly bored. I spoke to everyone—my parents, my cousins, my neighbors—trying to draw more words from them. I might ask, "Why is today hot, Father?" or "When will Mother return from gathering?" and I would get back answers like "Hot sun" or "Afternoon," and that would be that. The only real answers were the ones I said for them. The only stories were the ones I told myself.

I became frustrated, and then lonely, and then I began—by inches and stages—to fall into a kind of toddlerish depression. "What is, is," I would tell people, when they tried to speak their stories through me. What good was speaking, anyway?

Until one day, a new thought occurred to me. The day I had first spoken complete thoughts, mother had given me a piece of fruit and then angrily taken it away. Had the fruit been responsible? I knew that some foods could make you full, some could make you thirsty, and rather a lot of them could make you sick, because they weren't really foods at all. The world was full of berries and toads and bugs that would make you vomit. Could there also be fruits that would make you talk? My mother had also eaten the fruit, and she had not learned to speak, but perhaps she was too old? Some things, like milk and mush, were only for children. Could there be fruits that would make only children talk?

This seemed plausible enough to me, given the large number of obvious differences between adults and children, and so I began to formulate a plan around it.

"We should eat fruit," I would say to the older children I encountered around the village. Not children my own age, who were not allowed to wander, but boys old enough to carry a spear, and girls old enough to carry a knife and digging stick. Boys and Girls who could take me where I wanted to go.

If they said anything at all, I would grasp their hand and close it into a fist. "Fruit is this big. Fruit is red and yellow and purple. Where is this fruit?"

To this they would sometimes laugh, and sometimes shrug, and sometimes snatch their hands away and scold. But on my third day of trying, I found a boy who nodded and said, "Yes. Fruit. There."

He waved in a general direction.

"We go there?" I asked him excitedly. "We eat fruit? Fruit is good. Mmm!"

The boy, whose name was Dak-Dak, looked suspicious at this.

"Why?"

"Talk Girl knows this fruit. This fruit is good. Talk girl wants to share this fruit."

That seemed just barely good enough to assuage his suspicion, so he nodded, and asked permission from one of the village elders to take me for a walk. Permission was granted, and off we went.

Bugs and frogs and birds sang in the trees, as if wishing me good fortune. The walk was long, and so I composed a song of my own: "Talk Girl shares fruit. Talk girl shares fruit with Dak-Dak. Talk girl shares FRUIT!" I sang it over and over, until Dak-Dak told me to stop, at which point I simply hummed it, unable to contain my excitement.

Finally, we arrived at a tree bearing the fruit. Not the same one my mother had plucked from, but similar enough.

I tried to pick a fruit for myself, they were too high for me to reach.

"Help me," I said to Dak-Dak.

Obligingly, if somewhat annoyedly, he picked two fruits, handing one to me and taking the other for himself.

I bit into mine. "Mmm! Fruit is good! Dak-Dak should eat this fruit!"

As myself, Beth Remert, I thought, it's not an apple. In the legends related by Harv Leonel, he had used the word "apple", but he hadn’t seen it for himself. He’d landed several generations too late for that, and then several thousand generations too early. This fruit was something more like a pear, but fatty, too, like an olive or a coconut. I knew I had to remember this! Perhaps something resembling this still existed in the world, as corroborating evidence! It was only the increasing body of corroborating evidence that saved Leonel from 100% crank status, and I would need something. But again, this thought was fleeting.

Dak-Dak eyed both me and the fruit, now skeptical again. Here was a strange thing; sometimes my words could convince people to do things, or accept things. Other times, they seemed to have the opposite effect. Had I said something wrong, or in the wrong way? I had no elders to teach me this, and it sorely confused me.

"It’s good," I said, more quietly, then ate the rest of mine.

Frowning, Dak-Dak sniffed the fruit before taking a small bite. Then, finding that acceptable, he took a larger bite.

"Mmm?" I asked him.

"Mmm," he answered. Yes, the fruit is good.

"Can Dak-Dak talk now?" I asked him. Because for me it had happened that fast.

"Mmm? Talk?"

"Talk, Dak-Dak."

"Talk," he said vaguely.

For me, the fruit had worked immediately, which meant that it wasn't working for Dak-Dak. Was he too old? Was the whole idea simply wrong? Frustrated, I closed my eyes and began to cry. Never had I felt so alone.

And then I did feel a sense of dislocation, and movement, and then a dizzying rush of acceleration. What was happening?

I opened my eyes again, and then, in a sudden, fluttering moment I was Beth Remert, neurogeneticist, lying back in the seizure regression chair in my garage. Blinking against the tears that were still leaking from my eyes. Somehow feeling both lost and found, at home in my own body and yet also a stranger.

"Oh my God!" I said to Shirley Doaks. "Send me back! Send me back!"

"What?" she asked, because from her point of view I'd only lost consciousness for a few seconds.

"Increase the field strength! Send me back there! Oh, God, Shirley, I saw Talking Woman, somewhere in Ancient Africa. I was Talking Woman! For God's sake, send me back!

"Hold on. What?"

We went back and forth like that for a few iterations, until I finally persuaded her to start fiddling with the controls. Field strength! Write head gain! She even got down into the BIOS of my laptop and doubled the CPU clock speed. All to no avail. In that peculiarly Quixotic way of mnemochronautics, our experiment in quantome memory extraction had ended. We had, in Leonel’s parlance, "reached the end of the tape,", and despite a dull day of effort (for my journey had taken place at 9:15AM) nothing we tried could extract or inject even one more instant of recovered memory. The past was, once again, closed to me.

How I envied Harv Leonel that day! Oh, who am I kidding? I envy him still, and the years he spent in the Antediluvian world. Before the Flood, before the end if the Ice Age and the start of recorded history. Leonel had seen the Flood with his own two eyes, or rather the eyes of a theretofore legendary ancestor. He’d consorted with trolls, and witnessed the first ocean crossing, a million years before humans had even learned to sew. Oh, damn. What were a few weeks in Eden, compared to that?

Or perhaps I’ve got it wrong; perhaps even five seconds in Eden is worth all the prices I’ve paid. It may be true that my own experience—less consequential than Leonel’s and yet somehow even more controversial—serves only to tantalize believers and draw the scorn of critics, while proving nothing. The "apple" was most likely Dacryodes edulis, the atanga or "bush pear" of Cameroon, but so what? Skeptics will tell you I could have known that before building my machine. I could have made it up.

But I didn’t. Right? Believe me or not, as you see fit, but in any case, I know it happened. I know I caught a real glimpse of the real world in Antediluvian times, and on my better days I sometimes find that's enough.

And, you know, sometimes not.

Perhaps someday we’ll really really tame this science, and all of us will know for sure what really went on in the ancient world. Until that day, we’re like Talking Woman herself—able to share our experience with others, but not to grant it. And perhaps that’s better than the alternative; my greatest fear is not that I’ll be proven wrong (which I know is impossible), but rather that my life will serve only as a footnote to some greater truth, first revealed by someone luckier than myself. Or perhaps that has happened already, but as Talk Girl would say, with wisdom far beyond her years and far beyond her era, "What is, is."

Indeed.

—Bethany Remert, Dallas TX

* * *

"Talk Girl" is set within the world of Wil McCarthy’s novel Antediluvian, out in October 2019 from Baen Books. McCarthy is a former contributing editor for WIRED magazine and science columnist for the SyFy channel, where his "Lab Notes" column ran for ten years. His short fiction has graced the pages of magazines like Analog, Asimov's, WIRED, and SF Age, and his novels include Bloom, The Collapsium (a national bestseller), and To Crush the Moon. He has also written for TV, and appeared on the History Channel and the Science Channel. In addition to fiction and journalism, McCarthy also writes patents for a top law firm in Dallas.

Weeping Willikers

Aaron Michael Ritchey

Hiram Woolley didn’t need his bloodstone or his Saturn ring or any sort of help to know that he didn’t want to answer the door. That knock sounded angry. It was only a matter of time before the neighbors, especially one neighbor, came calling. He’d hoped to get away with his bit of charity unnoticed. That wasn’t meant to be.

He swung open the door. Mavis Keaner stood on his front porch, hands clenched. Mrs. Keaner liked her rose water and cold cream. She’d missed a line of white under her left eye, a glaring eye, nearly closed with an infected stye. Her mouth was small, tight, and wrinkled. Her blue dress was as faded as it was loose on her slim, spare frame. The lace was nice, though.

“Mr. Woolley, I know your property is your property, and I know living with your wild, troubled son must not be easy, and I know that in these trying times, it is our Christian duty to give comfort, but . . . ” A blush rose in her cheeks.

Michael, his son, was out at the creek with some of his friends. However, Mrs. Keaner hadn’t come to his beet farm to talk about Hiram’s questionable parenting. She had to include the remark in preparation for future tirades.

“You know a lot,” Hiram said quietly.

Mrs. Keaner leaned in and glanced around. The furniture might be dusty, but the floor was just swept. And he hoped the doilies covered up most of the grime. Hiram was a lean widower, wind-beaten and balding. It was easy for her to inspect his equally questionable housekeeping.

She leaned in as he leaned out to get a glimpse of his fields, greening, though the spring was coming in cold.

Mrs. Keaner straightened and brushed a hand down her blue dress. “Let me get right to the point. While offering those hobos a place to stay on your land is charitable, it threatens the stability and safety of your neighbors, surely you can see . . . ” And then she rattled on and on like an automobile that had to idle hard or stop for good.

Hiram scratched the back of his neck and let her go on and on. He nodded. He agreed with most everything she said. And when she finally found a place to pause, he kept it short.

“The Eggers are a family, not just men,” Hiram said. “They’ve had a rough go of it. The dust bowl, you know. Come in from their farm in southern Colorado. A lot of misfortunes.”

Too much bad luck for it to be luck. Hiram knew that sooner or later he’d need to use the knowledge to help them. Something was eating away at the family, worrying them, like how a dog will worry and chew at a bad leg. They were on their way to work a relative’s apple orchard in Washington. That was the hope, at any rate.

If Mrs. Keaner heard him, she didn’t show it. “And the baby! I do have good ears, or so my husband says, and I hear that baby’s crying both day and night. I have never seen, well, heard, such a bad case of colic. You know how you fix that?” Again, she glanced into his house, and then waited, expecting him to invite her in or do some other sort of mannerly gesture.

Or to answer her question. Hiram knew dozens of cures for a colicky baby. And he could cure her stye without too much fuss. However, Mrs. Keaner didn’t want a word from him. It was what Michael would’ve called a rhetorical question.

Good thing Michael wasn’t around. He had a way of baiting people, and Mrs. Keaner was already on the hook.

“Why, you rub a little honey on the gums,” she said. “But in such a severe case as the Eggers baby—”

Cecil, Hiram thought. The baby’s name is Cecil, and he knows things aren’t right. He knows, and that’s why he cries and cries.

Hiram thumbed the Saturn ring on his finger. He’d been having bad dreams that put needles in his gut.

The woman rattled on. “I’d make my gripe water, which of course, involves crushed fennel seeds and strong spirits, whiskey or rye. While that is against our religion, Mr. Woolley, one can never . . . ”

Hiram needed to get out of the conversation. If only he had a charm to make a polite exit.

He’d have to lie, but only a little, for truth was his shield, his sword his sober and chaste mind. Hiram touched his stomach. “Mrs. Keaner. I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling well. If you’ll excuse me, I do believe I need to make a visit to the johnny house out back.” Which wasn’t exactly a lie.

When Mrs. Keaner wound herself up to offer still more advice, he was forced to shut the door.

Still she pounded. “And if you have the dime for it, Mr. Woolley, there is castor oil.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Keaner!” He stomped his feet, so she’d hear him march through his spare home and out the back door. He managed to get wiring for electricity, but he’d not made the jump to indoor plumbing yet. Michael was forever threatening to leave if they didn’t get a water closet, yet it didn’t seem right to reach for comforts when the rest of the nation struggled under the Depression.

Heaven was kind. Mrs. Keaner didn’t follow him around back.

Yet Hiram wasn’t done for the evening. Another chore awaited him.

Standing in the field was Tom Eggers. He was weeping, holding his hat, a strong man brought low.

Hiram didn’t hear the baby.

In his dreams, he always heard the baby.

* * *

At the Eggers camp on the corner of Hiram’s property, the family had set up a tent and a lean-to tied to the homemade trailer they pulled with their Model A. The canvas was staked to the ground. A big hutch had been lashed to the top of a pile of furniture in the trailer. Chicken nesting boxes were stacked around the truck, full of dish towels and some china.

The children stood under the lean-to. They had clean faces, but the dirt of their journey marked their necks and ears. The boys wore patched britches of rough cloth. The girls wore flower sack dresses which couldn’t have been soft. They all smelled of the old smoke of their morning campfire. Hiram had given them bundles of beets, and they’d eaten them, greens and all, fried in pork fat.

The mother of the bunch, Helen Eggers, stood in front of them, her arms crossed. A yellow dress covered long underwear as if she couldn’t shake the morning chill. A lean woman, she fought to keep warm. Hiram’s late wife, Elmina, had been similar.

Helen chewed something, maybe a bit of tobacco. “Cecil is gone, Mr. Woolley. Just gone.”

Addie Beth was twenty but seemed younger. She was a twitchy, jittery creature. A red splotch marked her left hand where she had but a thick thumb and two fingers grown together. The defect left her left hand a crimson crayfish’s claw. Her pale right hand would strike out in intervals when she wasn’t scratching at her wild blonde hair.

Her eyes, though, were blue, with thick lashes, and there was a cleverness that belied her twitches and chatter. The young woman’s face was clean of tears, and she’d washed behind her ears. It seemed all the weeping was to be done by her father, who kept blowing his nose into his handkerchief, yellowed from snot and use.

“Ma’s right,” Addie Beth said. “I’s was washing my face in a tub down the way. I set Cecil down. With the water in my eyes, I couldn’t see a lick. I turned and Cecil was gone.”

Twitching wasn’t enough for Addie Beth. A nervousness filled her, and it could only come out in nonsense songs. She couldn’t help it. Her condition was going to make finding a husband for her a bit difficult, yet those eyes just might do the trick.

Addie Beth tried to keep her song in, but she couldn’t. “Willikers, Willikers, no one’s seen Willikers, because Willikers can’t be seen.”

A shiver went through Hiram. Growing up, when his mother and grandmother were as upright in their speech as they were in their dress and their religion, while other kids could say “Jeeze,” or “Jeezum Crow,” or “Gee Whillikens,” Hiram’s mother would blanch and correct Hiram because “Jeezum” was close enough to blasphemy to count. Even “Gee Willikers” was too much for the Woolleys.

After Hiram’s father left for Mexico with his other family, and his mother disappeared years later, Grandma Hettie hadn’t relaxed. She’d tell him that the cunning folk’s power lay in their speech, and their words should come out carefully. “Keep a prayer on your lips, Hiram, and goodness in your heart. In the end, every word you say is a spell.”

Hiram stood with his right hand in his pocket, gripping his heliotropus, the bloodstone he kept with him always. Around his neck, hidden by work shirt and overalls, hung the chi-roh amulet, with the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES etched into the iron. On his finger, where his wedding band should be, he wore a Saturn ring.

Addie Beth sighed. “Sorry, Ma. Sorry, Pa. I can’t keep my songs quiet sometimes. I feel bad.”

Gripping the stone, he waited to see if he felt a tinge. No, Addie Beth was telling the truth.

Tom let out a fresh sob. He couldn’t stop weeping. After losing a kid to pneumonia and then their precious baby to something else, Hiram couldn’t blame the man for his tears.

Yet Hiram found the man troubling, as troubling as the Willikers chant that had burst from Addie Beth.

Helen Eggers fought her despair with plain old hate. “You find him, Tom. You find him, or you’ll be burying me on this goddamn beet field ‘cause I won’t lose another child. I’d rather cut my own goddamn throat then live another goddamn day being tortured by our goddamn bad luck.”

Hiram frowned at her blasphemy. That wouldn’t help them any nor would her despair. His dreams came back to him—a baby in the forest, wailing. Cecil. And something was in the woods with him.

The Eggers weren’t unlucky. Something foul thing clung to them like a goathead thorn pushed into the bottom of a boot.

“I’ll need something of Cecil’s,” Hiram muttered. “Something personal. We’ll find him. We’ll fix it . . . if the Lord Divine is kind this day.”

Helen’s laugh was sharp and humorless. At least she didn’t curse.

* * *

Down the way, by an old tin tub collecting rainwater, neither Tom, nor Addie Beth, nor Hiram found any trace of footprints. It was like an eagle had swooped down to steal the baby away.

Hiram missed the cries of the babe. At least he’d been alive and squawking. Now, he was simply gone. In Hiram’s dreams, that cry was never silenced. He’d have faith Cecil still lived until the world showed him differently.

Hiram had retrieved his toolbox and carried it over his shoulder with a wide leather strap. He’d removed screwdrivers, wrenches, and other more mundane implements and added his revolver, a big flashlight, and a Y-shaped rod of witch hazel. At the same time, he’d left a note for Michael, letting his son know he’d be home late. Hiram was hopeful that meant by sunset, midnight at the latest.

Tom sniffed. “Whatcha got there, Mr. Woolley?”

The beet farmer shrugged. “Just some things.” He thought of warning them that they might not understand everything he said and did. Instead, he figured their grief would make the next few hours hazy. As long as they found the baby, there probably wouldn’t be a lot of questions.

“He’s gonna fix it, Pa. He’s gonna use his toolkit to fix things. We’s gonna find Cecil. Hiram is a righteous man, a Christian man, who let us squat on his property while his neighbors fussed at him. Why, that Mrs. Keaner gave him an earful.” Addie Beth waved her claw around until she used her other hand to grab it and settle it down. Then she scratched at herself. At least one louse in her mess of hair surely lost its life to her itching. “Willikers!”

The sun was being a little too quick crossing the sky. They didn’t have much time.

“Cecil is gonna be hungry! Willikers!” Addie Beth shouted. Then she shushed herself. “I’ll be quiet, Mr. Woolley. While you work. You’re gonna work it, I know’d it.”

Hiram nodded and took the witch hazel rod from the toolbox, closing it quickly to hide his gun. After the second night of listening to Cecil cry in his dreams, Hiram had taken the rod, peeled it, and soaked it in nightshade. Now it was dry and discolored.

“Did Cecil have any special nicknames?” Hiram asked.

Tom’s face crumbled into more weeping.

Addie Beth again had to quiet her crayfish hand. “Nope. Just Cecil.”

Using his clasp knife, Hiram carved three crosses, then the name CECIL EGGERS, then three more crosses. “Thanks, Addie. This rod should lead us to your brother.”

“Gosh,” Tom murmured. “When I was a boy, a man down the road had a rod like that. He said he could find water, and gee willikers, did it work. He found a well for the parson when he moved in.”

Willikers. There was that word again.

“Water. Treasure. But other things.” Hiram closed his eyes and gripped the rod. He said a long prayer. He’d skipped lunch. That was good. His hunger would sharpen his senses. A fasting man was a righteous man, and he would need all his righteousness to find the lost babe.

Wasn’t a baby the greatest of treasures? Even when the gravy went thin, and every child’s mouth seemed forever empty, a baby made things all right.

“Am I Hiram Woolley?” Hiram felt the rod jerk in his hand.

“Did Herbert Hoover win the 1932 election?” The rod remained still.

“Is Cecil Eggers still alive?” Again, the rod moved as if touched.

Tom choked out a sob.

Hiram held out a hand. “Addie Beth, if you please.”

She gave him a frayed piece of cloth, blue, as soft as puppy fur. A crust of the baby’s spit-up stiffened one corner.

Hiram wrapped the cloth around his rod. He whispered Psalm 67, asking for God’s mercy. He didn’t need to say Cecil’s name again. The rod was primed and wanting to find him.

Hiram had walked ten paces toward the Wasatch Mountains when he realized Tom and Addie Beth weren’t behind him. “Follow me and keep close,” Hiram said.

They marched out from Hiram’s fields. He held the barbed wire marking his property to let Tom and Addie Beth slip through. Tom had turned off his tears, for now, and yet his handkerchief was in his hand.

Tom couldn’t hold his eyes steady when he looked at Hiram. The man would glance away. Was that a man ashamed of his poverty and his desperation? Or was there guilt in that gaze?

Addie Beth couldn’t stop herself from her chatter. “I feel plumb awful for losing Cecil. I was responsible, but a girl can’t always be watching. I turned a second. Ma says that. When Ollie or Randal gets away from her, she says that. I say it too. But it’s our luck, ain’t it, Pa? It’s our luck.”

“I reckon it is, Addie Beth. I reckon it is.” He sniffled, hawked, and spat.

Hiram followed the witch hazel wand across Lyman Johnson’s fields. An hour later, three miles at least, they found the trail that switched-backed up the bald face of the Wasatch Mountains. There used to be pine forests there, but early settlers had taken every stick. Now, scrub oak created a tangle. The path cut through it, up and around, until the trail dropped them down into a little crack of a valley. A stream swollen with the snowmelt burbled down over rocks. Here, pines perfumed the crack.

Evening was upon them. There wasn’t a doubt in Hiram’s mind he’d be using the flashlight in his toolbox. The cool air made the pines even sweeter, and the dampness of the water felt good after the dry miles. He hoped it wasn’t going to be a dry spring. If it was, he’d have to do a little rain magic, but it never felt so honest casting that charm, since the rain had a way of wetting his fields and ignoring the Keaners and the Johnsons.

A shudder ran through Addie Beth’s arms. “First the farm goes. It was a shame. And then, Willikers, on the road, we lose little Bart. Not even two. We buried him. Afore that, we had bad blood with Uncle William. He took his family and left us. Maybe it was good. He wouldn’t have wanted to wait for a funeral. In Rock Springs, that’s in Wyoming, the preacher said the words for free. We got a little luck there, but then he said awful things to Pa.”

“Don’t.” Tom warned.

Hiram wondered what the preacher had said.

Addie Beth walked up the trail, her boots churning up dirt. She let out a strangled yell, then, “Willikers, the truck breaks in the Rockies. Pa spent the night working on her. Had to walk to town. Willikers. Gone a long time. Back at it. We thought our mis-mis-misfortunes were behind us. I won’t miss our misfortunes. When we wail in our sorrow, who is there to hear? Willikers! Washington is a long ways away.”

“Enough, now,” Tom said. His eyes were red, and his face was pale, and those eyes, so furtive. “We ain’t got bad luck. God is testing us. But we’ll pass it. We’re good . . . you and I are good people.”

Hiram felt the bloodstone in his pocket pinch his thigh. He paused, sweating. Hunger and bad feelings knotted his gut. The heliotropus protected him from venom and trickery. It felt the treachery—the Eggers family were good people.

Holding the rod wrapped in the blue cloth with his left hand, he gripped the bloodstone in his right. He prayed silently. God in Heaven, if there is treachery in the Eggers family, show me the culprit. Help me to win them back into your love.

The bloodstone stayed quiet in his hand. It even cooled a bit.

Who was the problem? The girl hadn’t wept, but neither did the mother. The man was out of his wits, all right. Was Addie Beth any less crazy?

“What’s the problem, Mr. Woolley?” Addie Beth asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Hiram whispered.

He withdrew his hand to grip the Mosaical rod. They continued their trek up the path. Every time he tried to quiet his mind, the girl would break out in a nonsense song.

And the sun was getting low—the day folding itself into the night. The evening star appeared in the sky, a powerful astral entity.

They had a moment of quiet.

Addie Beth choked, grunted, but couldn’t keep her song in. “Willikers, Willikers, someone loves Willikers, but Willikers loves no one!”

Another shiver tickled his neck. The bloodstone felt like an ember in the pocket of his overalls.

They topped a ridge and stopped in the bloody light of the sunset. A crag jutted into the air above them on their right. To the left lay the stream and pines. Down from them, fifty feet away, stood a ramshackle building of gray wood, an old mining shack, fifty years old at least. Trees clustered around the building. Some ragged bit of cloth flapped on the door. It was neither canvas nor oilcloth—it didn’t have that stiffness to it. A tight roll of the cloth was stuffed in the top of the shack’s door to keep it closed.

A baby’s squall drifted on the last breezes of the day.

Gooseflesh broke out over Hiram’s arms. The rod jerked itself out of his hands. It and the blue cloth fell to the dirt.

A vision came to him. He was dizzy from hunger and from the stink of Tom and his daughter. Was it their strong odor? Or was it oozing out of the shack? Something was in that cluster of rotten wood, something old and poisoned. And powerful.

Hiram bent over, hands on his knees, breathing hard. His Saturn ring itched him. In his mind’s eye, he saw the witch inside the shack. The witch was naked; it had long, greasy hair covering a face far dirtier than anyone sane would allow. It clutched the baby to a chest, where one impossible misshapen breast hung, marked with an angry red nipple, a cyst of a nipple, as scum-ridden and foul as the rest of the witch’s skin. The other part of the thing’s chest was flat, muscled, and hairy.

Hiram closed his eyes. The witch radiated lust. It wanted the touch of the man or the girl—it had caressed one of them before. But which one?

Hiram opened his eyes and straightened.

Tom let out a strangled cry. “Cecil!” He went to run toward the shack.

Hiram kicked the man’s boots out from under him. Tom went sprawling into the dirt. His thick-knuckled hand clawed at the dirt. He didn’t get up angry. He laid face down into the dirt and wept. Addie Beth stood over her father, her crayfish hand and normal hand gesticulating.

Hiram’s eyes adjusted enough to see into the gloom. A blue dress hung on that shack. A blue dress with white lace that could’ve come off Mrs. Keaner’s body.

* * *

“Willikers, why’d you kick my pa, Mr. Woolley?” Addie Beth asked in a somber voice.

He turned to her. She raised those pretty blue eyes to Hiram. He’d seen eyes like that before. A memory broke through his sweat and hunger. He recalled a church social, held after a long day of God and fellowship. Irene Smith had been there, a girl his age. He’d tried to cross the room to talk to her—he was young, uncertain, and he couldn’t get his courage up. He watched her laugh with her friends, and every so often, she’d throw those blue eyes at him, and he’d look away.

Addie Beth took his hand. “The baby’s in that shack, Mr. Woolley. You might want to go down there.”

He could feel the heat off her. And her stink didn’t seem so bad. In fact, there was a sweetness there, a subtle perfume. Not soap but rose water. A faint ghost of how Mrs. Keaner smelled. It was the witch’s lust, affecting him, maybe getting to Addie Beth as well. Or was the girl herself the source?

The baby wasn’t crying now. Cecil was sucking on the witch’s unnatural teat. The baby wouldn’t get milk. What would he get?

Addie’s voice was quiet. “We done found Cecil, Mr. Woolley. You found him. So go on.”

Hiram didn’t want the baby harmed. However, he didn’t like Addie’s heat nor her prodding. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and shook the young woman’s hand out of his own. Tom continued to weep into the dirt.

Hiram found enough spit in his dry mouth, to ask “What did the preacher say to your pa?”

Tom tried to get to his feet. He failed, too weak it seemed, and sat down on his backside and cradled his arms. His eyes were on the shack.

Addie Beth grunted. She was trying to keep her secret. She raised her hands and shook them, then she wrapped her arms around herself. “Leviticus! He quoted Leviticus at Pa! Willikers! Willikers! Willikers!”

It wasn’t just a bastardized curse word.

She let out a strangled cry then sang her nonsense song one last time. “Willikers, Willikers, Daddy loves Willikers, but Willikers loves no one.”

Tom was rocking back and forth, moaning.

Hiram knew the truth of it all. His bloodstone burned in his pocket. It was good, but his chi-roh amulet was far more powerful. Hiram drew it out from his work shirt. The dark had fallen on the shack. It was like someone had switched off the sunset.

He set down his toolbox and grabbed his flashlight. He stuck his revolver in his pocket.

The door to the shack creaked open.

He clicked on the big flashlight and lit up the shack. Willikers, the witch’s name was Willikers, was pulling the blue dress over its head. It might’ve been a human being once, but now, it wasn’t anything close to a person. It was a creature of darkness and lust. Inhuman.

The baby squalled from inside the shack—those weren’t hungry cries. He had fed on whatever nastiness had oozed out of the witch’s breast. Cecil bawled out of fear.

Willikers floated toward up the trail toward them. Its toenails and fingernails were long, black, chitinous, like the backside of a beetle. The blue dress hung off its body, one side of its chest full, the other empty.

Hiram let go of his amulet and pulled his revolver out of his pocket. The first fall of the hammer struck an empty chamber; it was an old trick he’d used for safety. The second trigger pull wasn’t any better. The weapon clicked uselessly in his hands. The witch must’ve jammed his gun. Hiram dropped the revolver.

Addie sucked in a breath. “Please, no, please. We just want our Cecil back. I’s sorry. I’s was scared, and my condition, it was my condition.”

Hiram doubted that. But he had no doubts about the accusations the preacher had hurled at Tom. The preacher must’ve seen the family man’s wandering eye during the funeral, or else perhaps the preacher had an eye for such men himself. Sometimes those who quoted Leviticus 18 and 20 the loudest, were the ones who struggled the most.

Shining his light on the thing, Hiram gripped his chi-roh amulet in a sweaty hand. If only he had time to start a fire, he might have been able to hurt Willikers with a witch bottle. That wasn’t going to happen.

The baby’s wail seemed to get louder and louder.

“Tell me the truth, Tom,” Hiram said in a choked voice. “I can hold it off. But you need to tell me the truth.”

“And my truth, too” Addie Beth sobbed. “When Bart died, it hurt me. Willikers knew it. It whispered to me, and I whispered back. At first, I thought Willikers wanted me. No, Willikers wanted Pa. And Pa wanted Willikers.”

Hiram jerked Addie to her father, so she stood over him. Hiram then jumped in front of them both. He raised the chi-roh amulet. His flashlight went out. He didn’t bother to shake it. If Willikers could disable his gun, it could extinguish his light source. Hiram could almost feel those beetle-back fingernails at his throat. He dropped the flashlight and clung to his faith.

“Tom, this is your doing,” Hiram said, trying to keep his voice strong. “Tell me.”

“I was lonely. My wife is fine, but I get lonely in other ways,” Tom said.

A rotten smell stifled them. Around and around them, the witch floated. The sky was moonless; midnight darkness covered the trail. The only lights were the twin glimmerings of Williker’s eyes. In front of them, behind them, on this side, then that.

Only the chi-roh amulet kept Williker’s nails out of their flesh. Hiram kept the amulet between Willikers and its prey. In his hand, the circle of iron was ice cold.

“I’m sorry for it,” Tom said in a hushed voice. “I tried to be strong, and I prayed to God for strength to fight it. I failed Him, myself, my family. Willikers was around, always around, whispering at us after Bart died. Like Addie said. When the truck broke down, and I had to walk to town. Willikers whispered to me. I went to it. It said it’d let us go in peace if I laid with it, but I know’d its promise was a lie. But it was a lie that I so wanted to believe.”

“I forgive you,” Hiram said. “I forgive you both. This world can be a sorrow, a bitter place, and sometimes the lies are just too sweet.”

Willikers floated in front of them. Its long hair was like the night itself. Its vile eyes gleamed like diamonds locked in rock.

“Go on, witch, git!” Hiram yelled. “Your hold on this family is over. They are righteous folk, and they are under my protection now.”

Willikers might’ve laughed, or it might’ve screamed, but Hiram was done with this beast. Hymns, psalms, prayers, a dozen passages from the Bible rose up in Hiram’s mind. Too much fire filled his glands for him to pick. He finally chose one that was tried and true and that both the man and his daughter would know. Hiram raised his voice in the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in Heaven!”

Tom staggered over to him. Hiram pulled him close. Addie Beth did as well. She clung to Hiram. She was strong, and her arms squeezed him. However, she was controlling her condition enough to join him in prayer. Her father followed along.

The three prayed the Our Father in the darkness, over and over, at least three times all the way through.

The flashlight on the ground winked on. The light fell on the blue dress, lying in the dirt, a pile of empty cloth. Willikers was gone.

* * *

Hiram found the baby lying on the dirt floor of the shack. Cecil was wrapped in a blue gingham blanket. He shrieked, sobbed, shrieked some more, as Hiram carried him back to Tom and Addie Beth. When the baby smelled Addie Beth, he reached out two chubby arms. She took him, and little Cecil hiccupped and shuddered himself quiet.

The three weren’t ready to make the journey back, not yet. It was a good couple of hours at a fast clip back to Hiram’s farm. Hiram hoped Helen would hold off on her suicide until they returned. The worst of their troubles were over, or so Hiram prayed. He’d send them on with a protection lamen he’d write up on virgin parchment. It was their faith, however, that would keep them safe.

Cecil slept, held by Addie Beth, who wasn’t as jittery now. She seemed able to control her outbursts, and when she did have to talk, she whispered nice things to her baby brother, and no more talk of Willikers.

They sat on the trail with the flashlight in the middle of them, balanced on Hiram’s toolbox.

Hiram had slaked his thirst from the stream. His hunger felt distant.

Tom wasn’t weeping. He sat staring off into the distance. “I’ll change in Washington. I won’t be a sinner no more. I swear it.”

Hiram was at a loss of what to say. Maybe he should hate the girl for whispering back to the witch, and maybe he should hate the man who had let himself be seduced. He couldn’t. Temptations were something he understood, and when times were tough, those temptations could turn overwhelming. He thought of his momentary weakness with Addie Beth and the memories of Irene Smith.

Hiram had to say something. He still clutched his amulet in his fist and prayed for the words. They came. “Be kind to yourself, Tom. Be kind to your family. Do what you can. We were not born sinners. We were born perfect. We were made in His image after all.”

Tom surprised Hiram by chuckling. “Made in His image? I have these feelings. And Addie Beth has her condition. What does that say about Him? What does that say about us?”

Hiram gazed up at the stars. The finer points of theology were lost on him. He kept it simple. “A cracked bucket can still carry water.”

“Only if it’s not cracked too much,” Tom said.

“And maybe you aren’t cracked at all.” Hiram knew a thing or two about being an outsider. “Maybe you’re just a dang human being.”

Hiram thought about quoting Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter thirteen, verse twelve to thirteen. Then thought better. He was a cunning man, not a preacher. He stood up. “Let’s get back to fix what we can.” He scooped up his toolbox.

When he got home in the middle of the night, Michael lay stretched out on the sofa. The boy had probably been waiting on him and fell asleep.

Hiram stood in front of the ice box and drank most of a bottle of butter milk. It was a bit greedy of him, but there were far harder things that other folks had to deal with.

* * *

Hiram saw Mrs. Keaner, after church, that Sunday. He was relieved to see that her blue dress was very different from the one Willikers had worn. Hiram had stuffed the witch’s dress in his toolbox and later burned it.

Mrs. Keaner knew some knowledge, certainly, but Hiram didn’t think her craft went beyond taking care of colicky babies and maybe a charm or too to keep away the darker spirits out there.

Michael was off with the other boys his age, tossing eager glances at the girls in their own conversations. The girls had eager looks of their own. So it went most of the time. When it didn’t, that seemed to Hiram like God’s plan as well.

Saturday it had rained all day, which meant the farmers were in good spirits.

Mrs. Keaner came over, stye still on her eye, and that cold cream smell to her. Her husband lingered behind her. While Hiram was taciturn, Mr. Joseph Keaner might as well have been from stone. He raised a hand.

Hiram raised one back.

“Those hobos are gone, and thank you, Mr. Woolley,” the woman said. “Strange, though, sometimes I can still hear that baby crying in the wind. The Lord can’t abide parents who don’t take care of their children.”

Hiram felt the sharp words on his lips. He thought of the letter he’d gotten. Written in Addie’s unsure penmanship, it told how the Eggers had made it to Washington, found work there, and that Cecil’s colic was better. The baby had a natural hunger and was growing just fine. They framed the lamen he’d given them and hung it on the wall.

Hiram didn’t snap at Mrs. Keaner. What good would that have done? Instead, he swept off his hat, smoothed the wisps of hair on his scalp, and raised his face to the sunshine. He sighed. “Nice spring we’re having . . . rain and then sunshine.”

Sometimes discussing the weather was far better than any charm a cunning man could cast.

After all, every word was a spell.

* * *

This story is set in the world of Depression-era historical fantasy novel The Cunning Man by D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey, out in November. Aaron Michael Ritchey is the author of twenty-one novels and numerous pieces of short fiction. He was born on a cold and snowy September day in Denver, Colorado, and while he’s lived and traveled all over the world, he’s a child of the American West. Sagebrush makes him homesick. While he pines for the road, he still lives in Colorado with his cactus flower of a wife and two stormy daughters.

A Visit to the Galaxy Ballroom

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

* * *

Scout Lina yo’Bingim inhaled, tasting the sharp, cold air, feeling a phantom flutter against her cheek. She blinked up at the gray sky, at snow—snow! She paid off the cabbie, soft flakes melting against her face.

She liked the fresh smell of the snow, but she had not come here to linger in quiet appreciation on the street. No, her purpose was to have a good time while enthusiastically expending energy.

Scout Lina yo'Bingim, off-duty for the next twenty-four hours, turned away from the curb and walked determinedly toward the building with the message lit up in bright pink and yellow lights:

WELCOME TO THE GALAXY BALLROOM

According to her information, she would find Scouts and pilots and mercenaries inside. She would find dancing, and gaming, and drinking, and—bowli ball.

She had specifically come for the bowli ball.

Inside the bar was everything one might expect of a rowdy emporium on a deep space route: twenty-three kinds of beer and ale instabrewed on the premises; both top-line and bottom-tier liquor, but none in between; and wine in quantity. A modest line of smokes was also on offer for those who sought peace.

Peace was not what Lina had come for.

Ten Standard Days ago, she had been on Liad, and looking forward with warm anticipation to Festival, at Solcintra. It had been a very difficult year; she deserved the Festival and she had intended to take full benefit from all of the festivities open to her.

Nine Standard Days ago, she had been called in to her commander's office—and given a mission.

She was to transport the Council-appointed Administrative Arbiter of Scouts, one Chola as'Barta, to Surebleak in the Daiellen Sector with "all haste." She was detached from her usual duties to this mission; Chola as'Barta her immediate superior and supervisor.

She was assigned Bentokoristo, she being one of six to have trained on it—a new ship sporting a not-quite-experimental enhanced drive and an upgraded weapons system.

That was the sole piece of good news; Bentokoristo was beautiful to fly. But no matter how fast the ship was, she was not fast enough to get to Surebleak and back again in time for the Festival at Solcintra, even if Lina flew like a Scout—which was not, after all, an option.

Admin as'Barta was . . . not a Scout. Lina was therefore constrained to put together a series of Jumps which would get them from Solcintra to Surebleak with a minimum of downtime, and which would not strain the resources of a man who counted five trips to the gaming salons in Liad's orbit as being an experienced space traveler. Admin as'Barta must, the commander insisted, arrive in fit condition, able to immediately embark upon his mission. The Administrator had been appointed to find what had occasioned the schism of the Scouts on Surebleak, creating the foolish situation of two Scout organizations—the Liaden Scouts, and the so-called Surebleak Scouts.

Nine Standard Days, the trip had taken, coddling Admin as'Barta.

For his part, he ignored her advice to move onto Surebleak time before they arrived, and periodically infringed on her rest shifts to try to talk the politics of the fissioning Scouts. He’d asked her why she thought the break had occurred, and her reply—"pilot’s choice"—had satisfied him not at all.

And, there, he wasn't a Scout, he was a Council-appointee, selected for his supposed "connections" in the piloting sphere. It was unlikely he'd known anyone who had died at Nev'Lorn, nor was he aware of the treachery that had led to the battle there.

"But how," he had demanded, as they waited for dinner to warm, "could a Liaden, born and bred to excellence in all things, having achieved a place in life through being a Scout—how could any such person turn their back on Liad and all that Liad offers? Liadens have the advantage of the Code and delms for guidance!"

"The same reason, Admin. A pilot flies the best course they may with the information to hand. A pilot operates in the moment, with the delm light years away and the Code irrelevant to the case."

"Have you found the Code irrelevant on many occasions, pilot?"

He held up a hand, forestalling a reply she had not intended to make.

"Consider your answer carefully. I will be needing an assistant after I am approved as permanent Director of Scout Operations on Surebleak. Once I have spoken to ter'Meulen, and this foolish matter has been regularized, there will be many rewarding administrative tasks available to a discerning Scout who may wish promotion and increased melant'i."

At that point the chime sounded for dinner being hot and ready, and Lina had deftly avoided the topic of promotion to as'Barta's assistant. As to the "foolish matter" of the schism, if it was Clonak ter'Meulen with whom the Admin was to liaise, then the matter would be settled by teatime. One could, if one wished, wonder why the most devious Scout currently serving hadn't fixed the "foolish matter" already, but that was merely a waste of time. Clonak always had his reasons, though they be ever so inobvious.

At last, they had made Surebleak, and she was granted leave—twenty-four hours free of Admin as'Barta!—but not before she had been instructed as to proper behavior even on her own time.

"Do not fraternize with the locals, Scout. Beware of any attempts to make you divulge your mission. I am told that there are places where proper Scouts meet. You will confine yourself to those venues."

Repairing to the small room she had been granted, Lina called up the screen and considered her options.

Given the connection to Clan Korval and their likely inclusion of the vague and detested "locals," she decided not to attempt the Emerald Casino. The entertainments advertised at Audrey's House of Joy tempted, but, again, there would likely be "locals" present.

Best Bowli Ball Court on Surebleak! the next advertisement promised, and Lina grinned. She did consider the "local" angle, but reasoned such an emporium was more likely to attract Scouts than Admin's loose "locals."

Lina therefore called a cab, and very shortly she was entering The Galaxy Ballroom.

She stopped at the counter to buy a ticket—not, alas, a token for a private Festival bower, or a key to an all night playroom—but admission as a contestant in one bout of "real bowli ball action!" which would warm her blood and satisfy her need for action, if not her wistful libido.

She excused her way past several inebriated mercs, one a red-haired master sergeant who briefly thought she’d come for him alone, but then he recognized the jacket and insignia and bowed a polite "Efning, pilot!" at her hopefully. "Come back if you need a winner!"

He’d managed to grab a table and was large enough that it was mostly hidden behind him. "I got two chairs, prezzels, a warm heart—and I just been paid!"

She gathered that he did have a warm heart—her empathy rating was just below that qualifying as a small talent—but she’d been considering a real workout, and soon.

She smiled, and her hand flung an equally polite busy here in his direction as she moved into the darkness, seeking that proper bowli ball deck, with transparent walls and resilient ceiling, an excellent air system, and opponents worthy of her.

A half-dozen languages brushed past her ears; the potent scent of alcohol mixed with the additional odors of many dozens of people exuding sweat and energy in the dimness.

Ahead, she heard a distant thud, and another, a round of cheers and laughter, a high voice calling, "I’ll still take two to one on the blue boots!"

Scout skill to the fore, Lina yo'Bingim slid between two hefty mercs on their sudden way to the john as yes—there!

There were four players on the deck, their time almost up. She stopped to watch the play.

One player stood out. He was doing too many dives to stay in the game much longer; in the mirrored ceiling, she could see him rolling to his feet with an awkward re-step to gain balance. She could tell that he was hurting—it didn’t take her high empathy rating or her training in body language across three cultures to see that.

She pushed forward, the better to see the clock.

Ah, that was the key. He had only seconds to hit his mark . . . and finish, at least.

The ball came at him again; he kneed it roughly, it went higher than his other knee, which had likely not been his intent, but he made a good recovery by striking it with his elbow, the ball’s own kinetics giving it an off-centered boost in the direction of the oldest fellow on the deck, who nonchalantly elbowed it on to a third person who—

Blangblangblang!

The bell rang; the third and fourth in the action dove for the ball together and came up laughing, bobbling the thing back and forth as it tried to spend the energy gained from the last burst of action. The spectators cheered, money changed hands, and the transparent door to the deck was opened as the next players moved forward.

The MC spoke purposefully into the mic, "Next up we have a five-group, came in together, and then . . ."

The player who had overexerted himself stumbled as he left the court, was steadied briefly by another of the combatants with an over-wide grin . . . and collapsed on the spot, nose bleeding.

"I’m a medic," one of the group entering the court yelled, and one of his companions added—"field medics, here, let us through!"

That quickly, the downed player was off the floor, and the next group of players, as well. The Master of Ceremonies looked around, eyes bright, and spoke into the mic.

"Hold up your tickets, show your cards! We'll do a quick single-match to give the next group time to get back!"

Lina’s arm reached high—yellow ticket, solo . . .

The MC saw her, waved her toward the deck door and pointed at another yellow—

"Come on up, pilots! Now or never; we got group play booked 'til after midnight!"

They met on the court, her opponent near her own age, a pilot, and, she saw with pleasure, a Scout. He wore light duty clothes, no rank marks visible, save the wings on his collar; his face was open, and a hint of a smile showing.

He would do, thought Lina, and returned the smile.

"Well, pilot?" she challenged him. "Shall we?"

He took a moment to survey her—she saw his eyes catch on the wings adorning her own collar, before he bowed, Scout to Scout.

"Pilot, we shall!"

"All right!" the MC called. "Let's get the ball rolling! Twelve minute match—what'll it be?" he asked, turning to them. "Liaden training rules, Scout standard rules, open court rules?"

"Scout standard?" she asked her opponent, and got a flicker of fingers in agreement.

"I am Lina," she said, stripping off her jacket and giving it into the MC's ready hand.

"Kelby," he answered, also relinquishing his jacket.

"Check the equipment, Pilots, you got thirty-three seconds."

Kelby received the ball first to check. Lina ran a quick rainbow, for focus, and looked about her.

"Spot!" she called, pointing, as Kelby called out, "Here also!"

The MC waved; a youngster with a mop rushed onto court and dealt with the spot of sweat, and the other, of blood.

"Right!" the MC shouted into his mic. "Up here we got Kelby and Lina, pickup match, twelve minutes, Scout standard!"

The crowd cheered, briefly.

The MC turned to them.

"Any private challenge; any bet between the two of you?"

Kelby looked at her, hands raised, face glowing as if he’d already been playing five minutes . . .

Lina bent forward, as eager as he to get the match started, whispering:

"Loser buys both breakfast?"

A grin showed in brief appreciation; she saw interest in his eyes.

He bowed, formally, accepting the challenge of an equal, and repeated the stakes to the MC, who outright laughed.

"All right, soldiers and pilots! Scouts and citizens! These two know how the game is played! Got a little private bet going—loser buys breakfast for both!"

The cheering this time was fuller, longer; the bell went blangblangblang; the MC slammed the bowli ball into the circle between them, and dove for the safety of the transparent observer's booth.

#

The deck was better than Lina had anticipated. The floor gave a firm, even footing without being loud; it was resilient rather than bouncy. She and Kelby had almost overrun each other on the launch, but the spin favored Lina. She twisted to catch and flick the busy ball high off a wall behind Kelby.

From within, the walls were slightly smoky and even ball-streaked but her first corner fling proved they were in good condition.

The first several minutes were given to testing—the facility, the ball, each other. The ball was regulation, with a tricky underspin. Every fifth or sixth time it hit, the ball added rather than subtracted and the amplified spin could push it along the wall or out of a grasping hand.

The match being timed rather than one-and-out, they both survived learning the ball’s eccentricities; Lina first when the ball tore itself from her hand to bounce down her wrist and into her chest, much to the delight of the crowd, and Kelby who’d timed a leap-and-grab perfectly, displaying both great style and interesting physique, only to have the ball hang for a half-second longer than anticipated, before flinging itself across the surface of the wall like a hurrying caterpillar.

The bell blanged caution at six minutes; distracted, Kelby had to do a three-hit, elbow, shoulder, palm to get the ball where he wanted it for his next throw. Between them, they'd been upping the tempo, and both still taking time to observe each other's moves and strengths.

Yes, Lina thought; he'll do nicely, as he turned from the recover and threw unexpectedly over his shoulder with his back to her—a good view—nearly rooting her to the spot with the trick move. She deflected the ball with her ankle before it hit the floor, portions of the betting crowd apparently doubtful that she’d managed it, and then had to dive and kick with the other foot, but this was one of her tricks, angling the ball high off the wall, against the ceiling, and onto another wall, the ball underspinning, leaving Kelby little choice but to do a dive of his own and juggle the ball until he mastered the tempo sufficiently to get his footwork back in sync.

"One each, here at the center stage!" called the MC. "Get your bets in, watch the action! Winner gets a free breakfast 'cause the loser’s going to pay! Thrills and chills here—Hey! Didja see that recover?"

Lina took the next throw with her left hand and did a quick launch; Kelby barely had time to catch and do the same. For several moments they traded the ball at throat level—flick, flick, flick—eyes on the ball, the throat, the face, slowly coming closer, faster . . .

Their eyes locked briefly as they trusted the motion, then they began backing away as they continued the same throw and catch at least a dozen more times. He changed it up: took the ball left-handed and swung back and around once before launching vertically so Lina had to move closer to catch it.

It was her turn to vary, her throw bouncing off a sidewall so she could catch it and she did that twice again, moving toward a corner, making him retreat to stay in front of her. Then an underhanded lob toward the leg he’d just raised and …

A roll! He landed hard, snatched the ball, the roll brought him very close before the ball was released, and he used the wall for the save, the angle bouncing the ball from wall to ceiling.

It was the ceiling that almost defeated her; Lina managing to just get to the bounce that extended to the other side of Kelby, who was still rising. The ball was in overdrive. Lina lunged, got a hand on it, and then tangled in Kelby’s legs, the ball bouncing overhead, with the crowd roaring.

Kelby lunged from his spot in the tangle, keeping the ball up and then she did the same, on one knee and then he reached through her arms and swung to keep it higher; the continued nearness a surprise, the joint effort promising.

The crowd was cheering wildly, some counting, and the "four, three, two, one . . ." ended with the blangblangblang of the closing bell.

Lina smothered the ball, hand on her shoulder to keep it still while Kelby’s hand was also on her shoulder and a laughing MC made his way onto the deck . . .

"Looks like we gotta live heat here! Even score! Guess the pilots here'll hafta figure out who pays for breakfast some other way, hey?"

He reached cautiously for the ball, with Kelby and Lina not quite smoothly working it from between them into his hand.

"I tell you what," he said into the mic, working the still merry crowd. "This ball's had quite a workout—it's still buzzing and so am I! Big cheer for Lina and Kelby!"

The crowd obliged as the MC helped the two of them finish detangling, and the mop-up crew came in to make all seemly for the next group.

"You’re good," Lina told Kelby as they hurried out, jackets in hand.

He bowed on the move, hand rising to sign So are you.

"I'm just in today," she said, when they paused by the door to pull on their jackets. "Please, Pilot, lead on!"

#

Lina returned to port with an hour still to run on her leave. The room she had been assigned was scarcely more than a pilot's ready room: a cot, some shelves, and a screen.

Kelby’s rooms were multiple and tidy, the small kitchen, small bath, and small living area with both a couch and a bed far wider than a cot.

As it came about, she had paid for breakfast at Reski’s, a mere three hundred paces from his rooms—perfectly equitable, as he had paid the taxi, shared his wine and worthy snacks, and not the least, his bed.

This room—well. If she were to be on Surebleak longer than three nights, she would have to find something else.

But that was for later. For now, her condition was considerably improved.

She’d had a romp far better than an impromptu Festival meeting, and had already accumulated a favorite morning cafe, taxi company, and bowli ball court, not to mention having Scout Lieutenant Kelby chel’Vona Clan Nosko’s personal and work comm codes in her pocket.

Came the sound of steps in the hall, followed by imperious knocking and the querulous voice of her direct superior.

"Open now, yo'Bingim!"

For a heartbeat, she considered ignoring the command, her leave with yet an hour to run.

"yo'Bingim!"

She growled softly and stepped to the door, opening with hairbrush in one hand and in the other, her wings.

Administrator as'Barta stood in the door, a pilot Lina had never seen before behind him—she was not a Scout.

"So you returned after making your contact, did you? I had word that you were off in the wilds beyond the city last night."

Lines of anger bracketed his mouth.

Mastering her own spurt of anger, Lina bowed a brief welcome to her superior, and made no answer regarding her whereabouts while on leave.

"Should you like to come in, Administrator?"

"No, I should not, yo’Bingam. Give me the key cards for our ship—all that are in your possession."

"All," she repeated, unsnapping her pouch even as she turned toward her jacket, hung on the back of a chair.

"You will not need your jacket," as'Barta snapped.

"A pilot keeps keys to hand, sir. You had wanted all in my possession."

She slipped her hand into the discreet inner pocket and removed the first set of keys, and the second set from her pouch. Those she brought to the door, and held toward the Adminstrator, who fell back a step and waved peremptorily at the stranger pilot.

"Pilot sig'Sted receives the keys."

The pilot stepped forward to do so, her eyes averted. Lina frowned at the logo on the breast of her jacket. vee'Mastin Lines, she saw. Adminstrator as'Barta's vaunted "connections with the piloting sphere" included owning half of vee'Mastin Lines.

Lina's fingers tightened on the keys, and she pulled them slightly back.

"I will surrender these to a Scout," she said. "vee'Mastin Lines has no cause to hold the keys to a Scout ship."

"You will surrender those keys when and to whom I direct you!" snarled as'Barta. "Give them to her!"

"No," said Lina, and put both sets of keys into her pouch.

"Insubordination! I will see you stripped of rank, and license."

"I will surrender the keys of a Scout ship to a Scout," Lina returned. "You have hundreds of Scouts at your beck, Administrator. Call one here."

He moved suddenly, surprisingly, kicking at her knee. She jumped back, avoiding the clumsy blow—and the door closed with a snap that meant the outside lock had been engaged.

Lina crossed the room to her screen, and called the duty desk.

"This is Lina yo'Bingam. I need to schedule an appointment with the base commander, immediately," she said.

There was a pause.

"Lina yo'Bingam, you are already on the commander's hearing list," the duty desk officer said. "Administrative Arbiter of Scouts as'Barta has filed a complaint, and placed your license under lock. The hearing is scheduled in two hours. You will be escorted to the meeting room."

#

Escort had been two Scout security officers. They had checked her weapon, locked it, and allowed her to return it to its place in her jacket. Ship keys were not mentioned; the first set was in her jacket; the second set in her pouch—standard procedure. Lina walked between her escorts calmly, eager to lay the situation out before a Scout, who knew the regs, and who would understand her objection to turning over the keys to a Scout ship to a passenger line pilot.

Her escort triggered the release on a door, and she walked into the conference room between them.

Before her was a conference table. Behind the conference table was Admin as'Barta, a hard-faced Scout captain—and the passenger line pilot to whom she had refused to give Bentokoristo's keys.

There were no chairs on her side of the table.

Lina drew a hard breath.

"Why is there a civilian at this Scout hearing?" she asked.

"It is not your place to ask questions here," snapped Admin as'Barta.

The Scout captain frowned.

"I will answer. It is a reasonable question of protocol, and an unusual situation."

He inclined his head slightly.

"Pilot sig'Sted is Administrator as'Barta's advising pilot. As the difficulties the Administrator has come to solve are Scout-based, it is considered best that the Administrator's team be outside of the Scout hierarchy."

"The disciplinary hearing is now called to order," Admin said briefly. "This procedure is being recorded and will become part of your permanent records."

He glanced down at his tablet and began speaking in her direction without making eye contact. As he spoke he ran his fingers down the tablet, apparently checking tick-boxes as he hit each point.

"Last evening I had dinner with Pilot sig'Sted, a mature pilot well-known to me. Her melant'i is without stain, and I trust her implicitly in all matters of piloting."

Pilot sig'Sted, seated next to him, had the grace to look embarrassed.

Lina put her hands behind her back and broadened her stance, waiting.

"I described to Pilot sig'Sted the irregular and exhausting journey produced by Scout yo'Bingam on my behalf. Pilot sig'Sted gave it as her professional opinion that the pilot in charge had been hasty and foolhardy, had made questionable and potentially dangerous choices of route, and subjected me to unnecessary hardship."

He paused to glance up, but did not meet Lina's eyes.

"Based on this information, I immediately moved to have Scout yo'Bingim's license revoked until she has taken remedial piloting classes and re-certifies at every level."

Lina looked at the Scout Captain.

He avoided her eyes.

"I am," she said, "a Scout pilot. That is the equivalent of a master pilot. I—"

"You do yourself no good by being uncooperative," Admin as'Barta stated.

The Scout Captain said nothing.

Lina bit her lip.

"In addition to her piloting errors, and willful disrespect for my person, my melant'i, and my office, it has become clear that Lina yo'Bingim is an agent of the false Scouts. No sooner had we landed, she filed for leave, and met with an agent attached to command structure of the very group which I am here to correct and bring back into alignment with the proper Liaden Scouts.

"In short, Lina yo'Bingim is working against my office, my mission, and myself. She is working to undermine and destroy the Liaden Scouts! Revoking her license to fly scarcely begins to address the problem. She must be struck from the lists of Liaden Scouts. In this she will finally serve my office and my mission, by standing as an example of what happens to those who work against the proper order and the Code."

"Scout Captain—" Lina began.

"Be silent," Admin as'Barta snapped.

She glared at him, felt her escort shift closer from the sides, and closed her eyes briefly, accessing the rainbow, for calmness.

"You may retain your place in the Scouts, though at a much reduced rank," Admin as'Barta said, then. "Tell me what information you shared with this agent of the schismatic officer ter'Meulen."

She took a breath.

"He named his ship; I named mine. We shared our class years and first flight dates. We counted the bruises we had from the bowli ball match we had played, and laughed because there, too, we had tied. I did not tell him the name of my superior; he did not tell me the name of his, though ter'Meulen—"

She looked again to the Scout Captain, who did not meet her eye.

"ter'Meulen," she continued, facing the admin again, "was head of pilot security for the Scouts—for the Liaden Scouts—for decades. He is no enemy of yours. If it is ter'Meulen who has authored this breach, then you must look for the fault in our own ranks."

Admin as'Barta sat back, satisfied. He turned to the Scout Captain.

"You hear her. She must be cast out."

"Yes," the Scout Captain said. "I hear her. The paperwork will be completed this afternoon."

"Captain," Lina said urgently. "The keys to the Scout ship I piloted here—Bentokoristo. There are only six trained to fly her . . ."

"That is no longer your concern, Lina yo'Bingim," he told her, and held out his hand.

"The keys, if you please."

Relief almost undid her. At least, in this, he would be proper. The Scout ship would be relinquished to a Scout.

She reached into her jacket, into her pouch, approached the table and placed the keys in his hand.

"Escort, take Lina yo'Bingim to her quarters. Hold yourselves ready to escort her out of this facility, once the paperwork is complete. Dismissed."

#

She was a Scout; everything she needed or wanted was in her jacket. Her license . . . she drew it out, slid it into the slot—and caught it when it was forcibly spat out—rejected.

Thoughtfully, she considered Admin as'Barta, the Council of Clans, and the assumptions surrounding this mission to re-unite the Scouts.

She then considered Clonak ter'Meulen, whom she had known, slightly. A Scout sublime, Clonak ter'Meulen, and one who cared for his pilots above all other things.

What could have happened, to make Clonak ter'Meulen break away from the Scouts he had loved?

The door to her cubicle opened. Her escort said, "It is time."

They handed her a stick—her records, they said. They walked her to the door, and outside, into the port. They left her standing on cold 'crete at the edge of the street, and went back inside.

Lina yo'Bingim inhaled sharply, tasting the sharp, cold air, feeling the phantom flutter of a snowflake against her cheek.

Across the way, she saw the bright green of a call-box. She crossed to it, fingering the slip of paper with Kelby chel'Vona's numbers on it out of her belt.

He answered at once, sounding pleased to hear from her so soon.

"I find we have an acquaintance in common," she said, after they had been pleased with each other. "Clonak ter'Meulen."

"Yes, of course. Everyone knows Clonak, so I've always heard it."

"I, too," she said. "He never let a pilot reside in peril. I wonder if you could bring me to him?"

"Certainly, but—why?"

"One of the things I recall Clonak saying—his fondness for Terran quotations, you know. He had used to quite often say that it’s better to be part of the solution than part of the problem.

"I want to talk to him about becoming part of the solution."

This story is set within Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden Universe® series, and within the timeline of December Liaden novel Accepting the Lance. Maine-based Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have written dozens of short stories and twenty plus novels, most set in their star-spanning Liaden Universe®. Before the husband-and-wife team settled down to the serene and stable life of science fiction and fantasy writers, Steve was a traveling poet, a rock-band reviewer, reporter, and editor of a string of community newspapers. Sharon, less adventurous, has been an advertising copywriter, copy editor on night-side news at a small city newspaper, reporter, photographer, and book reviewer. Both credit their newspaper experiences with teaching them the finer points of collaboration. Steve and Sharon maintain a web presence at korval.com.

Next Giant Leap

Patrick Chiles

Vladimir Vaschenko’s first indication that his landing attempt might not have planned for every variable was when the ground beneath him exploded.

Frozen nitrogen tended to do that when it changed phases, which it was doing with gusto under his rocket exhaust. The plume from his descent engines had a long reach; the radar altimeter showed him to be more than a hundred meters above the surface. Liberated by his exhaust heat, brilliant white clouds of violently sublimating nitrogen erupted beneath him and obscured the ground. Spires of what he assumed to be more of the same rose above him; he was threading a path down through a forest of frozen gases. The safer course would have been to boost above the terrain, but that would cost propellant he’d need later—assuming he could find a clearing through this fog.

The indistinct picture from his ground mapping radar, suggesting a corridor between the spires, marginally increased his confidence. Or it could just as easily be noise in the returns. He’d seen it happen before in the fighter aircraft that the radar had been adapted from. Pilots who trusted it too much often ended up dead.

The LK lander’s big window was of little help. Rising clouds of nitrogen and methane stubbornly followed his track. Wherever he pointed his craft, a blinding fog soon appeared. The unease of flying through this strange environment was tempered by the joy of doing it far from the reach of ground controllers nitpicking every decision. The liberties he’d enjoyed during the long journey had already expanded his personal horizons beyond anything in his previous experience—what might his surface exploration bring?

Vaschenko chided himself: First he had to land this rickety thing. He pressed ahead, eyes darting between his window and instruments. That this world had even less gravity than his lander was originally designed for translated to more time in his favor, an advantage which was disappearing by the second as he continued hovering. Indecision took time he didn’t have, and cost him fuel he couldn’t spare.

A broad, dark mass emerged at the end of the corridor on his screen. Better definition suggested less ice, but he needed to get out of here for a clear view of where he was going. Deciding to sacrifice fuel for the safe bet, he tipped the craft forward and goosed the throttle.

With its spindly legs and spheroid upper stage riding atop a column of rocket exhaust, the buglike lander rose out of the mist to trace a parabola above the ice spires. Vaschenko cut back on the throttle and coasted over the top toward what he hoped was solid ground.

At three hundred meters the terrain ahead looked clear, displaying ruddy shades of orange and brown with flecks of white.

At two hundred meters, those flecks resolved into sporadic patches of ice across the surface. He leaned farther into the window, expanding his field of view and hoping to find a large enough clearing free of ice and boulders. After coming all this way, he didn’t think that was asking for much.

One hundred meters. Random clouds of nitrogen mist billowed up as his descent engines blasted away at the scattered ice patches. They dissipated quickly, which told him the ice wasn’t very deep. It was worth the chance. He pulled back the throttle a bit more.

Fifty meters. Descent fuel at twenty percent. Time to commit. There was a shallow depression ahead, smoother than the surrounding terrain, not entirely free of ice but not icy enough to worry about, either. The thought occurred to him that it was quite possibly a frozen pond with a deceptive coating of dust, which he quickly put out of his mind. He’d see soon enough.

“I am passing fifty meters now. Initiating final descent.” His microphone was hot, transmitting everything he said to his comrade orbiting overhead in the Soyuz they’d named Dvina. He’d said almost nothing until now.

Thirty meters, down to seventeen percent. He eyed the abort handle. If the landing site turned out to be unstable, he only had to twist the handle and let the ascent engine boost him back into orbit. After coming this far, he saw that as an unacceptable capitulation. He was no daredevil, but he was no quitter either. This had to work.

At twenty meters, another cloud of nitrogen ice erupted beneath him as he hovered over the shallow depression. Fourteen percent fuel. He held his altitude, letting his landing rockets blast away a clear space. He eased back on the throttle as the whiteout subsided.

Ten meters, then five, and soon wires hanging from beneath each footpad contacted the ground, sounding an alarm in the cockpit. “Contact,” Vaschenko announced sharply as he stabbed the engine cutoff. The LK fell the remaining two meters in slow motion, hitting the frozen ground with a jolt that resonated through the little craft. The map must translate to mass market size and resolution.

“Vehicle is down, upright and stable,” though he could detect a slight list forward that was disorienting in the low gravity. An inclinometer by his shoulder confirmed the ground wasn’t completely level, but it was in tolerance. He wasn’t going anywhere.

A giddy voice crackled in his headset. “It is good to know you are upright, comrade colonel. Otherwise I don’t believe we could find a tow truck out here.”

It was Gregoriy, still watching over him from orbit. “I will take your word for it,” Vaschenko replied, just as giddy. “If you can’t find one, no one can.” It was nonsensical and he knew it, though who could fault him? He’d just become the first cosmonaut to land on another world, coming as far as any human had traveled, in fact as far as any human could reasonably hope to travel.

He couldn’t decide what was more improbable: That their machines had brought him safely to a distant expanse of frozen tundra more forbidding than the Siberian wastes, or that they’d covered the distance in only six months. Blindingly—almost inconceivably—fast, but still not enough for dramatic relativistic effects. When they returned next year, they’d be a few days younger than the people they’d left behind. The long signal delay was disquieting enough.

And liberating. For the first time in his career, he’d had the unchallenged command of an amazing spacecraft. For what could Moscow do to interfere when simple verbal exchanges took hours?

Ah, well. Such thoughts could wait for later. He checked the mission clock. They were on a tight schedule and an even tighter energy budget, thermodynamics being more pitiless than the Kremlin’s worst bureaucrats. His fuel cells could run for days, but his suit batteries could only hold out for so long when ambient temperatures flirted with absolute zero.

“Ambient” temperature . . . that was amusing. Who’d have thought there would be enough atmosphere for it to be a concern? Even this world’s exceedingly thin envelope of gases conducted away enough heat that it threatened to drain batteries and freeze fragile components solid, yet he still needed the alcohol vaporizing system to draw excess heat away from sensitive electronics.

He made his way through the post-landing checklist with swift efficiency, speaking with Gregoriy up in Dvina only when necessary. “Vehicle is secure, ready for surface operations.” He finished his report and took a deep, cleansing breath. The upcoming rest period would be his only break for several hours.

* * *

Rest, such as it was, came fitfully. The lander’s cabin heaters combined with the warmth radiating from its electronics to keep the killing cold at bay, though he could still feel its malign presence through the cabin’s outboard panels. The lander’s slight incline had kept him tucked up against a pressure bulkhead as he tried to sleep, just enough for the cold to wake him whenever he touched it. He ended up curled into a fetal position inside of his sleeping bag.

Vaschenko stretched as best he could in the cramped cabin. A thin layer of frost coated the forward porthole, there being just enough atmosphere outside to cause problems. He turned and stuck his head into the extravehicular suit port. For this harsh environment, the hard-shell surface excursion suit had been mounted outside as an extension to the cabin. Its backpack life support unit formed a small, rectangular hatch that he would climb through into the suit.

At least that was how it was supposed to work. With the suit now hanging lopsided at a shallow angle he clumsily fell into it, banging a leg against its internal control box along the way. Cursing, he snugged his feet into rubberized insulating socks and tested them against the hard boots. He bounced a few times until he was satisfied his feet wouldn’t slip around too much, ignoring the throbbing pain in his shin.

He was more concerned about having possibly damaged the controls mounted just in front of his chest. He hurriedly inspected the box and its settings, checking for damage or misconfigured switches before snapping on its internal power. The suit’s rebreathers came to life, filling his metallic cocoon with a dull whine as he reached into the LK to pull its outer hatch closed. Warm air hissed through vents around his waist and shoulders as he eyed gauges mounted just below the rim of his bubble visor. Satisfied he wasn’t about to freeze or suffocate, Vaschenko called to his comrade in orbit. “Suit is on internal power, air cycling is nominal. Preparing to close.”

“Very good, Comrade Colonel. Don’t forget your snowshoes.”

“I thought you packed them?” Vaschenko smiled to himself as the pilot answered with a simple double-click of his mic switch. Gregoriy would have sold his own children to gypsies for the chance to do this, especially after the EVA their crewmate Alexi had enjoyed during the long journey here. He would make certain to arrange a similar jaunt outside for his mission pilot on the return leg of their grand tour.

Satisfied with his suit’s function, he reached back once more to close its internal hatch. As he locked down the seal directly behind him, it disengaged him from the LK on the other side. He hung loosely against the portal now, his feet resting on the lander’s porch.

“Suit port is closed and free,” he said. “Preparing to disengage.”

The suit itself was a bulbous shell that looked as if it could have been scavenged from a movie set. He slipped his arms through rotary joints at the shoulders and elbows, then settled his hands into roughly articulated gloves at the ends of each sleeve. He flexed his arms and swung them through their range of motion, which was remarkably good for being a pressurized suit of armor.

He braced against the railing to take a step forward, just as he’d practiced hundreds of times in Star City’s simulator bay. The backpack slid out of its suit port more smoothly than in practice, a nice surprise which he attributed to the low gravity. He was careful not to put too much force into his movements lest momentum overtake him—this world might have offered only a fraction of Earth’s gravity, but that didn’t change the suit’s considerable mass.

The porch offered just enough room to position himself at the top of the ladder. It looked impossibly shaky, its angles changing as it folded over one of the LK’s insectoid legs. Shallow, then steep. He’d practiced it so many times that he could just about do it blindfolded.

“I’m on the ladder,” he reported. “Ready to descend.”

There was a burst of static followed by a new voice. “Understood, Comrade Colonel.” It was Alexi in the control block aboard their mothership Arkangel. Gregoriy’s Soyuz and its radios were now below the horizon and beyond his line of sight.

“Heading down now.”

The rungs were far apart, too much for a normal human, but perfectly spaced for a man in a hard suit. He made quick work of it, having learned from his many ground simulations that this was probably the riskiest phase of his EVA short of stumbling into some undetectable subsurface geyser. He let himself fall the final meter in slow motion and came to a stop atop the leg’s footpad. “I am at the base of the ladder.”

Alexi’s voice crackled in his ear, the radio static emphasizing his distance despite being almost directly overhead now. “And how is the view down there, comrade?”

Of the many challenges he faced on this expedition, visibility was not one of them. The bubble visor gave him a wide field of view while the lander’s floodlights made up for the distant sun. Vaschenko shook off the gnawing sense of isolation as he considered a suitable answer. For the moment he only cared about what might be directly beneath his feet. He drew a breath, knowing he was being recorded and determined to not sound the slightest bit shaky. “The surrounding area consists of hard, rocky soil with what appears to be a number of fresh divots. I suspect they held subsurface ice which my landing rockets evaporated. I can see more nearby, outside of the blast zone.” He paused. “Much of the surface has a clear glaze of ice . . . perhaps water ice, atop the nitrogen?” He had trouble believing his own assessment—finding water would be stunning, were he correct. “I also see veins of blue and green within the ice, which would indicate methane.”

“Thank you, Comrade Colonel. What is your suit’s skin temperature?”

Vaschenko knew what Alexi was getting at. He checked another gauge by his control box. “Minus one hundred twenty, not enough for anything to violently sublimate.”

The younger cosmonaut laughed. “More than cold enough to chill a bottle of Stoli, though.”

Vaschenko laughed with him. A good stiff drink would have been welcome at the end of all this. He took another deep, expectant breath. The time had come. “I am stepping off of the footpad now.”

With one hand still on the ladder, he cautiously poked at the crust with his left toe. Any loose material had been blasted away during his landing and what remained was almost as solid as rock. He pressed his foot into the regolith and withdrew it, studying the small impression it left behind. It was like stamping forms into dry ice. He released his grip on the ladder, stepped out with both feet, and exhaled. He held out his arms and turned in a circle to test his footing. He was actually here, standing free.

He cleared his throat before making the announcement their mission managers had waited so long for: “Standing on the shoulders of our comrades before us, I make this great leap forward on behalf of the people of the Soviet Union.”

There. He finally said it. The words had been carefully scripted by committee, approved by the Politburo, and drilled into him with a final demonstration for the mission political officer prior to their launch from Baikonur. He imagined the self-satisfied grin on that officious buffoon’s face when his words were received in a few hours.

Vaschenko hoped they would mean something to his countrymen. After being rehearsed so many times, they meant nothing to him. An empty sentiment, and a small price to pay for being able to command such a bold mission. He’d made worse compromises over his career.

“Congratulations, Comrade Colonel! It is a privilege to be the first human to hear you announce this glorious achievement.” The high-frequency static couldn’t hide the giddiness in Alexi’s voice. Even if his reply hadn’t been as well-rehearsed, he still answered in the manner expected. “I will relay the TsUP’s response as soon as we receive it here.”

“Thank you, Alexi.”

He wondered when his countrymen would be allowed to know they were here, as their mission had been a tightly guarded secret from its inception. Signal delays at least followed clear physical laws which made them predictable. Political delays were another matter, only having to follow whatever passed for laws or logic in the head of the decision maker.

As Earth grew ever more distant, the light delay had quickly tested ground control’s limits. The mission managers had tried to compensate by making the daily activity plans even more painstaking than usual—and he’d already been accustomed to overly ambitious plans in his days aboard Mir—which Vaschenko and his crewmates had eventually ignored. They’d made a dutiful effort to comply at first, but Arkangel was simply too complicated. The operational concept of a nuclear pulse drive was straightforward enough, but the execution had been another matter entirely: It was a lot of mass, propelled a frighteningly long way, at unheard-of velocities, whose critical systems had never functioned under varying levels of acceleration for such long periods.

It was perhaps fortunate that they had been forced to keep so much of it simple—aping the Americans’ tendency to overcomplicate designs and incorporate every wish-list item from every manager who touched the project would have left them crippled in orbit before detonating the first propellant slug. The combination of complexity and extreme distance had made them more self-reliant—and therefore freer—than anyone envisioned. Their mass and velocity had meant that even an immediate return order would have taken months to comply with.

Vaschenko trundled over to the equipment bay, now covered in the same frost that coated the rest of the descent stage. He scraped at it with the hard edge of his glove until he could get a hand around its latch. After some effort, he could feel the ice crumbling around its mechanism and the lever reluctantly gave way. He still had to pry the access panel free, working the hardened tips of his gloves through the crust of ice and around the lip. Once open, he reached in to remove a long-handled scoop and sample bag from their mounts. He turned and scraped at a patch of mostly loose soil, scooped up as much as the bag could hold, and clipped it to a cable on his waist. “Contingency sample secure,” he said, which Alexi acknowledged with two rapid clicks of his microphone. If something happened and he had to make an emergency return to orbit, he would not leave empty handed.

Vaschenko returned to the equipment bay for the next item on his list, removing a tripod and telescoping pole with a roll of fabric mounted at one end. He trudged away from the lander, eyes down, watching each step until he appeared to be out of the blast zone.

Satisfied he was in the clear, he set the pole onto the ice. Not surprisingly, it barely penetrated the surface. He lifted a small mallet from his utility belt and began hammering away at the top of the pole until it could stand upright, then unfolded the tripod around its base. Every otherwise mundane task in spaceflight had to be thought through and engineered, and this was no different. Whoever had been responsible for the flagpole had anticipated that it might not be able to stand on its own.

Vaschenko paused to look up from his work for the first time, turning to take in the full scope of his surroundings. Working around the lander with his back to the horizon almost this entire time, he’d stayed focused on the patch of ground around the little spacecraft which had served him so well, its familiarity shielding him from the dread of being utterly alone on such a forbidding world. If the word “alien” had any meaning at all, then it must surely apply here.

Stark white ice floes with variegated shades of blue and green stretched to the horizon, which itself appeared dizzyingly close. Random wisps of gas curling up from cracks in the surface implied some source of internal heat, while jumbles of nitrogen icebergs were clustered around a frozen shoreline perhaps a half-kilometer distant. Its crust was pockmarked in an odd, pebbled texture which he would investigate if his suit batteries held up long enough. Behind the lander, the white spires he’d had to negotiate during his approach stood tall, like sails on the sea.

He drew an arm back inside and turned down his suit radio. Mission rules required that he keep it in voice-activated mode throughout surface operations, but they hadn’t said anything about volume control. One didn’t rise to the level of colonel without learning precisely how and when to break the rules.

The silence became a sound unto itself, as eerily chilling as the icebound landscape. He could hear the frozen ground’s muffled crunch beneath his hardened, heavily insulated boots. The dull whine of air exchangers rose and fell with each breath, their background noise punctuated by the sharp pops and groans of his suit’s outer shell as it withstood the menacing cold. He was the only human on this world, one of only three to have traveled this deep into the Solar System—and no one outside of his crew, his mission control team, and the innermost circle of the Politburo knew about it. He hadn’t thought it possible to make a man feel any more isolated from the rest of humanity than he was right now, but they had found a way. Of course they had.

What would his wife and children think, once they eventually learned of his adventure? Would they rejoice in his achievement, or would it be just one more in an already too-long string of absences? All they knew was that he was on another long-duration mission classified “Most Secret” with all communications home restricted to recorded messages. Trust the KGB to take full advantage of the signal delay to keep the cosmonaut families in the dark.

As he contemplated this strange landscape, he was taken with an even stranger notion: What if he just started walking, away from the safety of his landing site and the control of others? Nothing but his own inhibition could stop him. What if he simply kept going until his batteries ran out or his carbon dioxide filter became saturated? Was there freedom in abandonment? Or was death the ultimate liberation, as the long-suffering Orthodox priests of his youth had once tried to convince him? He pushed those thoughts from his mind before the crush of loneliness threatened to paralyze him, just as he always had. Only the scenery had changed.

How to describe this place without sounding like a starstruck child? Fortunately no one was expecting flowery, poetic language from him. He was expected to record what he observed, and that’s what he would do. He turned the volume knob back up and was rewarded with the comforting hiss of a two-way connection again.

He unfolded one last section of tubing at the top of the flagpole. As it locked into place at a ninety-degree angle, a garish red banner bearing an embroidered golden hammer and sickle unfurled beneath it. His next words had been rehearsed just as many times as had his first announcement from the surface:

“I now plant the flag of our great people and hereby claim this planet, Pluto, for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

* * *

Vaschenko sensed something had changed the moment he and Gregoriy returned to Arkangel. Alexi waited for them at the docking tunnel, his forced smile hinting at something else behind the sentiment. The flight engineer had been unusually clipped and businesslike during their return, forgoing the levity that normally peppered their exchanges.

He traded looks with Gregoriy. “Not a warm welcome home I think, Alexi Mikhailovich.”

“My apologies, Comrade Colonel. I am not very good at hiding things, I’m afraid.”

“You’d have made a terrible GRU officer,” he agreed, “which is one reason I wanted you on my crew.”

The younger man’s eyes lit up at the compliment. He handed his commander a strip of paper from their thermal printer. “New orders from Moscow,” he explained.

Vaschenko studied the text. “This time stamp is five hours ago. They will be expecting my acknowledgment.”

Alexi looked uncomfortable. “I reminded them that you were presently occupied with returning to Arkangel, and that I would relay their orders immediately upon your return.”

Vaschenko frowned, then handed the printout to Gregoriy. The pilot read it with disbelief.

“They do realize how long a direct return will take?”

“The emergency plan is six months,” Vaschenko said. “Less time than with our scheduled Neptune and Uranus flybys, but it will require all of our reserve propellant.”

“I don’t understand, Comrade Colonel. What good can we do?”

“We don’t have to understand anything,” he said, more coldly than he felt. “We only have to follow orders. Acknowledge my receipt.”

* * *

That had been the answer a commander would be expected to give. The reality of their situation had been more complicated—and troubling—as Moscow’s subsequent orders had become even more heavy-handed: jettison all empty supply modules and unnecessary payload. Return immediately. Every day counted, therefore every gram of excess mass had to be shed, including everything he’d brought up from the surface.

Given their situation, were they compelled to follow orders? A year ago, he’d have done precisely as told. Now, given all that was happening on Earth, they’d still expected him to simply click his heels, salute, and carry on? It would have been laughable were the consequences not so grave, yet Gregoriy’s earlier question continued to haunt him: What good could we do?

It depended on one’s notion of “good,” which had become more elastic than he’d thought possible. He laughed darkly: one more assumption about himself this mission had irrevocably changed.

On the surface, each step he took away from the lander put him in more danger: hidden nitrogen pockets and crevasses, ice geysers and ruthless cold, all waiting for him to make a single mistake. How long would he have had if a battery failed, a heater burned out, or a seal succumbed to the cold? How far could he have walked before he was frozen in place?

The farther he’d ventured, the less he’d cared. Death would have been on his terms, as he’d known the risks, but had chosen to step out onto that alien tundra anyway. The many dangers had focused him on the present in a way he’d only occasionally experienced as a cosmonaut—that old pilot’s adage about hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror. It had been the first time in his life that he’d truly lived in the moment, free of the micromanagement that had defined his earlier missions. Being alone on Pluto’s surface had been his first taste of real freedom.

Alone again now aboard Arkangel, he felt like a prisoner aboard his own spacecraft. His crewmates had been gone for months, abandoning him at the edge of the Solar System. Even if Moscow could have forgiven mutiny, even if he ignited the pulse drive and aimed for home, he’d waited too long: life support would run out well before he arrived at Earth. Alexi and Gregoriy had long since used up their own, their silent frequency confirming his calculations.

He stared at the words in his journal, from happier times with his crew:

It is good to be back aboard with my comrades after being in such a desperately cold, forbidding place. It feels warm and inviting here now in a way that a spacecraft never has. If it had a fireplace, the feeling would be complete!

Pluto was utterly unlike anything I expected, beyond anything else in a Solar System already filled with unlikely worlds. I call it “forbidding” deliberately, as “frightening” would be too harsh though others may disagree. It was certainly disquieting, as though I had stepped into a realm not meant for men. It was as if I had disturbed something precious and absconded with riches beyond measure.

There is much to learn from here, and we have been ordered to abandon it all. For what purpose?

A question that he’d long ago learned to suppress now dominated his thoughts: What if humans were uniquely created with a purpose? Did that not argue for the primacy of individual liberty over the collective? He’d certainly felt like a better commander as Moscow’s grip on them grew more tenuous with distance. Was that just his pride? If there was a difference, did it matter?

Yet even at the end, in a state of solitude beyond human experience, he could still feel the firm hand of Moscow tugging at his leash. It was a grip that would only be released in his death.

Was that where ultimate freedom lay?

He would soon find out.

Vaschenko closed his journal for the last time and secured it by his bunk. Perhaps one day someone would find it and the world could learn the truth of what they did here.

He pushed away and sailed forward, out of the crew quarters and into the command deck, settling into the docking tunnel. The air had become noticeably stale of late. He didn’t bother consulting the environmental panel: The headache he’d been carrying since yesterday told him the CO2 scrubbers would soon fail.

It was time. He reached for the tunnel’s purge valve, closed his eyes, and waited for the darkness to become all-consuming.

* * *

This story is set in the world of January 2020 hard science fiction novel Frozen Orbit, by Patrick Chiles. Patrick Chiles has been fascinated by rockets and spaceflight ever since he watched the Apollo missions as a kid in South Carolina. How he ended up as an English major in college is still a mystery, though he eventually overcame this self-inflicted handicap to pursue a career in aviation. He is a graduate of The Citadel, a Marine Corps veteran, and a licensed pilot. He currently resides in Tennessee with his wife and sons, two lethargic dachshunds, and a bovine cat.